Of the Venables they spoke to each other less day by day. Each did not know how it fared with the other; each hardly knew how it fared with himself. It was well, perhaps, that during much of the day they had plenty to do. But there were the evenings. It was certainly a pity that they had begun to find convivial evenings so little amusing to them. Except when their friends came to see them they sat alone together. After a little while, when retrospect had taken them some way, they would often, by reading or talking, try to keep it at bay. But it was, at best, only a question of deferring; there remained always the nights. It was in the nights, of course, that retrospect most tyrannically had its way. The masterless nights are escaped steeds run loose for anybody's annexing. Retrospect annexed them, and rode them hard. In the nights, at all events, there is no confusing of issues, no foreground to obscure the vision. It took a succession of nights and days for perception to reach full stature. Each, lying awake, or sitting together through the evenings while Tommy drew pictures for _Marchese Peppino_, caught new aspects of the things which moved in progression through their memory. It seemed that each of the Venables family, marching through memory, flung at the Crevequers something which retrospect could turn into a ball for its game. From Miranda Betty collected guileless remarks in inverted commas (some of the inverted commas Miranda had supplied, some Betty filled in now) as to 'different sorts of people,' and how each sort had its own conventions and its own resorts. Plaints, also, about liberty of association tampered with--Miranda was a veritable garden for such flowers. There was also that day at the Trattoria Buonaventura, with Warren Venables standing at the door, impassive, observing, unable to linger because his mother was anxious....