Mr. Lucy looked fairly unapproachable. His niceness, Miss Keating imagined, would keep him linked arm in arm with his sister, maintaining, unconsciously, inoffensively, his distance and distinction. He would manage better than the Colonel. He would not have to get up and go away. So Miss Keating thought. From the lounge behind the veranda, Kitty's voice came to her again. Kitty was excited and her voice went winged. It flew upward, touched a perilous height and shook there. It hung, on its delicate, feminine wings, dominating the male voices that contended, brutally, below. Now and then it found its lyric mate, a high, adolescent voice that followed it with frenzy, that broke, pitifully, in sharp, abominable laughter, like a cry of pain. Miss Keating shut her eyes to keep out her vision of Kitty's face with the look it wore when her voice went high. She was roused by the waiter bringing coffee. Kitty Tailleur had come out on to the veranda. She was pouring out Grace Keating's coffee, and talking to her in another voice, the one that she kept for children and for animals, and for all diminutive and helpless things. She was saying that Miss Keating (whom she called Bunny) was a dear little white rabbit, and she wanted to stroke her. "You see, you are so very small," said Kitty, as she dropped sugar into Miss Keating's cup. She had ordered cigarettes and a liqueur for herself. Miss Keating said nothing. She drank her coffee with a distasteful movement of her lips. Kitty Tailleur stretched herself at full length on a garden chair. She watched her companion with eyes secretly, profoundly intent under lowered lids. "Do you mind my smoking?" she said presently. "No," said Miss Keating. "Do you mind my drinking Kümmel?" "No." "Do you mind my showing seven inches of stocking?" "No." "What do you mind, then?" "I mind your making yourself so very conspicuous." "I don't make myself conspicuous. I was born so." "You make me conspicuous. Goodness knows what all these people take us for!" "Holy Innocent! As long as you sit tight and do your hair like that, nobody could take you for anything but a dear little bunny with its ears laid back. But if you get palpitations in your little nose, and turn up your little white tail at people, and scuttle away when they look at you, you can't blame them if they wonder what's the matter with you." "With _me_?" "Yes; it's you who give the show away." Kitty smiled into her liqueur glass. "It doesn't seem to strike you that your behaviour compromises me." Miss Keating's mouth twitched. Her narrow, rather prominent front teeth lifted an instant, and then closed sharply on her lower lip. Her throat trembled as if she were swallowing some bitter thing that had been on the tip of her tongue. "If you think that," she said, and her voice crowed no longer, "wouldn't it be better for us not to be together?"