While she looked round at the architecture, I looked at her. She was wearing a rose-coloured evening dress, cut low and without sleeves. The skin of her neck and shoulders was very white. There was a bright rose in the opening of her corsage. Her arms without being bony were still very slender, like the arms of a little girl; her whole figure was slim and adolescent. “Why do you stare at me like that?” she asked, when the fascination of the architecture was exhausted. She had heightened the colour of her cheeks and faintly smiling lips. Between the darkened eyelids her eyes looked brighter than usual. “I was wondering why you were so happy. Secretly happy, inside, all by yourself. What’s the secret? That’s what I was wondering.” “Why shouldn’t I be happy?” she asked. “But, as a matter of fact,” she added an instant later, “I’m not happy. How can one be happy when thousands of people are being killed every minute and millions more are suffering?” She tried to look grave, as though she were in church. But the secret joy glittered irrepressibly through the slanting narrow openings of her eyes. Within its ambush her soul kept incessant holiday. I could not help laughing. “Luckily,” I said, “our sympathy for suffering is rarely strong enough to prevent us from eating dinner. Do you prefer lobster or salmon?” “Lobster,” said Barbara. “But how stupidly cynical you are! You don’t believe what I say. But I do assure you, there’s not a moment when I don’t remember all those killed and wounded. And poor people too: the way they live—in the slums. One can’t be happy. Not really.” She shook her head. I saw that if I pursued this subject of conversation, thus forcing her to continue her pretence of being in church, I should ruin her evening and make her thoroughly dislike me. The waiter with the wine list made a timely diversion. I skimmed the pages. “What do you say to a quart of champagne cup?” I suggested. “That would be delicious,” she said and was silent, looking at me meanwhile with a questioning, undecided face that did not know how to adjust itself—whether to continued gravity or to a more natural cheerfulness. I put an end to her indecision by pointing to a diner at a neighbouring table and whispering: “Have you ever seen anything so like a tapir?” She burst into a peal of delighted laughter; not so much because what I had said was particularly funny, but because it was such a tremendous relief to be allowed to laugh again with a good conscience.