All her life long Mrs. Aldwinkle had had a peculiar genius for breaking with her friends and lovers. Mr. Cardan was almost the sole survivor from an earlier generation of friends. From all the rest she had parted, and she had parted with a light heart. It had seemed easy to her, when she was younger, to make new friends in place of the old. Potential friends, she thought, were to be found everywhere, every day. But now she was beginning to doubt whether the supply was, after all, so inexhaustible as she had once supposed. People of her own age, she found, were already set fast in the little social worlds they had made for themselves. And people of the younger generation seemed to find it hard to believe that she felt, in her heart, just as young as they did. They mostly treated her with the rather distant politeness which one accords to a stranger and an elder person. “I think people are horrid,” said Irene, giving a particularly violent sweep with the hair-brush to emphasise her indignation. “You won’t be faithless?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle. Irene bent over and, for all answer, kissed her on the forehead. Mrs. Aldwinkle opened her glittering blue eyes and looked up at her, smiling, as she did so, that Siren smile that, for Irene, was still as fascinating as it had ever been. “If only everybody were like my little Irene!” Mrs. Aldwinkle let her head fall forward and once more closed her eyes. There was a silence. “What are you sighing about in that heart-breaking way?” she suddenly asked. Irene’s blush ran tingling up into her temples and disappeared under the copper-coloured fringe. “Oh, nothing,” she said, with an off-handedness that expressed the depth of her guilty embarrassment. That deep intake of breath, that brief and passionate expiry were not the components of a sigh. She had been yawning with her mouth shut. But Mrs. Aldwinkle, with her bias towards the romantic, did not suspect the truth. “Nothing, indeed!” she echoed incredulously. “Why, it was the noise of the wind blowing through the cracks of a broken heart. I never heard such a sigh.” She looked at the reflection of Irene’s face in the mirror. “And you’re blushing like a peony. What is it?” “But it’s nothing, I tell you,” Irene declared, speaking almost in a tone of irritation. She was annoyed with herself for having yawned so ineptly and blushed so pointlessly, rather than with her aunt. She immersed herself more than ever deeply in her brushing, hoping and praying that Mrs. Aldwinkle would drop the subject.