If there were only one moonshiny night in each century, men would never be done talking of it. Old lying books would be consulted; in padded club chairs grizzled gentry whose grandfathers had witnessed it would prate of that milky pervasion that once diluted the unmixed absolute of night. And those who had no vested gossip in the matter would proclaim it unlikely to recur, or impossible to have happened. Mr. and Mrs. Brook and Martin had gone on toward the veranda. Joyce lingered where the edge of the house’s shadow was a black frontier on the grass. The lawn was a lake of pallor. Under the aquamarine sky, glazed like the curly inmost of a shell, earth was not white or glittering, but a soft wash of argentine grey. There was light enough to see how invisible the world truly is. The pure unpurposeful glamour poured like dissolving spirit on the dull fogged obscure of ordinary evening: the cheap veneers of shadow peeled away, true darkness was perceivable: the dark that threads like marrow in the bones of things: the dark in which light is only an accidental tremble. Where trees and shrubs glowed in foamy tissue, hung chinks and tinctures of appeasing nothing. This was abyss unqualified, darkness neat. She was drowned at the bottom of this ocean of transparency. She felt as people look under water, pressed out of shape, refracted, blurred by the pressure of an enormous depth of love. In such clean light a thought, a memory, a desire, could put on shape and living, stare down the cautious masks of habit. The trustiest senses could play traitor inside this bubble of pearly lustre; the hottest bonfires of mirth would be only a flicker in this dim stainless peace. Better to go indoors, join the polite vaudeville of evasion, escape the unbearable reality of this enchanted.... “Here you are!” said a voice. “Thank goodness. I want to ask you things. You’re different.” It was Martin. “What’s the matter with all these people?” he exclaimed. “Why can’t they have fun? Why do they keep on telling me they love me? I don’t want to be loved. You can’t be happy when you’re being loved all the time. It’s a nuisance. I want to build castles in the sand and play croquet and draw pictures. I want to go to bed and get a good sleep for the Picnic; and that lady wants me to kiss her. I did it once; isn’t that enough?” Here was a merriment: to expect her, at this particular junction of here and now, to join his deprecations. “Quite enough,” she said. “But it depends on the person. She may not think so.” “It’s Mrs. Phyllis. I asked her if she was ready for me to go to bed, and she said I mustn’t say such things. What’s the matter with her? I think she’s angry. Everybody seems angry. Why is it?” Her pulses were applauding her private thought: If Phyllis loves _him_, I can love George. “And I saw Bunny in the garden. She says you’re the only one who can help me because you almost understand.” “Bunny! Bunny who? What do you mean?...”