... What sort of a life, after all, if not this one? For of course that dream of a Western farm was all rubbish. What he really wanted was a life in which professional interests as far-reaching and absorbing as his own were somehow impossibly combined with great stretches of country quiet, books, horses and children--ah, children! Boys of his own--teaching them all sorts of country things; taking them for long trudges, telling them about trees and plants and birds--watching the squirrels, feeding the robins and thrushes in winter; and coming home in the dusk to firelight, lamplight, a tea-table groaning with jolly things, all the boys and girls (girls too, more little Nonas) grouped around, hungry and tingling from their long tramp--and a woman lifting a calm face from her book: a woman who looked so absurdly young to be their mother; so-- "You're looking at Jim's wife?" The Marchesa broke in. "No wonder! _Très en beauté_, our Lita!--that dress, the very same colour as her hair, and those Indian emeralds ... how clever of her! But a little difficult to talk to? Little too silent? No? Ah, not to _you_, perhaps--her dear father! Father-in-law, I mean--" Silent! The word sent him off again. For in that other world, so ringing with children's laughter, children's wrangles, and all the healthy blustering noises of country life in a big family, there would somehow, underneath it all, be a great pool of silence, a reservoir on which one could always draw and flood one's soul with peace. The vision was vague and contradictory, but it all seemed to meet and mingle in the woman's eyes... Pauline was signalling from her table-end. He rose and offered his arm to the Marchesa. In the hall the strains of the famous Somaliland orchestra bumped and tossed downstairs from the ball-room to meet them. The ladies, headed by Mrs. Toy, flocked to the mirror-lined lift dissembled behind forced lilacs and Japanese plums; but Amalasuntha, on Manford's arm, set her blunt black slipper on the marble tread. "I'm used to Roman palaces!" VII "AT least you'll take a turn?" Heuston said; and Nona, yielding, joined the dancers balancing with slow steps about the shining floor. Dancing meant nothing; it was like breathing; what would one be doing if one weren't dancing? She could not refuse without seeming singular; it was simpler to acquiesce, and lose one's self among the couples absorbed in the same complicated ritual. The floor was full, but not crowded: Pauline always saw to that. It was easy to calculate in advance, for every one she asked always accepted, and she and Maisie Bruss, in making out the list, allotted the requisite space per couple as carefully as if they had been counting cubic feet in a hospital. The ventilation was perfect too; neither draughts nor stuffiness. One had almost the sense of dancing out of doors, under some equable southern sky. Nona, aware of what it cost to produce this illusion, marvelled once more at her tireless mother.