The atmosphere incommoding the husband, who at a second glance seemed to call even pathetically for articulate opposition, was that of a successful house-party, its tone set by the only two in sight who were through and through of the authentic brand: the deep-voiced woman and the nice man. The invalid and his wife belonged to that inner circle. But they were a little shadowed by his malady. It was an atmosphere in which the American and the Russian were ill at ease, one an impatient watchfulness for simpler, more lively behaviour and the other a bored detachment, heavily anchored, not so much by thoughts as by hard clear images left by things seen according to the current formula of whatever group of the European intelligentsia he belonged to. He was speaking softly through the general conversation to the nice man, with slight deprecating gestures of eyebrows and shoulders, in his eyes a qualified gratitude. The nice man spoke carefully with head turned and bent, seeking his words. French, with English intonation. All these people, however fluently, would talk like that. All of them came from a world that counted mastery of a foreign tongue both wonderful and admirable—but ever so little _infra dig_. * * * * * “Won’t you come in heah for a bit?” Drugged as she felt with weariness she turned joyfully into a room opening in the background of the hall whence the deep bass voice had sounded as she passed. A tiny salon, ugly; maroon and buff in a thick light. Plush sofa, plush cover on the round table in the centre, stiff buff-seated “drawing-room” chairs; a piano. It was from this dismal little room the Chopin had sounded out into the twilight. There she was, alone, standing very thin and tall in a good, rather drearily elderly black dress beside a cheerless radiator, one elbow resting on its rim and a slender foot held towards it from beneath the hem of a slightly hitched skirt: an Englishwoman at a fireside. “My name’s Harcourt, M’zz Harcourt,” she said at once. Books were set star-wise in small graded piles about the centre of the table, the uppermost carrying upon their covers scrolls and garlands of untarnished gilt. The one she opened revealed short-lined poems set within yet more garlands, appealing; leaves and buds and birds lively and sweet about the jingling verse. Swiss joy in deep quiet valleys guarded by sunlit mountains. Joy of people living in beauty all their lives; enclosed. Yet making rooms like this. But it held the woman at the radiator, knowing England and her sea, and whose smile looking up she met, watching, indulgent of her détour and, as too eagerly she moved forward, indulgent also of that. Here, if she would, was a friend, and, although middle-aged, a contemporary self-confessed by a note in her voice of impatience over waste of time in preliminaries.