For an instant she felt that nothing could fit but a gratefully affectionate salute and then a “How’s old So-and-So in these days?” after the manner of men of his type drifting happily about upon the surfaces of life. And when she said: “You got the whole of it this time,” it was as if the unexpressed remainder had indeed passed across to him, as if she were the newly-arrived friend whose presence somewhere upstairs had made him so radiant during dinner and afterwards sent him to pour out his happiness in the deserted little salon. “After a fashion,” he said with the little flicker of the eyelids that was his way, from sixth-form or from undergraduate days, of sustaining for further speech the pose of his turned head and smiling face: “There’s no one like him, is there?” “You were playing last evening just after I came. For a moment I couldn’t believe that ballade was actually here. I heard it long ago, and never since, and I’ve never been able to recall the theme.” “I’m _so_ glad,” he said with his little note of distress. “I’ve been trying for _days_ to get it all back.” For him, too, it came out of a past, and brought that past into this little Swiss room, spread it across whatever was current in his life, showed him himself unchanged. And in that past they had lived in the same world, seen and felt in the same terms the things that are there forever before life has moved. So far they were kindred. But since then she had been flung out into another world; belonged to the one in which he had gone forward only through an appreciative understanding of its code, of what it was that created its self-operating exclusiveness. He did not yet know that she stood outside the charmed circle, had been only an occasional visitor, and that now, visiting again after years of absence, she was hovering between the desire to mask and remain within it and her proper business as a Lycurgan: to make him aware of the worlds outside his own, let him see that his innocent happiness was kept going by his innocent mental oblivion. And whilst they called up cherished names and collided in agreement she wondered what these people who lived in exile from reality could find in their music beyond escape into the self for whom in their state of continuous urbane association there was so little space; and presently became aware of lively peace filling the intervals between their to and fro of words, distracting attention from them, abolishing everything but itself and its sure meaning: so that into this Swiss stillness of frost without and electricity within nothing had been present of the Switzerland that had brought them both here, and now suddenly came back, enhanced, a single unbounded impression that came and was gone, that was the face of its life now begun in her as memory.