Alma's voice, strangely free, softly lifted a little above its usual note, but happy and full, as it was with outsiders with whom she was at her best, took possession of the set scene. His voice came in answer, deferring, like that of a delighted guest. Presently they were all in an enchantment. From some small point of departure she had carried them off abroad, into an Italian holiday. He urged her on with his voice, his eyes returning perpetually from the business of his meal to rest in admiring delight upon her face. It was lovely, radiant, full of the joy of the theme she had set in the midst and was holding there with bright reflective voice, unattained by the little bursts of laughter, piling up her monologue, laughing her own laughter in its place, leading on little bridges of gay laughter that did not break her speech, to the points of her stories. All absurd. All making the places she described pathetically absurd, and mysterious strangers, square German housewives and hotel people, whom Miriam knew she would forever remember as they looked in Alma's tales, and love, absurd. But vivid; each place, the look and the sound and the very savour of it, each person.... By the end of dinner, in the midst of eating a peach, Alma was impersonating a fat shiny Italian opera star, flinging out without losing her dainty charm, a scrap of a rolling cadence, its swift final run up and up in curling trills to leap clear at the end to a single note, terrifically high, just touched and left on the air, the fat singer silent below it, unmoved and more mountainous than before. Hypo was wholly won by the enchantment she had felt and cast. His face was smooth with the pleasure that wreathed it whenever he passed, listening, from laughter that was not of his own making, to more laughter. He carried Alma off to the study with the bright eagerness he gave to an entertaining guest, but intimately, with his arm through hers. They sat side by side on the wide settee. There was to be no music. He did not want to go away by himself to the other end of the room and make music. Sitting forward with his hands clasped, towards Alma enthroned, he suddenly improvised a holiday abroad.... "We'll go mad, stark staring mad. Switzerland. Your ironmongery in my rucksack and off we'll go." To go away, not the wonderful eventful holiday life here; to go away, with Alma, was reward and holiday for him.... This life, with its pattern of guests was the hard work of everyday? These times abroad were the bright points of their long march together? Then if this life and its guests were so little, she was once more near to them. She had shared their times abroad, by first unconsciously kindling them to go. And presently they were deferring to her. It was strange that having preceded them, created, even with them, the sense of advantage persisting so long after they had outdone in such wide sweeps the scope of her small experience.