"There isn't anything near here," she objected. She pressed forward with difficulty, her strength ebbing away behind her. His impatience was drawing them away from something towards which they had all been moving. It was as if her real being were still facing the other way. "No--where really can we go?" In an instant he would remember the dark little Italian-Swiss café near the Marble Arch, and its seal would be set on the whole of the afternoon. The Lintoffs would not be aware of this. They were indifferent to surroundings in a world that had only one meaning for them. But the sense of them and their world, already, in the boundless immensity of Sunday, scattered into the past, would be an added misery amongst the clerks and shop-girls crowded in that stuffy little interior where so many of her Sunday afternoons had died. The place cancelled all her worlds, put an end to her efforts to fit Michael into them, led her always impatiently into the next week for forgetfulness of their recurring, strife-tormented leisure.... Verandahs and sunlit sea; small drawing-rooms, made large by their wandering shapes; spaces of shadow and sunlight beautifying all their English Sunday contents; windowed alcoves reflecting the sky; spacious, silken, upstairs tea-rooms in Bond Street.... But these things were hers now, only through friends. Here, by herself, as the Lintoffs knew her, she belonged to the resourceless crowd of London workers.... Michael ordered much tea and a lemonade, in a reproachful aside to the pallid grubby little waiter squeezing his way between the close-set tables with a crowded tray held high. "'Ow many?" he murmured over his shoulder, turning a low-browed anxious face. His tray tilted dangerously, sliding its contents. "You can count?" said Michael without looking at him. "Four tea, four limonade," murmured the poor little man huskily. "I have ordered _tea_," thundered Michael. "You can bring also one bottle limonade." The waiter pushed on, righting his noisy trayful. Michael subsided with elbows on the smeary marble table-top, his face propped on his hands, about to speak. The Lintoffs also; their gleaming pale faces set towards the common centre, while their eyes brooded outwards on the crowded little scene. Miriam surveyed them, glad of their engrossment, dizzy with the sense of having left herself outside in the Park. "Shall I tell the Lintoffs that you have dimples?" Michael asked serenely, shifting his bunched face round to smile at her. She checked him as he leaned across to call their attention.... It was in this very room that she had first told him he must choose between her company and violent scenes with waiters. He was utterly unconscious; aware only of his compatriots sitting opposite, himself before them in the pride of an international friendship. Yesterday's compact set aside, quite likely, later on, to be questioned.