ferred on me a
partnership in the family affairs.

I found that my tacitly acknowledged function was that of supervising
nurse-tender, the sort of thing that made for personal tenderness in the
aridity of profuse hired help. I was expected to arrange a rug just a
_little_ more comfortably than the lady's maid who would travel in the
compartment--to give the finishing touches.

It was astonishing how well the thing was engineered; the removal, I
mean. It gave me an even better idea of the woman my aunt had been than
even the panic of her solicitor. The thing went as smoothly as the
disappearance of a caravan of gypsies, camped for the night on a heath
beside gorse bushes. We went to the ball that night as if from a
household that had its roots deep in the solid rock, and in the morning
we had disappeared.

The ball itself was a finishing touch--the finishing touch of my
sister's affairs and the end of my patience. I spent an interminable
night, one of those nights that never end and that remain quivering and
raw in the memory. I seemed to be in a blaze of light, watching, through
a shifting screen of shimmering dresses--her and the Duc de Mersch. I
don't know whether the thing was really noticeable, but it seemed that
everyone was--that everyone must be--remarking it. I thought I caught
women making smile-punctuated remarks behind fans, men answering
inaudibly with eyes discreetly on the ground. It was a mixed assembly,
somebody's liquidation of social obligations, and there was a sprinkling
of the kind of people who do make remarks. It was not the noticeability
for its own sake that I hated, but the fact that their relations by
their noticeability made me impossible, whilst the notice itself
confirmed my own fears. I hung, glowering in corners, noticeable enough
myself, I suppose.

The thing reached a crisis late in the evening. There was a kind of
winter-garden that one strolled in, a place of giant palms stretching up
into a darkness of intense shadow. I was prowling about in the shadows
of great metallic leaves, cursing under my breath, in a fury of nervous
irritation; quivering like a horse martyrised by a stupidly merciless
driver. I happened to stand back for a moment in the narrowest of paths,
with the touch of spiky leaves on my hand and on my face. In front of me
was the glaring perspective of one of the longer alleys, and, stepping
into it, a great band of blue ribbon cutting across his chest, came de
Mer