ertainly a pity that
they had begun to find convivial evenings so little amusing to them.
Except when their friends came to see them they sat alone together.
After a little while, when retrospect had taken them some way, they
would often, by reading or talking, try to keep it at bay. But it was,
at best, only a question of deferring; there remained always the nights.
It was in the nights, of course, that retrospect most tyrannically had
its way. The masterless nights are escaped steeds run loose for
anybody's annexing. Retrospect annexed them, and rode them hard. In the
nights, at all events, there is no confusing of issues, no foreground to
obscure the vision.

It took a succession of nights and days for perception to reach full
stature. Each, lying awake, or sitting together through the evenings
while Tommy drew pictures for _Marchese Peppino_, caught new aspects of
the things which moved in progression through their memory.

It seemed that each of the Venables family, marching through memory,
flung at the Crevequers something which retrospect could turn into a
ball for its game.

From Miranda Betty collected guileless remarks in inverted commas (some
of the inverted commas Miranda had supplied, some Betty filled in now)
as to 'different sorts of people,' and how each sort had its own
conventions and its own resorts. Plaints, also, about liberty of
association tampered with--Miranda was a veritable garden for such
flowers. There was also that day at the Trattoria Buonaventura, with
Warren Venables standing at the door, impassive, observing, unable to
linger because his mother was anxious....

Then, in the procession, marched Mrs. Venables. Mrs. Venables had one
day sloughed a self. She had not liked doing so; it was a self she
valued; her most natural self, also--the aesthetic self, so easily and so
deeply struck. From this self she had reluctantly emerged temporarily to
stand forth a reputable, conventional Philistine--more, a maternal
Philistine, of all creatures the most _bornee_. Driven by circumstances,
she had talked to Betty Crevequer on the subject of friendship, its uses
and abuses. A certain impersonal detachment she had used, choosing her
words with careful discretion, to throw as much veil as might be over
the maternal Philistinism. She had not wanted to hurt Betty, nor had she
at all wanted that Betty should in her mind call her _bornee_. She
might have been relieved to know that this was a word only