of her soul too was standing out there in the
dark with Marion. They were both of them tainted with disloyalty to
their own lives.

When Marion came in she halted at the door and turned out all the lamps
save the candlesticks on the table. She passed through the amber,
fire-shot twilight and sat down in the other armchair, and began to
polish her nails on the palm of her hands. They were all of them lapped
in dusk, veiled with it, featureless because of it. Behind them the
candlesticks cast a brilliant light on the disordered table, on the four
chairs where Richard and Marion, Roger and Poppy had sat. Ellen's chair
had been pushed back against the wall when she rose; one would not have
known that Ellen had been sitting there too.

Marion kept looking back at the illuminated table as if it were a symbol
of the situation that made them sit in the twilight without words.
Suddenly she made a sound of distress. "Oh dear! Look at the cakes that
have been left! Ellen, you can't have had anything to eat."

"I've just had too good a tea," said Ellen, using the classic Edinburgh
formula.

"But you must have an eclair or a cream bun. I got them for you. I used
to love them when I was your age." She rose and began to move round the
table, bending over the cake-plates. Ellen was reminded of the way that
her own mother used to hover above the debris of the little tea-parties
they sometimes gave in Hume Park Square, cheeping: "I think they enjoyed
their teas. Do you not think so, Ellen?" and satisfying an appetite
which she had been too solicitous and interested a hostess to more than
whet in the presence of her friends. That was how a mother ought to be,
little, sweet, and moderate.

Marion brought her an eclair on a plate. She took it and stood up,
asking meekly: "Shall I take it and eat it somewhere else? You and
Richard'll be wanting to talk things over."

"Ah, no!" Marion was startled; and Ellen, to her own distress, found
herself exulting because this mature woman, who had dived so deeply into
the tides of adult experience in which she herself had hardly been
laved, was facing the situation so inadequately. She scorned her for the
stiffness of the conciliatory gesture she attempted, for the queer notes
which her voice made when she tried to alter it from her customary tone
of indifference in saying: "But, Ellen dear, you're one of us now. We've
no affairs that aren't yours too. We only wish they were a little
gayer...."