is behind you."

Grace was dancing round and round, wondering how one stopped. Away from
him she felt restless and nervous and will-less and incomplete, like a
frustrated animal lost and impotent, with smouldering rage in her heart
and sulky fires in her eyes. Why didn't he come to release her, to calm
the tearing fever of her blood?

Again and again she walked through the library and always he was on the
sofa with Virginia--Virginia in her orange haze melting into cushions;
and sometimes he was bending right forward, his whole body curved into
urgency. And when she passed, he half looked up with the tail end of a
smile falling as it were accidentally in her direction.

Estelle laughed and talked, her feet twinkled, her eyes danced.
Marriage, she said, was an altogether delightful thing, quite different
from what people thought----

Matthew was introduced to her. He explained that love was so important
that it could only be discussed lightly. He said that her hair reminded
him ... he wished he could think of what, but he had such a bad memory
for metaphors. It took him all his time to remember that a harp was like
water and Carpentier like a Greek god. It was funny, wasn't it, to have
such a weak head. He thought it came from hay fever--he always had hay
fever during the third week of May. It came entirely from honeysuckle.

Estelle said that she would like to sit in the library. Grace was in a
corner pulling monosyllables out of her mouth like teeth.

Virginia was still in the middle of the sofa, a dissolving mass of
orange mist. Edgar was talking away all risk of his suiting the action
to the word. Estelle was dimpling.

"Do you remember," she said to Matthew, "that orange is flame-colour?"

"By Jove, yes," he said, "oriflammes and hell fire."

A low murmur came from the sofa.

"Will you introduce me to your husband?" Matthew asked.

They all talked together.

"By the way, Virginia," Matthew said, "the young man does love you."

"Dear me, how very nice."

"It only required me to point it out to him."

"Was he pleased?"

"Delighted. By the way, Mr. Wilmot,"--Matthew turned to Edgar--"do you
ever wear spectacles?"

XII

VILLEGIATURA

[_To MARCEL PROUST_]

What a fool he had been to come. These wooden walls creaking at a touch,
and the floors responding like an animal in pain to the lightest
footstep. Not that Marie Aimee had light footsteps--far from it. She
clattered about with the ha