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‘But I have seen it.’ Hester drank off her tea and rose as she spoke, pushing back her chair. ‘During the war. The windows were all muffled up.’

She showed rather flagrantly that Clive’s suggestion of a quartette had ruffled her and glancing first at her and then at her son, Monica protested: ‘If you’ve not seen the glass, you’ve only seen it asleep; with its eyes shut. Clive must take you. You must go again.’

‘But I don’t want to go again,’ said Hester. ‘It’s the most beautiful cathedral in the world, no doubt, but it’s dead and done with; that’s what I feel about it. It’s like a terrible, beautiful skull, looking away over those endless plains.’ She walked to the window and pulled up the blind. ‘When is the taxi coming, Clive? Isn’t it late already?’

Clive was scanning his wife’s averted countenance. Was it really his suggestion about Celia that had so perturbed her? Yet she did not seem angry with Clive; she smiled round and up at him as he joined her at the window and said, laying his hand on her shoulder: ‘Not quite time yet. It’s hot, isn’t it?—I think I could open this a little further—may I, Mummy?—Yes; that’s better. Sit in the draught, darling. You’re tired.’

‘Not a skull, Hester,’ Monica sent the arrested