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ball rolling again. Mr. Gales, Oriana, and Mrs. Jessup were now bending their heads with wild laughter over some further atrocity discovered in the pages of the magazine and she and Clive and Hester and Celia seemed alone together. ‘More like the moon, as one sees it sometimes in daylight, in a blue sky.—Do you remember that we saw Chartres once like that, Clive, coming by train up from Bordeaux? It floated over the plains; from miles away we saw it; it looked transparent, impalpable; it was heavenly rather than terrible.’

Hester seemed to listen absently. She had not taken the chair Clive put for her and still stood looking out of the window. ‘Well, the moon is a skull,’ she said. ‘Here is the taxi, Clive.’

For some moments after they were gone Monica and Celia sat in silence. One might have thought that a much larger party had been there, Monica thought, looking slowly about her oddly disordered room, where a pile of magazines sprawled on the floor, the cushions of the sofa lay tossed and cigarette-ends and ash were scattered freely.

‘Well, what are you thinking of them?’ she enquired, looking across at Celia with an ironic lift of the lip.

Celia was watching her, quietly. ‘Of them?