Roger was carrying things off rather splendidly with a kind of sardonic gusto which he could often assume in times of stress. I knew him in that mood and respected it. I knew, too, that my presence added a particular zest to his performance. Throughout the evening I caught him in constant enquiry of me; was I attending to this parody of himself? I was his audience, not Lucy.

The fate in store for myself was manifest as soon as I came into the room. It was Lucy’s cousin Julia, the younger of the two girls Basil had told me of, the one whose début had been so disturbed by Lucy’s marriage. It would not, I felt, be a grave setback. Julia had that particular kind of succulent charm—bright, dotty, soft, eager, acquiescent, flattering, impudent—that is specially, it seems, produced for the delight of Anglo-Saxon manhood. She had no need of a London season to find a happy future. “Julia is staying with us. She is a great fan of yours,” said Lucy in her Pont Street manner; a manner which, like Roger’s, but much more subtly, had an element of dumb crambo in it. What she said turned out to be true.

“My word, this is exciting,” said Julia, and settled down to enjoy me as though I were a box of chocolates open on her knees.

“What a lot of people Lucy’s got here tonight.”

“Yes, it’s her first real dinner party, and she says it will be her last. She says she doesn’t like parties any more.”

“Did she ever?” I was ready to talk about Lucy at length, but this was not Julia’s plan.

“Everyone does at first,” she said briefly, and then began the conversation as she had rehearsed it, I am sure, in her bath. “I knew you the moment you came into the room. Guess how.”

“You heard my name announced.”

“Oh, no. Guess again.”

An American hero would have said, “For Christ’s sake,” but I said, “Really I’ve no idea, unless perhaps you knew everyone else already.”

“Oh, no. Shall I tell you? I saw you in the Ritz the day Lucy lunched with you.”

“Why didn’t you come and talk to us?”

“Lucy wouldn’t let me. She said she’d ask you to dinner instead.”

“Ah.”

“You see, for years and years the one thing in the world I’ve wanted most—or nearly most—was to meet you and when Lucy calmly said she was going to lunch with you I cried with envy—literally so I had to put a cold sponge on my eyes before going out.”

Talking to this delicious girl about Lucy, I thought, was like sitting in the dentist’s chair with one’s mouth full of instruments and the certainty that, all in good time, he would begin to hurt.

“Did she talk about it much, before she came to lunch?”

“Oh no, she just said ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to leave you today as Roger wants me to lunch with one of his old friends.’ So I said, ‘How rotten, who?’ and she said, ‘John Plant,’ just like that, and I said, ‘John Plant,’ and she said, ‘Oh, I forgot you were keen on thrillers.’ Thrillers, as though you were just anybody. And I said, ‘Couldn’t I possibly come,’ and she said, ‘Not possibly,’ and then when I was crying she said I might come with her to the lounge and sit behind a pillar and see you come in.”

“How did she describe me?”

“She just said you’d be the one who paid for the cocktails. Isn’t that just like Lucy, or don’t you know her well enough to tell?”

“What did she say about the lunch afterwards?”

“She said everyone talked about Kipling.”

“Was that all?”

“And she thought Roger had behaved badly because he doesn’t like smart restaurants, and she said neither did she, but it had cost you a lot of money so it was nasty to complain. Of course, I wanted to hear all about you and what you said, and she couldn’t remember anything. She just said you seemed very clever.”

“Oh, she said that?”

“She says that about all Roger’s friends. But, anyway, it’s my turn now. I’ve got you to myself for the evening.”

She had. We were sitting at dinner now. Lucy was still talking to Mr. Benwell. On my other side there was some kind of relative of Roger’s. She talked to me for a bit about how Roger had settled down since marriage. “I don’t take those political opinions of his seriously,” she said, “and, anyway, it’s all right to be a communist nowadays. Everyone is.”

“I’m not,” I said.

“Well, I mean all the clever young people.”

So I turned back to Julia. She was waiting for me. “D’you know you once wrote me a letter?”

“Good gracious. Why?”

“Dear Madam, Thank you for your letter. If you will read the passage in question more attentively you will note that the down train was four minutes late at Frasham. There was thus ample time for the disposal of the bicycle bell. Yours faithfully, John Plant,” she quoted.

“Did I write that?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“Vaguely. It was about The Frightened Footman, wasn’t it?”

“Mm. Of course I knew perfectly well about the train. I just wrote in the hopes of getting an answer and it worked. I liked you for being so severe. There was another girl at school was literary too, and she had a crush on Gilbert Warwick. He wrote her three pages beginning, My Dear Anthea, all about his house and the tithe barn he’s turned into his workroom and ending, Write to me again; I hope you like Silvia as much as Heather, those were two of his heroines, and she thought it showed what a better writer he was than you, but I knew just the opposite. And later Anthea did write again, and she had another long letter just like the first all about his tithe barn, and that made her very cynical. So I wrote to you again to show how different you were.”

“Did I answer?”

“No. So then all the Literary Club took to admiring you instead of Gilbert Warwick.”

“Because I didn’t answer letters?”

“Yes. You see, it showed you were a real artist and didn’t care a bit for your public, and just lived for your work.”

“I see.”

After dinner Roger said, “Has little Julia been boring you frightfully?”

“Yes.”

“I thought she was. She’s very pretty. It’s a great evening for her.”

Eventually we returned to the drawing room and sat about. Roger did not know how to manage this stage of this party. He talked vaguely of going on somewhere to dance and of playing a new parlour game that had lately arrived from New York. No one encouraged him. I did not speak to Lucy until I came to say good-bye, which was very early, as soon as the first guest moved and everyone, on the instant, rose too. When I said good-bye to her, Julia said, “Please, I must tell you. You’re a thousand times grander than I ever imagined. It was half a game before—now it’s serious.”

I could imagine the relief in the house as the last of us left, Roger and Lucy emerging into one another’s arms as though from shelter after a storm… “So that’s over. Was it as bad as you expected?” “Worse, worse. You were splendid”… perhaps they—and Julia too? — were cutting a caper on the drawing-room carpet in an ecstasy of liberation.

“That,” I said to myself, “is what you have bought with your five pounds.”

That evening, next day and for several days, I disliked Lucy. I made a story for all who knew him, of Roger’s dinner party, leaving the impression that this was the kind of life Lucy enjoyed and that she was driving Roger into it. But for all that I did not abate my resolve to force my friendship upon her. I can give no plausible account of this inconsistency. I was certainly not, consciously, in love with her. I did not, even, at that time find her conspicuously beautiful. In seeking her friendship I did not look for affection nor, exactly, for esteem. I sought recognition. I wanted to assert the simple fact of my separate and individual existence. I could not by any effort of will regard her as being, like Trixie, “one of Roger’s girls,” and I demanded reciprocation; I would not be regarded as, like Basil, “one of Roger’s friends”; still less, like Mr. Benwell, as someone who had to be asked to dinner every now and then. I had little else to think about at the time, and the thing became an itch with me. I felt about her, I suppose, as old men feel who are impelled by habit to touch every third lamppost on their walks; occasionally something happens to distract them, they see a friend or a street accident and they pass a lamppost by; then all day they fret and fidget until, after tea, they set out shamefacedly to put the matter right. That was how I felt about Lucy; our relationship constituted a tiny disorder in my life that had to be adjusted.