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Portia cast an anxious look round the tea-room. "Oh, ought you to imitate Anna here... ?"

"I may not feel in the mood to do it again. As a rule, the thought of Anna makes me much too angry. I should like you to hear the things she would say to me if she got this unparalleled opening.... She would say, to remember you're quite a child. She would imply she wondered what I could see in you, and imply that of course I must be up to something, and that she only just wondered what it was. She would say that of course I could count on her not to say a word to you about what I am really like. She would say that of course she quite realised that she and Thomas were dull compared to me, because I was a genius, too superior to do any work that she did not come and offer me on a plate. She would say, of course, people who pay their bills are dull. Then she would say she quite saw it must be a strain on me, having to live up to my reputation, and that she saw I must have what stimulus I could get. Last of all, she would say, 'And, of course, she is Thomas's sister.'"

"Well, I don't see the point of any of that."

"No, you wouldn't, darling. But I would. Anna'd be on the sofa; I should sit screwed round on one of her bloody little yellow chairs. When I tried to get up she would say: 'You do make me so tired.' She'd smoke. Like this"—Eddie opened his cigarette case, raked the contents over languidly with his finger-tips, his head on one side, as though playing the harp, selected one cigarette, looked at it cryptically, fastidiously lit it, and once more shook back an imaginary lock of hair. "She would say," he said, " 'You'd probably better go now—Portia's probably waiting down in the hall.' "

"Oh Eddie—would she ever say that?"

"She'd say anything. The thing about Anna is, she loves making a tart of another person. She'd never dare be a proper tart herself."

Portia looked puzzled. "But I'm certain you like her."

"Yes, I do in a way. That is why she annoys me so."

"You once said she'd been very kind."

"Indeed she has—that's her way of getting under my skin. Darling, didn't you think me being Anna was funny?"

"No, not really. I didn't think you enjoyed it."

"Well, it was: it was very funny," said Eddie defiantly.

Then he made several faces, pulling his features all ways, as though to flake off from them the last figments of Anna. The impersonation had (as Portia noticed) had fury behind it: each hypothetical arrow to him from Anna had been winged by a demoniac smile. Now he pulled his cup towards him and abruptly drank up some cold tea. He looked so threatening, Portia thought for a moment he might be going to spit the tea out—as though he were no more than rinsing his mouth with it. But he did swallow the tea, and after that smiled, though in a rather fagged-out way, like an actor coming off after a big scene. At the same time, he looked relieved, as though he had shot a weight off, and pious, as though a duty had been discharged. He seemed now to exist in a guiltless vacuum. At last he turned her way and sat filling his eyes with Portia, as though it were good to be home again.

After a pause he said: "Yes, I really do quite like Anna. But we have got to have a villain of some sort."

But Portia had a slower reaction time. During the villain's speech, while she ate crumpet, her brows had met in a rather uncertain line. While not really surprised, she had seemed to be hypnotised by this view of Anna. She was disturbed, and at the same time exhilarated, like a young tree tugged all ways in a vortex of wind. The force of Eddie's behaviour whirled her free of a hundred puzzling humiliations, of her hundred failures to take the ordinary cue. She could meet the demands he made with the natural genius of the friend and lover. The impetus under which he seemed to move made life fall, round him and her, into a new poetic order at once. Any kind of policy in the region of feeling would have been fatal in any lover of his—you had to yield to the