rightful station: said environment necessarily comprising a town house if
not on Park Lane at least nearly adjacent to it, and a country house
sitting, in the mellowed beauty of its Seventeenth Century architecture,
amid lordly acres of velvet lawn and private park.

She hoped the country house would be within sight of the sea, and that the
family garage would run to a comfortable little town-car for her personal
use when she went shopping in Bond Street, or to pay calls or leave cards,
or to concerts and matinees....

At about this stage her châteaux en Espagne began to rock upon their
foundations; a seismic phenomenon due to the appearance of Mama Thérèse and
Papa Dupont, coming from zinc and kitchen for their dinner, which meal they
habitually consumed in the café when the evening rush was over, the tables
undressed, and the establishment had settled down to drowse away the dull
hours till closing time.

Thus reminded that it was nine o'clock or thereabouts of a stuffy evening
in a stodgy world where nothing ever happened that hadn't wearily happened
the day before and the day before that and so back to the beginning of
Time, and wasn't scheduled tediously to continue happening to-morrow and
the day after and so on to the end of Eternity, Sofia sighed and shook
herself and put away the vanity of dreams.

But her beauty, as she sat brooding, was as sultry as the night.

In the rear of the room Mama Thérèse and Papa Dupont wrangled sourly over
their food; not with impassioned rancour but in the natural order of
things--as others might discuss the book of the moment or the play of the
year or scandal or Charlie Chaplin or the thundering fiasco of