vitalisation in the air, it was impossible not to be Parisian. The trees,
all arranged in beautiful perspectives, were coming into leaf, and through
their screens could be seen everywhere children shouting as they played at
ball and top, and both kinds of nurses, and scores of perambulators and
mothers, and a few couples dallying with their sensations, and old men
reading papers, and old women knitting and relating anecdotes or entire
histories. And nobody was curious beyond his own group. The people were
perfectly at home in this grandiose setting of gardens and fountains and
grey palaces, with theatres, boulevards and the odour and roar of
motor-buses just beyond the palisades. And Miss Ingate in the exciting
sunshine gazed around with her subdued Essex grin, as if saying: "It's the
most topsy-turvy planet that I was ever on, and why am I, of all people,
trying to make this canvas look like a piece of sculpture and a street?"

"Now, Miss Ingate," said tall red-haired Tommy, who was standing over her.
"Before you go any farther, do look at the line of roofs and see how
interesting it is; it's really full of interest. And you've simply not got
on speaking terms with it yet."

"No more I have! No more I have!" cried Miss Ingate, glancing round at
Audrey, who was swinging her racket. "Thank you, Tommy. I ought to have
thought of it for my own sake, because roofs are so much easier than
statues, and I must get an effect somewhere, mustn't I?"

Tommy winked at Audrey. But Tommy's wink was as naught to the great
invisible wink of Miss Ingate, the everlasting wink that derided the
universe and the sun himself.

Then Musa appeared, with paraphernalia, at the end of a path. Accompanying
him was a specimen of the creature known on tennis lawns as "a fourth." He