A day flashed out of her memory on a trail of blue larkspurs and of something that she had forgotten, something that was mixed up with Mr. and Mrs. Jervis and Rosalind.  She stared at the larkspurs as if they held the clue—­Nicky’s face appeared among the tall blue spires, Nicky’s darling face tied up in a scarf, brown stripes and yellow stripes—­something to do with a White Cake—­it must have been somebody’s birthday.  Now she had it—­Mr. Jervis’s cricket scarf.  It was the day of Nicky’s worst earache, the day when Mr. Vereker climbed the tree of Heaven—­was it possible that Mr. Vereker had ever climbed that tree?—­the day when Michael wouldn’t go to the party—­Rosalind’s birthday.

Eight candles burning for Rosalind.  Why, it was nineteen years ago.  Don-Don was a baby then, and Michael and Nicky were only little boys.  And look at them now!

She fed her arrogance by gazing on the tall, firmly knit, slender bodies of her sons, in white flannels, playing furiously and well.

“Dorothy is looking very handsome,” Mrs. Jervis said.  Yes, certainly Dorothy was looking handsome; but Frances loved before all things the male beauty of her sons.  In Michael and Nicholas it had reached perfection, the clean, hard perfection that would last, as Anthony’s had lasted.

She thought of their beauty that had passed from her, dying many deaths, each death hurting her; the tender mortal beauty of babyhood, of childhood, of boyhood; but this invulnerable beauty of their young manhood would be with her for a long time.  John would have it.  John was only a fairer Nicholas; but as yet his beauty had not hardened; his boyhood lingered in the fine tissues of his mouth, and in his eyelids and the soft corners of his eyes; so that in John she could still see what Nicky had been.

She had adored Anthony’s body, as if she had foreseen that it would give her such sons as these; and in her children she had adored the small bodies through whose clean, firm beauty she foresaw the beauty of their manhood.  These were the same bodies, the same faces that she had loved in them as children; nothing was blurred or twisted or overlaid.

Michael at six-and-twenty was beautiful and serious as she had foreseen him.  Frances knew that Michael had genius, and at other moments she was proud of his genius; but at this particular moment, sitting beside her friend and conscious of her jealousy, she was chiefly aware of his body.

Michael’s body was quiescent; its beauty gave her a proud, but austere and tranquil satisfaction.  It was when she looked at her second son that something caught at her breath and held it.  She saw him as the lover and bridegroom of Veronica.  Her sense of his virility was terrible to her and delightful.

Perhaps they were engaged already.