So when Frances said Veronica was good, she meant that Mrs. Jervis should understand, once for all, that she was not in the least like her mother or like Phyllis Desmond.

That was enough for Mrs. Jervis.  But it was not enough for Frances, who found her mind wandering off from Rosalind’s mother and looking for the word of words that would express her own meaning to her own satisfaction.

Her thoughts went on deep down under the stream of conversation that flowed through her from Mrs. Jervis on her right hand to Mrs. Vereker and Mrs. Norris on her left.

Veronica was good.  But she was not wrapped up in other people’s lives as Frances was wrapped up.  She was wrapped up, not in herself, but in some life of her own that, as Frances made it out, had nothing in the world to do with anybody else’s.

And yet Veronica knew what you were feeling and what you were thinking, and what you were going to do, and what was happening to you. (She had really known, in Dresden, what was happening to Nicky when Desmond made him marry her.) It was as if in her the walls that divide every soul from every other soul were made of some thin and porous stuff that let things through.  And in this life of yours, for the moments that she shared it, she lived intensely, with uncanny delight and pain that were her own and not her own.

And Frances wanted some hard, tight theory that would reconcile these extremes of penetration and detachment.

She remembered that Ferdinand Cameron had been like that.  He saw things.  He was a creature of queer, sudden sympathies and insights.  She supposed it was the Highland blood in both of them.

Mrs. Vereker on her right expressed the hope that Mr. Bartholomew was better.  Frances said he never would be better till chemists were forbidden to advertise and the British Medical Journal and The Lancet were suppressed.  Bartie would read them; and they supplied him with all sorts of extraordinary diseases.

She thought:  Seeing things had not made poor Ferdie happy; and Veronica in her innermost life was happy.  She had been happy when she came back from Germany, before she could have known that Nicky cared for her, before Nicky knew it himself.

Supposing she had known it all the time?  But that, Frances said to herself, was nonsense.  If she had known as much as all that, why should she have suffered so horribly that she had nearly died of it?  Unless—­supposing—­it had been his suffering that she had nearly died of?

Mrs. Norris on her left was saying that she was sorry to see Mr. Maurice looking so sadly; and Frances heard herself replying that Morrie hadn’t been fit for anything since he was in South Africa.

Between two pop-gun batteries of conversation the serious theme sustained itself.  She thought:  Then, Nicky had suffered.  And Veronica was the only one who knew.  She knew more about Nicky than Nicky’s mother.  This thought was disagreeable to Frances.