Music played.  Michael and Nicholas danced to the music.  It was Michael’s body and Nicky’s that kept for her the pattern of the dance, their feet that beat out its measure.  Sitting under the tree of Heaven Frances could see Mrs. Jervis’s party.  It shimmered and clustered in a visionary space between the tree and the border of blue larkspurs on the other side of the lawn.  The firm figures of Michael and Nicholas and Dorothy held it together, kept it from being shattered amongst the steep blue spires of the larkspurs.  When it was all over they would still hold it together, so that people would know that it had really happened and remember having been there.  They might even remember that Rosalind had had a birthday.

* * * * *

Frances had just bestowed this life after death on Mrs. Jervis’s party when she heard Michael saying he didn’t want to go to it.

He had no idea why he didn’t want to go except that he didn’t.

“What’?” said Frances.  “Not when Nicky and Dorothy are going?”

He shook his head.  He was mournful and serious.

“And there’s going to be a Magic Lantern”—­

“I know.”

“And a Funny Man”—­

“I know.”

“And a Big White Cake with sugar icing and Rosalind’s name on it in pink letters, and eight candles—­”

“I know, Mummy.”  Michael’s under lip began to shake.

“I thought it was only little baby boys that were silly and shy.”

Michael was not prepared to contest the statement.  He saw it was the sort of thing that in the circumstances she was bound to say.  All the same his under lip would have gone on shaking if he hadn’t stopped it.

“I thought you were a big boy,” said Frances.

“So I was, yesterday.  To-day isn’t yesterday, Mummy.”

“If John—­John was asked to a beautiful party he wouldn’t be afraid to go.”

As soon as Michael’s under lip had stopped shaking his eyelids began.  You couldn’t stop your eyelids.

“It’s not afraid, exactly,” he said.

“What is it, then?”

“It’s sort—­sort of forgetting things.”

“What things?”

“I don’t know, Mummy.  I think—­it’s pieces of me that I want to remember.  At a party I can’t feel all of myself at once—­like I do now.”

She loved his strange thoughts as she loved his strange beauty, his reddish yellow hair, his light hazel eyes that were not hers and not Anthony’s.

“What will you do, sweetheart, all afternoon, without Nicky and Dorothy and Mary-Nanna?”

“I don’t want Nicky and Dorothy and Mary-Nanna.  I want Myself.  I want to play with Myself.”

She thought:  “Why shouldn’t he?  What right have I to say these things to him and make him cry, and send him to stupid parties that he doesn’t want to go to?  After all, he’s only a little boy.”

She thought of Michael, who was seven, as if he were younger than Nicholas, who was only five.