I gathered that things were in a bad way, over there as over here; that there were scandals and a tremendous outcry for purification in the highest places.  I saw the man get into his fiacre and took my way back across the court-yard rather slowly, pondering over the part I was to fill in the emigration, wondering how far events had conferred on me a partnership in the family affairs.

I found that my tacitly acknowledged function was that of supervising nurse-tender, the sort of thing that made for personal tenderness in the aridity of profuse hired help.  I was expected to arrange a rug just a little more comfortably than the lady’s maid who would travel in the compartment—­to give the finishing touches.

It was astonishing how well the thing was engineered; the removal, I mean.  It gave me an even better idea of the woman my aunt had been than even the panic of her solicitor.  The thing went as smoothly as the disappearance of a caravan of gypsies, camped for the night on a heath beside gorse bushes.  We went to the ball that night as if from a household that had its roots deep in the solid rock, and in the morning we had disappeared.

The ball itself was a finishing touch—­the finishing touch of my sister’s affairs and the end of my patience.  I spent an interminable night, one of those nights that never end and that remain quivering and raw in the memory.  I seemed to be in a blaze of light, watching, through a shifting screen of shimmering dresses—­her and the Duc de Mersch.  I don’t know whether the thing was really noticeable, but it seemed that everyone was—­that everyone must be—­remarking it.  I thought I caught women making smile-punctuated remarks behind fans, men answering inaudibly with eyes discreetly on the ground.  It was a mixed assembly, somebody’s liquidation of social obligations, and there was a sprinkling of the kind of people who do make remarks.  It was not the noticeability for its own sake that I hated, but the fact that their relations by their noticeability made me impossible, whilst the notice itself confirmed my own fears.  I hung, glowering in corners, noticeable enough myself, I suppose.

The thing reached a crisis late in the evening.  There was a kind of winter-garden that one strolled in, a place of giant palms stretching up into a darkness of intense shadow.  I was prowling about in the shadows of great metallic leaves, cursing under my breath, in a fury of nervous irritation; quivering like a horse martyrised by a stupidly merciless driver.  I happened to stand back for a moment in the narrowest of paths, with the touch of spiky leaves on my hand and on my face.  In front of me was the glaring perspective of one of the longer alleys, and, stepping into it, a great band of blue ribbon cutting across his chest, came de Mersch with her upon his arm.  De Mersch himself hardly counted.  He had a way of glowing, but he paled ineffectual fires beside her maenadic glow.  There was something overpowering in the sight of her, in the fire of her eyes, in the glow of her coils of hair, in the poise of her head.  She wore some kind of early nineteenth-century dress, sweeping low from the waist with a tenderness of fold that affected one with delicate pathos, that had a virgin quality of almost poignant intensity.  And beneath it she stepped with the buoyancy—­the long steps—­of a triumphing Diana.