He laughed delightedly with her. “So, speaking as one snob to another,” he ended, “I couldn’t be more enchanted that you are you. Well, never mind! One’s meant not to say such things in these egalitarian days.”

He had a conspiratorial way of biting his underlip and lifting his shoulders: it was indescribably arch. “But we mustn’t be naughty,” said Mr. Pyke Period.

Nicola said: “They didn’t really explain at the agency exactly what my job is to be.”

“Ah! Because they didn’t exactly know. I was coming to that.”

It took him some time to come to it, though, because he would dodge about among innumerable parentheses. Finally, however, it emerged that he was writing a book. He had been approached by the head of a publishing firm.

“Wonderful,” Nicola said, “actually to be asked by a publisher to write.”

He laughed. “My dear child, I promise you it would never have come from me. Indeed, I thought he must be pulling my leg. But not at all. So in the end I madly consented and — and there we are, you know.”

“Your memoirs, perhaps?” Nicola ventured.

“No. No, although I must say — but no. You’ll never guess!”

She felt that she never would, and waited.

“It’s — how can I explain? Don’t laugh! It’s just that in these extraordinary times there are all sorts of people popping up in places where one would least expect to find them: clever, successful people, we must admit, but not — as we old fogies used to say — ‘not quite-quite.’ And there they find themselves in a milieu where they really are, poor darlings, at a grievous loss.”

And there it was: Mr. Pyke Period had been commissioned to write a book on etiquette. Nicola suspected that his publisher had displayed a remarkably shrewd judgment. The only book on etiquette she had ever read, a Victorian work unearthed in an attic by her brother, had been a favourite source for ribald quotation. “ ‘It is a mark of ill-breeding in a lady,’ ” Nicola’s brother would remind her, “ ‘to look over her shoulder, still more behind her, when walking abroad.’ ”