'What was his name?' 'I didn't think to ask. He's not anyone we know.' 'Poor fellow,' said Paula. 'I'd like to have known his name.' 'Why?' said Edward, who was experimenting with the tendons of one of the chicken's legs. 'Because it's somehow easier to think about somebody if you know their name.' 'Why?' said Henrietta, who was dissecting the other leg with a kitchen knife. 'You may well ask,' said Paula. 'Plato says how odd it is that we can think of anything, and however far away it is our Know msname – 'You are right to think of him,' said Kate. 'You are so right. You reproach me. I feel reproached. I just thought of Octaw vian and Barbara.' 'Why did he kill himself?' said Edward. 'I'll do Ducane's room now,' said Mary to Casie. 'No, you won't,' said Casie. They got up together and left the kitchen. The lazy sun, slanting along the front of the house, cast elongated rectangles of watery gold on to the faded floral wallpaper of the big paved hall, which served as the dining-room at week-ends. The front door was wide open, framing distant cuckoo calls, while beyond the weedy gravel drive, beyond the clipped descending lawn and the erect hedge of raspberryand-creamy spiraea, rose up the sea, a silvery blue, too thin and transparent to be called metallic, a texture as of skin-deep silver paper, rising up and merging'at some indeterminate point with the pallid glittering blue of the midsummer sky. There was something of evening already in the powdery goldness of the sun and the ethereal thinness of the sea. The two women swept round the white curve of the stairs, Casie clumping, Mary darting, and disputed briefly at the top. Mary let Casie go on to the spare room and turned herself in the direction of Barbara's room. Mary Clothier and her son Pierce had lived for nearly four years now at Trescombe House.