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ATE decided not to begin Jodie's portrait until the tea was over—painting made such a mess in the studio—but she put the picture of Joe on the big easel, the picture begun five years ago and never finished. And on the walls her art-school studies hung, the fish, the flowers, Nellie Verlaine, onions and copper saucepans, and heads of snuffy old gentlemen that were supposed to be full of "character."

She was out in the back yard so early on the morning of the tea that the dew soaked through the soles of her old satin slippers as she cut branching sprays of larkspur to fill the studio fireplace, under the plaster cast of the Della Robbia singing boys.

Carrie Pyne came wavering in from Cedarmere on her bicycle, to help make sandwiches. They made cream-cheese and olive sandwiches, lettuce and mayonnaise, and Joe had stopped at the expensive Plunkett's and sent home tins of caviar and small yellow terrines of foie gras. It was fun making the sandwiches, except when Carrie cut her finger; it was fun companionably eating the buttery, mayonnaisy crust, or having an olive all round—Lizzie, too, and Charlotte, who had been sent to say that her mother had one of her headaches and couldn't pour tea that after-