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Mr. and Mrs. Corrie looked thin and small and very young. Once or twice they laughed at the same moment and glanced at each other. Mr. Corrie’s face was flushed. Mr. and Mrs. Kronen looked like brother and sister—only that she said South Africa as if it were a phrase in a tragic recitative from an oratorio and he as if it were something he had behind him that gave him a sort of advantage over everyone. It seemed to be all he had. They had both been in South Africa, travelling in bullock waggons blinded by the fierce light and choked with sand. It seemed to linger in the curious brickish look of their complexions and the hard yellow of their hair. The talk about South Africa lasted all dinnertime. It seemed to interest Mr. Corrie. His eyes gleamed strangely as he talked about I.D.B.’s. Everybody at the table said, “Illicit dahmond bah” at least once with a little thrill of the face. Why was it illicit to buy diamonds?—strange people out there in the glare buying gleaming stones from miners and this curious feeling about it all round the table, everybody with hot glinting excited eyes—and somebody, some man, a business man who had handed round diamonds like chocolates to his friends in his box at the opera, a Stock Exchange man in a frock-coat throwing himself into the sea somewhere between England and South Africa—ah, what a pity, worried to death, with an excited head. He wanted diamonds. And when Mr. Corrie handed Mrs. Kronen a dish of fruit and said, “A banana? A bite of a barnato?” they all laughed, so comfortably. Something illicit seemed to creep into the very pictures and flow over the walls. The poor man’s body falling desperately into the sea. He could not endure his own excited eyes.