“She comes to tea with me at Gunter’s, just as usual, but our conversations are impersonal. Only she told me the other day that she was afraid the world would stop floating.’ ‘That’s Miss White,’ I said. ‘She’s my grandmother’s maid. When she used to cross the Atlantic she was always afraid that the liner would stop floating and sink to the bottom. Not because anything had gone wrong with it, you know, but because the rules about what could float and what couldn’t had suddenly altered.”
