The gong had been sounded in the garden, and by degrees recumbent figures rose and strolled in to eat, since the time had come for them to feed again.

There were pools and bars of shade in the garden even at midday, where two or three visitors could lie working or talking at their ease.
Owing to the heat of the day, luncheon was generally a silent meal, when people observed their neighbors and took stock of any new faces there might be, hazarding guesses as to who they were and what they did.

Mrs.
Paley, although well over seventy and crippled in the legs, enjoyed her food and the peculiarities of her fellow-beings.

She was seated at a small table with Susan.
"I shouldn't like to say what _she_ is!" she chuckled, surveying a tall woman dressed conspicuously in white, with paint in the hollows of her cheeks, who was always late, and always attended by a shabby female follower, at which remark Susan blushed, and wondered why her aunt said such things.
Lunch went on methodically, until each of the seven courses was left in fragments and the fruit was merely a toy, to be peeled and sliced as a child destroys a daisy, petal by petal.

The food served as an extinguisher upon any faint flame of the human spirit that might survive the midday heat, but Susan sat in her room afterwards, turning over and over the delightful fact that Mr.Venning had come to her in the garden, and had sat there quite half an hour while she read aloud to her aunt.
Men and women sought different corners where they could lie unobserved, and from two to four it might be said without exaggeration that the hotel was inhabited by bodies without souls.