At once she did the same, brewing herself a cup of tea.

All through that evening the two old people "kept company" with each other, after their own peculiar fashion.
"Setting out with each other" Miss Baker had begun to call it.

That they had been presented, that they had even been forced to talk together, had made no change in their relative positions.

Almost immediately they had fallen back into their old ways again, quite unable to master their timidity, to overcome the stifling embarrassment that seized upon them when in each other's presence.

It was a sort of hypnotism, a thing stronger than themselves.