I was like an outsider at some religious ceremony of which I couldn’t interpret the symbols. Even my driver left me to put his arm round another man’s shoulder, and I drank more beer to drown my sense of being excluded. I was drunk, I knew that, for drunken tears stood in my eyes, and I wanted to throw my beer glass on the floor and join the dancing. But I was excluded, as I had always been excluded. Tooley had joined her young friends and Miss Keene had departed to cousins in Koffiefontein, leaving her tatting on a chair under the Van de Velde. I would always be protected, as I had been when
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