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you people,” she said, and the couple kissed on.
    What Mrs. Ransome could never get used to was how unabashed the participants were, how unsheepish, and how none of these people was ever plain shy. Even when there was a program about shyness no one who took part was shy in any sense that Mrs. Ransome understood it; there was no hanging back and no shortage of unblushing participants willing to stand up and boast of their crippling self-consciousness and the absurdities to which overwhelming diffidence and self-effacingness had brought them. No matter how private or intimate the topic under discussion, none of these eager vociferous people had any shame. On the contrary, they seemed to vie with one another in coming up with confessions of behavior that grew ever more ingeniously gross and indelicate; one outrageous admission trumped another, the audience greeting each new revelation with wild whoops and yells, hurling advice at the participants and urging them on to retail new depravities.
    There were, it’s true, rare occasions when some of the audience gave vent not to glee but to outrage, even seeming for a moment, presented with some particularly egregious confession, to be genuinely shocked; but it was only because the presenter, glancing covertly at the audience behind the speaker’s back, had pulled a wry face and so cued their affront. The presenter was an accomplice, Mrs. Ransome thought, and no better than anyone else, even going out of her way to remind participants of yet more inventive and indelicate acts that they had earlier confided to her in the presumed privacy of the dressing room. When she jogged their memories they went through an elaborate pantomime of shame (hiding their heads, covering faces with hands, shaking with seemingly helpless laughter), all this to indicate that they had never expected such secrets to be made public, let alone retailed to the camera.
    Still, Mrs. Ransome felt, they were all better than she was. For what none of these whooping, giggling (and often quite obese) creatures seemed in no doubt about was that at the basic level at which these programs were pitched people were all the same. There was no shame and no reserve and to pretend otherwise was to be stuck up and a hypocrite. Mrs. Ransome felt that she was certainly the first and that her husband was probably the second.
    The contents of the flat were insured for £50,000. It had originally been much less, but being a solicitor and a careful man besides, Mr. Ransome had seen to it that the premium had kept pace with the cost of living. Accordingly this modest agglomeration of household goods, furniture, fixtures and fittings had gone on over the years gently increasing in value; the stereo and the Magimix, the canteen of cutlery, the EPNS salad servers, the tray cloths and table mats and all the apparatus of that life which the Ransomes had the complete equipment for but had never managed to lead, all this had marched comfortably in step with the index. Durable, sober, unshowy stuff, bought with an eye to use rather than ornament, hardly diminished by breakage or loss, dutifully dusted and polished over the years so that it was scarcely even abraded by wear or tear—all this had gone uneventfully forward until that terrible night when the column had been ambushed and this ordinary, unpretentious little fraternity seemingly wiped out and what Mrs. Ransome modestly called “our things” had vanished forever.
    So at any rate the insurance company concluded and in due course a check arrived for the full value plus an unforeseen increment payable in the absence of any previous claims and which served to cover disruption and compensate for distress.
    â€œThe extra is for our trauma,” said Mrs. Ransome, looking at the check.
    â€œI prefer to call it inconvenience,” Mr. Ransome said. “We’ve been burgled, not knocked down by a bus. Still, the extra will come in handy.”
    He was