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poems Betsinda Dances, published by the Oxford University Press in 1931, is an inkling:
    â€˜Evening’
    I have looked too long upon the sunset.
    Â Â Â Â Its spell has stripped me bare
    Of all the comfortable thoughts
    Â Â Â Â That commonly I wear.
    Evening’s the chink in the soul’s armour,
    Â Â Â Â And through it I can feel
    The soft cold fingers of desolation
    Â Â Â Â Silently, deftly steal.
    Nought’s left of joy now but its transience;
    Â Â Â Â Of pride, but its loneliness.
    Love’s a dim ache, a dying music,
    Â Â Â Â Beautiful, comfortless.
    Colour to greyness turns, and slowly
    Â Â Â Â Light fades from the sky:
    I sit bowed down by the weight of evening,
    Â Â Â Â Too sorrowful to cry.
    Joyce got a part-time job as a secretary at Scotland Yard in 1919. It was one way of satisfying her childhood agony of curiosity about what happened to drunkards when they went inside the doors of Rochester Row Police Station. Her superior, looking over her shoulder one morning, happened to see her typing out a court report riddled with four-letter words: ‘I think we’ll have one of the men finish that one, Miss Anstruther.’ For years afterwards she remained friends with the detectives at Scotland Yard, and dropped in sometimes to play poker with them.
    She was now a modern maiden, wearing high-heeled shoes and smoking cigarettes. The metaphors she used in her early articles in the Graphic and the Evening Standard (published in 1920 and 1921) reflect her daily experience: something was ‘as bland as a cocktail without ice’, and you could as little do something else as ‘live on a diet of salted almonds’. The débutante’s life involved many iceless cocktails and salted-almond evenings. Polite young men escorted her home to 25 Curzon Street in Mayfair, where she lived with her mother, the Dame.
    Joyce’s first love was Peter Sanders, whose details are to be found in the leather-bound notebook in which she recorded ‘Dances, Dinners, Boys, Girls, Etc.’ between 1918 and 1920. Under ‘Men, 1920’ appears ‘Sanders, Arthur (Peter), 3 Eaton Square, VIC 3785. Bayford Lodge, Wincanton, Somerset. 3rd Grenadier Gd., Gds Club.’

    The modern maiden
    Joyce burned her diaries in 1921 and never wrote about Peter afterwards, so it is only from the spidery handwriting of her best friend Frankie Whitehead that we know Peter to have been ‘a wonderful person, good-looking, very clean, very popular and very nice’. The last dance Joyce went to with him was at Claridge’s on 11 November 1920 – the Armistice Dance. Peter went away for a few days’ hunting after that, and on 22 November shot himself. Gambling debts were the official reason.
    A month after Peter’s death Joyce wrote this poem, which she called ‘Immortality’. It is not what one might expect from someone soon to be writing hymns.
    They talk to me of the immortal soul:
    Â Â Â Â And maybe they speak the truth.
    But O! small comfort, when I want the whole
    Â Â Â Â Bright bravery of your youth
    Which grim death stole.
    And yet wise men, forsooth,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Try with vague tales of immortality
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â To comfort me.
    They talk to me of all eternity:
    Â Â Â Â I think it sounds too vast
    And overwhelming just for you and me,
    Â Â Â Â Two pagan lovers; we should be aghast
    And shiver at its cold immensity.
    I’d rather be
    Â Â Â Â Back in our little past –
    Transient, perhaps, but we
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Found it sweet, even though it might not last
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Like this strange solemn immortality
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â They offer me.
    The cocktails and salted almonds carried on. The social system may have seemed cock-eyed to Joyce, but she had no qualms about enjoying what it