“Not much of that around here,” he said, indicating the room. “Of comfort no man speak.”

“I meant the other kind.”

“Anything new?” he inquired.

“Oh no. It wasn’t a success, this trip. It was awful.”

“Even in Yugoslavia?”

“Most of all in Yugoslavia,” she said, rather sharply.

“I only thought—because of the weather…” Then he said, “Why don’t you leave him, I always wonder?”

“Because—” She took out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. “Because, if there’s any possibility of its coming right, I don’t want to add to the waste in the world.”

Morgan sat holding his cup and looking unhappily into it. “Tea all right?” he asked.

“Oh, divine,” she said, but with a suggestion of not allowing her attention to be diverted.

She was always using drastic words like that, he thought: divine, gorgeous, ghastly. If, on the other hand, she had something serious to say, it came out offhandedly—“a bit annoying,” “rather boring”—which was just as exaggerated in its own way. He sometimes wondered hopefully whether these mannerisms would have irritated him if he had had to live with them; and could never sufficiently convince himself that they would.

“Of course,” she continued, “it may never come right. In which case it would be better to stop now, as you say. Some kinds of persistence are just stupidity. I mean, it just eats away all one’s self-respect, don’t you think?”

“Well,” he said, “one should not worry about what one cannot change.” He intended this injunction for himself.

“Isn’t that exactly why one worries, though? Because one can’t change it?”

“Doesn’t it work at all, then?”

She had put down her teacup and was absent-mindedly fluting the folds of her dress. She said, “He isn’t kind.”

“Not kind” he understood to be something quite distinct from cruel, something perhaps even less desirable: it implied having understood the principle of kindness and having rejected it.

“He keeps telling me,” she went on, “that he hasn’t promised me anything. I sometimes think, don’t you, that that must have been the first thing Adam said to Eve in the Garden of Eden?”

Morgan smiled. “Aeneas says it to Dido,” he said.

“And then he arrived the other night in a fearful state—terribly abusive.”

“You mean—he was drunk?”

She nodded solemnly. “Titus Andronicus, my dear.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” he said helplessly.

“One doesn’t have to behave like that, does one? Even if one doesn’t feel—deeply.” She opened her left hand so that it extended in his direction. “I mean—I am not like that with you, am I? Just because I don’t…?”

“Oh no,” he said.

“And you don’t mind my coming here like this?”

He took her little hand, but without looking up and with an air of capitulation. “Oh well,” he said.