“It isn’t awful for you—to see me, I mean?” Her head was bent toward him with a certain insistence.

“I love to see you.” After a moment he added, “It is awful, yes.”

When she said his name, he was obliged to raise his eyes.

“Morgan,” she said, her fingers resting in his, a pearl ring on her smallest finger pressing into his palm. “Does it hurt you very much, then?”

Looking into her face, he thought that this must always be a rhetorical question. He looked away. For the space of a second, he closed his eyes.

She sat back, withdrawing her hand. She put away her handkerchief. Shaking her hair again, recrossing her legs, she seemed to revive. After a moment, she asked, “Is there any more tea?”

He poured it in silence, and chipped out a little more sugar from the petrified bowl.

“Well, I feel better,” she said, “for seeing you. You’re so good, Morgan. Such a comfort. I think I should come here all the time, just to get renewed. A sort of purification—like the lustrum.”

“The lustrum was every five years,” he said with a smile.

“Which reminds me—I must watch the time. I have to be somewhere for lunch.”

“Oh? Where?” he asked.

She put down her cup. “Now, you’re not going to give me dreary directions about the buses again.” She looked around for her handbag. “Do you have a mirror?”

“In the hall,” he said.

She gathered her things together—her hat, her gloves. He pushed the table out of her way.

“I look hideous,” she said, putting on her hat before the mirror. “All this business is making an old woman of me.”

He watched the back of her head. He stood very still, like a person who in a great defeat somehow maintains his dignity. He said, “You look splendid.” It was the most fitting word he could think of.

“You’re a pet to say so.” She let him hold the door for her and went out onto the landing.

“I’ll come down and put you in a taxi,” he said.

“Oh, don’t do that. There are heaps of cabs in the High Street. Really—I’d rather go alone.”

She stood with her hand on the railing, her foot on the first of the carpeted stairs. She did not want him to know where she was going—after what she had said about giving up, about being reasonable. All that was perfectly clear to him. Light shone through her golden hat, on her brown skin. There was a smell of floor polish and, very delicately, of her perfume. Faint sounds of the street came up to them and, on the floor below, a gramophone was being played quite loudly: Beethoven was worrying about what he could not change.

“Mind the stairs,” he said.

“You are sweet, Morgan,” she said. “To cheer me up.”

“I haven’t done anything.”