As the gate clicked shut behind him, and he stumbled forward into the road, Charles suddenly realized the truth about what had happened. It was not Robert and Edith he had quarrelled with: it was Sheila. He had loved her with a passive persistence ever since the burning, spinning evening, when he was seventeen, that had taught him what love was, and she had entered his character and become its core. After a reasonable period of vacillation, she had agreed to marry him when this should be possible, and the prospect had been the foundation of his life in thought and action. Now, in the dusky street, his own footsteps beat into his head the knowledge that it could not happen. Her face rose before his eyes: that air of positive calm, of confident and sweet repose, smashed into his mind—always before it had reassuringly entered as an expected guest—and he saw behind her eyes the eyes of her mother, solemn, spectacled, judging him; in the bones of her chin he saw the chin of her father, jutting and scraped clean of its greying stubble below a tight, fussy, mouth. No! He had never been scared of the fact that she would grow older, losing the confident hardness of her limbs in dumpiness or scragginess; but now he saw her not merely growing old, but growing daily more and more of a piece with the prim, hedged gravel from which she flowered. With Robert’s complacent whine, with Edith’s angry squawk, still in his ears, he knew that he could never face it. It was over. No more Sheila.

At the thought of finality his mind was flooded with images: the ivory bald patches behind her ears, the quivering of her pointed chin as she had raised her face to be kissed for the first time, her delicate wrists . . . his heart lurched over and over in his breast like a cricket ball lobbed along a dry, bumpy pitch; a shudder seized him, so violent that he was flung off his balance and lurched against the stone wall of a prosperous man’s garden. The rough solidity of the stone flicked his mind empty again, and a new set of images crowded in: he saw Sheila’s face, pale, lumi­nous, resolute, and behind her the meanly precise face of her father, the tame and lumpy face of her mother, Edith’s spiteful plucked eyebrows, and presiding over the scene, Robert, with his detestable calf’s head and waving plump hands.