‘Supper’s ready, if you wouldn’t mind laying the table, Charles,’ came Betty’s deep croak. As he obediently rose to spread clean newspapers on the upturned packing-case, and put out three plates and an assortment of cutlery, Charles realized that these were the first words any of them had spoken since he came in an hour ago. They seemed from the first to have dispensed with speech; for different reasons, none of the three felt the need of conversation. Froulish was preoccupied, moodily silent except when one of his dormant grievances happened to be aroused, when he became vehement and oratorical. Betty was too stupid to wish for conversation, and too much wedded to her femme fatale manner to keep up the normal chatter of the silly young woman. Charles was physically tired and contented when he returned after his day’s work, and was in any case full of thoughts which neither of his companions would have understood or wished to share.

They drew up their chairs, Froulish merely swivelling his round from the writing-table, and Betty brought over the saucepan from the stove. Her cookery was of the simplest; it consisted merely of mixing together in her one saucepan every kind of food available, and subjecting the mixture to the uncertain heat of the paraffin flame. It seemed to work, and, if there were occasional failures, Froulish never noticed what he was eating and Charles was always hungry.

Even as they sat so close together, almost touching, the three seemed remarkably oblivious of one another’s presence. Charles realized for the first time how odd it was. Betty sat opposite him, hunched on a soap-box in her baggy slacks and a dirty flowered smock, peering abstractedly through her cascading hair at the newspaper under her plate; she was trying to read it upside down. Froulish, slumped in the only comfortable chair, scowled ab­stractedly into his plate, twitching and dropping food into his lap and on to the floor. The two seemed to have absolutely no contact; she never asked him about his work, and he would talk of nothing else. Yet he knew that they were happy together; it could not be said of either of them that they were capable of being in love, as most human beings know it; their natures did not permit it, his being too self-centred and hers too bovine. Yet to both the idea of a life which did not revolve round some kind of liaison would have seemed fantastic, and the suggestion insulting. The traditions of the ‘Bohemian’ artistic life, as lived in the Latin quarters of English industrial cities, were too strong to be questioned. One felt that they had not singled each other out, but merely come together by chance, and stuck.