“Not everyone lives in London,” I said, watching Mike with the astonishment which he always causes in me: he is so very tall and thin and American, and every bone and angle of him is full of absurd sensitivity, sensitivity carried to a painful, ridiculous degree. The back of his neck has the frightful tenderness of a child’s, and the shortness of his hair imposes it upon the view. I have known Mike for years: I first met him in Rome, when he was a typical American boy abroad and I was a typical English schoolgirl abroad, and I lost touch with him for some time after that, apart from a desultory plangent letter or two, until he turned up again in London, a literary success and working on the magazine with which I myself had odd connections. I did not exactly like him: in some ways he was rather unpleasant, being a perfect case of a man so interested in his own reactions that he cannot appreciate action or quality at all, and I remember one event, when a girl friend of his committed suicide, that almost put me off him for life. I was so much less interested in him than in whatever the wretched girl had been wanting, but all I ever learned from him was the tortuous succession of pettinesses that she had caused him to endure. However, he interested me: he always had something to say, even if it was only the usual complaint about journalism stifling his soul. And also I must admit that since he had actually had two novels printed, and moderately good firsthand ones at that, my respect for his sensitivities had increased. It was interesting to have him there, telling me about London, and who wrote what about whom in what, and who had had a five-poem spread in Encounter, and who had gone off to teach creative writing in which university in the States. I lapped all this up, starved as I was for casual gossip and deprived as I was amongst so many theatricals of any literary chat at all. So I listened with far more attention and enthusiasm than I usually gave him, and when the time came to dress he continued his conversation through the closed bedroom door. I was struck principally by his morbid concern lest his own responses should harden, which seemed to be far from likely, for he was as bare and as reed-in-the-wind as ever, and by his lack of generosity about his colleagues, whom he treated with an asperity that few actors could match. He had nothing of the superficial goodwill and interest and keenness and apparent love that is so widespread amongst actors that I sometimes think it must be not superficial but profound. He was like a Cambridge discussion, after weeks of messy latitude: not a darling from him, not a kiss on the cheek or an arm around the shoulders.