I walked briskly all the way home. I was by no means displeased by Mike’s overtures, though I was surprised. It would take someone very negligible to displease me. It seemed quite amazing that I should have had two overtures of more or less the same nature within one week, when for three years nobody except men on building sites had paid tribute to my inaccessible charms. I suppose that my encounter with Wyndham had loosed around me a sense of restlessness or availability, which, together with the champagne, had put the idea of me into Mike Papini’s head. And now I had a choice. Not that there was any question of what I would choose, for Mike had so many qualities that I seriously valued and Wyndham so many that seriously disquieted me that I knew that with an obstinate desire like mine for violation I could choose nothing but Wyndham. I amused myself as I walked through the dripping rain of May by totting up their differences, and what it all came down to was that Mike Papini was a professional and Wyndham Farrar an amateur. Mike Papini, whatever the vast differences of background and attitude, came from the same home as Mary Scott: to him life was a discipline, a search for values, an investigation of the soul, an apprenticeship to a trade, and all his aberrations were simply an effort to conduct his affairs according to some notion, however strange, of the right way. Whereas with Wyndham I felt that life was an entertainment.

The next morning, at about eleven, I was surprised to receive a visit from Sophy Brent. It was an hour when I had always imagined her to be in bed. I was doing the washing when she arrived. Pascal let her in, and as she sat down on the kitchen table, looking unusually pale and gloomy, I wondered what could have upset her.

“You’re up early,” I said brightly, as she did not seem to want to say anything herself. I was too busy fishing boiling-hot nappies out of the washing machine with a pair of wooden tongs to approach her with more finesse. She did not reply, so I said nothing more. I could hardly have heard her if she had spoken, as the hot tap was running and the noise of the gas is deafening. When I turned the tap off, she said in a subdued voice: