“Oh, OK.,” they said, and slouched off in the other direction, their hands resting neatly in their trouser pockets upon their bony hips. I said good-bye, but they did not respond. I liked the insolence of their deference. And I reflected, as I wandered aimlessly towards the town, that these words were the first social words that I had exchanged with any of the inhabitants of Hereford. I had bought things, it is true, and changed my library book, but I had said nothing. I had met nobody, I was living in a small dissociated pocket of people who had settled in this town and who had no more connection with it than they had with any other town in England. When autumn came they would move on, and that would be that. And the town itself, which seemed to outsiders to be a unit, was made up of pockets of people, all as unrelated to one another as actors to fanners or as farmers to “teds” in blue jeans. All that connected people was buying and selling. There was the cathedral, with its vergers and deans and choir-boys; and the theatre, with its actors and directors and stagehands; and the market, with its farmers and butchers and beef; and the library, with its librarians; and the newspaper, with its owners and its journalists and its printers; all little disconnected cells, and within each cell there are laws and habits and a prescribed language, and prescribed jokes. I wondered for a moment, as I walked along, whether I did not perhaps hate the place so much because of its so fully occupied and classified air. Unlike London, it left no room for the placeless, and I felt a moment’s piercing nostalgia for my school, which was the only place in my life where I had been fully classified, fully accounted for and fully known. Since then I had learned so well to detach myself from any attempt at a group: I had learned so thoroughly the tone of voice that dissociates, the glance that discourages, the slight formidable mystification which leaves one unaccounted for in the vast arrangements of human kind. I had refused to live in a street with anyone who could contaminate me by similarity, I had refused to wear the clothes that might have accounted for me or to pursue the interests that might have created me. And I had ended a freak, with nothing to my credit but my difference. I thought bitterly about that job that I might have been doing which would have been so thoroughly public and so anonymous; and my fury with David, who had brought me up so abruptly against my own weakness and against the cozy settling instincts of others, increased and smouldered.