I arranged myself as for sleep; David laid one hand across my thigh. I twitched and pushed it off. He put it back on again. I pushed it off once more; he protested, I protested, he lost his temper. I lost my temper, and we started to quarrel again. That was how it was with us. David started off about living in the country: how charming it would be, greenery, cows, silences, and I retaliated about boredom. London means everything to me, noise and human beauty, I am not a one for the inhuman, and the thought of nature and the limited range of social patterns that would be presented for my inspection began to fill me with as much horror as the idea of losing my job had done. I would be lost out there with the cattle and the actors, lost and nothing.

“Hereford is probably so ugly,” I said as I lay there between the sheets stiff with fright at the thought of it. “There won’t be a single building except the cathedral; what will I look at for nine months of my life? We’ll have to live in some foul semi-detached house, or some unspeakable flat. I can’t bear it, I just can’t bear it.”

“I can’t see what’s so bloody marvellous about this house,” he said, “as far as beauty goes.”

“Well then,” I said, “if you can’t see that, you must be stone blind.” And so, once more, we continued, for an hour and a half at least: in the end David got really angry, and at one of my more extreme insults to his profession he leaped up and beat his fist on the wall. Our house is an old house, an old Islington house, and his fist went right through the lath and plaster into nothingness, into the hollow middle of the wall itself. We both gave a yell of surprise; I reached out and switched on the light, and we stared at that gaping mouth, crunched so easily there into our wall, through the William Morris wallpaper, the pride of my life. As we watched a split appeared, reaching right up to the picture frame, and bits of plaster began to fall thick on our heads like hail from the decorated border of the ceiling.

“David,” I said in an awed whisper when all that would fall seemed to have fallen, “what on earth have you done? And the best piece of wallpaper in the house.”

“How amazing,” he said. “I hardly touched it.”

We were both awestruck; I was so impressed that I was not even angry, for this seemed to be a manifestation of the David I had known, the man at whose approach graves opened, fountains leaped out of rocks, and trees and women gathered to listen.