“That’s right,” I said. Michael Fenwick was looking disgusted, and I sympathized with him. Sophy looked appalled and pitying, and I could understand her feelings, too. And yet, for all that, they had both of them alienated themselves from our tableful by their reactions: those with children, however unwillingly with them, are in many ways irrevocably cut off from those without, and David and I watched Flora pursuing her peas with a unity of enthusiastic tenderness that we could not feel for anything else, and that they, those other single two, could feel for nothing. As we watched her, she dropped one on her knee.

“Oh, the pea!” she exclaimed in her tone of pure amazement, and started to hunt for it with her spoon. David and I smiled at each other, and he leaned over and retrieved it for her. She would not let him put it in her mouth, he had to put it on her plate so that she could pick it up again with her spoon. I recognize myself in her at every turn, my own obstinate artifact of life. And I said to myself, There must be more unlikely people than David and myself who have become fathers and mothers, harnessed to this domestic machinery, but I could not think of any.

On the way back to our compartment we passed Natalie Winter. She was sitting with a book on her knee, and happened to look up and smile as we passed. David opened the door and said, “Hi, Nat,” and she said, “Hello, David, hello Emma,” and then could not think of anything else to say, so we moved on. She was a very shy woman. She was also the star of the season, and was to play Vittoria in The White Devil and the lead in the new play, The Maple Tree. She would have been a perfect illustration of the belief (had it been true) that all actors and actresses are very ordinary, unglamorous people at heart. I had met her several times, mostly at dressy occasions, and every time she had looked quite dreadful, a governess dressed up in clothes she thought an actress should wear. I remember one dress, layer upon layer of pink frill, from which her bony neck and shoulders rose in vulnerable inelegance. In her railway compartment she was wearing a tweed coat, and looked more at home. Her hair was pale, wispy and short, and her face pale and tremulous. Nobody would look at her twice, and yet she is the genuine thing, and one of the few actresses that I admire, one might almost say a great, a classical actress. On stage she always looks enchanting. She is a doctor’s daughter, and has never been known to say anything of interest to anyone.