Having encountered my gaze, he thought he had said either enough or too much, and I wished I knew which; then he started to pin up his notice. It said, Could I see Sophy Brent in my office at five thirty this afternoon. When I had taken this in, I was relieved from further talk or silence by the arrival of the entire company, who had clearly just been released from some mass talk by one of Wyndham’s inferiors. I was swept off to eat pork pies in a pub with David and Neville and Julian and one or two others. As I munched mouthfuls of stale dry pastry, I tried to decide whether I had been shaken, whether I was still shaking; it seemed to me that I must be or the question would not have been in my mind. I could not think what it was that could have so affected me, for I meet a lot of people, and many of them are rude or gallant or impertinent or suggestive upon indiscriminate principle, quite flippantly, with no thought or intention of consequences, and I had no reason to assume that Wyndham Farrar was not just such another, as casual and possibly less appreciative than a man whistling from a passing lorry. And yet, knowing this and expecting nothing, I nevertheless felt shaken, as though what he had said had been said to me myself, and not to David Evans’ wife, or to a woman looking at a noticeboard who seemed from the eccentricity of her hair style to be an actress.

I suppose, in view of the consequences, that the only odd thing was that this should have been technically our second meeting and not our first. I have always paid great attention to chronology, and I sometimes wonder these days whether there can have been any significance in the meaninglessness of our first pregnant encounter. First encounters are of such appalling importance. The first time I saw David was not on that train, not even in the lift, but on the television a year before, not knowing who he was and not remembering until after we were married that I had seen him: one day he started to describe to me a certain play that he had done, and I suddenly realized that I had seen it and him, and had thought even at the time that David was the kind of man that would do. When I discovered that it had been him all the time that I had seen and wanted, I was both pleased and disappointed: pleased at the consistency of my judgement, disappointed that there should be one man where I had had a hopeful memory of two.