Miss Pym, with a welling up in the depths of her, was moved to tell Mrs Kerr everything and did not know where to begin. She was a timid woman, but had for a moment the sufferer’s arrogance. She hesitated, pondered, debated with herself, and again with reluctance looked back.

It had been what she would have to describe as a quarrel. It had been a Moment, not a succession of moments, not a gradual divergence of herself and Emily from the path of loving forbearance. It had been a flare – or a blotting out, how could she better describe it? – like the horrible blackness of spilt ink, suddenly everywhere, that makes one crinkle one’s face up. They had seen each other crudely illuminated, and they had seen each other as vulgar. She could not remember how it began; she could not remember anything leading up to it; just that there had been something intolerable about Emily from the moment she came to the door … That is the worst of anger, that terrible clarity. They had had, at that moment when everything tottered, worse than a sense of destruction: they had felt the whole force of a doubt in that moment: had there never been anything there? Isolating doubt which coming upon them suddenly had sent Miss Fitzgerald blindly downstairs and left Miss Pym, trembling, to put away the sketching-blocks and newly sharpened pencils and empty the steaming coffee from the thermos flask into the slop-pail … If Miss Pym were to tell Mrs Kerr all this, she couldn’t imagine what Mrs Kerr would be likely to say.

She realized that she had not made any remark for a long time, and wondered in agony what Mrs Kerr must be thinking of her. A slight turn of Mrs Kerr’s head, the ghost of a smile, the quickened twinkle of an earring made her feel all at once she could not tell Mrs Kerr: she was afraid.

‘I think many people might maintain,’ began Miss Pym laboriously, ‘that this was an ideal place to pass the winter.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ said Mrs Kerr.

‘Except, of course, those Spartans who enjoy the sleet and fogs, or say they do, because they maintain that endurance, that is, endurance practised as an act in itself, constitutes enjoyment.’

She pulled out a fine, full stop of sarcasm, but Mrs Kerr seemed to ignore it and said quite seriously: ‘Oh, but does anybody think that?’

‘I – I suppose they must,’ said Miss Pym, flustered. ‘But I do think that to the Straightforward Persons who can be frank with themselves and admit that they do like to escape the difficulties of Life and the unpleasantness – if they can do so without depriving themselves of experience or evading Responsibilities, or hurting Other People – then …’