Mrs Angelotti sat upon a chair. You heard the planting of her thighs, and the crackle of a not quite clean starched collar that she wore to salve professional convention.

I like to think I do what I do for a definite reason, said Mrs Angelotti. An’ you shall see the letters, the very nice letters, that I have from those as appreciate. You wouldn’t believe. There’s actresses, there’s names. It’s many a hole I’ve got the theatre out of.

Mrs Angelotti’s voice drifted like a skein of ether through a state of almost consciousness.

Yes, she said. It’s the connexion I have. It’s Angelotti. Was, that is. That brings the theatre near. He was trapezes, Angelotti. Then he went an’ missed the net. Oh yes, she said.

Her collar creaked.

Alone, Eden began to take notice. At first it was things. There were the half-dozen daffodils in the silver-plated trumpet vase. Her relief fastened on things. It is over, she said. She was even grateful for the pain, for the heavy, tumid legs. Because this meant release, even if bitter to admit, and it was, the perpetual clutching after freedom. This is a new life, said Maynard. She disposed of what she didn’t want to remember. Lying on her back, she began to look outward, out of a trance of more than physical pain, into Mrs Angelotti’s room. She realized now for the first time that she should have had a child. Instead she was free. She lay on her back looking at the six pallid daffodils, late and spindly, that stirred in a suburban breeze. There was no sign of the abortion that had been done, the child they had taken away, and which she had only just begun to consider as a child. Only now, afterwards, it had ceased to have connexion with herself and Maynard, the shoddiness, it had begun to have a significance of its own. Round her face, her hair felt heavy and oppressive. She was at a loss, had lost, there was after all an emptiness, she told herself there should have been a child.

The week dwindled. It was not time, she decided, but an insertion of painfully intense sensation. She stepped back into her own waiting footprints, on the dust in Mrs Angelotti’s hall. She stood there while Mrs Angelotti’s voice hovered between the technical and abstract generalities.

Good-bye, dear, she said. It’s been nice. Even so. Yes, she sighed heavily. I shan’t say happy returns. And remember, dear, not for the next six weeks.

Eden Standish went home. It began to be evening in the streets. She caught the train. She caught on diffidently enough to the slackened thread, but there was no reason for diffidence, she saw, it tightened logically enough. There was the fruiterer polishing his apples outside Victoria. There were the pink and placid sausage skins, and varnished pies, in the cold-food shop. She walked homeward through the heavy evening light, too warm, she felt, perhaps the time of year, her strange new feet tasting the pavement, entering a fresh phase.