Connie said that she burnt, she burnt for the People of Spain. She talked about Oppressors, almost as if she were repeating the correspondence in The Times.

Eden snorted.

And what are you going to do? she asked.

Do? repeated Connie vaguely.

Yes, said Eden.

She waited.

Well, said Connie, one can – only hope –

Hope, said Eden, is one of the incurable diseases of this day and age.

Elyot went on drinking his soup. Cynicism in other people, especially cynicism in Eden, shocked him. It had a hard, meretricious glint that was altogether absent from cynicism in yourself. It is after all a little difficult to catch the reflexion in your own armour. Adopted as a defence, this becomes a habit. Like the intellectual puzzle as a substitute for living, which you chose deliberately, in the small hours of the morning, in a Cambridge college, drunk on bad Chablis and talk of Beethoven and the universe. Contact with the living moment, that you watched in your shirt-sleeves from an upper window, the vague, formless moments in the street, made you recoil inside your shirt, too conscious of your own confused flesh. At dinner, he remembered, it was the gilded pineapple, it was that evening, there was the scene with Eden. Out of his own diffidence and doubt, very smug inside his own bright cynical armour, he had remarked that sex, like illness, was purely a state of mind. He had heard this, somewhere, a midnight tour d’esprit in a Cambridge college. Unprepared for Eden’s attack, for a show of passion, for the slammed door, he had sat there smugly rewarded for what, in his own estimation, was an increase in wit.

Now swallowing soup, Elyot Standish shuddered for his adolescence. At least one was ten years younger, he consoled himself.

Connie Tiarks was dabbing her eyes over the political state of Spain.

Why is it possible, asked Mrs Standish, to be completely unconscious of political states? Because, Connie, you make me ashamed. This morning I went for a walk in Kensington Gardens. I have never seen so many boats. I must say I was delighted. If only I could paint a landscape, I said. Because I’ve never had so much pleasure, just from a pondful of boats. Then you talk of political states. Perhaps I’m superficial, she said.

Half waiting for someone to contradict her; nobody did. Mrs Standish lapsed into an inner contemplation of her own pleasure, of many states of pleasure, though at the same time a little perturbed, she was ignored, she felt that time had won.

I’m very silly, said Connie, blowing her nose.

She listened to the clink of Eden’s spoon. It made no comment. Or Eden raised her head, to look, not at Connie, but beyond windows, into some distant country where there were answers.

Julia came to take away the soup. The tureen gone, the conscience remained.

Elyot retreated from the eyes of Connie Tiarks. He concentrated on bread. In a minute, he feared, she would ask him about his work, the trustful, over-interested voice of Connie, that upset him in the way her letter had. In the way you can be upset for the ingenuousness of the persistently ingenuous. You are suddenly appalled by the perpetual danger into which they run, you hold yourself helplessly responsible for this danger, both future and past. So Elyot Standish contemplated bread.