He impressed Connie, he knew with some embarrassment. To reach that stage at which you did not quail before the people you impressed was to achieve a state of felicity. To have the confidence in yourself, to be the person that impressed. It was like living, he imagined, in a world of bright illusion, of discarded honesty, in which you became a synthetic entity from the minds of reviewers for the Sunday papers. Because this, au fond, was what you were for Connie and the people you impressed. You ceased to be the dumb self sitting on the edge of other people’s conversations, stammering on the telephone, avoiding familiar faces in the street. To be the creature of your work, which anyway was a highly detached, synthetic product, to which you were related as an instrument. But for Connie this would be contentment. For Connie it was not a question of personal integrity. She only wanted to accept what she wanted to accept.

Tell me, Elyot, she said, are you working now?

He warded it off.

One doesn’t work, Connie. It happens or it doesn’t.

Feeling gauche, she blushed. He made her feel obtuse.

She made him feel a prig. It was the inevitable action of Connie Tiarks. And perhaps he was a prig. Recognizing this, there was still no remedy. Telling yourself you have a harelip still does not make it whole. But Connie Tiarks did attempt persistently to wrap him in the vestments of Art. She lowered her voice at lunch and talked about his work.

His work had evolved out of his innate diffidence, the withdrawing from a window at dusk, saying: I must do something, but what? Out of his bewilderment he had taken refuge behind what people told him was a scholarly mind. He hung on gratefully, after a month or two of uncertainty, to remarks made by tutors at Cambridge and the more wishful and hence more helpful remarks of his mother. So that he became before long, forgetting the process, a raker of dust, a rattler of bones. There was the book on Büchner, which appeared very soon after Cambridge, out of the requisite notes. There were also Gérard de Nerval, Mörike, Mme du Deffand, and Kleist. Critics remarked on his taste, on his catholicity, on his clarity of style. So that except for those bleaker moments of personal inventory, Elyot Standish could experience satisfaction, review with pleasure the tasteful and intellectual milestones dividing the last ten years of his life. But now beneath the sympathetic eyes of Connie Tiarks, his hands made little piles of salt. This is one of the contradictions. The sympathy, the approval of Connie Tiarks made him more self-critical than any disparagement in the press. Irritated by his own hands, he watched them continue to play with salt. The little mounds that rose, only so far, that fell, dry, pure, and limited.

Connie sighed.

Mrs Standish looked at her, as if about to say something that she did not say. Once Mrs Standish had remarked, though not in the presence of Connie herself: Poor Connie, elle est tellement vièrge – her voice paused half-way between criticism and approval. There was always something of this in her attitude to Connie Tiarks, whose nose reacted shinily to the plight of Loyalist Spain.