Connie Tiarks lived in Kensington. She lived with an old lady, a Mrs Lassiter, who kept a canary in her ground floor window, front. She sat with Mrs Lassiter in a conservatory at the back, in a gloom of begonias and geraniums. Connie Tiarks was a companion. Sent out by her mother from the boarding-house in Cheltenham, she had been the companion of three such old ladies, continuing in the tradition of gas fires, crumpets, and maidenhair, that she had accepted in her youth in Cheltenham. She was passably content. She sat holding wool for Mrs Lassiter, letting her mind wander. It took quite strange shapes and turns in the green gloom of the begonias. Sometimes it made her blush. But she blushed most on having to commit herself, or to say openly, well, I’m a companion. She would never forget the day she had announced this to Eden. But what was one to do? She lay awake at night, thinking of this, and her feet grew cold. She lay there on Mrs Lassiter’s bed, on one side of which there were lumps, and regretted her lack of enterprise. But she was grateful, she was grateful even for the lumps in Mrs Lassiter’s bed, she could always feel almost content when she pulled the blanket up to her nose.

Connie came sometimes to Ebury Street on Sunday, perhaps every third Sunday.

This is Connie’s Sunday, said Mrs Standish.

But this only labelled the institution, was no pointer to behaviour, you embarked on what you had intended, this was always understood, even by Connie it was understood. Connie sat and talked of Kensington and Cheltenham. Or she looked at books. She was always a book-worm, Mrs Tiarks said. In fact, Connie had ruined her eyes by an excess of literary enthusiasm, by reading even in the bus, by reading the biographies she got from a library in Kensington High. Now she looked out, rounder-eyed than she should have been, through the thick-lensed, thick-rimmed spectacles which time had made a part of her face.

Even if it were only every third Sunday that Connie appeared in Ebury Street, Elyot connected Sunday with her, it spoke with her accent through the drawing-room door, flat and hopeful and uninterrupted, it wore the expression of her face, her slightly lumpy, shapeless face. It settled on him, whether Connie or Sunday, and he knew that all was up. Her gratitude, her anticipation of pleasure merely in his presence, went to meet him, you might say attacked him, just on his going into the room.

There was the Sunday, defeated by this, overcome by the incubus of Connie Tiarks, he had proposed a visit to the National Gallery. As if you could exorcize your own emotions by carrying them into public places, and of all public places the National Gallery, where the incubus of Sunday sits, breathing the breath of central heat, wearing the face of the English upper class, the expression of just sentient vacuity, of those who suffer acutely from Civil Service. He regretted this enormously. But he regretted also the reflexion of his own face, in Uccello, in Piero di Cosimo, in the Crucifixion of Raphael.