Connie began to gasp in front of Raphael. She made the little, round, gasping, female noses of a woman trying to identify herself with Art.

It’s so, it’s so complete, Connie said helplessly, her eyes already humid under thick glass.

He hoped she would leave it at that. The fervid desire of a certain type of feminine mind to identify itself with objects; with nature, with art, drained the dignity from these. They existed in a detachment of their own. He avoided the emotional commentary, especially when made by his own reflected face, the part of him that ventured through the glass into the Italian field, out of his own body, away from the environment it had taken, the habits it had formed. This was dangerous because it verged on the irrational. Twentieth-century London was eminently rational. He was glad of it. He frowned at his reflexion in the glass, at any recollection of the beech forests of Germany.

They were looking at pictures, he and Connie Tiarks, and Connie persisted in telling him how she felt, in front of Delacroix, Constable, and Turner. She clutched his arm. Her face glowed with a most unaesthetic emotion. There was a smell of damp macintosh. Because outside it was raining. They would return into the rain, were in fact already returning, the lions of Trafalgar Square were sleek from rain.

Well, said Connie, waiting for the bus. Thank you, Elyot, for the afternoon.

You would have said, afraid. You would have said it was her first and last.

We must do it again, he said.

However often you were touched by compassion for Connie Tiarks, you were appalled, on afterthought, by the sterility of the mood. Compassion for Connie that was also repulsion. To be kind to Connie. Even if you wrote it up on the wall, it reminded only of the literal gesture.

Yes, we must do it, he said, in a scurry of wind, a flurry of bus, the touch of wet macintosh. If not next Sunday, very soon. Good-bye, Connie, he said. It’s been nice.

Then it was gone, her gratitude against a bus window, that left him with the skin stretched tightly on his face.

This before they sat at the dining-room table, before Mrs Standish said:

Elyot, pass Connie the cream.

Connie said, oh no, she didn’t, she really oughtn’t, that last time she stood on the scales, but all the same, she thanked Elyot, she would.

He looked at Eden, or, not looked, felt his way mentally in her direction. Eden was as remote as Connie present, offering herself, her pleasures and preoccupations on a plate. Not that Eden could not move into the foreground, at times too forcibly. You might say that Eden flickered up, lapsed again into a state of burnt, spent passion.

Even then, if you weren’t careful, as Adelaide Blenkinsop said, more by chance than insight – if you touched Eden you might get burnt.

Adelaide Blenkinsop was a friend of years. She was acquired the time that Eden had the breakdown and spent three weeks in the Engadine at the expense of Aubrey Silk. If it weren’t for Aubrey, said Mrs Standish, not without complacency, almost expecting it as her due. It was also just at the time that Eden had begun behaving oddly, shutting herself in her room, going off to stay with the girl Valerie Stevenson, whom Mrs Standish instinctively disliked. Then the breakdown. For Mrs Standish, an alarming but interesting state of affairs. She talked about neuroses. She read several textbooks on psychology.