Mrs Standish helped herself to a crystallized tangerine. She took a little meditative bite. She held it up to the light, to admire its transparent prettiness.

Lovely, she said, half to herself. Such pretty stuff. Like – like Christmas.

Then she popped it into her mouth. She had eaten much too much. She began to feel melancholy, the melancholy of too many departed Christmases.

Elyot stirred.

It was easy to feel smug after Sunday lunch, at the same time not so easy to avoid a feeling of claustration. He would go, he would slip out, he would lose his conscience and Connie Tiarks, he would walk in the wind along the comforting paths of habit, as far as the pond in Kensington Gardens. Here the kites sailed above the signs of autumn, a clear kite in a cold sky, that appealed to his sense of proportion, his love of reason. People walked below with their own submerged thoughts. But you avoided the submerged element, either in your own life or in the lives of other people, wherever this was possible.

I think, said Elyot, 1 shall go out for a little. You’ll be here I suppose, Connie, when I get back?

Yes, she said. I suppose. That is, I expect.

Asking for help, she received none. She floundered in her own embarrassment.

I expect I’ll be here till – I’m supposed to be back at Mrs Lassiter’s at five.

Elyot trod softly. His footsteps on the carpet avoided his own guilt, that the voice of Connie Tiarks implied. Outside the door he breathed.

Mrs Standish stretched. She put up her arms and the sleeves fell back, over her arms that were still white, if now untouched, sometimes she stroked her arms and thought. Because it seemed that time had won. For Mrs Standish, life had become epistolary, sedentary, and dull. Sometimes a panic rushed at her down the windy stretches of the early morning. She waited for the light. In retrospect this was the hour of delightful, intimate conversations on the doorstep, sometimes a protest, sometimes a yielding. And the suppers, the days when she had pulled out all the stops of her personality, ranging from the swashbuckling air of supper at the Savoy, to the intellectual we’re-in-the-know of the Café Royal, or her nobody-else-understands performance at Rule’s. She was certainly at her best at Rule’s. She sank with a sigh on to the plush and gave herself up to the exquisite pleasures of the exchanged confidence. No one could yearn like Mrs Standish over a late dish of bacon and eggs. But all this was long ago, before nature had her tiresome, if inevitable way, leaving her victim with the French belletrists and an overwhelming desire to prove nature wrong.

It was the sense of stagnation that appalled Mrs Standish, when mentally she still swirled, when she would still find in her mouth words from a conversation held only yesterday. She had great faith in herself, but the self that was a kind of composite abstract of Kitty Goose and Catherine Standish, that was a contradiction of time, and more especially the face that yawned at her out of a Sunday mirror, with its elaboration of emphatically copper curls and the tautness of an eyelid. The hand of Mrs Standish played with a curl, or rather, with a wisp of hair that had escaped from being curl, that was the more essential present Mrs Standish, a bit bedraggled and greying at the roots. Her nails blanched against each other, fastened against a strand of hair, almost as if she suspected lice. Or perhaps not. Perhaps more probable that Mrs Standish was bored, bored, BORED, though if she had expressed herself, she would certainly have said: J’ai des ennuis, mon cher.