You’re always making excuses for folks, said Joe.

Folks is folks, Julia said.

When they’re not considered as cattle. By the folks as do decide these things.

If you’re working up political, Joe Barnett, you’ll hear me sick out loud.

Joe said Julia was a capitalist.

Julia said Joe was an awful clown.

It made her breathe rather hard. Because she had no time for this, whether it was Joe Barnett or – Julia’s mind slid abruptly over the alternative.

It appears we don’t all agree, said Joe.

Yes, said Julia. It appears.

The air was heavy with warnings. Joe had spoilt her afternoon. Change and the unforeseen, the shifted furniture and the cracked cup, were the only things that threatened her composure.

In his more thoughtful and expansive moments, Joe Barnett started out for most extravagant utopias. Not that he was personally discontented. He took a great pleasure in his work. He was a cabinetmaker by trade. He worked in the workshop of Mr Crick at the corner of the street. He got up early in the morning, in winter when he had to blow on his hands and sound was vague and flannelly outside, in summer when his limbs were still slack and his feet trod through the pale pools of early-morning light. He took a pleasure in familiar things, the clean grain of wood planed in the workshop, the steel of a chisel that was very cool as he laid it in calculation against his cheek. Evenings, he read, or stood in a pub in the next street, silent, unless approached, above a pint of mild.

But behind all this, the habit, the substantial detail, there was much that he hadn’t accounted for. You still had to reckon with a kind of shapeless force. It made you wonder. It was a force of opposition that showed itself in moments of pain, injustice, and hunger. You resented the dictatorship of something that you didn’t understand, even if it hadn’t yet touched you personally, even if it only showed itself round the corner in the next street. So that Joe Barnett in his more thoughtful, selfless moments considered a possible existence free from this abstract dictatorship. He could not formulate the details of his desired utopia. But he was conscious, inside him, of a strange, peaceable, physical sensation that persuaded him a state of rightness must exist, that rightness must predominate.

Less satisfactory were the meetings. The toffs speaking in halls. He sat embarrassed and looked at his cap. It became a talking for the sake of talking. He did not know what it was about. Things happening in Russia were remote.

He said that once and Eden agreed with him.

At the first meeting in the hall, she had made him feel all right. He had waited to go to the shop. He had waited so many days, then made up his mind. He had marched in to find her standing in a glare of books, and the people looking at books, talking in quiet voices as if they were afraid. She was surprised. He was a bit surprised himself. But she made him feel all right. She came one afternoon to Crick’s workshop. She trod through the shavings and he heard her asking for Joe Barnett to his back. Well, he said, I’ll be blowed. Yes, she said. She laughed. But she kept turning round, as if she wished she hadn’t come, and it was a mistake after all. But he was glad. They talked a bit. They talked about nothing much. She called him Joe. Her name, she said, looking round, looking at her feet, her name was Eden. It was a name meant to be used.