Elyot Standish went upstairs to work. Under the skylight there was a hard, clear gloss on the table spread with papers, the operating table on which you dissected other people’s minds. To lay bare their faults, the little manias, the unsuspected vices. To behave in the convention of a clever age that encouraged corrosiveness, destruction. This was also necessary, you liked to think, afraid to stand looking at yourself, afraid your own turn had come with the forces of destruction. He sat down. In self-defence he began to arrange the papers. There was the monograph he was doing on Mme de Warens. In the searching light of afternoon it seemed sadly irrelevant, one more word from Elyot Standish, its opposition to the solid fact of Mme de Warens, a case of lives and the shadows of lives. There was a warmth and fullness about the life of a Mme de Warens, that a Standish, even a Rousseau didn’t destroy. There came back vividly, if unattached to any context, the sunlight on bare arms, the frosted road that the feet trod beneath spring trees, somewhere, he felt, the sea. Like recovering the innocent eye to look back through a window in time. He pulled up his socks. He held in one hand the smooth red and mauve pebbles that still smelt of the sea.

Downstairs the door-bell went.

He held in his hand a sheaf of papers, a combination of words. He was the commentator, on more than the life of Mme de Warens. And Muriel Raphael adding her voice to the same cerebral commentary, moving her body in the same gestures, that you deduced, from the behaviour of other people, was the behaviour of certain situations, of living, of loving perhaps. He faced what was more than probability now, a relationship with Muriel Raphael. It appeared logical enough. The conjunction of two consciously sentient bodies in moments of sensuality. There appeared no alternative for the Muriel Raphaels and Elyot Standishes. You had chosen the dictatorship of the mind.

Downstairs Mrs Standish had risen to the occasion of visitors in her drawing-room. A guarded enthusiasm of women’s voices. Mrs Standish’s own voice rose above the others, flattering them, warming them, flirting them into a belief that suspicions might partly rest. Mrs Standish enjoyed this mental flirtation with her own sex. She enjoyed the strange undercurrent of affinity that drew together in the same women as different as Adelaide, Connie, Muriel, and herself, the something other than tastes and enthusiasms in common that amounted to a kind of physical and mental well-being in unconfessed feminine conspiracy. It even clothed the sharper moments, took away some of their sting, just this sense of freemasonry.

It’s so nice for you, Muriel, I shall call you Muriel, it’s so nice for you, said Mrs Standish, to be able to wear amusing things.

It was, in fact, an amusing kind of white lacquered boater, that made you feel like a Tissot picture, its intention, it also made you annoyed to hear the effect translated into Mrs Standish’s voice. Muriel Raphael sat straight and lacquered, lacquered all over like her hat, altogether brittle. Her face set in a lacquer smile. It was the smile set to receive a telling remark, that you could not deny, like finding a spot on your face. No doubt Mrs Standish would also discover many spots on the faces of her friends. No doubt she would also make it known in the same clear tones of sympathy and surprise. Muriel waited. She could wait a long time. She settled in behind the barricade of platitude, the statements her voice made on the outer edge, fulfilling anything that was expected of her. The door opening, she would stand, or sit, she could not decide, her head inclined against furs, would say. She cleared her throat in anticipation.