Can’t it just! said Muriel Raphael.

She laughed. She opened up, her mouth, the little cavern of her furs from which her neck sprang, and the too concentrated smell of violets. Any suggestion of mirth finished, if it had begun, with the closing of the magenta mouth.

However, Muriel said, by compulsion I’m a Philistine.

You watched the picking of a finger-nail, its passage down a seam, the head bent beneath a lacquer hat. All too clearly. As if Muriel Raphael were isolated in a magnifying bottle, or sitting for inspection under cellophane.

Now I expect I’ve shocked you, she said.

No, said Connie quickly, too quickly. Elyot said –

You watched a finger marking time.

Yes?

Elyot said you were stimulating, breathed Connie Tiarks.

It hung between them now in a glance.

I know Elyot very slightly, Muriel smiled.

It flashed out quickly to destroy the lumpy, asking face. Muriel Raphael resented the presence of intuition in other people. She also regretted obsessions in herself. So she smiled in defence at Connie Tiarks. Her mouth was thin, and defensive, and bitter.

We were children together, said Connie.

Not consciously exalting herself in relationship to Elyot, but equally defensive, against what she suspected in a glance, only this, she would have said. To Connie Tiarks, the safe, the admissible, was the past. You could not aspire to a future. She clung even to the incident of the mulberry tree, because it was safely accomplished, it was incontestably hers. When she cried into her pillow, it was more for physical comfort than anything else. There was no actual hopelessness attached to anything you could never have achieved.

Dear me, decided Mrs Standish, how stupid of me, Connie is in love with Elyot, well, well, that Colonel Tiarks, the knickerbockers and the roast beef. She raised her eyebrows. There were many little incidents to check. There was also her child, Elyot as a child, very close, physical; she felt him through the thin nightdress against her body. Mrs Standish frowned. And then these two women, the absurdity of women in love, the way they raised superior claims.

Then he came in, as diffidently, as distastefully as Elyot always did.

There you are, Elyot, said Mrs Standish. We’ve been waiting.

She got up, she had to, it was true, to kiss him in a rush of passion that she feared, knew, would return coldly to her mouth. But to touch him in front of these women, to reject her own spasm of vanity that had made this moment in the drawing-room, Elyot, and Connie, and Muriel Raphael. She was a little frightened of her own doing. She was frightened of afternoons alone and pianos in the street. She was frightened of her own body still desiring to give what nobody would take.

Thought I’d drop in. Just for a minute, he was saying, as if he had to explain, modify, anything so strange in motive as his intrusion into this room.

Connie noticed that he looked pale.