She smiled the smile of someone who has said something both apposite and final. Even if this were possibly a waste. He bored her a little, but not enough. She got up to rearrange her room, to juggle with the ornaments in jade and glass. Elyot would stay. She would take him up, in time, in her own time. She moved about the room, content with her arrangement of the details of her life.

He smiled the indifferent smile of someone accepting a situation. No more than a situation that circumstance had arranged, in so many episodes, through so many instruments. Adelaide Blenkinsop, his mother, the saxophonist Wally Collins, who had found and delivered the Bristol box.

By the way, he said. So many weeks, and I don’t believe I’ve thanked you for the box.

The box? she said.

Her turned face was cloudy with surprise, asking for some kind of explanation.

The Bristol box, he said. I thought.

She began to be remotely interested.

I thought, he said, that you sent a box.

I’m sorry somebody thought of it first. This delicate attention.

She laughed off what might have been an edge of sarcasm. She smiled to anoint a wound. This was part of Muriel’s technique. But she scarcely touched him. He was preoccupied with the box, which he held again in retrospect, inquiring and deducing wrongly from the crumpled and electric paper. Muriel’s voice shrivelled a whole series of events that had developed out of the Bristol box. It almost destroyed Muriel herself. It was like discarding an illusion, he felt, as she stood waiting. It was recovering part of yourself.

You’ll stay to dinner, she said.

She sensed somehow the partial collapse of her authority. Interest revived in a too compelling rush. She had to put out a feeler, to reinforce.

No, he said. No, Muriel, not tonight.

She had to collect herself.

Then Friday. There’s the Queen’s Hall.

Perhaps, he said. I’ll ring. We’ll talk it over. But now I’ll be late.

He took his hat. His face revived under the touch of air. He could not walk fast enough, or think. You had to accept the evening as you found it, the shapes and sounds that started up, narcissus from the Scillys, and the blue policeman, and the tapping of the blind man’s stick. Now Muriel Raphael, and all that she implied, was dead. She was an error in deduction. She was little more than a lingering disgust.

When he got in, his mother said flatly, one of her domestic remarks, that she stamped with her distaste:

Connie is here, Elyot. I asked her to stay to dinner.

Not that Mrs Standish actively deplored Connie Tiarks. Connie was too negative for that. She was one of the unavoidable details, like ordering the meals, or buying a toothbrush. So you accepted Connie. She had kept on happening for such a long time.

Connie Tiarks was more acceptable to Elyot, tonight, and going into the drawing-room, and seeing Connie peering at a book. She looked at it very closely, because she had strained her eyes. She could not look at it closely enough, and this was not altogether eyes, it was also the eagerness of Connie Tiarks, her fear of waste, of wasting time, of not absorbing just another drop of knowledge. Connie Tiarks glanced up. He received the lumpiness of a face. This was in some way a resumption of many things.