Hello, Connie, he said. You can’t see. You’ll strain your eyes.

It was the sort of thing you said to Connie.

Oh no, she said rather breathlessly, and felt red. No, I can see perfectly. Really I can. And I was just glancing, she said. These prints.

She could not excuse herself enough. As if she were caught in a shameful act. She could feel the hot flushing of her face.

I love prints, she said.

But it sounded the desperate invention of a moment, to throw out something, she was climbing up the endless ladder of her own embarrassment.

Let’s have a drink, Connie, he said.

He poured out the sherry he didn’t really want.

Sherry always makes me feel funny, she said. Do you think, do you think perhaps I ought?

Definitely, Connie.

She couldn’t contain so much pent-up gratitude. Her hand slopped some of the sherry over the edge of the glass.

But Connie Tiarks’s gratitude was not without its vein of regret, that persistent nostalgia that rises out of impossible things. It lay around her all the evening. It spoke in her glance. It lay in the neighbourhood of Elyot, almost perpetually. All the things I have never done, Connie sometimes said. There was a tinge of failure to almost every enterprise. There was the glass box she had lost in the King’s Road. If I were anyone else, she said, I would have the courage to say, well, something, there are the people who always manage to convey intentions, even if no more than this, an intention. And the box had a certain value as an intention. If I were this kind of person, Connie felt.

Julia says lettuces have gone up twopence, Mrs Standish announced.

She did not know why she said this. A seeding, of lettuce, or the intellect, it was easy enough, and the things he said were tootsy, in a mauve shirt. She had listened to many anecdotes. She had listened to the prices of things. This was now conversation. But she could also hear, almost, the ticking of an eyelid. A moist mouth flowered in her sleep, the moist words of crooners, dissolving the emotions in a shower of words. There was still the pressure of his arm. Under the harsh bulbs along the Front at Brighton, she could feel the pressure of an acquired affection.

Connie said she supposed the frost

The what? asked Mrs Standish.

The lettuces, said Connie. I suppose it’s all due to the frost.

In a moment, sighed Mrs Standish inwardly, I shall say it is colder for this time of year, we must condemn the lettuce and the frost, quite firmly and finally.