And now, Willy, she said, as they spun down the drive in the light from their two little lamps, past receding oaks, and a sudden salient elm. And now, you see, I’ve done it. It was awful, quite awful!

Laughing, she wanted to cry, in spite of the escape, and the relief of cold air, and Willy’s hand. Her voice reeled out into the darkness, crazily and much too loud, like the hoofs of the mare on the hollow road.

It didn’t matter, he said, because nothing mattered, and she was splendid, she was the most splendid girl. Slopping over a bit ? he wondered, his voice unnatural from returning to the cold, he still had to say, to put an arm, touch the warmth of her body that became his. You shelved the tradition of suppression without giving it another thought.

You’ll love me, Willy, she said, you’ll love me, won’t you, because, because I just couldn’t think of anything without.

It was true. She could not press herself close enough. She could not assure herself too often. Because if assured, her life, it seemed, had reached its beginning and its end. She closed her eyes. She felt his mouth warming on her own. She died many times over in the rushing darkness.

Surviving somehow, Kitty Goose became Catherine Standish about the middle of the following spring. It happened very tastefully, quietly, with a minimum of Standishes. Now I am Catherine Standish, she said. She began to wear larger, droopy hats, because she felt changed with the changed name. She was conscious of her own impetus, entering a room. She was less dumpy, lumpy, anxious, in fact, she was more Catherine Standish and less Kitty Goose. This former tenant of her body remained behind in Norwich, though there was an amusing photograph, that Willy insisted he liked, and really it was amusing, of the sealskin tippet and the expression that used to go with this. For Willy, perhaps, she was still Kitty. But to most of Willy’s friends, with the exception of Maudie Westmacott, she became Catherine Standish as a matter of course. You must call me Catherine, she had said charmingly to Aubrey Silk, bringing him into her circle, because he was a friend of Willy’s, making him an intimate friend of hers. Best of all she liked to hear the tradesmen call her Mrs Standish. Ringing up the stores or the wine merchant if anything had been overlooked. Yes, Mrs Standish, certainly, over the telephone. This established her position more securely than anything else. Sometimes she thrust back her head, pursed up her mouth carelessly, and thought about her mother-in-law.

Buying the house in Ebury Street, because it was still a respectable and at the same time not too stuffy address, and close to Chelsea for Willy, who had found and rented a studio, they settled down quite soon to the amusing business of marriage. As Willy remarked, it was so like an odd and unusually prolonged charade. Though often that year they surprised themselves. At transitory moments, over a dessert, or waking in bed, you became aware of a real and consequently strange face, which had to be fitted at once into the pattern of the travesty. You played the charade for all you were worth, ignoring the moments of uncertainty. You lost the stranger on the stage, the little amateur stage, like the stages at the end of the drawing-room. They laughed a lot, at themselves and at the audience. Independent of history, of time, of the business of being two ordinary people, they could afford to. Nothing belonged that reflected on their own importance.