Friday? No, Harry, she said to Harry Allgood. Friday I can’t come. Because. Well, you know how I feel. Mrs Standish was a very old friend. It upsets me to think. And besides, there might be something I could do. For Elyot and Eden, I mean.

She heard the pp-pp pp-pp of his pipe, the contained but angry fizz of spittle making contact with the hot bowl. There was something stolid, comforting in the presence of Harry Allgood for which she might have been grateful. But the fizz of the angry spittle was too much. It made her boil. She recognized what was almost perpetual, a desire to take out on Harry any bitterness she felt.

After all, I was practically brought up with them, she said. All my life we’ve –

The pp-pp of a pipe cut in.

I didn’t contradict, he said, sideways, slowly, out of the corner of his mouth.

Silence was more potent than contradiction. Harry had discovered this. He waited. He was seldom moved by exasperation for the waywardness of other people. This exhausted itself in time. You could break it by waiting, as the rock broke the sea, the unimpressionable rocky forms of face and shoulder throwing back a shower of ineffectual passion in the direction from which it came. Walking down the street beside her, this often stirred the helplessness in Connie. She hated, or respected, she did not know, the tweed jacket with its leather elbows, the firm, necessary remarks he passed, which were aimed either to humiliate or to save. But either way, she had to take it out on Harry.

There was the practice in Lichfield, he said.

Oh, she answered, those Midland towns, smoke and dirt, and foreign people.

Harry Allgood offered rock against the spray of criticism.

He still wondered, he said, if she mightn’t reconsider, when he had settled in, of course, his proposal; she could take her time.

Because he, it was implied, could take his. Time held no fears for Harry Allgood.

Really, Harry, she said, I’ve already answered, the difference in ages, for one thing, I’ve – you make it difficult, she said, I don’t think I’ll ever marry, I’ve decided in fact that I definitely shan’t.

It was like throwing a bucket of water at a wall.

Tears came into Connie’s eyes for her own perversity. The twists of the knife she gave, she knew, were aimed more especially at herself. She lay in bed at night and regretted her unalterable self into a hot pillow. The darkness was exquisitely painful with the little self-tortures that she practised. I am an old maid, she said. She fell asleep playing bezique with old ladies in terraces.

If only had begun to be written on Connie’s lumpy face. It advertised its powers of sympathy, the powers that remained untried, because nobody ever called them out. If only the world had been made in a different way. If only the blind could see. It began to be like this. Before Mrs Standish died, frightening Connie, giving a sudden stir to the well of her unexpressed sympathies. There is nothing so violent, so desperate as a kind of unexpressed sympathy and unconfessed aloneness. It took possession of Connie Tiarks. Now is the moment, she felt, trembling at her own decision. Seeing what she hadn’t yet done, knowing already her own failure, she couldn’t get possession of her own will. She was acting quite outside herself.