The house in Ebury Street still had the atmosphere of death. Or her imagination, the nerve that shuddered with a bell, very quickly endowed it with this. But Connie, walking up the stairs, intent upon the living, hoped that something might have happened to a face, if only you might open the door on a change, out of contact with death the desired change, to walk in and say: You see, I have come, Elyot, I have waited all this time.

Now she waited in the doorway of his room. The fingers tensed, she could feel the things she had inside her bag. She felt inadequate, and clumsy, already fated.

It’s nice of you to come just now, Connie.

He would have up tea perhaps for Connie Tiarks. She would sit about and talk of things that had happened. It was not unpleasant. The mind could close in Connie’s presence, familiar as the furniture. If she would keep to the recognized routine, not uncover the corner of some hidden emotional life. You still wanted to keep to the substantial forms. You were grateful for the outline of a chair.

Connie was uneasy with intentions, with the things she couldn’t say.

There are so many things, Elyot, she said, that I want to, and know I can’t say.

She watched, anxious for encouragement.

Then why try to say them, Connie? he said.

Nervously, because it began to fill the room, the emotional surge of Connie’s voice. Adelaide Blenkinsop had sent a sheaf of big white lilies from a shop in Berkeley Square. In sympathy. Now the voice of Connie Tiarks had the overpowering scent of lilies.

He had made her look at her hands.

But one likes to try, she said. There are so few people. There are so few occasions on which one can be of use.

Not intending self-pity, or to play a self-conscious part, she hoped she had not given this impression.

One doesn’t like to feel oneself – quite one of the – useless ones, she fumbled rather desperately, caught in the tangle of her own pronouns.

No, he said, remotely. Quite. I expect you’d like some tea, Connie.

He threw in her face, what she suspected, her self-pity.

With the arrival of tea things, she launched more safely, she felt, on a biographical sketch of Mrs Standish. A little pointless perhaps, because already known, but he listened to her resurrect the dead, the driftwood incidents of life that did not altogether convince after the final scattering. He crumbled a piece of cake he did not want. Soon she will go, he said.

Soon I shall crumble, she felt, it is happening, there is an end to desperation, there is some word or incident finally responsible.

She listened to the clatter of a spoon on cup.

Whether to give up the house, he was saying.

But to give up all this? she protested. All the associations!

Her voice cheeped out, because Connie wanted to keep even the moments of frustration. She wanted to control, the new, the uncontrollable, time and her own emotions. So her voice swept round the walls, embracing the shape of a room. It beat and fluttered with her glance, as this rested on the mantelpiece, blankly, with surprise and horror. The box from Miss Chil-berry’s was a cold, white, passive square. It did not help the blood, the blink of stars, it sat calmly at the centre of a spinning universe.