She became a restrained panting on his chest.

Then you don’t think?

We can be of help to each other in many other ways.

That did not convince, or the too firm hands, you might have labelled it a final answer, which started her again, at the same time as a quivering retreat.

Backing, Connie had dwindled. She was a blotched face, the stooping, apologetic shoulders, she had almost reached her everyday state of humility.

Yes, she said. Perhaps.

Her breath curdled in a long whinge, as her awkward feet caught, it was the claw of the chair, she toppled, you watched, she toppled, she was sitting, lumped, heaped against the skirting board, her face turned outward without surprise.

My dear Connie! he said, bent.

No, she gasped. No. Elyot. Don’t! I –

She sat there gasping, like a hen chased and exhausted in the heat.

I don’t want, she said. I shall go in a minute.

She got up looking for her bag.

Please don’t. I’ll just go, she said.

The normal, tentative voice of Connie Tiarks died in the silence that she left.

The street was darker, out of it curved a cold avenue of lights. She walked without looking at faces, that might, she half expected, be aware of what she was hardly aware of herself. Immediately after exorcism, it is hard to believe in the flown passion. But distance soon revived a nagging of shame, and the irritation that became transferred, Harry’s red and bony wrists, the way he always pestered her. Walking, she glanced at shops, rather than the faces passed, trying instinctively to make a secret of her thoughts, her face still hot and blotched. Elyot stood alone in his room. She walked alone in Ebury Street, soon would be sucked into the vortex of Victoria. Harry asked for what she couldn’t give, just as she couldn’t give what Elyot wouldn’t take. Heads bent over evening papers, walking home. She was going in the opposite direction. Perpetually, it seemed. In isolation, she began, in the way it happens, she began to over-value the love that Elyot hadn’t asked her to give. The sight of a mauve hyacinth suddenly made her snivel. Harry Allgood, in slippers, sat in the armchair in his digs, with his feet propped up on the mantelpiece, this always irritated her, even an image in Ebury Street, that she had to shrug away. But Elyot crumbling cake made her tremble with the immense weight of her Unrequited Love. It was like a film. She thought in the terms of the cinema, would have spoken now in the language of a film, since a moment in the room when her whole behaviour accused her of unreality. There remained the soft, wronged expression she had begun helplessly to wear. She was soft and indifferent, washed on the tide that sucked about Victoria.

Connie loitered in the station yard, to catch or not to catch a bus, she couldn’t decide. The large, flat face of the clock marked the time for other people. She stood at the head of a channel, of flowing buses, of approaching forms, the red and black that fused and evened out, until there was no focus point, unless a pointing clock, the long perspective that it made, while offering no decision. At some future date she stood, appalled, on the same spot. She could not rely upon indifference. She began to walk quickly into the station to look for the row of telephone boxes. I shall do this quickly, she said, because it is wiser not to think, I shall simply say, Harry, I shall say. Two pennies fell a long way into the bosom of an iron box. Her nose rather shiny, she began to feel like a sacrifice. I suppose it happens like this very often, she said. She waited for a sign, the waiting that became a window opening on a Midland morning, the calm monotony of eggs and bacon, the morning paper, the morning kiss. Regretfully, she felt, at least this is something tangible. Upstairs Mrs Standish was lying on a bed.