On the whole, and by agreement, they had slipped into going different ways. It had begun with the pregnancy. This new development in Mrs Standish that was not entirely physical, but also a change in mind. She continually had to find excuses for not being the person she was in the first year of their marriage. He found her often looking at him, amused. That swinging motion of the crossed leg as she sat and looked at him across a room.

What’s the matter? he frowned.

What? she said, absent. Oh, nothing.

He sat for a moment. She seemed to have muffled the whole house, through this absorption of hers, and the period of waiting. Then he went out. She heard the door downstairs. She sat, passive enough, except for sudden flickers of desire in remembering his face, a little coarser than a year ago, underlining what had once passed muster as a not too obvious handsomeness. If spasmodically she grew afraid of her own position in relationship to Willy . . . misgiving settled down again into the lethargy of waiting. Later on, she would say, I shall make the effort, but not now, this is not the time.

In the meantime she was taking desultory lessons in French. An occupation, she said. The butter from the muffins that she ate at five fell on the pages of her grammar. There were textbooks in every room in the house.

Talk of entente cordiale! said Willy.

I must have an occupation, she said.

She was sitting at the dressing-table, combing out her hair. On the table the crimping irons, on a little methylated spirit lamp.

You can’t expect me to go to parties, she said, and this without a trace of malice.

No, he said.

But he suspected malice.

It helps to pass the time, she said.

So he went to another party, somewhere; the geography of London was growing vague. He had friends in Chelsea, the vague acquaintances who talked shop in the background of Willy’s conversation. Sometimes she met them on the telephone. In the same way, by accident, Maudie Westmacott, on a day when, feeling out of sorts, she had cancelled her lesson for the afternoon.

Maudie’s conversation was a blur and crackle of immediate solicitude. She had not seen her darling Kitty for how long an age, she was on her head, the rehearsals, and the dressmakers, and the General, who had left for Monte the morning before, and when should they meet, she couldn’t wait, an intimate talk between girls was what she, Maudie, needed most. But somehow the meeting remained one of those still crystallizing projects common to the telephone. And her darling Kitty went into the drawing-room, wondered, very silent in her search for facts, in collecting the non-existent evidence, that she felt, somehow felt in the crackle of the telephone. If Willy were no inducement, Maudie was. The voice of Maudie Westmacott made Willy suddenly desirable.

Maudie rang, she said casually at dinner.