I think, said Eden, I’ll get a job.

A job! said Mrs Standish. But what?

It hit the nail abjectly on the head.

That is the question, said Mrs Standish.

It was a discovery that made her go on looking, just a little too long, the eyebrows raised as if she enjoyed the tension in their arch. It made you want to kill her quietly. Instead of it, you slammed the door, and went upstairs and cried.

It made you sick, the business of being Eden Standish, the books skipped beside a midnight fire, the futility of walking winter streets. Promising yourself that soon – And then against the iron fence, the man in the macintosh, the voice half frozen, half liquid with the words of the Welsh singing, that she heard, not so much her ear, as right inside her, she was listening to it with her whole body, that became the contorted body of the man, sick inside the greenish macintosh. Feeling a scurry of grit on her face, she told herself she was sentimental. She was listening to the singing of a Welsh cripple. She was moved by the sick pallor of the face, the bones of a singing face, and the red, inflamed boss that grew from the side of the nose. She would walk, was already walking away. But she felt a tightening in her mouth. She was older, she felt older. She would go inside and look in the glass and find that this was true, that she was actually several years older. And it went on inside her, the singing, the voices of faces in the street, that flowed past her, melting with her own face. She had seen something for the first time. Her legs trembled when she closed the door, afraid to move from this discovery, a singing and revulsion in her own body.

Compassion is oddly physical. Without opportunity, she wanted to give expression to this fresh sensation, or not altogether fresh, traceable perhaps to the woman in the cottage. Instead, she continued to read, but with more direction. She discovered and read the Capital of Marx. She forced her way through a shell of words, finding a momentary satisfaction in her own endeavour, but also the disappointment that lies behind the passionless word. She staggered beneath the volume of these, their weight and aridity. Good Lord, but I was sentimental, she said, I fairly reeked. And she closed her door, she made notes, on a second-hand typewriter just acquired.

Finding a book, noticing a title page, Mrs Standish scented trouble again. Though smiling at the same time. A little quirk of pleasure for the intellectual enterprise of her young. Marx impressed her, his dullness. She had immense respect for intellectual exercises that were also dull, lacking the courage to embark on them herself. But misgiving now hammered at respect. ‘Communism – a Contemporary Neurosis,’ she had read somewhere. A quarterly, no doubt. She took in two or three of these, to glance through opening paragraphs and increase her conversational stock. Eden and neurosis, Eden in her room, the hard, bright look in Eden’s eye. Mrs Standish handled possibilities. But she spent a morning with the dictionary before getting on the telephone.