She summoned up her collapsing breath, collapsing for no reason, but collapsed.

Sometimes, she agreed.

She smiled even at a face. They were two people meeting in the marble wasteland. She began to catch up to her disappointment, the banality of just a face that she had not even chosen, it had sat there, but perhaps after all there was not much selection in these matters, the face, the moment presented itself with a dictatorial flourish.

She heard his breath, gathered for the next remark.

Did she listen also to good music? he asked.

You can’t always cope with the obvious. It wins. Even when you know, it wins. Like the voice of Maynard. Eden Standish knew this, even before he had become Maynard, or Norman Maynard, that she could never say, she called him Maynard, it kept the right accent on the whole business, she wanted to keep this between herself and Maynard’s face. She told herself this, afterwards, after the first spasm of being afraid. And she was afraid, the hand trembling on a tea cup, in a rain of Grieg.

Music, he said, was a kind of divine reparation for human weakness.

She floated repugnantly, but surprised, but listening, she floated in a sea of Jewesses, their faces upturned to a marble sky.

He began to tell her about his wife, who was no longer his wife, she lived at Putney, he was an architect, he said. Sympathy and understanding were very rare qualities. He wanted to live in the country, together with sympathy and understanding. That was why he appreciated this sudden, well, he had found himself, they had found themselves, by some strange coincidence, together, she had been good enough to listen.

Eden looked at him. He took it. She could not get away from her repugnance. She wanted to, she wanted to kill it, her humiliation. He looked at her with the bland, unseeing expression of someone obsessed by his own emotions. Or not quite. Someone wanting to share his own emotions. He handed them to her, like a tepid cup of tea.

Afterwards, becoming Maynard, he remained unchanged. Very quickly you knew everything about Maynard. He was very grateful, he said. It made her want to turn away. It made her hesitate before answering the telephone. Because he rang her up, because he had to see her, because she was the only person with whom he could discuss the prevailing problem of himself.

Sitting in Maynard’s rooms she smoked too much. She was uncertain. She did not know, not quite, what she wanted, if she was really listening to a voice.

Once he put his head in her lap.

No, she said.

She went away soon, inventing an excuse.

She would stay away, half waiting, would invent the ultimate excuse, say no, Maynard, I shall not come again. After all, as an individual you ought to be able to do this. If there were an individual. There was a business of sex, a business of being men and women. This was what made her afraid. And she did not want to be naïve. I am old enough, if not in experience, she said.