It’s only the next morning when she is walking along Gracechurch Street that she decides to do it – and even then it doesn’t feel like a decision, it feels like she is being carried along on a wave of something she cannot help.

For a long time she stands there before going in. She knows that in a great many ways she has led a sheltered life and that there are plenty of things she doesn’t know, such as the right places to go for certain things. Even now, when she comes to London, she feels most of the time like a clumsy traveller in a foreign land.

She can see herself in the glass: her black travelling outfit, her big dark bonnet with its grey lining; her reflection very clear in the sparkling window.

How clean the window is!

She herself has been doing a lot of cleaning lately. When she can’t write, and these days she cannot seem to write a single line, cleaning feels like a good productive thing to do.

Still not quite knowing what she’ll do when she gets inside, she pushes open the door.

He wants to talk to her, he said in his letter, about her next book. The appointment is at four o’clock which means she has two hours.

As soon as she’s inside, the bell on the door ringing out its last chimes behind her, she knows why she’s come.

The choice is bewildering.

‘That one,’ she says, pointing, after much deliberation over the possibilities, and takes the money from her purse. A huge amount, it seems, for such a thing. And then she takes off her bonnet, and puts it on the counter and watches it being taken away through the curtain, and sits, and waits till it’s ready. She feels naked, without her bonnet; almost asks if there is one she can borrow while she’s waiting.

At a quarter to four she leaves the shop, her bonnet back on her head, and makes her way along Gracechurch Street and from there to Cornhill to attend the meeting that is due to take place at four with her young publisher.

He has written her a letter, her tall, dark-haired, handsome young publisher, but she has not received it.

Not the letter asking if they can meet to talk about her next book.

Another letter, a second letter.

It was early when she left home yesterday and climbed into her compartment, first at Keighley, then at Leeds, and she has not received this second letter, as he had expected she would have, before her visit.

A second letter in which he’s told her the news that he has fallen in love with a Miss Elizabeth Blakeway and is engaged to be married.

He is standing behind his desk when she is shown into his office, a collection of papers in his hand.