His pale complexion is flushed from his morning ride in the park, and in the half-second it takes for him to look up from his reading, she takes him in afresh: his rangy, athletic height, his youthful, generous, intelligent, shrewd and sensitive face.

Never, in her whole life, has she been as conscious of her own appearance as she is at this moment – and she is always always acutely and painfully conscious of her own appearance when she is with him here in London, here in his office or having dinner with his mother and his sisters, or out in public, at the opera, or at an exhibition or at some terrifying literary party; but she has never, ever, been as conscious as she is now of her own tiny body and large, ill-proportioned head; her crooked mouth and her thin hair, bulked up with its little pad of stuffed brown silk – of her big nose, of her spectacles, of her age, or of how until this moment, she has never appeared before him in anything other than black or grey.

It is pink, the new lining of her bonnet – a lustrous, pearly pink like the interior of a shell, and it is the worst imaginable thing, when he looks up, for him to see it; for him to see this small plain woman, his friend, with this unexpected bonnet on her head.

For a moment he is speechless – all he can do is stand there looking at her and wishing that he could tell her something, the future perhaps – that before she dies in eighteen months’ time, at the age of thirty-eight, she will marry and be so happy, eventually, in this brief, late marriage with her quiet clergyman husband, that she will not care if she never writes another word; but he knows nothing of her future – nothing that could come now to her rescue or to his, and all he can do is to move towards her and shake her hand with what he hopes is all his usual warmth and invite her to sit, and for an hour they talk about her books, and the books of other people – they have always got along so well together, their discussions have always been so lively and full of interest – and he says nothing about the bonnet and neither does she but it is the worst imaginable thing for her to sit and feel the bright new silk around her face, like a shout, and see how embarrassed he is, how he can’t look at it.