The winter barn was swept out of sight, and with it went wish and motive to go on looking out of the window. Ransomed by remembered pleasure, he settled himself to sit comfortably, and stretched out his long legs. As he did so, he saw the lady hastily withdraw her feet. Catching his eyes, she smiled, and remarked, ‘Still unhurt.’

It devolved on him to offer some ensuing politeness, and as she was not dressed as if to enjoy a ham sandwich or Hardy’s poems, he asked if she would like the window opened.

She shook her head, and a smell of alembicated summer brushed his nostrils. ‘I don’t like fresh air unless it’s warm.’

Just as the unhurtness of her feet had been presented as a matter of mutual concern, the lady’s views on fresh air had a quality of being confidential. If confidences do not repel, they beguile. He said, with morosity, that he was travelling from one blast of fresh air to another, since at home his stepfather was always opening windows and at his school windows were never shut. This remark, too, was no sooner said than he regretted it—by an ill-considered knight’s move he had exposed his queen. But the lady ignored home and school alike, and asked him what he had been looking at with such pleasure a few miles back. Out of his reply, it was 42the smell of the clover field she took up. They talked about scents, about fruits, about summer, about cats, and all the things they spoke about seemed an aspect of the lady, and in praising them he was also praising her.

They made no reference to their fellow-men. Even stories of eccentric aunts, the natural standby of the becoming-acquainted English, they avoided. The instinct that presides over the matings of wild animals and teaches birds the choreography of their courting dances warded them away from any evocation of what might reimprison them in their incompatible realities: a boy going back to school, a woman returning from an interlude of country air and dieting to her stern career of courtesan; the one in terror of his inexperience, the other dreading the first folly of the over-ripe. After a stage in which they devoured every detail of each other’s appearance, each had become almost unaware of what the other looked like, as though the nuptial darkness had closed about them. In that darkness they fell silent, lost in a watchful, dreamlike attentiveness to each other’s existence.

But with a sigh of responsibility she glanced down at her wrist-watch and knew that there would not be time. If she did not hurry, they would not even kiss, and she was too far gone in passion for hurry and scheming to be anything but a vulgarly exorbitant purchase of something not meant for the market. Buildings darkened the outlook, sheds close on the railway track flashed by, and then others went by more slowly, and the train ran into a station and came to a standstill. From overhead, a voice of inhuman refinement bellowed through an amplifier, ‘This is Peasebridge. This is 43Peasebridge. Change here for the London train. Change here for the London train. The train for Wittenham, Clewhurst and all stations to Market Beaton is now at Platform Four. Passengers for London will—’ Under cover of that voice she gathered together her gloves, her handbag, her wrap of moleskin. ‘I must say goodbye. I am so sorry. Will you help me down with my things?’