While she chattered on about a little bungalow to retire to, and the delights of keeping a few chickabiddies, Miss St 104John stared at a vase of daffodils. They were already wilting in the sun; for spring had come suddenly, alien after the long winter.

That afternoon Miss St John set out to find new accommodation. Of the other hotels in Dunwater, two were booked up till the autumn, and all demanded twice as much money as she was paying or could afford to pay. At the Crown and Anchor, the humblest hotel in the place, the landlady asked how much she could afford. Miss St John named a sum, making it ten shillings more than she paid at the Peacock. ‘I can’t think of anywhere that would take you for that,’ said the woman. She did not speak unkindly, but Miss St John turned her back and stumped out.

The next day Miss St John went by bus to the neighbouring town. It was a low place compared to Dunwater, but the prices were no lower. Returning, she remembered a stationer’s window where she had seen notices of furnished rooms displayed, and went to look in it. The advertisements were for the most part written in curly illiterate handwriting on shabby cards or cheap envelopes. When she went to inspect the rooms, they matched the shabbiness of their advertisements. Even so, they were all beyond her means, except for one bed-sitting-room, and that was so fusty, so wretched and so hedged about with stipulations that she rejected it. She framed an advertisement herself. Lady, elderly but active and healthy, requires … She wrote it out with particular care, but behind the dirty glass it looked much of a muchness with the others—the prams, typewriters and reliable daily women required, the fire-irons and fur necklets for sale. No answer 105came to her box-number. Stifling her memories of dirt and squalor, she went back to the house where she had seen the cheap bed-sitting-room. It was let.

Now, when she visited the public library, the wide floors, the bright windows, the apparatus of sober civic luxury intimidated her. She felt herself unrelated to them, just as she was unrelated to the flawless weather of the finest summer England had known for years. New biographies, the fruits of war which she had foreseen, were on the shelves. But new or old, books had become no more than something to hold up between herself and Dennis, and which at his bidding she would put down to listen with shamed bare face to his chatter about rapine and bloodshed. For his savage whim to violate her decorum had persisted, and matured into an obsession. Each was the other’s victim: her cold and stockish respectability had become a rubbing-post against which, willy-nilly, he must rub himself frantic, and the realization that she was living at the Peacock on terms which no other hotel would accept laid her at his mercy, since her conscience, being entirely materialistic, would not allow her to show fight where she knew herself to be under an obligation.