He saw a bicycling woman dismount at his gate and walk with a dreadful positiveness up the path. Instantly deciding 130on the worst, he foresaw his afternoon laid waste by Mrs White. She had come to ‘look him up’, her car had broken down, but at the garage, inflexible as a tiger on the trail, she had borrowed a bicycle … It was the girl from the post-office with a reply-paid telegram. Loveday had met a friend at Ramsgate, and would spend the night there if he had no objection. He scribbled his permission, went jubilantly into the house that was now so much more his own, and settled down to work.

His hand was out. The expedient he had carried back did not fit. Words lay on the page like drowned flies. All his renounced obesities came back to him, qualifications and evasions muddied every sentence. It was worse than the Introduction to Peter Wilkins. He threw the day’s work on the floor, washed his face and hands in cold water, and began again, leaving the botch to clear itself, and taking up the narrative farther on where the manuscript petered out. He fell into a conversation, and three hours later the conversation was still going on, weakly sparkling like a squib that wouldn’t lie down and die. His head ached, his wrists were furrowed where he had clawed them. He walked into the kitchen to find himself something to eat, and immediately his spirits began to revive. Triviality released him into self-respect, and he sang to himself as he wandered about collecting the ingredients for a curry. Carrying his tray into the sitting-room, he turned back, daunted by the smell of smoked tobacco and labour-in-vain. The kitchen smelled gaily of onions and India, and he would eat his supper there. His hand went out for 131Loveday’s book. This time, he would begin at the beginning, and find out what the young man was up to—he was bound to be young, nowadays they were all young men. Seeing the first page so branded with over-anxiety, and finding the curry so accomplished, he muttered to himself that malt does more than Milton can, that if he consulted his own pleasure, he would drown his books, dismiss Loveday, and devote himself entirely to the satisfactions of cookery. After the first few pages—quite properly a little stiff, for if you cannot begin like Byron it is much better not to try to—Reverse the Sun seriously delighted him. He began to match his reading to the book, pausing to consider, turning back to compare one stroke with another. After those annihilating gallops over the High Hope course, just to be reading so was pleasure in itself. At times he stopped quite uncritically, halted by sheer astonishment at finding something so unforeseeably well managed. Yet though the book astonished him, it was congenial too, the fruit of a congenial mind: a scrupulous, searching, disdainful mind, with a vein of black bile. It was against this Calvinistic melancholy that the details of the narrative stood out with such brilliance, as though they were reeds and dragonflies taunting the vision of a drowning man. He read it to the end, and went to bed thinking of it, and thinking of the letter he would write to Norman Leigh. Words slipped through his mind, a little greasily from having been fingered by every reviewer. Rare … judicious … distinction … originality … authenticity … Plagiarism! That word didn’t slip! It seized on him, as 132ice is welded on a warm hand. The fellow was a plagiarist, an aper, a purloiner! And how near he had been to writing to congratulate his ape! He sat up in bed, shaking with fury. ‘Blast his impertinence,’ he said: and the exclamation doddered, because he had taken out his teeth.