V

THIS was the best awakening of all her life. Yesterday had been a dreadful morning, though she had remembered as soon as her eyes were open that she had had her last quarrel with Essington, that he had gone away forever, that she was free. But she had not wanted to be free. What good was that? It had made her feel lonely and unreal. If nobody was fond of you, you wouldn’t quite exist. With tears she remembered something that Essington had once told her, of how wise men debated whether a storm out at sea where there was no human being to behold it could truly be said to exist, since thunder was thunder only because an ear heard its roll, and lightning was lightning only because an eye was dazzled by it, and waves immense only because a mind measured them. She had rolled over and buried her face in the pillow, feeling as if she was already beginning to exist less definitely, as if presently she would fall through the bed because she was not solid enough to be borne by its solidity, and seep through it like a mist. She could not be sure, she could not be sure …

But this morning, when she awoke, she felt more real than she had ever done before. For one thing, she had not at any time known a feeling as strong as this happiness. Why, it was like clear music bubbling on and on, it was like bright sunshine, surely anyone coming into the room would hear it and see it! It was as amazing to find that she could be so immensely happy with so little previous training as it would have been to find that she had a magnificent singing voice; for this happiness was not just a judgment her mind was passing on what had happened to her, it was an achievement, it was something produced, it jetted out of her. But this was only one of the new things that were going on in her because she was now sure. Because she knew he set a high value upon her, she felt infinitely precious. She passed her hands over her face and under the bedclothes down her body, over her round breasts, down the strong hoops of her ribs, down her flanks, admitting their beauty as honestly as if they were in marble and no concern of hers, feeling such joy as one might feel who being seized by the madness of giving finds in that same moment a treasure in his lap. Yet she cried out aloud and most despairingly, ‘Oh, dear, I wish my nose was really straight!’ She felt about herself that mixture of severe vanity and carping self-dislike which she had noticed in great actors and great actresses, that was written all over Dusa, with her rounded shoulders and her cherishing arms holding motherwise nothing but her own self, as if to say, ‘I find myself dear to myself as other women find their children,’ and her face scared with disgust, as if to say, ‘Oh, God, when can I die so that I may lose this I?’ Ah, but Francis Pitt had made her as great as Dusa! When you came down to it all that made Dusa great was that she knew what she wanted to do. That she thought her parts completely into existence so that she knew what they would do in every conceivable circumstance, and no moment of the play found her at a loss for a perfect characteristic gesture. Now Francis Pitt had thought her completely into existence. When she had gone to his house after the theatre the night before, he had come out into the hall to meet her, and had given the footman a grave nod which made him go and warned him as he went that he must take no liberty of smiles and suspicions. They had stood in the shadows for a moment, while through the door that he had left ajar behind him sounded music and gay yet temperate laughter as of those who had not spoiled the pleasures of dancing and laughing by practising them too much. Then he had taken her right hand in both of his and said, ‘At last my Sunflower has come,’ and from the way he spoke she had learned that he had thought of her long and passionately, especially in those hours of trance, just before one sleeps, or after one wakes, or during the visit of a bore, when the image of a beloved person is not merely held in the mind but comes to motion, performing acts a little more fantastical than those of common life but illuminating them and explaining them. He had a complete conception of her. She knew that if anyone had come to him and said, ‘A thousand miles away, Sunflower is coming out of a church into sunlight,’ he would continue, his voice shaking deeply with delight, ‘Yes, and as she crossed the threshold she looked up at the sun and her brows frowned but her mouth smiled, and as she went down the steps she turned aside once to give a coin to a beggar.’ Because she loved him she would always do according to his imagination. Surely a man who loved one like that was God to one, for he made one. He gave one life. For how could one live unless somebody one cared about wanted one to live in a certain way? Otherwise one just flopped about. And a man who loved like that did not only make one, he made one after a beautiful image. He gave one not only life but salvation. Therefore one would worship him with one’s body and soul until one died.

Of course Dusa had done all this by herself, separate, alone. She had been the thinker and that which was thought into being real. Sunflower supposed that was really more wonderful. But who wants to do anything by themselves? Who wants to be separate? Who wants to be alone? Luxuriously she rolled from side to side in her bed, laughing at the dissolving terror of loneliness, who would never be alone again! The bright spaces of her room, which were lit by the morning sunshine and her happiness as by a lamp with a double wick, pleased her as being just right for what she felt. It was because she had hoped that she would wake up one day feeling like this that she made them do the walls like that, pale green, and faintly streaked in the lower half with very fine gold lines, fine as the lines on the petal of a crocus, and pointed upwards so that they had an air of growing. They looked very fresh and clean, as well they might, for they were washed all over every Monday, and she saw that it was done properly too. Oh, she was sorry for Dusa, for anyone whose greatness bound them to theatre! She had always loathed the theatre itself, the actual place where she had to act. That was partly because she disliked all buildings which were not made for people to live in: churches, railway stations, factories, offices, warehouses, seemed to her like the money she had to pay over in income tax, necessary, no doubt, for the community, but somehow also wasted. She liked farms, blacksmiths’ forges, shops in the villages and little country towns and the browner parts of London, where people could work alongside of their lives, where their children could come in and tell them that their meals were ready. But her loathing came even more from the feeling one had in every one of them that since the day it was built nobody had swept in all the corners, that those bare boards behind the stage weren’t ever scrubbed by anybody who had a nice enough home to realise what being clean is, and that however nice one’s dressing-room there were certain to be other ones on the floor above or the floor below where cracked hand basins were supported on awful pipes that looked like the bones of people who had not washed when they were alive. Oh, it was lovely to have one’s happiness coming to one here, in one’s own place, which one had taken trouble to keep right! And it was lovely to have it strong in the morning, when one always felt at one’s best and wanted to do things but if they weren’t important didn’t dare to because one had to save up one’s strength for the evening, as one had to work then, though of course one would have liked just to have dinner and dance or talk a bit and go to bed! But now her life was going to be lived in the right places, at the right hours! But in the very moment when she knew the joy of extrication from the theatre she felt an emotion which she had believed peculiar to the theatre, the feeling one had on first nights of an impatient desire for the curtain to go up and the performance to begin. She wished to proceed at once with her new and magnificent destiny. She threw out her hand and struck the bell that would bring her breakfast, that would start her splendid day. Then shy because it seemed to her that anybody who had seen her make the movement must have known that she was extravagantly loved and loved her lover back again as extravagantly and without shame, she rolled over in bed and drew the sheets tight over her like the wrappings of a mummy and pretended to be half-asleep.

Martyn set down the breakfast tray just as it ought to be set down: not quite silently, for if she had done that you might have gone to sleep again and let the tea get cold, but not so noisily that you woke up feeling cross, and she said, ‘Good morning’ just right, so that you knew there was someone human about, but not so that you felt you had to do anything about it. She hadn’t been much when she came. It was all a matter of training them, of pretending that you weren’t frightened of them and sort of suggesting to them what you wanted over and over again. Cook knew how to set a breakfast tray very nicely now. The stone-coloured linen tray-cloth, the Lowestoft china, its flowers painted a little brighter than nature but not out of contempt, rather as if the painter expected to go out into the country the next day and was looking forward to it so much that he was nourishing the absurdest hopes regarding everything that happens in the fields; the brown egg cosy in its cup; the three curled shavings of toast, the shells of butter on a wet leaf, the handful of raspberries on another; the single rose in the candy-striped Nailsea glass jar; it was all prettily done. In Sunflower’s house all things were done prettily. In any house she might own she would be able to contrive that they were done prettily. She saw all sorts of houses in her mind’s eye … Big houses in London, big enough to hold a great man’s importance, which must have the guilt of their bigness lifted from them by careful plans to make them warm as a little house. One would have to face the problem that arose all the time if one was rich, of how to make the difference on the nights when one had people in, which, if one were poor, one would make quite easily by having chicken. But it could be done. You’d have lovely things to eat and the place pretty and make everybody feel at home, and the women would go home feeling as if their automobiles were velvet-lined caskets and themselves jewels, the younger men would walk back, halting on the bridge over the Serpentine if the house were in Portman Square, or on the Embankment if it were one of those funny eighteen-eightyish castles at the foot of Tite Street, watching lights that waver on water like exhorting forefingers and discussing weighty matters with flushed sententiousness. The party would not stop, and would in a sense go on forever, the women would always remember the night when they had been so beautiful and charming and take it as their standard. The men would have been so carefully picked and the talk so good that something would remain the next morning, there would be a trace of it in The Times a week later, in the speech in the House of Commons a month later. It would all redound to the greatness of Francis Pitt. It would all make a delightful world into which to introduce young people. (She compressed her lips and reflected that Canterton must go.) There would be furnished homes one would take just for the summer. Green lawns that the sea-air cropped as close as sheep, and wild-haired hedges of tamarisk, broken where the path led down the cliff between changing cornices of sand to a yellow shore; and in the house lots of very big chairs, which one would probably have to bring oneself, for there were never enough, and scones and strawberry jam for tea, which everyone likes when they are on a holiday, and great fireplaces where as soon as evening fell one would light a wood fire and throw handfuls of lavender on it. The East Coast would be good for that, if one could find a place where the bathing was safe. Oh God! One must be quite sure that the bathing was safe. And perhaps there would be a country house where one lived all the year round, where things would be pleasant and would not change. An old house, that had gone on and on. One would not alter the garden very much, one would have the same herbaceous borders year after year, so that they should be loved and remembered and expected. One would not change the servants; one could always keep them if one was sensible. There would be a paddock for the old ponies. One would go to church every Sunday, not that one gets much out of it, but it is good to get into the habit of doing anything every Sunday. If a person was brought up in a settled home like that, and could always come back to it, surely they wouldn’t get puzzled and upset about things as other people did. She would be able to arrange all these things. None of them would be beyond her powers. It was strange to think that she had sat here and cried because her house, being beautiful and smoothly run, was of no use to Essington, who simply did not notice whatever was agreeable and afforded no relief to his pricking need to complain; that when she was giving her morning orders to the servants she had sometimes shivered, feeling herself like a crazy ageing childless woman who perpetually sews baby clothes and lays them by in a drawer. She had thought her housewifeliness waste, whereas she had been learning her life like an art, practising against the time of the performance of her love.

Nothing in her life had been wasted. Someone must have been planning it and loving her all the time while they planned, for it could not be by accident that everything which had ever happened to her had worked towards rounding the perfection of this moment. It had seemed utter waste for her to be an actress, to spend her days being rehearsed in theatres that were dark when outside it was light by clever people who became mosquito-like with irritation, and her nights in doing the wrong thing before audiences which always included enough people who didn’t know she was wrong to commit her to being engaged but which also included just enough people who knew she was awful for it to get about the world and spoil her peace. Yet being an actress had given her Francis Pitt. He had first seen her on the stage, wearing a silver cloak and speaking other people’s words. She had been able to show him her beauty without her stupidity. And now he was hers. Smiling cunningly, she was even glad that she had played leads, although always before she had wished she could have played minor parts and had fewer great moments to fail in, for that way she had got him by another of his foolish forelocks, by the childish pride he felt in being able to keep company with famous people. To get him through his funny little weaknesses was not disgraceful to her love; there is comedy as well as tragedy. But she was distressed to find herself passing from this thought, which after all struck her as a little too aggressive for this time when blessing had been given gently into her hands and all her future life was to be gentleness, into another one more predatory still. Before she knew what she had done she had said to herself, her hands gripping the sheet over her like claws, that she did not even mind the scandal about herself since what it meant was that when people heard her name they thought of Essington and then of love, and if in following that common process Francis Pitt had thought of love in connection with her sooner or more vividly than he would otherwise have done, why, she was glad of it. That was detestable. By making Francis Pitt profit by the world’s mauling of her name it put him in the position of a man whose wife goes on the streets to earn his bread. But the force in her that was inexorable so far as he was concerned said harshly, ‘Well, would you not, if he had no bread?’

Oh God, but why should she think of ugly things? Everything was good, everything was simple. Francis Pitt was a man; men found love-making easy and delicious, beauty was the source of its ease and delight, and she had beauty. What could be simpler? She flung back the sheet and lay in her nightgown with her arms stretched wide across the bed, joy like a wild dancer springing and whirling in her body, because it certainly had beauty, and because it had already felt his great mouth at several places, on her throat, on her shoulders, in the crook of her left elbow, where he had halted at the little tangle of blue veins, which he had claimed, in a whisper that was low as if he prayed but shook with laughter, to be his monogram. Oh, making love to somebody one really loved was so interesting! She blessed her beauty, she laid her lips to her arms in gratitude, she drew her long yellow hair across her mouth and kissed it. No, nothing in her life had been wasted, not even her beauty, which had sometimes seemed to be wasteful in its essence, to be as fruitless as it was prodigious. The idea had come to her quite terrifyingly one afternoon, when she was sitting in the darkness that was as unrestful as hard daylight because the people who arranged it stood about breathing hard and anxiously, of a spring opening at one of the big dressmakers’. Across the lighted stage had passed the lovely mannequins, slim and polished like Malacca canes, with smooth heads which shone as the top of a cane where it is rubbed by the palm, and delicate plucked eyebrows which made it seem as if an artist sitting at a table in a sunlit garden had spent the time while the coffee dripped down into the glass from the silver strainer in changing his friends’ canes to pretty women with a pencil-point, yet with something ardent and moist like sap about their eyes and lips, as if the wood of which these canes were cut was remembering that it had had a habit of coming to flower about this time of year. What they were doing was not as good as what they were. The clothes they were showing were horrid. Like so many English dresses they demonstrated the real disposition of life to take away as much as it gives, for one felt that the designer would never have reached his present position had he not been brought up in the stern nursery of English provincial life, which had taught him habits of diligence and punctuality, but had also unfitted him to make full use of that position since it had left him with a sense that the highest possible destiny for a dress is to be worn on Sunday or at high teas. She had shuddered because life was never easy for anybody, and because these girls were wasting their youth and sweetness on futility, and had sat back in her chair and distracted her thoughts by looking about her and trying to put names to the vague shapes she saw about her in the darkness. That was certainly Germaine Peyton just in front of her. Even in the dim light one could immediately recognise that broad, offering blandness that was like a shallow saucer of thick cream. She had wondered why nearly all actresses, including herself, were so naturally recognisable. It wasn’t that they were chosen for that, because they didn’t have that quality at the start. It grew on them in the course of their careers, and there was something forced and uneasy about it, as if their appearances were struggling to make as clear a statement of themselves as possible. It was, she supposed, because nearly all actresses were bad actresses, having been chosen to practise an art because of physical qualifications that have nothing to do with that or any other art; and it is the way of the inferior artist to make a bid for personal conspicuousness; the Montparnasse painter with his velvet coat and his coloured scarf; the mediocre pianist with his long hair; the second-rate prima donna with the exaggerated set back of her shoulders. There was something piteous about it. It was a throwing up of the hands and a lifting of the voice of someone who has been swept away from the shores of normal life into a rough sea and finds he cannot swim. ‘What I am doing with my art is not noticeable! I must be noticed or I must die, being human! But surely this thing I am doing with myself is noticeable!’ Again she shuddered, and looked away, at a woman who sat on her right. It was Mina Victoria, the Duke’s third wife. She was a lively little thing, but she did look silly. All the society women looked silly nowadays because all of them that were at all in the running as beauties had adopted two fashions that really didn’t go together. First, about ten years ago, they all began dropping their jaws and pushing their chins as far back as possible, because Lady Artemis Merals did that to fix attention on the marvellous purity of her brows, the mermaid blankness of her eyes. Then about five years later they had all wanted to look like Corton, the great Parisian cocotte and dressmaker, and because she wore a small hat that covered her forehead and shadowed her eyes in order to hide an expression of financial genius that would otherwise have made the men she met climb trees, they all did the same. To stylise their beauty in the manner of one woman they had got rid of their chins, to stylise it in the manner of another they had got rid of their foreheads and their eyes, so now there was nothing left of them except their noses and sleek mouths, except lovely little snouts. They looked like a lot of silly animals. And since they looked like that they behaved like that. If one made a gesture expressive of an emotion one felt that emotion; she knew that from her acting. The Duchess of Victoria had acted like a greedy little fool when she divorced the Duke. Beauty had put her in the way of doing that, and beauty had placed Germaine Peyton and herself and God knows how many other women in the ridiculous position of bad actresses. And beauty had set the mannequins ambling in these clumsy clothes. She had clenched her hands and muttered aloud, ‘Charlock! Charlock!’ There had come to her the memory of something that had happened long ago, when she and her sister Lily had gone down to stay for a fortnight after measles with a cousin of her mother’s who had married a stationmaster in a Devonshire village. One afternoon he had taken them for a walk up a lane that wound higher and higher between tall hedges until there was a gate and they stepped out on to a heathy moor and saw half of the countryside lying beneath them, checkered out over its hills and valleys with different coloured fields that were like a patchwork quilt stretched over the limbs of a sleeper. She and her sister had cried out at the sight, and then again, because these were more beautiful than any others, being bright. ‘Oh! Look at that pretty yellow stuff!’ they had squealed, running along the hilltop ridge with their long hair and their pinafores blowing round them in the upland wind. And from behind them had come the soft voice of the old man, seeing the catch in things as grown up people do: ‘Why, that’s charlock, the nasty stuff. Nothing won’t grow where charlock is, it kills all good growing.’ That had brought her to a standstill. Surely it was sign of something like being naughty in the universe that anything so beautiful should not be useful! Well, it might be that the universe had been naughty in a more fundamental point than that. Beauty, the nasty stuff! Nothing won’t grow where beauty is, it kills all good growing. The thought had haunted her. Once, lying half-asleep in Essington’s arms, she had moaned aloud, ‘Charlock, charlock!’ and he had cried in fury, ‘Oh God, Sunflower! The mess your mind is in! The ragbag of meaningless bits and scraps! Imagine interrupting me with imbecile mutterings of “charlock, charlock”, when I was thinking out proportional representation!’

But beauty was not a weed, it was not waste. It had made Francis Pitt say those things when she had turned her face to him in the moonlight, it had brought her life with Francis Pitt. She was not a field cursed with charlock, she was good pastureland. Lying there, she fell into a dream of how it would feel to be a meadow, to have a body of smooth wet earth pricked upwards with a million blades of growing grass. Someone would open a gate, there would run in a flock of young lambs, they would pound the wet earth with their strong little hooves, they would drop their little twitching muzzles to the grass and tug it up by the roots. Smiling and murmuring with pleasure, she took her own arms to her bosom and laid her lips to her own hands. They were like satin. He had thought so too the night before when he had laid his lips to them. For a moment he had stopped kissing them to murmur deeply to himself, ‘So soft, so soft!’ Oh, what a blessing her career had been to her, making her ready for him, lifting her out of her first ugly circumstances! She looked back at herself as she had been in 69 Tyndrum Road, getting up on a winter morning, washing at a deal wash-stand in cold water that left her hands all rough and red, not powdering her face or her body, not smoothing her elbows and her knees with lotion to make them ivory like the rest of her flesh; putting on coarse underclothes that left red marks on her with their thick armholes, creaking stays with high husks that rubbed her in between her breasts, black woollen stockings, and a rough serge dress that would not have been nice for a lover to touch and was not very clean, because one could not send it to the cleaners very often; brushing one’s hair not enough to burnish it because one had to be at the Jennings’ shop on time, and anyway the brush was cheap and had no grip; calling downstairs to warn Mum one was ready for breakfast in a Cockney whine. She lay breathless, panting thanks to God who had thrust on her, against her silly will, in spite of her stupid incapacity to imagine how gorgeous life might be, the gift of being fit to give herself to Francis Pitt. But her heart contracted suddenly, and she cried out, ‘But I am not young! I am thirty! He is only having the fag-end of my beauty! Why did he not come to me when I was nineteen!’ She sat up in bed and sobbed, having to make to herself the admission that however good her life was it still was not quite so good as it might have been, which was somehow frightful, like having to admit one’s Mother hadn’t loved you very much and hadn’t done her best for you. A protective power had failed. But she cried out in answer to herself, ‘Ah, now that I am going to be happy I shall keep young! I shall not grow old for ever so long!’ She looked sharply about her, at the cupboards which were full of dresses which would still make people think of fine tincture and bright colours when she came by even if her skin and hair lost theirs, which would give her beauty form and style even if middle age confused the definite image she now presented; and at the bathroom door which was ajar and showed the tall mirror held by golden eagles where the light was strongest, so that she should see the first calamities immediately they befell, and the blue and green marbled shelves where the bubble-tinted Venetian jars and bowls held the balms and astringents she had not yet begun to use. Her career had given her full command over the second chance that a rich woman can give her beauty. Nevertheless she felt a wild impatience to get on with the story of her happiness at once. Her hand fluttered towards the telephone, though she knew it was utterly the wrong hour to find Mr Isaacson and ask him if her understudy could play tonight; he would have left his house at Walton Heath and not yet arrived at the office. She made herself lie down again, and closed her eyes, and thought how pleasant it would be to be a meadow, to feel the hooves of the young lambs kick on one’s body and the little muzzles tug the grass by its roots.

Mr Isaacson would let her do it. He might reasonably say that though the management wanted to see the Manbury girl play the part they ought to have had longer notice, but he would not stick to that if she spoke with any of the urgency she felt. She did like Mr Isaacson. He was always the same, sitting at his desk, very slim, very rigid, very calm, with his long, white fingers crooked stiffly round the telephone, the thick discs of his strong glasses giving back the light steadily in front of his blindish, melancholy black eyes, his hair very smooth with brilliantine and his linen discreetly perfect, his skin preserving unflushed the strange discoloured pallor of the Northern Jew, which looks as if the race had daubed itself with the juice of a dark berry for disguise and now that happier circumstances have come were letting it wear off. When he spoke of his wife and his children he became more rigid, more calm than ever. Only one saw rise suddenly in front of the Walton Heath villa the immensely high and thick secretive and defensive walls of an oriental city. In a sentimental world he was a realist. He did not believe that this is particularly delicious, but he knew that if one does not eat one starves, and if one is not clothed one is cold, and if one does not marry and have children one is desolate. He did not believe that it is particularly agreeable to spend all one’s money on keeping a family, but he knew that if men did not do these things the bottom would fall out of life. Of course he would let Sunflower off if she gave him the slightest hint of where she was going. When he heard definitely he would congratulate her in formal and unexcited phrases, but his eyes would glow with a sombre and splendid fantaticism, seeing a woman whom he liked passing behind those walls within which is protection and honour and increase. It was a pity he was not quite happy. You could tell that he wasn’t from looking at him as he sat at his desk. There was a kind of strain across his shoulders as if he held his head high only by an effort. Of course he hated being subordinate to men so greatly inferior to him as Guggenheim, who was not a Jew but a Yid, and Madison, that fat old dandy with his tight clothes and his unshaded leer which looked as if his lashes had been burned off when some girl upset the lamp in the struggle. But it could not be helped. There was some weakness in Mr Isaacson which, beasts though they were, the other two had not got; when he said, ‘Go,’ nobody went. So he reconciled himself to the position, sat at his desk, and dealt justly with his work, his clever sensitive head inclined to droop, but his backbone forbidding that.

When one came to think of it, all the people one liked fell into that attitude sooner or later. Mum had done it all the time, working about the house. She’d never had enough fun, and she did so love a good laugh. (Oh, if only Mum had been alive to know how happy she was going to be!) Maxine had sat like that every night at Ciro’s and the Embassy in the dreadful time after Jerry, her face emptied of all blood, her eyes emptied of all meaning, but her body bravely braced in her lovely, carefully worn clothes, offering her beauty silently and passively to the love of men as a target offers itself to the arrow. It was funny to think that if she had given up and taken to going home early there would never have been that baby. (She must tell Maxine all about it the minute all the arrangements were made.) And years ago, at Tyndrum Road when Aunt Clara was so bad with pneumonia, Aunt Emma, who drank, begged so hard to be allowed to sit up with her one night that they let her; and when they took a cup of tea to her in the early morning they found her sitting in the basket-chair by the bed in just that pose. Her face, bruised with drunkenness, though she had not touched a drop since her sister got ill, had fallen forward so that her pointed chin dug into her bosom; but her eyes blinked vigilantly among the rheum and turkeyish red ruffles of flesh, and her shrivelled little body was held like a ramrod as if she were a little girl who wanted to show that though she was naughty sometimes she could be good when it was necessary. Poor Aunt Emma, dear Aunt Emma. It was a sign she was really nice that whenever she had one of her bad times one of the first things she did was to go off and buy people presents. And that was the way the nice old stage-door keeper at the Palladium used to sit. The one who was so kind to all the girls, who interpreted everything that happened in a lovely well-bred way, and with such silvery definiteness and precision that his interpretation became the truth, since everybody acted on it; and who went home one day to die quietly of a cancer that must have torn him for years. Oh, human beings were splendid things! And this pose was a symbol of their splendour, of their mad bravery when the odds were against them. The head, which was clever, which knew too well what was happening to it, hung down; but the spine, which was stupid, which only knew it had to go on living, bent only for a moment, and then stiffened straighter than it was before its bending. It was as if a link in a chain should be struck again and again by a vast hammer and doubly resolved, ‘I will not break, the chain’s the thing, the chain must hold, I will not break!’ It was lovely that at the party last night there had been only that kind of person, nobody like Billie Murphy or Lord Canterton, only people who did good work without being News: Farquharson, the little Australian cartoonist, who held his mousy head on one side all the time to make sure he was seeing things all right, because one must tell the truth, and Mackinnon, who went humbly, with an air of raising his hand and coughing behind it, into the furthest and most perilous places of the earth, their nice dowdy wives who smiled at one irrelevantly just to show they liked one, and a lot of young people who worked in Francis Pitt’s office. (But he did not seem to have made it up with poor young Mr Harrop and Miss Wycherley. There was not a sign of them.) They were having all sorts of nice feelings about the occasion that made a lovely atmosphere in which to be happy. For they were clever enough to see how funny the musty mid-Victorian house and furnishings were, to look up and laugh at the preposterous mouldings and copings and cosy corners of soap-cornered timber carved into a confused richness like that of pickles seen through the glass jar; and they were simple enough to enjoy the champagne and the very good dance music, and to be a little impressed because they had been asked out by the little man about whom there hung this heavy scent of greatness; and they were so good, with such gestures, as of those who checked themselves perpetually lest they should make some promise they could not perform, lest they should break any growing thing. It was marvellous to feel that though one was about to enjoy the most extravagant delights of love, that though henceforth one’s life was going to be saturated with pleasure, one was not going out into any desert of dissipation but would therefore range oneself forever with these sober people. For it was with their rhythm that he had moved when he laid his hand on her arm as they were watching the dear clumsy dancers, and had looked into her eyes so steadily, and spoken so solemnly, irrevocably committing himself to his question, and her to her answer.

‘Will you come with me and see the statue at the end of my chestnut alley? I told you, it is a statue of love.’

Remembering the words made her feel exactly as hearing them had done: as if a little silver hammer had struck her nerves and shattered them into a thousand splinters of ecstasy. She wanted to hear his voice now, and be disintegrated by the shock of her love for him, and come together again so that she might again be disintegrated, and so on forever. She wondered how soon he would telephone her. It occurred to her, and her breath stopped with panic, that he might call her up when she was speaking to Mr Isaacson. She must make that call at once. Picking up the receiver, she said, ‘Gerrard 773612.’ Her eyes moved about the room. That slit of sea-coloured bathroom visible through the open door. She had a nice house. Below was the Chinese room, that cube of perfection. Above were the servants’ rooms, which were really quite pretty; that unpolished oak furniture looked so clean, and the sheets were linen though she had bought them unbleached and lavender-scented. Outside the house was London; outside London was England. The fine setting for the fine play. All the colours in the world seemed to have grown much brighter. It was as if someone had passed a silk handkerchief over the surface of the globe.

Parkyns said, ‘Please madam, there’s something in the garden that Cook thought you might like to see.’

She dropped the pen with which she had been writing a letter to her sister Lily. She had felt like writing to her this morning, though for some years there hadn’t been much between them except at Christmas and the children’s birthdays, all that about Essington making it so difficult; and now she had fixed it up with Mr Isaacson that she need not play tonight there wasn’t anything to do but wait.

She put her face against the window-pane. ‘I don’t see nothing, anything.’

‘It’s ever so small,’ said Parkyns, smiling.

‘Oh, it isn’t a kitten, is it?’

‘It isn’t a kitten’ said Parkyns. ‘I don’t remember ever having seen one of what it is before.’

Sunflower opened the French window and ran down the iron steps into the garden. It wasn’t such a bad place. She had done what she could with it by paving a good deal of it, and having just four big flower-beds, with all sorts of old-fashioned sweet-smelling herbs round the edge of them, because people always liked to touch the green stuff if you took them out there after dinner, and they seemed specially pleased when they found lavender and rosemary and southernwood on their hands.

Cook and Martyn were leaning out of the kitchen window, resting their busts on their folded arms, smiling at the thought of the surprise they had found for her. But she could not see anything. The beds were full of dwarf snapdragon, that flower which always looks furry and red-blooded, like a plump, bustling, high-coloured little woman, the sort who wears plain dresses that button tightly down the front but has her warm, romantic moments; the widow who inherits the public house and runs it herself, and is liked by all the men and suspected by all their wives, with much reason. But otherwise there was nothing.

‘It’s here, Madam!’ said Cook. ‘Just in front of us.’

There, on the paving-stones, lay a loosely assembled collection of knitting needles, making feeble gestures of rejection, like an old man who has no longer the strength to be as disagreeable as he once was refusing to be introduced to somebody.

‘Oh!’ cried Sunflower. ‘It’s a hedgehog! Isn’t London a funny country sort of place!’

‘We thought you’d like to have a look at it,’ said Cook importantly.

‘Of course I do! Oh, thank you ever so much for telling me! Oh, what a funny little thing. Who found it?’

‘Martyn did,’ said Cook.

‘Yes, madam, I found it when I was putting out the white brocade bag to air after I’d washed it with petrol.’ She giggled. ‘Thought of keeping it to myself and slipping it into Cook’s bed for a surprise.’

Cook’s elbow nudged her in the ribs. ‘You’d have found something in your soup that would have surprised you!’

There were more giggles. Those two were good friends; but Parkyns always seemed a bit out of it. That was the worst of keeping three. It was apt to happen that way, not that any of them meant to be unkind. She beckoned Parkyns to come closer to her.

‘How do you suppose it ever got here? From one of the parks? Oh, look, look, you can see little winking eyes!’

The door between the front and the back garden slammed. It was Harrowby. He took off his coat and grunted some salutation and propped himself against the wall by the acacia tree. As always now, he looked terribly ill.

She called out to him, ‘Good morning, Harrowby! Look, we’ve got a visitor!’

His eyes went to it, but disregarding it and what she said he asked gruffly, ‘When will you be wanting me?’

That was surly, but you couldn’t blame him when he felt as bad as he evidently did. ‘Oh, Harrowby, not till tonight. I want to be up at Mr Pitt’s at eight.’ She was a little confused. Surely her happiness must be written all over her, they were all looking at her with a certain interested fixity, Parkyns, the two at the window, Harrowby with his cap half across his face. She bent over the hedgehog and cried out, in animation that was not feigned, because now the whole of life was so lovely to her that she had only to bend her attention to any part of it to become immediately enchanted. ‘Isn’t it silly to stick out its quills like that, when we don’t mean it any harm? Oh, I wish it was more like a kitten or puppy, and one could pick it up and make a fuss of it! Aren’t you silly to have a lot of quills instead of nice soft fur or a nice short coat! Oh, Parkyns, aren’t its little eyes funny?’

Parkyns, at her elbow, murmured benignantly, ‘They are indeed, madam.’

She appealed to Cook and Martyn. ‘Can’t we give it something to eat? Perhaps it’ll stay then. What does a hedgehog like to eat?’

They looked doubtful, indisposed to make suggestions. The initial discovery of the animal had put them in a strong position, they did not want to weaken it by any confession of ignorance about its diet.

‘There’s always lettuce leaves,’ said Parkyns, timidly.

‘It doesn’t look very vegetarian to me,’ said Cook coldly.

Harrowby spoke suddenly. ‘We had a lot of them at home, down at Warleigh, where my father is head keeper. We don’t think anything of them there.’ He said it sourly and desperately, and added contemptuously, ‘But them that take any notice of them give them milk.’

Illness took people such different ways. ‘Milk? Oh, thank you, Harrowby,’ said Sunflower. ‘Cook, give me some milk, please.’

Cook turned away. The white ‘X’ drawn on her broad flowered back by her apron straps showed for a minute in the interior dusk. Sunflower went to the window and laid her fingers on the ledge, doing a dance step to pass the time and singing over her shoulder to the knitting needles, ‘Oh, Mr Hereward, don’t run away!’ Parkyns and Martyn laughed slowly, happily, fondly.

‘Mind you don’t mess your dress, Madam,’ said Cook indulgently. ‘I’ve filled the saucer rather full.’

Sunflower set it down on the stones. ‘No, that isn’t what he wants. He isn’t taking a bit of notice. Oh, yes, he is. Harrowby, you were quite right. What lots of things you must know, being brought up in the country. Oh, look how he’s drinking it up. The poor thing must have been hungry. Now he’s put down all his quills. You’d hardly know he had any. I wonder whether you could ever make him fond of you if you gave him milk regularly, and if he would ever let you pick him up. Oh, look at the funny, funny way his nose works when he drinks.’

It was queer to be living life in two parallel columns, to be bending over the hedgehog and seeing that like anybody else it was divided and distraught, acting far more grown-up and self-possessed than it felt inside itself. For though in what it did with its quills it was like a testy old man, its winking eyes showed it piteous and playful as little animals are; and at the same time remembering with all one’s mind and one’s flesh what had happened beside the statue at the end of the chestnut alley.

When they had gone out of the house the night had seemed like a great, stirring snake, because of a young moon behind quick clouds, which perpetually cast on the earth faint, gleaming, changing patterns of black and white. All, all was movement, though it was very still. They did not speak a word, yet they were travelling fast as falling stars into a new relationship. When they came to the place where the path rose in steep steps between high walls of shrubs he put his hand on her arm to guide her, pressing his fingers into her flesh, not violently but gently, generously, dependently, to fuse the warmth that was in both their bodies, to share with her what he had that was good, to beg from her what she had that was good. From sheer habit she steeled herself against this delight, and leaned away from him. His fingers stiffened, he was hurt. Then she remembered she was free and moved back close to him, letting her body droop and her breath come softly, so that through the darkness he could feel her submission. His hand was contented again, closed on her arm, ran down it, made a bracelet round her wrist. She had never known him so utterly without laughter. That must mean that at last he felt safe, for his humour was a kind of knuckleduster he carried about with him, a method of defence. Gravity was his tonight, and an immense pride which towered above him like a strong pillar. When they were passing through the dark places in the chestnut alley, where two lines of trees made a tunnel, he was like her breathing hardly at all, moving as if his body were steeped in tenderness as in a softening fluid; but when they stepped into the bright places where there were no trees on the south side, and the moon watched them and the house looked up from the hollow with lighted windows, he walked like a very tall man. Twice his fingers tightened on her wrist and he stood still, drawing her towards him so that they looked into each other’s faces. Then it was as if she were bearing the weight of his soul on hers. There was no thought in that moment, and no feeling. Afterwards, she did not know whether she had been able to see his face through the dusk. All she had known was that he was giving himself to her, and she was taking him. The second time he did this it was as if he had said to himself that it could not really have happened the first time, he seemed to be standing a little way back from the experience in a verifying wonder. Then he pointed to the half-seen whiteness ahead of them and muttered urgently, ‘The statue! The statue!’ and hurried her on, as if since they had done so much they must do more.

On a square pedestal, shoulder-high, stood a boy with wings. He was a child, so that his limbs were round; but he was grown enough to have a hollow back and proudly carried loins. A cloud dressed him in their darkness.

She murmured, ‘Oh … I thought there was a fountain here.’

He answered, ‘No. Only this statue. Of love.’

He had loosened his hold of her. She was not sure if she could stand alone. Swaying, she looked up at the boy and her head fell back on her throat. She stretched up her arms and moulded in the air the childish roundness of his limbs, whispering, ‘I would like to be a sculptor … I would like to make figures out of wet clay …’

Francis Pitt struck down her hands, not cruelly, not kindly. Simply he wanted them for himself, to fold in his, to put to his great mouth. Then, as if he were making an immense trial of strength, he stepped backwards and stood apart from her, and shook himself, and made a soft, roaring noise of triumph, because though they were separate they were still as linked as if the same blood were flowing by some canal through both their hearts. And solemnly he said, ‘Sunflower, I love you very, very much.’

Remembering this, she felt again that silver hammer strike her nerves and shatter them into a thousand splinters of ecstasy. She drowned in a deep sea, and in the depths was given back her life, and slowly floated up, and up, and up, into the light, into the sunshine of the garden, into the sunshine where the hedgehog was wriggling its nose on the bottom of the saucer and making it jump on its base, and the three women in the print dresses smiled at her with their nice country faces, and poor Harrowby leaned against the wall, turning his head towards his own shadow, as if he found the noon brightness a little trying. She had never really been away from these things, she had been looking down at the saucer, at the diminishing circle of milk and thinking, ‘Now that’s too yellow for nature, yellow down to the last drop, country milk’s whiter, but there, what are you to do, all London milk is dyed with that annatto stuff, and it’s no use changing the dairy, for they all belong to the same combine and one’s the same as another.’ Yet at the same time she had been with Francis out in the night that was like a stirring snake, she had felt him give her his soul and herself take it, she had heard him say, ‘Sunflower, I love you very, very much.’ She supposed that it would always be so now. That beside the plain buff surface of life there would be the golden stripe of what happened to her with him, and she could always put out her hand from any dreary place where she might be and touch it with her memory and relive its loveliness. It was a pity she did not go to church now, for she could think of him during the sermon. There was nothing he was not doing for her, he was putting her on a ledge in the universe where she would never be fatigued or bored, he was making her, he was saving her.

She wondered if the others had noticed how far away she had gone that minute. She glanced shyly from face to face. Harrowby had seen nothing. He looked as if he were blind with a sick headache. But the three women were smiling at her with a hushed, steady kindliness. She was afraid they noticed she was very happy. It was nice of them to be glad. They must like her! But it made her feel confused, that they should have seen signs of this most private thing. She smiled back at them partly out of gratitude, partly to hide her embarrassment, and tried to think of some remark that would shift their attention from herself. She looked behind her at the garden and thought that the streaked dark red snapdragons were just the same colour as the juice on one’s plate when one had eaten damson tart and cream, and was not sure she really liked lavender, you felt it was aware that it was plain but very fragrant, and had the same acid sense of superiority over mere flowers that character actresses of ability have over all actresses, able or not, who play straight parts. That was no use, she turned round and looked up at the house: her house, that was at last free of Essington, in which she no longer needed to sit despondently like the stupid pupil of an irascible tutor, in which she could now lead her own life and do all the silly, funny things she wanted.

She called out, ‘I think I shall buy a dog!’

All three exclaimed, ‘Ooh yes!’ and Cook said handsomely, as if giving her full permission, ‘Yes, we’d like a bow-wow in the house again.’

‘You mustn’t steal him though!’ she warned them. ‘I don’t ever see Pussy, he’s always in the kitchen with you!’

At that moment, as if he had heard himself being spoken of, and wanted to see that no liberties were taken, Sambo thrust his three-cornered black velvet nose between the two print elbows on the window-ledge, closed his eyes as if to announce that he saw nothing worth seeing, let the exquisite moulding of his muzzle be delicately severed in two by a yawn, waved a pink strip of tongue, closed up all with a snap, and then did a brief, derisive, twitching dance with his ears, as if to make it quite plain that that had indeed been all he thought of the matter.

‘Oh, you know, he’s rude!’ exclaimed Sunflower.

‘Bless his Almightiness,’ said Cook, giving him a pat which he accepted with the tolerance of a young man who has married for money, and found that there is quite a lot of money. ‘He knows who his friends are.’

Parkyns said, in rather a low tone, so as to make the other two feel out of it, ‘What breed were you thinking of having, Madam?’

‘Oh, let’s have another peke!’ said Martyn.

Sunflower shook her head. She had cried so when she had had to give up Li Hung Chang. ‘A terrier would be nice … a Sealyham …’

She stopped. She had remembered that Francis Pitt had promised her one of the borzoi pups.

The night before drew her back to itself. There they had stood, and he had said those words about loving her. The cloud had travelled past the moon and as it passed unwound the veil of darkness from the statue, as if it were a scarf that had trailed from its hand. A rack of it remained for a little about the child’s right shoulder, and right arm, then he gleamed wholly white and dominant, the governor of this clearing. Putting her palms together under her chin, she answered, ‘Francis, I love you very, very much.’

He had held up his hand with one of his queer, pompous, great actor gestures. Heavily and conscientiously, like a rich merchant sitting in his office behind a vast mahogany desk and explaining the terms of a contract to one about to sign it whom he wished not to deceive, both because of his sense of honour and a matter of liking, he said: ‘Sunflower, I do not mean I love you as a friend. I do love my friends, I am loyal to my friends. But you, Sunflower, I love as a man loves a woman.’

His voice sounded false, it was so deep and laboured. She smiled to herself in the dark at this seeming falseness, it was so strangely at variance with his impassioned honesty, and it sprang from so dear a cause. For he was forcing his voice down as low as it could go, down far below where he could manage it, so that he should sound male.

Lifting her chin, she answered, ‘I love you as a woman loves a man.’

He made a growling sound of delight, his hands fluttered in front of him, but still he held himself back. Bringing his chin down on his poutering shirt-front and bending forward his broad shoulders till they were curved like a prie-dieu, he went on in this heavy, scrupulous, explanatory way. ‘You understand, Sunflower, I want you to give me your whole life? Would you do that for me?’

She asked, amazed, ‘Why, what else would I want to do with it?’ Again he made that growling sound. He jerked his head about, as if there were a bit in his mouth and he thought he could break it, and muttered drunkenly, ‘Sunflower, Sunflower …’ A questing, formless bulk, he thrust himself against her without moving his arms from his side. Softly, like somebody encouraging a child to walk, she said, ‘Kiss me, kiss me.’ Slowly his short, strong arms struggled free of his side, as if there were bands to be broken. When they gripped her he swayed clumsily, as if he were indeed a lion walking on its hind legs. She whispered, ‘Kiss me, oh, kiss me!’ His great head dropped forward into the hollow between her shoulder and her neck. He sighed deeply, and rolled it from side to side. Then he lifted it, and his mouth came down on hers like a blow.

Again the silver hammer struck her nerves, again she drowned in a deep sea, again she slowly rose into the sunshine of her garden. She was saying, ‘I’ve always thought I’d like an Aberdeen. I do think it’s funny the way they look so like Scotch people …’ That sounded all right. It was the kind of thing they printed in interviews with her, and there wasn’t any trouble unless Essington happened to see them. Shyly she glanced from face to face to see if any of them had noticed how far she had been away, but as before Harrowby was resting cheek by cheek with his own shadow on the wall, and the three women in the printed dresses were still smiling into the sunshine with a benignity that was as likely as not caused by the sunshine and nothing else. For it was a lovely day. Surely it was a specially lovely day. The few clouds were so thin they were no more than whorls in a glass bowl where the blower’s breath faltered, the unveiled sun softened the day with an apricot down and made all things wish not to move quickly, not to move at all, so that it was like the round cheek of a sunburned, sleeping child. Also everything seemed to be falling into a rhythm, into a pattern. In an infatuated search for the last drop the hedgehog was beating its little nose on the bottom of the saucer so that it spun on the stone like a top, and the two plump women leaning on the window-sill, the thin one standing alone, kept time in their lazy laughter. Looking about her, she saw for the first time that the three trees at the end of the garden grew like trees in a holy picture, as if their trunks had heard of the trinity and brought forth three branches apiece to its glory, as if the little twigs knew of other doctrines and busily sprouted this way and that to tell of them, like lesser brothers in a monastery bustling here and there on minor duties. She would not have been surprised if the dark houses behind them had been changed to the blue mountains that are seen in the country dreamed about by piety, blue as distance might be if it were ascetic, exalted but without the virility of rock, and if their leaves had become a golden treasury. She would not have been surprised if the falling acacia flowers had been supported before they reached the ground by a wind of intention and carried to her breast, where they would form a sign; or if the city thrushes, which were making short, circumscribed flights above her that were more like human aviation than the long surrenders to the air and victories over it which birds make in country skies, had suddenly flown down, slowly and straightly, and come to rest on her shoulders and her head. She stopped talking, she did not feel the need of keeping appearances going, she felt that if she trusted herself to this sunlit hour she would be all right.

It was lovely, just standing there in the brightness. It would not be so bad to be an image of a saint that stood for ever out of doors, in a shrine at the turn of the road above a valley, watching the sun burn the green corn to brown usefulness, watching the spears of rain strike down into the earth, which they do not kill but make more living since they change dust to wet mould, until that day when lightning flashes, and mountains are cleaved to their stony roots, and all images become flesh. During one’s waiting one would give hospitality to little creatures. Within the hollows of one’s gilt diadem a bird might build its nest, and soon short flights of nestlings would proceed from one’s head like rays; and she had heard of a wayside Madonna, creviced by weather within whom wild bees had made their honey. That pleased her. She became quite still, enacting to herself how it would be to stand in rain and shine with full wooden skirts about one, while in a hollow of one’s body dark buzzing principles of life built up cell upon cell of golden, feeding sweetness; and on her face she felt the sweet smile all images of holy women wear.

But Harrowby was saying something. She looked at him and was appalled. He had stepped clear of the wall and had one arm flung out. For a second she thought he was going to give her notice in some very insulting way, like the chauffeur before him, who had seemed so nice and jolly and devoted, but who had got terribly gloomy and taken to getting drunk, and when she went to discharge him had shouted at her that he would be glad to leave her and go into the service of respectable married people, and had flung his month’s money on the floor.

Whatever had given her that idea? His arm was flung out simply because he was pointing to the library window and all he was saying, and that quite without rudeness, indeed with the flattest lack of any emotion, was, ‘The telephone is ringing, Madam.’

It was Francis Pitt. She knew that at once.

She cried, ‘Oh!’ and looked up at the house as if she expected to see him tapping on the glass and beckoning her. Then she began to run towards the iron steps, but stopped herself at once. This time, surely, she had given herself away! When she glanced round at the three women in print dresses they were all paying attention to other things in the way that was a little too good to be true, like the way people unanimously pretend not to have heard when you have said something stupid so that you know they all have. Cook and Martyn had developed a sudden interest in the cat, which was twitching its ears in annoyance at being abruptly patted from both sides at once; and Parkyns was trying to suggest by angular movements that she well knew her duty was to answer the telephone but that her mistress seemed to want to answer it herself, and anyway she was absorbed in the hedgehog.

She said, ‘Parkyns, please …’

But it occurred to her that it would be dreadful when Parkyns came to the window and said, ‘Mr Pitt to speak to you, Madam.’ Then she would look so that they would all be certain. She said, ‘No … No … I’ll go … It may be … those photographs …’ and ran up the stairs.

At the top she halted. She wanted everyone, everything to be happy. ‘Look after the hedgehog! Put a box over it or something. We’d better take care of it for a few days. It did seem so hungry …’ They called up to her reassuring things, promises to do what they could. There was a special significant cordiality in their voices, as if they were trying to wish her good luck without saying the words. That made her feel shy, but all the same it was sweet of them to want her to be happy; and anyway they would all have to know quite soon. Probably she would be able to tell them herself, to put it into words. Surely he had meant that. She must see to it that they did not waste their money buying her wedding presents.

She had been quite right. It was one of the sleek-headed young secretaries saying, ‘Mr Francis Pitt would like to speak to Miss Fassendyll.’ Her voice went husky as she answered, ‘It’s me, speaking.’

She had to sit down while she waited, her heart was beating so. She smiled to see how the whole of her life was subordinated to her love. Henceforward she would think of the telephone in a specialised sense, just as something that Francis Pitt rang her up on.

‘At last,’ he spoke gruffly, softly. ‘Is that you, Sunflower?’

She knew just how it was with him. He too was shaking so that speech was difficult. She murmured, ‘Good morning, dear.’

There was a long silence. Then he said, ‘About that little party of ours tonight …’

She realised there was someone sitting at his elbow. She laughed shyly at the way he had had to put it.

‘Do you mind coming late? I find I cannot get away as early as I thought.’

Caressingly she asked, ‘How late, my dear? Half past eight?’

‘Yes. No, later than that. A quarter to nine.’

She had to smile at him. He was being so discreet, yet the sound of his voice which was rolling and echoing with emotion must have given away his secret to the stranger sitting by him. ‘Very well, I’ll come at a quarter to nine. Goodbye. And, Francis, I love you.’

She hung up the receiver and went to the window. They were all still there, the sun had cleared the trees on its way up to noon, the unshadowed snapdragons glowed like jewels. Parkyns’s skirts gleamed like an angel’s robes. She would have liked to go out and see what they were doing with the hedgehog, but she was afraid she looked too happy. To make sure she went over to the mirror, and had to cry out, ‘Oh, it isn’t decent!’ There was the letter to Lily still lying on the writing desk, but she thought it would be better to leave it till tomorrow. Then she could tell her everything. But she felt too restless to sit down and do nothing. She would go upstairs and choose her dress for tonight.

They had drawn down the blinds in her bedroom and uncovered the two jars of potpourri, so it was nice in there. She went to the big cupboard where her evening dresses were kept, and looked at them hanging in their black silk bags, feeling very fortunate because there were such a lot of them and they were all so beautiful. She sat down on the floor of the cupboard and with her back to the dresses and her chin cupped in her hands, thought them over one by one. ‘Nothing too fancy,’ she told herself solemnly. And she must not wear the green and gold, though she looked better in that than anything, because it made her look very tall, and he was much shorter than her anyway. The pale green chiffon from Chanel, the Molyneux gold lace, the flesh-coloured satin from Nicole Groult. They would be all right. She turned to find them, to try them on to make a choice. But her hand dropped from the silk it grasped, her lip began to tremble. It had occurred to her that these and all her other dresses had the grave fault that she had worn them before.

This thing had not come to her quite perfectly. That it had come at all was a blessed miracle. But all the same it had not come quite perfectly. It had been bad last night when he had repeated, ‘I do not mind at all, Sunflower, I swear I do not mind,’ and her hands, travelling up to hold his face so that she could kiss it gratefully, stiffened and slid down to his sides, because they found that even as he was saying he was not jealous, the sweat of jealousy was drenching his brow. Of course he had been sweet when she had whispered, ‘I knew that you would mind, I knew you could not help it,’ and had taken her to him; and surely she had put it all right when at last he had stuttered, ‘But it is true I do not mind, it is only that sometimes I thought I would go mad when you and he went home together and I was left here …’ For then she had wound her arms tightly round his neck and pressed her mouth close to his ear, because it was an awful thing to talk about, and told him he need not feel bad about that, since lately Essington had been very good to her in that way. Even on those weekends he had not seemed to want anything of her except to lie in her arms. Sometimes she had thought this was not just because she was very tired but because he was very kind, for he had a way just now of lying in bed as still as if he were asleep but with his eyes staring in front of him and his mouth a little open, as he used to when he was in the Cabinet and there was something difficult to be thought out. She had to tell this to Francis Pitt, so that he would realise what an exceptionally fine nature Essington had, and that was dreadful because he kept on not being able to hear and making her repeat it. At last he said, ‘I will not mind at all when nobody has been more to you than I have …’ And that would be tonight. She would not have to worry about this at all after tonight. But all the same, this thing had not come to her quite perfectly.

She rose and shut the cupboard door on all the dresses and stood for a time in the dusk, pressing her forehead against the cool wood. She would go down into the garden and see what they were doing for the hedgehog. And after lunch she would go out and buy a new white dress.

It would not have surprised her if there had been angels hovering over Hanover Square, one at each corner, blowing trumpets, as they do on old maps, that show coronations and royal weddings winding their pomp round cities. Really, there was something strangely appropriate to her happiness about the place. It was square, you know, square. Her happiness was foursquare. Built foursquare to the elements. And the sparrows fluttering dust through their feathers as ill-bred little boys like to blow imaginary bubbles through protruded lips made one remember that not a sparrow falls. And the taxi-drivers lounging against the railings, not of the same species as the sparrows but of the same class, told as plainly that the harsher laws of life were only illusions and did not really operate. They lived by getting fares, you would think it would be terrible for them unless they got fares, and yet there they were without any fares and yet they didn’t look as if anything so terrible was happening, showing that their condition was not so hard-pressed as one had thought it, that possibly nothing was ever hard-pressed, if one only knew. Everything was all right, and the frame of everything matched it, for the afternoon was very hot and clear. The powers had pushed back awning after awning in the upper air, and had reached the topmost one of all which is faded to the palest blue because it is so near the sun. Wonderful strong stuff it must be, never for all the wear it has had to split and let through the dazzling white nothingness. Because of these things she smiled blindly at the taxi-driver as if he were Harrowby, left him skimmingly, and was inside Maribonne’s saying, as if it were a prayer, ‘Surely he will let me buy a model straight off the mannequin, he has before, he is so keen that I should stop going to Paris and get my things from him,’ before the commissionaire touched her on the arm and asked her if she wanted the taxi to wait.

Blushing and smiling, as if this were a grave mistake but it would all work out for the best, she fled upwards to the driver, ‘I thought it was my own car.’

Anyone would, wouldn’t they, miss!’ That fetched him out of his seat. He had the door open, he was patting the upholstery as if it were the hide of a pet he had raised by hand. It appeared that this was the first day he had had it out, that this was the first day in his whole life he had worked as his own master.

More than a fortunate coincidence, an omen.

‘Fresh flowers in the ‘older,’ he recited, prodding them.

‘I noticed that! I noticed that!’ she assured him. She wished someone would come along the pavement now, to sell her flowers, to be overpaid. Was there nothing she could do for this nice man? People wanted her to write testimonials to face-creams and powders, couldn’t she write a testimonial to a taxi-cab? But it would be difficult to find anything to say. About powders one said, ‘I find nothing gives the skin such a velvety surface,’ but one couldn’t do any good by saying a taxi ran in a velvety way, for that would give credit to the kind it was, not to that particular one. And this poor man wouldn’t be able to afford to put an advertisement in the papers, anyway. Really there wasn’t anything one could do for him. But she need not worry, because he would be sure to do well since they had met on this day. Beaming with confidence in both their futures, she disengaged herself from him, because there were stirring in her mind imperative commands about the dress she must buy for that night. It must be of white satin, because that is the one white stuff which does not seem poor when one thinks of real things. White velvet is like snow lying under a sober sky, but not so good, and all the white crêpes are like sunlit snow crisped by winds of different forces, but none of them so good, and the thinner weaves are not so white and fine as the filaments of frost. But white satin is a human idea, a human triumph. There is nothing like it in nature save the contented face of the cream in its broad bowl on the dairy shelf, and that is not so beautiful, for it looks not quite right, as it tastes not quite right, because of the greasiness which reminds you that the cow is a bit of a silly and does not answer as a horse does when you speak to it over the gate. Thick white satin is like light made solid for a woman’s wearing when she wants to think of nothing but pure light, when colours are all wrong because they are stains which refer to passing moods, and there is nothing now on hand but a feeling that is going on for the rest of one’s life. It should be simply made, for light takes simple forms, the path of the moon on the water is quite straight, the lightning through the cloud traces a pattern simpler than a branch. It was lovely that there were artists who attended to such things, who would make her a dress for tonight.

It held her body closely, brightly, borrowing from the greenness of her dressing-room, and its image in the triple mirror gave green reflections such as one sees in blocks of ice, with which it snarled in the hollow between her breasts, streaked the long tapering of her waist beneath them. Her body was nice enough, that was all right, but her face looked so queer. She had gone white, with the dead whiteness of a white flower in shadow, and her lips, which until now she had hardly ever needed to rouge off the stage, were very pale pink, like pink roses ruined by the rain. And there was something new about her expression.