It had not occurred to Paul that Caro's influence might increase with her submission. Or that she would remain intelligent. When she leaned her head back to look at him, he was aware of her judgment persevering like a pulse--even forming the most tender, if least magical, part of love. He put a hand to her face, his own fingers trembling with a small, convulsive evidence of unfeigned life.

In a corner there was a wardrobe so heavy you thought at once of men who had heaved it up the stairs fifty or sixty years ago, grunting and putting their backs into it. [...]

Among the students, as with my colleagues here, there is often a background of poverty. There's no charade around this as in our countries--no dissembling by the poor, no fantasy of brotherhood on the part of the affluent. I remember the university people who used to come round Ancoats in my childhood, adopting our speech and clothes to show a kindred spirit--a sentimental condescension that does damn all for poverty. Membership in the proletariat doesn't come that cheap. What did it do for us, their guilt-edged security or the moral outrage they exchanged on their way home to their employed parents--and to their hot water and their books and music and savings-accounts, none of which they had immediate intention of sharing? What were their overalls to me, who'd have given anything to see my mother in a decent dress? In themselves, rags confer morality no more than they do disgrace.

The poor don't want solidarity with their lot, they want it changed.

"Yes." A flicker over her stare was the facial equivalent of a shrug. "Now you have a wife to give you both."

They stood fronting one another. Paul removed his hand from the door. "Caro. For pity's sake."

The figure of speech appeared to move her, and for an instant it seemed she might laugh. Again he pressed what he took for an advantage: "Have a bit of mercy."

She herself leaned back on the chalky wall, and closed her eyes. "How should you hope for mercy, rendering none?"

"These walls are full of dirty quotations, one way and another."

There was silence while she leaned there, austere with her umbrella, sheathed and closed. She roused herself and did step past him, then, to pull at the heavy door.

From behind her, Paul said, "You've got white all over your back." And in the most natural way in the world brushed his hand down her coat. Then passed his arms about her waist and put his mouth to the nape of her neck, and said, "Almighty God."

He helped her on with her jacket. His conventional, unblessed touch was the true dismissal. Composure in others always thwarted him, and hers at that moment denied him the offence of a scene. That he had loved Caro more, and far more, than he had cared for anyone else gave her stature: she was either unique or an inaugurator. Paul resented this historic position she had established for herself in the momentum of his life, and because of it would have liked to see her broken.

"My fear is, you will never need anything that I can provide." He neither wished to impute high motives to his anxiety for her nor to underrate a selflessness inseparable from love. He had seen how people grew cruel with telling themselves of their own compassion: nothing made you harder than that. He said, "Caro, when will you let me deliver you from these awful people?"

Caro lay in her frozen bed and stared at the skylight, which was a sheet of clotted ice. She lay in darkness or in moonlight, remembering how, one evening of the previous year, she had come in from work to find Paul sitting at her table writing; and that he had got up and embraced her and asked, "How does it strike you, to find a light on and someone waiting for you?" He had put his mouth to her hair and said, "I have wished that Tertia did not exist." Now it was Caro whom, for his convenience, he wished away.

Love had not been innocent. It was strange that suffering should seem so.

In her room Caroline Bell would fall into long reverie, remembering though not pondering sights, episodes, and sensations, or lines she had read; like an old woman ruminating on the long, long past. She was coming to look on men and women as fellow-survivors: well-dissemblers of their woes, who, with few signals of grief, had contained, assimilated, or put to use their own destruction. Of those who had endured the worst, not all behaved nobly or consistently. But all, involuntarily, became part of some deeper assertion of life.

Though the dissolution of love created no heroes, the process itself required some heroism. There was the risk that endurance might appear enough of an achievement. This risk had come up before.

"Or the best." He smiled. His hound-face had lines, at eyelids and mouth, that were now at rest but might be put to use. His dark hair, greying, fell loose over his forehead. His body, too heavy and indolent for the precise little chair, was that of an active man who had taught himself to wait: an incongruous patience that could trouble those who wondered what might be restrained. He said, "Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they're made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that it was neither the moment nor the true self."

Christian Thrale credited himself with special sensibilities towards pictures. In galleries where art had been sagely institutionalized, he walked and paused like all the rest, yet believed his own stare more penetrating than most; and, when others strolled ahead, would linger, patently engrossed beyond the ordinary.