‘You got married, didn’t you—are you still—I mean is your husband still—have you got a—husband—now—?’

‘Yes, yes, oh yes. My husband is alive—he’s with me, yes—we live—we live here.’

I was silent while a whole world of possibilities gradually folded themselves up, like some trick of stagecraft, quietly collapsing, folding, merging, becoming very small and vanishing. So that—was that—at any rate. And I would have to think, to invent, in a new way, to exist in this situation which was now, I realized, whatever was the case with Hartley, the continuing and only situation for me, the final state of affairs, the world centre.