She looks inside herself again and finds: A man and a woman. She, after years of freedom, is over-ready for a serious love. He is playing at the role of a serious lover because of some need for asylum or refuge. (Ella gets the idea of this character from the Canadian script-writer-from his cool and mask-like attitude as a lover: he was watching himself in a role, the role of a married man with a mistress. It is this aspect of the Canadian that Ella uses-a man watching himself play a role.) The woman, over-hungry, over-intense, freezes the man even more than he is; although he only half-knows he is frozen. The woman, having been unpossessive, unjealous, undemanding, turns into a jailor. It is as if she is possessed by a personality not hers. And she watches her own deterioration into this possessive termagant with surprise, as if this other self has nothing to do with her. And she is convinced it has not. For when the man accuses her of being a jealous spy, she replied and with sincerity: 'I'm not jealous, I've never been jealous.' Ella looked at this story with amazement; because there was nothing in her own experience that could suggest it. Where, then, had it come from? Ella thinks of Paul's wife-but no; she had been too humble and accepting to suggest such a character. Or perhaps her own husband, self-abasing, jealous, abject, making feminine hysterical scenes because of his incapacity as a man? Presumably, thinks Ella, this figure, her husband, with whom she was linked so briefly and apparently without any real involvement, is the masculine equivalent of the virago in her story? Which, however, she decides not to write. It is written, within her, but she does not recognise it as hers. Perhaps I read it somewhere?-she wonders; or someone told it to me and I've forgotten hearing about it?