[...] into a very large long room, in the middle of which was a gleaming oval table of the size which makes one think at once of the factory there must be somewhere whose whole business it is to create immense tables, long or oval or round, for the use of international conferences.

Well of course it was ridiculous to expect her, Kate, to turn herself into an old woman just because … Soon she discovered that if she wanted to be alone, she should sit badly, in a huddled or discouraged posture, and allow her legs to angle themselves unbecomingly. If she did this men did not see her. She could swear they did not. Sitting neatly, alertly, with her legs sleekly disposed, she made a signal. Sagging and slumped, it was only when all the seats in the coffee room were taken that someone came to sit near her. At which time it was enough to let her face droop to gain her privacy again, and very soon.

It was really extraordinary! There she sat, Kate Brown, just as she had always been, her self, her mind, her awareness, watching the world from behind a façade only very slightly different from the one she had maintained since she was sixteen. It was a matter only of a bad posture, breasts allowed to droop, and a look of “Yes, if you have to …” and people did not see her. It gave her a dislocated feeling, as if something had slipped out of alignment. For she was conscious, very conscious, as alert to it as if this was the most important fact of her life, that the person who sat there watching, shunned or ignored by men who otherwise would have been attracted to her, was not in the slightest degree different from the person who could bring them all on again towards her by adjusting the picture of herself—lips, a set of facial muscles, eye movements, angle of back and shoulders. This is what it must feel to be an actor, an actress—how very taxing that must be, a sense of self kept burning behind so many different phantasms.

[...] The pain was more what some part of her which she felt she ought not to approve of believed was owed to the situation. But the marriage continued quite well. To the surprise of them both, since they were surrounded by divorcing couples, marriages which had not been able to withstand an infidelity … at this point, the pattern of Kate’s thought, or memories, quite simply dissolved. Some of it was true: they had been right in making sure they did not expect too much from each other, or from marriage. But for the rest—the truth was, she had lost respect for her husband. Why, when he was doing no more than “everyone” did, men in his situation? But she was feeling about him, had felt for some time, rather as if he had a weakness for eating sweets and would not restrain it. He was diminished; there was no doubt about that. She felt maternal about her husband; she had not done so once. To have fallen in love, and painfully—that she could understand, she had done the same herself. But to arrange his life, consciously and purposefully, as he had done, “clearing it” with her, of course, while he did it, so that he might have an infinite series of casual friendly sexual encounters with any young woman who went by—that made him seem trivial to her. And the way he had been dressing and doing his hair—when he came back from abroad somewhere, the first time, having tried to turn the clock back by at least fifteen years—she had suffered a fit of trembling anger and disgust. Soon, of course, she had been persuaded—not least by what Michael was not saying so much as indicating—that she was envious: it was petty of her.

But from the time she understood that this was what he was doing, and that this was what she could expect until old age did for him—unless, like a granny who dyed her hair and wore short skirts so that people could admire her legs, still unchanged, he would keep on till he died—she felt that her own worth, even her substance, had been assaulted. There was no explaining this, but it was a fact. Because her husband—who was in every possible way a good and responsible husband—had decided to experience an indefinite number of “affairs” that were by definition irresponsible, and would have no point to them but sex, she, Kate, felt diminished. She would have preferred him to confess—no, insist, as his right, on a real emotion—a real bond with some woman, even two or three women, which would deepen and last and demand loyalty—from herself as well. That would not have made her feel as if a wound had been opened in her from which substance and strength drained from her as she sat in her house in South London, knowing him to be (only in the intervals of his real work, his real interests, of course) pursuing this or that sexual titillation. She felt about him—against all reason and what her carefully constructed blueprints told her she could feel—as if he had lost his way, had lost purpose.