His misery in that place had all been typical, a random sample. The city was cursed with sleazy inevitability--the most sombre thoughts acquired a picked-over character, and pleasure came ready-mixed for quick satiety. He had brought a girl to the hotel because the city expected it of him: loneliness had been industrialized. Yet fornication itself was very solitude. When he thought, here, of his wife and children and his own rooms, they seemed like health, and he could not feel that was banal. And when he invoked the presence of Caro it was to pit her strength against a city, or the world.

Grace told him how her parents had died in the wreck of an Australian ferry when she was a child. Next--so it seemed, as she came to relate it--there had been Christian. Recounting these things, she felt her story was undeveloped, without event. Years were missing, as from amnesia, and the only influential action of her life had been the common one of giving birth. The accidental foundering of her parents had remained larger than any conscious exploit of her own, and was still her only way to cause a stir.

The bare facts of Grace Thrale's love, if enumerated, would have appeared familiar, pitiful, and--to some--even comical. Of this, she herself was conscious. It was the sweetness that was unaccountable.

Because the condition struck her as inborn, she raked her experience for precedent. She dwelt on a man she had known long ago in London, before her marriage--a moody schoolteacher who often broke appointments or came late, and over whom she had suffered throughout a cold summer. Only the year before, she had heard he was now a headmaster in Dorset, and had looked up his name in the telephone directory. He provided no prologue to Angus Dance. In contrast to the schoolteacher, on the other hand, Christian had appeared a model of consideration, a responsible lover whose punctuality had from the start prefigured matrimony. Angus Dance had no precursor.

She saw, or knew, that Angus Dance had come back into the room. Making sure about some cheese puffs, she found him close to her, talking to a black-haired, blue-eyed girl who had come with the Dalrymples.

And why on earth not? A man like that could not possibly be leading a celibate life, abstinent in tribute to her own romantic fancies.

When she left the place it was getting dark and there was sleet. She did not want to go home; it was as if her humiliation must be disclosed there. She shrank from home as from extra punishmentas a child, mauled by playmates, might fear parental scolding for torn clothes. But stumbled along with no other possibility. Pain rose up from her thorax, and descended like sleet behind her eyes. It was scarcely credible there should be no one to comfort her.

She thought, My mortification. And for the first time realized that the word meant death.

"I've not seen you since."

It was the mingling of great and trivial that could not be misunderstood.

He went on, "Yet we are so close."

She fell silent, leaning back into colours and shadows of the room: not in fulfillment, which could hardly be, but in voluptuous calm, at peace. Her hand was outstretched on the table, the sleeve pushed up. It was the first time he had seen her inner arm. She knew it might be the only such passage between them, ever. If the usual griefs were coming to her at last, so was this unprecedented perfection.

He said, "I am near thirty-four years of age, and live with too much vacancy." She saw his rectitude existing in a cleared space like his parents' uncluttered house. He told her, "You cannot imagine--well, I do not mean that unkindly. But you, with your completeness--love, children, beauty, troops of friends--how would you understand such formlessness as mine? How would you know solitude, or despair?"

They were matters she had glimpsed in a mirror. She felt his view of her existence settling on her like an ornate, enfeebling garment; closing on her like a trap. She leaned back on the unyielding sofa, and he stood confronting. It was an allegorical contrast--sacred and profane love: her rapture offered like profanity. To assert, or retrieve, she said, "Yet there has been nothing lovelier in my life than the times we sat together at the hospital and looked at the photographs."

He said, "I am near thirty-four years of age, and live with too much vacancy." She saw his rectitude existing in a cleared space like his parents' uncluttered house. He told her, "You cannot imagine--well, I do not mean that unkindly. But you, with your completeness--love, children, beauty, troops of friends--how would you understand such formlessness as mine? How would you know solitude, or despair?"

They were matters she had glimpsed in a mirror. She felt his view of her existence settling on her like an ornate, enfeebling garment; closing on her like a trap. She leaned back on the unyielding sofa, and he stood confronting. It was an allegorical contrast--sacred and profane love: her rapture offered like profanity. To assert, or retrieve, she said, "Yet there has been nothing lovelier in my life than the times we sat together at the hospital and looked at the photographs."

He said, "I am near thirty-four years of age, and live with too much vacancy." She saw his rectitude existing in a cleared space like his parents' uncluttered house. He told her, "You cannot imagine--well, I do not mean that unkindly. But you, with your completeness--love, children, beauty, troops of friends--how would you understand such formlessness as mine? How would you know solitude, or despair?"

They were matters she had glimpsed in a mirror. She felt his view of her existence settling on her like an ornate, enfeebling garment; closing on her like a trap. She leaned back on the unyielding sofa, and he stood confronting. It was an allegorical contrast--sacred and profane love: her rapture offered like profanity. To assert, or retrieve, she said, "Yet there has been nothing lovelier in my life than the times we sat together at the hospital and looked at the photographs."