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scrupulously appended , “but I didn’t like it. I mean, I wasn’t any good at it.”
    He had finished folding his paper table napkin and began carefully tearing tiny holes in it.
    “Do you live with your sister?”
    “No, actually.”
    “With your parents?”
    “No. No, actually, I live on my own.”
    “What do you do?”
    Marcus unfolded the paper napkin and spread it like a gesture of despair. “Nothing,” he said.
    He knew what effect these confessions, these despairs, of his made on people. He himself was a person who could not look a cripple—let alone in the eye—in the leg; and he knew that his own emotionally, socially, crippled state consisted in his not merely communicating his anguish to others but infecting them with it—so that in all his social transactions both parties had first to blush, then to look away and finally to move away as quickly as social decency allowed, simply through the other people’s awareness of his awareness of their awareness … and so on.
    But Nancy behaved almost as though she were not a sensitive person. She did not even look down, to where the napkin was stretched between his hands, but went on looking straight at his eyes, which were deep brown, large and—even now, when smoke from the other guests’ cigarettes had brought up one or two capillaries in the whites to a cloudy scarlet—beautiful.
    “Well, if you did do something, what would it be?”
    “O, it would be …,” he said; and seemed to think for a moment he had expressed himself. “If I were creative,” he went on, mumbling, “I’d write a novel.”
    “What would it be like?”
    “Like Proust.” As though that went without saying.
    “And, as you’re not creative——?”
    Marcus took curiously kindly to her stating, in this off-hand way, that he was not, instead of assuring him that he might be, that one could never tell, and moving away. He said, almost firmly,
    “I’d like to work with beautiful things.”
    “What type of things?”
    “Anything,” he said, making peristaltic movements with his hands to urge the completing word through, “beautiful.” He added, in a nearly brisk voice, “I might be an art historian.”
    “Would you like to work in a museum?”
    “Yes,” he said, “if I could manage the administrative side that is, yes, I’d love to.”
    His radiance obliged her to say,
    “Not that I’ve got a museum job to offer you.”
    He looked down again. “No, I know,” he said. “And if you had, you wouldn’t offer it to me.”
    Instead of saying she didn’t see why not and that he had as good a chance as the next person Nancy said,
    “No, I don’t suppose they’d have you. You’re not trained, are you?”
    “Trained? No.”
    “What did you do at the university?”
    “Actually, I wasn’t at the university.” He knew he was making it worse, but he added, “I was at a sort of college—well, really a sort of glorified school, but we were all quite grown-up— in Oxford. I mean, it wasn’t part of … But we mixed with the undergraduates quite a lot,” he finished, knowing how terrible he sounded—and perhaps was.
    “And you like paintings?”
    “O, I love them.”
    “Who’s your favourite painter?”
    “Rubens,” he said.
    He knew that Nancy must be seeing the contrast between Rubens and his admirer.
    Her eye suddenly descended to the paper table napkin he was still holding open, and she saw he had made not, as she had half-thinkingly assumed when she saw what he was doing, a lace pattern but a silhouette of a kangaroo.
    It was his only conjuring trick, and he had invented it himself.
    “You’re good with your hands,” she said, and immediately afterwards looked at the small round gold watch on her small, bare, brown wrist and told him she was going. “No doubt they’ll think I only came for the food. And they wouldn’t be far wrong. I’m a bit sick of this kind of party. I’ve met them all—I’ve met it —before.”
    She smiled and half