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turned; and he, in an agony to wring from his mind something that should enclose the two of them in a conspiracy against the world, blurted “They’re all nothing but materialistic pigs.” As she smiled and went, he repeated “Materialistic pigs”; but repetition would not make it either an idiom or a startling metaphor; it was just another of his callownesses.
    Yet he felt exhilarated as he drove himself home alone. Even he had not been naïf enough to think she really was offering him a job in a museum: and yet he felt as though he had, for the first time in his life, been canny and worldly, had done himself a bit of good: as though he really had landed a job: or something even better. As he experienced it then, it was the exhilaration of having begun his first business deal rather than his first love affair.
    But already he was worrying whether he would be able to bring himself to arrange to meet her again.

2
    T HAT worry, however, really had been naïf of him. It was obvious from the fact that Nancy knew everyone at the party that they would meet again: obviously their milieux were intersecting circles. And as a matter of fact it turned out, when she got home from her ski resort, that Marcus’s sister knew Nancy slightly. Nancy had not recognised the relationship from Marcus’s surname because his sister was known by her married name. (She was, however, divorced.) When Marcus eventually tried to follow the threads back, he discovered that he and Nancy had just missed meeting a hundred times. Now that each was sensitised to a glimpse of the other, the threads were drawing them towards meeting again—towards meeting increasingly often.
    Marcus found this given to him, by society, without his having to bear the embarrassing responsibility of seeking it; and he felt less shy than he would have done because his sister or someone else they both knew was always present, though usually not participating in Marcus’s and Nancy’s conversation, which was as a rule about the arts. Marcus tried to communicate to Nancy—indeed, he probably did communicate—the agonised, ecstatic rapture that was provoked in him, provoked almost like a rash on his skin, by his sensuous, lyrical response to great blonde areas of Rubens flesh. Nancy heard him quite seriously, penetrating through the callowness of his expression to his thought, and nodding as she gave his thought high marks. But she was not wonover to his point of view. At the end she said, “It’s no good. I just can’t see anything in women of that type.” Certainly, it was not her type.
    Marcus recognised the distinction that where he was aesthetic Nancy was intelligent. She knew rather than felt about Rubens. But he was not in the least distressed by the difference between them; he was too fully occupied by welcoming the fact that her personality was exactly the complement for want of which his own had limped.
    The first time he went out alone with Nancy he scarcely noticed that it was the first time. They both wanted to see the same film. It was rather that they went together than that he took her, though he did as a matter of fact pay, and drove her in his car. On later expeditions, Nancy borrowed her parents’ Consul and drove him, because the Consul was more comfortable and better in traffic. It was typical of him, he commented despairingly to her, to have a car which was old but not vintage. “Vintage cars are no good anyway,” she said. “They break down if you look at them.”
    Sometimes he took Nancy back to his flat for coffee after dinner. His flat was in W.1‚ and the smart address cost him—or, rather, his father—four hundred a year. It was really a single room on the ground floor: there was a squalid cupboard where Marcus had his bed, another, with a rusted geyser, that was the kitchen, and another, without daylight or ventilation, that was the bathroom. In the bathroom the basin and all the ledges were spotted with white smears of toothpaste,