'. What's her name?

'The Singapore girl? Marie-Laure. Marie-Laure Auboyer. But really, Ann —’

'Have you got a picture of her?

'Yes, but look here —’

'Could I see it?

'I haven't got it with me I' said Felix, his voice rising. 'But I tell you that's all over I' Then he murmured' Sorry.

What am I saying? thought Ann. Does he realize I'm jealous? She put her hand to her head. She had momentarily lost her balance. She said as calmly as she could, 'Felix, you really had better go now. I'm so tired and you startled me and I'm probably being stupid. We are old friends, and I certainly don't want to send you away, but I don't exactly want to «keep» you either if that means any sort of encouragement. Forgive me.

'I startled you —’ he said. 'I'm a brute. I think I will stay in England, if you don't mind. Perhaps I ought just to have waited without telling you I was waiting. But I assure you I'm not at all encouraged. I hope nothing and I expect nothing. I only ask you to let me see you a little and help you a little. I want the joy of serving you, even if it only lasts for a while. I want it, and I feel that because I love you I have a kind of right to it.

They both got up and stood rather stiffly beside their chairs. It was the moment of departure. Ann felt a strange heaviness of the limbs. It was as if for a little time she had been separated from her body and had rejoined it to find that it had lived, it had changed, in the interim. 'Perhaps it had been inhabited by an angel. She shivered again as at the light touch of some image, some thought. What was it? Then she realized that it was, absent from her for so long, the idea of happiness. No wonder she had not recognized it.

Felix moved after her towards the door. Then they stopped and stared at each other. Ann said to herself, and the thoughts came quite clearly, Felix assumes it may be years before I get over Randall, years before I am ready to fall in love again. But I am ready to fall in love again now.

It was not that she had suddenly ceased to love Randall. But she was certainly able now, if she relaxed her grip for a moment, to fall in love with Felix. She felt a terrible weakness at the knees. Did love really come upon one like this? Yet this love had been long enough in preparation. Was this falling in love? It was certainly falling. Falling. Falling. She held on to the back of a chair. As Felix inclined his head and began to move on in the direction of the door she realized with anguish that he was going to go without kissing her.

Chapter Twenty-six

PENN GRAHAM found the behaviour of his English relations really incomprehensible. His uncle Randall had gone off publicly with another woman. Yet everyone was behaving quite calmly and cheerfully as if nothing had happened. Even Miranda, though restless and rather sulky, was scarcely more so than usual. Penn knew that if his own parents had parted he would have run mad.

They were over at Seton Blaise. Humphrey, Mildred and Felix were all in evidence, and Ann had come over with Miranda and himself. They had had a bonzer lunch with a butler waiting, and now they were walking in the chestnut grove which lay between the loop of the river and the little lake. Penn, who was walking by himself, could see the pale blue water between the trunks of the trees. It was a beautiful day, and a shifting yellowish green fell in elliptical coins of light through the gently moving branches. Penn was miserable.

His first feeling on realizing that he was in love with Miranda was a certain sense of achievement. He too, Penn Graham, was suffering from that famous ailment; and it did not take him long to realize that he had it in a very acute and probably quite exceptional form. Since then he had, he felt, lived through the whole history of love, and the dialectic of his suffering seemed to have spanned, in a few weeks, the whole of human experience. He began with a sense of exhilaration and with a pure unquestioning delight in the sheer existence of the beloved object. That Miranda should be: that was enough of joy. He contemplated, lying in bed that night, her marvellous beauty, her grace, her cleverness, her wit, her impish sharpness, and that sweet childishness which still hung like a veil upon her qualities of a lovely girl. Turning over and burying his face in the pillow he groaned with ecstasy and fell into a sleep of happiness.

The next morning to which he woke with an undifferentiated sense of bliss, produced however, as it wore on, a state of mind somewhat less solipsistic. Penn strayed forth into the world on that morning as into the Garden of Eden. He was a new man. A first man. A man. And since he had been made new it seemed to him somehow deeply evident that Miranda had been made new as well, and he wandered towards her through a rose-entangled forest full of sweet airs that gave delight and hurt not. He felt positively magnetic with the power of love, and did not doubt that since he loved Miranda so much he would be able irresistibly to draw her to him.

What this conjunction would, exactly, consist in was less clear to him nor did he give it thought. He did not avert his attention from the problem of sexual desire, the problem simply did not exist for him. His image of Miranda rose like a column of flame from the pure re-created form of his new life, and he and she existed in a golden haze of love and worship and diffused desire. And in so far as he precisely pictured himself at all as keeping company with the new Miranda, he saw them wandering eternally hand in hand in some flower-scattered field of bliss.

He absented himself from breakfast that morning, partly because he felt that if he ate anything he would be sick, and partly because he wanted to see Miranda in a more spiritual atmosphere than that induced by questions about eggs and cornflakes. He wandered instead upon the lawn, waiting for her to come out, as she always did after breakfast, to see if her hedgehogs had eaten up their bread and milk in the night. When she did appear he approached her, spoke to her, followed her. She was, as usual, detached and impish, full of the rather malicious gaiety which had confounded Penn from the first; and in the midst of the acute sensations occasioned by her presence Penn was forced to suspect that she was still the unregenerate old Miranda.

Penn shook himself at this point and reproached himself. He had learnt, he told himself, an important lesson. The lover readily imagines that he and his mistress are one. He feels he has love enough for both and that his loving will can swathe the two of them together like twin nuts in a shell. But what one loves is, after all, another human being, a person with other interests, other pains, in whose world one is oneself an object among others. While Penn glided after her in tune with the music of the spheres, Miranda was more concerned about the hedgehogs and about whether Hatfield had perhaps come to steal their milk, a question upon which she condescended to ask Penn's opinion. That she so consulted him disconcerted him at first but later delighted him. He must learn, he realized, to live in the real world with Miranda.

The real world however was a thorny place. Penn at this stage pictured himself somewhat as a disciple of Courtly Love. He imagined himself Miranda's slave, devoted to her service, running errands for her or, preferably, rescuing her from terrible dangers. And he envisaged this too, though less clearly, as a process which would transform Miranda, which would, in short, make her love him. His desert, he felt, was infinite and must in time be evident and then compelling. Service would call forth love and the new Miranda would arise, an apotheosis of the sweetness and power which he so powerfully divined as hidden within the puckish gamine who, alas, sometimes enjoyed teasing and tormenting him.