the National Gallery. Michael suggested that she should return to her painting; and Dora agreed, while insisting, as Michael indeed suspected, that she had a very meagre talent. Perhaps she could find a teaching job which would leave her time to go to an art school? Perhaps she could get back the scholarship which she had relinquished when she married Paul The problem of where and how she could live arose too. Michael advised her to leave London. Dora at first declared that life out of London was impossible, but later saw the point of the idea and even found it rather exciting. When the discussion had reached this stage a providential letter arrived from Dora's friend Sally, to say that Sally had got a good job as an art teacher at a school in Bath, and had got her hands on quite a decent flat, and did Dora know anyone in Bath who might help her to find someone to share the flat? It then became obvious that Dora must go to Bath, and Michael conducted some correspondence for her to see if she could get a grant to help her to complete her studies in that city. A very small grant was forthcoming, together with some suggestions about primary school-teaching. This suited Dora excellently and ecstatic telephone calls passed between her and Sally. Michael, reflecting later, was surprised at the efficiency with which he had helped Dora to organize her unorthodox future, considering how little thought he really gave to the matter. Perhaps his complete detachment from Dora, and a curious broken freedom brought about by his own state of mind, enabled him to act in a situation in which he would normally have hesitated or acted differently. He wondered if his counsels were wise; perhaps not even time would show. But he believed that he now knew Dora a little. She had talked a great deal about herself, and Michael glimpsed, in the stories which she told without bitterness of her unwanted childhood, some of the roots of her present being. No one had inspired her to place the least value on herself; she still felt herself to be a socially unacceptable waif, and what made her unpretentious also made her irresponsible and unreliable. Paul, with his absolute demands and his annihilating contempts and angers, was the worst partner she could have chosen. Dora was not altogether without hope of returning to Paul, and Michael hoped with her, although he was well aware that James had been right in calling her a bitch and that it was unlikely that her career of crime was at an end.
Dora of her own accord suggested that she might now have some talks with Mother Clare. She saw Mother Clare three times, and seemed pleased to have done so, though she was reticent about what had been said. They talked, of course, about their adventure in the lake, since which Dora had conceived a great admiration for the intrepid and amphibious nun; but they spoke too, Michael gathered, about Dora's future. He was glad to be able to conclude that the Abbey was putting no spanners in the wheel of his own plans for Dora, and had evidently not told her bluntly to return at once to her husband. He felt, in the case of Dora, too, that there was little point in forcing her willy-nilly into a machine of sin and repentance which was alien to her nature. Perhaps Dora would repent after her own fashion; perhaps she would be saved after her own fashion.
It was after they had been alone together for a while that Michael began to guess that Dora was a little in love with him. Something in her looks, her questioning, her manner of serving him, suggested this. Michael was touched, a little irritated, but in no way alarmed or repelled. He was grateful to Dora because he felt that she was a person to whom he could do no harm. There was something subdued and hopeless about her love which was perhaps new to her. Michael observed it, almost with tenderness, and did nothing to reduce the distance between them. He made her talk about herself, and quietly circumvented her clumsy efforts to make him talk about himself. Her unsuspicious and unsophisticated mind harboured of course no conception