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"I only am because my feet do hurt."

"Didn't I say they would? Round and round this hellish pavement. Look, shut up—you really can't} you know."

"Lilian always thinks people are looking. Now you are just like Lilian."

"I must get a taxi."

On the crest of a sob, she said: "I've only got sixpence. Have you got any money?"

Portia stood like a stone while Eddie went for a taxi, came back with one, gave the address of his flat. Once they were in the taxi, with Henrietta Street reeling jerking past, he miserably took her in his arms, pushing his face with cold and desperate persistence into the place where her hair fell away from her ear. "Don't," he said, "please don't, darling: things are quite bad enough."

"I can't, I can't, I can't."

"Well, weep if it helps. Only don't reproach me so terribly."

"You told her about our walk in the wood."

"I was only talking, you know."

"But that wood was where I kissed you."

"I can't live up to those things. I'm not really fit to have things happen, darling. For you and me there ought to be a new world. Why should we be at the start of our two lives when everything round us is losing its virtue? How can we grow up when there's nothing left to inherit, when what we must feed on is so stale and corrupt? No, don't look up: just stay buried in me."

"You're not buried; you're looking at things. Where are we?"

"Near Leicester Square Station. Just turning right."

Turning round in his arms to look up jealously, Portia saw the cold daylight reflected in Eddie's dilated eyes. Fighting an arm free, she covered his eyes with one hand and said: "But why can't we alter everything?"

"There are too few of us."

"No, you don't really want to. You've always only been playing."

"Do you think I have fun?"

"You have some sort of dreadful fun. You don't want me to interfere. You like despising more than you like loving. You pretend you're frightened of Anna: you're frightened of me." Eddie pulled her hand from his eyes and held it away firmly, but she said: "You're like this now, but you won't let me stay with you."

"But how could you? You are so childish, darling."

"You say that because I speak the truth. Something awful is always with you when I'm not. No, don't hold me; let me sit up. Where are we now?"

"I wanted to kiss you—Gower Street."

Sitting up in her own corner of the taxi, Portia knocked her crushed hat into shape on her knee. Flattening the ribbon bow with her fingers, she moved her head away a little and said: "No, don't kiss me now."

"Why not now?"

"Because I don't want you to."

"You mean," he said, "that I didn't once when you did?"

She began to put on her hat with an immune little smile, as though all that had been too long ago. The tears shed in that series of small convulsions—felt by him but quite silent—had done no more than mat her lashes together. Eddie noted this while he examined her face intently, while he with one anxious finger straightened her hat. "You're always crying now," he said. "It's really awful, you know.... We're just getting there. Listen, Portia, how much time have you? When do they expect you home?"

"That doesn't matter."

"Darling, don't be sappy—if you're not back, someone will have a fit. Is there really any good in your coming into my place? Why don't I see you home, instead?"

"It's not 'home'! Why can't I come in?" Knotting her hands in their prim, short gloves together she screwed her head away and said in a muffled voice: "Or have you invited somebody else?" The taxi drew up.

"All right, all right then: get out. You must have been reading novels."

The business with the taxi fare and the latchkey, the business of snatching letters from the hall rack, then of hustling Portia quietly upstairs preoccupied Eddie till he had turned a second Yale key and thrown open the door of his own room. But his nerves were at such a pitch of untoward alertness that he half expected to find some fateful figure standing by his window, or with its back to the grate.