: "Sorry, too. Have you been living here long?"

"Er--yes--a long time." She began to close the door slowly.

"Well--good-morning, thanks so much. Hope I haven't been a bother."

"Good-morning."

She heard him walk down the passage and then pause--lighting a
cigarette. Yes--a faint scent of delicious cigarette smoke penetrated
her room. She sniffed at it, smiling again. Well, that had been a
fascinating interlude! He looked so amazingly happy: his heavy clothes
and big buttoned gloves; his beautifully brushed hair... and that
smile... "Jolly" was the word--just a well-fed boy with the world for his
playground. People like that did one good--one felt "made over" at the
sight of them. SANE they were--so sane and solid. You could depend on
them never having one mad impulse from the day they were born until
the day they died. And Life was in league with them--jumped them on her
knee--quite rightly, too. At that moment she noticed Casimir's letter,
crumpled up on the floor--the smile faded. Staring at the letter she
began braiding her hair--a dull feeling of rage crept through her--she
seemed to be braiding it into her brain, and binding it, tightly, above
her head... Of course that had been the mistake all along. What had? Oh,
Casimir's frightful seriousness. If she had been happy when they first
met she never would have looked at him--but they had been like two
patients in the same hospital ward--each finding comfort in the sickness
of the other--sweet foundation for a love episode! Misfortune had
knocked their heads together: they had looked at each other, stunned
with the conflict and sympathised... "I wish I could step outside the
whole affair and just judge it--then I'd find a way out. I certainly was
in love with Casimir... Oh, be sincere for once." She flopped down on
the bed and hid her face in the pillow. "I was not in love. I wanted
somebody to look after me--and keep me until my work began to sell--and
he kept bothers with other men away. And what would have happened if he
hadn't come along? I would have spent my wretched little pittance, and
then--Yes, that was what decided me, thinking about that 'then.' He was
the only solution. And I believed in him then. I thought his work had
only to be recognised once, and he'd roll in wealth. I thought perhaps
we might be poor for a month--but he said, if only he could have me, the
stimulus... Funny, if it wasn't so damned tragic! Exactly the contrary
has happened--he