There lay in her manner, just out of sight, I felt,

this suggestion of the exact reverse—of unrest, shrinking, almost of

anxiety. Certain small strings in her seemed over-tight. ‘Keyed-up’

was the slang expression that crossed my mind. I looked rather

searchingly into her face as she was telling me this.

‘Only—the evenings,’ she added, noticing my query, yet rather

avoiding my eyes, ‘the evenings are—well, rather heavy sometimes, and

I find it difficult to keep awake.’

‘The strong air after London makes you drowsy,’ I suggested, ‘and

you like to get early to bed.’

Frances turned and looked at me for a moment steadily. ‘On the

contrary, Bill, I dislike going to bed—here. And Mabel goes so

early.’ She said it lightly enough, fingering the disorder upon my

dressing-table in such a stupid way that I saw her mind was working in

another direction altogether. She looked up suddenly with a kind of

nervousness from the brush and scissors.

‘Billy,’ she said abruptly, lowering her voice, ‘isn’t it odd, but

I hate sleeping alone here? I can’t make it out quite; I’ve never felt

such a thing before in my life. Do you—think it’s all nonsense?’

And she laughed, with her lips but not with her eyes; there was a

note of defiance in her I failed to understand.

‘Nothing a nature like yours feels strongly is nonsense, Frances,’

I replied soothingly.

But I, too, answered with my lips only, for another part of my mind

was working elsewhere, and among uncomfortable things. A touch of

bewilderment passed over me. I was not certain how best to continue.

If I laughed she would tell me no more, yet if I took her too seriously

the strings would tighten further. Instinctively, then, this flashed

rapidly across me: that something of what she felt, I had also felt,

though interpreting it differently. Vague it was, as the coming of

rain or storm that announce themselves hours in advance with their

hint of faint, unsettling excitement in the air. I had been but a

short hour in the house—big, comfortable, luxurious house—but had

experienced this sense of being unsettled, unfixed, fluctuating—a kind

of impermanence that transient lodgers in hotels must feel, but that a

guest in a friend’s home ought not to feel, be the visit short or

long. To Frances, an impressionable woman, the feeling had come in the

terms of alarm. She disliked sleeping alone, while yet she longed to

sleep. The precise idea in my mind evaded capture, merely brushing

through me, three-quarters out of sight; I realised only that we both

felt the same thing, and that neither of us could get at it dearly.

Degrees of unrest we felt, but the actual thing did not disclose

itself. It did not happen.

I felt strangely at sea for a moment. Frances would interpret

hesitation as endorsement, and encouragement might be the last thing

that could help her.

‘Sleeping in a strange house,’ I answered at length, ‘is often

difficult at first, and one feels lonely. After fifteen months in our

tiny flat one feels lost and uncared-for in a big house. It’s an

uncomfortable feeling—I know it well. And this is a barrack, isn’t

it? The masses of furniture only make it worse. One feels in storage

somewhere underground—the furniture doesn’t furnish.