It seemed that husbands and wives could part and come together again, and I was glad that it should be so, but what happened after that? It is said that people are refined and ennobled by suffering and one knows that they sometimes are, but would Helena have learned to be neater in the kitchen, or Rocky to share her interest in matrilineal kin-grou

‘I know the kind of person I should like to marry,’ he went on, ‘and I thought I had found her. But perhaps I looked too far and there might have been somebody nearer at hand.’ I stared into the electric fire and wished it had been a coal one, though the functional glowing bar was probably more suitable for this kind of occasion. ‘I cannot see what

‘I shall look forward to hearing your paper,’ I said, feeling that some effort was required and that it was up to me to make it. ‘Oh, you will find it deadly dull,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t expect too much.’ I forebore to remark that women like me really expected very little – nothing, almost.

‘What woman?’ I asked stupidly, thinking as I did so how melodramatic Winifred sounded, talking about ‘that woman’ as if she were in a play or a novel. ‘Allegra Gray,’ she stammered in a burst of tears. I was so astonished that I could think of nothing to say, but wondered irrelevantly if I was to be caught with a teapot in my hand on every dramati

A list of furniture is not a good beginning to a letter, though I dare say a clever person with a fantastic turn of mind could transform even a laundry list into a poem. I sat for a long time at my desk, unable to put pen to paper, idly turning the pages of a notebook in which I kept accounts and made shopping lists. How fascinating they would have

‘I am sorry to hear of this trouble between you and your husband, Mrs Napier,’ he said. ‘I think you should go back to him and talk things over.’ We were all – even Julian, I think – so taken aback at his boldness that for a moment nobody said anything.

Of course there had been a curate or two in my schooldays and later a bank clerk who read the Lessons, but none of these passions had gone very deep.

I would have a rest this afternoon, for Winifred had gone back to the vicarage and was comforting Julian. I felt a little sorry for him, surrounded as he would be by excellent women. But at least he would be safe from people like Mrs Gray; Sister Blatt would defend him fiercely against all such perils, I knew. Perhaps it might after all be my duty

‘This may sound a cynical thing to say, but don’t you think men sometimes leave difficulties to be solved by other people or to solve themselves?