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blessing and their help. But he did not know what he wanted. And there they could not help.
    Nancy, however, evidently believed she could. She rang up Marcus and told him she had heard of a job he could have: perhaps she felt she owed him a job from their first conversation. This prospective job was, in a sense, literary: no money, but it was a way in: it was in advertising.
    Marcus declined instantly. He became almost aggressive in explaining that, if he had any literary talent, though he supposed he had not, he would not prostitute it. He was so indignant that he stuttered over the p in prostitute. Immediately afterwards he felt remorse. He rang Nancy back and arranged to meet her in a teashop in Highgate, where, gazing at her with the passivity of an animal going to ritual slaughter on a frieze, he told her that he would take the job, and would try to do it, if she thought he ought. He put himself in her hands: it was tantamount to a declaration.
    Nancy quite accepted the responsibility. But to Marcus’s surprise she said that, on thinking it over, she had decided the job was not right for him, and that he should wait for one that was. Marcus had expected her to take the brisk therapeutic line that in a case as bad as his any job was better than no job. Now that she did not, but at the same time did not dismiss him as hopeless, he felt cherished.
    When Nancy did at last come to dinner with all Marcus’s family, Marcus’s father was at pains to amuse her by exploiting his comic personality and even his comic roly, rubbery figure. He spent the evening jumping round her with small servile middle-eastern attentions, bending almost double and bouncing up again. He looked like Monostatos. It would pass, of course, for his wishto make his son’s friend welcome; but Marcus knew it was really because Nancy was sexually provocative to him.
    It was probably not so much the obvious fact that his family wished him to marry her as the obvious fact that they all—except, presumably, his mother, who in his mind was exempted ex officio —found her sexually attractive which persuaded Marcus to welcome her, including her sexual attractiveness, as his own destiny.

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    H E had welcomed it before he properly knew what it was. At first he hardly knew what Nancy even looked like. Because of his diffident habit of always gazing down, he became acquainted with her figure earlier than her face. It was the figure—small, neat, perhaps more correct than beautiful—of a wooden dutch doll. And she was rather the same pretty biscuity colour. Her face was, if not pretty, comely, and small-featured. She had black hair, which she wore short and, although it was quite heavy and thick, kept always neat. The effect of this on top of her trim, straight little figure reminded one of the neat black head of a match. She was energetic: brisk and forthright in movement, yet sharply controlled; she had the ability to move swiftly and directly to her objective and then stop dead without noise or untidiness, like a tropical fish.
    She liked organising: liked controlling other people besides herself. That, fundamentally, Marcus had no doubt, was why she wanted to marry him. She did not try to conceal from him that she did. His life had been spent in an agony of trying to conceal things about himself—because everything about him was unworthy of scrutiny—and fearing they shone through. Nancy concealed nothing. It was almost—not quite almost insulting, but almost tactless.
    Indeed, she had a sort of emotional tactlessness: and that was her great gift in dealing with Marcus. Socially, intellectually, even artistically, she could never be tactless.But in direct personal relationships she had a habit not of failing to see nuances but of naming and discussing them—a sort of coarseness of mind sometimes found in nurses, where it is probably the only way that personalities of a certain kind can practise their profession; but in her it was not a response to