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circumstance but natural. For Marcus, from whose disabilities so many people had flinched, and whose parents had always made too large allowance for them, putting himself in Nancy’s hands was like putting himself, at last, under really competent medical care. To a very, very faint degree, she reminded him of a masseuse.
    She was highly intelligent, with a subtle and penetrating mind that was nonetheless not capable of originality . Neither had Marcus discovered any pronounced talent in her. Perhaps she wanted Marcus because she wanted to draw out and form some originality or talent in him. She played the violin competently, but did not have time to practise as she ought. Judging by what she said and had read, Marcus surmised she understood economics; and it turned out that she had at some period done a year at the London School of Economics.
    She had, in fact, done a great many things: which was in contrast to him. His curriculum vitae consisted almost wholly of his not being called up for the army—he had varicose veins. Besides her year at L.S.E., Nancy had taken a course in domestic science; she had taught the violin in Kent—at a private school for girls, which could not afford to engage a fully-qualified teacher; she had lived for six months with a family in France—and not a Jewish family, either. Her French was excellent. She had had four lovers. Them, too, she did not conceal from Marcus. All her lovers—one of them was the son of the French family—had been Gentiles, and possibly that was why she had not married one of them. At the moment she had neither a job nor a flat of her own; but she hadplenty to do; she often translated technical pamphlets for a firm which sold cameras, and she occasionally deputised for the French teacher at a commercial school.
    She took Marcus, of course, to her parents’ house, which to begin with seemed to him wonderful. On his first visit, both Nancy’s parents were out, and he felt free to look at the place scrupulously. The first great relief was that it was underfurnished; and nothing was en suite. The drawing room was occupied simply by a few contemporary -style armchairs which seemed to have been merely left standing about at whatever angle the last occupant had pushed them into when he got up. At Marcus’s parents’ house, the armchairs were too earthbound to push. The curtains in Nancy’s house were tweed. Even upstairs they did not become floral. Neither did the cushions, which were covered only in rep, in strong, pure colours. The floors were either left to themselves or covered with some sort of coarse, ribbed matting. Books lapsed all over the place, as naturally as uncultivated flowers: some in piles on the floor, besides an armchair, some inclining spaciously in the segments of what was not so much a bookcase as a room divider. His parents had had no books in their house since he had moved out. Looking round, he thought that the biggest single difference was that in his parents’ house all the rooms had a picture rail, even though no pictures hung from it: here the picture rails had been torn out and the walls whitewashed, and the pictures were nailed straight to the wall.
    He told Nancy that he thought the house wonderful.
    “I think it’s awful,” she said.
    He commended the absence of picture rail.
    “But have you looked at the pictures ?”she asked.
    He had to admit those were awful: he had been trying not to see them. They were without individual personality and yet without the discipline of any style: merely“modern”; not naturalistic, but with some sort of blameless subject, landscape or still life—so incompetently blobbed on that it was hard to tell which. They might or might not all be by the same hand. Most of them had thick bluish-black signatures, strictly illegible but not suggesting a name that was or expected to be known. They were framed in wide, slightly bevelled strips of creamish pebble-dash—and unglazed, of course: indeed, it