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I’ll see you then.’
    After that she leaned out of the window for a bit, trying to get her thoughts into order. He had telephoned. He was coming. That was the thing to remember. Anyone could get a date wrong. In a little while she felt calmer, her life-line re-established. Then she got out her notes and began to work.

THREE
    Oddly enough, she had never found her work difficult. On the contrary, it appeared to her in the guise of a neutral element in which there was no need for subterfuge, for watchfulness, or even for desire. Work, to Kitty, was something you did, not something you talked about. Her neighbour, Caroline, who had come down in the world, had often regaled her with stories of her fascinating past and would end such reminiscences with the words, ‘I really ought to write a book.’ ‘Why don’t you?’ Kitty Maule would ask, with genuine curiosity. She felt that the wish was father to the thought, and that no one need be without an occupation. Beauty, of course, offered its own dispensations: beautiful women, by a rule she acknowledged but did not understand, were somehow allowed to do nothing of worth and yet to command the time and attention of others. Kitty preferred her busy life, which she characterized as an easy life spent doing difficult things. At least, she supposed they were difficult. In fact, it took her more time to cook a special dish for Maurice than it did to write a paper or prepare a seminar. Yet she took no pride in the fact of doing such work and refused to think of it as important. Quite simply, it gave her no trouble and therefore she took no credit for doing it.
    ‘My God, Kitty,’ said Pauline Bentley, in the RomanceLanguages Department. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are. I use work as a weapon against depression. I see it as a way of outwitting nervous illness. You’d be surprised how many people feel this way.’ As she said this she combed her hair viciously, for she was ashamed at revealing so much. Yet Pauline was a superb lecturer, polished and impeccable, and for this reason much admired by the students. With less desperation behind it, Kitty’s style was milder and more popular. She enjoyed her intellectual obligations and did not sense them as onerous. Secretly she regarded her task as a temporary and rather pleasant way of filling in the time until her true occupation should be revealed to her. She did not quite know what this was but she sensed that she would rather excel at duties other than the ones with which she had occupied herself over the last few years.
    They were in Pauline’s room, preparing to go to a staff meeting. Pauline regarded these meetings, which took place once a term, with undisguised contempt. Kitty, on the other hand, rather liked them. As an occasional teacher she was grateful for the opportunity to attend, and although she could not always understand what was being discussed, she managed to look alert and even took notes. Her zeal, which was genuine, had been noted with approval by Professor Redmile. ‘I wonder if he’d notice if I marked a couple of essays,’ mused Pauline. ‘I tell you, Kitty, when I get to hell I expect to find a perpetual staff meeting in progress.’ She took a miscellaneous bundle of papers, which did indeed include a few essays, from her desk, and set off down the corridor. Kitty followed demurely in her wake.
    The meetings were always held in a gloomy and oleaginous brown room, which had been a dining room when the building had been occupied, in baronial state, by the benefactor of the university. Professor Redmile sat at the head of the table that gleamed with a curiousicy veneer in the bad light; at his side, importantly, sat his secretary, Jennifer, taking the minutes. They filed in reluctantly – the historians and the linguists – Dr Martinez, Professors Gault and Bodmin, Mme de Marcoussis, Mrs Vogel, Dr Oliphant, the Roger Fry Professor, whose hapless task it was to teach French art to the French