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face.
    â€˜He’s off!’ said Dave, who knows me well.
    â€˜Suggest something else,’ I said.
    â€˜I suggest you are a big fool,’ said Dave. ‘Society should take you by the neck and shake you and make you do a sensible job. Then in your evenings you would have the possibility to write a great book.’
    I could see that Dave was in one of his bad moods. The noise was mounting. With my foot I pushed my suitcase under the table beside Finn.
    â€˜Can I leave this here?’
    How do you know which is your real self anyway? someone was asking.
    â€˜You can leave them both here,’ said Dave.
    â€˜I’ll ring up later,’ I said. And I left them.

    I was still in some pain from the name that Finn had uttered. But in the midst of the pain a queer melody had been set going; a little flute that piped me to be away. It was not of course that I had the slightest intention of looking for Anna, but I wanted to be alone with the thought of her. I am not a mystic about women. I like the women in novels by James and Conrad who are so peculiarly flower-like and who are described as ‘guileless, profound, confident, and trustful’. That ‘profound’ is good; fluttering white hands and as deep as the sea. But I have never met any of these women in real life. I like to read about them, but then I like to read about Pegasus and Chrysaor. The women that I know are often inexperienced, inarticulate, credulous, and simple; but I see no reason to call them deep because they manifest qualities which would make us call men self-absorbed. Or if they are cunning they deceive themselves and others in much the same way as men do. It is the same deception that we are all involved in; except in so far as women are always a little more unbalanced by the part they have to act. Like high-heeled shoes which shift the inward organs in the course of time. Few things disgust me more than these pretended profundities.
    Yet I had found Anna deep. I cannot think what it is about her that would justify me in calling her mysterious, and yet she always seemed to me to be an unfathomable being. Dave once said to me that to find a person inexhaustible is simply the definition of love, so perhaps I loved Anna. She has a husky-speaking voice and a tenderly moulded face which is constantly lit by a warm intent glow from within. It is a face full of yearning, yet poised upon itself without any trace of discontent. She has heavy brown hair which is piled up in curving archaic coils, or was when I knew her first. All that was a long time ago. Anna is six years older than I am, and when I first met her she did a singing act with her sister Sadie. Anna provided the voice and Sadie provided the flash. Anna has a contralto voice that would break your heart even over the radio; and she makes little gestures while she sings which make her quite irresistible face to face. She seems to throw the song into your heart, at least this was what she did to me the first time I heard her, and I never got over it.
    Anna is about as like her sister as a sweet blackbird is like some sort of rather dangerous tropical fish, and later on the act broke up. This was partly I think because they couldn’t stand each other, and partly because their ambitions diverged. About this period, if you remember, British films were passing through a critical phase. The Bounty Belfounder Company had just been set up, and old Phantasifilms Ltd had come into new hands. But neither company seemed able to discover any new stars, although there were the usual old faithfuls, and time and again some young ster would receive the routine press fanfare and then pass away in the course of one picture with the noise and the brevity of a firework. Phantasifilms evidently decided that human beings were bad box office and started on their series of animal pictures, and they did make one or two discoveries in the animal kingdom: notably of course the Alsatian, Mister