Going on to Cirencester when you wanted to be in Stow-on-the-Wold, what was it but a cowardly retreat?  Driven out of Stow-on-the-Wold by Gibson?  Not she!

Dusk at ten o’clock in the morning under the trees on the mile-long hill.  You climbed up and up a steep green tunnel.  The sun would be blazing at its mouth on the top.  Nothing would matter.  Certainly not this affair with Gibson Herbert.  She could see clearly her immense, unique passion thus diminished.  Surprising what a lot of it you could forget.  Clean forget.  She supposed you forgot because you couldn’t bear to remember.

But there were days that stood out; hours; little minutes that thrilled you even now and stung.

This time, two years ago, that hot August.  The day in the office when everything went wrong all at once and the clicking of her typewriter maddened him and he sent her out of his room.

The day when he kept her over-time.  The others had gone and they were there by themselves, the big man in his big room and she in her den, the door open between.  Suddenly she saw him standing in the doorway, looking at her.  She knew then.  She could feel the blood rushing in her brain; the stabbing click of the typewriter set up little whirling currents that swamped her thoughts.

Her wet fingers kept slipping from the keys.  He came and took her in his arms.  She lay back in his arms, crying.  Crying because she was happy, because she knew.

She remembered now what he had said then.  “You must have known.  You must have thought of me.  You must have wanted me to take you in my arms.”  And her answer.  “No.  I didn’t.  I didn’t think of it.”

And his smile.  His unbelieving smile.  He thought she was lying.  He always thought people were lying.  Women.  He thought women always lied about what they wanted.

The first time.  In her Bloomsbury room, one evening, and the compact they made then, sitting on the edge of the sofa, like children, holding each other’s hands and swearing never to go back on it, never to go back on themselves or on each other.  If it ever had to end, a clean cut.  No going back on that either.

The first night, in the big, gloomy bedroom of the hotel in Glasgow.  The thick, grey daylight oozing in at the window out of the black street; and Gibson lying on his back, beside her, sleeping, the sheet dragged sideways across his great chest.  His innocent eyelids.

And the morning after; the happiness.  All day the queer, exalted feeling that she was herself, Charlotte Redhead, at last, undeceived and undeceiving.

The day his wife came into the office.  Her unhappy eyes and small, sharp-pointed face, shrinking into her furs.  Her name was Effie.

He had told her in the beginning that he had left off caring for his wife.  They couldn’t hurt her; she didn’t care enough.  She never had cared.  There was another fellow.  Effie would be all right.