“Oh, not exactly. I don’t know that the arts have a milieu here, any of them; they’re more like a very thinly settled outskirt.”

“But you care for such things?”

“Immensely. When I’m in Paris or London I never miss an exhibition. I try to keep up.”

She looked down at the tip of the little satin boot that peeped from her long draperies.

“I used to care immensely too: my life was full of such things. But now I want to try not to.”

“You want to try not to?”

“Yes: I want to cast off all my old life, to become just like everybody else here.”

Archer reddened. “You’ll never be like everybody else,” he said.

She raised her straight eyebrows a little. “Ah, don’t say that. If you knew how I hate to be different!”

Her face had grown as sombre as a tragic mask. She leaned forward, clasping her knee in her thin hands, and looking away from him into remote dark distances.

“I want to get away from it all,” she insisted.

He waited a moment and cleared his throat. “I know. Mr. Letterblair has told me.”

“Ah?”

“That’s the reason I’ve come. He asked me to—you see I’m in the firm.”

She looked slightly surprised, and then her eyes brightened. “You mean you can manage it for me? I can talk to you instead of Mr. Letterblair? Oh, that will be so much easier!”

Her tone touched him, and his confidence grew with his self-satisfaction. He perceived that she had spoken of business to Beaufort simply to get rid of him; and to have routed Beaufort was something of a triumph.

“I am here to talk about it,” he repeated.

She sat silent, her head still propped by the arm that rested on the back of the sofa. Her face looked pale and extinguished, as if dimmed by the rich red of her dress. She struck Archer, of a sudden, as a pathetic and even pitiful figure.

“Now we’re coming to hard facts,” he thought, conscious in himself of the same instinctive recoil that he had so often criticised in his mother and her contemporaries. How little practice he had had in dealing with unusual situations! Their very vocabulary was unfamiliar to him, and seemed to belong to fiction and the stage. In face of what was coming he felt as awkward and embarrassed as a boy.

After a pause Madame Olenska broke out with unexpected vehemence: “I want to be free; I want to wipe out all the past.”

“I understand that.”

Her face warmed. “Then you’ll help me?”

“First—” he hesitated—“perhaps I ought to know a little more.”