“Come along,” he said, walking to the steps that climbed to the station exit, and his words seemed to break the spell of horror. She became self-contemptuous and inclined to dose herself with cold logic. This is absurd, she told herself as she climbed the steps. An impossible state of things altogether, she decided, as she delivered up her ticket at the barrier. And as she stepped with him into the cool spaciousness of the High Road, she was energetically sermonizing herself. Conversation passed between them like a vague, irrelevant dream. At the corner of Gifford Road he shook hands and left her. And she knew with poignant emotion that she had displeased him. She knew with absolute certainty that her position was hopeless. The unutterable, unvanquishable horror came back to her: she saw a grim future of battle and defeat. And when she viewed herself in the mirror in her bedroom she noticed that her cheeks were pale and her eyes wide with fear.... CHAPTER XVI ALLEGRO CON FUOCO § 1 REACTION visited her. Walking along the sun-white pavements the next morning the self-revelation of the night before seemed incredibly absurd. It had rained during the night, and the cool scent of the gravel roadways seemed somehow to radiate the suggestion that life was cool and clear and fresh, to be taken light-heartedly and never to be feared. As she walked with springing step along the High Road, there seemed such an infinitude of interests in her life that she could afford to say: If I never saw him again it would not matter much. Every shop-window seemed bulging with reasons why, if she were never to see him again, it would not matter much. And when she stood by the counter in Burlington’s music emporium and leisurely scanned through piles of pianoforte music, she decided sincerely and clinchingly: It is impossible that I am in love with him. In the few novels she had read, being in love had been symptomized by dreamy abstraction, random melancholy, a tendency to neglect worldly duties, a replacement of clear-cut ambitions by a nebulous ideal. This was not true of her. Three hours of Chopin practising awaited her when she returned, and she was looking forward to it eagerly, enthusiastically. Never were her ambitions so clear and business-like, never had she less time and inclination for dreamy abstraction and random melancholy.