Summer died; leaves, whirled by October gales, swept the Embankment. Pamela was lonely, bored. She had fancied that the society of clever people--people with the public certificate of cleverness--would be invigorating. But the distinguished people who came to Beaufort Street were stupid; they seemed to go out of their way to be commonplace. “Conversational brilliance is out of fashion,” Barbara said flippantly. Pamela was tired of Barbara Clutton, tired of her volubility, her pettishness, her whims. She was very grateful to her, she liked her very much, of course--she was sick to death of her. How would it end? She studied the newspapers, for other than sentimental reasons: she looked for a situation. That would be the end--a situation. They would never take her back at the boarding-house in Bloomsbury; Edred’s history, and her connection with him, was too notorious. But there were other boarding-houses. She would go back to the old life--that would be the end. She would help carve, talk smoothly on safe, commonplace subjects at the dinner-table. She knew the life. She remembered; and it turned her sick. A woman in subservience was only half a woman. But that was to be the end. She was to finish as she had begun. Perhaps, by years of saving, she might be able to start a boarding-house of her own. Perhaps Jethro would help her to do so, if Maria would permit him. The boarding-house! She remembered the narrow hall, where the dinner always hung on the close air; remembered the shabby manservant, the guests. They had mostly been women, those boarders: old maids who called each other “dear,” “darling,” “sweet one,” and gathered by twos into corners of the big, shabby drawing-room to tear each other to shreds. They were fussy old women, susceptible to draught, and given to wearing ragged fur tippets in the house when an east wind was blowing. She knew--and shuddered. But it was the only thing left. Her thoughts flew to Folly Corner, and then to Edred. She would remind herself reproachfully that she had not once thought of him that day. She wanted to forget him; she tried to forget, and yet she reproached herself because she was beginning to succeed. She must forget--it wasn’t respectable to remember. Barbara Clutton was always impressing that on her. “I like,” she said one day, in explanation of her gospel, “to be a very respectable woman; an icily virtuous one--but yet to give the impression of being dangerous.” Pamela had left off laughing at her oddities--she had left off laughing at anything. She was cultivating the prim, half-formed manner of a spinster well over thirty. She grew fussy over trifles, became morbidly afraid of taking cold, studied her health, her diet. She gratuitously spied over the servants, seeing an embryo burglar in every tradesman’s boy, running her fingers along ledges for dust, measuring the contents of the dishes with suspicious eyes.