Her office hours, though fixed, were not arduous. And if they had less time to spend together, that time had come to seem more precious.... They would be sitting together at breakfast in their studio, Rose-Ann in a flame-coloured silk kimono that matched her curls, pouring coffee for him; all the more delightfully his, because he realized that when the occasion had been prolonged another five minutes, she would glance at the clock, and run behind the screen, to emerge dressed for her day’s work—no longer his, but belonging to some impersonal enterprise for which he cared less than nothing.... They would meet again at luncheon at the little Hungarian restaurant. Clive would be there. And the fact that they were all three of them snatching this hour of golden talk and comradeship from the midst of a working day, gave a special zest to the occasion.... They were, it seemed, happier than ever before. “I’ve always something I can do for my old magazine in the evening,” said Rose-Ann. “I won’t be lonely. Why don’t you go to your work-room?” Two or three evenings a week he took her at her word, and in those solitary hours it seemed to him that his creative fancy had begun to bloom again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ XLII. An Apparition 1 HE had occupied the room on odd afternoons and evenings for a month, when a strange encounter occurred—if seeing somebody could be called an encounter. It was a warm evening early in April, when he did not feel in the least like working.... And besides, he had been looking over the three little one-act plays which were the fruit of his month’s work, and they seemed to him trivial and silly; if this was all he could do, he had better stop trying to write plays. He was glad he had not shown them to Rose-Ann. They were caricatures of life—not without some grace, touched with a queer, decadent, heartless beauty, but essentially worthless. Why should he write things like that? One’s work was a reflection of one’s mind, of one’s life, critics said. If he had judged those plays as a critic, he would have drawn from them certain inevitable implications with respect to the author’s philosophy and mode of life; they were apparently the work of a man who did not believe in anything, and who found in reality no true satisfactions—otherwise why should he turn to this unreal realm of modernized Pierrots and Columbines for solace? Pondering this enigma, he sat in the open window and looked out on the street. And in the distance he saw a figure that he knew—a girl. It was Phyllis, the girl who had been at their wedding. She was coming toward him, and he recognized her with certainty despite the fact that he had seen her only once before in his life.