The little of decency that had in these days penetrated into them--no one can quite escape the impress of the educative years--had during their life in Naples slipped quite out of sight. In Naples they had entered into a feckless, laughing world, where they had lived from hand to mouth, and made friends in every street, and 'drifted about the bottom.' So drifting, they had been still together. For that reason everything had so greatly amused them; jests coming their way had, in passing from the eyes of one to the eyes of the other, acquired an overpowering humour; the world had been a merry playroom for two. Any friend made by one of them had been introduced, as a matter of course, into a three-cornered party; no other way could ever have occurred to either. And now, out of life the crucible, immutable values seemed to evolve themselves. That story which Tommy had found so tedious on the beach at Baja had been fulfilling itself of late. Life had truly proved a furnace, whose pitiless flames melted one's bright metal and horribly burnt one's hands. Those who in the end emerged from that furnace would certainly know their metal for what it was. Betty, still in the flames, could look ahead: she saw with increasing clearness the result of that testing and the gold that would remain--gold that could not, by any alchemy of newly acquired knowledge, be proved base. But if one lost that gold, then life--the essential interpretation of it--would end there. It were better that the name of it--the poor kernelless shell--should be swiftly crushed too. It would, no doubt, find itself crushed somehow before long, because no continuance of it was in the least degree imaginable. One cannot separate two lives so tied together. So, through the slow hours, life resolved itself into certainties, that rose like sharp rocks out of the mists of doubt. With their increasing clearness of outline, the emptiness of the other arm-chair became a jarring outrage; it was as if, to one who has learnt to say, 'This one thing matters, this one thing I must have,' the curt reply is flung, 'This one thing for the present you must go lacking.' The solitude became an offence, insupportable, oppressive. Betty horribly wanted Tommy; it seemed that she had never wanted anything else, so the slow hours had stretched. Between two and three the city shook with a stronger motion, more violent and prolonged. In the streets buildings must surely be falling.... Betty went out to see.