He waited, but he did not savour life. When he had quickened Ada, life would, no doubt, be worth the living, but, meantime, it dragged. He told himself that he was too young yet at this new business of giving to feel the joy of it. Certainly, he was not joyful, but he was resolute. There was a grim tightening of the lips and a dogged look in the eyes which proclaimed that this was Samuel, the son of Anne. In this mood he could eat Dead Sea apples and feel they were a proper diet. Politics had gone, and with them any interest in the Council. And he did not know what to do about his business. He wanted to ask Effie, and Effie was not there to be asked. It was not that she did not want to be there or that she did not suffer for her absence. Effie was not numb, and she suffered keenly, but she thought her absence strengthened Sam. When he came down from Hartle Pike with his resolution formed she took it that her scheme, as she had planned it, was complete and that she could forget her weak concession to return to the office. She was to be there in spirit, and spirit is strong though flesh is weak. Effie at the office in the flesh would have wanted to hug Sam and to kiss him, things which it is unbefitting to do in well-conducted offices. And, of course, she suffered. She had always known that she would suffer, but not that it would be as bad as this. The office was a temptation every day: to go there was to be with him, it was to find alleviation for her fever, it was to be at peace: but it was also to fling away hard-won success, and she resisted. That resistance engrossed her. It was all that she was capable of doing; it demanded all her strength. The obvious, the practical thing, if she was not to go to Sam’s office, was to go to someone else’s, to work, both as an antidote and as a means of livelihood, and she could not rouse herself to do it. She pawned some of the jewellery which remained to her, memorials of her father’s lavish past, sent the weekly dole to her mother and lived upon the rest. She had sunk to this, Effie the crusader, Effie the advocate of courage! With Mélisande, she told herself she was not happy. She was not happy, she was not well, and she wanted, wanted Sam. She stayed at home lest she should go to him and ruin all that she had done. It could not last and she knew it could not last, but neither did she see the end of it. Then began the game of consequences: the moves of two pieces, one a pawn, the other the knight called Dubby Stewart. It is a frumpish world, a world where the Frumps, of one or other sex or of neither sex, in one or other of their manifestations, have a great deal to do with the ordering of things. That is why it is politic, for one’s ease, never to ignore the Frumps and never, never to challenge them by an act of gallant defiance such as shying an imitation wedding ring into the waters of Blea Tarn.