One very hot evening in July I drove her to the door of the house in Regent Square, Bloomsbury, in which she occupied a little flat under the roof. We had been dancing and it was late; a hunch-backed moon had climbed a third of the way up the sky and was shining down into the square over the shoulder of the church that stands on its eastern side. I paid off the cabman and we were left alone on the pavement. I had been bored and irritated the whole evening; but at the thought that I should have to bid her good-night and walk off by myself I was filled with such an anguish that the tears came into my eyes. I stood there in silent irresolution, looking into her face. It was calmly and mysteriously smiling as though to itself and for some secret reason; her eyes were very bright. She too was silent, not restlessly, not irresolutely as I was silent, but easily, with a kind of majesty. She could live in silence, when she so desired, like a being in its proper element. “Well,” I brought myself to say at last, “I must go.” “Why not come in for a final cup of tea?” she suggested. Actuated by that spirit of perversity which makes us do what we do not want to do, what we know will make us suffer as much as it is possible in the given circumstance to suffer, I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I must get back.” I had never longed for anything more passionately than I longed to accept Barbara’s invitation. She repeated it. “Do come in,” she said. “It won’t take a minute to make tea on the gas ring.” Again I shook my head, in too much anguish, this time, to be able to speak. My trembling voice, I was afraid, would have betrayed me. Instinctively I knew that if I went into the house with her we should become lovers. My old determination to resist what had seemed the baser desires strengthened my resolution not to go in. “Well, if you won’t,” she shrugged her shoulders, “then good-night.” Her voice had a note of annoyance in it. I shook her hand and walked dumbly away. When I had gone ten yards my resolution abjectly broke down. I turned. Barbara was still standing on the doorstep, trying to fit the latchkey into the lock. “Barbara,” I called in a voice that sounded horribly unnatural in my own ears. I hurried back. She turned to look at me. “Do you mind if I change my mind and accept your invitation after all? I find I really am rather thirsty.” What a humiliation, I thought. She laughed. “What a goose you are, Francis.” And she added in a bantering tone: “If you weren’t such a silly old dear I’d tell you to go to the nearest horse-trough and drink there.”