“Does it ever seem to you, Terence, that the world is composed entirely of vast blocks of matter, and that we’re nothing but patches of light—­” she looked at the soft spots of sun wavering over the carpet and up the wall—­“like that?”

“No,” said Terence, “I feel solid; immensely solid; the legs of my chair might be rooted in the bowels of the earth.  But at Cambridge, I can remember, there were times when one fell into ridiculous states of semi-coma about five o’clock in the morning.  Hirst does now, I expect—­oh, no, Hirst wouldn’t.”

Rachel continued, “The day your note came, asking us to go on the picnic, I was sitting where you’re sitting now, thinking that; I wonder if I could think that again?  I wonder if the world’s changed? and if so, when it’ll stop changing, and which is the real world?”

“When I first saw you,” he began, “I thought you were like a creature who’d lived all its life among pearls and old bones.  Your hands were wet, d’you remember, and you never said a word until I gave you a bit of bread, and then you said, ‘Human Beings!’”

“And I thought you—­a prig,” she recollected.  “No; that’s not quite it.  There were the ants who stole the tongue, and I thought you and St. John were like those ants—­very big, very ugly, very energetic, with all your virtues on your backs.  However, when I talked to you I liked you—­”

“You fell in love with me,” he corrected her.  “You were in love with me all the time, only you didn’t know it.”

“No, I never fell in love with you,” she asserted.

“Rachel—­what a lie—­didn’t you sit here looking at my window—­didn’t you wander about the hotel like an owl in the sun—?”

“No,” she repeated, “I never fell in love, if falling in love is what people say it is, and it’s the world that tells the lies and I tell the truth.  Oh, what lies—­what lies!”

She crumpled together a handful of letters from Evelyn M., from Mr. Pepper, from Mrs. Thornbury and Miss Allan, and Susan Warrington.  It was strange, considering how very different these people were, that they used almost the same sentences when they wrote to congratulate her upon her engagement.

That any one of these people had ever felt what she felt, or could ever feel it, or had even the right to pretend for a single second that they were capable of feeling it, appalled her much as the church service had done, much as the face of the hospital nurse had done; and if they didn’t feel a thing why did they go and pretend to?  The simplicity and arrogance and hardness of her youth, now concentrated into a single spark as it was by her love of him, puzzled Terence; being engaged had not that effect on him; the world was different, but not in that way; he still wanted the things he had always wanted, and in particular he wanted the companionship of other people more than ever perhaps.  He took the letters out of her hand, and protested: