It took him a minute to remember who she meant.  Then his face shadowed.  “Don’t remind me of him, for God’s sake!” he said through his teeth.  “Go and put on your things and come out with me to the registrar.”

She drew backwards from him and stood silent till she could master her trembling.  He was very like Mr. Philip.  Softly she said:  “You sounded awful, as if you were telling me.”

“I was.”

She began to want to cry.  “I’ll not do anything that I’m told.”

He made a clicking noise of disgust in his throat.  It struck her as a mark of debasement that their bodies were moving more swiftly than their minds, and that each time they spoke they first gesticulated or made some wordless sound.  He burst out, more loudly than she had ever heard him before:  “Go and put on your things.”

“Away yourself to the registrar,” she cried more loudly still, “and tell him he’ll never marry you to me.”

The ringing of her own voice and his answering clamour recalled something to her that was dyed with a sunset light and yet was horrible.  She drew her hands across her face and tried to remember what it was; and found herself walking in memory along a street in Edinburgh towards a sunset which patterned the west with sweeping lines of little golden feathers as if some vain angel, forbidden to peacock it in heaven, had come to show his wings to earth.  On the other side, turned to the colour of a Gloire de Dijon rose, towered the height of the MacEwan Hall, that Byzantine pile which she always thought had an air as if it were remembering beautiful music that had been played within it at so many concerts; and at its base staggered a quarrelling man and woman.  The woman was not young and wore a man’s cloth cap and a full, long, filthy skirt.  They were moving sideways along the empty pavement about a yard apart, facing one another, shouting and making threatening gestures across the gap.  At last they stopped, put their drink-ulcerated faces close together, and vomited coarse cries at one another; and she had looked up at the pale golden stone that was remembering music, and at the bright golden sky that was promising that there was more than terrestrial music, as one might look at well-bred friends after some boor had stained some pleasant occasion with his ill manners.  Then she had been sixteen.  Now she was seventeen, and she and a man were shouting across a space.  Could it be that vileness was not a state which one could choose or refuse to enter, but a phase through which, being human, one must pass?  If that were so, life was too horrible.  She cried out through his vehemence:  “No, I’m not going to marry you.”

“Don’t be stupid.  You’re being exactly like all other women, silly and capricious.  Go and put your things on.”

“I will not.  I’m going away.”

“Don’t talk nonsense!  Where are you going?”

“Back to Edinburgh.”  She made a hard line of her trembling mouth.  “My mind’s made up.”