Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

‘Have you had a lot of women. Fowler?’ ‘I don’t know what a lot means. Not more than four women have had any importance to me – or me to them. The other forty-odd – one wonders why one does it. A notion of hygiene, of one’s social obligations, both mistaken.’ ‘You think they are mistaken?’ ‘I wish I could have those nights back. I’m still in love, Pyle, and I’m a wasting asset. Oh, and there was pride, of course. It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too.’

If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation.

‘Don’t worry. Something may happen. There are always ways,’ she said. ‘My sister says you could take out a life-insurance,’ and I thought how realistic it was of her not to minimize the importance of money and not to make any great and binding declarations of love. I wondered how Pyle over the years would stand that hard core, for Pyle was a romantic; but then of course in his case there would be a good settlement, the hardness might soften like an unused muscle when the need for it vanished. The rich had it both ways.

A French soldier sat beside me with his hand in a girl’s lap, and I envied the simplicity of his happiness or his misery, whichever it might be.

Perhaps she would never know security: what right had I to value her less than the dead bodies in the square? Suffering is not increased by numbers: one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.