He got into his car and drove off at speed. Beneath his off-hand words to Mrs. Buckingham Smith he was conscious of a quickly growing, tender sympathy for Marguerite Haim. The hardness in him was dissolved almost instantaneously. He saw Marguerite, who had been adamantine in the difference which separated them, as the image of pliancy², sweetness, altruism³, and devotion; and he saw her lips and the rapt glance of her eyes as beautiful as in the past. What a soft, soothing⁴, assuaging⁵ contrast with the difficult Lois, so imperious and egoistic! (An unforgettable phrase of Lois's had inhabited his mind for over a decade: "Fancy quarrelling over a man!") He had never met Marguerite since their separation, and for years he had heard nothing whatever about her; he did not under-estimate the ordeal⁶ of meeting her again. Yet he at once decided⁷ that he must meet her again. He simply could not ignore her in her bereavement⁸ and new loneliness. To write to her would be absurd; it would be a cowardly evasion⁹; moreover, he could not frame a letter. He must prove to her and to himself that he had a sense of decent kindliness¹⁰ which would rise above conventional trifles when occasion demanded.