It was too cold to sit down, but I paused every now and then to lean on the parapet, and as I passed each damp dolphin-entwined lamp-post I felt a little nearer to something. Yet I did not seem to be making any famous progress with my troubles. I felt on the whole a thorough nausea about recent events. That I should have had some time to 'open up' my relations with Georgie seemed inevitable: yet I detested both the moment and the manner of this particular revelation and there were times when I wondered whether my love for Georgie was strong enough to support the sheer weight of mess and muddle under which I felt it now laboured. All the same, when I had found her with Alexander my sense of possessiveness had been immediate and violent: a possessiveness which lingered on now as a sort of aching resentment. It was odd that I felt no urgency about seeing her. What I really wanted most just then was to put Georgie in cold storage. It is unfortunate that other human beings cannot be conveniently immobilized. Do what I might, Georgie would go on thinking, would go on acting, during my absence and my silence. This thought caused me pain, but still did not galvanize me into the simple action of ringing her up.

To turn my mind to Antonia was no less painful. One thing which I had in the last day or two realized was that I was very far indeed from having unravelled my thoughts and feelings concerning my wife. That I had so readily jumped at a way of enduring, as it were acting my way through the situation, had, it now seemed, merely postponed the moment of a more radical and more dreadful estimate of what had happened. It occurred to me particularly that I had never taken sufficient trouble to find out exactly what Antonia herself was thinking and feeling. To have attempted it would, of course, have been exquisitely painful, and it was partly to shun just that trial that I had so jumped at my role, that I had accepted with such completeness the picture of things which Palmer and Antonia had seemed to be offering. I could not have borne, given that I despaired at once, to have kept things 'open' between Antonia and myself. But perhaps it was just my terrible mistake to have despaired at once. Was it a mistake, or was it indeed the acting out of some hidden desire? Whichever it was, it had been, I now felt, my duty to inquire more closely, at whatever cost to myself. It had been suggested that Antonia and Palmer were, for all the appearances, really in two minds. What was certain was that my alacrity had helped to stabilize their union; and as I thought this I wondered whether in some way my role was just now destined to change, and that having, as Palmer put it, reached an apex, I was now about to undertake some remarkable descent.

I greatly regretted too that I had been so frank with Antonia about Georgie. My own former instinct, which Georgie had endorsed, that an intimate talk about her with Antonia was something to be avoided, seemed now to have been a sound one. That intimate talk had done nothing but damage: damage to me since I had thereby in some way blunted my love for my dear mistress, damage to Georgie since she was not only betrayed but put positively in danger of being in Antonia's power, and damage to Antonia since she had been thereby disturbed and excited and filled with schemes which could in the end only do harm. I was well aware, and it gave me a twisted gloomy satisfaction, that Antonia was very far from having made herself emotionally independent of me. She needed to have, and had indeed almost announced this as a programme, both Palmer and, in a subordinate role, myself. The discovery of Georgie's existence had been a bad shock and a challenge; and although I was sure that Antonia imagined herself to be inspired by nothing but ingenious and affectionate benevolence, she was certainly determined to hold, to organize, to gain power over, the matter of Georgie and me: and if in the process the matter of Georgie and me suffered shipwreck Antonia would not be exactly heartbroken. She would then set herself, with oh such enthusiasm and satisfaction, to the task of consoling me.

I watched, where a long golden streak had opened in the mist, the water flowing under Waterloo Bridge. A concealed sun was shining on the great white buttresses. And I thought about Honor Klein. I had in fact really been thinking about her all the morning. It was with something of an effort that I had given my mind to other matters, even to other people. For this was at present the magnetic centre of my swinging thoughts, and with a puzzlement which it was something of a luxury to indulge I found myself brooding on Palmer's curious sister. I was sorry now that I had sent her the second letter, though I was very relieved that I had not sent her the first one. The second letter was a poor trivial affair, making but little of what had been, after all, a somewhat remarkable occasion. The third letter would have been in many ways more suitable; or I regretted, rather, that I had not taken time and trouble to write the fourth one, whatever that would have turned out to be.

The third letter was certainly the most sincere, since I felt curiously little remorse about the scene in the cellar. The only thing I regretted, paradoxically, was that I had not been sober, although of course if I had been sober the scene would not have occurred. But I recalled the scene itself with a certain satisfaction: satisfaction mingled with some more obscure and disturbing emotions. I kept returning with wonderment to the thought that I had now touched her: 'touched' was putting it mildly, given what had happened. But it seemed, perhaps for that very reason, almost implausible in retrospect; and although I could picture her face screwed up with pain and fury, although I could see her black oily hair rolling in the dust and hear her gasp as I twisted her arm yet further, I could not altogether recall any sense of the contact of my flesh with hers. It was as if the extreme untouchability, which with a kind of repulsion I had earlier felt her to possess, had cast, on this sacrilegious occasion, a cloak about her. It was as if I had not really touched her.

I was beginning to feel rather sick again. I walked on under Waterloo Bridge and saw through the tilting, slightly lifting, mist the long gracious pillared facade of Somerset House. Receding, swaying, variously browned and greyed, it seemed like a piece of stage scenery. Below it upon the river, clear yet infinitely soft and simple as in a Chinese print, two swans sailed against a background of watery grey light, swept steadily downstream in the company of a dipping branch of some unidentified foliage. They receded, turning a little, and disappeared. I walked on, and then paused by the parapet looking out to where in the much-curtained distance the great form of St Paul's must be. I could now just descry the warehouses directly opposite across the river, their fronts touched by diffused but increasing intimations of sunlight. The task of peering through the mist was becoming exasperating and painful. I cannot see, I cannot see, I said to myself: it was as if some inner blindness were being here tormentingly exteriorized. I saw shadows and hints of things, nothing clearly at all.

I turned back from the swirling tawny flood with its shadow palaces to look for reassurance at the solid pavement, and I saw that I was standing near a telephone box. I looked at the telephone box; and as I looked it seemed to take on a strange sudden glory, such as is said to invest the meanest object in the eyes of those who claim to experience the proof of the existence of God e contingentia mundi. Like one of Kohler's apes, my cluttered mind attempted to connect one thing with another. Very dimly and distantly, but hugely, it began to dawn upon me what the nature of my ailment was. It was something new and something, as I even then at once apprehended, terrible. My pain was that of a perhaps fatal illness. I moved towards the telephone box. My hands trembled so much that it was only at the third attempt that I was able to dial the Pelham Crescent number correctly. The maid answered. Dr Anderson and Mrs Lynch-Gibbon had gone away for the week-end, and Dr Klein had gone back to Cambridge.