[To ALICE LONGWORTH]

There is a special quality about a December sunset. The ruffles of red gold gradually untightening, the congested mauve islands on a transparent sea of green, the ultimate luminous primrose dissolving into violet powder and then the cold biting night lit up by strange patches of colour that have somehow been forgotten in the sky.

Eve was walking home, her quick, defiant movements challenging the evening, her head bent slightly forward, her chin almost touching her muff, while her eyes shone and her cheeks glowed and her lithe figure seemed almost to be cutting through the icy air.

“This is happiness,” she thought exultantly, “this bitter winter stimulus I feel so light as if my heart and mind were empty only my body is quivering with life the pure life of physical fitness. Why think, or feel, or look forward?” She doubled her pace until her feet seemed to be skimming the road. “I feel like a duck and drake,” she laughed to herself. “Nothing matters, nothing, while there is still frost in the world.”

And then she saw a little motor waiting on the other side of the road. She stopped dead and her heart stopped with her.

“There is no reason why it should be his. Hundreds of people have motors like that.”

Resolutely she took a step forward. “I can’t see from here, and I won’t go and look,” she added as she crossed over.

And then, shutting her eyes:

“Jerry,” she said to herself, trying to kill his ghost with his name.

The evening air had become damp and penetrating. It made her throat feel sore and she choked a little as she breathed it.

Gingerly she approached the motor to make sure. What an absurd phrase! Why, a leap of her heart would have announced its presence, even had her eyes been shut.

She knew its every detail, the sound the gears made changing, the feel of the seat, the way the hood went up. And, above all, the little clock, ticking its warning by day, regular and relentless, while at night its bright prying eyes reminded her of all the things she wanted to forget. “It is my conscience,” she would say, “and fate and mortality. It symbolises all the limitations of life. It is the frontier to happiness, the defeat of peace.”

“Go on,” he had said, “and you will end by forgetting it.”

It was what he had called her habit of talking things “away.”

How often she had slipped into his motor after him, sliding along the shiny leather, nestling happily against him, explaining that there was no draught, that the rain was not coming in, that her feet were as warm as toast. How often he had steered slowly with one hand, while her fingers crept into the palm of the other. And then he had turned off the engine and they had sat there together silent and alone, cut off from the world. How she had loved his motor! Surreptitiously she would caress it with her hand, stroking the cool shiny leather, and seeing him looking at her, she would say, “I think my purse must have fallen behind the seat.” It had become to her a child and a mother, a refuge and an adventure, an island cut off from all the wretched necessities of existence, associated only with her and with him. It was a much better kingdom than a room; for a room is full of paraphernalia and impedimenta, with books and photographs, and the envelopes of letters to remind you of people and things that you want to forget. After all she could not sweep her house clear of her life, empty it of the necessary and the superfluous of her ties and her duties and her responsibilities.

But his motor his little gasping uncomfortable motor that was really and truly hers, because it was his. Here was her throne and his altar.

No wonder she sometimes stroked it a little, when it was too dark for him to ask her what she was doing.

And now, now some one else crept in after him, slid towards him on the shiny leather, murmured that her feet were as warm as toast, that there was no draught, and of course the rain didn’t come in....

Or did she say, “Do you think there is something the matter with your motor to-day? It seems a little asthmatic?”

Eve looked at the house. She could see brightness shining behind the curtains. She could imagine a glowing fire and a faint smell of warm roses. Who was the woman? What were they doing? Sitting on either side of the fireplace drowsily intimate, smiling a little perhaps and hardly talking, conscious only of the cold outside and the warm room and one another....

Eve shivered. Almost unconsciously she fingered the mud guard. “A room is a horrible unprivate thing,” she said. “People walk in and out of it, any one, and there are books and photographs and letters. It is a market place, not a sanctuary, whereas you....” She looked at the little motor. It was too dark to see anything, but every line of it was branded on her heart.

“No one will ever love you as I did,” she said to it and slowly, wearily, dragging one foot after another, she walked away into the cold raw night.

“Nothing in the world like winter air to make you feel fit,” Bob said to himself as he swung himself along the road at a tremendous pace.

“Jove, what a sunset!” he added, looking up at the red gold ruffles slowly untightening. He reflected that there is nothing in the world like health. Live cleanly and the high thinking will look after itself or at least won’t matter. Physical condition, there’s nothing like it. Love and that sort of thing all very well in its way, but a cold bath in the morning and plenty of exercise.... He began to whistle, and then because he did feel most frightfully well to run.

“Run a mile without being out of breath,” he thought complacently, and then because he hadn’t meant to ("wasn’t even thinking of her,” he grumbled to Providence) he found himself outside her door. And in the road there was a motor, a little coral coloured motor. He looked at it in dismay and then he looked at the house. He saw it was lit up and he imagined the room he knew so well. The crimson damask curtains and the creamy walls, the glowing fire and the red roses, the roses he had sent for her. Probably she would be sitting on that white fur rug on the floor, her arms clasped round her knees, her red hair as bright as the red hot coals, her dark eyes dreamy and half closed.

“Damn him, I wonder who he is,” and he started examining the motor.

“It’s not very new,” he thought, “the varnish is all off and those shiny leather seats are damned cold and slippery, draughty too, I should say; hood doesn’t close properly. Must let in the rain like a leaking boat.”

He put his hand on the mud guard. “Bent,” he said. He felt a little cheered. But then, looking at the glowing house, he grew disconsolate again.

“Wonder what they’re doing,” he grumbled to himself. “Jabbering away, I’ll be bound. Never was much of a hand at talking myself. Wonder who the deuce he is.”

And then he looked contemptuously at the little motor.

“Damned if I couldn’t do her better than that,” he said. “God, how cold it is.”

Irresolutely he moved away. Then he began to run, but the raw air caught his throat and he felt out of breath.

“Not as young as I was,” he thought as he walked away into the damp night.