What can have happened? It is now nine o’clock and after waiting and waiting I have come home. What can have prevented her from turning up? We were to dine at seven o’clock at Martini’s and go on to the Philharmonic concert at the Queen’s Hall. I waited till a quarter to eight and then rang up her flat from the restaurant. Martha answered the telephone. Rose was not in. What time had she gone out? Martha couldn’t say. I returned to our table and ordered something for myself because I hadn’t the face not to. I felt that the waiter was an interested spectator of my predicament. If she had left her flat she must arrive soon. And yet a terrible foreboding told me she wouldn’t come. I was quivering with anxiety and the thought of food was loathsome; but I forced myself to eat and at a quarter past eight I left the restaurant. What was I to do now? There was nothing to do but ring up her flat again and I was ashamed to do that. Could an accident have happened to her? I imagined all sorts of horrors and turned away, shuddering, from my imaginings, trying to account for her absence by a variety of theories which my mind evolved with a feverish glibness.
