He felt as though he had lost her. At first he thought that he had resigned her, to Christopher’s greater claim – he could not get Christopher out of his mind, his muttered, monotonous complaint, his tale of woe, his plateful of fried eggs, his wretched goldfish, his air of desertion – and then he began to fear that he had too well taken in what Christopher had said of her, that he had been convinced, as might a judge or jury, that Rose was not what she appeared, that her apparent virtue was truly a dim reflex of the voracious self, that she had been corrupting, not abused. Fortunately he was able to deflect himself by work: a case which he had been promised at Easter had come up, a case of such interest that it absorbed him completely. It was a closed-shop case, in which he found himself representing the Union. The Union had behaved extremely badly, having refused renewal of membership to the plaintiff for highly dubious reasons. He had never had any dealings with this particular union before: it was a small, tightly knit, not particularly powerful one, and the more he inspected it the less democratic its methods appeared.
