Ella worked for a women’s magazine. She had done articles on dress and cosmetics, and of the getting-and-keeping-a-man kind, for three years, hating the work. She was not good at it. She would have been sacked if she had not been a friend of the woman editor. Recently she had been doing work she liked much better. The magazine had introduced a medical column. It was written by a doctor. But every week several hundred letters came in and half of them had nothing to do with medicine, and were of such a personal nature that they had to be answered privately. Ella handled these letters. Also she had written half a dozen short stories which she herself described satirically as ‘sensitive and feminine’, and which both she and Julia said were the kind of stories they most disliked. And she had written part of a novel. In short, on the face of it there was no reason for Julia to envy Ella. But she did.

The party tonight was at the house of the doctor under whom Ella worked. It was a long way out, in North London. Ella was lazy. It was always an effort for her to move herself. And if Julia had not come up, she would have gone to bed and read.

‘You say,’ said Julia, ‘that you want to get married again, but how will you ever, if you never meet anybody?’

‘That’s what I can’t stand,’ said Ella, with sudden energy. ‘I’m on the market again, so I have to go off to parties.’

‘It’s no good taking that attitude — that’s how everything is run, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose so.’

Ella, wishing Julia would go, sat on the edge of the bed (at the moment a divan and covered with soft green woven stuff), and smoked with her. She imagined she was hiding what she felt, but in fact she was frowning and fidgety. ‘After all,’ said Julia, ‘you never meet anyone but those awful phonies in your office.’ She added, ‘Besides your decree was absolute last week.’

Ella suddenly laughed, and after a moment Julia laughed with her, and they felt at once friendly to each other.

Julia’s last remark had struck a familiar note. They both considered themselves very normal, not to say conventional women. Women, that is to say, with conventional emotional reactions. The fact that their lives never seemed to run on the usual tracks was because, so they felt, or might even say, they never met men who were capable of seeing what they really were. As things were, they were regarded by women with a mixture of envy and hostility, and by men with emotions which — so they complained — were depressingly banal. Their friends saw them as women who positively disdained ordinary morality. Julia was the only person who would have believed Ella if she had said that for the whole of the time while she was waiting for the divorce she had been careful to limit her own reactions to any man (or rather, they limited themselves) who showed an attraction for her. Ella was now free. Her husband had married the day after the divorce was final. Ella was indifferent to this. It had been a sad marriage, no worse than many, certainly; but then Ella would have felt a traitor to her own self had she remained in a compromise marriage. For outsiders, the story went that Ella’s husband George had left her for somebody else. She resented the pity she earned on this account, but did nothing to put things right, because of all sorts of complicated pride. And besides, what did it matter what people thought?