The end of the affair. Though that was not the word that Ella used then. She used it afterwards, and with bitterness.

Ella first understands that Paul is withdrawing from her at the moment when she realizes he is not helping her with the letters. He says: ‘What’s the use? I deal with widow Brown all day at the hospital. I can’t do any good, not really. I help one here and there. Ultimately the boulder-pushers don’t really help anything. We imagine we do. Psychiatry and welfare work, it’s putting poultices on unnecessary misery.’

‘But Paul, you know you help them.’

‘All the time I’m thinking that we are all obsolete. What sort of a doctor is it who sees his patients as symptoms of a world sickness?’

‘If it were true you really feel like that, you wouldn’t work so hard.’

He hesitated, then delivered this blow: ‘But Ella, you’re my mistress, not my wife. Why do you want me to share all the serious business of life with you?’

Ella was angry. ‘Every night you lie in my bed and tell me everything. I am your wife.’ As she said it, she knew she was signing the warrant for the end. It seemed a terrible cowardice that she had not said it before. He reacted with a small offended laugh, a gesture of withdrawal.

Ella finishes her novel and it is accepted for publication. She knows it is a quite good novel, nothing very startling. If she were to read it she would report that it was a small, honest novel. But Paul reads it and reacts with elaborate sarcasm.

He says: ‘Well, we men might just as well resign from life.’

She is frightened, and says: ‘What do you mean?’ Yet she laughs, because of the dramatic way he says it, parodying himself.

Now he drops his self-parody and says with great seriousness: ‘My dear Ella, don’t you know what the great revolution of our time is? The Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution — they’re nothing at all. The real revolution is, women against men.’

‘But Paul, that doesn’t mean anything to me.’

‘I saw a film last week, I went by myself, I didn’t take you, that was a film for a man by himself.’

‘What film?’

‘Did you know that a woman can now have children without a man?’

‘But what on earth for?’

‘You can apply ice to a woman’s ovaries, for instance. She can have a child. Men are no longer necessary to humanity.’

At once Ella laughs, and with confidence. ‘But what woman in her senses would want ice applied to her ovaries instead of a man?’