‘Yes, but they just kick us afterwards as hard as they can, so why do we do it?’

‘Yes, but I never seem to learn.’

A few weeks later, Ella sees Julia, tells her: ‘Four men, and I haven’t even flirted with them before, have telephoned to say their wives are away, and every time they have a delightful coy note in their voices. It really is extraordinary — one knows a man, to work with, for years, then it’s enough that their wives should go away for them to change their voices and they seem to think you’re going to fall over yourself to get into bed. What on earth do you suppose goes through their minds?’

‘Much better not think about that.’

Ella says to Julia, out of an impulse to placate, to charm (and she recognizes it as she speaks as the same need she has to charm or placate a man), ‘Well, at least when I was living in your house, this didn’t happen. Which is odd in itself, isn’t it?’

Julia shows a flash of triumph, as if she would like to say: Well, I was good for something, then …

There is now a moment of discomfort: Ella lets slide, out of cowardice, the chance of saying that Julia has behaved badly about her leaving; the chance of ‘getting it all out in the open’. And in the silence of this discomfort, there is the thought, which follows naturally from the ‘it is odd in itself, isn’t it?’ — is it possible they thought us Lesbians?

Ella had considered this before, with amusement. But she is thinking: No. If they had thought us Lesbians it would have attracted them, they would have been around in swarms. Every man I’ve ever known has spoken with relish — either openly or unconsciously, about Lesbians. It’s an aspect of their incredible vanity: seeing themselves as redeemers of these lost females.

Ella listens to the bitter words she is using in her mind and is shaken by them. At home she tries to analyse the bitterness which possesses her. She literally feels poisoned by it.

She thinks that nothing has occurred which has not been happening all her life. Married men, temporarily wifeless, trying to have an affair with her — etc. etc., ten years ago she would not have even noticed or remarked on it. All this was taken by her as part of the hazards and chances of being a ‘free woman’. But ten years ago, she realized, she had been feeling something that she had not then recognized. An emotion of satisfaction, of victory over the wives; because she, Ella, the free woman, was so much more exciting than the dull tied women. Looking back and acknowledging this emotion she is ashamed.

She thinks, too, that the quality of her tone with Julia is that of a bitter spinster. Men. The enemy. They. She decides not to confide in Julia again, or at least, to banish the tone of dry bitterness.