Jack, announcing the fact that he must return home, begins talking about his wife. ‘She is a good girl,’ he remarks, and Ella freezes at the condescension in his voice. ‘I make damned sure she never suspects me when I go off the rails. Of course, she gets pretty fed up, stuck with the kids, they’re a bit of a handful, but she copes.’ He is putting on his tie, pulling on his shoes as he sits on Ella’s bed. He is full of well-being; his face is the unmarked, open face of a boy. ‘I’m pretty lucky in my old woman,’ he goes on; but now there is resentment in it, against his wife; and Ella knows that this occasion, his sleeping with her is going to be used subtly as a means to denigrate his wife. And he is jaunty with satisfaction, not because of the pleasures of love, about which he knows very little, but because he has proved something to himself. He says good-bye to Ella, remarking: ‘Well, back to the grindstone. My wife’s the best in the world, but she’s not exactly an exhilarating conversationalist.’ Ella checks herself, does not say that a woman with three small children, stuck in a house in the suburbs with a television set has nothing much exhilarating to talk about. The depths of her resentment amaze her. She knows that his wife, the woman who is waiting for him miles away somewhere across London will know, the moment he enters the bedroom, that he has been sleeping with another woman, from his self-satisfied jauntiness.

Ella decides (a) that she will be chaste until she falls in love and (b) that she will not discuss this incident with Julia.

Next day she telephones Julia, they meet for lunch and she tells Julia. She is reflecting, as she does so, that while she has always steadily refused to confide in Patricia Brent, or at least refused to be an accomplice in her sardonic criticism of men (Ella thinks that the sardonic, almost good-natured quality of Patricia’s criticism of men is what her own present bitterness will mellow into and she is determined that it won’t), yet she is prepared to confide in Julia whose bitterness is turning rapidly into a corroding contempt. She again decides not to indulge in these conversations with Julia, thinking that two women, friends on a basis of criticism of men are Lesbian, psychologically if not physically.

This time she keeps her promise to herself not to talk to Julia. She is isolated and lonely.

Now something new happens. She begins to suffer torments of sexual desire. Ella is frightened because she cannot remember feeling sexual desire, as a thing in itself, without reference to a specific man before, or at least not since her adolescence, and then it was always in relation to a fantasy about a man. Now she cannot sleep, she masturbates, to accompaniment of fantasies of hatred about men. Paul has vanished completely: she has lost the warm strong man of her experience, and can only remember a cynical betrayer. She suffers sex desire in a vacuum. She is acutely humiliated, thinking that this means she is dependent on men for ‘having sex’, for ‘being serviced’, for ‘being satisfied’. She uses this kind of savage phrase to humiliate herself.