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lively, but she was not Helen of Troy, she was no queen who drew the males of the species like honey or violet light drew moths. Indeed, her only other suitor appeared to be rather half-hearted, rather self-contained, exhibiting a nervous male version of what Luk had just characterised as the ritual move of avoidance. Jacqueline had “always” been attached to Marcus Potter, since before he, Luk, had known her. Marcus looked vaguely, Luk thought uncharitably, as though he needed a woman to make sure his shirt was buttoned on the right buttons, and his socks matched. Vague and thin and pale. It was impossible to imagine him, in bed, doing more than
poke
feebly and blindly. He did not believe Jacqueline was a virgin but he didn’t believe she slept with Marcus Potter. Another mystery. On the other hand, she
looked at him
tenderly, or hopefully ...
    Another curiosity about unsuccessful love was the way it set itself against reason—the reasoned observation of instinctual behaviour, that was—by waiting patiently for a change in circumstances. Luk had not observed many cases—he was not sure he had observed
any
—of the objects of hopeless passions suddenly doing a
volte-face
and learning to love the rejected. He had observed one or two cases of sad and resigned decisions to accept second-best (both by men and by women) which had more or less worked, but left whole areas of the fiercest, secret selves of lover and beloved forever closed away, inert. And how did he know all that? Because he watched. You could do experiments in human love, as you could in the choices of apes or rabbits, tomtits or red deer. You could infect or inoculate yourself with various strains of it (once you understood how it “took”) as doctors did who were their own experimental subjects for vaccines. Did he want to be cured? No, he wanted Jacqueline. He observed wryly that both pure reason and the instinct of blind self-preservation (to say nothing of the need to spread his seed to become an ancestor) required him to give up this clearly futile pursuit. The sun rose higher over the moortops, and Luk looked at Jacqueline, crouched in burned grass and heather, with love.

Jacqueline tried to concentrate on her drawing. She did not like upsetting people. Luk most of all. This thought was, however, peripheral to her concentration on the idea of electrical conduction and practical ways of examining the activities of giant neurones. Jacqueline Winwar, like Frederica Potter, was an ambitious woman. But she had come upon her own ambition almost casually, as one thing led to another. She had grown up in a suburb of Calverley, with a pharmacist father and an infant-teacher mother, who had been pleased that she did so well at school, but had never said to her “you will go to a good university,” let alone “you will be a scientist” or “you will make discoveries.” Nature studies had seemed wholesome, and Jacqueline’s ability to throw herself into them showed she had a nice, uncomplicated, enthusiastic nature. Jacqueline’s parents, and Jacqueline, supposed that these were interesting hobbies. They assumed that she would marry, and bear children, and the hobbies would come in useful for teaching the children about the world, keeping them occupied. Jacqueline, unlike Frederica, was not always top of the class, and did not expect to be. But she did well, and it became clear that she must go to university—the school expected it, and by then a certain blindly-working greed for knowledge in Jacqueline required it.
    She still had a conventional vision of herself, some day or other, meeting the “right man” and being joined to him in a flurry of white veiling and organ music. In the interim, she had various student affairs—partly at least out of physiological curiosity, partly also because she wished to do what was expected—and continued her desultory but deeply rooted connection