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laughed. I suppose it sounded rather peculiar nowadays.
    â€œI’m sure it’ll be very nice,” she said. “Yes. I’ll come. About half past four, will that be right?”
    â€œI’ll be waiting for you,” I said. “I—I’m glad.” I didn’t say what I was glad about.
    We had come to the last turn of the road where the houses began.
    â€œGood-bye, then,” I said, “till tomorrow. And—don’t think again about what that old hag said. She just likes scaring people, I think. She’s not all there,” I added.
    â€œDo you feel it’s a frightening place?” Ellie asked.
    â€œGipsy’s Acre? No, I don’t,” I said. I said it perhaps a trifle too decidedly, but I didn’t think it was frightening. I thought as I’d thought before, that it was a beautiful place, a beautiful setting for a beautiful house….
    Well, that’s how my first meeting with Ellie went. I was in Market Chadwell the next day waiting in the Blue Dog and she came. We had tea together and we talked. We still didn’t say muchabout ourselves, not about our lives, I mean. We talked mostly about things we thought, and felt; and then Ellie glanced at her wristwatch and said she must be going because her train to London left at 5:30—
    â€œI thought you had a car down here,” I said.
    She looked slightly embarrassed then and she said no, no, that hadn’t been her car yesterday. She didn’t say whose it had been. That shadow of embarrassment came over us again. I raised a finger to the waitress and paid the bill, then I said straight out to Ellie:
    â€œAm I—am I ever going to see you again?”
    She didn’t look at me, she looked down at the table. She said:
    â€œI shall be in London for another fortnight.”
    I said:
    â€œWhere? How?”
    We made a date to meet in Regent’s Park in three days’ time. It was a fine day. We had some food in the open-air restaurant and we walked in Queen Mary’s Gardens and we sat there in two deck chairs and we talked. From that time on, we began to talk about ourselves. I’d had some good schooling, I told her, but otherwise I didn’t amount to much. I told her about the jobs I’d had, some of them at any rate, and how I’d never stuck to things and how I’d been restless and wandered about trying this and that. Funnily enough, she was entranced to hear all this.
    â€œSo different,” she said, “so wonderfully different.”
    â€œDifferent from what?”
    â€œFrom me.”
    â€œYou’re a rich girl?” I said teasingly—“A poor little rich girl.”
    â€œYes,” she said, “I’m a poor little rich girl.”
    She talked then in a fragmentary way about her background ofriches, of stifling comfort, of boredom, of not really choosing your own friends, of never doing what you wanted. Sometimes looking at people who seemed to be enjoying themselves, when she wasn’t. Her mother had died when she was a baby and her father had married again. And then, not many years after, he had died, she said. I gathered she didn’t care much for her stepmother. She’d lived mostly in America but also travelling abroad a fair amount.
    It seemed fantastic to me listening to her that any girl in this age and time could live this sheltered, confined existence. True, she went to parties and entertainments, but it might have been fifty years ago it seemed to me from the way she talked. There didn’t seem to be any intimacy, any fun! Her life was as different from mine as chalk from cheese. In a way it was fascinating to hear about it but it sounded stultifying to me.
    â€œYou haven’t really got any friends of your own then?” I said, incredulously. “What about boyfriends?”
    â€œThey’re chosen for me,” she said rather bitterly. “They’re deadly dull.”
    â€œIt’s