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German for coffee?’ Her expression alarmed him. He ran down the corridor and closed the only open window. ‘Are you feeling all right?’
    She said slowly with half-closed eyes, ‘That’s better. You’ve made it quite stuffy. I’m warm enough now. Feel me.’ She lifted her hand; he put it against his cheek and was startled by the heat. ‘Look here,’ he said. ‘Go back to your carriage and I’ll try and find some brandy for you. You are ill.’ ‘It’s only that I can’t keep warm,’ she explained. ‘I was hot and now it’s cold again. I don’t want to go back. I’ll stay here.’
    â€˜You must have my coat,’ he began reluctantly, but before he had time to limit his unwilling offer with ‘for a while’ or ‘until you are warm,’ she slid to the floor. He took her hands and chafed them, watching her face with helpless anxiety. It seemed to him suddenly of vital necessity that he should aid her. Watching her dance upon the stage, or stand in a lit street outside a stage-door, he would have regarded her only as game for the senses, but helpless and sick under the dim unsteady lamp of the corridor, her body shaken by the speed of the train, she woke a painful pity. She had not complained of the cold; she had commented on it as a kind of necessary evil, and in a flash of insight he became aware of the innumerable necessary evils of which life for her was made up. He heard the monotonous tread of the man whom he had seen pass and re-pass his compartment and went to meet him. ‘You are a doctor? There’s a girl fainted.’ The man stopped and asked reluctantly, ‘Where is she?’ Then he saw her past Myatt’s shoulder. His hesitation angered the Jew. ‘She looks really ill,’ he urged him. The doctor sighed. ‘All right, I’m coming.’ He might have been nerving himself to an ordeal.
    But the fear seemed to leave him as he knelt by the girl. He was tender towards her with the impersonal experienced tenderness of a doctor. He felt her heart and then lifted her lids. The girl came back to a confusing consciousness; she thought that it was she who was bending over a stranger with a long shabby moustache. She felt pity for the experience which had caused his great anxiety, and her solicitude went out to the friendliness she imagined in his eyes. She put her hands down to his face. He’s ill, she thought, and for a moment shut out the puzzling shadows which fell the wrong way, the globe of light shining from the ground. ‘Who are you?’ she asked, trying to remember how it was that she had come to his help. Never, she thought, had she seen a man who needed help more.
    â€˜A doctor.’
    She opened her eyes in astonishment and the world cleared. It was she who was lying in the corridor and the stranger who bent over her. ‘Did I faint?’ she asked. ‘It was very cold.’ She was aware of the heavy slow movement of the train. Lights streamed through the window across the doctor’s face and on to the young Jew behind. Myatt. My’at. She laughed to herself in sudden contentment. It was as though, for the moment, she had passed to another all responsibility. The train lurched to a standstill, and the Jew was thrown against the wall. The doctor had not stirred. If he had swayed it was with the movement of the train and not against it. His eyes were on her face, his finger on her pulse; he watched her with a passion which was trembling on the edge of speech, but she knew that it was not passion for her or any attribute of her. She phrased it to herself: If I’d got Mistinguett’s legs, he wouldn’t notice. She asked him, ‘What is it?’ and lost all his answer in the voices crying down the platform and the entrance of blue uniformed men but ‘my proper work.’
    â€˜Passports and luggage ready,’ a foreign voice called to