He decided, as he glanced at her shoulders at this moment, that it would have been those particular fastenings she would have to unloose to get off the brown dress.

“I wonder whether our time together tonight,” he said bitterly, “will have helped to make your writing more what you want it to be and less of the sort that ‘copies men’?”

Christie gave a faint toss of her head and a faint tilt of her arched eyebrows. She got up from her seat and shook out her wide brown skirt with both hands. The combination of these gestures filled Wolf with discomfort; for it was as if he had said to her something so brutal that she had to shake it from her petticoats, like burdock-seed or cuckoo-spit!