“Do you ever feel,” he said, “as if one part of your soul belonged to a world altogether different from this world⁠—as if it were completely disillusioned about all the things that people make such a fuss over and yet were involved in something that was very important?”

She looked straight into his face. “I wouldn’t put it like that,” she said. “But I’ve always known what it was to accept an enormous emptiness round me, echoing and echoing, and I sitting there in the middle, like a paper-doll reflected in hundreds of mirrors.”

Wolf screwed up his eyes and bit his underlip.

“You haven’t been as happy in your mind as I’ve been in my mind,” he said with a kind of wistfulness; “but I often feel as if I were unfairly privileged⁠ ⁠… as if some invisible god were unjustly favouring me⁠ ⁠… quite beyond my deserts.”

“I don’t think you’re as favoured as you fancy you are,” said Christie, with the ghost of a smile. But Wolf went on: