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was a wasted day, an unhappy day, a very beautiful day in some respects. It started, as far as Maria’s memory and therefore as far as we are concerned, in the afternoon. Armed only with a copy of poems by Baudelaire, which she had no intention of reading, she stationed herself on a bench, beneath a tree, opposite the main entrance to one of the men’s colleges. It was astonishingly hot, and had been for about a week, the heat was beginning to have that weighty feel which means that a storm is not far off. It weighed her down, supplemented internally by the heat of anxiety and of desire. Her heart pounded, as hearts do at such moments, and in such situations, not an unpleasant feeling as long as it doesn’t happen too often, more than once every few weeks, for example. In this position, which she varied only in a small way as we shall see, she waited for five hours, during which time she reflected haphazardly on the circumstances, the feelings and former incidents, which had brought her to this pretty pass. She did not recall them in chronological order, she did not so much recall them at all; in fact, it would be truer to say that they assaulted her, but we shall record them chronologically, for the reader’s benefit.
    She had first met Stephen shortly after waving goodbye to her brother at Oxford station, all those months ago. Maria was short of friends at the time. Her tutorial partner, a girl called Madeline, had noticed this and, being a horse of a different colour from those which inhabited Cribbage House, she had taken pity, what’s more in quite a useful way. She had recognized immediately that there could be no real sympathy between Maria and herself, and so, rather than making an extravagant show of friendship, she had simply taken the trouble, over a number of weeks, to introduce Maria to most of her friends in the hope that some of them would like her, and that she, in turn, would like some of them. And indeed both of these hopes were, to a modest extent, realized, so that Maria needed no longer to be short of company on those days when she ventured into the city. She never took full advantage of this fact, it is true. For instance, she would never have called on one of these friends uninvited. But if she were to meet one of them by chance she would by no means hasten away, she would linger and talk, perhaps for a long time.
    Of these new friends Maria had a particular favourite, whose name was Stephen. After waving goodbye to Bobby she had hurried off to her afternoon tutorial, and after her afternoon tutorial she had been invited back to Madeline’s room, for a light tea, and also, did she but know it, for the opportunity to meet Stephen. Maria and Stephen had not got on, initially. She had thought him furtive, and he had thought her unfriendly, although both were wrong. In Maria’s experience, boys either disliked her at once, or liked her at once, and if they liked her they would convert this liking, not knowing what else to do with it, into moonstruck love, droopy hangdog moody wide-eyed romantic slobbering, and if this emotion was not immediately reciprocated, which understandably enough it never was, they would adopt the absurd posture of the injured suitor, absurd enough in itself but fifty times more so if adopted within minutes of clapping eyes on the admired object. Now Stephen was very reticent with her at first, and so Maria assumed that this reticence had its origins in this same process, why after all should he be any different, and consequently she designated it with the word furtive, whereas in fact his only feelings towards her had been confusion, and an incipient liking which he had not known how to act upon. But Maria shortly came to realize her mistake. Meanwhile he had mistaken her distrust, her weariness, her abstraction and strange inner awareness of both loss and gain after the last two days with Bobby, all for unfriendliness. An inauspicious start, wouldn’t you say. And yet out of