artin went back to dinner
rejoicing in his courage and his first steps to adventure. He had been
right: there was something about Pink Roses, indefinable perhaps, but
plainly something. She wasn't just one of the Oxford girls.

So they met again and on Saturday night they drove out in a taxi to
Abingdon and dined in rather squalid pomp. Henceforward they saw much
of one another and had more drives and dinners and were happy: for both
had won a release.

They did not at all know what they wanted, but both knew quite plainly
from what they wanted to escape. Martin wanted to throw off for a few
hours the burden of his work, which was neither mere routine, like
copying addresses, nor definite creation, like the making of a poem or
a good mashie shot. This minute preparation of books and this learning
by rote of variant readings and emendations seemed so appalling just
because they defied both a mechanical application and a vivid interest.
And May wanted to escape from the frigid respectability of a red-brick
villa at Botley, where she lived with her father, a retired Oxford
tradesman: she wanted to escape from an existence which contained
nothing but meals, a bicycle, _The Daily Mirror_, and walks with the
girl next door. So she invented an old school friend who had jolly
evenings in Walton Street. Her father had the virtue of credulity and
allowed her to go her own way, and Martin's.

So much they knew and nothing more. Martin never discovered whether he
actually felt any enthusiasm for May as a real person abstracted from
Mods and his own despair and the black mass of circumstance: he didn't
think about it, but just took her as she was. There were times when
she amused him and gave him pleasure, and times when he thought that
the satisfaction of her kisses was as nothing to the boredom of her
conversation. Yet, because he was young and simple and far more
conscientious than he would have cared to admit to the advanced young
men of the Push, he was not prepared to confess to himself that she was
just an amusement. The Martin who talked so airily in Lawrence's rooms
about women and the world was an innocent impostor: as a matter of fact
the Push, also conscious and a little ashamed of their own excessive
virtue, were not taken in by his magniloquence. May was equally
ignorant about her own attitude and intentions. She was not at all a
fast or desperate young woman: an impartial critic might even have
noticed