Going into the Ladies, towards the end of the evening, she caught her own face unawares in the mirror, sideways, the reflection thrown back by another mirror in the opposite wall, and saw a woman who did not (she thought) look forty, smiling to herself, reaching in her bag for a comb, momentarily a stranger, or a friend long unseen and half forgotten. She looks nice, Anne thought – I look nice. Quite pretty too. The reaction surprised her; she had never been vain. Her own looks had never much interested her; it was with relief that she had shed the intense physical self-consciousness of a young girl. It seemed an odd bonus, at the end of all those years of neglect, to have emerged really quite nice-looking, no worse, certainly, than many women whose time and energies must have been devoted to self-preservation. She combed her hair and washed her hands, looking again at her own face in the mirror and thinking of how her mother used to insist on the connection between good looks and a state of mind. ‘You can’t be thinking nice things and look an ugly person – it’s written on a face, how a person feels.’ It’s not true, of course, not true at all. Except just in this one thing. Which is why I must not go on looking like this. I could, she said to her face in the mirror, I could be entirely wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. I could have made the most awful mistake, which is why, among many, many reasons, I must not look like this. She went back into the pub, trying to restore anonymity to her expression.