Chook took out his cigarettes, and asked if Mr Partridge objected to smoke.

There was no answer.
"You must speak louder, Mr Fowles," said Mrs Partridge.

"William's 'earing ain't wot it used to be." William resented this remark by twisting his chair farther away and emitting a grunt.
Pinkey, conscious of Chook's eyes, was bustling in and out with the airs of a busy housewife, her arms, thin as a broomstick, bared to the elbow.

His other love-affairs had belonged to the open-air, with the street for a stage and the park for scenery, and this domestic setting struck Chook as a novelty.

Pinkey, then, was not merely a plaything for an hour, but a woman of serious uses, like the old mother who suckled him and would hear no ill word of him.