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. It was the hottest sleepiest hour of the afternoon. The sun blazed down upon them, the sweat tickled his face. And the thought struck him . . . 'Why didn't you give her a good shove?' said Julia. 'I would have.' 'Yes, dear, you would have. I would, if I'd been the same person then as I am now. Or perhaps I would -- I'm not certain.' 'Are you sorry you didn't?' 'Yes. On the whole I'm sorry I didn't.' They were sitting side by side on the dusty floor. He pulled her closer against him. Her head rested on his shoulder, the pleasant smell of her hair conquering the pigeon dung. She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing. 'Actually it would have made no difference,' he said. 'Then why are you sorry you didn't do it?' 'Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.' He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent. She always contradicted him when he said anything of this kind. She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated. In a way she realized that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her and kill her, but with another part of her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you chose
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