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passed her on a country road.

For me the most important thing was to listen to Clare and ask questions. As we rode through the lovely French countryside, she gave me an enormous amount of information about the textile world, the fabric houses, the modus operandi of the market. She tutored me in a field almost wholly foreign to my experience, giving me an education I was soon to find most useful.

I come now to the last chapter in the story of my marriage.

It lasted for about two years more, moving in the same rather purposeless fashion as before. A kind of emotional anaemia [[anemia]] set in, no doubt long before I recognized it, slowing draining the life from my relationship with Leon. There were no quarrels, no stormy scenes, no recriminations. There was no "other man" and, I feel sure, no "other woman".  I cannot point to a specific hour and say, "I knew then that my marriage was shipwrieked [[shipwrecked]]." There was a specific incident,