In their Wisdom by C.P. Snow

When Jenny moved into Lorimer's flat she, for once unwilling to tempt fate, was still keeping on her own. She never returned there. That told as much of the story as she would have told, even to herself. In her kind of realism, she knew when not to put sex into words. She might have repeated the saying she had picked up earlier in her life – the worst doesn't always happen. That had been the advice given her by a derelict acquaintance when her own existence was in one of its bleakest phases. The saying sounded to her grim, realistic, Nordic, and she liked it. In fact, of course, it would have appealed so much only to a nature as sanguine as her own.

The worst hadn't happened this time. They both of them looked happy. He felt proud that he had made the decision that night in the embankment garden. She was satisfied that she had judged it right. Perhaps something could be inferred from noticing that he was showing signs of cheerful, almost flippant happiness, which none of his acquaintances had seen in him before: whereas Jenny wasn't so elated, but content and secretly triumphant.