Read "The Malcontents" by C.P. Snow online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
When Tess was listening to those two in the common room, Mark was walking with Bernard Kelshall in the university garden. Mark had fixed that meeting place because he was as security-conscious as any of them: it was safer to talk in the open air. Even so, Mark was soothed at being in a garden – though it was January, only the English grass to impress the eye, the green of the soft damp weather. Still, for Mark any garden was better than none. Not that he was a horticulturist; in this one, maintained by the botany department, he couldn't in summer have named one flower in ten. But Mark, so easy with all people, men and women, often got out of their way: he spent much time alone, he sat about for hours, sometimes in sight of foliage, before he went and expended energies on a friend.
He wasn't tired that morning, although he had had only four hours' sleep: he would have been glad, though, to be strolling in that place alone.