The Malcontents by C.P. Snow

For half an hour Stephen walked, without any purpose, round the middle of the town. Shops, bright and busy, chain stores now, not the old proprietorial shops, but busier than they ever were, he glanced at but didn't see. Or rather he saw them as though it were through dark glasses. It was the same when he had lunch at home with his mother. They had some civil conversation, utterly remote from what they were both thinking, remoter still to Stephen because her voice seemed to come from outside the envelope from which he hadn't yet escaped.

He would have said – and later he did say – that he spent all those hours, from the evening before to this Thursday afternoon, making up his mind. When he told Hotchkinson that he had not ‘quite decided', he wasn't pretending; he believed that to be the truth. And yet the decision had been made hours before, probably in Mark's drawing-room (there isn't a precise time for the first crystallization of a decision), certainly by the time he had spoken to Tess on the telephone.