Charles’s first sustained encounter with Hartley in the church reveals that the woman he is reuniting with bears almost no relation to the woman he has been carrying inside himself for 40 years. However, he barely notices the gap, reinforcing the fact that he is completely absorbed in his own narrative, unable to step out of it and recognize reality, reinforcing the idea of The Nostalgic Power of First Love. He registers her as “a stout elderly woman in a shapeless brown tent-like dress” with grey hair, caked powder, “magisterial horizontal lines upon the forehead” and “long darkish hairs above the mouth” (111), and yet within an hour he is sitting on a gravestone “sketching a kind of programme for survival” in which he will “devote the rest of [his] life to Hartley” (118). He never seems to recognize the gap between reality and his perception, and he even names the trick by which they fail to meet: “[B]etween me and it there hovered, perhaps for the last time, the vision of a slim long-legged girl with gleaming thighs” (110). Charles’s perspective shows itself here as a problem of seeing: Charles has not loved Hartley through the years; he has loved an image that her actual 60-year-old face must now be made to fit. When he tells her in the church, “[Y]ou are still what you were for me” (113), the sentence is accurate in a way he does not hear. She is what she was for him; in his mind, she exists only as she has in the past.

Rosina’s night invasion offers Charles and the reader a model for his own coming behavior with regard to Ben. She announces her own method openly: “It is very easy to frighten people, Charles. I know, I have done it. It is easy to maim people and utterly destroy their peace of mind and cripple all their joy” (104-5). She has broken the vase and the mirror, taken a room at the Raven, watched him for a week, and will, she promises, “be a demon in [his] life and in her life” if he settles with anyone else (104). Rosina also shows herself to be particularly insightful when it comes to Charles, telling him, “[Y]ou are never interested in the people you want, so you learn nothing” (105). The theme of Jealousy as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy is established here as Rosina practices it with full self-awareness. The novel is careful to plant her terms (“haunt,” “demon,” “spoil”) just before Charles begins haunting Nibletts himself. Her claim on him rests on a sentence he half-remembers having said while drunk, but she has built a whole campaign on it; her mindset echoes Charles’s own, in which his memory of Hartley and their love determines his actions even as she makes clear that he doesn’t have the whole picture. The scene shows what a jealous mind can do with a single fragment of evidence, foreshadowing the lengths Charles will soon go to.

Charles’s visit to Nibletts and the second church meeting are written so that almost every detail he records cuts against the story he is composing about it. Ben answers the door, shakes hands, asks him about electricity and cars; Hartley fetches mats, opens a window, calls Nibletts “our dream house” (123). Charles, sitting in the stuffy rose-scented sitting room, is already searching for evidence to support his theory while claiming not to be: “[I]f I was searching for cracks in the fabric…Well of course I was not doing that, I was just trying to understand” (127). The self-correction is the giveaway to his real motives, and later, he ponders the question: “Is her husband, Fitch, Ben, whatever his name is, a jealous tyrant, is he the cause of her unhappiness?” (141). He has barely met Ben but feels qualified to assess their marriage; Charles needs Ben to be a tyrant because the alternative, that Hartley has had “a very happy marriage” without him (114), is unbearable. Even when she tells him, “I’ve been very happy,” he reflects, “It was impossible to tell if she was sincere. Probably she was” (114), and then quietly drops the subject. The novel presents the reader with Hartley’s own assessment of her marriage and then shows Charles deliberately devaluing it, placing his own assessment of her marriage above her own.

Lizzie’s correspondence in this section shows Charles’s idea of his own goodness operating as stagecraft, developing the theme of The Futility of Renouncing One’s Nature. Within a single afternoon, he writes Lizzie a long, finely modulated letter releasing her (“let us, as you urged, enjoy a free and unpossessive mutual affection” [134]), receives her acceptance of his earlier proposal, and fires off a telegram reversing himself again: “Your first idea was right” (138). He notes plainly that his letter is “partly disingenuous, partly sincere” and that his hint about coming to London is “simply a ploy to keep Lizzie there” (134). Charles’s characteristic tendency toward the dramatic is visible in these passages through the texture of the prose he produces. He blesses Lizzie for her “common sense,” congratulates himself on a “new detached generosity,” and wonders whether Hartley, “seen not touched, loved not possessed, destined to make me a saint,” is the engine of his purification (135). The same paragraph admits this plan of his “flourished somewhat upon the absence of alternatives” (135). In his mind, Charles is directing the drama between himself, Lizzie, Gilbert, and Hartley; he adopts this spiritual vocabulary when he wants to portray himself a particular way, highlighting that, even in his retirement, he is playing a role, reverting to his previous self.

The structure of these two sections further juxtaposes Charles’s past in London with his new life at Shruff End. Murdoch arranges Rosina’s ambush and Hartley’s in-person arrival in the novel as a single sequence: Rosina’s headlights expose first her threat and then, in the same instant, “the old village woman” who “did not resemble Hartley. She was Hartley” (107). The two women are placed in the frame at the same time, a direct confrontation between the reality of his past love with Rosina and his fantasy of childhood love with Hartley. Charles himself calls attention to the arrangement of his diary when he notes, after Lizzie’s visit, “I have just written out my account of Lizzie’s visit as a story, and it has somehow excited and pleased me to put it down in this way” (96). Charles as the narrator, in other words, is shaping the diary for effect. This structural choice and Charles’s attention to it further highlight the futility of renouncing one’s nature: The man who has retired from the theatre to “abjure magic” is directing his own life as a production, casting Ben as villain, Hartley as captive, himself as rescuer, and writing the dialogue in advance. When he closes his Nibletts visit with the words “frightful glee” at finding Ben “just as [he] had—feared—and hoped” (150), the dash in the middle of the sentence does the analytical work: The plot he wants requires the husband he claims to dread.