The best volume so far in A Dance to the Music of Time

Was any reader anywhere at any time surprised by the "surprise" meeting at the end of volume 9 of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time? By this point we certainly know the pattern, even of erstwhile narrator Nick Jenkins doesn't or thinks we don't: every chance encounter involving Nick will link him to one of the 20 or so characters that make up the network of his socially circumscribed upper-class 20th-century English life. So when, escorting a group of allied leaders to a victory mass celebration in St. Paul's on conclusion of WWII, Nick finds a seat for a Latin American officer - how can we not recall that his first beloved, Jean Duport, on last report had broken off marriage and subsequent affair and remarried a Latin American military man? Of course we know that when this guy offers Nick a ride home, the beautiful woman waiting in the car will turn out to be Jean - whom Nick has not seen for 20 or so years. So the tight web of this series of novels tightens by another notch. Volume 9, The Military Philosophers, despite the foolish title, is the strongest in the series so far I think - a terrific portrayal of what London must have been like during the many years of aerial attacks and then, in peacetime, battered and in rubble - the people very proud but - a feeling much like after a nightmare, or after a flood or tornado, surveying the omnipresent damages and wondering how to pick up and where to begin. This volume, like others in the series, ends rather abruptly without any clear conclusion or completion of a narrative arc. But we do see, or suspect, that Jenkins is not through with Jean Duport, that he will see more of her in volume 10, now that she and wealthy playboy husband are settled in postwar London; and we also get the still-surprising news that the loathsome Widmerpool has married the sexpot Pamela Flitton - so it will be interesting to see what horrors that relationship leads to and to try to figure out what exactly Flitton expects to wrest from Widmerpool - she can't possibly have fallen in love w/ him, who could?