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sad and sordid things, doing good all around him, but missing romance in his own life, like Sir Galahad.” She re-read the last two words doubtfully, altered them to “St. Francis,” crossed it out, and decided to end the sentence with “life” after all. “He would need to marry someone with a great love of Beauty to keep him from becoming lonely and disillusioned in middle age. Someone younger than himself would probably be best for this.”
    She re-read this paragraph several times, elaborating the capitals and adding shape to the down-strokes; and was going over it for the fourth time when footsteps, and the rattle of crockery on a tray, sounded on the stairs. She thrust the book quickly down the neck of her pyjamas, and tied the pink ribbon bow of her bed-jacket firmly over it.
    It happened that, at much the same time on the same day, Peter was writing too. He had just finished making up the books for the evening; there was a good fire in Dr. Sloane’s consulting-room, and a comfortable patient’s chair; writing materials lay around him, and it required less energy to start a letter—which would, in any case, have to be written sooner or later—than to resettle himself in the sitting-room with a novel. He poised his pen, full of that virtue peculiar to the bad correspondent who writes a letter in any circumstances at all.
    “Darling,—Blessings on you for yours of the other day” (it could hardly be more than three weeks, after all) “which was full of delights, as always.” (He had lost the letter, or, if not, it was somewhere upstairs.) “This is a far cry from St. Jerome’s, and it requires a definite effort of the imagination to picture you, at this moment, mentioning the deficient swab to Tonky, while a queue of caesars and ruptured fallopians forms in the anaesthetic room.” (This was putting the day back some hours; “washing instruments,” he felt, lacked style.) “But I don’t doubt your humanizing and humourizing influence has the usual Orpheus touch in the jungle of temperaments.” (He wondered, passingly, whether she would know who Orpheus was; but, if not, she would certainly look it up.) “Queer to think that my leaving-party and all that went with it—and still does, praise be—was a year ago last Christmas. What a night that was; and queer, too, to remember how it surprised us. Yes, you’re right” (he remembered this part) “of course it’s time I struck roots somewhere. But I still think I’ll strike firmer ones as a result of nosing around first and doing a bit of spotting. It’s no use sinking one’s exiguous capital irrevocably in a practice, only to find that the surrounding scenery saddens your guts, and the natives worship a divine aspidistra on Sundays. I wouldn’t bury that shining wit of yours in the thick brown wool of an industrial suburb.”
    He read this over with approval, and looked out of the window in search of further ideas. The wind was getting up, and a bleak handful of rain rattled the glass, mixed with the sound of a rising sea. “How, I wonder,” he continued, suddenly inspired, “would you like to settle around here? It lacks some of the trimmings, of course—nearest cinema and shopping centre three miles along the sands when exposed, or six by bus when running; water supply pumped by hand from the bottom of the garden, and cooking mostly by oil. But it has a kind of acid charm. Cliffs made of hard edgy volcanic rock, holding in a beautiful but rather evil sea—like a fire-opal with a bad history set in blackened silver—and, perched on top of it all, a surrealist arrangement of bungaloids, made mostly of cast concrete blocks which the local architect, who must have an individual sense of humour, has titivated with stone rabbits, witch-balls, and dear little gnomes.” He considered this with his head on one side, recalling Norah’s penchant for Regent’s Park and the Circus at Bath.
    “By the way, I am treating the daughter of this