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dark blue suit, with her skis beside her, with her fair short hair and her flushed cheeks, she looked a typical example of healthy Anglo-Saxon womanhood, yet she was more alien to him in blood and tradition than a Castillian gipsy. There were depths and barriers and reservations in her that he could only guess at. She spelt mystery, adventure, the unknown.
    She turned away from her long reverie and looked back at him, realizing that he had been staring at her.
    â€œI’m surprised,” she said, “that you’ve never married.”
    He shrugged. “I’m nearly thirty. I suppose it’s time I did.”
    â€œI didn’t mean that. Marriage isn’t like graduation. But it’s strange that you should have got to thirty without ever wanting to.”
    â€œHow do you know I haven’t?”
    â€œIf you have, why haven’t you? You could have afforded to.”
    He hesitated. What had he to tell her? Remarkably little when the sum was told. There had been that girl at Folkestone, met in the spring of 1916, when he was recovering from a wound. He had been lonely there, and bored. It had been easy to fall half in love. He’d have fallen the whole way in love, if he’d had the chance, if he’d had the time, if he’d not been posted back to France. They’d corresponded, and he’d dreamed about her, in the way that you did in France. He’d carried her snapshot in his pocket book. He had pictured his next leave in terms of her. And then a week before that leave, she had married someone else.
    At the moment he had thought himself broken-hearted. But a year later he had realized that he had been unhappy less because he had lost her than because his plans for a leave had been upset. He could scarcely present that episode in terms of a grand passion.
    â€œPerhaps you’ve got yourself involved with someone that you can’t marry?”
    He shook his head. He had not led a life of copy-bookdecorum. There had been heavy evenings after Rugger dinners ending up at Brett’s. One of those evenings had led to a Le Touquet week-end, to a series of Le Touquet week-ends. But it had not been serious. He had had no real adventures. He had not met the Jimmy Grant type of girl. Most of the girls he knew had a very definite interest in matrimony, at any rate when they were with marriageable men. He was inclined to wonder whether there was quite so much ‘of that kind of thing’ as novels like
The Green Hat
suggested. He wondered if it wasn’t largely talk. At any rate, he shook his head to Renée’s question.
    â€œAre you really going to tell me that you’ve got to the age of thirty without having fallen seriously in love?” she asked.
    He hesitated. It seemed an ignominious confession and one that he would never have dared to make to Jimmy Grant. But somehow he couldn’t lie to Renée.
    â€œIt sounds very unromantic, but that does happen to be the way it is. First there was the war, then there was Oxford; then all that football. I’ve had to work very hard. I’ve kept in training through the winter. I’ve been pretty busy all the time . . . And well ... I don’t seem to have met anyone I could feel that way about.”
    She laughed. “There’s no need for you to make excuses. I’ve always heard that Englishmen developed late; sometimes it can be confusing… But when it’s somebody like you——” She paused, and her face grew thoughtful. “It’s rather a relief to find somebody like that,’ she said.
    There was an abstracted expression on her face. That clause ‘sometimes it can be confusing’ had sprung, he suspected, out of some deep and not too welcome experience. Out of what experience, he wondered, out of what type of experience? She rose to her feet and stretched out her arms.
    â€œI’m getting cold. Time we were getting back,” she said.
    Down the smooth