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to you. My God, yes.”
    “Why did you really take her all that way up the Rhine with us, Jan? It was because her elbows were double-jointed, wasn’t it?”
    “Certainly not. I can look deeper than a woman’s elbows, I hope. She believed in the Great Pyramid, as well.” He lifted his wet shoulders from the grass, shrugged them in vague discomfort, and deposited them in her lap. “Well, go on about you.”
    “She used always to be talking about my detachment.”
    “So she did. I could never make out why it annoyed you so much.”
    “I used to imagine I was concealing that. It was because I liked saying that to myself, and when she said it I knew it wasn’t true.”
    “It’s true within limits, I think.”
    “Exactly. And I haven’t the least idea what the limits are. All these years at home I’ve spent wrapping myself up in a sort of spurious tranquillity. Without dust and heat, you know. I enjoyed it, too. I used to think it was the result of having arrived somewhere. Then one day it occurred to me that it was the result of not having started out.”
    “You’re severe with yourself,” he said, thoughtfully.
    “Why not? So are you, on your own lines.”
    Jan’s head moved a little on her knee, but he said nothing. Vivian pulled a leaf, twisted it in her fingers, and said slowly, “You see, what Anstice thought about me was so much what I used to think about Father—before.”
    Jan looked away. “A little severe on him, too, perhaps,” he said in a hard voice. “Aren’t you?”
    “I dare say.” She tore the leaf down the middle and threw the pieces away. “I haven’t the right to be severe on anyone. I’ve experienced nothing myself, except at second-hand. No one would think—” She stopped.
    “You mean,” said Jan distantly, “that Mother died in her dressing-room at Wyndham’s with people weeping over her in about half the European languages. Quite.”
    “Oh, well, that’s—nothing to do with it, really.” She found she had been moving a hand towards him, and took it quickly back again. “Anyhow, the point is that I was right. I know that now. The detached person was something built up, like a face for the films, except that I was my own audience. Now I have to start again. It’s interesting, though it’s uncomfortable.”
    “I see. I thought something of the kind might be happening, but I don’t think I was quite prepared for your knowing so much about it. Do you like Mic?”
    “I haven’t the least idea,” said Vivian, whose train of thought this sudden swerve had jolted. “He’s hardly the sort of man you can summarise when you’ve met him once, is he?”
    “No,” said Jan, with an emphasis born of his own thoughts, “he isn’t. I mean, he’s another person who’s too good at seeing through himself.”
    “That wouldn’t surprise me.”
    “One of the few people I know who doesn’t regard his own limitations as the coping-stones of a completed personality.”
    Vivian laughed to herself. “He’d never make a nurse.”
    Jan had not listened. His brows were drawn together in a thick soft bar. “It’s the only thing one can respect, of course,” he said. “It’s a pity.”
    “What is?”
    “Nothing, really. It’s a pity your lousy hospital can’t pay him more, they’re getting a good brain dirt cheap. Go on telling me.”
    “It’s hard to put over to anyone outside. I don’t think I can.”
    “Do the physical horrors upset you?”
    “No. One faints, or retches, or whatever one does, the first time, and that’s that. It’s the purely childish things that get under my skin. The social survivals. Like being forced to wear a hat when you go out.”
    “Are you forced to? Good Lord. I wondered why you did.”
    “Because Florence Nightingale did. Nursing began as a reform movement, you know. Like the Church of England. It’s curious how they tend to reach a certain point and then petrify. Thank God, at least we have an advancing technique to keep abreast