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house-surgeonship or else the
ordinary unexciting life of the general practitioner.
    But Philip’s plans were vague in the extreme. He was twenty-five years
old—rather older, that is, than most undergraduates attaining their
degrees; he had had by no means a distinguished career, though he could
regard that as chiefly a result of bad luck, The Civil Service did not
attract him, despite the high position that his father had held in it; nor
did journalism or the law, even supposing he could have obtained an entry
into either of those professions. Sufficient money to do as he liked, without
the necessity of earning a living, rather accentuated than eased the
difficulty of the problem.
    One sphere of life had always lured him, and that was politics. He had the
half didactic, half administrative mind, the mind that delights in schemes
and paper formulations of all kinds. In another age he would have found a
patron and been nominated for a “rotten” borough. As it was, the way to
success seemed barred by the utter unthinkability of his ever winning an
election. He was too nervous, too slow in speech, too unready for any
combative emergency. “My dear boy,” said his mother, “why on earth should you
choose a profession in which you will be even more a failure than in any
other? Take my advice and be either a diplomat or a stockbroker. And if you
can’t make up your mind which, have another year at Cambridge to think about
it…Or travel…Or write books…Or marry…Or do anything you like.”
    “ Marry ?—And whom should I marry?”
    “I should have thought, Philip,” she answered severely, “that there were
some things which even you would have felt capable of deciding for
yourself.”
    But with all her mordant cleverness she totally failed to understand him.
She did not realise that beneath his slowness and willingness to listen to
advice, he hail a quiet and definite will of his own, in subservience to
which he would spend himself wholly and absolutely, and with all the greater
fierceness in that he would count and mark down every atom of the coast. In
short, he was an idealist, and Mrs. Monsell did not understand the breed.
V
    The party was arranged. Mrs. Monsell motored up with Stella,
and Philip met them at the “White Horse” Hotel, where they all lunched
together. Somehow the realisation that Stella was beautiful had never
occurred to him quite so keenly as it did during those first moments of
seeing her after his failure. Perhaps it was because he had never previously
had so much time to think of anything outside his work; or perhaps it was
some subtle alchemy in the Cambridge atmosphere that was making her more
beautiful and himself more perceptive of it. At any rate, as he watched her
across the table during lunch, he thought it strange that for so long he had
missed something in her that he was seeing then.
    That afternoon they motored about the town and district. Stella took the
wheel, and he watched her, brown-faced and eager-eyed, as she picked her way
cautiously round corners and drove swiftly along the straight vistas of
Fenland road. There was some thing vital and passionate in even the least
thing she did, the least movement of her head and hand—the clasp of her
fingers on the rim of the steering-wheel, the quivering blade-like glance she
gave at every cross-roads, and, above all, the slight smile that played about
her lips as she thrilled to the sensation of speed. They drove through
Girton, Impington, and Milton, to old Chesterton village, where the road
creeps along by the riverside and broadens in front of The Pike and Eel inn.
Here they meditated tea, and as they were climbing out of the car two
“Rob-Roy” skiffs came flashing down the stream with the men in them paddling
at top speed.
    “Look—look!” cried Stella, in ecstasy. She was like a child when she
saw swiftly moving things.
    Her eyes kindled as she watched the approaching