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interrupted him.
    “I only want to understand some of the terms you use - enough so as to understand you without making you stop to explain everything the whole time. Go on. I'm following you all right.”
    “Well,” he said doubtfully, “remember Scobell's unsound.” He went on talking. He talked for two hours and a half. Reviewing the set-backs, analyzing the possibilities, outlining possible theories. He was hardly conscious of Henrietta's presence. And yet, more than once, as he hesitated, her quick intelligence took him a step of the way, seeing, almost before he did, what he was hesitating to advance. He was interested now, and his belief in himself was creeping back. He had been right - the main theory was correct - and there were ways, more ways than one, of combating the toxic symptoms...
    And then, suddenly, he was tired out. He'd got it all clear now. He'd get on to it tomorrow morning. He'd ring up Neill, tell him to combine the two solutions and try that. Yes - try that. By God, he wasn't going to be beaten!
    “I'm tired,” he said abruptly. “My God, I'm tired.” And he had flung himself down and slept - slept like the dead.
    He had wakened to find Henrietta smiling at him in the morning light and making tea and he had smiled back at her.
    “Not at all according to plan,” he said.
    “Does it matter?”
    “No. No. You are rather a nice person, Henrietta.” His eyes went to the bookcase. “If you're interested in this sort of thing, I'll get you the proper stuff to read.”
    “I'm not interested in this sort of thing. I'm interested in you, John.”
    “You can't read Scobell.” He took up the offending volume. “The man's a charlatan.”
    And she had laughed. He could not understand why his strictures on Scobell amused her so.
    But that was what, every now and then, startled him about Henrietta. The sudden revelation, disconcerting to him, that she was able to laugh at him...
    He wasn't used to it. Gerda took him in deadly earnest. And Veronica had never thought about anything but herself. But Henrietta had a trick of throwing her head back, of looking at him through half-closed eyes, with a sudden, tender, half-mocking little smile, as though she were saying: “Let me have a good look at this funny person called John... Let me get a long way away and look at him...”
    It was, he thought, very much the same as the way she screwed up her eyes to look at her work - or a picture. It was - damn it all - it was detached. He didn't want Henrietta to be detached. He wanted Henrietta to think only of him, never to let her mind stray away from him.
    (“Just what you object to in Gerda, in fact,” said his private imp, bobbing up again.)
    The truth of it was that he was completely illogical. He didn't know what he wanted.
    (I want to go home... What an absurd, what a ridiculous phrase. It didn't mean anything.)
    In an hour or so at any rate he'd be driving out of London - forgetting about sick people with their faint, sour, “wrong” smell... sniffing wood smoke and pines and soft wet Autumn leaves... The very motion of the car would be soothing - that smooth, effortless increase of speed...
    But it wouldn't, he reflected suddenly, be at all like that because owing to a slightly strained wrist, Gerda would have to drive, and Gerda, God help her, had never been able to begin to drive a car! Every time she changed gear, he would sit silent, grinding his teeth together, managing not to say anything because he knew, by bitter experience, that when he did say anything Gerda became immediately worse. Curious that no one had ever been able to teach Gerda to change gear - not even Henrietta. He'd turned her over to Henrietta thinking that Henrietta's enthusiasm might do better than his own irritability.
    For Henrietta loved cars. She spoke of cars with the lyrical intensity that other people gave to Spring, or the first snowdrop.
    “Isn't he a beauty, John? Doesn't he just purr along? (For Henrietta's cars