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"Get up," she whispered. "Ellen, dear, don't kneel like that. Please. . . . Please."

"I'm Miss Platt's new secretary," she said.

Now they were battered and dirty and the corner of one of them was shapeless. One of the sources of his income was the sum that he received from a bookseller for his review copies; he would never now receive a penny for either of these books.

"I never seem to meet such people now or to see such things. Was it only my youth perhaps that made me fancy it all like that? You and Henry, may be, are imagining things in just that way now. Stephen, for instance, my fisherman friend. I've never met any one like him since��so good, so simple, so direct, so childlike. I knew magnificent men in the War as[Pg 106] direct and simple as Stephen, but they didn't affect me in the way he did��that may have been my youth again.

"Anyway that first success put me on my feet. It was during those years after the Boer War when I think literary success was easier to get than it is now��more attention was paid to writing because the world was quieter and had leisure to think about the arts and money to pay for them. I don't mean that genius, real genius, wouldn't find it just as easy now as then to come along and establish itself, but I wasn't a genius, of course, nor anything like one. Well, I had friends and a home and work and everything should have been well, but I always felt that something was working against me, some bad influence, some ill omen��I've felt it all my life, I feel it now, I shall feel it till I die. Lucky, healthy people can laugh at those things, but when you feel them you don't laugh. You know better. Then I married��the daughter of people who lived near by in Chelsea; I was terribly in love; although I felt there was something working against us, yet I couldn't see how now it could touch us. I was sure that she loved me��I knew that I loved her. She was such a child that I thought that I could guide her and form her and make her what I wanted. From the first there was something wrong; I can see that now looking back. She had been spoilt because she was an only child and had a stupid silly mother, and she was afraid of everything��of being ill, of being hurt, of being poor. She was conventional too, and only liked the people from the class she knew, people who did all the same things, spoke the same way, ate the same way, dressed the same way. I remember that some of my Glebeshire friends came to see me one day and[Pg 107] frightened her out of her life. Poor Clare! I should understand her now I think, but I don't know. One has things put into one and things left out of one before one's born and you can't alter them, you can only restrain them, keep them in check. I had something fundamentally wild in me, she something tame in her. If we had both been older and wiser we might have compromised as all married people have to, I suppose, but we were both so young that we expected perfection, nay, we demanded it. Perfection! Lord, what youth! . . . Then a baby was born, a boy��I let myself go over that boy!" . . . Peter paused. . . . "I can't talk much about that even now. He died. Then everything went wrong. Clare said she'd never have another child. And she was tired of me and frightened of me too. I can see now that she had much justice there. I must have been a dull dog after the boy died, and when I'm dull I am dull. I get so easily convinced that I'm meant to fail, that I've no right in the world at all. Clare wanted fun and gaiety.

He slipped into Peter Street as into a country marked off from the rest of the world and known to him by heart. This afternoon the barrows and stalls were away; no one was there, not even the familiar policeman. It was like a back-water hidden from the main river, and its traffic by the thick barrier of the forest trees, gleaming in its own sunlight, happy in its solitude. He found the door-bell, listened to it go tinkling into the depths of the house, and after its cessation heard only the thumping of his own heart and the shattered beat of the unresting town.

At the very moment in the afternoon when Millie was hiding herself from a horrible world in a taxi Henry and Lady Bell-Hall were entering the Hill Street house.

"It's what he cared for more than anything," Henry cried. "It's got to be beautiful."

Miss Cass was five years older than Millicent and had seen a great deal of life. She had driven an ambulance in France, and it was afterwards, when nursing in a hospital in Boulogne, that she and Millicent had made friends. She had nursed with the same quiet capacity with which she had driven her ambulance, and now she was studying at the Women's College of Medicine and at the end of her five years' course was going to be one of the most efficient women surgeons in Europe. That was what she set in front of her, and the things that she set in front of her she obtained. She was a little, insignificant, mild-eyed mouse of a woman with a very determined chin; she had none of Millicent's gaiety and wild zest for life. Life seemed to her rather a poor thing at best; she had no great expectations of it, but, on the other hand, bore no one a grudge because she was in the midst of it. So long as she was working at something she was happy; she was fond of Millicent but not extravagant about her.