It was evening and Mrs. Rylands lay in bed in her unlit room. The windows were wide open but the blue serenities without were seen through a silken haze of mosquito curtain. And Mrs. Rylands was thinking.

Before lunch she had summoned Lady Catherine to her bedside and thrust most of her duties as a hostess upon her. “I’m ill,” she said. “I’ve had a shock, never mind what, dearest, don’t say a word about it, but it’s made me ill. I want to be alone, and there’s all this party!”

All Lady Catherine’s better self came uppermost. She kissed her friend. “I’ll see they get their lunch,” she said; “I and Bombaccio. It’s your privilege to be ill now, just as you please and whenever you please. And afterwards shall I pack some of them off?”

“They do very little harm,” said Mrs. Rylands. “I shall get on all right — in a bit. Get the bridge and tennis Stupids out of the house if you can — if they have somewhere to go. But don’t chase them out. They amuse each other. . . . Don’t make them uncomfortable. . . . I like to have Mr. Sempack about. I like him. When they have gone I will come down again.”

“And Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan?”

“He doesn’t matter. Just take hold of things, Kitty. I can’t arrange.”

Lady Catherine took hold of things. “Don’t you bother, Cynthia. Bombaccio and I could run four such parties.”

“Don’t want to see anyone. Just want to think.”

“I quite understand.”

A last murmur from the bed. “Don’t want to be told or asked about anything just now.”

A kiss in response and Lady Catherine had gone.

The head on the pillow snuggled under the sheet with an affectation of profound fatigue until Lady Catherine was surely out of the room, and then it was raised and looked round cautiously. Slowly, wearily Mrs. Rylands sat up again and became still, staring in front of her. The protective mask of the rather pathetic dear little thing had vanished. A very grave, very sad human being was revealed.

For a long time her mind remained stagnant. And when at last it did revive it did not so much move forward from thought to thought as sit down and contemplate her world unveiled.

She had been living in a dream, she realised, and only such a shock as this could have awakened her. She had been living in a dream wilfully. In spite of a thousand hints and intimations, she had clung to her beautiful illusions about Philip and herself and the quality of life. Now that she had not so much let go of her dream as had it torn from her hand, it began forthwith to seem incredible and remote. It was plain to her that for weeks and months she had understood Philip’s real quality — and refused to understand. She was already amazed to remember how steadfastly she had refused to understand.

When at last, late in the afternoon, a letter came from Philip, a note rather than a letter, written in pencil, it did but confirm the hard outlines of her realisations.

“My darling Cynthia,” wrote Philip. “What can I say to you, except ask you to forgive me? I suppose you think I’m an utter beast and I suppose I am an utter beast. Yet these things take one in a way you can’t understand and one finds out what seems just a lark isn’t. I do hope anyhow that whatever you say or do to me you won’t be too hard on old Puppy. It’s my fault first and foremost and all the time. It is dead against all Puppy’s code to go back on the hostess with whom she is staying in that fashion. But one thing led to another. I over-persuaded her and really we had not planned or arranged what happened. On my honour. It just came upon us. It may have been brewing in the air but I swear I didn’t plan it. We have always been pretty good friends, Puppy and me I mean, and I suppose we ought not to have done anything so risky as a swim together without anyone else. Her bathing dress tore on a nail. A pure accident. Things looked worse than they actually were. At the time it seemed just fun. Anyhow she has insisted on clearing out and she’s gone. And that’s that. I’d like to come and see you and have a talk when you feel up to it. I could kick myself to death that this should have happened to you, now above all. I feel the dirtiest of rotters. Nothing of the sort if I can help it shall ever happen again. That I swear. Forgive me and try to forget it all, for both our sakes. Your sorry Philip.”

She read that over in a whisper. “Your sorry Philip.”

She agreed.

She lay for a long time quite motionless with his note on the counterpane before her. It was exactly like him. How could she ever have imagined that he was anything else but precisely what that note displayed?

And yet he was so good-looking and with something fine — delusively fine was it? — about his face and bearing. So different from wary unreal Geoffry. Still.

Later on another letter was brought to her, a letter in a different hand, a large clear and firm script without a trace of the puerility of Philip’s still unformed writing, and this also she read and re-read. Now in the twilight she went on with the train of thought this second letter had set going.

“Dear Mrs. Rylands,” it began; “Forgive this rigmarole please that I am obliged to write to you. A sort of accident made you tell me something of your trouble and I feel perhaps you will not resent it if I write to you about it. Anyhow I must write about it even if you do not read it, because I can think of nothing else.”

She thought of his sprawling person dispersed over a writing-table, his face transfigured intently, and then came a memory of him like Pan half changed into an old olive tree of like some weather-worn Terminus, being kissed by Lady Catherine. For plainly she had been kissing him. Mrs. Rylands recalled that incident now without shock or repulsion. He was so different from her idea of a man who could love. Catherine might have been kissing an old leather-bound bible. . . .

“I want to write, if I may, as a close friend. I like and admire your husband very greatly and I like and admire you very greatly. I am, so far as you go, an old experienced man who has observed far more than he has experienced, and I think if I could make you see what has happened as I see it, it might cease to appear so conclusive and devastating an incident as perhaps it does now. It is significant enough, I admit, but indeed it is no sort of catastrophe.

“I have liked him ever since he came into the room at Roquebrune — the first time I saw him. He has exceptional vitality, energy, intelligence. He is extraordinarily young for his years. For all practical purposes he is still merely adolescent. He may still become a man of great distinction. Considering his position and opportunities he may yet play a quite considerable part in the world’s affairs.”

“That is what I had dreamt,” she said and her eyes went back to that pencil scrawl.

“What has happened does nothing to change that. There are points material to this issue which I do not think you apprehend. I do not see how they can have entered into your consciousness. I will try to put them to you — if you will be patient with me. Let me repeat, I think enormous things of your Philip. I don’t think that you made a mistake when you loved him and gave your life to him. And for you — you might be my daughter — I have that feeling, that only people who have been schooled to disinterested affection can have. I have watched you both. I care for you both deeply. I care doubly. I care for you also on account of him. I care for him also on account of you. Two fine lives are yours; two hopeful lives.”

“And then this!” she whispered and for some moments read no more.

“I want you to consider your differences. I don’t think you have ever thought about your differences. Everything has disposed you to ignore them. You are a finer thing than Philip but you are — slighter. You are completer but slighter. He is still unformed but larger and more powerful. He has the makings of a far bigger and stronger and more effective person than you can ever be. You must grant me that. I think you will grant me that. We human things; what are we? Channels through which physical energy flows into decision and act and creative achievement. There is a pitiless pressure to do. Living is doing. Life is an engine, a trap, to catch blind force and turn it into more life and build it up into greater and more powerful forms. That is how I see life. That is how you are disposed to see life. We are all under that pressure — in varying degrees. The chief business of every one of us, every one who has a consciousness of such things, is to master and direct and utilise his pressure. Most of us spend the better part of our lives trying to solve the problem of how that is to be done before all pressure of vitality is exhausted. And your Philip is under pressures, blind pressures, ten, twenty times as powerful as all the driving force in you. I hope this does not offend you?”

“There is a sort of truth in that,” said Mrs. Rylands.

“And now let me assure you he loves you. It is you he loves, have no doubt of it. And he loves you for endless things of course, but among them, chief among them, because of this, that you have self-control, you seemed to him, as you are, serene, wise, balanced, delicately poised.”

“Not now,” said Mrs. Rylands.

“He thinks, no! he realises, that you have direction, which is just what he lacks. That brought him to you perhaps first. That does and can continue to hold him to you. But that does not prevent old Nature, who has made us all out of the dust and the hot damp and the slime, pressing upon him and pressing him. He is living here in this warmth, in this abundance, far off from the business life and political life that might engage him; he came here — that is the irony of it — to be with you, to wait upon you here in the loveliest, most perfect setting. You know that was his intention. You know he has treated you sweetly and delicately. Until, as you think, you found him out.”

She nodded assent and turned the page quickly.

“But he wasn............