Both Philip and Cynthia had a feeling that they had much to communicate to each other and neither knew how to set about communicating. She even thought of writing him a long carefully weighed letter; it was a trick her father had in moments of crisis, retreat to his study, statements, documentation, distribution; her brain kept coining statements and formul?, but it seemed useless to write a long letter to some one who was so soon to depart and make letters the only means of intercourse. Moreover he kept drifting in and out of her sitting-room and sitting beside her couch, so that she had no time for any consecutive composition. He would pat her and caress her gently, sit about her room, fiddle with things on her dressing-table or take up and open books and then put them down again, and he would sometimes sit still and keep silence for five minutes together. He had a way of getting up when he had anything to say and walking about while he said it, and he seemed never to expect her to answer at once to anything he said. And if they were walking in the garden then on the contrary he would stop to deliver himself, and afterwards pick a flower or throw a pebble at a tree. As soon as Lady Grieswold and the Bullaces and Tamars were well out of the way, and the weekly visiting-day when the chars-a-bancs poured their polyglot freight through the garden was past, she came down out of her seclusion and walked about the paths and stairways with him and sat and talked here and there. They never seemed to thresh anything out and yet when at last he too had gone, she began to realise that they had, in phrases and fragments, achieved quite considerable exchanges. Three separate times he had said: “You’ve never looked so lovely as you do now,” which did not at all help matters forward but still seemed somehow to make for understanding.

She detected in herself a disposition to prelude rather heavily, to say often and too impressively: “Philip, dear; there is something I want to say ——” She hated herself every time she found that this preluding tendency had got her again, and had foisted itself upon her in some new, not instantly avoidable variation.

Yes, things were said and there were answers and acceptances. In the retrospect things fell into place and the remark of the late afternoon linked itself to the neglected suggestion of the morning. He had attended to her observations more than she had supposed, and expressed himself she realised with a fragmentary completeness.

Among the things she thought had been got over between herself and Philip was the recognition of their personal difference. They had to understand that their minds worked differently. Mr. Sempack had made that very plain to her, plainer even than he had intended, and she meant to make it very plain to Philip. Philip would have to make allowances for her in the days ahead. It was not only she who had to make allowances for Philip. They had to see each other plain. Illusions were all very well for lovers but not for the love of man and wife.

“I worry more with my mind over things than you do,” she had struggled with it. “Your mind bites and swallows; you hardly know what has happened, but mine grinds round and round. I’m an intellectualiser.”

“You’re damned intelligent,” said Philip loyally.

“That’s not so certain, Phil. I not only think a thing but I’ve got to think I’m thinking it. I’ve got to join things on one to the other. I’ve got to get out my principles and look at them, before I judge anything Philip, has it ever dawned on you that I’m a bit of a prig?”

“You!” cried Philip. “My God!”

He was so horrified; she had to laugh. “Dear, I am,” she said. “I don’t forget myself in things. You do. But I’m always there, with my set of principles complete, in the foreground — or the frame if you like — of what I’m thinking about. You can’t get away from it, if you are like that.”

“You’re no prig,” said Philip. “What has put that into your head?”

“And so far as I can see,” she said, “it’s no good making up your mind not to be a prig if you are a prig. That’s only going one depth deeper into priggishness.”

Philip had one of his flashes. “Still that’s not so bad as making up your mind that you won’t make up your mind not to be a prig, you little darling. This — all this is adorable and just like you. You are growing up in your own fashion, and so perhaps am I. I’ve always loved your judgments and your balance. . . . How little we’ve talked since our marriage! How little we’ve talked! And I always dreamt of talking to you. Before we married I used to think of us sitting and talking — just like this.”

That was a good phase of their time to recall. And she recalled it, with a number of little things he said later, little things that came back again and again to this question of some method, some reasoned substance, in their relationship that she had broached in this fashion. At times he would say things that amounted to the endorsement and acceptance of her own gently hinted criticisms. It was queer how he gave them back to her, enlarged, rather strengthened.

“Of course,” said Philip, half a day later; “all this taking things for granted is Rot — sheer Rot. Everyone ought to think things out for himself. Everyone. Coal strike. Everything. How lazy — in our minds I mean — people of our sort are! We seem to take it all out of ourselves keeping fit. . . . Fit for nothing.”

And: “Empty-minded. I suppose that people never have been so empty-minded as our sort of people are now. Always before, they had their religion. They had their intentions to live in a certain way that they thought was right. Not simply just jazzing about. . . . ”

It was extraordinary with what completeness he grasped and accepted her long latent criticisms of their life in common. “Puppy,” he remarked, “only put the lid on. I see I must get clear. The damned thing of it, wasn’t that at all. It was the drift. The day after day. The tennis. Just anything that happened.”

He had seized upon her timid and shadowy intimations to make a definite project for their intercourse while he was away. “Prig or no prig,” they were to explain their beliefs to each other, clear up their ideas, “stop the drift.” They were to write as fully and clearly as possible to each other. “God and all that,” he said. It didn’t matter.

“I’ve never written a letter, a real letter, I mean about serious things, in my life. I shall try and write about ’em now to you. Just as I see them over there. I shan’t write love-letters to you — except every now and then. Lill’ nonsense, just in passin’. I shall write about every blessed thing. Every blessed thing.

“You mustn’t laugh at the stuff I shall send you. It will clear my mind. People of our sort ought to be made to write things down what we believe. Just to make sure we aren’t fudging.”

Walking up and down with her in the broad path beyond the stone of the sweet Lucina, he remarked at large, loudly and with no sequence: “Prig be damned!”

And also he said: “A woman is a man’s keeper. A wife is a man’s conscience. If he can’t bring his thoughts to her — she’s no good at all.

“No real good.”

Then a confession. “I always thought of talking about things with you. When first I met you. We did talk rather. For a bit.”

Her fullest memory was of him late at night on the balcony outside her sitting-room. She was lying on a long deck-chair and he stood leaning against the parapet, jerking things at her, going from topic to topic, lighting, smoking, throwing away cigarettes.

“Cynthia,” he asked abruptly, “what do you think about Socialism and all that sort of thing?”

So comprehensive a question found her unprepared. One was trained a............