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to a gentleman; and Mr. Nixon replied that, since the Char-
ter, men were going into it who had been to public schools
and a university; moreover, if Philip disliked the work and
after a year wished to leave, Herbert Carter, for that was the
accountant’s name, would return half the money paid for
the articles. This settled it, and it was arranged that Philip
should start work on the fifteenth of September.
‘I have a full month before me,’ said Philip.
‘And then you go to freedom and I to bondage,’ returned
Miss Wilkinson.
Her holidays were to last six weeks, and she would be
leaving Blackstable only a day or two before Philip.
‘I wonder if we shall ever meet again,’ she said.
‘I don’t know why not.’
‘Oh, don’t speak in that practical way. I never knew any-
one so unsentimental.’
Philip reddened. He was afraid that Miss Wilkin-
son would think him a milksop: after all she was a young
woman, sometimes quite pretty, and he was getting on for
twenty; it was absurd that they should talk of nothing but
art and literature. He ought to make love to her. They had
talked a good deal of love. There was the art-student in the
Rue Breda, and then there was the painter in whose family
she had lived so long in Paris: he had asked her to sit for him,
and had started to make love to her so violently that she was
forced to invent excuses not to sit to him again. It was clear
enough that Miss Wilkinson was used to attentions of that
sort. She looked very nice now in a large straw hat: it was
hot that afternoon, the hottest day they had had, and beads