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good deal; it was comic that he should set so much store on
another man’s child. He was peculiar and no mistake.
But one or two things surprised her. She had been used
to his subservience: he was only too glad to do anything
for her in the old days, she was accustomed to see him cast
down by a cross word and in ecstasy at a kind one; he was
different now, and she said to herself that he had not im-
proved in the last year. It never struck her for a moment that
there could be any change in his feelings, and she thought
it was only acting when he paid no heed to her bad temper.
He wanted to read sometimes and told her to stop talking:
she did not know whether to flare up or to sulk, and was so
puzzled that she did neither. Then came the conversation
in which he told her that he intended their relations to be
platonic, and, remembering an incident of their common
past, it occurred to her that he dreaded the possibility of her
being pregnant. She took pains to reassure him. It made no
difference. She was the sort of woman who was unable to
realise that a man might not have her own obsession with
sex; her relations with men had been purely on those lines;
and she could not understand that they ever had other in-
terests. The thought struck her that Philip was in love with
somebody else, and she watched him, suspecting nurses at
the hospital or people he met out; but artful questions led
her to the conclusion that there was no one dangerous in
the Athelny household; and it forced itself upon her also
that Philip, like most medical students, was unconscious of
the sex of the nurses with whom his work threw him in con-
tact. They were associated in his mind with a faint odour of

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