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his own head would always be a little the nearest to the sun, like that of the apex figure in a Raphael; but the rightness of this was so obvious to him that he never thought about it.
    “I’ve noticed ever since I was a baby. But I’ve never told anyone but you.” She could not, if she had thought it out for a day, have thanked him more suitably. He squeezed her hand. With her heart in her mouth, she squeezed his back.
    “Of course,” he said, “it’s obvious at a glance that things are badly wrong. What is it, exactly? Is one of them carrying on with someone else?”
    Elsie gasped; she even let go of him. She was shocked to death.
    “Oh, no . Nothing like that. I mean, they wouldn’t.”
    “M-m, no, of course not. Probably be a lot happier if they did.”
    Elsie gazed at him, horror at this blasphemy mingled with a secret admiration. Her face registered both like a cinema screen.
    “Well, after all,” said Peter, radiating the vast toleration of his twenty-eight years, “they’re just a part of universal human nature, you know, and subject to the same laws. What you want to do is to get it out of your head that you’re the only person to whom this has ever happened. I’ll tell you something if it’ll make you feel better. My people got divorced when I was fifteen. I was at school when it came out in the papers. They had to take me away and send me somewhere else.”
    “Oh. I am sorry.” Elsie felt as if years of experience had passed over her since this morning. Here she was, dealing with unthinkable situations, having them discussed with her as an equal. “That must have been terrible for you.”
    Peter smiled remotely. “It was an upheaval at the time. Later on they both married other people, and now they’re reasonably good friends. I get on quite well with all four of them.”
    In Elsie’s social circle, divorced persons were mentioned in almost the same breath as girls who spoke to strange men in the street. Her horizons were dissolving in every direction. The excitement of it was enormous. Her very blood seemed to be circulating at a different rate.
    “My people don’t believe in divorce,” she said.
    Peter nodded. “That’s the tragedy. They imprison themselves, and you have to pay.”
    “When it gets too bad I go for a long walk and try to forget about it.”
    “That’s how you picked up your bronchitis, I suppose?”
    “It might have been. I did get rather wet.”
    “God! You poor kid.”
    He stroked his hand gently over her thin round shoulder. Should he kiss her? he was thinking. It seemed a shame not to; it would probably make her happy for the rest of the day. She was looking much less unattractive already. All she wanted was a tonic, the sort that didn’t come out of a bottle. There were, however, limits even to Peter’s capacity for professional indiscretion; nor had he lost sight entirely of the fact, which had never crossed Elsie’s mind, that when doctors visit young female patients, a chaperon is considered all to the good. He compromised by smoothing back the hair from her forehead. This seemed to do very well.
    “From now on,” he said, “you’re going to feel different about everything. Aren’t you?”
    “Yes,” she whispered. “I believe I am.”
    “I know you are. I’ll be here for another three weeks, you know. We’ll go for a walk one day, and talk things over properly. Shall we? Now I’ll have to go. But I’ll be thinking about you.”
    The sun had come out. Elsie lay, after he had gone, and watched the golden square from the window move across the bedroom wall. A blackbird was singing. It was as though she had never heard one before.
    Peter was bucketing the Ford along the rough road, whistling the “Soldiers’ Chorus” from Faust . The roof was open. He felt delightfully full of the sea air and of himself.
    They had succeeded in making one another very happy.

CHAPTER IV
    I T WAS SHORTLY AFTER this that Elsie began to keep a diary. It was her