A. Day at the Zoo

I

A SMALL man, with a fine head, beginning to be bald, face of a scholar, sat writing at a small table, scratching himself, writing, writing, sitting awkwardly on an uncomfortable chair. Several untidy piles of letters, books, a half-eaten apple, cigarette ends in a saucer, filled every other corner of the table. The roof sloped at one side; the floor was carpeted, but it would have been better if it had not been. Against one wall there was an unmade bed. All the furniture was good, — the inkstained carpet was a Chinese one, — and the room was not squalid, only neglected and unbelievably dusty.

The kettle on a gas ring suddenly boiled over. He jumped up, exclaiming, ‘God damn the thing!’ and snatched it off before it could splash a jacket lying on the floor. The handle was hot; still cursing fervently, he set it down with a thud on to the carpet, lifted it again with his handkerchief, and made the tea before trying to rub off the ring of soot left behind. He cleared a space on the table for the tray, and drank while he went on writing.

Now and then he picked up a clock which was lying face downwards in the disorder of the table, and glared at it. ‘Half an hour . . .’

‘Ten minutes . . . blast it!’

He wrote and drank. Occasionally he referred to a letter he snatched from one of the piles. When the ten minutes left to him had become five he began muttering as he wrote. ‘. . . My advice to you, Shy Girlie, is to let him go. You will never be happy with a young man who deserts you for other girls even before you are married. Don’t make any scene. Simply tell him gently and seriously that his conduct causes you pain and that you would rather he did not call for you again. You will feel a little unhappy at first — don’t sit at home and mope; take up tennis or skating, and in time . . .’

Throwing down his pen in the middle of the sentence, he jumped up and began dressing himself to go out. He rested each foot on the chair in turn while he polished his shoes with a rag and a jar of cream. Then, frowning at himself in the glass, he changed into the jacket that matched his trousers, pulled a soft hat well down over one eye, and hurried from the room. He locked the door and put the key in his pocket. All this time his face was that of a man faced with unspeakable disaster if he lost a minute.

His room was on the top floor. Just as he was leaving the house his landlady called to him from her room, in a soft hoarse voice: ‘Good morning! You’re off early to-day!’

Turning his head but without pausing for a second, he called back: ‘Yes. Good morning.’ He smiled delightfully and half waved his hand — so that she should not think him rude.

Leaning forward, she watched him out of sight. He was walking at a great rate, holding himself straight, and swinging his arms. From the back, he seemed a young man. It’s when you see him indoors, she thought: he must be forty. ‘Yes. Good morning,’ she mimicked in her curious voice. I’m glad I never married a little man; they’re conceited. I’ll bet God’s underweight — and that’s why He takes it out of us women.

The street was as hot as brass in the sun. A few lilac trees in the narrow gardens were just coming into bloom; one of them — a white lilac — scented the air as he came towards it, and he looked at it with a slight, smile. But just then a car rushed past, trailing a kite of burned-out oil. He wrinkled his forehead in disgust. Blast it — why do I stay in London? he thought.

He could not remain unhappy. The hot sun exhilarated him; his step became almost a prance, until when he reached the tube station and was plunged underground he thought he had descended into hell.

His wife’s new house was in one of the terraces enclosing Regent’s Park: it was even more imposing than he had expected and he felt a momentary qualm. He was not overawed or impressed. He was only anxious not to let. her down by appearing shabby. Then he reflected that she would have new servants, who did not know that he was her first husband. He ran up a flight of steps to the door and rang the bell.

As he had expected, a strange and rather severe-looking manservant opened the door and asked him his name.

‘Mr. Askwith,’ he said; he added quickly, ‘I have an appointment with Mrs. Glenn.’

Strange that even after five years he felt a profound repugnance to her new name. He blinked. As the man was leading him towards a room on the right of the hall a maid came out of the room with a duster in her hand. He recognized the elderly woman who had been with them when he separated from his wife and had stayed with her afterwards. She gave evidence at. the divorce.

‘Well, Louisa! How are you?’ he asked, smiling.

She gave him a confused glance. ‘Quite well, sir. Thank you.’ Her face colored in blotches, as though she were ashamed to talk to him. She stood aside to let him pass.

Well, blast you, he thought cheerfully. He forgot her at once. There was no one in the room and he walked over to the fireplace and stood there. It was a large room, the paneled walls painted a light green and hung with modern paintings. By Jove, that’s a Courbet, he thought. He went nearer, to examine it. There were three Seurats, a Braque, and on a wall by themselves two delicious heads of children by Renoir. He felt awed now. Is this Mary’s taste or his? Either way, they’re damned fine pictures. He stared round him. If she’d stuck to me she’d never have had them, he thought, grinning. And that would have been just too bad.

His head drooped. I’m an ass, he thought; a waster; I ‘m no good.

The door opened and his wife came in. If I’d married a dozen other women since, she would still be my wife, he thought irrelevantly.

She came forward with her warm smile, holding out. her hand. He shook it, thinking, How idiotic! ‘Well, how are you?’ he said, smiling gently at her. She was as beautifully turned out as always since she married Glenn, her hair curled, skin smooth from massage and clever make-up, her lips lightly reddened. She wore a green dress; it suited her reddish fair hair.

‘ I’m very well — how are you ? ‘ Her voice was exactly the same, high-pitched, rather childish. Does Glenn ever hear it shrill with anger? he wondered. She went on without a pause: ‘The children are dressing. They remembered yesterday that you always come to take them to the Zoo on Gillian’s birthday, and John said — ‘

He interrupted her. ‘Never mind what John said’ — he felt certain she invented these things. How on earth, he said to himself irritably, could either of them remember me? What chance do I give them? He felt sad, as well as irritated, but he would not admit it. ‘ When did you buy these pictures? ‘ he asked his wife quickly.

She looked at him in surprise. ‘They belong to — ‘ she hesitated for less than a second. She was on the point of saying: ‘They belong to my husband,’ but she checked herself in time, and ended her sentence with a cough and the words '— to Dick. He took them in part payment of a debt last year.’

Askwith growled: ‘It must have been a large debt. The Courbet alone is worth anything you could pay for it.’ He felt a sudden rage against the man who dealt in such sums of money that he could rob another man of his most priceless possessions to recoup himself. He cheated some poor devil, he thought. Recovering himself, he smiled and said: ’I hope their late owner has something left.’

‘I don’t know,’ Mary said simply.

She had seated herself on a couch and invited him to sit near her. Looking at him without seeming to, she thought, He is as impossible as ever — I suppose he thinks we should have been willing to lose the money. With an extraordinary bitterness she recalled how when they were at their poorest, and Gillian was ill, he absolutely refused to ask a friend of his to return ten pounds he had borrowed a year since. He had remained silent when she cried, for several hours, with disappointment and unhappiness; he was sorry for her, he suffered; but nothing would move him to press for the return of the loan. I might have been dying, she thought.

‘What are you doing now?’ she asked in a bright voice.

‘Oh — the same things,’ he said carelessly.

‘You still keep up the — the journalism?’ She was afraid that she might laugh if she spoke of it. Only yesterday, in the nursery of a friend’s house, she had caught sight of a magazine open at the page, ‘Aunt Hester Will Know: Write to Her’ — and there were the usual pathetic or fatuous letters and the answers. A spasm of inward laughter seized her. It was all she could do not to cry out: ‘Do you know who writes those?’ Denying herself this malicious joy, she said languidly: ‘Who is reading this? You, Gretel? ‘ ‘My nurse reads it every week,’ her friend said, laughing. ‘So does cook. Servants love it, don’t they? ‘

And here in front of her sat Aunt Hester, a rather stiff smile on his small and delicate mouth. He was Aunt Laura in a similar paper, and simply Lillah in a third. And he had been a brilliant scholar at Cambridge — and in the war he earned two French medals besides his D.S.O. For the hundredth time she thought, He’s utterly, everlastingly hopeless — how could I have married him?

His face was puckered, as though he were crushed by despair. It merely meant that he was bored. She was seized by a too familiar impatience. It made her feel ashamed. Surely I need n’t quarrel with him on the one day in the year when we meet, she thought. She forced herself to smile politely, and said: ‘And the great work?’

He had been writing a treatise on mathematics for ten years. At one time she had believed it was a masterpiece; the thought, of it now made her shrug her shoulders; she was even a little sorry for him. Ten years of an illusion!

Askwith glanced up half eagerly. Perhaps he saw in her face that she was merely making conversation. An expression of irony crossed his face and he did not reply, except by waving his hand as though he dismissed her curiosity.

‘You are going to finish it? ‘ Mary persisted.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said carelessly, ‘some day.’

‘And who will publish it?’

‘God knows!’ he said, grinning. ‘Perhaps no one.’

I could arrange something, she thought instantly. Somebody could be paid to make an offer. ‘Years and years of work!’ she exclaimed. ‘That would be frightful. Ghastly.’

‘Yes, it would be just too bad,’ he grinned.

‘Oh, don’t pretend,’ she said swiftly. Then she blushed, annoyed with herself for losing her calm. It’s extraordinary that he can still provoke me, she thought; she felt vexed and startled.

Askwith looked at her with a charming smile; almost loving. And it means nothing, she thought, nothing; he smiles in the same way at everyone. I am a fool.

‘ You are wasting your life,’ she sighed.

‘ But you told me so years ago,’ Askwith said, gently. ‘Don’t you remember writing to me, You will never do anything; you’re vain, lazy, a born amateur. And you were quite right. ... If I only had half your energy!’ he went on, with a smile. ‘On how many committees do you sit?’

‘I forget. . . . Do you remember everything I wrote — or only the unpleasant things?’

‘I should n’t remember anything,’ he said mockingly, ‘if I had n’t kept every one of your letters.’

An extraordinary expression of dismay came into his wife’s face. She had opened her eyes widely — and she was just going to say something when the door opened again and the children burst into the room, the little girl in front. At once she assumed an air of humorous reproof.

‘Don’t turn into little savages even before you reach the animals,’ she said, laughing.

II

Askwith frowned; for a moment he detested her. He jumped up to greet his two children. The little girl, Gillian, came straight to him, with a charming smile, which was a replica of his own. She held her face up to be kissed. The boy hung back; he was polite, but he did not smile; he seemed bored or indifferent. He was handsome, like his mother, and tall for his twelve years. When they were outside the house he walked a little in front, with bent head; his sister skipped along beside their father, throwing her slender legs out like a young lamb’s. She chattered away. Two years younger than her brother, she was tiny, delicatelooking, with an old-fashioned prettiness, as though she had stepped out of an eighteenth-century painting. Askwith held her hand lightly, afraid of crushing it; he was terribly nervous, yet so happy that he felt himself as light as a dancer.

He tried to draw the boy into the conversation, but John showed no interest; he answered yes or no, not troubling to look his father in the face. I am boring him, Askwith thought sadly. He encouraged himself with the thought that when they reached the Zoo it would be all right. Naturally, I can’t amuse him, he said to himself. And yet he wished uselessly that the boy had been more friendly.

Paying for the three of them at the gate, he remembered with shame the occasion when they got there and he found he had no money: he had left it behind. Gillian had cried, and he had been forced to take a taxi back the short distance to his wife’s house and there ask her to lend him money. She had behaved very well, too, not allowing herself even a smile. It was the most humiliating episode in his life.

‘Where do you want to go first?’ he said, looking at John.

The two of them argued fiercely. He was shocked to hear in Gillian’s voice the shrill biting tone of his wife’s in anger.

‘Come — we’ll go and see if the elephant is giving rides,’ he said authoritatively.

They quietened at once — and seemed relieved that he had taken charge. When they moved off, clinging with the other children on the beast’s vast dirtylooking back, he stood in the hot sun and sniffed idly at the leaf he had pulled from the bush at his back. Suddenly he recalled an incident he had forgotten, completely — it returned like a blow over the heart. He almost gasped.

He and Mary were in Paris: it was the first month of their marriage — he was spending his gratuity on taking her abroad, because she had never seen anything. One day they took the train to Meudon: it was a heavenly day, hot, cloudless; the chestnuts were in bloom, dazzlingly bright against the blue sky. Sauntering under the trees, they lived through a few of those moments — how few in any lifetime! — when a fleeting touch of the hand becomes a happiness hardly to be borne. ‘Put your arms round me; I want to feel you,’ she whispered. There was so much agony mixed with his joy that he could scarcely breathe. They lay down.

Perhaps, when he took his coat off, the pocketbook with its roll of notes dropped out. It was gone when they went back to the station in the evening, and he had spent all his loose money on their meals. An outraged and excitable stationmaster would not allow them to enter the train without tickets: he seemed to look upon it as an insult to France — ‘France, bleeding from a million wounds.’ Mary was horribly embarrassed by the argument. With a crimson face, she drew her husband away from the station into the darkened street. ‘What shall we do now?’ she demanded. ‘You ought to be more careful.’ In the end Askwith persuaded the landlady of a small shabby inn on the outskirts of Meudon to trust them for the night. They slept on a feather bed that sank with them in the centre and swelled at the sides like a balloon. Only one pane of the window opened, but a light wind had risen and it blew freshly into the room, bringing with it the scent of white acacia and lilac, and the timid sound of an accordion someone was playing in the garden. When that stopped the night was extraordinarily still.

He remembered falling asleep close to Mary’s round bare shoulder. In the morning some noise disturbed him. He stretched his arm towards her without opening his eyes, and said out loud: ‘Oh, darling, darling.’ An outburst of female laughter startled him into sitting bolt upright in bed, naked as he was. The door of the room had swung open during the night, and two swarthy young women, perhaps they were the aubergiste’s daughters, were watching from the passage.

Mary had been angry — with him.

The elephant was pacing back. He lifted Gillian down, and turned to catch the boy. John’s eyes were now brilliant with excitement; he no longer looked bored or indifferent, and on the way to the bear pit he walked close to his father and even answered questions about his school. He spoke with a kind of arrogance, startling in a child.

‘I have n’t made any friends yet,’ he remarked. ‘I don’t like any of the boys — and they don’t seem to like me. I’m afraid I’m not popular.’

‘But what do you do with yourself in your spare time?’ Askwith said. ‘Surely you could find one boy who is not so bad.’

‘Oh, well, I go about with some of them. And then we ride — and take photographs of birds. But I don’t tell any of them what I think, and if anyone tries to make me I hit him. You see I’m very strong.’ He held his arm out, with the hand clenched, and let it drop suddenly. ‘I don’t know what it will be like when I go to Westminster next year,’ he said.

His manner did not alter, but Askwith had caught a change in his voice, so subtle that he might have thought himself mistaken if he had not instantly recognized it. It might have been himself speaking! He knew every turn, every stone, in the path his son was taking; he knew the fear, hidden from every eye, of failure. John was frightened just as he had been, and lonely. He stood still, gripping the boy’s hand; the feeling of his own wrongdoing and inadequacy overwhelmed him. My God, why did n’t I keep him ? he thought.

He saw John looking at him with surprise; forcing himself to smile, he walked on. ‘You’ll get on better at Westminster,’ he muttered. ‘I was fairly happy there.’

John’s face wore its look of dreamy indifference. After a minute he said coolly: ‘I’m going to have boxing lessons. My father says it’s better to be able to defend yourself than to sweat at Latin.’

My father! thought Askwith dubiously; he was bewildered for a second, then he realized that the boy was speaking about Glenn. An insane anger took possession of him. His brain seemed to be bursting with it; he could not see, and stumbled. Gillian laughed — it was a light, breathless sound, and it brought him to his senses again.

‘Oh, do mind,’ she cried.

His anger vanished. Shrugging his shoulders, he thought, Well, what do you expect? One miserable solitary day a year — no wonder if the boy forgets which of us is his father. Perhaps he thinks he has two. He felt guilty — as though he had wronged his son in some way; but how else could I have acted? he thought. Glancing again at John, he did not know what to say. The boy was looking down; his lashes lay like a thick shadow on his cheeks. Really, he was too good-looking. Askwith felt again the painful sense of responsibility for this young complex creature.

He saw Mary kneeling on the floor in the sitting room of their flat. Tears were pouring over her face; she was beside herself with grief and terror. With arms crossed, she rocked herself to and fro, like an old woman, not caring in the least what she looked like. And she was always careful not to give way to tears; she declared that they ruined the skin of any woman over thirty.

She was behaving like this because he had just said that he would keep one of the children. He would give her her divorce since she wanted it so badly, but not John. Or not Gillian. He would rather, he told her, keep the boy; but if she preferred him to Gillian, then let her take him and he would take their fiveyear-old little girl. It was then she had broken down. Staring at him as if he had wanted to murder her, she gasped: ‘Prefer! How can I prefer one of my children to the other? How can you even say such things?’

‘They are my children, too,’ he said coldly.

He tried to harden his heart. But he still loved her, and seeing her broken like this was more than he could stand. After not more than ten minutes he gave in to her: he told her she could take both of them, and he tried to repress the bitterness that gripped him when she was pouring out her thanks. Wiiy, she had almost fawned on him. He could not help the feeling — but it was quite shameful — that he had been sold.

And yet it seems I was to blame, he thought, ironically.

The heat was becoming too much of a good thing. It blazed on the asphalt paths, and Gillian began complaining that her ankles ached. Askwith picked her up, but in a moment, as soon as he had adjusted himself to her light weight, she demanded to be set down again. She cried a little, then laughed. The fine strands of hair clinging to her neck were damp.

Askwith suggested going into the restaurant for lunch. The room was cool and almost empty; there were actually strawberries on the menu, although it was only the middle of May, and he felt pleased, as though he had arranged it. Both children had already eaten them once this year, and John did not show surprise or pleasure. None the less Askwith was happy; he felt that things were going better. Very well, in fact.

After lunch they went directly to the Aquarium, which is a Chinese scroll painting, alive by a miracle. Here for the first lime John seized his father’s arm. ‘This is a splendid place!’ he exclaimed. Again Askwith felt a thrill of joy and triumph. Gillian began laughing. ‘You cried when we were fishing,’ she said to John.

‘Shut up!’ the boy said furiously.

‘Yes, he did! He did! He cried because the fish he had caught died — he kissed it! Fancy kissing a dead fish!’

‘Very well,’ her brother said, with icy contempt. ‘I’ll tell how you were punished for lying.’

‘Neither of you will tell anything,’ Askwith said. He looked from one to the other. Now that the hard, mocking expression had left her face, Gillian seemed to him very frail and defenseless. His heart ached. He did n’t at all like these glimpses he was being given of their life with their mother and stepfather. But what can I do? he thought helplessly. His anger against Mary returned; it mounted slowly while he was walking beside the now subdued children. I must speak to her, he thought sternly. The words he would use, in order to convince and confuse her, jumped into his mind. If you sat on fewer committees, I shall say, and took a closer interest in your children: you say you’re devoted to them, you were even (but was she?) prepared to give up your — your — Glenn — if I had refused to hand them over to you. But now what are you doing? How much do you know about John, for instance? And if Gillian tells lies, and is punished for them, whose fault is it, do you suppose? Hers?

He worked himself into a fine state of passion and determination. Anything she might find to say in her own defense he swept aside. She prided herself on her tact — on what she called her ‘diplomatic touch’ in handling people; he would not allow himself to be ‘handled.’ I’m damned if I’ll stand it, he thought.

III

When, at four o’clock, he took the children back to the house, he did n’t see his wife. She was out.

He went back to Chelsea, to his room. Its disorder and the look of the unmade bed struck him disagreeably as he opened the door; he set about clearing it up. As soon as it was more or less neat he sat down, in the person of Aunt Hester, and tried to finish his page of questions and answers. His brain seemed to have been replaced by a piece of old leather. When he tugged at it, it creaked. What on earth was it I meant to say? ‘. . . In time ... in time . . .’ he repeated desperately. Nothing came. Not another word,

I might as well go out, he decided. He sat still. The sense of failure, of being nothing at all, paralyzed him. Why should any woman have stayed with me? he thought. I ‘m an ass. I ought to have stayed in the army.

He remembered days when Mary was so bored with him that she did nothing but find fault. In a shrill childish voice she told him over and over again that he ought to pester his friends until one of them from desperation took the trouble to find him a job. He ought to push himself. ‘You know five languages,’ she said; ‘you’re supposed to be a genius at mathematics — yet you can’t even get a lectureship, or a post in a school.’ She said he had no persistence. And of course she was right.

I am a fool, a fool, a fool, he thought, clenching his hands.

From being bored with him, she grew scornful — then silent. That must, have been when she first met Glenn. He never learned how long she had known the other man before they came to an understanding, and before the evening when she cried in his room and begged him to let her take both the children. Well, at the time she was grateful, he thought wearily. In one way and another she struggled to show it — she found him this room and put the best of their furniture in it. But perhaps she knew then that Glenn would soon be worth twelve thousand a year, he reflected cynically. He was not ashamed of the thought.

There was a knock at his door. Thinking that it was his landlady, he did not answer. It was repeated. He raised his voice sharply and called: ‘Come in!’

He saw his wife standing in the doorway. She smiled timidly, and said in a soft voice: ‘Am I in the way?’

After his first shock, of amazement, Askwith bounded from his chair. Closing the door behind her, he made room for her on the couch by tumbling the books and papers on it to one side, and asked her if she would like tea.

‘No.’ She hesitated, and said in the same voice, as though she were a young girl, uncertain of herself, ‘But if you have any dry sherry —’

He had two bottles of sherry in his wardrobe, and there were various-sized glasses crowded together on one of the bookshelves. His hand shook as he filled glasses for both of them. He felt as though he had been poked in the stomach. His head throbbed.

‘What has brought you here?’ he said, speaking casually. The incredible thought darted through his head that she was tired of Glenn and wanted him to take her back. Could I ? he said to himself.

‘It’s nothing very much — ‘

That’s a good beginning, he thought, jeering at himself and his conceits. He waited.

She was trying to talk coolly. Her voice gave her away; it was jerky and breathless. ‘I — I came to ask you whether you have kept all my letters.’

‘ Every one you ever wrote.’ Since she said nothing, he asked: ‘Why?’

Looking down as she put her glass on the table, she said slowly: ‘I wish you would give me them back.’

‘But why?’

Askwith was genuinely perplexed. He could not have the faintest idea what had come over her, or why she felt this sudden desire for her own letters — letters written years ago. They could not possibly have any interest for her now. ‘What has come over you? Tell me why you want them.’

‘I want them,’ she repeated.

She is like Gillian, he said to himself. ‘I don’t see why I should give them to you,’ he said slowly. ‘What’s the point?’ He smiled slightly. ‘Are you writing an autobiography? Your Testament of Middle Age?’

His wife shook her head. ‘No, no — ‘ She looked into his face. ’I should feel safer if I had them. Please give them to me. They can’t mean anything to you — I beg you —’

‘Safer!’ he repeated, without understanding. Suddenly he realized what she meant. The blood rushed to his brain, so that it felt like a ball spinning behind his eyes. He crashed his glass down. It broke, and the wine ran over the table on to his papers. He was angrier than he had ever felt in his life — and shocked. ‘What do you imagine I am going to do with them?’ he said coldly. ‘Show them to people? Put them into a book?’

‘No — but you’re so careless,’ she said weakly. ‘You might — lose them — anything.’ Her under lip quivered. ‘Don’t be angry with me,’ she said under her breath.

His anger evaporated as it had risen, in an instant, and he felt only that something shameful was happening and he could not stop it. It was as though he had seen her behave with a senseless cruelty or greed.

‘Has n’t it struck you that they are all I have left? Unless you count the furniture?’ he said, looking at her.

She only repeated: ‘But you don’t want them; why should you want them ? ‘

Tears came into her eyes. In another moment, he thought, she will be kneeling to me again. He pulled himself together and began to speak to her soothingly: —

‘Very well, you shall have them. Or would you like me to destroy them while you are here?’

He saw the flash of joy on her face — controlled in a second. She hesitated; to his surprise he saw that she found it difficult to speak. ‘You do — oh, I’m ashamed,’ she said quickly. ‘Give them to me and let me take them away. I don’t want to watch you destroy them.’

The letters were in a cardboard box underneath his shirts. He wrapped it up for her while she sat silently. He was wondering what he could say to her to restore her self-respect and send her away soothed and self-confident again. Her look of crushed humiliation saddened him. She won’t get over it, he thought.

When he was handing her the parcel he said deliberately: ‘You interrupted my work’ — pointing at the half-written page.

‘Your work?’

‘Yes. My page for Home and Woman. It has to be in to-morrow.’

Mary burst out laughing. Trying to control herself, she stammered: ‘I forgot — Aunt Hester, is n’t it? Or is that the other paper?’

‘It keeps me alive,’ he said gravely.

‘Yes, I know — but — for a man to write it. And with your education. Why don’t you try for something better? Surely you could find — I would rather starve than — ‘

‘Oh no, you would n’t,’ he said. ‘And I have n’t your energy.’

‘No,’ she agreed, with simple patronage. ‘But it’s a pity.’

He saw her out — and stood on the step for a moment, watching her raise her hand to beckon a taxi and step into it with the clumsy parcel under her right arm. Let’s hope she gets safely to her own room with it, he thought dryly. They’ll take some burning.

He went back to his room. In the half-open drawer where he had kept her letters he saw one lying, flat against the back of the drawer. It must have been dropped from the box at some time. With a queer sensation, half excitement, — his heart throbbing at the ends of his fingers, — he took it out of its envelope, and began to read it.

It was the letter she had written asking him to arrange the divorce for her so that she could marry Glenn. There was nothing spontaneous in the letter. None of its phrases were sincere — probably it was composed under the eye of a solicitor. But at the end she had written, in a different, less careful hand than the rest: ‘Forgive me. I was n’t good enough. You ought to have married someone better and simpler.’

Shall I keep it? he thought.

Almost without thinking, he tore it into tiny shreds and threw them into his waste-paper basket, beside an empty claret bottle and the pieces of broken glass.

A delicious sense of relief filled him as soon as he did it — and an intense, serious joy. Now I can live, he was thinking. By God — yes — I can live.