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her maternity had expressed itself not only in passionate comradeship with her child, but in swift repudiation of all matrimonial approaches. She was impatient of sentimental predicaments; averse, even hostile to any display of amorous emotion. She was remembering those years after the war as she stood there, that time of halcyon sweetness when, like two tempest-tossed sea-gulls, she and Clive had floated side by side in a sunlit harbour; the happiest time of her life. She had never been inclined to pathos or self-pity. She had, for all the years of his boyhood, eaten her cold mutton in the West Kensington lodgings, run the hat shop, written the articles on the French countryside, since only so could she send him to Winchester and Oxford; and the road she trod was never dusty to her, since Clive’s future was its goal. But when, her goal attained, the tidal wave of the war broke over the world, she had, for a suffocating and swooning moment, seen herself as a collapsed and falling form with bubbles rising from its mouth. She remembered now the turmoil of horrifying darkness, the sensation, while it lasted, of holding her breath and swimming under water, and then the emergence, tragic, since Clive was brought back to her almost dying of his wounds, yet ecstatic, for he was in her