“He’s the greatest teacher I have ever had.” But this of course was not an answer, and he knew it. “He comes closer to what teaching should be than anyone—” he added as if a further blank check was needed.

“What should teaching be?”

He laughed. “I was going to say a transfusion, but it sounds absurd—something more anyway than an intellectual exercise—Oh, you know,” he ended, reaching across for her hand. It was ice cold, as it always was these days. He looked at it for a moment, lying there quite passively in his as if it didn’t belong to her. “Next year I might get an instructorship. We could get married.”

He had not meant to say it like this, so casually, but it just popped out as if he had in the last hour reached the end of his tether, and it had to be said.

She withdrew her hand quite violently and sat looking down at her lap, her face closed up like an empty house. “Don’t push me, George, please.”

“I’m not pushing you,” he said irritably. “But after all, we’ve known each other for a year——”

“I’m sorry, George.”

“Is there someone else?” he could just bring himself to ask.

She hesitated, then answered looking at him very frankly, “Only myself. I don’t know really who I am, you see. I don’t know what it’s all about. It’s not my fault.”

“Oh, I know,” he groaned, “I do all the wrong things.”

“It wasn’t the wrong thing to take me to the seminar, darling.”

So near to misery he had been a second before, so near now he was to happiness because she had said “darling.” After all and in spite of everything, it was a lucky day.

VI

VI