“I do,” he said. “He’s not your sort. You’re poles apart. I believe in affinities, you know. If you marry him you’ll very soon see the need for adaptation, and as he’s a man it’s you who’ll have to adapt yourself. Even then—oh, Elizabeth, you’re only a kid, and I’m afraid you’re going to make a mess of things!”

“I think—it’s a matter for me to decide.”

“Certainly it is.”

“What is more, my father entirely approves.”

Mr. Hengist started to say, Your father be damned, and recovered himself in time.

“Auntie too,” Elizabeth said gently.

“Oh, lord!” groaned Mr. Hengist.

To Lawrence he said more, forcibly, but Lawrence put his finger-tips together and was blandly complacent. You could make no impression on him; he wanted to have Stephen, Ramsay as a son : in-law.

And all the time Stephen was kicking against the barriers that were attendant upon engagement. Hotly he desired Elizabeth, and chafed against restraint. She was his, but not his. He could take her out in his car, to dances, to the theatre; he could sit alone with her at her home but all the time he was conscious of the convenances hedging them round and witholding Elizabeth.

He would not take her to see Queen’s Halt. Tentatively she suggested it, and he laughed, and the blood stole up to the roots of his hair as he confessed his whimsical fancy.

“I don’t want to take you there until you’re my wife, sweetheart. I can’t explain why not, and I suppose it sounds ridiculous, but I—well, I won’t. I’m getting incurably sentimental. All your fault, you adorable little angel. Soon I shall be seized with a longing to lift you over the threshold. Wouldn’t it be awful?”

“I think it would be rather attractive,” she said, reflecting.

“All right, I’ll do it, and brave the sniggers of the cook and the housemaid. It’s a bet.”

“Would they snigger? It wouldn’t be very nice, then.”

“Sure to. Probably think me mad. Oh, no, they’d say, Ah, well, he’s a writer, with an indulgent smile. You can do anything if you’re a writer, darling. Awfully useful. People rather expect you to be eccentric. Provided you wrote or painted they’d say, How delightfully Bohemian, if you turned up at a dinner-party in a tweed coat.”

“Or threw kippers out of the window,” Elizabeth added, remembering.

His eyes narrowed in a puzzled way peculiar to him.

“What’s the joke?”

“Mrs. Ramsay—I mean, mater—said you did that once.”

“Did I? Oh, yes, I know! How base of mater! If I promise never to do it again can our engagement stand?”

“Stephen, you silly!”

“Elizabeth, you pet! When will you marry me?”