Something of that cruel beauty entered the doctor’s house in Shawgate, touching him every morning as he rose and every evening when he had said good-night to his last surgery caller and there was nothing left but to smoke and go to bed. He preferred those final moments of the day alone, for he was, beyond outward fellowship and impersonal altruism, a solitary, aware of communion with life itself rather than with individual lives.

But now, meeting Leni from time to time during the diminishing fortnight, a little of that calmness was dislodged. He saw her sometimes during the afternoons, when she played the piano in the drawing-room; once he got out his violin and began a sonata with her, but in the middle of it he heard Jessica entering the house and talking to Susan, so he made an excuse to discontinue the performance. He knew Jessica disliked music, and he had never found it possible to enjoy playing when she was at home. He said, putting his violin back in the case: “We must finish that sometime. And I must see about lessons for you — you really ought to have them, you know.” He kept saying that, but he never did anything about it.

He knew, though she did not tell him, how little she wished to leave, yet how hard it was to stay, even those few more days. For Jessica, by pricks of word and action, was always indicating the obvious — that there was nothing to stay for, no work to do, no reason why she should not take her money and quit. The days passed slowly, braked by a curious brooding uncomfortableness; David, busy with his work, saw neither Jessica nor Leni for any length of time; yet whenever he entered the house he felt their presence in distant separate rooms. Perhaps it had been a mistake to insist on that fortnight; he thought so when, taking meals with Jessica, he measured her cold, controlled civility against the thoughts that might lie behind it. But when, at other times, he met Leni in the hall, or in the corridor outside the surgery, her smile made him feel that the fortnight was beautiful, with a beauty sharpened by all that made it unwise.

He fretted, too, about Gerald and how he was faring, and once, after his day’s work, the news in the evening paper gave him a vision of human mischief larger, but no more wanton, than that which had invaded his own affairs. Seeking escape from an intolerable perception, he went out, took the path by the river, and climbed the Knoll. The vast unreason of the world assailed him, as well as a sense of his own unfitness for battle; and suddenly, with rueful self-scrutiny, he saw himself as he must seem to others, perhaps even to Leni — a weak-willed middle-aged husband who dared not say no to his wife. Yet it wasn’t really that he dared not. It was a profounder reluctance, an inertia of the spirit that fell on him whenever he faced a conflict outside the territory in which he could struggle with joy. To fight the blood flow as it streamed into the cavity of an operation, to fight the weakening of lungs and heartbeat, to fight death and the fear of death — these were his battles and he had no strength or will for others.