and girls. I'm not the
pursuing type. But I perceived that in some odd way I attracted her
and I was neither wise enough nor generous enough not to let the thing
develop."

"H'm," said Dr. Martineau.

"I'd never had to do with an intellectually brilliant woman before. I
see now that the more imaginative force a woman has, the more likely she
is to get into a state of extreme self-abandonment with any male thing
upon which her imagination begins to crystallize. Before I came along
she'd mixed chiefly with a lot of young artists and students, all doing
nothing at all except talk about the things they were going to do. I
suppose I profited by the contrast, being older and with my hands full
of affairs. Perhaps something had happened that had made her recoil
towards my sort of thing. I don't know. But she just let herself go at
me."

"And you?"

"Let myself go too. I'd never met anything like her before. It was her
wit took me. It didn't occur to me that she wasn't my contemporary
and as able as I was. As able to take care of herself. All sorts of
considerations that I should have shown to a sillier woman I never
dreamt of showing to her. I had never met anyone so mentally brilliant
before or so helpless and headlong. And so here we are on each other's
hands!"

"But the child?

"It happened to us. For four years now things have just happened to us.
All the time I have been overworking, first at explosives and now at
this fuel business. She too is full of her work.

"Nothing stops that though everything seems to interfere with it. And
in a distraught, preoccupied way we are abominably fond of each other.
'Fond' is the word. But we are both too busy to look after either
ourselves or each other.

"She is much more incapable than I am," said Sir Richmond as if he
delivered a weighed and very important judgment.

"You see very much of each other?"

"She has a flat in Chelsea and a little cottage in South Cornwall, and
we sometimes snatch a few days together, away somewhere in Surrey or up
the Thames or at such a place as Southend where one is lost in a crowd
of inconspicuous people. Then things go well--they usually go well at
the start--we are glorious companions. She is happy, she is creative,
she will light up a new place with flashes of humour, with a keenness of
appreciation...."

"But things do not always go well?"

"Things," said Sir Richmond with the deliberation of a man who measures
his words, "are a