pt to go wrong.... At the flat there is constant
trouble with the servants; they bully her. A woman is more entangled
with servants than a man. Women in that position seem to resent the work
and freedom of other women. Her servants won't leave her in peace as
they would leave a man; they make trouble for her.... And when we have
had a few days anywhere away, even if nothing in particular has gone
wrong--"

Sir Richmond stopped short.

"When they go wrong it is generally her fault," the doctor sounded.

"Almost always."

"But if they don't?" said the psychiatrist.

"It is difficult to describe.... The essential incompatibility of the
whole thing comes out."

The doctor maintained his expression of intelligent interest.

"She wants to go on with her work. She is able to work anywhere. All she
wants is just cardboard and ink. My mind on the other hand turns back to
the Fuel Commission...."

"Then any little thing makes trouble."

"Any little thing makes trouble. And we always drift round to the same
discussion; whether we ought really to go on together."

"It is you begin that?"

"Yes, I start that. You see she is perfectly contented when I am about.
She is as fond of me as I am of her."

"Fonder perhaps."

"I don't know. But she is--adhesive. Emotionally adhesive. All she wants
to do is just to settle down when I am there and go on with her work.
But then, you see, there is MY work."

"Exactly.... After all it seems to me that your great trouble is not
in yourselves but in social institutions. Which haven't yet fitted
themselves to people like you two. It is the sense of uncertainty makes
her, as you say, adhesive. Nervously so. If we were indeed living in a
new age Instead of the moral ruins of a shattered one--"

"We can't alter the age we live in," said Sir Richmond a little testily.

"No. Exactly. But we CAN realize, in any particular situation, that it
is not the individuals to blame but the misfit of ideas and forms and
prejudices."

"No," said Sir Richmond, obstinately rejecting this pacifying
suggestion; "she could adapt herself. If she cared enough."

"But how?"

"She will not take the slightest trouble to adjust herself to the
peculiarities of our position.... She could be cleverer. Other women are
cleverer. Any other woman almost would be cleverer than she is."

"But if she was cleverer, she wouldn't be the genius she is. She would
just be any other woman."

"Perhaps she would," said