k down to her or to make conversation, no need
to take the initiative and play the gallant male. Viola neither
patronised Martin, as did the men who came to the house, nor expected
patronage, as did the girls. She treated him as an equal and talked
about reasonable things; she had ideas and could think clearly. If a
man had expressed her views Martin would have been interested, but the
fact that they came from a woman rendered them doubly attractive.
During the vacation Martin had begun to form a vision of the perfect
woman: it had been the ideal that appeals to most intelligent boys at
some period of their adolescence, the union of masculine mind and
female beauty. He was old enough now to be troubled by sex, not as
something abstract that might crop up in a theoretical future, but as a
present pain and pleasure: in his growing restlessness he tended
inevitably to find his ideal personified in every woman who was not
quite a fool, the wish being always father to the thought. Viola
Cartmell's masculine attributes, her managing ways, and her power of
thought and argument gave him a genuine excuse for setting her on his
pedestal. Yet Martin's attitude was one of adoration, not of passion.
Quite apart from the manifest impossibility of making love, apart too
from the fact that, even if circumstances had allowed, he did not know
how to make love, he did not even want to make love. He wanted to be
with her, to watch her, above all to talk with her: and that was the
limit of his desires.

On the tennis court Margaret and he were too strong for Robert and
Viola; accordingly the two Berrisfords fought great battles against the
visitors and as a rule prevailed. But they were not invincible. Once
Martin and Viola had lost two sets in succession and in the third the
score was five-three and forty-fifteen against them. Viola had said,
"Now we're going to win," and Martin had performed the most impossible
feats at the net, smashing and cutting and getting back for the lob.

Martin finished the set with a perfect drive down the said line.

"Wimbledon," said Robert, making no effort to reach it.

As they went in to tea his partner smiled upon him and said: "You were
simply wonderful."

That moment gave him greater joy than he had ever gained from the
avenging of Gideon or the conquest of Randall's with fraudulent
googlies.

On the last day of his holidays (it is a nice point whether the two
months before a man goes up