compact that she made with it—a compact that things should always be easy, comfortable, above all, never threatening. The present must be calm but the Future's absolutely got to be—and I believe, although she loves him devotedly in the depths of her strange little soul, that she half blames Peter for all of this disturbance, and that there are a great many things about him—his earlier life, his earlier friends, even his work—that she would strip from him if she could.
“Well, enough for the present. I don't know what nonsense there isn't here. Into the envelope it all goes. I've been talking to you for an hour and a half and that's something. . . .”
II
“. . . I've just come in from dinner with Peter and Clare and feel inclined to talk to you for hours ahead. However, that I can't do, so I shall write to you instead and you're to regard it all as a continuation of the things that I said in last night's letter. I am as interested as ever and indeed, after this evening's dinner more interested. The odd thing about it all is that Peter is so completely oblivious to any change that may be going on in Clare. His whole mind is centred now on the baby, he cannot have enough of it and it was he, and not Clare, who took me up after dinner to see it sleeping.
“You remember that they had some kind of a dispute about the name of the boy at the time of the christening. Peter insisted that it should be Stephen, after, I suppose, that odd Cornish friend of his, and Clare, weak and ill though she was, objected with all her might. I don't know why she took this so much to heart but it was all, I suppose, part of that odd hatred that she has of Peter's earlier life and earlier friends. She has never met the man Brant, but I think that she fancies that he is going to swoop down one of these days and carry Peter off on a broomstick or something. She gave in about the name—indeed I have never seen Peter more determined—but I think, nevertheless, that she broods over it and remembers it. My dear, I am as sorry for her as I can be. There
