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If this woman would only forget the ladylike shrouding of her hips, if this mermaid would be oblivious of her well-tailored tail! Aloud his words were,

'Hester, are you sure I am not disturbing you?'

Hester answered clearly and even sharply,

'No.'

'I say, you must have thought I had taken leave of my senses. Well, that is exactly what did happen. I am most frightfully sorry. Please do forgive me, Hester!'

'I suppose I must,' she said. 'I did not at all like the form your madness took.'

'I know! They say that under an anæsthetic people say the most awful things.'

'You were not under an anæsthetic,' she retorted.

'True. But the fact is I probably need an anæsthetic. Then people sometimes say worse things without them.'

He took one step forward, all that was needed for complete contact, and placed both his arms around her. She turned, of course, the big silly mouth away. But very soon the mutual warmth and marital pressures converted her from an indignant icicle into a mass of melting flesh. A similar transformation occurred in the masterful analyst. This was not at all, at the conference in the neighbouring flat, as it had been planned to proceed. Eros was a factor he always left out of his calculations and when he first remarked that the above pressures were resulting in the same warmth on his side as he had intended them to induce on hers, he was traversed by what almost amounted to a shudder. The absurd was happening. He was unable to escape from the absurd; that absurd which was for him an analogous enormity to l'infâme. It was with mortification that he arrived a quarter of an hour late at the restaurant where he was meeting for lunch an ex-colleague, a man whose friendship he greatly prized.