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But these things were externals. What was she really like? Stacey could not discover. In all the years that he had known her, first as Philip’s fiancée and then as Philip’s wife, he had never got beneath her intense shy reserve. Yet—which seemed odd—there was no sense of constraint between them as long as Phil was there, too. Stacey could talk impersonally with her, or, better still, sit for a long time silent with her, as now, perfectly at ease and sure that she, too, felt at ease. That was all, though. He could not understand the marriage. Still, he recognized that it was a happy marriage and he admitted loyally that a man very rarely did understand his most intimate friend’s choice of a wife.

Sometimes, he remembered, he had tried to sum up Catherine and her relation to Phil impressionistically. Once he had told himself that she was like a castle and Philip like a wind blowing around it, rattling the shutters but leaving the castle permanent and unchanged. But he felt a touch of impatience now in the recollection of that judgment. He had always been full of such fancies. Perhaps he had even cultivated them and felt a small pride in them. Somehow, in these last weeks he had come to feel almost antipathy for these baubles. What did they really explain? What good did it do to catch a mood, even truly? What was a mood but an evanescent unrelated thing?