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It had always seemed to Teresa that this life, in spite of its suffrage and girl’s clubs and “culture,” was both callous and frivolous in comparison with the tremendous adventures that were going on, all round, in laboratories and studies and College rooms: at any moment Professor —— might be able to resolve an atom, and blow up the whole of Cambridge in the process; and, in little plots of ground, flowers whose habitat was Peru or the Himalayas, were springing up with—say, purple pollen instead of golden, and that meant that a new species had been born; or else, Mr. —— of Christ’s, or John’s, or Caius, would suddenly feel the blood rush to his head as a blinding light was thrown on the verbal nouns of classical Arabic by a French article he had just been reading on the use of diminutives in the harems of Morocco.

Anyhow, whether callous or frivolous or both, it had given Pepa seven happy years.

What Harry Sinclair’s contribution—apart from the necessary background—had been to that happiness it would, perhaps, be difficult to determine. There could be no one in the world less sympathetic to the small emotional things—so important in married life—than Harry: homesickness, imagined slights when one was tired, fears that one’s son aged three summers might some twenty years ahead fall in love with little Angela Webb, and there was consumption in the family—he viewed them with the impatience of a young lady before the furniture of a drawing-room that she wants to clear for a dance, the dance, in his case, being the sweeps, pirouettes, glides, of endless clever and abstract talk through the clear, wide spaces of an intellectual universe.