“We mean it all right,” said Giles. “It sounds like a comic dream, but it’s the grisly truth. For no apparent reason, Katharine annoys me. For no apparent reason, I get her goat. If we started to discuss those flowerlets, in five minutes we should be slinging books at each other. She’s witty, you know, and I’m a bit of a wag. We’ve always fenced, for fun—always. But now we can’t stop, and—the buttons are off the foils.” “He’s perfectly right,” said Katharine. “I’m ashamed to say it, but we lead a cat and dog life. And now we’re both agreed that it isn’t good enough. Don’t suggest change, because we’ve tried that. He went away for a week. The night he came back I threw a glass at him.” “An empty one,” said Giles. “Missed me by yards. But it’s the—the principle.” “Exactly,” said Katharine. “Besides, the glass was a good one, and now it leaks.” Forsyth, who felt the sting beneath the banter, was genuinely dismayed. He smiled politely. “It seems a pity,” he said. “When I say that, I’m putting it very low. A pity. You mustn’t be impatient, because, though I’m the keeper of your legal conscience, at heart I’m an ordinary man—with eyes in his head. I think you’re playing with fire. Life’s very uncertain, you know. If anything happened after you’d gone apart—the other would grieve, I’m afraid . . . have something to remember they’ld give a lot to forget . . . grudge the bit of their life they’d deliberately sworn away. . . . One never thinks of Remorse, until it touches you on the shoulder. I don’t suppose I should, only I’ve seen it . . . at work.” There was a long silence. Then— “Thank you,” said Giles quietly. “Now, whatever else we regret, we shall never regret having come to see you this morning.” He paused. “Setting aside Sentiment, the answer is this. We should like to be able to forget the last three months. As we can’t, we think it better to prevent their becoming six.” Forsyth inclined his head. “Very good. Am I to draw up a deed? A deed of separation?” “Please.” “What about trustees?” “Are they a necessary evil? We don’t mind you. In fact, you come under godsends. But the idea of inducting others into our private confessional is peculiarly repugnant.” “It’s worse than that,” said Katharine. “We three are familiar. If I think Mr. Forsyth a brute, I can ring up and tell him so. I couldn’t do that to a trustee. In fact, the whole arrangement would become stiff, reinforced—like putting bones in a belt.” “You couldn’t, for instance,” said her husband, “employ that simile. For your information, Forsyth, that’s not a proverb. Below the surface female woman wears a sort of comic cummerbund, four sizes too small. The idea is to displace the vitals. If she wants to shorten her life, she lines it with strips of whalebone, running the wrong way. Thus with the minimum of motion she gets the maximum of pain.”