CRÉBILLON DELIVERED. _À bientôt_—she had promised to come again very soon. She thought of the essay on the “Jus Primæ Noctis”—ah! what we’ve all been feeling and none of us clever enough to say. We on the sofas, ruthless, lovely and fastidious.... “I am proud to constitute myself”—Mr. Mercaptan had said of it—“_l’esprit d’escalier des dames galantes_.” Rosie was not quite sure what he meant; but it certainly sounded very witty indeed. She read the book slowly. Her French, indeed, wasn’t good enough to permit her to read it anyhow else. She wished it were better. Perhaps it if were better she wouldn’t be yawning like this. It was disgraceful: she pulled herself together. Mr. Mercaptan had said that, it was a masterpiece. In his study, Shearwater was trying to write his paper on the regulative functions of the kidneys. He was not succeeding. Why wouldn’t she see me yesterday? he kept wondering. With anguish he suspected other lovers; desired her, in consequence, the more. Gumbril had said something, he remembered, that night they had met her by the coffee-stall. What was it? He wished now that he had listened more attentively. She’s bored with me. Already. It was obvious. Perhaps he was too rustic for her. Shearwater looked at his hands. Yes, the nails _were_ dirty. He took an orange stick out of his waistcoat pocket and began to clean them. He had bought a whole packet of orange sticks that morning. Determinedly he took up his pen. “The hydrogen ion concentration in the blood ...” he began a new paragraph. But he got no further than the first seven words. If, he began thinking with a frightful confusion, if—if—if—— Past conditionals, hopelessly past. He might have been brought up more elegantly; his father, for example, might have been a barrister instead of a barrister’s clerk. He mightn’t have had to work so hard when he was young; might have been about more, danced more, seen more young women. If he had met her years ago—during the war, should one say, dressed in the uniform of a lieutenant in the Guards.... He had pretended that he wasn’t interested in women; that they had no effect on him; that, in fact, he was above that sort of thing. Imbecile! He might as well have said that he was above having a pair of kidneys. He had only consented to admit, graciously, that they were a physiological necessity. O God, what a fool he had been! And then, what about Rosie? What sort of a life had she been having while he was being above that sort of thing? Now he came to think of it, he really knew nothing about her, except that she had been quite incapable of learning correctly, even by heart, the simplest facts about the physiology of frogs. Having found that out, he had really given up exploring further. How could he have been so stupid?