I objected: “Why would she find it necessary to say that to him? Doesn’t he grasp it that there’s such a thing as the privacy of work?” I could not be homesick: it was inconceivable that I be homesick. This was more fundamental than the rather slippery emotion called homesickness. We were here; and we were unaware of what worked against us. We believed nervousness was the excitement of inspiration when it was the excitation of sick nerves. We were defeating our own ends. With more tranquillity, with a greater simplicity, we might stay in the garden of Eden of peace. But in pushing myself into the problems of Eva Litchfield I was being forced to face my own. I knew that nostalgia was growing on us, destroying our correct self-appraisal, and that it would finally envelop our minds in a foreboding gloom that we would call our genius. I said to myself: “Laugh at it, you fool!” I laughed, at myself and every friend I had in the world. Uneasy over my silences, racked by my laughter, Gertrude spoke with a catch in her breath: “Tony and I dropped in: we used to drop in on Nick when he lived at home. Eva didn’t come out of her study, just shrieked through the closed door that she’d go crazy if Nick interrupted her. We heard it so plainly, you see, because she lifted her voice and--and--yelled. I tried to look as if nothing was happening, and Tony, too, tried to pass it off for Nick’s sake. And then Nick opened her door and walked in. I whispered to Tony that we had better leave----” “Was she working?” I cut across her flow of narrative: she told things as a child does, starting each sentence with a small intake of the breath. She said that Eva had been writing, she imagined. “And I said to Tony that we had better go----” Anthony shrugged. “I told you there would be no squabble. Nick’s loony over her. If I had a wife who didn’t so much as turn her head to speak to me when I went to her room, I’d give her a dose of her own medicine.” “I should like to know what he did?” I murmured. “That’s the point you were thinking of making, wasn’t it? What did he do?” “He went over and kissed the nape of her neck,” said Anthony with deep disgust. “She is pretty,” Gertrude conceded. Agreeing that this was the solution, he wagged his handsome head. “She knows it. She’s wise. Those tea roses she has around her study are becoming to her. But she is a strange woman: she gets the roses because they are so becoming to her, and then she doesn’t play up to them; she picks up papers from her desk and frowns and pretends she doesn’t hear a word you say.” “She probably doesn’t,” I reassured him. “Look here, you two: you will have to make up your minds to it. Your friend has married a creature of mist and cobwebs, an--” I hesitated before their blankness--“an enchantress who throws spells and doesn’t take part in what her spells bring about.” Gertrude was practical about it. “Then why did she marry him?”