pieces because his missus was in the family way. That was why he had broken up the bridge-party. He had wanted her to have a good sleep. ‘If we go back quietly now, she’ll not wake up; we can bid in whispers.’ So we went back and he drank silently and the airman drank silently and we played silently. I had three or four glasses myself; my brother abstained. We stopped at three-thirty in the morning. The colonel paid up and went to sleep on the sofa. I was eighteen shillings and my brother twelve shillings up at sixpence a hundred. I was sick and shaking for weeks after this. In March the second baby was born and we called him David. My mother was overjoyed. It was the first Graves grandson; my elder brothers had had only girls; here, at last, was an heir for the Graves family silver and documents. When Jenny was born my mother had condoled with Nancy: ‘Perhaps it is as well to have a girl first to practise on.’ Nancy had from the first decided to have four children; they were to be like the children in her drawings and were to be girl, boy, girl, boy, in that order. She was going to get it all over quickly; she believed in young parents and families of three or four children fairly close together in age. She had the children in the order she intended and they were all like her drawings. She began to regret our marriage, as I also did. We wanted somehow to be dis-married—not by divorce, which was as bad as marriage—and able to live together without any legal or religious obligation to live together. It was about this time that I met Dick again, for the last time; I found him merely pleasant and disagreeable. He was at the university, about to enter the diplomatic service, and had changed so much that it seemed absurd to have ever suffered on his account. Yet the caricature likeness remained. XXVIII