Guy was aware of wanting to take Pauline to some place that was neither hallowed nor cursed by past hours, and avoiding familiar ways, they reached a barren cup-shaped field shut off from the road by a spinney of firs that offered such a dry and draughty shade as made the field even in the hot sun of afternoon more tolerable. They sat down on the sour stony land among the ragwort and teazles and feverfew. Summer had burnt up this abandoned pasturage, and while they sat in silence Guy rattled from the rank umbels of fools-parsley and hemlock the innumerable seeds that would only profit the rankness of another year. "Well?" he said at last. Pauline looked at him questioningly, and he felt impatient to be sitting here on this sour stony land and wondered how for merely this he could have refused that offer of Persian adventure. Not until now had he realized how much he had been resenting the performance of a duty. "You've hardly told me anything about your time in London," said Pauline. He looked at her sharply in case this might be a prelude to jealous interrogation. "There's nothing much to tell. I settled that my poems should appear anonymously. I'm afraid their publication may otherwise do me more harm than good." "All your poems?" she asked wistfully. He nodded impelled by a strong desire for absolute honesty, though he would have liked to except the poems about her, knowing how much she must be wounded to hear even them called worthless. "Then I've been no good to you at all?" "Of course you have. Because these poems are no good, it doesn't follow that what I write next won't be good. And yet I'm uncertain whether I ought to go on merely writing. I'm beginning to wonder if I oughtn't to have gone out to Persia with Gascony. I refused the job because I thought it would upset you. And so, dearest Pauline, when next you feel jealous, do remember that. Do remember that it is always you who come first. Don't think I'm regretful about Persia. I'm only wondering on _your_ account if I ought to have gone. It would have made our marriage in three years a certainty, but still I hope by journalism to make it certain in one year. Are you glad, my Pauline?" "Yes, of course I'm glad," she answered without fervour. "And you won't be jealous of my friends? Because it's impossible to be in London without friends you know." "I told you I should never be enough." Guy tried not to be irritated by this. "If you would only be reasonable! I realize now that for me at my age it's foolish to withdraw from my contemporaries. I shall stagnate. These two years have not been wasted...." "Yes, they have," she interrupted, "if your poems are not worth your name." "Dearest, these two years may well be the foundation on which I build all the rest of my life." "May they?"