I am sorry for Claire. She spends her life and her strength in making the wrong demands on the wrong people. In middle life she still retains all the passionate desire of youth to be wholly understood. It has never yet occurred to her that, in the majority of human relationships, it is still more desirable not to be wholly understood. When Christopher comes home on leave, she is as frightfully and pathetically excited as though he were not one of the most real and poignant disappointments of her life. And yet, her bitter resentment of Christopher’s emotional inadequacy occupies her mind for hours and hours, and days and nights, and fills pages of her diaries, and reams of her notepaper, besides forming a sort of standing item in the list of miseries with which it is her nightly habit to keep herself awake. (Like all neurasthenics, Claire is always complaining of sleepless nights). Christopher, having spent part of each of his previous furloughs with us, is always looked upon as belonging to Cross Loman, and the welcome accorded to Captain Patch was of course extended also to him by the whole neighborhood. It was I who suggested, tactlessly enough, that Mary and her children should come up to dinner on the evening after Christopher’s arrival. Claire’s enormous dark eyes were turned upon me with tragic reproachfulness. “His second evening with me? They can come next week, if they like.” Unfortunately, before the close of his first evening with us Christopher said: “Why didn’t you have Mary and the two kids here? Let’s walk down and see them after dinner.” “Certainly,” said Claire, her lips compressed, her spirit descended into fathomless depths of depression. But Christopher, the sturdy and, to be honest, rather stupid Christopher, has no clue to Claire’s mercurial sensitiveness. When she is most profoundly wounded by his matter-of-factness, Christopher regards her pregnant silence and her tragic eyes as an all too common phenomenon which he describes as “Old Claire being a bit put out about something or other.” “Mary’s children have grown up, you know,” I said to Christopher. “Martyn is twenty-one, and Sallie is now a medical student. She wants to specialize, eventually, as a psycho-analyst.” “Is she clever?” said Christopher, astounded. “Very.” Claire did not look delighted. “I’m not so sure, Miles, that Sallie is really very clever. She’s sharp, in a way, and of course she thinks herself tremendously clever, but all that talk, and the opinionative way in which she lays down the law, doesn’t impress me very much. Sallie and Martyn are both crude in many ways.” “But is Sallie really going to be a lady doctor?” “So she thinks at present,” replied Claire, with a tolerant smile that I think relieved her feelings. “Girls have these wonderful opportunities nowadays. I’ve sometimes thought that if it had been possible, I ought to have gone in for that kind of career myself. I believe I’ve got a natural turn for that sort of thing.”