They are both perfectly satisfied once they have found a label, and affixed it, to any situation. I should like to see Martyn or Sallie--but especially Sallie--in love. There are times when I believe that she is quite incapable of it. She would pin down and analyze every symptom of her condition and then discuss it exhaustively, and very likely write a book about it. Perhaps passion could survive all this. I am not prepared to say that it could not, for I am conscious that the understanding of one generation cannot project itself into that of another, whatever Claire may say about the experience of a lifetime, which in reality has nothing whatever to do with it. Once upon a time, Martyn Ambrey did bring a very young girl, with shingled hair and most beautiful slim ankles, to stay with his mother for a week-end. They went out on his motor bicycle all Sunday, and that evening--when the girl was out of the room--Martyn said casually to Mary and Sallie: “Lois has plenty of brains, but I didn’t realize how conventional her upbringing has made her. She’d insist upon having her children baptized.” On Monday morning he took her away again on the carrier of his motor bicycle, and that--so far as I know--was the end of it. Mary said that Lois, from start to finish, remained as demure as a Victorian school girl. They have their own standards, no doubt. Mary says so, and leaves it at that. But Claire says, in one and the same breath, that the Lois and Martyn type do not know the meaning of reality, and are incapable of recognizing it when they meet it, and that their attitude of detachment is all a pose. Perhaps she envies them their undoubted immunity from the perpetual emotional turmoil in which her own life has been spent. But, on the other hand, there was bitter and passionate envy in her condemnation of Mrs. Harter. I could understand that, in a way. Claire, like many another woman who is more or less incapable of self-command, holds the theory that this lack of discipline constitutes a special and peculiar claim upon Providence. Only a supreme call, they hold, can bring forth the supreme response of which they feel themselves to be capable. Failing that, it is impossible that they should fulfil themselves. They go through life with a sense of frustration. Claire has far too much perception not to appraise an atmospheric value very quickly. She knew quite well that Bill Patch and Mrs. Harter were not engaged upon the odious pastime, so odiously described by Dolly Kendal, of “getting up a flirtation.” Bill Patch himself, quite unconsciously, made one see that. He did not very often speak Mrs. Harter’s name, but when he did, it was like an electric spark in the room. “What will happen?” Nancy Fazackerly murmured to me once, so vaguely that I half wondered if she knew that she was speaking aloud. “You think something _will_ happen? Sometimes these things die of themselves, you know.”