"Where will you go then?" "I don't know. Anywhere. By the sea, I think." He suggested the Yorkshire coast, but she said that was too far and she didn't like the North. "Oh! No!" he said. "Want to forget it?" She passed that by. He took down a map, and she looked along the south coast and pitched on a place in Sussex, because it was far from the railway and would therefore be quiet. He left his work, wired to the hotel for rooms, sat and talked to her as she packed, saw her off the next morning and returned to his work, rejoicing in the silence and emptiness of the chambers. He sent her letters on to her without particularly noticing their superscription. On the third day a letter came for her, and he recognized the handwriting as Panoukian's. He sent that on. When his work went swimmingly and his pen raced he wrote to her, long, droll, affectionate epistles: when his work hobbled then he did not write and hardly gave a thought to her. She wrote to him in her awkward hand with gauche, conventional descriptions of the scenery amid which she was living. He read them and they gave him fresh light on education. He was reaching the constructive part of his work, and it began to take shape as an exposition of the methods by which the essential Matilda might have been freed of the diffidence and self-distrust which hemmed her in. That brought him to feminism, and he imagined a description of women in Trafalgar Square screaming in a shrill eloquence for deliverance from the captivity into which they had been cast by the morals of the sand heap. He was keenly interested in this scene, and, as he had sketched it, was not sure that he had the topography of the Square exact. One evening, therefore, he dined at his club, meaning to walk home by the Square and the Strand. He was drawn into an argument and did not set out before ten o'clock. It was one of those nights when heavy clouds lumber low over the city and absorb the light, break the chain of it so that the great arcs are like dotted lanterns, and behind them buildings loom. He turned down Parliament Street to get the full effect of this across the Square, and then came up across and across it, carefully observing how the great thoroughfares lay in relation to the Nelson Column. As, finally, he was crossing to the Strand he was almost dashed over by a taxicab, drew back, looked up, saw his wife gazing startled out of the window. He stared at her, but she did not recognize him and seemed to be entirely absorbed in the fright and shock of the avoided accident. He followed the car with his eyes. It had turned sharply in the middle of the road to pass into the southward stream of traffic. He saw it slow down and draw up outside a huge hotel, and hurried after it. The porter came out and opened the door. Matilda stepped to the pavement, and after her Panoukian. They passed in through the revolving door of the hotel just as he reached the pavement. The porter staggered in with Matilda's portmanteau.