Lady Mary's marriage made Peter think. Already Vivette was an obsession, serious enough to be noticed by his friends, and to interfere with his work. Peter began to be frightened, and secretly ashamed. His last years seemed all to be bound up with women. Was he never to be free of his foolish sensibility? Was he to fall helplessly from figure to figure as opportunity called him? There was work to do, but his fancy was perpetually caught and held in one monotonous lure. Lady Mary had shown him there were other ends to follow than a personal and perfect mating. He was beginning to feel haunted. There was a murk in his brain--into which thoughts sometimes intruded which he found, in clear moments, to be shabby. They prompted him intimately towards Vivette. Perhaps it would give him peace if once for all he pricked the bubble of his expectation. Why should he not test this vision; pierce rudely in, and pass on? Sex was not all, and if here he fell short of perfection, it was no great matter. He could leave that dream behind, no longer urged about it in a weary circle. He felt at first that this impulse towards weak submission was treason to a secret part of himself that seemed to be waiting, seemed also to know that perfection would come and must find him virginal. But this feeling was less strong with the passing time. He came more and more to cherish the idea of Vivette. Her changing eyes became his only mirror wherein to look for an answer to his question, and when he did not find the answer he began stormily to wonder whether their cryptic shallows might not surrender the secret he desired if adventurously he dived deep enough. This mood always found and left him deeply out of heart. It was part of a general feeling that he was gradually breaking down. Sometimes, in defence, it flung him to an extreme of carefully induced exaltation. When temptation whispered that Vivette was a pleasant creature, and would allow his love, he insisted, to justify his impulse to take her, that surely she must perfectly be his mate. His unconquerable idealism, weakened and gradually beaten down, required that he should thus deceive himself. Through the winter--Atterbury's play still lingered--they frequently spent Sunday evening together in her Soho flat. Vivette alternated between fits of extreme physical energy--when she took exercise in every discovered way--and complete inertia. Midwinter found her at the close of her hibernating--"lying fallow for the spring," she described it. She passed her Sundays curled up in a deep settee by the fire. Peter spent long, drowsy afternoons and evenings reading with her, dropping occasional words, eating light food prepared by a cook who understood that her mistress must on no account be served with anything which required her to sit upright. Peter, who earlier in the year had ridden, rowed, and played tennis with Vivette, did not in the least like her present habits.