Two white ponies were coming through a wood, with a violent sun striking between the trees. Each tree was painted as a solemn dark column with four twisting branches on each of which hung four formal emerald leaves. But the ponies were round and fat, with flowing manes and tails and little hooves uplifted. There was a classical rotundity about their haunches; their necks were thick and curved. Geoffrey looked at them and thought how much happier they would have been frolicking in some flowery glade, or prancing round a little copse with a white temple in the centre. Against these stark blue-brown trees they became fantastic: the wood seemed real and permanent, the ponies--ironically robust--were creatures of an hour, a fashion, a convention. "It's unkind to the ponies," he said, turning to Helen. "They're wretched in that wood. They want to caper in a nice little meadow full of daisies and buttercups." "Daisies and buttercups," repeated Helen broodingly. "Yes, I suppose they do. Anyhow, it's no good at all. I thought I had discovered something when I began, but half-way through I lost my idea. That's why I haven't finished it. Perhaps after all I'll marry you and have a red plush dining-room and hang that over the mantelpiece." Her voice was sullen, her face pinched and plain. Geoffrey was conscious of a profound and weary melancholy settling on his spirits. He looked at Helen who returned his look suspiciously, like a stranger. Their marriage seemed remote and improbable. Vaguely he contemplated kissing her, but the effort was too great in his dazed and empty state. "I'll ring up," he said disjointedly. "I must go now. Or I'll come and see you; perhaps Sunday would do, would it? Anyhow I must go now; I'm so tired I don't know what I'm saying." "Yes, come on Sunday. I'll give you some supper. And don't even mention my name to anyone. I don't know yet what I'm going to do about you." Her tone was withdrawn and hostile; it matched her suspicious glance. "Good-night, Helen," said Geoffrey wearily, and the blue door shut behind him as she said, "Good-night, Geoffrey Greene." II Six months of alternating ecstasy and despair with a persistent undercurrent of nervous fatigue, so wrought upon Geoffrey's healthy frame that when he caught influenza in the spring of 1924, he was seriously ill and convalescence was long and difficult. The day before he took ill when he was feeling particularly low and inadequate, Helen had come to a serious and, she proclaimed, a final decision. It coincided with a change in her method of painting. She had abandoned the genre of conventional subjects placed in a futurist setting of which the two white ponies were the last example, and had turned instead to poster painting. After some months of very hard work she had succeeded with a design which momentarily at least, satisfied her exacting standards.