"How you _understand_. You're amazing: for a man who tries to be a sea-anemone!" She said: "Yes, this is the first holiday I've had for four solid months; six hours a day typing; four hours a day work for the movement; three, housework and gardening; three, mother reading out her day's work for slips of the pen. . . . And on the top of it the raid and the anxiety. . . . Dreadful anxiety, you know. Suppose mother _had_ gone to prison. . . . Oh, I'd have gone mad. . . . Week-days and Sundays. . . ." She stopped: "I'm apologising, really," she went on. "Of course I ought not to have talked to you like that. You, a great Panjandrum; saving the country with your statistics and all. . . . It _did_ make you a rather awful figure, you know . . . and the relief to find you're . . . oh, a man like oneself with feet of clay. . . . I'd dreaded this drive. . . . I'd have dreaded it dreadfully if I hadn't been in such a dread about Gertie and the police. And, if I hadn't let off steam I should have had to jump out and run beside the cart. . . . I could still . . ." "You couldn't," Tietjens said. "You couldn't see the cart." They had just run into a bank of solid fog that seemed to encounter them with a soft, ubiquitous blow. It was blinding; it was deadening to sounds; it was in a sense mournful; but it was happy, too, in its romantic unusualness. They couldn't see the gleam of the lamps; they could hardly hear the step of the horse; the horse had fallen at once to a walk. They agreed that neither of them could be responsible for losing the way; in the circumstances that was impossible. Fortunately the horse would take them somewhere; it had belonged to a local higgler: a man that used the roads buying poultry for re-sale. . . . They agreed that they had no responsibilities, and after that went on for unmeasured hours in silence; the mist growing, but very, very gradually, more luminous. . . . Once or twice, at a rise in the road, they saw again the stars and the moon, but mistily. On the fourth occasion they had emerged into the silver lake; like mermen rising to the surface of a tropical sea. . . . Tietjens had said: "You'd better get down and take the lamp. See if you can find a milestone; I'd get down myself, but you might not be able to hold the horse. . . ." She had plunged in . . .