He filled up my glass and said: "Can't understand it a bit--why she's taken up such an extraordinary attitude. But she won't have you--won't have you up to the house at any price--not even for this party. Says she'll walk out if you come.... Awkward, eh?" Of course I suggested that I should consider the invitation cancelled, and after formally protesting, he agreed. (It was what he had intended me to suggest, I could see.) "Decent of you not to mind," he said. "If you ever marry, you'll find it's always best to humour a woman when she begins to take absurd dislikes.... We're going for a month to the Canaries--perhaps that'll do her good." We talked for a while on other topics, and then, just before we separated, he said: "By the way--not been making love to Helen or anything like that, have you?" I assured him that I hadn't, and he laughed. "Thought I'd just ask you, that's all. Don't know that I'd blame you altogether if you _had_ been--she's a wonderful woman, only capricious--absolutely capricious.... Anyhow, no need to worry about it--probably just an attack of nerves. You and I can always meet here when we want, can't we? ... Dam silly creatures, women, eh? Why _do_ we marry them? ..." VII Letters from Terry began to arrive with marvellous regularity every fortnight. If they were a post late I knew there had been an avalanche in the Tirol or a storm in mid-Channel or some other act of God. They were always very short, and nearly always quite uninteresting. They never mentioned Severn or Helen, and never referred to the argument we had had upon the night of the storm. They were, in fact, the sort of letters a public-school boy might write to his mother. Two items they very rarely lacked--a brief reference to continued good health, and a rough summary of the weather. On the few occasions that the former item was omitted, I was free to guess rather than to know that he had been unwell. He didn't mention that he had made or was making any friends; but then, of course, that wasn't the sort of thing that he ever would mention. He didn't even say whether he liked Vienna as a city to live in. One or two people wandered in and out of his letters like characters in a Russian play; there was Karelsky, naturally, and Frau Scholz, who kept the apartment-house where he lodged, and "Mizzi," her daughter... Besides these few--absolutely nobody.... Of miscellaneous information, the most frequent reference was to his progress in the German language. No mention ever of theatres or concerts or operas. He was, I gathered, living the sort of life he had had before meeting Helen, and the fact that it had a Viennese instead of a London setting was not, perhaps, so very important.