They looked up, startled, and then laughed. “What time is it?” asked Rose-Ann. “I’ve been telling Phyllis the history of our marriage....” So that was what they were talking about! Half-appeased, at having been after all included in the conversation, he looked at his watch. “Seven-thirty,” he said. “I have to have my dummy at the printer’s at eight,” said Rose-Ann. “I wonder if you will take it there for me, Felix, while I take a bath. And we’ll all meet at breakfast. Clive and Phyllis are going to have breakfast at Henrici’s, and we’ll join them. Will you?” Felix went back to the studio for the dummy. As he went, he carried in his mind the picture he had seen when he opened the door of Phyllis’s room—Phyllis sitting on the floor at Rose-Ann’s feet precisely as a few hours earlier she had sat at his, with what must have been the same worshipful expression on her face as she listened to Rose-Ann’s words. Rose-Ann had also probably been deciding her young destinies for her. Felix laughed. It was certainly odd enough! Yes, but what ideas had Rose-Ann been putting into her head? What kind of story had Rose-Ann told her about their marriage? Had Rose-Ann talked about their mutual “freedom”? That theme would have accounted for Phyllis’s rapt and devout attention. It was what Phyllis wanted to hear, what she wanted to believe—that love could be like that! Anyway, he was glad that Phyllis and Rose-Ann were friends. 3 The four of them breakfasted together at Henrici’s, and at noon Phyllis was inducted into the magic circle of their mid-day comradeship at the corner table in the little Hungarian restaurant; and that afternoon they took the train for Woods Point—whither Phyllis had to go as it were in disguise, or at least stealthily, for her family must not know that she was spending the night at Clive’s: an ironic precaution, for their relations were still as vexatiously and chastely intellectual as they had been in the earliest days of their clandestine meetings. In spite of their need of sleep—and fortified by the thought that tomorrow was Sunday and they could sleep as long as they liked—they sat up until all hours, talking. It was like a reunion, and the memory of their first meeting here touched it with romantic suggestion. The promise of comradeship which had been implicit in that first meeting, obscured at the time by the anxieties and discomforts of a tribal ceremonial, had now, after so long an interval, come true. They felt that they had discovered each other, to a new extent, in this new grouping. It is not often that two couples can happily coalesce into that infinitely fluid and various arrangement, a group of four. But it had quite unmistakably and thrillingly happened! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ XLV. Foursome 1