“Why should you be so unsympathetic, Felix? Because you are contented, you think everybody else ought to find it easy to achieve the same state? I hope you’re not going to be smug. I’m really sorry for Clive.” “I might be sorry, if I knew what to be sorry about. I haven’t the slightest idea what the trouble is.” “That neurotic girl, of course.” “Neurotic? Do you mean Phyllis? Why, what nonsense!” he exclaimed. “Why nonsense?” she asked. “Because—why—well, it’s just ridiculous!” “After all, Felix, we neither of us know her well enough to be so positive,” said Rose-Ann pacifyingly. “Then why do you say that about her?” “Because I think it, Felix!” she replied with a touch of exasperation. “I really do!” “I can’t understand you,” he said coldly. “What are you children quarrelling about now?” asked Clive, returning. Rose-Ann laughed. “About nothing at all, again. Felix, we are rather absurd. Come, we’ll look at those apartments.—And don’t imagine vain things about our home till you see it, Clive!” 3 To Felix, the apartments seemed just apartments. An apartment couldn’t be a house in the country. And as apartments, these were all that could be expected. The only serious objection to them, indeed, was that the rents were rather high. “Why don’t you like them?” he asked again. “I don’t know. They’re not quite—our kind of place.” “I wish I knew what you meant, Rose-Ann,” he said wistfully. “I’ll try to tell you,” she said, “on the way home.” And on the train, she began: “You saw those people on the other side of the hall at that last place we looked at?” The door had been opened by a fat man with a bulging neck, and they had glimpsed an interior of plush and golden oak, and the rather plump and vapid-looking woman who awaited him there. “Well, those apartments are made for people like that—I mean people without imagination. They take such an apartment and buy some of the furniture that is made to go in it, and they settle down and are contented there. Why not! It has a kitchen, a dining-room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a room to sit in and entertain callers. And that is the whole of their existence—cooking, eating, sleeping, washing their bodies, and showing off to their friends. But that isn’t the whole of our existence.—Felix, I would rather we would eat at a lunch-wagon and sleep on a park bench, than make those things the centre of our lives!” It was not so much her argument that impressed him as the genuine and profound scorn in her tone and manner. He was conscious of a defection of sympathy in himself from the point of view that her words expressed. It might have been himself of a few years ago saying these things so intensely; and yet they seemed like nonsense to him now! But one could not argue about such things in the midst of a trainload of people, the nearest of whom were already beginning to be too much interested in one’s affairs, so he only said, “Yes—I think I understand.”