Here is Young Wriford not quite so youthful as a few months before. He has lost his keen interest in games and recreation. He thinks nothing but work, breathes nothing but work; most significant symptom of all, sometimes dreams work or lies awake at night a little because his mind is occupied with work. That in itself, though, is nothing: he likes it, he relishes every moment of it. What accounts more directly for the slight loss of youthfulness, what increasingly interferes with his relish of his work, is what comes up from the Filmer household at Surbiton in form of frequent letters from Alice; is what greets him there when he fulfils Alice's entreaties by giving up his every week-end to spending it as Dragon Mrs. Filmer's guest. The letters begin to worry him, to get on his nerves, to give him for some reason that he cannot quite determine a harassing feeling of self-reproach. They are inordinately long; they consist from beginning to end of a recital of passages-at-arms between Alice and her parents; they seem to hint, when in replies to them he tries to reason away the troubles, that it is all very well for Young Wriford, who is out of it all and free and comfortable and happy, but that if he were here--! "Well, but what more can I do than I am doing?" Young Wriford cries aloud to himself on receipt of such a letter; and thenceforward that question and alternate fits of impatience and of self-reproach over it, and letters expressive first of one frame of mind and then, in remorse, of the other--thenceforward these occupy more and more of his thoughts, and more and more mix with his work and disturb his peace of mind. Why is all this put upon him? Why can't he be left alone? V Here is Young Wriford in love. She is eighteen. Her name is Brida. She is working for the stage at a school of dramatic art quite close to Gamber's. He gets to know her through a friend at Gamber's whose sister is also at the school. Young Wriford and Brida happen to lunch every day--meeting without arrangement--at the same tea-shop off the Strand. She leaves her school at the same hour he leaves Gamber's in the evening, and they happen to meet every evening--without arrangement--and he walks home with her across St. James's Park to a Belgravia flat where she lives with her married sister. Young Wriford thinks of her face, day and night, as like a flower--radiant and fresh and fragrant as a flower at dawn; and of her spirit as a flower--gay as a posy, fragrant as apple-blossom, fresh as a rose, a rose! And so one Friday evening as they cross the Park together, when suddenly she challenges his unusual silence with: "I say, you're jolly glum to-night," he replies with a plump: "I'm going to call you Brida." "Oh, goodness!" says Brida and begins to walk very fast. "Do you mind?" She shakes her head. "Don't let's hurry. Stop here a moment."