He found on waking next morning that, with all the sense of calamity that lay like a physical weight on his heart, the sense of beauty, of something gained, still shone round him. He needed light, for his path was dark with perplexity. Alix had left him yesterday to go to her room, and to bed. In the few words that passed between him and his mother on her return from London the child’s shattered state was sufficiently explained by Toppie’s decision. Toppie’s decision, he felt, explained his state, too. Mrs. Bradley heard of it with consternation. “A nun, Giles! A convent!” she had gasped. Generations of candid Protestantism spoke in the exclamation. Nuns and convents were, to Mrs. Bradley, strange, alien, almost sinister anachronisms. Dim pictures from Fox’s “Book of Martyrs” and the “Pilgrim’s Progress” floated across her mind as she heard Giles. And tears rose to her eyes as she saw an end, not only to all his hopes, but to every link that bound them to Toppie. There was no need to explain anything further to his mother. He had to face at breakfast the dismay of Ruth and Rosemary. “Poor Alix! She’s bowled out completely.—Says she doesn’t want any breakfast; but I’m going to take her up a tray,” said Rosemary. “No, not kidneys, Jack; if you’re ill in bed you don’t want kidneys;—a boiled egg’s the thing, and toast, and tea. She looks rotten; perfectly rotten. She’s awfully fond of Toppie, you see.” “I suppose there’s no good whatever in my going over and seeing what I can say to Toppie,” Ruth ventured to her brother when breakfast was over. “If she’d only let herself be psycho-analysed by Miriam Stott it would be sure to help. Miriam is extraordinary, you know. She’s a friend of the Burnetts; she does it professionally. Toppie is just a case for her.” “My dear Ruth,” said Giles, “I’m sure you mean well; but you are sometimes an arrant ass.” “It’s all very well,” said Ruth to her sister when Giles had gone to shut himself in his study; “ass or no ass, I’ve thought for some time now that Toppie was quite liable to go off her chump. It’s sexual repression coming out in religious mania; plain as day.” “Sexual repression!” Rosemary stared. “What an extraordinary thing to say, Ruth! Toppie’s no more repressed than you or I.” “Yes, she is. Sensible people like you and me work it off, sublimate it, in games and work and all sorts of healthy activities, whereas poor foolish Toppie has always moped and brooded at home, never knowing what she was or what she wanted. You’re old enough to read Freud now, Rosemary, and the sooner you do the better. He will explain it all to you.” Ruth’s universe was of the latest tabloid variety.