There was nothing deliberately offensive to Gladys or to God in this compromise. Christine dared not risk upsetting God (if He existed) with her first letter. Nor dared she send Gladys--who was a rake and a cynic--the tumbled hymn and song and stutter of thanksgiving, which God (He must exist, if He sent me Douglas!) might commend as truthful. [IV] URSULA was jealous of Christine. Stretched and wry with jealousy. And especially of Christine going to bed down the passage and the three little steps, into her small room with the white walls, hearing Doug’s good-night voice and look into solitude with her. Morning’s awakening, to Ursula, was always a first sharp spring to the mind’s realization of Christine’s lazy, englamoured awakening in the room; and then a desperate longing to turn back, nauseated, from the flat, heavy day to come ... to burrow her head once more into night’s quiet dark wrappings ... until a shout from beside her, and a colossal leap and thump of bedclothes and Doug combined, on to the floor, proclaimed that her husband was awake and up, in full possession of his _joie de vivre_. One afternoon on their way home from the cove, Doug and Christine quarreled: “----I don’t care. It _is_ dirty to let a dog lick your mouth.” “He jumps up. And anyway, it’s not like a strange dog. Hi--Rough--Rough--good feller then----” Rough, excited by his master’s shouts and gesticulations, jumped again and again at Doug’s face, with frantic, ill-directed dabs. “It may not be a strange dog,” Chris insisted, funnily fastidious on this point, “but the tongue he’s licking you with has been in some damned strange places.” “I say, little girl, I--I wish you wouldn’t swear.” “I wish you’d learn to be clean, then.” “Clean?” “Men! They’d die if they missed their hot bath and their cold plunge and all the rest of it. Your sort of men.” She rolled over from her back on to her front in the short grass dotted by Mrs. Thomas’ second crop of haycocks; with chin propped in her hands, she gazed upwards at Doug, and perversely, from her happiness in him, tried anew to prod him to anger. “Baths aren’t everything, when you let a horrid dog run about with his face in the dust and then let him--let him----” she was shy of using the word kiss again. “It’s more than dirty, it’s filthy,” she finished, half crying with the queer rich excitement of being in love. “What’s the difference?” he teased her.