But after all, Hal was all right. She had given him back to the world as a complete specimen of hero--a careless, lordly, invulnerable being, good-natured, with a voice of lazy authority. Anything so complete was surely precious, though it was said that only suffering and humiliation enriched the soul ... but so many people with doubtlessly enriched souls, yet dragged about, to all appearances maimed and burdened and spoilt. So might not an occasional Hal remain splendidly poised, neither fretted by consciousness, nor torn by imagination? And Ursula had achieved that for him. She had power. There was sudden dazzlement in the thought.... She lifted her head proudly.... To have secret vision, and to act on it, swiftly, clearly, successfully ... why, she was almost God! The luminous moment was swept into grey commonplace again, and only a disconsolate little girl in a taxi was on her way to the station. But she broke into a happy gurgle of laughter, remembering how Lottie had tried to deal with the situation by arranging pins in a pattern on Aunt Lavvy’s cushion. PART II “DOUG” [I] URSULA’S husband waited for her to speak. But she laughed instead. Just a low, thrilled, secret little laugh, very peculiarly hers. It made Doug uncomfortable. Because by all the laws of commonplace she ought to have been working up for a scene. And he was quite ready to call himself a despicable brute, and had taken off his coat to do so--he always felt bigger and more virile and primitive in his shirt sleeves, than in a sober dinner-jacket. Doug Barrison had roughed it so much, that, metaphorically, he still swung a perpetual axe with which to build a log cabin for his woman. “By God, Teddy, it’s hot tonight. I’d like--I’d like to be beating down the Channel, with the deck lifting and straining under my feet.” She dismissed the deck as momentarily unimportant. “Doug----” He sat on the edge of the bed; it creaked under his weight. Ursula leant back against the pillows, hands clasped behind her head. “If I were you, and you were me, what would you do about it, Doug?” “I’ve been a vile, hulking, despicable brute,” he began. “Oh, no, dear, nothing as powerful as that. Because you can’t help it, can you?” “Not in this world full of girls,” he confessed, with sudden understanding that she understood. How mischievously attractive she was, with that wise little smile flickering round her lips, and her profound mermaid eyes. Teddy--Ursula--his teddy-bear--the nickname was obvious. She was so much more to him than Monica and Kate and--and Doreen--oh, all the procession!