Was he a romantic, then? Well ... a dependent romantic, dependent upon his setting. He could understand how a traveller, staying in safe, prosy, comfortable London because his old mother wanted him, would chafe and get restless for hard winds and bare horizons and the hot-coloured East. But a retired grocer fretful for his cheeses and balls of string again--“Not much romance about cheese, is there? What beats me, is how the poor little chap stuck to trade all those years. I’d have broken away...” it was a constant miracle to Doug, how few people did indeed by their bodies break away. The spirit which had broken away was invisible to him. It may have been by sheer luck that Douglas Barrison was tanned and hard-bitten, or it may have been that his desire for this type of looks was powerful enough to achieve them. Tall, burly--he would have preferred to be lean, though!--his hearty boyish voice contradicting a certain remote sadness in his deep-set eyes; hard brown skin and even a small white scar ... no wonder he impressed Ursula romantically. Ursula, at eighteen, was a baby still, proud that her notions of romance swung with free steps past the pale sentimentalities of an earlier generation of schoolgirls. Her definition of a man--after she had met Doug--was a massive and inarticulate being, who would rather be cold than warm, rather fighting than lapped in unperilous peace. They confided in each other a craving for loneliness and adventure. “You’re the first girl I’ve met who understood all that. God, if I had you in ...” he became geographical. “Four corners to my bed, Four angels round my head----” De Vere Stacpoole, Robert Service, Jack London and Joseph Conrad were the four angels who ought to be grouped round the bed in any symbolic representation of Doug. Not that he ever read them much; big, simple, rolling-stone sort of men read their Bible and perhaps Shakespeare. They seem to find Shakespeare easy reading, even scenes in which the Fool makes conversation. Ursula was not fond of reading, either. So that their courtship did not include enthusiastic quotations and miraculous discovery of mutual favourites. Instead, he planned a love-scene in every setting that captivated by its distance from the actual verandah of the Barrison home.... And yet, it was not such a bad verandah. He won Ursula on scenery, and on his restlessness which leapt to hers and exultantly joined hands with it. Now they had been married eight years, and all their journeyings had been for “holidays,” Easter and Summer, tethered at one end by Pall Mall and the Knapsack Club. Doug liked his genial post as secretary there; the careless come and go; a drink with a fellow just back from Tibet, a chat with another over his plans for a toddle into the Amazon region--“Lucky devil, wish I could come with you!” from Doug.