"Doesn't that just prove it?" she cried triumphantly. "If she'd had a baby the first year she'd probably have forgotten all about her book. But when the second year came, and the third, and the fourth--well, thank God I've got my Jennie at school; but I can guess. These things get worse for a woman instead of better as time goes on. And now she's forty-one. I can't say I see very much mystery about those ten years." "But," I said, "all this rests on the assumption that at one time they were lovers. He certainly didn't speak as if that had been so." "Ah, then he has spoken of her! What did he say?" "Just what you'd expect him to say, of course--that he's awfully sick he's upset her without intending to, and wants to explain." She mused. Then, with the most disconcerting promptitude, she laughed and threw her whole castle down to the ground. "Well, I suppose I'm wrong. If that was really the colour of the Bear's hide I don't suppose he'd be a friend of yours, and I certainly shouldn't want to meet him. It's because I'm probably wrong that it's so fascinating. I don't want to be right just yet. No, George, all I said this afternoon was that it was an interesting situation, and I defy you to say it isn't. Now tell me lots and lots about him." But that was impossible. Once more every sane particle in me was beginning to doubt whether I had been in Cambridge Circus that evening at all. Moreover, one other thing had struck me with something of a shock. This was those ten years during which Mrs Bassett had nursed her anger against him. Those ten years, for him, did not exist, or existed only with the most amazing qualifications. As mere time they did not exist, but as experience they did. For him the _Arrow_ and the _Ape_ were both contemporaneous and not. In one sense ten years separated them, but in another her retort had come back to him as it were by return of post. Desperately I tried to envisage a situation so utterly beyond reason. I tried to set it out in my mind in parallel columns: He was thirty-five when he wrote She was thirty-one when she read his _Ape_. it and began her rejoinder. He was forty-five when he read She was forty-one at the time the _Arrow_. that he read it. But he was thirty-five again. She was still forty-one. He was going on getting younger. She would get no younger. He was convinced he would die at She---- sixteen. But I had to give it up. It made my head ache. It shocked my sense of the unities. And then fortunately there came a revulsion.