e sneezed at, wasn't it? Anyhow
she was in no hurry, and she was not going to take the first step. She was
glad to see how fond he was growing of the baby, though it tickled her a
good deal; it was comic that he should set so much store on another man's
child. He was peculiar and no mistake.

But one or two things surprised her. She had been used to his
subservience: he was only too glad to do anything for her in the old days,
she was accustomed to see him cast down by a cross word and in ecstasy at
a kind one; he was different now, and she said to herself that he had not
improved in the last year. It never struck her for a moment that there
could be any change in his feelings, and she thought it was only acting
when he paid no heed to her bad temper. He wanted to read sometimes and
told her to stop talking: she did not know whether to flare up or to sulk,
and was so puzzled that she did neither. Then came the conversation in
which he told her that he intended their relations to be platonic, and,
remembering an incident of their common past, it occurred to her that he
dreaded the possibility of her being pregnant. She took pains to reassure
him. It made no difference. She was the sort of woman who was unable to
realise that a man might not have her own obsession with sex; her
relations with men had been purely on those lines; and she could not
understand that they ever had other interests. The thought struck her that
Philip was in love with somebody else, and she watched him, suspecting
nurses at the hospital or people he met out; but artful questions led her
to the conclusion that there was no one dangerous in the Athelny
household; and it forced itself upon her also that Philip, like most
medical students, was unconscious of the sex of the nurses with whom his
work threw him in contact. They were associated in his mind with a faint
odour of iodoform. Philip received no letters, and there was no girl's
photograph among his belongings. If he was in love with someone, he was
very clever at hiding it; and he answered all Mildred's questions with
frankness and apparently without suspicion that there was any motive in
them.

"I don't believe he's in love with anybody else," she said to herself at
last.

It was a relief, for in that case he was certainly still in love with her;
but it made his behaviour very puzzling. If he was going to treat her like
that why did he ask her to come and live at the flat? It was unnatural.