g, but I don't want to marry if I'm going to be no better off than
what I am now. I don't see the use of it."

"If you cared for me you wouldn't think of all that."

"P'raps not."

He was silent. He drank a glass of wine in order to get rid of the choking
in his throat.

"Look at that girl who's just going out," said Mildred. "She got them furs
at the Bon Marche at Brixton. I saw them in the window last time I went
down there."

Philip smiled grimly.

"What are you laughing at?" she asked. "It's true. And I said to my aunt
at the time, I wouldn't buy anything that had been in the window like
that, for everyone to know how much you paid for it."

"I can't understand you. You make me frightfully unhappy, and in the next
breath you talk rot that has nothing to do with what we're speaking
about."

"You are nasty to me," she answered, aggrieved. "I can't help noticing
those furs, because I said to my aunt..."

"I don't care a damn what you said to your aunt," he interrupted
impatiently.

"I wish you wouldn't use bad language when you speak to me Philip. You
know I don't like it."

Philip smiled a little, but his eyes were wild. He was silent for a while.
He looked at her sullenly. He hated, despised, and loved her.

"If I had an ounce of sense I'd never see you again," he said at last. "If
you only knew how heartily I despise myself for loving you!"

"That's not a very nice thing to say to me," she replied sulkily.

"It isn't," he laughed. "Let's go to the Pavilion."

"That's what's so funny in you, you start laughing just when one doesn't
expect you to. And if I make you that unhappy why d'you want to take me to
the Pavilion? I'm quite ready to go home."

"Merely because I'm less unhappy with you than away from you."

"I should like to know what you really think of me."

He laughed outright.

"My dear, if you did you'd never speak to me again."

LXIII

Philip did not pass the examination in anatomy at the end of March. He and
Dunsford had worked at the subject together on Philip's skeleton, asking
each other questions till both knew by heart every attachment and the
meaning of every nodule and groove on the human bones; but in the
examination room Philip was seized with panic, and failed to give right
answers to questions from a sudden fear that they might be wrong. He knew
he was ploughed and did not even trouble to go up to the building next day
to see whether his number was up. The second