edicine, midwifery, and surgery, the interest of
which was more vivid than the anatomy and physiology with which he had
been hitherto concerned. Philip looked forward with interest to the rest
of the curriculum. Nor did he want to have to confess to Mildred that he
had failed: though the examination was difficult and the majority of
candidates were ploughed at the first attempt, he knew that she would
think less well of him if he did not succeed; she had a peculiarly
humiliating way of showing what she thought.

Mildred sent him a postcard to announce her safe arrival, and he snatched
half an hour every day to write a long letter to her. He had always a
certain shyness in expressing himself by word of mouth, but he found he
could tell her, pen in hand, all sorts of things which it would have made
him feel ridiculous to say. Profiting by the discovery he poured out to
her his whole heart. He had never been able to tell her before how his
adoration filled every part of him so that all his actions, all his
thoughts, were touched with it. He wrote to her of the future, the
happiness that lay before him, and the gratitude which he owed her. He
asked himself (he had often asked himself before but had never put it into
words) what it was in her that filled him with such extravagant delight;
he did not know; he knew only that when she was with him he was happy, and
when she was away from him the world was on a sudden cold and gray; he
knew only that when he thought of her his heart seemed to grow big in his
body so that it was difficult to breathe (as if it pressed against his
lungs) and it throbbed, so that the delight of her presence was almost
pain; his knees shook, and he felt strangely weak as though, not having
eaten, he were tremulous from want of food. He looked forward eagerly to
her answers. He did not expect her to write often, for he knew that
letter-writing came difficultly to her; and he was quite content with the
clumsy little note that arrived in reply to four of his. She spoke of the
boarding-house in which she had taken a room, of the weather and the baby,
told him she had been for a walk on the front with a lady-friend whom she
had met in the boarding-house and who had taken such a fancy to baby, she
was going to the theatre on Saturday night, and Brighton was filling up.
It touched Philip because it was so matter-of-fact. The crabbed style, the
formality of the matter, gave him a queer desire to laugh and to t