r family. When are
your poems coming out? I heard from Tom Anstruther the other day.
He seems rather hurt that an attache at Madrid is not given an
opportunity of adjusting or upsetting the balance of power in
Europe. I'll try to get down for a week-end, but I'm betraying my
order by voting against an obscurantist majority whenever I can,
and plotting hard against the liberties of landowners when I'm
not voting. However, when the House flies away to search for
Summer I'll drop out of the flock and perch a while on your roof.
One thing I will promise, which is that when I'm Prime Minister
you shall be offered the Laurel at L200 a year.

Yours ever,
COM.

It was jolly to hear from Comeragh like this, and the letter opened for
Guy a prospect of something that, when he came to think about it,
appeared very much like a retreat. He realized abruptly that the strain
of the last two months had been playing upon his nerves to such an
extent that the notion of leaving Wychiford was no longer very
distasteful. The realization of his potential apostasy came with rather
a shock, and he felt that he ought somehow to atone to Pauline for the
disloyalty towards her his attitude seemed to involve. He began to go to
church again in a desperate endeavor to pursue the phantom that she
called faith, but this very endeavor only made more apparent the vital
difference in their relations with life. She always had for his attempts
to capture something worth while for himself in religion a kind of
questioning anxiety which was faintly irritating; and though he always
pushed the problem hastily out of sight, the fact that he could now be
irritated by her was dolefully significant.

All through this month of maddening east wind Guy felt that he stood
upon the verge of a catastrophe, and the despatch of the poems which at
first had done so much to help matters along was now only another source
of vexation. Formerly he had always possessed the refuge of work, but in
this perpetual uncertainty he could not settle down to anything fresh,
and the expectation every morning of his poems being once again rejected
was a handicap to the whole day. Partly to plunge himself into a
reaction and partly to avoid and even to crush their spiritual
divergence, Guy always made love passionately to Pauline during these
days. He was aware that she was terribly tried by this, but the
knowledge made him more self