first, it had only seemed quite unnatural.
Everything had stopped being natural when the small creature in lawn,
only the height of his knee, had been torn reluctantly away from its
hold on his trousers. This parting had made Winn feel as if something
inside him was being unfairly handled.

There was nothing he could get hold of in Peter to promise security, and
the only thing that Peter could grasp was the trousers, which had had to
be forcibly removed from him.

Later on Peter would be consoled by a Teddy Bear or the hearth brush,
but Winn had had to go before Peter was consoled, and without the
resources of the hearth brush.

Estelle wept bitterly in the hall, but Winn hadn't minded that; he had
long ago come to the conclusion that Estelle had a taste for tears, just
as some people liked boiled eggs for breakfast. He simply patted her on
the shoulder and looked away from her while she kissed him.

He had enjoyed starting from Charing Cross, intimidating the porters and
giving the man who registered his luggage dispassionate and unfavorable
pieces of his mind. But when he was once fairly off he began to have a
new feeling. It came over him when he was out of England and had crossed
the small gray strip of formless familiar sea--the sea itself always
seemed to Winn to belong much more to England than to France--so much so
that it annoyed him at Boulogne to have to submit to being thought
possibly unblasphemous by porters. He began to feel alone. Up till now
he had always seen his way. There had been fellows to do things with and
animals; even marriage, though disconcerting, had not set him adrift. He
had been cramped by it, but not disintegrated. Now what seemed to have
happened was that he had been cut loose. There wasn't the regiment or
even a staff college to fall back upon. There wasn't a trail to follow
or horses to gentle; his very dog had had to be left behind because of
the ridiculous restrictions of canine quarantine.

It really was an extraordinarily uncomfortable feeling, as if he were a
damned ghost poking about in a new world full of surprises. It was quite
possible that he might find himself among bounders. He had always
avoided bounders, but that had been comparatively easy in a world where
everybody observed an unspoken, inviolable code. If people didn't know
the ropes, they found it simpler to go, and Winn had sometimes assisted
them to find it simpler; but he saw that now bounders could really tur