her for your own
children?"

It was as if she said: "If you care so much about Veronica, why don't
you marry _her_?"

"It's a bit too late to think of that now," said poor Nicky.

Because he had cared so much about Veronica he was going to marry
Desmond.

* * * * *

"I couldn't do anything with him," Vera said afterwards. "Nothing I said
made the least impression on him."

That however (as both Vera and Nicky were aware), was not strictly true.
But, in spite of Nicky's terrible capacity for remembering, she stuck to
it that Desmond's affair would have made no impression on him if it had
not been for that other absurd affair of the Professor's wife. And it
would have been better, Lawrence Stephen said, for Nicky to have made
love to all the married women in Cambridge than for him to marry
Phyllis Desmond.

These reflections were forced on them by the ironic coincidence of
Nicky's engagement with his rehabilitation at the University.

Drayton's forecast was correct; Nicky's brother Michael had not been
removed from Nicky's College eight months before letters of apology and
restitution came. But both apology and restitution came too late.

For by that time Nicky had married Desmond.

XIV

After Nicholas, Veronica; and after Veronica, Michael.

Anthony and Frances sat in the beautiful drawing-room of their house,
one on each side of the fireplace. They had it all to themselves, except
for the cats, Tito and Timmy, who crouched on the hearthrug at their
feet. Frances's forehead and her upper lip were marked delicately with
shallow, tender lines; Anthony's eyes had crow's-feet at their corners,
pointing to grey hairs at his temples. To each other their faces were as
they had been fifteen years ago. The flight of time was measured for
them by the generations of the cats that had succeeded Jane and Jerry.
For still in secret they refused to think of their children as grown-up.

Dorothy was upstairs in her study writing articles for the Women's
Franchise Union. They owed it to her magnanimity that they had one child
remaining with them in the house. John was at Cheltenham; Veronica was
in Dresden. Michael was in Germany, too, at that School of Forestry at
Aschaffenburg which Anthony had meant for Nicky. They couldn't bear to
think where Nicky was.

When Frances thought about her children now her mind went backwards. If
only they hadn't grown-up; if only they could have stayed