e went away and left me once. But he
came back. He can't really do without me."

"You don't know how he'll hate you if you come between him and what he
wants most."

"_I_ used to be what he wanted most."

"Well--it's his honour now."

"That's what they all say, Michael and Anthony, and Dorothy. They're men
and they don't know. Dorothy's more a man than a woman.

"But you're different. I thought you might help me to keep him--they say
you've got some tremendous secret. And this is the way you go on!"

"I wouldn't help you to keep him if I could. I wouldn't have kept Nicky
for all the world. Aunt Frances wouldn't have kept him. She wants
Michael to go."

"She doesn't. If she says she does she lies. All the women are lying.
Either they don't care--they're just _lumps_, with no hearts and no
nerves in them--or they lie.

"It's this rotten pose of patriotism. They get it from each other,
like--like a skin disease. No wonder it makes Michael sick."

"Men going out--thousands and thousands and thousands--to be cut about
and blown to bits, and their women safe at home, snuffling and
sentimentalizing--

"Lying--lying--lying."

"Who wouldn't? Who wouldn't tell one big, thumping, sacred lie, if it
sends them off happy?"

"But we're not lying. It's the most real thing that ever happened to us.
I'm glad Nicky's going. I shall be glad all my life."

"It comes easy to you. You're a child. You've never grown up. You were a
miserable little mummy when you were born. And now you look as if every
drop of blood was drained out of your body in your teens. If that's
your tremendous secret you can keep it yourself. It seems to be all
you've got."

"If it wasn't for Aunt Frances and Uncle Anthony it _would_ have been
all I've got."

Vera looked at her daughter and saw her for the first time as she really
was. The child was not a child any more. She was a woman, astonishingly
and dangerously mature. Veronica's sorrowful, lucid eyes took her in;
they neither weighed her nor measured her, but judged her, off-hand with
perfect accuracy.

"Poor little Ronny. I've been a beastly mother to you. Still, you can
thank my beastliness for Aunt Frances and Uncle Anthony."

Veronica thought: "How funny she is about it!" She said, "It's your
beastliness to poor Larry that I mind. You know what you're keeping
him for."

* * * * *

She knew; and Lawrence knew.

That night he told her that if he hadn't