ws it."

"Veronica, then."

"Veronica doesn't know what passion is. The poor child's anaemic."

"Another mistake. Veronica, and 'children' like Veronica have more
passion in one eyelash than you have in your whole body."

"It's a pity," she said, "you can't have Veronica and her eyelashes
instead of me. She's young and she's pretty."

He sighed with pain as her nerves lashed into his.

"That's what it all amounts to--your wanting to get out to the Front.
It's what's the matter with half the men who go there and pose as
heroes. They want to get rid of the wives--and mistresses--they're tired
of because the poor things aren't young or pretty any longer."

She dropped into the mourning voice that made him mad with her. "I'm
old--old--old. And the War's making me older every day, and uglier. And
I'm not married to you. Talk of keeping you! How _can_ I keep you when
I'm old and ugly?"

He looked at her and smiled with a hard pity. Compunction always worked
in him at the sight of her haggard face, glazed and stained with crying.

"That's how--by getting older.

"I've never tired of you. You're more to me now than you were when I
first knew you. It's when I see you looking old that I'm sure I
love you."

She smiled, too, in her sad sexual wisdom.

"There may be women who'd believe you, Larry, or who'd say they believe
you; but not me."

"It's the truth," he said. "If you were young and if you were married to
me I should have enlisted months ago.

"Can't you see it's not you, it's this life we lead that I'm sick and
tired of? I tell you I'd rather be hanged than go on with it. I'd rather
be a prisoner in Germany than shut up in this house of yours."

"Poor little house. You used to like it. What's wrong with it now?"

"Everything. Those damned lime-trees all round it. And that damned white
wall round the lime-trees. Shutting me in.

"And those curtains in your bed-room. Shutting me in.

"And your mind, trying to shut mine in.

"I come into this room and I find Phyllis Desmond in it and Orde-Jones,
drinking tea and talking. I go upstairs for peace, and Michael and Ellis
are sitting there--talking; trying to persuade themselves that funk's
the divinest thing in God's universe.

"And over there's the one thing I've been looking for all my life--the
one thing I've cared for. And you're keeping me from it."

They left it. But it began all over again the next day and the next. And
Lawrence went on growing hi