h the
midday boat for Ostend. And Norah came with us to see us off. If I'd
given her the smallest encouragement she'd have come too. I _might_ take
her, she said; it was beastly being left behind.

I said, like a savage, that Belgium was no place for women. I'd take my
sister-in-law there, but not my wife.

I suppose the dressing-down I'd got from Viola two nights before had
rankled. I must have felt that I was getting my own back that time, when
I threw it up to her that she wasn't my wife.

Norah, I said, had too much sense to want to go where she wasn't wanted.

But Viola only laughed again and said, "Please remember that I'm taking
you, not you me. And Norah wants to go as much as I do, and it isn't
altogether on your account. You needn't think it. As for keeping her
back, you couldn't do it if she meant to go. It's Baby that's keeping
her, not you."

And then she thanked God she hadn't got a child.

And so, sparring and chaffing by turns, half in play and half in
earnest--for a secret subterranean anger smouldered still in both of
us--we got off. I remember at the last moment Norah--dear little
Norah--telling her that she was not to bully me. She was to let me sit
in the motor-car as much as I liked; and she was to see that I didn't
get into any danger.

Danger? Danger? As the great fans of the screws churned the harbour water
into foam that the waves thinned and flattened out again till the green
lane broadened between our track and the pier head where Norah stood, and
the little, slender, dark blue figure became a dot on the pier and lost
itself in the crowd of dots and disappeared, then, for the first time, it
struck me that to be going off like this, alone, with Viola, was danger
in itself.

Because, the other night she had made me see myself as I really was--a
man, not of an irreproachable rectitude, an immaculate purity (had I
ever, had anybody ever really supposed that I was such a man?) but quite
deplorably human, and blind--yes, my dear Viola, blind as any bat--and
vulnerable, so vulnerable that I think you might have spared me, you
might have had some pity.

I found myself addressing her like that, in my heart, as I walked up and
down, up and down the deck, not looking at her, but acutely aware of her,
where she sat in her deck-chair, bundled up in her great khaki motor-coat
and in the rugs I had wrapped round her.

I resented the power she had over me to make me aware of her--at such a
time,