s of my own sex. It was quite a good
post and everyone said I ought to have stayed on. But I just couldn't.
So now I have only myself to blame if I'm unhappy."

"I think it was very plucky of you," was all Martin could think of.

"Oh, I'm safe enough. I don't starve, you know. But there's not much
over for books."

"It must be rotten!"

There was a silence.

"Do the Berrisfords go to church?" Freda asked suddenly. "I only came
on Tuesday."

"No, rather not."

"Thank God!"

"Then you aren't one of the faithful?"

"No. Taking the girls to church had a bad effect on my temper.
Besides, after all----"

"Well?"

"I'm keen on philosophy. Are you?"

"I'm going to be when I begin Greats."

"Don't you like it now?"

"In a crude sort of way. We're always talking about God at Oxford."

"That must be splendid. I have to do it with myself, but I don't get
any further."

"Than what?"

"Than a tremendous conviction that there can't be one."

"There isn't."

"You've settled it?"

"Long ago."

"I suppose," said Freda, "that people laugh at you, like they do at me.
I don't care. Margaret talks about the Unknowable and says I'm
presumptuous. I hate the Unknowable: it seems so cowardly, somehow."

"You're quite right," decided Martin. "The Unknowable is the limit."

"But we mustn't agree about everything," Freda put in: "otherwise it
will be frightfully dull."

"Well, let's talk about Art," he suggested. "We're bound to quarrel
then."

And they did. It was astonishing how soon lunchtime arrived.

Later on they talked about everything in the world. Martin knew that
he had found what he wanted, a woman with an undergraduate's mind. In
a way it was like talking to one of the Push, but yet there was all the
difference in the world. Why there should be that difference he
couldn't tell. But there it undeniably was. To meet men who could
argue was good: to meet a woman who said the same sort of things was
more than good. Freda walked with him on the moor on Tuesday, and he
had the chance of helping her over bogs and chasms. On that evening
she accepted a billiard lesson at his hands. Of these opportunities he
made the most. May Williams had at least had an educational value.

These four days were magically sundered from the rest of life: he had
succeeded, to his own great surprise, in forgetting Oxford altogether.
But the day of reckoning was at hand, and when Martin settled down in
th