inks that now we have children, and that she has two, we can
consider what was past, past and closed and done with, and she wants to
hear--about me.... Apart from everything else--we were very great
friends."

"Of course," said Rachel with lips a little awry, "of course. You must
have been great friends. And it's natural for her to write."

"I suppose," she added, "her husband knows."

"She's told him, she says...."

Her eye fell on the letter in my hand for the smallest fraction of a
second, and it was as if hastily she snatched away a thought from my
observation. I had a moment of illuminating embarrassment. So far we had
contrived to do as most young people do when they marry, we had sought
to make our lives unreservedly open to one another, we had affected an
entire absence of concealments about our movements, our thoughts. If
perhaps I had been largely silent to her about Mary it was not so much
that I sought to hide things from her as that I myself sought to forget.
It is one of the things that we learn too late, the impossibility of any
such rapid and wilful coalescences of souls. But we had maintained a
convention of infinite communism since our marriage; we had shown each
other our letters as a matter of course, shared the secrets of our
friends, gone everywhere together as far as we possibly could.

I wanted now to give her the letter in my hand to read--and to do so was
manifestly impossible. Something had arisen between us that made out of
our unity two abruptly separated figures masked and veiled. Here were
things I knew and understood completely and that I could not even
describe to Rachel. What would she make of Mary's "Write to me. Write to
me"? A mere wish to resume.... I would not risk the exposure of Mary's
mind and heart and unhappiness, to her possible misinterpretation....

That letter fell indeed like a pitiless searchlight into all that
region of differences ignored, over which we had built the vaulted
convention of our complete mutual understanding. In my memory it seems
to me now as though we hung silent for quite a long time over the
evasions that were there so abruptly revealed.

Then I put the letter into my pocket with a clumsy assumption of
carelessness, and knelt down to the fender and sausages.

"It will be curious," I said, "to write to her again.... To tell her
about things...."

And then with immense interest, "Are these Chichester sausages you've
got here, Rachel, or some n