“You mean I’ve no business to?  That was different.  I didn’t take any other woman’s husband, or any other woman’s lover, Nicky.”

“If you had,” said Nicky, “I wouldn’t have interfered.”

“I wouldn’t interfere if I thought you cared that for Desmond.  But you don’t.  You know you don’t.”

“Of course I care for her.”

He said it stoutly, but he coloured all the same, and Vera knew that he was vulnerable.

“Oh, Nicky dear, if you’d only waited—­”

“What do you mean?”

His young eyes interrogated her austerely; and she flinched.  “I don’t know what I mean.  Unless I mean that you’re just a little young to marry anybody.”

“I don’t care if I am.  I don’t feel young, I can tell you.  Anyhow Desmond’s years younger.”

“Desmond is twenty-three.  You’re twenty.  It’s Veronica who’s years younger.”

“Veronica?”

“She’s sixteen.  You don’t imagine Desmond is as young as that, do you?  Wait till she’s twenty-five and you’re twenty-two.”

“It wouldn’t do poor Desmond much good if I did.  I could kill Headley Richards.”

“What for?”

“For leaving her.”

Vera smiled.  “That shows how much you care.  You wouldn’t have felt like killing him if he’d stuck to her.  Why should you marry Headley Richards’ mistress and take on his child?  It’s preposterous.”

“It isn’t.  If the other fellow’s a brute it’s all the more reason why I shouldn’t be.  I want to be some use in this rotten world where people are so damnably cruel to each other.  And there’s that unhappy kiddy.  You’ve forgotten the kiddy.”

“Do you mean to say it’s Desmond’s child you’re thinking of?”

“I can’t understand any woman not thinking of it,” said Nicky.

He looked at her, and she knew that he remembered Veronica.

Then she gave him back his own with interest, for his good.

“If you care so much, why don’t you choose a better mother for your own children?”

It was as if she said:  “If you care so much about Veronica, why don’t you marry her?”

“It’s a bit too late to think of that now,” said poor Nicky.

Because he had cared so much about Veronica he was going to marry Desmond.

* * * * *

“I couldn’t do anything with him,” Vera said afterwards.  “Nothing I said made the least impression on him.”

That however (as both Vera and Nicky were aware), was not strictly true.  But, in spite of Nicky’s terrible capacity for remembering, she stuck to it that Desmond’s affair would have made no impression on him if it had not been for that other absurd affair of the Professor’s wife.  And it would have been better, Lawrence Stephen said, for Nicky to have made love to all the married women in Cambridge than for him to marry Phyllis Desmond.

These reflections were forced on them by the ironic coincidence of Nicky’s engagement with his rehabilitation at the University.