She was interested in her painting again.  She worked in long fits, after long intervals of idleness.  She worked with a hard, passionless efficiency.  Nicky thought her paintings were hideous and repulsive; but he did not say so.  He was not aware of the extent to which Desmond imitated her master, Alfred Orde-Jones.  He knew nothing about painting and he had got used to the things.  He had got used to Desmond, slouching about the flat, in her sloping, slovenly grace, dressed in her queer square jacket and straight short skirt, showing her long delicate ankles, and her slender feet in their grey stockings and black slippers.

He was used to Desmond when she was lazy; when she sat hunched up on her cushions and smoked one cigarette after another without a word, and watched him sullenly.  Her long, slippered feet, thrust out, pointed at him, watching.  Her long face watched him between the sleek bands of hair and the big black bosses plaited over her ears.

The beauty of Desmond’s face had gone to sleep again, stilled into hardness by the passing of her passion.  A sort of ugliness was awake there, and it watched him.

In putting weakness and pathos away from her Desmond had parted with two-thirds of her power.  Yet the third part still served to hold him, used with knowledge and a cold and competent economy.  He resented it, resisted it over and over again; and over and over again it conquered resentment and resistance.  It had something to do with her subtle, sloping lines, with her blackness and her sallow whiteness, with the delicate scent and the smoothness of her skin under the sliding hand.  He couldn’t touch her without still feeling a sort of pity, a sort of affection.

But she could take and give caresses while she removed her soul from him in stubborn rancour.

He couldn’t understand that.  It amazed him every time.  He thought it horrible.  For Nicky’s memory was faithful.  It still kept the impression of the Desmond he had married, the tender, frightened, helpless Desmond he had thought he loved.  The Desmond he remembered reminded him of Veronica.

And Desmond said to herself, “He’s impossible.  You can’t make any impression on him.  I might as well be married to a Moving Fortress.”

* * * * *

Months passed.  The War Office had not yet given up Nicky’s model of the Moving Fortress.  In the first month it was not aware of any letter or of any parcel or of any Mr. Nicholas Harrison.  In the second month inquiries would be made and the results communicated to Captain Drayton.  In the third month the War Office knew nothing of the matter referred to by Captain Drayton.

Drayton hadn’t a hope.  “We can’t get it back, Nicky,” he said.

“I can,” said Nicky, “I can get it back out of my head.”