“And compared with Hirst I’m a perfect Zany.”

The clock here struck twelve instead of eleven.

“We’re wasting the morning—­I ought to be writing my book, and you ought to be answering these.”

“We’ve only got twenty-one whole mornings left,” said Rachel.  “And my father’ll be here in a day or two.”

However, she drew a pen and paper towards her and began to write laboriously,

“My dear Evelyn—­”

Terence, meanwhile, read a novel which some one else had written, a process which he found essential to the composition of his own.  For a considerable time nothing was to be heard but the ticking of the clock and the fitful scratch of Rachel’s pen, as she produced phrases which bore a considerable likeness to those which she had condemned.  She was struck by it herself, for she stopped writing and looked up; looked at Terence deep in the arm-chair, looked at the different pieces of furniture, at her bed in the corner, at the window-pane which showed the branches of a tree filled in with sky, heard the clock ticking, and was amazed at the gulf which lay between all that and her sheet of paper.  Would there ever be a time when the world was one and indivisible?  Even with Terence himself—­how far apart they could be, how little she knew what was passing in his brain now!  She then finished her sentence, which was awkward and ugly, and stated that they were “both very happy, and going to be married in the autumn probably and hope to live in London, where we hope you will come and see us when we get back.”  Choosing “affectionately,” after some further speculation, rather than sincerely, she signed the letter and was doggedly beginning on another when Terence remarked, quoting from his book: 

“Listen to this, Rachel.  ‘It is probable that Hugh’ (he’s the hero, a literary man), ’had not realised at the time of his marriage, any more than the young man of parts and imagination usually does realise, the nature of the gulf which separates the needs and desires of the male from the needs and desires of the female. . . .  At first they had been very happy.  The walking tour in Switzerland had been a time of jolly companionship and stimulating revelations for both of them.  Betty had proved herself the ideal comrade. . . .  They had shouted Love in the Valley to each other across the snowy slopes of the Riffelhorn’ (and so on, and so on—­I’ll skip the descriptions). . . .  ’But in London, after the boy’s birth, all was changed.  Betty was an admirable mother; but it did not take her long to find out that motherhood, as that function is understood by the mother of the upper middle classes, did not absorb the whole of her energies.  She was young and strong, with healthy limbs and a body and brain that called urgently for exercise. . . .’ (In short she began to give tea-parties.) . . .  ’Coming in late from this singular talk with old Bob Murphy in his smoky, book-lined room, where