Neville Bendish, who was not even in the thirties, but so near the brink of senile decay as the forties, entered her name once more at the London University School of Medicine, and plunged forthwith into her interrupted studies.  Her aim was to spend this summer in reacquiring such knowledge as should prepare her for the October session.  And it was difficult beyond her imaginings.  It had not been difficult twenty-two years ago; she had worked then with pleasure and interest, and taken examinations with easy triumph.  As Kay did now at Cambridge, only more so, because she had been cleverer than Kay.  She was a vain creature, and had believed that cleverness of hers to be unimpaired by life, until she came to try.  She supposed that if she had spent her married life in head work, her head would never have lost the trick of it.  But she hadn’t.  She had spent it on Rodney and Gerda and Kay, and the interesting, amusing life led by the wife of a man in Rodney’s position, which had brought her always into contact with people and ideas.  Much more amusing than grinding at intellectual work of her own, but it apparently caused the brain to atrophy.  And she was, anyhow, tired of doing nothing in particular.  After forty you must have your job, you must be independent of other people’s jobs, of human and social contacts, however amusing and instructive.

Rodney wasn’t altogether pleased, though he understood.  He wanted her constant companionship and interest in his own work.

“You’ve had twenty-two years of it, darling,” Neville said.  “Now I must Live my own Life, as the Victorians used to put it.  I must be a doctor; quite seriously I must.  I want it.  It’s my job.  The only one I could ever really have been much good at.  The sight of human bones or a rabbit’s brain thrills me, as the sight of a platform and a listening audience thrills you, or as pen and paper (I suppose) thrill the children.  You ought to be glad I don’t want to write.  Our family seems to run to that as a rule.”

“But,” Rodney said, “you don’t mean ever to practise, surely?  You won’t have time for it, with all the other things you do.”

“It’s the other things I shan’t have time for, old man.  Sorry, but there it is....  It’s all along of mother, you see.  She’s such an object lesson in how not to grow old.  If she’d been a doctor, now....”

“She couldn’t have been a doctor, possibly.  She hasn’t the head.  On the other hand, you’ve got enough head to keep going without the slavery of a job like this, even when you’re old.”

“I’m not so sure.  My brain isn’t what it was; it may soften altogether unless I do something with it before it’s too late.  Then there I shall be, a burden to myself and everyone else....  After all, Rodney, you’ve your job.  Can’t I have mine?  Aren’t you a modern, an intellectual and a feminist?”

Rodney, who believed with truth that he was all these things, gave in.