“It happened to us.  For four years now things have just happened to us.  All the time I have been overworking, first at explosives and now at this fuel business.  She too is full of her work.

“Nothing stops that though everything seems to interfere with it.  And in a distraught, preoccupied way we are abominably fond of each other.  ‘Fond’ is the word.  But we are both too busy to look after either ourselves or each other.

“She is much more incapable than I am,” said Sir Richmond as if he delivered a weighed and very important judgment.

“You see very much of each other?”

“She has a flat in Chelsea and a little cottage in South Cornwall, and we sometimes snatch a few days together, away somewhere in Surrey or up the Thames or at such a place as Southend where one is lost in a crowd of inconspicuous people.  Then things go well—­they usually go well at the start—­we are glorious companions.  She is happy, she is creative, she will light up a new place with flashes of humour, with a keenness of appreciation....”

“But things do not always go well?”

“Things,” said Sir Richmond with the deliberation of a man who measures his words, “are apt to go wrong....  At the flat there is constant trouble with the servants; they bully her.  A woman is more entangled with servants than a man.  Women in that position seem to resent the work and freedom of other women.  Her servants won’t leave her in peace as they would leave a man; they make trouble for her....  And when we have had a few days anywhere away, even if nothing in particular has gone wrong—­”

Sir Richmond stopped short.

“When they go wrong it is generally her fault,” the doctor sounded.

“Almost always.”

“But if they don’t?” said the psychiatrist.

“It is difficult to describe....  The essential incompatibility of the whole thing comes out.”

The doctor maintained his expression of intelligent interest.

“She wants to go on with her work.  She is able to work anywhere.  All she wants is just cardboard and ink.  My mind on the other hand turns back to the Fuel Commission....”

“Then any little thing makes trouble.”

“Any little thing makes trouble.  And we always drift round to the same discussion; whether we ought really to go on together.”

“It is you begin that?”

“Yes, I start that.  You see she is perfectly contented when I am about.  She is as fond of me as I am of her.”

“Fonder perhaps.”

“I don’t know.  But she is—­adhesive.  Emotionally adhesive.  All she wants to do is just to settle down when I am there and go on with her work.  But then, you see, there is my work.”

“Exactly....  After all it seems to me that your great trouble is not in yourselves but in social institutions.  Which haven’t yet fitted themselves to people like you two.  It is the sense of uncertainty makes her, as you say, adhesive.  Nervously so.  If we were indeed living in a new age Instead of the moral ruins of a shattered one—­”