“I don’t care a damn what you said to your aunt,” he interrupted impatiently.

“I wish you wouldn’t use bad language when you speak to me Philip.  You know I don’t like it.”

Philip smiled a little, but his eyes were wild.  He was silent for a while.  He looked at her sullenly.  He hated, despised, and loved her.

“If I had an ounce of sense I’d never see you again,” he said at last.  “If you only knew how heartily I despise myself for loving you!”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say to me,” she replied sulkily.

“It isn’t,” he laughed.  “Let’s go to the Pavilion.”

“That’s what’s so funny in you, you start laughing just when one doesn’t expect you to.  And if I make you that unhappy why d’you want to take me to the Pavilion?  I’m quite ready to go home.”

“Merely because I’m less unhappy with you than away from you.”

“I should like to know what you really think of me.”

He laughed outright.

“My dear, if you did you’d never speak to me again.”

LXIII

Philip did not pass the examination in anatomy at the end of March.  He and Dunsford had worked at the subject together on Philip’s skeleton, asking each other questions till both knew by heart every attachment and the meaning of every nodule and groove on the human bones; but in the examination room Philip was seized with panic, and failed to give right answers to questions from a sudden fear that they might be wrong.  He knew he was ploughed and did not even trouble to go up to the building next day to see whether his number was up.  The second failure put him definitely among the incompetent and idle men of his year.

He did not care much.  He had other things to think of.  He told himself that Mildred must have senses like anybody else, it was only a question of awakening them; he had theories about woman, the rip at heart, and thought that there must come a time with everyone when she would yield to persistence.  It was a question of watching for the opportunity, keeping his temper, wearing her down with small attentions, taking advantage of the physical exhaustion which opened the heart to tenderness, making himself a refuge from the petty vexations of her work.  He talked to her of the relations between his friends in Paris and the fair ladies they admired.  The life he described had a charm, an easy gaiety, in which was no grossness.  Weaving into his own recollections the adventures of Mimi and Rodolphe, of Musette and the rest of them, he poured into Mildred’s ears a story of poverty made picturesque by song and laughter, of lawless love made romantic by beauty and youth.  He never attacked her prejudices directly, but sought to combat them by the suggestion that they were suburban.  He never let himself be disturbed by her inattention, nor irritated by her indifference.  He thought he had bored her.  By an effort he made himself