“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.”
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
