Jimmy drew a long breath.  “It’s very funny.  He’s mostly so quick.  If I had the horns, Sister Elisabet would tie them there at the foot of the bed.  And I could pretend I was hunting.”

Harmony had a great piece of luck that day.  As she went home she saw hanging in front of the wild-game shop next to the delicatessen store a fresh deer, and this time it was a stag.  Like the others it hung head down, and as it swayed on its hook its great antlers tapped against the shop door as if mutely begging admission.

She could not buy the antlers.  In vain she pleaded, explained, implored.  Harmony enlisted the Portier, and took him across with her.  The wild-game seller was obdurate.  He would sell the deer entire, or he would mount head and antlers for his wife’s cousin in Galicia as a Christmas gift.

Harmony went back to the lodge and climbed the stairs.  She was profoundly depressed.  Even the discovery that Peter had come home early and was building a fire in the kitchen brought only a fleeting smile.  Anna was not yet home.

Peter built the fire.  The winter dusk was falling and Harmony made a movement to light the candles.  Peter stopped her.

“Can’t we have the firelight for a little while?  You are always beautiful, but—­you are lovely in the firelight, Harmony.”

“That is because you like me.  We always think our friends are beautiful.”

“I am fond of Anna, but I have never thought her beautiful.”

The kitchen was small.  Harmony, rolling up her sleeves by the table, and Peter before the stove were very close together.  The dusk was fast fading into darkness; to this tiny room at the back of the old house few street sounds penetrated.  Round them, shutting them off together from the world of shops with lighted windows, rumbling busses and hurrying humanity, lay the old lodge with its dingy gardens, its whitewashed halls, its dark and twisting staircases.

Peter had been very careful.  He had cultivated a comradely manner with the girl that had kept her entirely at her ease with him.  But it had been growing increasingly hard.  He was only human after all.  And he was very comfortable.  Love, healthy human love, thrives on physical ease.  Indigestion is a greater foe to it than poverty.  Great love songs are written, not by poets starving in hall bedrooms, with insistent hunger gnawing and undermining all that is of the spirit, but by full-fed gentlemen who sing out of an overflowing of content and wide fellowship, and who write, no doubt, just after dinner.  Love, being a hunger, does not thrive on hunger.

Thus Peter.  He had never found women essential, being occupied in the struggle for other essentials.  Women had had little part in his busy life.  Once or twice he had seen visions, dreamed dreams, to waken himself savagely to the fact that not for many years could he afford the luxury of tender eyes looking up into his, of soft arms about his neck.  So he had kept away from women with almost ferocious determination.  And now!