“Not a womanly nature.”

Sally said “No” again, and then spoilt the effect by a little gurgle of laughter. “Wilfrid, will you get out! I’ve got to concentrate on the professor, and then get on with a kind ‘No, I couldn’t possibly’ letter to a woman who says she has written a novel, and she’s afraid her writing is dreadfully bad and she can’t afford to have it typed, but will Marigold read it? And that’s only a beginning, because there are three people who want autographs, and one who wants advice, and two I’m saving up to the last who just say how grateful they are because Marigold has given them a lot of pleasure. So will you please get up and go away, because I’m not getting on, and I’ve got to if I don’t want to sit up half the night, which I don’t.”

“Why don’t you?” said Wilfrid in his laziest voice. “If you don’t sit up at night, when do you sit up? All my best ideas come to me then. No distractions, no interruptions. The mind just floating-not quite detached, but almost imperceptibly linked with the abstract. There is a rhythm, a sense of the imponderable, a kind of floating haze.”

“It sounds like drugs or drink,” said Sally frankly.

“There might be some flavour of alcohol. But not drugs, darling-they are lowering to the Moral Tone so conspicuous in my Work.”

“I hadn’t noticed it.”

“Dim-witted of you. However one can’t have everything, and your looks are pleasing. I did ask you to marry me? These things slip the memory. What is much more important at the moment is the matter of the outing or ousting of David Moray. You wouldn’t like to wake up in the morning and read in the paper that I have been driven to the violent elimination of Mrs. Hunable. My nature is one of peace, but I have an exceptionally sensitive psyche-if that is what they call the thing that takes charge and nerves you to murder the people who have been annoying you. I don’t think it is, but no matter. What emerges is the horrid fact that I am being driven to desperation, and that if I can’t oust David and have Paulina’s attic, almost anything may happen at almost any moment. You will notice that I have now decided upon oust rather than out. It is more forcible and has a richer flavour.”

Sally was about to raise her voice in a final “Wilfrid, will you go!” when there came a rapping on the door. She said “Come in!” instead, and Mr. David Moray walked into the room. He was a large, uncompromising young man of Scottish appearance, with blunt features and fair hair burnt to the colour of dry grass. His eyes were between blue and grey, and his eyebrows and lashes very fair and thick. He viewed Wilfrid with disfavour and addressed himself to Sally.

“Are you busy?”

“Frightfully.”

“With him?”

Wilfrid said, “Yes,” and Sally said, “No.”

David Moray frowned.

“Because if you’re not, there was something I rather wanted to ask you about.”

Wilfrid pulled himself up a little farther in his chair.

“Not another word. You wish to give up your attic, and you want somebody to break it to Paulina. Don’t worry-it doesn’t really need breaking at all. You want to give it up, I am ready and willing to take it. The whole thing is as good as done. Except for the mere physical transaction you have already moved out and I have moved in. Blood is thicker than water and a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse. Paulina will be delighted. Sally walks on air.”

David looked at him bleakly.

“If you know what you are talking about, nobody else does.”

Wilfrid’s tone became tinged with malice.

“Sally and I do. The proverbial two hearts that beat as one. A stroke of the wand and we change over. I to Paulina’s attic, and you to my Mrs. Hunable, now mine no more. I have bestowed her upon you freely. I will go and pack.”

Under a particularly menacing look from Sally, he rose, kissed his hand to her, turned a charming smile on David, and drifted out of the door, which he left open behind him.

David didn’t wait for his footsteps to die away. He gave the door a push with his shoulder, and derived some satisfaction from the fact that Wilfrid must have heard the resulting slam.

Sally raised her eyebrows.

“It is my room,” she said.

“And my studio isn’t mine-is that it? Is there anything in what he was talking about, or was it just blethers?”

Sally Foster had a very charming dimple. It showed now as the corner of her mouth lifted.

“It was just blethers. He doesn’t like his place, and he would like to come here. I should never get any work done if he did.”

David scowled.

“Why do you let him bother you?”

“Oh, well, there isn’t very much I can do about it-he just gets into a chair and sticks.”

“You could tell him to go.”

“David, darling, if you think that makes any difference you just don’t know our Wilfrid.”

There was an angry jerk in his voice as he said,

“Don’t call me darling!”

“But it doesn’t mean anything.”

He gave her a look of concentrated dislike and said,

“That’s why.”

Sally said, “Oh-” on which he continued in the same forbidding strain.

“I suppose you call him darling-too!” The last word was ejected with considerable force.

Sally said, “Sometimes.”

“And what have you left to say to the man you love, if all this frittering stuff has left you any feelings worth the name? Tell me that! And I will tell you that when I call a woman darling it will be because I’m thinking of her for my wife, and because she’s everything in the world to me and a bit over!”

Sally said, “Oh-” again. Afterwards she thought of quite a lot of things she might have said, but at the time nothing came out but that “Oh-” Because something hurt her at her heart and there was a pricking behind her eyes. It didn’t get quite as far as anything you could call a tear, but it did impart a softness and a brightness which were quite extraordinarily becoming.

Mr. Moray may have felt himself slipping. He may have felt that he had been harsh, he may have decided that he had gone far enough. He stopped looking at her as if he might be about to proceed to violence, allowed his features to relax, and dismissed the subject.

“That will be enough about that. If I’m not interrupting you-”

The fan mail might not have existed. That was the bother about David, when he was there, Sally found it quite dreadfully difficult to remember things like being a secretary or having work to do. Afterwards she would kick herself and work overtime to make up, but for the moment she couldn’t have cared less about the professor and his split infinitives, or the other people who were waiting for autographs and advice. She said quickly,

“Oh, no. This is just Marigold’s fan mail.”

“Well then, I came down to talk to you. About that picture of mine. The Listener-it’s all right about its being sold. I went round to the gallery and met the man who was enquiring about it, and he asked what I wanted for it, so I said two hundred, and when I heard myself say it I thought I’d gone out of my mind. But he just nodded and said that was all right, and he liked it very much, and I’d got a future before me.”

“Oh, David!”

It was naturally meat and drink to have Sally looking at him like that, but he kept his head.

“His name is Bellingdon, and Masters- you know, the Art Gallery people-they say he has one of the best private collections in the south, and when he buys any new stuff it means that other people are likely to be interested too. Anyhow there it is, marked ‘Sold’ and the cheque in my pocket, so I thought it would be a good plan if we were to go out and celebrate.”

The faint stirring of a usually competent sense of duty prompted Sally to say, “I oughtn’t to.”

“Why oughtn’t you?”

She threw a reluctant glance at the typewriter.

“Work.”

He picked up the letters, pulled up a chair, and straddled it.