The sun moved down the sky and the shadows lengthened upon the water There were fewer craft on the river now; the tea-parties were hurrying home to dinner and the supper parties had not yet put out. Endymion had the air of being settled for the night; it was really time to harden her heart and pull up the poles. She put off decision from moment to moment, till a loud shriek and a bump at her end of the punt came to spare her the trouble. The incompetent novice had returned with her crew and, having left her pole in the middle of the river had let her craft drift across their stern. Harriet pushed the intruders off with more vigour than sympathy and turned to find her host sitting up and grinning rather sheepishly.

“Have I been asleep?”

“Getting on for two hours,” said Harriet, with a pleased chuckle.

“Good lord, what disgusting behaviour! I’m frightfully sorry. Why didn’t you give me a shout? What time is it? My poor girl, you’ll get no dinner tonight if we don’t hurry up. Look here, I do apologize most abjectly.”

“It doesn’t matter a bit. You were awfully tired.”

“That’s no excuse.” He was on his feet now, extricating the punt-poles from the mud. “We might make it by double punting-if you’ll forgive the infernal cheek of asking you to work to make up for my soul-destroying sloth.”

“I’d love to punt. But, Peter!” She suddenly liked him enormously. “What’s the hurry? I mean, is the Master expecting you, or anything?”

“No; I’ve removed myself to the Mitre. I can’t use the Master’s Lodgings as a hotel; besides, they’ve got people coming in.”

“Then couldn’t we get something to eat somewhere along the river and make a day of it? I mean, if you feel like it. Or must you have a proper dinner?”

“My dear, I would gladly eat husks for having behaved like a hog. Or thistles. Preferably thistles. You are a most forgiving woman.”

“Well, give me the pole. I’ll stay up in the bows and you can do the steering.”

“And watch you bring the pole up in three.”

“I promise to do that.”

She was conscious, nevertheless, of Wimsey of Balliol’s critical eye upon her handling of the heavy pole. For either you look graceful or you look ghastly; there is no middle way in punting. They set their course towards Iffley.

“On the whole,” said Harriet, as they took boat again some little time later, “thistles would have been preferable.”

“That kind of food is provided for very young people whose minds are elsewhere. Men of passions but no parts. I am glad to have dined on apricot flan and synthetic lemonade; it enlarges one’s experience. Shall I, you or we pole? Or shall we abandon aloofness and superiority and paddle in beauty side by side?” His eyes mocked her. “I am tame; pronounce.”

“Whichever you prefer.”

He handed her gravely to the stern seat and coiled himself down beside her.

“What the devil am I sitting on?”

“Sir Thomas Browne, I expect. I’m afraid I rifled your pockets.”

“Since I was such a bad companion, I’m glad I provided you with a good substitute.”

“Is he a constant companion of yours?”

“My tastes are fairly catholic. It might easily have been Kai Lung or Alice in Wonderland or Machiavelli-”

“Or Boccaccio or the Bible?”

“Just as likely as not. Or Apuleius.”

“Or John Donne?”

He was silent for a moment, and then said in a changed voice:

“Was that a bow drawn at a venture?”

“A good shot?”

“Whang in the gold. Between the joints of the harness… If you would paddle a little on your side it would make it handier to steer.”

“Sorry… Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?”

“So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober. Which accounts for my talking so much.”

“And yet, if anybody had asked me, I should have said you had a passion for balance and order-no beauty without measure.”

“One may have a passion for the unattainable.”

“But you do attain it. At least, you appear to attain it.”

“The perfect Augustan? No; I’m afraid it’s at most a balance of opposing forces… The river’s filling up again.”

“Lots of people come out after supper.”

“Yes-well, bless their hearts, why shouldn’t they? You’re not feeling cold?”

“Not the least bit.”

That was the second time within five minutes that he had warned her off his private ground. His mood had changed since the early hours of the afternoon and all his defences were up once more. She could not again disregard the “No Thoroughfare” sign; so she left it to him to start a fresh subject.

He did so, courteously enough, by asking how the new novel was getting on.

“It’s gone sticky.”

“What’s happened to it?”

This involved a full rehearsal of the plot of Death ’twixt Wind and Water. It was a complicated story, and the punt had covered a good deal of water before she reached the solution.

“There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with that,” said he; and proceeded to offer a few suggestions about detail.

“How intelligent you are, Peter. You’re quite right. Of course that would be much the best way to get over the clock difficulty. But why does the whole story sound so dead and alive?”

“If you ask me,” said Wimsey, “it’s Wilfrid. I know he marries the girl-but must he be such a mutt? Why does he go and pocket the evidence and tell all those unnecessary lies?”

“Because he thinks the girl’s done it.”

“Yes-but why should he? He’s dotingly in love with her-he thinks she’s absolutely the cat’s pyjamas-and yet, merely because he finds her handkerchief in the bedroom he is instantly convinced, on evidence that wouldn’t hang a dog, that she not only is Winchester’s mistress but has also murdered him in a peculiarly diabolical way. That may be one way of love, but-”

“But, you would like to point out, it isn’t yours-and in fact, it wasn’t yours.”

There it was again-the old resentment, and the impulse to hit back savagely for the pleasure of seeing him wince.

“No,” he said, “I was considering the question impersonally.”

“Academically, in fact.”

“Yes-please… From a purely constructional point of view, I don’t feel that Wilfrid’s behaviour is sufficiently accounted for.”

“Well,” said Harriet, recovering her poise, “academically speaking, I admit that Wilfrid is the world’s worst goop. But if he doesn’t conceal the handkerchief, where’s my plot?”

“Couldn’t you make Wilfrid one of those morbidly conscientious people, who have been brought up to think that anything pleasant must be wrong-so that, if he wants to believe the girl an angel of light she is, for that very reason, all the more likely to be guilty. Give him a puritanical father and a hellfire religion.”

“Peter, that’s an idea.”

“He has, you see, a gloomy conviction that love is sinful in itself, and that he can only purge himself by taking the young woman’s sins upon him and wallowing in vicarious suffering… He’d still be a goop, and a pathological goop, but he would be a bit more consistent.”

“Yes-he’d be interesting. But if I give Wilfrid all those violent and lifelike feelings, he’ll throw the whole book out of balance.”

“You would have to abandon the jig-saw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change.”

“I’m afraid to try that, Peter. It might go too near the bone.”

“It might be the wisest thing you could do.”

“Write it out and get rid of it?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll think about that. It would hurt like hell.”

“What would that matter, if it made a good book?”

She was taken aback, not by what he said, but by his saying it. She had never imagined that he regarded her work very seriously, and she had certainly not expected him to take this ruthless attitude about it. The protective male? He was being about as protective as a can-opener.

“You haven’t yet,” he went on, “written the book you could write if you tried. Probably you couldn’t write it when you were too close to things. But you could do it now, if you had the-the-”