“They’d back up their husbands, in any case,” said Miss Allison. “My man, right or wrong, they’d say. Even if he did rob the till.”

“Of course they would,” said Miss Hillyard. “That’s what the man wants. He wouldn’t say thank you for a critic on the hearth.”

“He must have the womanly woman, you think?” said Harriet. “What is it, Annie? My coffee-cup? Here you are… Somebody who will say, ‘The greater the sin the greater the sacrifice-and consequently the greater devotion.’ Poor Miss Schuster-Slatt!… I suppose it is comforting to be told that one is loved whatever one does.”

“Ah, yes,” said Peter, in his reediest wood-wind voice:

“And these say: ‘No more now my knight

Or God’s knight any longer’-you,

Being than they so much more white,

So much more pure and good and true

Will cling to me for ever-

William Morris had his moments of being a hundred-percent manly man.”

“Poor Morris!” said the Dean.

“He was young at the time,” said Peter, indulgently. “It’s odd, when you come to think of it, that the expressions ‘manly’ and ‘womanly’ should be almost more offensive than their opposites. One is tempted to believe that there may be something indelicate about sex after all.”

“It all comes of this here eddication,” pronounced the Dean, as the door shut behind the last of the coffee-service. “Here we sit round in a ring dissociating ourselves from kind Mrs. Bones and that sweet girl, Miss Tape-”

“Not to mention,” put in Harriet, “those fine, manly fellows, the masculine Tapes and Boneses-”

“ And clacking on in the most unwomanly manner about intellectual integrity.”

“While I,” said Peter, “sit desolate in the midst, like a lodge in a garden of cucumbers.”

“You look it,” said Harriet, laughing. “The sole relic of humanity in a cold, bitter and indigestible wilderness.”

There was a laugh, and a momentary silence. Harriet could feel a nervous tension in the room-little threads of anxiety and expectation strung out, meeting, crossing, quivering. Now, they were all saying to themselves, now something is going to be said about IT. The ground has been surveyed, the coffee has been cleared out of the road, the combatants are stripped for action-now, this amiable gentleman with the well-filed tongue will come out in his true colours as an inquisitor, and it is all going to be very uncomfortable.

Lord Peter took out his handkerchief, polished his monocle carefully, readjusted it, looked rather severely at the Warden, and lifted up his voice in emphatic, pained and querulous complaint about the Corporation dump.

The Warden had gone, expressing courteous thanks to Miss Lydgate for the hospitality of the Senior Common Room, and graciously inviting his lordship to call upon her in her own house at any convenient time during his stay in Oxford. Various dons rose up and drifted away, murmuring that they had essays to look through before they went to bed. The talk had ranged pleasantly over a variety of topics. Peter had let the reins drop from his hands and let it go whither it would, and Harriet, realizing this, had scarcely troubled to follow it. In the end, there remained only herself and Peter, the Dean, Miss Edwards (who seemed to have taken a strong fancy to Peter’s conversation), Miss Chilperic, silent and half-hidden in an obscure position and, rather to Harriet’s surprise, Miss Hillyard.

The clocks struck eleven. Wimsey roused himself and said he thought he had better be getting along. Everybody rose. The Old Quad was dark, except for the glean of lighted windows; the sky had clouded, and a rising wind stirred the boughs of the beech-trees.

“Well, good-night,” said Miss Edwards. “I’ll see that you get a copy of that paper about blood-groups. I think you’ll find it of interest.”

“I shall, indeed,” said Wimsey. “Thank you very much.”

Miss Edwards strode briskly away.

“Good-night, Lord Peter.”

“Good-night, Miss Chilperic. Let me know when the social revolution is about to begin and I’ll come to die upon the barricades.”

“I think you would,” said Miss Chilperic, astonishingly, and, in defiance of tradition, gave him her hand.

“Good-night,” said Miss Hillyard, to the world in general, and whisked quickly past them with her head high.

Miss Chilperic flitted off into the darkness like a pale moth, and the Dean said, “Well!” And then, interrogatively, “Well?”

“Pass, and all’s well,” said Peter, placidly.

“There were one or two moments, weren’t there?” said the Dean. “But on the whole-as well as could be expected.”

“I enjoyed myself very much,” said Peter, with the mischievous note back in his voice.

“I bet you did,” said the Dean. “I wouldn’t trust you a yard. Not a yard.”

“Oh, yes, you would,” said he. “Don’t worry.”

The Dean, too, was gone.

“You left your gown in my room yesterday,” said Harriet “You’d better come and fetch it.”

“I brought yours back with me and left it at the Jowett Walk Lodge. Also your dossier. I expect they’ve been taken up.”

“You didn’t leave the dossier lying about!”

“What do you take me for? It’s wrapped up and sealed.”

They crossed the quad slowly.

“There are a lot of questions I want to ask, Peter.”

“Oh, yes. And there’s one I want to ask you. What is your second name? The one that begins with a D?”

“Deborah, I’m sorry to say. Why?”

“Deborah? Well, I’m damned. All right. I won’t call you by it. There’s Miss de Vine, I see, still working.”

The curtains of the Fellows’ window were drawn back this time, and they could see her dark, untidy head, bent over a book.

“She interests me very much,” said Peter.

“I like her, you know.”

“So do I.”

“But I’m afraid those are her kind of hairpins.”

“I know they are,” said he. He took his hand from his pocket and held it out. They were close under Tudor, and the light from an adjacent window showed a melancholy, spraddle-legged hairpin lying across his palm. “She shed this on the dais after dinner. You saw me pick it up.”

“I saw you pick up Miss Shaw’s scarf.”

“Always the gentleman. May I come up with you, or is that against the regulations?”

“You can come up.”

There were a number of students scurrying about the corridors in undress, who looked at Peter with more curiosity than annoyance. In Harriet’s room, they found her gown lying on the table, together with the dossier. Peter picked up the book, examined the paper and string and the seals which secured them, each one stamped with the crouching cat and arrogant Wimsey motto.

“If that’s been opened, I’ll make a meal of hot sealing wax.”

He went to the window and looked out into the quad.

“Not a bad observation post-in its way. Thanks. That’s all I wanted to look at.”

He showed no further curiosity, but took the gown she handed to him and followed her downstairs again.

They were half-way across the quad when he said suddenly:

“Harriet. Do you really prize honesty above every other thing?”

“I think I do. I hope so. Why?”

“If you don’t, I am the most blazing fool in Christendom. I am busily engaged in sawing off my own branch. If I am honest, I shall probably lose you altogether. If I am not-”

His voice was curiously rough, as though he were trying to control something; not, she thought, bodily pain or passion, but something more fundamental.

“If you are not,” said Harriet, “then I shall lose you, because you wouldn’t be the same person, should you?”

“I don’t know. I have a reputation for flippant insincerity. You think I’m honest?”

“I know you are. I couldn’t imagine your being anything else.”

“And yet at this moment I’m trying to insure myself against the effects of my own honesty. ‘I have tried if I could reach that great resolution, to be honest without a thought of heaven or hell.’ It looks as though I should get hell either way, though; so I need scarcely bother about the resolution. I believe you mean what you say-and I hope I should do the same thing if I didn’t believe a word of it.”