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That's the worst of you clever writing chaps. You seem to think nobody can ever see anything except yourselves." When he had left him Michael thought: "I wonder if he really does see? Or if he made it all up?" They had not said to each other all that they had really meant. Of Nicky's many words there were only two that he remembered vividly, "Not yet."
Nobody but Veronica and Nicky were ever in bed on that floor before midnight. Night after night he got up and came to her and stayed beside her till she went to sleep. Once he said, "If it was Michael he could tell you stories." "I don't want Michael. I want you." In the day-time she went about looking for him. "Where's Nicky?" she said. "I want him." "Nicky's in the schoolroom.
The dream of a French engineer, the old, abandoned dream of the forteresse mobile, had become Nicky's passion. He claimed no originality for his idea. It was a composite of the amoured train, the revolving turret, the tractor with caterpillar wheels and the motor-car. These things had welded themselves together gradually in Nicky's mind during his last year at Cambridge.
Nicky got to his feet and said rather coldly that he hoped his uncle was well, but it was the old man whose eagerness in holding out his hand made Nicky's advance seem laggard. Nicky had taken a dislike to his uncle; he could not tell why. He flattered himself he was not a snob, but he thought this old Rip Van Winkle a terrible thing to drop into any family out of the blue.
Not the petty friction of domesticity, nor the pervading thought of that queer feeling in his eyes, nor care for Nicky's future, or anything of the present, stirred within him.
Nicky's sense of touch had been hardened by violent impacts and collisions, by experiments with jack-knives and saws and chisels and gouges, and by struggling with the material of his everlasting inventions. Through communion with Jerry it became tender and sensitive again.
But for Frances the affairs of the nation sank into insignificance beside Nicky's Cambridge affair. There could be no doubt that Nicky's affair was serious. You could not, Anthony said, get over the letters, the Master's letter and the Professor's letter and Michael's.
Archelaus was somewhere now with little Jimmy, telling him tales of the far places of the earth, which he, Ishmael, had never seen, never would see. Jim was listening entranced, his bright brown eyes shining as Nicky's did when he was moved, as Phoebe's had been wont to do.
They came in late, and occupied the entire third row at the opening performance of "Believe Me!" And Ethel was Nicky's partner. She was glowing like a rose. When the lights went up after the first act Ethel saw that her uncle Jo was seated just ahead of her with what she afterward described as a blonde.
"Nicky's come home," she said. "Nicky?" "He's been sent down." "Whatever for?" "Darling, I can't possibly tell you." But in the end she did. Up till now Frances had taken a quiet interest in Women's Suffrage. It had got itself into the papers and thus become part of the affairs of the nation. The names of Mrs. Palmerston-Swete and Mrs.
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