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Updated: June 2, 2025
He said good-night, not looking at the limp, quiet figure on the bed, and went out. He knew that he had seemed competent, unhurried and unmoved as befitted a man to whom death was the most salient feature of life. But he knew also that he had fled from her. In the crowd that went with him that night were Francey Wilmot and Connie Edwards and Cosgrave and all the people who had made up his youth.
He had forgotten, if he had ever fully realized, that there were strangers about him. He shook his fist and shouted, whilst the slow, hopeless tears rolled down the sunken yellow cheeks onto the dirty manuscript. They stared at him in consternation, all but Francey, who uncurled herself negligently and slid from the sofa. "It's past my tea-time," she announced, "and I want my tea."
The very memory of that "scene" with Francey made him shrink with a kind of physical disgust. Only no more of that. Back to work back to reason. If she wished to go in pursuit of Howard and Gertie she would have to go. It seemed strange to him now that he should have minded so desperately. Christine called to him as he passed her door. "Is that you, Robert? Have you had your breakfast?
They were allies fighting together against a poisonous miasma that sapped men's brains their intellectual integrity. "Piling one fallacy on another isn't argument, Francey. We don't need to like our fellow-creatures. It's a mistake to care. Emotion upsets one's judgment. Scientists the best men in the profession try to eliminate personal feeling altogether.
I'd be awfully glad, if you wouldn't mind, of course." Robert surreptitiously wiped the blood from his nose on to his sleeve. As usual he had no handkerchief. A warm, delicious solace flowed over his battered spirit. His heart swelled till it hurt him. It opened wide to the little red-haired boy. If only Francey could see him now the defender of the oppressed. But he did not dare to think of that.
He could not talk their talk. He could not play with them. He had tried. The old hunger "to belong" had driven him. But he was stiff with strength and clumsy with purpose. If he and Francey had not belonged to one another, he would have been overwhelmed in loneliness. He shut his ears against them. But when she spoke he had to listen jealously, fearfully. "It would be no use, Howard.
And, thinking of the old struggle, he threw out his hand, as he had done that night when he had met Francey Wilmot, and clenched the slender, powerful fingers as though he had life by the throat, smiling a little in the cold, rather cruel way that Cosgrave knew a theatrical gesture, had it been less passionately sincere.
Ricardo thinks I'm unprejudiced. He's forgotten the times when he pulled my ears and smacked my head. But you are different, Francey. You can say what you think." "But it wouldn't be at all helpful," she answered very solemnly. "To begin with, I have the scientific mind, and I cannot accept as a basis of argument an entirely untested hypothesis."
He went on stubbornly, in silence. He did not try to see Francey. They met inevitably in the wake of the surgeon on whose post they worked, but they did not speak. Their eyes avoided one another. Yet he could not forget her. It was not the old consciousness that had been full of mystery and delight. It hurt. He felt her unsapped joyous living like a blow on his own aching weariness.
They were like strangers, peering at each other through the grey dusk. "Look here, Francey, dearest, you don't expect me to believe that? You're just joking, aren't you? You're you're a modern woman, with a scientific training, too. You can't believe in an old, worn-out myth." "I didn't say that." "'An untested hypothesis," he quoted teasingly, but with a stirring anger.
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