The decisions of that last evening had carried with them, at the time, the sense of hauling on a slack rope which is one of life’s quiet intimations of irony. No crisis confronted her. She merely developed Julian s cold. It was the kind of cold which wet-blankets every activity of body and mind, while never permitting one the indulgence of being really ill. She was merely tired, stupid, miserable, and plain. When she thought of Julian it was with dim good will and an earnest wish that he would stay away. It was faintly comforting, however, to get one of his rambling, inarticulate letters, containing a paragraph, startling in its sudden neatness and point, about The Ascent of F.6, which he had apparently just read. Having herself seen the play indifferently done, she was seized with a positive eagerness to discuss it with him. She had actually sat down with the pen in her hand before she remembered. Receiving herself, in the course of her work, a constant stream of letters locally postmarked, she had forgotten that he got probably very few in long-familiar scripts.
