Darcourt was looking forward to his Christmas holiday. The doings of the autumn had worn him out, or so he thought. It was true that the mess of Arthur, Maria, and Powell drew heavily on his spiritual resources; although he was not at the centre of the affair, it seemed that he was expected to be confidant and adviser to all three, and that meant that he had to listen to them, give them advice—and then listen again while they rejected it. Of the three, Maria was the least troublesome. Her course was clear; she was going to have a baby, but for a woman of brains, highly educated and with a background sufficiently unusual to put her above bourgeois conventionalities, she was making heavy weather of it, and had decided that she had wronged Arthur irreparably. Arthur was being magnanimous; he had taken upon himself the role of The Magnanimous Cuckold and was acting it to the hilt. Magnanimity can be extremely vexatious to the bystanders, for it forces them into secondary roles that are not much fun to play. Powell was enjoying himself, finding new rhetorical ways of expressing his sense of guilt, and trying them out on his friend Simon whenever he visited the hospital.

It would all have been so much simpler if all three had not been utterly sincere. They were sure they meant everything they said—even Powell, who said so much, and said it so gaudily, and enjoyed saying it. If they had been fools, Darcourt could have told them so and called them to order. But they were not fools; they were people who found themselves in a tangle from which they could not escape and for which their superficial modernity of opinion offered no solace. Modern opinion stood no chance against the clamour of voices from—from where? From the past, it seemed. Darcourt did his best and poured out comfort as well as he could.

His chief difficulty was that he did not, himself, place much value on comfort. He regarded it as the sugar-teat stupid mothers pop into the mouth of the crying baby. He wished his friends would use their heads, but was well aware that their trouble was not one for which the head offers much relief; it insists on testing the aching tooth to see if it hurts as much as it did yesterday. Because he mistrusted comfort, he could only recommend endurance, and was told, in a variety of disagreeable ways, that it was easy to tell other people to endure. Ah, well, I’m their punching-bag, he thought. They are lucky to have a good, reliable punching-bag.

His own luck was that he was able to put aside his punching-bag character and rejoice in his role as triumphant artistic detective and potentially successful biographer. He wrote to Princess Amalie and her husband, and said that he had some new light to throw on their wonderful picture. Their reply was cautious. They wanted to know what he knew, and he wrote again, offering to explain everything when he had all his material in order. They were courteous but guarded, as people are likely to be when somebody offers to throw new light on a valuable family possession. Meanwhile he was marshalling his evidence, for, although he was sure what it meant, he had to make it convincing to people who might take it badly.

No wonder, then, he was looking forward to two weeks at Christmas when he thought he could put other people’s troubles out of his head, and enjoy long walks, a mass of detective stories, and a great deal of good food and drink. He had made his reservation at an expensive hotel in the north woods, where there would certainly be other holiday-makers, but perhaps not of the heartiest, most athletic kind.

He had forgotten about his promise to take Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot to visit Maria’s mother, the seeress, the phuri dai, the element in Maria’s background that Maria was still anxious to put behind her.

“You really ought to talk to your mother,” he said to Maria, during a divano when they were discussing the pressing problem for, it seemed to him, the twentieth time. It was really not more than the fourth. “She’s an extremely wise old bird. You ought to trust her more than you do.”

“What would she know about it?” said Maria.

“For that matter, what do I know about it? I tell you what I think, and you tell me I don’t understand. Mamusia would at least see the thing from another point of view. And she knows you, Maria. Knows you better than you think.”

“My mother lived a reasonably civilized, modern sort of life so long as she was married to my father. When he died, she reverted as fast as she could to all the old Gypsy stuff. Of course there is something to be said for that, but not when it comes to my marriage.”

“You are more like your mother than you care to think. It seems to me you get more like her every day. You were very like her the first time you came to talk to me about this wretched business, all dolled up in red like the Bad Girl in a bad nineteenth-century play. But you have been getting stupider ever since.”

“Thanks very much.”

“Well, I have to be rough with you when you won’t listen to common sense. And I mean your common sense, not mine. And your common sense goes right back to Mamusia.”

“Why not right back to my father?”

“That devout, ultra-conventional Catholic Pole? Is it because of him you’ve never considered doing the modern thing and having an abortion? Cut the knot, clear the slate, and begin again?”

“No, it’s not. It’s because of me. I am not going to do violence to what my body has undertaken without consulting my head.”

“Good. But what you have just said sounds like your mother, though she would probably put it in much plainer terms. Listen, Maria: you’re trying to bury your mother, and it won’t work, because what you bury grows fat while you grow thin. Look at Arthur; he’s buried his justifiable anger and jealousy and is giving a very respectable impersonation of a generous man who has no complaints. None whatever. But it isn’t working, as I expect you know. Look at Powell; he’s the lucky one of you three because he has the trick of turning everything that happens to him into art of some sort, and he is chanting away all his guilt in juicy Welsh rhetoric. He’ll be off and away, one of these days, and as free as a bird. But you and Arthur will still be right here with Little What’s-His-Name.”

“Arthur and I call him Nemo. You know—Nobody.”

“That’s stupid. He is somebody, right now, and you will spend years finding out who that somebody is. Don’t forget—What’s bred in the bone, etcetera–What is bred in the bone of Nemo, as you call him? That gospel-roaring old father of Geraint’s, among other things.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous!”

“Anything I say to you that makes sense to me you dismiss as ridiculous. So what’s the good of threshing old straw?”

“Threshing old straw! One of your Old Ontario expressions, I suppose; one of your pithy old Loyalist sayings.”

“That’s what’s bred in the bone with me, Maria, and if you don’t like it, why do you keep coming back to me to hear it?”