different. Heaven knows, I'm frank enough about it--even to myself.
But it's only a phase. Why not let me get over it and live it down?
If there's anything good in me, and there is, it will come out
sooner or later. Why not let me go through it my own way? A few
months to play the fool in--it isn't much to ask, and don't I know
what it means to be old?"

She hadn't been along that passage before. It was Martin's side of
the house. She hadn't given much thought to Martin's side of
anything. She tried a door and opened it, fumbled for the button
that would turn the light on and found it. It was a large and
usefully fitted dressing room with a hanging cupboard that ran all
along one wall, with several doors. Two old shiny-faced English
tallboys were separated by a boot rack. Between the two windows was
a shaving glass over a basin. There was a bookcase on each side of
the fire-place and a table conveniently near a deep armchair with a
tobacco jar, pipes and a box of cigarettes. Every available space of
wall was crammed with framed photographs of college groups, some
showing men with the whiskered faces and the strange garments of the
early Victorian period, others of the clean-shaven men of the day,
but all of them fit and eager and care-free, caught in their
happiest hours. It was a man's room, arranged by one, now used by
another.

Joan went through into the bedroom. The light followed her. There
was no Martin. It was all strangely tidy. Its owner might have been
away for weeks.

With a sense of chill and a feeling of queer loneliness, she went
back to the dressing room. She wanted Martin. If Martin had been