"In the box-room? Why?" He vaulted up the two flights of stairs; and then up another steep little flight.
Patricia was rummaging among a disorderly chaos of trunks and sacks and broken packing-cases that had disgorged half their contents over the bare uneven floor: picture-frames; torn books; a pair of ski; the spring-mattress of a bed ... general litter of tools ... remnants of fancy-dress, and old boots, and brown-paper, and a battered bird-cage ... he wondered how all these inconsequent articles had managed to accumulate during their seven months of marriage?—he could not recall that they had ever had a bird.... Then speculation was split asunder by lightning memory of his errand:
"Pat," breathless from mingled excitement and his quick passage up the stairs, "Pat—I want your book to be published as well as mine; or instead of mine. Yours is the better book. I've made up my mind——"
"Books?"—she looked up from her squatting position in front of an old belabelled portmanteau; her arms still plunged elbow-deep in search of some article. "Heavens above, my good man, who cares about books now!"
... "They've stopped mattering," she added, an instant later, with less of vehement scorn in her voice, seeing his expression of slapped bewilderment.
He sat down on a dusty roll of carpet. It was not much good explaining to her how his apparently irrelevant decision was indeed closely linked up with the war ... a sort of readjustment of soul and spring-cleaning of motive which in its ultimate working-out would at least infinitesimally contribute towards his dreaming conception of a nation massed to loftier aim than before August the fourth. He had trusted to Patricia's understanding of this, since like impulses of her own had always resolved themselves quickly into deed. But Pat, with strangely shallow interpretation, said that books did not matter.... He was six weeks too late to impress her by open admission of his literary inferiority. Another failure——Why could he never once succeed in pulling off anything with full staging and effects?
Dejectedly he asked: "What are you looking for?"
"My big waterproof boots. They ought to be here somewhere. I've found everything else——" She came to an abrupt halt, tugging a sturdy strap from the depths of the portmanteau. "Good; that'll come in useful. I'm off to Belgium on Thursday."
"What?" He was on his feet in a moment.
"With Hume Ferguson's Ambulance Corps."