"But she said—But she understood that she was My Wife," he repeated again and again, as if by the repetition he could find the key to the riddle.
"And, you see, Peter," said Ferlie simply, "if she had been married to you in the ordinary way——"
But that was going ahead too quickly for Peter.
"She said... She promised..." Surely that creed should be all-sufficient which admitted the word of a mortal soul to be its bond.
Mrs. Carmichael's sense of injury against That Creature for having caught Peter was now transformed into indignation because she had let him go.
His father, the danger safely over, resumed his man-of-the-world pose as though he had never departed from it, produced an extra ten-pound note, or so, and told his wife that boys would be boys.
Only Ferlie fully realized that by such means boys become men.
Aunt B., meeting Peter accidentally soon afterwards in the Tube, immersed in illustrated volumes whose pages unblushingly revealed to his neighbours on either side aspects of the human frame the existence of which they had, hitherto, blandly ignored, nodded her shingled locks in Sybillic understanding.
"Buses and Tubes are the most natural places to study the shapes of one's fellow-creatures," she remarked. "I see you are determined it is to be Medicine, Peter."
"Medicine must be the preliminary," Peter replied, unshaken in his resolve to arrive at summits unattained, albeit it seemed he would be obliged to scale them unpartnered.