Instead of swinging the car left for London, Patricia drove straight past the Harrow foot-ball fields, up the Hill towards the School. Holidays had emptied the Georgian street, the red-brick buildings; the little low cake-shop at which they halted was quite empty.

“I haven’t had any tea,” she explained, as they sat down at a clean table.

“Sorry, old thing,”—Peter’s voice sounded gentler than usual—“I’m afraid I’m a selfish beast.”

“Sometimes,” she laughed, “but I’m glad to have you back all the same.”

A waitress appeared from the back of the shop. Patricia ordered tea for two. They wandered up to the counter; chose cakes, sat down again.

“Now tell me about business,” she said. And Peter told her, a little bitterly, the whole tale.

“I can’t see any hope of saving the show,” he ended. “Miss Macpherson thinks she can run it. Perhaps she could, if one had enough capital. But one hasn’t. So that’s the end of that. First Nirvana, then Jamesons—they all go the same way home. Serves me right for gambling, I suppose. But I wish I hadn’t let you down, Pat.”

“You haven’t let me down,” she flashed at him: and the sudden anger surprised them both. “Do you think I married you just for money? Do you think I want you to be like Rawlings? ...”

“No”—somehow her anger soothed him—“of course I don’t.”

“Well then, why do you talk about letting me down?”

“Because, Pat”—he spoke slowly, fumbling for words—“a man’s got no right to marry a woman and have children if he can’t look after them. Two years ago, we had three thousand a year; today, we’ll be lucky if we’ve got six hundred. That’s failure, Pat. And you know what I think of failure.”

She remembered a similar conversation, long ago, at the Carlton.

“It isn’t your fault,” she said stubbornly. “And besides”—her voice grew very gentle—-“lots of people are very happy on six hundred a year.”

“In books,” he sneered.

“Peter”—she looked at him and he saw her eyes suffuse—“that hurts.”

The sudden change in her dumbfounded him. Always, they had talked openly, as man to man. Now, he knew instinctively that he must finesse. And he hated finesse—even in commerce. Yet he was sorry to have hurt her; told her so; tried to explain.

“It’s all right for some people, Pat. But it wouldn’t suit us. Imagine us living in a place like ‘The Limes.’ ...”

Thought Patricia, “He’s been home half a day and he hasn’t even kissed me yet!”

Nevertheless, she pulled herself together. He had come home “on business”; and he must be allowed to settle his business in his own way. He looked thinner, she thought: and it seemed to her a shame that he should be worried with money-matters when his real work lay elsewhere, at the front.

She let him talk himself into optimism; admired the ultimate philosophy with which he said: “Anyway, it’s only temporary. One doesn’t alter a deal by talking round it. Jamesons will have to go. Let it! Once this war’s over, I’ll get into business again. And then, then, my dear, you’ll see me make things hum.”

He paid for tea; insisted on driving home himself. They spun out of twilit country into the blueing gloom of war-time London; made Harley Street in time for dinner.

The children, who had waited up for his return, greeted their father uproariously; could hardly be induced to bed. Later Heron Baynet produced Clicquot, a decanter of special brandy. The three of them made semblance of enjoyment. Peter told them how he had wangled his leave; Patricia broached a plan long contemplated—the taking of a little place in the country; her father spoke, as always, of his work.

The little consultant with the lined face and the kind eyes was one of the only three men in England who had made any study of war’s effect on the fighting man’s nerves. Already, in the card-index on the table in his consulting-room, he had tabulated five hundred cases; and from those five hundred cases, a theory had begun to evolve itself—a theory of eminent simplicity. Heron Baynet called it, “The Curve of the Limit of Human Endurance.”

The curve and the limit of each individual varied, were affected by conditions—physical, mental, and sexual, conditions of heredity and conditions of pre-war environment. But of one thing, Heron Baynet already held the absolute certainty:—The superman, as preached by German philosophers, did not exist. Every human individuality possessed its breaking-strain, the point beyond which will-power could not force either the body or the brain. Any attempt to pass that “limit of human endurance” must be foredoomed to failure.

And it seemed to Heron Baynet, sitting alone after the two had gone to bed, that he could already detect from certain tones in his son-in-law’s voice, from the way his conversation ran from one topic to another, from the whole atmosphere his personality exuded, that Peter Jameson had already abandoned the flat level of the normal, begun the slow climb up that curve of endurance which must lead eventually to breaking point....