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gray eyes with the blue-black hair, the slanted brows, and lashes which were emphatic even from that distance away. His grace in the saddle, flexible and erect, was something separable from good horsemanship, as if it would have cost him a deliberate effort to make any movement which was ugly or out of line. His head was up—he and the horse were getting their breath—and this chance pose gave him a look of medieval challenge and adventure which went with all the rest. It was fantastic that anyone unself-conscious and alone could look so faultlessly arranged.
    He looked quite unaware of himself, and happy. His long mouth had the rare mingling of sweetness and arrogance which can last only for a few years while youth holds them in suspension; for he was very young, perhaps twenty or so, perhaps not out of his teens. It was hard to say; his beauty was of that mind-arresting kind which silences other questions. Now, his face reflected only movement and the morning. Two magpies, scared up from the edge of the wood, flew suddenly out against the trees. He lit with a flash of pleasure as vivid as their flight, then touched his horse with his knee, and trotted away into an open aisle of the larches. The fallen needles muffled the sound, so that he seemed to vanish like a legend, leaving the sadness of mortality in his wake.
    Hilary sat up, and brushed bits of bracken smartly from her tweeds. With amused impatience, she dusted off also the impression from her mind. She naturally distrusted, and felt ill at ease with, physical perfection in either sex; not from envy—for she seldom troubled to improve on her own moderate good looks—but because she found it a confusing irrelevance, camouflaging the personality which interested her more. Within her own observation, the principal function of beauty had been to make a fool of intelligence, in one or two instances a tragic fool. The way to enjoy it was like this, impersonally, at a distance, for what it was worth; and she felt grateful for the absence of introductions, which had doubtless preserved her from hearty, illusion-shattering banalities about the clemency of the morning and the prospects of golf.
    These reflections carried her back to her car. As she drove home the air was still sweet and cool, but the early magic had dispersed; it was not sunrise but day, and already there was white dust on the road. Her mind began to travel on to the day’s work, and the glimpse in the larch wood only remained there as an incidental part of the pleasures of early rising, like dew and young rabbits, which in general cause one to say, “Why don’t I do this more often?” while knowing that one will not.

Chapter Two: A PATIENT’S SUBCONSCIOUS
    H ILARY SAT AT THE COTTAGE TABLE , holding a little glass pipette like a fountain-pen filler, and gazing down into a cardboard shoe box. In the box was cotton wool lined with a clean handkerchief of her own, and, embedded in the handkerchief, a tiny waxen face, no bigger than the palm of her hand. The face was full of an ancient ennui; the eyes were closed; the mouth was shut too, in remote obstinacy, passively resisting the pipette which Hilary was trying stealthily to introduce to it. With her fingertip she drew down the lower jaw, revealing a cavity much the size of the moon on a thumbnail. A few drops of brandy-and-water trickled in. The mouth sketched a grimace of languid, but definite, resentment, and out of it came a cry, thinner than the mew of a newborn kitten. Moving out from under the handkerchief in undirected protest, a hand, perfect and slender like an adult’s in miniature, closed round one of Hilary’s fingers and let go again in fastidious distaste.
    From the bed against the wall a dim voice said, “Was that her crying?”
    “Yes,” said Hilary cheerfully. “And about time, too.”
    “I couldn’t hardly hear it.”
    “Give her time. She’s not much over three pounds, by the look of her.”
    “Will I rear her,