He has that tall lanky, 'rangy' loose-jointed graceful close-cropped formidably clean American look. He has silver-grey hair which grows soft, furry, and inch-long all over his very round rather smallish head, and a smooth face which looks uncannily younger than his years. It is hard to believe he is over fifty. He dresses in the American style with belts instead of braces and so on, and affects many foppish and casual rig-outs, involving bright silk handkerchiefs instead of ties. I can never indeed see a gay clean silk handkerchief without thinking of Palmer; there is something about this object which is singularly reminiscent of him. Palmer conveys an immediate impression of gentleness and sweetness and almost, so far have good manners here assumed the air of a major virtue, of goodness. He is also a beautifully cultivated person. It was I, not Antonia, who 'discovered' Palmer, and for a long time, before she took him over, I saw a good deal of him. We used to read Dante together; and his relaxed gaiety, his unshadowed enjoyment of his pleasures, eased and complemented, though without dispelling, my affection of a resigned melancholy. Palmer appeared, in my generously admiring vision of him, as a complete and successful human being. He had come to analysis fairly late, after practising for some time, both in America and in Japan, as an ordinary doctor, and he had achieved a considerable reputation as that fashionable kind of modern magician. He spent half the week in Cambridge, where he lodged with his sister and lent his ear to neurotic undergraduates, and the other half in London, where he seemed to have a formidable number of well-known patients. He worked hard; and as I saw him, he was and deserved to be a being of an exceptional felicity.

I had known Palmer, when this story starts, for nearly four years. I had known Georgie Hands for three years, and she had been my mistress for eighteen months. Georgie, who is now twenty-six, had been an undergraduate at Cambridge, where she had taken a degree in economics.