THE WOMAN WITH THE FAN

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

EPILOGUE

IN a large and cool drawing-room of London a few people were scattered about, listening to a soprano voice that was singing to the accompaniment of a piano. The sound of the voice came from an inner room, towards which most of these people were looking earnestly. Only one or two seemed indifferent to the fascination of the singer.

A little woman, with oily black hair and enormous dark eyes, leaned back on a sofa, playing with a scarlet fan and glancing sideways at a thin, elderly man, who gazed into the distance from which the voice came. His mouth worked slightly under his stiff white moustache, and his eyes, in colour a faded blue, were fixed and stern. Upon his knees his thin and lemon-coloured hands twitched nervously, as if they longed to grasp something and hold it fast. The little dark woman glanced down at these hands, and then sharply up at the elderly man’s face. A faint and malicious smile curved her full lips, which were artificially reddened, and she turned her shoulder to him with deliberation and looked about the room.

On all the faces in it, except one, she perceived intent expressions. A sleek and plump man, with hanging cheeks, a hooked nose, and hair slightly tinged with grey and parted in the middle, was the exception. He sat in a low chair, pouting his lips, playing with his single eyeglass, and looking as sulky as an ill-conditioned school-boy. Once or twice he crossed and uncrossed his short legs with a sort of abrupt violence, laid his fat, white hands on the arms of the chair, lifted them, glanced at his rosy and shining nails, and frowned. Then he shut his little eyes so tightly that the skin round them became wrinkled, and, stretching out his feet, seemed almost angrily endeavouring to fall asleep.

A tall young man, who was sitting alone not far off, cast a glance of contempt at him, and then, as if vexed at having bestowed upon him even this slight attention, leaned forward, listening with eagerness to the soprano voice. The little dark woman observed him carefully above the scarlet feathers of her fan, which she now held quite still. His face was lean and brown. His eyes were long and black, heavy-lidded, and shaded by big lashes which curled upward. His features were good. The nose and chin were short and decided, but the mouth was melancholy, almost weak. On his upper lip grew a short moustache, turned up at the ends. His body was slim and muscular.

After watching him for a little while the dark woman looked again at the elderly man beside her, and then quickly back to the young fellow. She seemed to be comparing the two attentions, of age and of youth. Perhaps she found something horrible in the process for she suddenly lost her expression of sparkling and birdlike sarcasm, and bending her arm, as if overcome with lassitude, she let her fan drop on her knees, and stared moodily at the carpet.

A very tall woman, with snow-white hair and a face in which nobility and weariness were mated, let fall two tears, and a huge man, with short, bronze-coloured hair and a protruding lower jaw, who was sitting opposite to her, noticed them and suddenly looked proud.

The light soprano voice went on singing an Italian song about a summer night in Venice, about stars, dark waters and dark palaces, heat, and the sound of music, and of gondoliers calling over the lagoons to their comrades. It was an exquisite voice; not large, but flexible and very warm. The pianoforte accompaniment was rather uneasy and faltering. Now and then, when it became blurred and wavering, the voice was abruptly hard and decisive, once even piercing and almost shrewish. Then the pianist, as if attacked by fear, played louder and hurried the tempo, the little dark woman smiled mischievously, the white-haired woman put her handkerchief to her eyes, and the young man looked as if he wished to commit murder. But the huge man with the bronze hair went on looking equably proud.

When the voice died away there was distinct, though slight, applause, which partially drowned the accompanist’s muddled conclusion. Then a woman walked in from the second drawing-room with an angry expression on her face.

She was tall and slight. Her hair and eyes were light yellow-brown, and the former had a natural wave in it. Her shoulders and bust were superb, and her small head was beautifully set on a lovely, rather long, neck. She had an oval face, with straight, delicate features, now slightly distorted by temper. But the most remarkable thing about her was her complexion. Her skin was exquisite, delicately smooth and white, warmly white like a white rose. She did nothing to add to its natural beauty, though nearly every woman in London declared that she had a special preparation and always slept in a mask coated thickly with it. The Bond Street oracles never received a visit from her. She had been born with an enchanting complexion, a marvellous skin. She was young, just twenty-four. She let herself alone because she knew improvement—in that direction—was not possible. The mask coated with Juliet paste, or Aphrodite ivorine, existed only in the radiant imaginations of her carefully-arranged acquaintances.

In appearance she was a siren. By nature she was a siren too. But she had a temper and sometimes showed it. She showed it now.

As she walked in slowly all the scattered people leaned forward, murmuring their thanks, and the men stood up and gathered round her.

“Beautiful! Beautiful!” muttered the thin, elderly man in a hoarse voice, striking his fingers repeatedly against the palms of his withered hands.

The young man looked at the singer and said nothing; but the anger in her face was reflected in his, and mingled with a flaming of sympathy that made his appearance almost startling. The white-haired woman clasped the singer’s hands and said, “Thank you, dearest!” in a thrilling voice, and the little dark woman with the red fan cried out, “Viola, you simply pack up Venice, carry it over the Continent and set it down here in London!”

Lady Holme frowned slightly.

“Thank you, thank you, you good-natured dears,” she said with an attempt at lightness. Then, hearing the thin rustle of a dress, she turned sharply and cast an unfriendly glance at a mild young woman with a very pointed nose, on which a pair of eyeglasses sat astride, who came meekly forward, looking self-conscious, and smiling with one side of her mouth. The man with the protruding jaw, who was Lord Holme, said to her, in a loud bass voice:

“Thanks, Miss Filberte, thanks.”

“Oh, not at all, Lord Holme,” replied the accompanist with a sudden air of rather foolish delight. “I consider it an honour to accompany an amateur who sings like Lady Holme.”

She laid a slight emphasis on the word “amateur.”

Lady Holme suddenly walked forward to an empty part of the drawing-room. The elderly man, whose name was Sir Donald Ulford, made a movement as if to follow her, then cleared his throat and stood still looking after her. Lord Holme stuck out his under jaw. But Lady Cardington, the white-haired woman spoke to him softly, and he leaned over to her and replied. The sleek man, whose name was Mr. Bry, began to talk about Tschaikowsky to Mrs. Henry Wolfstein, the woman with the red fan. He uttered his remarks authoritatively in a slow and languid voice, looking at the pointed toes of his shoes. Conversation became general.

Robin Pierce, the tall young man, stood alone for a few minutes. Two or three times he glanced towards Lady Holme, who had sat down on a sofa, and was opening and shutting a small silver box which she had picked up from a table near her. Then he walked quietly up the room and sat down beside her.

“Why on earth didn’t you accompany yourself?” he asked in a low voice. “You knew what a muddler that girl was, I suppose.”

“Yes. She plays like a distracted black beetle—horrid creature!”

“Then—why?”

“I look ridiculous sitting at the piano.”

“Ridiculous—you—”

“Well, I hold them far more when I stand up. They can’t get away from me then.”

“And you’d rather have your singing ruined than part for a moment with a scrap of your physical influence, of the influence that comes from your beauty, not your talent—your face, not your soul. Viola, you’re just the same.”

“Lady Holme,” she said.

“P’sh! Why?”

“My little husband’s fussy.”

“And much you care if he is.”

“Oh, yes, I do. He sprawls when he fusses and knocks things over, and then, when I’ve soothed him, he always goes and does Sandow exercises and gets bigger. And he’s big enough as it is. I must keep him quiet.”

“But you can’t keep the other men quiet. With your face and your voice—”

“Oh, it isn’t the voice,” she said with contempt.

He looked at her rather sadly.

“Why will you put such an exaggerated value on your appearance? Why will you never allow that three-quarters at least of your attraction comes from something else?”

“What?”

“Your personality—your self.”

“My soul!” she said, suddenly putting on a farcically rapt and yearning expression and speaking in a hollow, hungry voice. “Are we in the prehistoric Eighties?”

“We are in the unchanging world.”

“Unchanging! My dear boy!”

“Yes, unchanging,” he repeated obstinately.

He pressed his lips together and looked away. Miss Filberte was cackling and smiling on a settee, with a man whose figure presented a succession of curves, and who kept on softly patting his hands together and swaying gently backwards and forwards.

“Well, Mr. Pierce, what’s the matter?”

“Mr. Pierce!” he said, almost savagely.

“Yes, of the English Embassy in Rome, rising young diplomat and full of early Eighty yearns—”

“How the deuce can you be as you are and yet sing as you do?” he exclaimed, turning on her. “You say you care for nothing but the outside of things—the husk, the shell, the surface. You think men care for nothing else. Yet when you sing you—you—”

“What do I do?”

“It’s as if another woman than you were singing in you—a woman totally unlike you, a woman who believes in, and loves, the real beauty which you care nothing about.”

“The real beauty that rules the world is lodged in the epidermis,” she said, opening her fan and smiling slowly. “If this”—she touched her face—“were to be changed into—shall we say a Filberte countenance?”

“Oh!” he exclaimed.

“There! You see, directly I put the matter before you, you have to agree with me!”

“No one could sing like you and have a face like a silly sheep.”

“Poor Miss Filberte! Well, then, suppose me disfigured and singing better than ever—what man would listen to me?”

“I should.”

“For half a minute. Then you’d say, ‘Poor wretch, she’s lost her voice!’ No, no, it’s my face that sings to the world, my face the world loves to listen to, my face that makes me friends and—enemies.”

She looked into his eyes with impertinent directness.

“It’s my face that’s made Mr. Robin Pierce deceive himself into the belief that he only worships women for their souls, their lovely natures, their—”

“Do you know that in a way you are a singularly modest woman?” he suddenly interrupted.

“Am I? How?”

“In thinking that you hold people only by your appearance, that your personality has nothing to say in the matter.”

“I am modest, but not so modest as that.”

“Well, then?”

“Personality is a crutch, a pretty good crutch; but so long as men are men they will put crutches second and—something else first. Yes, I know I’m a little bit vulgar, but everybody in London is.”

“I wish you lived in Rome.”

“I’ve seen people being vulgar there too. Besides, there may be reasons why it would not be good for me to live in Rome.”

She glanced at him again less impertinently, and suddenly her whole body looked softer and kinder.

“You must put up with my face, Robin,” she added. “It’s no good wishing me to be ugly. It’s no use. I can’t be.”

She laughed. Her ill-humour had entirely vanished.

“If you were—” he said. “If you were—!”

“What then?”

“Do you think no one would stick to you—stick to you for yourself?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Who, then?”

“Quite several old ladies. It’s very strange, but old ladies of a certain class—the almost obsolete class that wears caps and connects piety with black brocade—like me. They think me ‘a bright young thing.’ And so I am.”

“I don’t know what you are. Sometimes I seem to divine what you are, and then—then your face is like a cloud which obscures you—except when you are singing.”

She laughed frankly.

“Poor Robin! It was always your great fault—trying to plumb shallows and to take high dives into water half a foot deep.”

He was silent for a minute. At last he said:

“And your husband?”

“Fritz!”

His forehead contracted.

“Fritz—yes. What does he do? Try to walk in ocean depths?”

“You needn’t sneer at Fritz,” she said sharply.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Fritz doesn’t bother about shallows and depths. He loves me absurdly, and that’s quite enough for him.”

“And for you.”

She nodded gravely.

“And what would Fritz do if you were to lose your beauty? Would he be like all the other men? Would he cease to care?”

For the first time Lady Holme looked really thoughtful—almost painfully thoughtful.

“One’s husband,” she said slowly. “Perhaps he’s different. He—he ought to be different.”

A faint suggestion of terror came into her large brown eyes.

“There’s a strong tie, you know, whatever people may say, a very strong tie in marriage,” she murmured, as if she were thinking out something for herself. “Fritz ought to love me, even if—if—”

She broke off and looked about the room. Robin Pierce glanced round too over the chattering guests sitting or standing in easy or lazy postures, smiling vaguely, or looking grave and indifferent. Mrs. Wolfstein was laughing, and yawned suddenly in the midst of her mirth. Lady Cardington said something apparently tragic, to Mr. Bry, who was polishing his eyeglass and pouting out his dewy lips. Sir Donald Ulford, wandering round the walls, was examining the pictures upon them. Lady Manby, a woman with a pyramid of brown hair and an aggressively flat back, was telling a story. Evidently it was a comic history of disaster. Her gestures were full of deliberate exaggeration, and she appeared to be impersonating by turns two or three different people, each of whom had a perfectly ridiculous personality. Lord Holme burst into a roar of laughter. His big bass voice vibrated through the room. Suddenly Lady Holme laughed too.

“Why are you laughing?” Robin Pierce asked rather harshly. “You didn’t hear what Lady Manby said.”

“No, but Fritz is so infectious. I believe there are laughter microbes. What a noise he makes! It’s really a scandal.”

And she laughed again joyously.

“You don’t know much about women if you think any story of Lady Manby’s is necessary, to prompt my mirth. Poor dear old Fritz is quite enough. There he goes again!”

Robin Pierce began to look stiff with constraint, and just then Sir Donald Ulford, in his progress round the walls, reached the sofa where they were sitting.

“You are very fortunate to possess this Cuyp, Lady Holme,” he said in a voice from which all resonance had long ago departed.

“Alas, Sir Donald, cows distress me! They call up sad memories. I was chased by one in the park at Grantoun when I was a child. A fly had stung it, so it tried to kill me. This struck me as unreason run riot, and ever since then I have wished the Spaniards would go a step farther and make cow-fights the national pastime. I hate cows frankly.”

Sir Donald sat down in an armchair and looked, with his faded blue eyes, into the eyes of his hostess. His drawn yellow face was melancholy, like the face of one who had long been an invalid. People who knew him well, however, said there was nothing the matter with him, and that his appearance had not altered during the last twenty years.

“You can hate nothing beautiful,” he said with a sort of hollow assurance.

“I think cows hideous.”

“Cuyp’s?”

“All cows. You’ve never had one running after you.”

She took up her gloves, which she had laid down on the table beside her, and began to pull them gently through her fingers. Both Sir Donald and Robin looked at her hands, which were not only beautiful in shape but extraordinarily intelligent in their movements. Whatever they did they did well, without hesitation or bungling. Nobody had ever seen them tremble.

“Do you consider that anything that can be dangerous for a moment must be hideous for ever?” asked Sir Donald, after a slight pause.

“I’m sure I don’t know. But I truly think cows hideous—I truly do.”

“Don’t put on your gloves,” exclaimed Robin at this moment.

Sir Donald glanced at him and said:

“Thank you.”

“Why not?” said Lady Holme.

It was obvious to both men that there was no need to answer her question. She laid the gloves in her lap, smoothed them with her small fingers, and kept silence. Silence was characteristic of her. When she was in society she sometimes sat quite calmly and composedly without uttering a word. After watching her for a minute or two, Sir Donald said:

“You must know Venice very well and understand it completely.”

“Oh, I’ve been there, of course.”

“Recently?”

“Not so very long ago. After my marriage Fritz took me all over Europe.”

“And you loved Venice.”

Sir Donald did not ask a question, he made a statement.

“No. It didn’t agree with me. It depressed me. We were there in the mosquito season.”

“What has that to do with it?”

“My dear Sir Donald, if you’d ever had a hole in your net you’d know. I made Fritz take me away after two days, and I’ve never been back. I don’t want to have my one beauty ruined.”

Sir Donald did not pay the reasonable compliment. He only stretched out his lean hands over his knees, and said:

“Venice is the only ideal city in Europe.”

“You forget Paris.”

“Paris!” said Sir Donald. “Paris is a suburb of London and New York. Paris is no longer the city of light, but the city of pornography and dressmakers.”

“Well, I don’t know exactly what pornography is—unless it’s some new process for taking snapshots. But I do know what gowns are, and I love Paris. The Venice shops are failures and the Venice mosquitoes are successes, and I hate Venice.”

An expression of lemon-coloured amazement appeared upon Sir Donald’s face, and he glanced at Robin Pierce as if requesting the answer to a riddle. Robin looked rather as if he were enjoying himself, but the puzzled melancholy grew deeper on Sir Donald’s face. With the air of a man determined to reassure his mind upon some matter, however, he spoke again.

“You visited the European capitals?” he said.

“Yes, all of them.”

“Constantinople?”

“Terrible place! Dogs, dogs, nothing but dogs.”

“Did you like Petersburg?”

“No, I couldn’t bear it. I caught cold there.”

“And that was why you hated it?”

“Yes. I went out one night with Fritz on the Neva to hear a woman in a boat singing—a peasant girl with high cheek-bones—and I caught a frightful chill.”

“Ah!” said Sir Donald. “What was the song? I know a good many of the Northern peasant songs.”

Suddenly Lady Holme got up, letting her gloves fall to the ground.

“I’ll sing it to you,” she said.

Robin Pierce touched her arm.

“For Heaven’s sake not to Miss Filberte’s accompaniment!”

“Very well. But come and sit where you can see me.”

“I won’t,” he said with brusque obstinacy.

“Madman!” she answered. “Anyhow, you come, Sir Donald.”

And she walked lightly away towards the piano, followed by Sir Donald, who walked lightly too, but uncertainly, on his thin, stick-like legs.

“What are you up to, Vi?” said Lord Holme, as she came near to him.

“I’m going to sing something for Sir Donald.”

“Capital! Where’s Miss Filberte?”

“Here I am!” piped a thin alto voice.

There was a rustle of skirts as the accompanist rose hastily from her chair.

“Sit down, please, Miss Filberte,” said Lady Holme in a voice of ice.

Miss Filberte sat down like one who has been knocked on the head with a hammer, and Lady Holme went alone to the piano, turned the button that raised the music-stool, sat down too, holding herself very upright, and played some notes. For a moment, while she played, her face was so determined and pitiless that Mr. Bry, unaware that she was still thinking about Miss Filberte, murmured to Lady Cardington:

“Evidently we are in for a song about Jael with the butter in the lordly dish omitted.”

Then an expression of sorrowful youth stole into Lady Holme’s eyes, changed her mouth to softness and her cheeks to curving innocence. She leaned a little way from the piano towards her audience and sang, looking up into vacancy as if her world were hidden there. The song had the clear melancholy and the passion of a Northern night. It brought the stars out within that room and set purple distances before the eyes. Water swayed in it, but languidly, as water sways at night in calm weather, when the black spars of ships at anchor in sheltered harbours are motionless as fingers of skeletons pointing towards the moon. Mysterious lights lay round a silent shore. And in the wide air, on the wide waters, one woman was singing to herself of a sorrow that was deep as the grave, and that no one upon the earth knew of save she who sang. The song was very short. It had only two little verses. When it was over, Sir Donald, who had been watching the singer, returned to the sofa, where Robin Pierce was sitting with his eyes shut and, again striking his fingers against the palms of his hands, said: “I have heard that song at night on the Neva, and yet I never heard it before.”

People began getting up to go away. It was past eleven o’clock. Sir Donald and Robin Pierce stood together, saying good-bye to Lady Holme. As she held out her hand to the former, she said:

“Oh, Sir Donald, you know Russia, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“Then I want you to tell me the name of that stuff they carry down the Neva in boats—the stuff that has such a horrible smell. That song always reminds me of it, and Fritz can’t remember the name.”

“Nor can I,” said Sir Donald, rather abruptly. “Good-night, Lady Holme.”

He walked out of the room, followed by Robin.

LORD HOLME’S house was in Cadogan Square. When Sir Donald had put on his coat in the hall he turned to Robin Pierce and said:

“Which way do you go?”

“To Half Moon Street,” said Robin.

“We might walk, if you like. I am going the same way.

“Certainly.”

They set out slowly. It was early in the year. Showers of rain had fallen during the day. The night was warm, and the damp earth in the Square garden steamed as if it were oppressed and were breathing wearily. The sky was dark and cloudy, and the air was impregnated with a scent to which many things had contributed, each yielding a fragment of the odour peculiar to it. Rain, smoke, various trees and plants, the wet paint on a railing, the damp straw laid before the house of an invalid, the hothouse flowers carried by a woman in a passing carriage—these and other things were represented in the heavy atmosphere which was full of the sensation of life. Sir Donald expanded his nostrils.

“London, London!” he said. “I should know it if I were blind.”

“Yes. The London smell is not to be confused with the smell of any other place. You have been back a good while, I believe?”

“Three years. I am laid on the London shelf now.”

“You have had a long life of work—interesting work.”

“Yes. Diplomacy has interesting moments. I have seen many countries. I have been transferred from Copenhagen to Teheran, visited the Sultan of Morocco at Fez, and—” he stopped. After a pause he added: “And now I sit in London clubs and look out of bay windows.”

They walked on slowly.

“Have you known our hostess of to-night long?” Sir Donald asked presently.

“A good while—quite a good while. But I’m very much away at Rome now. Since I have been there she has married.”

“I have only met her to speak to once before to-night, though I have seen her about very often and heard her sing.”

“Ah!”

“To me she is an enigma,” Sir Donald continued with some hesitation. “I cannot make her out at all.”

Robin Pierce smiled in the dark and thrust his hands deep down in the pockets of his overcoat.

“I don’t know,” Sir Donald resumed, after a slight pause, “I don’t know what is your—whether you care much for beauty in its innumerable forms. Many young men don’t, I believe.”

“I do,” said Robin. “My mother is an Italian, you know, and not an Italian Philistine.”

“Then you can help me, perhaps. Does Lady Holme care for beauty? But she must. It is impossible that she does not.”

“Do you think so? Why?”

“I really cannot reconcile myself to the idea that such performances as hers are matters of chance.”

“They are not. Lady Holme is not a woman who chances things before the cruel world in which she, you and I live, Sir Donald.”

“Exactly. I felt sure of that. Then we come to calculation of effects, to consideration of that very interesting question—self-consciousness in art.”

“Do you feel that Lady Holme is self-conscious when she is singing?”

“No. And that is just the point. She must, I suppose, have studied till she has reached that last stage of accomplishment in which the self-consciousness present is so perfectly concealed that it seems to be eliminated.”

“Exactly. She has an absolute command over her means.”

“One cannot deny it. No musician could contest it. But the question that interests me lies behind all this. There is more than accomplishment in her performance. There is temperament, there is mind, there is emotion and complete understanding. I am scarcely speaking strongly enough in saying complete—perhaps infinitely subtle would be nearer the mark. What do you say?”

“I don’t think if you said that there appears to be an infinitely subtle understanding at work in Lady Holme’s singing you would be going at all too far.”

“Appears to be?”

Sir Donald stopped for a moment on the pavement under a gas-lamp. As the light fell on him he looked like a weary old ghost longing to fade away into the dark shadows of the London night.

“You say ‘appears to be,’” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“May I ask why?”

“Well, would you undertake to vouch for Lady Holme’s understanding—I mean for the infinite subtlety of it?”

Sir Donald began to walk on once more.

“I cannot find it in her conversation,” he said.

“Nor can I, nor can anyone.”

“She is full of personal fascination, of course.”

“You mean because of her personal beauty?”

“No, it’s more than that, I think. It’s the woman herself. She is suggestive somehow. She makes one’s imagination work. Of course she is beautiful.”

“And she thinks that is everything. She would part with her voice, her intelligence—she is very intelligent in the quick, frivolous fashion that is necessary for London—that personal fascination you speak of, everything rather than her white-rose complexion and the wave in her hair.”

“Really, really?”

“Yes. She thinks the outside everything. She believes the world is governed, love is won and held, happiness is gained and kept by the husk of things. She told me only to-night that it is her face which sings to us all, not her voice; that were she to sing as well and be an ugly woman we should not care to listen to her.”

“H’m! H’m!”

“Absurd, isn’t it?”

“What will be the approach of old age to her?”

There was a suspicion of bitterness in his voice.

“The coming of the King of Terrors,” said Pierce. “But she cannot hear his footsteps yet.”

“They are loud enough in some ears. Ah, we, are at your door already?”

“Will you be good-natured and come in for a little while?”

“I’m afraid—isn’t it rather late?”

“Only half-past eleven.”

“Well, thank you.”

They stepped into the little hall. As they did so a valet appeared at the head of the stairs leading to the servants’ quarters.

“If you please, sir,” he said to Pierce, “this note has just come. I was to ask if you would read it directly you returned.”

“Will you excuse me?” said Pierce to Sir Donald, tearing open the envelope.

He glanced at the note.

“Is it to ask you to go somewhere to-night?” Sir Donald said.

“Yes, but—”

“I will go.”

“Please don’t. It is only from a friend who is just round the corner in Stratton Street. If you will not mind his joining us here I will send him a message.”

He said a few words to his man.

“That will be all right. Do come upstairs.”

“You are sure I am not in the way?”

“I hope you will not find my friend in the way; that’s all. He’s an odd fellow at the best of times, and to-night he’s got an attack of what he calls the blacks—his form of blues. But he’s very talented. Carey is his name—Rupert Carey. You don’t happen to know him?”

“No. If I may say so, your room is charming.”

They were on the first floor now, in a chamber rather barely furnished and hung with blue-grey linen, against which were fastened several old Italian pictures in black frames. On the floor were some Eastern rugs in which faded and originally pale colours mingled. A log fire was burning on an open hearth, at right angles to which stood an immense sofa with a square back. This sofa was covered with dull blue stuff. Opposite to it was a large and low armchair, also covered in blue. A Steinway grand piano stood out in the middle of the room. It was open and there were no ornaments or photographs upon it. Its shining dark case reflected the flames which sprang up from the logs. Several dwarf bookcases of black wood were filled with volumes, some in exquisite bindings, some paper covered. On the top of the bookcases stood four dragon china vases filled with carnations of various colours. Electric lights burned just under the ceiling, but they were hidden from sight. In an angle of the wall, on a black ebony pedestal, stood an extremely beautiful marble statuette of a nude girl holding a fan. Under this, on a plaque, was written, “Une Danseuse de Tunisie.”

Sir Donald went up to it, and stood before it for two or three minutes in silence.

“I see indeed you do care for beauty,” he said at length. “But—forgive me—that fan makes that statuette wicked.”

“Yes, but a thousand times more charming. Carey said just the same thing when he saw it. I wonder I wonder what Lady Holme would say.”

They sat down on the sofa by the wood fire.

“Carey could probably tell us!” Pierce added.

“Oh, then your friend knows Lady Holme?”

“He did once. I believe he isn’t allowed to now. Ah, here is Carey!”

A quick step was audible on the stairs, the door was opened, and a broad, middle-sized young man, with red hair, a huge red moustache and fierce red-brown eyes, entered swiftly with an air of ruthless determination.

“I came, but I shall be devilish bad company to-night,” he said at once, looking at Sir Donald.

“We’ll cheer you up. Let me introduce you to Sir Donald Ulford—Mr. Rupert Carey.”

Carey shook Sir Donald by the hand.

“Glad to meet you,” he said abruptly. “I’ve carried your Persian poems round the world with me. They lay in my trunk cheek by jowl with God-forsaken, glorious old Omar.”

A dusky red flush appeared in Sir Donald’s hollow cheeks.

“Really,” he said, with obvious embarrassment, “I—they were a great failure. ‘Obviously the poems of a man likely to be successful in dealing with finance,’ as The Times said in reviewing them.”

“Well, in the course of your career you’ve done some good things for England financially, haven’t you?—not very publicly, perhaps, but as a minister abroad.”

“Yes. To come forward as a poet was certainly a mistake.”

“Any fool could see the faults in your book. True Persia all the same though. I saw all the faults and read ‘em twenty times.”

He flung himself down in the big armchair. Sir Donald could see now that there was a shining of misery in his big, rather ugly, eyes.

“Where have you two been?” he continued, with a directness that was almost rude.

“Dining with the Holmes,” answered Pierce.

“That ruffian! Did she sing?”

“Yes, twice.”

“Wish I’d heard her. Here am I playing Saul without a David. Many people there?”

“Several. Lady Cardington—”

“That white-haired enchantress! There’s a Niobe—weeping not for her children, she never had any, but for her youth. She is the religion of half Mayfair, though I don’t know whether she’s got a religion. Men who wouldn’t look at her when she was sixteen, twenty-six, thirty-six, worship her now she’s sixty. And she weeps for her youth! Who else?”

“Mrs. Wolfstein.”

“A daughter of Israel; coarse, intelligent, brutal to her reddened finger-tips. I’d trust her to judge a singer, actor, painter, writer. But I wouldn’t trust her with my heart or half a crown.”

“Lady Manby.”

“Humour in petticoats. She’s so infernally full of humour that there’s no room in her for anything else. I doubt if she’s got lungs. I’m sure she hasn’t got a heart or a brain.”

“But if she is so full of humour,” said Sir Donald mildly, “how does she—?”

“How does a great writer fail over an addition sum? How does a man who speaks eight languages talk imbecility in them all? How is it that a bird isn’t an angel? I wish to Heaven we knew. Well, Robin?”

“Of course, Mr. Bry.”

Carey’s violent face expressed disgust in every line.

“One of the most finished of London types,” he exclaimed. “No other city supplies quite the same sort of man to take the colour out of things. He’s enormously clever, enormously abominable, and should have been strangled at birth merely because of his feet. Why he’s not Chinese I can’t conceive; why he dines out every night I can. He’s a human cruet-stand without the oil. He’s so monstrously intelligent that he knows what a beast he is, and doesn’t mind. Not a bad set of people to talk with, unless Lady Holme was in a temper and you were next to her, or you were left stranded with Holme when the women went out of the dining-room.”

“You think Holme a poor talker?” asked Sir Donald.

“Precious poor. His brain is muscle-bound, I believe. Robin, you know I’m miserable to-night you offer me nothing to drink.”

“I beg your pardon. Help yourself. And, Sir Donald, what will you—?”

“Nothing, thank you.”

“Try one of those cigars.”

Sir Donald took one and lit it quietly, looking at Carey, who seemed to interest him a good deal.

“Why are you miserable, Carey?” said Pierce, as the former buried his moustache in a tall whisky-and-soda.

“Because I’m alive and don’t want to be dead. Reason enough.”

“Because you’re an unmitigated egoist,” rejoined Pierce.

“Yes, I am an egoist. Introduce me to a man who is not, will you?”

“And what about women?”

“Many women are not egoists. But you have been dining with one of the most finished egoists in London to-night.”

“Lady Holme?” said Sir Donald, shifting into the left-hand corner of the sofa.

“Yes, Viola Holme, once Lady Viola Grantoun; whom I mustn’t know any more.”

“I’m not sure that you are right, Carey,” said Pierce, rather coldly.

“What!”

“Can a true and perfect egoist be in love?”

“Certainly. Is not even an egoist an animal?”

Pierce’s lips tightened for a second, and his right hand strained itself round his knee, on which it was lying.

“And how much can she be in love?”

“Very much.”

“Do you mean with her body?”

“Yes, I do; and with the spirit that lives in it. I don’t believe there’s any life but this. A church is more fantastic to me than the room in which Punch belabours Judy. But I say that there is spirit in lust, in hunger, in everything. When I want a drink my spirit wants it. Viola Holme’s spirit—a flame that will be blown out at death—takes part in her love for that great brute Holme. And yet she’s one of the most pronounced egoists in London.”

“Do you care to tell us any reason you may have for saying so?” said Sir Donald.

As he spoke, his voice, brought into sharp contrast with the changeful and animated voice of Carey, sounded almost preposterously thin and worn out.

“She is always conscious of herself in every situation, in every relation of life. While she loves even she thinks to herself, ‘How beautifully I am loving!’ And she never forgets for a single moment that she is a fascinating woman. If she were being murdered she would be saying silently, while the knife went in, ‘What an attractive creature, what an unreplaceable personage they are putting an end to!’”

“Rupert, you are really too absurd!” exclaimed Pierce, laughing reluctantly.

“I’m not absurd. I see straight. Lady Holme is an egoist—a magnificent, an adorable egoist, fine enough in her brilliant selfishness to stand quite alone.”

“And you mean to tell us that any woman can do that?” exclaimed Pierce.

“Who am I that I should pronounce a verdict upon the great mystery? What do I know of women?”

“Far too much, I’m afraid,” said Pierce.

“Nothing, I have never been married, and only the married man knows anything of women. The Frenchmen are wrong. It is not the mistress who informs, it is the loving wife. For me the sex remains mysterious, like the heroine of my realm of dreams.”

“You are talking great nonsense, Rupert.”

“I always do when I am depressed, and I am very specially depressed to-night.”

“But why? There must be some very special reason.”

“There is. I, too, dined out and met at dinner a young man whose one desire in life appears to be to deprive living creatures of life.”

Sir Donald moved slightly.

“You’re not a sportsman, then, Mr. Carey?” he said.

“Indeed, I am. I’ve shot big game, the Lord forgive me, and found big pleasure in doing it. Yet this young man depressed me. He was so robust, so perfectly happy, so supremely self-satisfied, and, according to his own account, so enormously destructive, that he made me feel very sick. He is married. He married a widow who has an ear-trumpet and a big shooting in Scotland. If she could be induced to crawl in underwood, or stand on a cairn against a skyline, I’m sure he’d pot at her for the fun of the thing.”

“What is his name?” asked Sir Donald.

“I didn’t catch it. My host called him Leo. He has—”

“Ah! He is my only son.”

Pierce looked very uncomfortable, but Carey replied calmly:

“Really. I wonder he hasn’t shot you long ago.”

Sir Donald smiled.

“Doesn’t he depress you?” added Carey.

“He does, I’m sorry to say, but scarcely so much as I depress him.”

“I think Lady Holme would like him.”

For once Sir Donald looked really expressive, of surprise and disgust.

“Oh, I can’t think so!” he said.

“Yes, yes, she would. She doesn’t care honestly for art-loving men. Her idea of a real man, the sort of man a woman marries, or bolts with, or goes off her head for, is a huge mass of bones and muscles and thews and sinews that knows not beauty. And your son would adore her, Sir Donald. Better not let him, though. Holme’s a jealous devil.”

“Totally without reason,” said Pierce, with a touch of bitterness.

“No doubt. It’s part of his Grand Turk nature. He ought to possess a Yildiz. He’s out of place in London where marital jealousy is more unfashionable than pegtop trousers.”

He buried himself in his glass. Sir Donald rose to go.

“I hope I may see you again,” he said rather tentatively at parting. “I am to be found in the Albany.”

They both said they would call, and he slipped away gently.

“There’s a sensitive man,” said Carey when he had gone. “A sort of male Lady Cardington. Both of them are morbidly conscious of their age and carry it about with them as if it were a crime. Yet they’re both worth knowing. People with that temperament who don’t use hair-dye must have grit. His son’s awful.”

“And his poems?”

“Very crude, very faulty, very shy, but the real thing. But he’ll never publish anything again. It must have been torture to him to reveal as much as he did in that book. He must find others to express him, and such as him, to the world.”

“Lady Holmes?”

“Par exemple. Deuced odd that while the dumb understand the whole show the person who’s describing it quite accurately to them often knows nothing about it. Paradox, irony, blasted eternal cussedness of life! Did you ever know Lady Ulford?”

“No.”

“She was a horse-dealer’s daughter.”

“Rupert!”

“On my honour! One of those women who are all shirt and collar and nattiness, with a gold fox for a tie-pin and a hunting-crop under the arm. She was killed schooling a horse in Mexico after making Ulford shy and uncomfortable for fifteen years. Lady Cardington and a Texas cowboy would have been as well suited to one another. Ulford’s been like a wistful ghost, they tell me, ever since her death. I should like to see him and his son together.”

A hard and almost vicious gleam shone for as instant in his eyes.

“You’re as cruel as a Spaniard at a bull-fight.”

“My boy, I’ve been gored by the bull.”

Pierce was silent for a minute. He thought of Lady Holme’s white-rose complexion and of the cessation of Carey’s acquaintance with the Holmes. No one seemed to know exactly why Carey went to the house in Cadogan Square no more.

“For God’s sake give me another drink, Robin, and make it a stiff one.”

Pierce poured out the whisky and thought:

“Could it have been that?”

Carey emptied the tumbler and heaved a long sigh.

“When d’you go back to Rome?”

“Beginning of July.”

“You’ll be there in the dead season.”

“I like Rome then. The heat doesn’t hurt me and I love the peace. Antiquity seems to descend upon the city in August, returning to its own when America is far away.”

Carey stared at him hard.

“A rising diplomatist oughtn’t to live in the past,” he said bluntly.

“I like ruins.”

“Unless they’re women.”

“If I loved a woman I could love her when she became what is called a ruin.”

“If you were an old man who had crumbled gradually with her.”

“As a young man, too. I was discussing—or rather flitting about, dinner-party fashion—that very subject to-night.”

“With whom?”

“Viola.”

“The deuce! What line did you take?”

“That one loves—if one loves—the kernel, not the shell.”

“And she?”

“You know her—the opposite.”

“Ah!”

“And you, Carey?”

“I! I think if the shell is a beautiful shell and becomes suddenly broken it makes a devil of a lot of difference in what most people think of the kernel.”

“It wouldn’t to me.”

“I think it would.”

“You take Viola’s side then?”

“And when did I ever do anything else? I’m off.”

He got up, nodded good-night, and was gone in a moment. Pierce heard him singing in a deep voice as he went down the stairs, and smiled with a faint contempt.

“How odd it is that nobody will believe a man if he’s fool enough to hint at the truth of his true self,” he thought. “And Carey—who’s so clever about people!”

WHEN the last guest had grimaced at her and left the drawing-room, Lady Holme stood with her hand on the mantelpiece, facing a tall mirror. She was alone for the moment. Her husband had accompanied Mrs. Wolfstein downstairs, and Lady Holme could hear his big, booming voice below, interrupted now and then by her impudent soprano. She spoke English with a slight foreign accent which men generally liked and women loathed. Lady Holme loathed it. But she was not fond of her own sex. She believed that all women were untrustworthy. She often said that she had never met a woman who was not a liar, and when she said it she had no doubt that, for once, a woman was speaking the truth. Now, as she heard Mrs. Wolfstein’s curiously improper laugh, she frowned. The face in the mirror changed and looked almost old.

This struck her unpleasantly. She kept the frown in its place and stared from under it, examining her features closely, fancying herself really an old woman, her whimsical fascination dead in its decaying home, her powers faded if not fled for ever. She might do what she liked then. It would all be of no use. Even the voice would be cracked and thin, unresponsive, unwieldy. The will would be phlegmatic. If it were not, the limbs and features would not easily obey its messages. The figure, now beautiful, would perhaps be marred by the ungracious thickness, the piteous fleshiness that Time often adds assiduously to ageing bodies, as if with an ironic pretence of generously giving in one direction while taking away in another. Decay would be setting in, life becoming perpetual loss. The precious years would be gone irrevocably.

She let the frown go and looked again on her beauty and smiled. The momentary bitterness passed. For there were many precious years to come for her, many years of power. She was young. Her health was superb. Her looks were of the kind that lasts. She thought of a famous actress whom she resembled closely. This actress was already forty-three, and was still a lovely woman, still toured about the world winning the hearts of men, was still renowned for her personal charm, worshipped not only for her talent but for her delicious skin, her great romantic eyes, her thick, waving hair.

Lady Holme laughed. In twenty years what Robin Pierce called her “husk” would still be an exquisite thing, and she would be going about without hearing the horrible tap, tap of the crutch in whose sustaining power she really believed so little. She knew men, and she said to herself, as she had said to Robin, that for them beauty lies in the epidermis.

“Hullo, Vi, lookin’ in the glass! ‘Pon my soul, your vanity’s disgustin’. A plain woman like you ought to keep away from such things—leave ‘em to the Mrs. Wolfsteins—what?”

Lady Holme turned round in time to see her husband’s blunt, brown features twisted in the grimace which invariably preceded his portentous laugh.

“I admire Mrs. Wolfstein,” she said.

The laugh burst like a bomb.

“You admire another woman! Why, you’re incapable of it. The Lord defend me from hypocrisy, and there’s no greater hypocrisy than one woman takin’ Heaven to witness that she thinks another a stunnin’ beauty.”

“You know nothing about it, Fritz. Mrs. Wolfstein’s eyes would be lovely if they hadn’t that pawnbroking expression.”

“Good, good! Now we’re goin’ to hear the voice of truth. Think it went well, eh?”

He threw himself down on a sofa and began to light a cigarette.

“The evening? No, I don’t.”

“Why not?”

He crossed his long legs and leaned back, resting his head on a cushion, and puffing the smoke towards the ceiling.

“They all seemed cheery—what? Even Lady Cardington only cried when you were squallin’.”

It was Lord Holme’s habit to speak irreverently of anything he happened to admire.

“She had reason to cry. Miss Filberte’s accompaniment was a tragedy. She never comes here again.”

“What’s the row with her? I thought her fingers got about over the piano awful quick.”

“They did—on the wrong notes.”

She came and sat down beside him.

“You don’t understand music, Fritz, thank goodness.”

“I know I don’t. But why thank what’s-his-name?”

“Because the men that do are usually such anaemic, dolly things, such shaved poodles with their Sunday bows on.”

“What about that chap Pierce? He’s up to all the scales and thingumies, isn’t he?”

“Robin—”

“Pierce I said.”

“And I said Robin.”

Lord Holme frowned and stuck out his under jaw. When he was irritated he always made haste to look like a prize-fighter. His prominent cheek-bones, and the abnormal development of bone in the lower part of his face, helped the illusion whose creation was begun by his expression.

“Look here, Vi,” he said gruffly. “If you get up to any nonsense there’ll be another Carey business. I give you the tip, and you can just take it in time. Don’t you make any mistake. I’m not a Brenford, or a Godley-Halstoun, or a Pennisford, to sit by and—”

“What a pity it is that your body’s so big and your intelligence so small!” she interrupted gently. “Why aren’t there Sandow exercises for increasing the brain?”

“I’ve quite enough brain to rub along with very well. If I’d chosen to take it I could have been undersecretary—-”

“You’ve told me that so many times, old darling, and I really can’t believe it. The Premier’s very silly. Everybody knows that. But he’s still got just a faint idea of the few things the country won’t stand. And you are one of them, you truly are. You don’t go down even with the Primrose League, and they simply worship at the shrine of the great Ar-rar.”

“Fool or not, I’d kick out Pierce as I kicked out Carey if I thought—”

“And suppose I wouldn’t let you?”

Her voice had suddenly changed. There was in it the sharp sound which had so overwhelmed Miss Filberte.

Lord Holme sat straight up and looked at his wife.

“Suppose—what?”

“Suppose I declined to let you behave ridiculously a second time.”

“Ridiculously! I like that! Do you stick out that Carey didn’t love you?”

“Half London loves me. I’m one of the most attractive women in it. That’s why you married me, blessed boy.”

“Carey’s a violent ass. Red-headed men always are. There’s a chap at White’s—”

“I know, I know. You told me about him when you forbade poor Mr. Carey the house. But Robin’s hair is black and he’s the gentlest creature in diplomacy.”

“I wouldn’t trust him a yard.”

“Believe me, he doesn’t wish you to. He’s far too clever to desire the impossible.”

“Then he can stop desirin’ you.”

“Don’t be insulting, Fritz. Remember that by birth you are a gentleman.”

Lord Holme bit through his cigarette.

“Sometimes I wish you were an ugly woman,” he muttered.

“And if I were?”

She leaned forward quite eagerly on the sofa and her whimsical, spoilt-child manner dropped away from her.

“You ain’t.”

“Don’t be silly. I know I’m not, of course. But if I were to become one?”

“What?”

“Really, Fritz, there’s no sort of continuity in your mental processes. If I were to become an ugly woman, what would you feel about me then?”

“How the deuce could you become ugly?”

“Oh, in a hundred ways. I might have smallpox and be pitted for life, or be scalded in the face as poor people’s babies often are, or have vitriol thrown over me as lots of women do in Paris, or any number of things.”

“What rot! Who’d throw vitriol over you, I should like to know?”

He lit a fresh cigarette with tender solicitude. Lady Holme began to look irritated.

“Do use your imagination!” she cried.

“Haven’t got one, thank God!” he returned philosophically.

“I insist upon your imagining me ugly. Do you hear, I insist upon it.”

She laid one soft hand on his knee and squeezed his leg with all her might.

“Now you’re to imagine me ugly and just the same as I am now.”

“You wouldn’t be the same.”

“Yes, I should. I should be the same woman, with the same heart and feelings and desires and things as I have now. Only the face would be altered.”

“Well, go ahead, but don’t pinch so, old girl.”

“I pinch you to make you exert your mind. Now tell me truly—truly; would you love me as you do now, would you be jealous of me, would you—”

“I say, wait a bit! Don’t drive on at such a rate. How ugly are you?”

“Very ugly; worse than Miss Filberte.”

“Miss Filberte’s not so bad.”

“Yes, she is, Fritz, you know she is. But I mean ever so much worse; with a purple complexion, perhaps, like Mrs. Armington, whose husband insisted on a judicial separation; or a broken nose, or something wrong with my mouth—”

“What wrong?”

“Oh, dear, anything! What l’homme qui vir had—or a frightful scar across my cheek. Could you love me as you do now? I should be the same woman, remember.”

“Then it’d be all the same to me, I s’pose. Let’s turn in.”

He got up, went over to the hearth, on which a small wood fire was burning, straddled his legs, bent his knees and straightened them several times, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his trousers, which were rather tight and horsey and defined his immense limbs. An expression of profound self-satisfaction illumined his face as he looked at his wife, giving it a slightly leery expression, as of a shrewd rustic. His large blunt features seemed to broaden, his big brown eyes twinkled, and his lips, which were thick and very red and had a cleft down their middle, parted under his short bronze moustache, exposing two level rows of square white teeth.

“It’s jolly difficult to imagine you an ugly woman,” he said, with a deep chuckle.

“I do wish you’d keep your legs still,” said Lady Holme. “What earthly pleasure can it give you to go on like that? Would you love me as you do now?”

“You’d be jolly sick if I didn’t, wouldn’t you, Vi, eh?”

“I wonder if it ever occurs to you that you’re hideously conceited, Fritz?”

She spoke with a touch of real anger, real exasperation.

“No more than any other Englishman that’s worth his salt and ever does any good in the world. I ain’t a timid molly-coddle, if that’s what you mean.”

He took one large hand out of his pocket, scratched his cheek and yawned. As he did so he looked as unconcerned, as free from self-consciousness, as much a slave to every impulse born of passing physical sensation as a wild animal in a wood or out on a prairie.

“Otherwise life ain’t worth tuppence,” he added through his yawn.

Lady Holme sat looking at him for a moment in silence. She was really irritated by his total lack of interest in what she wanted to interest in him, irritated, too, because her curiosity remained unsatisfied. But that abrupt look and action of absolutely unconscious animalism, chasing the leeriness of the contented man’s conceit, turned her to softness if not to cheerfulness. She adored Fritz like that. His open-mouthed, gaping yawn moved something in her to tenderness. She would have liked to kiss him while he was yawning and to pass her hands over his short hair, which was like a mat and grew as strongly as the hair which he shaved every morning from his brown cheeks.

“Well, what about bed, old girl?” he said, stretching himself.

Lady Holme did not reply. Some part of him, some joint, creaked as he forced his clasped hands downward and backward. She was listening eagerly for a repetition of the little sound.

“What! Is mum the word?” he said, bending forward to stare into her face.

At this moment the door opened, and a footman came in to extinguish the lights and close the piano. By mistake he let the lid of the latter drop with a bang. Lady Holme, who had just got up to go to bed, started violently. She said nothing but stared at him for an instant with an expression of cold rebuke on her face. The man reddened. Lord Holme was already on the stairs. He yawned again noisily, and turned the sound eventually into a sort of roaring chant up and down the scale as he mounted towards the next floor. Lady Holme came slowly after him. She had a very individual walk, moving from the hips and nearly always taking small, slow steps. Her sapphire-blue gown trailed behind her with a pretty noise over the carpet.

When her French maid had locked up her jewels and helped her to undress, she dismissed her, and called out to Lord Holme, who was in the next room, the door of which was slightly open.

“Fritz!”

“Girlie?”

His mighty form, attired in pale blue pyjamas, stood in the doorway. In his hand he grasped a toothbrush, and there were dabs of white tooth-powder on his cheeks and chin.

“Finish your toilet and make haste.”

He disappeared. There was a prolonged noise of brushing and the gurgling and splashing of water. Lady Holme sat down on the white couch at the foot of the great bed. She was wrapped in a soft white gown made like a burnous, a veritable Arab garment, with a white silk hood at the back, and now she put up her hands and, with great precision, drew the hood up over her head. The burnous, thus adjusted, made her look very young. She had thrust her bare feet into white slippers without heels, and now she drew up her legs lightly and easily and crossed them under her, assuming an Eastern attitude and the expression of supreme impassivity which suits it. A long mirror was just opposite to her. She swayed to and fro, looking into it.

“Allah-Akbar!” she murmured. “Allah-Akbar! I am a fatalist. Everything is ordained, so why should I bother? I will live for the day. I will live for the night. Allah-Akbar, Allah-Akbar!”

The sound of water gushing from a reversed tumbler into a full basin was followed by the reappearance of Lord Holme, looking very clean and very sleepy.

Lady Holme stopped swaying.

“You look like a kid of twelve years old in that thing, Vi,” he observed, surveying her with his hands on his hips.

“I am a woman with a philosophy,” she returned with dignity.

“A philosophy! What the deuce is that?”

“You didn’t learn much at Eton and Christchurch.”

“I learnt to use my fists and to make love to the women.”

“You’re a brute!” she exclaimed with most unphilosophic vehemence.

“And that’s why you worship the ground I tread on,” he rejoined equably. “And that’s why I’ve always had a good time with the women ever since I stood six foot in my stockin’s when I was sixteen.”

Lady Holme looked really indignant. Her face was contorted by a spasm. She was one of those unfortunate women who are capable of retrospective jealousy.

“I won’t—how dare you speak to me of those women?” she said bitterly. “You insult me.”

“Hang it, there’s no one since you, Vi. You know that. And what would you have thought of a great, hulkin’ chap like me who’d never—well, all right. I’ll dry up. But you know well enough you wouldn’t have looked at me.”

“I wonder why I ever did.”

“No, you don’t. I’m just the chap to suit you. You’re full of whimsies and need a sledge-hammer fellow to keep you quiet. It you’d married that ass, Carey, or that—”

“Fritz, once for all, I won’t have my friends abused. I allowed you to have your own way about Rupert Carey, but I will not have Robin Pierce or anyone else insulted. Please understand that. I married to be more free, not more—”

“You married because you’d fallen jolly well in love with me, that’s why you married, and that’s why you’re a damned lucky woman. Come to bed. You won’t, eh?”

He made a stride, snatched Lady Holme up as if she were a bundle, and carried her off to bed.

She was on the point of bursting into angry tears, but when she found herself snatched up, her slippers tumbling off, the hood of the burnous falling over her eyes, her face crushed anyhow against her husband’s sinewy chest, she suddenly felt oddly contented, disinclined to protest or to struggle.

Lord Holme did not trouble himself to ask what she was feeling or why she was feeling it.

He thought of himself—the surest way to fasten upon a man the thoughts of others.

ROBIN PIERCE and Carey were old acquaintances, if not exactly old friends. They had been for a time at Harrow together. Pierce had six thousand a year and worked hard for a few hundreds. Carey had a thousand and did nothing. He had never done anything definite, anything to earn a living. Yet his talents were notorious. He played the piano well for an amateur, was an extraordinarily clever mimic, acted better than most people who were not on the stage, and could write very entertaining verse with a pungent, sub-acid flavour. But he had no creative power and no perseverance. As a critic of the performances of others he was cruel but discerning, giving no quarter, but giving credit where it was due. He loathed a bad workman more than a criminal, and would rather have crushed an incompetent human being than a worm. Secretly he despised himself. His own laziness was as disgusting to him as a disease, and was as incurable as are certain diseases. He was now thirty-four and realised that he was never going to do anything with his life. Already he had travelled over the world, seen a hundred, done a hundred things. He had an enormous acquaintance in Society and among artists; writers, actors, painters—all the people who did things and did them well. As a rule they liked him, despite his bizarre bluntness of speech and manner, and they invariably spoke of him as a man of great talent; he said because he was so seldom fool enough to do anything that could reveal incompetence. His mother, who was a widow, lived in the north, in an old family mansion, half house, half castle, near the sea coast of Cumberland. He had one sister, who was married to an American.

Carey always declared that he was that rara avis an atheist, and that he had been born an atheist. He affirmed that even when a child he had never, for a moment, felt that there could be any other life than this earth-life. Few people believed him. There are few people who can believe in a child atheist.

Pierce had a totally different character. He seemed to be more dreamy and was more energetic, talked much less and accomplished much more. It had always been his ambition to be a successful diplomat, and in many respects he was well fitted for a diplomatic career. He had a talent for languages, great ease of manner, self-possession, patience and cunning. He loved foreign life. Directly he set foot in a country which was not his own he felt stimulated. He felt that he woke up, that his mind became more alert, his imagination more lively. He delighted in change, in being brought into contact with a society which required study to be understood. His present fate contented him well enough. He liked Rome and was liked there. As his mother was a Roman he had many Italian connections, and he was far more at ease with Romans than with the average London man. His father and mother lived almost perpetually in large hotels. The former, who was enormously rich, was a malade imaginaire. He invariably spoke of his quite normal health as if it were some deadly disease, and always treated himself, and insisted on being treated, as if he were an exceptionally distinguished invalid. In the course of years his friends had learned to take his view of the matter, and he was at this time almost universally spoken of as “that poor Sir Henry Pierce whose life has been one long martyrdom.” Poor Sir Henry was fortunate in the possession of a wife who really was a martyr—to him. Nobody had ever discovered whether Lady Pierce knew, or did not know, that her husband was quite as well as most people. There are many women with such secrets. Robin’s parents were at present taking baths and drinking waters in Germany. They were later going for an “after cure” to Switzerland, and then to Italy to “keep warm” during the autumn. As they never lived in London, Robin had no home there except his little house in Half Moon Street. He had one brother, renowned as a polo player, and one sister, who was married to a rising politician, Lord Evelyn Clowes, a young man with a voluble talent, a peculiar power of irritating Chancellors of the Exchequer, and hair so thick that he was adored by the caricaturists.

Robin Pierce and Carey saw little of each other now, being generally separated by a good many leagues of land and sea, but when they met they were still fairly intimate. They had some real regard for each other. Carey felt at ease in giving his violence to the quiet and self-possessed young secretary, who was three years his junior, but who sometimes seemed to him the elder of the two, perhaps because calm is essentially the senior of storm. He had even allowed Robin to guess at the truth of his feeling for Lady Holme, though he had never been explicit, on the subject to him or to anyone. There were moments when Robin wished he had not been permitted to guess, for Lady Holme attracted him far more than any other woman he had seen, and he had proposed to her before she had been carried off by her husband. He admired her beauty, but he did not believe that it was her beauty which had led him into love. He was sure that he loved the woman in her, the hidden woman whom Lord Holme and the world at large—including Carey—knew nothing about. He thought that Lady Holme herself did not understand this hidden woman, did not realise, as he did, that she existed. She spoke to him sometimes in Lady Holme’s singing, sometimes in an expression in her eyes when she was serious, sometimes even in a bodily attitude. For Robin, half fantastically, put faith in the eloquence of line as a revealer of character, of soul. But she did not speak to him in Lady Holme’s conversation. He really thought this hidden woman was obscured by the lovely window—he conceived it as a window of exquisite stained glass, jewelled but concealing—through which she was condemned to look for ever, through which, too, all men must look at her. He really wished sometimes, as he had said, that Lady Holme were ugly, for he had a fancy that perhaps then, and only then, would the hidden woman arise and be seen as a person may be seen through unstained, clear glass. He really felt that what he loved would be there to love if the face that ruled was ruined; would not only still be there to love, but would become more powerful, more true to itself, more understanding of itself, more reliant, purer, braver. And he had learnt to cherish this fancy till it had become a little monomania. Robin thought that the world misunderstood him, but he knew the world too well to say so. He never risked being laughed at. He felt sure that he was passionate, that he was capable of romantic deeds, of Quixotic self-sacrifice, of a devotion that might well be sung by poets, and that would certainly be worshipped by ardent women. And he said to himself that Lady Holme was the one woman who could set free, if the occasion came, this passionate, unusual and surely admirable captive at present chained within him, doomed to inactivity and the creeping weakness that comes from enforced repose.

Carey’s passion for Lady Holme had come into being shortly before her marriage. No one knew much about it, or about the rupture of all relations between him and the Holmes which had eventually taken place. But the fact that Carey had lost his head about Lady Holme was known to half London. For Carey, when carried away, was singularly reckless; singularly careless of consequences and of what people thought. It was difficult to influence him, but when influenced he was almost painfully open in his acknowledgment of the power that had reached him. As a rule, however, despite his apparent definiteness, his decisive violence, there seemed to be something fluid in his character, something that divided and flowed away from anything which sought to grasp and hold it. He had impetus but not balance; swiftness, but a swiftness that was uncontrolled. He resembled a machine without a brake.

It was soon after his rupture with the Holmes that his intimates began to notice that he was becoming inclined to drink too much. When Pierce returned to London from Rome he was immediately conscious of the slight alteration in his friend. Once he remonstrated with Carey about it. Carey was silent for a moment. Then he said abruptly:

“My heart wants to be drowned.”

Lord Holme hated Carey. Yet Lady Holme had not loved him; though she had not objected to him more than to other men because he loved her. She had been brought up in a society which is singularly free from prejudices, which has no time to study carefully questions of so-called honour, which has little real religious feeling, and a desire for gaiety which perhaps takes the place of a desire for morals. Intrigues are one of the chief amusements of this society, which oscillates from London to Paris as the pendulum of a clock oscillates from right to left. Lady Holme, however, happened to be protected doubly against the dangers—or joys by the way—to which so many of her companions fell cheerful, and even chattering, victims. She had a husband who though extremely stupid was extremely masterful, and, for the time at any rate, she sincerely loved him. She was a faithful wife and had no desire to be anything else, though she liked to be, and usually was, in the fashion. But though faithful to Lord Holme she had, as has been said, both the appearance and the temperament of a siren. She enjoyed governing men, and those who were governed by her, who submitted obviously to the power of her beauty and the charm of manner that seemed to emanate from it, and to be one with it, were more attractive to her than those who were not. She was inclined to admire a man for loving her, as a serious and solemn-thinking woman, with bandeaux and convictions, admires a clergyman for doing his duty. Carey had done his duty with such fiery ardour that, though she did not prevent her husband from kicking him out of the house, she could not refrain from thinking well of him.

Her thoughts of Robin Pierce were perhaps a little more confused.

She had not accepted him. Carey would have said that he was not “her type.” Although strong and active he was not the huge mass of bones and muscles and thews and sinews, ignorant of beauty and devoid of the love of art, which Carey had described as her ideal. There was melancholy and there was subtlety in him. When Lady Holme was a girl this melancholy and subtlety had not appealed to her sufficiently to induce her to become Lady Viola Pierce. Nevertheless, Robin’s affection for her, and the peculiar form it took—of idealising her secret nature and wishing her obvious beauty away—had won upon the egoism of her. Although she laughed at his absurdity, as she called it, and honestly held to her Pagan belief that physical beauty was all in all to the world she wished to influence, it pleased her sometimes to fancy that perhaps he was right, that perhaps her greatest loveliness was hidden and dwelt apart. The thought was flattering, and though her knowledge of men rejected the idea that such a loveliness alone could ever command an empire worth the ruling, she could have no real objection to being credited with a double share of charm—the charm of face and manner which everyone, including herself, was aware that she possessed, and that other stranger, more dim and mysterious charm at whose altar Robin burnt an agreeably perfumed incense.

She had a peculiar power of awakening in others that which she usually seemed not to possess herself—imagination, passion, not only physical but ethereal and of the mind; a tenderness for old sorrows, desire for distant, fleeting, misty glories not surely of this earth. She was a brilliant suggestionist, but not in conversation. Her face and her voice, when she sang, were luring to the lovers of beauty. When she sang she often expressed for them the under-thoughts and under-feelings of secretly romantic, secretly wistful men and women, and drew them to her as if by a spell. But her talk and manner in conversation were so unlike her singing, so little accorded with the look that often came into her eyes while she sang, that she was a perpetual puzzle to such elderly men as Sir Donald Ulford, to such young men as Robin Pierce, and even to some women. They came about her like beggars who have heard a chink of gold, and she showed them a purse that seemed to be empty.

Was it the milieu in which she lived, the influence of a vulgar and greedy age, which prevented her from showing her true self except in her art? Or was she that stupefying enigma sometimes met with, an unintelligent genius?

There were some who wondered.

In her singing she seemed to understand, to love, to pity, to enthrone. In her life she often seemed not to understand, not to love, not to pity, not to place high.

She sang of Venice, and those who cannot even think of the city in the sea without a flutter of the heart, a feeling not far from soft pain in its tenderness and gratitude, listened to the magic bells at sunset, and glided in the fairy barques across the liquid plains of gold. She spoke of Venice, and they heard only the famished voice of the mosquito uttering its midnight grace before meat.

Which was the real Venice?

Which was the real woman?

ON the following day, which was warm and damp; Lady Holme drove to Bond Street, bought two new hats, had her hand read by a palmist who called himself “Cupido,” looked in at a ladies’ club and then went to Mrs. Wolfstein, with whom she was engaged to lunch. She did not wish to lunch with her. She disliked Mrs. Wolfstein as she disliked most women, but she had not been able to get out of it. Mrs. Wolfstein had overheard her saying to Lady Cardington that she had nothing particular to do till four that day, and had immediately “pinned her.” Besides disliking Mrs. Wolfstein, Lady Holme was a little afraid of her. Like many clever Jewesses, Mrs. Wolfstein was a ruthless conversationalist, and enjoyed showing off at the expense of others, even when they were her guests. She had sometimes made Lady Holme feel stupid, even feel as if a good talker might occasionally gain, and keep, an advantage over a lovely woman who did not talk so well. The sensation passed, but the fact that it had ever been did not draw Lady Holme any closer to the woman with the “pawnbroking expression” in her eyes.

Mrs. Wolfstein was not in the most exclusive set in London, but she was in the smart set, which is no longer exclusive although it sometimes hopes it is. She knew the racing people, nearly all the most fashionable Jews, and those very numerous English patricians who like to go where money is. She also knew the whole of Upper Bohemia, and was a persona gratissima in that happy land of talent and jealousy. She entertained a great deal, generally at modish restaurants. Many French and Germans were to be met with at her parties; and it was impossible to be with either them or her for many minutes without hearing the most hearty and whole-souled abuse of English aspirations, art, letters and cooking. The respectability, the pictures, the books and the boiled cabbage of Britain all came impartially under the lash.

Mrs. Wolfstein’s origin was obscure. That she was a Jewess was known to everybody, but few could say with certainty whether she was a German, a Spanish, a Polish or an Eastern Jewess. She had much of the covert coarseness and open impudence of a Levantine, and occasionally said things which made people wonder whether, before she became Amalia Wolfstein, she had not perhaps been—well really—something very strange somewhere a long way off.

Her husband was shocking to look at: small, mean, bald, Semitic and nervous, with large ears which curved outwards from his head like leaves, and cheeks blue from much shaving. He was said to hide behind his anxious manner an acuteness that was diabolic, and to have earned his ill-health by sly dissipations for which he had paid enormous sums. There were two Wolfstein children, a boy and a girl of eleven and twelve; small, swarthy, frog-like, self-possessed. They already spoke three languages, and their protruding eyes looked almost diseased with intelligence.

The Wolfstein house, which was in Curzon Street, was not pretty, Apparently neither Mrs. Wolfstein nor her husband, who was a financier and company promoter on a very large scale, had good taste in furniture and decoration. The mansion was spacious but dingy. There was a great deal of chocolate and fiery yellow paint. There were many stuffy brown carpets, and tables which were unnecessarily solid. In the hall were pillars which looked as if they were made of brawn, and arches with lozenges of azure paint in which golden stars appeared rather meretriciously. A plaster statue of Hebe, with crinkly hair and staring eyeballs, stood in a corner without improving matters. That part of the staircase which was not concealed by the brown carpet was dirty white. An immense oil painting of a heap of dead pheasants, rabbits and wild duck, lying beside a gun and a pair of leather gaiters, immediately faced the hall door, which was opened by two enormous men with yellow complexions and dissipated eyes. Mrs. Wolfstein was at home, and one of the enormous men lethargically showed Lady Holme upstairs into a drawing-room which suggested a Gordon Hotel. She waited for about five minutes on a brown and yellow sofa near a table on which lay some books and several paper-knives, and then Mrs. Wolfstein appeared. She was dressed very smartly in blue and red, and looked either Oriental or Portuguese, as she came in. Lady Holme was not quite certain which.

“Dear person!” she said, taking Lady Holme’s hands in hers, which were covered with unusually large rings. “Now, I’ve got a confession to make. What a delicious hat!”

Lady Holme felt certain the confession was of something unpleasant, but she only said, in the rather languid manner she generally affected towards women:

“Well? My ear is at the grating.”

“My lunch is at the Carlton.”

Lady Holme was pleased. At the Carlton one can always look about.

“And—it’s a woman’s lunch.”

Lady Holme’s countenance fell quite frankly.

“I knew you’d be horrified. You think us such bores, and so we are. But I couldn’t resist being malicious to win such a triumph. You at a hen lunch! It’ll be the talk of London. Can you forgive me?”

“Of course.”

“And can you stand it?”

Lady Holme looked definitely dubious.

“I’ll tell you who’ll be there—Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mrs. Trent—do you know her? Spanish looking, and’s divorced two husbands, and’s called the scarlet woman because she always dresses in red—Sally Perceval, Miss Burns and Pimpernel Schley.”

“Pimpernel Schley! Who is she?”

“The American actress who plays all the improper modern parts. Directly a piece is produced in Paris that we run over to see—you know the sort! the Grand Duke and foreign Royalty species—she has it adapted for her. Of course it’s Bowdlerised as to words, but she manages to get back all that’s been taken out in her acting. Young America’s crazy about her. She’s going to play over here.”

“Oh!”

Lady Holme’s voice was not encouraging, but Mrs. Wolfstein was not sensitive. She chattered gaily all the way to the Haymarket. When they came into the Palm Court they found Lady Cardington already there, seated tragically in an armchair, and looking like a weary empress. The band was playing on the balcony just outside the glass wall which divides the great dining-room from the court, and several people were dotted about waiting for friends, or simply killing time by indulging curiosity. Among them was a large, broad-shouldered young man, with a round face, contemptuous blue eyes and a mouth with chubby, pouting lips. He was well dressed, but there was a touch of horseyness in the cut of his trousers, the arrangement of his tie. He sat close to the band, tipping his green chair backwards and smoking a cigarette.

As Mrs. Wolfstein and Lady Holme went up to greet Lady Cardington, Sally Perceval and Mrs. Trent came in together, followed almost immediately by Lady Manby.

Sally Perceval was a very pretty young married woman, who spent most of her time racing, gambling and going to house parties. She looked excessively fragile and consumptive, but had lived hard and never had a day’s illness in her life. She was accomplished, not at all intellectual, clever at games, a fine horsewoman and an excellent swimmer. She had been all over the world with her husband, who was very handsome and almost idiotic, and who could not have told you what the Taj was, whether Thebes was in Egypt or India, or what was the difference, if any, between the Golden Gate and the Golden Horn. Mrs. Trent was large, sultry, well-informed and supercilious; had the lustrous eyes of a Spaniard, and spoke in a warm contralto voice. Her figure was magnificent, and she prided herself on having a masculine intellect. Her enemies said that she had a more than masculine temper.

Lady Manby had been presented by Providence with a face like a teapot, her nose being the spout and her cheeks the bulging sides. She saw everything in caricature. If war were spoken of, her imagination immediately conjured up visions of unwashed majors conspicuously absurd in toeless boots, of fat colonels forced to make merry on dead rats, of field-marshals surprised by the enemy in their nightshirts, and of common soldiers driven to repair their own clothes and preposterously at work on women’s tasks. She adored the clergy for their pious humours, the bench for its delicious attempts at dignity, the bar for its grotesque travesties of passionate conviction—lies with their wigs on—the world political for its intrigues dressed up in patriotism. A Lord Chancellor in full state seemed to her the most delightfully ridiculous phenomenon in a delightfully ridiculous universe. And she had once been obliged to make a convulsive exit from an English cathedral, in which one hundred colonial bishops were singing a solemn hymn, entirely devastated by the laughter waked in her by this most sacred spectacle.

Miss Burns, who hurried in breathlessly ten minutes late, was very thin, badly dressed and insignificant-looking, wore her hair short, and could not see you if you were more than four feet away from her. She had been on various lonely and distant travelling excursions, about which she had written books, had consorted merrily with naked savages, sat in the oily huts of Esquimaux, and penetrated into the interior of China dressed as a man. Her lack of affectation hit you in the face on a first meeting, and her sincerity was perpetually embroiling her with the persistent liars who, massed together, formed what is called decent society.

“I know I’m late,” she said, pushing her round black hat askew on her shaggy little head. “I know I’ve kept you all waiting. Pardon!”

“Indeed you haven’t,” replied Mrs. Wolfstein. “Pimpernel Schley isn’t here yet. She lives in the hotel, so of course she’ll turn up last.”

Mrs. Trent put one hand on her hip and stared insolently at the various groups of people in the court, Lady Cardington sighed, and Lady Holme assumed a vacant look, which suited her mental attitude at the moment. She generally began to feel rather vacant if she were long alone with women.

Another ten minutes passed.

“I’m famishing,” said Sally Perceval. “I’ve been at the Bath Club diving, and I do so want my grub. Let’s skip in.”

“It really is too bad—oh, here she comes!” said Mrs. Wolfstein.

Many heads in the Palm Court were turned towards the stairs, down which a demure figure was walking with extreme slowness. The big young man with the round face got up from his chair and looked greedy, and the waiters standing by the desk just inside the door glanced round, whispered, and smiled quickly before gliding off to their different little tables.

Pimpernel Schley was alone, but she moved as if she were leading a quiet procession of vestal virgins. She was dressed in white, with a black velvet band round her tiny waist and a large black hat. Her shining, straw-coloured hair was fluffed out with a sort of ostentatious innocence on either side of a broad parting, and she kept her round chin tucked well in as she made what was certainly an effective entrance. Her arms hung down at her sides, and in one hand she carried a black fan. She wore no gloves, and many diamond rings glittered on her small fingers, the rosy nails of which were trimmed into points. As she drew near to Mrs. Wolfstein’s party she walked slower and slower, as if she felt that she was arriving at a destination much too soon.

Lady Holme watched her as she approached, examined her with that piercing scrutiny in which the soul of one woman is thrust out, like a spear, towards the soul of another. She noticed at once that Miss Schley resembled her, had something of her charm of fairness. It was a fainter, more virginal charm than hers. The colouring of hair and eyes was lighter. The complexion was a more dead, less warm, white. But there was certainly a resemblance. Miss Schley was almost exactly her height, too, and—

Lady Holme glanced swiftly round the Palm Court. Of all the women gathered there Pimpernel Schley and herself were nearest akin in appearance.

As she recognised this fact Lady Holme felt hostile to Miss Schley.

Not until the latter was almost touching her hostess did she lift her eyes from the ground. Then she stood still, looked up calmly, and said, in a drawling and infantine voice:

“I had to see my trunks unpacked, but I was bound to be on time. I wouldn’t have come down to-day for any soul in the world but you. I would not.”

It was a pretty speaking voice, clear and youthful, with a choir-boyish sound in it, and remarkably free from nasal twang, but it was not a lady’s voice. It sounded like the frontispiece of a summer number become articulate.

Mrs. Wolfstein began to introduce Miss Schley to her guests, none of whom, it seemed, knew her. She bowed to each of them, still with the vestal virgin air, and said, “Glad to know you!” to each in turn without looking at anyone. Then Mrs. Wolfstein led the way into the restaurant.

Everyone looked at the party of women as they came in and ranged themselves round a table in the middle of the big room. Lady Cardington sat on one side of Mrs. Wolfstein and Lady Holme on the other, between her and Mrs. Trent. Miss Schley was exactly opposite. She kept her eyes eternally cast down like a nun at Benediction. All the quite young men who could see her were looking at her with keen interest, and two or three of them—probably up from Sandhurst—had already assumed expressions calculated to alarm modesty. Others looked mournfully fatuous, as if suddenly a prey to lasting and romantic grief. The older men were more impartial in their observation of Mrs. Wolfstein’s guests. And all the women, without exception, fixed their eyes upon Lady Holme’s hat.

Lady Cardington, who seemed oppressed by grief, said to Mrs. Wolfstein:

“Did you see that article in the Daily Mail this morning?”

“Which one?”

“On the suggestion to found a school in which the only thing to be taught would be happiness.”

“Who’s going to be the teacher?”

“Some man. I forget the name.”

“A man!” said Mrs. Trent, in a slow, veiled contralto voice. “Why, men are always furious if they think we have any pleasure which they can’t deprive us of at a minute’s notice. A man is the last two-legged thing to be a happiness teacher.”

“Whom would you have then?” said Lady Cardington.

“Nobody, or a child.”

“Of which sex?” said Mrs. Wolfstein.

“The sex of a child,” replied Mrs. Trent.

Mrs. Wolfstein laughed rather loudly.

“I think children are the most greedy, unsatisfied individuals in—” she began.

“I was not alluding to Curzon Street children,” observed Mrs. Trent, interrupting. “When I speak in general terms of anything I always except London.”

“Why?” said Sally Perceval.

“Because it’s no more natural, no more central, no more in line with the truth of things than you are, Sally.”

“But, my dear, you surely aren’t a belated follower of Tolstoi!” cried Mrs. Wolfstein. “You don’t want us all to live like day labourers.”

“I don’t want anybody to do anything, but if happiness is to be taught it must not be by a man or by a Londoner.”

“I had no idea you had been caught by the cult of simplicity,” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “But you are so clever. You reveal your dislikes but conceal your preferences. Most women think that if they only conceal their dislikes they are quite perfectly subtle.”

“Subtle people are delicious,” said Lady Manby, putting her mouth on one side. “They remind me of a kleptomaniac I once knew who had a little pocket closed by a flap let into the front of her gown. When she dined out she filled it with scraps. Once she dined with us and I saw her, when she thought no one was watching, peppering her pocket with cayenne, and looking so delightfully sly and thieving. Subtle people are always peppering their little pockets and thinking nobody sees them.”

“And lots of people don’t,” said Mrs. Wolfstein.

“The vices are divinely comic,” continued Lady Manby, looking every moment more like a teapot. “I think it’s such a mercy. Fancy what a lot of fun we should lose if there were no drunkards, for instance!”

Lady Cardington looked shocked.

“The virtues are often more comic than the vices,” said Mrs. Trent, with calm authority. “Dramatists know that. Think of the dozens of good farces whose foundation is supreme respectability in contact with the wicked world.”

“I didn’t know anyone called respectability a virtue,” cried Sally Perceval.

“Oh, all the English do in their hearts,” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “Pimpernel, are you Yankees as bad?”

Miss Schley was eating sole a la Colbert with her eyes on her plate. She ate very slowly and took tiny morsels. Now she looked up.

“We’re pretty respectable over in America, I suppose,” she drawled. “Why not? What harm does it do anyway?”

“Well, it limits the inventive faculties for one thing. If one is strictly respectable life is plain sailing.”

“Oh, life is never that,” said Mrs. Trent, “for women.”

Lady Cardington seemed touched by this remark.

“Never, never,” she said in her curious voice—a voice in which tears seemed for ever to be lingering. “We women are always near the rocks.”

“Or on them,” said Mrs. Trent, thinking doubtless of the two husbands she had divorced.

“I like a good shipwreck,” exclaimed Miss Burns in a loud tenor voice. “I was in two before I was thirty, one off Hayti and one off Java, and I enjoyed them both thoroughly. They wake folks up and make them show their mettle.”

“It’s always dangerous to speak figuratively if she’s anywhere about,” murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Holme. “She’ll talk about lowering boats and life-preservers now till the end of lunch.”

Lady Holme started. She had not been listening to the conversation but had been looking at Miss Schley. She had noticed instantly the effect created in the room by the actress’s presence in it. The magic of a name flits, like a migratory bird, across the Atlantic. Numbers of the youthful loungers of London had been waiting impatiently during the last weeks for the arrival of this pale and demure star. Now that she had come their interest in her was keen. Her peculiar reputation for ingeniously tricking Mrs. Bowdler, secretary to Mrs. Grundy, rendered her very piquant, and this piquancy was increased by her ostentatiously vestal appearance.

Lady Holme was sometimes clairvoyante. At this moment every nerve in her body seemed telling her that the silent girl, who sat there nibbling her lunch composedly, was going to be the rage in London. It did not matter at all whether she had talent or not. Lady Holme saw that directly, as she glanced from one little table to another at the observant, whispering men.

She felt angry with Miss Schley for resembling her in colouring, for resembling her in another respect—capacity for remaining calmly silent in the midst of fashionable chatterboxes.

“Will she?” she said to Mrs. Wolfstein.

“Yes. If she’d never been shipwrecked she’d have been almost entertaining, but—there’s Sir Donald Ulford trying to attract your attention.”

“Where?”

She looked and saw Sir Donald sitting opposite to the large young man with the contemptuous blue eyes and the chubby mouth. They both seemed very bored. Sir Donald bowed.

“Who is that with him?” asked Lady Holme.

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “He looks like a Cupid who’s been through Sandow’s school. He oughtn’t to wear anything but wings.”

“It’s Sir Donald’s son, Leo,” said Lady Cardington.

Pimpernel Schley lifted her eyes for an instant from her plate, glanced at Leo Ulford, and cast them down again.

“Leo Ulford’s a blackguard,” observed Mrs. Trent. “And when a fair man’s a blackguard he’s much more dangerous than a dark man.”

All the women stared at Leo Ulford with a certain eagerness.

“He’s good-looking,” said Sally Perceval. “But I always distrust cherubic people. They’re bound to do you if they get the chance. Isn’t he married?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Trent. “He married a deaf heiress.”

“Intelligent of him!” remarked Mrs. Wolfstein. “I always wish I’d married a blind millionaire instead of Henry. Being a Jew, Henry sees not only all there is to see, but all there isn’t. Sir Donald and his Cupid son don’t seem to have much to say to one another.”

“Oh, don’t you know that family affection’s the dumbest thing on earth?” said Mrs. Trent.

“Too deep for speech,” said Lady Manby. “I love to see fathers and sons together, the fathers trying to look younger than they are and the sons older. It’s the most comic relationship, and breeds shyness as the West African climate breeds fever.”

“I know the whole of the West African coast by heart,” declared Miss Burns, wagging her head, and moving her brown hands nervously among her knives and forks. “And I never caught anything there.”

“Not even a husband,” murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Manby.

“In fact, I never felt better in my life than I did at Old Calabar,” continued Miss Burns. “But there my mind was occupied. I was studying the habits of alligators.”

“They’re very bad, aren’t they?” asked Lady Manby, in a tone of earnest inquiry.

“I prefer to study the habits of men,” said Sally Perceval, who was always surrounded by a troup of young racing men and athletes, who admired her swimming feats.

“Men are very disappointing, I think,” observed Mrs. Trent. “They are like a lot of beads all threaded on one string.”

“And what’s the string?” asked Sally Perceval.

“Vanity. Men are far vainer than we are. Their indifference to the little arts we practise shows it. A woman whose head is bald covers it with a wig. Without a wig she would feel that she was an outcast totally powerless to attract. But a bald-headed man has no idea of diffidence. He does not bother about a wig because he expects to be adored without one.”

“And the worst of it is that he is adored,” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “Look at my passion for Henry.”

They began to talk about their husbands. Lady Holme did not join in. She and Pimpernel Schley were very silent members of the party. Even Miss Burns, who was—so she said—a spinster by conviction not by necessity, plunged into the husband question, and gave some very daring illustrations of the marriage customs of certain heathen tribes.

Pimpernel Schley hardly spoke at all. When someone, turning to her, asked her what she thought about the subject under discussion, she lifted her pale eyes and said, with the choir-boy drawl:

“I’ve got no husband and never had one, so I guess I’m no kind of a judge.”

“I guess she’s a judge of other women’s husbands, though,” said Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Cardington. “That child is going to devastate London.”

Now and then Lady Holme glanced towards Sir Donald and his son. They seemed as untalkative as she was. Sir Donald kept on looking towards Mrs. Wolfstein’s table. So did Leo. But whereas Leo Ulford’s eyes were fixed on Pimpernel Schley, Sir Donald’s met the eyes of Lady Holme. She felt annoyed; not because Sir Donald was looking at her, but because his son was not.

How these women talked about their husbands! Lady Cardington, who was a widow, spoke of husbands as if they were a race which was gradually dying out. She thought the modern woman was beginning to get a little tired of the institution of matrimony, and to care much less for men than was formerly the case. Being contradicted by Mrs. Trent, she gave her reasons for this belief. One was that whereas American matinee girls used to go mad over the “leading men” of the stage they now went mad over the leading women. She also instanced the many beautiful London women, universally admired, who were over thirty and still remained spinsters. Mrs. Trent declared that they were abnormal, and that, till the end of time, women would always wish to be wives. Mrs. Wolfstein agreed with her on various grounds. One was that it was the instinct of woman to buy and to rule, and that if she were rich she could now acquire a husband as, in former days, people acquired slaves—by purchase. This remark led to the old question of American heiresses and the English nobility, and to a prolonged discussion as to whether or not most women ruled their husbands.

Women nearly always argue from personal experience, and consequently Lady Cardington—whose husband had treated her badly—differed on this point from Mrs. Wolfstein, who always did precisely what she pleased, regardless of Mr. Wolfstein’s wishes. Mrs. Trent affirmed that for her part she thought women should treat their husbands as they treated their servants, and dismiss them if they didn’t behave themselves, without giving them a character. She had done so twice, and would do it a third time if the occasion arose. Sally Perceval attacked her for this, pleading slangily that men would be men, and that their failings ought to be winked at; and Miss Burns, as usual, brought the marital proceedings of African savages upon the carpet. Lady Manby turned the whole thing into a joke by a farcical description of the Private Enquiry proceedings of a jealous woman of her acquaintance, who had donned a canary-coloured wig as a disguise, and dogged her husband’s footsteps in the streets of London, only to find that he went out at odd times to visit a grandmother from whom he had expectations, and who happened to live in St. John’s Wood.

The foreign waiters, who moved round the table handing the dishes, occasionally exchanged furtive glances which seemed indicative of suppressed amusement, and the men who were lunching near, many of whom were now smoking cigarettes, became more and more intent upon Mrs. Wolfstein and her guests. As they were getting up to go into the Palm Court for coffee and liqueurs, Lady Cardington again referred to the article on the proposed school for happiness, which had apparently made a deep impression upon her.

“I wonder if happiness can be taught,” she said. “If it can—”

“It can’t,” said Mrs. Trent, with more than her usual sledge-hammer bluntness. “We aren’t meant to be happy here.”

“Who doesn’t mean us to be happy?” asked poor Lady Cardington in a deplorable voice.

“First—our husbands.”

“It’s cowardly not to be happy,” cried Miss Burns, pushing her hat over her left eye as a tribute to the close of lunch. “In a savage state you’ll always find—”

The remainder of her remark was lost in the frou-frou of skirts as the eight women began slowly to thread their way between the tables to the door.

Lady Holme found herself immediately behind Miss Schley, who moved with impressive deliberation and the extreme composure of a well-brought-up child thoroughly accustomed to being shown off to visitors. Her straw-coloured hair was done low in the nape of her snowy neck, and, as she took her little steps, her white skirt trailed over the carpet behind her with a sort of virginal slyness. As she passed Leo Ulford it brushed gently against him, and he drummed the large fingers of his left hand with sudden violence on the tablecloth, at the same time pursing his chubby lips and then opening his mouth as if he were going to say something.

Sir Donald rose and bowed. Mrs. Wolfstein murmured a word to him in passing, and they had not been sipping their coffee for more than two or three minutes before he joined them with his son.

Sir Donald came up at once to Lady Holme.

“May I present my son to you, Lady Holme?” he said.

“Certainly.”

“Leo, I wish to introduce you to Lady Holme.”

Leo Ulford bowed rather ungracefully. Standing up he looked more than ever like a huge boy, and he had much of the expression that is often characteristic of huge boys—an expression in which impudence seems to float forward from a background of surliness.

Lady Holme said nothing. Leo Ulford sat down beside her in an armchair.

“Better weather,” he remarked.

Then he called a waiter, and said to him, in a hectoring voice:

“Bring me a Kummel and make haste about it.”

He lit a cigarette that was almost as big as a cigar, and turned again to Lady Holme.

“I’ve been in the Sahara gazelle shooting,” he continued.

He spoke in a rather thick, lumbering voice and very loud, probably because he was married to a deaf woman.

“Just come back,” he added.

“Oh!” said Lady Holme.

She was sitting perfectly upright on her chair, and noticed that her companion’s eyes travelled calmly and critically over her figure with an unveiled deliberation that was exceptionally brazen even in a modern London man. Lady Holme did not mind it. Indeed, she rather liked it. She knew at once, by that look, the type of man with whom she had to deal. In Leo Ulford there was something of Lord Holme, as in Pimpernel Schley there was perhaps a touch of herself. Having finished his stare, Leo Ulford continued:

“Jolly out there. No rot. Do as you like and no one to bother you. Gazelle are awfully shy beasts though.”

“They must have suited you,” said Lady Holme, very gravely.

“Why?” he asked, taking the glass of Kummel which the waiter had brought and setting it down on a table by him.

“Aren’t you a shy—er—beast?”

He stared at her calmly for a moment, and then said:

“I say, you’re too sharp, Lady Holme.”

He turned his head towards Pimpernel Schley, who was sitting a little way off with her soft, white chin tucked well in, looking steadily down into a cup half full of Turkish coffee and speaking to nobody.

“Who’s that girl?” he asked.

“That’s Miss Pimpernel Schley. A pretty name, isn’t it?”

“Is it? An American of course.”

“Of course.”

“What cheek they have? What’s she do?”

“I believe she acts in—well, a certain sort of plays.”

A slow smile overspread Leo Ulford’s face and made him look more like a huge boy than ever.

“What certain sort?” he asked. “The sort I’d like?”

“Very probably. But I know nothing of your tastes.”

She did—everything almost. There are a good many Leo Ulfords lounging about London.

“I like anything that’s a bit lively, with no puritanic humbug about it.”

“Well, you surely can’t suppose that there can be any puritanic humbug about Miss Schley or anything she has to do with!”

He glanced again at Pimpernel Schley and then at Lady Holme. The smile on his face became a grin. Then his huge shoulders began to shake gently.

“I do love talking to women,” he said, on the tide of a prolonged chuckle. “When they aren’t deaf.”

Lady Holme still remained perfectly grave.

“Do you? Why?” she inquired.

“Can’t you guess why?”

“Our charity to our sister women?”

She was smiling now.

“You teach me such a lot,” he said.

He drank his Kummel.

“I always learn something when I talk to a woman. I’ve learnt something from you.”

Lady Holme did not ask him what it was. She saw that he was now more intent on her than he had been on Miss Schley, and she got up to go, feeling more cheerful than she had since she left the atelier of “Cupido.”

“Don’t go.”

“I must.”

“Already! May I come and call?”

“Your father knows my address.”

“Oh, I say—but—”

“You’re not going already!” cried Mrs. Wolfstein, who was having a second glass of Benedictine and beginning to talk rather outrageously and with a more than usually pronounced foreign accent.

“I must, really.”

“I’m afraid my son has bored you,” murmured Sir Donald, in his worn-out voice.

“No, I like him,” she replied, loud enough for Leo to hear.

Sir Donald did not look particularly gratified at this praise of his achievement. Lady Holme took an airy leave of everybody. When she came to Pimpernel Schley she said:

“I wish you a great success, Miss Schley.”

“Many thanks,” drawled the vestal virgin, who was still looking into her coffee cup.

“I must come to your first night. Have you ever acted in London?”

“Never.”

“You won’t be nervous?”

“Nervous! Don’t know the word.”

She bent to sip her coffee.

When Lady Holme reached the door of the Carlton, and was just entering one of the revolving cells to gain the pavement, she heard Lady Cardington’s low voice behind her.

“Let me drive you home, dear.”

At the moment she felt inclined to be alone. She had even just refused Sir Donald’s earnest request to accompany her to her carriage. Had any other woman made her this offer she would certainly have refused it. But few people refused any request of Lady Cardington’s. Lady Holme, like the rest of the world, felt the powerful influence that lay in her gentleness as a nerve lies in a body. And then had she not wept when Lady Holme sang a tender song to her? In a moment they were driving up the Haymarket together in Lady Cardington’s barouche.

The weather had grown brighter. Wavering gleams of light broke through the clouds and lay across the city, giving a peculiarly unctuous look to the slimy streets, in which there were a good many pedestrians more or less splashed with mud. There was a certain hopefulness in the atmosphere, and yet a pathos such as there always is in Spring, when it walks through London ways, bearing itself half nervously, like a country cousin.

“I don’t like this time of year,” said Lady Cardington.

She was leaning back and glancing anxiously about her.

“But why not?” asked Lady Holme. “What’s the matter with it?”

“Youth.”

“But surely—”

“The year’s too young. And at my age one feels very often as if the advantage of youth were an unfair advantage.”

“Dare I ask—?”

She checked herself, looking at her companion’s snow-white hair, which was arranged in such a way that it looked immensely thick under the big black hat she wore—a hat half grandmotherly and half coquettish, that certainly suited her to perfection.

“Spring—” she was beginning rather quickly; but Lady Cardington interrupted her.

“Fifty-eight,” she said.

She laughed anxiously and looked at Lady Holme.

“Didn’t you think I was older?”

“I don’t know that I ever thought about it,” replied Lady Holme, with the rather careless frankness she often used towards women.

“Of course not. Why should you, or anyone? When a woman’s once over fifty it really doesn’t matter much whether she’s fifty-one or seventy-one. Does it?”

Lady Holme thought for a moment. Then she said:

“I really don’t know. You see, I’m not a man.”

Lady Cardington’s forehead puckered and her mouth drooped piteously.

“A woman’s real life is very short,” she said. “But her desire for real life can last very long—her silly, useless desire.”

“But if her looks remain?”

“They don’t.”

“You think it is a question of looks?”

“Do you think it is?” asked Lady Cardington. “But how can you know anything about it, at your age, and with your appearance?”

“I suppose we all have our different opinions as to what men are and what men want,” Lady Holme said, more thoughtfully than usual.

“Men! Men!” Lady Cardington exclaimed, with a touch of irritation unusual in her. “Why should we women do, and be, everything for men?”

“I don’t know, but we do and we are. There are some men, though, who think it isn’t a question of looks, or think they think so.”

“Who?” said Lady Cardington, quickly.

“Oh, there are some,” answered Lady Holme, evasively, “who believe in mental charm more than in physical charm, or say they do. And mental charm doesn’t age so obviously as physical—as the body does, I suppose. Perhaps we ought to pin our faith to it. What do you think of Miss Schley?”

Lady Cardington glanced at her with a kind of depressed curiosity.

“She pins her faith to the other thing,” she said.

“Yes.”

“She’s pretty. Do you know she reminds me faintly of you.”

Lady Holme felt acute irritation at this remark, but she only said:

“Does she?”

“Something in her colouring. I’m sure she’s a man’s woman, but I can’t say I found her interesting.”

“Men’s women seldom are interesting to us. They don’t care to be,” said Lady Holme.

Suddenly she thought that possibly between Pimpernel Schley and herself there were resemblances unconnected with colouring.

“I suppose not. But still—ah, here’s Cadogan Square!”

She kissed Lady Holme lightly on the cheek.

“Fifty-eight!” Lady Holme said to herself as she went into the house. “Just think of being fifty-eight if one has been a man’s woman! Perhaps it’s better after all to be an everybody’s woman. Well, but how’s it done?”

She looked quite puzzled as she came into the drawing-room, where Robin Pierce had been waiting impatiently for twenty minutes.

“Robin,” she said seriously, “I’m very unhappy.”

“Not so unhappy as I have been for the last half hour,” he said, taking her hand and holding it. “What is it?”

“I’m dreadfully afraid I’m a man’s woman. Do you think I am?”

He could not help smiling as he looked into her solemn eyes.

“I do indeed. Why should you be upset about it?”

“I don’t know. Lady Cardington’s been saying things—and I met a rather abominable little person at lunch, a little person like a baby that’s been about a great deal in a former state, and altogether—Let’s have tea.”

“By all means.”

“And now soothe me, Robin. I’m dreadfully strung up. Soothe me. Tell me, I’m an everybody’s woman and that I shall never be de trop in the world—not even when I’m fifty-eight.”

THE success of Pimpernel Schley in London was great and immediate, and preceded her appearance upon the stage. To some people, who thought they knew their London, it was inexplicable. Miss Schley was pretty and knew how to dress. These facts, though of course denied by some, as all facts in London are, were undeniable. But Miss Schley had nothing to say. She was not a brilliant talker, as so many of her countrywomen are. She was not vivacious in manner, except on rare occasions. She was not interested in all the questions of the day. She was not—a great many things. But she was one thing.

She was exquisitely sly.

Her slyness was definite and pervasive. In her it took the place of wit. It took the place of culture. It even took the place of vivacity. It was a sort of maid-of-all-work in her personality and never seemed to tire. The odd thing was that it did not seem to tire others. They found it permanently piquant. Men said of Miss Schley, “She’s a devilish clever little thing. She don’t say much, but she’s up to every move on the board.” Women were impressed by her. There was something in her supreme and snowy composure that suggested inflexible will. Nothing ever put her out or made her look as if she were in a false position.

London was captivated by the abnormal combination of snow and slyness which she presented to it, and began at once to make much of her.

At one time the English were supposed to be cold; and rather gloried in the supposition. But recently a change has taken place in the national character—at any rate as exhibited in London. Rigidity has gone out of fashion. It is condemned as insular, and unless you are cosmopolitan nowadays you are nothing, or worse than nothing. The smart Englishwoman is beginning to be almost as restless as a Neapolitan. She is in a continual flutter of movement, as if her body were threaded with trembling wires. She uses a great deal of gesture. She is noisy about nothing. She is vivacious at all costs, and would rather suggest hysteria than British phlegm.

Miss Schley’s calm was therefore in no danger of being drowned in any pervasive calm about her. On the contrary, it stood out. It became very individual. Her composed speechlessness in the midst of uneasy chatter—the Englishwoman is seldom really self-possessed—carried with it a certain dignity which took the place of breeding. She was always at her ease, and to be always at your ease makes a deep impression upon London, which is full of self-consciousness.

She began to be the fashion at once. A great lady, who had a passion for supplying smart men with what they wanted, saw that they were going to want Miss Schley and promptly took her up. Other women followed suit. Miss Schley had a double triumph. She was run after by women as well as by men. She got her little foot in everywhere, and in no time. Her personal character was not notoriously bad. The slyness had taken care of that. But even if it had been, if only the papers had not been too busy in the matter, she might have had success. Some people do whose names have figured upon the evening bills exposed at the street corners. Hers had not and was not likely to. It was her art to look deliberately pure and good, and to suggest, in a way almost indefinable and very perpetual, that she could be anything and everything, and perhaps had been, under the perfumed shadow of the rose. The fact that the suggestion seemed to be conveyed with intention was the thing that took corrupt old London’s fancy and made Miss Schley a pet.

Her name of Pimpernel was not against her.

Men liked it for its innocence, and laughed as they mentioned it in the clubs, as who should say:

“We know the sort of Pimpernel we mean.”

Miss Schley’s social success brought her into Lady Holme’s set, and people noticed, what Lady Holme had been the first to notice, the faint likeness between them. Lady Holme was not exquisitely sly. Her voice was not like a choir-boy’s; her manner was not like the manner of an image; her eyes were not for ever cast down. Even her characteristic silence was far less perpetual than the equally characteristic silence of Miss Schley. But men said they were the same colour. What men said women began to think, and it was not an assertion wholly without foundation. At a little distance there was an odd resemblance in the one white face and fair hair to the other. Miss Schley’s way of moving, too, had a sort of reference to Lady Holme’s individual walk. There were several things characteristic of Lady Holme which Miss Schley seemed to reproduce, as it were, with a sly exaggeration. Her hair was similar, but paler, her whiteness more dead, her silence more perpetual, her composure more enigmatically serene, her gait slower, with diminished steps.

It was all a little like an imitation, with just a touch of caricature added.

One or two friends remarked upon it to Lady Holme, who heard them very airily.

“Are we alike?” she said. “I daresay, but you mustn’t expect me to see it. One never knows the sort of impression one produces on the world. I think Miss Schley a very attractive little creature, and as to her social gifts, I bow to them.”

“But she has none,” cried Mrs. Wolfstein, who was one of those who had drawn Lady Holme’s attention to the likeness.

“How can you say so? Everyone is at her feet.”

“Her feet, perhaps. They are lovely. But she has no gifts. That’s why she gets on. Gifted people are a drug in the market. London’s sick of them. They worry. Pimpernel’s found that out and gone in for the savage state. I mean mentally of course.”

“Her mind dwells in a wigwam,” said Lady Manby. “And wears glass beads and little bits of coloured cloth.”

“But her acting?” asked Lady Holme, with careless indifference.

“Oh, that’s improper but not brilliant,” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “The American critics says it’s beneath contempt.”

“But not beneath popularity, I suppose?” said Lady Holme.

“No, she’s enormously popular. Newspaper notices don’t matter to Pimpernel. Are you going to ask her to your house? You might. She’s longing to come. Everybody else has, and she knew you first.”

Lady Holme began to realise why she could never like Mrs. Wolfstein. The latter would try to manage other people’s affairs.

“I had no idea she would care about it,” she answered, rather coldly.

“My dear—an American! And your house! You’re absurdly modest. She’s simply pining to come. May I tell her to?”

“I should prefer to invite her myself,” said Lady Holme, with a distinct touch of hauteur which made Mrs. Wolfstein smile maliciously.

When Lady Holme was alone she realised that she had, half unconsciously, meant that Miss Schley should find that there was at any rate one house in London whose door did not at once fly open to welcome her demure presence. But now? She certainly did not intend to be a marked exception to a rule that was apparently very general. If people were going to talk about her exclusion of Miss Schley, she would certainly not exclude her. She asked herself why she wished to, and said to herself that Miss Schley’s slyness bored her. But she knew that the real reason of the secret hostility she felt towards the American was the fact of their resemblance to each other. Until Miss Schley appeared in London she—Viola Holme—had been original both in her beauty and in her manner of presenting it to the world. Miss Schley was turning her into a type.

It was too bad. Any woman would have disliked it.

She wondered whether Miss Schley recognised the likeness. But of course people had spoken to her about it. Mrs. Wolfstein was her bosom friend. The Jewess had met her first at Carlsbad and, with that terrible social flair which often dwells in Israel, had at once realised her fitness for a London success and resolved to “get her over.” Women of the Wolfstein species are seldom jealously timorous of the triumphs of other women. A certain coarse cleverness, a certain ingrained assurance and unconquerable self-confidence keeps them hardy. And they generally have a noble reliance on the power of the tongue. Being incapable of any fear of Miss Schley, Mrs. Wolfstein, ever on the look-out for means of improving her already satisfactory position in the London world, saw one in the vestal virgin and resolved to launch her in England. She was delighted with the result. Miss Schley had already added several very desirable people to the Wolfstein visiting-list. In return “Henry” had “put her on to” one or two very good things in the City. Everything would be most satisfactory if only Lady Holme were not tiresome about the Cadogan Square door.

“She hates you, Pimpernel,” said Mrs. Wolfstein to her friend.

“Why?” drawled Miss Schley.

“You know why perfectly well. You reproduce her looks. I’m perfectly certain she’s dreading your first night. She’s afraid people will begin to think that extraordinary colourless charm she and you possess stagey. Besides, you have certain mannerisms—you don’t imitate her, Pimpernel?”

The pawnbroking expression was remarkably apparent for a moment in Mrs. Wolfstein’s eyes.

“I haven’t started to yet.”

“Yet?”

“Well, if she don’t ask me to number thirty-eight—‘tis thirty-eight?”

“Forty-two.”

“Forty-two Cadogan Square, I might be tempted. I came out as a mimic, you know, at Corsher and Byall’s in Philadelphia.”

Miss Schley gazed reflectively upon the brown carpet of Mrs. Wolfstein’s boudoir.

“Folks said I wasn’t bad,” she added meditatively.

“I think I ought to warn Viola,” said Mrs. Wolfstein.

She was peculiarly intimate with people of distinction when they weren’t there. Miss Schley looked as if she had not heard. She often did when anything of importance to her was said. It was important to her to be admitted to Lady Holme’s house. Everybody went there. It was one of the very smartest houses in London, and since everybody knew that she had been introduced to Lady Holme, since half the world was comparing their faces and would soon begin to compare their mannerisms—well, it would be better that she should not be forced into any revival of her Philadelphia talents.

Mrs. Wolfstein did not warn Lady Holme. She was far too fond of being amused to do anything so short-sighted. Indeed, from that moment she was inclined to conspire to keep the Cadogan Square door shut against her friend. She did not go so far as that; for she had a firm faith in Pimpernel’s cuteness and was aware that she would be found out. But she remained passive and kept her eyes wide open.

Miss Schley was only going to act for a month in London. Her managers had taken a theatre for her from the first of June till the first of July. As she was to appear in a play she had already acted in all over the States, and as her American company was coming over to support her, she had nothing to do in the way of preparation. Having arrived early in the year, she had nearly three months of idleness to enjoy. Her conversation with Mrs. Wolfstein took place in the latter days of March. And it was just at this period that Lady Holme began seriously to debate whether she should, or should not, open her door to the American. She knew Miss Schley was determined to come to her house. She knew her house was one of those to which any woman setting out on the conquest of London would wish to come. She did not want Miss Schley there, but she resolved to invite her if peopled talked too much about her not being invited. And she wished to be informed if they did. One day she spoke to Robin Pierce about it. Lord Holme’s treatment of Carey had not yet been applied to him. They met at a private view in Bond Street, given by a painter who was adored by the smart world, and, as yet, totally unknown in every other circle. The exhibition was of portraits of beautiful women, and all the beautiful women and their admirers crowded the rooms. Both Lady Holme and Miss Schley had been included among the sitters of the painter, and—was it by chance or design?—their portraits hung side by side upon the brown-paper-covered walls. Lady Holme was not aware of this when she caught Robin’s eye through a crevice in the picture hats and called him to her with a little nod.

“Is there tea?”

“Yes. In the last room.”

“Take me there. Oh, there’s Ashley Greaves. Avoid him, like a dear, till I’ve looked at something.”

Ashley Greaves was the painter. There was nothing of the Bohemian about him. He looked like a heavy cavalry officer as he stood in the centre of the room talking to a small, sharp-featured old lady in a poke bonnet.

“He’s safe. Lady Blower’s got hold of him.”

“Poor wretch! She ought to have a keeper. Strong tea, Robin.”

They found a settee in a corner walled in by the backs of tea-drinking beauties.

“I want to ask you something,” said Lady Holme, confidentially. “You go about and hear what they’re saying.”

“And greater nonsense it seems each new season.”

“Nonsense keeps us alive.”

“Is it the oxygen self-administered by an almost moribund society?”

“It’s the perfume that prevents us from noticing the stuffiness of the room. But, Robin, tell me—what is the nonsense of now?”

“Religious, political, theatrical, divorce court or what, Lady Holme?”

He looked at her with a touch of mischief in his dark face, which told her, and was meant to tell her, that he was on the alert, and had divined that she had a purpose in thus pleasantly taking possession of him.

“Oh, the people—nonsense. You know perfectly what I mean.”

“Whom are they chattering about most at the moment? You’ll be contemptuous if I tell you.”

“It’s a woman, then?”

“When isn’t it?”

“Do I know her?”

“Slightly.”

“Well?”

“Miss Schley.”

“Really?”

Lady Holme’s voice sounded perfectly indifferent and just faintly surprised. There was no hint of irritation in it.

“And what are they saying about Miss Schley?” she added, sipping her tea and glancing about the crowded room.

“Oh, many things, and among the many one that’s more untrue than all the rest put together.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s too absurd. I don’t think I’ll tell you.”

“But why not? If it’s too absurd it’s sure to be amusing.”

“I don’t think so.”

His voice sounded almost angry.

“Tell me, Robin.”

He looked at her quickly with a warm light in his dark eyes.

“If you only knew how I—”

“Hush! Go on about Miss Schley.”

“They’re saying that she’s wonderfully like you, and that—have some more tea?”

“That—?”

“That you hate it.”

Lady Holme smiled, as if she were very much entertained.

“But why should I hate it?”

“I don’t know. But women invent reasons for everything.”

“What have they invented for this?”

“Oh—well—that you like to—I can’t tell you it all, really. But in substance it comes to this! They are saying, or implying—”

“Implication is the most subtle of the social arts.”

“It’s the meanest—implying that all that’s natural to you, that sets you apart from others, is an assumption to make you stand out from the rest of the crowd, and that you hate Miss Schley because she happens to have assumed some of the same characteristics, and so makes you seem less unique than you did before.”

Lady Holme said nothing for a moment. Then she remarked:

“I’m sure no woman said ‘less unique.’”

“Why not?”

“Now did anyone? Confess!”

“What d’you suppose they did say?”

“More commonplace.”

He could not help laughing.

“As if you were ever commonplace!” he exclaimed, rather relieved by her manner.

“That’s not the question. But then Miss Schley’s said to be like me not only in appearance but in other ways? Are we really so Siamese?”

“I can’t see the faintest beginning of a resemblance.”

“Ah, now you’re falling into exaggeration in the other direction.”

“Well, not in realities. Perhaps in one or two trifling mannerisms—I believe she imitates you deliberately.”

“I think I must ask her to the house.”

“Why should you?”

“Well, perhaps you might tell me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Aren’t people saying that the reason I don’t ask her is because I am piqued at the supposed resemblance between us?”

“Oh, people will say anything. If we are to model our lives according to their ridiculous ideas—”

“Well, but we do.”

“Unless we follow the dictates of our own natures, our own souls.”

He lowered his voice almost to a whisper.

“Be yourself, be the woman who sings, and no one—not even a fool—will ever say again that you resemble a nonentity like Miss Schley. You see—you see now that even socially it is a mistake not to be your real self. You can be imitated by a cute little Yankee who has neither imagination nor brains, only the sort of slyness that is born out of the gutter.”

“My dear Robin, remember where we are. You—a diplomatist!”

She put her finger to her lips and got up.

“We must look at something or Ashley Greaves will be furious.”

They made their way into the galleries, which were almost impassable. In the distance Lady Holme caught sight of Miss Schley with Mrs. Wolfstein. They were surrounded by young men. She looked hard at the American’s pale face, saying to herself, “Is that like me? Is that like me?” Her conversation with Robin Pierce had made her feel excited. She had not shown it. She had seemed, indeed, almost oddly indifferent. But something combative was awake within her. She wondered whether the American was consciously imitating her. What an impertinence! But Miss Schley was impertinence personified. Her impertinence was her raison d’etre. Without it she would almost cease to be. She would at any rate be as nothing.

Followed by Robin, Lady Holme made her way slowly towards the Jewess and the American.

They were now standing together before the pictures, and had been joined by Ashley Greaves, who was beginning to look very warm and expressive, despite his cavalry moustache. Their backs were towards the room, and Lady Holme and Robin drew near to them without being perceived. Mrs. Wolfstein had a loud voice and did not control it in a crowd. On the contrary, she generally raised it, as if she wished to be heard by those whom she was not addressing.

“Sargent invariably brings out the secret of his sitters,” she was saying to Ashley Greaves as Lady Holme and Robin came near and stood for an instant wedged in by people, unable to move forward or backward. “You’ve brought out the similarities between Pimpernel and Lady Holme. I never saw anything so clever. You show us not only what we all saw but what we all passed over though it was there to see. There is an absurd likeness, and you’ve blazoned it.”

Robin stole a glance at his companion. Ashley Greaves said, in a thin voice that did not accord with his physique:

“My idea was to indicate the strong link there is between the English woman and the American woman. If I may say so, these two portraits, as it were, personify the two countries, and—er—and—er—”

His mind appeared to give way. He strove to continue, to say something memorable, conscious of his conspicuous and central position. But his intellect, possibly over-heated and suffering from lack of air, declined to back him up, and left him murmuring rather hopelessly:

“The one nation—er—and the other—yes—the give and take—the give and take. You see my meaning? Yes, yes.”

Miss Schley said nothing. She looked at Lady Holme’s portrait and at hers with serenity, and seemed quite unconscious of the many eyes fastened upon her.

“You feel the strong link, I hope, Pimpernel?” said Mrs. Wolfstein, with her most violent foreign accent. “Hands across the Herring Pond!”

“Mr. Greaves has been too cute for words,” she replied. “I wish Lady Holme could cast her eye on them.”

She looked up at nothing, with a sudden air of seeing something interesting that was happening along way off.

“Philadelphia!” murmured Mrs. Wolfstein, with an undercurrent of laughter.

It was very like Lady Holme’s look when she was singing. Robin Pierce saw it and pressed his lips together. At this moment the crowd shifted and left a gap through which Lady Holme immediately glided towards Ashley Greaves. He saw her and came forward to meet her with eagerness, holding out his hand, and smiling mechanically with even more than his usual intention.

“What a success!” she said.

“If it is, your portrait makes it so.”

“And where is my portrait?”

Robin Pierce nipped in the bud a rather cynical smile. The painter wiped his forehead with a white silk handkerchief.

“Can’t you guess? Look where the crowd is thickest.”

The people had again closed densely round the two pictures.

“You are an artist in more ways than one, I’m afraid,” said Lady Holme. “Don’t turn my head more than the heat has.”

The searching expression, that indicated the strong desire to say something memorable, once more contorted the painter’s face.

“He who would essay to fix beauty on canvas,” he began, in a rather piercing voice, “should combine two gifts.”

He paused and lifted his upper lip two or three times, employing his under-jaw as a lever.

“Yes?” said Lady Holme, encouragingly.

“The gift of the brush which perpetuates and the gift of—er—gift of the—”

His intellect once more retreated from him into some distant place and left him murmuring:

“Beauty demands all, beauty demands all. Yes, yes! Sacrifice! Sacrifice! Isn’t it so?”

He tugged at his large moustache, with an abrupt assumption of the cavalry officer’s manner, which he doubtless deemed to be in accordance with his momentary muddle-headedness.

“And you give it what it wants most—the touch of the ideal. It blesses you. Can we get through?”

She had glanced at Robin while she spoke the first words. Ashley Greaves, with an expression of sudden relief, began very politely to hustle the crowd, which yielded to his persuasive shoulders, and Lady Holme found herself within looking distance of the two portraits, and speaking distance of Mrs. Wolfstein and Miss Schley. She greeted them with a nod that was more gay and friendly than her usual salutations to women, which often lacked bonhomie. Mrs. Wolfstein’s too expressive face lit up.

“The sensation is complete!” she exclaimed loudly.

“Hope you’re well,” murmured Miss Schley, letting her pale eyes rest on Lady Holme for about a quarter of a second, and then becoming acutely attentive to vacancy.

Lady Holme was now in front of the pictures. She looked at Miss Schley’s portrait with apparent interest, while Mrs. Wolfstein looked at her with an interest that was maliciously real.

“Well?” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “Well?”

“There’s an extraordinary resemblance!” said Lady Holme. “It’s wonderfully like.”

“Even you see it! Ashley, you ought to be triumphant—”

“Wonderfully like—Miss Schley,” added Lady Holme, cutting gently through Mrs. Wolfstein’s rather noisy outburst.

She turned to the American.

“I have been wondering whether you won’t come in one day and see my little home. Everyone wants you, I know, but if you have a minute some Wednesday—”

“I’ll be delighted.”

“Next Wednesday, then?”

“Thanks. Next Wednesday.”

“Cadogan Square—the red book will tell you. But I’ll send cards. I must be running away now.”

When she had gone, followed by Robin, Mrs. Wolfstein said to Miss Schley:

“She’s been conquered by fear of Philadelphia.”

“Wait till I give her Noo York,” returned the American, placidly.

It seemed that Lady Holme’s secret hostility to Miss Schley was returned by the vestal virgin.

LORD HOLME seldom went to parties and never to private views. He thought such things “all damned rot.” Few functions connected with the arts appealed to his frankly Philistine spirit, which rejoiced in celebrations linked with the glories of the body; boxing and wrestling matches, acrobatic performances, weight-lifting exhibitions, and so forth. He regretted that bear-baiting and cock-fighting were no longer legal in England, and had, on two occasions, travelled from London to South America solely in order to witness prize fights.

As he so seldom put in an appearance at smart gatherings he had not yet encountered Miss Schley, nor had he heard a whisper of her much-talked-of resemblance to his wife. Her name was known to him as that of a woman whom one or two of his “pals” began to call a “deuced pretty girl” but his interest in her was not greatly awakened. The number of deuced pretty girls that had been in his life, and in the lives of his pals, was legion. They came and went like feathers dancing on the wind. The mere report of them, therefore, casual and drifting, could not excite his permanent attention, or fix their names and the record of their charms in his somewhat treacherous memory. Lady Holme had not once mentioned the American to him. She was a woman who knew how to be silent, and sometimes she was silent by instinct without saying to herself why.

Lord Holme never appeared on her Wednesdays; and, indeed, those days were a rather uncertain factor among the London joys. If Lady Holme was to be found in her house at all, she was usually to be found on a Wednesday afternoon. She herself considered that she was at home on Wednesdays, but this idea of hers was often a mere delusion, especially when the season had fully set in. There were a thousand things to be done. She frequently forgot what the day of the week was. Unluckily she forgot it on the Wednesday succeeding her invitation to Miss Schley. The American duly turned up in Cadogan Square and was informed that Lady Holme was not to be seen. She left her card and drove away in her coupe with a decidedly stony expression upon her white face.

That day it chanced that Lord Holme came in just before his wife and carelessly glanced over the cards which had been left during the afternoon. He was struck by the name of Pimpernel. It tickled his fancy somehow. As he looked at it he grinned. He looked at it again and vaguely recalled some shreds of the club gossip about Miss Schley’s attractions. When Lady Holme walked quietly into her drawing-room two or three minutes later he met her with Miss Schley’s card in his hand.

“What have you got there, Fritz?” she said.

He gave her the card.

“You never told me you’d run up against her,” he remarked.

Lady Holme looked at the card and then, quickly, at her husband.

“Why—do you know Miss Schley?” she asked.

“Not I.”

“Well then?”

“Fellows say she’s deuced takin’. That’s all. And she’s got a fetchin’ name—eh? Pimpernel.”

He repeated it twice and began to grin once more, and to bend and straighten his legs in the way which sometimes irritated his wife. Lady Holme was again looking at the card.

“Surely it isn’t Wednesday?” she said.

“Yes, it is. What did you think it was?”

“Tuesday—Monday—I don’t know.”

“Where’d you meet her?”

“Whom? Miss Schley? At the Carlton. A lunch of Amalia Wolfstein’s.”

“Is she pretty?”

“Yes.”

There was no hesitation before the reply.

“What colour?

“Oh!—not Albino.”

Lord Holme stared.

“What d’you mean by that, girlie?”

“That Miss Schley is remarkably fair—fairer than I am.”

“Is she as pretty as you?

“You can find out for yourself. I’m going to ask her to something—presently.”

In the last word, in the pause that preceded it, there was the creeping sound of the reluctance Lady Holme felt in allowing Miss Schley to draw any closer to her life. Lord Holme did not notice it. He only said:

“Right you are. Pimpernel—I should like to have a squint at her.”

“Very well. You shall.”

“Pimpernel,” repeated Lord Holme, in a loud bass voice, as he lounged out of the room, grinning. The name tickled his fancy immensely. That was evident.

Lady Holme fully intended to ask Miss Schley to the “something” already mentioned immediately. But somehow several days slipped by and it was difficult to find an unoccupied hour. The Holme cards had, of course, duly gone to the Carlton, but there the matter had ended, so far as Lady Holme was concerned. Miss Schley, however, was not so heedless as the woman she resembled. She began to return with some assiduity to the practice of the talent of the old Philadelphia days. In those days she used to do a “turn” in the course of which she imitated some of the popular public favourites of the States, and for each of her imitations she made up to resemble the person mimicked. She now concentrated this talent upon Lady Holme, but naturally the methods she employed in Society were far more subtle than those she had formerly used upon the stage. They were scarcely less effective. She slightly changed her fashion of doing her hair, puffing it out less at the sides, wearing it a little higher at the back. The change accentuated her physical resemblance to Lady Holme. She happened to get the name of the dressmaker who made most of the latter’s gowns, and happened to give her an order that was executed with remarkable rapidity. But all this was only the foundation upon which she based, as it were, the structure of her delicate revenge.

That consisted in a really admirable hint—it could not be called more—of Lady Holme’s characteristic mannerisms.

Lady Holme was not an affected woman, but, like all women of the world who are greatly admired and much talked about, she had certain little ways of looking, moving, speaking, being quiet, certain little habits of laughter, of gravity, that were her own property. Perhaps originally natural to her, they had become slightly accentuated as time went on, and many tongues and eyes admired them. That which had been unconscious had become conscious. The faraway look came a little more abruptly, went a little more reluctantly; than it had in the young girl’s days. The wistful smile lingered more often on the lips of the twenties than on the lips of the teens. Few noticed any change, perhaps, but there had been a slight change, and it made things easier for Miss Schley.

Her eye was observant although it was generally cast down. Society began to smile secretly at her talented exercises. Only a select few, like Mrs. Wolfstein, knew exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it, but the many were entertained, as children are, without analysing the cause of their amusement.

Two people, however, were indignant—Robin Pierce and Rupert Carey.

Robin Pierce, who had an instinct that was almost feminine in its subtlety, raged internally, and Rupert Carey, who, naturally acute, was always specially shrewd when his heart was in the game, openly showed his distaste for Miss Schley, and went about predicting her complete failure to capture the London public as an actress.

“She’s done it as a woman,” someone replied to him.

“Not the public, only the smart fools,” returned Carey.

“The smart fools have more influence on the public every day.”

Carey only snorted. He was in one of his evil moods that afternoon. He left the club in which the conversation had taken place, and, casting about for something to do, some momentary solace for his irritation and ennui, he bethought him of Sir Donald Ulford’s invitation and resolved to make a call at the Albany. Sir Donald would be out, of course, but anyhow he would chance it and shoot a card.

Sir Donald’s servant said he was in. Carey was glad. Here was an hour filled up.

With his usual hasty, decisive step he followed the man through a dark and Oriental-looking vestibule into a library, where Sir Donald was sitting at a bureau of teakwood, slowly writing upon a large, oblong sheet of foolscap with a very pointed pen.

He got up, looking rather startled, and held out his hand.

“I am glad to see you. I hoped you would come.”

“I’m disturbing a new poem,” said Carey.

Sir Donald’s faded face acknowledged it.

“Sorry. I’ll go.”

“No, no. I have infinite leisure, and I write now merely for myself. I shall never publish anything more. The maunderings of the old are really most thoroughly at home in the waste-paper basket. Do sit down.”

Carey threw himself into a deep chair and looked round. It was a room of books and Oriental china. The floor was covered with an exquisite Persian carpet, rich and delicate in colour, with one of those vague and elaborate designs that stir the imagination as it is stirred by a strange perfume in a dark bazaar where shrouded merchants sit.

“I light it with wax candles,” said Sir Donald, handing Carey a cigar.

“It’s a good room to think in, or to be sad in.”

He struck a match on his boot.

“You like to shut out London,” he continued.

“Yes. Yet I live in it.”

“And hate it. So do I. London’s like a black-browed brute that gets an unholy influence over you. It would turn Mark Tapley into an Ibsen man. Yet one can’t get away from it.”

“It holds interesting minds and interesting faces.”

“Didn’t Persia?”

“Lethargy dwells there and in all Eastern lands.”

“You have made up your mind to spend the rest of your days in the fog?”

“No. Indeed, only to-day I acquired a Campo Santo with cypress trees, in which I intend to make a home for any dying romance that still lingers within me.”

He spoke with a sort of wistful whimsicality. Carey stared hard at him.

“A Campo Santo’s a place for the dead.”

“Why not for the dying? Don’t they need holy ground as much?”

“And where’s this holy ground of yours?”

Sir Donald got up from his chair, went over to the bureau, opened a drawer, and took out of it a large photograph rolled round a piece of wood, which he handed to Carey, who swiftly spread it out on his knees.

“That is it.”

“I say, Sir Donald, d’you mind my asking for a whisky-and-soda?”

“I beg your pardon.”

He hastily touched a bell and ordered it. Meanwhile Carey examined the photograph.

“What do you think of it?” Sir Donald asked.

“Well—Italy obviously.”

“Yes, and a conventional part of Italy.”

“Maggiore?”

“No, Como.”

“The playground of the honeymoon couple.”

“Not where my Campo Santo is. They go to Cadenabbia, Bellagio, Villa D’Este sometimes.”

“I see the fascination. But it looks haunted. You’ve bought it?”

“Yes. The matter was arranged to-day.”

The photograph showed a large, long house, or rather two houses divided by a piazza with slender columns. In the foreground was water. Through the arches of the piazza water was also visible, a cascade falling in the black cleft of a mountain gorge dark with the night of cypresses. To the right of the house, rising from the lake, was a tall old wall overgrown with masses of creeping plants and climbing roses. Over it more cypresses looked, and at the base of it, near the house, were a flight of worn steps disappearing into the lake, and an arched doorway with an elaborately-wrought iron grille. Beneath the photograph was written, “Casa Felice.”

“Casa Felice, h’m!” said Carey, with his eyes on the photograph.

“You think the name inappropriate?”

“Who knows? One can be wretched among sunbeams. One might be gay among cypresses. And Casa Felice belongs to you?”

“From to-day.”

“Old—of course?”

“Yes. There is a romance connected with the house.”

“What is it?”

“Long ago two guilty lovers deserted their respective mates and the brilliant world they had figured in, and fled there together.”

“And quarrelled and were generally wretched there for how many months?”

“For eight years.”

“The devil! Fidelity gone mad!”

“It is said that during those years the mistress never left the garden, except to plunge into the lake on moonlight nights and swim through the silver with her lover.”

Carey was silent. He did not take his eyes from the photograph, which seemed to fascinate him. When the servant came in with the whisky-and-soda he started.

“Not a place to be alone in,” he said.

He drank, and stared again at the photograph.

“There’s something about the place that holds one even in a photograph,” he added.

“One can feel the strange intrigue that made the house a hermitage. It has been a hermitage ever since.”

“Ah!”

“An old Italian lady, very rich, owned it, but never lived there. She recently died, and her heir consented to sell it to me.”

“Well, I should like to see it in the flesh—or the bricks and mortar. But it’s not a place to be alone in,” repeated Carey. “It wants a woman if ever a house did.”

“What sort of woman?”

Sir Donald had sat down again on the chair opposite, and was looking with his exhausted eyes through the smoke of the cigars at Carey.

“A fair woman, a woman with a white face, a slim woman with eyes that are cords to draw men to her and bind them to her, and a voice that can sing them into the islands of the sirens.”

“Are there such women in a world that has forgotten Ulysses?”

“Don’t you know it?”

He rolled the photograph round the piece of wood and laid it on a table.

“I can only think of one who at all answers to your description.”

“The one of whom I was thinking.”

“Lady Holme?”

“Of course.”

“Don’t you think she would be dreadfully bored in Casa Felice?”

“Horribly, horribly. Unless—”

“Unless?”

“Who knows what? But there’s very often an unless hanging about, like a man at a street corner, that—” He broke off, then added abruptly, “Invite me to Casa Felice some day.”

“I do.”

“When will you be going there?”

“As soon as the London season is over. Some time in August. Will you come then?”

“The house is ready for you?”

“It will be. The necessary repairs will be begun now. I have bought it furnished.”

“The lovers’ furniture?”

“Yes. I shall add a number of my own things, picked up on my wanderings.”

“I’ll come in August if you’ll have me. But I’ll give you the season to think whether you’ll have me or whether you won’t. I’m a horrible bore in a house—the lazy man who does nothing and knows a lot. Casa Felice—Casa Felice. You won’t alter the name?”

“Would you advise me to?”

“I don’t know. To keep it is to tempt the wrath of the gods, but I should keep it.”

He poured out another whisky-and-soda and suddenly began to curse Miss Schley.

Sir Donald had spoken to her after Mrs. Wolfstein’s lunch.

“She’s imitating Lady Holme,” said Carey.

“I cannot see the likeness,” Sir Donald said. “Miss Schley seems to me uninteresting and common.”

“She is.”

“And Lady Holme’s personality is, on the contrary; interesting and uncommon.”

“Of course. Pimpernel Schley would be an outrage in that Campo Santo of yours. And yet there is a likeness, and she’s accentuating it every day she lives.”

“Why?”

“Ask the women why they do the cursed things they do do.”

“You are a woman-hater?”

“Not I. Didn’t I say just now that Casa Felice wanted a woman? But the devil generally dwells where the angel dwells—cloud and moon together. Now you want to get on with that poem.”

Half London was smiling gently at the resemblance between Lady Holme and Miss Schley before the former made up her mind to ask the latter to “something.” And when, moved to action by certain evidences of the Philadelphia talent which could not be misunderstood, she did make up her mind, she resolved that the “something” should be very large and by no means very intimate. Safety wanders in crowds.

She sent out cards for a reception, one of those affairs that begin about eleven, are tremendous at half past, look thin at twelve, and have faded away long before the clock strikes one.

Lord Holme hated them. On several occasions he had been known to throw etiquette to the winds and not to turn up when his wife was giving them. He always made what he considered to be a good excuse. Generally he had “gone into the country to look at a horse.” As Lady Holme sent out her cards, and saw her secretary writing the words, “Miss Pimpernel Schley,” on an envelope which contained one, she asked herself whether her husband would be likely to play her false this time.

“Shall you be here on the twelfth?” she asked him casually.

“Why? What’s up on the twelfth?”

“I’m going to have one of those things you hate—before the Arkell House ball. I chose that night so that everyone should run away early! You won’t be obliged to look at a horse in the country that particular day?”

She spoke laughingly, as if she wanted him to say no, but would not be very angry if he didn’t. Lord Holme tugged his moustache and looked very serious indeed.

“Another!” he ejaculated. “We’re always havin’ ‘em. Any music?”

“No, no, nothing. There are endless dinners that night, and Mrs. Crutchby’s concert with Calve, and the ball. People will only run in and say something silly and run out again.”

“Who’s comin’?”

“Everybody. All the tiresome dears that have had their cards left.”

Lord Holme stared at his varnished boots and looked rather like a puzzled boy at a viva voce examination.

“The worst of it is, I can’t be in the country lookin’ at a horse that night,” he said with depression.

“Why not?”

She hastily added:

“But why should you? You ought to be here.”

“I’d rather be lookin’ at a horse. But I’m booked for the dinner to Rowley at the Nation Club that night. I might say the speeches were too long and I couldn’t get away. Eh?”

He looked at her for support.

“You really ought to be here, Fritz,” she answered.

It ended there. Lady Holme knew her husband pretty well. She fancied that the speeches at the dinner given to Sir Jacob Rowley, ex-Governor of some place she knew nothing about, would turn out to be very lengthy indeed—speeches to keep a man far from his home till after midnight.

On the evening of the twelfth Lord Holme had not arrived when the first of his wife’s guests came slowly up the stairs, and Lady Holme began gently to make his excuses to all the tiresome dears who had had their cards left at forty-two Cadogan Square. There were a great many tiresome dears. The stream flowed steadily, and towards half-past eleven resembled a flood-tide.

Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mr. Bry, Sally Perceval had one by one appeared, and Robin Pierce’s dark head was visible mounting slowly amid a throng of other heads of all shapes, sizes and tints.

Lady Holme was looking particularly well. She was dressed in black. Of course black suits everybody. It suited her even better than most people, and her gown was a triumph. She was going on to the Arkell House ball, and wore the Holme diamonds, which were superb, and which she had recently had reset. She was in perfect health, and felt unusually young and unusually defiant. As she stood at the top of the staircase, smiling, shaking hands with people, and watching Robin Pierce coming slowly nearer, she wondered a little at certain secret uneasinesses—they could scarcely be called tremors—which had recently oppressed her. How absurd of her to have been troubled, even lightly, by the impertinent proceedings of an American actress, a nobody from the States, without position, without distinction, without even a husband. How could it matter to her what such a little person—she always called Pimpernel Schley a little person in her thoughts—did or did not do? As Robin came towards her she almost—but not quite—wished that the speeches at the dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley had not been so long as they evidently had been, and that her husband were standing beside her, looking enormous and enormously bored.

“What a crowd!”

“Yes. We can’t talk now. Are you going to Arkell House?”

Robin nodded.

“Take me in to supper there.”

“May I? Thank you. I’m going with Rupert Carey.”

“Really!”

At this moment Lady Holme’s eyes and manner wandered. She had just caught a glimpse of Mrs. Wolfstein, a mass of jewels, and of Pimpernel Schley at the foot of the staircase, had just noticed that the latter happened to be dressed in black.

“Bye-bye!” she added.

Robin Pierce walked on into the drawing-rooms looking rather preoccupied.

Everybody came slowly up the stairs. It was impossible to do anything else. But it seemed to Lady Holme that Miss Schley walked far more slowly than the rest of the tiresome dears, with a deliberation that had a touch of insolence in it. Her straw-coloured hair was done exactly like Lady Holme’s, but she wore no diamonds in it. Indeed, she had on no jewels. And this absence of jewels, and her black gown, made her skin look almost startlingly white, if possible whiter than Lady Holme’s. She smiled quietly as she mounted the stairs, as if she were wrapt in a pleasant, innocent dream which no one knew anything about.

Amalia Wolfstein was certainly a splendid—a too splendid—foil to her. The Jewess was dressed in the most vivid orange colour, and was very much made up. Her large eyebrows were heavily darkened. Her lips were scarlet. Her eyes, which moved incessantly, had a lustre which suggested oil with a strong light shining on it. “Henry” followed in her wake, looking intensely nervous, and unnaturally alive and observant, as if he were searching in the crowd for a bit of gold that someone had accidentally dropped. When anyone spoke to him he replied with extreme vivacity but in the fewest possible words. He held his spare figure slightly sideways as he walked, and his bald head glistened under the electric lamps. Behind them, in the distance, was visible the yellow and sunken face of Sir Donald Ulford.

When Miss Schley gained the top of the staircase Lady Holme saw that their gowns were almost exactly alike. Hers was sewn with diamonds, but otherwise there was scarcely any difference. And she suddenly felt as if the difference made by the jewels was not altogether in her favour, as if she were one of those women who look their best when they are not wearing any ornaments. Possibly Mrs. Wolfstein made all jewellery seem vulgar for the moment. She looked like an exceedingly smart jeweller’s shop rather too brilliantly illuminated; “as if she were for sale,” as an old and valued friend of hers aptly murmured into the ear of someone who had known her ever since she began to give good dinners.

“Here we are! I’m chaperoning Pimpernel. But her mother arrives to-morrow,” began Mrs. Wolfstein, with her strongest accent, while Miss Schley put out a limp hand to meet Lady Holme’s and very slightly accentuated her smile.

“Your mother? I shall be delighted to meet her. I hope you’ll bring her one day,” said Lady Holme; thinking more emphatically than ever that for a woman with a complexion as perfect as hers it was a mistake to wear many jewels.

“I’ll be most pleased, but mother don’t go around much,” replied Miss Schley.

“Does she know London?”

“She does not. She spends most of her time sitting around in Susanville, but she’s bound to look after me in this great city.”

Mrs. Wolfstein was by this time in violent conversation with a pale young man, who always looked as if he were on the point of fainting, but who went literally everywhere. Miss Schley glanced up into Lady Holme’s eyes.

“I hoped to make the acquaintance of Lord Holme to-night,” she murmured. “Folks tell me he’s a most beautiful man. Isn’t he anywhere around?”

She looked away into vacancy, ardently. Lady Holme felt a slight tingling sensation in her cool skin. For a moment it seemed to her as if she watched herself in caricature, distorted perhaps by a mirror with a slight flaw in it.

“My husband was obliged to dine out to-night; unfortunately. I hope he’ll be here in a moment, but he may be kept, as there are to be some dreadful speeches afterwards. I can’t think why elderly men always want to get up and talk nonsense about the Royal family after a heavy dinner. It’s so bad for the digestion and the—ah, Sir Donald! Sweet of you to turn up. Your boy’s been so unkind. I asked him to call, or he asked to call, and he’s never been near me.”

Miss Schley drifted away and was swallowed by the crowd. Sir Donald had arrived at the top of the stairs.

“Leo’s been away in Scotland ever since he had the pleasure of meeting you. He only came back to-night.”

“Then I’m not quite so hurt. He’s always running about, I suppose, to kill things, like my husband.”

“He does manage a good deal in that way. If you are going to the Arkell House ball you’ll meet him there. He and his wife are both—”

“How did do! Oh, Charley, I never expected to see you. I thought it wasn’t the thing for the 2nd to turn up at little hay parties like this. Kitty Barringlave is in the far room, dreadfully bored. Go and cheer her up. Tell her what’ll win the Cup. She’s pale and peaky with ignorance about Ascot this year. Both going to Arkell House, Sir Donald, did you say? Bring your son to me, won’t you? But of course you’re a wise man trotting off to bed.”

“No. The Duke is a very old friend of mine, and so—”

“Perfect. We’ll meet then. They say it’s really locomotor ataxia, poor fellow I but—ah, there’s Fritz!”

Sir Donald looked at her with a sudden inquiring shrewdness, that lit up his faded eyes and made them for a moment almost young. He had caught a sound of vexation in her voice, which reminded him oddly of the sound in her singing voice when Miss Filberte was making a fiasco of the accompaniment. Lord Holme was visible and audible in the hall. His immense form towered above his guests, and his tremendous bass voice dominated the hum of conversation round him. Lady Holme could see from where she stood that he was in a jovial and audacious mood. The dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley had evidently been well cooked and gay. Fritz had the satisfied and rather larky air of a man who has been having one good time and intends to have another. She glanced into the drawing-rooms. They were crammed. She saw in the distance Lady Cardington talking to Sir Donald Ulford. Both of them looked rather pathetic. Mrs. Wolfstein was not far off, standing in the midst of a group and holding forth with almost passionate vivacity and self-possession. Her husband was gliding sideways through the crowd with his peculiarly furtive and watchful air, which always suggested the old nursery game, “Here I am on Tom Tiddler’s ground, picking up gold and silver.” Lady Manby was laughing in a corner with an archdeacon who looked like a guardsman got up in fancy dress. Mr. Bry, his eyeglass fixed in his left eye, came towards the staircase, moving delicately like Agag, and occasionally dropping a cold or sarcastic word to an acquaintance. He reached Lady Holme when Lord Holme was half-way up the stairs, and at once saw him.

“A giant refreshed with wine,” he observed, dropping his eyeglass.

It was such a perfect description of Lord Holme in his present condition that two or three people who were standing with Lady Holme smiled, looking down the staircase. Lady Holme did not smile. She continued chattering, but her face wore a discontented expression. Mr. Bry noticed it. There were very few things he did not notice, although he claimed to be the most short-sighted man in London.

“Why is your husband so dutiful to-night?” he murmured to his hostess. “I thought he always had to go into the country to look at a gee-gee on these occasions.”

“He had to be in town for the dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley. I begged him to come back in—How did do! How did do! Yes, very. Mr. Raleigh, do tell the opera people not to put on Romeo too often this season. Of course Melba’s splendid in it, and all that, but still—”

Mr. Bry fixed his eyeglass again, and began to smile gently like an evil-minded baby. Lord Holme’s brown face was full in view, grinning. His eyes were looking about with unusual vivacity.

“How early you are, Fritz! Good boy. I want you to look after—”

“I say, Vi, why didn’t you tell me?”

Mr. Bry, letting his eyeglass fall, looked abstracted and lent an attentive ear. If he were not playing prompter to social comedies he generally stood in the wings, watching and listening to them with a cold amusement that was seldom devoid of a spice of venom.

“Tell you what, Fritz?”

“That Miss Schley was comin’ to-night. Everyone’s talking about her. I sat next Laycock at dinner and he was ravin’. Told me she was to be here and I didn’t know it. Rather ridiculous, you know. Where is she?”

“Somewhere in the rooms.”

“What’s she like?”

“Oh!—I don’t know. She’s in black. Go and look for her.”

Lord Holme strode on. As he passed Mr. Bry he said:

“I say, Bry, d’you know Miss Pimpernel Schley?”

“Naturally.”

“Come with me, there’s a good chap, and—what’s she like?”

As they went on into the drawing-rooms Mr. Bry dropped out:

“Some people say she’s like Lady Holme.”

“Like Vi! Is she? Laycock’s been simply ravin’—simply ravin’—and Laycock’s not a feller to—where is she?

“We shall come to her. So there was no gee-gee to look at in the country to-night?”

Lord Holme burst into a roar of laughter.

“There’s the vestal tending her lamp,” said Mr. Bry a moment later.

“The what up to what?”

“Miss Pimpernel Schley keeping the fire of adoration carefully alight.”

“Where?”

“There.”

“Oh, I see! Jove, what a skin, though! Eh! Isn’t it? She is deuced like Vi at a distance. Vi looks up just like that when she’s singin’. Doesn’t she, though? Eh?”

He went on towards her.

Mr. Bry followed him, murmuring.

“The giant refreshed with wine. No gee-gee to-night. No gee-gee.”

“Tell his lordship.”

The butler went out, and Lady Holme’s maid put a long black cloak carefully over her mistress’s shoulders. While she did this Lady Holme stood quite still gazing into vacancy. They were in the now deserted yellow drawing-room, which was still brilliantly lit, and full of the already weary-looking flowers which had been arranged for the reception. The last guest had gone and the carriage was waiting to take the Holmes to Arkell House.

The maid did something to the diamonds in Lady Holme’s hair with deft fingers, and the light touch seemed to wake Lady Holme from a reverie. She went to a mirror and looked into it steadily. The maid stood behind. After a moment Lady Holme lifted her hand suddenly to her head, as if she were going to take off her tiara. The maid could not repress a slight movement of startled astonishment. Lady Holme saw it in the glass, dropped her hand, and said:

“C’est tout, Josephine. Vous pouvez vous en aller.”

“Merci, miladi.”

She went out quietly.

Two or three minutes passed. Then Lord Holme’s deep bass voice was audible, humming vigorously:

  “Ina, Ina, oh, you should have seen her!
     Seen her with her eyes cast down.
       She looked upon the floor,
         And all the Johnnies swore
   That Ina, Ina—oh, you should have seen her!—
     That Ina was the chic-est girl in town.”
 

Lady Holme frowned.

“Fritz!” she called rather sharply.

Lord Holme appeared with a coat thrown over his arm and a hat in his hand. His brown face was beaming with self-satisfaction.

“Well, old girl, ready? What’s up now?”

“I wish you wouldn’t sing those horrible music-hall songs. You know I hate them.”

“Music-hall! I like that. Why, it’s the best thing in The Chick from the Army and Navy at the Blue Theatre.”

“It’s disgustingly vulgar.”

“What next? Why, I saw the Lord Chan—”

“I daresay you did. Vulgarity will appeal to the Saints of Heaven next season if things go on as they’re going now. Come along.”

She went out of the room, walking more quickly than she usually walked, and holding herself very upright. Lord Holme followed, forming the words of his favourite song with his lips, and screwing up his eyes as if he were looking at an improper peepshow. When they were in the electric brougham, which spun along with scarcely any noise, he began:

“I say, Vi, how long’ve you known Miss Schley?”

“I don’t know. Some weeks.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I did. I said I had met her at Mrs. Wolfstein’s lunch.”

“No, but why didn’t you tell me how like you she was?”

There was complete silence in the brougham for a minute. Then Lady Holme said:

“I had no idea she was like me.”

“Then you’re blind, old girl. She’s like you if you’d been a chorus-girl and known a lot of things you don’t know.”

“Really. Perhaps she has been a chorus-girl.”

“I’ll bet she has, whether she says so or not.”

He gave a deep chuckle. Lady Holme’s gown rustled as she leaned back in her corner.

“And she’s goin’ to Arkell House. Americans are the very devil for gettin’ on. Laycock was tellin’ me to-night that—”

“I don’t wish to hear Mr. Laycock’s stories, Fritz. They don’t amuse me.”

“Well, p’r’aps they’re hardly the thing for you, Vi. But they’re deuced amusin’ for all that.”

He chuckled again. Lady Holme felt an intense desire to commit some act of physical violence. She shut her eyes. In a minute she heard her husband once more beginning to hum the refrain about Ina. How utterly careless he was of her desires and requests. There was something animal in his forgetfulness and indifference. She had loved the animal in him. She did love it. Something deep down in her nature answered eagerly to its call. But at moments she hated it almost with fury. She hated it now and longed to use the whip, as the tamer in a menagerie uses it when one of his beasts shows its teeth, or sulkily refuses to perform one of its tricks.

Lord Holme went on calmly humming till the brougham stopped in the long line of carriages that stretched away into the night from the great portico of Arkell House.

People were already going in to supper when the Holmes arrived. The Duke, upon whom a painful malady was beginning to creep, was bravely welcoming his innumerable guests. He found it already impossible to go unaided up and down stairs, and sat in a large armchair close to the ball-room, with one of his pretty daughters near him, talking brightly, and occasionally stealing wistful glances at the dancers, who were visible through a high archway to his left. He was a thin, middle-aged man, with a curious, transparent look in his face—something crystalline that was nearly beautiful.

The Duchess was swarthy and masterful, very intelligent and grande dame. Vivacity was easy to her. People said she had been a good hostess in her cradle, and that she had presided over the ceremony of her own baptism in a most autocratic and successful manner. It was quite likely.

After a word with the Duke, Lady Holme went slowly towards the ballroom with her husband. She did not mean to dance, and began to refuse the requests of would-be partners with charming protestations of fatigue. Lord Holme was scanning the ballroom with his big brown eyes.

“Are you going to dance, Fritz?” asked Lady Holme, nodding to Robin Pierce, whom she had just seen standing at a little distance with Rupert Carey.

The latter had not seen her yet, but as Robin returned her nod he looked hastily round.

“Yes, I promised Miss Schley to struggle through a waltz with her. Wonder if she’s dancin’?”

Lady Holme bowed, a little ostentatiously, to Rupert Carey. Her husband saw it and began at once to look pugilistic. He could not say anything, for at this moment two or three men strolled up to speak to Lady Holme. While she was talking to them, Pimpernel Schley came in sight waltzing with Mr. Laycock, one of those abnormally thin, narrow-featured, smart men, with bold, inexpressive ayes, in whom London abounds.

Lord Holme’s under-jaw resumed its natural position, and he walked away and was lost in the crowd, following the two dancers.

“Take me in to supper, Robin. I’m tired.”

“This way. I thought you were never coming.”

“People stayed so late. I can’t think why. I’m sure it was dreadfully dull and foolish. How odd Mr. Carey’s looking! When I bowed to him just now he didn’t return it, but only stared at me as if I were a stranger.”

Robin Pierce made no rejoinder. They descended the great staircase and went towards the picture-gallery.

“Find a corner where we can really talk.”

“Yes, yes.”

He spoke eagerly.

“Here—this is perfect.”

They sat down at a table for two that was placed in an angle of the great room. Upon the walls above them looked down a Murillo and a Velasquez. Lady Holme was under the Murillo, which represented three Spanish street boys playing a game in the dust with pieces of money.

“A table for two,” said Robin Pierce. “I have always said that the Duchess understands the art of entertaining better than anyone in London, except you—when you choose.”

“To-night I really couldn’t choose. Later on, I’m going to give two or three concerts. Is anything the matter with Mr. Carey?”

“Do you think so?”

“Well, I hope it isn’t true what people are saying.”

“What are they saying?”

“That’s he’s not very judicious in one way.”

A footman poured champagne into her glass. Robin Pierce touched the glass.

“That way?”

“Yes. It would be too sad.”

“Let us hope it isn’t true, then.”

“You know him well. Is it true?”

“Would you care if it was?”

He looked at her earnestly.

“Yes. I like Mr. Carey.”

There was a rather unusual sound of sincerity in her voice.

“And what is it that you like in him?”

“Oh, I don’t know. He talks shocking nonsense, of course, and is down on people and things. And he’s absurdly unsophisticated at moments, though he knows the world so well. He’s not like you—not a diplomat. But I believe if he had a chance he might do something great.”

Robin felt as if the hidden woman had suddenly begun to speak. Why did she speak about Rupert Carey?

“Do you like a man to do something great?” he said.

“Oh, yes. All women do.”

“But I perpetually hear you laughing at the big people—the Premiers, the Chancellors, the Archbishops, the Generals of the world.”

“Because I’ve always known them. And really they are so often quite absurd and tiresome.”

“And—Rupert Carey?”

“Oh, he’s nothing at all, poor fellow! Still there’s something in his face that makes me think he could do an extraordinary thing if he had the chance. I saw it there to-night when he didn’t bow to me. There’s Sir Donald’s son. And what a dreadful-looking woman just behind him.”

Leo Ulford was coming down the gallery with a gaunt, aristocratic, harsh-featured girl. Behind him walked Mr. Bry, conducting a very young old woman, immensely smart, immensely vivacious, and immensely pink, who moved with an unnecessary alertness that was birdlike, and turned her head about sharply on a long, thin neck decorated with a large diamond dog-collar. Slung at her side there was a tiny jewelled tube.

“That’s Mrs. Leo.”

“She must be over sixty.”

“She is.”

The quartet sat down at the next table. Leo Ulford did not see Lady Holme at once. When he caught sight of her, he got up, came to her, stood over her and pressed her hand.

“Been away,” he explained. “Only back to-night.”

“I’ve been complaining to your father about you.”

A slow smile overspread his chubby face.

“May I see you again after supper?”

“If you can find me.”

“I can always manage to find what I want,” he returned, still smiling.

When he had gone back to his table Robin Pierce said:

“How insolent Englishmen are allowed to be in Society! It always strikes me after I’ve been a long time abroad. Doesn’t anybody mind it?”

“Do you mean that you consider Mr. Ulford insolent?”

“In manner. Yes, I do.”

“Well, I think there’s something like Fritz about him.”

Robin Pierce could not tell from the way this was said what would be a safe remark to make. He therefore changed the subject.

“Do you know what Sir Donald’s been doing?” he said.

“No. What?”

“Buying a Campo Santo.”

“A Campo Santo! Is he going to bury himself, then? What do you mean, Robin?”

“He called it a Campo Santo to Carey. It’s really a wonderful house in Italy, on Como. Casa Felice is the name of it. I know it well.”

“Casa Felice. How delicious! But is it the place for Sir Donald?”

“Why not?”

“For an old, tired man. Casa Felice. Won’t the name seem an irony to him when he’s there?”

“You think an old man can’t be happy anywhere?”

“I can’t imagine being happy old.”

“Why not?”

“Oh!”—she lowered her voice—“if you want to know, look at Mrs. Ulford.”

“Your husk theory again. A question of looks. But you will grow old gracefully—some day in the far future.”

“I don’t think I shall grow old at all.”

“Then—?”

“I think I shall die before that comes—say at forty-five. I couldn’t live with wrinkles all over my face. No, Robin, I couldn’t. And—look at Mrs. Ulford!—perhaps an ear-trumpet set with opals.”

“What do the wrinkles matter? But some day you’ll find I’m right. You’ll tell me so. You’ll acknowledge that your charm comes from within, and has survived the mutilation of the husk.”

“Mutilation! What a hideous sound that word has. Why don’t all mutilated people commit suicide at once? I should. Is Sir Donald going to live in his happy house?”

“Naturally. He’ll be there this August. He’s invited Rupert Carey to stay there with him.”

“And you?”

“Not yet.”

“I suppose he will. Everybody always asks you everywhere. Diplomacy is so universally—”

She broke off. Far away, at the end of the gallery, she had caught sight of Miss Schley coming in with her husband. They sat down at a table near the door. Robin Pierce followed her eyes and understood her silence.

“Are you going on the first?” he asked.

“What to?”

“Miss Schley’s first night.”

“Is it on the first? I didn’t know. We can’t. We’re dining at Brayley House that evening.”

“What a pity!” he said, with a light touch of half playful malice. “You would have seen her as she really is—from all accounts.”

“And what is Miss Schley really?”

“The secret enemy of censors.”

“Oh!”

“You dislike her. Why?”

“I don’t dislike her at all.”

“Do you like her?”

“No. I like very few women. I don’t understand them.”

“At any rate you understand—say Miss Schley—better than a man would.”

“Oh—a man!”

“I believe all women think all men fools.”

Lady Holme laughed, not very gaily.

“Don’t they?” he insisted.

“In certain ways, in certain relations of life, I suppose most men are—rather short-sighted.”

“Like Mr. Bry.”

“Mr. Bry is the least short-sighted man I know. That’s why he always wears an eyeglass.”

“To create an illusion?”

“Who knows?”

She looked down the long room. Between the heads of innumerable men and women she could see Miss Schley. Her husband was hidden. She would have preferred to see him. Miss Schley’s head was by no means expressive of the naked truth. It merely looked cool, self-possessed, and—so Lady Holme said to herself—extremely American. What she meant by that she could, perhaps, hardly have explained.

“Do you admire Miss Schley’s appearance?”

Robin Pierce spoke again with a touch of humorous malice. He knew Lady Holme so well that he had no objection to seem wanting in tact to her when he had a secret end to gain. She looked at him sharply; leaning forward over the table and opening her eyes very wide.

“Why are you forgetting your manners to-night and bombarding me with questions?”

“The usual reason—devouring curiosity.”

She hesitated, looking at him. Then suddenly her face changed. Something, some imp of adorable frankness, peeped out of it at him, and her whole body seemed confiding.

“Miss Schley is going about London imitating me. Now, isn’t that true? Isn’t she?”

“I believe she is. Damned impertinence!”

He muttered the last words under his breath.

“How can I admire her?”

There was something in the way she said that which touched him. He leaned forward to her.

“Why not punish her for it?”

“How?”

“Reveal what she can’t imitate.”

“What’s that?”

“All you hide and I divine.”

“Go on.”

“She mimics the husk. She couldn’t mimic the kernel.”

“Ice, my lady?”

Lady Holme started. Till the footman spoke she had not quite realised how deeply interested she was in the conversation. She helped herself to some ice.

“You can go on, Mr. Pierce,” she said when the man had gone.

“But you understand.”

She shook her head, smiling. Her body still looked soft and attractive, and deliciously feminine.

“Miss Schley happens to have some vague resemblance to you in height and colouring. She is a clever mimic. She used to be a professional mimic.”

“Really!”

“That was how she first became known.”

“In America?”

“Yes.”

“Why should she imitate me?”

“Have you been nice to her?”

“I don’t know. Yes. Nice enough.”

Robin shook his head.

“You think she dislikes me then?”

“Do women want definite reasons for half the things they do? Miss Schley may not say to herself that she dislikes you, any more than you say to yourself that you dislike her. Nevertheless—”

“We should never get on. No.”

“Consider yourselves enemies—for no reasons, or secret woman’s reasons. It’s safer.”

Lady Holme looked down the gallery again. Miss Schley’s fair head was bending forward to some invisible person.

“And the mimicry?” she asked, turning again to Robin.

“Can only be applied to mannerisms, to the ninety-ninth part, the inconsiderable fraction of your charm. Miss Schley could never imitate the hidden woman, the woman who sings, the woman who laughs at, denies herself when she is not singing.”

“But no one cares for her—if she exists.”

There was a hint of secret bitterness in her voice when she said that.

“Give her a chance—and find out. But you know already that numbers do.”

He tried to look into her eyes, but she avoided his gaze and got up.

“Take me back to the ballroom.”

“You are going to dance?”

“I want to see who’s here.”

As they passed the next table Lady Holme nodded to Leo Ulford. He bowed in return and indicated that he was following almost immediately. Mrs. Ulford put down her ear-trumpet, turned her head sharply, and looked at Lady Holme sideways, fluttering her pink eyelids.

“How exactly like a bird she is,” murmured Lady Holme.

“Exactly—moulting.”

Lady Holme meant as she walked down the gallery; to stop and speak a few gay words to Miss Schley and her husband, but when she drew near to their table Lord Holme was holding forth with such unusual volubility, and Miss Schley was listening with such profound attention, that it did not seem worth while, and she went quietly on, thinking they did not see her. Lord Holme did not. But the American smiled faintly as Lady Holme and Robin disappeared into the hall. Then she said, in reply to her animated companion:

“I’m sure if I am like Lady Holme I ought to say Te Deum and think myself a lucky girl. I ought, indeed.”

Lady Holme had not been in the ballroom five minutes before Leo Ulford came up smiling.

“Here I am,” he remarked, as if the statement were certain to give universal satisfaction.

Robin looked black and moved a step closer to Lady Holme.

“Thank you, Mr. Pierce,” she said.

She took Leo Ulford’s arm, nodded to Robin, and walked away.

Robin stood looking after her. He started when he heard Carey’s voice saying:

“Why d’you let her dance with that blackguard?”

“Hulloa, Carey?”

“Come to the supper-room. I want to have a yarn with you. And all this”—he made a wavering, yet violent, gesture towards the dancers—“might be a Holbein.”

“A dance of death? What nonsense you talk!”

“Come to the supper-room.”

Robin looked at his friend narrowly.

“You’re bored. Let’s go and take a stroll down Park Lane.”

“No. Well, then, if you won’t—”

“I’ll come.”

He put his arm through Carey’s, and they went out together.

Lady Holme was generally agreeable to men. She was particularly charming to Leo Ulford that night. He was not an interesting man, but he seemed to interest her very much. They sat out together for a long time in the corner of a small drawing-room, far away from the music. She had said to Robin Pierce that she thought there was something about Leo Ulford that was like her husband, and when she talked to him she found the resemblance even greater than she had supposed.

Lord Holme and Leo Ulford were of a similar type. Both were strong, healthy, sensual, slangy, audacious in a dull kind of fashion—Lady Holme did not call it dull—serenely and perpetually intent upon having everything their own way in life. Both lived for the body and ignored the soul, as they would have ignored a man with a fine brain, a passionate heart, a narrow chest and undeveloped muscles. Such a man they would have summed up as “a rotter.” If they ever thought of the soul at all, it was probably under some such comprehensive name. Both had the same simple and blatant aim in life, an aim which governed all their actions and was the generator of most of their thoughts. This aim, expressed in their own terse language, was “to do themselves jolly well.” Both had, so far, succeeded in their ambition. Both were, consequently, profoundly convinced of their own cleverness. Intellectual conceit—the conceit of the brain—is as nothing to physical conceit—the conceit of the body. Acute intelligence is always capable of uneasiness, can always make room for a doubt. But the self-satisfaction of the little-brained and big-muscled man who has never had a rebuff or a day’s illness is cased in triple brass. Lady Holme knew this self-satisfaction well. She had seen it staring out of her husband’s big brown eyes. She saw it now in the boyish eyes of Leo Ulford. She was at home with it and rather liked it. In truth, it had at least one merit—from the woman’s point of view—it was decisively masculine.

Whether Leo Ulford was, or was not, a blackguard; as Mrs. Trent had declared, did not matter to her. Three-quarters of the men she knew were blackguards according to the pinched ideas of Little Peddlington; and Mrs. Trent might originally have issued from there.

She got on easily with Leo Ulford because she was experienced in the treatment of his type. She knew exactly what to do with it; how to lead it on, how to fend it off, how to throw cold water on its enterprise without dashing it too greatly, how to banish any little, sulky cloud that might appear on the brassy horizon without seeming to be solicitous.

The type is amazingly familiar to the woman of the London world. She can recognize it at a glance, and can send it in its armchair canter round the circus with scarce a crack of the ring-mistress’s whip.

To-night Lady Holme enjoyed governing it more than usual, and for a subtle reason.

In testing her power upon Leo Ulford she was secretly practising her siren’s art, with a view that would have surprised and disgusted him, still more amazed him, had he known it. She was firing at the dummy in order that later she might make sure of hitting the living man. Leo Ulford was the dummy. The living man would be Fritz.

Both dummy and living man were profoundly ignorant of her moving principle. The one was radiant with self-satisfaction under her fusillade. The other, ignorant of it so far, would have been furious in the knowledge of it.

She knew-and laughed at the men.

Presently she turned the conversation, which was getting a little too personal—on Leo Ulford’s side—to a subject very present in her mind that night.

“Did you have a talk with Miss Schley the other day after I left?” she asked. “I ran away on purpose to give you a chance. Wasn’t it good-natured of me, when I was really longing to stay?”

Leo Ulford stretched out his long legs slowly, his type’s way of purring.

“I’d rather have gone on yarning with you.”

“Then you did have a talk! She was at my house to-night, looking quite delicious. You know she’s conquered London?”

“That sort’s up to every move on the board.”

“What do you mean? What board?”

She looked at him with innocent inquiry.

“I wish men didn’t know so much,” she added; with a sort of soft vexation. “You have so many opportunities of acquiring knowledge and we so few—if we respect the convenances.”

“Miss Schley wouldn’t respect ‘em.”

He chuckled, and again drew up and then stretched out his legs, slowly and luxuriously.

“How can you know?”

“She’s not the sort that does. She’s the sort that’s always kicking over the traces and keeping it dark. I know ‘em.”

“I think you’re rather unkind. Miss Schley’s mother arrives to-morrow.”

Leo Ulford put up his hands to his baby moustache and shook with laughter.

“That’s the only thing she wanted to set her up in business,” he ejaculated. “A marmar. I do love those Americans!”

“But you speak as if Mrs. Schley were a stage property!”

“I’ll bet she is. Wait till you see her. Why, it’s a regular profession in the States, being a marmar. I tell you what—”

He leaned forward and fixed his blue eyes on Lady Holme, with an air of profound acuteness.

“Are you going to see her?”

“Mrs. Schley? I daresay.”

“Well, you remember what I tell you. She’ll be as dry as a dog-biscuit, wear a cap and spectacles with gold rims, and say nothing but ‘Oh, my, yes indeed!’ to everything that’s said to her. Does she come from Susanville?”

“How extraordinary! I believe she does.”

Leo Ulford’s laugh was triumphant and prolonged.

“That’s where they breed marmars!” he exclaimed, when he was able to speak. “Women are stunning.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,” said Lady Holme, preserving a quiet air of pupilage. “But perhaps it’s better I shouldn’t. Anyhow, I am quite sure Miss Schley’s mother will be worthy of her daughter.”

“You may bet your bottom dollar on that. She’ll be what they call ‘a sootable marmar.’ I must get my wife to shoot a card on her.”

“I hope you’ll introduce me to Mrs. Ulford. I should like to know her.”

“Yours isn’t the voice to talk down a trumpet,” said Leo Ulford, with a sudden air of surliness.

“I should like to know her now I know you and your father.”

At the mention of his father Leo Ulford’s discontented expression increased.

“My father’s a rotter,” he said. “Never cared for anything. No shot to speak of. He can sit on a horse all right. Had to, in South America and Morocco and all those places. But he never really cared about it, I don’t believe. Why, he’d rather look at a picture than a thoroughbred any day!”

At this moment Sir Donald wandered into the room, with his hands behind his thin back, and his eyes searching the walls. The Duke possessed a splendid collection of pictures.

“There he is!” said Leo, gruffly.

“He doesn’t see us. Go and tell him I’m here.”

“Why? he might go out again if we keep mum.”

“But I want to speak to him. Sir Donald! Sir Donald!”

Sir Donald turned round at the second summons and came towards them, looking rather embarrassed.

“Hulloa, pater!” said Leo.

Sir Donald nodded to his son with a conscientious effort to seem familiar and genial.

“Hulloa!” he rejoined in a hollow voice.

“Your boy has been instructing me in American mysteries,” said Lady Holme. “Do take me to the ballroom, Sir Donald.”

Leo Ulford’s good humour returned as abruptly as it had departed. Her glance at him, as she spoke, had seemed to hint at a secret understanding between them in which no one—certainly not his father—was included.

“Pater can tell you all about the pictures,” he said, with a comfortable assurance, which he did not strive to disguise, that she would be supremely bored.

He stared at her hard, gave a short laugh, and lounged away.

When he had gone, Sir Donald still seemed embarrassed. He looked at Lady Holme apologetically, and in his faded eyes she saw an expression that reminded her of Lady Cardington. It was surely old age asking forgiveness for its existence.

She did not feel much pity for it, but with the woman of the world’s natural instinct to smooth rough places—especially for a man—she began to devote herself to cheering Sir Donald up, as they slowly made their way through room after room towards the distant sound of the music.

“I hear you’ve been plunging!” she began gaily.

Sir Donald looked vague.

“I’m afraid I scarcely—”

“Forgive me. I catch slang from my husband. He’s ruining my English. I mean that I hear you’ve been investing—shall I say your romance?—in a wonderful place abroad, with a fascinating name. I hope you’ll get enormous interest.”

A faint colour, it was like the ghost of a blush, rose in Sir Donald’s withered cheeks.

“Ah, Mr. Carey—”

He checked himself abruptly, remembering whet he had heard from Robin Pierce.

“No, Mr. Pierce was my informant. He knows your place and says it’s too wonderful. I adore the name.”

“Casa Felice. You would not advise me to change it, then?”

“Change it! Why?”

“Well, I—one should not, perhaps, insist beforehand that one is going to have happiness, which must always lie on the knees of the gods.”

“Oh, I believe in defiance.”

There was an audacious sound in her voice. Her long talk with Leo Ulford had given her back her belief in herself, her confidence in her beauty, her reliance on her youth.

“You have a right to believe in it. But Casa Felice is mine.”

“Even to buy it was a defiance—in a way.”

“Perhaps so. But then—”

“But then you have set out and you must not turn back, Sir Donald. Baptise your wonderful house yourself by filling it with happiness. Another gave it its name. Give it yourself the reason for the name.”

Happiness seemed to shine suddenly in the sound of her speaking voice, as it shone in her singing voice when the theme of her song was joy. Sir Donald’s manner lost its self-consciousness, its furtive diffidence.

“You—you come and give my house its real baptism,” he said, with a flash of ardour that, issuing from him, was like fire bursting out of a dreary marsh land. “Will you? This August?”

“But,” she hesitated. “Isn’t Mr. Carey coming?”

At this moment they came into a big drawing-room that immediately preceded the ballroom, with which it communicated by an immense doorway hung with curtains of white velvet. They could see in the distance the dancers moving rather indifferently in a lancers. Lord Holme and Miss Schley were dancing in the set nearest to the doorway, and on the side that faced the drawing-room. Directly Lady Holme saw the ballroom she saw them. A sudden sense of revolt, the defiance of joy carried on into the defiance of anger, rose up in her.

“If Mr. Carey is coming I’ll come too, and baptise your house,” she said.

Sir Donald looked surprised, but he answered, with a swiftness that did not seem to belong to old age:

“That is a bargain, Lady Holme. I regard that as a bargain.”

“I’ll not go back on it.”

There was a hard sound in her voice.

They entered the ballroom just as the band played the closing bars of the lancers, and the many sets began to break up and melt into a formless crowd which dispersed in various directions. The largest number of people moved towards the archway near which the Duke was still sitting, bravely exerting himself to be cheerful. Lady Holme and Sir Donald became involved in this section of the crowd, and naturally followed in its direction. Lord Holme and Miss Schley were at a short distance behind them, and Lady Holme was aware of this. The double defiance was still alive in her, and was strengthened by a clear sound which reached her ears for a moment, then was swallowed up by the hum of conversation from many intervening voices—the sound of the American’s drawling tones raised to say something she could not catch. As she came out into the hall, close to the Duke’s chair, she saw Rupert Carey trying to make his way into the ballroom against the stream of dancers. His face was flushed. There were drops of perspiration on his forehead, and the violent expression that was perpetually visible in his red-brown eyes, lighting them up as with a flame, seemed partially obscured as if by a haze. The violence of them was no longer vivid but glassy.

Lady Holme did not notice all this. The crowd was round her, and she was secretly preoccupied. She merely saw that Rupert Carey was close to her, and she knew who was following behind her. A strong impulse came upon her and she yielded to it without hesitation. As she reached Rupert Carey she stopped and held out her hand.

“Mr. Carey,” she said, “I’ve been wanting to speak to you all the evening. Why didn’t you ask me to dance?”

She spoke very distinctly. Carey stood still and stared at her, and now she noticed the flush on his face and the unnatural expression in his eyes. She understood at once what was the matter and repented of her action. But it was too late to draw back. Carey stared dully for an instant, as if he scarcely knew who she was. Then, with a lurch, he came closer to her, and, with a wavering movement, tried to find her hand, which she had withdrawn.

“Where is it?” he muttered in a thick voice. “Where is it?”

He groped frantically.

“Sir Donald!” Lady Holme whispered sharply, while the people nearest to them began to exchange glances of surprise or of amusement.

She pressed his arm and he tried to draw her on. But Carey was exactly in front of her. It was impossible for her to escape. He found her hand at last, took it limply in his, bent down and began to kiss it, mumbling some loud but incoherent words.

The Duke, who from his chair, was a witness of the scene, tried to raise himself up, and a vivid spot of scarlet burned in his almost transparent cheeks. His daughter hastened forward to stop his effort. Lady Holme dragged her hand away violently, and Carey suddenly burst into tears. Sir Donald hurried Lady Holme on, and Carey tried to follow, but was forcibly prevented by two men.

When at length Lady Holme found herself at the other end of the great hall, she turned and saw her husband coming towards her with a look of fury on his face.

“I wish to go home,” she said to him in a low voice.

She withdrew her hand from Sir Donald’s arm and quietly bade him good-bye. Lord Holme did not say a word.

“Where is the Duchess?” Lady Holme added. “Ah, there she is!”

She saw the Duchess hurriedly going towards the place where the Duke was sitting, intercepted her swiftly, and bade her good-night.

“Now, Fritz!” she said.

She was conscious that a number of people were watching her, and her voice and manner were absolutely unembarrassed. A footman took the number of her cloak from Lord Holme and fetched the cloak. A voice cried in the distance, “Lord Holme’s carriage!” Another, and nearer voice, echoed the call. She passed slowly between two lines of men over a broad strip of carpet to the portico, and stepped into the brougham.

As it glided away into the night she heard her husband’s loud breathing.

He did not speak for two or three minutes, but breathed like a man who had been running, and moved violently in the carriage as if to keep still were intolerable to him. The window next to him was up. He let it down. Then he turned right round to his wife, who was leaning back in her corner wrapped up in her black cloak.

“With the Duke sittin’ there!” he said in a loud voice. “With the Duke sittin’ there!”

There was a sound of outrage in the voice.

“Didn’t I kick that sweep out of the house?” he added. “Didn’t I?”

“I believe you asked Mr. Carey not to call anymore.”

Lady Holme’s voice had no excitement in it.

“Asked him! I—”

“Don’t make such a noise, Fritz. The men will hear you.”

“I told him if he ever came again I’d have him put out.”

“Well, he never has come again.”

“What d’you mean by speakin’ to him? What d’you mean by it?”

Lady Holme knew that her husband was a thoroughly conventional man, and, like all conventional men, had a horror of a public scene in which any woman belonging to him was mixed up. Such a scene alone was quite enough to rouse his wrath. But there was in his present anger something deeper, more brutal, than any rage caused by a breach of the conventions. His jealousy was stirred.

“He didn’t speak to you. You spoke to him.”

Lady Holme did not deny it.

“I heard every word you said,” continued Lord Holme, beginning to breathe hard again. “I—I—”

Lady Holme felt that he was longing to strike her, that if he had been the same man, but a collier or a labourer, born in another class of life, he would not have hesitated to beat her. The tradition in which he had been brought up controlled him. But she knew that if he could have beaten her he would have hated her less, that his sense of bitter wrong would have at once diminished. In self-control it grew. The spark rose to a flame.

“You’re a damned shameful woman!” he said.

The brougham drew up softly before their house. Lord Holme, who was seated on the side next the house, got out first. He did not wait on the pavement to assist his wife, but walked up the steps, opened the door, and went into the hall. Lady Holme followed. She saw her husband, with the light behind him, standing with his hand on the handle of the hall door. For an instant she thought that he was going to shut her out. He actually pushed the door till the light was almost hidden. Then he flung it open with a bang, threw down his hat and strode upstairs.

If he had shut her out! She found herself wondering what would have become of her, where she would have gone. She would have had to go to the Coburg, or to Claridge’s, without a maid, without luggage. As she slowly came upstairs she heard her husband go into the drawing-room. Was he waiting for her there? or did he wish to avoid her? When she reached the broad landing she hesitated. She was half inclined to go in audaciously, to laugh in his face; turn his fury into ridicule, tell him she was the sort of woman who is born to do as she likes, to live as she chooses, to think of nothing but her own will, consult nothing but her whims of the moment. But she went on and into her bedroom.

Josephine was there and began to take the diamonds out of her hair. Lady Holme did not say a word. She was listening intently for the sound of any movement below. She heard nothing. When she was undressed, and there was nothing more for the maid to do, she began to feel uneasy, as if she would rather not dismiss the girl. But it was very late. Josephine strangled her yawns with difficulty. There was no excuse for keeping her up any longer.

“You can go.”

The maid went out, leaving Lady Holme standing in the middle of the big bedroom. Next to it on one side was Lord Holme’s dressing-room. On the other side there was a door leading into Lady Holme’s boudoir. Almost directly after Josephine had gone Lady Holme heard the outer door of this room opened, and the heavy step of her husband. It moved about the room, stopped, moved about again. What could he be doing? She stood where she was, listening. Suddenly the door between the rooms was thrown open and Lord Holme appeared.

“Where’s the red book?” he said.

“The red book!”

“Where is it? D’you hear?”

“What do you want it for?”

“That sweep’s address.”

“What are you going to do? Write to him?”

“Write to him!” said Lord Holme, with bitter contempt. “I’m goin’ to thrash him. Where is it?”

“You are going now?”

“I’ve not come up to answer questions. I’ve come for the red book. Where is it?”

“The little drawer at the top on the right hand of the writing-table.”

Lord Holme turned back into the boudoir, went to the writing-table, found the book, opened it, found the address and wrote it down on a bit of paper. He folded the paper up anyhow and thrust it into his waistcoat pocket. Then, without saying another word to his wife, or looking at her, he went out and down the staircase.

She followed him on to the landing, and stood there till she heard the hall door shut with a bang.

A clock below struck four. She went back into the bedroom and sank into an armchair.

A slight sense of confusion floated over her mind for a moment, like a cloud. She was not accustomed to scenes. There had been one certainly when Rupert Carey was forbidden to come to the house any more, but it had been brief, and she had not been present at it. She had only heard of it afterwards. Lord Holme had been angry then, and she had rather liked his anger. She took it as, in some degree, a measure of his attachment to her. And then she had had no feeling of being in the wrong or of humiliation. She had been charming to Carey, as she was charming to all men. He had lost his head. He had mistaken the relations existing between her and her husband, and imagined that such a woman as she was must be unhappily mated with such a man as Lord Holme. The passionate desire to console a perfectly-contented woman had caused him to go too far, and bring down upon himself a fiat of exile, which he could not defy since Lady Holme permitted it to go forth, and evidently was not rendered miserable by it. So the acquaintance with Rupert Carey had ceased, and life had slipped along once more on wheels covered with india-rubber tyres.

And now she had renewed the acquaintance publicly and with disastrous results.

As she sat there she began to wonder at herself, at the strength of her temper, the secret violence of her nature. She had yielded like a child to a sudden impulse. She had not thought of consequences. She had ignored her worldly knowledge. She had considered nothing, but had acted abruptly, as any ignorant, uneducated woman might have acted. She had been the slave of a mood. Or had she been the slave of another woman—of a woman whom she despised?

Miss Schley had certainly been the cause of the whole affair. Lady Holme had spoken to Rupert Carey merely because she knew that her husband was immediately behind her with the American. There had been within her at that moment something of a broad, comprehensive feeling, mingled with the more limited personal feeling of anger against another woman’s successful impertinence, a sentiment of revolt in which womanhood seemed to rise up against the selfish tyrannies of men. As she had walked in the crowd, and heard for an instant Miss Schley’s drawlling voice speaking to her husband, she had felt as if the forbidding of the acquaintance between herself and Rupert Carey had been an act of tyranny, as if the acquaintance between Miss Schley and her husband were a worse act of tyranny. The feeling was wholly unreasonable, of course. How could Lord Holme know that she wished to impose a veto, even as he had? And what reason was there for such a veto? That lay deep down within her as woman’s instinct. No man could have understood it.

And now Lord Holme had gone out in the dead of the night to thrash Carey.

She began to think about Carey.

How disgusting he had been. A drunken man must be one of two things—either terrible or absurd. Carey had been absurd—disgusting and absurd. It had been better for him if he had been terrible. But mumblings and tears! She remembered what she had said of Carey to Robin Pierce—that something in his eyes, one of those expressions which are the children of the eyes, or of the lines about the eyes, told her that he was capable of doing something great. What an irony that her remark to Robin had been succeeded by such a scene! And she heard again the ugly sound of Carey’s incoherent exclamations, and felt again the limp clasp of his hot, weak hand, and saw again the tears running over his flushed, damp face. It was all very nauseous. And yet—had she been wrong in what she had said of him? Did she even think that she had been wrong now, after what had passed?

What kind of great action had she thought he would be capable of if a chance to do something great were thrown in his way? She said to herself that she had spoken at random, as one perpetually speaks in Society. And then she remembered Carey’s eyes. They were ugly eyes. She had always thought them ugly. Yet, now and then, there was something in them, something to hold a woman—no, perhaps not that—but something to startle a woman, to make her think, wonder, even to make her trust. And the scene which had just occurred, with all its weakness, its fatuity, its maundering display of degradation and the inability of any self-government, had not somehow destroyed the impression made upon Lady Holme by that something in Carey’s eyes. What she had said to Robin Pierce she might not choose ever to say again. She would not choose ever to say it again—of that she was certain—but she had not ceased to think it.

A conviction based upon no evidence that could be brought forward to convince anyone is the last thing that can be destroyed in a woman’s heart.

It was nearly six o’clock when Lady Holme heard a step coming up the stairs. She was still sitting in the deep chair, and had scarcely moved. The step startled her. She put her hands on the arms of the chair and leaned forward. The step passed her bedroom. She heard the door of the dressing-room opened and then someone moving about.

“Fritz!” she called. “Fritz!”

There was no answer. She got up and went quickly to the dressing-room. Her husband was there in his shirt sleeves. His evening coat and waistcoat were lying half on a chair, half on the floor, and he was in the act of unfastening his collar. She looked into his face, trying to read it.

“Well?” she said. “Well?”

“Go to bed!” he said brutally.

“What have you done?”

“That’s my business. Go to bed. D’you hear?”

She hesitated. Then she said:

“How dare you speak to me like that? Have you seen Mr. Carey?”

Lord Holme suddenly took his wife by the shoulders; pushed her out of the room, shut the door, and locked it.

They always slept in the same bedroom. Was he not going to bed at all? What had happened? Lady Holme could not tell from his face or manner anything of what had occurred. She looked at her clock and saw her husband had been out of the house for two hours. Indignation and curiosity fought within her; and she became conscious of an excitement such as she had never felt before. Sleep was impossible, but she got into bed and lay there listening to the noises made by her husband in his dressing-room. She could just hear them faintly through the door. Presently they ceased. A profound silence reigned. There was a sofa in the dressing-room. Could he be trying to sleep on it? Such a thing seemed incredible to her. For Lord Holme, although he could rough it when he was shooting or hunting, at home or abroad, and cared little for inconvenience when there was anything to kill, was devoted to comfort in ordinary life, and extremely exigent in his own houses. For nothing, for nobody, had Lady Holme ever known him to allow himself to be put out.

She strained her ears as she lay in bed. For a long time the silence lasted. She began to think her husband must have left the dressing-room, when she heard a noise as if something—some piece of furniture—had been kicked, and then a stentorian “Damn!”

Suddenly she burst out laughing. She shook against the pillows. She laughed and laughed weakly; helplessly, till the tears ran down her cheeks. And with those tears ran away her anger, the hot, strained sensation that had been within her even since the scene at Arkell House. If she had womanly pride it melted ignominiously. If she had feminine dignity—that pure and sacred panoply which man ignores at his own proper peril—it disappeared. The “poor old Fritz” feeling, which was the most human, simple, happy thing in her heart, started into vivacity as she realised the long legs flowing into air over the edge of the short sofa, the pent-up fury—fury of the too large body on the too small resting-place—which found a partial vent in the hallowed objurgation of the British Philistine.

With every moment that she lay in the big bed she was punishing Fritz. She nestled down among the pillows. She stretched out her limbs luxuriously. How easy it was to punish a man! Lying there she recalled her husband’s words, each detail of his treatment of her since she had spoken to Carey. He had called her “a damned shameful woman.” That was of all the worst offence. She told herself that she ought to, that she must, for that expression alone, hate Fritz for ever. And then, immediately, she knew that she had forgiven it already, without effort, without thought.

She understood the type with which she had to deal, the absurd boyishness that was linked with the brutality of it, the lack of mind to give words their true, their inmost meaning. Words are instruments of torture, or the pattering confetti of a carnival, not by themselves but by the mind that sends them forth. Fritz’s exclamation might have roused eternal enmity in her if it had been uttered by another man. Coming from Fritz it won its pardon easily by having a brother, “Damn.”

She wondered how long her husband would be ruled by his sense of outrage.

Towards seven she heard another movement; another indignant exclamation, then the creak of furniture, a step, a rattling at the door. She turned on her side towards the wall, shut her eyes and breathed lightly and regularly. The key revolved, the door opened and closed, and she heard feet shuffling cautiously over the carpet. A moment and Fritz was in bed. Another moment, a long sigh, and he was asleep.

Lady Holme still lay awake. Now that her attention was no longer fixed upon her husband’s immediate proceedings she began to wonder again what had happened between him and Rupert Carey. She would find out in the morning.

And presently she too slept.

IN the morning Lord Holme woke very late and in a different humour. Lady Holme was already up, sitting by a little table and pouring out tea, when he stretched himself, yawned, turned over, uttered two or three booming, incohorent exclamations, and finally raised himself on one arm, exhibiting a touzled head and a pair of blinking eyes, stared solemnly at his wife’s white figure and at the tea-table, and ejaculated:

“Eh?”

“Tea?” she returned, lifting up the silver teapot and holding it towards him with an encouraging, half-playful gesture.

Lord Holme yawned again, put up his hands to his hair, and then looked steadily at the teapot, which his wife was moving about in the sunbeams that were shining in at the window. The morning was fine.

“Tea, Fritz?”

He smiled and began to roll out of bed. But the action woke up his memory, and when he was on his feet he looked at his wife again more doubtfully. She saw that he was beginning, sleepily but definitely, to consider whether he should go on being absolutely furious about the events of the preceding night, and acted with promptitude.

“Don’t be frightened,” she said quickly. “I’ve made up my mind to forgive you. You’re only a great schoolboy after all. Come along.”

She began to pour out the tea. It made a pleasant little noise falling into the cup. The sun was wonderfully bright in the pretty room, almost Italian in its golden warmth. Lady Holme’s black Pomeranian, Pixie, stood on its hind legs to greet him. He came up to the sofa, still looking undecided, but with a wavering light of dawning satisfaction in his eyes.

“You behaved damned badly last night,” he growled.

He sat down beside his wife with a bump. She put up her hand to his rough, brown cheek.

“We both behaved atrociously,” she answered. “There’s your tea.”

She poured in the cream and buttered a thin piece of toast. Lord Holme sipped. As he put the cup down she held the piece of toast up to his mouth. He took a bite.

“And we both do the Christian act and forgive each other,” she added.

He leaned back. Sleep was flowing away from him, full consciousness of life and events returning to him.

“What made you speak to that feller?” he said.

“Drink your tea. I don’t know. He looked miserable at being avoided, and—”

“Miserable! He was drunk. He’s done for himself in London, and pretty near done for you too.”

As he thought about it all a cloud began to settle over his face. Lady Holme saw it and said:

“That depends on you, Fritz.”

She nestled against him, put her hand over his, and kept on lifting his hand softly and then letting it fall on his knee, as she went on:

“That all depends on you.”

“How?”

He began to look at her hand and his, following their movements almost like a child.

“If we are all right together, obviously all right, very, very par-ti-cu-lar-ly all right—voyez vous, mon petit chou?—they will think nothing of it. ‘Poor Mr. Carey! What a pity the Duke’s champagne is so good!’ That’s what they’ll say. But if we—you and I—are not on perfect terms, if you behave like a bear that’s been sitting on a wasps’ nest—why then they’ll say—they’ll say—”

“What’ll they say?”

“They’ll say, ‘That was really a most painful scene at the Duke’s. She’s evidently been behaving quite abominably. Those yellow women always bring about all the tragedies—‘”

“Yellow women!” Lord Holme ejaculated.

He looked hard at his wife. It was evident that his mind was tacking.

“Miss Schley heard what you said to the feller,” he added.

“People who never speak hear everything—naturally.”

“How d’you mean—never speak? Why, she’s full of talk.”

“How well she listened to him!” was Lady Holme’s mental comment.

“If half the world heard it doesn’t matter if you and I choose it shouldn’t. Unless—”

“Unless what?”

“Unless you did anything last night—afterwards—that will make a scandal?”

“Ah!”

“Did you?”

“That’s all right.”

He applied himself with energy to the toast. Lady Holme recognised, with a chagrin which she concealed, that Lord Holme was not going to allow himself to be “managed” into any revelation. She recognised it so thoroughly that she left the subject at once.

“We’d better forgive and forget,” she said. “After all, we are married and I suppose we must stick together.”

There was a clever note of regret in her voice.

“Are you sorry?” Lord Holme said, with a manner that suggested a readiness to be surly.

“For what?”

“That we’re married?”

She sat calmly considering.

“Am I? Well, I must think. It’s so difficult to be sure. I must compare you with other men—”

“If it comes to that, I might do a bit of comparin’ too.”

“I should be the last to prevent you, old boy. But I’m sure you’ve often done it already and always made up your mind afterwards that she wasn’t quite up to the marrying mark.”

“Who wasn’t?”

“The other—horrid creature.”

He could not repress a chuckle.

“You’re deuced conceited,” he said.

“You’ve made me so.”

“I—how?”

“By marrying me first and adoring me afterwards.”

They had finished tea and were no longer preoccupied with cups and saucers. It was very bright in the room, very silent. Lord Holme looked at his wife and remembered how much she was admired by other men, how many men would give—whatever men are ready to give—to see her as she was just then. It occurred to him that he would have been rather a fool if he had yielded to his violent impulse and shut her out of the house the previous night.

“You’re never to speak to that cad again,” he said. “D’you hear?”

“Whisper it close in my ear and I’ll try to hear. Your voice is so—what’s your expression—so infernally soft.”

He put his great arm round her.