Transcriber's Note.

A list of the changes made can be found at the end of the book.

The Romantic Lady

MICHAEL ARLEN

By MICHAEL ARLEN

• These Charming People
• The Green Hat
• "Piracy"
• The London Venture
• The Romantic Lady

The
Romantic Lady

by
Michael Arlen

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

Copyright, 1921,
By George H. Doran Company

THE ROMANTIC LADY
— B —
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To
WALTER PAYNE, Esq.

"A VERY ABLE MAN"

CONTENTS

I: THE ROMANTIC LADY

THE ROMANTIC LADY

I: THE ROMANTIC LADY

NOËL ANSON and I had been great friends in our first youthful days, but our lives and ambitions had led us so contrarily that we had not seen each other for more than six years when, on the night two weeks ago, we happened to meet at the Club. We had both, of course, so much to say that, as often happens, we babbled on quite inartistically, spoiling many a good story in the gay, breathless exchange of reminiscence and experience; from all of which, however, clearly loomed out these great cardinal facts of our lives, that we had both married; my wife, who was a perfect woman, I explained, I had had to leave behind in New Zealand to take care of her old father; while his wife, who was also a perfect woman, he chivalrously insisted, had thought fit to divorce poor Noël some six months before.

But there was one story, anyway, which Noël Anson did not hurriedly spoil. He kept it long inside him—until that hour after ten when our corner of the smoking-room was entirely our own, and until he safely knew that I had talked enough to be able now to remain comfortably silent and attentive. Dear Noël, he dearly loved to tell a story!

"You are the very first person to hear this," he began untruthfully; and the calm grey eyes of my friend Noël Anson merged into the luxurious stare with which the raconteur hypnotically fixes his prey all the world over. Even thus must the gentle Marlow have transfixed his hearers as he led them inexorably through the labyrinth of Lord Jim's career, and through many another such intricacy of Conradian imagination.

"It's old, older than the stuff that hills and Armenians are made of," he said. "The ageless tale of the inevitable lady sitting alone in the inevitable box of the inevitable theatre to which our inevitable young man has gone to wile away a tiresome evening. History supplies the formula, it is only the details for which I'm personally responsible.

"There I sat, one night years ago, alone in a stall at the old Imperial; grimly smoking, and watching the footlight favourites 'getting-off' with a stage-boxful of rowdy young men who hadn't the grace even to try to imitate the few gentlemen who might at one time have been good enough to know 'em—until, on a moment, my eyes circled round the upper boxes and fixed on a marvellous lady in white, amazing and alone and unashamed....

"One has grown into the habit of using phrases trivially, but when I say that I caught my breath at the sight of that figure through the smoke, I mean that I actually did. There she suddenly was, a wonderful fact in a dreary place! A candle lighting even the dimmest recesses of that mausoleum! She, in contrast to all around, was real, exquisite life....

"And, of course, there was to her beauty the added attraction of the curious, as you can well understand. For there simply was not the slightest trace of the demi-monde about her, nothing at all to suggest that she might at any moment be the mistress of a great shopkeeper—as, the deuce take it, there well might be about any woman who had the effrontery to sit so shamelessly alone and—and soignée in front of a box at the Imperial! I mean, it was not the sort of thing one's sister could do and look dignified about—in fact, it is some very special and subtle quality which will prevent a well-dressed woman looking like a courtesan under certain circumstances. French women say English women haven't got it, and English women say French women have got nothing else. But this dark-haired, immobile, alien woman had just that quality—well, of utter 'rightness'; she was impeccable, you understand. It was more than an impertinence not to take for granted that she herself had walked into Cartier's and bought that rope of pearls around her throat.... For although she was in one of the upper boxes, I could see her quite clearly.

"But 'desirable'—that's the word for the particular creak in the hinge of one's mind as it enfolds the beauty of such a person—desirable! You wanted to stretch out a long graceful arm above the heads of all the stuffy people around you and catch her up, not by force, for she must yield; and then, as you brought her close to you, what happened would depend entirely on the sort of woman she was and the sort of man you were....

"Of course one couldn't let this sort of thing go on without, anyway, trying to see about it. In the first entr'acte I made a dash for that ginger-haired old boy by the box-office and got him to send a page-boy with a note. It naturally wasn't all done in a breath, for the note had obviously to be a note of the finer sort, it had to convey a very particular impertinence which wasn't an impertinence simply because it was so particular. You must know what I mean.... Oh, it had to be just right! You must be neither too casual nor too ingratiating. You must not write it either in clogs or in carpet slippers, but in a happy mean, in the most exquisite pumps that were ever contrived by Lobb. You may think I'm exaggerating, but really I sweated blood over those few lines—how, how did one know that one might not miss the best thing of a lifetime by a gauche word!

"I sent it off at last—the central idea of it being that I greatly desired the honour of her presence at supper, while apologising for my monstrous cheek in asking for her presence at same, and that I was sitting in the third seat from the end of the third row of the stalls.... Which, by the way, reminds me! It always pays to take a stall, for imagine writing to a marvellous woman who may have spent her maid's quarterly wages on a box and saying that you are sitting in the dress-circle—the dress-circle, mind you! It sounds so odd—anyway, I breathe again when I think that I might have missed a perfect thing by sitting in the dress-circle. One isn't being a snob, but an opportunist.

"I received my answer in the second interval ... amazed, excited. Yes, she was a foreigner by her writing; just a couple of cold lines saying that I could call at her box at the end of the revue.

"Preliminaries are of course always tiresome, but these were perhaps less so than most, simply because one was so in the air about her, and so much readier than usual to be appreciative.... And, mind you, rightly, as it proved. She spoke English charmingly well, but just incorrectly enough to be recognisable as a 'distinguished foreigner.'

"Almost on my entrance she began to apologise for her 'rudeness' at neither accepting nor declining my invitation to supper in her note.

"'But let's be amazingly candid,' I suggested, on her note. 'You wished, of course, to have a look at your host, before—'

"'But no, I wished to have a look at my guest,' she said, quickly. And by the slightest flutter in her voice I guessed for the first time that she was frightfully shy. Personally, I never felt so unattractive in my life, all prickly hot and affected—as one gets, you know.

"'You must understand that I have a charming house,' she explained. 'And if you will not think me too insincere, I will say that I should be very flattered if you will take supper with me....'

"I was still standing. She had turned towards me in her chair, and was looking up at me. She smiled up at me, with a pretty pretence at pathos, and very lightly her fingers just touched my arm....

"'Please, will you not mind my depriving you of the pleasure of showing me how charming a host you can be? And anyway, it is so much more important for me to show you my qualities as a hostess. I have something of a reputation for that, I must warn you.'

"That quickly found note of intimacy, how fascinating it is! This woman could turn a drawing-room into an adventure, and an adventure into a drawing-room, all by a particular quality of—what is it? eye, voice, manner, ancestry? God knows! But all, all a snare and a delusion....

"Her electric brougham took us away from the deserted theatre. I was of course too interested in my companion to notice where we were going. I had a vague idea of Piccadilly, that's all.... She was very amusing. We had stepped off the ice too quickly, if indeed we had ever been on it, to get back to it in any way, and the twenty minutes or so of that gliding motion passed in one pleasant moment.

"'But perhaps you would prefer me to be haughty,' she said suddenly, 'or how do you say it—county? It would perhaps be more becoming in a woman who does not yet know the name of her guest?'

"'You drive me into a fatuous corner,' I said. 'For what on earth can I answer but that you can well afford not to be county or any stuff of that kind?'

"She turned her eyes quickly on mine; suddenly, she was very serious. She brooded on me for a swift, palpable second.

"'You really, really mean that you do not think me—ah, it is very delicate!—well, you don't think me "cheap" for letting this happen, like this? But,' she laughed as suddenly, 'but forgive me,' she said. 'I was not trusting my own judgment.... And besides you have just said that your father is a Bishop!'

"It was as she was about to step out of the brougham that she said: 'It has a charm, our adventure. You are so delightful a partner, you "play up." It is most unusual in men.... And perhaps, too, you are good at forgetting?'

"'Am I being threatened?' I had to ask.

"'But no, you are being trusted!' she said, very gently....

"I followed her into the house a little shamefacedly; taken, as it were, out of my stride. There seemed, don't you see, to be no tattered edges about this woman, there was a finesse about her every emotion and movement, it was as though every mood and motive had been polished to perfection before it became articulate in word or gesture. She was deplorably civilized.

"The house was of the sort that one would have expected of her, though I can't specify what that was; and exactly where it was, as I've said, I didn't realize, though it couldn't have been a hundred miles away from Hyde Park Corner.

"I am not much of a hand at describing rooms, so I can't tell you much more of the room into which I followed her than that it was large and seemed just right. What I mean is that I wasn't taking much interest in antique furniture at that moment, but if anything had been wrong or jarring in the room I would have been on it at once,—so it must have been a perfect room. Simplicity stunt on Howard de Walden lines, you know, with Whistler and Meryon etchings scattered here and there about the pale walls, and a certain suggestion of black and gold lacquer somewhere, which I can't now exactly place, unless it was a tall boy or something of the kind.

"As we entered the room, and she was putting her cloak, white stuff and ermine, and other things on a chair, I saw particularly the glitter on the table which meant supper—and as she turned I suppose that I must too obviously have shown a hint of gauche surprise; and indeed I was surprised, for the table was laid for two! She had caught me out, and rather unfairly, and for a second the divine person watched me quite severely—a severity that amazingly broke into the most absolute and whole-hearted laugh that I've ever had the misfortune and fortune to see on any face. Its abandon and gaiety were quite delightful, but I don't ever wish repeated the prickly discomfort of being so utterly laughed at, as she laughed at me so helplessly standing there.

"But she mended it, a quick simple gesture towards me changed her from a possible enemy into a—well—comrade.

"'Fool man!' she said. 'Did you really think that it was you who had, how d'you say it? "picked me up"? Don't you know that it was decided this morning that you should come to supper with me, decided quite, quite, early? Or some one like you, perhaps not so charming—but then I have been so lucky.... Are you very angry with me?'

"She was very close to me, smiling, intimate. Pure coquetry, of course,—but what perfect technique! You knew that she was playing, but that did not prevent the blood rushing to your head; and she was so clean, so much 'one of us'! Perhaps she expected me to kiss her at that moment, in fact, I could scarcely resist, for I always try to be a little gentleman and do what is expected of me; but I didn't kiss her then, for I felt it was the wrong moment, it would have to come about differently. Besides, I don't like your scrappy kisses.... But she was waiting.

"'Anger isn't exactly one of my emotions at the moment,' I said, stupidly enough. 'But will you please be very gentle with me, because never, never have I met any one like you?'

"'I will make a note of that and refer to it when you make a fool of yourself. Ah, but I know you very well, you are a cautious person who will make a fool of himself only when it would be folly to be wise.'

"She was close to me, it was dangerous, and I can only bear a certain amount of that kind of thing, for my sort of restraint is due entirely to a desire for, well, greater efficiency.... But why will women do that, why will they step in where men fear to tread? I only speak from my own paltry experience, of course, but the only two real affairs I've had would have gone sadly awry if the women had had their way, if it hadn't been for my mania for organisation.... But I couldn't stand there another second, holding my breath over that face, that scent. She was wearing an orchid, too, and an orchid takes its scent from a woman's body, you can't really smell it except when it is entangled in a woman's breath. It was an exquisite, damnable addition. I had to break loose.

"'Encouraged as I am being to enter for the correspondent stakes,' I said impertinently, 'I am being most awfully neglected as a guest.'

"The darling, how she laughed! She had the kind of large soft mouth that's made for laughter—until one day you find it's made for tragedy.

"Not then, nor later, did I see any servant about. But the table was admirably arranged. I am a commonplace enough person, I think of food in terms of cantaloup and caviare and damn the labour question; one would be a charming person if one had ten thousand a year. And so, though I would have been surprised if the supper had not been good, I was surprised that it was so good; for women, as you know, are rather bewildering in their choice of food, generally I don't trust 'em, but she—how well she had plumbed the particular male beastliness which I, anyway, affect! Oh, her age? About that of Mary Stuart when Bothwell and Swinburne fell in love with her....

"It was as we sat down to supper that I really looked round the room for the first time, and noticed a full length portrait in oils on a wall by the door; of a very distinguished-looking person indeed, in the toy uniform of some foreign cavalry—Italian, I imagined. But, gorgeously decorated and hilted as he was, his chest emblazoned with the ribbons of orders (merited as much by his birth as by any action, one thought), there was a great air of distinction about the man which discounted as well as harmonised with his ridiculous trappings. The slim, perhaps too waisted, figure bore a thin hawk-like face, which with its perfectly poised mixture of ferocity and courtesy would have carried its fortunate owner as easily into the heart of any schoolboy as into the boudoir of the most unattainable lady; and sweeping moustachios somehow added prominence to the long, delicate, very arched nose—surely the nose of a Roman person, I ventured to myself at the end of my long glance. And as I turned to my hostess, she explained quickly that the decoration was her husband.

"'A very charming and considerate person,' she said, 'who apologises for being neglected by me.'

"Over supper I began at last to lose my shyness, for I had been very nervous, you know. As one only too rarely is.... She had the quality of making one talk, of making one feel that one was on the top of one's form. Oh, that insinuating art of unuttered flattery which makes one weak and sincere and terribly reckless.

"'You are very terrible, you make me almost articulate,' I simply had to say, as we rose from the table. 'You see the only really nice things about me are my admirations, and I admire you so unreservedly....'

"Perhaps it was just at that moment that I first kissed her. Yes, it must have been then, for she had a way of accepting those shameless remarks with such an air of pretty surprise that I couldn't have resisted the impulse—and anyway, I didn't want to, the thing could go its own divine way without any more officious restraint on my part.

"I found then that she had that rarest of generous gifts, the power of graceful admission.... You, old man, who have loved beautiful things, must know how rare that is, how often one is jarred by that meanest sort of pride which denies, refuses to admit, the influence of another. Oh, the insaneness of generous people, the indecencies of decent people! Am I phrasing a sensation too absurdly if I say that I was comfortable with this woman whom I had known for less than two hours? And when I had kissed her, and kissed her again, for hers was not the riddle to be solved by one touch of the lips, the thing did not take on the air of a liaison, it was not a surprising and stolen pleasure, it was just natural.

"Slowly she unpinned her orchid and threw it among the elegant debris of the table.

"'You crush orchids,' she said. She didn't smile. She looked up at me very thoughtfully.

"'But you must know that this is all wrong,' she said. 'It should not have been like this at all. When I decided this morning that you must come to supper with me it was on the distinct understanding that you should not touch more than the tips of my fingers—and they were manicured so well this afternoon, too! Look.... Oh, no no! It is too late, now that you have crushed my orchid it is too late to be so deferential. And anyway, I did not intend that you should kiss even my hand until you were going away—and I imagined you going away very disappointed and full of quite pleasant regrets that I was a cold woman in spite, oh, in spite of everything! Come, Noël Anson, defend yourself. Give me reasons why you should not be disappointed. I am very serious.' And I realised that she was indeed serious.

"'But why d'you say that?' I asked quickly. 'Must the thing be exactly as you planned, can't anything be altered—oh, I know that sounds fatuous, but when you look like that one feels helpless! I was right. You are very terrible.'

"'I know, that's all.' she said. And she slowly raised her arms and put her hands on my shoulders. 'Do not be a fool, Noël Anson,' she said gently. 'Life is not so easy. There is no romance without reality. I am warning you, because I am afraid.'

"'And will you tell me when a warning has prevented a fool from being foolish? And besides, I like being a fool. And I am not afraid. I'm not even afraid of your answer if I ask whether you love me.'

"She laughed, but so lightly that she didn't break the tension—you know that infernal laugh?

"'But that is a leading question!' she protested.

"'And that is a dangerous way of answering it,' I had to say, though anything else would have done equally well, for I hadn't mind for words. She had lost her laugh and her eyes held mine. We stood there looking at each other.... As men and women will, when they know everything and nothing of each other. She was close to me, amazingly kissable! But I didn't, instead I picked her up in my arms and carried her to the door, and out into the strange hall, and up the strange wide staircase of this unknown house, up....

"But if my impulse was to carry her, hers was certainly to let me. Do you understand that, or am I cheapening her to you? Oh, but one was so uncertain yet certain about her, it was so good to be with a woman with whom one could lose one's head and be sure that she wouldn't lose her dignity—until that moment when she, like every one else, must become self-conscious. And that moment came, on the landing upstairs, when her fingers suddenly tightened around my arm. I let her stand, gently, and she whispered something, just two words, into my ear, but I didn't catch them, they are lost words.... She opened a door.

"In there she suddenly turned on me, and shook my arm. And a sudden, queer darkness about her face made me wonder if she was angry.

"'Oh, you are so inevitable, aren't you!' she cried, but the exclamation ended so surprisingly in the air, somehow so high up in the air, that I've never yet been able to bring it definitely down to earth and discover its meaning; unless it was that—I don't know.... She was so strange, so different from the other women who had filled and emptied one's life, and it was difficult to tell her moods from her emotions. But there was nothing spurious nor counterfeit about her, she was not unreal, she wasn't even the closely-knit but far away dream that beautiful women sometimes become in those terrifying, intimate moments. She was the most essentially feminine woman that I've ever met, she was so real.... That white oval face with the large, so large and so articulate eyes, set in a mass of soft black Southern hair which I myself had unpinned and let fall over her shoulders despite a shy murmur from her—why, desire is a cheap word to express the passion to possess that, the living symbol of the loveliest woman of all time! Yes, yes, I was supremely ridiculous. I still am....

"A second or a century later, at the end of a long, long silence, for me an infinity of happiness, she moved her head away from me and asked me to light her a cigarette. I gave it to her, and waited. I knew so well, you see, what was coming. I had been watching her, I had made a feast of all the movements of that amazing face. It was a sad face, wonderfully alive, but sad; and its sadness became fixed, her eyes were large and held no curiosity at all. I noticed the lack of curiosity in them, because one is so used to meeting it in women—they want to find out! But she, perhaps, in her splendid conceit, had found out, she knew, and she was sad—had she not said downstairs that she knew? I didn't care then whether she knew or not, for then life was before me, the present and the future were in exquisite certainty; but now, as I waited and watched her draw her cigarette, I looked back on that future, and was really terrified of the present. There are moments of ice-clear sanity in all of us—you must know those moments?—when you realise with helpless vividness what you can and what you cannot do, what you simply cannot alter. And so with this moment and this woman; she was inexorable, I could not alter her, I could do nothing but wait—for the epilogue to that prelude played long ago downstairs, when she had put her hands on my shoulders and told me that she was warning me....

"'But perhaps you will think me very vain?' she asked at last, very quietly.

"'Because you are thinking you will make me wretched by what you are going to say?'

"'Oh, you are too quick!' she murmured. And she raised her head on her elbow and looked at me.

"'Dear Noël Anson,' she said, 'our lives go different ways. To-day we had never met, and to-morrow it must be as though we had never met. For life is not a romance, it is a reality, and it is much stronger than our—inclinations? And even if I loved you it would be the same, I should be saying what I am saying now, because in me there is something much stronger than love, much more inevitable.... Please, you must believe me, it will hurt me if you do not believe me. I am not playing any more. I do not play with memories of crushed orchids, because it is only fools who think there is no pleasure in being serious ... just sometimes.'

"'It is no use for me to say any more,' she said, 'because if you like me very much then, anyway, you will be bitter about me—and if you do not like me very much then you will only think me (how is it?) an odd sort of woman.... I command you, and I put you on your honour to obey, that when you leave this house you will go into the brougham waiting for you without looking to see the number of the house, nor the name of the street, so that you will never see me again, you man.... But it is now very, very late, you must go, Don Noël, you must go! And take with you my blessings—Adieu!'

"But I can only repeat her words to you barely and crudely. I can't hope to give you the tragic gesture of impotence in her voice, and the way her voice grew lighter and lighter until it seemed to become part of the air, as impalpable, as mysterious. And at the end her voice had died down to almost less than a whisper, her 'adieu' had fainted between her tongue and her lips, it was only a wisp of a dying word. It was strangely as though she were rehearsing something she might have to say sometime.... She was only rehearsing. I waited.

"'Oh, but isn't that enough!' she almost cried, suddenly. 'Have I not done it quite, quite well, or do you want me to think of something else—something more ... more dramatic?'

"'Please, please do make it easy for me, Don Noël—do go away, please!' she begged. 'This is so difficult, so much more difficult than I.... It is not a tragedy, this, remember! It is an incident, and the incident is finished, that's all. Don't please let me make a tragedy of it—by apologising! You see, my Noël, I am so weak, so weak. I feel such a bad woman, such a brute.... And you can never understand why, never.... Forgive me, and go!'

"Her very last word was almost brutal in its defined meaning, it held no uncertainty; but I didn't move at that moment. I remembered that I did not know her name.

"'A few moments ago, before you spoke, I had a dream,' I said. 'And in my dream I was told that you would tell me your name, the name that will explain the initials under the coronet on your hairbrushes. The adventure would not have been so complete without a coronet, so I looked to see if one was there, and behold! it was there. I am such a snob, I would like to know your name.... And then I would forget it.'

"'That was a false dream,' she said. 'You will not know my name, you will not know where this house is, you will not know anything. Don Noël, you will be an English gentleman of the kind we find in books, you will not remember or know anything that I do not wish. You will not look at the number of the house, nor at the name of the street. That is my wish.'

"She was quite, quite cold. Just like a woman who has had a love affair which has lasted an eternity but cannot outlast another second. How wise she was to let me see that—oh, well, anti-climax! She knew that men do not fall of their own accord from great heights down to Mother Earth, they must be pushed over—ever so gently, gently.

"'It is getting light,' she murmured.

"But as I rose she confessed her affectation; she threw her arms round my neck and brought my face close to hers.

"'You fool man!' she said. 'Why do you hurt yourself and me? Why did you just say that this was an adventure? This has not been an adventure, it has been a love-affair.... And always remember that I asked you to forgive me. Always.'

"When I was at the door I had to turn round. I had feared this moment of going, and I had made up my mind to go quickly and be done with it. But I make a bad actor, and artistic effects can go to the devil for all I care. With my hand on the knob I had to turn round.

"'I can't go like this,' I said. And I walked back across the room, and looked down on her.

"'I can't. It seems wrong,' I said.

"'Perhaps, then, it was not worth it?' she asked, so tentatively!

"'It will always have been worth it.... But there is something missing, isn't there?'

"'But, of course, Don Noël! There is much missing, for it is an unfinished romance which will never be finished. You do not understand—this is life!

"'I know. You are a baby, like all really nice men, and you want a piece of chocolate to eat as you go away,' she said. 'Bring your head down—yes, down, down, Noël—and I will give it to you.... Listen, you! It is decided that you will never see me again, is it not? And that you will keep your promise not to look where this house is, so that you will never, never find me again? But, my dear, will you please believe that I am ver' ver' sorry, that I would like to see you many, many times before this stupid "good-bye." For it is not every day that people like you and I meet, we could laugh and cry so well together.... A long time ago, as we came into this house (and we came in because we had to come in, my Noël) I asked you if you were good at forgetting. But you have been such a dear that I now give you permission to remember—me! And that is the end of my vanity and your love affair, Don Noël, for now you must go away, out of the house into the night from which you came—oh, so wonderfully! Go—adieu, adieu.'

"And this time I did not turn round at the door, but went out of the room and out of the house, into the pale darkness of the early morning. The squat shape of the electric brougham was there, waiting on ice for me; but the bent figure of the man in the driving-seat seemed asleep, he certainly did not hear me until I was opening the door of the cab, when I gave him my direction. And I stepped in. The thing glided softly away, and I lay back and closed my eyes....

"I don't know how what I've told you has impressed you, I may indeed have made the thing seem farcical; it had begun as a—well—casual adventure, it had ended—ended! with me sitting back in her brougham, seriously, abjectly miserable! My feeling was one of deadly and unutterable flatness—just that. From my own lips had come a promise that I would let something go, something which I wanted more than anything else in the world, something which would never come back! I would never see her again! Everything but that one agonising certainty was in utter blankness. I was very flat, everything was grey....

"The brougham soon drew up at my door in Mount Street. I got out and stood by the footboard, rather absentmindedly fumbling in my pocket for a pound note to give to this obviously very confidential chauffeur. He was still huddled up in his seat, his peaked cap well over his eyes, his coat-collar turned up over half his face. Only his nose was really visible, and that dimly. I was vaguely staring at it as I picked out a note, a little piqued by the fellow's utter lack of interest in me. I had only stood there, say, four seconds or so; he hadn't looked at me once, wasn't even going to wait for the tip, for I saw that he was releasing the lever to move off—when suddenly, staring at that nose, I realised with a shock that I had seen it before. The car was almost in motion when I said, sharply, amazedly:

"'But you've shaved off your moustache!'

"The car stopped. The man deliberately got out, and stood on the pavement beside me. I am pretty tall, but he was even taller. I could see his face clearly now—yes, it was he! looking almost cadaverous without his sweeping moustachios, but still very distinguished. He was smiling at me, with a strange urbanity.

"'This is very awkward,' he said, or rather murmured; his accent and voice were distinctly foreign.

"'Very,' I agreed hotly. I was angry, shocked. 'It's so awkward that I wonder how you put up with it.'

"'I can do one of two things,' he went on, ignoring my bad temper, but looking intently at me. 'I can either kill you, or I can explain.'

"He looked about forty, and there was a courteous and fatherly air about him which I found intensely irritating. But any manner would have been irritating in my absurd position.

"'You have a perfect right to do the first, of course,' I rapped out. 'But may I suggest that you do both, and the explaining first, if you don't mind. I think I'm rather entitled to one, don't you?'

"He considered me for a moment.

"'As you will, then,' he conceded. 'If you will get back into the cab I will explain in there. I have found the night air rather chilly.'

"His manner infected me. 'If you will accept my hospitality for a moment, please come inside. And perhaps a little firewater....' I suggested vaguely.

"He accepted my invitation with a bow, and followed me into my flat. In the sitting-room he unbuttoned his heavy coat, and stood with his back to the empty grate; a tall, slim, decorative, and dangerous gentleman. He made me feel like a baby in arms, but I stifled my irritation. I poured out two stiff whiskies.

"'Only a touch of soda, thanks,' he answered my inquiry.

"'It was clever of you to recognise me by my nose,' he said. 'But the Casamonas have been proud of their noses for so long that I, the last of them, find it a little hard to have to conceal mine even for a few minutes. And as for my moustache, to the absence of which you referred so pointedly, that has been gone for some time. That portrait of me which you saw was painted a long time ago, and since then I have become subject to colds in the head. And I found that my moustachios became frequently mal-soignés after the continual application, however delicate, of a handkerchief. I begin to concede that there may, after all, be some defence for that "tooth-brush" parody of a moustache which you, par exemple, can so charmingly affect.'

"No, he wasn't laughing at me. He was just talking courteously on about whatever had come first. But I couldn't bear it.

"'Eh—about that little matter,' I said absurdly, feeling more and more like a tradesman.

"'Yes, of course,' he instantly agreed. He drained his glass, put it delicately down on the table, and then turned to me.

"'If you will forgive a pointed question—did you keep your promise not to look where the house was?'

"I had given up being irritated, it was so clearly no use.

"'Of course I did.' I answered abruptly.

"'Good! How charming it is to meet in life what one is tired of meeting in books—for you are exactly like the English gentlemen in Mr. Oppenheim's novels who always lose secret documents and find beautiful wives. I envy them, and you—but oh, my dear sir, I do wish you were a little more wicked and human!'

"'Are you complaining of my being too good!' I burst out, amazed.

"He saw the point, and for the first time really laughed.

"'I see that I must get to my explanation quickly,' he apologised. 'May I sit down? Thank you.... That lady, as you have guessed, is my wife. Or, more correctly, she was my wife until two years ago. Since when she has been so only in name. I use the language of convention so that you may the more quickly understand me.... She loved me, but she ceased to love me. It happens thus. And though I love her still, it is without fire or passion; it is not the love of a possesser, but of a connoisseur. I love her as I love a vase, a marble, any really beautiful thing. You understand?... We married four years ago, in Paris. She is of the best Sicilian blood, but a rebel, an aristo in revolt. She believes in only one law, and that is the law of lawlessness. We met without the formal courtesies of an introduction—if I may draw a parallel, as you and she met a few hours ago. And again, since I am as sensitive a person as yourself—it is our charm, my dear sir—the same happened to me four years ago as to you to-night. The night took wings, and carried us away to the very pinnacles of wonderful adventure—she and I, king and queen of more than one world! To the very pinnacles of that enchanting adventure towards which the poets and philosophers of ages have been vainly scrambling, that adventure for which cities have been sacked and battles won. You, too, have been on those heights, and you know. In most men's lives those heights are never attained, but you and I have been supremely fortunate. I regret nothing.... Night became morning, romance became life. The adventure ended. And I found myself in the street, with her last command ringing in my ears, not to look where the house was, to forget—everything! The Seine seemed alluring to my agony.... But I am Italian, I have at least the courage of my passions, and so I broke my promise. I called the very next afternoon. And how can I express to you, even now, my great surprise at the warmness of my reception! For the fingers with which I had given the concierge my card had trembled with fear—had she not commanded me never to see her again! But it needed only one second of her presence to soothe my fear, she was so gay, so cordial, so quite delighted to see me! No word of any promise, no word of last night, passed her lips—we had met before, that is all! But we were not long together before another joined us—a short chic little man, of an agreeable air. He looked that rarest of all human beings, a banker from whom it would be a pleasure to borrow money. And as he came towards us I wondered if this was yet one more slave of this marvellous lamp, but she introduced him to my bewilderment as her husband. And then—imagine it—presented me to him as her future husband! All in the most casual and un-ostentatious way, as though she were performing a mere formality; and as such, indeed, this amazing husband accepted it. For instead of knocking me down, he bowed politely and took my hand. As for her, I didn't dare look at her, I was so embarrassed. But when at last, as tea was served, I did look, she smiled at me, and I knew that her smile was to say, "This is your punishment for breaking your oath. I am so sorry...." The husband did not stay for more than five minutes; obviously he did not wish to intrude. But before he left us he turned to me, and with the most charming deference, said: "You will find everything arranged. Madame will explain. I beg you to accept my sincerest wishes for your happiness." And then his lips touched her fingers, and he left us—to let himself be divorced so that Madame could marry me, who had never dared even to dream of such supreme happiness. And so it was that we married.

"'I am sorry to be so tiresome and detailed, but the worst is over. For the rest of my tale is a commonplace in the history of the world—you realise? She tired of me. Gently, but remorselessly. As such wonderful women will, you know. It is no use kicking—no man, neither Hector, nor Adonis, nor Machiavelli, can supply the deficiencies of the sphinx. She smiles and says "no," she says "no" even to the wisdom of Solomon, and besotted man sprawls at her feet and murmurs frantically that, anyway, it is better to be miserable about her than to be happy about any one else.... Yes, my friend, men have been known to say that to women. I myself have said it more than once, but I only believed it once. That was two years ago. But it was no use, her love was as dead as though it had never been—I was a man, I had become a God, and now I was a man again. And so the revolt of man ended in submission, and I had to acquiesce in her mere affection for me—that affection with which all splendid women enshroud their dead loves. And how much in oneself dies with their dead love! Why, there dies the ritual of love, the sacrament of sex! for sex can be exalted to a sacrament only once in a lifetime, for the rest it's just a game, an indoor sport....

"'You see, such women as she make their own laws. It is not her fault, nor her arrogance, it is ours, who are so consistently susceptible. Physically she belongs to the universe, not to one single man. She never belonged to me, I was just an expression of the world to her. She has never belonged to any one, she never will—for she is in quest of the ideal which even she will never find. And so she will go on, testing our—our quality and breaking our hearts. Men have killed themselves because of her, poor dear, and I too would have considered it seriously if I had not found that she ranked suicide high in the list of supreme impoliteness from men to women.

"'I had suggested that she should divorce me, but she would not do that, for she complained of a nervous fear of being left alone in a house. We were in Rome then, and we could envisage no possible husband for her from among our acquaintance—so she begged me to continue in my capacity for a while. Of course, I was only too pleased.... In the end we hit upon the only way out of the impasse—that she should do what she had (so successfully, she sweetly said) done before, and risk the adventure; and if the young man was acceptable, and broke his solemn promise, and came to see her, then he would be made to suffer the penalty of his weakness—happy, wretched youth! But I would not let her take the risk without some guarantee as to her safety, for even adventures can sometimes become unpleasant, and so I insisted that I should be her chauffeur for the occasion—and from beginning to end of the adventure, I insisted. To which she replied, smiling, that it would not always be the same—"you will not be kept waiting long," she said.

"'And it happened as she said, for in the two adventures before this of yours I was indeed not kept waiting long. Not for more than an hour, in fact—in each case the wretched young man had a good supper and left immediately after, wondering how this most unattainable of women had ever come, so informally, to invite him. The first happened in Vienna, the second in Paris—they bored her utterly to death, she told me. And thus the occasion for the promise, the pivot of the adventure, as you realise, never arose in those two cases. But in yours, the third....'

"'Yes?' I asked eagerly.

"'The night air was certainly chilly,' he demurred gently.

"He was silent for a few long minutes. I waited intently. And then he leaned forward towards me, and put a hand lightly on my knee.

"'Young man, will you forgive an impertinence?' His eyes held in them the kindliest light; my silence answered them, and he continued: 'I am perhaps twelve or thirteen years older than you, so I may be allowed the liberty of advising you—about something in which I am an expert. Never, never try to find the house to which you went a few hours ago—never, I say! And I say it because I like you, and because I know that she is the most enchanting woman in the world; and if she likes you, so she is the more enchanting—and the more dangerous! As she was dangerous to me.... You forgive the liberty I have taken?'

"He let his quite solemn speech balance in the air for a long pause, then got up and, very lazily, stretched his arms over his head. And a delightful, intimate smile passed over his lean face—the man had a large share of the divine essence of childishness.

"'You know your 'Trilby'? he asked lightly; and murmured into the air:—

'Hélas! Je sais un chant d'amour,

Triste et gai, tour à tour!'

"As he went to the door I sat on in my chair; circumstances somehow waived aside common politeness. I just stared after him—to meet his eyes, for from the door he turned round just to say:—

"'I did not mean to jeer at your honesty in keeping your promise to madame—please never think that. On the contrary, I sincerely admire you—and congratulate you! For you have avoided a marvellous misery.... Good-night, Sir Lancelot. Adieu!'"

The Italian's exit seemed to bring Noël Anson's tale to an end, and yet so abruptly that I could not but wait for a final ending. He waited, but threw the end of his cigarette into the dying fire, and continued silent.

"And so you never saw her again, and lived unhappily ever after?" I suggested at last. But I wasn't prepared for his quick, pitying stare. He heaved himself up from his chair.

"You damn fool!" he said. "Didn't I tell you all through dinner that I was divorced six months ago!"

"But your promise—you told him—"

"The first thing I did when I left that house," he explained firmly, "was to look round at the number on that door...."

II: FAY RICHMOND

II: FAY RICHMOND

THE influenza epidemic of the winter of 1918-19 will for me always be memorable for a strange coincidence, which could in no way have happened but for that plague's overwhelming rush; and together with that I remember vividly the grieved face of a homely matron, as she spoke to me that January afternoon on the hushed stairway of a nursing-home in Beaumont Street. It was, I suppose, one of those unreal incidents which are so essentially part of that life which realism likes to depict, that a realist may often fail to translate them into his tale (after that very old man, blind to the thing under his nose), whereas a romanticist will, perhaps, with a debonair gesture, give them their true part in the histories of his creatures.

Thus, this tale, sown however dismally, takes to itself the air of a romance; not mine indeed, nor Howard Wentworth's, the well-known playwright whom it intimately concerns, but Fay Richmond's. I call her by that name even though it was lost, in the way that women must lose the most apt and adequate names (as only names can be), on her Italian marriage some twenty years before Howard told me about her. He was curiously infatuated with it; I remember him repeating it, delicately, and pronouncing it a beautiful name, not unworthy of the meditation of Mr. George Moore by his fireside in Ebury Street.

"No, it was too fitting a name to last," he said. "A girl with such a name couldn't but die or get married young.... Can you imagine an aged spinster called Fay Richmond? It could only be the name of a lovely girl, but it could never live much more than twenty years except in a novel by, well, Disraeli or Meredith; unlikely enough shades, you'll say, the bedizened and the tortuous, to be joined together even in sentimental discourse about a girl's name, with whom I've already bored you sufficiently...."

"But I haven't met her yet!" I protested actively from my side of the fireplace, in his room in the Beaumont Street nursing home.

Influenza had already gripped and released me, so that I was now in an irritatingly robust state of health in which to visit a less fortunate friend who had succumbed to its second wave; for that second wave was more virulent and more treacherous than the first, mocking its victim into partial convalescence and then, with a jeer and a snarl at the ambuscaded wretch, fixing again upon the damaged lungs, so inexorably that there was only the one release. And thus Howard Wentworth, who was thought, even by himself, to have cheated the thing, in the end died; not ten days after that afternoon when I had sat listening to him, as he lounged in the happy déshabillé of convalescence, and was reminiscent about a girl called Fay Richmond.

The difference in our years had not prevented an acquaintance ripening into a steady friendship. What I liked about Howard Wentworth was that—unlike so many Englishmen of middle years—he was not young for his age. He was completely, sincerely, and normally over 45, which was so refreshing of him among the crowds of 38's to 42's passing all the way from Coombe to Sunningdale of a Sunday morning.... And it was after our occasional dinners in his house in Upper Brook Street that I would be interested by a solitary photograph in a plain sandal-wood frame; one could not help contrasting its prominence on the grand piano with the total absence of any other photograph in that austere house—austere, in spite of that slight Chinese element of tapestry, strange green horsemen and the like, which even the best of celibates are nowadays growing to affect.

I used to wonder, quite shamelessly, who the girl with the sad, sincere face was, and whether my host and she had loved unhappily; for the girl's eyes were large and sad, and the firm set of her young mouth had not tried to obey the exhortation to smile; which must, indeed, have been given very hesitatingly, for there was a frightening sincerity about her face. You felt, looking even upon the poor mockery of a likeness, that you would have to dance very well indeed before you begged the favour of such as she to dance with you. You imagined to yourself fine arrogances behind those young eyes, to attract and appall you in a venturesome moment....

But, of course, I could not ask my host about her, I had to wait; until, on his reported convalescence, I went to see him in Beaumont Street, and I suppose too obviously noticed the sandal-wood frame on the dressing-table. He smiled:

"It always seemed to go with me," he said. "And I don't quite know why, as I don't remember ever having made a point of it. But Briggs somehow got into the habit of treating it like a toothbrush, so that it now goes with me even for weekends. I don't think I've even really looked at it for years and years.

"Though, I suppose, I've always got the feeling that it's there," he said, "or that she's there...."

"No," he corrected himself quickly. "I can't aspire to that consistency. Even in a sentimental mood with you sitting there trying to look as though you had come to amuse a sick man, whereas you've come to be amused, and well you know it...."

Then it was that he told me her name, dwelling on it.

"As a preface, I was a very sane young man," he went on, smiling. "I know I must have been, because when I try to find in my youth even one among those rare mornings in which a giant wakes up with the feeling that he could break a lance for a fair lady that day, I can't find one. There never was one, I never woke up so recklessly. And the fact that I may have grown to have that feeling when it's too late and I'm too old to joust carelessly is neither here nor there; it can't bluff me into thinking that once upon a time I, too, could have followed His Grace of Dorset into the river for a Zuleika Dobson—or, more splendidly, for a Fay Richmond, no conjurer nor coquette! For I know dismally that my wildest youth couldn't have shared in that fantasy of love—I was too sane or too stupid, whichever you like. And that's why, instead of being the chief actor, I am only a humble observer in the only play that has ever really mattered in my life....

"One February afternoon, about six years ago, I drove past two people on the Route Corniche between Nice and Monte-Carlo. I was driving alone, a noisy Mercèdes. And I had just swung round a corner on to a straight stretch, when ahead of me I saw a man and a woman come out of the garden gate of a villa. The woman had on a white dress. I looked at it until I was abreast.... And I don't know how I got round the next corner. I don't know if she really recognised me as I whirled past, if she really smiled—perhaps it was only a mocking game that the sun had played on a woman's comely face! Indeed, I thought she had smiled, that old, gentle smile.... For me the whole thing was just a sudden stare, and then a long acute, acute pain. The sort of pain that fixes on the heart and mind, with a doubtful smile to crown its ache.... Wondering about that smile, as of a ghost in a white dress, all the rest of my way on that fiendish, lovely mountain road, I suppose it wasn't my fault that car and self didn't add one more wreck to the credit of Les Alpes Maritimes.... I hadn't seen Fay Richmond for fourteen years, and I have never seen her since then.

"I was about twenty-eight or so when I first met the Richmonds, mère et fille, in London. Old General Richmond had died a few years before—perhaps luckily, before the Boer War rats got at his reputation as a strategist.

"I had already two fairly successful plays to my name; and so, among the thousand and one people of my first drawing-rooms, I can't remember exactly how I met Mrs. Richmond, unless it was at a bridge party, for she was a fearsome player even at that early stage of the damnable game. Fearsome she was, I said; but only in spades and clubs. She is the only woman I've never really been terrified of in my life, bless her dear kind heart! A huge, vast woman, with a vast expanse of genial face, and fair hair, and a rumbling rasping voice that caught you behind the shoulders and made you smile sheepishly. She had no right to be a woman, she ought to have been a stockbroker, with a terrified, adoring little wife and a large place in the country. I'm not exaggerating, she wasn't fat, she was massive—simply exuding luxury, terror, and kindliness. Yes, that rumbling, rasping voice said the most encouraging things to a not-very-conceited young playwright; who, I like to think, fascinated by the kindliness of that vast terror, perhaps stood behind its chair all that afternoon and watched it take the odd trick, or know the reason why not, my dear partner?...

"And not very many days later, on a lazy afternoon one October, he was sending in his name from the doorway of a house in Rutland Gate, vaguely hoping that she was not at home so that he could wander about the Park for an hour or two. But within the next few minutes he was in an unconventional little grey room upstairs, certainly not the usual drawing-room of this large house, in half-hesitating talk with a girl who had followed him in.

"He had swung round, as guiltily as one always does from the examination of a strange room, when he heard the door open behind him; and expecting, prepared for that large woman, he was suddenly struck shy, absurdly stammering, when a slight thing, a girl, came towards him with a smile and flushed cheeks and some quick nervous words. It was surprising how slight she seemed! Her words and her flush showed him that she was much more shy than he—why, she was only a girl!—and this pulled him together into his experienced self, before he entirely missed what she had begun to say.

"'My mother told me—' she was saying, but she had misjudged her distance, and was now so close to me that she had to break in with a 'How d'you do?' and shake hands.... Then her eyelids fluttered, quite, quite sincerely. But, beneath them, the brown eyes were apprising me steadily all the time—she was one of those sweet things who valiantly pretend that they can judge for themselves! Well, she would have to like me, I decided.

"'You see,' she was going on quickly, 'when your card came up, mother said at first that she wasn't at home—'

"'Thank you,' I said, and we both laughed like shy children.

"'You know I didn't mean—oh, dear, it's very difficult!' she broke in helplessly. 'And I haven't even asked you to sit down yet!'

"'But I don't know if I'm to be allowed to stay!'

"'Why, of course, you are going to stay!' she said, surprised into a decisive manner. 'I'm just trying to explain.... Do sit down, please!' We both sat down. She took a deep breath:

"'Mother said she wasn't at home at first, because she is lying down with a headache and a bad temper. But then she changed her mind—even a headache can't ever prevent mother from changing her mind—and said that she couldn't turn you away from the door the very first time you called, as you might never come again, which—'

"'Yes, I would,' I interrupted.

"'But you wouldn't dare contradict mother like that if she were here,' she retorted; and then covered her suddenly heightened flush with a little tremor of a laugh. It wasn't quite a laugh—rather like a happy gurgle, you know, if that doesn't sound too stupid. And it made one want to smile all over.

"'Shall I go on where I left off when you interrupted?... Which, said mother, would be a pity, because you were a nice young man and had quite good manners for a man who couldn't help having gone to Oxford or Cambridge—'

"'Heidelberg,' I corrected softly.

"'Well, I'm glad mother doesn't know that, because she generally doesn't like eccentric people.... And then she told me to come down and receive you, and give you tea, and make such a fuss of you that you'd have to pretend to be amused, anyway.'

"I suppose she caught me with a whole-hearted smile all over my face, because she added, 'And you are pretending splendidly,' in a shy, mischievous way. Then again that tremor of a laugh, with just a little mocking wave in it. And now, too, laughter was playing a fluttering game with the inevitable shyness in the tortoiseshell eyes. Yes, they were just brown eyes when she first came in, but now they were tortoiseshell in the pale October light. These things happen.

"It was rash of me to begin to try and tell you about Fay Richmond, because I find I am groping for the threads. And there is something almost irritating in trying to modulate one's thoughts to the facts of an intimacy which has been at the back of one's mind for so many years, but which only lasted twelve months. That's all—just about twelve months from that afternoon which I've been describing to you at such terrible length; on purpose, indeed, because in groping to fit a memory with a face and a voice I have got to go back to the very beginning, to re-live that first impression of that first meeting; which ended only with a suddenly returned nervousness, itself the herald of my returning formality. As I took my leave I had the happy feeling that I had found a friend—you know that feeling? as you walk away from a house which you had entered never dreaming of the unusual smile with which you would be leaving it? It happens so seldom....

"From that time I saw a great deal of them—or rather, as much of them as of any one, for I did more writing at that period of my life than at any other. I was still young enough to have the luxury of having something to say, or thinking I had, which is as enjoyable. Mrs. Richmond was really fond of me, God only knows why. And genuine in her affections as in all else, the ordinary barriers of time between acquaintance and friendship counted for nothing with her; and so I found myself, very delightfully, to be almost an 'old friend' of the family within less than a month!

"Perhaps it was just this unusual development that put me in the wrong channel; for there were Fay and I, with the embracing presence of her mother between us, or upstairs about to come down—how often she was, carelessly, 'about to come down'!—calling each other by our Christian names within, perhaps, the fifth time of my seeing her! While there was another young man, much more often and with more right at Rutland Gate than I, who, I know now, could not have called her by her Christian name, nor she by his, until the moment came when he simply couldn't help calling her by it. And that, after all, is what a Christian name is for! Certainly not to be scattered about in casual familiarity.... What a feeling, not to have called her 'Fay' until, one day, I simply had to! It's an emotion I missed, with other things....

"You will find it scarcely believable when I tell you that I went there, for most of that time, just as much to see the mother as the daughter! I simply can't remember hoping, when I rang the bell, that Mrs. Richmond would be out or lying down, and that I must 'pretend to be amused' with Fay—a joke, by the way, not easily released by any of us in that pleasant house! Mrs. Richmond was quite right in trusting to her affections, as good people often are right; and she herself said once, 'One very seldom places confidence in the wrong people.'

"No, this unfinished romance would never have happened if, several months before I met her, Fay Richmond had not been engaged to marry the Marchese Vitiali. It would not have happened because Mrs. Richmond was a sensible and practical woman, and because I was quite an ineligible young man, having no money, and, as she once remarked, only the most erratic prospects.

"'And for a woman to marry a man who lives by his pen is as dangerous an adventure as to marry a man who lives by his sword,' she ponderously added in the course of this same conversation; which of course held no strictly personal quality in it, but had sprung, one afternoon early in our friendship, from her coming down and finding Fay and me in a happy mood together.

"'One of the pleasant things that have happened,' she said embracingly as she came in, 'since this girl was clever enough to get herself engaged, is that now we can have ineligible young men about the house—can't we, Fay?'

"Even I could see that she wouldn't have answered but for the silence of two people.

"'Yes, it's fun to have friends,' Fay said, almost shortly. And for the first time in that house I felt a twinge of embarrassment. Something, a faint idea, brushed me in the face, vaguely. It's exaggerating a vagary into a phrase to say that I could almost feel it leave a faint red mark, like a flush. But it's quite poignant, even now.

"Yes, I suppose I have brought in her engagement as a sort of casual incident instead of as the real fact of her life. But, don't you see, that is exactly how it seemed to strike one, entering that house at a mid-way hour, so to say? Why, as I see it now, I think it was weeks before I actually realised the fact of her engagement! Her fiancé was nearly always there, of course; but not acutely so as her fiancé! He wasn't momentously present, I mean.... And I don't think that it was entirely an excessive good breeding or a lack of point of view which so blurred the outlines of his position in the house. The Richmonds seemed, rather, to have peculiarly enveloped him, his whole foreignness, his demonstrativeness, and his dark good looks. So that it wasn't, perhaps, unnatural that some time passed before I realised anything other in the handsome young Italian than a charming and cultured—one might almost be pardoned for adding, decorative—addition to an already luxurious household. Accepting him as part of the family he seemed to just grow, in his capacity of lover, into my consciousness; as, I guessed, he must have grown with time into Fay's life—that rich and eligible young Roman! He, born with all the good things of life, having entered it with a letter of introduction, as it were, from the god who awards the silver spoons, had managed to happen on yet one more! And, with it all, he was still so very likeable....

"There seemed, through all those earlier months, to be a grim sort of silence sustained by the mother and daughter about Vitiali. It grew queerly on one, this silence, after I had accepted him as part of the Richmond household; and I impudently put myself to inquiring into it. Not, of course, that I often saw Mrs. Richmond and Fay, or either of them, alone, for as I've said he was nearly always about the house, had just left or was just arriving.... I chose to think it a little strange that so ardent a fiancé, as undoubtedly he was, should be treated so utterly as part of the family—strange, or if you like, more than flattering for a foreigner in an English house! And, happening on what I've already described as that grim sort of silence about him, I found a more subtle reason to account for it than this whole-hearted acceptance of him into the family as a lover and a gentleman. Its very quality of grimness, which seems a little absurd in this context, gave one the key to Mrs. Richmond's queerly and almost insensibly working conscience, and—as I stretched the limits of my conceit—to Fay's dim understanding of it and its cause. Surely you can see the pathos of a situation in which a mother and a daughter, very really loving one another, seldom referred to an approaching marriage because they both vaguely saw in it a contradiction to their mutual understanding? It couldn't have been more definite than that, else my tale would run differently.

"I can see Mrs. Richmond, now, fumbling in her generous mind, through that time for a real and deep content at her daughter's marriage with the Marchese Vitiali, whom she liked so much. She, who would indignantly have denied that she could ever force or more than mildly persuade her daughter to a choice of a husband, must have felt a plaintive discomfort in doubting if her genuine desire for Fay to accept him had not influenced a daughter, who placed her mother's happiness beside her own, over just that fraction which helps indecision into assent.

"That Fay's concession of herself was not more abandoned than an assent I came to see through the window which an intimate household, unused to secreting its intimacies except by way of good breeding, almost forces upon the privileged third person. It didn't vividly strike one, as such a fact vividly should, that Fay was in love with her fiancé; not, I mean, that admirable sort of "in love" of young people, however undemonstrative, which makes the third person, on leaving its happy presence, want to clutch at the heart of the first pretty woman he sees so that he too can share of the beauty of a beautiful world.... But the opposite, the flatness of a forced emotion, certainly didn't strike me; love was there, I suppose, but of that pale kind which so often doesn't outlast, even in the purest mind, its consequence of marriage. The third person didn't have the acute feeling that he had blundered, ever so little, on them in a room; or that, once there, he should quickly leave them. There was a "grown-up" atmosphere about her in Vitiali's presence which, I once realised, was quite lacking when he wasn't there; which was terribly seldom.... Of course, when I did come on them together, as happened sometimes when I called in the afternoon and Mrs. Richmond was 'lying down,' I generally found a way to retire quite early—but entirely because of that other party to the approaching marriage, the charming Vitiali, whose eyes made no secret of a fact which, after all, there's no reason to conceal from a celibate woman.

"I had nothing from Fay about the preliminaries, as I came to be curious about them. She never spoke of yesterday, very seldom of to-morrow; all her words and laughter were for the present moment, when you were with her and were held captive by the deliciously sincere brown eyes, which could mock so faintly—and, if she chose to play with you, act so plaintively! Perhaps it is because I, even then, had put her on a velvet cushion in a glass case, to admire and enjoy her especially, but she certainly did seem a figure quite apart from her own generation of just-emerged débutantes—usually a tiresome barley-water stage for a girl, when she hasn't yet quite dropped her girlish giggle for her woman's smile. I never thought of her in relation to the other maidenly things one met in drawing-rooms round about, even when she was herself there as one of them, and by a quaint mixture of shyness and self-possession made one mentally describe her by an unusual epithet for a girl—she looked gracious! But then that was suitable, for parties and such-like were different to these nowadays. It was much less difficult then than it is now to tell a lady from a demi-mondaine; girls hadn't yet learnt, or pretended they hadn't, to be sophisticated before getting married. One played more ping-pong in those days.

"So it was entirely from Mrs. Richmond that I learnt of Vitiali's approach, and of her own motherly share in it, and was able to piece together my theory of the good lady's vague discomfort at it all. He had appeared in London about two years before to take up the vaguest post at the Embassy here, but with just a little more than the usual social advantages of the ordinary attaché. Mothers' hearts could not but beat a little frenziedly in the presence of his fortune and his very agreeable person; and his title, however Italian, held a long and honoured tradition. Mrs. Richmond was quite a dear in her self-directed sarcasm, and there was a real tenderness in her reference to the parti which her daughter had won—because, after all, the prize had melted before Fay into the most graceful of begging suitors; had so wantonly fallen in love, her mother explained, that only the severest exercise in breeding had restrained her from feeling superior to more commonplace mothers. From the first he had lain, so to speak, on the door-mat, quite pitifully. Fay, who had just 'come out' had quite definitely refused his first proposal—any Englishman would have run to join the salmon in the Hebrides after that girlish refusal! But not so Carlo, who loved without false pride, like the Venetian suitor he was; he ran no further than that door-mat, and there he stayed; looking not in the least ridiculous in a position which tarnishes the dignity of most spoiled young men, but rather grew in it, to one watching kindly more than ever acceptable. Indeed both liking and approving him, Mrs. Richmond had watched his suit kindly and carefully from the first and had favoured it as well as she could; and more than ever after his rebuff, for Vitiali was emerging so admirably from the dangerous test that, so she affirmed, she had never in her life learnt so much as then about the best way in which a young man can win a young woman.

"'And, after all, it's not every day that you will be loved so well and so eligibly,' she had told Fay; and I gather that the rumbling voice must have held a certain weight of impatience in it that day. Because, beside the initial one, there were so many advantages which the tiresome girl didn't seem to see; such, for instance, as the very important one that the southern climate was good for her delicate health,—a cause for great anxiety ever since a very severe attack of bronchial pneumonia in her sixteenth year; in fact, just because of that, they would anyway have to spend a considerable part of every year in the south.... Not of course that any advantage of any kind could or should sway a definite dislike into anything more amiable—but where, incomparably instead of dislike, there was a genuine fondness which the slightest touch of time's finger might throw into love, it was irritating to see a girl's whim assert itself so contrarily!

"And who, in the end, but Fay herself had proved it to be a whim, when, some eight months after he had first declared his suit, Carlo had found himself accepted as whole-heartedly, Mrs. Richmond affirmed, as once he had been refused? Although, of course, Fay was of a very undemonstrative nature—which perhaps was just as well in a mate of this Italian gallant, who was himself quite demonstrative enough for one household!

"But there was to be no hurry about the affair, Mrs. Richmond had decided from the first; and I could imagine her bustling that decision about her mind, as a sort of anodyne for she didn't quite know what. They had been engaged already six months, and she, watching her only child's happiness very, very carefully, had gained from her care not less than certainty about the felicity of Fay's choice. There was in Carlo no note that jarred, as there often is even in the best of men; besides, he could so perfectly accommodate one's every mood, and yet lose not a fraction of his dignity in such complaisance; for, having so absolutely thrown himself at Fay's feet, she hadn't really been able to help allowing him to stay there—'as who wouldn't?' Mrs. Richmond demanded comfortably.

"No, there was to be no hurrying. Carlo had been persuaded by her determination—Mrs. Richmond rather stressed her influence here—and the marriage would not take place for another six months from then; for she preferred that Fay should have reached a decent one-and-twenty before setting out on the conquest of Italy.

"'But she is an odd girl, with a terrible capacity for loyalty—I suppose that's the word,' she added. 'With more loyalty than a human being can comfortably hold, I sometimes imagine.' A note of self-deprecatory anxiety in her voice conflicted oddly in one's ears with the 'happy-ever-after' tone of her previous sentences; and to help her out of her ensuing silence, I ventured that surely it was just Fay's loyalty (if that was the word), which even a stranger could feel, that made her so unusually, well, attractive for her years.

"'Of course, of course....' Mrs. Richmond assented heavily; then turned in her chair directly round on me. 'But, my dear man, don't you see that when it's carried to excess it can make a very treacherous quality? When, let's say, it becomes a leading principle in life for a girl who, after all, needs only a working amount of it, all sorts of troublesome things might happen—I mean, of course, that it's just conceivable as a theory in a foolish moment such as this.... Poor Howard! to be burdened by a mother with her child's virtues for lack of any real faults! It's a sweet thought, that way.

"'You see,' she said wistfully, 'people sometimes break after the strain of too much loyalty—I've adopted that word now. They don't take things easily enough, until, one day, they suddenly break and take things too easily! I've seen it happen, a dear sweet woman.... I'm talking so intimately to you because I expect you to understand, and not be too brilliantly conclusive to yourself about it. Of course you know that I am not talking directly of Fay, for it's absurd to suppose that there ever could be a strain on her loyalty about anything, but about my own theories. I've got lately into the habit, from so much watching, of doing her introspection for her, just as I still like doing her hair for her sometimes—for it's a shame that a mere maid should have all the fun, isn't it?'

"But, after all, it was not to run so smoothly for dear Mrs. Richmond; her half-articulate anxiety—I can't really call it self-reproach—seemed to have held a parallel justification in its subject. Fay, knowing nothing of her good mother's shouldering of her burden, had done her own introspection as well as she could by herself; and came, as girls will, upon its results inconveniently as the marriage grew nearer—instead of having thought of it all before as her mother had done for her!

"I had a very good view of the pattern they unknowingly worked between them because, in my curious too-quickly developed position in that house, I was again made the confidant. I was, 'Since mother has quarrelled with all her "in-laws," the only sensible man about the premises,' Fay herself said once; a bloodless and unenviable prerogative so unsuitable to Vitiali's temper that he had never troubled to stoop down to claim it from the heights where his good fortune had enthroned him. For who, able to be something better, would trouble himself to hold the mean place of 'the sensible man about the premises?' I've never been lured into it since, anyway.

"It was about a month later that, after a week in which I had not seen them, I called one afternoon and came face to face with Vitiali by the drawing-room door, which he had just closed behind him.

"I'm so glad you have come, Howard,' he said, with his affectionate smile, retaining my hand in his; we were great friends, you understand. 'I have just left Fay, looking exactly as though she were going to write a book or a tragedy. Oh, so serious!

"'Come on, quickly,' he said, catching me by the arm and hurrying me to the door. 'Let her see you before she takes a pen in her hand—let her see a man who actually has written something, and take warning.

"'Of course, you don't look like an author, old man,' he soothed my protest. 'You look just like any one else, but more sympathetic. That is why I am asking you to make Fay look not so serious—Oh, it's terrible, that quiet Fay seriousness!' He held me at arm's length with a sudden gesture. 'Can you make a woman laugh?' he asked.

"'I can do nothing else,' I answered.

"'Then, Howard, I shall count you not a good friend if Fay is not smiling all over her face when I come back to-night to take them out to dinner.' He had a delightful way of mock solemnity, which seemed to suit particularly his dark mobile features.

"'Quick, now, before she takes up that horrible pen!' and he opened the door and thrust me into the room. 'God be with you,' he whispered behind the closing door.

"What poor Carlo had helplessly called her 'seriousness' I had remarked about Fay just lately; and the forced comedy of my entrance to combat it was part of the woe-begone air with which he usually tried to appease and lighten it.... It was, as I had noticed, as though a fleeting shadow of thought, in brushing across her face, had been seduced to stay beyond its first impulse; and there's nothing in the world so satisfying to watch as a young serious loveliness, so it be without guile. I, as sometimes the four of us sat at the play (when of course I was Mrs. Richmond's companion in particular), in a side glance at her would catch the shadow of that thought, and it was as a delicate engravure on a lovely face; and I'd wonder what problem that dear mind was trying to work out—of course, bravely! You see? She was the sort of girl to induce a generous epithet about her every action, the sort that even great writers seldom show as anything but lay figures, simply because it needs a rare personal quality to create a perfect description of beauty together with simplicity and genuineness. I can't even attempt to do that, I'm content just to envy my youth her company, and curse it for its commonplace vigour which, ambitious in a busy world, thought of that girl as a playmate, instead of—oh, instead of as a mate!

"'I'm here, to-day, as a clown,' I said, as I walked towards her at the writing table by the window. They affected quills in that house, and as she turned round in her chair she had the end of one thoughtfully between her teeth.

"'You don't have to be a clown,' she denied, quite vigorously. 'Even though Carlo did make a speech to you just outside—and isn't he a sweet when he's fussed!'

"'And with reason. For the point of his speech was that you had been pulling a long face at him, and no decent Italian likes to have his women pulling long faces.'

"'It wasn't at him, Howard. Could any woman pull one of those faces you refer to at Carlo? Obviously he's too dear to be treated as an ordinary man....'

"'Well, I did say I was only a clown,' I murmured humbly.

"'No, to-day you are an uncle, Uncle Howard,' she said, puckering her eyebrows as though in examination of me for that post. 'Yes, you've got to be the sort of uncle that real uncles never are.'

"'This is one of my serious days,' she explained. 'I'm sorry, Howard, but it is. I'm not old enough yet to have a plain day, so I've got to put up with a serious one instead now and again. There's no sugar or chocolate on any of the cakes I think about to-day.'

"'I remember a tale by a man called Henry Harland about a woman who once had a plain day—' I was beginning vaguely.

"'You mustn't remember it because I'm not a bit interested in her,' she stopped me. 'If you please, we will discuss myself Entirely. Do you mind very much, Howard?'

"'Not very much,' I said.

"And suddenly she jumped up and caught me tightly by the arm, the whole smile and impulse exquisitely childish. 'Oh, my dear, what shall I do when I'm married to a foreigner and no strong, silly, sensible Englishman about the house to play with!' Quick words they were, tumbling over one another—and then she let go my arm, for that inevitable flush was tingeing her cheeks.

"'You see, one thinks of that,' she went on, more sedately. 'It simply creeps over me, the thought of who poor Fay is going to talk nonsense with in the "near future." It's difficult to talk nonsense with most people, isn't it? Yes, say it is.... You know you get that feeling yourself, Howard—you know very well that it isn't with every chit of a girl you can talk the sort of stuff you do with me. Just try, anyway, and see what you get!'

"'Of course, I can with Carlo too,' she said. 'But it's different. Rather like work. Why, it took me months and months to make him understand that I didn't hate him when I laughed at him! And one only really laughs at people one's very fond of, after all.... I suppose it's different because he's in love with me,' she added, and waited for me to find a query in her eyebrows; but I didn't answer it.

"'Italians are very odd,' she said. 'I know all about them now. They simply mustn't be laughed at—it's a sort of threat they hold over you, poor dears! I'm always making a sunny day into a rainy day for Carlo.... When I said "foreigner" I didn't, of course, mean to imply that he was an ordinary foreigner,' she added very decidedly.

"'Even if he had no money,' I agreed, 'he could never be anything worse than an "alien." With a face like that he simply couldn't be "undesirable."

"'What is it, Fay?' I asked suddenly. 'You've got the air of a woman "leading up to something." There is an important look in your eye.'

"She smiled a little plaintively. 'It's not very important,' she said. 'I'm worrying about myself, that's all. To-day, and yesterday, and other days before, I've been wondering whether I am or am not going to marry Carlo.'

"'But, Fay, of course you are!' I was startled enough to cry.

"'Yes,' she nodded. 'That is exactly what mother would say, except that she would say it in a bigger way; but she doesn't know.... I'm worrying about it a lot, Howard. I simply don't know which to do.'

"She had startled me into the attitude of uncle she had desired of me. I stood on the hearth, just by her chair, and really felt very serious. Suddenly, and with both hands, she had given me a responsibility. She had half turned a key and shown me a place of discomfort for three people whom I was really fond of. And I wanted, intensely, to help—not only Fay, but her mother. If this was only a passing indecision I decided that her mother must never hear of it, for I already knew of her infinite capacity to worry herself.... But it doesn't matter what in particular I said. I probably bent over from my place on the hearth, and spoke into her eyes, telling her that this wasn't a game. She simply must make up her mind—now! To go on doubting was, after all, so unfair to Carlo!

"'It can't all be so indefinite,' I urged rather impatiently. 'I mean, my child, that you must know whether you do or don't like him enough.'

"'But I do, I like him frightfully,' she protested. 'You don't quite understand, Uncle Howard. I'm not worrying so much about his part of it as about mine. I'm sure about him, you see. He is the sweetest and dearest young man in the world, and I know that I can be happy with him—even though he does look sulky when I laugh at him. But Italian sulks are so much more attractive than the home product.... Yes, I like him very, very much, and I know very, very clearly that I'm not in love with him—'

"She was too sensible a girl for me to take up that cue in the conventional way; but there was no other way in which to answer it, so I didn't.

"'But I'm not an idiot. I don't quarrel with that especially,' she said, 'because I will probably never like any one I can marry half as much. No, it's quite easy to just marry Carlo, he fits in so well.'

"'Well, if that's so, I wonder what on earth we are talking about!' I had to say. And she shook her head at me helplessly.

"'You make an awfully good uncle, Howard, you are so terribly stupid! Didn't I tell you ages ago that this discussion was to be limited strictly to Fay? So Carlo, for the moment, is just a man who has bought a ring. I, the Queen of Sheba, come to Solomon for wisdom, but with one fat worry instead of jewels and things....'

"How surprised she would have been if I had said, 'My dear, even Solomon was not more grateful.' But I wanted to.

"'I seem very meek and mild, but I'm really very full of myself,' she explained shyly. 'I've been introspecting, you see, and of course I've made an awful mess of it. Knowing oneself doesn't help, it simply complicates.... I've found, for instance, that once I do a thing—well, it's done! It's like a thing written in a book (or in a play by you!), always there, by me. I mean that once I've stuck myself to a thing, I am—do you mind?—a "sticker." I don't change or break away—I can't. And it's very frightening and discouraging to realize that, because it sort of cuts away from under the feet all the trap-doors which other people can escape through. I feel very pathetic ... and even you don't know what I'm talking about.'

"'But I do, Fay, I do!' I said quickly. And I knew even better than she, with her mother's self-deprecatory confidence on 'loyalty' in my ears!

"'The feeling,' she went on encouraged, 'is that, not quite like other people, once I'm married—well, just suppose that I even in the least bit wanted to get unmarried again! I couldn't. It's like a Roman Catholic marriage, for ever and ever. Of course,' she added quickly, sincerely, 'it's the very dimmest nightmare. I'm quite happy to marry Carlo, and I can't really imagine that I could begin to be unhappy with him—but just suppose! I'm much too fond of him even now to want to hurt him, and as I grow fonder of him I shall never be able to hurt him. Never. His eyes wouldn't let me....'

"And as I looked at her I couldn't help thinking that the world would be a splendid place if women realised the responsibility of being loved as did this girl. For that, mainly, was what it was, the burden of the responsibility of being utterly loved for the first time.

"But I didn't give way to that sort of thing. I seem to remember talking a great deal of sense that afternoon, but sense which I tried to frame illogically enough not to appear too disagreeable. I simply can't help feeling a little proud of my own share in that afternoon. I remember that I said quite sternly that it was very strange for a girl like her to have wandered so far ahead, strange and not very fitting. 'Because, don't you see, Fay, it's all very unfair to Carlo and to your own affection for him? You say you are frightfully fond of him, you let him feel that you are, and then, if you please, your mind goes searching on ahead concocting plots as to what you will or will not do when you are not so fond of him. If you are fond enough of him now, as you say you are, it's simply dishonest of you, Fay, to go on playing draughts with those vague doubts about a very vague future. It's the sort of thing women do when they are thinking of marrying a fourth husband.... If you go on like this, when you are an old woman you will be very superstitious and quite unbearable. For it's not much more than a superstition now, and you are treating yourself very cruelly to make it the keystone of your "serious day." I've never felt less sympathetic about a thing in all my life!'

"And so I went on, bartering my mess of pottage for the homely position of 'Uncle' Howard. And as she looked up at me and listened, her eyes grew not so serious, until they laughed outright.

"'Oh, dear, I'm sure you're right,' she said at last; 'but I don't in the least agree with what you say.... But anyway I've gained something by boring you with it all, Howard. The whole thing seems so very unimportant and silly now I've told it to some one else.' And then she added, with a manner: 'The serious day has nothing further on which to proceed, so ... let's have tea! And muffins! It's simply impossible not to have muffins to-day, Howard.'

"She was a dear, that girl! And a little later, as I walked up Piccadilly towards my flat, I suddenly found myself staring hard at an empty 'crawler,' with the tremendous thought in my head that it was a great shame that England should lose such a girl to a foreigner and a foreign country! It began to seem wrong, somehow....

"I saw very little of them between then and the marriage. August and part of September took them up to Scotland, while I stayed in London and worked. How I must have enjoyed working in those days! And when they came back I was busy with the production of a new play, and they too, I supposed, with the usual preparations. But Vitiali used often to drop in at my rooms at odd hours, and I asked him once if Fay had ever looked serious enough since that afternoon to write a tragedy; he showed his teeth in a smile, and said that I must have done her a great deal of good that day, 'Because, my dear Howard, she has never been gayer and more light-hearted as lately. I am very happy....' He could say those things, he had a way of charming you with his simplicity; and, anyway, there is nothing more charming in the world than a cultured foreigner—except, of course, a cultured Englishman.

"Two nights before the wedding day, after ten o'clock, Fay rang me up on the telephone. 'I hope I am disturbing you,' she began sweetly.

"'I just want to know, Howard,' the voice said, 'if you really are coming to see me married.'

"'Well, I've intimated to your mother my decision to be present, and I've committed myself in writing, what's more.'

"'Don't be silly, my dear! Whoever takes any notice of what you write? You write much too well.'

"'It's only that I had a vague idea,' she explained very gently, 'that you wouldn't be there.' Then, somehow, there was a short silence. That telephone silence, full of dim murmurings and the attention of two people!

"'Why?' I asked abruptly.

"'Don't be snappy with me, please, Howard,' the voice begged. 'I just wanted to know for certain, that's all.'

"Queer things happen sometimes on a clear telephone about half-past ten at night. Voices seem to take their clothes off....

"'Well, as a matter of fact,' I began slowly.

"'Yes?' It was scarcely a word, but a light low tremor of a question.... I put my lips very close to the mouthpiece and formed my words very clearly:—

"'Why don't you want me to come, Fay?'

"I'm not sure about the little gasp, but only about the little voice, after a long second, saying, 'I don't know why, Howard.'

"'Now that you've asked me I realise that I never intended to come,' I confessed. 'And I'm damned if I know why, either!... If I come at all I shall be among the crowd outside, admiring you and Carlo.'

"'But aren't you quite, quite sure that at the last moment you won't regretfully find it impossible to come at all?' the voice seemed to plead.

"'I'm beginning not to be sure of anything to-night,' I said fretfully.

"'Poor Howard!' Ah, I knew that voice, the firmer one with the little caress of mischief over it! I made a quick grab at it.

"'I say, you're going to write to me quite a lot, aren't you?'

"'Not one line,' she answered firmly.

"'But, Fay, you can't disappear from my life like that!' I protested heatedly. 'Of course you are going to write to me, aren't you?'

"'I don't intend to,' she said sweetly, 'but I suppose I will, sometime.... Don't you know, Howard,' the voice asked, as though getting farther and farther away, 'that you don't deserve a letter from me, ever?' No words of mine could hold that voice near, it was disappearing, a faint thing growing fainter, like phantom in a wind.

"'And you don't deserve ever to see me again.... Good-bye, Howard.'

"'Fay!' I cried. Her name seemed to be on the wall before me, a written word. And I couldn't reach it, couldn't! Her receiver clicked—like a far away door clicking behind some one who has left a room empty of all that matters. And I was realising that only then! There was no more Fay Richmond! That voice over the telephone, with an unrealised shade and quiver in it, had wrenched aside in my consciousness what the eyes and body of that voice had seemed to leave intact for so long! As though a sudden ray of sunshine had awakened a man whom an alarm-clock had left sleeping. There was no more Fay Richmond! I didn't go to the wedding.

"I haven't, even now, the least sympathy with myself. Nor would I have with you, say, if you had grossly bungled your affairs in the same way. It's a deficiency for which there is not the shadow of an excuse, that mean, ungenerous, deficiency which blinds a man to the necessities of his own happiness—until, since life is always farce or melodrama, it's too late!

"She did not write to me. The 'sometime' of her concession faded with the months into a dream, perhaps to come true, sometime!... I wrote only once to her, a dishonest letter, which I did my best to fill with the spirit of my past—and how long passed!—'avuncular' relations with her. And yet nothing happened since the day when the Queen of Sheba had come to Solomon with 'one fat worry,' nothing at all! Not even the first syllable of a word of love—not, by a thousand miles, even the shadow of an attempted or desired kiss! Only, to account for it all, a voice on a telephone one night, a so familiar voice changed by magic.... Changed in itself or in my mind? I simply didn't ask! But, however it was, from that strange thing the god worked a stranger, for I knew that when she read that letter she would know that it was dishonest, unreal.

"She must have known! Or else, sixteen months later.... That 'sometime' letter of hers had come at last! A treasure, stamped from Vienna where (so Mrs. Richmond had written me from Tonbridge, her new home since the disposal of the house of Rutland Gate) Carlo was now attached. It was a very short letter something like this:

"'I am coming to England for a week,' she wrote, 'to see mother in her new home in the country. But, if you don't mind, there are other folk I would like to see, too!... Carlo is getting more and more of a personage, and simply can't leave Vienna, so I won't be able to stay away more than a week, from next Thursday as ever is, Howard! But as I don't know what day I will be in London, you will please institute no inquiries about me until you hear from me. I will ring you up at about 10:30 on any of my seven nights, so that we can arrange to meet somewhere. Of course, I could write to you, but I want to wonder, as I take up the receiver, whether you will recognise my voice. But you won't dare not to, will you, Howard?' That is only a reason in a letter, I said to myself, for I can hear her adding, 'And so, my dear, if there's anything gay enough to keep you out after ten-thirty on any of those nights, then you will miss Fay—now won't you?'

"Thursday came. And then came those other days and nights, and passed! Each one tingling with hope, until half-past ten, and then—oh, it's a misery unlike any other, that waiting for a bell that doesn't ring! It is a cruel game to play upon a man, that exaltation of hope to hear a voice, and then that helpless misery, with no remedy but what he can find in cigarettes. I paced many miles of carpet those six evenings.

"Thursday again. I dined alone, and then, telling Briggs that he could take his evening out, opened a book, and read grimly. I can't remember anything in my life like the bitter, dismal anger of that night. It's a vivid sore even now, that last vigil by my fire with mind and heart telling me that I had been cruelly played with, like a beast in a cage. I didn't love the less, I couldn't; indeed it was my love that was measured by my bitter grievance.... And even if I do hear her voice to-night, I wasn't spared from realising, it will be too late to see her—'to arrange to meet somewhere,' she had written!—for she will be leaving to-morrow.

"One can act very well in one's own bitter company. Even as the clock in my little hall struck the half-hour after ten I pretended to read grimly on.... I've explained all this waiting to you because it seems to reflect quite importantly on my behaviour that night. It can't but account for it in a sort of way—and as for excusing it, well I don't care a button for that!

"I suppose it was about a quarter of an hour later that the door-bell rang. Briggs was out, as I've said, and I had not the faintest intention of answering it, for it could only be a casual caller wanting a drink. But the bell rang again, furiously—and this time, without a second's hesitation, I threw aside my book, strode into the hall, and flung open the door.

"'You beast!' I said with all my heart, quivering.