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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Unbearable Bassington, by Saki
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Unbearable Bassington
+
+
+Author: Saki
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 4, 2013  [eBook #555]
+[Updated edition of: etext96/nbrbl10h.htm]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNBEARABLE BASSINGTON***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1913 John Lane edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+                              THE UNBEARABLE
+                                BASSINGTON
+
+
+                      :: BY H. H. MUNRO (“SAKI”) ::
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                      [Picture: Decorative graphic]
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                    LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
+
+                       NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
+
+                    TORONTO: BELL & COCKBURN.  MCMXIII
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                             _SIXTH EDITION_
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+               PRINTED BY JAS. TRUSCOTT & SON, LTD.  LONDON
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR’S NOTE
+
+
+This story has no moral.
+
+If it points out an evil at any rate it suggests no remedy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+FRANCESCA BASSINGTON sat in the drawing-room of her house in Blue Street,
+W., regaling herself and her estimable brother Henry with China tea and
+small cress sandwiches.  The meal was of that elegant proportion which,
+while ministering sympathetically to the desires of the moment, is
+happily reminiscent of a satisfactory luncheon and blessedly expectant of
+an elaborate dinner to come.
+
+In her younger days Francesca had been known as the beautiful Miss
+Greech; at forty, although much of the original beauty remained, she was
+just dear Francesca Bassington.  No one would have dreamed of calling her
+sweet, but a good many people who scarcely knew her were punctilious
+about putting in the “dear.”
+
+Her enemies, in their honester moments, would have admitted that she was
+svelte and knew how to dress, but they would have agreed with her friends
+in asserting that she had no soul.  When one’s friends and enemies agree
+on any particular point they are usually wrong.  Francesca herself, if
+pressed in an unguarded moment to describe her soul, would probably have
+described her drawing-room.  Not that she would have considered that the
+one had stamped the impress of its character on the other, so that close
+scrutiny might reveal its outstanding features, and even suggest its
+hidden places, but because she might have dimly recognised that her
+drawing-room was her soul.
+
+Francesca was one of those women towards whom Fate appears to have the
+best intentions and never to carry them into practice.  With the
+advantages put at her disposal she might have been expected to command a
+more than average share of feminine happiness.  So many of the things
+that make for fretfulness, disappointment and discouragement in a woman’s
+life were removed from her path that she might well have been considered
+the fortunate Miss Greech, or later, lucky Francesca Bassington.  And she
+was not of the perverse band of those who make a rock-garden of their
+souls by dragging into them all the stoney griefs and unclaimed troubles
+they can find lying around them.  Francesca loved the smooth ways and
+pleasant places of life; she liked not merely to look on the bright side
+of things but to live there and stay there.  And the fact that things
+had, at one time and another, gone badly with her and cheated her of some
+of her early illusions made her cling the closer to such good fortune as
+remained to her now that she seemed to have reached a calmer period of
+her life.  To undiscriminating friends she appeared in the guise of a
+rather selfish woman, but it was merely the selfishness of one who had
+seen the happy and unhappy sides of life and wished to enjoy to the
+utmost what was left to her of the former.  The vicissitudes of fortune
+had not soured her, but they had perhaps narrowed her in the sense of
+making her concentrate much of her sympathies on things that immediately
+pleased and amused her, or that recalled and perpetuated the pleasing and
+successful incidents of other days.  And it was her drawing-room in
+particular that enshrined the memorials or tokens of past and present
+happiness.
+
+Into that comfortable quaint-shaped room of angles and bays and alcoves
+had sailed, as into a harbour, those precious personal possessions and
+trophies that had survived the buffetings and storms of a not very
+tranquil married life.  Wherever her eyes might turn she saw the embodied
+results of her successes, economies, good luck, good management or good
+taste.  The battle had more than once gone against her, but she had
+somehow always contrived to save her baggage train, and her complacent
+gaze could roam over object after object that represented the spoils of
+victory or the salvage of honourable defeat.  The delicious bronze
+Fremiet on the mantelpiece had been the outcome of a Grand Prix
+sweepstake of many years ago; a group of Dresden figures of some
+considerable value had been bequeathed to her by a discreet admirer, who
+had added death to his other kindnesses; another group had been a
+self-bestowed present, purchased in blessed and unfading memory of a
+wonderful nine-days’ bridge winnings at a country-house party.  There
+were old Persian and Bokharan rugs and Worcester tea-services of glowing
+colour, and little treasures of antique silver that each enshrined a
+history or a memory in addition to its own intrinsic value.  It amused
+her at times to think of the bygone craftsmen and artificers who had
+hammered and wrought and woven in far distant countries and ages, to
+produce the wonderful and beautiful things that had come, one way and
+another, into her possession.  Workers in the studios of medieval Italian
+towns and of later Paris, in the bazaars of Baghdad and of Central Asia,
+in old-time English workshops and German factories, in all manner of
+queer hidden corners where craft secrets were jealously guarded, nameless
+unremembered men and men whose names were world-renowned and deathless.
+
+And above all her other treasures, dominating in her estimation every
+other object that the room contained, was the great Van der Meulen that
+had come from her father’s home as part of her wedding dowry.  It fitted
+exactly into the central wall panel above the narrow buhl cabinet, and
+filled exactly its right space in the composition and balance of the
+room.  From wherever you sat it seemed to confront you as the dominating
+feature of its surroundings.  There was a pleasing serenity about the
+great pompous battle scene with its solemn courtly warriors bestriding
+their heavily prancing steeds, grey or skewbald or dun, all gravely in
+earnest, and yet somehow conveying the impression that their campaigns
+were but vast serious picnics arranged in the grand manner.  Francesca
+could not imagine the drawing-room without the crowning complement of the
+stately well-hung picture, just as she could not imagine herself in any
+other setting than this house in Blue Street with its crowded Pantheon of
+cherished household gods.
+
+And herein sprouted one of the thorns that obtruded through the rose-leaf
+damask of what might otherwise have been Francesca’s peace of mind.
+One’s happiness always lies in the future rather than in the past.  With
+due deference to an esteemed lyrical authority one may safely say that a
+sorrow’s crown of sorrow is anticipating unhappier things.  The house in
+Blue Street had been left to her by her old friend Sophie Chetrof, but
+only until such time as her niece Emmeline Chetrof should marry, when it
+was to pass to her as a wedding present.  Emmeline was now seventeen and
+passably good-looking, and four or five years were all that could be
+safely allotted to the span of her continued spinsterhood.  Beyond that
+period lay chaos, the wrenching asunder of Francesca from the sheltering
+habitation that had grown to be her soul.  It is true that in imagination
+she had built herself a bridge across the chasm, a bridge of a single
+span.  The bridge in question was her schoolboy son Comus, now being
+educated somewhere in the southern counties, or rather one should say the
+bridge consisted of the possibility of his eventual marriage with
+Emmeline, in which case Francesca saw herself still reigning, a trifle
+squeezed and incommoded perhaps, but still reigning in the house in Blue
+Street.  The Van der Meulen would still catch its requisite afternoon
+light in its place of honour, the Fremiet and the Dresden and Old
+Worcester would continue undisturbed in their accustomed niches.
+Emmeline could have the Japanese snuggery, where Francesca sometimes
+drank her after-dinner coffee, as a separate drawing-room, where she
+could put her own things.  The details of the bridge structure had all
+been carefully thought out.  Only—it was an unfortunate circumstance that
+Comus should have been the span on which everything balanced.
+
+Francesca’s husband had insisted on giving the boy that strange Pagan
+name, and had not lived long enough to judge as to the appropriateness,
+or otherwise, of its significance.  In seventeen years and some odd
+months Francesca had had ample opportunity for forming an opinion
+concerning her son’s characteristics.  The spirit of mirthfulness which
+one associates with the name certainly ran riot in the boy, but it was a
+twisted wayward sort of mirth of which Francesca herself could seldom see
+the humorous side.  In her brother Henry, who sat eating small cress
+sandwiches as solemnly as though they had been ordained in some
+immemorial Book of Observances, fate had been undisguisedly kind to her.
+He might so easily have married some pretty helpless little woman, and
+lived at Notting Hill Gate, and been the father of a long string of pale,
+clever useless children, who would have had birthdays and the sort of
+illnesses that one is expected to send grapes to, and who would have
+painted fatuous objects in a South Kensington manner as Christmas
+offerings to an aunt whose cubic space for lumber was limited.  Instead
+of committing these unbrotherly actions, which are so frequent in family
+life that they might almost be called brotherly, Henry had married a
+woman who had both money and a sense of repose, and their one child had
+the brilliant virtue of never saying anything which even its parents
+could consider worth repeating.  Then he had gone into Parliament,
+possibly with the idea of making his home life seem less dull; at any
+rate it redeemed his career from insignificance, for no man whose death
+can produce the item “another by-election” on the news posters can be
+wholly a nonentity.  Henry, in short, who might have been an
+embarrassment and a handicap, had chosen rather to be a friend and
+counsellor, at times even an emergency bank balance; Francesca on her
+part, with the partiality which a clever and lazily-inclined woman often
+feels for a reliable fool, not only sought his counsel but frequently
+followed it.  When convenient, moreover, she repaid his loans.
+
+Against this good service on the part of Fate in providing her with Henry
+for a brother, Francesca could well set the plaguy malice of the destiny
+that had given her Comus for a son.  The boy was one of those untameable
+young lords of misrule that frolic and chafe themselves through nursery
+and preparatory and public-school days with the utmost allowance of storm
+and dust and dislocation and the least possible amount of collar-work,
+and come somehow with a laugh through a series of catastrophes that has
+reduced everyone else concerned to tears or Cassandra-like forebodings.
+Sometimes they sober down in after-life and become uninteresting,
+forgetting that they were ever lords of anything; sometimes Fate plays
+royally into their hands, and they do great things in a spacious manner,
+and are thanked by Parliaments and the Press and acclaimed by gala-day
+crowds.  But in most cases their tragedy begins when they leave school
+and turn themselves loose in a world that has grown too civilised and too
+crowded and too empty to have any place for them.  And they are very
+many.
+
+Henry Greech had made an end of biting small sandwiches, and settled down
+like a dust-storm refreshed, to discuss one of the fashionably prevalent
+topics of the moment, the prevention of destitution.
+
+“It is a question that is only being nibbled at, smelt at, one might say,
+at the present moment,” he observed, “but it is one that will have to
+engage our serious attention and consideration before long.  The first
+thing that we shall have to do is to get out of the dilettante and
+academic way of approaching it.  We must collect and assimilate hard
+facts.  It is a subject that ought to appeal to all thinking minds, and
+yet, you know, I find it surprisingly difficult to interest people in
+it.”
+
+Francesca made some monosyllabic response, a sort of sympathetic grunt
+which was meant to indicate that she was, to a certain extent, listening
+and appreciating.  In reality she was reflecting that Henry possibly
+found it difficult to interest people in any topic that he enlarged on.
+His talents lay so thoroughly in the direction of being uninteresting,
+that even as an eye-witness of the massacre of St. Bartholomew he would
+probably have infused a flavour of boredom into his descriptions of the
+event.
+
+“I was speaking down in Leicestershire the other day on this subject,”
+continued Henry, “and I pointed out at some length a thing that few
+people ever stop to consider—”
+
+Francesca went over immediately but decorously to the majority that will
+not stop to consider.
+
+“Did you come across any of the Barnets when you were down there?” she
+interrupted; “Eliza Barnet is rather taken up with all those subjects.”
+
+In the propagandist movements of Sociology, as in other arenas of life
+and struggle, the fiercest competition and rivalry is frequently to be
+found between closely allied types and species.  Eliza Barnet shared many
+of Henry Greech’s political and social views, but she also shared his
+fondness for pointing things out at some length; there had been occasions
+when she had extensively occupied the strictly limited span allotted to
+the platform oratory of a group of speakers of whom Henry Greech had been
+an impatient unit.  He might see eye to eye with her on the leading
+questions of the day, but he persistently wore mental blinkers as far as
+her estimable qualities were concerned, and the mention of her name was a
+skilful lure drawn across the trail of his discourse; if Francesca had to
+listen to his eloquence on any subject she much preferred that it should
+be a disparagement of Eliza Barnet rather than the prevention of
+destitution.
+
+“I’ve no doubt she means well,” said Henry, “but it would be a good thing
+if she could be induced to keep her own personality a little more in the
+background, and not to imagine that she is the necessary mouthpiece of
+all the progressive thought in the countryside.  I fancy Canon Besomley
+must have had her in his mind when he said that some people came into the
+world to shake empires and others to move amendments.”
+
+Francesca laughed with genuine amusement.
+
+“I suppose she is really wonderfully well up in all the subjects she
+talks about,” was her provocative comment.
+
+Henry grew possibly conscious of the fact that he was being drawn out on
+the subject of Eliza Barnet, and he presently turned on to a more
+personal topic.
+
+“From the general air of tranquillity about the house I presume Comus has
+gone back to Thaleby,” he observed.
+
+“Yes,” said Francesca, “he went back yesterday.  Of course, I’m very fond
+of him, but I bear the separation well.  When he’s here it’s rather like
+having a live volcano in the house, a volcano that in its quietest
+moments asks incessant questions and uses strong scent.”
+
+“It is only a temporary respite,” said Henry; “in a year or two he will
+be leaving school, and then what?”
+
+Francesca closed her eyes with the air of one who seeks to shut out a
+distressing vision.  She was not fond of looking intimately at the future
+in the presence of another person, especially when the future was draped
+in doubtfully auspicious colours.
+
+“And then what?” persisted Henry.
+
+“Then I suppose he will be upon my hands.”
+
+“Exactly.”
+
+“Don’t sit there looking judicial.  I’m quite ready to listen to
+suggestions if you’ve any to make.”
+
+“In the case of any ordinary boy,” said Henry, “I might make lots of
+suggestions as to the finding of suitable employment.  From what we know
+of Comus it would be rather a waste of time for either of us to look for
+jobs which he wouldn’t look at when we’d got them for him.”
+
+“He must do something,” said Francesca.
+
+“I know he must; but he never will.  At least, he’ll never stick to
+anything.  The most hopeful thing to do with him will be to marry him to
+an heiress.  That would solve the financial side of his problem.  If he
+had unlimited money at his disposal, he might go into the wilds somewhere
+and shoot big game.  I never know what the big game have done to deserve
+it, but they do help to deflect the destructive energies of some of our
+social misfits.”
+
+Henry, who never killed anything larger or fiercer than a trout, was
+scornfully superior on the subject of big game shooting.
+
+Francesca brightened at the matrimonial suggestion.  “I don’t know about
+an heiress,” she said reflectively.  “There’s Emmeline Chetrof of course.
+One could hardly call her an heiress, but she’s got a comfortable little
+income of her own and I suppose something more will come to her from her
+grandmother.  Then, of course, you know this house goes to her when she
+marries.”
+
+“That would be very convenient,” said Henry, probably following a line of
+thought that his sister had trodden many hundreds of times before him.
+“Do she and Comus hit it off at all well together?”
+
+“Oh, well enough in boy and girl fashion,” said Francesca.  “I must
+arrange for them to see more of each other in future.  By the way, that
+little brother of hers that she dotes on, Lancelot, goes to Thaleby this
+term.  I’ll write and tell Comus to be specially kind to him; that will
+be a sure way to Emmeline’s heart.  Comus has been made a prefect, you
+know.  Heaven knows why.”
+
+“It can only be for prominence in games,” sniffed Henry; “I think we may
+safely leave work and conduct out of the question.”
+
+Comus was not a favourite with his uncle.
+
+Francesca had turned to her writing cabinet and was hastily scribbling a
+letter to her son in which the delicate health, timid disposition and
+other inevitable attributes of the new boy were brought to his notice,
+and commanded to his care.  When she had sealed and stamped the envelope
+Henry uttered a belated caution.
+
+“Perhaps on the whole it would be wiser to say nothing about the boy to
+Comus.  He doesn’t always respond to directions you know.”
+
+Francesca did know, and already was more than half of her brother’s
+opinion; but the woman who can sacrifice a clean unspoiled penny stamp is
+probably yet unborn.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+LANCELOT CHETROF stood at the end of a long bare passage, restlessly
+consulting his watch and fervently wishing himself half an hour older
+with a certain painful experience already registered in the past;
+unfortunately it still belonged to the future, and what was still more
+horrible, to the immediate future.  Like many boys new to a school he had
+cultivated an unhealthy passion for obeying rules and requirements, and
+his zeal in this direction had proved his undoing.  In his hurry to be
+doing two or three estimable things at once he had omitted to study the
+notice-board in more than a perfunctory fashion and had thereby missed a
+football practice specially ordained for newly-joined boys.  His fellow
+juniors of a term’s longer standing had graphically enlightened him as to
+the inevitable consequences of his lapse; the dread which attaches to the
+unknown was, at any rate, deleted from his approaching doom, though at
+the moment he felt scarcely grateful for the knowledge placed at his
+disposal with such lavish solicitude.
+
+“You’ll get six of the very best, over the back of a chair,” said one.
+
+“They’ll draw a chalk line across you, of course you know,” said another.
+
+“A chalk line?”
+
+“Rather.  So that every cut can be aimed exactly at the same spot.  It
+hurts much more that way.”
+
+Lancelot tried to nourish a wan hope that there might be an element of
+exaggeration in this uncomfortably realistic description.
+
+Meanwhile in the prefects’ room at the other end of the passage, Comus
+Bassington and a fellow prefect sat also waiting on time, but in a mood
+of far more pleasurable expectancy.  Comus was one of the most junior of
+the prefect caste, but by no means the least well-known, and outside the
+masters’ common-room he enjoyed a certain fitful popularity, or at any
+rate admiration.  At football he was too erratic to be a really brilliant
+player, but he tackled as if the act of bringing his man headlong to the
+ground was in itself a sensuous pleasure, and his weird swear-words
+whenever he got hurt were eagerly treasured by those who were fortunate
+enough to hear them.  At athletics in general he was a showy performer,
+and although new to the functions of a prefect he had already established
+a reputation as an effective and artistic caner.  In appearance he
+exactly fitted his fanciful Pagan name.  His large green-grey eyes seemed
+for ever asparkle with goblin mischief and the joy of revelry, and the
+curved lips might have been those of some wickedly-laughing faun; one
+almost expected to see embryo horns fretting the smoothness of his sleek
+dark hair.  The chin was firm, but one looked in vain for a redeeming
+touch of ill-temper in the handsome, half-mocking, half-petulant face.
+With a strain of sourness in him Comus might have been leavened into
+something creative and masterful; fate had fashioned him with a certain
+whimsical charm, and left him all unequipped for the greater purposes of
+life.  Perhaps no one would have called him a lovable character, but in
+many respects he was adorable; in all respects he was certainly damned.
+
+Rutley, his companion of the moment, sat watching him and wondering, from
+the depths of a very ordinary brain, whether he liked or hated him; it
+was easy to do either.
+
+“It’s not really your turn to cane,” he said.
+
+“I know it’s not,” said Comus, fingering a very serviceable-looking cane
+as lovingly as a pious violinist might handle his Strad.  “I gave Greyson
+some mint-chocolate to let me toss whether I caned or him, and I won.  He
+was rather decent over it and let me have half the chocolate back.”
+
+The droll lightheartedness which won Comus Bassington such measure of
+popularity as he enjoyed among his fellows did not materially help to
+endear him to the succession of masters with whom he came in contact
+during the course of his schooldays.  He amused and interested such of
+them as had the saving grace of humour at their disposal, but if they
+sighed when he passed from their immediate responsibility it was a sigh
+of relief rather than of regret.  The more enlightened and experienced of
+them realised that he was something outside the scope of the things that
+they were called upon to deal with.  A man who has been trained to cope
+with storms, to foresee their coming, and to minimise their consequences,
+may be pardoned if he feels a certain reluctance to measure himself
+against a tornado.
+
+Men of more limited outlook and with a correspondingly larger belief in
+their own powers were ready to tackle the tornado had time permitted.
+
+“I think I could tame young Bassington if I had your opportunities,” a
+form-master once remarked to a colleague whose House had the embarrassing
+distinction of numbering Comus among its inmates.
+
+“Heaven forbid that I should try,” replied the housemaster.
+
+“But why?” asked the reformer.
+
+“Because Nature hates any interference with her own arrangements, and if
+you start in to tame the obviously untameable you are taking a fearful
+responsibility on yourself.”
+
+“Nonsense; boys are Nature’s raw material.”
+
+“Millions of boys are.  There are just a few, and Bassington is one of
+them, who are Nature’s highly finished product when they are in the
+schoolboy stage, and we, who are supposed to be moulding raw material,
+are quite helpless when we come in contact with them.”
+
+“But what happens to them when they grow up?”
+
+“They never do grow up,” said the housemaster; “that is their tragedy.
+Bassington will certainly never grow out of his present stage.”
+
+“Now you are talking in the language of Peter Pan,” said the form-master.
+
+“I am not thinking in the manner of Peter Pan,” said the other.  “With
+all reverence for the author of that masterpiece I should say he had a
+wonderful and tender insight into the child mind and knew nothing
+whatever about boys.  To make only one criticism on that particular work,
+can you imagine a lot of British boys, or boys of any country that one
+knows of, who would stay contentedly playing children’s games in an
+underground cave when there were wolves and pirates and Red Indians to be
+had for the asking on the other side of the trap door?”
+
+The form-master laughed.  “You evidently think that the ‘Boy who would
+not grow up’ must have been written by a ‘grown-up who could never have
+been a boy.’  Perhaps that is the meaning of the ‘Never-never Land.’  I
+daresay you’re right in your criticism, but I don’t agree with you about
+Bassington.  He’s a handful to deal with, as anyone knows who has come in
+contact with him, but if one’s hands weren’t full with a thousand and one
+other things I hold to my opinion that he could be tamed.”
+
+And he went his way, having maintained a form-master’s inalienable
+privilege of being in the right.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+In the prefects’ room, Comus busied himself with the exact position of a
+chair planted out in the middle of the floor.
+
+“I think everything’s ready,” he said.
+
+Rutley glanced at the clock with the air of a Roman elegant in the
+Circus, languidly awaiting the introduction of an expected Christian to
+an expectant tiger.
+
+“The kid is due in two minutes,” he said.
+
+“He’d jolly well better not be late,” said Comus.
+
+Comus had gone through the mill of many scorching castigations in his
+earlier school days, and was able to appreciate to the last ounce the
+panic that must be now possessing his foredoomed victim, probably at this
+moment hovering miserably outside the door.  After all, that was part of
+the fun of the thing, and most things have their amusing side if one
+knows where to look for it.
+
+There was a knock at the door, and Lancelot entered in response to a
+hearty friendly summons to “come in.”
+
+“I’ve come to be caned,” he said breathlessly; adding by way of
+identification, “my name’s Chetrof.”
+
+“That’s quite bad enough in itself,” said Comus, “but there is probably
+worse to follow.  You are evidently keeping something back from us.”
+
+“I missed a footer practice,” said Lancelot
+
+“Six,” said Comus briefly, picking up his cane.
+
+“I didn’t see the notice on the board,” hazarded Lancelot as a forlorn
+hope.
+
+“We are always pleased to listen to excuses, and our charge is two extra
+cuts.  That will be eight.  Get over.”
+
+And Comus indicated the chair that stood in sinister isolation in the
+middle of the room.  Never had an article of furniture seemed more
+hateful in Lancelot’s eyes.  Comus could well remember the time when a
+chair stuck in the middle of a room had seemed to him the most horrible
+of manufactured things.
+
+“Lend me a piece of chalk,” he said to his brother prefect.
+
+Lancelot ruefully recognised the truth of the chalk-line story.
+
+Comus drew the desired line with an anxious exactitude which he would
+have scorned to apply to a diagram of Euclid or a map of the
+Russo-Persian frontier.
+
+“Bend a little more forward,” he said to the victim, “and much tighter.
+Don’t trouble to look pleasant, because I can’t see your face anyway.  It
+may sound unorthodox to say so, but this is going to hurt you much more
+than it will hurt me.”
+
+There was a carefully measured pause, and then Lancelot was made vividly
+aware of what a good cane can be made to do in really efficient hands.
+At the second cut he projected himself hurriedly off the chair.
+
+“Now I’ve lost count,” said Comus; “we shall have to begin all over
+again.  Kindly get back into the same position.  If you get down again
+before I’ve finished Rutley will hold you over and you’ll get a dozen.”
+
+Lancelot got back on to the chair, and was re-arranged to the taste of
+his executioner.  He stayed there somehow or other while Comus made eight
+accurate and agonisingly effective shots at the chalk line.
+
+“By the way,” he said to his gasping and gulping victim when the
+infliction was over, “you said Chetrof, didn’t you?  I believe I’ve been
+asked to be kind to you.  As a beginning you can clean out my study this
+afternoon.  Be awfully careful how you dust the old china.  If you break
+any don’t come and tell me but just go and drown yourself somewhere; it
+will save you from a worse fate.”
+
+“I don’t know where your study is,” said Lancelot between his chokes.
+
+“You’d better find it or I shall have to beat you, really hard this time.
+Here, you’d better keep this chalk in your pocket, it’s sure to come in
+handy later on.  Don’t stop to thank me for all I’ve done, it only
+embarrasses me.”
+
+As Comus hadn’t got a study Lancelot spent a feverish half-hour in
+looking for it, incidentally missing another footer practice.
+
+“Everything is very jolly here,” wrote Lancelot to his sister Emmeline.
+“The prefects can give you an awful hot time if they like, but most of
+them are rather decent.  Some are Beasts.  Bassington is a prefect though
+only a junior one.  He is the Limit as Beasts go.  At least I think so.”
+
+Schoolboy reticence went no further, but Emmeline filled in the gaps for
+herself with the lavish splendour of feminine imagination.  Francesca’s
+bridge went crashing into the abyss.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+ON the evening of a certain November day, two years after the events
+heretofore chronicled, Francesca Bassington steered her way through the
+crowd that filled the rooms of her friend Serena Golackly, bestowing nods
+of vague recognition as she went, but with eyes that were obviously
+intent on focussing one particular figure.  Parliament had pulled its
+energies together for an Autumn Session, and both political Parties were
+fairly well represented in the throng.  Serena had a harmless way of
+inviting a number of more or less public men and women to her house, and
+hoping that if you left them together long enough they would constitute a
+_salon_.  In pursuance of the same instinct she planted the flower
+borders at her week-end cottage retreat in Surrey with a large mixture of
+bulbs, and called the result a Dutch garden.  Unfortunately, though you
+may bring brilliant talkers into your home, you cannot always make them
+talk brilliantly, or even talk at all; what is worse you cannot restrict
+the output of those starling-voiced dullards who seem to have, on all
+subjects, so much to say that was well worth leaving unsaid.  One group
+that Francesca passed was discussing a Spanish painter, who was
+forty-three, and had painted thousands of square yards of canvas in his
+time, but of whom no one in London had heard till a few months ago; now
+the starling-voices seemed determined that one should hear of very little
+else.  Three women knew how his name was pronounced, another always felt
+that she must go into a forest and pray whenever she saw his pictures,
+another had noticed that there were always pomegranates in his later
+compositions, and a man with an indefensible collar knew what the
+pomegranates “meant.”  “What I think so splendid about him,” said a stout
+lady in a loud challenging voice, “is the way he defies all the
+conventions of art while retaining all that the conventions stand for.”
+“Ah, but have you noticed—” put in the man with the atrocious collar, and
+Francesca pushed desperately on, wondering dimly as she went, what people
+found so unsupportable in the affliction of deafness.  Her progress was
+impeded for a moment by a couple engaged in earnest and voluble
+discussion of some smouldering question of the day; a thin spectacled
+young man with the receding forehead that so often denotes advanced
+opinions, was talking to a spectacled young woman with a similar type of
+forehead, and exceedingly untidy hair.  It was her ambition in life to be
+taken for a Russian girl-student, and she had spent weeks of patient
+research in trying to find out exactly where you put the tea-leaves in a
+samovar.  She had once been introduced to a young Jewess from Odessa, who
+had died of pneumonia the following week; the experience, slight as it
+was, constituted the spectacled young lady an authority on all things
+Russian in the eyes of her immediate set.
+
+“Talk is helpful, talk is needful,” the young man was saying, “but what
+we have got to do is to lift the subject out of the furrow of
+indisciplined talk and place it on the threshing-floor of practical
+discussion.”
+
+The young woman took advantage of the rhetorical full-stop to dash in
+with the remark which was already marshalled on the tip of her tongue.
+
+“In emancipating the serfs of poverty we must be careful to avoid the
+mistakes which Russian bureaucracy stumbled into when liberating the
+serfs of the soil.”
+
+She paused in her turn for the sake of declamatory effect, but recovered
+her breath quickly enough to start afresh on level terms with the young
+man, who had jumped into the stride of his next sentence.
+
+“They got off to a good start that time,” said Francesca to herself; “I
+suppose it’s the Prevention of Destitution they’re hammering at.  What on
+earth would become of these dear good people if anyone started a crusade
+for the prevention of mediocrity?”
+
+Midway through one of the smaller rooms, still questing for an elusive
+presence, she caught sight of someone that she knew, and the shadow of a
+frown passed across her face.  The object of her faintly signalled
+displeasure was Courtenay Youghal, a political spur-winner who seemed
+absurdly youthful to a generation that had never heard of Pitt.  It was
+Youghal’s ambition—or perhaps his hobby—to infuse into the greyness of
+modern political life some of the colour of Disraelian dandyism, tempered
+with the correctness of Anglo-Saxon taste, and supplemented by the
+flashes of wit that were inherent from the Celtic strain in him.  His
+success was only a half-measure.  The public missed in him that touch of
+blatancy which it looks for in its rising public men; the decorative
+smoothness of his chestnut-golden hair, and the lively sparkle of his
+epigrams were counted to him for good, but the restrained sumptuousness
+of his waistcoats and cravats were as wasted efforts.  If he had
+habitually smoked cigarettes in a pink coral mouthpiece, or worn spats of
+Mackenzie tartan, the great heart of the voting-man, and the gush of the
+paragraph-makers might have been unreservedly his.  The art of public
+life consists to a great extent of knowing exactly where to stop and
+going a bit further.
+
+It was not Youghal’s lack of political sagacity that had brought the
+momentary look of disapproval into Francesca’s face.  The fact was that
+Comus, who had left off being a schoolboy and was now a social problem,
+had lately enrolled himself among the young politician’s associates and
+admirers, and as the boy knew and cared nothing about politics, and
+merely copied Youghal’s waistcoats, and, less successfully, his
+conversation, Francesca felt herself justified in deploring the intimacy.
+To a woman who dressed well on comparatively nothing a year it was an
+anxious experience to have a son who dressed sumptuously on absolutely
+nothing.
+
+The cloud that had passed over her face when she caught sight of the
+offending Youghal was presently succeeded by a smile of gratified
+achievement, as she encountered a bow of recognition and welcome from a
+portly middle-aged gentleman, who seemed genuinely anxious to include her
+in the rather meagre group that he had gathered about him.
+
+“We were just talking about my new charge,” he observed genially,
+including in the “we” his somewhat depressed-looking listeners, who in
+all human probability had done none of the talking.  “I was just telling
+them, and you may be interested to hear this—”
+
+Francesca, with Spartan stoicism, continued to wear an ingratiating
+smile, though the character of the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear and
+will not hearken, seemed to her at that moment a beautiful one.
+
+Sir Julian Jull had been a member of a House of Commons distinguished for
+its high standard of well-informed mediocrity, and had harmonised so
+thoroughly with his surroundings that the most attentive observer of
+Parliamentary proceedings could scarcely have told even on which side of
+the House he sat.  A baronetcy bestowed on him by the Party in power had
+at least removed that doubt; some weeks later he had been made Governor
+of some West Indian dependency, whether as a reward for having accepted
+the baronetcy, or as an application of a theory that West Indian islands
+get the Governors they deserve, it would have been hard to say.  To Sir
+Julian the appointment was, doubtless, one of some importance; during the
+span of his Governorship the island might possibly be visited by a member
+of the Royal Family, or at the least by an earthquake, and in either case
+his name would get into the papers.  To the public the matter was one of
+absolute indifference; “who is he and where is it?” would have correctly
+epitomised the sum total of general information on the personal and
+geographical aspects of the case.
+
+Francesca, however, from the moment she had heard of the likelihood of
+the appointment, had taken a deep and lively interest in Sir Julian.  As
+a Member of Parliament he had not filled any very pressing social want in
+her life, and on the rare occasions when she took tea on the Terrace of
+the House she was wont to lapse into rapt contemplation of St. Thomas’s
+Hospital whenever she saw him within bowing distance.  But as Governor of
+an island he would, of course, want a private secretary, and as a friend
+and colleague of Henry Greech, to whom he was indebted for many little
+acts of political support (they had once jointly drafted an amendment
+which had been ruled out of order), what was more natural and proper than
+that he should let his choice fall on Henry’s nephew Comus?  While
+privately doubting whether the boy would make the sort of secretary that
+any public man would esteem as a treasure, Henry was thoroughly in
+agreement with Francesca as to the excellence and desirability of an
+arrangement which would transplant that troublesome’ young animal from
+the too restricted and conspicuous area that centres in the parish of St.
+James’s to some misty corner of the British dominion overseas.  Brother
+and sister had conspired to give an elaborate and at the same time cosy
+little luncheon to Sir Julian on the very day that his appointment was
+officially announced, and the question of the secretaryship had been
+mooted and sedulously fostered as occasion permitted, until all that was
+now needed to clinch the matter was a formal interview between His
+Excellency and Comus.  The boy had from the first shewn very little
+gratification at the prospect of his deportation.  To live on a remote
+shark-girt island, as he expressed it, with the Jull family as his chief
+social mainstay, and Sir Julian’s conversation as a daily item of his
+existence, did not inspire him with the same degree of enthusiasm as was
+displayed by his mother and uncle, who, after all, were not making the
+experiment.  Even the necessity for an entirely new outfit did not appeal
+to his imagination with the force that might have been expected.  But,
+however lukewarm his adhesion to the project might be, Francesca and her
+brother were clearly determined that no lack of deft persistence on their
+part should endanger its success.  It was for the purpose of reminding
+Sir Julian of his promise to meet Comus at lunch on the following day,
+and definitely settle the matter of the secretaryship that Francesca was
+now enduring the ordeal of a long harangue on the value of the West
+Indian group as an Imperial asset.  Other listeners dexterously detached
+themselves one by one, but Francesca’s patience outlasted even Sir
+Julian’s flow of commonplaces, and her devotion was duly rewarded by a
+renewed acknowledgment of the lunch engagement and its purpose.  She
+pushed her way back through the throng of starling-voiced chatterers
+fortified by a sense of well-earned victory.  Dear Serena’s absurd
+_salons_ served some good purpose after all.
+
+Francesca was not an early riser and her breakfast was only just
+beginning to mobilise on the breakfast-table next morning when a copy of
+_The Times_, sent by special messenger from her brother’s house, was
+brought up to her room.  A heavy margin of blue pencilling drew her
+attention to a prominently-printed letter which bore the ironical
+heading: “Julian Jull, Proconsul.”  The matter of the letter was a cruel
+dis-interment of some fatuous and forgotten speeches made by Sir Julian
+to his constituents not many years ago, in which the value of some of our
+Colonial possessions, particularly certain West Indian islands, was
+decried in a medley of pomposity, ignorance and amazingly cheap humour.
+The extracts given sounded weak and foolish enough, taken by themselves,
+but the writer of the letter had interlarded them with comments of his
+own, which sparkled with an ironical brilliance that was Cervantes-like
+in its polished cruelty.  Remembering her ordeal of the previous evening
+Francesca permitted herself a certain feeling of amusement as she read
+the merciless stabs inflicted on the newly-appointed Governor; then she
+came to the signature at the foot of the letter, and the laughter died
+out of her eyes.  “Comus Bassington” stared at her from above a thick
+layer of blue pencil lines marked by Henry Greech’s shaking hand.
+
+Comus could no more have devised such a letter than he could have written
+an Episcopal charge to the clergy of any given diocese.  It was obviously
+the work of Courtenay Youghal, and Comus, for a palpable purpose of his
+own, had wheedled him into foregoing for once the pride of authorship in
+a clever piece of political raillery, and letting his young friend stand
+sponsor instead.  It was a daring stroke, and there could be no question
+as to its success; the secretaryship and the distant shark-girt island
+faded away into the horizon of impossible things.  Francesca, forgetting
+the golden rule of strategy which enjoins a careful choosing of ground
+and opportunity before entering on hostilities, made straight for the
+bathroom door, behind which a lively din of splashing betokened that
+Comus had at least begun his toilet.
+
+“You wicked boy, what have you done?” she cried, reproachfully.
+
+“Me washee,” came a cheerful shout; “me washee from the neck all the way
+down to the merrythought, and now washee down from the merrythought to—”
+
+“You have ruined your future.  _The Times_ has printed that miserable
+letter with your signature.”
+
+A loud squeal of joy came from the bath.  “Oh, Mummy!  Let me see!”
+
+There were sounds as of a sprawling dripping body clambering hastily out
+of the bath.  Francesca fled.  One cannot effectively scold a moist
+nineteen-year old boy clad only in a bath-towel and a cloud of steam.
+
+Another messenger arrived before Francesca’s breakfast was over.  This
+one brought a letter from Sir Julian Jull, excusing himself from
+fulfilment of the luncheon engagement.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+FRANCESCA prided herself on being able to see things from other people’s
+points of view, which meant, as it usually does, that she could see her
+own point of view from various aspects.  As regards Comus, whose doings
+and non-doings bulked largely in her thoughts at the present moment, she
+had mapped out in her mind so clearly what his outlook in life ought to
+be, that she was peculiarly unfitted to understand the drift of his
+feelings or the impulses that governed them.  Fate had endowed her with a
+son; in limiting the endowment to a solitary offspring Fate had certainly
+shown a moderation which Francesca was perfectly willing to acknowledge
+and be thankful for; but then, as she pointed out to a certain complacent
+friend of hers who cheerfully sustained an endowment of half-a-dozen male
+offsprings and a girl or two, her one child was Comus.  Moderation in
+numbers was more than counterbalanced in his case by extravagance in
+characteristics.
+
+Francesca mentally compared her son with hundreds of other young men whom
+she saw around her, steadily, and no doubt happily, engaged in the
+process of transforming themselves from nice boys into useful citizens.
+Most of them had occupations, or were industriously engaged in qualifying
+for such; in their leisure moments they smoked reasonably-priced
+cigarettes, went to the cheaper seats at music-halls, watched an
+occasional cricket match at Lord’s with apparent interest, saw most of
+the world’s spectacular events through the medium of the cinematograph,
+and were wont to exchange at parting seemingly superfluous injunctions to
+“be good.”  The whole of Bond Street and many of the tributary
+thoroughfares of Piccadilly might have been swept off the face of modern
+London without in any way interfering with the supply of their daily
+wants.  They were doubtless dull as acquaintances, but as sons they would
+have been eminently restful.  With a growing sense of irritation
+Francesca compared these deserving young men with her own intractable
+offspring, and wondered why Fate should have singled her out to be the
+parent of such a vexatious variant from a comfortable and desirable type.
+As far as remunerative achievement was concerned, Comus copied the
+insouciance of the field lily with a dangerous fidelity.  Like his mother
+he looked round with wistful irritation at the example afforded by
+contemporary youth, but he concentrated his attention exclusively on the
+richer circles of his acquaintance, young men who bought cars and polo
+ponies as unconcernedly as he might purchase a carnation for his
+buttonhole, and went for trips to Cairo or the Tigris valley with less
+difficulty and finance-stretching than he encountered in contriving a
+week-end at Brighton.
+
+Gaiety and good-looks had carried Comus successfully and, on the whole,
+pleasantly, through schooldays and a recurring succession of holidays;
+the same desirable assets were still at his service to advance him along
+his road, but it was a disconcerting experience to find that they could
+not be relied on to go all distances at all times.  In an animal world,
+and a fiercely competitive animal world at that, something more was
+needed than the decorative _abandon_ of the field lily, and it was just
+that something more which Comus seemed unable or unwilling to provide on
+his own account; it was just the lack of that something more which left
+him sulking with Fate over the numerous breakdowns and stumbling-blocks
+that held him up on what he expected to be a triumphal or, at any rate,
+unimpeded progress.
+
+Francesca was, in her own way, fonder of Comus than of anyone else in the
+world, and if he had been browning his skin somewhere east of Suez she
+would probably have kissed his photograph with genuine fervour every
+night before going to bed; the appearance of a cholera scare or rumour of
+native rising in the columns of her daily news-sheet would have caused
+her a flutter of anxiety, and she would have mentally likened herself to
+a Spartan mother sacrificing her best-beloved on the altar of State
+necessities.  But with the best-beloved installed under her roof,
+occupying an unreasonable amount of cubic space, and demanding daily
+sacrifices instead of providing the raw material for one, her feelings
+were tinged with irritation rather than affection.  She might have
+forgiven Comus generously for misdeeds of some gravity committed in
+another continent, but she could never overlook the fact that out of a
+dish of five plovers’ eggs he was certain to take three.  The absent may
+be always wrong, but they are seldom in a position to be inconsiderate.
+
+Thus a wall of ice had grown up gradually between mother and son, a
+barrier across which they could hold converse, but which gave a wintry
+chill even to the sparkle of their lightest words.  The boy had the gift
+of being irresistibly amusing when he chose to exert himself in that
+direction, and after a long series of moody or jangling meal-sittings he
+would break forth into a torrential flow of small talk, scandal and
+malicious anecdote, true or more generally invented, to which Francesca
+listened with a relish and appreciation, that was all the more flattering
+from being so unwillingly bestowed.
+
+“If you chose your friends from a rather more reputable set you would be
+doubtless less amusing, but there would be compensating advantages.”
+
+Francesca snapped the remark out at lunch one day when she had been
+betrayed into a broader smile than she considered the circumstances of
+her attitude towards Comus warranted.
+
+“I’m going to move in quite decent society to-night,” replied Comus with
+a pleased chuckle; “I’m going to meet you and Uncle Henry and heaps of
+nice dull God-fearing people at dinner.”
+
+Francesca gave a little gasp of surprise and annoyance.
+
+“You don’t mean to say Caroline has asked you to dinner to-night?” she
+said; “and of course without telling me.  How exceedingly like her!”
+
+Lady Caroline Benaresq had reached that age when you can say and do what
+you like in defiance of people’s most sensitive feelings and most
+cherished antipathies.  Not that she had waited to attain her present age
+before pursuing that line of conduct; she came of a family whose
+individual members went through life, from the nursery to the grave, with
+as much tact and consideration as a cactus-hedge might show in going
+through a crowded bathing tent.  It was a compensating mercy that they
+disagreed rather more among themselves than they did with the outside
+world; every known variety and shade of religion and politics had been
+pressed into the family service to avoid the possibility of any agreement
+on the larger essentials of life, and such unlooked-for happenings as the
+Home Rule schism, the Tariff-Reform upheaval and the Suffragette crusade
+were thankfully seized on as furnishing occasion for further differences
+and sub-divisions.  Lady Caroline’s favourite scheme of entertaining was
+to bring jarring and antagonistic elements into close contact and play
+them remorselessly one against the other.  “One gets much better results
+under those circumstances” she used to observe, “than by asking people
+who wish to meet each other.  Few people talk as brilliantly to impress a
+friend as they do to depress an enemy.”
+
+She admitted that her theory broke down rather badly if you applied it to
+Parliamentary debates.  At her own dinner table its success was usually
+triumphantly vindicated.
+
+“Who else is to be there?” Francesca asked, with some pardonable
+misgiving.
+
+“Courtenay Youghal.  He’ll probably sit next to you, so you’d better
+think out a lot of annihilating remarks in readiness.  And Elaine de
+Frey.”
+
+“I don’t think I’ve heard of her.  Who is she?”
+
+“Nobody in particular, but rather nice-looking in a solemn sort of way,
+and almost indecently rich.”
+
+“Marry her” was the advice which sprang to Francesca’s lips, but she
+choked it back with a salted almond, having a rare perception of the fact
+that words are sometimes given to us to defeat our purposes.
+
+“Caroline has probably marked her down for Toby or one of the
+grand-nephews,” she said, carelessly; “a little money would be rather
+useful in that quarter, I imagine.”
+
+Comus tucked in his underlip with just the shade of pugnacity that she
+wanted to see.
+
+An advantageous marriage was so obviously the most sensible course for
+him to embark on that she scarcely dared to hope that he would seriously
+entertain it; yet there was just a chance that if he got as far as the
+flirtation stage with an attractive (and attracted) girl who was also an
+heiress, the sheer perversity of his nature might carry him on to more
+definite courtship, if only from the desire to thrust other more
+genuinely enamoured suitors into the background.  It was a forlorn hope;
+so forlorn that the idea even crossed her mind of throwing herself on the
+mercy of her _bête noire_, Courtenay Youghal, and trying to enlist the
+influence which he seemed to possess over Comus for the purpose of
+furthering her hurriedly conceived project.  Anyhow, the dinner promised
+to be more interesting than she had originally anticipated.
+
+Lady Caroline was a professed Socialist in politics, chiefly, it was
+believed, because she was thus enabled to disagree with most of the
+Liberals and Conservatives, and all the Socialists of the day.  She did
+not permit her Socialism, however, to penetrate below stairs; her cook
+and butler had every encouragement to be Individualists.  Francesca, who
+was a keen and intelligent food critic, harboured no misgivings as to her
+hostess’s kitchen and cellar departments; some of the human side-dishes
+at the feast gave her more ground for uneasiness.  Courtenay Youghal, for
+instance, would probably be brilliantly silent; her brother Henry would
+almost certainly be the reverse.
+
+The dinner party was a large one and Francesca arrived late with little
+time to take preliminary stock of the guests; a card with the name, “Miss
+de Frey,” immediately opposite her own place at the other side of the
+table, indicated, however, the whereabouts of the heiress.  It was
+characteristic of Francesca that she first carefully read the menu from
+end to end, and then indulged in an equally careful though less open
+scrutiny of the girl who sat opposite her, the girl who was nobody in
+particular, but whose income was everything that could be desired.  She
+was pretty in a restrained nut-brown fashion, and had a look of grave
+reflective calm that probably masked a speculative unsettled temperament.
+Her pose, if one wished to be critical, was just a little too elaborately
+careless.  She wore some excellently set rubies with that indefinable air
+of having more at home that is so difficult to improvise.  Francesca was
+distinctly pleased with her survey.
+
+“You seem interested in your _vis-à-vis_,” said Courtenay Youghal.
+
+“I almost think I’ve seen her before,” said Francesca; “her face seems
+familiar to me.”
+
+“The narrow gallery at the Louvre; attributed to Leonardo da Vinci,” said
+Youghal.
+
+“Of course,” said Francesca, her feelings divided between satisfaction at
+capturing an elusive impression and annoyance that Youghal should have
+been her helper.  A stronger tinge of annoyance possessed her when she
+heard the voice of Henry Greech raised in painful prominence at Lady
+Caroline’s end of the table.
+
+“I called on the Trudhams yesterday,” he announced; “it was their Silver
+Wedding, you know, at least the day before was.  Such lots of silver
+presents, quite a show.  Of course there were a great many duplicates,
+but still, very nice to have.  I think they were very pleased to get so
+many.”
+
+“We must not grudge them their show of presents after their twenty-five
+years of married life,” said Lady Caroline, gently; “it is the silver
+lining to their cloud.”
+
+A third of the guests present were related to the Trudhams.
+
+“Lady Caroline is beginning well,” murmured Courtenay Youghal.
+
+“I should hardly call twenty-five years of married life a cloud,” said
+Henry Greech, lamely.
+
+“Don’t let’s talk about married life,” said a tall handsome woman, who
+looked like some modern painter’s conception of the goddess Bellona;
+“it’s my misfortune to write eternally about husbands and wives and their
+variants.  My public expects it of me.  I do so envy journalists who can
+write about plagues and strikes and Anarchist plots, and other pleasing
+things, instead of being tied down to one stale old topic.”
+
+“Who is that woman and what has she written?” Francesca asked Youghal;
+she dimly remembered having seen her at one of Serena Golackly’s
+gatherings, surrounded by a little Court of admirers.
+
+“I forget her name; she has a villa at San Remo or Mentone, or somewhere
+where one does have villas, and plays an extraordinary good game of
+bridge.  Also she has the reputation, rather rare in your sex, of being a
+wonderfully sound judge of wine.”
+
+“But what has she written?”
+
+“Oh, several novels of the thinnish ice order.  Her last one, ‘The Woman
+who wished it was Wednesday,’ has been banned at all the libraries.  I
+expect you’ve read it.”
+
+“I don’t see why you should think so,” said Francesca, coldly.
+
+“Only because Comus lent me your copy yesterday,” said Youghal.  He threw
+back his handsome head and gave her a sidelong glance of quizzical
+amusement.  He knew that she hated his intimacy with Comus, and he was
+secretly rather proud of his influence over the boy, shallow and negative
+though he knew it to be.  It had been, on his part, an unsought intimacy,
+and it would probably fall to pieces the moment he tried seriously to
+take up the _rôle_ of mentor.  The fact that Comus’s mother openly
+disapproved of the friendship gave it perhaps its chief interest in the
+young politician’s eyes.
+
+Francesca turned her attention to her brother’s end of the table.  Henry
+Greech had willingly availed himself of the invitation to leave the
+subject of married life, and had launched forthwith into the equally
+well-worn theme of current politics.  He was not a person who was in much
+demand for public meetings, and the House showed no great impatience to
+hear his views on the topics of the moment; its impatience, indeed, was
+manifested rather in the opposite direction.  Hence he was prone to
+unburden himself of accumulated political wisdom as occasion presented
+itself—sometimes, indeed, to assume an occasion that was hardly visible
+to the naked intelligence.
+
+“Our opponents are engaged in a hopelessly uphill struggle, and they know
+it,” he chirruped, defiantly; “they’ve become possessed, like the
+Gadarene swine, with a whole legion of—”
+
+“Surely the Gadarene swine went downhill,” put in Lady Caroline in a
+gently enquiring voice.
+
+Henry Greech hastily abandoned simile and fell back on platitude and the
+safer kinds of fact.
+
+Francesca did not regard her brother’s views on statecraft either in the
+light of gospel or revelation; as Comus once remarked, they more usually
+suggested exodus.  In the present instance she found distraction in a
+renewed scrutiny of the girl opposite her, who seemed to be only
+moderately interested in the conversational efforts of the diners on
+either side of her.  Comus who was looking and talking his best, was
+sitting at the further end of the table, and Francesca was quick to
+notice in which direction the girl’s glances were continually straying.
+Once or twice the eyes of the young people met and a swift flush of
+pleasure and a half-smile that spoke of good understanding came to the
+heiress’s face.  It did not need the gift of the traditional intuition of
+her sex to enable Francesca to guess that the girl with the desirable
+banking account was already considerably attracted by the lively young
+Pagan who had, when he cared to practise it, such an art of winning
+admiration.  For the first time for many, many months Francesca saw her
+son’s prospects in a rose-coloured setting, and she began, unconsciously,
+to wonder exactly how much wealth was summed up in the expressive label
+“almost indecently rich.”  A wife with a really large fortune and a
+correspondingly big dower of character and ambition, might, perhaps,
+succeed in turning Comus’s latent energies into a groove which would
+provide him, if not with a career, at least with an occupation, and the
+young serious face opposite looked as if its owner lacked neither
+character or ambition.  Francesca’s speculations took a more personal
+turn.  Out of the well-filled coffers with which her imagination was
+toying, an inconsiderable sum might eventually be devoted to the leasing,
+or even perhaps the purchase of, the house in Blue Street when the
+present convenient arrangement should have come to an end, and Francesca
+and the Van der Meulen would not be obliged to seek fresh quarters.
+
+A woman’s voice, talking in a discreet undertone on the other side of
+Courtenay Youghal, broke in on her bridge-building.
+
+“Tons of money and really very presentable.  Just the wife for a rising
+young politician.  Go in and win her before she’s snapped up by some
+fortune hunter.”
+
+Youghal and his instructress in worldly wisdom were looking straight
+across the table at the Leonardo da Vinci girl with the grave reflective
+eyes and the over-emphasised air of repose.  Francesca felt a quick throb
+of anger against her match-making neighbour; why, she asked herself, must
+some women, with no end or purpose of their own to serve, except the
+sheer love of meddling in the affairs of others, plunge their hands into
+plots and schemings of this sort, in which the happiness of more than one
+person was concerned?  And more clearly than ever she realised how
+thoroughly she detested Courtenay Youghal.  She had disliked him as an
+evil influence, setting before her son an example of showy ambition that
+he was not in the least likely to follow, and providing him with a model
+of extravagant dandyism that he was only too certain to copy.  In her
+heart she knew that Comus would have embarked just as surely on his
+present course of idle self-indulgence if he had never known of the
+existence of Youghal, but she chose to regard that young man as her son’s
+evil genius, and now he seemed likely to justify more than ever the
+character she had fastened on to him.  For once in his life Comus
+appeared to have an idea of behaving sensibly and making some use of his
+opportunities, and almost at the same moment Courtenay Youghal arrived on
+the scene as a possible and very dangerous rival.  Against the good looks
+and fitful powers of fascination that Comus could bring into the field,
+the young politician could match half-a-dozen dazzling qualities which
+would go far to recommend him in the eyes of a woman of the world, still
+more in those of a young girl in search of an ideal.  Good-looking in his
+own way, if not on such showy lines as Comus, always well turned-out,
+witty, self-confident without being bumptious, with a conspicuous
+Parliamentary career alongside him, and heaven knew what else in front of
+him, Courtenay Youghal certainly was not a rival whose chances could be
+held very lightly.  Francesca laughed bitterly to herself as she
+remembered that a few hours ago she had entertained the idea of begging
+for his good offices in helping on Comus’s wooing.  One consolation, at
+least, she found for herself: if Youghal really meant to step in and try
+and cut out his young friend, the latter at any rate had snatched a
+useful start.  Comus had mentioned Miss de Frey at luncheon that day,
+casually and dispassionately; if the subject of the dinner guests had not
+come up he would probably not have mentioned her at all.  But they were
+obviously already very good friends.  It was part and parcel of the state
+of domestic tension at Blue Street that Francesca should only have come
+to know of this highly interesting heiress by an accidental sorting of
+guests at a dinner party.
+
+Lady Caroline’s voice broke in on her reflections; it was a gentle
+purring voice, that possessed an uncanny quality of being able to make
+itself heard down the longest dinner table.
+
+“The dear Archdeacon is getting so absent-minded.  He read a list of
+box-holders for the opera as the First Lesson the other Sunday, instead
+of the families and lots of the tribes of Israel that entered Canaan.
+Fortunately no one noticed the mistake.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+ON a conveniently secluded bench facing the Northern Pheasantry in the
+Zoological Society’s Gardens, Regent’s Park, Courtenay Youghal sat
+immersed in mature flirtation with a lady, who, though certainly young in
+fact and appearance, was some four or five years his senior.  When he was
+a schoolboy of sixteen, Molly McQuade had personally conducted him to the
+Zoo and stood him dinner afterwards at Kettner’s, and whenever the two of
+them happened to be in town on the anniversary of that bygone festivity
+they religiously repeated the programme in its entirety.  Even the menu
+of the dinner was adhered to as nearly as possible; the original
+selection of food and wine that schoolboy exuberance, tempered by
+schoolboy shyness, had pitched on those many years ago, confronted
+Youghal on those occasions, as a drowning man’s past life is said to rise
+up and parade itself in his last moments of consciousness.
+
+The flirtation which was thus perennially restored to its old-time
+footing owed its longevity more to the enterprising solicitude of Miss
+McQuade than to any conscious sentimental effort on the part of Youghal
+himself.  Molly McQuade was known to her neighbours in a minor hunting
+shire as a hard-riding conventionally unconventional type of young woman,
+who came naturally into the classification, “a good sort.”  She was just
+sufficiently good-looking, sufficiently reticent about her own illnesses,
+when she had any, and sufficiently appreciative of her neighbours’
+gardens, children and hunters to be generally popular.  Most men liked
+her, and the percentage of women who disliked her was not inconveniently
+high.  One of these days, it was assumed, she would marry a brewer or a
+Master of Otter Hounds, and, after a brief interval, be known to the
+world as the mother of a boy or two at Malvern or some similar seat of
+learning.  The romantic side of her nature was altogether unguessed by
+the countryside.
+
+Her romances were mostly in serial form and suffered perhaps in fervour
+from their disconnected course what they gained in length of days.  Her
+affectionate interest in the several young men who figured in her affairs
+of the heart was perfectly honest, and she certainly made no attempt
+either to conceal their separate existences, or to play them off one
+against the other.  Neither could it be said that she was a husband
+hunter; she had made up her mind what sort of man she was likely to
+marry, and her forecast did not differ very widely from that formed by
+her local acquaintances.  If her married life were eventually to turn out
+a failure, at least she looked forward to it with very moderate
+expectations.  Her love affairs she put on a very different footing and
+apparently they were the all-absorbing element in her life.  She
+possessed the happily constituted temperament which enables a man or
+woman to be a “pluralist,” and to observe the sage precaution of not
+putting all one’s eggs into one basket.  Her demands were not exacting;
+she required of her affinity that he should be young, good-looking, and
+at least, moderately amusing; she would have preferred him to be
+invariably faithful, but, with her own example before her, she was
+prepared for the probability, bordering on certainty, that he would be
+nothing of the sort.  The philosophy of the “Garden of Kama” was the
+compass by which she steered her barque and thus far, if she had
+encountered some storms and buffeting, she had at least escaped being
+either shipwrecked or becalmed.
+
+Courtenay Youghal had not been designed by Nature to fulfil the _rôle_ of
+an ardent or devoted lover, and he scrupulously respected the limits
+which Nature had laid down.  For Molly, however, he had a certain
+responsive affection.  She had always obviously admired him, and at the
+same time she never beset him with crude flattery; the principal reason
+why the flirtation had stood the test of so many years was the fact that
+it only flared into active existence at convenient intervals.  In an age
+when the telephone has undermined almost every fastness of human privacy,
+and the sanctity of one’s seclusion depends often on the ability for
+tactful falsehood shown by a club pageboy, Youghal was duly appreciative
+of the circumstance that his lady fair spent a large part of the year
+pursuing foxes, in lieu of pursuing him.  Also the honestly admitted fact
+that, in her human hunting, she rode after more than one quarry, made the
+inevitable break-up of the affair a matter to which both could look
+forward without a sense of coming embarrassment and recrimination.  When
+the time for gathering ye rosebuds should be over, neither of them could
+accuse the other of having wrecked his or her entire life.  At the most
+they would only have disorganised a week-end.
+
+On this particular afternoon, when old reminiscences had been gone
+through, and the intervening gossip of past months duly recounted, a lull
+in the conversation made itself rather obstinately felt.  Molly had
+already guessed that matters were about to slip into a new phase; the
+affair had reached maturity long ago, and a new phase must be in the
+nature of a wane.
+
+“You’re a clever brute,” she said, suddenly, with an air of affectionate
+regret; “I always knew you’d get on in the House, but I hardly expected
+you to come to the front so soon.”
+
+“I’m coming to the front,” admitted Youghal, judicially; “the problem is,
+shall I be able to stay there.  Unless something happens in the financial
+line before long, I don’t see how I’m to stay in Parliament at all.
+Economy is out of the question.  It would open people’s eyes, I fancy, if
+they knew how little I exist on as it is.  And I’m living so far beyond
+my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.”
+
+“It will have to be a rich wife, I suppose,” said Molly, slowly; “that’s
+the worst of success, it imposes so many conditions.  I rather knew, from
+something in your manner, that you were drifting that way.”
+
+Youghal said nothing in the way of contradiction; he gazed steadfastly at
+the aviary in front of him as though exotic pheasants were for the moment
+the most absorbing study in the world.  As a matter of fact, his mind was
+centred on the image of Elaine de Frey, with her clear untroubled eyes
+and her Leonardo da Vinci air.  He was wondering whether he was likely to
+fall into a frame of mind concerning her which would be in the least like
+falling in love.
+
+“I shall mind horribly,” continued Molly, after a pause, “but, of course,
+I have always known that something of the sort would have to happen one
+of these days.  When a man goes into politics he can’t call his soul his
+own, and I suppose his heart becomes an impersonal possession in the same
+way.”
+
+“Most people who know me would tell you that I haven’t got a heart,” said
+Youghal.
+
+“I’ve often felt inclined to agree with them,” said Molly; “and then, now
+and again, I think you have a heart tucked away somewhere.”
+
+“I hope I have,” said Youghal, “because I’m trying to break to you the
+fact that I think I’m falling in love with somebody.”
+
+Molly McQuade turned sharply to look at her companion, who still fixed
+his gaze on the pheasant run in front of him.
+
+“Don’t tell me you’re losing your head over somebody useless, someone
+without money,” she said; “I don’t think I could stand that.”
+
+For the moment she feared that Courtenay’s selfishness might have taken
+an unexpected turn, in which ambition had given way to the fancy of the
+hour; he might be going to sacrifice his Parliamentary career for a life
+of stupid lounging in momentarily attractive company.  He quickly
+undeceived her.
+
+“She’s got heaps of money.”
+
+Molly gave a grunt of relief.  Her affection for Courtenay had produced
+the anxiety which underlay her first question; a natural jealousy
+prompted the next one.
+
+“Is she young and pretty and all that sort of thing, or is she just a
+good sort with a sympathetic manner and nice eyes?  As a rule that’s the
+kind that goes with a lot of money.”
+
+“Young and quite good-looking in her way, and a distinct style of her
+own.  Some people would call her beautiful.  As a political hostess I
+should think she’d be splendid.  I imagine I’m rather in love with her.”
+
+“And is she in love with you?”
+
+Youghal threw back his head with the slight assertive movement that Molly
+knew and liked.
+
+“She’s a girl who I fancy would let judgment influence her a lot.  And
+without being stupidly conceited, I think I may say she might do worse
+than throw herself away on me.  I’m young and quite good-looking, and I’m
+making a name for myself in the House; she’ll be able to read all sorts
+of nice and horrid things about me in the papers at breakfast-time.  I
+can be brilliantly amusing at times, and I understand the value of
+silence; there is no fear that I shall ever degenerate into that fearsome
+thing—a cheerful talkative husband.  For a girl with money and social
+ambitions I should think I was rather a good thing.”
+
+“You are certainly in love, Courtenay,” said Molly, “but it’s the old
+love and not a new one.  I’m rather glad.  I should have hated to have
+you head-over-heels in love with a pretty woman, even for a short time.
+You’ll be much happier as it is.  And I’m going to put all my feelings in
+the background, and tell you to go in and win.  You’ve got to marry a
+rich woman, and if she’s nice and will make a good hostess, so much the
+better for everybody.  You’ll be happier in your married life than I
+shall be in mine, when it comes; you’ll have other interests to absorb
+you.  I shall just have the garden and dairy and nursery and lending
+library, as like as two peas to all the gardens and dairies and nurseries
+for hundreds of miles round.  You won’t care for your wife enough to be
+worried every time she has a finger-ache, and you’ll like her well enough
+to be pleased to meet her sometimes at your own house.  I shouldn’t
+wonder if you were quite happy.  She will probably be miserable, but any
+woman who married you would be.”
+
+There was a short pause; they were both staring at the pheasant cages.
+Then Molly spoke again, with the swift nervous tone of a general who is
+hurriedly altering the disposition of his forces for a strategic retreat.
+
+“When you are safely married and honey-mooned and all that sort of thing,
+and have put your wife through her paces as a political hostess, some
+time, when the House isn’t sitting, you must come down by yourself, and
+do a little hunting with us.  Will you?  It won’t be quite the same as
+old times, but it will be something to look forward to when I’m reading
+the endless paragraphs about your fashionable political wedding.”
+
+“You’re looking forward pretty far,” laughed Youghal; “the lady may take
+your view as to the probable unhappiness of a future shared with me, and
+I may have to content myself with penurious political bachelorhood.
+Anyhow, the present is still with us.  We dine at Kettner’s to-night,
+don’t we?”
+
+“Rather,” said Molly, “though it will be more or less a throat-lumpy
+feast as far as I am concerned.  We shall have to drink to the health of
+the future Mrs. Youghal.  By the way, it’s rather characteristic of you
+that you haven’t told me who she is, and of me that I haven’t asked.  And
+now, like a dear boy, trot away and leave me.  I haven’t got to say
+good-bye to you yet, but I’m going to take a quiet farewell of the
+Pheasantry.  We’ve had some jolly good talks, you and I, sitting on this
+seat, haven’t we?  And I know, as well as I know anything, that this is
+the last of them.  Eight o’clock to-night, as punctually as possible.”
+
+She watched his retreating figure with eyes that grew slowly misty; he
+had been such a jolly comely boy-friend, and they had had such good times
+together.  The mist deepened on her lashes as she looked round at the
+familiar rendezvous where they had so often kept tryst since the day when
+they had first come there together, he a schoolboy and she but lately out
+of her teens.  For the moment she felt herself in the thrall of a very
+real sorrow.
+
+Then, with the admirable energy of one who is only in town for a fleeting
+fortnight, she raced away to have tea with a world-faring naval admirer
+at his club.  Pluralism is a merciful narcotic.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+ELAINE DE FREY sat at ease—at bodily ease—at any rate—in a low wicker
+chair placed under the shade of a group of cedars in the heart of a
+stately spacious garden that had almost made up its mind to be a park.
+The shallow stone basin of an old fountain, on whose wide ledge a
+leaden-moulded otter for ever preyed on a leaden salmon, filled a
+conspicuous place in the immediate foreground.  Around its rim ran an
+inscription in Latin, warning mortal man that time flows as swiftly as
+water and exhorting him to make the most of his hours; after which piece
+of Jacobean moralising it set itself shamelessly to beguile all who might
+pass that way into an abandonment of contemplative repose.  On all sides
+of it a stretch of smooth turf spread away, broken up here and there by
+groups of dwarfish chestnut and mulberry trees, whose leaves and branches
+cast a laced pattern of shade beneath them.  On one side the lawn sloped
+gently down to a small lake, whereon floated a quartette of swans, their
+movements suggestive of a certain mournful listlessness, as though a
+weary dignity of caste held them back from the joyous bustling life of
+the lesser waterfowl.  Elaine liked to imagine that they re-embodied the
+souls of unhappy boys who had been forced by family interests to become
+high ecclesiastical dignitaries and had grown prematurely Right Reverend.
+A low stone balustrade fenced part of the shore of the lake, making a
+miniature terrace above its level, and here roses grew in a rich
+multitude.  Other rose bushes, carefully pruned and tended, formed little
+oases of colour and perfume amid the restful green of the sward, and in
+the distance the eye caught the variegated blaze of a many-hued hedge of
+rhododendron.  With these favoured exceptions flowers were hard to find
+in this well-ordered garden; the misguided tyranny of staring geranium
+beds and beflowered archways leading to nowhere, so dear to the suburban
+gardener, found no expression here.  Magnificent Amherst pheasants, whose
+plumage challenged and almost shamed the peacock on his own ground,
+stepped to and fro over the emerald turf with the assured self-conscious
+pride of reigning sultans.  It was a garden where summer seemed a
+part-proprietor rather than a hurried visitor.
+
+By the side of Elaine’s chair under the shadow of the cedars a wicker
+table was set out with the paraphernalia of afternoon tea.  On some
+cushions at her feet reclined Courtenay Youghal, smoothly preened and
+youthfully elegant, the personification of decorative repose; equally
+decorative, but with the showy restlessness of a dragonfly, Comus
+disported his flannelled person over a considerable span of the available
+foreground.
+
+The intimacy existing between the two young men had suffered no immediate
+dislocation from the circumstance that they were tacitly paying court to
+the same lady.  It was an intimacy founded not in the least on friendship
+or community of tastes and ideas, but owed its existence to the fact that
+each was amused and interested by the other.  Youghal found Comus, for
+the time being at any rate, just as amusing and interesting as a rival
+for Elaine’s favour as he had been in the _rôle_ of scapegrace
+boy-about-Town; Comus for his part did not wish to lose touch with
+Youghal, who among other attractions possessed the recommendation of
+being under the ban of Comus’s mother.  She disapproved, it is true, of a
+great many of her son’s friends and associates, but this particular one
+was a special and persistent source of irritation to her from the fact
+that he figured prominently and more or less successfully in the public
+life of the day.  There was something peculiarly exasperating in reading
+a brilliant and incisive attack on the Government’s rash handling of
+public expenditure delivered by a young man who encouraged her son in
+every imaginable extravagance.  The actual extent of Youghal’s influence
+over the boy was of the slightest; Comus was quite capable of deriving
+encouragement to rash outlay and frivolous conversation from an anchorite
+or an East-end parson if he had been thrown into close companionship with
+such an individual.  Francesca, however, exercised a mother’s privilege
+in assuming her son’s bachelor associates to be industrious in labouring
+to achieve his undoing.  Therefore the young politician was a source of
+unconcealed annoyance to her, and in the same degree as she expressed her
+disapproval of him Comus was careful to maintain and parade the intimacy.
+Its existence, or rather its continued existence, was one of the things
+that faintly puzzled the young lady whose sought-for favour might have
+been expected to furnish an occasion for its rapid dissolution.
+
+With two suitors, one of whom at least she found markedly attractive,
+courting her at the same moment, Elaine should have had reasonable cause
+for being on good terms with the world, and with herself in particular.
+Happiness was not, however, at this auspicious moment, her dominant mood.
+The grave calm of her face masked as usual a certain degree of grave
+perturbation.  A succession of well-meaning governesses and a plentiful
+supply of moralising aunts on both sides of her family, had impressed on
+her young mind the theoretical fact that wealth is a great
+responsibility.  The consciousness of her responsibility set her
+continually wondering, not as to her own fitness to discharge her
+“stewardship,” but as to the motives and merits of people with whom she
+came in contact.  The knowledge that there was so much in the world that
+she could buy, invited speculation as to how much there was that was
+worth buying.  Gradually she had come to regard her mind as a sort of
+appeal court before whose secret sittings were examined and judged the
+motives and actions, the motives especially, of the world in general.  In
+her schoolroom days she had sat in conscientious judgment on the motives
+that guided or misguided Charles and Cromwell and Monck, Wallenstein and
+Savonarola.  In her present stage she was equally occupied in examining
+the political sincerity of the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, the
+good-faith of a honey-tongued but possibly loyal-hearted waiting-maid,
+and the disinterestedness of a whole circle of indulgent and flattering
+acquaintances.  Even more absorbing, and in her eyes, more urgently
+necessary, was the task of dissecting and appraising the characters of
+the two young men who were favouring her with their attentions.  And
+herein lay cause for much thinking and some perturbation.  Youghal, for
+example, might have baffled a more experienced observer of human nature.
+Elaine was too clever to confound his dandyism with foppishness or
+self-advertisement.  He admired his own toilet effect in a mirror from a
+genuine sense of pleasure in a thing good to look upon, just as he would
+feel a sensuous appreciation of the sight of a well-bred, well-matched,
+well-turned-out pair of horses.  Behind his careful political flippancy
+and cynicism one might also detect a certain careless sincerity, which
+would probably in the long run save him from moderate success, and turn
+him into one of the brilliant failures of his day.  Beyond this it was
+difficult to form an exact appreciation of Courtenay Youghal, and Elaine,
+who liked to have her impressions distinctly labelled and pigeon-holed,
+was perpetually scrutinising the outer surface of his characteristics and
+utterances, like a baffled art critic vainly searching beneath the
+varnish and scratches of a doubtfully assigned picture for an
+enlightening signature.  The young man added to her perplexities by his
+deliberate policy of never trying to show himself in a favourable light
+even when most anxious to impart a favourable impression.  He preferred
+that people should hunt for his good qualities, and merely took very good
+care that as far as possible they should never draw blank; even in the
+matter of selfishness, which was the anchor-sheet of his existence, he
+contrived to be noted, and justly noted, for doing remarkably unselfish
+things.  As a ruler he would have been reasonably popular; as a husband
+he would probably be unendurable.
+
+Comus was to a certain extent as great a mystification as Youghal, but
+here Elaine was herself responsible for some of the perplexity which
+enshrouded his character in her eyes.  She had taken more than a passing
+fancy for the boy—for the boy as he might be, that was to say—and she was
+desperately unwilling to see him and appraise him as he really was.  Thus
+the mental court of appeal was constantly engaged in examining witnesses
+as to character, most of whom signally failed to give any testimony which
+would support the favourable judgment which the tribunal was so anxious
+to arrive at.  A woman with wider experience of the world’s ways and
+shortcomings would probably have contented herself with an endeavour to
+find out whether her liking for the boy outweighed her dislike of his
+characteristics; Elaine took her judgments too seriously to approach the
+matter from such a simple and convenient standpoint.  The fact that she
+was much more than half in love with Comus made it dreadfully important
+that she should discover him to have a lovable soul, and Comus, it must
+be confessed, did little to help forward the discovery.
+
+“At any rate he is honest,” she would observe to herself, after some
+outspoken admission of unprincipled conduct on his part, and then she
+would ruefully recall certain episodes in which he had figured, from
+which honesty had been conspicuously absent.  What she tried to label
+honesty in his candour was probably only a cynical defiance of the laws
+of right and wrong.
+
+“You look more than usually thoughtful this afternoon,” said Comus to
+her, “as if you had invented this summer day and were trying to think out
+improvements.”
+
+“If I had the power to create improvements anywhere I think I should
+begin with you,” retorted Elaine.
+
+“I’m sure it’s much better to leave me as I am,” protested Comus; “you’re
+like a relative of mine up in Argyllshire, who spends his time producing
+improved breeds of sheep and pigs and chickens.  So patronising and
+irritating to the Almighty I should think, to go about putting superior
+finishing touches to Creation.”
+
+Elaine frowned, and then laughed, and finally gave a little sigh.
+
+“It’s not easy to talk sense to you,” she said.
+
+“Whatever else you take in hand,” said Youghal, “you must never improve
+this garden.  It’s what our idea of Heaven might be like if the Jews
+hadn’t invented one for us on totally different lines.  It’s dreadful
+that we should accept them as the impresarios of our religious dreamland
+instead of the Greeks.”
+
+“You are not very fond of the Jews,” said Elaine.
+
+“I’ve travelled and lived a good deal in Eastern Europe,” said Youghal.
+
+“It seems largely a question of geography,” said Elaine; “in England no
+one really is anti-Semitic.”
+
+Youghal shook his head.  “I know a great many Jews who are.”
+
+Servants had quietly, almost reverently, placed tea and its accessories
+on the wicker table, and quietly receded from the landscape.  Elaine sat
+like a grave young goddess about to dispense some mysterious potion to
+her devotees.  Her mind was still sitting in judgment on the Jewish
+question.
+
+Comus scrambled to his feet.
+
+“It’s too hot for tea,” he said; “I shall go and feed the swans.”
+
+And he walked off with a little silver basket-dish containing brown
+bread-and-butter.
+
+Elaine laughed quietly.
+
+“It’s so like Comus,” she said, “to go off with our one dish of
+bread-and-butter.”
+
+Youghal chuckled responsively.  It was an undoubted opportunity for him
+to put in some disparaging criticism of Comus, and Elaine sat alert in
+readiness to judge the critic and reserve judgment on the criticised.
+
+“His selfishness is splendid but absolutely futile,” said Youghal; “now
+my selfishness is commonplace, but always thoroughly practical and
+calculated.  He will have great difficulty in getting the swans to accept
+his offering, and he incurs the odium of reducing us to a
+bread-and-butterless condition.  Incidentally he will get very hot.”
+
+Elaine again had the sense of being thoroughly baffled.  If Youghal had
+said anything unkind it was about himself.
+
+“If my cousin Suzette had been here,” she observed, with the shadow of a
+malicious smile on her lips, “I believe she would have gone into a flood
+of tears at the loss of her bread-and-butter, and Comus would have
+figured ever after in her mind as something black and destroying and
+hateful.  In fact I don’t really know why we took our loss so
+unprotestingly.”
+
+“For two reasons,” said Youghal; “you are rather fond of Comus.  And I—am
+not very fond of bread-and-butter.”
+
+The jesting remark brought a throb of pleasure to Elaine’s heart.  She
+had known full well that she cared for Comus, but now that Courtenay
+Youghal had openly proclaimed the fact as something unchallenged and
+understood matters seemed placed at once on a more advanced footing.  The
+warm sunlit garden grew suddenly into a Heaven that held the secret of
+eternal happiness.  Youth and comeliness would always walk here, under
+the low-boughed mulberry trees, as unchanging as the leaden otter that
+for ever preyed on the leaden salmon on the edge of the old fountain, and
+somehow the lovers would always wear the aspect of herself and the boy
+who was talking to the four white swans by the water steps.  Youghal was
+right; this was the real Heaven of one’s dreams and longings,
+immeasurably removed from that Rue de la Paix Paradise about which one
+professed utterly insincere hankerings in places of public worship.
+Elaine drank her tea in a happy silence; besides being a brilliant talker
+Youghal understood the rarer art of being a non-talker on occasion.
+
+Comus came back across the grass swinging the empty basket-dish in his
+hand.
+
+“Swans were very pleased,” he cried, gaily, “and said they hoped I would
+keep the bread-and-butter dish as a souvenir of a happy tea-party.  I may
+really have it, mayn’t I?” he continued in an anxious voice; “it will do
+to keep studs and things in.  You don’t want it.”
+
+“It’s got the family crest on it,” said Elaine.  Some of the happiness
+had died out of her eyes.
+
+“I’ll have that scratched off and my own put on,” said Comus.
+
+“It’s been in the family for generations,” protested Elaine, who did not
+share Comus’s view that because you were rich your lesser possessions
+could have no value in your eyes.
+
+“I want it dreadfully,” said Comus, sulkily, “and you’ve heaps of other
+things to put bread-and-butter in.”
+
+For the moment he was possessed by an overmastering desire to keep the
+dish at all costs; a look of greedy determination dominated his face, and
+he had not for an instant relaxed his grip of the coveted object.
+
+Elaine was genuinely angry by this time, and was busily telling herself
+that it was absurd to be put out over such a trifle; at the same moment a
+sense of justice was telling her that Comus was displaying a good deal of
+rather shabby selfishness.  And somehow her chief anxiety at the moment
+was to keep Courtenay Youghal from seeing that she was angry.
+
+“I know you don’t really want it, so I’m going to keep it,” persisted
+Comus.
+
+“It’s too hot to argue,” said Elaine.
+
+“Happy mistress of your destinies,” laughed Youghal; “you can suit your
+disputations to the desired time and temperature.  I have to go and
+argue, or what is worse, listen to other people’s arguments, in a hot and
+doctored atmosphere suitable to an invalid lizard.”
+
+“You haven’t got to argue about a bread-and-butter dish,” said Elaine.
+
+“Chiefly about bread-and-butter,” said Youghal; “our great preoccupation
+is other people’s bread-and-butter.  They earn or produce the material,
+but we busy ourselves with making rules how it shall be cut up, and the
+size of the slices, and how much butter shall go on how much bread.  That
+is what is called legislation.  If we could only make rules as to how the
+bread-and-butter should be digested we should be quite happy.”
+
+Elaine had been brought up to regard Parliaments as something to be
+treated with cheerful solemnity, like illness or family re-unions.
+Youghal’s flippant disparagement of the career in which he was involved
+did not, however, jar on her susceptibilities.  She knew him to be not
+only a lively and effective debater but an industrious worker on
+committees.  If he made light of his labours, at least he afforded no one
+else a loophole for doing so.  And certainly, the Parliamentary
+atmosphere was not inviting on this hot afternoon.
+
+“When must you go?” she asked, sympathetically.
+
+Youghal looked ruefully at his watch.  Before he could answer, a cheerful
+hoot came through the air, as of an owl joyously challenging the sunlight
+with a foreboding of the coming night.  He sprang laughing to his feet.
+
+“Listen!  My summons back to my galley,” he cried.  “The Gods have given
+me an hour in this enchanted garden, so I must not complain.”
+
+Then in a lower voice he almost whispered, “It’s the Persian debate
+to-night.”
+
+It was the one hint he had given in the midst of his talking and laughing
+that he was really keenly enthralled in the work that lay before him.  It
+was the one little intimate touch that gave Elaine the knowledge that he
+cared for her opinion of his work.
+
+Comus, who had emptied his cigarette-case, became suddenly clamorous at
+the prospect of being temporarily stranded without a smoke.  Youghal took
+the last remaining cigarette from his own case and gravely bisected it.
+
+“Friendship could go no further,” he observed, as he gave one-half to the
+doubtfully appeased Comus, and lit the other himself.
+
+“There are heaps more in the hall,” said Elaine.
+
+“It was only done for the Saint Martin of Tours effect,” said Youghal; “I
+hate smoking when I’m rushing through the air.  Good-bye.”
+
+The departing galley-slave stepped forth into the sunlight, radiant and
+confident.  A few minutes later Elaine could see glimpses of his white
+car as it rushed past the rhododendron bushes.  He woos best who leaves
+first, particularly if he goes forth to battle or the semblance of
+battle.
+
+Somehow Elaine’s garden of Eternal Youth had already become clouded in
+its imagery.  The girl-figure who walked in it was still distinctly and
+unchangingly herself, but her companion was more blurred and undefined,
+as a picture that has been superimposed on another.
+
+Youghal sped townward well satisfied with himself.  To-morrow, he
+reflected, Elaine would read his speech in her morning paper, and he knew
+in advance that it was not going to be one of his worst efforts.  He knew
+almost exactly where the punctuations of laughter and applause would
+burst in, he knew that nimble fingers in the Press Gallery would be
+taking down each gibe and argument as he flung it at the impassive
+Minister confronting him, and that the fair lady of his desire would be
+able to judge what manner of young man this was who spent his afternoon
+in her garden, lazily chaffing himself and his world.
+
+And he further reflected, with an amused chuckle, that she would be
+vividly reminded of Comus for days to come, when she took her afternoon
+tea, and saw the bread-and-butter reposing in an unaccustomed dish.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+TOWARDS four o’clock on a hot afternoon Francesca stepped out from a shop
+entrance near the Piccadilly end of Bond Street and ran almost into the
+arms of Merla Blathlington.  The afternoon seemed to get instantly
+hotter.  Merla was one of those human flies that buzz; in crowded
+streets, at bazaars and in warm weather, she attained to the proportions
+of a human bluebottle.  Lady Caroline Benaresq had openly predicted that
+a special fly-paper was being reserved for her accommodation in another
+world; others, however, held the opinion that she would be miraculously
+multiplied in a future state, and that four or more Merla Blathlingtons,
+according to deserts, would be in perpetual and unremitting attendance on
+each lost soul.
+
+“Here we are,” she cried, with a glad eager buzz, “popping in and out of
+shops like rabbits; not that rabbits do pop in and out of shops very
+extensively.”
+
+It was evidently one of her bluebottle days.
+
+“Don’t you love Bond Street?” she gabbled on.  “There’s something so
+unusual and distinctive about it; no other street anywhere else is quite
+like it.  Don’t you know those ikons and images and things scattered up
+and down Europe, that are supposed to have been painted or carved, as the
+case may be, by St. Luke or Zaccheus, or somebody of that sort; I always
+like to think that some notable person of those times designed Bond
+Street.  St. Paul, perhaps.  He travelled about a lot.”
+
+“Not in Middlesex, though,” said Francesca.
+
+“One can’t be sure,” persisted Merla; “when one wanders about as much as
+he did one gets mixed up and forgets where one _has_ been.  I can never
+remember whether I’ve been to the Tyrol twice and St. Moritz once, or the
+other way about; I always have to ask my maid.  And there’s something
+about the name Bond that suggests St. Paul; didn’t he write a lot about
+the bond and the free?”
+
+“I fancy he wrote in Hebrew or Greek,” objected Francesca; “the word
+wouldn’t have the least resemblance.”
+
+“So dreadfully non-committal to go about pamphleteering in those bizarre
+languages,” complained Merla; “that’s what makes all those people so
+elusive.  As soon as you try to pin them down to a definite statement
+about anything you’re told that some vitally important word has fifteen
+other meanings in the original.  I wonder our Cabinet Ministers and
+politicians don’t adopt a sort of dog-Latin or Esperanto jargon to
+deliver their speeches in; what a lot of subsequent explaining away would
+be saved.  But to go back to Bond Street—not that we’ve left it—”
+
+“I’m afraid I must leave it now,” said Francesca, preparing to turn up
+Grafton Street; “Good-bye.”
+
+“Must you be going?  Come and have tea somewhere.  I know of a cosy
+little place where one can talk undisturbed.”
+
+Francesca repressed a shudder and pleaded an urgent engagement.
+
+“I know where you’re going,” said Merla, with the resentful buzz of a
+bluebottle that finds itself thwarted by the cold unreasoning resistance
+of a windowpane.  “You’re going to play bridge at Serena Golackly’s.  She
+never asks me to her bridge parties.”
+
+Francesca shuddered openly this time; the prospect of having to play
+bridge anywhere in the near neighbourhood of Merla’s voice was not one
+that could be contemplated with ordinary calmness.
+
+“Good-bye,” she said again firmly, and passed out of earshot; it was
+rather like leaving the machinery section of an exhibition.  Merla’s
+diagnosis of her destination had been a correct one; Francesca made her
+way slowly through the hot streets in the direction of Serena Golackly’s
+house on the far side of Berkeley Square.  To the blessed certainty of
+finding a game of bridge, she hopefully added the possibility of hearing
+some fragments of news which might prove interesting and enlightening.
+And of enlightenment on a particular subject, in which she was acutely
+and personally interested, she stood in some need.  Comus of late had
+been provokingly reticent as to his movements and doings; partly,
+perhaps, because it was his nature to be provoking, partly because the
+daily bickerings over money matters were gradually choking other forms of
+conversation.  Francesca had seen him once or twice in the Park in the
+desirable company of Elaine de Frey, and from time to time she heard of
+the young people as having danced together at various houses; on the
+other hand, she had seen and heard quite as much evidence to connect the
+heiress’s name with that of Courtenay Youghal.  Beyond this meagre and
+conflicting and altogether tantalising information, her knowledge of the
+present position of affairs did not go.  If either of the young men was
+seriously “making the running,” it was probable that she would hear some
+sly hint or open comment about it from one of Serena’s gossip-laden
+friends, without having to go out of her way to introduce the subject and
+unduly disclose her own state of ignorance.  And a game of bridge, played
+for moderately high points, gave ample excuse for convenient lapses into
+reticence; if questions took an embarrassingly inquisitive turn, one
+could always find refuge in a defensive spade.
+
+The afternoon was too warm to make bridge a generally popular diversion,
+and Serena’s party was a comparatively small one.  Only one table was
+incomplete when Francesca made her appearance on the scene; at it was
+seated Serena herself, confronted by Ada Spelvexit, whom everyone was
+wont to explain as “one of the Cheshire Spelvexits,” as though any other
+variety would have been intolerable.  Ada Spelvexit was one of those
+naturally stagnant souls who take infinite pleasure in what are called
+“movements.”  “Most of the really great lessons I have learned have been
+taught me by the Poor,” was one of her favourite statements.  The one
+great lesson that the Poor in general would have liked to have taught
+her, that their kitchens and sickrooms were not unreservedly at her
+disposal as private lecture halls, she had never been able to assimilate.
+She was ready to give them unlimited advice as to how they should keep
+the wolf from their doors, but in return she claimed and enforced for
+herself the penetrating powers of an east wind or a dust storm.  Her
+visits among her wealthier acquaintances were equally extensive and
+enterprising, and hardly more welcome; in country-house parties, while
+partaking to the fullest extent of the hospitality offered her, she made
+a practice of unburdening herself of homilies on the evils of leisure and
+luxury, which did not particularly endear her to her fellow guests.
+Hostesses regarded her philosophically as a form of social measles which
+everyone had to have once.
+
+The third prospective player, Francesca noted without any special
+enthusiasm, was Lady Caroline Benaresq.  Lady Caroline was far from being
+a remarkably good bridge player, but she always managed to domineer
+mercilessly over any table that was favoured with her presence, and
+generally managed to win.  A domineering player usually inflicts the
+chief damage and demoralisation on his partner; Lady Caroline’s special
+achievement was to harass and demoralise partner and opponents alike.
+
+“Weak and weak,” she announced in her gentle voice, as she cut her
+hostess for a partner; “I suppose we had better play only five shillings
+a hundred.”
+
+Francesca wondered at the old woman’s moderate assessment of the stake,
+knowing her fondness for highish play and her usual good luck in card
+holding.
+
+“I don’t mind what we play,” said Ada Spelvexit, with an incautious
+parade of elegant indifference; as a matter of fact she was inwardly
+relieved and rejoicing at the reasonable figure proposed by Lady
+Caroline, and she would certainly have demurred if a higher stake had
+been suggested.  She was not as a rule a successful player, and money
+lost at cards was always a poignant bereavement to her.
+
+“Then as you don’t mind we’ll make it ten shillings a hundred,” said Lady
+Caroline, with the pleased chuckle of one who has spread a net in the
+sight of a bird and disproved the vanity of the proceeding.
+
+It proved a tiresome ding-dong rubber, with the strength of the cards
+slightly on Francesca’s side, and the luck of the table going mostly the
+other way.  She was too keen a player not to feel a certain absorption in
+the game once it had started, but she was conscious to-day of a
+distracting interest that competed with the momentary importance of leads
+and discards and declarations.  The little accumulations of talk that
+were unpent during the dealing of the hands became as noteworthy to her
+alert attention as the play of the hands themselves.
+
+“Yes, quite a small party this afternoon,” said Serena, in reply to a
+seemingly casual remark on Francesca’s part; “and two or three
+non-players, which is unusual on a Wednesday.  Canon Besomley was here
+just before you came; you know, the big preaching man.”
+
+“I’ve been to hear him scold the human race once or twice,” said
+Francesca.
+
+“A strong man with a wonderfully strong message,” said Ada Spelvexit, in
+an impressive and assertive tone.
+
+“The sort of popular pulpiteer who spanks the vices of his age and
+lunches with them afterwards,” said Lady Caroline.
+
+“Hardly a fair summary of the man and his work,” protested Ada.  “I’ve
+been to hear him many times when I’ve been depressed or discouraged, and
+I simply can’t tell you the impression his words leave—”
+
+“At least you can tell us what you intend to make trumps,” broke in Lady
+Caroline, gently.
+
+“Diamonds,” pronounced Ada, after a rather flurried survey of her hand.
+
+“Doubled,” said Lady Caroline, with increased gentleness, and a few
+minutes later she was pencilling an addition of twenty-four to her score.
+
+“I stayed with his people down in Herefordshire last May,” said Ada,
+returning to the unfinished theme of the Canon; “such an exquisite rural
+retreat, and so restful and healing to the nerves.  Real country scenery;
+apple blossom everywhere.”
+
+“Surely only on the apple trees,” said Lady Caroline.
+
+Ada Spelvexit gave up the attempt to reproduce the decorative setting of
+the Canon’s homelife, and fell back on the small but practical
+consolation of scoring the odd trick in her opponent’s declaration of
+hearts.
+
+“If you had led your highest club to start with, instead of the nine, we
+should have saved the trick,” remarked Lady Caroline to her partner in a
+tone of coldly, gentle reproof; “it’s no use, my dear,” she continued, as
+Serena flustered out a halting apology, “no earthly use to attempt to
+play bridge at one table and try to see and hear what’s going on at two
+or three other tables.”
+
+“I can generally manage to attend to more than one thing at a time,” said
+Serena, rashly; “I think I must have a sort of double brain.”
+
+“Much better to economise and have one really good one,” observed Lady
+Caroline.
+
+“_La belle dame sans merci_ scoring a verbal trick or two as usual,” said
+a player at another table in a discreet undertone.
+
+“Did I tell you Sir Edward Roan is coming to my next big evening,” said
+Serena, hurriedly, by way, perhaps, of restoring herself a little in her
+own esteem.
+
+“Poor dear, good Sir Edward.  What have you made trumps?” asked Lady
+Caroline, in one breath.
+
+“Clubs,” said Francesca; “and pray, why these adjectives of
+commiseration?”
+
+Francesca was a Ministerialist by family interest and allegiance, and was
+inclined to take up the cudgels at the suggested disparagement aimed at
+the Foreign Secretary.
+
+“He amuses me so much,” purred Lady Caroline.  Her amusement was usually
+of the sort that a sporting cat derives from watching the Swedish
+exercises of a well-spent and carefully thought-out mouse.
+
+“Really?  He has been rather a brilliant success at the Foreign Office,
+you know,” said Francesca.
+
+“He reminds one so of a circus elephant—infinitely more intelligent than
+the people who direct him, but quite content to go on putting his foot
+down or taking it up as may be required, quite unconcerned whether he
+steps on a meringue or a hornet’s nest in the process of going where he’s
+expected to go.”
+
+“How can you say such things?” protested Francesca.
+
+“I can’t,” said Lady Caroline; “Courtenay Youghal said it in the House
+last night.  Didn’t you read the debate?  He was really rather in form.
+I disagree entirely with his point of view, of course, but some of the
+things he says have just enough truth behind them to redeem them from
+being merely smart; for instance, his summing up of the Government’s
+attitude towards our embarrassing Colonial Empire in the wistful phrase
+‘happy is the country that has no geography.’”
+
+“What an absurdly unjust thing to say,” put in Francesca; “I daresay some
+of our Party at some time have taken up that attitude, but every one
+knows that Sir Edward is a sound Imperialist at heart.”
+
+“Most politicians are something or other at heart, but no one would be
+rash enough to insure a politician against heart failure.  Particularly
+when he happens to be in office.”
+
+“Anyhow, I don’t see that the Opposition leaders would have acted any
+differently in the present case,” said Francesca.
+
+“One should always speak guardedly of the Opposition leaders,” said Lady
+Caroline, in her gentlest voice; “one never knows what a turn in the
+situation may do for them.”
+
+“You mean they may one day be at the head of affairs?” asked Serena,
+briskly.
+
+“I mean they may one day lead the Opposition.  One never knows.”
+
+Lady Caroline had just remembered that her hostess was on the Opposition
+side in politics.
+
+Francesca and her partner scored four tricks in clubs; the game stood
+irresolutely at twenty-four all.
+
+“If you had followed the excellent lyrical advice given to the Maid of
+Athens and returned my heart we should have made two more tricks and gone
+game,” said Lady Caroline to her partner.
+
+“Mr. Youghal seems pushing himself to the fore of late,” remarked
+Francesca, as Serena took up the cards to deal.  Since the young
+politician’s name had been introduced into their conversation the
+opportunity for turning the talk more directly on him and his affairs was
+too good to be missed.
+
+“I think he’s got a career before him,” said Serena; “the House always
+fills when he’s speaking, and that’s a good sign.  And then he’s young
+and got rather an attractive personality, which is always something in
+the political world.”
+
+“His lack of money will handicap him, unless he can find himself a rich
+wife or persuade someone to die and leave him a fat legacy,” said
+Francesca; “since M.P.’s have become the recipients of a salary rather
+more is expected and demanded of them in the expenditure line than
+before.”
+
+“Yes, the House of Commons still remains rather at the opposite pole to
+the Kingdom of Heaven as regards entrance qualifications,” observed Lady
+Caroline.
+
+“There ought to be no difficulty about Youghal picking up a girl with
+money,” said Serena; “with his prospects he would make an excellent
+husband for any woman with social ambitions.”
+
+And she half sighed, as though she almost regretted that a previous
+matrimonial arrangement precluded her from entering into the competition
+on her own account.
+
+Francesca, under an assumption of languid interest, was watching Lady
+Caroline narrowly for some hint of suppressed knowledge of Youghal’s
+courtship of Miss de Frey.
+
+“Whom are you marrying and giving in marriage?”
+
+The question came from George St. Michael, who had strayed over from a
+neighbouring table, attracted by the fragments of small-talk that had
+reached his ears.
+
+St. Michael was one of those dapper bird-like illusorily-active men, who
+seem to have been in a certain stage of middle-age for as long as human
+memory can recall them.  A close-cut peaked beard lent a certain dignity
+to his appearance—a loan which the rest of his features and mannerisms
+were continually and successfully repudiating.  His profession, if he had
+one, was submerged in his hobby, which consisted of being an
+advance-agent for small happenings or possible happenings that were or
+seemed imminent in the social world around him; he found a perpetual and
+unflagging satisfaction in acquiring and retailing any stray items of
+gossip or information, particularly of a matrimonial nature, that chanced
+to come his way.  Given the bare outline of an officially announced
+engagement he would immediately fill it in with all manner of details,
+true or, at any rate, probable, drawn from his own imagination or from
+some equally exclusive source.  The _Morning Post_ might content itself
+with the mere statement of the arrangement which would shortly take
+place, but it was St. Michael’s breathless little voice that proclaimed
+how the contracting parties had originally met over a salmon-fishing
+incident, why the Guards’ Chapel would not be used, why her Aunt Mary had
+at first opposed the match, how the question of the children’s religious
+upbringing had been compromised, etc., etc., to all whom it might
+interest and to many whom it might not.  Beyond his industriously-earned
+pre-eminence in this special branch of intelligence, he was chiefly
+noteworthy for having a wife reputed to be the tallest and thinnest woman
+in the Home Counties.  The two were sometimes seen together in Society,
+where they passed under the collective name of St. Michael and All
+Angles.
+
+“We are trying to find a rich wife for Courtenay Youghal,” said Serena,
+in answer to St. Michael’s question.
+
+“Ah, there I’m afraid you’re a little late,” he observed, glowing with
+the importance of pending revelation; “I’m afraid you’re a little late,”
+he repeated, watching the effect of his words as a gardener might watch
+the development of a bed of carefully tended asparagus.  “I think the
+young gentleman has been before you and already found himself a rich mate
+in prospect.”
+
+He lowered his voice as he spoke, not with a view to imparting impressive
+mystery to his statement, but because there were other table groups
+within hearing to whom he hoped presently to have the privilege of
+re-disclosing his revelation.
+
+“Do you mean—?” began Serena.
+
+“Miss de Frey,” broke in St. Michael, hurriedly, fearful lest his
+revelation should be forestalled, even in guesswork; “quite an ideal
+choice, the very wife for a man who means to make his mark in politics.
+Twenty-four thousand a year, with prospects of more to come, and a
+charming place of her own not too far from town.  Quite the type of girl,
+too, who will make a good political hostess, brains without being brainy,
+you know.  Just the right thing.  Of course, it would be premature to
+make any definite announcement at present—”
+
+“It would hardly be premature for my partner to announce what she means
+to make trumps,” interrupted Lady Caroline, in a voice of such sinister
+gentleness that St. Michael fled headlong back to his own table.
+
+“Oh, is it me?  I beg your pardon.  I leave it,” said Serena.
+
+“Thank you.  No trumps,” declared Lady Caroline.  The hand was
+successful, and the rubber ultimately fell to her with a comfortable
+margin of honours.  The same partners cut together again, and this time
+the cards went distinctly against Francesca and Ada Spelvexit, and a
+heavily piled-up score confronted them at the close of the rubber.
+Francesca was conscious that a certain amount of rather erratic play on
+her part had at least contributed to the result.  St. Michael’s incursion
+into the conversation had proved rather a powerful distraction to her
+ordinarily sound bridge-craft.
+
+Ada Spelvexit emptied her purse of several gold pieces and infused a
+corresponding degree of superiority into her manner.
+
+“I must be going now,” she announced; “I’m dining early.  I have to give
+an address to some charwomen afterwards.”
+
+“Why?” asked Lady Caroline, with a disconcerting directness that was one
+of her most formidable characteristics.
+
+“Oh, well, I have some things to say to them that I daresay they will
+like to hear,” said Ada, with a thin laugh.
+
+Her statement was received with a silence that betokened profound
+unbelief in any such probability.
+
+“I go about a good deal among working-class women,” she added.
+
+“No one has ever said it,” observed Lady Caroline, “but how painfully
+true it is that the poor have us always with them.”
+
+Ada Spelvexit hastened her departure; the marred impressiveness of her
+retreat came as a culminating discomfiture on the top of her ill-fortune
+at the card-table.  Possibly, however, the multiplication of her own
+annoyances enabled her to survey charwomen’s troubles with increased
+cheerfulness.  None of them, at any rate, had spent an afternoon with
+Lady Caroline.
+
+Francesca cut in at another table and with better fortune attending on
+her, succeeded in winning back most of her losses.  A sense of
+satisfaction was distinctly dominant as she took leave of her hostess.
+St. Michael’s gossip, or rather the manner in which it had been received,
+had given her a clue to the real state of affairs, which, however slender
+and conjectural, at least pointed in the desired direction.  At first she
+had been horribly afraid lest she should be listening to a definite
+announcement which would have been the death-blow to her hopes, but as
+the recitation went on without any of those assured little minor details
+which St. Michael so loved to supply, she had come to the conclusion that
+it was merely a piece of intelligent guesswork.  And if Lady Caroline had
+really believed in the story of Elaine de Frey’s virtual engagement to
+Courtenay Youghal she would have taken a malicious pleasure in
+encouraging St. Michael in his confidences, and in watching Francesca’s
+discomfiture under the recital.  The irritated manner in which she had
+cut short the discussion betrayed the fact, that, as far as the old
+woman’s information went, it was Comus and not Courtenay Youghal who held
+the field.  And in this particular case Lady Caroline’s information was
+likely to be nearer the truth than St. Michael’s confident gossip.
+
+Francesca always gave a penny to the first crossing-sweeper or
+match-seller she chanced across after a successful sitting at bridge.
+This afternoon she had come out of the fray some fifteen shillings to the
+bad, but she gave two pennies to a crossing-sweeper at the north-west
+corner of Berkeley Square as a sort of thank-offering to the Gods.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+IT was a fresh rain-repentant afternoon, following a morning that had
+been sultry and torrentially wet by turns; the sort of afternoon that
+impels people to talk graciously of the rain as having done a lot of
+good, its chief merit in their eyes probably having been its recognition
+of the art of moderation.  Also it was an afternoon that invited bodily
+activity after the convalescent languor of the earlier part of the day.
+Elaine had instinctively found her way into her riding-habit and sent an
+order down to the stables—a blessed oasis that still smelt sweetly of
+horse and hay and cleanliness in a world that reeked of petrol, and now
+she set her mare at a smart pace through a succession of long-stretching
+country lanes.  She was due some time that afternoon at a garden-party,
+but she rode with determination in an opposite direction.  In the first
+place neither Comus or Courtenay would be at the party, which fact seemed
+to remove any valid reason that could be thought of for inviting her
+attendance thereat; in the second place about a hundred human beings
+would be gathered there, and human gatherings were not her most crying
+need at the present moment.  Since her last encounter with her wooers,
+under the cedars in her own garden, Elaine realised that she was either
+very happy or cruelly unhappy, she could not quite determine which.  She
+seemed to have what she most wanted in the world lying at her feet, and
+she was dreadfully uncertain in her more reflective moments whether she
+really wanted to stretch out her hand and take it.  It was all very like
+some situation in an Arabian Nights tale or a story of Pagan Hellas, and
+consequently the more puzzling and disconcerting to a girl brought up on
+the methodical lines of Victorian Christianity.  Her appeal court was in
+permanent session these last few days, but it gave no decisions, at least
+none that she would listen to.  And the ride on her fast light-stepping
+little mare, alone and unattended, through the fresh-smelling leafy lanes
+into unexplored country, seemed just what she wanted at the moment.  The
+mare made some small delicate pretence of being roadshy, not the staring
+dolt-like kind of nervousness that shows itself in an irritating
+hanging-back as each conspicuous wayside object presents itself, but the
+nerve-flutter of an imaginative animal that merely results in a quick
+whisk of the head and a swifter bound forward.  She might have
+paraphrased the mental attitude of the immortalised Peter Bell into
+
+    A basket underneath a tree
+    A yellow tiger is to me,
+             If it is nothing more.
+
+The more really alarming episodes of the road, the hoot and whir of a
+passing motor-car or the loud vibrating hum of a wayside
+threshing-machine, were treated with indifference.
+
+On turning a corner out of a narrow coppice-bordered lane into a wider
+road that sloped steadily upward in a long stretch of hill Elaine saw,
+coming toward her at no great distance, a string of yellow-painted vans,
+drawn for the most part by skewbald or speckled horses.  A certain rakish
+air about these oncoming road-craft proclaimed them as belonging to a
+travelling wild-beast show, decked out in the rich primitive colouring
+that one’s taste in childhood would have insisted on before it had been
+schooled in the artistic value of dulness.  It was an unlooked-for and
+distinctly unwelcome encounter.  The mare had already commenced a sixfold
+scrutiny with nostrils, eyes and daintily-pricked ears; one ear made
+hurried little backward movements to hear what Elaine was saying about
+the eminent niceness and respectability of the approaching caravan, but
+even Elaine felt that she would be unable satisfactorily to explain the
+elephants and camels that would certainly form part of the procession.
+To turn back would seem rather craven, and the mare might take fright at
+the manœuvre and try to bolt; a gate standing ajar at the entrance to a
+farmyard lane provided a convenient way out of the difficulty.
+
+As Elaine pushed her way through she became aware of a man standing just
+inside the lane, who made a movement forward to open the gate for her.
+
+“Thank you.  I’m just getting out of the way of a wild-beast show,” she
+explained; “my mare is tolerant of motors and traction-engines, but I
+expect camels—hullo,” she broke off, recognising the man as an old
+acquaintance, “I heard you had taken rooms in a farmhouse somewhere.
+Fancy meeting you in this way.”
+
+In the not very distant days of her little-girlhood, Tom Keriway had been
+a man to be looked upon with a certain awe and envy; indeed the glamour
+of his roving career would have fired the imagination, and wistful desire
+to do likewise, of many young Englishmen.  It seemed to be the grown-up
+realisation of the games played in dark rooms in winter fire-lit
+evenings, and the dreams dreamed over favourite books of adventure.
+Making Vienna his headquarters, almost his home, he had rambled where he
+listed through the lands of the Near and Middle East as leisurely and
+thoroughly as tamer souls might explore Paris.  He had wandered through
+Hungarian horse-fairs, hunted shy crafty beasts on lonely Balkan
+hillsides, dropped himself pebble-wise into the stagnant human pool of
+some Bulgarian monastery, threaded his way through the strange racial
+mosaic of Salonika, listened with amused politeness to the shallow
+ultra-modern opinions of a voluble editor or lawyer in some wayside
+Russian town, or learned wisdom from a chance tavern companion, one of
+the atoms of the busy ant-stream of men and merchandise that moves
+untiringly round the shores of the Black Sea.  And far and wide as he
+might roam he always managed to turn up at frequent intervals, at ball
+and supper and theatre, in the gay Hauptstadt of the Habsburgs, haunting
+his favourite cafés and wine-vaults, skimming through his favourite
+news-sheets, greeting old acquaintances and friends, from ambassadors
+down to cobblers in the social scale.  He seldom talked of his travels,
+but it might be said that his travels talked of him; there was an air
+about him that a German diplomat once summed up in a phrase: “a man that
+wolves have sniffed at.”
+
+And then two things happened, which he had not mapped out in his route; a
+severe illness shook half the life and all the energy out of him, and a
+heavy money loss brought him almost to the door of destitution.  With
+something, perhaps, of the impulse which drives a stricken animal away
+from its kind, Tom Keriway left the haunts where he had known so much
+happiness, and withdrew into the shelter of a secluded farmhouse lodging;
+more than ever he became to Elaine a hearsay personality.  And now the
+chance meeting with the caravan had flung her across the threshold of his
+retreat.
+
+“What a charming little nook you’ve got hold of,” she exclaimed with
+instinctive politeness, and then looked searchingly round, and discovered
+that she had spoken the truth; it really was charming.  The farmhouse had
+that intensely English look that one seldom sees out of Normandy.  Over
+the whole scene of rickyard, garden, outbuildings, horsepond and orchard,
+brooded that air which seems rightfully to belong to out-of-the-way
+farmyards, an air of wakeful dreaminess which suggests that here, man and
+beast and bird have got up so early that the rest of the world has never
+caught them up and never will.
+
+Elaine dismounted, and Keriway led the mare round to a little paddock by
+the side of a great grey barn.  At the end of the lane they could see the
+show go past, a string of lumbering vans and great striding beasts that
+seemed to link the vast silences of the desert with the noises and sights
+and smells, the naphtha-flares and advertisement hoardings and trampled
+orange-peel, of an endless succession of towns.
+
+“You had better let the caravan pass well on its way before you get on
+the road again,” said Keriway; “the smell of the beasts may make your
+mare nervous and restive going home.”
+
+Then he called to a boy who was busy with a hoe among some defiantly
+prosperous weeds, to fetch the lady a glass of milk and a piece of
+currant loaf.
+
+“I don’t know when I’ve seen anything so utterly charming and peaceful,”
+said Elaine, propping herself on a seat that a pear-tree had obligingly
+designed in the fantastic curve of its trunk.
+
+“Charming, certainly,” said Keriway, “but too full of the stress of its
+own little life struggle to be peaceful.  Since I have lived here I’ve
+learnt, what I’ve always suspected, that a country farmhouse, set away in
+a world of its own, is one of the most wonderful studies of interwoven
+happenings and tragedies that can be imagined.  It is like the old
+chronicles of medieval Europe in the days when there was a sort of
+ordered anarchy between feudal lords and overlords, and burg-grafs, and
+mitred abbots, and prince-bishops, robber barons and merchant guilds, and
+Electors and so forth, all striving and contending and counter-plotting,
+and interfering with each other under some vague code of loosely-applied
+rules.  Here one sees it reproduced under one’s eyes, like a musty page
+of black-letter come to life.  Look at one little section of it, the
+poultry-life on the farm.  Villa poultry, dull egg-machines, with records
+kept of how many ounces of food they eat, and how many pennyworths of
+eggs they lay, give you no idea of the wonder-life of these farm-birds;
+their feuds and jealousies, and carefully maintained prerogatives, their
+unsparing tyrannies and persecutions, their calculated courage and
+bravado or sedulously hidden cowardice, it might all be some human
+chapter from the annals of the old Rhineland or medieval Italy.  And
+then, outside their own bickering wars and hates, the grim enemies that
+come up against them from the woodlands; the hawk that dashes among the
+coops like a moss-trooper raiding the border, knowing well that a charge
+of shot may tear him to bits at any moment.  And the stoat, a creeping
+slip of brown fur a few inches long, intently and unstayably out for
+blood.  And the hunger-taught master of craft, the red fox, who has
+waited perhaps half the afternoon for his chance while the fowls were
+dusting themselves under the hedge, and just as they were turning
+supper-ward to the yard one has stopped a moment to give her feathers a
+final shake and found death springing upon her.  Do you know,” he
+continued, as Elaine fed herself and the mare with morsels of
+currant-loaf, “I don’t think any tragedy in literature that I have ever
+come across impressed me so much as the first one, that I spelled out
+slowly for myself in words of three letters: the bad fox has got the red
+hen.  There was something so dramatically complete about it; the badness
+of the fox, added to all the traditional guile of his race, seemed to
+heighten the horror of the hen’s fate, and there was such a suggestion of
+masterful malice about the word ‘got.’  One felt that a countryside in
+arms would not get that hen away from the bad fox.  They used to think me
+a slow dull reader for not getting on with my lesson, but I used to sit
+and picture to myself the red hen, with its wings beating helplessly,
+screeching in terrified protest, or perhaps, if he had got it by the
+neck, with beak wide agape and silent, and eyes staring, as it left the
+farmyard for ever.  I have seen blood-spillings and down-crushings and
+abject defeat here and there in my time, but the red hen has remained in
+my mind as the type of helpless tragedy.”  He was silent for a moment as
+if he were again musing over the three-letter drama that had so dwelt in
+his childhood’s imagination.  “Tell me some of the things you have seen
+in your time,” was the request that was nearly on Elaine’s lips, but she
+hastily checked herself and substituted another.
+
+“Tell me more about the farm, please.”
+
+And he told her of a whole world, or rather of several intermingled
+worlds, set apart in this sleepy hollow in the hills, of beast lore and
+wood lore and farm craft, at times touching almost the border of
+witchcraft—passing lightly here, not with the probing eagerness of those
+who know nothing, but with the averted glance of those who fear to see
+too much.  He told her of those things that slept and those that prowled
+when the dusk fell, of strange hunting cats, of the yard swine and the
+stalled cattle, of the farm folk themselves, as curious and remote in
+their way, in their ideas and fears and wants and tragedies, as the
+brutes and feathered stock that they tended.  It seemed to Elaine as if a
+musty store of old-world children’s books had been fetched down from some
+cobwebbed lumber-room and brought to life.  Sitting there in the little
+paddock, grown thickly with tall weeds and rank grasses, and shadowed by
+the weather-beaten old grey barn, listening to this chronicle of
+wonderful things, half fanciful, half very real, she could scarcely
+believe that a few miles away there was a garden-party in full swing,
+with smart frocks and smart conversation, fashionable refreshments and
+fashionable music, and a fevered undercurrent of social strivings and
+snubbings.  Did Vienna and the Balkan Mountains and the Black Sea seem as
+remote and hard to believe in, she wondered, to the man sitting by her
+side, who had discovered or invented this wonderful fairyland?  Was it a
+true and merciful arrangement of fate and life that the things of the
+moment thrust out the after-taste of the things that had been?  Here was
+one who had held much that was priceless in the hollow of his hand and
+lost it all, and he was happy and absorbed and well-content with the
+little wayside corner of the world into which he had crept.  And Elaine,
+who held so many desirable things in the hollow of her hand, could not
+make up her mind to be even moderately happy.  She did not even know
+whether to take this hero of her childhood down from his pedestal, or to
+place him on a higher one; on the whole she was inclined to resent rather
+than approve the idea that ill-health and misfortune could so completely
+subdue and tame an erstwhile bold and roving spirit.
+
+The mare was showing signs of delicately-hinted impatience; the paddock,
+with its teasing insects and very indifferent grazing, had not thrust out
+the image of her own comfortable well-foddered loose-box.  Elaine
+divested her habit of some remaining crumbs of bun-loaf and jumped
+lightly on to her saddle.  As she rode slowly down the lane, with Keriway
+escorting her as far as its gate, she looked round at what had seemed to
+her, a short while ago, just a picturesque old farmstead, a place of
+bee-hives and hollyhocks and gabled cart-sheds; now it was in her eyes a
+magic city, with an undercurrent of reality beneath its magic.
+
+“You are a person to be envied,” she said to Keriway; “you have created a
+fairyland, and you are living in it yourself.”
+
+“Envied?”
+
+He shot the question out with sudden bitterness.  She looked down and saw
+the wistful misery that had come into his face.
+
+“Once,” he said to her, “in a German paper I read a short story about a
+tame crippled crane that lived in the park of some small town.  I forget
+what happened in the story, but there was one line that I shall always
+remember: ‘it was lame, that is why it was tame.’”
+
+He had created a fairyland, but assuredly he was not living in it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+IN the warmth of a late June morning the long shaded stretch of raked
+earth, gravel-walk and rhododendron bush that is known affectionately as
+the Row was alive with the monotonous movement and alert stagnation
+appropriate to the time and place.  The seekers after health, the seekers
+after notoriety and recognition, and the lovers of good exercise were all
+well represented on the galloping ground; the gravel-walk and chairs and
+long seats held a population whose varied instincts and motives would
+have baffled a social catalogue-maker.  The children, handled or in
+perambulators, might be excused from instinct or motive; they were
+brought.
+
+Pleasingly conspicuous among a bunch of indifferent riders pacing along
+by the rails where the onlookers were thickest was Courtenay Youghal, on
+his handsome plum-roan gelding Anne de Joyeuse.  That delicately stepping
+animal had taken a prize at Islington and nearly taken the life of a
+stable-boy of whom he disapproved, but his strongest claims to
+distinction were his good looks and his high opinion of himself.  Youghal
+evidently believed in thorough accord between horse and rider.
+
+“Please stop and talk to me,” said a quiet beckoning voice from the other
+side of the rails, and Youghal drew rein and greeted Lady Veula Croot.
+Lady Veula had married into a family of commercial solidity and
+enterprising political nonentity.  She had a devoted husband, some blonde
+teachable children, and a look of unutterable weariness in her eyes.  To
+see her standing at the top of an expensively horticultured staircase
+receiving her husband’s guests was rather like watching an animal
+performing on a music-hall stage.
+
+One always tells oneself that the animal likes it, and one always knows
+that it doesn’t.
+
+“Lady Veula is an ardent Free Trader, isn’t she?” someone once remarked
+to Lady Caroline.
+
+“I wonder,” said Lady Caroline, in her gently questioning voice; “a woman
+whose dresses are made in Paris and whose marriage has been made in
+Heaven might be equally biassed for and against free imports.”
+
+Lady Veula looked at Youghal and his mount with slow critical
+appraisement, and there was a note of blended raillery and wistfulness in
+her voice.
+
+“You two dear things, I should love to stroke you both, but I’m not sure
+how Joyeuse would take it.  So I’ll stroke you down verbally instead.  I
+admired your attack on Sir Edward immensely, though of course I don’t
+agree with a word of it.  Your description of him building a hedge round
+the German cuckoo and hoping he was isolating it was rather sweet.
+Seriously though, I regard him as one of the pillars of the
+Administration.”
+
+“So do I,” said Youghal; “the misfortune is that he is merely propping up
+a canvas roof.  It’s just his regrettable solidity and integrity that
+makes him so expensively dangerous.  The average Briton arrives at the
+same judgment about Roan’s handling of foreign affairs as Omar does of
+the Supreme Being in his dealings with the world: He’s a good fellow and
+’twill all be well.’”
+
+Lady Veula laughed lightly.  “My Party is in power so I may exercise the
+privilege of being optimistic.  Who is that who bowed to you?” she
+continued, as a dark young man with an inclination to stoutness passed by
+them on foot; “I’ve seen him about a good deal lately.  He’s been to one
+or two of my dances.”
+
+“Andrei Drakoloff,” said Youghal; “he’s just produced a play that has had
+a big success in Moscow and is certain to be extremely popular all over
+Russia.  In the first three acts the heroine is supposed to be dying of
+consumption; in the last act they find she is really dying of cancer.”
+
+“Are the Russians really such a gloomy people?”
+
+“Gloom-loving but not in the least gloomy.  They merely take their
+sadness pleasurably, just as we are accused of taking our pleasures
+sadly.  Have you noticed that dreadful Klopstock youth has been pounding
+past us at shortening intervals.  He’ll come up and talk if he half
+catches your eye.”
+
+“I only just know him.  Isn’t he at an agricultural college or something
+of the sort?”
+
+“Yes, studying to be a gentleman farmer, he told me.  I didn’t ask if
+both subjects were compulsory.”
+
+“You’re really rather dreadful,” said Lady Veula, trying to look as if
+she thought so; “remember, we are all equal in the sight of Heaven.”
+
+For a preacher of wholesome truths her voice rather lacked conviction.
+
+“If I and Ernest Klopstock are really equal in the sight of Heaven,” said
+Youghal, with intense complacency, “I should recommend Heaven to consult
+an eye specialist.”
+
+There was a heavy spattering of loose earth, and a squelching of
+saddle-leather, as the Klopstock youth lumbered up to the rails and
+delivered himself of loud, cheerful greetings. Joyeuse laid his ears well
+back as the ungainly bay cob and his appropriately matched rider drew up
+beside him; his verdict was reflected and endorsed by the cold stare of
+Youghal’s eyes.
+
+“I’ve been having a nailing fine time,” recounted the newcomer with
+clamorous enthusiasm; “I was over in Paris last month and had lots of
+strawberries there, then I had a lot more in London, and now I’ve been
+having a late crop of them in Herefordshire, so I’ve had quite a lot this
+year.”  And he laughed as one who had deserved well and received well of
+Fate.
+
+“The charm of that story,” said Youghal, “is that it can be told in any
+drawing-room.”  And with a sweep of his wide-brimmed hat to Lady Veula he
+turned the impatient Joyeuse into the moving stream of horse and
+horsemen.
+
+“That woman reminds me of some verse I’ve read and liked,” thought
+Youghal, as Joyeuse sprang into a light showy canter that gave full
+recognition to the existence of observant human beings along the side
+walk.  “Ah, I have it.”
+
+And he quoted almost aloud, as one does in the exhilaration of a canter:
+
+    “How much I loved that way you had
+    Of smiling most, when very sad,
+    A smile which carried tender hints
+    Of sun and spring,
+    And yet, more than all other thing,
+    Of weariness beyond all words.”
+
+And having satisfactorily fitted Lady Veula on to a quotation he
+dismissed her from his mind.  With the constancy of her sex she thought
+about him, his good looks and his youth and his railing tongue, till late
+in the afternoon.
+
+While Youghal was putting Joyeuse through his paces under the elm trees
+of the Row a little drama in which he was directly interested was being
+played out not many hundred yards away.  Elaine and Comus were indulging
+themselves in two pennyworths of Park chair, drawn aside just a little
+from the serried rows of sitters who were set out like bedded plants over
+an acre or so of turf.  Comus was, for the moment, in a mood of
+pugnacious gaiety, disbursing a fund of pointed criticism and unsparing
+anecdote concerning those of the promenaders or loungers whom he knew
+personally or by sight.  Elaine was rather quieter than usual, and the
+grave serenity of the Leonardo da Vinci portrait seemed intensified in
+her face this morning.  In his leisurely courtship Comus had relied
+almost exclusively on his physical attraction and the fitful drollery of
+his wit and high spirits, and these graces had gone far to make him seem
+a very desirable and rather lovable thing in Elaine’s eyes.  But he had
+left out of account the disfavour which he constantly risked and
+sometimes incurred from his frank and undisguised indifference to other
+people’s interests and wishes, including, at times, Elaine’s.  And the
+more that she felt that she liked him the more she was irritated by his
+lack of consideration for her.  Without expecting that her every wish
+should become a law to him she would at least have liked it to reach the
+formality of a Second Reading.  Another important factor he had also left
+out of his reckoning, namely the presence on the scene of another suitor,
+who also had youth and wit to recommend him, and who certainly did not
+lack physical attractions.  Comus, marching carelessly through unknown
+country to effect what seemed already an assured victory, made the
+mistake of disregarding the existence of an unbeaten army on his flank.
+
+To-day Elaine felt that, without having actually quarrelled, she and
+Comus had drifted a little bit out of sympathy with one another.  The
+fault she knew was scarcely hers, in fact from the most good-natured
+point of view it could hardly be denied that it was almost entirely his.
+The incident of the silver dish had lacked even the attraction of
+novelty; it had been one of a series, all bearing a strong connecting
+likeness.  There had been small unrepaid loans which Elaine would not
+have grudged in themselves, though the application for them brought a
+certain qualm of distaste; with the perversity which seemed inseparable
+from his doings, Comus had always flung away a portion of his borrowings
+in some ostentatious piece of glaring and utterly profitless
+extravagance, which outraged all the canons of her upbringing without
+bringing him an atom of understandable satisfaction.  Under these
+repeated discouragements it was not surprising that some small part of
+her affection should have slipped away, but she had come to the Park that
+morning with an unconfessed expectation of being gently wooed back to the
+mood of gracious forgetfulness that she was only too eager to assume.  It
+was almost worth while being angry with Comus for the sake of
+experiencing the pleasure of being coaxed into friendliness again with
+the charm which he knew so well how to exert.  It was delicious here
+under the trees on this perfect June morning, and Elaine had the blessed
+assurance that most of the women within range were envying her the
+companionship of the handsome merry-hearted youth who sat by her side.
+With special complacence she contemplated her cousin Suzette, who was
+self-consciously but not very elatedly basking in the attentions of her
+fiancé, an earnest-looking young man who was superintendent of a People’s
+something-or-other on the south side of the river, and whose clothes
+Comus had described as having been made in Southwark rather than in
+anger.
+
+Most of the pleasures in life must be paid for, and the chair-ticket
+vendor in due time made his appearance in quest of pennies.
+
+Comus paid him from out of a varied assortment of coins and then balanced
+the remainder in the palm of his hand.  Elaine felt a sudden
+foreknowledge of something disagreeable about to happen and a red spot
+deepened in her cheeks.
+
+“Four shillings and fivepence and a half-penny,” said Comus,
+reflectively.  “It’s a ridiculous sum to last me for the next three days,
+and I owe a card debt of over two pounds.”
+
+“Yes?” commented Elaine dryly and with an apparent lack of interest in
+his exchequer statement.  Surely, she was thinking hurriedly to herself,
+he could not be foolish enough to broach the matter of another loan.
+
+“The card debt is rather a nuisance,” pursued Comus, with fatalistic
+persistency.
+
+“You won seven pounds last week, didn’t you?” asked Elaine; “don’t you
+put by any of your winnings to balance losses?”
+
+“The four shillings and the fivepence and the half-penny represent the
+rearguard of the seven pounds,” said Comus; “the rest have fallen by the
+way.  If I can pay the two pounds to-day I daresay I shall win something
+more to go on with; I’m holding rather good cards just now.  But if I
+can’t pay it of course I shan’t show up at the club.  So you see the fix
+I am in.”
+
+Elaine took no notice of this indirect application.  The Appeal Court was
+assembling in haste to consider new evidence, and this time there was the
+rapidity of sudden determination about its movement.
+
+The conversation strayed away from the fateful topic for a few moments
+and then Comus brought it deliberately back to the danger zone.
+
+“It would be awfully nice if you would let me have a fiver for a few
+days, Elaine,” he said quickly; “if you don’t I really don’t know what I
+shall do.”
+
+“If you are really bothered about your card debt I will send you the two
+pounds by messenger boy early this afternoon.”  She spoke quietly and
+with great decision.  “And I shall not be at the Connor’s dance
+to-night,” she continued; “it’s too hot for dancing.  I’m going home now;
+please don’t bother to accompany me, I particularly wish to go alone.”
+
+Comus saw that he had overstepped the mark of her good nature.  Wisely he
+made no immediate attempt to force himself back into her good graces.  He
+would wait till her indignation had cooled.
+
+His tactics would have been excellent if he had not forgotten that
+unbeaten army on his flank.
+
+Elaine de Frey had known very clearly what qualities she had wanted in
+Comus, and she had known, against all efforts at self-deception, that he
+fell far short of those qualities.  She had been willing to lower her
+standard of moral requirements in proportion as she was fond of the boy,
+but there was a point beyond which she would not go.  He had hurt her
+pride besides alarming her sense of caution.
+
+Suzette, on whom she felt a thoroughly justified tendency to look down,
+had at any rate an attentive and considerate lover.  Elaine walked
+towards the Park gates feeling that in one essential Suzette possessed
+something that had been denied to her, and at the gates she met Joyeuse
+and his spruce young rider preparing to turn homeward.
+
+“Get rid of Joyeuse and come and take me out to lunch somewhere,”
+demanded Elaine.
+
+“How jolly,” said Youghal.  “Let’s go to the Corridor Restaurant.  The
+head waiter there is an old Viennese friend of mine and looks after me
+beautifully.  I’ve never been there with a lady before, and he’s sure to
+ask me afterwards, in his fatherly way, if we’re engaged.”
+
+The lunch was a success in every way.  There was just enough orchestral
+effort to immerse the conversation without drowning it, and Youghal was
+an attentive and inspired host.  Through an open doorway Elaine could see
+the café reading-room, with its imposing array of _Neue Freie Presse_,
+_Berliner Tageblatt_, and other exotic newspapers hanging on the wall.
+She looked across at the young man seated opposite her, who gave one the
+impression of having centred the most serious efforts of his brain on his
+toilet and his food, and recalled some of the flattering remarks that the
+press had bestowed on his recent speeches.
+
+“Doesn’t it make you conceited, Courtenay,” she asked, “to look at all
+those foreign newspapers hanging there and know that most of them have
+got paragraphs and articles about your Persian speech?”
+
+Youghal laughed.
+
+“There’s always a chastening corrective in the thought that some of them
+may have printed your portrait.  When once you’ve seen your features
+hurriedly reproduced in the _Matin_, for instance, you feel you would
+like to be a veiled Turkish woman for the rest of your life.”
+
+And Youghal gazed long and lovingly at his reflection in the nearest
+mirror, as an antidote against possible incitements to humility in the
+portrait gallery of fame.
+
+Elaine felt a certain soothed satisfaction in the fact that this young
+man, whose knowledge of the Middle East was an embarrassment to Ministers
+at question time and in debate, was showing himself equally well-informed
+on the subject of her culinary likes and dislikes.  If Suzette could have
+been forced to attend as a witness at a neighbouring table she would have
+felt even happier.
+
+“Did the head waiter ask if we were engaged?” asked Elaine, when
+Courtenay had settled the bill, and she had finished collecting her
+sunshade and gloves and other impedimenta from the hands of obsequious
+attendants.
+
+“Yes,” said Youghal, “and he seemed quite crestfallen when I had to say
+‘no.’”
+
+“It would be horrid to disappoint him when he’s looked after us so
+charmingly,” said Elaine; “tell him that we are.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+THE Rutland Galleries were crowded, especially in the neighbourhood of
+the tea-buffet, by a fashionable throng of art-patrons which had gathered
+to inspect Mervyn Quentock’s collection of Society portraits.  Quentock
+was a young artist whose abilities were just receiving due recognition
+from the critics; that the recognition was not overdue he owed largely to
+his perception of the fact that if one hides one’s talent under a bushel
+one must be careful to point out to everyone the exact bushel under which
+it is hidden.  There are two manners of receiving recognition: one is to
+be discovered so long after one’s death that one’s grandchildren have to
+write to the papers to establish their relationship; the other is to be
+discovered, like the infant Moses, at the very outset of one’s career.
+Mervyn Quentock had chosen the latter and happier manner.  In an age when
+many aspiring young men strive to advertise their wares by imparting to
+them a freakish imbecility, Quentock turned out work that was
+characterised by a pleasing delicate restraint, but he contrived to
+herald his output with a certain fanfare of personal eccentricity,
+thereby compelling an attention which might otherwise have strayed past
+his studio.  In appearance he was the ordinary cleanly young Englishman,
+except, perhaps, that his eyes rather suggested a library edition of the
+Arabian Nights; his clothes matched his appearance and showed no taint of
+the sartorial disorder by which the bourgeois of the garden-city and the
+Latin Quarter anxiously seeks to proclaim his kinship with art and
+thought.  His eccentricity took the form of flying in the face of some of
+the prevailing social currents of the day, but as a reactionary, never as
+a reformer.  He produced a gasp of admiring astonishment in fashionable
+circles by refusing to paint actresses—except, of course, those who had
+left the legitimate drama to appear between the boards of Debrett.  He
+absolutely declined to execute portraits of Americans unless they hailed
+from certain favoured States.  His “water-colour-line,” as a New York
+paper phrased it, earned for him a crop of angry criticisms and a shoal
+of Transatlantic commissions, and criticism and commissions were the
+things that Quentock most wanted.
+
+“Of course he is perfectly right,” said Lady Caroline Benaresq, calmly
+rescuing a piled-up plate of caviare sandwiches from the neighbourhood of
+a trio of young ladies who had established themselves hopefully within
+easy reach of it.  “Art,” she continued, addressing herself to the Rev.
+Poltimore Vardon, “has always been geographically exclusive.  London may
+be more important from most points of view than Venice, but the art of
+portrait painting, which would never concern itself with a Lord Mayor,
+simply grovels at the feet of the Doges.  As a Socialist I’m bound to
+recognise the right of Ealing to compare itself with Avignon, but one
+cannot expect the Muses to put the two on a level.”
+
+“Exclusiveness,” said the Reverend Poltimore, “has been the salvation of
+Art, just as the lack of it is proving the downfall of religion.  My
+colleagues of the cloth go about zealously proclaiming the fact that
+Christianity, in some form or other, is attracting shoals of converts
+among all sorts of races and tribes, that one had scarcely ever heard of,
+except in reviews of books of travel that one never read.  That sort of
+thing was all very well when the world was more sparsely populated, but
+nowadays, when it simply teems with human beings, no one is particularly
+impressed by the fact that a few million, more or less, of converts, of a
+low stage of mental development, have accepted the teachings of some
+particular religion.  It not only chills one’s enthusiasm, it positively
+shakes one’s convictions when one hears that the things one has been
+brought up to believe as true are being very favourably spoken of by
+Buriats and Samoyeds and Kanakas.”
+
+The Rev. Poltimore Vardon had once seen a resemblance in himself to
+Voltaire, and had lived alongside the comparison ever since.
+
+“No modern cult or fashion,” he continued, “would be favourably
+influenced by considerations based on statistics; fancy adopting a
+certain style of hat or cut of coat, because it was being largely worn in
+Lancashire and the Midlands; fancy favouring a certain brand of champagne
+because it was being extensively patronised in German summer resorts.  No
+wonder that religion is falling into disuse in this country under such
+ill-directed methods.”
+
+“You can’t prevent the heathen being converted if they choose to be,”
+said Lady Caroline; “this is an age of toleration.”
+
+“You could always deny it,” said the Rev. Poltimore, “like the Belgians
+do with regrettable occurrences in the Congo.  But I would go further
+than that.  I would stimulate the waning enthusiasm for Christianity in
+this country by labelling it as the exclusive possession of a privileged
+few.  If one could induce the Duchess of Pelm, for instance, to assert
+that the Kingdom of Heaven, as far as the British Isles are concerned, is
+strictly limited to herself, two of the under-gardeners at Pelmby, and,
+possibly, but not certainly, the Dean of Dunster, there would be an
+instant reshaping of the popular attitude towards religious convictions
+and observances.  Once let the idea get about that the Christian Church
+is rather more exclusive than the Lawn at Ascot, and you would have a
+quickening of religious life such as this generation has never witnessed.
+But as long as the clergy and the religious organisations advertise their
+creed on the lines of ‘Everybody ought to believe in us: millions do,’
+one can expect nothing but indifference and waning faith.”
+
+“Time is just as exclusive in its way as Art,” said Lady Caroline.
+
+“In what way?” said the Reverend Poltimore.
+
+“Your pleasantries about religion would have sounded quite clever and
+advanced in the early ’nineties.  To-day they have a dreadfully warmed-up
+flavour.  That is the great delusion of you would-be advanced satirists;
+you imagine you can sit down comfortably for a couple of decades saying
+daring and startling things about the age you live in, which, whatever
+other defects it may have, is certainly not standing still.  The whole of
+the Sherard Blaw school of discursive drama suggests, to my mind, Early
+Victorian furniture in a travelling circus.  However, you will always
+have relays of people from the suburbs to listen to the Mocking Bird of
+yesterday, and sincerely imagine it is the harbinger of something new and
+revolutionising.”
+
+“_Would_ you mind passing that plate of sandwiches,” asked one of the
+trio of young ladies, emboldened by famine.
+
+“With pleasure,” said Lady Caroline, deftly passing her a nearly empty
+plate of bread-and-butter.
+
+“I meant the place of caviare sandwiches.  So sorry to trouble you,”
+persisted the young lady.
+
+Her sorrow was misapplied; Lady Caroline had turned her attention to a
+newcomer.
+
+“A very interesting exhibition,” Ada Spelvexit was saying; “faultless
+technique, as far as I am a judge of technique, and quite a master-touch
+in the way of poses.  But have you noticed how very animal his art is?
+He seems to shut out the soul from his portraits.  I nearly cried when I
+saw dear Winifred depicted simply as a good-looking healthy blonde.”
+
+“I wish you had,” said Lady Caroline; “the spectacle of a strong, brave
+woman weeping at a private view in the Rutland Galleries would have been
+so sensational.  It would certainly have been reproduced in the next
+Drury Lane drama.  And I’m so unlucky; I never see these sensational
+events.  I was ill with appendicitis, you know, when Lulu Braminguard
+dramatically forgave her husband, after seventeen years of estrangement,
+during a State luncheon party at Windsor.  The old queen was furious
+about it.  She said it was so disrespectful to the cook to be thinking of
+such a thing at such a time.”
+
+Lady Caroline’s recollections of things that hadn’t happened at the Court
+of Queen Victoria were notoriously vivid; it was the very widespread fear
+that she might one day write a book of reminiscences that made her so
+universally respected.
+
+“As for his full-length picture of Lady Brickfield,” continued Ada,
+ignoring Lady Caroline’s commentary as far as possible, “all the
+expression seems to have been deliberately concentrated in the feet;
+beautiful feet, no doubt, but still, hardly the most distinctive part of
+a human being.”
+
+“To paint the right people at the wrong end may be an eccentricity, but
+it is scarcely an indiscretion,” pronounced Lady Caroline.
+
+One of the portraits which attracted more than a passing flutter of
+attention was a costume study of Francesca Bassington.  Francesca had
+secured some highly desirable patronage for the young artist, and in
+return he had enriched her pantheon of personal possessions with a clever
+piece of work into which he had thrown an unusual amount of imaginative
+detail.  He had painted her in a costume of the great Louis’s brightest
+period, seated in front of a tapestry that was so prominent in the
+composition that it could scarcely be said to form part of the
+background.  Flowers and fruit, in exotic profusion, were its dominant
+note; quinces, pomegranates, passion-flowers, giant convolvulus, great
+mauve-pink roses, and grapes that were already being pressed by gleeful
+cupids in a riotous Arcadian vintage, stood out on its woven texture.
+The same note was struck in the beflowered satin of the lady’s kirtle,
+and in the pomegranate pattern of the brocade that draped the couch on
+which she was seated.  The artist had called his picture “Recolte.”  And
+after one had taken in all the details of fruit and flower and foliage
+that earned the composition its name, one noted the landscape that showed
+through a broad casement in the left-hand corner.  It was a landscape
+clutched in the grip of winter, naked, bleak, black-frozen; a winter in
+which things died and knew no rewakening.  If the picture typified
+harvest, it was a harvest of artificial growth.
+
+“It leaves a great deal to the imagination, doesn’t it?” said Ada
+Spelvexit, who had edged away from the range of Lady Caroline’s tongue.
+
+“At any rate one can tell who it’s meant for,” said Serena Golackly.
+
+“Oh, yes, it’s a good likeness of dear Francesca,” admitted Ada; “of
+course, it flatters her.”
+
+“That, too, is a fault on the right side in portrait painting,” said
+Serena; “after all, if posterity is going to stare at one for centuries
+it’s only kind and reasonable to be looking just a little better than
+one’s best.”
+
+“What a curiously unequal style the artist has,” continued Ada, almost as
+if she felt a personal grievance against him; “I was just noticing what a
+lack of soul there was in most of his portraits.  Dear Winifred, you
+know, who speaks so beautifully and feelingly at my gatherings for old
+women, he’s made her look just an ordinary dairy-maidish blonde; and
+Francesca, who is quite the most soulless woman I’ve ever met, well, he’s
+given her quite—”
+
+“Hush,” said Serena, “the Bassington boy is just behind you.”
+
+Comus stood looking at the portrait of his mother with the feeling of one
+who comes suddenly across a once-familiar half-forgotten acquaintance in
+unfamiliar surroundings.  The likeness was undoubtedly a good one, but
+the artist had caught an expression in Francesca’s eyes which few people
+had ever seen there.  It was the expression of a woman who had forgotten
+for one short moment to be absorbed in the small cares and excitements of
+her life, the money worries and little social plannings, and had found
+time to send a look of half-wistful friendliness to some sympathetic
+companion.  Comus could recall that look, fitful and fleeting, in his
+mother’s eyes when she had been a few years younger, before her world had
+grown to be such a committee-room of ways and means.  Almost as a
+re-discovery he remembered that she had once figured in his boyish mind
+as a “rather good sort,” more ready to see the laughable side of a piece
+of mischief than to labour forth a reproof.  That the bygone feeling of
+good fellowship had been stamped out was, he knew, probably in great part
+his own doing, and it was possible that the old friendliness was still
+there under the surface of things, ready to show itself again if he
+willed it, and friends were becoming scarcer with him than enemies in
+these days.  Looking at the picture with its wistful hint of a long ago
+comradeship, Comus made up his mind that he very much wanted things to be
+back on their earlier footing, and to see again on his mother’s face the
+look that the artist had caught and perpetuated in its momentary
+flitting.  If the projected Elaine-marriage came off, and in spite of
+recent maladroit behaviour on his part he still counted it an assured
+thing, much of the immediate cause for estrangement between himself and
+his mother would be removed, or at any rate, easily removable.  With the
+influence of Elaine’s money behind him he promised himself that he would
+find some occupation that would remove from himself the reproach of being
+a waster and idler.  There were lots of careers, he told himself, that
+were open to a man with solid financial backing and good connections.
+There might yet be jolly times ahead, in which his mother would have her
+share of the good things that were going, and carking thin-lipped Henry
+Greech and other of Comus’s detractors could take their sour looks and
+words out of sight and hearing.  Thus, staring at the picture as though
+he were studying its every detail, and seeing really only that wistful
+friendly smile, Comus made his plans and dispositions for a battle that
+was already fought and lost.
+
+The crowd grew thicker in the galleries, cheerfully enduring an amount of
+overcrowding that would have been fiercely resented in a railway
+carriage.  Near the entrance Mervyn Quentock was talking to a Serene
+Highness, a lady who led a life of obtrusive usefulness, largely imposed
+on her by a good-natured inability to say “No.”  “That woman creates a
+positive draught with the number of bazaars she opens,” a
+frivolously-spoken ex-Cabinet Minister had once remarked.  At the present
+moment she was being whimsically apologetic.
+
+“When I think of the legions of well-meaning young men and women to whom
+I’ve given away prizes for proficiency in art-school curriculum, I feel
+that I ought not to show my face inside a picture gallery.  I always
+imagine that my punishment in another world will be perpetually
+sharpening pencils and cleaning palettes for unending relays of misguided
+young people whom I deliberately encouraged in their artistic delusions.”
+
+“Do you suppose we shall all get appropriate punishments in another world
+for our sins in this?” asked Quentock.
+
+“Not so much for our sins as for our indiscretions; they are the things
+which do the most harm and cause the greatest trouble.  I feel certain
+that Christopher Columbus will undergo the endless torment of being
+discovered by parties of American tourists.  You see I am quite old
+fashioned in my ideas about the terrors and inconveniences of the next
+world.  And now I must be running away; I’ve got to open a Free Library
+somewhere.  You know the sort of thing that happens—one unveils a bust of
+Carlyle and makes a speech about Ruskin, and then people come in their
+thousands and read ‘Rabid Ralph, or Should he have Bitten Her?’  Don’t
+forget, please, I’m going to have the medallion with the fat cupid
+sitting on a sundial.  And just one thing more—perhaps I ought not to ask
+you, but you have such nice kind eyes, you embolden one to make daring
+requests, would you send me the recipe for those lovely
+chestnut-and-chicken-liver sandwiches?  I know the ingredients of course,
+but it’s the proportions that make such a difference—just how much liver
+to how much chestnut, and what amount of red pepper and other things.
+Thank you so much.  I really am going now.”
+
+Staring round with a vague half-smile at everybody within nodding
+distance, Her Serene Highness made one of her characteristic exits, which
+Lady Caroline declared always reminded her of a scrambled egg slipping
+off a piece of toast.  At the entrance she stopped for a moment to
+exchange a word or two with a young man who had just arrived.  From a
+corner where he was momentarily hemmed in by a group of tea-consuming
+dowagers, Comus recognised the newcomer as Courtenay Youghal, and began
+slowly to labour his way towards him.  Youghal was not at the moment the
+person whose society he most craved for in the world, but there was at
+least the possibility that he might provide an opportunity for a game of
+bridge, which was the dominant desire of the moment.  The young
+politician was already surrounded by a group of friends and
+acquaintances, and was evidently being made the recipient of a salvo of
+congratulation—presumably on his recent performances in the Foreign
+Office debate, Comus concluded.  But Youghal himself seemed to be
+announcing the event with which the congratulations were connected.  Had
+some dramatic catastrophe overtaken the Government, Comus wondered.  And
+then, as he pressed nearer, a chance word, the coupling of two names,
+told him the news.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+AFTER the momentous lunch at the Corridor Restaurant Elaine had returned
+to Manchester Square (where she was staying with one of her numerous
+aunts) in a frame of mind that embraced a tangle of competing emotions.
+In the first place she was conscious of a dominant feeling of relief; in
+a moment of impetuosity, not wholly uninfluenced by pique, she had
+settled the problem which hours of hard thinking and serious
+heart-searching had brought no nearer to solution, and, although she felt
+just a little inclined to be scared at the headlong manner of her final
+decision, she had now very little doubt in her own mind that the decision
+had been the right one.  In fact the wonder seemed rather that she should
+have been so long in doubt as to which of her wooers really enjoyed her
+honest approval.  She had been in love, these many weeks past with an
+imaginary Comus, but now that she had definitely walked out of her
+dreamland she saw that nearly all the qualities that had appealed to her
+on his behalf had been absent from, or only fitfully present in, the
+character of the real Comus.  And now that she had installed Youghal in
+the first place of her affections he had rapidly acquired in her eyes
+some of the qualities which ranked highest in her estimation.  Like the
+proverbial buyer she had the happy feminine tendency of magnifying the
+worth of her possession as soon as she had acquired it.  And Courtenay
+Youghal gave Elaine some justification for her sense of having chosen
+wisely.  Above all other things, selfish and cynical though he might
+appear at times, he was unfailingly courteous and considerate towards
+her.  That was a circumstance which would always have carried weight with
+her in judging any man; in this case its value was enormously heightened
+by contrast with the behaviour of her other wooer.  And Youghal had in
+her eyes the advantage which the glamour of combat, even the combat of
+words and wire-pulling, throws over the fighter.  He stood well in the
+forefront of a battle which however carefully stage-managed, however
+honeycombed with personal insincerities and overlaid with calculated
+mock-heroics, really meant something, really counted for good or wrong in
+the nation’s development and the world’s history.  Shrewd parliamentary
+observers might have warned her that Youghal would never stand much
+higher in the political world than he did at present, as a brilliant
+Opposition freelance, leading lively and rather meaningless forays
+against the dull and rather purposeless foreign policy of a Government
+that was scarcely either to be blamed for or congratulated on its
+handling of foreign affairs.  The young politician had not the strength
+of character or convictions that keeps a man naturally in the forefront
+of affairs and gives his counsels a sterling value, and on the other hand
+his insincerity was not deep enough to allow him to pose artificially and
+successfully as a leader of men and shaper of movements.  For the moment,
+however, his place in public life was sufficiently marked out to give him
+a secure footing in that world where people are counted individually and
+not in herds.  The woman whom he would make his wife would have the
+chance, too, if she had the will and the skill, to become an individual
+who counted.
+
+There was balm to Elaine in this reflection, yet it did not wholly
+suffice to drive out the feeling of pique which Comus had called into
+being by his slighting view of her as a convenient cash supply in moments
+of emergency.  She found a certain satisfaction in scrupulously observing
+her promise, made earlier on that eventful day, and sent off a messenger
+with the stipulated loan.  Then a reaction of compunction set in, and she
+reminded herself that in fairness she ought to write and tell her news in
+as friendly a fashion as possible to her dismissed suitor before it burst
+upon him from some other quarter.  They had parted on more or less
+quarrelling terms it was true, but neither of them had foreseen the
+finality of the parting nor the permanence of the breach between them;
+Comus might even now be thinking himself half-forgiven, and the awakening
+would be rather cruel.  The letter, however, did not prove an easy one to
+write; not only did it present difficulties of its own but it suffered
+from the competing urgency of a desire to be doing something far
+pleasanter than writing explanatory and valedictory phrases.  Elaine was
+possessed with an unusual but quite overmastering hankering to visit her
+cousin Suzette Brankley.  They met but rarely at each other’s houses and
+very seldom anywhere else, and Elaine for her part was never conscious of
+feeling that their opportunities for intercourse lacked anything in the
+way of adequacy.  Suzette accorded her just that touch of patronage which
+a moderately well-off and immoderately dull girl will usually try to mete
+out to an acquaintance who is known to be wealthy and suspected of
+possessing brains.  In return Elaine armed herself with that particular
+brand of mock humility which can be so terribly disconcerting if properly
+wielded.  No quarrel of any description stood between them and one could
+not legitimately have described them as enemies, but they never disarmed
+in one another’s presence.  A misfortune of any magnitude falling on one
+of them would have been sincerely regretted by the other, but any minor
+discomfiture would have produced a feeling very much akin to
+satisfaction.  Human nature knows millions of these inconsequent little
+feuds, springing up and flourishing apart from any basis of racial,
+political, religious or economic causes, as a hint perhaps to crass
+unseeing altruists that enmity has its place and purpose in the world as
+well as benevolence.
+
+Elaine had not personally congratulated Suzette since the formal
+announcement of her engagement to the young man with the dissentient
+tailoring effects.  The impulse to go and do so now, overmastered her
+sense of what was due to Comus in the way of explanation.  The letter was
+still in its blank unwritten stage, an unmarshalled sequence of sentences
+forming in her brain, when she ordered her car and made a hurried but
+well-thought-out change into her most sumptuously sober afternoon
+toilette.  Suzette, she felt tolerably sure, would still be in the
+costume that she had worn in the Park that morning, a costume that aimed
+at elaboration of detail, and was damned with overmuch success.
+
+Suzette’s mother welcomed her unexpected visitor with obvious
+satisfaction.  Her daughter’s engagement, she explained, was not so
+brilliant from the social point of view as a girl of Suzette’s
+attractions and advantages might have legitimately aspired to, but Egbert
+was a thoroughly commendable and dependable young man, who would very
+probably win his way before long to membership of the County Council.
+
+“From there, of course, the road would be open to him to higher things.”
+
+“Yes,” said Elaine, “he might become an alderman.”
+
+“Have you seen their photographs, taken together?” asked Mrs. Brankley,
+abandoning the subject of Egbert’s prospective career.
+
+“No, do show me,” said Elaine, with a flattering show of interest; “I’ve
+never seen that sort of thing before.  It used to be the fashion once for
+engaged couples to be photographed together, didn’t it?”
+
+“It’s _very_ much the fashion now,” said Mrs. Brankley assertively, but
+some of the complacency had filtered out of her voice.  Suzette came into
+the room, wearing the dress that she had worn in the Park that morning.
+
+“Of course, you’ve been hearing all about _the_ engagement from mother,”
+she cried, and then set to work conscientiously to cover the same ground.
+
+“We met at Grindelwald, you know.  He always calls me his Ice Maiden
+because we first got to know each other on the skating rink.  Quite
+romantic, wasn’t it?  Then we asked him to tea one day, and we got to be
+quite friendly.  Then he proposed.”
+
+“He wasn’t the only one who was smitten with Suzette,” Mrs. Brankley
+hastened to put in, fearful lest Elaine might suppose that Egbert had had
+things all his own way.  “There was an American millionaire who was quite
+taken with her, and a Polish count of a very old family.  I assure you I
+felt quite nervous at some of our tea-parties.”
+
+Mrs. Brankley had given Grindelwald a sinister but rather alluring
+reputation among a large circle of untravelled friends as a place where
+the insolence of birth and wealth was held in precarious check from
+breaking forth into scenes of savage violence.
+
+“My marriage with Egbert will, of course, enlarge the sphere of my life
+enormously,” pursued Suzette.
+
+“Yes,” said Elaine; her eyes were rather remorselessly taking in the
+details of her cousin’s toilette.  It is said that nothing is sadder than
+victory except defeat.  Suzette began to feel that the tragedy of both
+was concentrated in the creation which had given her such unalloyed
+gratification, till Elaine had come on the scene.
+
+“A woman can be so immensely helpful in the social way to a man who is
+making a career for himself.  And I’m so glad to find that we’ve a great
+many ideas in common.  We each made out a list of our idea of the hundred
+best books, and quite a number of them were the same.”
+
+“He looks bookish,” said Elaine, with a critical glance at the
+photograph.
+
+“Oh, he’s not at all a bookworm,” said Suzette quickly, “though he’s
+tremendously well-read.  He’s quite the man of action.”
+
+“Does he hunt?” asked Elaine.
+
+“No, he doesn’t get much time or opportunity for riding.”
+
+“What a pity,” commented Elaine; “I don’t think I could marry a man who
+wasn’t fond of riding.”
+
+“Of course that’s a matter of taste,” said Suzette, stiffly; “horsey men
+are not usually gifted with overmuch brains, are they?”
+
+“There is as much difference between a horseman and a horsey man as there
+is between a well-dressed man and a dressy one,” said Elaine, judicially;
+“and you may have noticed how seldom a dressy woman really knows how to
+dress.  As an old lady of my acquaintance observed the other day, some
+people are born with a sense of how to clothe themselves, others acquire
+it, others look as if their clothes had been thrust upon them.”
+
+She gave Lady Caroline her due quotation marks, but the sudden
+tactfulness with which she looked away from her cousin’s frock was
+entirely her own idea.
+
+A young man entering the room at this moment caused a diversion that was
+rather welcome to Suzette.
+
+“Here comes Egbert,” she announced, with an air of subdued triumph; it
+was at least a satisfaction to be able to produce the captive of her
+charms, alive and in good condition, on the scene.  Elaine might be as
+critical as she pleased, but a live lover outweighed any number of
+well-dressed straight-riding cavaliers who existed only as a distant
+vision of the delectable husband.
+
+Egbert was one of those men who have no small talk, but possess an
+inexhaustible supply of the larger variety.  In whatever society he
+happened to be, and particularly in the immediate neighbourhood of an
+afternoon-tea table, with a limited audience of womenfolk, he gave the
+impression of someone who was addressing a public meeting, and would be
+happy to answer questions afterwards.  A suggestion of gas-lit
+mission-halls, wet umbrellas, and discreet applause seemed to accompany
+him everywhere.  He was an exponent, among other things, of what he
+called New Thought, which seemed to lend itself conveniently to the
+employment of a good deal of rather stale phraseology.  Probably in the
+course of some thirty odd years of existence he had never been of any
+notable use to man, woman, child or animal, but it was his
+firmly-announced intention to leave the world a better, happier, purer
+place than he had found it; against the danger of any relapse to earlier
+conditions after his disappearance from the scene, he was, of course,
+powerless to guard.  ’Tis not in mortals to insure succession, and Egbert
+was admittedly mortal.
+
+Elaine found him immensely entertaining, and would certainly have exerted
+herself to draw him out if such a proceeding had been at all necessary.
+She listened to his conversation with the complacent appreciation that
+one bestows on a stage tragedy, from whose calamities one can escape at
+any moment by the simple process of leaving one’s seat.  When at last he
+checked the flow of his opinions by a hurried reference to his watch, and
+declared that he must be moving on elsewhere, Elaine almost expected a
+vote of thanks to be accorded him, or to be asked to signify herself in
+favour of some resolution by holding up her hand.
+
+When the young man had bidden the company a rapid business-like farewell,
+tempered in Suzette’s case by the exact degree of tender intimacy that it
+would have been considered improper to omit or overstep, Elaine turned to
+her expectant cousin with an air of cordial congratulation.
+
+“He is exactly the husband I should have chosen for you, Suzette.”
+
+For the second time that afternoon Suzette felt a sense of waning
+enthusiasm for one of her possessions.
+
+Mrs. Brankley detected the note of ironical congratulation in her
+visitor’s verdict.
+
+“I suppose she means he’s not her idea of a husband, but, he’s good
+enough for Suzette,” she observed to herself, with a snort that expressed
+itself somewhere in the nostrils of the brain.  Then with a smiling air
+of heavy patronage she delivered herself of her one idea of a damaging
+counter-stroke.
+
+“And when are we to hear of your engagement, my dear?”
+
+“Now,” said Elaine quietly, but with electrical effect; “I came to
+announce it to you but I wanted to hear all about Suzette first.  It will
+be formally announced in the papers in a day or two.”
+
+“But who is it?  Is it the young man who was with you in the Park this
+morning?” asked Suzette.
+
+“Let me see, who was I with in the Park this morning?  A very
+good-looking dark boy?  Oh no, not Comus Bassington.  Someone you know by
+name, anyway, and I expect you’ve seen his portrait in the papers.”
+
+“A flying-man?” asked Mrs. Brankley.
+
+“Courtenay Youghal,” said Elaine.
+
+Mrs. Brankley and Suzette had often rehearsed in the privacy of their
+minds the occasion when Elaine should come to pay her personal
+congratulations to her engaged cousin.  It had never been in the least
+like this.
+
+On her return from her enjoyable afternoon visit Elaine found an express
+messenger letter waiting for her.  It was from Comus, thanking her for
+her loan—and returning it.
+
+“I suppose I ought never to have asked you for it,” he wrote, “but you
+are always so deliciously solemn about money matters that I couldn’t
+resist.  Just heard the news of your engagement to Courtenay.  Congrats.
+to you both.  I’m far too stoney broke to buy you a wedding present so
+I’m going to give you back the bread-and-butter dish.  Luckily it still
+has your crest on it.  I shall love to think of you and Courtenay eating
+bread-and-butter out of it for the rest of your lives.”
+
+That was all he had to say on the matter about which Elaine had been
+preparing to write a long and kindly-expressed letter, closing a rather
+momentous chapter in her life and his.  There was not a trace of regret
+or upbraiding in his note; he had walked out of their mutual fairyland as
+abruptly as she had, and to all appearances far more unconcernedly.
+Reading the letter again and again Elaine could come to no decision as to
+whether this was merely a courageous gibe at defeat, or whether it
+represented the real value that Comus set on the thing that he had lost.
+
+And she would never know.  If Comus possessed one useless gift to
+perfection it was the gift of laughing at Fate even when it had struck
+him hardest.  One day, perhaps, the laughter and mockery would be silent
+on his lips, and Fate would have the advantage of laughing last.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+A DOOR closed and Francesca Bassington sat alone in her well-beloved
+drawing-room.  The visitor who had been enjoying the hospitality of her
+afternoon-tea table had just taken his departure.  The tête-à-tête had
+not been a pleasant one, at any rate as far as Francesca was concerned,
+but at least it had brought her the information for which she had been
+seeking.  Her rôle of looker-on from a tactful distance had necessarily
+left her much in the dark concerning the progress of the all-important
+wooing, but during the last few hours she had, on slender though
+significant evidence, exchanged her complacent expectancy for a
+conviction that something had gone wrong.  She had spent the previous
+evening at her brother’s house, and had naturally seen nothing of Comus
+in that uncongenial quarter; neither had he put in an appearance at the
+breakfast table the following morning.  She had met him in the hall at
+eleven o’clock, and he had hurried past her, merely imparting the
+information that he would not be in till dinner that evening.  He spoke
+in his sulkiest tone, and his face wore a look of defeat, thinly masked
+by an air of defiance; it was not the defiance of a man who is losing,
+but of one who has already lost.
+
+Francesca’s conviction that things had gone wrong between Comus and
+Elaine de Frey grew in strength as the day wore on.  She lunched at a
+friend’s house, but it was not a quarter where special social information
+of any importance was likely to come early to hand.  Instead of the news
+she was hankering for, she had to listen to trivial gossip and
+speculation on the flirtations and “cases” and “affairs” of a string of
+acquaintances whose matrimonial projects interested her about as much as
+the nesting arrangements of the wildfowl in St. James’s Park.
+
+“Of course,” said her hostess, with the duly impressive emphasis of a
+privileged chronicler, “we’ve always regarded Claire as the marrying one
+of the family, so when Emily came to us and said, ‘I’ve got some news for
+you,’ we all said, ‘Claire’s engaged!’  ‘Oh, no,’ said Emily, ‘it’s not
+Claire this time, it’s me.’  So then we had to guess who the lucky man
+was.  ‘It can’t be Captain Parminter,’ we all said, ‘because he’s always
+been sweet on Joan.’  And then Emily said—”
+
+The recording voice reeled off the catalogue of inane remarks with a
+comfortable purring complacency that held out no hope of an early
+abandoning of the topic.  Francesca sat and wondered why the innocent
+acceptance of a cutlet and a glass of indifferent claret should lay one
+open to such unsparing punishment.
+
+A stroll homeward through the Park after lunch brought no further
+enlightenment on the subject that was uppermost in her mind; what was
+worse, it brought her, without possibility of escape, within hailing
+distance of Merla Blathington, who fastened on to her with the enthusiasm
+of a lonely tsetse fly encountering an outpost of civilisation.
+
+“Just think,” she buzzed inconsequently, “my sister in Cambridgeshire has
+hatched out thirty-three White Orpington chickens in her incubator!”
+
+“What eggs did she put in it?” asked Francesca.
+
+“Oh, some very special strain of White Orpington.”
+
+“Then I don’t see anything remarkable in the result.  If she had put in
+crocodile’s eggs and hatched out White Orpingtons, there might have been
+something to write to _Country Life_ about.”
+
+“What funny fascinating things these little green park-chairs are,” said
+Merla, starting off on a fresh topic; “they always look so quaint and
+knowing when they’re stuck away in pairs by themselves under the trees,
+as if they were having a heart-to-heart talk or discussing a piece of
+very private scandal.  If they could only speak, what tragedies and
+comedies they could tell us of, what flirtations and proposals.”
+
+“Let us be devoutly thankful that they can’t,” said Francesca, with a
+shuddering recollection of the luncheon-table conversation.
+
+“Of course, it would make one very careful what one said before them—or
+above them rather,” Merla rattled on, and then, to Francesca’s infinite
+relief, she espied another acquaintance sitting in unprotected solitude,
+who promised to supply a more durable audience than her present rapidly
+moving companion.  Francesca was free to return to her drawing-room in
+Blue Street to await with such patience as she could command the coming
+of some visitor who might be able to throw light on the subject that was
+puzzling and disquieting her.  The arrival of George St. Michael boded
+bad news, but at any rate news, and she gave him an almost cordial
+welcome.
+
+“Well, you see I wasn’t far wrong about Miss de Frey and Courtenay
+Youghal, was I?” he chirruped, almost before he had seated himself.
+Francesca was to be spared any further spinning-out of her period of
+uncertainty.  “Yes, it’s officially given out,” he went on, “and it’s to
+appear in the _Morning Post_ to-morrow.  I heard it from Colonel Deel
+this morning, and he had it direct from Youghal himself.  Yes, please,
+one lump; I’m not fashionable, you see.”  He had made the same remark
+about the sugar in his tea with unfailing regularity for at least thirty
+years.  Fashions in sugar are apparently stationary.  “They say,” he
+continued, hurriedly, “that he proposed to her on the Terrace of the
+House, and a division bell rang, and he had to hurry off before she had
+time to give her answer, and when he got back she simply said, ‘the Ayes
+have it.’”  St. Michael paused in his narrative to give an appreciative
+giggle.
+
+“Just the sort of inanity that would go the rounds,” remarked Francesca,
+with the satisfaction of knowing that she was making the criticism direct
+to the author and begetter of the inanity in question.  Now that the blow
+had fallen and she knew the full extent of its weight, her feeling
+towards the bringer of bad news, who sat complacently nibbling at her
+tea-cakes and scattering crumbs of tiresome small-talk at her feet, was
+one of wholehearted dislike.  She could sympathise with, or at any rate
+understand, the tendency of oriental despots to inflict death or
+ignominious chastisement on messengers bearing tidings of misfortune and
+defeat, and St. Michael, she perfectly well knew, was thoroughly aware of
+the fact that her hopes and wishes had been centred on the possibility of
+having Elaine for a daughter-in-law; every purring remark that his mean
+little soul prompted him to contribute to the conversation had an easily
+recognizable undercurrent of malice.  Fortunately for her powers of
+polite endurance, which had been put to such searching and repeated tests
+that day, St. Michael had planned out for himself a busy little
+time-table of afternoon visits, at each of which his self-appointed task
+of forestalling and embellishing the newspaper announcements of the
+Youghal-de Frey engagement would be hurriedly but thoroughly performed.
+
+“They’ll be quite one of the best-looking and most interesting couples of
+the Season, won’t they?” he cried, by way of farewell.  The door closed
+and Francesca Bassington sat alone in her drawing-room.
+
+Before she could give way to the bitter luxury of reflection on the
+downfall of her hopes, it was prudent to take precautionary measures
+against unwelcome intrusion.  Summoning the maid who had just speeded the
+departing St. Michael, she gave the order: “I am not at home this
+afternoon to Lady Caroline Benaresq.”  On second thoughts she extended
+the taboo to all possible callers, and sent a telephone message to catch
+Comus at his club, asking him to come and see her as soon as he could
+manage before it was time to dress for dinner.  Then she sat down to
+think, and her thinking was beyond the relief of tears.
+
+She had built herself a castle of hopes, and it had not been a castle in
+Spain, but a structure well on the probable side of the Pyrenees.  There
+had been a solid foundation on which to build.  Miss de Frey’s fortune
+was an assured and unhampered one, her liking for Comus had been an
+obvious fact; his courtship of her a serious reality.  The young people
+had been much together in public, and their names had naturally been
+coupled in the match-making gossip of the day.  The only serious shadow
+cast over the scene had been the persistent presence, in foreground or
+background, of Courtenay Youghal.  And now the shadow suddenly stood
+forth as the reality, and the castle of hopes was a ruin, a hideous
+mortification of dust and débris, with the skeleton outlines of its
+chambers still standing to make mockery of its discomfited architect.
+The daily anxiety about Comus and his extravagant ways and intractable
+disposition had been gradually lulled by the prospect of his making an
+advantageous marriage, which would have transformed him from a
+ne’er-do-well and adventurer into a wealthy idler.  He might even have
+been moulded, by the resourceful influence of an ambitious wife, into a
+man with some definite purpose in life.  The prospect had vanished with
+cruel suddenness, and the anxieties were crowding back again, more
+insistent than ever.  The boy had had his one good chance in the
+matrimonial market and missed it; if he were to transfer his attentions
+to some other well-dowered girl he would be marked down at once as a
+fortune-hunter, and that would constitute a heavy handicap to the most
+plausible of wooers.  His liking for Elaine had evidently been genuine in
+its way, though perhaps it would have been rash to read any deeper
+sentiment into it, but even with the spur of his own inclination to
+assist him he had failed to win the prize that had seemed so temptingly
+within his reach.  And in the dashing of his prospects, Francesca saw the
+threatening of her own.  The old anxiety as to her precarious tenure of
+her present quarters put on again all its familiar terrors.  One day, she
+foresaw, in the horribly near future, George St. Michael would come
+pattering up her stairs with the breathless intelligence that Emmeline
+Chetrof was going to marry somebody or other in the Guards or the Record
+Office as the case might be, and then there would be an uprooting of her
+life from its home and haven in Blue Street and a wandering forth to some
+cheap unhappy far-off dwelling, where the stately Van der Meulen and its
+companion host of beautiful and desirable things would be stuffed and
+stowed away in soulless surroundings, like courtly émigrés fallen on evil
+days.  It was unthinkable, but the trouble was that it had to be thought
+about.  And if Comus had played his cards well and transformed himself
+from an encumbrance into a son with wealth at his command, the tragedy
+which she saw looming in front of her might have been avoided or at the
+worst whittled down to easily bearable proportions.  With money behind
+one, the problem of where to live approaches more nearly to the simple
+question of where do you wish to live, and a rich daughter-in-law would
+have surely seen to it that she did not have to leave her square mile of
+Mecca and go out into the wilderness of bricks and mortar.  If the house
+in Blue Street could not have been compounded for there were other
+desirable residences which would have been capable of consoling Francesca
+for her lost Eden.  And now the detested Courtenay Youghal, with his
+mocking eyes and air of youthful cynicism, had stepped in and overthrown
+those golden hopes and plans whose non-fulfilment would make such a world
+of change in her future.  Assuredly she had reason to feel bitter against
+that young man, and she was not disposed to take a very lenient view of
+Comus’s own mismanagement of the affair; her greeting when he at last
+arrived, was not couched in a sympathetic strain.
+
+“So you have lost your chance with the heiress,” she remarked abruptly.
+
+“Yes,” said Comus, coolly; “Courtenay Youghal has added her to his other
+successes.”
+
+“And you have added her to your other failures,” pursued Francesca,
+relentlessly; her temper had been tried that day beyond ordinary limits.
+
+“I thought you seemed getting along so well with her,” she continued, as
+Comus remained uncommunicative.
+
+“We hit it off rather well together,” said Comus, and added with
+deliberate bluntness, “I suppose she got rather sick at my borrowing
+money from her.  She thought it was all I was after.”
+
+“You borrowed money from her!” said Francesca; “you were fool enough to
+borrow money from a girl who was favourably disposed towards you, and
+with Courtenay Youghal in the background waiting to step in and oust
+you!”
+
+Francesca’s voice trembled with misery and rage.  This great stroke of
+good luck that had seemed about to fall into their laps had been thrust
+aside by an act or series of acts of wanton paltry folly.  The good ship
+had been lost for the sake of the traditional ha’porth of tar.  Comus had
+paid some pressing tailor’s or tobacconist’s bill with a loan unwillingly
+put at his disposal by the girl he was courting, and had flung away his
+chances of securing a wealthy and in every way desirable bride.  Elaine
+de Frey and her fortune might have been the making of Comus, but he had
+hurried in as usual to effect his own undoing.  Calmness did not in this
+case come with reflection; the more Francesca thought about the matter,
+the more exasperated she grew.  Comus threw himself down in a low chair
+and watched her without a trace of embarrassment or concern at her
+mortification.  He had come to her feeling rather sorry for himself, and
+bitterly conscious of his defeat, and she had met him with a taunt and
+without the least hint of sympathy; he determined that she should be
+tantalised with the knowledge of how small and stupid a thing had stood
+between the realisation and ruin of her hopes for him.
+
+“And to think she should be captured by Courtenay Youghal,” said
+Francesca, bitterly; “I’ve always deplored your intimacy with that young
+man.”
+
+“It’s hardly my intimacy with him that’s made Elaine accept him,” said
+Comus.
+
+Francesca realised the futility of further upbraiding.  Through the tears
+of vexation that stood in her eyes, she looked across at the handsome boy
+who sat opposite her, mocking at his own misfortune, perversely
+indifferent to his folly, seemingly almost indifferent to its
+consequences.
+
+“Comus,” she said quietly and wearily, “you are an exact reversal of the
+legend of Pandora’s Box.  You have all the charm and advantages that a
+boy could want to help him on in the world, and behind it all there is
+the fatal damning gift of utter hopelessness.”
+
+“I think,” said Comus, “that is the best description that anyone has ever
+given of me.”
+
+For the moment there was a flush of sympathy and something like outspoken
+affection between mother and son.  They seemed very much alone in the
+world just now, and in the general overturn of hopes and plans, there
+flickered a chance that each might stretch out a hand to the other, and
+summon back to their lives an old dead love that was the best and
+strongest feeling either of them had known.  But the sting of
+disappointment was too keen, and the flood of resentment mounted too high
+on either side to allow the chance more than a moment in which to flicker
+away into nothingness.  The old fatal topic of estrangement came to the
+fore, the question of immediate ways and means, and mother and son faced
+themselves again as antagonists on a well-disputed field.
+
+“What is done is done,” said Francesca, with a movement of tragic
+impatience that belied the philosophy of her words; “there is nothing to
+be gained by crying over spilt milk.  There is the present and the future
+to be thought about, though.  One can’t go on indefinitely as a
+tenant-for-life in a fools’ paradise.”  Then she pulled herself together
+and proceeded to deliver an ultimatum which the force of circumstances no
+longer permitted her to hold in reserve.
+
+“It’s not much use talking to you about money, as I know from long
+experience, but I can only tell you this, that in the middle of the
+Season I’m already obliged to be thinking of leaving Town.  And you, I’m
+afraid, will have to be thinking of leaving England at equally short
+notice.  Henry told me the other day that he can get you something out in
+West Africa.  You’ve had your chance of doing something better for
+yourself from the financial point of view, and you’ve thrown it away for
+the sake of borrowing a little ready money for your luxuries, so now you
+must take what you can get.  The pay won’t be very good at first, but
+living is not dear out there.”
+
+“West Africa,” said Comus, reflectively; “it’s a sort of modern
+substitute for the old-fashioned _oubliette_, a convenient depository for
+tiresome people.  Dear Uncle Henry may talk lugubriously about the burden
+of Empire, but he evidently recognises its uses as a refuse consumer.”
+
+“My dear Comus, you are talking of the West Africa of yesterday.  While
+you have been wasting your time at school, and worse than wasting your
+time in the West End, other people have been grappling with the study of
+tropical diseases, and the West African coast country is being rapidly
+transformed from a lethal chamber into a sanatorium.”
+
+Comus laughed mockingly.
+
+“What a beautiful bit of persuasive prose; it reminds one of the Psalms
+and even more of a company prospectus.  If you were honest you’d confess
+that you lifted it straight out of a rubber or railway promotion scheme.
+Seriously, mother, if I must grub about for a living, why can’t I do it
+in England?  I could go into a brewery for instance.”
+
+Francesca shook her head decisively; she could foresee the sort of steady
+work Comus was likely to accomplish, with the lodestone of Town and the
+minor attractions of race-meetings and similar festivities always
+beckoning to him from a conveniently attainable distance, but apart from
+that aspect of the case there was a financial obstacle in the way of his
+obtaining any employment at home.
+
+“Breweries and all those sort of things necessitate money to start with;
+one has to pay premiums or invest capital in the undertaking, and so
+forth.  And as we have no money available, and can scarcely pay our debts
+as it is, it’s no use thinking about it.”
+
+“Can’t we sell something?” asked Comus.
+
+He made no actual suggestion as to what should be sacrificed, but he was
+looking straight at the Van der Meulen.
+
+For a moment Francesca felt a stifling sensation of weakness, as though
+her heart was going to stop beating.  Then she sat forward in her chair
+and spoke with energy, almost fierceness.
+
+“When I am dead my things can be sold and dispersed.  As long as I am
+alive I prefer to keep them by me.”
+
+In her holy place, with all her treasured possessions around her, this
+dreadful suggestion had been made.  Some of her cherished household gods,
+souvenirs and keepsakes from past days, would, perhaps, not have fetched
+a very considerable sum in the auction-room, others had a distinct value
+of their own, but to her they were all precious.  And the Van der Meulen,
+at which Comus had looked with impious appraising eyes, was the most
+sacred of them all.  When Francesca had been away from her Town residence
+or had been confined to her bedroom through illness, the great picture
+with its stately solemn representation of a long-ago battle-scene,
+painted to flatter the flattery-loving soul of a warrior-king who was
+dignified even in his campaigns—this was the first thing she visited on
+her return to Town or convalescence.  If an alarm of fire had been raised
+it would have been the first thing for whose safety she would have
+troubled.  And Comus had almost suggested that it should be parted with,
+as one sold railway shares and other soulless things.
+
+Scolding, she had long ago realised, was a useless waste of time and
+energy where Comus was concerned, but this evening she unloosed her
+tongue for the mere relief that it gave to her surcharged feelings.  He
+sat listening without comment, though she purposely let fall remarks that
+she hoped might sting him into self-defence or protest.  It was an
+unsparing indictment, the more damaging in that it was so irrefutably
+true, the more tragic in that it came from perhaps the one person in the
+world whose opinion he had ever cared for.  And he sat through it as
+silent and seemingly unmoved as though she had been rehearsing a speech
+for some drawing-room comedy.  When she had had her say his method of
+retort was not the soft answer that turneth away wrath but the
+inconsequent one that shelves it.
+
+“Let’s go and dress for dinner.”
+
+The meal, like so many that Francesca and Comus had eaten in each other’s
+company of late, was a silent one.  Now that the full bearings of the
+disaster had been discussed in all its aspects there was nothing more to
+be said.  Any attempt at ignoring the situation, and passing on to less
+controversial topics would have been a mockery and pretence which neither
+of them would have troubled to sustain.  So the meal went forward with
+its dragged-out dreary intimacy of two people who were separated by a
+gulf of bitterness, and whose hearts were hard with resentment against
+one another.
+
+Francesca felt a sense of relief when she was able to give the maid the
+order to serve her coffee upstairs.  Comus had a sullen scowl on his
+face, but he looked up as she rose to leave the room, and gave his
+half-mocking little laugh.
+
+“You needn’t look so tragic,” he said, “You’re going to have your own
+way.  I’ll go out to that West African hole.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+COMUS found his way to his seat in the stalls of the Straw Exchange
+Theatre and turned to watch the stream of distinguished and
+distinguishable people who made their appearance as a matter of course at
+a First Night in the height of the Season.  Pit and gallery were already
+packed with a throng, tense, expectant and alert, that waited for the
+rise of the curtain with the eager patience of a terrier watching a
+dilatory human prepare for outdoor exercises.  Stalls and boxes filled
+slowly and hesitatingly with a crowd whose component units seemed for the
+most part to recognise the probability that they were quite as
+interesting as any play they were likely to see.  Those who bore no
+particular face-value themselves derived a certain amount of social
+dignity from the near neighbourhood of obvious notabilities; if one could
+not obtain recognition oneself there was some vague pleasure in being
+able to recognise notoriety at intimately close quarters.
+
+“Who is that woman with the auburn hair and a rather effective
+belligerent gleam in her eyes?” asked a man sitting just behind Comus;
+“she looks as if she might have created the world in six days and
+destroyed it on the seventh.”
+
+“I forget her name,” said his neighbour; “she writes.  She’s the author
+of that book, ‘The Woman who wished it was Wednesday,’ you know.  It used
+to be the convention that women writers should be plain and dowdy; now we
+have gone to the other extreme and build them on extravagantly decorative
+lines.”
+
+A buzz of recognition came from the front rows of the pit, together with
+a craning of necks on the part of those in less favoured seats.  It
+heralded the arrival of Sherard Blaw, the dramatist who had discovered
+himself, and who had given so ungrudgingly of his discovery to the world.
+Lady Caroline, who was already directing little conversational onslaughts
+from her box, gazed gently for a moment at the new arrival, and then
+turned to the silver-haired Archdeacon sitting beside her.
+
+“They say the poor man is haunted by the fear that he will die during a
+general election, and that his obituary notices will be seriously
+curtailed by the space taken up by the election results.  The curse of
+our party system, from his point of view, is that it takes up so much
+room in the press.”
+
+The Archdeacon smiled indulgently.  As a man he was so exquisitely
+worldly that he fully merited the name of the Heavenly Worldling bestowed
+on him by an admiring duchess, and withal his texture was shot with a
+pattern of such genuine saintliness that one felt that whoever else might
+hold the keys of Paradise he, at least, possessed a private latchkey to
+that abode.
+
+“Is it not significant of the altered grouping of things,” he observed,
+“that the Church, as represented by me, sympathises with the message of
+Sherard Blaw, while neither the man nor his message find acceptance with
+unbelievers like you, Lady Caroline.”
+
+Lady Caroline blinked her eyes.  “My dear Archdeacon,” she said, “no one
+can be an unbeliever nowadays.  The Christian Apologists have left one
+nothing to disbelieve.”
+
+The Archdeacon rose with a delighted chuckle.  “I must go and tell that
+to De la Poulett,” he said, indicating a clerical figure sitting in the
+third row of the stalls; “he spends his life explaining from his pulpit
+that the glory of Christianity consists in the fact that though it is not
+true it has been found necessary to invent it.”
+
+The door of the box opened and Courtenay Youghal entered, bringing with
+him subtle suggestion of chaminade and an atmosphere of political
+tension.  The Government had fallen out of the good graces of a section
+of its supporters, and those who were not in the know were busy
+predicting a serious crisis over a forthcoming division in the Committee
+stage of an important Bill.  This was Saturday night, and unless some
+successful cajolery were effected between now and Monday afternoon,
+Ministers would be, seemingly, in danger of defeat.
+
+“Ah, here is Youghal,” said the Archdeacon; “he will be able to tell us
+what is going to happen in the next forty-eight hours.  I hear the Prime
+Minister says it is a matter of conscience, and they will stand or fall
+by it.”
+
+His hopes and sympathies were notoriously on the Ministerial side.
+
+Youghal greeted Lady Caroline and subsided gracefully into a chair well
+in the front of the box.  A buzz of recognition rippled slowly across the
+house.
+
+“For the Government to fall on a matter of conscience,” he said, “would
+be like a man cutting himself with a safety razor.”
+
+Lady Caroline purred a gentle approval.
+
+“I’m afraid it’s true, Archdeacon,” she said.
+
+No one can effectively defend a Government when it’s been in office
+several years.  The Archdeacon took refuge in light skirmishing.
+
+“I believe Lady Caroline sees the makings of a great Socialist statesman
+in you, Youghal,” he observed.
+
+“Great Socialist statesmen aren’t made, they’re stillborn,” replied
+Youghal.
+
+“What is the play about to-night?” asked a pale young woman who had taken
+no part in the talk.
+
+“I don’t know,” said Lady Caroline, “but I hope it’s dull.  If there is
+any brilliant conversation in it I shall burst into tears.”
+
+In the front row of the upper circle a woman with a restless
+starling-voice was discussing the work of a temporarily fashionable
+composer, chiefly in relation to her own emotions, which she seemed to
+think might prove generally interesting to those around her.
+
+“Whenever I hear his music I feel that I want to go up into a mountain
+and pray.  Can you understand that feeling?”
+
+The girl to whom she was unburdening herself shook her head.
+
+“You see, I’ve heard his music chiefly in Switzerland, and we were up
+among the mountains all the time, so it wouldn’t have made any
+difference.”
+
+“In that case,” said the woman, who seemed to have emergency emotions to
+suit all geographical conditions, “I should have wanted to be in a great
+silent plain by the side of a rushing river.”
+
+“What I think is so splendid about his music—” commenced another
+starling-voice on the further side of the girl.  Like sheep that feed
+greedily before the coming of a storm the starling-voices seemed impelled
+to extra effort by the knowledge of four imminent intervals of acting
+during which they would be hushed into constrained silence.
+
+In the back row of the dress circle a late-comer, after a cursory glance
+at the programme, had settled down into a comfortable narrative, which
+was evidently the resumed thread of an unfinished taxi-drive monologue.
+
+“We all said ‘it can’t be Captain Parminter, because he’s always been
+sweet on Joan,’ and then Emily said—”
+
+The curtain went up, and Emily’s contribution to the discussion had to be
+held over till the entr’acte.
+
+The play promised to be a success.  The author, avoiding the pitfall of
+brilliancy, had aimed at being interesting and as far as possible,
+bearing in mind that his play was a comedy, he had striven to be amusing.
+Above all he had remembered that in the laws of stage proportions it is
+permissible and generally desirable that the part should be greater than
+the whole; hence he had been careful to give the leading lady such a
+clear and commanding lead over the other characters of the play that it
+was impossible for any of them ever to get on level terms with her.  The
+action of the piece was now and then delayed thereby, but the duration of
+its run would be materially prolonged.
+
+The curtain came down on the first act amid an encouraging instalment of
+applause, and the audience turned its back on the stage and began to take
+a renewed interest in itself.  The authoress of “The Woman who wished it
+was Wednesday” had swept like a convalescent whirlwind, subdued but
+potentially tempestuous, into Lady Caroline’s box.
+
+“I’ve just trodden with all my weight on the foot of an eminent publisher
+as I was leaving my seat,” she cried, with a peal of delighted laughter.
+“He was such a dear about it; I said I hoped I hadn’t hurt him, and he
+said, ‘I suppose you think, who drives hard bargains should himself be
+hard.’  Wasn’t it pet-lamb of him?”
+
+“I’ve never trodden on a pet lamb,” said Lady Caroline, “so I’ve no idea
+what its behaviour would be under the circumstances.”
+
+“Tell me,” said the authoress, coming to the front of the box, the better
+to survey the house, and perhaps also with a charitable desire to make
+things easy for those who might pardonably wish to survey her, “tell me,
+please, where is the girl sitting whom Courtenay Youghal is engaged to?”
+
+Elaine was pointed out to her, sitting in the fourth row of the stalls,
+on the opposite side of the house to where Comus had his seat.  Once
+during the interval she had turned to give him a friendly nod of
+recognition as he stood in one of the side gangways, but he was absorbed
+at the moment in looking at himself in the glass panel.  The grave brown
+eyes and the mocking green-grey ones had looked their last into each
+other’s depths.
+
+For Comus this first-night performance, with its brilliant gathering of
+spectators, its groups and coteries of lively talkers, even its
+counterfoil of dull chatterers, its pervading atmosphere of stage and
+social movement, and its intruding undercurrent of political flutter, all
+this composed a tragedy in which he was the chief character.  It was the
+life he knew and loved and basked in, and it was the life he was leaving.
+It would go on reproducing itself again and again, with its stage
+interest and social interest and intruding outside interests, with the
+same lively chattering crowd, the people who had done things being
+pointed out by people who recognised them to people who didn’t—it would
+all go on with unflagging animation and sparkle and enjoyment, and for
+him it would have stopped utterly.  He would be in some unheard-of
+sun-blistered wilderness, where natives and pariah dogs and
+raucous-throated crows fringed round mockingly on one’s loneliness, where
+one rode for sweltering miles for the chance of meeting a collector or
+police officer, with whom most likely on closer acquaintance one had
+hardly two ideas in common, where female society was represented at long
+intervals by some climate-withered woman missionary or official’s wife,
+where food and sickness and veterinary lore became at last the three
+outstanding subjects on which the mind settled or rather sank.  That was
+the life he foresaw and dreaded, and that was the life he was going to.
+For a boy who went out to it from the dulness of some country rectory,
+from a neighbourhood where a flower show and a cricket match formed the
+social landmarks of the year, the feeling of exile might not be very
+crushing, might indeed be lost in the sense of change and adventure.  But
+Comus had lived too thoroughly in the centre of things to regard life in
+a backwater as anything else than stagnation, and stagnation while one is
+young he justly regarded as an offence against nature and reason, in
+keeping with the perverted mockery that sends decrepit invalids touring
+painfully about the world and shuts panthers up in narrow cages.  He was
+being put aside, as a wine is put aside, but to deteriorate instead of
+gaining in the process, to lose the best time of his youth and health and
+good looks in a world where youth and health and good looks count for
+much and where time never returns lost possessions.  And thus, as the
+curtain swept down on the close of each act, Comus felt a sense of
+depression and deprivation sweep down on himself; bitterly he watched his
+last evening of social gaiety slipping away to its end.  In less than an
+hour it would be over; in a few months’ time it would be an unreal
+memory.
+
+In the third interval, as he gazed round at the chattering house, someone
+touched him on the arm.  It was Lady Veula Croot.
+
+“I suppose in a week’s time you’ll be on the high seas,” she said.  “I’m
+coming to your farewell dinner, you know; your mother has just asked me.
+I’m not going to talk the usual rot to you about how much you will like
+it and so on.  I sometimes think that one of the advantages of Hell will
+be that no one will have the impertinence to point out to you that you’re
+really better off than you would be anywhere else.  What do you think of
+the play?  Of course one can foresee the end; she will come to her
+husband with the announcement that their longed-for child is going to be
+born, and that will smooth over everything.  So conveniently effective,
+to wind up a comedy with the commencement of someone else’s tragedy.  And
+every one will go away saying ‘I’m glad it had a happy ending.’”
+
+Lady Veula moved back to her seat, with her pleasant smile on her lips
+and the look of infinite weariness in her eyes.
+
+The interval, the last interval, was drawing to a close and the house
+began to turn with fidgetty attention towards the stage for the unfolding
+of the final phase of the play.  Francesca sat in Serena Golackly’s box
+listening to Colonel Springfield’s story of what happened to a
+pigeon-cote in his compound at Poona.  Everyone who knew the Colonel had
+to listen to that story a good many times, but Lady Caroline had
+mitigated the boredom of the infliction, and in fact invested it with a
+certain sporting interest, by offering a prize to the person who heard it
+oftenest in the course of the Season, the competitors being under an
+honourable understanding not to lead up to the subject.  Ada Spelvexit
+and a boy in the Foreign Office were at present at the top of the list
+with five recitals each to their score, but the former was suspected of
+doubtful adherence to the rules and spirit of the competition.
+
+“And there, dear lady,” concluded the Colonel, “were the eleven dead
+pigeons.  What had become of the bandicoot no one ever knew.”
+
+Francesca thanked him for his story, and complacently inscribed the
+figure 4 on the margin of her theatre programme.  Almost at the same
+moment she heard George St. Michael’s voice pattering out a breathless
+piece of intelligence for the edification of Serena Golackly and anyone
+else who might care to listen.  Francesca galvanised into sudden
+attention.
+
+“Emmeline Chetrof to a fellow in the Indian Forest Department.  He’s got
+nothing but his pay and they can’t be married for four or five years; an
+absurdly long engagement, don’t you think so?  All very well to wait
+seven years for a wife in patriarchal times, when you probably had others
+to go on with, and you lived long enough to celebrate your own
+tercentenary, but under modern conditions it seems a foolish
+arrangement.”
+
+St. Michael spoke almost with a sense of grievance.  A marriage project
+that tied up all the small pleasant nuptial gossip-items about
+bridesmaids and honeymoon and recalcitrant aunts and so forth, for an
+indefinite number of years seemed scarcely decent in his eyes, and there
+was little satisfaction or importance to be derived from early and
+special knowledge of an event which loomed as far distant as a
+Presidential Election or a change of Viceroy.  But to Francesca, who had
+listened with startled apprehension at the mention of Emmeline Chetrof’s
+name, the news came in a flood of relief and thankfulness.  Short of
+entering a nunnery and taking celibate vows, Emmeline could hardly have
+behaved more conveniently than in tying herself up to a lover whose
+circumstances made it necessary to relegate marriage to the distant
+future.  For four or five years Francesca was assured of undisturbed
+possession of the house in Blue Street, and after that period who knew
+what might happen?  The engagement might stretch on indefinitely, it
+might even come to nothing under the weight of its accumulated years, as
+sometimes happened with these protracted affairs.  Emmeline might lose
+her fancy for her absentee lover, and might never replace him with
+another.  A golden possibility of perpetual tenancy of her present home
+began to float once more through Francesca’s mind.  As long as Emmeline
+had been unbespoken in the marriage market there had always been the
+haunting likelihood of seeing the dreaded announcement, “a marriage has
+been arranged and will shortly take place,” in connection with her name.
+And now a marriage had been arranged and would not shortly take place,
+might indeed never take place.  St. Michael’s information was likely to
+be correct in this instance; he would never have invented a piece of
+matrimonial intelligence which gave such little scope for supplementary
+detail of the kind he loved to supply.  As Francesca turned to watch the
+fourth act of the play, her mind was singing a pæan of thankfulness and
+exultation.  It was as though some artificer sent by the Gods had
+reinforced with a substantial cord the horsehair thread that held up the
+sword of Damocles over her head.  Her love for her home, for her
+treasured household possessions, and her pleasant social life was able to
+expand once more in present security, and feed on future hope.  She was
+still young enough to count four or five years as a long time, and
+to-night she was optimistic enough to prophesy smooth things of the
+future that lay beyond that span.  Of the fourth act, with its carefully
+held back but obviously imminent reconciliation between the leading
+characters, she took in but little, except that she vaguely understood it
+to have a happy ending.  As the lights went up she looked round on the
+dispersing audience with a feeling of friendliness uppermost in her mind;
+even the sight of Elaine de Frey and Courtenay Youghal leaving the
+theatre together did not inspire her with a tenth part of the annoyance
+that their entrance had caused her.  Serena’s invitation to go on to the
+Savoy for supper fitted in exactly with her mood of exhilaration.  It
+would be a fit and appropriate wind-up to an auspicious evening.  The
+cold chicken and modest brand of Chablis waiting for her at home should
+give way to a banquet of more festive nature.
+
+In the crush of the vestibule, friends and enemies, personal and
+political, were jostled and locked together in the general effort to
+rejoin temporarily estranged garments and secure the attendance of
+elusive vehicles.  Lady Caroline found herself at close quarters with the
+estimable Henry Greech, and experienced some of the joy which comes to
+the homeward wending sportsman when a chance shot presents itself on
+which he may expend his remaining cartridges.
+
+“So the Government is going to climb down, after all,” she said, with a
+provocative assumption of private information on the subject.
+
+“I assure you the Government will do nothing of the kind,” replied the
+Member of Parliament with befitting dignity; “the Prime Minister told me
+last night that under no circumstances—”
+
+“My dear Mr. Greech,” said Lady Caroline, “we all know that Prime
+Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other wedded couples they
+sometimes live apart.”
+
+For her, at any rate, the comedy had had a happy ending.
+
+Comus made his way slowly and lingeringly from the stalls, so slowly that
+the lights were already being turned down and great shroud-like
+dust-cloths were being swaythed over the ornamental gilt-work.  The
+laughing, chattering, yawning throng had filtered out of the vestibule,
+and was melting away in final groups from the steps of the theatre.  An
+impatient attendant gave him his coat and locked up the cloak room.
+Comus stepped out under the portico; he looked at the posters announcing
+the play, and in anticipation he could see other posters announcing its
+200th performance.  Two hundred performances; by that time the Straw
+Exchange Theatre would be to him something so remote and unreal that it
+would hardly seem to exist or to have ever existed except in his fancy.
+And to the laughing chattering throng that would pass in under that
+portico to the 200th performance, he would be, to those that had known
+him, something equally remote and non-existent.  “The good-looking
+Bassington boy?  Oh, dead, or rubber-growing or sheep-farming or
+something of that sort.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+THE farewell dinner which Francesca had hurriedly organised in honour of
+her son’s departure threatened from the outset to be a doubtfully
+successful function.  In the first place, as he observed privately, there
+was very little of Comus and a good deal of farewell in it.  His own
+particular friends were unrepresented.  Courtenay Youghal was out of the
+question; and though Francesca would have stretched a point and welcomed
+some of his other male associates of whom she scarcely approved, he
+himself had been opposed to including any of them in the invitations.  On
+the other hand, as Henry Greech had provided Comus with this job that he
+was going out to, and was, moreover, finding part of the money for the
+necessary outfit, Francesca had felt it her duty to ask him and his wife
+to the dinner; the obtuseness that seems to cling to some people like a
+garment throughout their life had caused Mr. Greech to accept the
+invitation.  When Comus heard of the circumstance he laughed long and
+boisterously; his spirits, Francesca noted, seemed to be rising fast as
+the hour for departure drew near.
+
+The other guests included Serena Golackly and Lady Veula, the latter
+having been asked on the inspiration of the moment at the theatrical
+first-night.  In the height of the Season it was not easy to get together
+a goodly selection of guests at short notice, and Francesca had gladly
+fallen in with Serena’s suggestion of bringing with her Stephen Thorle,
+who was alleged, in loose feminine phrasing, to “know all about” tropical
+Africa.  His travels and experiences in those regions probably did not
+cover much ground or stretch over any great length of time, but he was
+one of those individuals who can describe a continent on the strength of
+a few days’ stay in a coast town as intimately and dogmatically as a
+paleontologist will reconstruct an extinct mammal from the evidence of a
+stray shin bone.  He had the loud penetrating voice and the prominent
+penetrating eyes of a man who can do no listening in the ordinary way and
+whose eyes have to perform the function of listening for him.  His vanity
+did not necessarily make him unbearable, unless one had to spend much
+time in his society, and his need for a wide field of audience and
+admiration was mercifully calculated to spread his operations over a
+considerable human area.  Moreover, his craving for attentive listeners
+forced him to interest himself in a wonderful variety of subjects on
+which he was able to discourse fluently and with a certain semblance of
+special knowledge.  Politics he avoided; the ground was too well known,
+and there was a definite no to every definite yes that could be put
+forward.  Moreover, argument was not congenial to his disposition, which
+preferred an unchallenged flow of dissertation modified by occasional
+helpful questions which formed the starting point for new offshoots of
+word-spinning.  The promotion of cottage industries, the prevention of
+juvenile street trading, the extension of the Borstal prison system, the
+furtherance of vague talkative religious movements the fostering of
+inter-racial _ententes_, all found in him a tireless exponent, a fluent
+and entertaining, though perhaps not very convincing, advocate.  With the
+real motive power behind these various causes he was not very closely
+identified; to the spade-workers who carried on the actual labours of
+each particular movement he bore the relation of a trowel-worker, delving
+superficially at the surface, but able to devote a proportionately far
+greater amount of time to the advertisement of his progress and
+achievements.  Such was Stephen Thorle, a governess in the nursery of
+Chelsea-bred religions, a skilled window-dresser in the emporium of his
+own personality, and needless to say, evanescently popular amid a wide
+but shifting circle of acquaintances.  He improved on the record of a
+socially much-travelled individual whose experience has become classical,
+and went to most of the best houses—twice.
+
+His inclusion as a guest at this particular dinner-party was not a very
+happy inspiration.  He was inclined to patronise Comus, as well as the
+African continent, and on even slighter acquaintance.  With the exception
+of Henry Greech, whose feelings towards his nephew had been soured by
+many years of overt antagonism, there was an uncomfortable feeling among
+those present that the topic of the black-sheep export trade, as Comus
+would have himself expressed it, was being given undue prominence in what
+should have been a festive farewell banquet.  And Comus, in whose honour
+the feast was given, did not contribute much towards its success; though
+his spirits seemed strung up to a high pitch his merriment was more the
+merriment of a cynical and amused onlooker than of one who responds to
+the gaiety of his companions.  Sometimes he laughed quietly to himself at
+some chance remark of a scarcely mirth-provoking nature, and Lady Veula,
+watching him narrowly, came to the conclusion that an element of fear was
+blended with his seemingly buoyant spirits.  Once or twice he caught her
+eye across the table, and a certain sympathy seemed to grow up between
+them, as though they were both consciously watching some lugubrious
+comedy that was being played out before them.
+
+An untoward little incident had marked the commencement of the meal.  A
+small still-life picture that hung over the sideboard had snapped its
+cord and slid down with an alarming clatter on to the crowded board
+beneath it.  The picture itself was scarcely damaged, but its fall had
+been accompanied by a tinkle of broken glass, and it was found that a
+liqueur glass, one out of a set of seven that would be impossible to
+match, had been shivered into fragments.  Francesca’s almost motherly
+love for her possessions made her peculiarly sensible to a feeling of
+annoyance and depression at the accident, but she turned politely to
+listen to Mrs. Greech’s account of a misfortune in which four soup-plates
+were involved.  Mrs. Henry was not a brilliant conversationalist, and her
+flank was speedily turned by Stephen Thorle, who recounted a slum
+experience in which two entire families did all their feeding out of one
+damaged soup-plate.
+
+“The gratitude of those poor creatures when I presented them with a set
+of table crockery apiece, the tears in their eyes and in their voices
+when they thanked me, would be impossible to describe.”
+
+“Thank you all the same for describing it,” said Comus.
+
+The listening eyes went swiftly round the table to gather evidence as to
+how this rather disconcerting remark had been received, but Thorle’s
+voice continued uninterruptedly to retail stories of East-end gratitude,
+never failing to mention the particular deeds of disinterested charity on
+his part which had evoked and justified the gratitude.  Mrs. Greech had
+to suppress the interesting sequel to her broken-crockery narrative, to
+wit, how she subsequently matched the shattered soup-plates at Harrod’s.
+Like an imported plant species that sometimes flourishes exceedingly, and
+makes itself at home to the dwarfing and overshadowing of all native
+species, Thorle dominated the dinner-party and thrust its original
+purport somewhat into the background.  Serena began to look helplessly
+apologetic.  It was altogether rather a relief when the filling of
+champagne glasses gave Francesca an excuse for bringing matters back to
+their intended footing.
+
+“We must all drink a health,” she said; “Comus, my own dear boy, a safe
+and happy voyage to you, much prosperity in the life you are going out
+to, and in due time a safe and happy return—”
+
+Her hand gave an involuntary jerk in the act of raising the glass, and
+the wine went streaming across the tablecloth in a froth of yellow
+bubbles.  It certainly was not turning out a comfortable or auspicious
+dinner party.
+
+“My dear mother,” cried Comus, “you must have been drinking healths all
+the afternoon to make your hand so unsteady.”
+
+He laughed gaily and with apparent carelessness, but again Lady Veula
+caught the frightened note in his laughter.  Mrs. Henry, with practical
+sympathy, was telling Francesca two good ways for getting wine stains out
+of tablecloths.  The smaller economies of life were an unnecessary branch
+of learning for Mrs. Greech, but she studied them as carefully and
+conscientiously as a stay-at-home plain-dwelling English child commits to
+memory the measurements and altitudes of the world’s principal mountain
+peaks.  Some women of her temperament and mentality know by heart the
+favourite colours, flowers and hymn-tunes of all the members of the Royal
+Family; Mrs. Greech would possibly have failed in an examination of that
+nature, but she knew what to do with carrots that have been over-long in
+storage.
+
+Francesca did not renew her speech-making; a chill seemed to have fallen
+over all efforts at festivity, and she contented herself with refilling
+her glass and simply drinking to her boy’s good health.  The others
+followed her example, and Comus drained his glass with a brief “thank you
+all very much.”  The sense of constraint which hung over the company was
+not, however, marked by any uncomfortable pause in the conversation.
+Henry Greech was a fluent thinker, of the kind that prefer to do their
+thinking aloud; the silence that descended on him as a mantle in the
+House of Commons was an official livery of which he divested himself as
+thoroughly as possible in private life.  He did not propose to sit
+through dinner as a mere listener to Mr. Thorle’s personal narrative of
+philanthropic movements and experiences, and took the first opportunity
+of launching himself into a flow of satirical observations on current
+political affairs.  Lady Veula was inured to this sort of thing in her
+own home circle, and sat listening with the stoical indifference with
+which an Esquimau might accept the occurrence of one snowstorm the more,
+in the course of an Arctic winter.  Serena Golackly felt a certain relief
+at the fact that her imported guest was not, after all, monopolising the
+conversation.  But the latter was too determined a personality to allow
+himself to be thrust aside for many minutes by the talkative M.P.  Henry
+Greech paused for an instant to chuckle at one of his own shafts of
+satire, and immediately Thorle’s penetrating voice swept across the
+table.
+
+“Oh, you politicians!” he exclaimed, with pleasant superiority; “you are
+always fighting about how things should be done, and the consequence is
+you are never able to do anything.  Would you like me to tell you what a
+Unitarian horsedealer said to me at Brindisi about politicians?”
+
+A Unitarian horsedealer at Brindisi had all the allurement of the
+unexpected.  Henry Greech’s witticisms at the expense of the Front
+Opposition bench were destined to remain as unfinished as his wife’s
+history of the broken soup-plates.  Thorle was primed with an ample
+succession of stories and themes, chiefly concerning poverty,
+thriftlessness, reclamation, reformed characters, and so forth, which
+carried him in an almost uninterrupted sequence through the remainder of
+the dinner.
+
+“What I want to do is to make people think,” he said, turning his
+prominent eyes on to his hostess; “it’s so hard to make people think.”
+
+“At any rate you give them the opportunity,” said Comus, cryptically.
+
+As the ladies rose to leave the table Comus crossed over to pick up one
+of Lady Veula’s gloves that had fallen to the floor.
+
+“I did not know you kept a dog,” said Lady Veula.
+
+“We don’t,” said Comus, “there isn’t one in the house.”
+
+“I could have sworn I saw one follow you across the hall this evening,”
+she said.
+
+“A small black dog, something like a schipperke?” asked Comus in a low
+voice.
+
+“Yes, that was it.”
+
+“I saw it myself to-night; it ran from behind my chair just as I was
+sitting down.  Don’t say anything to the others about it; it would
+frighten my mother.”
+
+“Have you ever seen it before?” Lady Veula asked quickly.
+
+“Once, when I was six years old.  It followed my father downstairs.”
+
+Lady Veula said nothing.  She knew that Comus had lost his father at the
+age of six.
+
+In the drawing-room Serena made nervous excuses for her talkative friend.
+
+“Really, rather an interesting man, you know, and up to the eyes in all
+sorts of movements.  Just the sort of person to turn loose at a
+drawing-room meeting, or to send down to a mission-hall in some
+unheard-of neighbourhood.  Given a sounding-board and a harmonium, and a
+titled woman of some sort in the chair, and he’ll be perfectly happy; I
+must say I hadn’t realised how overpowering he might be at a small
+dinner-party.”
+
+“I should say he was a very good man,” said Mrs. Greech; she had forgiven
+the mutilation of her soup-plate story.
+
+The party broke up early as most of the guests had other engagements to
+keep.  With a belated recognition of the farewell nature of the occasion
+they made pleasant little good-bye remarks to Comus, with the usual
+predictions of prosperity and anticipations of an ultimate auspicious
+return.  Even Henry Greech sank his personal dislike of the boy for the
+moment, and made hearty jocular allusions to a home-coming, which, in the
+elder man’s eyes, seemed possibly pleasantly remote.  Lady Veula alone
+made no reference to the future; she simply said, “Good-bye, Comus,” but
+her voice was the kindest of all and he responded with a look of
+gratitude.  The weariness in her eyes was more marked than ever as she
+lay back against the cushions of her carriage.
+
+“What a tragedy life is,” she said, aloud to herself.
+
+Serena and Stephen Thorle were the last to leave, and Francesca stood
+alone for a moment at the head of the stairway watching Comus laughing
+and chatting as he escorted the departing guests to the door.  The
+ice-wall was melting under the influence of coming separation, and never
+had he looked more adorably handsome in her eyes, never had his merry
+laugh and mischief-loving gaiety seemed more infectious than on this
+night of his farewell banquet.  She was glad enough that he was going
+away from a life of idleness and extravagance and temptation, but she
+began to suspect that she would miss, for a little while at any rate, the
+high-spirited boy who could be so attractive in his better moods.  Her
+impulse, after the guests had gone, was to call him to her and hold him
+once more in her arms, and repeat her wishes for his happiness and
+good-luck in the land he was going to, and her promise of his welcome
+back, some not too distant day, to the land he was leaving.  She wanted
+to forget, and to make him forget, the months of irritable jangling and
+sharp discussions, the months of cold aloofness and indifference and to
+remember only that he was her own dear Comus as in the days of yore,
+before he had grown from an unmanageable pickle into a weariful problem.
+But she feared lest she should break down, and she did not wish to cloud
+his light-hearted gaiety on the very eve of his departure.  She watched
+him for a moment as he stood in the hall, settling his tie before a
+mirror, and then went quietly back to her drawing-room.  It had not been
+a very successful dinner party, and the general effect it had left on her
+was one of depression.
+
+Comus, with a lively musical-comedy air on his lips, and a look of
+wretchedness in his eyes, went out to visit the haunts that he was
+leaving so soon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+ELAINE YOUGHAL sat at lunch in the Speise Saal of one of Vienna’s
+costlier hotels.  The double-headed eagle, with its “K.u.K.” legend,
+everywhere met the eye and announced the imperial favour in which the
+establishment basked.  Some several square yards of yellow bunting,
+charged with the image of another double-headed eagle, floating from the
+highest flag-staff above the building, betrayed to the initiated the fact
+that a Russian Grand Duke was concealed somewhere on the premises.
+Unannounced by heraldic symbolism but unconcealable by reason of nature’s
+own blazonry, were several citizens and citizenesses of the great
+republic of the Western world.  One or two Cobdenite members of the
+British Parliament engaged in the useful task of proving that the cost of
+living in Vienna was on an exorbitant scale, flitted with restrained
+importance through a land whose fatness they had come to spy out; every
+fancied over-charge in their bills was welcome as providing another nail
+in the coffin of their fiscal opponents.  It is the glory of democracies
+that they may be misled but never driven.  Here and there, like brave
+deeds in a dust-patterned world, flashed and glittered the sumptuous
+uniforms of representatives of the Austrian military caste.  Also in
+evidence, at discreet intervals, were stray units of the Semetic tribe
+that nineteen centuries of European neglect had been unable to mislay.
+
+Elaine sitting with Courtenay at an elaborately appointed luncheon table,
+gay with high goblets of Bohemian glassware, was mistress of three
+discoveries.  First, to her disappointment, that if you frequent the more
+expensive hotels of Europe you must be prepared to find, in whatever
+country you may chance to be staying, a depressing international likeness
+between them all.  Secondly, to her relief, that one is not expected to
+be sentimentally amorous during a modern honeymoon.  Thirdly, rather to
+her dismay, that Courtenay Youghal did not necessarily expect her to be
+markedly affectionate in private.  Someone had described him, after their
+marriage, as one of Nature’s bachelors, and she began to see how aptly
+the description fitted him.
+
+“Will those Germans on our left never stop talking?” she asked, as an
+undying flow of Teutonic small talk rattled and jangled across the
+intervening stretch of carpet.  “Not one of those three women has ceased
+talking for an instant since we’ve been sitting here.”
+
+“They will presently, if only for a moment,” said Courtenay; “when the
+dish you have ordered comes in there will be a deathly silence at the
+next table.  No German can see a _plat_ brought in for someone else
+without being possessed with a great fear that it represents a more
+toothsome morsel or a better money’s worth than what he has ordered for
+himself.”
+
+The exuberant Teutonic chatter was balanced on the other side of the room
+by an even more penetrating conversation unflaggingly maintained by a
+party of Americans, who were sitting in judgment on the cuisine of the
+country they were passing through, and finding few extenuating
+circumstances.
+
+“What Mr. Lonkins wants is a real _deep_ cherry pie,” announced a lady in
+a tone of dramatic and honest conviction.
+
+“Why, yes, that is so,” corroborated a gentleman who was apparently the
+Mr. Lonkins in question; “a real _deep_ cherry pie.”
+
+“We had the same trouble way back in Paris,” proclaimed another lady;
+“little Jerome and the girls don’t want to eat any more _crème
+renversée_.  I’d give anything if they could get some real cherry pie.”
+
+“Real _deep_ cherry pie,” assented Mr. Lonkins.
+
+“Way down in Ohio we used to have peach pie that was real good,” said
+Mrs. Lonkins, turning on a tap of reminiscence that presently flowed to a
+cascade.  The subject of pies seemed to lend itself to indefinite
+expansion.
+
+“Do those people think of nothing but their food?” asked Elaine, as the
+virtues of roasted mutton suddenly came to the fore and received emphatic
+recognition, even the absent and youthful Jerome being quoted in its
+favour.
+
+“On the contrary,” said Courtenay, “they are a widely-travelled set, and
+the man has had a notably interesting career.  It is a form of
+home-sickness with them to discuss and lament the cookery and foods that
+they’ve never had the leisure to stay at home and digest.  The Wandering
+Jew probably babbled unremittingly about some breakfast dish that took so
+long to prepare that he had never time to eat it.”
+
+A waiter deposited a dish of Wiener Nierenbraten in front of Elaine.  At
+the same moment a magic hush fell upon the three German ladies at the
+adjoining table, and the flicker of a great fear passed across their
+eyes.  Then they burst forth again into tumultuous chatter.  Courtenay
+had proved a reliable prophet.
+
+Almost at the same moment as the luncheon-dish appeared on the scene, two
+ladies arrived at a neighbouring table, and bowed with dignified
+cordiality to Elaine and Courtenay.  They were two of the more worldly
+and travelled of Elaine’s extensive stock of aunts, and they happened to
+be making a short stay at the same hotel as the young couple.  They were
+far too correct and rationally minded to intrude themselves on their
+niece, but it was significant of Elaine’s altered view as to the sanctity
+of honeymoon life that she secretly rather welcomed the presence of her
+two relatives in the hotel, and had found time and occasion to give them
+more of her society than she would have considered necessary or desirable
+a few weeks ago.  The younger of the two she rather liked, in a
+restrained fashion, as one likes an unpretentious watering-place or a
+restaurant that does not try to give one a musical education in addition
+to one’s dinner.  One felt instinctively about her that she would never
+wear rather more valuable diamonds than any other woman in the room, and
+would never be the only person to be saved in a steamboat disaster or
+hotel fire.  As a child she might have been perfectly well able to recite
+“On Linden when the sun was low,” but one felt certain that nothing ever
+induced her to do so.  The elder aunt, Mrs. Goldbrook, did not share her
+sister’s character as a human rest-cure; most people found her rather
+disturbing, chiefly, perhaps, from her habit of asking unimportant
+questions with enormous solemnity.  Her manner of enquiring after a
+trifling ailment gave one the impression that she was more concerned with
+the fortunes of the malady than with oneself, and when one got rid of a
+cold one felt that she almost expected to be given its postal address.
+Probably her manner was merely the defensive outwork of an innate
+shyness, but she was not a woman who commanded confidences.
+
+“A telephone call for Courtenay,” commented the younger of the two women
+as Youghal hurriedly flashed through the room; “the telephone system
+seems to enter very largely into that young man’s life.”
+
+“The telephone has robbed matrimony of most of its sting,” said the
+elder; “so much more discreet than pen and ink communications which get
+read by the wrong people.”
+
+Elaine’s aunts were conscientiously worldly; they were the natural
+outcome of a stock that had been conscientiously straight-laced for many
+generations.
+
+Elaine had progressed to the pancake stage before Courtenay returned.
+
+“Sorry to be away so long,” he said, “but I’ve arranged something rather
+nice for to-night.  There’s rather a jolly masquerade ball on.  I’ve
+’phoned about getting a costume for you and it’s alright.  It will suit
+you beautifully, and I’ve got my harlequin dress with me.  Madame
+Kelnicort, excellent soul, is going to chaperone you, and she’ll take you
+back any time you like; I’m quite unreliable when I get into fancy dress.
+I shall probably keep going till some unearthly hour of the morning.”
+
+A masquerade ball in a strange city hardly represented Elaine’s idea of
+enjoyment.  Carefully to disguise one’s identity in a neighbourhood where
+one was entirely unknown seemed to her rather meaningless.  With
+Courtenay, of course, it was different; he seemed to have friends and
+acquaintances everywhere.  However, the matter had progressed to a point
+which would have made a refusal to go seem rather ungracious.  Elaine
+finished her pancake and began to take a polite interest in her costume.
+
+“What is your character?” asked Madame Kelnicort that evening, as they
+uncloaked, preparatory to entering the already crowded ball-room.
+
+“I believe I’m supposed to represent Marjolaine de Montfort, whoever she
+may have been,” said Elaine.  “Courtenay declares he only wanted to marry
+me because I’m his ideal of her.”
+
+“But what a mistake to go as a character you know nothing about.  To
+enjoy a masquerade ball you ought to throw away your own self and be the
+character you represent.  Now Courtenay has been Harlequin since half-way
+through dinner; I could see it dancing in his eyes.  At about six o’clock
+to-morrow morning he will fall asleep and wake up a member of the British
+House of Parliament on his honeymoon, but to-night he is unrestrainedly
+Harlequin.”
+
+Elaine stood in the ball-room surrounded by a laughing jostling throng of
+pierrots, jockeys, Dresden-china shepherdesses, Roumanian peasant-girls
+and all the lively make-believe creatures that form the ingredients of a
+fancy-dress ball.  As she stood watching them she experienced a growing
+feeling of annoyance, chiefly with herself.  She was assisting, as the
+French say, at one of the gayest scenes of Europe’s gayest capital, and
+she was conscious of being absolutely unaffected by the gaiety around
+her.  The costumes were certainly interesting to look at, and the music
+good to listen to, and to that extent she was amused, but the _abandon_
+of the scene made no appeal to her.  It was like watching a game of which
+you did not know the rules, and in the issue of which you were not
+interested.  Elaine began to wonder what was the earliest moment at which
+she could drag Madame Kelnicort away from the revel without being guilty
+of sheer cruelty.  Then Courtenay wriggled out of the crush and came
+towards her, a joyous laughing Courtenay, looking younger and handsomer
+than she had ever seen him.  She could scarcely recognise in him to-night
+the rising young debater who made embarrassing onslaughts on the
+Government’s foreign policy before a crowded House of Commons.  He
+claimed her for the dance that was just starting, and steered her
+dexterously into the heart of the waltzing crowd.
+
+“You look more like Marjolaine than I should have thought a mortal woman
+of these days could look,” he declared, “only Marjolaine did smile
+sometimes.  You have rather the air of wondering if you’d left out enough
+tea for the servants’ breakfast.  Don’t mind my teasing; I love you to
+look like that, and besides, it makes a splendid foil to my Harlequin—my
+selfishness coming to the fore again, you see.  But you really are to go
+home the moment you’re bored; the excellent Kelnicort gets heaps of
+dances throughout the winter, so don’t mind sacrificing her.”
+
+A little later in the evening Elaine found herself standing out a dance
+with a grave young gentleman from the Russian Embassy.
+
+“Monsieur Courtenay enjoys himself, doesn’t he?” he observed, as the
+youthful-looking harlequin flashed past them, looking like some restless
+gorgeous-hued dragonfly; “why is it that the good God has given your
+countrymen the boon of eternal youth?  Some of your countrywomen, too,
+but all of the men.”
+
+Elaine could think of many of her countrymen who were not and never could
+have been youthful, but as far as Courtenay was concerned she recognised
+the fitness of the remark.  And the recognition carried with it a sense
+of depression.  Would he always remain youthful and keen on gaiety and
+revelling while she grew staid and retiring?  She had thrust the lively
+intractable Comus out of her mind, as by his perverseness he had thrust
+himself out of her heart, and she had chosen the brilliant young man of
+affairs as her husband.  He had honestly let her see the selfish side of
+his character while he was courting her, but she had been prepared to
+make due sacrifices to the selfishness of a public man who had his career
+to consider above all other things.  Would she also have to make
+sacrifices to the harlequin spirit which was now revealing itself as an
+undercurrent in his nature?  When one has inured oneself to the idea of a
+particular form of victimisation it is disconcerting to be confronted
+with another.  Many a man who would patiently undergo martyrdom for
+religion’s sake would be furiously unwilling to be a martyr to neuralgia.
+
+“I think that is why you English love animals so much,” pursued the young
+diplomat; “you are such splendid animals yourselves.  You are lively
+because you want to be lively, not because people are looking on at you.
+Monsieur Courtenay is certainly an animal.  I mean it as a high
+compliment.”
+
+“Am I an animal?” asked Elaine.
+
+“I was going to say you are an angel,” said the Russian, in some
+embarrassment, “but I do not think that would do; angels and animals
+would never get on together.  To get on with animals you must have a
+sense of humour, and I don’t suppose angels have any sense of humour; you
+see it would be no use to them as they never hear any jokes.”
+
+“Perhaps,” said Elaine, with a tinge of bitterness in her voice, “perhaps
+I am a vegetable.”
+
+“I think you most remind me of a picture,” said the Russian.
+
+It was not the first time Elaine had heard the simile.
+
+“I know,” she said, “the Narrow Gallery at the Louvre; attributed to
+Leonardo da Vinci.”
+
+Evidently the impression she made on people was solely one of externals.
+
+Was that how Courtenay regarded her?  Was that to be her function and
+place in life, a painted background, a decorative setting to other
+people’s triumphs and tragedies?  Somehow to-night she had the feeling
+that a general might have who brought imposing forces into the field and
+could do nothing with them.  She possessed youth and good looks,
+considerable wealth, and had just made what would be thought by most
+people a very satisfactory marriage.  And already she seemed to be
+standing aside as an onlooker where she had expected herself to be taking
+a leading part.
+
+“Does this sort of thing appeal to you?” she asked the young Russian,
+nodding towards the gay scrimmage of masqueraders and rather prepared to
+hear an amused negative.”
+
+“But yes, of course,” he answered; “costume balls, fancy fairs, café
+chantant, casino, anything that is not real life appeals to us Russians.
+Real life with us is the sort of thing that Maxim Gorki deals in.  It
+interests us immensely, but we like to get away from it sometimes.”
+
+Madame Kelnicort came up with another prospective partner, and Elaine
+delivered her ukase: one more dance and then back to the hotel.  Without
+any special regret she made her retreat from the revel which Courtenay
+was enjoying under the impression that it was life and the young Russian
+under the firm conviction that it was not.
+
+Elaine breakfasted at her aunts’ table the next morning at much her usual
+hour.  Courtenay was sleeping the sleep of a happy tired animal.  He had
+given instructions to be called at eleven o’clock, from which time onward
+the _Neue Freie Presse_, the _Zeit_, and his toilet would occupy his
+attention till he appeared at the luncheon table.  There were not many
+people breakfasting when Elaine arrived on the scene, but the room seemed
+to be fuller than it really was by reason of a penetrating voice that was
+engaged in recounting how far the standard of Viennese breakfast fare
+fell below the expectations and desires of little Jerome and the girls.
+
+“If ever little Jerome becomes President of the United States,” said
+Elaine, “I shall be able to contribute quite an informing article on his
+gastronomic likes and dislikes to the papers.”
+
+The aunts were discreetly inquisitive as to the previous evening’s
+entertainment.
+
+“If Elaine would flirt mildly with somebody it would be such a good
+thing,” said Mrs. Goldbrook; “it would remind Courtenay that he’s not the
+only attractive young man in the world.”
+
+Elaine, however, did not gratify their hopes; she referred to the ball
+with the detachment she would have shown in describing a drawing-room
+show of cottage industries.  It was not difficult to discern in her
+description of the affair the confession that she had been slightly
+bored.  From Courtenay, later in the day, the aunts received a much
+livelier impression of the festivities, from which it was abundantly
+clear that he at any rate had managed to amuse himself.  Neither did it
+appear that his good opinion of his own attractions had suffered any
+serious shock.  He was distinctly in a very good temper.
+
+“The secret of enjoying a honeymoon,” said Mrs. Goldbrook afterwards to
+her sister, “is not to attempt too much.”
+
+“You mean—?”
+
+“Courtenay is content to try and keep one person amused and happy, and he
+thoroughly succeeds.”
+
+“I certainly don’t think Elaine is going to be very happy,” said her
+sister, “but at least Courtenay saved her from making the greatest
+mistake she could have made—marrying that young Bassington.”
+
+“He has also,” said Mrs. Goldbrook, “helped her to make the next biggest
+mistake of her life—marrying Courtenay Youghal.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+IT was late afternoon by the banks of a swiftly rushing river, a river
+that gave back a haze of heat from its waters as though it were some
+stagnant steaming lagoon, and yet seemed to be whirling onward with the
+determination of a living thing, perpetually eager and remorseless,
+leaping savagely at any obstacle that attempted to stay its course; an
+unfriendly river, to whose waters you committed yourself at your peril.
+Under the hot breathless shade of the trees on its shore arose that acrid
+all-pervading smell that seems to hang everywhere about the tropics, a
+smell as of some monstrous musty still-room where herbs and spices have
+been crushed and distilled and stored for hundreds of years, and where
+the windows have seldom been opened.  In the dazzling heat that still
+held undisputed sway over the scene, insects and birds seemed
+preposterously alive and active, flitting their gay colours through the
+sunbeams, and crawling over the baked dust in the full swing and pursuit
+of their several businesses; the flies engaged in Heaven knows what, and
+the fly-catchers busy with the flies.  Beasts and humans showed no such
+indifference to the temperature; the sun would have to slant yet further
+downward before the earth would become a fit arena for their revived
+activities.  In the sheltered basement of a wayside rest-house a gang of
+native hammock-bearers slept or chattered drowsily through the last hours
+of the long mid-day halt; wide awake, yet almost motionless in the thrall
+of a heavy lassitude, their European master sat alone in an upper
+chamber, staring out through a narrow window-opening at the native
+village, spreading away in thick clusters of huts girt around with
+cultivated vegetation.  It seemed a vast human ant-hill, which would
+presently be astir with its teeming human life, as though the Sun God in
+his last departing stride had roused it with a careless kick.  Even as
+Comus watched he could see the beginnings of the evening’s awakening.
+Women, squatting in front of their huts, began to pound away at the rice
+or maize that would form the evening meal, girls were collecting their
+water pots preparatory to a walk down to the river, and enterprising
+goats made tentative forays through gaps in the ill-kept fences of
+neighbouring garden plots; their hurried retreats showed that here at
+least someone was keeping alert and wakeful vigil.  Behind a hut perched
+on a steep hillside, just opposite to the rest-house, two boys were
+splitting wood with a certain languid industry; further down the road a
+group of dogs were leisurely working themselves up to quarrelling pitch.
+Here and there, bands of evil-looking pigs roamed about, busy with
+foraging excursions that came unpleasantly athwart the border-line of
+scavenging.  And from the trees that bounded and intersected the village
+rose the horrible, tireless, spiteful-sounding squawking of the
+iron-throated crows.
+
+Comus sat and watched it all with a sense of growing aching depression.
+It was so utterly trivial to his eyes, so devoid of interest, and yet it
+was so real, so serious, so implacable in its continuity.  The brain grew
+tired with the thought of its unceasing reproduction.  It had all gone
+on, as it was going on now, by the side of the great rushing swirling
+river, this tilling and planting and harvesting, marketing and
+store-keeping, feast-making and fetish-worship and love-making, burying
+and giving in marriage, child-bearing and child-rearing, all this had
+been going on, in the shimmering, blistering heat and the warm nights,
+while he had been a youngster at school, dimly recognising Africa as a
+division of the earth’s surface that it was advisable to have a certain
+nodding acquaintance with.
+
+It had been going on in all its trifling detail, all its serious
+intensity, when his father and his grandfather in their day had been
+little boys at school, it would go on just as intently as ever long after
+Comus and his generation had passed away, just as the shadows would
+lengthen and fade under the mulberry trees in that far away English
+garden, round the old stone fountain where a leaden otter for ever preyed
+on a leaden salmon.
+
+Comus rose impatiently from his seat, and walked wearily across the hut
+to another window-opening which commanded a broad view of the river.
+There was something which fascinated and then depressed one in its
+ceaseless hurrying onward sweep, its tons of water rushing on for all
+time, as long as the face of the earth should remain unchanged.  On its
+further shore could be seen spread out at intervals other teeming
+villages, with their cultivated plots and pasture clearings, their moving
+dots which meant cattle and goats and dogs and children.  And far up its
+course, lost in the forest growth that fringed its banks, were hidden
+away yet more villages, human herding-grounds where men dwelt and worked
+and bartered, squabbled and worshipped, sickened and perished, while the
+river went by with its endless swirl and rush of gleaming waters.  One
+could well understand primitive early races making propitiatory
+sacrifices to the spirit of a great river on whose shores they dwelt.
+Time and the river were the two great forces that seemed to matter here.
+
+It was almost a relief to turn back to that other outlook and watch the
+village life that was now beginning to wake in earnest.  The procession
+of water-fetchers had formed itself in a long chattering line that
+stretched river-wards.  Comus wondered how many tens of thousands of
+times that procession had been formed since first the village came into
+existence.  They had been doing it while he was playing in the
+cricket-fields at school, while he was spending Christmas holidays in
+Paris, while he was going his careless round of theatres, dances, suppers
+and card-parties, just as they were doing it now; they would be doing it
+when there was no one alive who remembered Comus Bassington.  This
+thought recurred again and again with painful persistence, a morbid
+growth arising in part from his loneliness.
+
+Staring dumbly out at the toiling sweltering human ant-hill Comus
+marvelled how missionary enthusiasts could labour hopefully at the work
+of transplanting their religion, with its homegrown accretions of
+fatherly parochial benevolence, in this heat-blistered, fever-scourged
+wilderness, where men lived like groundbait and died like flies.  Demons
+one might believe in, if one did not hold one’s imagination in healthy
+check, but a kindly all-managing God, never.  Somewhere in the west
+country of England Comus had an uncle who lived in a rose-smothered
+rectory and taught a wholesome gentle-hearted creed that expressed itself
+in the spirit of “Little lamb, who made thee?” and faithfully reflected
+the beautiful homely Christ-child sentiment of Saxon Europe.  What a far
+away, unreal fairy story it all seemed here in this West African land,
+where the bodies of men were of as little account as the bubbles that
+floated on the oily froth of the great flowing river, and where it
+required a stretch of wild profitless imagination to credit them with
+undying souls.  In the life he had come from Comus had been accustomed to
+think of individuals as definite masterful personalities, making their
+several marks on the circumstances that revolved around them; they did
+well or ill, or in most cases indifferently, and were criticised,
+praised, blamed, thwarted or tolerated, or given way to.  In any case,
+humdrum or outstanding, they had their spheres of importance, little or
+big.  They dominated a breakfast table or harassed a Government,
+according to their capabilities or opportunities, or perhaps they merely
+had irritating mannerisms.  At any rate it seemed highly probable that
+they had souls.  Here a man simply made a unit in an unnumbered
+population, an inconsequent dot in a loosely-compiled deathroll.  Even
+his own position as a white man exalted conspicuously above a horde of
+black natives did not save Comus from the depressing sense of nothingness
+which his first experience of fever had thrown over him.  He was a lost,
+soulless body in this great uncaring land; if he died another would take
+his place, his few effects would be inventoried and sent down to the
+coast, someone else would finish off any tea or whisky that he left
+behind—that would be all.
+
+It was nearly time to be starting towards the next halting place where he
+would dine or at any rate eat something.  But the lassitude which the
+fever had bequeathed him made the tedium of travelling through
+interminable forest-tracks a weariness to be deferred as long as
+possible.  The bearers were nothing loth to let another half-hour or so
+slip by, and Comus dragged a battered paper-covered novel from the pocket
+of his coat.  It was a story dealing with the elaborately tangled love
+affairs of a surpassingly uninteresting couple, and even in his almost
+bookless state Comus had not been able to plough his way through more
+than two-thirds of its dull length; bound up with the cover, however,
+were some pages of advertisement, and these the exile scanned with a
+hungry intentness that the romance itself could never have commanded.
+The name of a shop, of a street, the address of a restaurant, came to him
+as a bitter reminder of the world he had lost, a world that ate and drank
+and flirted, gambled and made merry, a world that debated and intrigued
+and wire-pulled, fought or compromised political battles—and recked
+nothing of its outcasts wandering through forest paths and steamy swamps
+or lying in the grip of fever.  Comus read and re-read those few lines of
+advertisement, just as he treasured a much-crumpled programme of a
+first-night performance at the Straw Exchange Theatre; they seemed to
+make a little more real the past that was already so shadowy and so
+utterly remote.  For a moment he could almost capture the sensation of
+being once again in those haunts that he loved; then he looked round and
+pushed the book wearily from him.  The steaming heat, the forest, the
+rushing river hemmed him in on all sides.
+
+The two boys who had been splitting wood ceased from their labours and
+straightened their backs; suddenly the smaller of the two gave the other
+a resounding whack with a split lath that he still held in his hand, and
+flew up the hillside with a scream of laughter and simulated terror, the
+bigger lad following in hot pursuit.  Up and down the steep bush-grown
+slope they raced and twisted and dodged, coming sometimes to close
+quarters in a hurricane of squeals and smacks, rolling over and over like
+fighting kittens, and breaking away again to start fresh provocation and
+fresh pursuit.  Now and again they would lie for a time panting in what
+seemed the last stage of exhaustion, and then they would be off in
+another wild scamper, their dusky bodies flitting through the bushes,
+disappearing and reappearing with equal suddenness.  Presently two girls
+of their own age, who had returned from the water-fetching, sprang out on
+them from ambush, and the four joined in one joyous gambol that lit up
+the hillside with shrill echoes and glimpses of flying limbs.  Comus sat
+and watched, at first with an amused interest, then with a returning
+flood of depression and heart-ache.  Those wild young human kittens
+represented the joy of life, he was the outsider, the lonely alien,
+watching something in which he could not join, a happiness in which he
+had no part or lot.  He would pass presently out of the village and his
+bearers’ feet would leave their indentations in the dust; that would be
+his most permanent memorial in this little oasis of teeming life.  And
+that other life, in which he once moved with such confident sense of his
+own necessary participation in it, how completely he had passed out of
+it.  Amid all its laughing throngs, its card parties and race-meetings
+and country-house gatherings, he was just a mere name, remembered or
+forgotten, Comus Bassington, the boy who went away.  He had loved himself
+very well and never troubled greatly whether anyone else really loved
+him, and now he realised what he had made of his life.  And at the same
+time he knew that if his chance were to come again he would throw it away
+just as surely, just as perversely.  Fate played with him with loaded
+dice; he would lose always.
+
+One person in the whole world had cared for him, for longer than he could
+remember, cared for him perhaps more than he knew, cared for him perhaps
+now.  But a wall of ice had mounted up between him and her, and across it
+there blew that cold-breath that chills or kills affection.
+
+The words of a well-known old song, the wistful cry of a lost cause, rang
+with insistent mockery through his brain:
+
+    “Better loved you canna be,
+    Will ye ne’er come back again?”
+
+If it was love that was to bring him back he must be an exile for ever.
+His epitaph in the mouths of those that remembered him would be, Comus
+Bassington, the boy who never came back.
+
+And in his unutterable loneliness he bowed his head on his arms, that he
+might not see the joyous scrambling frolic on yonder hillside.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+THE bleak rawness of a grey December day held sway over St. James’s Park,
+that sanctuary of lawn and tree and pool, into which the bourgeois
+innovator has rushed ambitiously time and again, to find that he must
+take the patent leather from off his feet, for the ground on which he
+stands is hallowed ground.
+
+In the lonely hour of early afternoon, when the workers had gone back to
+their work, and the loiterers were scarcely yet gathered again, Francesca
+Bassington made her way restlessly along the stretches of gravelled walk
+that bordered the ornamental water.  The overmastering unhappiness that
+filled her heart and stifled her thinking powers found answering echo in
+her surroundings.  There is a sorrow that lingers in old parks and
+gardens that the busy streets have no leisure to keep by them; the dead
+must bury their dead in Whitehall or the Place de la Concorde, but there
+are quieter spots where they may still keep tryst with the living and
+intrude the memory of their bygone selves on generations that have almost
+forgotten them.  Even in tourist-trampled Versailles the desolation of a
+tragedy that cannot die haunts the terraces and fountains like a
+bloodstain that will not wash out; in the Saxon Garden at Warsaw there
+broods the memory of long-dead things, coeval with the stately trees that
+shade its walks, and with the carp that swim to-day in its ponds as they
+doubtless swam there when “Lieber Augustin” was a living person and not
+as yet an immortal couplet.  And St. James’s Park, with its lawns and
+walks and waterfowl, harbours still its associations with a bygone order
+of men and women, whose happiness and sadness are woven into its history,
+dim and grey as they were once bright and glowing, like the faded pattern
+worked into the fabric of an old tapestry.  It was here that Francesca
+had made her way when the intolerable inaction of waiting had driven her
+forth from her home.  She was waiting for that worst news of all, the
+news which does not kill hope, because there has been none to kill, but
+merely ends suspense.  An early message had said that Comus was ill,
+which might have meant much or little; then there had come that morning a
+cablegram which only meant one thing; in a few hours she would get a
+final message, of which this was the preparatory forerunner.  She already
+knew as much as that awaited message would tell her.  She knew that she
+would never see Comus again, and she knew now that she loved him beyond
+all things that the world could hold for her.  It was no sudden rush of
+pity or compunction that clouded her judgment or gilded her recollection
+of him; she saw him as he was, the beautiful, wayward, laughing boy, with
+his naughtiness, his exasperating selfishness, his insurmountable folly
+and perverseness, his cruelty that spared not even himself, and as he
+was, as he always had been, she knew that he was the one thing that the
+Fates had willed that she should love.  She did not stop to accuse or
+excuse herself for having sent him forth to what was to prove his death.
+It was, doubtless, right and reasonable that he should have gone out
+there, as hundreds of other men went out, in pursuit of careers; the
+terrible thing was that he would never come back.  The old cruel
+hopelessness that had always chequered her pride and pleasure in his good
+looks and high spirits and fitfully charming ways had dealt her a last
+crushing blow; he was dying somewhere thousands of miles away without
+hope of recovery, without a word of love to comfort him, and without hope
+or shred of consolation she was waiting to hear of the end.  The end;
+that last dreadful piece of news which would write “nevermore” across his
+life and hers.
+
+The lively bustle in the streets had been a torture that she could not
+bear.  It wanted but two days to Christmas and the gaiety of the season,
+forced or genuine, rang out everywhere.  Christmas shopping, with its
+anxious solicitude or self-centred absorption, overspread the West End
+and made the pavements scarcely passable at certain favoured points.
+Proud parents, parcel-laden and surrounded by escorts of their young
+people, compared notes with one another on the looks and qualities of
+their offspring and exchanged loud hurried confidences on the difficulty
+or success which each had experienced in getting the right presents for
+one and all.  Shouted directions where to find this or that article at
+its best mingled with salvos of Christmas good wishes.  To Francesca,
+making her way frantically through the carnival of happiness with that
+lonely deathbed in her eyes, it had seemed a callous mockery of her pain;
+could not people remember that there were crucifixions as well as joyous
+birthdays in the world?  Every mother that she passed happy in the
+company of a fresh-looking clean-limbed schoolboy son sent a fresh stab
+at her heart, and the very shops had their bitter memories.  There was
+the tea-shop where he and she had often taken tea together, or, in the
+days of their estrangement, sat with their separate friends at separate
+tables.  There were other shops where extravagantly-incurred bills had
+furnished material for those frequently recurring scenes of
+recrimination, and the Colonial outfitters, where, as he had phrased it
+in whimsical mockery, he had bought grave-clothes for his burying-alive.
+The “oubliette!”  She remembered the bitter petulant name he had flung at
+his destined exile.  There at least he had been harder on himself than
+the Fates were pleased to will; never, as long as Francesca lived and had
+a brain that served her, would she be able to forget.  That narcotic
+would never be given to her.  Unrelenting, unsparing memory would be with
+her always to remind her of those last days of tragedy.  Already her mind
+was dwelling on the details of that ghastly farewell dinner-party and
+recalling one by one the incidents of ill-omen that had marked it; how
+they had sat down seven to table and how one liqueur glass in the set of
+seven had been shivered into fragments; how her glass had slipped from
+her hand as she raised it to her lips to wish Comus a safe return; and
+the strange, quiet hopelessness of Lady Veula’s “good-bye”; she
+remembered now how it had chilled and frightened her at the moment.
+
+The park was filling again with its floating population of loiterers, and
+Francesca’s footsteps began to take a homeward direction.  Something
+seemed to tell her that the message for which she waited had arrived and
+was lying there on the hall table.  Her brother, who had announced his
+intention of visiting her early in the afternoon would have gone by now;
+he knew nothing of this morning’s bad news—the instinct of a wounded
+animal to creep away by itself had prompted her to keep her sorrow from
+him as long as possible.  His visit did not necessitate her presence; he
+was bringing an Austrian friend, who was compiling a work on the
+Franco-Flemish school of painting, to inspect the Van der Meulen, which
+Henry Greech hoped might perhaps figure as an illustration in the book.
+They were due to arrive shortly after lunch, and Francesca had left a
+note of apology, pleading an urgent engagement elsewhere.  As she turned
+to make her way across the Mall into the Green Park a gentle voice hailed
+her from a carriage that was just drawing up by the sidewalk.  Lady
+Caroline Benaresq had been favouring the Victoria Memorial with a long
+unfriendly stare.
+
+“In primitive days,” she remarked, “I believe it was the fashion for
+great chiefs and rulers to have large numbers of their relatives and
+dependents killed and buried with them; in these more enlightened times
+we have invented quite another way of making a great Sovereign
+universally regretted.  My dear Francesca,” she broke off suddenly,
+catching the misery that had settled in the other’s eyes, “what is the
+matter?  Have you had bad news from out there?”
+
+“I am waiting for very bad news,” said Francesca, and Lady Caroline knew
+what had happened.
+
+“I wish I could say something; I can’t.”  Lady Caroline spoke in a harsh,
+grunting voice that few people had ever heard her use.
+
+Francesca crossed the Mall and the carriage drove on.
+
+“Heaven help that poor woman,” said Lady Caroline; which was, for her,
+startlingly like a prayer.
+
+As Francesca entered the hall she gave a quick look at the table; several
+packages, evidently an early batch of Christmas presents, were there, and
+two or three letters.  On a salver by itself was the cablegram for which
+she had waited.  A maid, who had evidently been on the lookout for her,
+brought her the salver.  The servants were well aware of the dreadful
+thing that was happening, and there was pity on the girl’s face and in
+her voice.
+
+“This came for you ten minutes ago, ma’am, and Mr. Greech has been here,
+ma’am, with another gentleman, and was sorry you weren’t at home.  Mr.
+Greech said he would call again in about half-an-hour.”
+
+Francesca carried the cablegram unopened into the drawing-room and sat
+down for a moment to think.  There was no need to read it yet, for she
+knew what she would find written there.  For a few pitiful moments Comus
+would seem less hopelessly lost to her if she put off the reading of that
+last terrible message.  She rose and crossed over to the windows and
+pulled down the blinds, shutting out the waning December day, and then
+reseated herself.  Perhaps in the shadowy half-light her boy would come
+and sit with her again for awhile and let her look her last upon his
+loved face; she could never touch him again or hear his laughing,
+petulant voice, but surely she might look on her dead.  And her starving
+eyes saw only the hateful soulless things of bronze and silver and
+porcelain that she had set up and worshipped as gods; look where she
+would they were there around her, the cold ruling deities of the home
+that held no place for her dead boy.  He had moved in and out among them,
+the warm, living, breathing thing that had been hers to love, and she had
+turned her eyes from that youthful comely figure to adore a few feet of
+painted canvas, a musty relic of a long departed craftsman.  And now he
+was gone from her sight, from her touch, from her hearing for ever,
+without even a thought to flash between them for all the dreary years
+that she should live, and these things of canvas and pigment and wrought
+metal would stay with her.  They were her soul.  And what shall it profit
+a man if he save his soul and slay his heart in torment?
+
+On a small table by her side was Mervyn Quentock’s portrait of her—the
+prophetic symbol of her tragedy; the rich dead harvest of unreal things
+that had never known life, and the bleak thrall of black unending Winter,
+a Winter in which things died and knew no re-awakening.
+
+Francesca turned to the small envelope lying in her lap; very slowly she
+opened it and read the short message.  Then she sat numb and silent for a
+long, long time, or perhaps only for minutes.  The voice of Henry Greech
+in the hall, enquiring for her, called her to herself. Hurriedly she
+crushed the piece of paper out of sight; he would have to be told, of
+course, but just yet her pain seemed too dreadful to be laid bare.
+“Comus is dead” was a sentence beyond her power to speak.
+
+“I have bad news for you, Francesca, I’m sorry to say,” Henry announced.
+Had he heard, too?
+
+“Henneberg has been here and looked at the picture,” he continued,
+seating himself by her side, “and though he admired it immensely as a
+work of art he gave me a disagreeable surprise by assuring me that it’s
+not a genuine Van der Meulen.  It’s a splendid copy, but still,
+unfortunately, only a copy.”
+
+Henry paused and glanced at his sister to see how she had taken the
+unwelcome announcement.  Even in the dim light he caught some of the
+anguish in her eyes.
+
+“My dear Francesca,” he said soothingly, laying his hand affectionately
+on her arm, “I know that this must be a great disappointment to you,
+you’ve always set such store by this picture, but you mustn’t take it too
+much to heart.  These disagreeable discoveries come at times to most
+picture fanciers and owners.  Why, about twenty per cent. of the alleged
+Old Masters in the Louvre are supposed to be wrongly attributed.  And
+there are heaps of similar cases in this country.  Lady Dovecourt was
+telling me the other day that they simply daren’t have an expert in to
+examine the Van Dykes at Columbey for fear of unwelcome disclosures.  And
+besides, your picture is such an excellent copy that it’s by no means
+without a value of its own.  You must get over the disappointment you
+naturally feel, and take a philosophical view of the matter. . . ”
+
+Francesca sat in stricken silence, crushing the folded morsel of paper
+tightly in her hand and wondering if the thin, cheerful voice with its
+pitiless, ghastly mockery of consolation would never stop.
+
+
+
+
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+<title>The Unbearable Bassington, by Saki</title>
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+
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Unbearable Bassington, by Saki
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Unbearable Bassington
+
+
+Author: Saki
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 4, 2013  [eBook #555]
+[Updated edition of: etext96/nbrbl10h.htm]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNBEARABLE BASSINGTON***
+</pre>
+<p>Transcribed from the 1913 John Lane edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
+<h1>THE UNBEARABLE<br />
+BASSINGTON</h1>
+<p style="text-align: center">:: BY H. H. MUNRO
+(&ldquo;SAKI&rdquo;) ::</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p0b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Decorative graphic"
+title=
+"Decorative graphic"
+src="images/p0s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center">LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY
+HEAD</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">TORONTO: BELL &amp; COCKBURN.&nbsp;
+MCMXIII</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<div class="gapmediumdoubleline">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>SIXTH EDITION</i></p>
+<div class="gapmediumdoubleline">&nbsp;</div>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">PRINTED BY
+JAS. TRUSCOTT &amp; SON, LTD.&nbsp; LONDON</span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<h2><span class="smcap">Author&rsquo;s Note</span></h2>
+<p>This story has no moral.</p>
+<p>If it points out an evil at any rate it suggests no
+remedy.</p>
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Francesca Bassington</span> sat in the
+drawing-room of her house in Blue Street, W., regaling herself
+and her estimable brother Henry with China tea and small cress
+sandwiches.&nbsp; The meal was of that elegant proportion which,
+while ministering sympathetically to the desires of the moment,
+is happily reminiscent of a satisfactory luncheon and blessedly
+expectant of an elaborate dinner to come.</p>
+<p>In her younger days Francesca had been known as the beautiful
+Miss Greech; at forty, although much of the original beauty
+remained, she was just dear Francesca Bassington.&nbsp; No one
+would have dreamed of calling her sweet, but a good many people
+who scarcely knew her were punctilious about putting in the
+&ldquo;dear.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her enemies, in their honester moments, would have admitted
+that she was svelte and knew how to dress, but they would have
+agreed with her friends in asserting that she had no soul.&nbsp;
+When one&rsquo;s friends and enemies agree on any particular
+point they are usually wrong.&nbsp; Francesca herself, if pressed
+in an unguarded moment to describe her soul, would probably have
+described her drawing-room.&nbsp; Not that she would have
+considered that the one had stamped the impress of its character
+on the other, so that close scrutiny might reveal its outstanding
+features, and even suggest its hidden places, but because she
+might have dimly recognised that her drawing-room was her
+soul.</p>
+<p>Francesca was one of those women towards whom Fate appears to
+have the best intentions and never to carry them into
+practice.&nbsp; With the advantages put at her disposal she might
+have been expected to command a more than average share of
+feminine happiness.&nbsp; So many of the things that make for
+fretfulness, disappointment and discouragement in a woman&rsquo;s
+life were removed from her path that she might well have been
+considered the fortunate Miss Greech, or later, lucky Francesca
+Bassington.&nbsp; And she was not of the perverse band of those
+who make a rock-garden of their souls by dragging into them all
+the stoney griefs and unclaimed troubles they can find lying
+around them.&nbsp; Francesca loved the smooth ways and pleasant
+places of life; she liked not merely to look on the bright side
+of things but to live there and stay there.&nbsp; And the fact
+that things had, at one time and another, gone badly with her and
+cheated her of some of her early illusions made her cling the
+closer to such good fortune as remained to her now that she
+seemed to have reached a calmer period of her life.&nbsp; To
+undiscriminating friends she appeared in the guise of a rather
+selfish woman, but it was merely the selfishness of one who had
+seen the happy and unhappy sides of life and wished to enjoy to
+the utmost what was left to her of the former.&nbsp; The
+vicissitudes of fortune had not soured her, but they had perhaps
+narrowed her in the sense of making her concentrate much of her
+sympathies on things that immediately pleased and amused her, or
+that recalled and perpetuated the pleasing and successful
+incidents of other days.&nbsp; And it was her drawing-room in
+particular that enshrined the memorials or tokens of past and
+present happiness.</p>
+<p>Into that comfortable quaint-shaped room of angles and bays
+and alcoves had sailed, as into a harbour, those precious
+personal possessions and trophies that had survived the
+buffetings and storms of a not very tranquil married life.&nbsp;
+Wherever her eyes might turn she saw the embodied results of her
+successes, economies, good luck, good management or good
+taste.&nbsp; The battle had more than once gone against her, but
+she had somehow always contrived to save her baggage train, and
+her complacent gaze could roam over object after object that
+represented the spoils of victory or the salvage of honourable
+defeat.&nbsp; The delicious bronze Fremiet on the mantelpiece had
+been the outcome of a Grand Prix sweepstake of many years ago; a
+group of Dresden figures of some considerable value had been
+bequeathed to her by a discreet admirer, who had added death to
+his other kindnesses; another group had been a self-bestowed
+present, purchased in blessed and unfading memory of a wonderful
+nine-days&rsquo; bridge winnings at a country-house party.&nbsp;
+There were old Persian and Bokharan rugs and Worcester
+tea-services of glowing colour, and little treasures of antique
+silver that each enshrined a history or a memory in addition to
+its own intrinsic value.&nbsp; It amused her at times to think of
+the bygone craftsmen and artificers who had hammered and wrought
+and woven in far distant countries and ages, to produce the
+wonderful and beautiful things that had come, one way and
+another, into her possession.&nbsp; Workers in the studios of
+medieval Italian towns and of later Paris, in the bazaars of
+Baghdad and of Central Asia, in old-time English workshops and
+German factories, in all manner of queer hidden corners where
+craft secrets were jealously guarded, nameless unremembered men
+and men whose names were world-renowned and deathless.</p>
+<p>And above all her other treasures, dominating in her
+estimation every other object that the room contained, was the
+great Van der Meulen that had come from her father&rsquo;s home
+as part of her wedding dowry.&nbsp; It fitted exactly into the
+central wall panel above the narrow buhl cabinet, and filled
+exactly its right space in the composition and balance of the
+room.&nbsp; From wherever you sat it seemed to confront you as
+the dominating feature of its surroundings.&nbsp; There was a
+pleasing serenity about the great pompous battle scene with its
+solemn courtly warriors bestriding their heavily prancing steeds,
+grey or skewbald or dun, all gravely in earnest, and yet somehow
+conveying the impression that their campaigns were but vast
+serious picnics arranged in the grand manner.&nbsp; Francesca
+could not imagine the drawing-room without the crowning
+complement of the stately well-hung picture, just as she could
+not imagine herself in any other setting than this house in Blue
+Street with its crowded Pantheon of cherished household gods.</p>
+<p>And herein sprouted one of the thorns that obtruded through
+the rose-leaf damask of what might otherwise have been
+Francesca&rsquo;s peace of mind.&nbsp; One&rsquo;s happiness
+always lies in the future rather than in the past.&nbsp; With due
+deference to an esteemed lyrical authority one may safely say
+that a sorrow&rsquo;s crown of sorrow is anticipating unhappier
+things.&nbsp; The house in Blue Street had been left to her by
+her old friend Sophie Chetrof, but only until such time as her
+niece Emmeline Chetrof should marry, when it was to pass to her
+as a wedding present.&nbsp; Emmeline was now seventeen and
+passably good-looking, and four or five years were all that could
+be safely allotted to the span of her continued
+spinsterhood.&nbsp; Beyond that period lay chaos, the wrenching
+asunder of Francesca from the sheltering habitation that had
+grown to be her soul.&nbsp; It is true that in imagination she
+had built herself a bridge across the chasm, a bridge of a single
+span.&nbsp; The bridge in question was her schoolboy son Comus,
+now being educated somewhere in the southern counties, or rather
+one should say the bridge consisted of the possibility of his
+eventual marriage with Emmeline, in which case Francesca saw
+herself still reigning, a trifle squeezed and incommoded perhaps,
+but still reigning in the house in Blue Street.&nbsp; The Van der
+Meulen would still catch its requisite afternoon light in its
+place of honour, the Fremiet and the Dresden and Old Worcester
+would continue undisturbed in their accustomed niches.&nbsp;
+Emmeline could have the Japanese snuggery, where Francesca
+sometimes drank her after-dinner coffee, as a separate
+drawing-room, where she could put her own things.&nbsp; The
+details of the bridge structure had all been carefully thought
+out.&nbsp; Only&mdash;it was an unfortunate circumstance that
+Comus should have been the span on which everything balanced.</p>
+<p>Francesca&rsquo;s husband had insisted on giving the boy that
+strange Pagan name, and had not lived long enough to judge as to
+the appropriateness, or otherwise, of its significance.&nbsp; In
+seventeen years and some odd months Francesca had had ample
+opportunity for forming an opinion concerning her son&rsquo;s
+characteristics.&nbsp; The spirit of mirthfulness which one
+associates with the name certainly ran riot in the boy, but it
+was a twisted wayward sort of mirth of which Francesca herself
+could seldom see the humorous side.&nbsp; In her brother Henry,
+who sat eating small cress sandwiches as solemnly as though they
+had been ordained in some immemorial Book of Observances, fate
+had been undisguisedly kind to her.&nbsp; He might so easily have
+married some pretty helpless little woman, and lived at Notting
+Hill Gate, and been the father of a long string of pale, clever
+useless children, who would have had birthdays and the sort of
+illnesses that one is expected to send grapes to, and who would
+have painted fatuous objects in a South Kensington manner as
+Christmas offerings to an aunt whose cubic space for lumber was
+limited.&nbsp; Instead of committing these unbrotherly actions,
+which are so frequent in family life that they might almost be
+called brotherly, Henry had married a woman who had both money
+and a sense of repose, and their one child had the brilliant
+virtue of never saying anything which even its parents could
+consider worth repeating.&nbsp; Then he had gone into Parliament,
+possibly with the idea of making his home life seem less dull; at
+any rate it redeemed his career from insignificance, for no man
+whose death can produce the item &ldquo;another
+by-election&rdquo; on the news posters can be wholly a
+nonentity.&nbsp; Henry, in short, who might have been an
+embarrassment and a handicap, had chosen rather to be a friend
+and counsellor, at times even an emergency bank balance;
+Francesca on her part, with the partiality which a clever and
+lazily-inclined woman often feels for a reliable fool, not only
+sought his counsel but frequently followed it.&nbsp; When
+convenient, moreover, she repaid his loans.</p>
+<p>Against this good service on the part of Fate in providing her
+with Henry for a brother, Francesca could well set the plaguy
+malice of the destiny that had given her Comus for a son.&nbsp;
+The boy was one of those untameable young lords of misrule that
+frolic and chafe themselves through nursery and preparatory and
+public-school days with the utmost allowance of storm and dust
+and dislocation and the least possible amount of collar-work, and
+come somehow with a laugh through a series of catastrophes that
+has reduced everyone else concerned to tears or Cassandra-like
+forebodings.&nbsp; Sometimes they sober down in after-life and
+become uninteresting, forgetting that they were ever lords of
+anything; sometimes Fate plays royally into their hands, and they
+do great things in a spacious manner, and are thanked by
+Parliaments and the Press and acclaimed by gala-day crowds.&nbsp;
+But in most cases their tragedy begins when they leave school and
+turn themselves loose in a world that has grown too civilised and
+too crowded and too empty to have any place for them.&nbsp; And
+they are very many.</p>
+<p>Henry Greech had made an end of biting small sandwiches, and
+settled down like a dust-storm refreshed, to discuss one of the
+fashionably prevalent topics of the moment, the prevention of
+destitution.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is a question that is only being nibbled at, smelt
+at, one might say, at the present moment,&rdquo; he observed,
+&ldquo;but it is one that will have to engage our serious
+attention and consideration before long.&nbsp; The first thing
+that we shall have to do is to get out of the dilettante and
+academic way of approaching it.&nbsp; We must collect and
+assimilate hard facts.&nbsp; It is a subject that ought to appeal
+to all thinking minds, and yet, you know, I find it surprisingly
+difficult to interest people in it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Francesca made some monosyllabic response, a sort of
+sympathetic grunt which was meant to indicate that she was, to a
+certain extent, listening and appreciating.&nbsp; In reality she
+was reflecting that Henry possibly found it difficult to interest
+people in any topic that he enlarged on.&nbsp; His talents lay so
+thoroughly in the direction of being uninteresting, that even as
+an eye-witness of the massacre of St. Bartholomew he would
+probably have infused a flavour of boredom into his descriptions
+of the event.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was speaking down in Leicestershire the other day on
+this subject,&rdquo; continued Henry, &ldquo;and I pointed out at
+some length a thing that few people ever stop to
+consider&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Francesca went over immediately but decorously to the majority
+that will not stop to consider.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did you come across any of the Barnets when you were
+down there?&rdquo; she interrupted; &ldquo;Eliza Barnet is rather
+taken up with all those subjects.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In the propagandist movements of Sociology, as in other arenas
+of life and struggle, the fiercest competition and rivalry is
+frequently to be found between closely allied types and
+species.&nbsp; Eliza Barnet shared many of Henry Greech&rsquo;s
+political and social views, but she also shared his fondness for
+pointing things out at some length; there had been occasions when
+she had extensively occupied the strictly limited span allotted
+to the platform oratory of a group of speakers of whom Henry
+Greech had been an impatient unit.&nbsp; He might see eye to eye
+with her on the leading questions of the day, but he persistently
+wore mental blinkers as far as her estimable qualities were
+concerned, and the mention of her name was a skilful lure drawn
+across the trail of his discourse; if Francesca had to listen to
+his eloquence on any subject she much preferred that it should be
+a disparagement of Eliza Barnet rather than the prevention of
+destitution.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve no doubt she means well,&rdquo; said Henry,
+&ldquo;but it would be a good thing if she could be induced to
+keep her own personality a little more in the background, and not
+to imagine that she is the necessary mouthpiece of all the
+progressive thought in the countryside.&nbsp; I fancy Canon
+Besomley must have had her in his mind when he said that some
+people came into the world to shake empires and others to move
+amendments.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Francesca laughed with genuine amusement.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I suppose she is really wonderfully well up in all the
+subjects she talks about,&rdquo; was her provocative comment.</p>
+<p>Henry grew possibly conscious of the fact that he was being
+drawn out on the subject of Eliza Barnet, and he presently turned
+on to a more personal topic.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;From the general air of tranquillity about the house I
+presume Comus has gone back to Thaleby,&rdquo; he observed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Francesca, &ldquo;he went back
+yesterday.&nbsp; Of course, I&rsquo;m very fond of him, but I
+bear the separation well.&nbsp; When he&rsquo;s here it&rsquo;s
+rather like having a live volcano in the house, a volcano that in
+its quietest moments asks incessant questions and uses strong
+scent.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is only a temporary respite,&rdquo; said Henry;
+&ldquo;in a year or two he will be leaving school, and then
+what?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Francesca closed her eyes with the air of one who seeks to
+shut out a distressing vision.&nbsp; She was not fond of looking
+intimately at the future in the presence of another person,
+especially when the future was draped in doubtfully auspicious
+colours.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And then what?&rdquo; persisted Henry.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then I suppose he will be upon my hands.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Exactly.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t sit there looking judicial.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m
+quite ready to listen to suggestions if you&rsquo;ve any to
+make.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In the case of any ordinary boy,&rdquo; said Henry,
+&ldquo;I might make lots of suggestions as to the finding of
+suitable employment.&nbsp; From what we know of Comus it would be
+rather a waste of time for either of us to look for jobs which he
+wouldn&rsquo;t look at when we&rsquo;d got them for
+him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He must do something,&rdquo; said Francesca.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know he must; but he never will.&nbsp; At least,
+he&rsquo;ll never stick to anything.&nbsp; The most hopeful thing
+to do with him will be to marry him to an heiress.&nbsp; That
+would solve the financial side of his problem.&nbsp; If he had
+unlimited money at his disposal, he might go into the wilds
+somewhere and shoot big game.&nbsp; I never know what the big
+game have done to deserve it, but they do help to deflect the
+destructive energies of some of our social misfits.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Henry, who never killed anything larger or fiercer than a
+trout, was scornfully superior on the subject of big game
+shooting.</p>
+<p>Francesca brightened at the matrimonial suggestion.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know about an heiress,&rdquo; she said
+reflectively.&nbsp; &ldquo;There&rsquo;s Emmeline Chetrof of
+course.&nbsp; One could hardly call her an heiress, but
+she&rsquo;s got a comfortable little income of her own and I
+suppose something more will come to her from her
+grandmother.&nbsp; Then, of course, you know this house goes to
+her when she marries.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That would be very convenient,&rdquo; said Henry,
+probably following a line of thought that his sister had trodden
+many hundreds of times before him.&nbsp; &ldquo;Do she and Comus
+hit it off at all well together?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, well enough in boy and girl fashion,&rdquo; said
+Francesca.&nbsp; &ldquo;I must arrange for them to see more of
+each other in future.&nbsp; By the way, that little brother of
+hers that she dotes on, Lancelot, goes to Thaleby this
+term.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll write and tell Comus to be specially kind
+to him; that will be a sure way to Emmeline&rsquo;s heart.&nbsp;
+Comus has been made a prefect, you know.&nbsp; Heaven knows
+why.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It can only be for prominence in games,&rdquo; sniffed
+Henry; &ldquo;I think we may safely leave work and conduct out of
+the question.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Comus was not a favourite with his uncle.</p>
+<p>Francesca had turned to her writing cabinet and was hastily
+scribbling a letter to her son in which the delicate health,
+timid disposition and other inevitable attributes of the new boy
+were brought to his notice, and commanded to his care.&nbsp; When
+she had sealed and stamped the envelope Henry uttered a belated
+caution.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Perhaps on the whole it would be wiser to say nothing
+about the boy to Comus.&nbsp; He doesn&rsquo;t always respond to
+directions you know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Francesca did know, and already was more than half of her
+brother&rsquo;s opinion; but the woman who can sacrifice a clean
+unspoiled penny stamp is probably yet unborn.</p>
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Lancelot Chetrof</span> stood at the end
+of a long bare passage, restlessly consulting his watch and
+fervently wishing himself half an hour older with a certain
+painful experience already registered in the past; unfortunately
+it still belonged to the future, and what was still more
+horrible, to the immediate future.&nbsp; Like many boys new to a
+school he had cultivated an unhealthy passion for obeying rules
+and requirements, and his zeal in this direction had proved his
+undoing.&nbsp; In his hurry to be doing two or three estimable
+things at once he had omitted to study the notice-board in more
+than a perfunctory fashion and had thereby missed a football
+practice specially ordained for newly-joined boys.&nbsp; His
+fellow juniors of a term&rsquo;s longer standing had graphically
+enlightened him as to the inevitable consequences of his lapse;
+the dread which attaches to the unknown was, at any rate, deleted
+from his approaching doom, though at the moment he felt scarcely
+grateful for the knowledge placed at his disposal with such
+lavish solicitude.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll get six of the very best, over the back of
+a chair,&rdquo; said one.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They&rsquo;ll draw a chalk line across you, of course
+you know,&rdquo; said another.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A chalk line?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Rather.&nbsp; So that every cut can be aimed exactly at
+the same spot.&nbsp; It hurts much more that way.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lancelot tried to nourish a wan hope that there might be an
+element of exaggeration in this uncomfortably realistic
+description.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile in the prefects&rsquo; room at the other end of the
+passage, Comus Bassington and a fellow prefect sat also waiting
+on time, but in a mood of far more pleasurable expectancy.&nbsp;
+Comus was one of the most junior of the prefect caste, but by no
+means the least well-known, and outside the masters&rsquo;
+common-room he enjoyed a certain fitful popularity, or at any
+rate admiration.&nbsp; At football he was too erratic to be a
+really brilliant player, but he tackled as if the act of bringing
+his man headlong to the ground was in itself a sensuous pleasure,
+and his weird swear-words whenever he got hurt were eagerly
+treasured by those who were fortunate enough to hear them.&nbsp;
+At athletics in general he was a showy performer, and although
+new to the functions of a prefect he had already established a
+reputation as an effective and artistic caner.&nbsp; In
+appearance he exactly fitted his fanciful Pagan name.&nbsp; His
+large green-grey eyes seemed for ever asparkle with goblin
+mischief and the joy of revelry, and the curved lips might have
+been those of some wickedly-laughing faun; one almost expected to
+see embryo horns fretting the smoothness of his sleek dark
+hair.&nbsp; The chin was firm, but one looked in vain for a
+redeeming touch of ill-temper in the handsome, half-mocking,
+half-petulant face.&nbsp; With a strain of sourness in him Comus
+might have been leavened into something creative and masterful;
+fate had fashioned him with a certain whimsical charm, and left
+him all unequipped for the greater purposes of life.&nbsp;
+Perhaps no one would have called him a lovable character, but in
+many respects he was adorable; in all respects he was certainly
+damned.</p>
+<p>Rutley, his companion of the moment, sat watching him and
+wondering, from the depths of a very ordinary brain, whether he
+liked or hated him; it was easy to do either.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not really your turn to cane,&rdquo; he
+said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know it&rsquo;s not,&rdquo; said Comus, fingering a
+very serviceable-looking cane as lovingly as a pious violinist
+might handle his Strad.&nbsp; &ldquo;I gave Greyson some
+mint-chocolate to let me toss whether I caned or him, and I
+won.&nbsp; He was rather decent over it and let me have half the
+chocolate back.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The droll lightheartedness which won Comus Bassington such
+measure of popularity as he enjoyed among his fellows did not
+materially help to endear him to the succession of masters with
+whom he came in contact during the course of his
+schooldays.&nbsp; He amused and interested such of them as had
+the saving grace of humour at their disposal, but if they sighed
+when he passed from their immediate responsibility it was a sigh
+of relief rather than of regret.&nbsp; The more enlightened and
+experienced of them realised that he was something outside the
+scope of the things that they were called upon to deal
+with.&nbsp; A man who has been trained to cope with storms, to
+foresee their coming, and to minimise their consequences, may be
+pardoned if he feels a certain reluctance to measure himself
+against a tornado.</p>
+<p>Men of more limited outlook and with a correspondingly larger
+belief in their own powers were ready to tackle the tornado had
+time permitted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think I could tame young Bassington if I had your
+opportunities,&rdquo; a form-master once remarked to a colleague
+whose House had the embarrassing distinction of numbering Comus
+among its inmates.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Heaven forbid that I should try,&rdquo; replied the
+housemaster.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But why?&rdquo; asked the reformer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Because Nature hates any interference with her own
+arrangements, and if you start in to tame the obviously
+untameable you are taking a fearful responsibility on
+yourself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nonsense; boys are Nature&rsquo;s raw
+material.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Millions of boys are.&nbsp; There are just a few, and
+Bassington is one of them, who are Nature&rsquo;s highly finished
+product when they are in the schoolboy stage, and we, who are
+supposed to be moulding raw material, are quite helpless when we
+come in contact with them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But what happens to them when they grow up?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They never do grow up,&rdquo; said the housemaster;
+&ldquo;that is their tragedy.&nbsp; Bassington will certainly
+never grow out of his present stage.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now you are talking in the language of Peter
+Pan,&rdquo; said the form-master.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am not thinking in the manner of Peter Pan,&rdquo;
+said the other.&nbsp; &ldquo;With all reverence for the author of
+that masterpiece I should say he had a wonderful and tender
+insight into the child mind and knew nothing whatever about
+boys.&nbsp; To make only one criticism on that particular work,
+can you imagine a lot of British boys, or boys of any country
+that one knows of, who would stay contentedly playing
+children&rsquo;s games in an underground cave when there were
+wolves and pirates and Red Indians to be had for the asking on
+the other side of the trap door?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The form-master laughed.&nbsp; &ldquo;You evidently think that
+the &lsquo;Boy who would not grow up&rsquo; must have been
+written by a &lsquo;grown-up who could never have been a
+boy.&rsquo;&nbsp; Perhaps that is the meaning of the
+&lsquo;Never-never Land.&rsquo;&nbsp; I daresay you&rsquo;re
+right in your criticism, but I don&rsquo;t agree with you about
+Bassington.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s a handful to deal with, as anyone
+knows who has come in contact with him, but if one&rsquo;s hands
+weren&rsquo;t full with a thousand and one other things I hold to
+my opinion that he could be tamed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And he went his way, having maintained a form-master&rsquo;s
+inalienable privilege of being in the right.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">* * * * *</p>
+<p>In the prefects&rsquo; room, Comus busied himself with the
+exact position of a chair planted out in the middle of the
+floor.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think everything&rsquo;s ready,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>Rutley glanced at the clock with the air of a Roman elegant in
+the Circus, languidly awaiting the introduction of an expected
+Christian to an expectant tiger.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The kid is due in two minutes,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;d jolly well better not be late,&rdquo; said
+Comus.</p>
+<p>Comus had gone through the mill of many scorching castigations
+in his earlier school days, and was able to appreciate to the
+last ounce the panic that must be now possessing his foredoomed
+victim, probably at this moment hovering miserably outside the
+door.&nbsp; After all, that was part of the fun of the thing, and
+most things have their amusing side if one knows where to look
+for it.</p>
+<p>There was a knock at the door, and Lancelot entered in
+response to a hearty friendly summons to &ldquo;come
+in.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve come to be caned,&rdquo; he said
+breathlessly; adding by way of identification, &ldquo;my
+name&rsquo;s Chetrof.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s quite bad enough in itself,&rdquo; said
+Comus, &ldquo;but there is probably worse to follow.&nbsp; You
+are evidently keeping something back from us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I missed a footer practice,&rdquo; said Lancelot</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Six,&rdquo; said Comus briefly, picking up his
+cane.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t see the notice on the board,&rdquo;
+hazarded Lancelot as a forlorn hope.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We are always pleased to listen to excuses, and our
+charge is two extra cuts.&nbsp; That will be eight.&nbsp; Get
+over.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And Comus indicated the chair that stood in sinister isolation
+in the middle of the room.&nbsp; Never had an article of
+furniture seemed more hateful in Lancelot&rsquo;s eyes.&nbsp;
+Comus could well remember the time when a chair stuck in the
+middle of a room had seemed to him the most horrible of
+manufactured things.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lend me a piece of chalk,&rdquo; he said to his brother
+prefect.</p>
+<p>Lancelot ruefully recognised the truth of the chalk-line
+story.</p>
+<p>Comus drew the desired line with an anxious exactitude which
+he would have scorned to apply to a diagram of Euclid or a map of
+the Russo-Persian frontier.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Bend a little more forward,&rdquo; he said to the
+victim, &ldquo;and much tighter.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t trouble to
+look pleasant, because I can&rsquo;t see your face anyway.&nbsp;
+It may sound unorthodox to say so, but this is going to hurt you
+much more than it will hurt me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was a carefully measured pause, and then Lancelot was
+made vividly aware of what a good cane can be made to do in
+really efficient hands.&nbsp; At the second cut he projected
+himself hurriedly off the chair.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now I&rsquo;ve lost count,&rdquo; said Comus; &ldquo;we
+shall have to begin all over again.&nbsp; Kindly get back into
+the same position.&nbsp; If you get down again before I&rsquo;ve
+finished Rutley will hold you over and you&rsquo;ll get a
+dozen.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lancelot got back on to the chair, and was re-arranged to the
+taste of his executioner.&nbsp; He stayed there somehow or other
+while Comus made eight accurate and agonisingly effective shots
+at the chalk line.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By the way,&rdquo; he said to his gasping and gulping
+victim when the infliction was over, &ldquo;you said Chetrof,
+didn&rsquo;t you?&nbsp; I believe I&rsquo;ve been asked to be
+kind to you.&nbsp; As a beginning you can clean out my study this
+afternoon.&nbsp; Be awfully careful how you dust the old
+china.&nbsp; If you break any don&rsquo;t come and tell me but
+just go and drown yourself somewhere; it will save you from a
+worse fate.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know where your study is,&rdquo; said
+Lancelot between his chokes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;d better find it or I shall have to beat you,
+really hard this time.&nbsp; Here, you&rsquo;d better keep this
+chalk in your pocket, it&rsquo;s sure to come in handy later
+on.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t stop to thank me for all I&rsquo;ve done,
+it only embarrasses me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>As Comus hadn&rsquo;t got a study Lancelot spent a feverish
+half-hour in looking for it, incidentally missing another footer
+practice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Everything is very jolly here,&rdquo; wrote Lancelot to
+his sister Emmeline.&nbsp; &ldquo;The prefects can give you an
+awful hot time if they like, but most of them are rather
+decent.&nbsp; Some are Beasts.&nbsp; Bassington is a prefect
+though only a junior one.&nbsp; He is the Limit as Beasts
+go.&nbsp; At least I think so.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schoolboy reticence went no further, but Emmeline filled in
+the gaps for herself with the lavish splendour of feminine
+imagination.&nbsp; Francesca&rsquo;s bridge went crashing into
+the abyss.</p>
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">On</span> the evening of a certain
+November day, two years after the events heretofore chronicled,
+Francesca Bassington steered her way through the crowd that
+filled the rooms of her friend Serena Golackly, bestowing nods of
+vague recognition as she went, but with eyes that were obviously
+intent on focussing one particular figure.&nbsp; Parliament had
+pulled its energies together for an Autumn Session, and both
+political Parties were fairly well represented in the
+throng.&nbsp; Serena had a harmless way of inviting a number of
+more or less public men and women to her house, and hoping that
+if you left them together long enough they would constitute a
+<i>salon</i>.&nbsp; In pursuance of the same instinct she planted
+the flower borders at her week-end cottage retreat in Surrey with
+a large mixture of bulbs, and called the result a Dutch
+garden.&nbsp; Unfortunately, though you may bring brilliant
+talkers into your home, you cannot always make them talk
+brilliantly, or even talk at all; what is worse you cannot
+restrict the output of those starling-voiced dullards who seem to
+have, on all subjects, so much to say that was well worth leaving
+unsaid.&nbsp; One group that Francesca passed was discussing a
+Spanish painter, who was forty-three, and had painted thousands
+of square yards of canvas in his time, but of whom no one in
+London had heard till a few months ago; now the starling-voices
+seemed determined that one should hear of very little else.&nbsp;
+Three women knew how his name was pronounced, another always felt
+that she must go into a forest and pray whenever she saw his
+pictures, another had noticed that there were always pomegranates
+in his later compositions, and a man with an indefensible collar
+knew what the pomegranates &ldquo;meant.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;What
+I think so splendid about him,&rdquo; said a stout lady in a loud
+challenging voice, &ldquo;is the way he defies all the
+conventions of art while retaining all that the conventions stand
+for.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Ah, but have you noticed&mdash;&rdquo;
+put in the man with the atrocious collar, and Francesca pushed
+desperately on, wondering dimly as she went, what people found so
+unsupportable in the affliction of deafness.&nbsp; Her progress
+was impeded for a moment by a couple engaged in earnest and
+voluble discussion of some smouldering question of the day; a
+thin spectacled young man with the receding forehead that so
+often denotes advanced opinions, was talking to a spectacled
+young woman with a similar type of forehead, and exceedingly
+untidy hair.&nbsp; It was her ambition in life to be taken for a
+Russian girl-student, and she had spent weeks of patient research
+in trying to find out exactly where you put the tea-leaves in a
+samovar.&nbsp; She had once been introduced to a young Jewess
+from Odessa, who had died of pneumonia the following week; the
+experience, slight as it was, constituted the spectacled young
+lady an authority on all things Russian in the eyes of her
+immediate set.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Talk is helpful, talk is needful,&rdquo; the young man
+was saying, &ldquo;but what we have got to do is to lift the
+subject out of the furrow of indisciplined talk and place it on
+the threshing-floor of practical discussion.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The young woman took advantage of the rhetorical full-stop to
+dash in with the remark which was already marshalled on the tip
+of her tongue.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In emancipating the serfs of poverty we must be careful
+to avoid the mistakes which Russian bureaucracy stumbled into
+when liberating the serfs of the soil.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She paused in her turn for the sake of declamatory effect, but
+recovered her breath quickly enough to start afresh on level
+terms with the young man, who had jumped into the stride of his
+next sentence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They got off to a good start that time,&rdquo; said
+Francesca to herself; &ldquo;I suppose it&rsquo;s the Prevention
+of Destitution they&rsquo;re hammering at.&nbsp; What on earth
+would become of these dear good people if anyone started a
+crusade for the prevention of mediocrity?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Midway through one of the smaller rooms, still questing for an
+elusive presence, she caught sight of someone that she knew, and
+the shadow of a frown passed across her face.&nbsp; The object of
+her faintly signalled displeasure was Courtenay Youghal, a
+political spur-winner who seemed absurdly youthful to a
+generation that had never heard of Pitt.&nbsp; It was
+Youghal&rsquo;s ambition&mdash;or perhaps his hobby&mdash;to
+infuse into the greyness of modern political life some of the
+colour of Disraelian dandyism, tempered with the correctness of
+Anglo-Saxon taste, and supplemented by the flashes of wit that
+were inherent from the Celtic strain in him.&nbsp; His success
+was only a half-measure.&nbsp; The public missed in him that
+touch of blatancy which it looks for in its rising public men;
+the decorative smoothness of his chestnut-golden hair, and the
+lively sparkle of his epigrams were counted to him for good, but
+the restrained sumptuousness of his waistcoats and cravats were
+as wasted efforts.&nbsp; If he had habitually smoked cigarettes
+in a pink coral mouthpiece, or worn spats of Mackenzie tartan,
+the great heart of the voting-man, and the gush of the
+paragraph-makers might have been unreservedly his.&nbsp; The art
+of public life consists to a great extent of knowing exactly
+where to stop and going a bit further.</p>
+<p>It was not Youghal&rsquo;s lack of political sagacity that had
+brought the momentary look of disapproval into Francesca&rsquo;s
+face.&nbsp; The fact was that Comus, who had left off being a
+schoolboy and was now a social problem, had lately enrolled
+himself among the young politician&rsquo;s associates and
+admirers, and as the boy knew and cared nothing about politics,
+and merely copied Youghal&rsquo;s waistcoats, and, less
+successfully, his conversation, Francesca felt herself justified
+in deploring the intimacy.&nbsp; To a woman who dressed well on
+comparatively nothing a year it was an anxious experience to have
+a son who dressed sumptuously on absolutely nothing.</p>
+<p>The cloud that had passed over her face when she caught sight
+of the offending Youghal was presently succeeded by a smile of
+gratified achievement, as she encountered a bow of recognition
+and welcome from a portly middle-aged gentleman, who seemed
+genuinely anxious to include her in the rather meagre group that
+he had gathered about him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We were just talking about my new charge,&rdquo; he
+observed genially, including in the &ldquo;we&rdquo; his somewhat
+depressed-looking listeners, who in all human probability had
+done none of the talking.&nbsp; &ldquo;I was just telling them,
+and you may be interested to hear this&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Francesca, with Spartan stoicism, continued to wear an
+ingratiating smile, though the character of the deaf adder that
+stoppeth her ear and will not hearken, seemed to her at that
+moment a beautiful one.</p>
+<p>Sir Julian Jull had been a member of a House of Commons
+distinguished for its high standard of well-informed mediocrity,
+and had harmonised so thoroughly with his surroundings that the
+most attentive observer of Parliamentary proceedings could
+scarcely have told even on which side of the House he sat.&nbsp;
+A baronetcy bestowed on him by the Party in power had at least
+removed that doubt; some weeks later he had been made Governor of
+some West Indian dependency, whether as a reward for having
+accepted the baronetcy, or as an application of a theory that
+West Indian islands get the Governors they deserve, it would have
+been hard to say.&nbsp; To Sir Julian the appointment was,
+doubtless, one of some importance; during the span of his
+Governorship the island might possibly be visited by a member of
+the Royal Family, or at the least by an earthquake, and in either
+case his name would get into the papers.&nbsp; To the public the
+matter was one of absolute indifference; &ldquo;who is he and
+where is it?&rdquo; would have correctly epitomised the sum total
+of general information on the personal and geographical aspects
+of the case.</p>
+<p>Francesca, however, from the moment she had heard of the
+likelihood of the appointment, had taken a deep and lively
+interest in Sir Julian.&nbsp; As a Member of Parliament he had
+not filled any very pressing social want in her life, and on the
+rare occasions when she took tea on the Terrace of the House she
+was wont to lapse into rapt contemplation of St. Thomas&rsquo;s
+Hospital whenever she saw him within bowing distance.&nbsp; But
+as Governor of an island he would, of course, want a private
+secretary, and as a friend and colleague of Henry Greech, to whom
+he was indebted for many little acts of political support (they
+had once jointly drafted an amendment which had been ruled out of
+order), what was more natural and proper than that he should let
+his choice fall on Henry&rsquo;s nephew Comus?&nbsp; While
+privately doubting whether the boy would make the sort of
+secretary that any public man would esteem as a treasure, Henry
+was thoroughly in agreement with Francesca as to the excellence
+and desirability of an arrangement which would transplant that
+troublesome&rsquo; young animal from the too restricted and
+conspicuous area that centres in the parish of St. James&rsquo;s
+to some misty corner of the British dominion overseas.&nbsp;
+Brother and sister had conspired to give an elaborate and at the
+same time cosy little luncheon to Sir Julian on the very day that
+his appointment was officially announced, and the question of the
+secretaryship had been mooted and sedulously fostered as occasion
+permitted, until all that was now needed to clinch the matter was
+a formal interview between His Excellency and Comus.&nbsp; The
+boy had from the first shewn very little gratification at the
+prospect of his deportation.&nbsp; To live on a remote shark-girt
+island, as he expressed it, with the Jull family as his chief
+social mainstay, and Sir Julian&rsquo;s conversation as a daily
+item of his existence, did not inspire him with the same degree
+of enthusiasm as was displayed by his mother and uncle, who,
+after all, were not making the experiment.&nbsp; Even the
+necessity for an entirely new outfit did not appeal to his
+imagination with the force that might have been expected.&nbsp;
+But, however lukewarm his adhesion to the project might be,
+Francesca and her brother were clearly determined that no lack of
+deft persistence on their part should endanger its success.&nbsp;
+It was for the purpose of reminding Sir Julian of his promise to
+meet Comus at lunch on the following day, and definitely settle
+the matter of the secretaryship that Francesca was now enduring
+the ordeal of a long harangue on the value of the West Indian
+group as an Imperial asset.&nbsp; Other listeners dexterously
+detached themselves one by one, but Francesca&rsquo;s patience
+outlasted even Sir Julian&rsquo;s flow of commonplaces, and her
+devotion was duly rewarded by a renewed acknowledgment of the
+lunch engagement and its purpose.&nbsp; She pushed her way back
+through the throng of starling-voiced chatterers fortified by a
+sense of well-earned victory.&nbsp; Dear Serena&rsquo;s absurd
+<i>salons</i> served some good purpose after all.</p>
+<p>Francesca was not an early riser and her breakfast was only
+just beginning to mobilise on the breakfast-table next morning
+when a copy of <i>The Times</i>, sent by special messenger from
+her brother&rsquo;s house, was brought up to her room.&nbsp; A
+heavy margin of blue pencilling drew her attention to a
+prominently-printed letter which bore the ironical heading:
+&ldquo;Julian Jull, Proconsul.&rdquo;&nbsp; The matter of the
+letter was a cruel dis-interment of some fatuous and forgotten
+speeches made by Sir Julian to his constituents not many years
+ago, in which the value of some of our Colonial possessions,
+particularly certain West Indian islands, was decried in a medley
+of pomposity, ignorance and amazingly cheap humour.&nbsp; The
+extracts given sounded weak and foolish enough, taken by
+themselves, but the writer of the letter had interlarded them
+with comments of his own, which sparkled with an ironical
+brilliance that was Cervantes-like in its polished cruelty.&nbsp;
+Remembering her ordeal of the previous evening Francesca
+permitted herself a certain feeling of amusement as she read the
+merciless stabs inflicted on the newly-appointed Governor; then
+she came to the signature at the foot of the letter, and the
+laughter died out of her eyes.&nbsp; &ldquo;Comus
+Bassington&rdquo; stared at her from above a thick layer of blue
+pencil lines marked by Henry Greech&rsquo;s shaking hand.</p>
+<p>Comus could no more have devised such a letter than he could
+have written an Episcopal charge to the clergy of any given
+diocese.&nbsp; It was obviously the work of Courtenay Youghal,
+and Comus, for a palpable purpose of his own, had wheedled him
+into foregoing for once the pride of authorship in a clever piece
+of political raillery, and letting his young friend stand sponsor
+instead.&nbsp; It was a daring stroke, and there could be no
+question as to its success; the secretaryship and the distant
+shark-girt island faded away into the horizon of impossible
+things.&nbsp; Francesca, forgetting the golden rule of strategy
+which enjoins a careful choosing of ground and opportunity before
+entering on hostilities, made straight for the bathroom door,
+behind which a lively din of splashing betokened that Comus had
+at least begun his toilet.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You wicked boy, what have you done?&rdquo; she cried,
+reproachfully.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Me washee,&rdquo; came a cheerful shout; &ldquo;me
+washee from the neck all the way down to the merrythought, and
+now washee down from the merrythought to&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have ruined your future.&nbsp; <i>The Times</i> has
+printed that miserable letter with your signature.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A loud squeal of joy came from the bath.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh,
+Mummy!&nbsp; Let me see!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There were sounds as of a sprawling dripping body clambering
+hastily out of the bath.&nbsp; Francesca fled.&nbsp; One cannot
+effectively scold a moist nineteen-year old boy clad only in a
+bath-towel and a cloud of steam.</p>
+<p>Another messenger arrived before Francesca&rsquo;s breakfast
+was over.&nbsp; This one brought a letter from Sir Julian Jull,
+excusing himself from fulfilment of the luncheon engagement.</p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Francesca</span> prided herself on being
+able to see things from other people&rsquo;s points of view,
+which meant, as it usually does, that she could see her own point
+of view from various aspects.&nbsp; As regards Comus, whose
+doings and non-doings bulked largely in her thoughts at the
+present moment, she had mapped out in her mind so clearly what
+his outlook in life ought to be, that she was peculiarly unfitted
+to understand the drift of his feelings or the impulses that
+governed them.&nbsp; Fate had endowed her with a son; in limiting
+the endowment to a solitary offspring Fate had certainly shown a
+moderation which Francesca was perfectly willing to acknowledge
+and be thankful for; but then, as she pointed out to a certain
+complacent friend of hers who cheerfully sustained an endowment
+of half-a-dozen male offsprings and a girl or two, her one child
+was Comus.&nbsp; Moderation in numbers was more than
+counterbalanced in his case by extravagance in
+characteristics.</p>
+<p>Francesca mentally compared her son with hundreds of other
+young men whom she saw around her, steadily, and no doubt
+happily, engaged in the process of transforming themselves from
+nice boys into useful citizens.&nbsp; Most of them had
+occupations, or were industriously engaged in qualifying for
+such; in their leisure moments they smoked reasonably-priced
+cigarettes, went to the cheaper seats at music-halls, watched an
+occasional cricket match at Lord&rsquo;s with apparent interest,
+saw most of the world&rsquo;s spectacular events through the
+medium of the cinematograph, and were wont to exchange at parting
+seemingly superfluous injunctions to &ldquo;be good.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The whole of Bond Street and many of the tributary thoroughfares
+of Piccadilly might have been swept off the face of modern London
+without in any way interfering with the supply of their daily
+wants.&nbsp; They were doubtless dull as acquaintances, but as
+sons they would have been eminently restful.&nbsp; With a growing
+sense of irritation Francesca compared these deserving young men
+with her own intractable offspring, and wondered why Fate should
+have singled her out to be the parent of such a vexatious variant
+from a comfortable and desirable type.&nbsp; As far as
+remunerative achievement was concerned, Comus copied the
+insouciance of the field lily with a dangerous fidelity.&nbsp;
+Like his mother he looked round with wistful irritation at the
+example afforded by contemporary youth, but he concentrated his
+attention exclusively on the richer circles of his acquaintance,
+young men who bought cars and polo ponies as unconcernedly as he
+might purchase a carnation for his buttonhole, and went for trips
+to Cairo or the Tigris valley with less difficulty and
+finance-stretching than he encountered in contriving a week-end
+at Brighton.</p>
+<p>Gaiety and good-looks had carried Comus successfully and, on
+the whole, pleasantly, through schooldays and a recurring
+succession of holidays; the same desirable assets were still at
+his service to advance him along his road, but it was a
+disconcerting experience to find that they could not be relied on
+to go all distances at all times.&nbsp; In an animal world, and a
+fiercely competitive animal world at that, something more was
+needed than the decorative <i>abandon</i> of the field lily, and
+it was just that something more which Comus seemed unable or
+unwilling to provide on his own account; it was just the lack of
+that something more which left him sulking with Fate over the
+numerous breakdowns and stumbling-blocks that held him up on what
+he expected to be a triumphal or, at any rate, unimpeded
+progress.</p>
+<p>Francesca was, in her own way, fonder of Comus than of anyone
+else in the world, and if he had been browning his skin somewhere
+east of Suez she would probably have kissed his photograph with
+genuine fervour every night before going to bed; the appearance
+of a cholera scare or rumour of native rising in the columns of
+her daily news-sheet would have caused her a flutter of anxiety,
+and she would have mentally likened herself to a Spartan mother
+sacrificing her best-beloved on the altar of State
+necessities.&nbsp; But with the best-beloved installed under her
+roof, occupying an unreasonable amount of cubic space, and
+demanding daily sacrifices instead of providing the raw material
+for one, her feelings were tinged with irritation rather than
+affection.&nbsp; She might have forgiven Comus generously for
+misdeeds of some gravity committed in another continent, but she
+could never overlook the fact that out of a dish of five
+plovers&rsquo; eggs he was certain to take three.&nbsp; The
+absent may be always wrong, but they are seldom in a position to
+be inconsiderate.</p>
+<p>Thus a wall of ice had grown up gradually between mother and
+son, a barrier across which they could hold converse, but which
+gave a wintry chill even to the sparkle of their lightest
+words.&nbsp; The boy had the gift of being irresistibly amusing
+when he chose to exert himself in that direction, and after a
+long series of moody or jangling meal-sittings he would break
+forth into a torrential flow of small talk, scandal and malicious
+anecdote, true or more generally invented, to which Francesca
+listened with a relish and appreciation, that was all the more
+flattering from being so unwillingly bestowed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you chose your friends from a rather more reputable
+set you would be doubtless less amusing, but there would be
+compensating advantages.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Francesca snapped the remark out at lunch one day when she had
+been betrayed into a broader smile than she considered the
+circumstances of her attitude towards Comus warranted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to move in quite decent society
+to-night,&rdquo; replied Comus with a pleased chuckle;
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to meet you and Uncle Henry and heaps of
+nice dull God-fearing people at dinner.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Francesca gave a little gasp of surprise and annoyance.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t mean to say Caroline has asked you to
+dinner to-night?&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;and of course without
+telling me.&nbsp; How exceedingly like her!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Caroline Benaresq had reached that age when you can say
+and do what you like in defiance of people&rsquo;s most sensitive
+feelings and most cherished antipathies.&nbsp; Not that she had
+waited to attain her present age before pursuing that line of
+conduct; she came of a family whose individual members went
+through life, from the nursery to the grave, with as much tact
+and consideration as a cactus-hedge might show in going through a
+crowded bathing tent.&nbsp; It was a compensating mercy that they
+disagreed rather more among themselves than they did with the
+outside world; every known variety and shade of religion and
+politics had been pressed into the family service to avoid the
+possibility of any agreement on the larger essentials of life,
+and such unlooked-for happenings as the Home Rule schism, the
+Tariff-Reform upheaval and the Suffragette crusade were
+thankfully seized on as furnishing occasion for further
+differences and sub-divisions.&nbsp; Lady Caroline&rsquo;s
+favourite scheme of entertaining was to bring jarring and
+antagonistic elements into close contact and play them
+remorselessly one against the other.&nbsp; &ldquo;One gets much
+better results under those circumstances&rdquo; she used to
+observe, &ldquo;than by asking people who wish to meet each
+other.&nbsp; Few people talk as brilliantly to impress a friend
+as they do to depress an enemy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She admitted that her theory broke down rather badly if you
+applied it to Parliamentary debates.&nbsp; At her own dinner
+table its success was usually triumphantly vindicated.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who else is to be there?&rdquo; Francesca asked, with
+some pardonable misgiving.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Courtenay Youghal.&nbsp; He&rsquo;ll probably sit next
+to you, so you&rsquo;d better think out a lot of annihilating
+remarks in readiness.&nbsp; And Elaine de Frey.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think I&rsquo;ve heard of her.&nbsp; Who
+is she?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nobody in particular, but rather nice-looking in a
+solemn sort of way, and almost indecently rich.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Marry her&rdquo; was the advice which sprang to
+Francesca&rsquo;s lips, but she choked it back with a salted
+almond, having a rare perception of the fact that words are
+sometimes given to us to defeat our purposes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Caroline has probably marked her down for Toby or one
+of the grand-nephews,&rdquo; she said, carelessly; &ldquo;a
+little money would be rather useful in that quarter, I
+imagine.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Comus tucked in his underlip with just the shade of pugnacity
+that she wanted to see.</p>
+<p>An advantageous marriage was so obviously the most sensible
+course for him to embark on that she scarcely dared to hope that
+he would seriously entertain it; yet there was just a chance that
+if he got as far as the flirtation stage with an attractive (and
+attracted) girl who was also an heiress, the sheer perversity of
+his nature might carry him on to more definite courtship, if only
+from the desire to thrust other more genuinely enamoured suitors
+into the background.&nbsp; It was a forlorn hope; so forlorn that
+the idea even crossed her mind of throwing herself on the mercy
+of her <i>b&ecirc;te noire</i>, Courtenay Youghal, and trying to
+enlist the influence which he seemed to possess over Comus for
+the purpose of furthering her hurriedly conceived project.&nbsp;
+Anyhow, the dinner promised to be more interesting than she had
+originally anticipated.</p>
+<p>Lady Caroline was a professed Socialist in politics, chiefly,
+it was believed, because she was thus enabled to disagree with
+most of the Liberals and Conservatives, and all the Socialists of
+the day.&nbsp; She did not permit her Socialism, however, to
+penetrate below stairs; her cook and butler had every
+encouragement to be Individualists.&nbsp; Francesca, who was a
+keen and intelligent food critic, harboured no misgivings as to
+her hostess&rsquo;s kitchen and cellar departments; some of the
+human side-dishes at the feast gave her more ground for
+uneasiness.&nbsp; Courtenay Youghal, for instance, would probably
+be brilliantly silent; her brother Henry would almost certainly
+be the reverse.</p>
+<p>The dinner party was a large one and Francesca arrived late
+with little time to take preliminary stock of the guests; a card
+with the name, &ldquo;Miss de Frey,&rdquo; immediately opposite
+her own place at the other side of the table, indicated, however,
+the whereabouts of the heiress.&nbsp; It was characteristic of
+Francesca that she first carefully read the menu from end to end,
+and then indulged in an equally careful though less open scrutiny
+of the girl who sat opposite her, the girl who was nobody in
+particular, but whose income was everything that could be
+desired.&nbsp; She was pretty in a restrained nut-brown fashion,
+and had a look of grave reflective calm that probably masked a
+speculative unsettled temperament.&nbsp; Her pose, if one wished
+to be critical, was just a little too elaborately careless.&nbsp;
+She wore some excellently set rubies with that indefinable air of
+having more at home that is so difficult to improvise.&nbsp;
+Francesca was distinctly pleased with her survey.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You seem interested in your
+<i>vis-&agrave;-vis</i>,&rdquo; said Courtenay Youghal.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I almost think I&rsquo;ve seen her before,&rdquo; said
+Francesca; &ldquo;her face seems familiar to me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The narrow gallery at the Louvre; attributed to
+Leonardo da Vinci,&rdquo; said Youghal.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; said Francesca, her feelings divided
+between satisfaction at capturing an elusive impression and
+annoyance that Youghal should have been her helper.&nbsp; A
+stronger tinge of annoyance possessed her when she heard the
+voice of Henry Greech raised in painful prominence at Lady
+Caroline&rsquo;s end of the table.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I called on the Trudhams yesterday,&rdquo; he
+announced; &ldquo;it was their Silver Wedding, you know, at least
+the day before was.&nbsp; Such lots of silver presents, quite a
+show.&nbsp; Of course there were a great many duplicates, but
+still, very nice to have.&nbsp; I think they were very pleased to
+get so many.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We must not grudge them their show of presents after
+their twenty-five years of married life,&rdquo; said Lady
+Caroline, gently; &ldquo;it is the silver lining to their
+cloud.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A third of the guests present were related to the
+Trudhams.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lady Caroline is beginning well,&rdquo; murmured
+Courtenay Youghal.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I should hardly call twenty-five years of married life
+a cloud,&rdquo; said Henry Greech, lamely.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t let&rsquo;s talk about married life,&rdquo;
+said a tall handsome woman, who looked like some modern
+painter&rsquo;s conception of the goddess Bellona;
+&ldquo;it&rsquo;s my misfortune to write eternally about husbands
+and wives and their variants.&nbsp; My public expects it of
+me.&nbsp; I do so envy journalists who can write about plagues
+and strikes and Anarchist plots, and other pleasing things,
+instead of being tied down to one stale old topic.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who is that woman and what has she written?&rdquo;
+Francesca asked Youghal; she dimly remembered having seen her at
+one of Serena Golackly&rsquo;s gatherings, surrounded by a little
+Court of admirers.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I forget her name; she has a villa at San Remo or
+Mentone, or somewhere where one does have villas, and plays an
+extraordinary good game of bridge.&nbsp; Also she has the
+reputation, rather rare in your sex, of being a wonderfully sound
+judge of wine.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But what has she written?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, several novels of the thinnish ice order.&nbsp; Her
+last one, &lsquo;The Woman who wished it was Wednesday,&rsquo;
+has been banned at all the libraries.&nbsp; I expect you&rsquo;ve
+read it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see why you should think so,&rdquo; said
+Francesca, coldly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Only because Comus lent me your copy yesterday,&rdquo;
+said Youghal.&nbsp; He threw back his handsome head and gave her
+a sidelong glance of quizzical amusement.&nbsp; He knew that she
+hated his intimacy with Comus, and he was secretly rather proud
+of his influence over the boy, shallow and negative though he
+knew it to be.&nbsp; It had been, on his part, an unsought
+intimacy, and it would probably fall to pieces the moment he
+tried seriously to take up the <i>r&ocirc;le</i> of mentor.&nbsp;
+The fact that Comus&rsquo;s mother openly disapproved of the
+friendship gave it perhaps its chief interest in the young
+politician&rsquo;s eyes.</p>
+<p>Francesca turned her attention to her brother&rsquo;s end of
+the table.&nbsp; Henry Greech had willingly availed himself of
+the invitation to leave the subject of married life, and had
+launched forthwith into the equally well-worn theme of current
+politics.&nbsp; He was not a person who was in much demand for
+public meetings, and the House showed no great impatience to hear
+his views on the topics of the moment; its impatience, indeed,
+was manifested rather in the opposite direction.&nbsp; Hence he
+was prone to unburden himself of accumulated political wisdom as
+occasion presented itself&mdash;sometimes, indeed, to assume an
+occasion that was hardly visible to the naked intelligence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Our opponents are engaged in a hopelessly uphill
+struggle, and they know it,&rdquo; he chirruped, defiantly;
+&ldquo;they&rsquo;ve become possessed, like the Gadarene swine,
+with a whole legion of&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Surely the Gadarene swine went downhill,&rdquo; put in
+Lady Caroline in a gently enquiring voice.</p>
+<p>Henry Greech hastily abandoned simile and fell back on
+platitude and the safer kinds of fact.</p>
+<p>Francesca did not regard her brother&rsquo;s views on
+statecraft either in the light of gospel or revelation; as Comus
+once remarked, they more usually suggested exodus.&nbsp; In the
+present instance she found distraction in a renewed scrutiny of
+the girl opposite her, who seemed to be only moderately
+interested in the conversational efforts of the diners on either
+side of her.&nbsp; Comus who was looking and talking his best,
+was sitting at the further end of the table, and Francesca was
+quick to notice in which direction the girl&rsquo;s glances were
+continually straying.&nbsp; Once or twice the eyes of the young
+people met and a swift flush of pleasure and a half-smile that
+spoke of good understanding came to the heiress&rsquo;s
+face.&nbsp; It did not need the gift of the traditional intuition
+of her sex to enable Francesca to guess that the girl with the
+desirable banking account was already considerably attracted by
+the lively young Pagan who had, when he cared to practise it,
+such an art of winning admiration.&nbsp; For the first time for
+many, many months Francesca saw her son&rsquo;s prospects in a
+rose-coloured setting, and she began, unconsciously, to wonder
+exactly how much wealth was summed up in the expressive label
+&ldquo;almost indecently rich.&rdquo;&nbsp; A wife with a really
+large fortune and a correspondingly big dower of character and
+ambition, might, perhaps, succeed in turning Comus&rsquo;s latent
+energies into a groove which would provide him, if not with a
+career, at least with an occupation, and the young serious face
+opposite looked as if its owner lacked neither character or
+ambition.&nbsp; Francesca&rsquo;s speculations took a more
+personal turn.&nbsp; Out of the well-filled coffers with which
+her imagination was toying, an inconsiderable sum might
+eventually be devoted to the leasing, or even perhaps the
+purchase of, the house in Blue Street when the present convenient
+arrangement should have come to an end, and Francesca and the Van
+der Meulen would not be obliged to seek fresh quarters.</p>
+<p>A woman&rsquo;s voice, talking in a discreet undertone on the
+other side of Courtenay Youghal, broke in on her
+bridge-building.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tons of money and really very presentable.&nbsp; Just
+the wife for a rising young politician.&nbsp; Go in and win her
+before she&rsquo;s snapped up by some fortune hunter.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Youghal and his instructress in worldly wisdom were looking
+straight across the table at the Leonardo da Vinci girl with the
+grave reflective eyes and the over-emphasised air of
+repose.&nbsp; Francesca felt a quick throb of anger against her
+match-making neighbour; why, she asked herself, must some women,
+with no end or purpose of their own to serve, except the sheer
+love of meddling in the affairs of others, plunge their hands
+into plots and schemings of this sort, in which the happiness of
+more than one person was concerned?&nbsp; And more clearly than
+ever she realised how thoroughly she detested Courtenay
+Youghal.&nbsp; She had disliked him as an evil influence, setting
+before her son an example of showy ambition that he was not in
+the least likely to follow, and providing him with a model of
+extravagant dandyism that he was only too certain to copy.&nbsp;
+In her heart she knew that Comus would have embarked just as
+surely on his present course of idle self-indulgence if he had
+never known of the existence of Youghal, but she chose to regard
+that young man as her son&rsquo;s evil genius, and now he seemed
+likely to justify more than ever the character she had fastened
+on to him.&nbsp; For once in his life Comus appeared to have an
+idea of behaving sensibly and making some use of his
+opportunities, and almost at the same moment Courtenay Youghal
+arrived on the scene as a possible and very dangerous
+rival.&nbsp; Against the good looks and fitful powers of
+fascination that Comus could bring into the field, the young
+politician could match half-a-dozen dazzling qualities which
+would go far to recommend him in the eyes of a woman of the
+world, still more in those of a young girl in search of an
+ideal.&nbsp; Good-looking in his own way, if not on such showy
+lines as Comus, always well turned-out, witty, self-confident
+without being bumptious, with a conspicuous Parliamentary career
+alongside him, and heaven knew what else in front of him,
+Courtenay Youghal certainly was not a rival whose chances could
+be held very lightly.&nbsp; Francesca laughed bitterly to herself
+as she remembered that a few hours ago she had entertained the
+idea of begging for his good offices in helping on Comus&rsquo;s
+wooing.&nbsp; One consolation, at least, she found for herself:
+if Youghal really meant to step in and try and cut out his young
+friend, the latter at any rate had snatched a useful start.&nbsp;
+Comus had mentioned Miss de Frey at luncheon that day, casually
+and dispassionately; if the subject of the dinner guests had not
+come up he would probably not have mentioned her at all.&nbsp;
+But they were obviously already very good friends.&nbsp; It was
+part and parcel of the state of domestic tension at Blue Street
+that Francesca should only have come to know of this highly
+interesting heiress by an accidental sorting of guests at a
+dinner party.</p>
+<p>Lady Caroline&rsquo;s voice broke in on her reflections; it
+was a gentle purring voice, that possessed an uncanny quality of
+being able to make itself heard down the longest dinner
+table.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The dear Archdeacon is getting so absent-minded.&nbsp;
+He read a list of box-holders for the opera as the First Lesson
+the other Sunday, instead of the families and lots of the tribes
+of Israel that entered Canaan.&nbsp; Fortunately no one noticed
+the mistake.&rdquo;</p>
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">On</span> a conveniently secluded bench
+facing the Northern Pheasantry in the Zoological Society&rsquo;s
+Gardens, Regent&rsquo;s Park, Courtenay Youghal sat immersed in
+mature flirtation with a lady, who, though certainly young in
+fact and appearance, was some four or five years his
+senior.&nbsp; When he was a schoolboy of sixteen, Molly McQuade
+had personally conducted him to the Zoo and stood him dinner
+afterwards at Kettner&rsquo;s, and whenever the two of them
+happened to be in town on the anniversary of that bygone
+festivity they religiously repeated the programme in its
+entirety.&nbsp; Even the menu of the dinner was adhered to as
+nearly as possible; the original selection of food and wine that
+schoolboy exuberance, tempered by schoolboy shyness, had pitched
+on those many years ago, confronted Youghal on those occasions,
+as a drowning man&rsquo;s past life is said to rise up and parade
+itself in his last moments of consciousness.</p>
+<p>The flirtation which was thus perennially restored to its
+old-time footing owed its longevity more to the enterprising
+solicitude of Miss McQuade than to any conscious sentimental
+effort on the part of Youghal himself.&nbsp; Molly McQuade was
+known to her neighbours in a minor hunting shire as a hard-riding
+conventionally unconventional type of young woman, who came
+naturally into the classification, &ldquo;a good
+sort.&rdquo;&nbsp; She was just sufficiently good-looking,
+sufficiently reticent about her own illnesses, when she had any,
+and sufficiently appreciative of her neighbours&rsquo; gardens,
+children and hunters to be generally popular.&nbsp; Most men
+liked her, and the percentage of women who disliked her was not
+inconveniently high.&nbsp; One of these days, it was assumed, she
+would marry a brewer or a Master of Otter Hounds, and, after a
+brief interval, be known to the world as the mother of a boy or
+two at Malvern or some similar seat of learning.&nbsp; The
+romantic side of her nature was altogether unguessed by the
+countryside.</p>
+<p>Her romances were mostly in serial form and suffered perhaps
+in fervour from their disconnected course what they gained in
+length of days.&nbsp; Her affectionate interest in the several
+young men who figured in her affairs of the heart was perfectly
+honest, and she certainly made no attempt either to conceal their
+separate existences, or to play them off one against the
+other.&nbsp; Neither could it be said that she was a husband
+hunter; she had made up her mind what sort of man she was likely
+to marry, and her forecast did not differ very widely from that
+formed by her local acquaintances.&nbsp; If her married life were
+eventually to turn out a failure, at least she looked forward to
+it with very moderate expectations.&nbsp; Her love affairs she
+put on a very different footing and apparently they were the
+all-absorbing element in her life.&nbsp; She possessed the
+happily constituted temperament which enables a man or woman to
+be a &ldquo;pluralist,&rdquo; and to observe the sage precaution
+of not putting all one&rsquo;s eggs into one basket.&nbsp; Her
+demands were not exacting; she required of her affinity that he
+should be young, good-looking, and at least, moderately amusing;
+she would have preferred him to be invariably faithful, but, with
+her own example before her, she was prepared for the probability,
+bordering on certainty, that he would be nothing of the
+sort.&nbsp; The philosophy of the &ldquo;Garden of Kama&rdquo;
+was the compass by which she steered her barque and thus far, if
+she had encountered some storms and buffeting, she had at least
+escaped being either shipwrecked or becalmed.</p>
+<p>Courtenay Youghal had not been designed by Nature to fulfil
+the <i>r&ocirc;le</i> of an ardent or devoted lover, and he
+scrupulously respected the limits which Nature had laid
+down.&nbsp; For Molly, however, he had a certain responsive
+affection.&nbsp; She had always obviously admired him, and at the
+same time she never beset him with crude flattery; the principal
+reason why the flirtation had stood the test of so many years was
+the fact that it only flared into active existence at convenient
+intervals.&nbsp; In an age when the telephone has undermined
+almost every fastness of human privacy, and the sanctity of
+one&rsquo;s seclusion depends often on the ability for tactful
+falsehood shown by a club pageboy, Youghal was duly appreciative
+of the circumstance that his lady fair spent a large part of the
+year pursuing foxes, in lieu of pursuing him.&nbsp; Also the
+honestly admitted fact that, in her human hunting, she rode after
+more than one quarry, made the inevitable break-up of the affair
+a matter to which both could look forward without a sense of
+coming embarrassment and recrimination.&nbsp; When the time for
+gathering ye rosebuds should be over, neither of them could
+accuse the other of having wrecked his or her entire life.&nbsp;
+At the most they would only have disorganised a week-end.</p>
+<p>On this particular afternoon, when old reminiscences had been
+gone through, and the intervening gossip of past months duly
+recounted, a lull in the conversation made itself rather
+obstinately felt.&nbsp; Molly had already guessed that matters
+were about to slip into a new phase; the affair had reached
+maturity long ago, and a new phase must be in the nature of a
+wane.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re a clever brute,&rdquo; she said, suddenly,
+with an air of affectionate regret; &ldquo;I always knew
+you&rsquo;d get on in the House, but I hardly expected you to
+come to the front so soon.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m coming to the front,&rdquo; admitted Youghal,
+judicially; &ldquo;the problem is, shall I be able to stay
+there.&nbsp; Unless something happens in the financial line
+before long, I don&rsquo;t see how I&rsquo;m to stay in
+Parliament at all.&nbsp; Economy is out of the question.&nbsp; It
+would open people&rsquo;s eyes, I fancy, if they knew how little
+I exist on as it is.&nbsp; And I&rsquo;m living so far beyond my
+income that we may almost be said to be living apart.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It will have to be a rich wife, I suppose,&rdquo; said
+Molly, slowly; &ldquo;that&rsquo;s the worst of success, it
+imposes so many conditions.&nbsp; I rather knew, from something
+in your manner, that you were drifting that way.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Youghal said nothing in the way of contradiction; he gazed
+steadfastly at the aviary in front of him as though exotic
+pheasants were for the moment the most absorbing study in the
+world.&nbsp; As a matter of fact, his mind was centred on the
+image of Elaine de Frey, with her clear untroubled eyes and her
+Leonardo da Vinci air.&nbsp; He was wondering whether he was
+likely to fall into a frame of mind concerning her which would be
+in the least like falling in love.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I shall mind horribly,&rdquo; continued Molly, after a
+pause, &ldquo;but, of course, I have always known that something
+of the sort would have to happen one of these days.&nbsp; When a
+man goes into politics he can&rsquo;t call his soul his own, and
+I suppose his heart becomes an impersonal possession in the same
+way.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Most people who know me would tell you that I
+haven&rsquo;t got a heart,&rdquo; said Youghal.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve often felt inclined to agree with
+them,&rdquo; said Molly; &ldquo;and then, now and again, I think
+you have a heart tucked away somewhere.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I hope I have,&rdquo; said Youghal, &ldquo;because
+I&rsquo;m trying to break to you the fact that I think I&rsquo;m
+falling in love with somebody.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Molly McQuade turned sharply to look at her companion, who
+still fixed his gaze on the pheasant run in front of him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t tell me you&rsquo;re losing your head over
+somebody useless, someone without money,&rdquo; she said;
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think I could stand that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For the moment she feared that Courtenay&rsquo;s selfishness
+might have taken an unexpected turn, in which ambition had given
+way to the fancy of the hour; he might be going to sacrifice his
+Parliamentary career for a life of stupid lounging in momentarily
+attractive company.&nbsp; He quickly undeceived her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;s got heaps of money.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Molly gave a grunt of relief.&nbsp; Her affection for
+Courtenay had produced the anxiety which underlay her first
+question; a natural jealousy prompted the next one.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is she young and pretty and all that sort of thing, or
+is she just a good sort with a sympathetic manner and nice
+eyes?&nbsp; As a rule that&rsquo;s the kind that goes with a lot
+of money.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Young and quite good-looking in her way, and a distinct
+style of her own.&nbsp; Some people would call her
+beautiful.&nbsp; As a political hostess I should think
+she&rsquo;d be splendid.&nbsp; I imagine I&rsquo;m rather in love
+with her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And is she in love with you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Youghal threw back his head with the slight assertive movement
+that Molly knew and liked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;s a girl who I fancy would let judgment
+influence her a lot.&nbsp; And without being stupidly conceited,
+I think I may say she might do worse than throw herself away on
+me.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m young and quite good-looking, and I&rsquo;m
+making a name for myself in the House; she&rsquo;ll be able to
+read all sorts of nice and horrid things about me in the papers
+at breakfast-time.&nbsp; I can be brilliantly amusing at times,
+and I understand the value of silence; there is no fear that I
+shall ever degenerate into that fearsome thing&mdash;a cheerful
+talkative husband.&nbsp; For a girl with money and social
+ambitions I should think I was rather a good thing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are certainly in love, Courtenay,&rdquo; said
+Molly, &ldquo;but it&rsquo;s the old love and not a new
+one.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m rather glad.&nbsp; I should have hated to
+have you head-over-heels in love with a pretty woman, even for a
+short time.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll be much happier as it is.&nbsp;
+And I&rsquo;m going to put all my feelings in the background, and
+tell you to go in and win.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ve got to marry a rich
+woman, and if she&rsquo;s nice and will make a good hostess, so
+much the better for everybody.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll be happier in
+your married life than I shall be in mine, when it comes;
+you&rsquo;ll have other interests to absorb you.&nbsp; I shall
+just have the garden and dairy and nursery and lending library,
+as like as two peas to all the gardens and dairies and nurseries
+for hundreds of miles round.&nbsp; You won&rsquo;t care for your
+wife enough to be worried every time she has a finger-ache, and
+you&rsquo;ll like her well enough to be pleased to meet her
+sometimes at your own house.&nbsp; I shouldn&rsquo;t wonder if
+you were quite happy.&nbsp; She will probably be miserable, but
+any woman who married you would be.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was a short pause; they were both staring at the
+pheasant cages.&nbsp; Then Molly spoke again, with the swift
+nervous tone of a general who is hurriedly altering the
+disposition of his forces for a strategic retreat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When you are safely married and honey-mooned and all
+that sort of thing, and have put your wife through her paces as a
+political hostess, some time, when the House isn&rsquo;t sitting,
+you must come down by yourself, and do a little hunting with
+us.&nbsp; Will you?&nbsp; It won&rsquo;t be quite the same as old
+times, but it will be something to look forward to when I&rsquo;m
+reading the endless paragraphs about your fashionable political
+wedding.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re looking forward pretty far,&rdquo; laughed
+Youghal; &ldquo;the lady may take your view as to the probable
+unhappiness of a future shared with me, and I may have to content
+myself with penurious political bachelorhood.&nbsp; Anyhow, the
+present is still with us.&nbsp; We dine at Kettner&rsquo;s
+to-night, don&rsquo;t we?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Rather,&rdquo; said Molly, &ldquo;though it will be
+more or less a throat-lumpy feast as far as I am concerned.&nbsp;
+We shall have to drink to the health of the future Mrs.
+Youghal.&nbsp; By the way, it&rsquo;s rather characteristic of
+you that you haven&rsquo;t told me who she is, and of me that I
+haven&rsquo;t asked.&nbsp; And now, like a dear boy, trot away
+and leave me.&nbsp; I haven&rsquo;t got to say good-bye to you
+yet, but I&rsquo;m going to take a quiet farewell of the
+Pheasantry.&nbsp; We&rsquo;ve had some jolly good talks, you and
+I, sitting on this seat, haven&rsquo;t we?&nbsp; And I know, as
+well as I know anything, that this is the last of them.&nbsp;
+Eight o&rsquo;clock to-night, as punctually as
+possible.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She watched his retreating figure with eyes that grew slowly
+misty; he had been such a jolly comely boy-friend, and they had
+had such good times together.&nbsp; The mist deepened on her
+lashes as she looked round at the familiar rendezvous where they
+had so often kept tryst since the day when they had first come
+there together, he a schoolboy and she but lately out of her
+teens.&nbsp; For the moment she felt herself in the thrall of a
+very real sorrow.</p>
+<p>Then, with the admirable energy of one who is only in town for
+a fleeting fortnight, she raced away to have tea with a
+world-faring naval admirer at his club.&nbsp; Pluralism is a
+merciful narcotic.</p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Elaine de Frey</span> sat at ease&mdash;at
+bodily ease&mdash;at any rate&mdash;in a low wicker chair placed
+under the shade of a group of cedars in the heart of a stately
+spacious garden that had almost made up its mind to be a
+park.&nbsp; The shallow stone basin of an old fountain, on whose
+wide ledge a leaden-moulded otter for ever preyed on a leaden
+salmon, filled a conspicuous place in the immediate
+foreground.&nbsp; Around its rim ran an inscription in Latin,
+warning mortal man that time flows as swiftly as water and
+exhorting him to make the most of his hours; after which piece of
+Jacobean moralising it set itself shamelessly to beguile all who
+might pass that way into an abandonment of contemplative
+repose.&nbsp; On all sides of it a stretch of smooth turf spread
+away, broken up here and there by groups of dwarfish chestnut and
+mulberry trees, whose leaves and branches cast a laced pattern of
+shade beneath them.&nbsp; On one side the lawn sloped gently down
+to a small lake, whereon floated a quartette of swans, their
+movements suggestive of a certain mournful listlessness, as
+though a weary dignity of caste held them back from the joyous
+bustling life of the lesser waterfowl.&nbsp; Elaine liked to
+imagine that they re-embodied the souls of unhappy boys who had
+been forced by family interests to become high ecclesiastical
+dignitaries and had grown prematurely Right Reverend.&nbsp; A low
+stone balustrade fenced part of the shore of the lake, making a
+miniature terrace above its level, and here roses grew in a rich
+multitude.&nbsp; Other rose bushes, carefully pruned and tended,
+formed little oases of colour and perfume amid the restful green
+of the sward, and in the distance the eye caught the variegated
+blaze of a many-hued hedge of rhododendron.&nbsp; With these
+favoured exceptions flowers were hard to find in this
+well-ordered garden; the misguided tyranny of staring geranium
+beds and beflowered archways leading to nowhere, so dear to the
+suburban gardener, found no expression here.&nbsp; Magnificent
+Amherst pheasants, whose plumage challenged and almost shamed the
+peacock on his own ground, stepped to and fro over the emerald
+turf with the assured self-conscious pride of reigning
+sultans.&nbsp; It was a garden where summer seemed a
+part-proprietor rather than a hurried visitor.</p>
+<p>By the side of Elaine&rsquo;s chair under the shadow of the
+cedars a wicker table was set out with the paraphernalia of
+afternoon tea.&nbsp; On some cushions at her feet reclined
+Courtenay Youghal, smoothly preened and youthfully elegant, the
+personification of decorative repose; equally decorative, but
+with the showy restlessness of a dragonfly, Comus disported his
+flannelled person over a considerable span of the available
+foreground.</p>
+<p>The intimacy existing between the two young men had suffered
+no immediate dislocation from the circumstance that they were
+tacitly paying court to the same lady.&nbsp; It was an intimacy
+founded not in the least on friendship or community of tastes and
+ideas, but owed its existence to the fact that each was amused
+and interested by the other.&nbsp; Youghal found Comus, for the
+time being at any rate, just as amusing and interesting as a
+rival for Elaine&rsquo;s favour as he had been in the
+<i>r&ocirc;le</i> of scapegrace boy-about-Town; Comus for his
+part did not wish to lose touch with Youghal, who among other
+attractions possessed the recommendation of being under the ban
+of Comus&rsquo;s mother.&nbsp; She disapproved, it is true, of a
+great many of her son&rsquo;s friends and associates, but this
+particular one was a special and persistent source of irritation
+to her from the fact that he figured prominently and more or less
+successfully in the public life of the day.&nbsp; There was
+something peculiarly exasperating in reading a brilliant and
+incisive attack on the Government&rsquo;s rash handling of public
+expenditure delivered by a young man who encouraged her son in
+every imaginable extravagance.&nbsp; The actual extent of
+Youghal&rsquo;s influence over the boy was of the slightest;
+Comus was quite capable of deriving encouragement to rash outlay
+and frivolous conversation from an anchorite or an East-end
+parson if he had been thrown into close companionship with such
+an individual.&nbsp; Francesca, however, exercised a
+mother&rsquo;s privilege in assuming her son&rsquo;s bachelor
+associates to be industrious in labouring to achieve his
+undoing.&nbsp; Therefore the young politician was a source of
+unconcealed annoyance to her, and in the same degree as she
+expressed her disapproval of him Comus was careful to maintain
+and parade the intimacy.&nbsp; Its existence, or rather its
+continued existence, was one of the things that faintly puzzled
+the young lady whose sought-for favour might have been expected
+to furnish an occasion for its rapid dissolution.</p>
+<p>With two suitors, one of whom at least she found markedly
+attractive, courting her at the same moment, Elaine should have
+had reasonable cause for being on good terms with the world, and
+with herself in particular.&nbsp; Happiness was not, however, at
+this auspicious moment, her dominant mood.&nbsp; The grave calm
+of her face masked as usual a certain degree of grave
+perturbation.&nbsp; A succession of well-meaning governesses and
+a plentiful supply of moralising aunts on both sides of her
+family, had impressed on her young mind the theoretical fact that
+wealth is a great responsibility.&nbsp; The consciousness of her
+responsibility set her continually wondering, not as to her own
+fitness to discharge her &ldquo;stewardship,&rdquo; but as to the
+motives and merits of people with whom she came in contact.&nbsp;
+The knowledge that there was so much in the world that she could
+buy, invited speculation as to how much there was that was worth
+buying.&nbsp; Gradually she had come to regard her mind as a sort
+of appeal court before whose secret sittings were examined and
+judged the motives and actions, the motives especially, of the
+world in general.&nbsp; In her schoolroom days she had sat in
+conscientious judgment on the motives that guided or misguided
+Charles and Cromwell and Monck, Wallenstein and Savonarola.&nbsp;
+In her present stage she was equally occupied in examining the
+political sincerity of the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, the
+good-faith of a honey-tongued but possibly loyal-hearted
+waiting-maid, and the disinterestedness of a whole circle of
+indulgent and flattering acquaintances.&nbsp; Even more
+absorbing, and in her eyes, more urgently necessary, was the task
+of dissecting and appraising the characters of the two young men
+who were favouring her with their attentions.&nbsp; And herein
+lay cause for much thinking and some perturbation.&nbsp; Youghal,
+for example, might have baffled a more experienced observer of
+human nature.&nbsp; Elaine was too clever to confound his
+dandyism with foppishness or self-advertisement.&nbsp; He admired
+his own toilet effect in a mirror from a genuine sense of
+pleasure in a thing good to look upon, just as he would feel a
+sensuous appreciation of the sight of a well-bred, well-matched,
+well-turned-out pair of horses.&nbsp; Behind his careful
+political flippancy and cynicism one might also detect a certain
+careless sincerity, which would probably in the long run save him
+from moderate success, and turn him into one of the brilliant
+failures of his day.&nbsp; Beyond this it was difficult to form
+an exact appreciation of Courtenay Youghal, and Elaine, who liked
+to have her impressions distinctly labelled and pigeon-holed, was
+perpetually scrutinising the outer surface of his characteristics
+and utterances, like a baffled art critic vainly searching
+beneath the varnish and scratches of a doubtfully assigned
+picture for an enlightening signature.&nbsp; The young man added
+to her perplexities by his deliberate policy of never trying to
+show himself in a favourable light even when most anxious to
+impart a favourable impression.&nbsp; He preferred that people
+should hunt for his good qualities, and merely took very good
+care that as far as possible they should never draw blank; even
+in the matter of selfishness, which was the anchor-sheet of his
+existence, he contrived to be noted, and justly noted, for doing
+remarkably unselfish things.&nbsp; As a ruler he would have been
+reasonably popular; as a husband he would probably be
+unendurable.</p>
+<p>Comus was to a certain extent as great a mystification as
+Youghal, but here Elaine was herself responsible for some of the
+perplexity which enshrouded his character in her eyes.&nbsp; She
+had taken more than a passing fancy for the boy&mdash;for the boy
+as he might be, that was to say&mdash;and she was desperately
+unwilling to see him and appraise him as he really was.&nbsp;
+Thus the mental court of appeal was constantly engaged in
+examining witnesses as to character, most of whom signally failed
+to give any testimony which would support the favourable judgment
+which the tribunal was so anxious to arrive at.&nbsp; A woman
+with wider experience of the world&rsquo;s ways and shortcomings
+would probably have contented herself with an endeavour to find
+out whether her liking for the boy outweighed her dislike of his
+characteristics; Elaine took her judgments too seriously to
+approach the matter from such a simple and convenient
+standpoint.&nbsp; The fact that she was much more than half in
+love with Comus made it dreadfully important that she should
+discover him to have a lovable soul, and Comus, it must be
+confessed, did little to help forward the discovery.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At any rate he is honest,&rdquo; she would observe to
+herself, after some outspoken admission of unprincipled conduct
+on his part, and then she would ruefully recall certain episodes
+in which he had figured, from which honesty had been
+conspicuously absent.&nbsp; What she tried to label honesty in
+his candour was probably only a cynical defiance of the laws of
+right and wrong.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You look more than usually thoughtful this
+afternoon,&rdquo; said Comus to her, &ldquo;as if you had
+invented this summer day and were trying to think out
+improvements.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If I had the power to create improvements anywhere I
+think I should begin with you,&rdquo; retorted Elaine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sure it&rsquo;s much better to leave me as I
+am,&rdquo; protested Comus; &ldquo;you&rsquo;re like a relative
+of mine up in Argyllshire, who spends his time producing improved
+breeds of sheep and pigs and chickens.&nbsp; So patronising and
+irritating to the Almighty I should think, to go about putting
+superior finishing touches to Creation.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Elaine frowned, and then laughed, and finally gave a little
+sigh.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not easy to talk sense to you,&rdquo; she
+said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Whatever else you take in hand,&rdquo; said Youghal,
+&ldquo;you must never improve this garden.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s what
+our idea of Heaven might be like if the Jews hadn&rsquo;t
+invented one for us on totally different lines.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
+dreadful that we should accept them as the impresarios of our
+religious dreamland instead of the Greeks.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are not very fond of the Jews,&rdquo; said
+Elaine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve travelled and lived a good deal in Eastern
+Europe,&rdquo; said Youghal.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It seems largely a question of geography,&rdquo; said
+Elaine; &ldquo;in England no one really is
+anti-Semitic.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Youghal shook his head.&nbsp; &ldquo;I know a great many Jews
+who are.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Servants had quietly, almost reverently, placed tea and its
+accessories on the wicker table, and quietly receded from the
+landscape.&nbsp; Elaine sat like a grave young goddess about to
+dispense some mysterious potion to her devotees.&nbsp; Her mind
+was still sitting in judgment on the Jewish question.</p>
+<p>Comus scrambled to his feet.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s too hot for tea,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I
+shall go and feed the swans.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And he walked off with a little silver basket-dish containing
+brown bread-and-butter.</p>
+<p>Elaine laughed quietly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s so like Comus,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;to go
+off with our one dish of bread-and-butter.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Youghal chuckled responsively.&nbsp; It was an undoubted
+opportunity for him to put in some disparaging criticism of
+Comus, and Elaine sat alert in readiness to judge the critic and
+reserve judgment on the criticised.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;His selfishness is splendid but absolutely
+futile,&rdquo; said Youghal; &ldquo;now my selfishness is
+commonplace, but always thoroughly practical and
+calculated.&nbsp; He will have great difficulty in getting the
+swans to accept his offering, and he incurs the odium of reducing
+us to a bread-and-butterless condition.&nbsp; Incidentally he
+will get very hot.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Elaine again had the sense of being thoroughly baffled.&nbsp;
+If Youghal had said anything unkind it was about himself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If my cousin Suzette had been here,&rdquo; she
+observed, with the shadow of a malicious smile on her lips,
+&ldquo;I believe she would have gone into a flood of tears at the
+loss of her bread-and-butter, and Comus would have figured ever
+after in her mind as something black and destroying and
+hateful.&nbsp; In fact I don&rsquo;t really know why we took our
+loss so unprotestingly.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For two reasons,&rdquo; said Youghal; &ldquo;you are
+rather fond of Comus.&nbsp; And I&mdash;am not very fond of
+bread-and-butter.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The jesting remark brought a throb of pleasure to
+Elaine&rsquo;s heart.&nbsp; She had known full well that she
+cared for Comus, but now that Courtenay Youghal had openly
+proclaimed the fact as something unchallenged and understood
+matters seemed placed at once on a more advanced footing.&nbsp;
+The warm sunlit garden grew suddenly into a Heaven that held the
+secret of eternal happiness.&nbsp; Youth and comeliness would
+always walk here, under the low-boughed mulberry trees, as
+unchanging as the leaden otter that for ever preyed on the leaden
+salmon on the edge of the old fountain, and somehow the lovers
+would always wear the aspect of herself and the boy who was
+talking to the four white swans by the water steps.&nbsp; Youghal
+was right; this was the real Heaven of one&rsquo;s dreams and
+longings, immeasurably removed from that Rue de la Paix Paradise
+about which one professed utterly insincere hankerings in places
+of public worship.&nbsp; Elaine drank her tea in a happy silence;
+besides being a brilliant talker Youghal understood the rarer art
+of being a non-talker on occasion.</p>
+<p>Comus came back across the grass swinging the empty
+basket-dish in his hand.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Swans were very pleased,&rdquo; he cried, gaily,
+&ldquo;and said they hoped I would keep the bread-and-butter dish
+as a souvenir of a happy tea-party.&nbsp; I may really have it,
+mayn&rsquo;t I?&rdquo; he continued in an anxious voice;
+&ldquo;it will do to keep studs and things in.&nbsp; You
+don&rsquo;t want it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s got the family crest on it,&rdquo; said
+Elaine.&nbsp; Some of the happiness had died out of her eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have that scratched off and my own put
+on,&rdquo; said Comus.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s been in the family for generations,&rdquo;
+protested Elaine, who did not share Comus&rsquo;s view that
+because you were rich your lesser possessions could have no value
+in your eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I want it dreadfully,&rdquo; said Comus, sulkily,
+&ldquo;and you&rsquo;ve heaps of other things to put
+bread-and-butter in.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For the moment he was possessed by an overmastering desire to
+keep the dish at all costs; a look of greedy determination
+dominated his face, and he had not for an instant relaxed his
+grip of the coveted object.</p>
+<p>Elaine was genuinely angry by this time, and was busily
+telling herself that it was absurd to be put out over such a
+trifle; at the same moment a sense of justice was telling her
+that Comus was displaying a good deal of rather shabby
+selfishness.&nbsp; And somehow her chief anxiety at the moment
+was to keep Courtenay Youghal from seeing that she was angry.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know you don&rsquo;t really want it, so I&rsquo;m
+going to keep it,&rdquo; persisted Comus.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s too hot to argue,&rdquo; said Elaine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Happy mistress of your destinies,&rdquo; laughed
+Youghal; &ldquo;you can suit your disputations to the desired
+time and temperature.&nbsp; I have to go and argue, or what is
+worse, listen to other people&rsquo;s arguments, in a hot and
+doctored atmosphere suitable to an invalid lizard.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You haven&rsquo;t got to argue about a bread-and-butter
+dish,&rdquo; said Elaine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Chiefly about bread-and-butter,&rdquo; said Youghal;
+&ldquo;our great preoccupation is other people&rsquo;s
+bread-and-butter.&nbsp; They earn or produce the material, but we
+busy ourselves with making rules how it shall be cut up, and the
+size of the slices, and how much butter shall go on how much
+bread.&nbsp; That is what is called legislation.&nbsp; If we
+could only make rules as to how the bread-and-butter should be
+digested we should be quite happy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Elaine had been brought up to regard Parliaments as something
+to be treated with cheerful solemnity, like illness or family
+re-unions.&nbsp; Youghal&rsquo;s flippant disparagement of the
+career in which he was involved did not, however, jar on her
+susceptibilities.&nbsp; She knew him to be not only a lively and
+effective debater but an industrious worker on committees.&nbsp;
+If he made light of his labours, at least he afforded no one else
+a loophole for doing so.&nbsp; And certainly, the Parliamentary
+atmosphere was not inviting on this hot afternoon.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When must you go?&rdquo; she asked,
+sympathetically.</p>
+<p>Youghal looked ruefully at his watch.&nbsp; Before he could
+answer, a cheerful hoot came through the air, as of an owl
+joyously challenging the sunlight with a foreboding of the coming
+night.&nbsp; He sprang laughing to his feet.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Listen!&nbsp; My summons back to my galley,&rdquo; he
+cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;The Gods have given me an hour in this
+enchanted garden, so I must not complain.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then in a lower voice he almost whispered, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+the Persian debate to-night.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was the one hint he had given in the midst of his talking
+and laughing that he was really keenly enthralled in the work
+that lay before him.&nbsp; It was the one little intimate touch
+that gave Elaine the knowledge that he cared for her opinion of
+his work.</p>
+<p>Comus, who had emptied his cigarette-case, became suddenly
+clamorous at the prospect of being temporarily stranded without a
+smoke.&nbsp; Youghal took the last remaining cigarette from his
+own case and gravely bisected it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Friendship could go no further,&rdquo; he observed, as
+he gave one-half to the doubtfully appeased Comus, and lit the
+other himself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There are heaps more in the hall,&rdquo; said
+Elaine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was only done for the Saint Martin of Tours
+effect,&rdquo; said Youghal; &ldquo;I hate smoking when I&rsquo;m
+rushing through the air.&nbsp; Good-bye.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The departing galley-slave stepped forth into the sunlight,
+radiant and confident.&nbsp; A few minutes later Elaine could see
+glimpses of his white car as it rushed past the rhododendron
+bushes.&nbsp; He woos best who leaves first, particularly if he
+goes forth to battle or the semblance of battle.</p>
+<p>Somehow Elaine&rsquo;s garden of Eternal Youth had already
+become clouded in its imagery.&nbsp; The girl-figure who walked
+in it was still distinctly and unchangingly herself, but her
+companion was more blurred and undefined, as a picture that has
+been superimposed on another.</p>
+<p>Youghal sped townward well satisfied with himself.&nbsp;
+To-morrow, he reflected, Elaine would read his speech in her
+morning paper, and he knew in advance that it was not going to be
+one of his worst efforts.&nbsp; He knew almost exactly where the
+punctuations of laughter and applause would burst in, he knew
+that nimble fingers in the Press Gallery would be taking down
+each gibe and argument as he flung it at the impassive Minister
+confronting him, and that the fair lady of his desire would be
+able to judge what manner of young man this was who spent his
+afternoon in her garden, lazily chaffing himself and his
+world.</p>
+<p>And he further reflected, with an amused chuckle, that she
+would be vividly reminded of Comus for days to come, when she
+took her afternoon tea, and saw the bread-and-butter reposing in
+an unaccustomed dish.</p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Towards</span> four o&rsquo;clock on a hot
+afternoon Francesca stepped out from a shop entrance near the
+Piccadilly end of Bond Street and ran almost into the arms of
+Merla Blathlington.&nbsp; The afternoon seemed to get instantly
+hotter.&nbsp; Merla was one of those human flies that buzz; in
+crowded streets, at bazaars and in warm weather, she attained to
+the proportions of a human bluebottle.&nbsp; Lady Caroline
+Benaresq had openly predicted that a special fly-paper was being
+reserved for her accommodation in another world; others, however,
+held the opinion that she would be miraculously multiplied in a
+future state, and that four or more Merla Blathlingtons,
+according to deserts, would be in perpetual and unremitting
+attendance on each lost soul.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here we are,&rdquo; she cried, with a glad eager buzz,
+&ldquo;popping in and out of shops like rabbits; not that rabbits
+do pop in and out of shops very extensively.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was evidently one of her bluebottle days.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you love Bond Street?&rdquo; she gabbled
+on.&nbsp; &ldquo;There&rsquo;s something so unusual and
+distinctive about it; no other street anywhere else is quite like
+it.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you know those ikons and images and things
+scattered up and down Europe, that are supposed to have been
+painted or carved, as the case may be, by St. Luke or Zaccheus,
+or somebody of that sort; I always like to think that some
+notable person of those times designed Bond Street.&nbsp; St.
+Paul, perhaps.&nbsp; He travelled about a lot.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not in Middlesex, though,&rdquo; said Francesca.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One can&rsquo;t be sure,&rdquo; persisted Merla;
+&ldquo;when one wanders about as much as he did one gets mixed up
+and forgets where one <i>has</i> been.&nbsp; I can never remember
+whether I&rsquo;ve been to the Tyrol twice and St. Moritz once,
+or the other way about; I always have to ask my maid.&nbsp; And
+there&rsquo;s something about the name Bond that suggests St.
+Paul; didn&rsquo;t he write a lot about the bond and the
+free?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I fancy he wrote in Hebrew or Greek,&rdquo; objected
+Francesca; &ldquo;the word wouldn&rsquo;t have the least
+resemblance.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So dreadfully non-committal to go about pamphleteering
+in those bizarre languages,&rdquo; complained Merla;
+&ldquo;that&rsquo;s what makes all those people so elusive.&nbsp;
+As soon as you try to pin them down to a definite statement about
+anything you&rsquo;re told that some vitally important word has
+fifteen other meanings in the original.&nbsp; I wonder our
+Cabinet Ministers and politicians don&rsquo;t adopt a sort of
+dog-Latin or Esperanto jargon to deliver their speeches in; what
+a lot of subsequent explaining away would be saved.&nbsp; But to
+go back to Bond Street&mdash;not that we&rsquo;ve left
+it&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid I must leave it now,&rdquo; said
+Francesca, preparing to turn up Grafton Street;
+&ldquo;Good-bye.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Must you be going?&nbsp; Come and have tea
+somewhere.&nbsp; I know of a cosy little place where one can talk
+undisturbed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Francesca repressed a shudder and pleaded an urgent
+engagement.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know where you&rsquo;re going,&rdquo; said Merla,
+with the resentful buzz of a bluebottle that finds itself
+thwarted by the cold unreasoning resistance of a
+windowpane.&nbsp; &ldquo;You&rsquo;re going to play bridge at
+Serena Golackly&rsquo;s.&nbsp; She never asks me to her bridge
+parties.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Francesca shuddered openly this time; the prospect of having
+to play bridge anywhere in the near neighbourhood of
+Merla&rsquo;s voice was not one that could be contemplated with
+ordinary calmness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good-bye,&rdquo; she said again firmly, and passed out
+of earshot; it was rather like leaving the machinery section of
+an exhibition.&nbsp; Merla&rsquo;s diagnosis of her destination
+had been a correct one; Francesca made her way slowly through the
+hot streets in the direction of Serena Golackly&rsquo;s house on
+the far side of Berkeley Square.&nbsp; To the blessed certainty
+of finding a game of bridge, she hopefully added the possibility
+of hearing some fragments of news which might prove interesting
+and enlightening.&nbsp; And of enlightenment on a particular
+subject, in which she was acutely and personally interested, she
+stood in some need.&nbsp; Comus of late had been provokingly
+reticent as to his movements and doings; partly, perhaps, because
+it was his nature to be provoking, partly because the daily
+bickerings over money matters were gradually choking other forms
+of conversation.&nbsp; Francesca had seen him once or twice in
+the Park in the desirable company of Elaine de Frey, and from
+time to time she heard of the young people as having danced
+together at various houses; on the other hand, she had seen and
+heard quite as much evidence to connect the heiress&rsquo;s name
+with that of Courtenay Youghal.&nbsp; Beyond this meagre and
+conflicting and altogether tantalising information, her knowledge
+of the present position of affairs did not go.&nbsp; If either of
+the young men was seriously &ldquo;making the running,&rdquo; it
+was probable that she would hear some sly hint or open comment
+about it from one of Serena&rsquo;s gossip-laden friends, without
+having to go out of her way to introduce the subject and unduly
+disclose her own state of ignorance.&nbsp; And a game of bridge,
+played for moderately high points, gave ample excuse for
+convenient lapses into reticence; if questions took an
+embarrassingly inquisitive turn, one could always find refuge in
+a defensive spade.</p>
+<p>The afternoon was too warm to make bridge a generally popular
+diversion, and Serena&rsquo;s party was a comparatively small
+one.&nbsp; Only one table was incomplete when Francesca made her
+appearance on the scene; at it was seated Serena herself,
+confronted by Ada Spelvexit, whom everyone was wont to explain as
+&ldquo;one of the Cheshire Spelvexits,&rdquo; as though any other
+variety would have been intolerable.&nbsp; Ada Spelvexit was one
+of those naturally stagnant souls who take infinite pleasure in
+what are called &ldquo;movements.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Most of the
+really great lessons I have learned have been taught me by the
+Poor,&rdquo; was one of her favourite statements.&nbsp; The one
+great lesson that the Poor in general would have liked to have
+taught her, that their kitchens and sickrooms were not
+unreservedly at her disposal as private lecture halls, she had
+never been able to assimilate.&nbsp; She was ready to give them
+unlimited advice as to how they should keep the wolf from their
+doors, but in return she claimed and enforced for herself the
+penetrating powers of an east wind or a dust storm.&nbsp; Her
+visits among her wealthier acquaintances were equally extensive
+and enterprising, and hardly more welcome; in country-house
+parties, while partaking to the fullest extent of the hospitality
+offered her, she made a practice of unburdening herself of
+homilies on the evils of leisure and luxury, which did not
+particularly endear her to her fellow guests.&nbsp; Hostesses
+regarded her philosophically as a form of social measles which
+everyone had to have once.</p>
+<p>The third prospective player, Francesca noted without any
+special enthusiasm, was Lady Caroline Benaresq.&nbsp; Lady
+Caroline was far from being a remarkably good bridge player, but
+she always managed to domineer mercilessly over any table that
+was favoured with her presence, and generally managed to
+win.&nbsp; A domineering player usually inflicts the chief damage
+and demoralisation on his partner; Lady Caroline&rsquo;s special
+achievement was to harass and demoralise partner and opponents
+alike.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Weak and weak,&rdquo; she announced in her gentle
+voice, as she cut her hostess for a partner; &ldquo;I suppose we
+had better play only five shillings a hundred.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Francesca wondered at the old woman&rsquo;s moderate
+assessment of the stake, knowing her fondness for highish play
+and her usual good luck in card holding.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t mind what we play,&rdquo; said Ada
+Spelvexit, with an incautious parade of elegant indifference; as
+a matter of fact she was inwardly relieved and rejoicing at the
+reasonable figure proposed by Lady Caroline, and she would
+certainly have demurred if a higher stake had been
+suggested.&nbsp; She was not as a rule a successful player, and
+money lost at cards was always a poignant bereavement to her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then as you don&rsquo;t mind we&rsquo;ll make it ten
+shillings a hundred,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline, with the pleased
+chuckle of one who has spread a net in the sight of a bird and
+disproved the vanity of the proceeding.</p>
+<p>It proved a tiresome ding-dong rubber, with the strength of
+the cards slightly on Francesca&rsquo;s side, and the luck of the
+table going mostly the other way.&nbsp; She was too keen a player
+not to feel a certain absorption in the game once it had started,
+but she was conscious to-day of a distracting interest that
+competed with the momentary importance of leads and discards and
+declarations.&nbsp; The little accumulations of talk that were
+unpent during the dealing of the hands became as noteworthy to
+her alert attention as the play of the hands themselves.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, quite a small party this afternoon,&rdquo; said
+Serena, in reply to a seemingly casual remark on
+Francesca&rsquo;s part; &ldquo;and two or three non-players,
+which is unusual on a Wednesday.&nbsp; Canon Besomley was here
+just before you came; you know, the big preaching man.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been to hear him scold the human race once
+or twice,&rdquo; said Francesca.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A strong man with a wonderfully strong message,&rdquo;
+said Ada Spelvexit, in an impressive and assertive tone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The sort of popular pulpiteer who spanks the vices of
+his age and lunches with them afterwards,&rdquo; said Lady
+Caroline.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hardly a fair summary of the man and his work,&rdquo;
+protested Ada.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been to hear him many
+times when I&rsquo;ve been depressed or discouraged, and I simply
+can&rsquo;t tell you the impression his words
+leave&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At least you can tell us what you intend to make
+trumps,&rdquo; broke in Lady Caroline, gently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Diamonds,&rdquo; pronounced Ada, after a rather
+flurried survey of her hand.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Doubled,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline, with increased
+gentleness, and a few minutes later she was pencilling an
+addition of twenty-four to her score.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I stayed with his people down in Herefordshire last
+May,&rdquo; said Ada, returning to the unfinished theme of the
+Canon; &ldquo;such an exquisite rural retreat, and so restful and
+healing to the nerves.&nbsp; Real country scenery; apple blossom
+everywhere.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Surely only on the apple trees,&rdquo; said Lady
+Caroline.</p>
+<p>Ada Spelvexit gave up the attempt to reproduce the decorative
+setting of the Canon&rsquo;s homelife, and fell back on the small
+but practical consolation of scoring the odd trick in her
+opponent&rsquo;s declaration of hearts.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you had led your highest club to start with, instead
+of the nine, we should have saved the trick,&rdquo; remarked Lady
+Caroline to her partner in a tone of coldly, gentle reproof;
+&ldquo;it&rsquo;s no use, my dear,&rdquo; she continued, as
+Serena flustered out a halting apology, &ldquo;no earthly use to
+attempt to play bridge at one table and try to see and hear
+what&rsquo;s going on at two or three other tables.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can generally manage to attend to more than one thing
+at a time,&rdquo; said Serena, rashly; &ldquo;I think I must have
+a sort of double brain.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Much better to economise and have one really good
+one,&rdquo; observed Lady Caroline.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>La belle dame sans merci</i> scoring a verbal trick
+or two as usual,&rdquo; said a player at another table in a
+discreet undertone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did I tell you Sir Edward Roan is coming to my next big
+evening,&rdquo; said Serena, hurriedly, by way, perhaps, of
+restoring herself a little in her own esteem.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Poor dear, good Sir Edward.&nbsp; What have you made
+trumps?&rdquo; asked Lady Caroline, in one breath.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Clubs,&rdquo; said Francesca; &ldquo;and pray, why
+these adjectives of commiseration?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Francesca was a Ministerialist by family interest and
+allegiance, and was inclined to take up the cudgels at the
+suggested disparagement aimed at the Foreign Secretary.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He amuses me so much,&rdquo; purred Lady
+Caroline.&nbsp; Her amusement was usually of the sort that a
+sporting cat derives from watching the Swedish exercises of a
+well-spent and carefully thought-out mouse.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Really?&nbsp; He has been rather a brilliant success at
+the Foreign Office, you know,&rdquo; said Francesca.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He reminds one so of a circus elephant&mdash;infinitely
+more intelligent than the people who direct him, but quite
+content to go on putting his foot down or taking it up as may be
+required, quite unconcerned whether he steps on a meringue or a
+hornet&rsquo;s nest in the process of going where he&rsquo;s
+expected to go.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How can you say such things?&rdquo; protested
+Francesca.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline;
+&ldquo;Courtenay Youghal said it in the House last night.&nbsp;
+Didn&rsquo;t you read the debate?&nbsp; He was really rather in
+form.&nbsp; I disagree entirely with his point of view, of
+course, but some of the things he says have just enough truth
+behind them to redeem them from being merely smart; for instance,
+his summing up of the Government&rsquo;s attitude towards our
+embarrassing Colonial Empire in the wistful phrase &lsquo;happy
+is the country that has no geography.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What an absurdly unjust thing to say,&rdquo; put in
+Francesca; &ldquo;I daresay some of our Party at some time have
+taken up that attitude, but every one knows that Sir Edward is a
+sound Imperialist at heart.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Most politicians are something or other at heart, but
+no one would be rash enough to insure a politician against heart
+failure.&nbsp; Particularly when he happens to be in
+office.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Anyhow, I don&rsquo;t see that the Opposition leaders
+would have acted any differently in the present case,&rdquo; said
+Francesca.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One should always speak guardedly of the Opposition
+leaders,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline, in her gentlest voice;
+&ldquo;one never knows what a turn in the situation may do for
+them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You mean they may one day be at the head of
+affairs?&rdquo; asked Serena, briskly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I mean they may one day lead the Opposition.&nbsp; One
+never knows.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Caroline had just remembered that her hostess was on the
+Opposition side in politics.</p>
+<p>Francesca and her partner scored four tricks in clubs; the
+game stood irresolutely at twenty-four all.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you had followed the excellent lyrical advice given
+to the Maid of Athens and returned my heart we should have made
+two more tricks and gone game,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline to her
+partner.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mr. Youghal seems pushing himself to the fore of
+late,&rdquo; remarked Francesca, as Serena took up the cards to
+deal.&nbsp; Since the young politician&rsquo;s name had been
+introduced into their conversation the opportunity for turning
+the talk more directly on him and his affairs was too good to be
+missed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think he&rsquo;s got a career before him,&rdquo; said
+Serena; &ldquo;the House always fills when he&rsquo;s speaking,
+and that&rsquo;s a good sign.&nbsp; And then he&rsquo;s young and
+got rather an attractive personality, which is always something
+in the political world.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;His lack of money will handicap him, unless he can find
+himself a rich wife or persuade someone to die and leave him a
+fat legacy,&rdquo; said Francesca; &ldquo;since M.P.&rsquo;s have
+become the recipients of a salary rather more is expected and
+demanded of them in the expenditure line than before.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, the House of Commons still remains rather at the
+opposite pole to the Kingdom of Heaven as regards entrance
+qualifications,&rdquo; observed Lady Caroline.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There ought to be no difficulty about Youghal picking
+up a girl with money,&rdquo; said Serena; &ldquo;with his
+prospects he would make an excellent husband for any woman with
+social ambitions.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And she half sighed, as though she almost regretted that a
+previous matrimonial arrangement precluded her from entering into
+the competition on her own account.</p>
+<p>Francesca, under an assumption of languid interest, was
+watching Lady Caroline narrowly for some hint of suppressed
+knowledge of Youghal&rsquo;s courtship of Miss de Frey.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Whom are you marrying and giving in
+marriage?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The question came from George St. Michael, who had strayed
+over from a neighbouring table, attracted by the fragments of
+small-talk that had reached his ears.</p>
+<p>St. Michael was one of those dapper bird-like
+illusorily-active men, who seem to have been in a certain stage
+of middle-age for as long as human memory can recall them.&nbsp;
+A close-cut peaked beard lent a certain dignity to his
+appearance&mdash;a loan which the rest of his features and
+mannerisms were continually and successfully repudiating.&nbsp;
+His profession, if he had one, was submerged in his hobby, which
+consisted of being an advance-agent for small happenings or
+possible happenings that were or seemed imminent in the social
+world around him; he found a perpetual and unflagging
+satisfaction in acquiring and retailing any stray items of gossip
+or information, particularly of a matrimonial nature, that
+chanced to come his way.&nbsp; Given the bare outline of an
+officially announced engagement he would immediately fill it in
+with all manner of details, true or, at any rate, probable, drawn
+from his own imagination or from some equally exclusive
+source.&nbsp; The <i>Morning Post</i> might content itself with
+the mere statement of the arrangement which would shortly take
+place, but it was St. Michael&rsquo;s breathless little voice
+that proclaimed how the contracting parties had originally met
+over a salmon-fishing incident, why the Guards&rsquo; Chapel
+would not be used, why her Aunt Mary had at first opposed the
+match, how the question of the children&rsquo;s religious
+upbringing had been compromised, etc., etc., to all whom it might
+interest and to many whom it might not.&nbsp; Beyond his
+industriously-earned pre-eminence in this special branch of
+intelligence, he was chiefly noteworthy for having a wife reputed
+to be the tallest and thinnest woman in the Home Counties.&nbsp;
+The two were sometimes seen together in Society, where they
+passed under the collective name of St. Michael and All
+Angles.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We are trying to find a rich wife for Courtenay
+Youghal,&rdquo; said Serena, in answer to St. Michael&rsquo;s
+question.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, there I&rsquo;m afraid you&rsquo;re a little
+late,&rdquo; he observed, glowing with the importance of pending
+revelation; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid you&rsquo;re a little
+late,&rdquo; he repeated, watching the effect of his words as a
+gardener might watch the development of a bed of carefully tended
+asparagus.&nbsp; &ldquo;I think the young gentleman has been
+before you and already found himself a rich mate in
+prospect.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He lowered his voice as he spoke, not with a view to imparting
+impressive mystery to his statement, but because there were other
+table groups within hearing to whom he hoped presently to have
+the privilege of re-disclosing his revelation.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you mean&mdash;?&rdquo; began Serena.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Miss de Frey,&rdquo; broke in St. Michael, hurriedly,
+fearful lest his revelation should be forestalled, even in
+guesswork; &ldquo;quite an ideal choice, the very wife for a man
+who means to make his mark in politics.&nbsp; Twenty-four
+thousand a year, with prospects of more to come, and a charming
+place of her own not too far from town.&nbsp; Quite the type of
+girl, too, who will make a good political hostess, brains without
+being brainy, you know.&nbsp; Just the right thing.&nbsp; Of
+course, it would be premature to make any definite announcement
+at present&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would hardly be premature for my partner to announce
+what she means to make trumps,&rdquo; interrupted Lady Caroline,
+in a voice of such sinister gentleness that St. Michael fled
+headlong back to his own table.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, is it me?&nbsp; I beg your pardon.&nbsp; I leave
+it,&rdquo; said Serena.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank you.&nbsp; No trumps,&rdquo; declared Lady
+Caroline.&nbsp; The hand was successful, and the rubber
+ultimately fell to her with a comfortable margin of
+honours.&nbsp; The same partners cut together again, and this
+time the cards went distinctly against Francesca and Ada
+Spelvexit, and a heavily piled-up score confronted them at the
+close of the rubber.&nbsp; Francesca was conscious that a certain
+amount of rather erratic play on her part had at least
+contributed to the result.&nbsp; St. Michael&rsquo;s incursion
+into the conversation had proved rather a powerful distraction to
+her ordinarily sound bridge-craft.</p>
+<p>Ada Spelvexit emptied her purse of several gold pieces and
+infused a corresponding degree of superiority into her
+manner.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I must be going now,&rdquo; she announced;
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m dining early.&nbsp; I have to give an address to
+some charwomen afterwards.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why?&rdquo; asked Lady Caroline, with a disconcerting
+directness that was one of her most formidable
+characteristics.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, well, I have some things to say to them that I
+daresay they will like to hear,&rdquo; said Ada, with a thin
+laugh.</p>
+<p>Her statement was received with a silence that betokened
+profound unbelief in any such probability.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I go about a good deal among working-class
+women,&rdquo; she added.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No one has ever said it,&rdquo; observed Lady Caroline,
+&ldquo;but how painfully true it is that the poor have us always
+with them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ada Spelvexit hastened her departure; the marred
+impressiveness of her retreat came as a culminating discomfiture
+on the top of her ill-fortune at the card-table.&nbsp; Possibly,
+however, the multiplication of her own annoyances enabled her to
+survey charwomen&rsquo;s troubles with increased
+cheerfulness.&nbsp; None of them, at any rate, had spent an
+afternoon with Lady Caroline.</p>
+<p>Francesca cut in at another table and with better fortune
+attending on her, succeeded in winning back most of her
+losses.&nbsp; A sense of satisfaction was distinctly dominant as
+she took leave of her hostess.&nbsp; St. Michael&rsquo;s gossip,
+or rather the manner in which it had been received, had given her
+a clue to the real state of affairs, which, however slender and
+conjectural, at least pointed in the desired direction.&nbsp; At
+first she had been horribly afraid lest she should be listening
+to a definite announcement which would have been the death-blow
+to her hopes, but as the recitation went on without any of those
+assured little minor details which St. Michael so loved to
+supply, she had come to the conclusion that it was merely a piece
+of intelligent guesswork.&nbsp; And if Lady Caroline had really
+believed in the story of Elaine de Frey&rsquo;s virtual
+engagement to Courtenay Youghal she would have taken a malicious
+pleasure in encouraging St. Michael in his confidences, and in
+watching Francesca&rsquo;s discomfiture under the recital.&nbsp;
+The irritated manner in which she had cut short the discussion
+betrayed the fact, that, as far as the old woman&rsquo;s
+information went, it was Comus and not Courtenay Youghal who held
+the field.&nbsp; And in this particular case Lady
+Caroline&rsquo;s information was likely to be nearer the truth
+than St. Michael&rsquo;s confident gossip.</p>
+<p>Francesca always gave a penny to the first crossing-sweeper or
+match-seller she chanced across after a successful sitting at
+bridge.&nbsp; This afternoon she had come out of the fray some
+fifteen shillings to the bad, but she gave two pennies to a
+crossing-sweeper at the north-west corner of Berkeley Square as a
+sort of thank-offering to the Gods.</p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was a fresh rain-repentant
+afternoon, following a morning that had been sultry and
+torrentially wet by turns; the sort of afternoon that impels
+people to talk graciously of the rain as having done a lot of
+good, its chief merit in their eyes probably having been its
+recognition of the art of moderation.&nbsp; Also it was an
+afternoon that invited bodily activity after the convalescent
+languor of the earlier part of the day.&nbsp; Elaine had
+instinctively found her way into her riding-habit and sent an
+order down to the stables&mdash;a blessed oasis that still smelt
+sweetly of horse and hay and cleanliness in a world that reeked
+of petrol, and now she set her mare at a smart pace through a
+succession of long-stretching country lanes.&nbsp; She was due
+some time that afternoon at a garden-party, but she rode with
+determination in an opposite direction.&nbsp; In the first place
+neither Comus or Courtenay would be at the party, which fact
+seemed to remove any valid reason that could be thought of for
+inviting her attendance thereat; in the second place about a
+hundred human beings would be gathered there, and human
+gatherings were not her most crying need at the present
+moment.&nbsp; Since her last encounter with her wooers, under the
+cedars in her own garden, Elaine realised that she was either
+very happy or cruelly unhappy, she could not quite determine
+which.&nbsp; She seemed to have what she most wanted in the world
+lying at her feet, and she was dreadfully uncertain in her more
+reflective moments whether she really wanted to stretch out her
+hand and take it.&nbsp; It was all very like some situation in an
+Arabian Nights tale or a story of Pagan Hellas, and consequently
+the more puzzling and disconcerting to a girl brought up on the
+methodical lines of Victorian Christianity.&nbsp; Her appeal
+court was in permanent session these last few days, but it gave
+no decisions, at least none that she would listen to.&nbsp; And
+the ride on her fast light-stepping little mare, alone and
+unattended, through the fresh-smelling leafy lanes into
+unexplored country, seemed just what she wanted at the
+moment.&nbsp; The mare made some small delicate pretence of being
+roadshy, not the staring dolt-like kind of nervousness that shows
+itself in an irritating hanging-back as each conspicuous wayside
+object presents itself, but the nerve-flutter of an imaginative
+animal that merely results in a quick whisk of the head and a
+swifter bound forward.&nbsp; She might have paraphrased the
+mental attitude of the immortalised Peter Bell into</p>
+<blockquote><p>A basket underneath a tree<br />
+A yellow tiger is to me,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; If it is nothing
+more.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The more really alarming episodes of the road, the hoot and
+whir of a passing motor-car or the loud vibrating hum of a
+wayside threshing-machine, were treated with indifference.</p>
+<p>On turning a corner out of a narrow coppice-bordered lane into
+a wider road that sloped steadily upward in a long stretch of
+hill Elaine saw, coming toward her at no great distance, a string
+of yellow-painted vans, drawn for the most part by skewbald or
+speckled horses.&nbsp; A certain rakish air about these oncoming
+road-craft proclaimed them as belonging to a travelling
+wild-beast show, decked out in the rich primitive colouring that
+one&rsquo;s taste in childhood would have insisted on before it
+had been schooled in the artistic value of dulness.&nbsp; It was
+an unlooked-for and distinctly unwelcome encounter.&nbsp; The
+mare had already commenced a sixfold scrutiny with nostrils, eyes
+and daintily-pricked ears; one ear made hurried little backward
+movements to hear what Elaine was saying about the eminent
+niceness and respectability of the approaching caravan, but even
+Elaine felt that she would be unable satisfactorily to explain
+the elephants and camels that would certainly form part of the
+procession.&nbsp; To turn back would seem rather craven, and the
+mare might take fright at the man&oelig;uvre and try to bolt; a
+gate standing ajar at the entrance to a farmyard lane provided a
+convenient way out of the difficulty.</p>
+<p>As Elaine pushed her way through she became aware of a man
+standing just inside the lane, who made a movement forward to
+open the gate for her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank you.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m just getting out of the way
+of a wild-beast show,&rdquo; she explained; &ldquo;my mare is
+tolerant of motors and traction-engines, but I expect
+camels&mdash;hullo,&rdquo; she broke off, recognising the man as
+an old acquaintance, &ldquo;I heard you had taken rooms in a
+farmhouse somewhere.&nbsp; Fancy meeting you in this
+way.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In the not very distant days of her little-girlhood, Tom
+Keriway had been a man to be looked upon with a certain awe and
+envy; indeed the glamour of his roving career would have fired
+the imagination, and wistful desire to do likewise, of many young
+Englishmen.&nbsp; It seemed to be the grown-up realisation of the
+games played in dark rooms in winter fire-lit evenings, and the
+dreams dreamed over favourite books of adventure.&nbsp; Making
+Vienna his headquarters, almost his home, he had rambled where he
+listed through the lands of the Near and Middle East as leisurely
+and thoroughly as tamer souls might explore Paris.&nbsp; He had
+wandered through Hungarian horse-fairs, hunted shy crafty beasts
+on lonely Balkan hillsides, dropped himself pebble-wise into the
+stagnant human pool of some Bulgarian monastery, threaded his way
+through the strange racial mosaic of Salonika, listened with
+amused politeness to the shallow ultra-modern opinions of a
+voluble editor or lawyer in some wayside Russian town, or learned
+wisdom from a chance tavern companion, one of the atoms of the
+busy ant-stream of men and merchandise that moves untiringly
+round the shores of the Black Sea.&nbsp; And far and wide as he
+might roam he always managed to turn up at frequent intervals, at
+ball and supper and theatre, in the gay Hauptstadt of the
+Habsburgs, haunting his favourite caf&eacute;s and wine-vaults,
+skimming through his favourite news-sheets, greeting old
+acquaintances and friends, from ambassadors down to cobblers in
+the social scale.&nbsp; He seldom talked of his travels, but it
+might be said that his travels talked of him; there was an air
+about him that a German diplomat once summed up in a phrase:
+&ldquo;a man that wolves have sniffed at.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And then two things happened, which he had not mapped out in
+his route; a severe illness shook half the life and all the
+energy out of him, and a heavy money loss brought him almost to
+the door of destitution.&nbsp; With something, perhaps, of the
+impulse which drives a stricken animal away from its kind, Tom
+Keriway left the haunts where he had known so much happiness, and
+withdrew into the shelter of a secluded farmhouse lodging; more
+than ever he became to Elaine a hearsay personality.&nbsp; And
+now the chance meeting with the caravan had flung her across the
+threshold of his retreat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What a charming little nook you&rsquo;ve got hold
+of,&rdquo; she exclaimed with instinctive politeness, and then
+looked searchingly round, and discovered that she had spoken the
+truth; it really was charming.&nbsp; The farmhouse had that
+intensely English look that one seldom sees out of
+Normandy.&nbsp; Over the whole scene of rickyard, garden,
+outbuildings, horsepond and orchard, brooded that air which seems
+rightfully to belong to out-of-the-way farmyards, an air of
+wakeful dreaminess which suggests that here, man and beast and
+bird have got up so early that the rest of the world has never
+caught them up and never will.</p>
+<p>Elaine dismounted, and Keriway led the mare round to a little
+paddock by the side of a great grey barn.&nbsp; At the end of the
+lane they could see the show go past, a string of lumbering vans
+and great striding beasts that seemed to link the vast silences
+of the desert with the noises and sights and smells, the
+naphtha-flares and advertisement hoardings and trampled
+orange-peel, of an endless succession of towns.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You had better let the caravan pass well on its way
+before you get on the road again,&rdquo; said Keriway; &ldquo;the
+smell of the beasts may make your mare nervous and restive going
+home.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then he called to a boy who was busy with a hoe among some
+defiantly prosperous weeds, to fetch the lady a glass of milk and
+a piece of currant loaf.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know when I&rsquo;ve seen anything so
+utterly charming and peaceful,&rdquo; said Elaine, propping
+herself on a seat that a pear-tree had obligingly designed in the
+fantastic curve of its trunk.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Charming, certainly,&rdquo; said Keriway, &ldquo;but
+too full of the stress of its own little life struggle to be
+peaceful.&nbsp; Since I have lived here I&rsquo;ve learnt, what
+I&rsquo;ve always suspected, that a country farmhouse, set away
+in a world of its own, is one of the most wonderful studies of
+interwoven happenings and tragedies that can be imagined.&nbsp;
+It is like the old chronicles of medieval Europe in the days when
+there was a sort of ordered anarchy between feudal lords and
+overlords, and burg-grafs, and mitred abbots, and prince-bishops,
+robber barons and merchant guilds, and Electors and so forth, all
+striving and contending and counter-plotting, and interfering
+with each other under some vague code of loosely-applied
+rules.&nbsp; Here one sees it reproduced under one&rsquo;s eyes,
+like a musty page of black-letter come to life.&nbsp; Look at one
+little section of it, the poultry-life on the farm.&nbsp; Villa
+poultry, dull egg-machines, with records kept of how many ounces
+of food they eat, and how many pennyworths of eggs they lay, give
+you no idea of the wonder-life of these farm-birds; their feuds
+and jealousies, and carefully maintained prerogatives, their
+unsparing tyrannies and persecutions, their calculated courage
+and bravado or sedulously hidden cowardice, it might all be some
+human chapter from the annals of the old Rhineland or medieval
+Italy.&nbsp; And then, outside their own bickering wars and
+hates, the grim enemies that come up against them from the
+woodlands; the hawk that dashes among the coops like a
+moss-trooper raiding the border, knowing well that a charge of
+shot may tear him to bits at any moment.&nbsp; And the stoat, a
+creeping slip of brown fur a few inches long, intently and
+unstayably out for blood.&nbsp; And the hunger-taught master of
+craft, the red fox, who has waited perhaps half the afternoon for
+his chance while the fowls were dusting themselves under the
+hedge, and just as they were turning supper-ward to the yard one
+has stopped a moment to give her feathers a final shake and found
+death springing upon her.&nbsp; Do you know,&rdquo; he continued,
+as Elaine fed herself and the mare with morsels of currant-loaf,
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think any tragedy in literature that I have
+ever come across impressed me so much as the first one, that I
+spelled out slowly for myself in words of three letters: the bad
+fox has got the red hen.&nbsp; There was something so
+dramatically complete about it; the badness of the fox, added to
+all the traditional guile of his race, seemed to heighten the
+horror of the hen&rsquo;s fate, and there was such a suggestion
+of masterful malice about the word &lsquo;got.&rsquo;&nbsp; One
+felt that a countryside in arms would not get that hen away from
+the bad fox.&nbsp; They used to think me a slow dull reader for
+not getting on with my lesson, but I used to sit and picture to
+myself the red hen, with its wings beating helplessly, screeching
+in terrified protest, or perhaps, if he had got it by the neck,
+with beak wide agape and silent, and eyes staring, as it left the
+farmyard for ever.&nbsp; I have seen blood-spillings and
+down-crushings and abject defeat here and there in my time, but
+the red hen has remained in my mind as the type of helpless
+tragedy.&rdquo;&nbsp; He was silent for a moment as if he were
+again musing over the three-letter drama that had so dwelt in his
+childhood&rsquo;s imagination.&nbsp; &ldquo;Tell me some of the
+things you have seen in your time,&rdquo; was the request that
+was nearly on Elaine&rsquo;s lips, but she hastily checked
+herself and substituted another.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tell me more about the farm, please.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And he told her of a whole world, or rather of several
+intermingled worlds, set apart in this sleepy hollow in the
+hills, of beast lore and wood lore and farm craft, at times
+touching almost the border of witchcraft&mdash;passing lightly
+here, not with the probing eagerness of those who know nothing,
+but with the averted glance of those who fear to see too
+much.&nbsp; He told her of those things that slept and those that
+prowled when the dusk fell, of strange hunting cats, of the yard
+swine and the stalled cattle, of the farm folk themselves, as
+curious and remote in their way, in their ideas and fears and
+wants and tragedies, as the brutes and feathered stock that they
+tended.&nbsp; It seemed to Elaine as if a musty store of
+old-world children&rsquo;s books had been fetched down from some
+cobwebbed lumber-room and brought to life.&nbsp; Sitting there in
+the little paddock, grown thickly with tall weeds and rank
+grasses, and shadowed by the weather-beaten old grey barn,
+listening to this chronicle of wonderful things, half fanciful,
+half very real, she could scarcely believe that a few miles away
+there was a garden-party in full swing, with smart frocks and
+smart conversation, fashionable refreshments and fashionable
+music, and a fevered undercurrent of social strivings and
+snubbings.&nbsp; Did Vienna and the Balkan Mountains and the
+Black Sea seem as remote and hard to believe in, she wondered, to
+the man sitting by her side, who had discovered or invented this
+wonderful fairyland?&nbsp; Was it a true and merciful arrangement
+of fate and life that the things of the moment thrust out the
+after-taste of the things that had been?&nbsp; Here was one who
+had held much that was priceless in the hollow of his hand and
+lost it all, and he was happy and absorbed and well-content with
+the little wayside corner of the world into which he had
+crept.&nbsp; And Elaine, who held so many desirable things in the
+hollow of her hand, could not make up her mind to be even
+moderately happy.&nbsp; She did not even know whether to take
+this hero of her childhood down from his pedestal, or to place
+him on a higher one; on the whole she was inclined to resent
+rather than approve the idea that ill-health and misfortune could
+so completely subdue and tame an erstwhile bold and roving
+spirit.</p>
+<p>The mare was showing signs of delicately-hinted impatience;
+the paddock, with its teasing insects and very indifferent
+grazing, had not thrust out the image of her own comfortable
+well-foddered loose-box.&nbsp; Elaine divested her habit of some
+remaining crumbs of bun-loaf and jumped lightly on to her
+saddle.&nbsp; As she rode slowly down the lane, with Keriway
+escorting her as far as its gate, she looked round at what had
+seemed to her, a short while ago, just a picturesque old
+farmstead, a place of bee-hives and hollyhocks and gabled
+cart-sheds; now it was in her eyes a magic city, with an
+undercurrent of reality beneath its magic.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are a person to be envied,&rdquo; she said to
+Keriway; &ldquo;you have created a fairyland, and you are living
+in it yourself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Envied?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He shot the question out with sudden bitterness.&nbsp; She
+looked down and saw the wistful misery that had come into his
+face.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Once,&rdquo; he said to her, &ldquo;in a German paper I
+read a short story about a tame crippled crane that lived in the
+park of some small town.&nbsp; I forget what happened in the
+story, but there was one line that I shall always remember:
+&lsquo;it was lame, that is why it was tame.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He had created a fairyland, but assuredly he was not living in
+it.</p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the warmth of a late June
+morning the long shaded stretch of raked earth, gravel-walk and
+rhododendron bush that is known affectionately as the Row was
+alive with the monotonous movement and alert stagnation
+appropriate to the time and place.&nbsp; The seekers after
+health, the seekers after notoriety and recognition, and the
+lovers of good exercise were all well represented on the
+galloping ground; the gravel-walk and chairs and long seats held
+a population whose varied instincts and motives would have
+baffled a social catalogue-maker.&nbsp; The children, handled or
+in perambulators, might be excused from instinct or motive; they
+were brought.</p>
+<p>Pleasingly conspicuous among a bunch of indifferent riders
+pacing along by the rails where the onlookers were thickest was
+Courtenay Youghal, on his handsome plum-roan gelding Anne de
+Joyeuse.&nbsp; That delicately stepping animal had taken a prize
+at Islington and nearly taken the life of a stable-boy of whom he
+disapproved, but his strongest claims to distinction were his
+good looks and his high opinion of himself.&nbsp; Youghal
+evidently believed in thorough accord between horse and
+rider.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Please stop and talk to me,&rdquo; said a quiet
+beckoning voice from the other side of the rails, and Youghal
+drew rein and greeted Lady Veula Croot.&nbsp; Lady Veula had
+married into a family of commercial solidity and enterprising
+political nonentity.&nbsp; She had a devoted husband, some blonde
+teachable children, and a look of unutterable weariness in her
+eyes.&nbsp; To see her standing at the top of an expensively
+horticultured staircase receiving her husband&rsquo;s guests was
+rather like watching an animal performing on a music-hall
+stage.</p>
+<p>One always tells oneself that the animal likes it, and one
+always knows that it doesn&rsquo;t.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lady Veula is an ardent Free Trader, isn&rsquo;t
+she?&rdquo; someone once remarked to Lady Caroline.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wonder,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline, in her gently
+questioning voice; &ldquo;a woman whose dresses are made in Paris
+and whose marriage has been made in Heaven might be equally
+biassed for and against free imports.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Veula looked at Youghal and his mount with slow critical
+appraisement, and there was a note of blended raillery and
+wistfulness in her voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You two dear things, I should love to stroke you both,
+but I&rsquo;m not sure how Joyeuse would take it.&nbsp; So
+I&rsquo;ll stroke you down verbally instead.&nbsp; I admired your
+attack on Sir Edward immensely, though of course I don&rsquo;t
+agree with a word of it.&nbsp; Your description of him building a
+hedge round the German cuckoo and hoping he was isolating it was
+rather sweet.&nbsp; Seriously though, I regard him as one of the
+pillars of the Administration.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So do I,&rdquo; said Youghal; &ldquo;the misfortune is
+that he is merely propping up a canvas roof.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
+just his regrettable solidity and integrity that makes him so
+expensively dangerous.&nbsp; The average Briton arrives at the
+same judgment about Roan&rsquo;s handling of foreign affairs as
+Omar does of the Supreme Being in his dealings with the world:
+He&rsquo;s a good fellow and &rsquo;twill all be
+well.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Veula laughed lightly.&nbsp; &ldquo;My Party is in power
+so I may exercise the privilege of being optimistic.&nbsp; Who is
+that who bowed to you?&rdquo; she continued, as a dark young man
+with an inclination to stoutness passed by them on foot;
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve seen him about a good deal lately.&nbsp;
+He&rsquo;s been to one or two of my dances.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Andrei Drakoloff,&rdquo; said Youghal;
+&ldquo;he&rsquo;s just produced a play that has had a big success
+in Moscow and is certain to be extremely popular all over
+Russia.&nbsp; In the first three acts the heroine is supposed to
+be dying of consumption; in the last act they find she is really
+dying of cancer.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are the Russians really such a gloomy
+people?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Gloom-loving but not in the least gloomy.&nbsp; They
+merely take their sadness pleasurably, just as we are accused of
+taking our pleasures sadly.&nbsp; Have you noticed that dreadful
+Klopstock youth has been pounding past us at shortening
+intervals.&nbsp; He&rsquo;ll come up and talk if he half catches
+your eye.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I only just know him.&nbsp; Isn&rsquo;t he at an
+agricultural college or something of the sort?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, studying to be a gentleman farmer, he told
+me.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t ask if both subjects were
+compulsory.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re really rather dreadful,&rdquo; said Lady
+Veula, trying to look as if she thought so; &ldquo;remember, we
+are all equal in the sight of Heaven.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For a preacher of wholesome truths her voice rather lacked
+conviction.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If I and Ernest Klopstock are really equal in the sight
+of Heaven,&rdquo; said Youghal, with intense complacency,
+&ldquo;I should recommend Heaven to consult an eye
+specialist.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was a heavy spattering of loose earth, and a squelching
+of saddle-leather, as the Klopstock youth lumbered up to the
+rails and delivered himself of loud, cheerful greetings. Joyeuse
+laid his ears well back as the ungainly bay cob and his
+appropriately matched rider drew up beside him; his verdict was
+reflected and endorsed by the cold stare of Youghal&rsquo;s
+eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been having a nailing fine time,&rdquo;
+recounted the newcomer with clamorous enthusiasm; &ldquo;I was
+over in Paris last month and had lots of strawberries there, then
+I had a lot more in London, and now I&rsquo;ve been having a late
+crop of them in Herefordshire, so I&rsquo;ve had quite a lot this
+year.&rdquo;&nbsp; And he laughed as one who had deserved well
+and received well of Fate.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The charm of that story,&rdquo; said Youghal, &ldquo;is
+that it can be told in any drawing-room.&rdquo;&nbsp; And with a
+sweep of his wide-brimmed hat to Lady Veula he turned the
+impatient Joyeuse into the moving stream of horse and
+horsemen.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That woman reminds me of some verse I&rsquo;ve read and
+liked,&rdquo; thought Youghal, as Joyeuse sprang into a light
+showy canter that gave full recognition to the existence of
+observant human beings along the side walk.&nbsp; &ldquo;Ah, I
+have it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And he quoted almost aloud, as one does in the exhilaration of
+a canter:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;How much I loved that way you had<br />
+Of smiling most, when very sad,<br />
+A smile which carried tender hints<br />
+Of sun and spring,<br />
+And yet, more than all other thing,<br />
+Of weariness beyond all words.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>And having satisfactorily fitted Lady Veula on to a quotation
+he dismissed her from his mind.&nbsp; With the constancy of her
+sex she thought about him, his good looks and his youth and his
+railing tongue, till late in the afternoon.</p>
+<p>While Youghal was putting Joyeuse through his paces under the
+elm trees of the Row a little drama in which he was directly
+interested was being played out not many hundred yards
+away.&nbsp; Elaine and Comus were indulging themselves in two
+pennyworths of Park chair, drawn aside just a little from the
+serried rows of sitters who were set out like bedded plants over
+an acre or so of turf.&nbsp; Comus was, for the moment, in a mood
+of pugnacious gaiety, disbursing a fund of pointed criticism and
+unsparing anecdote concerning those of the promenaders or
+loungers whom he knew personally or by sight.&nbsp; Elaine was
+rather quieter than usual, and the grave serenity of the Leonardo
+da Vinci portrait seemed intensified in her face this
+morning.&nbsp; In his leisurely courtship Comus had relied almost
+exclusively on his physical attraction and the fitful drollery of
+his wit and high spirits, and these graces had gone far to make
+him seem a very desirable and rather lovable thing in
+Elaine&rsquo;s eyes.&nbsp; But he had left out of account the
+disfavour which he constantly risked and sometimes incurred from
+his frank and undisguised indifference to other people&rsquo;s
+interests and wishes, including, at times, Elaine&rsquo;s.&nbsp;
+And the more that she felt that she liked him the more she was
+irritated by his lack of consideration for her.&nbsp; Without
+expecting that her every wish should become a law to him she
+would at least have liked it to reach the formality of a Second
+Reading.&nbsp; Another important factor he had also left out of
+his reckoning, namely the presence on the scene of another
+suitor, who also had youth and wit to recommend him, and who
+certainly did not lack physical attractions.&nbsp; Comus,
+marching carelessly through unknown country to effect what seemed
+already an assured victory, made the mistake of disregarding the
+existence of an unbeaten army on his flank.</p>
+<p>To-day Elaine felt that, without having actually quarrelled,
+she and Comus had drifted a little bit out of sympathy with one
+another.&nbsp; The fault she knew was scarcely hers, in fact from
+the most good-natured point of view it could hardly be denied
+that it was almost entirely his.&nbsp; The incident of the silver
+dish had lacked even the attraction of novelty; it had been one
+of a series, all bearing a strong connecting likeness.&nbsp;
+There had been small unrepaid loans which Elaine would not have
+grudged in themselves, though the application for them brought a
+certain qualm of distaste; with the perversity which seemed
+inseparable from his doings, Comus had always flung away a
+portion of his borrowings in some ostentatious piece of glaring
+and utterly profitless extravagance, which outraged all the
+canons of her upbringing without bringing him an atom of
+understandable satisfaction.&nbsp; Under these repeated
+discouragements it was not surprising that some small part of her
+affection should have slipped away, but she had come to the Park
+that morning with an unconfessed expectation of being gently
+wooed back to the mood of gracious forgetfulness that she was
+only too eager to assume.&nbsp; It was almost worth while being
+angry with Comus for the sake of experiencing the pleasure of
+being coaxed into friendliness again with the charm which he knew
+so well how to exert.&nbsp; It was delicious here under the trees
+on this perfect June morning, and Elaine had the blessed
+assurance that most of the women within range were envying her
+the companionship of the handsome merry-hearted youth who sat by
+her side.&nbsp; With special complacence she contemplated her
+cousin Suzette, who was self-consciously but not very elatedly
+basking in the attentions of her fianc&eacute;, an
+earnest-looking young man who was superintendent of a
+People&rsquo;s something-or-other on the south side of the river,
+and whose clothes Comus had described as having been made in
+Southwark rather than in anger.</p>
+<p>Most of the pleasures in life must be paid for, and the
+chair-ticket vendor in due time made his appearance in quest of
+pennies.</p>
+<p>Comus paid him from out of a varied assortment of coins and
+then balanced the remainder in the palm of his hand.&nbsp; Elaine
+felt a sudden foreknowledge of something disagreeable about to
+happen and a red spot deepened in her cheeks.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Four shillings and fivepence and a half-penny,&rdquo;
+said Comus, reflectively.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a ridiculous
+sum to last me for the next three days, and I owe a card debt of
+over two pounds.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes?&rdquo; commented Elaine dryly and with an apparent
+lack of interest in his exchequer statement.&nbsp; Surely, she
+was thinking hurriedly to herself, he could not be foolish enough
+to broach the matter of another loan.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The card debt is rather a nuisance,&rdquo; pursued
+Comus, with fatalistic persistency.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You won seven pounds last week, didn&rsquo;t
+you?&rdquo; asked Elaine; &ldquo;don&rsquo;t you put by any of
+your winnings to balance losses?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The four shillings and the fivepence and the half-penny
+represent the rearguard of the seven pounds,&rdquo; said Comus;
+&ldquo;the rest have fallen by the way.&nbsp; If I can pay the
+two pounds to-day I daresay I shall win something more to go on
+with; I&rsquo;m holding rather good cards just now.&nbsp; But if
+I can&rsquo;t pay it of course I shan&rsquo;t show up at the
+club.&nbsp; So you see the fix I am in.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Elaine took no notice of this indirect application.&nbsp; The
+Appeal Court was assembling in haste to consider new evidence,
+and this time there was the rapidity of sudden determination
+about its movement.</p>
+<p>The conversation strayed away from the fateful topic for a few
+moments and then Comus brought it deliberately back to the danger
+zone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would be awfully nice if you would let me have a
+fiver for a few days, Elaine,&rdquo; he said quickly; &ldquo;if
+you don&rsquo;t I really don&rsquo;t know what I shall
+do.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you are really bothered about your card debt I will
+send you the two pounds by messenger boy early this
+afternoon.&rdquo;&nbsp; She spoke quietly and with great
+decision.&nbsp; &ldquo;And I shall not be at the Connor&rsquo;s
+dance to-night,&rdquo; she continued; &ldquo;it&rsquo;s too hot
+for dancing.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m going home now; please don&rsquo;t
+bother to accompany me, I particularly wish to go
+alone.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Comus saw that he had overstepped the mark of her good
+nature.&nbsp; Wisely he made no immediate attempt to force
+himself back into her good graces.&nbsp; He would wait till her
+indignation had cooled.</p>
+<p>His tactics would have been excellent if he had not forgotten
+that unbeaten army on his flank.</p>
+<p>Elaine de Frey had known very clearly what qualities she had
+wanted in Comus, and she had known, against all efforts at
+self-deception, that he fell far short of those qualities.&nbsp;
+She had been willing to lower her standard of moral requirements
+in proportion as she was fond of the boy, but there was a point
+beyond which she would not go.&nbsp; He had hurt her pride
+besides alarming her sense of caution.</p>
+<p>Suzette, on whom she felt a thoroughly justified tendency to
+look down, had at any rate an attentive and considerate
+lover.&nbsp; Elaine walked towards the Park gates feeling that in
+one essential Suzette possessed something that had been denied to
+her, and at the gates she met Joyeuse and his spruce young rider
+preparing to turn homeward.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Get rid of Joyeuse and come and take me out to lunch
+somewhere,&rdquo; demanded Elaine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How jolly,&rdquo; said Youghal.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s go to the Corridor Restaurant.&nbsp; The head
+waiter there is an old Viennese friend of mine and looks after me
+beautifully.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve never been there with a lady
+before, and he&rsquo;s sure to ask me afterwards, in his fatherly
+way, if we&rsquo;re engaged.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The lunch was a success in every way.&nbsp; There was just
+enough orchestral effort to immerse the conversation without
+drowning it, and Youghal was an attentive and inspired
+host.&nbsp; Through an open doorway Elaine could see the
+caf&eacute; reading-room, with its imposing array of <i>Neue
+Freie Presse</i>, <i>Berliner Tageblatt</i>, and other exotic
+newspapers hanging on the wall.&nbsp; She looked across at the
+young man seated opposite her, who gave one the impression of
+having centred the most serious efforts of his brain on his
+toilet and his food, and recalled some of the flattering remarks
+that the press had bestowed on his recent speeches.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Doesn&rsquo;t it make you conceited, Courtenay,&rdquo;
+she asked, &ldquo;to look at all those foreign newspapers hanging
+there and know that most of them have got paragraphs and articles
+about your Persian speech?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Youghal laughed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s always a chastening corrective in the
+thought that some of them may have printed your portrait.&nbsp;
+When once you&rsquo;ve seen your features hurriedly reproduced in
+the <i>Matin</i>, for instance, you feel you would like to be a
+veiled Turkish woman for the rest of your life.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And Youghal gazed long and lovingly at his reflection in the
+nearest mirror, as an antidote against possible incitements to
+humility in the portrait gallery of fame.</p>
+<p>Elaine felt a certain soothed satisfaction in the fact that
+this young man, whose knowledge of the Middle East was an
+embarrassment to Ministers at question time and in debate, was
+showing himself equally well-informed on the subject of her
+culinary likes and dislikes.&nbsp; If Suzette could have been
+forced to attend as a witness at a neighbouring table she would
+have felt even happier.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did the head waiter ask if we were engaged?&rdquo;
+asked Elaine, when Courtenay had settled the bill, and she had
+finished collecting her sunshade and gloves and other impedimenta
+from the hands of obsequious attendants.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Youghal, &ldquo;and he seemed quite
+crestfallen when I had to say &lsquo;no.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would be horrid to disappoint him when he&rsquo;s
+looked after us so charmingly,&rdquo; said Elaine; &ldquo;tell
+him that we are.&rdquo;</p>
+<h2>CHAPTER X</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> Rutland Galleries were crowded,
+especially in the neighbourhood of the tea-buffet, by a
+fashionable throng of art-patrons which had gathered to inspect
+Mervyn Quentock&rsquo;s collection of Society portraits.&nbsp;
+Quentock was a young artist whose abilities were just receiving
+due recognition from the critics; that the recognition was not
+overdue he owed largely to his perception of the fact that if one
+hides one&rsquo;s talent under a bushel one must be careful to
+point out to everyone the exact bushel under which it is
+hidden.&nbsp; There are two manners of receiving recognition: one
+is to be discovered so long after one&rsquo;s death that
+one&rsquo;s grandchildren have to write to the papers to
+establish their relationship; the other is to be discovered, like
+the infant Moses, at the very outset of one&rsquo;s career.&nbsp;
+Mervyn Quentock had chosen the latter and happier manner.&nbsp;
+In an age when many aspiring young men strive to advertise their
+wares by imparting to them a freakish imbecility, Quentock turned
+out work that was characterised by a pleasing delicate restraint,
+but he contrived to herald his output with a certain fanfare of
+personal eccentricity, thereby compelling an attention which
+might otherwise have strayed past his studio.&nbsp; In appearance
+he was the ordinary cleanly young Englishman, except, perhaps,
+that his eyes rather suggested a library edition of the Arabian
+Nights; his clothes matched his appearance and showed no taint of
+the sartorial disorder by which the bourgeois of the garden-city
+and the Latin Quarter anxiously seeks to proclaim his kinship
+with art and thought.&nbsp; His eccentricity took the form of
+flying in the face of some of the prevailing social currents of
+the day, but as a reactionary, never as a reformer.&nbsp; He
+produced a gasp of admiring astonishment in fashionable circles
+by refusing to paint actresses&mdash;except, of course, those who
+had left the legitimate drama to appear between the boards of
+Debrett.&nbsp; He absolutely declined to execute portraits of
+Americans unless they hailed from certain favoured States.&nbsp;
+His &ldquo;water-colour-line,&rdquo; as a New York paper phrased
+it, earned for him a crop of angry criticisms and a shoal of
+Transatlantic commissions, and criticism and commissions were the
+things that Quentock most wanted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course he is perfectly right,&rdquo; said Lady
+Caroline Benaresq, calmly rescuing a piled-up plate of caviare
+sandwiches from the neighbourhood of a trio of young ladies who
+had established themselves hopefully within easy reach of
+it.&nbsp; &ldquo;Art,&rdquo; she continued, addressing herself to
+the Rev. Poltimore Vardon, &ldquo;has always been geographically
+exclusive.&nbsp; London may be more important from most points of
+view than Venice, but the art of portrait painting, which would
+never concern itself with a Lord Mayor, simply grovels at the
+feet of the Doges.&nbsp; As a Socialist I&rsquo;m bound to
+recognise the right of Ealing to compare itself with Avignon, but
+one cannot expect the Muses to put the two on a level.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Exclusiveness,&rdquo; said the Reverend Poltimore,
+&ldquo;has been the salvation of Art, just as the lack of it is
+proving the downfall of religion.&nbsp; My colleagues of the
+cloth go about zealously proclaiming the fact that Christianity,
+in some form or other, is attracting shoals of converts among all
+sorts of races and tribes, that one had scarcely ever heard of,
+except in reviews of books of travel that one never read.&nbsp;
+That sort of thing was all very well when the world was more
+sparsely populated, but nowadays, when it simply teems with human
+beings, no one is particularly impressed by the fact that a few
+million, more or less, of converts, of a low stage of mental
+development, have accepted the teachings of some particular
+religion.&nbsp; It not only chills one&rsquo;s enthusiasm, it
+positively shakes one&rsquo;s convictions when one hears that the
+things one has been brought up to believe as true are being very
+favourably spoken of by Buriats and Samoyeds and
+Kanakas.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The Rev. Poltimore Vardon had once seen a resemblance in
+himself to Voltaire, and had lived alongside the comparison ever
+since.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No modern cult or fashion,&rdquo; he continued,
+&ldquo;would be favourably influenced by considerations based on
+statistics; fancy adopting a certain style of hat or cut of coat,
+because it was being largely worn in Lancashire and the Midlands;
+fancy favouring a certain brand of champagne because it was being
+extensively patronised in German summer resorts.&nbsp; No wonder
+that religion is falling into disuse in this country under such
+ill-directed methods.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t prevent the heathen being converted if
+they choose to be,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline; &ldquo;this is an
+age of toleration.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You could always deny it,&rdquo; said the Rev.
+Poltimore, &ldquo;like the Belgians do with regrettable
+occurrences in the Congo.&nbsp; But I would go further than
+that.&nbsp; I would stimulate the waning enthusiasm for
+Christianity in this country by labelling it as the exclusive
+possession of a privileged few.&nbsp; If one could induce the
+Duchess of Pelm, for instance, to assert that the Kingdom of
+Heaven, as far as the British Isles are concerned, is strictly
+limited to herself, two of the under-gardeners at Pelmby, and,
+possibly, but not certainly, the Dean of Dunster, there would be
+an instant reshaping of the popular attitude towards religious
+convictions and observances.&nbsp; Once let the idea get about
+that the Christian Church is rather more exclusive than the Lawn
+at Ascot, and you would have a quickening of religious life such
+as this generation has never witnessed.&nbsp; But as long as the
+clergy and the religious organisations advertise their creed on
+the lines of &lsquo;Everybody ought to believe in us: millions
+do,&rsquo; one can expect nothing but indifference and waning
+faith.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Time is just as exclusive in its way as Art,&rdquo;
+said Lady Caroline.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In what way?&rdquo; said the Reverend Poltimore.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your pleasantries about religion would have sounded
+quite clever and advanced in the early &rsquo;nineties.&nbsp;
+To-day they have a dreadfully warmed-up flavour.&nbsp; That is
+the great delusion of you would-be advanced satirists; you
+imagine you can sit down comfortably for a couple of decades
+saying daring and startling things about the age you live in,
+which, whatever other defects it may have, is certainly not
+standing still.&nbsp; The whole of the Sherard Blaw school of
+discursive drama suggests, to my mind, Early Victorian furniture
+in a travelling circus.&nbsp; However, you will always have
+relays of people from the suburbs to listen to the Mocking Bird
+of yesterday, and sincerely imagine it is the harbinger of
+something new and revolutionising.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Would</i> you mind passing that plate of
+sandwiches,&rdquo; asked one of the trio of young ladies,
+emboldened by famine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;With pleasure,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline, deftly
+passing her a nearly empty plate of bread-and-butter.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I meant the place of caviare sandwiches.&nbsp; So sorry
+to trouble you,&rdquo; persisted the young lady.</p>
+<p>Her sorrow was misapplied; Lady Caroline had turned her
+attention to a newcomer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A very interesting exhibition,&rdquo; Ada Spelvexit was
+saying; &ldquo;faultless technique, as far as I am a judge of
+technique, and quite a master-touch in the way of poses.&nbsp;
+But have you noticed how very animal his art is?&nbsp; He seems
+to shut out the soul from his portraits.&nbsp; I nearly cried
+when I saw dear Winifred depicted simply as a good-looking
+healthy blonde.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wish you had,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline; &ldquo;the
+spectacle of a strong, brave woman weeping at a private view in
+the Rutland Galleries would have been so sensational.&nbsp; It
+would certainly have been reproduced in the next Drury Lane
+drama.&nbsp; And I&rsquo;m so unlucky; I never see these
+sensational events.&nbsp; I was ill with appendicitis, you know,
+when Lulu Braminguard dramatically forgave her husband, after
+seventeen years of estrangement, during a State luncheon party at
+Windsor.&nbsp; The old queen was furious about it.&nbsp; She said
+it was so disrespectful to the cook to be thinking of such a
+thing at such a time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Caroline&rsquo;s recollections of things that
+hadn&rsquo;t happened at the Court of Queen Victoria were
+notoriously vivid; it was the very widespread fear that she might
+one day write a book of reminiscences that made her so
+universally respected.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As for his full-length picture of Lady
+Brickfield,&rdquo; continued Ada, ignoring Lady Caroline&rsquo;s
+commentary as far as possible, &ldquo;all the expression seems to
+have been deliberately concentrated in the feet; beautiful feet,
+no doubt, but still, hardly the most distinctive part of a human
+being.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To paint the right people at the wrong end may be an
+eccentricity, but it is scarcely an indiscretion,&rdquo;
+pronounced Lady Caroline.</p>
+<p>One of the portraits which attracted more than a passing
+flutter of attention was a costume study of Francesca
+Bassington.&nbsp; Francesca had secured some highly desirable
+patronage for the young artist, and in return he had enriched her
+pantheon of personal possessions with a clever piece of work into
+which he had thrown an unusual amount of imaginative
+detail.&nbsp; He had painted her in a costume of the great
+Louis&rsquo;s brightest period, seated in front of a tapestry
+that was so prominent in the composition that it could scarcely
+be said to form part of the background.&nbsp; Flowers and fruit,
+in exotic profusion, were its dominant note; quinces,
+pomegranates, passion-flowers, giant convolvulus, great
+mauve-pink roses, and grapes that were already being pressed by
+gleeful cupids in a riotous Arcadian vintage, stood out on its
+woven texture.&nbsp; The same note was struck in the beflowered
+satin of the lady&rsquo;s kirtle, and in the pomegranate pattern
+of the brocade that draped the couch on which she was
+seated.&nbsp; The artist had called his picture
+&ldquo;Recolte.&rdquo;&nbsp; And after one had taken in all the
+details of fruit and flower and foliage that earned the
+composition its name, one noted the landscape that showed through
+a broad casement in the left-hand corner.&nbsp; It was a
+landscape clutched in the grip of winter, naked, bleak,
+black-frozen; a winter in which things died and knew no
+rewakening.&nbsp; If the picture typified harvest, it was a
+harvest of artificial growth.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It leaves a great deal to the imagination,
+doesn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; said Ada Spelvexit, who had edged away
+from the range of Lady Caroline&rsquo;s tongue.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At any rate one can tell who it&rsquo;s meant
+for,&rdquo; said Serena Golackly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes, it&rsquo;s a good likeness of dear
+Francesca,&rdquo; admitted Ada; &ldquo;of course, it flatters
+her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That, too, is a fault on the right side in portrait
+painting,&rdquo; said Serena; &ldquo;after all, if posterity is
+going to stare at one for centuries it&rsquo;s only kind and
+reasonable to be looking just a little better than one&rsquo;s
+best.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What a curiously unequal style the artist has,&rdquo;
+continued Ada, almost as if she felt a personal grievance against
+him; &ldquo;I was just noticing what a lack of soul there was in
+most of his portraits.&nbsp; Dear Winifred, you know, who speaks
+so beautifully and feelingly at my gatherings for old women,
+he&rsquo;s made her look just an ordinary dairy-maidish blonde;
+and Francesca, who is quite the most soulless woman I&rsquo;ve
+ever met, well, he&rsquo;s given her quite&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hush,&rdquo; said Serena, &ldquo;the Bassington boy is
+just behind you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Comus stood looking at the portrait of his mother with the
+feeling of one who comes suddenly across a once-familiar
+half-forgotten acquaintance in unfamiliar surroundings.&nbsp; The
+likeness was undoubtedly a good one, but the artist had caught an
+expression in Francesca&rsquo;s eyes which few people had ever
+seen there.&nbsp; It was the expression of a woman who had
+forgotten for one short moment to be absorbed in the small cares
+and excitements of her life, the money worries and little social
+plannings, and had found time to send a look of half-wistful
+friendliness to some sympathetic companion.&nbsp; Comus could
+recall that look, fitful and fleeting, in his mother&rsquo;s eyes
+when she had been a few years younger, before her world had grown
+to be such a committee-room of ways and means.&nbsp; Almost as a
+re-discovery he remembered that she had once figured in his
+boyish mind as a &ldquo;rather good sort,&rdquo; more ready to
+see the laughable side of a piece of mischief than to labour
+forth a reproof.&nbsp; That the bygone feeling of good fellowship
+had been stamped out was, he knew, probably in great part his own
+doing, and it was possible that the old friendliness was still
+there under the surface of things, ready to show itself again if
+he willed it, and friends were becoming scarcer with him than
+enemies in these days.&nbsp; Looking at the picture with its
+wistful hint of a long ago comradeship, Comus made up his mind
+that he very much wanted things to be back on their earlier
+footing, and to see again on his mother&rsquo;s face the look
+that the artist had caught and perpetuated in its momentary
+flitting.&nbsp; If the projected Elaine-marriage came off, and in
+spite of recent maladroit behaviour on his part he still counted
+it an assured thing, much of the immediate cause for estrangement
+between himself and his mother would be removed, or at any rate,
+easily removable.&nbsp; With the influence of Elaine&rsquo;s
+money behind him he promised himself that he would find some
+occupation that would remove from himself the reproach of being a
+waster and idler.&nbsp; There were lots of careers, he told
+himself, that were open to a man with solid financial backing and
+good connections.&nbsp; There might yet be jolly times ahead, in
+which his mother would have her share of the good things that
+were going, and carking thin-lipped Henry Greech and other of
+Comus&rsquo;s detractors could take their sour looks and words
+out of sight and hearing.&nbsp; Thus, staring at the picture as
+though he were studying its every detail, and seeing really only
+that wistful friendly smile, Comus made his plans and
+dispositions for a battle that was already fought and lost.</p>
+<p>The crowd grew thicker in the galleries, cheerfully enduring
+an amount of overcrowding that would have been fiercely resented
+in a railway carriage.&nbsp; Near the entrance Mervyn Quentock
+was talking to a Serene Highness, a lady who led a life of
+obtrusive usefulness, largely imposed on her by a good-natured
+inability to say &ldquo;No.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;That woman
+creates a positive draught with the number of bazaars she
+opens,&rdquo; a frivolously-spoken ex-Cabinet Minister had once
+remarked.&nbsp; At the present moment she was being whimsically
+apologetic.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When I think of the legions of well-meaning young men
+and women to whom I&rsquo;ve given away prizes for proficiency in
+art-school curriculum, I feel that I ought not to show my face
+inside a picture gallery.&nbsp; I always imagine that my
+punishment in another world will be perpetually sharpening
+pencils and cleaning palettes for unending relays of misguided
+young people whom I deliberately encouraged in their artistic
+delusions.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you suppose we shall all get appropriate punishments
+in another world for our sins in this?&rdquo; asked Quentock.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not so much for our sins as for our indiscretions; they
+are the things which do the most harm and cause the greatest
+trouble.&nbsp; I feel certain that Christopher Columbus will
+undergo the endless torment of being discovered by parties of
+American tourists.&nbsp; You see I am quite old fashioned in my
+ideas about the terrors and inconveniences of the next
+world.&nbsp; And now I must be running away; I&rsquo;ve got to
+open a Free Library somewhere.&nbsp; You know the sort of thing
+that happens&mdash;one unveils a bust of Carlyle and makes a
+speech about Ruskin, and then people come in their thousands and
+read &lsquo;Rabid Ralph, or Should he have Bitten
+Her?&rsquo;&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t forget, please, I&rsquo;m going to
+have the medallion with the fat cupid sitting on a sundial.&nbsp;
+And just one thing more&mdash;perhaps I ought not to ask you, but
+you have such nice kind eyes, you embolden one to make daring
+requests, would you send me the recipe for those lovely
+chestnut-and-chicken-liver sandwiches?&nbsp; I know the
+ingredients of course, but it&rsquo;s the proportions that make
+such a difference&mdash;just how much liver to how much chestnut,
+and what amount of red pepper and other things.&nbsp; Thank you
+so much.&nbsp; I really am going now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Staring round with a vague half-smile at everybody within
+nodding distance, Her Serene Highness made one of her
+characteristic exits, which Lady Caroline declared always
+reminded her of a scrambled egg slipping off a piece of
+toast.&nbsp; At the entrance she stopped for a moment to exchange
+a word or two with a young man who had just arrived.&nbsp; From a
+corner where he was momentarily hemmed in by a group of
+tea-consuming dowagers, Comus recognised the newcomer as
+Courtenay Youghal, and began slowly to labour his way towards
+him.&nbsp; Youghal was not at the moment the person whose society
+he most craved for in the world, but there was at least the
+possibility that he might provide an opportunity for a game of
+bridge, which was the dominant desire of the moment.&nbsp; The
+young politician was already surrounded by a group of friends and
+acquaintances, and was evidently being made the recipient of a
+salvo of congratulation&mdash;presumably on his recent
+performances in the Foreign Office debate, Comus concluded.&nbsp;
+But Youghal himself seemed to be announcing the event with which
+the congratulations were connected.&nbsp; Had some dramatic
+catastrophe overtaken the Government, Comus wondered.&nbsp; And
+then, as he pressed nearer, a chance word, the coupling of two
+names, told him the news.</p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">After</span> the momentous lunch at the
+Corridor Restaurant Elaine had returned to Manchester Square
+(where she was staying with one of her numerous aunts) in a frame
+of mind that embraced a tangle of competing emotions.&nbsp; In
+the first place she was conscious of a dominant feeling of
+relief; in a moment of impetuosity, not wholly uninfluenced by
+pique, she had settled the problem which hours of hard thinking
+and serious heart-searching had brought no nearer to solution,
+and, although she felt just a little inclined to be scared at the
+headlong manner of her final decision, she had now very little
+doubt in her own mind that the decision had been the right
+one.&nbsp; In fact the wonder seemed rather that she should have
+been so long in doubt as to which of her wooers really enjoyed
+her honest approval.&nbsp; She had been in love, these many weeks
+past with an imaginary Comus, but now that she had definitely
+walked out of her dreamland she saw that nearly all the qualities
+that had appealed to her on his behalf had been absent from, or
+only fitfully present in, the character of the real Comus.&nbsp;
+And now that she had installed Youghal in the first place of her
+affections he had rapidly acquired in her eyes some of the
+qualities which ranked highest in her estimation.&nbsp; Like the
+proverbial buyer she had the happy feminine tendency of
+magnifying the worth of her possession as soon as she had
+acquired it.&nbsp; And Courtenay Youghal gave Elaine some
+justification for her sense of having chosen wisely.&nbsp; Above
+all other things, selfish and cynical though he might appear at
+times, he was unfailingly courteous and considerate towards
+her.&nbsp; That was a circumstance which would always have
+carried weight with her in judging any man; in this case its
+value was enormously heightened by contrast with the behaviour of
+her other wooer.&nbsp; And Youghal had in her eyes the advantage
+which the glamour of combat, even the combat of words and
+wire-pulling, throws over the fighter.&nbsp; He stood well in the
+forefront of a battle which however carefully stage-managed,
+however honeycombed with personal insincerities and overlaid with
+calculated mock-heroics, really meant something, really counted
+for good or wrong in the nation&rsquo;s development and the
+world&rsquo;s history.&nbsp; Shrewd parliamentary observers might
+have warned her that Youghal would never stand much higher in the
+political world than he did at present, as a brilliant Opposition
+freelance, leading lively and rather meaningless forays against
+the dull and rather purposeless foreign policy of a Government
+that was scarcely either to be blamed for or congratulated on its
+handling of foreign affairs.&nbsp; The young politician had not
+the strength of character or convictions that keeps a man
+naturally in the forefront of affairs and gives his counsels a
+sterling value, and on the other hand his insincerity was not
+deep enough to allow him to pose artificially and successfully as
+a leader of men and shaper of movements.&nbsp; For the moment,
+however, his place in public life was sufficiently marked out to
+give him a secure footing in that world where people are counted
+individually and not in herds.&nbsp; The woman whom he would make
+his wife would have the chance, too, if she had the will and the
+skill, to become an individual who counted.</p>
+<p>There was balm to Elaine in this reflection, yet it did not
+wholly suffice to drive out the feeling of pique which Comus had
+called into being by his slighting view of her as a convenient
+cash supply in moments of emergency.&nbsp; She found a certain
+satisfaction in scrupulously observing her promise, made earlier
+on that eventful day, and sent off a messenger with the
+stipulated loan.&nbsp; Then a reaction of compunction set in, and
+she reminded herself that in fairness she ought to write and tell
+her news in as friendly a fashion as possible to her dismissed
+suitor before it burst upon him from some other quarter.&nbsp;
+They had parted on more or less quarrelling terms it was true,
+but neither of them had foreseen the finality of the parting nor
+the permanence of the breach between them; Comus might even now
+be thinking himself half-forgiven, and the awakening would be
+rather cruel.&nbsp; The letter, however, did not prove an easy
+one to write; not only did it present difficulties of its own but
+it suffered from the competing urgency of a desire to be doing
+something far pleasanter than writing explanatory and valedictory
+phrases.&nbsp; Elaine was possessed with an unusual but quite
+overmastering hankering to visit her cousin Suzette
+Brankley.&nbsp; They met but rarely at each other&rsquo;s houses
+and very seldom anywhere else, and Elaine for her part was never
+conscious of feeling that their opportunities for intercourse
+lacked anything in the way of adequacy.&nbsp; Suzette accorded
+her just that touch of patronage which a moderately well-off and
+immoderately dull girl will usually try to mete out to an
+acquaintance who is known to be wealthy and suspected of
+possessing brains.&nbsp; In return Elaine armed herself with that
+particular brand of mock humility which can be so terribly
+disconcerting if properly wielded.&nbsp; No quarrel of any
+description stood between them and one could not legitimately
+have described them as enemies, but they never disarmed in one
+another&rsquo;s presence.&nbsp; A misfortune of any magnitude
+falling on one of them would have been sincerely regretted by the
+other, but any minor discomfiture would have produced a feeling
+very much akin to satisfaction.&nbsp; Human nature knows millions
+of these inconsequent little feuds, springing up and flourishing
+apart from any basis of racial, political, religious or economic
+causes, as a hint perhaps to crass unseeing altruists that enmity
+has its place and purpose in the world as well as
+benevolence.</p>
+<p>Elaine had not personally congratulated Suzette since the
+formal announcement of her engagement to the young man with the
+dissentient tailoring effects.&nbsp; The impulse to go and do so
+now, overmastered her sense of what was due to Comus in the way
+of explanation.&nbsp; The letter was still in its blank unwritten
+stage, an unmarshalled sequence of sentences forming in her
+brain, when she ordered her car and made a hurried but
+well-thought-out change into her most sumptuously sober afternoon
+toilette.&nbsp; Suzette, she felt tolerably sure, would still be
+in the costume that she had worn in the Park that morning, a
+costume that aimed at elaboration of detail, and was damned with
+overmuch success.</p>
+<p>Suzette&rsquo;s mother welcomed her unexpected visitor with
+obvious satisfaction.&nbsp; Her daughter&rsquo;s engagement, she
+explained, was not so brilliant from the social point of view as
+a girl of Suzette&rsquo;s attractions and advantages might have
+legitimately aspired to, but Egbert was a thoroughly commendable
+and dependable young man, who would very probably win his way
+before long to membership of the County Council.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;From there, of course, the road would be open to him to
+higher things.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Elaine, &ldquo;he might become an
+alderman.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Have you seen their photographs, taken together?&rdquo;
+asked Mrs. Brankley, abandoning the subject of Egbert&rsquo;s
+prospective career.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, do show me,&rdquo; said Elaine, with a flattering
+show of interest; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never seen that sort of thing
+before.&nbsp; It used to be the fashion once for engaged couples
+to be photographed together, didn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s <i>very</i> much the fashion now,&rdquo;
+said Mrs. Brankley assertively, but some of the complacency had
+filtered out of her voice.&nbsp; Suzette came into the room,
+wearing the dress that she had worn in the Park that morning.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course, you&rsquo;ve been hearing all about
+<i>the</i> engagement from mother,&rdquo; she cried, and then set
+to work conscientiously to cover the same ground.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We met at Grindelwald, you know.&nbsp; He always calls
+me his Ice Maiden because we first got to know each other on the
+skating rink.&nbsp; Quite romantic, wasn&rsquo;t it?&nbsp; Then
+we asked him to tea one day, and we got to be quite
+friendly.&nbsp; Then he proposed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He wasn&rsquo;t the only one who was smitten with
+Suzette,&rdquo; Mrs. Brankley hastened to put in, fearful lest
+Elaine might suppose that Egbert had had things all his own
+way.&nbsp; &ldquo;There was an American millionaire who was quite
+taken with her, and a Polish count of a very old family.&nbsp; I
+assure you I felt quite nervous at some of our
+tea-parties.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mrs. Brankley had given Grindelwald a sinister but rather
+alluring reputation among a large circle of untravelled friends
+as a place where the insolence of birth and wealth was held in
+precarious check from breaking forth into scenes of savage
+violence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My marriage with Egbert will, of course, enlarge the
+sphere of my life enormously,&rdquo; pursued Suzette.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Elaine; her eyes were rather
+remorselessly taking in the details of her cousin&rsquo;s
+toilette.&nbsp; It is said that nothing is sadder than victory
+except defeat.&nbsp; Suzette began to feel that the tragedy of
+both was concentrated in the creation which had given her such
+unalloyed gratification, till Elaine had come on the scene.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A woman can be so immensely helpful in the social way
+to a man who is making a career for himself.&nbsp; And I&rsquo;m
+so glad to find that we&rsquo;ve a great many ideas in
+common.&nbsp; We each made out a list of our idea of the hundred
+best books, and quite a number of them were the same.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He looks bookish,&rdquo; said Elaine, with a critical
+glance at the photograph.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, he&rsquo;s not at all a bookworm,&rdquo; said
+Suzette quickly, &ldquo;though he&rsquo;s tremendously
+well-read.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s quite the man of action.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Does he hunt?&rdquo; asked Elaine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, he doesn&rsquo;t get much time or opportunity for
+riding.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What a pity,&rdquo; commented Elaine; &ldquo;I
+don&rsquo;t think I could marry a man who wasn&rsquo;t fond of
+riding.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course that&rsquo;s a matter of taste,&rdquo; said
+Suzette, stiffly; &ldquo;horsey men are not usually gifted with
+overmuch brains, are they?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There is as much difference between a horseman and a
+horsey man as there is between a well-dressed man and a dressy
+one,&rdquo; said Elaine, judicially; &ldquo;and you may have
+noticed how seldom a dressy woman really knows how to
+dress.&nbsp; As an old lady of my acquaintance observed the other
+day, some people are born with a sense of how to clothe
+themselves, others acquire it, others look as if their clothes
+had been thrust upon them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She gave Lady Caroline her due quotation marks, but the sudden
+tactfulness with which she looked away from her cousin&rsquo;s
+frock was entirely her own idea.</p>
+<p>A young man entering the room at this moment caused a
+diversion that was rather welcome to Suzette.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here comes Egbert,&rdquo; she announced, with an air of
+subdued triumph; it was at least a satisfaction to be able to
+produce the captive of her charms, alive and in good condition,
+on the scene.&nbsp; Elaine might be as critical as she pleased,
+but a live lover outweighed any number of well-dressed
+straight-riding cavaliers who existed only as a distant vision of
+the delectable husband.</p>
+<p>Egbert was one of those men who have no small talk, but
+possess an inexhaustible supply of the larger variety.&nbsp; In
+whatever society he happened to be, and particularly in the
+immediate neighbourhood of an afternoon-tea table, with a limited
+audience of womenfolk, he gave the impression of someone who was
+addressing a public meeting, and would be happy to answer
+questions afterwards.&nbsp; A suggestion of gas-lit
+mission-halls, wet umbrellas, and discreet applause seemed to
+accompany him everywhere.&nbsp; He was an exponent, among other
+things, of what he called New Thought, which seemed to lend
+itself conveniently to the employment of a good deal of rather
+stale phraseology.&nbsp; Probably in the course of some thirty
+odd years of existence he had never been of any notable use to
+man, woman, child or animal, but it was his firmly-announced
+intention to leave the world a better, happier, purer place than
+he had found it; against the danger of any relapse to earlier
+conditions after his disappearance from the scene, he was, of
+course, powerless to guard.&nbsp; &rsquo;Tis not in mortals to
+insure succession, and Egbert was admittedly mortal.</p>
+<p>Elaine found him immensely entertaining, and would certainly
+have exerted herself to draw him out if such a proceeding had
+been at all necessary.&nbsp; She listened to his conversation
+with the complacent appreciation that one bestows on a stage
+tragedy, from whose calamities one can escape at any moment by
+the simple process of leaving one&rsquo;s seat.&nbsp; When at
+last he checked the flow of his opinions by a hurried reference
+to his watch, and declared that he must be moving on elsewhere,
+Elaine almost expected a vote of thanks to be accorded him, or to
+be asked to signify herself in favour of some resolution by
+holding up her hand.</p>
+<p>When the young man had bidden the company a rapid
+business-like farewell, tempered in Suzette&rsquo;s case by the
+exact degree of tender intimacy that it would have been
+considered improper to omit or overstep, Elaine turned to her
+expectant cousin with an air of cordial congratulation.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He is exactly the husband I should have chosen for you,
+Suzette.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For the second time that afternoon Suzette felt a sense of
+waning enthusiasm for one of her possessions.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Brankley detected the note of ironical congratulation in
+her visitor&rsquo;s verdict.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I suppose she means he&rsquo;s not her idea of a
+husband, but, he&rsquo;s good enough for Suzette,&rdquo; she
+observed to herself, with a snort that expressed itself somewhere
+in the nostrils of the brain.&nbsp; Then with a smiling air of
+heavy patronage she delivered herself of her one idea of a
+damaging counter-stroke.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And when are we to hear of your engagement, my
+dear?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now,&rdquo; said Elaine quietly, but with electrical
+effect; &ldquo;I came to announce it to you but I wanted to hear
+all about Suzette first.&nbsp; It will be formally announced in
+the papers in a day or two.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But who is it?&nbsp; Is it the young man who was with
+you in the Park this morning?&rdquo; asked Suzette.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let me see, who was I with in the Park this
+morning?&nbsp; A very good-looking dark boy?&nbsp; Oh no, not
+Comus Bassington.&nbsp; Someone you know by name, anyway, and I
+expect you&rsquo;ve seen his portrait in the papers.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A flying-man?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Brankley.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Courtenay Youghal,&rdquo; said Elaine.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Brankley and Suzette had often rehearsed in the privacy
+of their minds the occasion when Elaine should come to pay her
+personal congratulations to her engaged cousin.&nbsp; It had
+never been in the least like this.</p>
+<p>On her return from her enjoyable afternoon visit Elaine found
+an express messenger letter waiting for her.&nbsp; It was from
+Comus, thanking her for her loan&mdash;and returning it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I suppose I ought never to have asked you for
+it,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;but you are always so deliciously
+solemn about money matters that I couldn&rsquo;t resist.&nbsp;
+Just heard the news of your engagement to Courtenay.&nbsp;
+Congrats. to you both.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m far too stoney broke to
+buy you a wedding present so I&rsquo;m going to give you back the
+bread-and-butter dish.&nbsp; Luckily it still has your crest on
+it.&nbsp; I shall love to think of you and Courtenay eating
+bread-and-butter out of it for the rest of your lives.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>That was all he had to say on the matter about which Elaine
+had been preparing to write a long and kindly-expressed letter,
+closing a rather momentous chapter in her life and his.&nbsp;
+There was not a trace of regret or upbraiding in his note; he had
+walked out of their mutual fairyland as abruptly as she had, and
+to all appearances far more unconcernedly.&nbsp; Reading the
+letter again and again Elaine could come to no decision as to
+whether this was merely a courageous gibe at defeat, or whether
+it represented the real value that Comus set on the thing that he
+had lost.</p>
+<p>And she would never know.&nbsp; If Comus possessed one useless
+gift to perfection it was the gift of laughing at Fate even when
+it had struck him hardest.&nbsp; One day, perhaps, the laughter
+and mockery would be silent on his lips, and Fate would have the
+advantage of laughing last.</p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">A door</span> closed and Francesca
+Bassington sat alone in her well-beloved drawing-room.&nbsp; The
+visitor who had been enjoying the hospitality of her
+afternoon-tea table had just taken his departure.&nbsp; The
+t&ecirc;te-&agrave;-t&ecirc;te had not been a pleasant one, at
+any rate as far as Francesca was concerned, but at least it had
+brought her the information for which she had been seeking.&nbsp;
+Her r&ocirc;le of looker-on from a tactful distance had
+necessarily left her much in the dark concerning the progress of
+the all-important wooing, but during the last few hours she had,
+on slender though significant evidence, exchanged her complacent
+expectancy for a conviction that something had gone wrong.&nbsp;
+She had spent the previous evening at her brother&rsquo;s house,
+and had naturally seen nothing of Comus in that uncongenial
+quarter; neither had he put in an appearance at the breakfast
+table the following morning.&nbsp; She had met him in the hall at
+eleven o&rsquo;clock, and he had hurried past her, merely
+imparting the information that he would not be in till dinner
+that evening.&nbsp; He spoke in his sulkiest tone, and his face
+wore a look of defeat, thinly masked by an air of defiance; it
+was not the defiance of a man who is losing, but of one who has
+already lost.</p>
+<p>Francesca&rsquo;s conviction that things had gone wrong
+between Comus and Elaine de Frey grew in strength as the day wore
+on.&nbsp; She lunched at a friend&rsquo;s house, but it was not a
+quarter where special social information of any importance was
+likely to come early to hand.&nbsp; Instead of the news she was
+hankering for, she had to listen to trivial gossip and
+speculation on the flirtations and &ldquo;cases&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;affairs&rdquo; of a string of acquaintances whose
+matrimonial projects interested her about as much as the nesting
+arrangements of the wildfowl in St. James&rsquo;s Park.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; said her hostess, with the duly
+impressive emphasis of a privileged chronicler,
+&ldquo;we&rsquo;ve always regarded Claire as the marrying one of
+the family, so when Emily came to us and said, &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve
+got some news for you,&rsquo; we all said, &lsquo;Claire&rsquo;s
+engaged!&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Oh, no,&rsquo; said Emily,
+&lsquo;it&rsquo;s not Claire this time, it&rsquo;s
+me.&rsquo;&nbsp; So then we had to guess who the lucky man
+was.&nbsp; &lsquo;It can&rsquo;t be Captain Parminter,&rsquo; we
+all said, &lsquo;because he&rsquo;s always been sweet on
+Joan.&rsquo;&nbsp; And then Emily said&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The recording voice reeled off the catalogue of inane remarks
+with a comfortable purring complacency that held out no hope of
+an early abandoning of the topic.&nbsp; Francesca sat and
+wondered why the innocent acceptance of a cutlet and a glass of
+indifferent claret should lay one open to such unsparing
+punishment.</p>
+<p>A stroll homeward through the Park after lunch brought no
+further enlightenment on the subject that was uppermost in her
+mind; what was worse, it brought her, without possibility of
+escape, within hailing distance of Merla Blathington, who
+fastened on to her with the enthusiasm of a lonely tsetse fly
+encountering an outpost of civilisation.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Just think,&rdquo; she buzzed inconsequently, &ldquo;my
+sister in Cambridgeshire has hatched out thirty-three White
+Orpington chickens in her incubator!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What eggs did she put in it?&rdquo; asked
+Francesca.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, some very special strain of White
+Orpington.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then I don&rsquo;t see anything remarkable in the
+result.&nbsp; If she had put in crocodile&rsquo;s eggs and
+hatched out White Orpingtons, there might have been something to
+write to <i>Country Life</i> about.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What funny fascinating things these little green
+park-chairs are,&rdquo; said Merla, starting off on a fresh
+topic; &ldquo;they always look so quaint and knowing when
+they&rsquo;re stuck away in pairs by themselves under the trees,
+as if they were having a heart-to-heart talk or discussing a
+piece of very private scandal.&nbsp; If they could only speak,
+what tragedies and comedies they could tell us of, what
+flirtations and proposals.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let us be devoutly thankful that they
+can&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said Francesca, with a shuddering
+recollection of the luncheon-table conversation.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course, it would make one very careful what one said
+before them&mdash;or above them rather,&rdquo; Merla rattled on,
+and then, to Francesca&rsquo;s infinite relief, she espied
+another acquaintance sitting in unprotected solitude, who
+promised to supply a more durable audience than her present
+rapidly moving companion.&nbsp; Francesca was free to return to
+her drawing-room in Blue Street to await with such patience as
+she could command the coming of some visitor who might be able to
+throw light on the subject that was puzzling and disquieting
+her.&nbsp; The arrival of George St. Michael boded bad news, but
+at any rate news, and she gave him an almost cordial welcome.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, you see I wasn&rsquo;t far wrong about Miss de
+Frey and Courtenay Youghal, was I?&rdquo; he chirruped, almost
+before he had seated himself.&nbsp; Francesca was to be spared
+any further spinning-out of her period of uncertainty.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Yes, it&rsquo;s officially given out,&rdquo; he went on,
+&ldquo;and it&rsquo;s to appear in the <i>Morning Post</i>
+to-morrow.&nbsp; I heard it from Colonel Deel this morning, and
+he had it direct from Youghal himself.&nbsp; Yes, please, one
+lump; I&rsquo;m not fashionable, you see.&rdquo;&nbsp; He had
+made the same remark about the sugar in his tea with unfailing
+regularity for at least thirty years.&nbsp; Fashions in sugar are
+apparently stationary.&nbsp; &ldquo;They say,&rdquo; he
+continued, hurriedly, &ldquo;that he proposed to her on the
+Terrace of the House, and a division bell rang, and he had to
+hurry off before she had time to give her answer, and when he got
+back she simply said, &lsquo;the Ayes have
+it.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; St. Michael paused in his narrative to
+give an appreciative giggle.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Just the sort of inanity that would go the
+rounds,&rdquo; remarked Francesca, with the satisfaction of
+knowing that she was making the criticism direct to the author
+and begetter of the inanity in question.&nbsp; Now that the blow
+had fallen and she knew the full extent of its weight, her
+feeling towards the bringer of bad news, who sat complacently
+nibbling at her tea-cakes and scattering crumbs of tiresome
+small-talk at her feet, was one of wholehearted dislike.&nbsp;
+She could sympathise with, or at any rate understand, the
+tendency of oriental despots to inflict death or ignominious
+chastisement on messengers bearing tidings of misfortune and
+defeat, and St. Michael, she perfectly well knew, was thoroughly
+aware of the fact that her hopes and wishes had been centred on
+the possibility of having Elaine for a daughter-in-law; every
+purring remark that his mean little soul prompted him to
+contribute to the conversation had an easily recognizable
+undercurrent of malice.&nbsp; Fortunately for her powers of
+polite endurance, which had been put to such searching and
+repeated tests that day, St. Michael had planned out for himself
+a busy little time-table of afternoon visits, at each of which
+his self-appointed task of forestalling and embellishing the
+newspaper announcements of the Youghal-de Frey engagement would
+be hurriedly but thoroughly performed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They&rsquo;ll be quite one of the best-looking and most
+interesting couples of the Season, won&rsquo;t they?&rdquo; he
+cried, by way of farewell.&nbsp; The door closed and Francesca
+Bassington sat alone in her drawing-room.</p>
+<p>Before she could give way to the bitter luxury of reflection
+on the downfall of her hopes, it was prudent to take
+precautionary measures against unwelcome intrusion.&nbsp;
+Summoning the maid who had just speeded the departing St.
+Michael, she gave the order: &ldquo;I am not at home this
+afternoon to Lady Caroline Benaresq.&rdquo;&nbsp; On second
+thoughts she extended the taboo to all possible callers, and sent
+a telephone message to catch Comus at his club, asking him to
+come and see her as soon as he could manage before it was time to
+dress for dinner.&nbsp; Then she sat down to think, and her
+thinking was beyond the relief of tears.</p>
+<p>She had built herself a castle of hopes, and it had not been a
+castle in Spain, but a structure well on the probable side of the
+Pyrenees.&nbsp; There had been a solid foundation on which to
+build.&nbsp; Miss de Frey&rsquo;s fortune was an assured and
+unhampered one, her liking for Comus had been an obvious fact;
+his courtship of her a serious reality.&nbsp; The young people
+had been much together in public, and their names had naturally
+been coupled in the match-making gossip of the day.&nbsp; The
+only serious shadow cast over the scene had been the persistent
+presence, in foreground or background, of Courtenay
+Youghal.&nbsp; And now the shadow suddenly stood forth as the
+reality, and the castle of hopes was a ruin, a hideous
+mortification of dust and d&eacute;bris, with the skeleton
+outlines of its chambers still standing to make mockery of its
+discomfited architect.&nbsp; The daily anxiety about Comus and
+his extravagant ways and intractable disposition had been
+gradually lulled by the prospect of his making an advantageous
+marriage, which would have transformed him from a
+ne&rsquo;er-do-well and adventurer into a wealthy idler.&nbsp; He
+might even have been moulded, by the resourceful influence of an
+ambitious wife, into a man with some definite purpose in
+life.&nbsp; The prospect had vanished with cruel suddenness, and
+the anxieties were crowding back again, more insistent than
+ever.&nbsp; The boy had had his one good chance in the
+matrimonial market and missed it; if he were to transfer his
+attentions to some other well-dowered girl he would be marked
+down at once as a fortune-hunter, and that would constitute a
+heavy handicap to the most plausible of wooers.&nbsp; His liking
+for Elaine had evidently been genuine in its way, though perhaps
+it would have been rash to read any deeper sentiment into it, but
+even with the spur of his own inclination to assist him he had
+failed to win the prize that had seemed so temptingly within his
+reach.&nbsp; And in the dashing of his prospects, Francesca saw
+the threatening of her own.&nbsp; The old anxiety as to her
+precarious tenure of her present quarters put on again all its
+familiar terrors.&nbsp; One day, she foresaw, in the horribly
+near future, George St. Michael would come pattering up her
+stairs with the breathless intelligence that Emmeline Chetrof was
+going to marry somebody or other in the Guards or the Record
+Office as the case might be, and then there would be an uprooting
+of her life from its home and haven in Blue Street and a
+wandering forth to some cheap unhappy far-off dwelling, where the
+stately Van der Meulen and its companion host of beautiful and
+desirable things would be stuffed and stowed away in soulless
+surroundings, like courtly &eacute;migr&eacute;s fallen on evil
+days.&nbsp; It was unthinkable, but the trouble was that it had
+to be thought about.&nbsp; And if Comus had played his cards well
+and transformed himself from an encumbrance into a son with
+wealth at his command, the tragedy which she saw looming in front
+of her might have been avoided or at the worst whittled down to
+easily bearable proportions.&nbsp; With money behind one, the
+problem of where to live approaches more nearly to the simple
+question of where do you wish to live, and a rich daughter-in-law
+would have surely seen to it that she did not have to leave her
+square mile of Mecca and go out into the wilderness of bricks and
+mortar.&nbsp; If the house in Blue Street could not have been
+compounded for there were other desirable residences which would
+have been capable of consoling Francesca for her lost Eden.&nbsp;
+And now the detested Courtenay Youghal, with his mocking eyes and
+air of youthful cynicism, had stepped in and overthrown those
+golden hopes and plans whose non-fulfilment would make such a
+world of change in her future.&nbsp; Assuredly she had reason to
+feel bitter against that young man, and she was not disposed to
+take a very lenient view of Comus&rsquo;s own mismanagement of
+the affair; her greeting when he at last arrived, was not couched
+in a sympathetic strain.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So you have lost your chance with the heiress,&rdquo;
+she remarked abruptly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Comus, coolly; &ldquo;Courtenay
+Youghal has added her to his other successes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you have added her to your other failures,&rdquo;
+pursued Francesca, relentlessly; her temper had been tried that
+day beyond ordinary limits.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I thought you seemed getting along so well with
+her,&rdquo; she continued, as Comus remained uncommunicative.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We hit it off rather well together,&rdquo; said Comus,
+and added with deliberate bluntness, &ldquo;I suppose she got
+rather sick at my borrowing money from her.&nbsp; She thought it
+was all I was after.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You borrowed money from her!&rdquo; said Francesca;
+&ldquo;you were fool enough to borrow money from a girl who was
+favourably disposed towards you, and with Courtenay Youghal in
+the background waiting to step in and oust you!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Francesca&rsquo;s voice trembled with misery and rage.&nbsp;
+This great stroke of good luck that had seemed about to fall into
+their laps had been thrust aside by an act or series of acts of
+wanton paltry folly.&nbsp; The good ship had been lost for the
+sake of the traditional ha&rsquo;porth of tar.&nbsp; Comus had
+paid some pressing tailor&rsquo;s or tobacconist&rsquo;s bill
+with a loan unwillingly put at his disposal by the girl he was
+courting, and had flung away his chances of securing a wealthy
+and in every way desirable bride.&nbsp; Elaine de Frey and her
+fortune might have been the making of Comus, but he had hurried
+in as usual to effect his own undoing.&nbsp; Calmness did not in
+this case come with reflection; the more Francesca thought about
+the matter, the more exasperated she grew.&nbsp; Comus threw
+himself down in a low chair and watched her without a trace of
+embarrassment or concern at her mortification.&nbsp; He had come
+to her feeling rather sorry for himself, and bitterly conscious
+of his defeat, and she had met him with a taunt and without the
+least hint of sympathy; he determined that she should be
+tantalised with the knowledge of how small and stupid a thing had
+stood between the realisation and ruin of her hopes for him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And to think she should be captured by Courtenay
+Youghal,&rdquo; said Francesca, bitterly; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve
+always deplored your intimacy with that young man.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s hardly my intimacy with him that&rsquo;s
+made Elaine accept him,&rdquo; said Comus.</p>
+<p>Francesca realised the futility of further upbraiding.&nbsp;
+Through the tears of vexation that stood in her eyes, she looked
+across at the handsome boy who sat opposite her, mocking at his
+own misfortune, perversely indifferent to his folly, seemingly
+almost indifferent to its consequences.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Comus,&rdquo; she said quietly and wearily, &ldquo;you
+are an exact reversal of the legend of Pandora&rsquo;s Box.&nbsp;
+You have all the charm and advantages that a boy could want to
+help him on in the world, and behind it all there is the fatal
+damning gift of utter hopelessness.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Comus, &ldquo;that is the best
+description that anyone has ever given of me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For the moment there was a flush of sympathy and something
+like outspoken affection between mother and son.&nbsp; They
+seemed very much alone in the world just now, and in the general
+overturn of hopes and plans, there flickered a chance that each
+might stretch out a hand to the other, and summon back to their
+lives an old dead love that was the best and strongest feeling
+either of them had known.&nbsp; But the sting of disappointment
+was too keen, and the flood of resentment mounted too high on
+either side to allow the chance more than a moment in which to
+flicker away into nothingness.&nbsp; The old fatal topic of
+estrangement came to the fore, the question of immediate ways and
+means, and mother and son faced themselves again as antagonists
+on a well-disputed field.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is done is done,&rdquo; said Francesca, with a
+movement of tragic impatience that belied the philosophy of her
+words; &ldquo;there is nothing to be gained by crying over spilt
+milk.&nbsp; There is the present and the future to be thought
+about, though.&nbsp; One can&rsquo;t go on indefinitely as a
+tenant-for-life in a fools&rsquo; paradise.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then she
+pulled herself together and proceeded to deliver an ultimatum
+which the force of circumstances no longer permitted her to hold
+in reserve.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not much use talking to you about money, as
+I know from long experience, but I can only tell you this, that
+in the middle of the Season I&rsquo;m already obliged to be
+thinking of leaving Town.&nbsp; And you, I&rsquo;m afraid, will
+have to be thinking of leaving England at equally short
+notice.&nbsp; Henry told me the other day that he can get you
+something out in West Africa.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ve had your chance
+of doing something better for yourself from the financial point
+of view, and you&rsquo;ve thrown it away for the sake of
+borrowing a little ready money for your luxuries, so now you must
+take what you can get.&nbsp; The pay won&rsquo;t be very good at
+first, but living is not dear out there.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;West Africa,&rdquo; said Comus, reflectively;
+&ldquo;it&rsquo;s a sort of modern substitute for the
+old-fashioned <i>oubliette</i>, a convenient depository for
+tiresome people.&nbsp; Dear Uncle Henry may talk lugubriously
+about the burden of Empire, but he evidently recognises its uses
+as a refuse consumer.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My dear Comus, you are talking of the West Africa of
+yesterday.&nbsp; While you have been wasting your time at school,
+and worse than wasting your time in the West End, other people
+have been grappling with the study of tropical diseases, and the
+West African coast country is being rapidly transformed from a
+lethal chamber into a sanatorium.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Comus laughed mockingly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What a beautiful bit of persuasive prose; it reminds
+one of the Psalms and even more of a company prospectus.&nbsp; If
+you were honest you&rsquo;d confess that you lifted it straight
+out of a rubber or railway promotion scheme.&nbsp; Seriously,
+mother, if I must grub about for a living, why can&rsquo;t I do
+it in England?&nbsp; I could go into a brewery for
+instance.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Francesca shook her head decisively; she could foresee the
+sort of steady work Comus was likely to accomplish, with the
+lodestone of Town and the minor attractions of race-meetings and
+similar festivities always beckoning to him from a conveniently
+attainable distance, but apart from that aspect of the case there
+was a financial obstacle in the way of his obtaining any
+employment at home.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Breweries and all those sort of things necessitate
+money to start with; one has to pay premiums or invest capital in
+the undertaking, and so forth.&nbsp; And as we have no money
+available, and can scarcely pay our debts as it is, it&rsquo;s no
+use thinking about it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Can&rsquo;t we sell something?&rdquo; asked Comus.</p>
+<p>He made no actual suggestion as to what should be sacrificed,
+but he was looking straight at the Van der Meulen.</p>
+<p>For a moment Francesca felt a stifling sensation of weakness,
+as though her heart was going to stop beating.&nbsp; Then she sat
+forward in her chair and spoke with energy, almost
+fierceness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When I am dead my things can be sold and
+dispersed.&nbsp; As long as I am alive I prefer to keep them by
+me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In her holy place, with all her treasured possessions around
+her, this dreadful suggestion had been made.&nbsp; Some of her
+cherished household gods, souvenirs and keepsakes from past days,
+would, perhaps, not have fetched a very considerable sum in the
+auction-room, others had a distinct value of their own, but to
+her they were all precious.&nbsp; And the Van der Meulen, at
+which Comus had looked with impious appraising eyes, was the most
+sacred of them all.&nbsp; When Francesca had been away from her
+Town residence or had been confined to her bedroom through
+illness, the great picture with its stately solemn representation
+of a long-ago battle-scene, painted to flatter the
+flattery-loving soul of a warrior-king who was dignified even in
+his campaigns&mdash;this was the first thing she visited on her
+return to Town or convalescence.&nbsp; If an alarm of fire had
+been raised it would have been the first thing for whose safety
+she would have troubled.&nbsp; And Comus had almost suggested
+that it should be parted with, as one sold railway shares and
+other soulless things.</p>
+<p>Scolding, she had long ago realised, was a useless waste of
+time and energy where Comus was concerned, but this evening she
+unloosed her tongue for the mere relief that it gave to her
+surcharged feelings.&nbsp; He sat listening without comment,
+though she purposely let fall remarks that she hoped might sting
+him into self-defence or protest.&nbsp; It was an unsparing
+indictment, the more damaging in that it was so irrefutably true,
+the more tragic in that it came from perhaps the one person in
+the world whose opinion he had ever cared for.&nbsp; And he sat
+through it as silent and seemingly unmoved as though she had been
+rehearsing a speech for some drawing-room comedy.&nbsp; When she
+had had her say his method of retort was not the soft answer that
+turneth away wrath but the inconsequent one that shelves it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s go and dress for dinner.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The meal, like so many that Francesca and Comus had eaten in
+each other&rsquo;s company of late, was a silent one.&nbsp; Now
+that the full bearings of the disaster had been discussed in all
+its aspects there was nothing more to be said.&nbsp; Any attempt
+at ignoring the situation, and passing on to less controversial
+topics would have been a mockery and pretence which neither of
+them would have troubled to sustain.&nbsp; So the meal went
+forward with its dragged-out dreary intimacy of two people who
+were separated by a gulf of bitterness, and whose hearts were
+hard with resentment against one another.</p>
+<p>Francesca felt a sense of relief when she was able to give the
+maid the order to serve her coffee upstairs.&nbsp; Comus had a
+sullen scowl on his face, but he looked up as she rose to leave
+the room, and gave his half-mocking little laugh.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You needn&rsquo;t look so tragic,&rdquo; he said,
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re going to have your own way.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll
+go out to that West African hole.&rdquo;</p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Comus</span> found his way to his seat in
+the stalls of the Straw Exchange Theatre and turned to watch the
+stream of distinguished and distinguishable people who made their
+appearance as a matter of course at a First Night in the height
+of the Season.&nbsp; Pit and gallery were already packed with a
+throng, tense, expectant and alert, that waited for the rise of
+the curtain with the eager patience of a terrier watching a
+dilatory human prepare for outdoor exercises.&nbsp; Stalls and
+boxes filled slowly and hesitatingly with a crowd whose component
+units seemed for the most part to recognise the probability that
+they were quite as interesting as any play they were likely to
+see.&nbsp; Those who bore no particular face-value themselves
+derived a certain amount of social dignity from the near
+neighbourhood of obvious notabilities; if one could not obtain
+recognition oneself there was some vague pleasure in being able
+to recognise notoriety at intimately close quarters.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who is that woman with the auburn hair and a rather
+effective belligerent gleam in her eyes?&rdquo; asked a man
+sitting just behind Comus; &ldquo;she looks as if she might have
+created the world in six days and destroyed it on the
+seventh.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I forget her name,&rdquo; said his neighbour;
+&ldquo;she writes.&nbsp; She&rsquo;s the author of that book,
+&lsquo;The Woman who wished it was Wednesday,&rsquo; you
+know.&nbsp; It used to be the convention that women writers
+should be plain and dowdy; now we have gone to the other extreme
+and build them on extravagantly decorative lines.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A buzz of recognition came from the front rows of the pit,
+together with a craning of necks on the part of those in less
+favoured seats.&nbsp; It heralded the arrival of Sherard Blaw,
+the dramatist who had discovered himself, and who had given so
+ungrudgingly of his discovery to the world.&nbsp; Lady Caroline,
+who was already directing little conversational onslaughts from
+her box, gazed gently for a moment at the new arrival, and then
+turned to the silver-haired Archdeacon sitting beside her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They say the poor man is haunted by the fear that he
+will die during a general election, and that his obituary notices
+will be seriously curtailed by the space taken up by the election
+results.&nbsp; The curse of our party system, from his point of
+view, is that it takes up so much room in the press.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The Archdeacon smiled indulgently.&nbsp; As a man he was so
+exquisitely worldly that he fully merited the name of the
+Heavenly Worldling bestowed on him by an admiring duchess, and
+withal his texture was shot with a pattern of such genuine
+saintliness that one felt that whoever else might hold the keys
+of Paradise he, at least, possessed a private latchkey to that
+abode.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is it not significant of the altered grouping of
+things,&rdquo; he observed, &ldquo;that the Church, as
+represented by me, sympathises with the message of Sherard Blaw,
+while neither the man nor his message find acceptance with
+unbelievers like you, Lady Caroline.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Caroline blinked her eyes.&nbsp; &ldquo;My dear
+Archdeacon,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;no one can be an unbeliever
+nowadays.&nbsp; The Christian Apologists have left one nothing to
+disbelieve.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The Archdeacon rose with a delighted chuckle.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+must go and tell that to De la Poulett,&rdquo; he said,
+indicating a clerical figure sitting in the third row of the
+stalls; &ldquo;he spends his life explaining from his pulpit that
+the glory of Christianity consists in the fact that though it is
+not true it has been found necessary to invent it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The door of the box opened and Courtenay Youghal entered,
+bringing with him subtle suggestion of chaminade and an
+atmosphere of political tension.&nbsp; The Government had fallen
+out of the good graces of a section of its supporters, and those
+who were not in the know were busy predicting a serious crisis
+over a forthcoming division in the Committee stage of an
+important Bill.&nbsp; This was Saturday night, and unless some
+successful cajolery were effected between now and Monday
+afternoon, Ministers would be, seemingly, in danger of
+defeat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, here is Youghal,&rdquo; said the Archdeacon;
+&ldquo;he will be able to tell us what is going to happen in the
+next forty-eight hours.&nbsp; I hear the Prime Minister says it
+is a matter of conscience, and they will stand or fall by
+it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His hopes and sympathies were notoriously on the Ministerial
+side.</p>
+<p>Youghal greeted Lady Caroline and subsided gracefully into a
+chair well in the front of the box.&nbsp; A buzz of recognition
+rippled slowly across the house.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For the Government to fall on a matter of
+conscience,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;would be like a man cutting
+himself with a safety razor.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Caroline purred a gentle approval.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid it&rsquo;s true, Archdeacon,&rdquo;
+she said.</p>
+<p>No one can effectively defend a Government when it&rsquo;s
+been in office several years.&nbsp; The Archdeacon took refuge in
+light skirmishing.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I believe Lady Caroline sees the makings of a great
+Socialist statesman in you, Youghal,&rdquo; he observed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Great Socialist statesmen aren&rsquo;t made,
+they&rsquo;re stillborn,&rdquo; replied Youghal.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is the play about to-night?&rdquo; asked a pale
+young woman who had taken no part in the talk.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline,
+&ldquo;but I hope it&rsquo;s dull.&nbsp; If there is any
+brilliant conversation in it I shall burst into tears.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In the front row of the upper circle a woman with a restless
+starling-voice was discussing the work of a temporarily
+fashionable composer, chiefly in relation to her own emotions,
+which she seemed to think might prove generally interesting to
+those around her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Whenever I hear his music I feel that I want to go up
+into a mountain and pray.&nbsp; Can you understand that
+feeling?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The girl to whom she was unburdening herself shook her
+head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You see, I&rsquo;ve heard his music chiefly in
+Switzerland, and we were up among the mountains all the time, so
+it wouldn&rsquo;t have made any difference.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In that case,&rdquo; said the woman, who seemed to have
+emergency emotions to suit all geographical conditions, &ldquo;I
+should have wanted to be in a great silent plain by the side of a
+rushing river.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What I think is so splendid about his
+music&mdash;&rdquo; commenced another starling-voice on the
+further side of the girl.&nbsp; Like sheep that feed greedily
+before the coming of a storm the starling-voices seemed impelled
+to extra effort by the knowledge of four imminent intervals of
+acting during which they would be hushed into constrained
+silence.</p>
+<p>In the back row of the dress circle a late-comer, after a
+cursory glance at the programme, had settled down into a
+comfortable narrative, which was evidently the resumed thread of
+an unfinished taxi-drive monologue.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We all said &lsquo;it can&rsquo;t be Captain Parminter,
+because he&rsquo;s always been sweet on Joan,&rsquo; and then
+Emily said&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The curtain went up, and Emily&rsquo;s contribution to the
+discussion had to be held over till the entr&rsquo;acte.</p>
+<p>The play promised to be a success.&nbsp; The author, avoiding
+the pitfall of brilliancy, had aimed at being interesting and as
+far as possible, bearing in mind that his play was a comedy, he
+had striven to be amusing.&nbsp; Above all he had remembered that
+in the laws of stage proportions it is permissible and generally
+desirable that the part should be greater than the whole; hence
+he had been careful to give the leading lady such a clear and
+commanding lead over the other characters of the play that it was
+impossible for any of them ever to get on level terms with
+her.&nbsp; The action of the piece was now and then delayed
+thereby, but the duration of its run would be materially
+prolonged.</p>
+<p>The curtain came down on the first act amid an encouraging
+instalment of applause, and the audience turned its back on the
+stage and began to take a renewed interest in itself.&nbsp; The
+authoress of &ldquo;The Woman who wished it was Wednesday&rdquo;
+had swept like a convalescent whirlwind, subdued but potentially
+tempestuous, into Lady Caroline&rsquo;s box.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve just trodden with all my weight on the foot
+of an eminent publisher as I was leaving my seat,&rdquo; she
+cried, with a peal of delighted laughter.&nbsp; &ldquo;He was
+such a dear about it; I said I hoped I hadn&rsquo;t hurt him, and
+he said, &lsquo;I suppose you think, who drives hard bargains
+should himself be hard.&rsquo;&nbsp; Wasn&rsquo;t it pet-lamb of
+him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never trodden on a pet lamb,&rdquo; said
+Lady Caroline, &ldquo;so I&rsquo;ve no idea what its behaviour
+would be under the circumstances.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; said the authoress, coming to the front
+of the box, the better to survey the house, and perhaps also with
+a charitable desire to make things easy for those who might
+pardonably wish to survey her, &ldquo;tell me, please, where is
+the girl sitting whom Courtenay Youghal is engaged to?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Elaine was pointed out to her, sitting in the fourth row of
+the stalls, on the opposite side of the house to where Comus had
+his seat.&nbsp; Once during the interval she had turned to give
+him a friendly nod of recognition as he stood in one of the side
+gangways, but he was absorbed at the moment in looking at himself
+in the glass panel.&nbsp; The grave brown eyes and the mocking
+green-grey ones had looked their last into each other&rsquo;s
+depths.</p>
+<p>For Comus this first-night performance, with its brilliant
+gathering of spectators, its groups and coteries of lively
+talkers, even its counterfoil of dull chatterers, its pervading
+atmosphere of stage and social movement, and its intruding
+undercurrent of political flutter, all this composed a tragedy in
+which he was the chief character.&nbsp; It was the life he knew
+and loved and basked in, and it was the life he was
+leaving.&nbsp; It would go on reproducing itself again and again,
+with its stage interest and social interest and intruding outside
+interests, with the same lively chattering crowd, the people who
+had done things being pointed out by people who recognised them
+to people who didn&rsquo;t&mdash;it would all go on with
+unflagging animation and sparkle and enjoyment, and for him it
+would have stopped utterly.&nbsp; He would be in some unheard-of
+sun-blistered wilderness, where natives and pariah dogs and
+raucous-throated crows fringed round mockingly on one&rsquo;s
+loneliness, where one rode for sweltering miles for the chance of
+meeting a collector or police officer, with whom most likely on
+closer acquaintance one had hardly two ideas in common, where
+female society was represented at long intervals by some
+climate-withered woman missionary or official&rsquo;s wife, where
+food and sickness and veterinary lore became at last the three
+outstanding subjects on which the mind settled or rather
+sank.&nbsp; That was the life he foresaw and dreaded, and that
+was the life he was going to.&nbsp; For a boy who went out to it
+from the dulness of some country rectory, from a neighbourhood
+where a flower show and a cricket match formed the social
+landmarks of the year, the feeling of exile might not be very
+crushing, might indeed be lost in the sense of change and
+adventure.&nbsp; But Comus had lived too thoroughly in the centre
+of things to regard life in a backwater as anything else than
+stagnation, and stagnation while one is young he justly regarded
+as an offence against nature and reason, in keeping with the
+perverted mockery that sends decrepit invalids touring painfully
+about the world and shuts panthers up in narrow cages.&nbsp; He
+was being put aside, as a wine is put aside, but to deteriorate
+instead of gaining in the process, to lose the best time of his
+youth and health and good looks in a world where youth and health
+and good looks count for much and where time never returns lost
+possessions.&nbsp; And thus, as the curtain swept down on the
+close of each act, Comus felt a sense of depression and
+deprivation sweep down on himself; bitterly he watched his last
+evening of social gaiety slipping away to its end.&nbsp; In less
+than an hour it would be over; in a few months&rsquo; time it
+would be an unreal memory.</p>
+<p>In the third interval, as he gazed round at the chattering
+house, someone touched him on the arm.&nbsp; It was Lady Veula
+Croot.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I suppose in a week&rsquo;s time you&rsquo;ll be on the
+high seas,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m coming to your
+farewell dinner, you know; your mother has just asked me.&nbsp;
+I&rsquo;m not going to talk the usual rot to you about how much
+you will like it and so on.&nbsp; I sometimes think that one of
+the advantages of Hell will be that no one will have the
+impertinence to point out to you that you&rsquo;re really better
+off than you would be anywhere else.&nbsp; What do you think of
+the play?&nbsp; Of course one can foresee the end; she will come
+to her husband with the announcement that their longed-for child
+is going to be born, and that will smooth over everything.&nbsp;
+So conveniently effective, to wind up a comedy with the
+commencement of someone else&rsquo;s tragedy.&nbsp; And every one
+will go away saying &lsquo;I&rsquo;m glad it had a happy
+ending.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Veula moved back to her seat, with her pleasant smile on
+her lips and the look of infinite weariness in her eyes.</p>
+<p>The interval, the last interval, was drawing to a close and
+the house began to turn with fidgetty attention towards the stage
+for the unfolding of the final phase of the play.&nbsp; Francesca
+sat in Serena Golackly&rsquo;s box listening to Colonel
+Springfield&rsquo;s story of what happened to a pigeon-cote in
+his compound at Poona.&nbsp; Everyone who knew the Colonel had to
+listen to that story a good many times, but Lady Caroline had
+mitigated the boredom of the infliction, and in fact invested it
+with a certain sporting interest, by offering a prize to the
+person who heard it oftenest in the course of the Season, the
+competitors being under an honourable understanding not to lead
+up to the subject.&nbsp; Ada Spelvexit and a boy in the Foreign
+Office were at present at the top of the list with five recitals
+each to their score, but the former was suspected of doubtful
+adherence to the rules and spirit of the competition.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And there, dear lady,&rdquo; concluded the Colonel,
+&ldquo;were the eleven dead pigeons.&nbsp; What had become of the
+bandicoot no one ever knew.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Francesca thanked him for his story, and complacently
+inscribed the figure 4 on the margin of her theatre
+programme.&nbsp; Almost at the same moment she heard George St.
+Michael&rsquo;s voice pattering out a breathless piece of
+intelligence for the edification of Serena Golackly and anyone
+else who might care to listen.&nbsp; Francesca galvanised into
+sudden attention.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Emmeline Chetrof to a fellow in the Indian Forest
+Department.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s got nothing but his pay and they
+can&rsquo;t be married for four or five years; an absurdly long
+engagement, don&rsquo;t you think so?&nbsp; All very well to wait
+seven years for a wife in patriarchal times, when you probably
+had others to go on with, and you lived long enough to celebrate
+your own tercentenary, but under modern conditions it seems a
+foolish arrangement.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>St. Michael spoke almost with a sense of grievance.&nbsp; A
+marriage project that tied up all the small pleasant nuptial
+gossip-items about bridesmaids and honeymoon and recalcitrant
+aunts and so forth, for an indefinite number of years seemed
+scarcely decent in his eyes, and there was little satisfaction or
+importance to be derived from early and special knowledge of an
+event which loomed as far distant as a Presidential Election or a
+change of Viceroy.&nbsp; But to Francesca, who had listened with
+startled apprehension at the mention of Emmeline Chetrof&rsquo;s
+name, the news came in a flood of relief and thankfulness.&nbsp;
+Short of entering a nunnery and taking celibate vows, Emmeline
+could hardly have behaved more conveniently than in tying herself
+up to a lover whose circumstances made it necessary to relegate
+marriage to the distant future.&nbsp; For four or five years
+Francesca was assured of undisturbed possession of the house in
+Blue Street, and after that period who knew what might
+happen?&nbsp; The engagement might stretch on indefinitely, it
+might even come to nothing under the weight of its accumulated
+years, as sometimes happened with these protracted affairs.&nbsp;
+Emmeline might lose her fancy for her absentee lover, and might
+never replace him with another.&nbsp; A golden possibility of
+perpetual tenancy of her present home began to float once more
+through Francesca&rsquo;s mind.&nbsp; As long as Emmeline had
+been unbespoken in the marriage market there had always been the
+haunting likelihood of seeing the dreaded announcement, &ldquo;a
+marriage has been arranged and will shortly take place,&rdquo; in
+connection with her name.&nbsp; And now a marriage had been
+arranged and would not shortly take place, might indeed never
+take place.&nbsp; St. Michael&rsquo;s information was likely to
+be correct in this instance; he would never have invented a piece
+of matrimonial intelligence which gave such little scope for
+supplementary detail of the kind he loved to supply.&nbsp; As
+Francesca turned to watch the fourth act of the play, her mind
+was singing a p&aelig;an of thankfulness and exultation.&nbsp; It
+was as though some artificer sent by the Gods had reinforced with
+a substantial cord the horsehair thread that held up the sword of
+Damocles over her head.&nbsp; Her love for her home, for her
+treasured household possessions, and her pleasant social life was
+able to expand once more in present security, and feed on future
+hope.&nbsp; She was still young enough to count four or five
+years as a long time, and to-night she was optimistic enough to
+prophesy smooth things of the future that lay beyond that
+span.&nbsp; Of the fourth act, with its carefully held back but
+obviously imminent reconciliation between the leading characters,
+she took in but little, except that she vaguely understood it to
+have a happy ending.&nbsp; As the lights went up she looked round
+on the dispersing audience with a feeling of friendliness
+uppermost in her mind; even the sight of Elaine de Frey and
+Courtenay Youghal leaving the theatre together did not inspire
+her with a tenth part of the annoyance that their entrance had
+caused her.&nbsp; Serena&rsquo;s invitation to go on to the Savoy
+for supper fitted in exactly with her mood of exhilaration.&nbsp;
+It would be a fit and appropriate wind-up to an auspicious
+evening.&nbsp; The cold chicken and modest brand of Chablis
+waiting for her at home should give way to a banquet of more
+festive nature.</p>
+<p>In the crush of the vestibule, friends and enemies, personal
+and political, were jostled and locked together in the general
+effort to rejoin temporarily estranged garments and secure the
+attendance of elusive vehicles.&nbsp; Lady Caroline found herself
+at close quarters with the estimable Henry Greech, and
+experienced some of the joy which comes to the homeward wending
+sportsman when a chance shot presents itself on which he may
+expend his remaining cartridges.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So the Government is going to climb down, after
+all,&rdquo; she said, with a provocative assumption of private
+information on the subject.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I assure you the Government will do nothing of the
+kind,&rdquo; replied the Member of Parliament with befitting
+dignity; &ldquo;the Prime Minister told me last night that under
+no circumstances&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My dear Mr. Greech,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline,
+&ldquo;we all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth,
+but like other wedded couples they sometimes live
+apart.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For her, at any rate, the comedy had had a happy ending.</p>
+<p>Comus made his way slowly and lingeringly from the stalls, so
+slowly that the lights were already being turned down and great
+shroud-like dust-cloths were being swaythed over the ornamental
+gilt-work.&nbsp; The laughing, chattering, yawning throng had
+filtered out of the vestibule, and was melting away in final
+groups from the steps of the theatre.&nbsp; An impatient
+attendant gave him his coat and locked up the cloak room.&nbsp;
+Comus stepped out under the portico; he looked at the posters
+announcing the play, and in anticipation he could see other
+posters announcing its 200th performance.&nbsp; Two hundred
+performances; by that time the Straw Exchange Theatre would be to
+him something so remote and unreal that it would hardly seem to
+exist or to have ever existed except in his fancy.&nbsp; And to
+the laughing chattering throng that would pass in under that
+portico to the 200th performance, he would be, to those that had
+known him, something equally remote and non-existent.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The good-looking Bassington boy?&nbsp; Oh, dead, or
+rubber-growing or sheep-farming or something of that
+sort.&rdquo;</p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> farewell dinner which Francesca
+had hurriedly organised in honour of her son&rsquo;s departure
+threatened from the outset to be a doubtfully successful
+function.&nbsp; In the first place, as he observed privately,
+there was very little of Comus and a good deal of farewell in
+it.&nbsp; His own particular friends were unrepresented.&nbsp;
+Courtenay Youghal was out of the question; and though Francesca
+would have stretched a point and welcomed some of his other male
+associates of whom she scarcely approved, he himself had been
+opposed to including any of them in the invitations.&nbsp; On the
+other hand, as Henry Greech had provided Comus with this job that
+he was going out to, and was, moreover, finding part of the money
+for the necessary outfit, Francesca had felt it her duty to ask
+him and his wife to the dinner; the obtuseness that seems to
+cling to some people like a garment throughout their life had
+caused Mr. Greech to accept the invitation.&nbsp; When Comus
+heard of the circumstance he laughed long and boisterously; his
+spirits, Francesca noted, seemed to be rising fast as the hour
+for departure drew near.</p>
+<p>The other guests included Serena Golackly and Lady Veula, the
+latter having been asked on the inspiration of the moment at the
+theatrical first-night.&nbsp; In the height of the Season it was
+not easy to get together a goodly selection of guests at short
+notice, and Francesca had gladly fallen in with Serena&rsquo;s
+suggestion of bringing with her Stephen Thorle, who was alleged,
+in loose feminine phrasing, to &ldquo;know all about&rdquo;
+tropical Africa.&nbsp; His travels and experiences in those
+regions probably did not cover much ground or stretch over any
+great length of time, but he was one of those individuals who can
+describe a continent on the strength of a few days&rsquo; stay in
+a coast town as intimately and dogmatically as a paleontologist
+will reconstruct an extinct mammal from the evidence of a stray
+shin bone.&nbsp; He had the loud penetrating voice and the
+prominent penetrating eyes of a man who can do no listening in
+the ordinary way and whose eyes have to perform the function of
+listening for him.&nbsp; His vanity did not necessarily make him
+unbearable, unless one had to spend much time in his society, and
+his need for a wide field of audience and admiration was
+mercifully calculated to spread his operations over a
+considerable human area.&nbsp; Moreover, his craving for
+attentive listeners forced him to interest himself in a wonderful
+variety of subjects on which he was able to discourse fluently
+and with a certain semblance of special knowledge.&nbsp; Politics
+he avoided; the ground was too well known, and there was a
+definite no to every definite yes that could be put
+forward.&nbsp; Moreover, argument was not congenial to his
+disposition, which preferred an unchallenged flow of dissertation
+modified by occasional helpful questions which formed the
+starting point for new offshoots of word-spinning.&nbsp; The
+promotion of cottage industries, the prevention of juvenile
+street trading, the extension of the Borstal prison system, the
+furtherance of vague talkative religious movements the fostering
+of inter-racial <i>ententes</i>, all found in him a tireless
+exponent, a fluent and entertaining, though perhaps not very
+convincing, advocate.&nbsp; With the real motive power behind
+these various causes he was not very closely identified; to the
+spade-workers who carried on the actual labours of each
+particular movement he bore the relation of a trowel-worker,
+delving superficially at the surface, but able to devote a
+proportionately far greater amount of time to the advertisement
+of his progress and achievements.&nbsp; Such was Stephen Thorle,
+a governess in the nursery of Chelsea-bred religions, a skilled
+window-dresser in the emporium of his own personality, and
+needless to say, evanescently popular amid a wide but shifting
+circle of acquaintances.&nbsp; He improved on the record of a
+socially much-travelled individual whose experience has become
+classical, and went to most of the best houses&mdash;twice.</p>
+<p>His inclusion as a guest at this particular dinner-party was
+not a very happy inspiration.&nbsp; He was inclined to patronise
+Comus, as well as the African continent, and on even slighter
+acquaintance.&nbsp; With the exception of Henry Greech, whose
+feelings towards his nephew had been soured by many years of
+overt antagonism, there was an uncomfortable feeling among those
+present that the topic of the black-sheep export trade, as Comus
+would have himself expressed it, was being given undue prominence
+in what should have been a festive farewell banquet.&nbsp; And
+Comus, in whose honour the feast was given, did not contribute
+much towards its success; though his spirits seemed strung up to
+a high pitch his merriment was more the merriment of a cynical
+and amused onlooker than of one who responds to the gaiety of his
+companions.&nbsp; Sometimes he laughed quietly to himself at some
+chance remark of a scarcely mirth-provoking nature, and Lady
+Veula, watching him narrowly, came to the conclusion that an
+element of fear was blended with his seemingly buoyant
+spirits.&nbsp; Once or twice he caught her eye across the table,
+and a certain sympathy seemed to grow up between them, as though
+they were both consciously watching some lugubrious comedy that
+was being played out before them.</p>
+<p>An untoward little incident had marked the commencement of the
+meal.&nbsp; A small still-life picture that hung over the
+sideboard had snapped its cord and slid down with an alarming
+clatter on to the crowded board beneath it.&nbsp; The picture
+itself was scarcely damaged, but its fall had been accompanied by
+a tinkle of broken glass, and it was found that a liqueur glass,
+one out of a set of seven that would be impossible to match, had
+been shivered into fragments.&nbsp; Francesca&rsquo;s almost
+motherly love for her possessions made her peculiarly sensible to
+a feeling of annoyance and depression at the accident, but she
+turned politely to listen to Mrs. Greech&rsquo;s account of a
+misfortune in which four soup-plates were involved.&nbsp; Mrs.
+Henry was not a brilliant conversationalist, and her flank was
+speedily turned by Stephen Thorle, who recounted a slum
+experience in which two entire families did all their feeding out
+of one damaged soup-plate.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The gratitude of those poor creatures when I presented
+them with a set of table crockery apiece, the tears in their eyes
+and in their voices when they thanked me, would be impossible to
+describe.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank you all the same for describing it,&rdquo; said
+Comus.</p>
+<p>The listening eyes went swiftly round the table to gather
+evidence as to how this rather disconcerting remark had been
+received, but Thorle&rsquo;s voice continued uninterruptedly to
+retail stories of East-end gratitude, never failing to mention
+the particular deeds of disinterested charity on his part which
+had evoked and justified the gratitude.&nbsp; Mrs. Greech had to
+suppress the interesting sequel to her broken-crockery narrative,
+to wit, how she subsequently matched the shattered soup-plates at
+Harrod&rsquo;s.&nbsp; Like an imported plant species that
+sometimes flourishes exceedingly, and makes itself at home to the
+dwarfing and overshadowing of all native species, Thorle
+dominated the dinner-party and thrust its original purport
+somewhat into the background.&nbsp; Serena began to look
+helplessly apologetic.&nbsp; It was altogether rather a relief
+when the filling of champagne glasses gave Francesca an excuse
+for bringing matters back to their intended footing.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We must all drink a health,&rdquo; she said;
+&ldquo;Comus, my own dear boy, a safe and happy voyage to you,
+much prosperity in the life you are going out to, and in due time
+a safe and happy return&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her hand gave an involuntary jerk in the act of raising the
+glass, and the wine went streaming across the tablecloth in a
+froth of yellow bubbles.&nbsp; It certainly was not turning out a
+comfortable or auspicious dinner party.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My dear mother,&rdquo; cried Comus, &ldquo;you must
+have been drinking healths all the afternoon to make your hand so
+unsteady.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He laughed gaily and with apparent carelessness, but again
+Lady Veula caught the frightened note in his laughter.&nbsp; Mrs.
+Henry, with practical sympathy, was telling Francesca two good
+ways for getting wine stains out of tablecloths.&nbsp; The
+smaller economies of life were an unnecessary branch of learning
+for Mrs. Greech, but she studied them as carefully and
+conscientiously as a stay-at-home plain-dwelling English child
+commits to memory the measurements and altitudes of the
+world&rsquo;s principal mountain peaks.&nbsp; Some women of her
+temperament and mentality know by heart the favourite colours,
+flowers and hymn-tunes of all the members of the Royal Family;
+Mrs. Greech would possibly have failed in an examination of that
+nature, but she knew what to do with carrots that have been
+over-long in storage.</p>
+<p>Francesca did not renew her speech-making; a chill seemed to
+have fallen over all efforts at festivity, and she contented
+herself with refilling her glass and simply drinking to her
+boy&rsquo;s good health.&nbsp; The others followed her example,
+and Comus drained his glass with a brief &ldquo;thank you all
+very much.&rdquo;&nbsp; The sense of constraint which hung over
+the company was not, however, marked by any uncomfortable pause
+in the conversation.&nbsp; Henry Greech was a fluent thinker, of
+the kind that prefer to do their thinking aloud; the silence that
+descended on him as a mantle in the House of Commons was an
+official livery of which he divested himself as thoroughly as
+possible in private life.&nbsp; He did not propose to sit through
+dinner as a mere listener to Mr. Thorle&rsquo;s personal
+narrative of philanthropic movements and experiences, and took
+the first opportunity of launching himself into a flow of
+satirical observations on current political affairs.&nbsp; Lady
+Veula was inured to this sort of thing in her own home circle,
+and sat listening with the stoical indifference with which an
+Esquimau might accept the occurrence of one snowstorm the more,
+in the course of an Arctic winter.&nbsp; Serena Golackly felt a
+certain relief at the fact that her imported guest was not, after
+all, monopolising the conversation.&nbsp; But the latter was too
+determined a personality to allow himself to be thrust aside for
+many minutes by the talkative M.P.&nbsp; Henry Greech paused for
+an instant to chuckle at one of his own shafts of satire, and
+immediately Thorle&rsquo;s penetrating voice swept across the
+table.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, you politicians!&rdquo; he exclaimed, with pleasant
+superiority; &ldquo;you are always fighting about how things
+should be done, and the consequence is you are never able to do
+anything.&nbsp; Would you like me to tell you what a Unitarian
+horsedealer said to me at Brindisi about politicians?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A Unitarian horsedealer at Brindisi had all the allurement of
+the unexpected.&nbsp; Henry Greech&rsquo;s witticisms at the
+expense of the Front Opposition bench were destined to remain as
+unfinished as his wife&rsquo;s history of the broken
+soup-plates.&nbsp; Thorle was primed with an ample succession of
+stories and themes, chiefly concerning poverty, thriftlessness,
+reclamation, reformed characters, and so forth, which carried him
+in an almost uninterrupted sequence through the remainder of the
+dinner.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What I want to do is to make people think,&rdquo; he
+said, turning his prominent eyes on to his hostess;
+&ldquo;it&rsquo;s so hard to make people think.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At any rate you give them the opportunity,&rdquo; said
+Comus, cryptically.</p>
+<p>As the ladies rose to leave the table Comus crossed over to
+pick up one of Lady Veula&rsquo;s gloves that had fallen to the
+floor.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I did not know you kept a dog,&rdquo; said Lady
+Veula.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said Comus, &ldquo;there
+isn&rsquo;t one in the house.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I could have sworn I saw one follow you across the hall
+this evening,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A small black dog, something like a schipperke?&rdquo;
+asked Comus in a low voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, that was it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I saw it myself to-night; it ran from behind my chair
+just as I was sitting down.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t say anything to the
+others about it; it would frighten my mother.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Have you ever seen it before?&rdquo; Lady Veula asked
+quickly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Once, when I was six years old.&nbsp; It followed my
+father downstairs.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lady Veula said nothing.&nbsp; She knew that Comus had lost
+his father at the age of six.</p>
+<p>In the drawing-room Serena made nervous excuses for her
+talkative friend.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Really, rather an interesting man, you know, and up to
+the eyes in all sorts of movements.&nbsp; Just the sort of person
+to turn loose at a drawing-room meeting, or to send down to a
+mission-hall in some unheard-of neighbourhood.&nbsp; Given a
+sounding-board and a harmonium, and a titled woman of some sort
+in the chair, and he&rsquo;ll be perfectly happy; I must say I
+hadn&rsquo;t realised how overpowering he might be at a small
+dinner-party.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I should say he was a very good man,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Greech; she had forgiven the mutilation of her soup-plate
+story.</p>
+<p>The party broke up early as most of the guests had other
+engagements to keep.&nbsp; With a belated recognition of the
+farewell nature of the occasion they made pleasant little
+good-bye remarks to Comus, with the usual predictions of
+prosperity and anticipations of an ultimate auspicious
+return.&nbsp; Even Henry Greech sank his personal dislike of the
+boy for the moment, and made hearty jocular allusions to a
+home-coming, which, in the elder man&rsquo;s eyes, seemed
+possibly pleasantly remote.&nbsp; Lady Veula alone made no
+reference to the future; she simply said, &ldquo;Good-bye,
+Comus,&rdquo; but her voice was the kindest of all and he
+responded with a look of gratitude.&nbsp; The weariness in her
+eyes was more marked than ever as she lay back against the
+cushions of her carriage.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What a tragedy life is,&rdquo; she said, aloud to
+herself.</p>
+<p>Serena and Stephen Thorle were the last to leave, and
+Francesca stood alone for a moment at the head of the stairway
+watching Comus laughing and chatting as he escorted the departing
+guests to the door.&nbsp; The ice-wall was melting under the
+influence of coming separation, and never had he looked more
+adorably handsome in her eyes, never had his merry laugh and
+mischief-loving gaiety seemed more infectious than on this night
+of his farewell banquet.&nbsp; She was glad enough that he was
+going away from a life of idleness and extravagance and
+temptation, but she began to suspect that she would miss, for a
+little while at any rate, the high-spirited boy who could be so
+attractive in his better moods.&nbsp; Her impulse, after the
+guests had gone, was to call him to her and hold him once more in
+her arms, and repeat her wishes for his happiness and good-luck
+in the land he was going to, and her promise of his welcome back,
+some not too distant day, to the land he was leaving.&nbsp; She
+wanted to forget, and to make him forget, the months of irritable
+jangling and sharp discussions, the months of cold aloofness and
+indifference and to remember only that he was her own dear Comus
+as in the days of yore, before he had grown from an unmanageable
+pickle into a weariful problem.&nbsp; But she feared lest she
+should break down, and she did not wish to cloud his
+light-hearted gaiety on the very eve of his departure.&nbsp; She
+watched him for a moment as he stood in the hall, settling his
+tie before a mirror, and then went quietly back to her
+drawing-room.&nbsp; It had not been a very successful dinner
+party, and the general effect it had left on her was one of
+depression.</p>
+<p>Comus, with a lively musical-comedy air on his lips, and a
+look of wretchedness in his eyes, went out to visit the haunts
+that he was leaving so soon.</p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Elaine Youghal</span> sat at lunch in the
+Speise Saal of one of Vienna&rsquo;s costlier hotels.&nbsp; The
+double-headed eagle, with its &ldquo;K.u.K.&rdquo; legend,
+everywhere met the eye and announced the imperial favour in which
+the establishment basked.&nbsp; Some several square yards of
+yellow bunting, charged with the image of another double-headed
+eagle, floating from the highest flag-staff above the building,
+betrayed to the initiated the fact that a Russian Grand Duke was
+concealed somewhere on the premises.&nbsp; Unannounced by
+heraldic symbolism but unconcealable by reason of nature&rsquo;s
+own blazonry, were several citizens and citizenesses of the great
+republic of the Western world.&nbsp; One or two Cobdenite members
+of the British Parliament engaged in the useful task of proving
+that the cost of living in Vienna was on an exorbitant scale,
+flitted with restrained importance through a land whose fatness
+they had come to spy out; every fancied over-charge in their
+bills was welcome as providing another nail in the coffin of
+their fiscal opponents.&nbsp; It is the glory of democracies that
+they may be misled but never driven.&nbsp; Here and there, like
+brave deeds in a dust-patterned world, flashed and glittered the
+sumptuous uniforms of representatives of the Austrian military
+caste.&nbsp; Also in evidence, at discreet intervals, were stray
+units of the Semetic tribe that nineteen centuries of European
+neglect had been unable to mislay.</p>
+<p>Elaine sitting with Courtenay at an elaborately appointed
+luncheon table, gay with high goblets of Bohemian glassware, was
+mistress of three discoveries.&nbsp; First, to her
+disappointment, that if you frequent the more expensive hotels of
+Europe you must be prepared to find, in whatever country you may
+chance to be staying, a depressing international likeness between
+them all.&nbsp; Secondly, to her relief, that one is not expected
+to be sentimentally amorous during a modern honeymoon.&nbsp;
+Thirdly, rather to her dismay, that Courtenay Youghal did not
+necessarily expect her to be markedly affectionate in
+private.&nbsp; Someone had described him, after their marriage,
+as one of Nature&rsquo;s bachelors, and she began to see how
+aptly the description fitted him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Will those Germans on our left never stop
+talking?&rdquo; she asked, as an undying flow of Teutonic small
+talk rattled and jangled across the intervening stretch of
+carpet.&nbsp; &ldquo;Not one of those three women has ceased
+talking for an instant since we&rsquo;ve been sitting
+here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They will presently, if only for a moment,&rdquo; said
+Courtenay; &ldquo;when the dish you have ordered comes in there
+will be a deathly silence at the next table.&nbsp; No German can
+see a <i>plat</i> brought in for someone else without being
+possessed with a great fear that it represents a more toothsome
+morsel or a better money&rsquo;s worth than what he has ordered
+for himself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The exuberant Teutonic chatter was balanced on the other side
+of the room by an even more penetrating conversation unflaggingly
+maintained by a party of Americans, who were sitting in judgment
+on the cuisine of the country they were passing through, and
+finding few extenuating circumstances.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What Mr. Lonkins wants is a real <i>deep</i> cherry
+pie,&rdquo; announced a lady in a tone of dramatic and honest
+conviction.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, yes, that is so,&rdquo; corroborated a gentleman
+who was apparently the Mr. Lonkins in question; &ldquo;a real
+<i>deep</i> cherry pie.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We had the same trouble way back in Paris,&rdquo;
+proclaimed another lady; &ldquo;little Jerome and the girls
+don&rsquo;t want to eat any more <i>cr&egrave;me
+renvers&eacute;e</i>.&nbsp; I&rsquo;d give anything if they could
+get some real cherry pie.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Real <i>deep</i> cherry pie,&rdquo; assented Mr.
+Lonkins.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Way down in Ohio we used to have peach pie that was
+real good,&rdquo; said Mrs. Lonkins, turning on a tap of
+reminiscence that presently flowed to a cascade.&nbsp; The
+subject of pies seemed to lend itself to indefinite
+expansion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do those people think of nothing but their food?&rdquo;
+asked Elaine, as the virtues of roasted mutton suddenly came to
+the fore and received emphatic recognition, even the absent and
+youthful Jerome being quoted in its favour.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;On the contrary,&rdquo; said Courtenay, &ldquo;they are
+a widely-travelled set, and the man has had a notably interesting
+career.&nbsp; It is a form of home-sickness with them to discuss
+and lament the cookery and foods that they&rsquo;ve never had the
+leisure to stay at home and digest.&nbsp; The Wandering Jew
+probably babbled unremittingly about some breakfast dish that
+took so long to prepare that he had never time to eat
+it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A waiter deposited a dish of Wiener Nierenbraten in front of
+Elaine.&nbsp; At the same moment a magic hush fell upon the three
+German ladies at the adjoining table, and the flicker of a great
+fear passed across their eyes.&nbsp; Then they burst forth again
+into tumultuous chatter.&nbsp; Courtenay had proved a reliable
+prophet.</p>
+<p>Almost at the same moment as the luncheon-dish appeared on the
+scene, two ladies arrived at a neighbouring table, and bowed with
+dignified cordiality to Elaine and Courtenay.&nbsp; They were two
+of the more worldly and travelled of Elaine&rsquo;s extensive
+stock of aunts, and they happened to be making a short stay at
+the same hotel as the young couple.&nbsp; They were far too
+correct and rationally minded to intrude themselves on their
+niece, but it was significant of Elaine&rsquo;s altered view as
+to the sanctity of honeymoon life that she secretly rather
+welcomed the presence of her two relatives in the hotel, and had
+found time and occasion to give them more of her society than she
+would have considered necessary or desirable a few weeks
+ago.&nbsp; The younger of the two she rather liked, in a
+restrained fashion, as one likes an unpretentious watering-place
+or a restaurant that does not try to give one a musical education
+in addition to one&rsquo;s dinner.&nbsp; One felt instinctively
+about her that she would never wear rather more valuable diamonds
+than any other woman in the room, and would never be the only
+person to be saved in a steamboat disaster or hotel fire.&nbsp;
+As a child she might have been perfectly well able to recite
+&ldquo;On Linden when the sun was low,&rdquo; but one felt
+certain that nothing ever induced her to do so.&nbsp; The elder
+aunt, Mrs. Goldbrook, did not share her sister&rsquo;s character
+as a human rest-cure; most people found her rather disturbing,
+chiefly, perhaps, from her habit of asking unimportant questions
+with enormous solemnity.&nbsp; Her manner of enquiring after a
+trifling ailment gave one the impression that she was more
+concerned with the fortunes of the malady than with oneself, and
+when one got rid of a cold one felt that she almost expected to
+be given its postal address.&nbsp; Probably her manner was merely
+the defensive outwork of an innate shyness, but she was not a
+woman who commanded confidences.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A telephone call for Courtenay,&rdquo; commented the
+younger of the two women as Youghal hurriedly flashed through the
+room; &ldquo;the telephone system seems to enter very largely
+into that young man&rsquo;s life.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The telephone has robbed matrimony of most of its
+sting,&rdquo; said the elder; &ldquo;so much more discreet than
+pen and ink communications which get read by the wrong
+people.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Elaine&rsquo;s aunts were conscientiously worldly; they were
+the natural outcome of a stock that had been conscientiously
+straight-laced for many generations.</p>
+<p>Elaine had progressed to the pancake stage before Courtenay
+returned.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sorry to be away so long,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but
+I&rsquo;ve arranged something rather nice for to-night.&nbsp;
+There&rsquo;s rather a jolly masquerade ball on.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve
+&rsquo;phoned about getting a costume for you and it&rsquo;s
+alright.&nbsp; It will suit you beautifully, and I&rsquo;ve got
+my harlequin dress with me.&nbsp; Madame Kelnicort, excellent
+soul, is going to chaperone you, and she&rsquo;ll take you back
+any time you like; I&rsquo;m quite unreliable when I get into
+fancy dress.&nbsp; I shall probably keep going till some
+unearthly hour of the morning.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A masquerade ball in a strange city hardly represented
+Elaine&rsquo;s idea of enjoyment.&nbsp; Carefully to disguise
+one&rsquo;s identity in a neighbourhood where one was entirely
+unknown seemed to her rather meaningless.&nbsp; With Courtenay,
+of course, it was different; he seemed to have friends and
+acquaintances everywhere.&nbsp; However, the matter had
+progressed to a point which would have made a refusal to go seem
+rather ungracious.&nbsp; Elaine finished her pancake and began to
+take a polite interest in her costume.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is your character?&rdquo; asked Madame Kelnicort
+that evening, as they uncloaked, preparatory to entering the
+already crowded ball-room.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I believe I&rsquo;m supposed to represent Marjolaine de
+Montfort, whoever she may have been,&rdquo; said Elaine.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Courtenay declares he only wanted to marry me because
+I&rsquo;m his ideal of her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But what a mistake to go as a character you know
+nothing about.&nbsp; To enjoy a masquerade ball you ought to
+throw away your own self and be the character you
+represent.&nbsp; Now Courtenay has been Harlequin since half-way
+through dinner; I could see it dancing in his eyes.&nbsp; At
+about six o&rsquo;clock to-morrow morning he will fall asleep and
+wake up a member of the British House of Parliament on his
+honeymoon, but to-night he is unrestrainedly
+Harlequin.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Elaine stood in the ball-room surrounded by a laughing
+jostling throng of pierrots, jockeys, Dresden-china
+shepherdesses, Roumanian peasant-girls and all the lively
+make-believe creatures that form the ingredients of a fancy-dress
+ball.&nbsp; As she stood watching them she experienced a growing
+feeling of annoyance, chiefly with herself.&nbsp; She was
+assisting, as the French say, at one of the gayest scenes of
+Europe&rsquo;s gayest capital, and she was conscious of being
+absolutely unaffected by the gaiety around her.&nbsp; The
+costumes were certainly interesting to look at, and the music
+good to listen to, and to that extent she was amused, but the
+<i>abandon</i> of the scene made no appeal to her.&nbsp; It was
+like watching a game of which you did not know the rules, and in
+the issue of which you were not interested.&nbsp; Elaine began to
+wonder what was the earliest moment at which she could drag
+Madame Kelnicort away from the revel without being guilty of
+sheer cruelty.&nbsp; Then Courtenay wriggled out of the crush and
+came towards her, a joyous laughing Courtenay, looking younger
+and handsomer than she had ever seen him.&nbsp; She could
+scarcely recognise in him to-night the rising young debater who
+made embarrassing onslaughts on the Government&rsquo;s foreign
+policy before a crowded House of Commons.&nbsp; He claimed her
+for the dance that was just starting, and steered her dexterously
+into the heart of the waltzing crowd.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You look more like Marjolaine than I should have
+thought a mortal woman of these days could look,&rdquo; he
+declared, &ldquo;only Marjolaine did smile sometimes.&nbsp; You
+have rather the air of wondering if you&rsquo;d left out enough
+tea for the servants&rsquo; breakfast.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t mind my
+teasing; I love you to look like that, and besides, it makes a
+splendid foil to my Harlequin&mdash;my selfishness coming to the
+fore again, you see.&nbsp; But you really are to go home the
+moment you&rsquo;re bored; the excellent Kelnicort gets heaps of
+dances throughout the winter, so don&rsquo;t mind sacrificing
+her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A little later in the evening Elaine found herself standing
+out a dance with a grave young gentleman from the Russian
+Embassy.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur Courtenay enjoys himself, doesn&rsquo;t
+he?&rdquo; he observed, as the youthful-looking harlequin flashed
+past them, looking like some restless gorgeous-hued dragonfly;
+&ldquo;why is it that the good God has given your countrymen the
+boon of eternal youth?&nbsp; Some of your countrywomen, too, but
+all of the men.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Elaine could think of many of her countrymen who were not and
+never could have been youthful, but as far as Courtenay was
+concerned she recognised the fitness of the remark.&nbsp; And the
+recognition carried with it a sense of depression.&nbsp; Would he
+always remain youthful and keen on gaiety and revelling while she
+grew staid and retiring?&nbsp; She had thrust the lively
+intractable Comus out of her mind, as by his perverseness he had
+thrust himself out of her heart, and she had chosen the brilliant
+young man of affairs as her husband.&nbsp; He had honestly let
+her see the selfish side of his character while he was courting
+her, but she had been prepared to make due sacrifices to the
+selfishness of a public man who had his career to consider above
+all other things.&nbsp; Would she also have to make sacrifices to
+the harlequin spirit which was now revealing itself as an
+undercurrent in his nature?&nbsp; When one has inured oneself to
+the idea of a particular form of victimisation it is
+disconcerting to be confronted with another.&nbsp; Many a man who
+would patiently undergo martyrdom for religion&rsquo;s sake would
+be furiously unwilling to be a martyr to neuralgia.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think that is why you English love animals so
+much,&rdquo; pursued the young diplomat; &ldquo;you are such
+splendid animals yourselves.&nbsp; You are lively because you
+want to be lively, not because people are looking on at
+you.&nbsp; Monsieur Courtenay is certainly an animal.&nbsp; I
+mean it as a high compliment.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Am I an animal?&rdquo; asked Elaine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was going to say you are an angel,&rdquo; said the
+Russian, in some embarrassment, &ldquo;but I do not think that
+would do; angels and animals would never get on together.&nbsp;
+To get on with animals you must have a sense of humour, and I
+don&rsquo;t suppose angels have any sense of humour; you see it
+would be no use to them as they never hear any jokes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Perhaps,&rdquo; said Elaine, with a tinge of bitterness
+in her voice, &ldquo;perhaps I am a vegetable.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think you most remind me of a picture,&rdquo; said
+the Russian.</p>
+<p>It was not the first time Elaine had heard the simile.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;the Narrow Gallery at
+the Louvre; attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Evidently the impression she made on people was solely one of
+externals.</p>
+<p>Was that how Courtenay regarded her?&nbsp; Was that to be her
+function and place in life, a painted background, a decorative
+setting to other people&rsquo;s triumphs and tragedies?&nbsp;
+Somehow to-night she had the feeling that a general might have
+who brought imposing forces into the field and could do nothing
+with them.&nbsp; She possessed youth and good looks, considerable
+wealth, and had just made what would be thought by most people a
+very satisfactory marriage.&nbsp; And already she seemed to be
+standing aside as an onlooker where she had expected herself to
+be taking a leading part.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Does this sort of thing appeal to you?&rdquo; she asked
+the young Russian, nodding towards the gay scrimmage of
+masqueraders and rather prepared to hear an amused
+negative.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But yes, of course,&rdquo; he answered; &ldquo;costume
+balls, fancy fairs, caf&eacute; chantant, casino, anything that
+is not real life appeals to us Russians.&nbsp; Real life with us
+is the sort of thing that Maxim Gorki deals in.&nbsp; It
+interests us immensely, but we like to get away from it
+sometimes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Madame Kelnicort came up with another prospective partner, and
+Elaine delivered her ukase: one more dance and then back to the
+hotel.&nbsp; Without any special regret she made her retreat from
+the revel which Courtenay was enjoying under the impression that
+it was life and the young Russian under the firm conviction that
+it was not.</p>
+<p>Elaine breakfasted at her aunts&rsquo; table the next morning
+at much her usual hour.&nbsp; Courtenay was sleeping the sleep of
+a happy tired animal.&nbsp; He had given instructions to be
+called at eleven o&rsquo;clock, from which time onward the
+<i>Neue Freie Presse</i>, the <i>Zeit</i>, and his toilet would
+occupy his attention till he appeared at the luncheon
+table.&nbsp; There were not many people breakfasting when Elaine
+arrived on the scene, but the room seemed to be fuller than it
+really was by reason of a penetrating voice that was engaged in
+recounting how far the standard of Viennese breakfast fare fell
+below the expectations and desires of little Jerome and the
+girls.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If ever little Jerome becomes President of the United
+States,&rdquo; said Elaine, &ldquo;I shall be able to contribute
+quite an informing article on his gastronomic likes and dislikes
+to the papers.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The aunts were discreetly inquisitive as to the previous
+evening&rsquo;s entertainment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If Elaine would flirt mildly with somebody it would be
+such a good thing,&rdquo; said Mrs. Goldbrook; &ldquo;it would
+remind Courtenay that he&rsquo;s not the only attractive young
+man in the world.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Elaine, however, did not gratify their hopes; she referred to
+the ball with the detachment she would have shown in describing a
+drawing-room show of cottage industries.&nbsp; It was not
+difficult to discern in her description of the affair the
+confession that she had been slightly bored.&nbsp; From
+Courtenay, later in the day, the aunts received a much livelier
+impression of the festivities, from which it was abundantly clear
+that he at any rate had managed to amuse himself.&nbsp; Neither
+did it appear that his good opinion of his own attractions had
+suffered any serious shock.&nbsp; He was distinctly in a very
+good temper.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The secret of enjoying a honeymoon,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Goldbrook afterwards to her sister, &ldquo;is not to attempt too
+much.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You mean&mdash;?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Courtenay is content to try and keep one person amused
+and happy, and he thoroughly succeeds.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I certainly don&rsquo;t think Elaine is going to be
+very happy,&rdquo; said her sister, &ldquo;but at least Courtenay
+saved her from making the greatest mistake she could have
+made&mdash;marrying that young Bassington.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He has also,&rdquo; said Mrs. Goldbrook, &ldquo;helped
+her to make the next biggest mistake of her life&mdash;marrying
+Courtenay Youghal.&rdquo;</p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was late afternoon by the banks
+of a swiftly rushing river, a river that gave back a haze of heat
+from its waters as though it were some stagnant steaming lagoon,
+and yet seemed to be whirling onward with the determination of a
+living thing, perpetually eager and remorseless, leaping savagely
+at any obstacle that attempted to stay its course; an unfriendly
+river, to whose waters you committed yourself at your
+peril.&nbsp; Under the hot breathless shade of the trees on its
+shore arose that acrid all-pervading smell that seems to hang
+everywhere about the tropics, a smell as of some monstrous musty
+still-room where herbs and spices have been crushed and distilled
+and stored for hundreds of years, and where the windows have
+seldom been opened.&nbsp; In the dazzling heat that still held
+undisputed sway over the scene, insects and birds seemed
+preposterously alive and active, flitting their gay colours
+through the sunbeams, and crawling over the baked dust in the
+full swing and pursuit of their several businesses; the flies
+engaged in Heaven knows what, and the fly-catchers busy with the
+flies.&nbsp; Beasts and humans showed no such indifference to the
+temperature; the sun would have to slant yet further downward
+before the earth would become a fit arena for their revived
+activities.&nbsp; In the sheltered basement of a wayside
+rest-house a gang of native hammock-bearers slept or chattered
+drowsily through the last hours of the long mid-day halt; wide
+awake, yet almost motionless in the thrall of a heavy lassitude,
+their European master sat alone in an upper chamber, staring out
+through a narrow window-opening at the native village, spreading
+away in thick clusters of huts girt around with cultivated
+vegetation.&nbsp; It seemed a vast human ant-hill, which would
+presently be astir with its teeming human life, as though the Sun
+God in his last departing stride had roused it with a careless
+kick.&nbsp; Even as Comus watched he could see the beginnings of
+the evening&rsquo;s awakening.&nbsp; Women, squatting in front of
+their huts, began to pound away at the rice or maize that would
+form the evening meal, girls were collecting their water pots
+preparatory to a walk down to the river, and enterprising goats
+made tentative forays through gaps in the ill-kept fences of
+neighbouring garden plots; their hurried retreats showed that
+here at least someone was keeping alert and wakeful vigil.&nbsp;
+Behind a hut perched on a steep hillside, just opposite to the
+rest-house, two boys were splitting wood with a certain languid
+industry; further down the road a group of dogs were leisurely
+working themselves up to quarrelling pitch.&nbsp; Here and there,
+bands of evil-looking pigs roamed about, busy with foraging
+excursions that came unpleasantly athwart the border-line of
+scavenging.&nbsp; And from the trees that bounded and intersected
+the village rose the horrible, tireless, spiteful-sounding
+squawking of the iron-throated crows.</p>
+<p>Comus sat and watched it all with a sense of growing aching
+depression.&nbsp; It was so utterly trivial to his eyes, so
+devoid of interest, and yet it was so real, so serious, so
+implacable in its continuity.&nbsp; The brain grew tired with the
+thought of its unceasing reproduction.&nbsp; It had all gone on,
+as it was going on now, by the side of the great rushing swirling
+river, this tilling and planting and harvesting, marketing and
+store-keeping, feast-making and fetish-worship and love-making,
+burying and giving in marriage, child-bearing and child-rearing,
+all this had been going on, in the shimmering, blistering heat
+and the warm nights, while he had been a youngster at school,
+dimly recognising Africa as a division of the earth&rsquo;s
+surface that it was advisable to have a certain nodding
+acquaintance with.</p>
+<p>It had been going on in all its trifling detail, all its
+serious intensity, when his father and his grandfather in their
+day had been little boys at school, it would go on just as
+intently as ever long after Comus and his generation had passed
+away, just as the shadows would lengthen and fade under the
+mulberry trees in that far away English garden, round the old
+stone fountain where a leaden otter for ever preyed on a leaden
+salmon.</p>
+<p>Comus rose impatiently from his seat, and walked wearily
+across the hut to another window-opening which commanded a broad
+view of the river.&nbsp; There was something which fascinated and
+then depressed one in its ceaseless hurrying onward sweep, its
+tons of water rushing on for all time, as long as the face of the
+earth should remain unchanged.&nbsp; On its further shore could
+be seen spread out at intervals other teeming villages, with
+their cultivated plots and pasture clearings, their moving dots
+which meant cattle and goats and dogs and children.&nbsp; And far
+up its course, lost in the forest growth that fringed its banks,
+were hidden away yet more villages, human herding-grounds where
+men dwelt and worked and bartered, squabbled and worshipped,
+sickened and perished, while the river went by with its endless
+swirl and rush of gleaming waters.&nbsp; One could well
+understand primitive early races making propitiatory sacrifices
+to the spirit of a great river on whose shores they dwelt.&nbsp;
+Time and the river were the two great forces that seemed to
+matter here.</p>
+<p>It was almost a relief to turn back to that other outlook and
+watch the village life that was now beginning to wake in
+earnest.&nbsp; The procession of water-fetchers had formed itself
+in a long chattering line that stretched river-wards.&nbsp; Comus
+wondered how many tens of thousands of times that procession had
+been formed since first the village came into existence.&nbsp;
+They had been doing it while he was playing in the cricket-fields
+at school, while he was spending Christmas holidays in Paris,
+while he was going his careless round of theatres, dances,
+suppers and card-parties, just as they were doing it now; they
+would be doing it when there was no one alive who remembered
+Comus Bassington.&nbsp; This thought recurred again and again
+with painful persistence, a morbid growth arising in part from
+his loneliness.</p>
+<p>Staring dumbly out at the toiling sweltering human ant-hill
+Comus marvelled how missionary enthusiasts could labour hopefully
+at the work of transplanting their religion, with its homegrown
+accretions of fatherly parochial benevolence, in this
+heat-blistered, fever-scourged wilderness, where men lived like
+groundbait and died like flies.&nbsp; Demons one might believe
+in, if one did not hold one&rsquo;s imagination in healthy check,
+but a kindly all-managing God, never.&nbsp; Somewhere in the west
+country of England Comus had an uncle who lived in a
+rose-smothered rectory and taught a wholesome gentle-hearted
+creed that expressed itself in the spirit of &ldquo;Little lamb,
+who made thee?&rdquo; and faithfully reflected the beautiful
+homely Christ-child sentiment of Saxon Europe.&nbsp; What a far
+away, unreal fairy story it all seemed here in this West African
+land, where the bodies of men were of as little account as the
+bubbles that floated on the oily froth of the great flowing
+river, and where it required a stretch of wild profitless
+imagination to credit them with undying souls.&nbsp; In the life
+he had come from Comus had been accustomed to think of
+individuals as definite masterful personalities, making their
+several marks on the circumstances that revolved around them;
+they did well or ill, or in most cases indifferently, and were
+criticised, praised, blamed, thwarted or tolerated, or given way
+to.&nbsp; In any case, humdrum or outstanding, they had their
+spheres of importance, little or big.&nbsp; They dominated a
+breakfast table or harassed a Government, according to their
+capabilities or opportunities, or perhaps they merely had
+irritating mannerisms.&nbsp; At any rate it seemed highly
+probable that they had souls.&nbsp; Here a man simply made a unit
+in an unnumbered population, an inconsequent dot in a
+loosely-compiled deathroll.&nbsp; Even his own position as a
+white man exalted conspicuously above a horde of black natives
+did not save Comus from the depressing sense of nothingness which
+his first experience of fever had thrown over him.&nbsp; He was a
+lost, soulless body in this great uncaring land; if he died
+another would take his place, his few effects would be
+inventoried and sent down to the coast, someone else would finish
+off any tea or whisky that he left behind&mdash;that would be
+all.</p>
+<p>It was nearly time to be starting towards the next halting
+place where he would dine or at any rate eat something.&nbsp; But
+the lassitude which the fever had bequeathed him made the tedium
+of travelling through interminable forest-tracks a weariness to
+be deferred as long as possible.&nbsp; The bearers were nothing
+loth to let another half-hour or so slip by, and Comus dragged a
+battered paper-covered novel from the pocket of his coat.&nbsp;
+It was a story dealing with the elaborately tangled love affairs
+of a surpassingly uninteresting couple, and even in his almost
+bookless state Comus had not been able to plough his way through
+more than two-thirds of its dull length; bound up with the cover,
+however, were some pages of advertisement, and these the exile
+scanned with a hungry intentness that the romance itself could
+never have commanded.&nbsp; The name of a shop, of a street, the
+address of a restaurant, came to him as a bitter reminder of the
+world he had lost, a world that ate and drank and flirted,
+gambled and made merry, a world that debated and intrigued and
+wire-pulled, fought or compromised political battles&mdash;and
+recked nothing of its outcasts wandering through forest paths and
+steamy swamps or lying in the grip of fever.&nbsp; Comus read and
+re-read those few lines of advertisement, just as he treasured a
+much-crumpled programme of a first-night performance at the Straw
+Exchange Theatre; they seemed to make a little more real the past
+that was already so shadowy and so utterly remote.&nbsp; For a
+moment he could almost capture the sensation of being once again
+in those haunts that he loved; then he looked round and pushed
+the book wearily from him.&nbsp; The steaming heat, the forest,
+the rushing river hemmed him in on all sides.</p>
+<p>The two boys who had been splitting wood ceased from their
+labours and straightened their backs; suddenly the smaller of the
+two gave the other a resounding whack with a split lath that he
+still held in his hand, and flew up the hillside with a scream of
+laughter and simulated terror, the bigger lad following in hot
+pursuit.&nbsp; Up and down the steep bush-grown slope they raced
+and twisted and dodged, coming sometimes to close quarters in a
+hurricane of squeals and smacks, rolling over and over like
+fighting kittens, and breaking away again to start fresh
+provocation and fresh pursuit.&nbsp; Now and again they would lie
+for a time panting in what seemed the last stage of exhaustion,
+and then they would be off in another wild scamper, their dusky
+bodies flitting through the bushes, disappearing and reappearing
+with equal suddenness.&nbsp; Presently two girls of their own
+age, who had returned from the water-fetching, sprang out on them
+from ambush, and the four joined in one joyous gambol that lit up
+the hillside with shrill echoes and glimpses of flying
+limbs.&nbsp; Comus sat and watched, at first with an amused
+interest, then with a returning flood of depression and
+heart-ache.&nbsp; Those wild young human kittens represented the
+joy of life, he was the outsider, the lonely alien, watching
+something in which he could not join, a happiness in which he had
+no part or lot.&nbsp; He would pass presently out of the village
+and his bearers&rsquo; feet would leave their indentations in the
+dust; that would be his most permanent memorial in this little
+oasis of teeming life.&nbsp; And that other life, in which he
+once moved with such confident sense of his own necessary
+participation in it, how completely he had passed out of
+it.&nbsp; Amid all its laughing throngs, its card parties and
+race-meetings and country-house gatherings, he was just a mere
+name, remembered or forgotten, Comus Bassington, the boy who went
+away.&nbsp; He had loved himself very well and never troubled
+greatly whether anyone else really loved him, and now he realised
+what he had made of his life.&nbsp; And at the same time he knew
+that if his chance were to come again he would throw it away just
+as surely, just as perversely.&nbsp; Fate played with him with
+loaded dice; he would lose always.</p>
+<p>One person in the whole world had cared for him, for longer
+than he could remember, cared for him perhaps more than he knew,
+cared for him perhaps now.&nbsp; But a wall of ice had mounted up
+between him and her, and across it there blew that cold-breath
+that chills or kills affection.</p>
+<p>The words of a well-known old song, the wistful cry of a lost
+cause, rang with insistent mockery through his brain:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Better loved you canna be,<br />
+Will ye ne&rsquo;er come back again?&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>If it was love that was to bring him back he must be an exile
+for ever.&nbsp; His epitaph in the mouths of those that
+remembered him would be, Comus Bassington, the boy who never came
+back.</p>
+<p>And in his unutterable loneliness he bowed his head on his
+arms, that he might not see the joyous scrambling frolic on
+yonder hillside.</p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> bleak rawness of a grey
+December day held sway over St. James&rsquo;s Park, that
+sanctuary of lawn and tree and pool, into which the bourgeois
+innovator has rushed ambitiously time and again, to find that he
+must take the patent leather from off his feet, for the ground on
+which he stands is hallowed ground.</p>
+<p>In the lonely hour of early afternoon, when the workers had
+gone back to their work, and the loiterers were scarcely yet
+gathered again, Francesca Bassington made her way restlessly
+along the stretches of gravelled walk that bordered the
+ornamental water.&nbsp; The overmastering unhappiness that filled
+her heart and stifled her thinking powers found answering echo in
+her surroundings.&nbsp; There is a sorrow that lingers in old
+parks and gardens that the busy streets have no leisure to keep
+by them; the dead must bury their dead in Whitehall or the Place
+de la Concorde, but there are quieter spots where they may still
+keep tryst with the living and intrude the memory of their bygone
+selves on generations that have almost forgotten them.&nbsp; Even
+in tourist-trampled Versailles the desolation of a tragedy that
+cannot die haunts the terraces and fountains like a bloodstain
+that will not wash out; in the Saxon Garden at Warsaw there
+broods the memory of long-dead things, coeval with the stately
+trees that shade its walks, and with the carp that swim to-day in
+its ponds as they doubtless swam there when &ldquo;Lieber
+Augustin&rdquo; was a living person and not as yet an immortal
+couplet.&nbsp; And St. James&rsquo;s Park, with its lawns and
+walks and waterfowl, harbours still its associations with a
+bygone order of men and women, whose happiness and sadness are
+woven into its history, dim and grey as they were once bright and
+glowing, like the faded pattern worked into the fabric of an old
+tapestry.&nbsp; It was here that Francesca had made her way when
+the intolerable inaction of waiting had driven her forth from her
+home.&nbsp; She was waiting for that worst news of all, the news
+which does not kill hope, because there has been none to kill,
+but merely ends suspense.&nbsp; An early message had said that
+Comus was ill, which might have meant much or little; then there
+had come that morning a cablegram which only meant one thing; in
+a few hours she would get a final message, of which this was the
+preparatory forerunner.&nbsp; She already knew as much as that
+awaited message would tell her.&nbsp; She knew that she would
+never see Comus again, and she knew now that she loved him beyond
+all things that the world could hold for her.&nbsp; It was no
+sudden rush of pity or compunction that clouded her judgment or
+gilded her recollection of him; she saw him as he was, the
+beautiful, wayward, laughing boy, with his naughtiness, his
+exasperating selfishness, his insurmountable folly and
+perverseness, his cruelty that spared not even himself, and as he
+was, as he always had been, she knew that he was the one thing
+that the Fates had willed that she should love.&nbsp; She did not
+stop to accuse or excuse herself for having sent him forth to
+what was to prove his death.&nbsp; It was, doubtless, right and
+reasonable that he should have gone out there, as hundreds of
+other men went out, in pursuit of careers; the terrible thing was
+that he would never come back.&nbsp; The old cruel hopelessness
+that had always chequered her pride and pleasure in his good
+looks and high spirits and fitfully charming ways had dealt her a
+last crushing blow; he was dying somewhere thousands of miles
+away without hope of recovery, without a word of love to comfort
+him, and without hope or shred of consolation she was waiting to
+hear of the end.&nbsp; The end; that last dreadful piece of news
+which would write &ldquo;nevermore&rdquo; across his life and
+hers.</p>
+<p>The lively bustle in the streets had been a torture that she
+could not bear.&nbsp; It wanted but two days to Christmas and the
+gaiety of the season, forced or genuine, rang out
+everywhere.&nbsp; Christmas shopping, with its anxious solicitude
+or self-centred absorption, overspread the West End and made the
+pavements scarcely passable at certain favoured points.&nbsp;
+Proud parents, parcel-laden and surrounded by escorts of their
+young people, compared notes with one another on the looks and
+qualities of their offspring and exchanged loud hurried
+confidences on the difficulty or success which each had
+experienced in getting the right presents for one and all.&nbsp;
+Shouted directions where to find this or that article at its best
+mingled with salvos of Christmas good wishes.&nbsp; To Francesca,
+making her way frantically through the carnival of happiness with
+that lonely deathbed in her eyes, it had seemed a callous mockery
+of her pain; could not people remember that there were
+crucifixions as well as joyous birthdays in the world?&nbsp;
+Every mother that she passed happy in the company of a
+fresh-looking clean-limbed schoolboy son sent a fresh stab at her
+heart, and the very shops had their bitter memories.&nbsp; There
+was the tea-shop where he and she had often taken tea together,
+or, in the days of their estrangement, sat with their separate
+friends at separate tables.&nbsp; There were other shops where
+extravagantly-incurred bills had furnished material for those
+frequently recurring scenes of recrimination, and the Colonial
+outfitters, where, as he had phrased it in whimsical mockery, he
+had bought grave-clothes for his burying-alive.&nbsp; The
+&ldquo;oubliette!&rdquo;&nbsp; She remembered the bitter petulant
+name he had flung at his destined exile.&nbsp; There at least he
+had been harder on himself than the Fates were pleased to will;
+never, as long as Francesca lived and had a brain that served
+her, would she be able to forget.&nbsp; That narcotic would never
+be given to her.&nbsp; Unrelenting, unsparing memory would be
+with her always to remind her of those last days of
+tragedy.&nbsp; Already her mind was dwelling on the details of
+that ghastly farewell dinner-party and recalling one by one the
+incidents of ill-omen that had marked it; how they had sat down
+seven to table and how one liqueur glass in the set of seven had
+been shivered into fragments; how her glass had slipped from her
+hand as she raised it to her lips to wish Comus a safe return;
+and the strange, quiet hopelessness of Lady Veula&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;good-bye&rdquo;; she remembered now how it had chilled and
+frightened her at the moment.</p>
+<p>The park was filling again with its floating population of
+loiterers, and Francesca&rsquo;s footsteps began to take a
+homeward direction.&nbsp; Something seemed to tell her that the
+message for which she waited had arrived and was lying there on
+the hall table.&nbsp; Her brother, who had announced his
+intention of visiting her early in the afternoon would have gone
+by now; he knew nothing of this morning&rsquo;s bad
+news&mdash;the instinct of a wounded animal to creep away by
+itself had prompted her to keep her sorrow from him as long as
+possible.&nbsp; His visit did not necessitate her presence; he
+was bringing an Austrian friend, who was compiling a work on the
+Franco-Flemish school of painting, to inspect the Van der Meulen,
+which Henry Greech hoped might perhaps figure as an illustration
+in the book.&nbsp; They were due to arrive shortly after lunch,
+and Francesca had left a note of apology, pleading an urgent
+engagement elsewhere.&nbsp; As she turned to make her way across
+the Mall into the Green Park a gentle voice hailed her from a
+carriage that was just drawing up by the sidewalk.&nbsp; Lady
+Caroline Benaresq had been favouring the Victoria Memorial with a
+long unfriendly stare.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In primitive days,&rdquo; she remarked, &ldquo;I
+believe it was the fashion for great chiefs and rulers to have
+large numbers of their relatives and dependents killed and buried
+with them; in these more enlightened times we have invented quite
+another way of making a great Sovereign universally
+regretted.&nbsp; My dear Francesca,&rdquo; she broke off
+suddenly, catching the misery that had settled in the
+other&rsquo;s eyes, &ldquo;what is the matter?&nbsp; Have you had
+bad news from out there?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am waiting for very bad news,&rdquo; said Francesca,
+and Lady Caroline knew what had happened.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wish I could say something; I
+can&rsquo;t.&rdquo;&nbsp; Lady Caroline spoke in a harsh,
+grunting voice that few people had ever heard her use.</p>
+<p>Francesca crossed the Mall and the carriage drove on.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Heaven help that poor woman,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline;
+which was, for her, startlingly like a prayer.</p>
+<p>As Francesca entered the hall she gave a quick look at the
+table; several packages, evidently an early batch of Christmas
+presents, were there, and two or three letters.&nbsp; On a salver
+by itself was the cablegram for which she had waited.&nbsp; A
+maid, who had evidently been on the lookout for her, brought her
+the salver.&nbsp; The servants were well aware of the dreadful
+thing that was happening, and there was pity on the girl&rsquo;s
+face and in her voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This came for you ten minutes ago, ma&rsquo;am, and Mr.
+Greech has been here, ma&rsquo;am, with another gentleman, and
+was sorry you weren&rsquo;t at home.&nbsp; Mr. Greech said he
+would call again in about half-an-hour.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Francesca carried the cablegram unopened into the drawing-room
+and sat down for a moment to think.&nbsp; There was no need to
+read it yet, for she knew what she would find written
+there.&nbsp; For a few pitiful moments Comus would seem less
+hopelessly lost to her if she put off the reading of that last
+terrible message.&nbsp; She rose and crossed over to the windows
+and pulled down the blinds, shutting out the waning December day,
+and then reseated herself.&nbsp; Perhaps in the shadowy
+half-light her boy would come and sit with her again for awhile
+and let her look her last upon his loved face; she could never
+touch him again or hear his laughing, petulant voice, but surely
+she might look on her dead.&nbsp; And her starving eyes saw only
+the hateful soulless things of bronze and silver and porcelain
+that she had set up and worshipped as gods; look where she would
+they were there around her, the cold ruling deities of the home
+that held no place for her dead boy.&nbsp; He had moved in and
+out among them, the warm, living, breathing thing that had been
+hers to love, and she had turned her eyes from that youthful
+comely figure to adore a few feet of painted canvas, a musty
+relic of a long departed craftsman.&nbsp; And now he was gone
+from her sight, from her touch, from her hearing for ever,
+without even a thought to flash between them for all the dreary
+years that she should live, and these things of canvas and
+pigment and wrought metal would stay with her.&nbsp; They were
+her soul.&nbsp; And what shall it profit a man if he save his
+soul and slay his heart in torment?</p>
+<p>On a small table by her side was Mervyn Quentock&rsquo;s
+portrait of her&mdash;the prophetic symbol of her tragedy; the
+rich dead harvest of unreal things that had never known life, and
+the bleak thrall of black unending Winter, a Winter in which
+things died and knew no re-awakening.</p>
+<p>Francesca turned to the small envelope lying in her lap; very
+slowly she opened it and read the short message.&nbsp; Then she
+sat numb and silent for a long, long time, or perhaps only for
+minutes.&nbsp; The voice of Henry Greech in the hall, enquiring
+for her, called her to herself. Hurriedly she crushed the piece
+of paper out of sight; he would have to be told, of course, but
+just yet her pain seemed too dreadful to be laid bare.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Comus is dead&rdquo; was a sentence beyond her power to
+speak.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have bad news for you, Francesca, I&rsquo;m sorry to
+say,&rdquo; Henry announced.&nbsp; Had he heard, too?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Henneberg has been here and looked at the
+picture,&rdquo; he continued, seating himself by her side,
+&ldquo;and though he admired it immensely as a work of art he
+gave me a disagreeable surprise by assuring me that it&rsquo;s
+not a genuine Van der Meulen.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a splendid copy,
+but still, unfortunately, only a copy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Henry paused and glanced at his sister to see how she had
+taken the unwelcome announcement.&nbsp; Even in the dim light he
+caught some of the anguish in her eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My dear Francesca,&rdquo; he said soothingly, laying
+his hand affectionately on her arm, &ldquo;I know that this must
+be a great disappointment to you, you&rsquo;ve always set such
+store by this picture, but you mustn&rsquo;t take it too much to
+heart.&nbsp; These disagreeable discoveries come at times to most
+picture fanciers and owners.&nbsp; Why, about twenty per cent. of
+the alleged Old Masters in the Louvre are supposed to be wrongly
+attributed.&nbsp; And there are heaps of similar cases in this
+country.&nbsp; Lady Dovecourt was telling me the other day that
+they simply daren&rsquo;t have an expert in to examine the Van
+Dykes at Columbey for fear of unwelcome disclosures.&nbsp; And
+besides, your picture is such an excellent copy that it&rsquo;s
+by no means without a value of its own.&nbsp; You must get over
+the disappointment you naturally feel, and take a philosophical
+view of the matter. . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>Francesca sat in stricken silence, crushing the folded morsel
+of paper tightly in her hand and wondering if the thin, cheerful
+voice with its pitiless, ghastly mockery of consolation would
+never stop.</p>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNBEARABLE BASSINGTON***</p>
+<pre>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Unbearable Bassington, by  Saki
+(#2 in our series by  Saki)
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+Title: The Unbearable Bassington
+
+Author:  Saki
+
+Release Date: Jun, 1996  [EBook #555]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on April 7, 1996]
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+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE UNBEARABLE BASSINGTON ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1913 John Lane edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+THE UNBEARABLE BASSINGTON
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+
+Francesca Bassington sat in the drawing-room of her house in Blue
+Street, W., regaling herself and her estimable brother Henry with
+China tea and small cress sandwiches.  The meal was of that elegant
+proportion which, while ministering sympathetically to the desires
+of the moment, is happily reminiscent of a satisfactory luncheon
+and blessedly expectant of an elaborate dinner to come.
+
+In her younger days Francesca had been known as the beautiful Miss
+Greech; at forty, although much of the original beauty remained,
+she was just dear Francesca Bassington.  No one would have dreamed
+of calling her sweet, but a good many people who scarcely knew her
+were punctilious about putting in the "dear."
+
+Her enemies, in their honester moments, would have admitted that
+she was svelte and knew how to dress, but they would have agreed
+with her friends in asserting that she had no soul.  When one's
+friends and enemies agree on any particular point they are usually
+wrong.  Francesca herself, if pressed in an unguarded moment to
+describe her soul, would probably have described her drawing-room.
+Not that she would have considered that the one had stamped the
+impress of its character on the other, so that close scrutiny might
+reveal its outstanding features, and even suggest its hidden
+places, but because she might have dimly recognised that her
+drawing-room was her soul.
+
+Francesca was one of those women towards whom Fate appears to have
+the best intentions and never to carry them into practice.  With
+the advantages put at her disposal she might have been expected to
+command a more than average share of feminine happiness.  So many
+of the things that make for fretfulness, disappointment and
+discouragement in a woman's life were removed from her path that
+she might well have been considered the fortunate Miss Greech, or
+later, lucky Francesca Bassington.  And she was not of the perverse
+band of those who make a rock-garden of their souls by dragging
+into them all the stoney griefs and unclaimed troubles they can
+find lying around them.  Francesca loved the smooth ways and
+pleasant places of life; she liked not merely to look on the bright
+side of things but to live there and stay there.  And the fact that
+things had, at one time and another, gone badly with her and
+cheated her of some of her early illusions made her cling the
+closer to such good fortune as remained to her now that she seemed
+to have reached a calmer period of her life.  To undiscriminating
+friends she appeared in the guise of a rather selfish woman, but it
+was merely the selfishness of one who had seen the happy and
+unhappy sides of life and wished to enjoy to the utmost what was
+left to her of the former.  The vicissitudes of fortune had not
+soured her, but they had perhaps narrowed her in the sense of
+making her concentrate much of her sympathies on things that
+immediately pleased and amused her, or that recalled and
+perpetuated the pleasing and successful incidents of other days.
+And it was her drawing-room in particular that enshrined the
+memorials or tokens of past and present happiness.
+
+Into that comfortable quaint-shaped room of angles and bays and
+alcoves had sailed, as into a harbour, those precious personal
+possessions and trophies that had survived the buffetings and
+storms of a not very tranquil married life.  Wherever her eyes
+might turn she saw the embodied results of her successes,
+economies, good luck, good management or good taste.  The battle
+had more than once gone against her, but she had somehow always
+contrived to save her baggage train, and her complacent gaze could
+roam over object after object that represented the spoils of
+victory or the salvage of honourable defeat.  The delicious bronze
+Fremiet on the mantelpiece had been the outcome of a Grand Prix
+sweepstake of many years ago; a group of Dresden figures of some
+considerable value had been bequeathed to her by a discreet
+admirer, who had added death to his other kindnesses; another group
+had been a self-bestowed present, purchased in blessed and unfading
+memory of a wonderful nine-days' bridge winnings at a country-house
+party.  There were old Persian and Bokharan rugs and Worcester tea-
+services of glowing colour, and little treasures of antique silver
+that each enshrined a history or a memory in addition to its own
+intrinsic value.  It amused her at times to think of the bygone
+craftsmen and artificers who had hammered and wrought and woven in
+far distant countries and ages, to produce the wonderful and
+beautiful things that had come, one way and another, into her
+possession.  Workers in the studios of medieval Italian towns and
+of later Paris, in the bazaars of Baghdad and of Central Asia, in
+old-time English workshops and German factories, in all manner of
+queer hidden corners where craft secrets were jealously guarded,
+nameless unremembered men and men whose names were world-renowned
+and deathless.
+
+And above all her other treasures, dominating in her estimation
+every other object that the room contained, was the great Van der
+Meulen that had come from her father's home as part of her wedding
+dowry.  It fitted exactly into the central wall panel above the
+narrow buhl cabinet, and filled exactly its right space in the
+composition and balance of the room.  From wherever you sat it
+seemed to confront you as the dominating feature of its
+surroundings.  There was a pleasing serenity about the great
+pompous battle scene with its solemn courtly warriors bestriding
+their heavily prancing steeds, grey or skewbald or dun, all gravely
+in earnest, and yet somehow conveying the impression that their
+campaigns were but vast serious picnics arranged in the grand
+manner.  Francesca could not imagine the drawing-room without the
+crowning complement of the stately well-hung picture, just as she
+could not imagine herself in any other setting than this house in
+Blue Street with its crowded Pantheon of cherished household gods.
+
+And herein sprouted one of the thorns that obtruded through the
+rose-leaf damask of what might otherwise have been Francesca's
+peace of mind.  One's happiness always lies in the future rather
+than in the past.  With due deference to an esteemed lyrical
+authority one may safely say that a sorrow's crown of sorrow is
+anticipating unhappier things.  The house in Blue Street had been
+left to her by her old friend Sophie Chetrof, but only until such
+time as her niece Emmeline Chetrof should marry, when it was to
+pass to her as a wedding present.  Emmeline was now seventeen and
+passably good-looking, and four or five years were all that could
+be safely allotted to the span of her continued spinsterhood.
+Beyond that period lay chaos, the wrenching asunder of Francesca
+from the sheltering habitation that had grown to be her soul.  It
+is true that in imagination she had built herself a bridge across
+the chasm, a bridge of a single span.  The bridge in question was
+her schoolboy son Comus, now being educated somewhere in the
+southern counties, or rather one should say the bridge consisted of
+the possibility of his eventual marriage with Emmeline, in which
+case Francesca saw herself still reigning, a trifle squeezed and
+incommoded perhaps, but still reigning in the house in Blue Street.
+The Van der Meulen would still catch its requisite afternoon light
+in its place of honour, the Fremiet and the Dresden and Old
+Worcester would continue undisturbed in their accustomed niches.
+Emmeline could have the Japanese snuggery, where Francesca
+sometimes drank her after-dinner coffee, as a separate drawing-
+room, where she could put her own things.  The details of the
+bridge structure had all been carefully thought out.  Only--it was
+an unfortunate circumstance that Comus should have been the span on
+which everything balanced.
+
+Francesca's husband had insisted on giving the boy that strange
+Pagan name, and had not lived long enough to judge as to the
+appropriateness, or otherwise, of its significance.  In seventeen
+years and some odd months Francesca had had ample opportunity for
+forming an opinion concerning her son's characteristics.  The
+spirit of mirthfulness which one associates with the name certainly
+ran riot in the boy, but it was a twisted wayward sort of mirth of
+which Francesca herself could seldom see the humorous side.  In her
+brother Henry, who sat eating small cress sandwiches as solemnly as
+though they had been ordained in some immemorial Book of
+Observances, fate had been undisguisedly kind to her.  He might so
+easily have married some pretty helpless little woman, and lived at
+Notting Hill Gate, and been the father of a long string of pale,
+clever useless children, who would have had birthdays and the sort
+of illnesses that one is expected to send grapes to, and who would
+have painted fatuous objects in a South Kensington manner as
+Christmas offerings to an aunt whose cubic space for lumber was
+limited.  Instead of committing these unbrotherly actions, which
+are so frequent in family life that they might almost be called
+brotherly, Henry had married a woman who had both money and a sense
+of repose, and their one child had the brilliant virtue of never
+saying anything which even its parents could consider worth
+repeating.  Then he had gone into Parliament, possibly with the
+idea of making his home life seem less dull; at any rate it
+redeemed his career from insignificance, for no man whose death can
+produce the item "another by-election" on the news posters can be
+wholly a nonentity.  Henry, in short, who might have been an
+embarrassment and a handicap, had chosen rather to be a friend and
+counsellor, at times even an emergency bank balance; Francesca on
+her part, with the partiality which a clever and lazily-inclined
+woman often feels for a reliable fool, not only sought his counsel
+but frequently followed it.  When convenient, moreover, she repaid
+his loans.
+
+Against this good service on the part of Fate in providing her with
+Henry for a brother, Francesca could well set the plaguy malice of
+the destiny that had given her Comus for a son.  The boy was one of
+those untameable young lords of misrule that frolic and chafe
+themselves through nursery and preparatory and public-school days
+with the utmost allowance of storm and dust and dislocation and the
+least possible amount of collar-work, and come somehow with a laugh
+through a series of catastrophes that has reduced everyone else
+concerned to tears or Cassandra-like forebodings.  Sometimes they
+sober down in after-life and become uninteresting, forgetting that
+they were ever lords of anything; sometimes Fate plays royally into
+their hands, and they do great things in a spacious manner, and are
+thanked by Parliaments and the Press and acclaimed by gala-day
+crowds.  But in most cases their tragedy begins when they leave
+school and turn themselves loose in a world that has grown too
+civilised and too crowded and too empty to have any place for them.
+And they are very many.
+
+Henry Greech had made an end of biting small sandwiches, and
+settled down like a dust-storm refreshed, to discuss one of the
+fashionably prevalent topics of the moment, the prevention of
+destitution.
+
+"It is a question that is only being nibbled at, smelt at, one
+might say, at the present moment," he observed, "but it is one that
+will have to engage our serious attention and consideration before
+long.  The first thing that we shall have to do is to get out of
+the dilettante and academic way of approaching it.  We must collect
+and assimilate hard facts.  It is a subject that ought to appeal to
+all thinking minds, and yet, you know, I find it surprisingly
+difficult to interest people in it."
+
+Francesca made some monosyllabic response, a sort of sympathetic
+grunt which was meant to indicate that she was, to a certain
+extent, listening and appreciating.  In reality she was reflecting
+that Henry possibly found it difficult to interest people in any
+topic that he enlarged on.  His talents lay so thoroughly in the
+direction of being uninteresting, that even as an eye-witness of
+the massacre of St. Bartholomew he would probably have infused a
+flavour of boredom into his descriptions of the event.
+
+"I was speaking down in Leicestershire the other day on this
+subject," continued Henry, "and I pointed out at some length a
+thing that few people ever stop to consider--"
+
+Francesca went over immediately but decorously to the majority that
+will not stop to consider.
+
+"Did you come across any of the Barnets when you were down there?"
+she interrupted; "Eliza Barnet is rather taken up with all those
+subjects."
+
+In the propagandist movements of Sociology, as in other arenas of
+life and struggle, the fiercest competition and rivalry is
+frequently to be found between closely allied types and species.
+Eliza Barnet shared many of Henry Greech's political and social
+views, but she also shared his fondness for pointing things out at
+some length; there had been occasions when she had extensively
+occupied the strictly limited span allotted to the platform oratory
+of a group of speakers of whom Henry Greech had been an impatient
+unit.  He might see eye to eye with her on the leading questions of
+the day, but he persistently wore mental blinkers as far as her
+estimable qualities were concerned, and the mention of her name was
+a skilful lure drawn across the trail of his discourse; if
+Francesca had to listen to his eloquence on any subject she much
+preferred that it should be a disparagement of Eliza Barnet rather
+than the prevention of destitution.
+
+"I've no doubt she means well," said Henry, "but it would be a good
+thing if she could be induced to keep her own personality a little
+more in the background, and not to imagine that she is the
+necessary mouthpiece of all the progressive thought in the
+countryside.  I fancy Canon Besomley must have had her in his mind
+when he said that some people came into the world to shake empires
+and others to move amendments."
+
+Francesca laughed with genuine amusement.
+
+"I suppose she is really wonderfully well up in all the subjects
+she talks about," was her provocative comment.
+
+Henry grew possibly conscious of the fact that he was being drawn
+out on the subject of Eliza Barnet, and he presently turned on to a
+more personal topic.
+
+"From the general air of tranquillity about the house I presume
+Comus has gone back to Thaleby," he observed.
+
+"Yes," said Francesca, "he went back yesterday.  Of course, I'm
+very fond of him, but I bear the separation well.  When he's here
+it's rather like having a live volcano in the house, a volcano that
+in its quietest moments asks incessant questions and uses strong
+scent."
+
+"It is only a temporary respite," said Henry; "in a year or two he
+will be leaving school, and then what?"
+
+Francesca closed her eyes with the air of one who seeks to shut out
+a distressing vision.  She was not fond of looking intimately at
+the future in the presence of another person, especially when the
+future was draped in doubtfully auspicious colours.
+
+"And then what?" persisted Henry.
+
+"Then I suppose he will be upon my hands."
+
+"Exactly."
+
+"Don't sit there looking judicial.  I'm quite ready to listen to
+suggestions if you've any to make."
+
+"In the case of any ordinary boy," said Henry, "I might make lots
+of suggestions as to the finding of suitable employment.  From what
+we know of Comus it would be rather a waste of time for either of
+us to look for jobs which he wouldn't look at when we'd got them
+for him."
+
+"He must do something," said Francesca.
+
+"I know he must; but he never will.  At least, he'll never stick to
+anything.  The most hopeful thing to do with him will be to marry
+him to an heiress.  That would solve the financial side of his
+problem.  If he had unlimited money at his disposal, he might go
+into the wilds somewhere and shoot big game.  I never know what the
+big game have done to deserve it, but they do help to deflect the
+destructive energies of some of our social misfits."
+
+Henry, who never killed anything larger or fiercer than a trout,
+was scornfully superior on the subject of big game shooting.
+
+Francesca brightened at the matrimonial suggestion.  "I don't know
+about an heiress," she said reflectively.  "There's Emmeline
+Chetrof of course.  One could hardly call her an heiress, but she's
+got a comfortable little income of her own and I suppose something
+more will come to her from her grandmother.  Then, of course, you
+know this house goes to her when she marries."
+
+"That would be very convenient," said Henry, probably following a
+line of thought that his sister had trodden many hundreds of times
+before him.  "Do she and Comus hit it off at all well together?"
+
+"Oh, well enough in boy and girl fashion," said Francesca.  "I must
+arrange for them to see more of each other in future.  By the way,
+that little brother of hers that she dotes on, Lancelot, goes to
+Thaleby this term.  I'll write and tell Comus to be specially kind
+to him; that will be a sure way to Emmeline's heart.  Comus has
+been made a prefect, you know.  Heaven knows why."
+
+"It can only be for prominence in games," sniffed Henry; "I think
+we may safely leave work and conduct out of the question."
+
+Comus was not a favourite with his uncle.
+
+Francesca had turned to her writing cabinet and was hastily
+scribbling a letter to her son in which the delicate health, timid
+disposition and other inevitable attributes of the new boy were
+brought to his notice, and commanded to his care.  When she had
+sealed and stamped the envelope Henry uttered a belated caution.
+
+"Perhaps on the whole it would be wiser to say nothing about the
+boy to Comus.  He doesn't always respond to directions you know."
+
+Francesca did know, and already was more than half of her brother's
+opinion; but the woman who can sacrifice a clean unspoiled penny
+stamp is probably yet unborn.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+
+Lancelot Chetrof stood at the end of a long bare passage,
+restlessly consulting his watch and fervently wishing himself half
+an hour older with a certain painful experience already registered
+in the past; unfortunately it still belonged to the future, and
+what was still more horrible, to the immediate future.  Like many
+boys new to a school he had cultivated an unhealthy passion for
+obeying rules and requirements, and his zeal in this direction had
+proved his undoing.  In his hurry to be doing two or three
+estimable things at once he had omitted to study the notice-board
+in more than a perfunctory fashion and had thereby missed a
+football practice specially ordained for newly-joined boys.  His
+fellow juniors of a term's longer standing had graphically
+enlightened him as to the inevitable consequences of his lapse; the
+dread which attaches to the unknown was, at any rate, deleted from
+his approaching doom, though at the moment he felt scarcely
+grateful for the knowledge placed at his disposal with such lavish
+solicitude.
+
+"You'll get six of the very best, over the back of a chair," said
+one.
+
+"They'll draw a chalk line across you, of course you know," said
+another.
+
+"A chalk line?"
+
+"Rather.  So that every cut can be aimed exactly at the same spot.
+It hurts much more that way."
+
+Lancelot tried to nourish a wan hope that there might be an element
+of exaggeration in this uncomfortably realistic description.
+
+Meanwhile in the prefects' room at the other end of the passage,
+Comus Bassington and a fellow prefect sat also waiting on time, but
+in a mood of far more pleasurable expectancy.  Comus was one of the
+most junior of the prefect caste, but by no means the least well-
+known, and outside the masters' common-room he enjoyed a certain
+fitful popularity, or at any rate admiration.  At football he was
+too erratic to be a really brilliant player, but he tackled as if
+the act of bringing his man headlong to the ground was in itself a
+sensuous pleasure, and his weird swear-words whenever he got hurt
+were eagerly treasured by those who were fortunate enough to hear
+them.  At athletics in general he was a showy performer, and
+although new to the functions of a prefect he had already
+established a reputation as an effective and artistic caner.  In
+appearance he exactly fitted his fanciful Pagan name.  His large
+green-grey eyes seemed for ever asparkle with goblin mischief and
+the joy of revelry, and the curved lips might have been those of
+some wickedly-laughing faun; one almost expected to see embryo
+horns fretting the smoothness of his sleek dark hair.  The chin was
+firm, but one looked in vain for a redeeming touch of ill-temper in
+the handsome, half-mocking, half-petulant face.  With a strain of
+sourness in him Comus might have been leavened into something
+creative and masterful; fate had fashioned him with a certain
+whimsical charm, and left him all unequipped for the greater
+purposes of life.  Perhaps no one would have called him a lovable
+character, but in many respects he was adorable; in all respects he
+was certainly damned.
+
+Rutley, his companion of the moment, sat watching him and
+wondering, from the depths of a very ordinary brain, whether he
+liked or hated him; it was easy to do either.
+
+"It's not really your turn to cane," he said.
+
+"I know it's not," said Comus, fingering a very serviceable-looking
+cane as lovingly as a pious violinist might handle his Strad.  "I
+gave Greyson some mint-chocolate to let me toss whether I caned or
+him, and I won.  He was rather decent over it and let me have half
+the chocolate back."
+
+The droll lightheartedness which won Comus Bassington such measure
+of popularity as he enjoyed among his fellows did not materially
+help to endear him to the succession of masters with whom he came
+in contact during the course of his schooldays.  He amused and
+interested such of them as had the saving grace of humour at their
+disposal, but if they sighed when he passed from their immediate
+responsibility it was a sigh of relief rather than of regret.  The
+more enlightened and experienced of them realised that he was
+something outside the scope of the things that they were called
+upon to deal with.  A man who has been trained to cope with storms,
+to foresee their coming, and to minimise their consequences, may be
+pardoned if he feels a certain reluctance to measure himself
+against a tornado.
+
+Men of more limited outlook and with a correspondingly larger
+belief in their own powers were ready to tackle the tornado had
+time permitted.
+
+"I think I could tame young Bassington if I had your
+opportunities," a form-master once remarked to a colleague whose
+House had the embarrassing distinction of numbering Comus among its
+inmates.
+
+"Heaven forbid that I should try," replied the housemaster.
+
+"But why?" asked the reformer.
+
+"Because Nature hates any interference with her own arrangements,
+and if you start in to tame the obviously untameable you are taking
+a fearful responsibility on yourself."
+
+"Nonsense; boys are Nature's raw material."
+
+"Millions of boys are.  There are just a few, and Bassington is one
+of them, who are Nature's highly finished product when they are in
+the schoolboy stage, and we, who are supposed to be moulding raw
+material, are quite helpless when we come in contact with them."
+
+"But what happens to them when they grow up?"
+
+"They never do grow up," said the housemaster; "that is their
+tragedy.  Bassington will certainly never grow out of his present
+stage."
+
+"Now you are talking in the language of Peter Pan," said the form-
+master.
+
+"I am not thinking in the manner of Peter Pan," said the other.
+"With all reverence for the author of that masterpiece I should say
+he had a wonderful and tender insight into the child mind and knew
+nothing whatever about boys.  To make only one criticism on that
+particular work, can you imagine a lot of British boys, or boys of
+any country that one knows of, who would stay contentedly playing
+children's games in an underground cave when there were wolves and
+pirates and Red Indians to be had for the asking on the other side
+of the trap door?"
+
+The form-master laughed.  "You evidently think that the 'Boy who
+would not grow up' must have been written by a 'grown-up who could
+never have been a boy.'  Perhaps that is the meaning of the 'Never-
+never Land.'  I daresay you're right in your criticism, but I don't
+agree with you about Bassington.  He's a handful to deal with, as
+anyone knows who has come in contact with him, but if one's hands
+weren't full with a thousand and one other things I hold to my
+opinion that he could be tamed."
+
+And he went his way, having maintained a form-master's inalienable
+privilege of being in the right.
+
+* * * * *
+
+In the prefects' room, Comus busied himself with the exact position
+of a chair planted out in the middle of the floor.
+
+"I think everything's ready," he said.
+
+Rutley glanced at the clock with the air of a Roman elegant in the
+Circus, languidly awaiting the introduction of an expected
+Christian to an expectant tiger.
+
+"The kid is due in two minutes," he said.
+
+"He'd jolly well better not be late," said Comus.
+
+Comus had gone through the mill of many scorching castigations in
+his earlier school days, and was able to appreciate to the last
+ounce the panic that must be now possessing his foredoomed victim,
+probably at this moment hovering miserably outside the door.  After
+all, that was part of the fun of the thing, and most things have
+their amusing side if one knows where to look for it.
+
+There was a knock at the door, and Lancelot entered in response to
+a hearty friendly summons to "come in."
+
+"I've come to be caned," he said breathlessly; adding by way of
+identification, "my name's Chetrof."
+
+"That's quite bad enough in itself," said Comus, "but there is
+probably worse to follow.  You are evidently keeping something back
+from us."
+
+"I missed a footer practice," said Lancelot
+
+"Six," said Comus briefly, picking up his cane.
+
+"I didn't see the notice on the board," hazarded Lancelot as a
+forlorn hope.
+
+"We are always pleased to listen to excuses, and our charge is two
+extra cuts.  That will be eight.  Get over."
+
+And Comus indicated the chair that stood in sinister isolation in
+the middle of the room.  Never had an article of furniture seemed
+more hateful in Lancelot's eyes.  Comus could well remember the
+time when a chair stuck in the middle of a room had seemed to him
+the most horrible of manufactured things.
+
+"Lend me a piece of chalk," he said to his brother prefect.
+
+Lancelot ruefully recognised the truth of the chalk-line story.
+
+Comus drew the desired line with an anxious exactitude which he
+would have scorned to apply to a diagram of Euclid or a map of the
+Russo-Persian frontier.
+
+"Bend a little more forward," he said to the victim, "and much
+tighter.  Don't trouble to look pleasant, because I can't see your
+face anyway.  It may sound unorthodox to say so, but this is going
+to hurt you much more than it will hurt me."
+
+There was a carefully measured pause, and then Lancelot was made
+vividly aware of what a good cane can be made to do in really
+efficient hands.  At the second cut he projected himself hurriedly
+off the chair.
+
+"Now I've lost count," said Comus; "we shall have to begin all over
+again.  Kindly get back into the same position.  If you get down
+again before I've finished Rutley will hold you over and you'll get
+a dozen."
+
+Lancelot got back on to the chair, and was re-arranged to the taste
+of his executioner.  He stayed there somehow or other while Comus
+made eight accurate and agonisingly effective shots at the chalk
+line.
+
+"By the way," he said to his gasping and gulping victim when the
+infliction was over, "you said Chetrof, didn't you?  I believe I've
+been asked to be kind to you.  As a beginning you can clean out my
+study this afternoon.  Be awfully careful how you dust the old
+china.  If you break any don't come and tell me but just go and
+drown yourself somewhere; it will save you from a worse fate."
+
+"I don't know where your study is," said Lancelot between his
+chokes.
+
+"You'd better find it or I shall have to beat you, really hard this
+time.  Here, you'd better keep this chalk in your pocket, it's sure
+to come in handy later on.  Don't stop to thank me for all I've
+done, it only embarrasses me."
+
+As Comus hadn't got a study Lancelot spent a feverish half-hour in
+looking for it, incidentally missing another footer practice.
+
+"Everything is very jolly here," wrote Lancelot to his sister
+Emmeline.  "The prefects can give you an awful hot time if they
+like, but most of them are rather decent.  Some are Beasts.
+Bassington is a prefect though only a junior one.  He is the Limit
+as Beasts go.  At least I think so."
+
+Schoolboy reticence went no further, but Emmeline filled in the
+gaps for herself with the lavish splendour of feminine imagination.
+Francesca's bridge went crashing into the abyss.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+
+On the evening of a certain November day, two years after the
+events heretofore chronicled, Francesca Bassington steered her way
+through the crowd that filled the rooms of her friend Serena
+Golackly, bestowing nods of vague recognition as she went, but with
+eyes that were obviously intent on focussing one particular figure.
+Parliament had pulled its energies together for an Autumn Session,
+and both political Parties were fairly well represented in the
+throng.  Serena had a harmless way of inviting a number of more or
+less public men and women to her house, and hoping that if you left
+them together long enough they would constitute a salon.  In
+pursuance of the same instinct she planted the flower borders at
+her week-end cottage retreat in Surrey with a large mixture of
+bulbs, and called the result a Dutch garden.  Unfortunately, though
+you may bring brilliant talkers into your home, you cannot always
+make them talk brilliantly, or even talk at all; what is worse you
+cannot restrict the output of those starling-voiced dullards who
+seem to have, on all subjects, so much to say that was well worth
+leaving unsaid.  One group that Francesca passed was discussing a
+Spanish painter, who was forty-three, and had painted thousands of
+square yards of canvas in his time, but of whom no one in London
+had heard till a few months ago; now the starling-voices seemed
+determined that one should hear of very little else.  Three women
+knew how his name was pronounced, another always felt that she must
+go into a forest and pray whenever she saw his pictures, another
+had noticed that there were always pomegranates in his later
+compositions, and a man with an indefensible collar knew what the
+pomegranates "meant."  "What I think so splendid about him," said a
+stout lady in a loud challenging voice, "is the way he defies all
+the conventions of art while retaining all that the conventions
+stand for."  "Ah, but have you noticed--" put in the man with the
+atrocious collar, and Francesca pushed desperately on, wondering
+dimly as she went, what people found so unsupportable in the
+affliction of deafness.  Her progress was impeded for a moment by a
+couple engaged in earnest and voluble discussion of some
+smouldering question of the day; a thin spectacled young man with
+the receding forehead that so often denotes advanced opinions, was
+talking to a spectacled young woman with a similar type of
+forehead, and exceedingly untidy hair.  It was her ambition in life
+to be taken for a Russian girl-student, and she had spent weeks of
+patient research in trying to find out exactly where you put the
+tea-leaves in a samovar.  She had once been introduced to a young
+Jewess from Odessa, who had died of pneumonia the following week;
+the experience, slight as it was, constituted the spectacled young
+lady an authority on all things Russian in the eyes of her
+immediate set.
+
+"Talk is helpful, talk is needful," the young man was saying, "but
+what we have got to do is to lift the subject out of the furrow of
+indisciplined talk and place it on the threshing-floor of practical
+discussion."
+
+The young woman took advantage of the rhetorical full-stop to dash
+in with the remark which was already marshalled on the tip of her
+tongue.
+
+"In emancipating the serfs of poverty we must be careful to avoid
+the mistakes which Russian bureaucracy stumbled into when
+liberating the serfs of the soil."
+
+She paused in her turn for the sake of declamatory effect, but
+recovered her breath quickly enough to start afresh on level terms
+with the young man, who had jumped into the stride of his next
+sentence.
+
+"They got off to a good start that time," said Francesca to
+herself; "I suppose it's the Prevention of Destitution they're
+hammering at.  What on earth would become of these dear good people
+if anyone started a crusade for the prevention of mediocrity?"
+
+Midway through one of the smaller rooms, still questing for an
+elusive presence, she caught sight of someone that she knew, and
+the shadow of a frown passed across her face.  The object of her
+faintly signalled displeasure was Courtenay Youghal, a political
+spur-winner who seemed absurdly youthful to a generation that had
+never heard of Pitt.  It was Youghal's ambition--or perhaps his
+hobby--to infuse into the greyness of modern political life some of
+the colour of Disraelian dandyism, tempered with the correctness of
+Anglo-Saxon taste, and supplemented by the flashes of wit that were
+inherent from the Celtic strain in him.  His success was only a
+half-measure.  The public missed in him that touch of blatancy
+which it looks for in its rising public men; the decorative
+smoothness of his chestnut-golden hair, and the lively sparkle of
+his epigrams were counted to him for good, but the restrained
+sumptuousness of his waistcoats and cravats were as wasted efforts.
+If he had habitually smoked cigarettes in a pink coral mouthpiece,
+or worn spats of Mackenzie tartan, the great heart of the voting-
+man, and the gush of the paragraph-makers might have been
+unreservedly his.  The art of public life consists to a great
+extent of knowing exactly where to stop and going a bit further.
+
+It was not Youghal's lack of political sagacity that had brought
+the momentary look of disapproval into Francesca's face.  The fact
+was that Comus, who had left off being a schoolboy and was now a
+social problem, had lately enrolled himself among the young
+politician's associates and admirers, and as the boy knew and cared
+nothing about politics, and merely copied Youghal's waistcoats,
+and, less successfully, his conversation, Francesca felt herself
+justified in deploring the intimacy.  To a woman who dressed well
+on comparatively nothing a year it was an anxious experience to
+have a son who dressed sumptuously on absolutely nothing.
+
+The cloud that had passed over her face when she caught sight of
+the offending Youghal was presently succeeded by a smile of
+gratified achievement, as she encountered a bow of recognition and
+welcome from a portly middle-aged gentleman, who seemed genuinely
+anxious to include her in the rather meagre group that he had
+gathered about him.
+
+"We were just talking about my new charge," he observed genially,
+including in the "we" his somewhat depressed-looking listeners, who
+in all human probability had done none of the talking.  "I was just
+telling them, and you may be interested to hear this--"
+
+Francesca, with Spartan stoicism, continued to wear an ingratiating
+smile, though the character of the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear
+and will not hearken, seemed to her at that moment a beautiful one.
+
+Sir Julian Jull had been a member of a House of Commons
+distinguished for its high standard of well-informed mediocrity,
+and had harmonised so thoroughly with his surroundings that the
+most attentive observer of Parliamentary proceedings could scarcely
+have told even on which side of the House he sat.  A baronetcy
+bestowed on him by the Party in power had at least removed that
+doubt; some weeks later he had been made Governor of some West
+Indian dependency, whether as a reward for having accepted the
+baronetcy, or as an application of a theory that West Indian
+islands get the Governors they deserve, it would have been hard to
+say.  To Sir Julian the appointment was, doubtless, one of some
+importance; during the span of his Governorship the island might
+possibly be visited by a member of the Royal Family, or at the
+least by an earthquake, and in either case his name would get into
+the papers.  To the public the matter was one of absolute
+indifference; "who is he and where is it?" would have correctly
+epitomised the sum total of general information on the personal and
+geographical aspects of the case.
+
+Francesca, however, from the moment she had heard of the likelihood
+of the appointment, had taken a deep and lively interest in Sir
+Julian.  As a Member of Parliament he had not filled any very
+pressing social want in her life, and on the rare occasions when
+she took tea on the Terrace of the House she was wont to lapse into
+rapt contemplation of St. Thomas's Hospital whenever she saw him
+within bowing distance.  But as Governor of an island he would, of
+course, want a private secretary, and as a friend and colleague of
+Henry Greech, to whom he was indebted for many little acts of
+political support (they had once jointly drafted an amendment which
+had been ruled out of order), what was more natural and proper than
+that he should let his choice fall on Henry's nephew Comus?  While
+privately doubting whether the boy would make the sort of secretary
+that any public man would esteem as a treasure, Henry was
+thoroughly in agreement with Francesca as to the excellence and
+desirability of an arrangement which would transplant that
+troublesome' young animal from the too restricted and conspicuous
+area that centres in the parish of St. James's to some misty corner
+of the British dominion overseas.  Brother and sister had conspired
+to give an elaborate and at the same time cosy little luncheon to
+Sir Julian on the very day that his appointment was officially
+announced, and the question of the secretaryship had been mooted
+and sedulously fostered as occasion permitted, until all that was
+now needed to clinch the matter was a formal interview between His
+Excellency and Comus.  The boy had from the first shewn very little
+gratification at the prospect of his deportation.  To live on a
+remote shark-girt island, as he expressed it, with the Jull family
+as his chief social mainstay, and Sir Julian's conversation as a
+daily item of his existence, did not inspire him with the same
+degree of enthusiasm as was displayed by his mother and uncle, who,
+after all, were not making the experiment.  Even the necessity for
+an entirely new outfit did not appeal to his imagination with the
+force that might have been expected.  But, however lukewarm his
+adhesion to the project might be, Francesca and her brother were
+clearly determined that no lack of deft persistence on their part
+should endanger its success.  It was for the purpose of reminding
+Sir Julian of his promise to meet Comus at lunch on the following
+day, and definitely settle the matter of the secretaryship that
+Francesca was now enduring the ordeal of a long harangue on the
+value of the West Indian group as an Imperial asset.  Other
+listeners dexterously detached themselves one by one, but
+Francesca's patience outlasted even Sir Julian's flow of
+commonplaces, and her devotion was duly rewarded by a renewed
+acknowledgment of the lunch engagement and its purpose.  She pushed
+her way back through the throng of starling-voiced chatterers
+fortified by a sense of well-earned victory.  Dear Serena's absurd
+salons served some good purpose after all.
+
+Francesca was not an early riser and her breakfast was only just
+beginning to mobilise on the breakfast-table next morning when a
+copy of The Times, sent by special messenger from her brother's
+house, was brought up to her room.  A heavy margin of blue
+pencilling drew her attention to a prominently-printed letter which
+bore the ironical heading:  "Julian Jull, Proconsul."  The matter
+of the letter was a cruel dis-interment of some fatuous and
+forgotten speeches made by Sir Julian to his constituents not many
+years ago, in which the value of some of our Colonial possessions,
+particularly certain West Indian islands, was decried in a medley
+of pomposity, ignorance and amazingly cheap humour.  The extracts
+given sounded weak and foolish enough, taken by themselves, but the
+writer of the letter had interlarded them with comments of his own,
+which sparkled with an ironical brilliance that was Cervantes-like
+in its polished cruelty.  Remembering her ordeal of the previous
+evening Francesca permitted herself a certain feeling of amusement
+as she read the merciless stabs inflicted on the newly-appointed
+Governor; then she came to the signature at the foot of the letter,
+and the laughter died out of her eyes.  "Comus Bassington" stared
+at her from above a thick layer of blue pencil lines marked by
+Henry Greech's shaking hand.
+
+Comus could no more have devised such a letter than he could have
+written an Episcopal charge to the clergy of any given diocese.  It
+was obviously the work of Courtenay Youghal, and Comus, for a
+palpable purpose of his own, had wheedled him into foregoing for
+once the pride of authorship in a clever piece of political
+raillery, and letting his young friend stand sponsor instead.  It
+was a daring stroke, and there could be no question as to its
+success; the secretaryship and the distant shark-girt island faded
+away into the horizon of impossible things.  Francesca, forgetting
+the golden rule of strategy which enjoins a careful choosing of
+ground and opportunity before entering on hostilities, made
+straight for the bathroom door, behind which a lively din of
+splashing betokened that Comus had at least begun his toilet.
+
+"You wicked boy, what have you done?" she cried, reproachfully.
+
+"Me washee," came a cheerful shout; "me washee from the neck all
+the way down to the merrythought, and now washee down from the
+merrythought to--"
+
+"You have ruined your future.  The Times has printed that miserable
+letter with your signature."
+
+A loud squeal of joy came from the bath.  "Oh, Mummy!  Let me see!"
+
+There were sounds as of a sprawling dripping body clambering
+hastily out of the bath.  Francesca fled.  One cannot effectively
+scold a moist nineteen-year old boy clad only in a bath-towel and a
+cloud of steam.
+
+Another messenger arrived before Francesca's breakfast was over.
+This one brought a letter from Sir Julian Jull, excusing himself
+from fulfilment of the luncheon engagement.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+
+Francesca prided herself on being able to see things from other
+people's points of view, which meant, as it usually does, that she
+could see her own point of view from various aspects.  As regards
+Comus, whose doings and non-doings bulked largely in her thoughts
+at the present moment, she had mapped out in her mind so clearly
+what his outlook in life ought to be, that she was peculiarly
+unfitted to understand the drift of his feelings or the impulses
+that governed them.  Fate had endowed her with a son; in limiting
+the endowment to a solitary offspring Fate had certainly shown a
+moderation which Francesca was perfectly willing to acknowledge and
+be thankful for; but then, as she pointed out to a certain
+complacent friend of hers who cheerfully sustained an endowment of
+half-a-dozen male offsprings and a girl or two, her one child was
+Comus.  Moderation in numbers was more than counterbalanced in his
+case by extravagance in characteristics.
+
+Francesca mentally compared her son with hundreds of other young
+men whom she saw around her, steadily, and no doubt happily,
+engaged in the process of transforming themselves from nice boys
+into useful citizens.  Most of them had occupations, or were
+industriously engaged in qualifying for such; in their leisure
+moments they smoked reasonably-priced cigarettes, went to the
+cheaper seats at music-halls, watched an occasional cricket match
+at Lord's with apparent interest, saw most of the world's
+spectacular events through the medium of the cinematograph, and
+were wont to exchange at parting seemingly superfluous injunctions
+to "be good."  The whole of Bond Street and many of the tributary
+thoroughfares of Piccadilly might have been swept off the face of
+modern London without in any way interfering with the supply of
+their daily wants.  They were doubtless dull as acquaintances, but
+as sons they would have been eminently restful.  With a growing
+sense of irritation Francesca compared these deserving young men
+with her own intractable offspring, and wondered why Fate should
+have singled her out to be the parent of such a vexatious variant
+from a comfortable and desirable type.  As far as remunerative
+achievement was concerned, Comus copied the insouciance of the
+field lily with a dangerous fidelity.  Like his mother he looked
+round with wistful irritation at the example afforded by
+contemporary youth, but he concentrated his attention exclusively
+on the richer circles of his acquaintance, young men who bought
+cars and polo ponies as unconcernedly as he might purchase a
+carnation for his buttonhole, and went for trips to Cairo or the
+Tigris valley with less difficulty and finance-stretching than he
+encountered in contriving a week-end at Brighton.
+
+Gaiety and good-looks had carried Comus successfully and, on the
+whole, pleasantly, through schooldays and a recurring succession of
+holidays; the same desirable assets were still at his service to
+advance him along his road, but it was a disconcerting experience
+to find that they could not be relied on to go all distances at all
+times.  In an animal world, and a fiercely competitive animal world
+at that, something more was needed than the decorative ABANDON of
+the field lily, and it was just that something more which Comus
+seemed unable or unwilling to provide on his own account; it was
+just the lack of that something more which left him sulking with
+Fate over the numerous breakdowns and stumbling-blocks that held
+him up on what he expected to be a triumphal or, at any rate,
+unimpeded progress.
+
+Francesca was, in her own way, fonder of Comus than of anyone else
+in the world, and if he had been browning his skin somewhere east
+of Suez she would probably have kissed his photograph with genuine
+fervour every night before going to bed; the appearance of a
+cholera scare or rumour of native rising in the columns of her
+daily news-sheet would have caused her a flutter of anxiety, and
+she would have mentally likened herself to a Spartan mother
+sacrificing her best-beloved on the altar of State necessities.
+But with the best-beloved installed under her roof, occupying an
+unreasonable amount of cubic space, and demanding daily sacrifices
+instead of providing the raw material for one, her feelings were
+tinged with irritation rather than affection.  She might have
+forgiven Comus generously for misdeeds of some gravity committed in
+another continent, but she could never overlook the fact that out
+of a dish of five plovers' eggs he was certain to take three.  The
+absent may be always wrong, but they are seldom in a position to be
+inconsiderate.
+
+Thus a wall of ice had grown up gradually between mother and son, a
+barrier across which they could hold converse, but which gave a
+wintry chill even to the sparkle of their lightest words.  The boy
+had the gift of being irresistibly amusing when he chose to exert
+himself in that direction, and after a long series of moody or
+jangling meal-sittings he would break forth into a torrential flow
+of small talk, scandal and malicious anecdote, true or more
+generally invented, to which Francesca listened with a relish and
+appreciation, that was all the more flattering from being so
+unwillingly bestowed.
+
+"If you chose your friends from a rather more reputable set you
+would be doubtless less amusing, but there would be compensating
+advantages."
+
+Francesca snapped the remark out at lunch one day when she had been
+betrayed into a broader smile than she considered the circumstances
+of her attitude towards Comus warranted.
+
+"I'm going to move in quite decent society to-night," replied Comus
+with a pleased chuckle; "I'm going to meet you and Uncle Henry and
+heaps of nice dull God-fearing people at dinner."
+
+Francesca gave a little gasp of surprise and annoyance.
+
+"You don't mean to say Caroline has asked you to dinner to-night?"
+she said; "and of course without telling me.  How exceedingly like
+her!"
+
+Lady Caroline Benaresq had reached that age when you can say and do
+what you like in defiance of people's most sensitive feelings and
+most cherished antipathies.  Not that she had waited to attain her
+present age before pursuing that line of conduct; she came of a
+family whose individual members went through life, from the nursery
+to the grave, with as much tact and consideration as a cactus-hedge
+might show in going through a crowded bathing tent.  It was a
+compensating mercy that they disagreed rather more among themselves
+than they did with the outside world; every known variety and shade
+of religion and politics had been pressed into the family service
+to avoid the possibility of any agreement on the larger essentials
+of life, and such unlooked-for happenings as the Home Rule schism,
+the Tariff-Reform upheaval and the Suffragette crusade were
+thankfully seized on as furnishing occasion for further differences
+and sub-divisions.  Lady Caroline's favourite scheme of
+entertaining was to bring jarring and antagonistic elements into
+close contact and play them remorselessly one against the other.
+"One gets much better results under those circumstances" she used
+to observe, "than by asking people who wish to meet each other.
+Few people talk as brilliantly to impress a friend as they do to
+depress an enemy."
+
+She admitted that her theory broke down rather badly if you applied
+it to Parliamentary debates.  At her own dinner table its success
+was usually triumphantly vindicated.
+
+"Who else is to be there?" Francesca asked, with some pardonable
+misgiving.
+
+"Courtenay Youghal.  He'll probably sit next to you, so you'd
+better think out a lot of annihilating remarks in readiness.  And
+Elaine de Frey."
+
+"I don't think I've heard of her.  Who is she?"
+
+"Nobody in particular, but rather nice-looking in a solemn sort of
+way, and almost indecently rich."
+
+"Marry her" was the advice which sprang to Francesca's lips, but
+she choked it back with a salted almond, having a rare perception
+of the fact that words are sometimes given to us to defeat our
+purposes.
+
+"Caroline has probably marked her down for Toby or one of the
+grand-nephews," she said, carelessly; "a little money would be
+rather useful in that quarter, I imagine."
+
+Comus tucked in his underlip with just the shade of pugnacity that
+she wanted to see.
+
+An advantageous marriage was so obviously the most sensible course
+for him to embark on that she scarcely dared to hope that he would
+seriously entertain it; yet there was just a chance that if he got
+as far as the flirtation stage with an attractive (and attracted)
+girl who was also an heiress, the sheer perversity of his nature
+might carry him on to more definite courtship, if only from the
+desire to thrust other more genuinely enamoured suitors into the
+background.  It was a forlorn hope; so forlorn that the idea even
+crossed her mind of throwing herself on the mercy of her bete
+noire, Courtenay Youghal, and trying to enlist the influence which
+he seemed to possess over Comus for the purpose of furthering her
+hurriedly conceived project.  Anyhow, the dinner promised to be
+more interesting than she had originally anticipated.
+
+Lady Caroline was a professed Socialist in politics, chiefly, it
+was believed, because she was thus enabled to disagree with most of
+the Liberals and Conservatives, and all the Socialists of the day.
+She did not permit her Socialism, however, to penetrate below
+stairs; her cook and butler had every encouragement to be
+Individualists.  Francesca, who was a keen and intelligent food
+critic, harboured no misgivings as to her hostess's kitchen and
+cellar departments; some of the human side-dishes at the feast gave
+her more ground for uneasiness.  Courtenay Youghal, for instance,
+would probably be brilliantly silent; her brother Henry would
+almost certainly be the reverse.
+
+The dinner party was a large one and Francesca arrived late with
+little time to take preliminary stock of the guests; a card with
+the name, "Miss de Frey," immediately opposite her own place at the
+other side of the table, indicated, however, the whereabouts of the
+heiress.  It was characteristic of Francesca that she first
+carefully read the menu from end to end, and then indulged in an
+equally careful though less open scrutiny of the girl who sat
+opposite her, the girl who was nobody in particular, but whose
+income was everything that could be desired.  She was pretty in a
+restrained nut-brown fashion, and had a look of grave reflective
+calm that probably masked a speculative unsettled temperament.  Her
+pose, if one wished to be critical, was just a little too
+elaborately careless.  She wore some excellently set rubies with
+that indefinable air of having more at home that is so difficult to
+improvise.  Francesca was distinctly pleased with her survey.
+
+"You seem interested in your vis-a-vis," said Courtenay Youghal.
+
+"I almost think I've seen her before," said Francesca; "her face
+seems familiar to me."
+
+"The narrow gallery at the Louvre; attributed to Leonardo da
+Vinci," said Youghal.
+
+"Of course," said Francesca, her feelings divided between
+satisfaction at capturing an elusive impression and annoyance that
+Youghal should have been her helper.  A stronger tinge of annoyance
+possessed her when she heard the voice of Henry Greech raised in
+painful prominence at Lady Caroline's end of the table.
+
+"I called on the Trudhams yesterday," he announced; "it was their
+Silver Wedding, you know, at least the day before was.  Such lots
+of silver presents, quite a show.  Of course there were a great
+many duplicates, but still, very nice to have.  I think they were
+very pleased to get so many."
+
+"We must not grudge them their show of presents after their twenty-
+five years of married life," said Lady Caroline, gently; "it is the
+silver lining to their cloud."
+
+A third of the guests present were related to the Trudhams.
+
+"Lady Caroline is beginning well," murmured Courtenay Youghal.
+
+"I should hardly call twenty-five years of married life a cloud,"
+said Henry Greech, lamely.
+
+"Don't let's talk about married life," said a tall handsome woman,
+who looked like some modern painter's conception of the goddess
+Bellona; "it's my misfortune to write eternally about husbands and
+wives and their variants.  My public expects it of me.  I do so
+envy journalists who can write about plagues and strikes and
+Anarchist plots, and other pleasing things, instead of being tied
+down to one stale old topic."
+
+"Who is that woman and what has she written?" Francesca asked
+Youghal; she dimly remembered having seen her at one of Serena
+Golackly's gatherings, surrounded by a little Court of admirers.
+
+"I forget her name; she has a villa at San Remo or Mentone, or
+somewhere where one does have villas, and plays an extraordinary
+good game of bridge.  Also she has the reputation, rather rare in
+your sex, of being a wonderfully sound judge of wine."
+
+"But what has she written?"
+
+"Oh, several novels of the thinnish ice order.  Her last one, 'The
+Woman who wished it was Wednesday,' has been banned at all the
+libraries.  I expect you've read it."
+
+"I don't see why you should think so," said Francesca, coldly.
+
+"Only because Comus lent me your copy yesterday," said Youghal.  He
+threw back his handsome head and gave her a sidelong glance of
+quizzical amusement.  He knew that she hated his intimacy with
+Comus, and he was secretly rather proud of his influence over the
+boy, shallow and negative though he knew it to be.  It had been, on
+his part, an unsought intimacy, and it would probably fall to
+pieces the moment he tried seriously to take up the role of mentor.
+The fact that Comus's mother openly disapproved of the friendship
+gave it perhaps its chief interest in the young politician's eyes.
+
+Francesca turned her attention to her brother's end of the table.
+Henry Greech had willingly availed himself of the invitation to
+leave the subject of married life, and had launched forthwith into
+the equally well-worn theme of current politics.  He was not a
+person who was in much demand for public meetings, and the House
+showed no great impatience to hear his views on the topics of the
+moment; its impatience, indeed, was manifested rather in the
+opposite direction.  Hence he was prone to unburden himself of
+accumulated political wisdom as occasion presented itself--
+sometimes, indeed, to assume an occasion that was hardly visible to
+the naked intelligence.
+
+"Our opponents are engaged in a hopelessly uphill struggle, and
+they know it," he chirruped, defiantly; "they've become possessed,
+like the Gadarene swine, with a whole legion of--"
+
+"Surely the Gadarene swine went downhill," put in Lady Caroline in
+a gently enquiring voice.
+
+Henry Greech hastily abandoned simile and fell back on platitude
+and the safer kinds of fact.
+
+Francesca did not regard her brother's views on statecraft either
+in the light of gospel or revelation; as Comus once remarked, they
+more usually suggested exodus.  In the present instance she found
+distraction in a renewed scrutiny of the girl opposite her, who
+seemed to be only moderately interested in the conversational
+efforts of the diners on either side of her.  Comus who was looking
+and talking his best, was sitting at the further end of the table,
+and Francesca was quick to notice in which direction the girl's
+glances were continually straying.  Once or twice the eyes of the
+young people met and a swift flush of pleasure and a half-smile
+that spoke of good understanding came to the heiress's face.  It
+did not need the gift of the traditional intuition of her sex to
+enable Francesca to guess that the girl with the desirable banking
+account was already considerably attracted by the lively young
+Pagan who had, when he cared to practise it, such an art of winning
+admiration.  For the first time for many, many months Francesca saw
+her son's prospects in a rose-coloured setting, and she began,
+unconsciously, to wonder exactly how much wealth was summed up in
+the expressive label "almost indecently rich."  A wife with a
+really large fortune and a correspondingly big dower of character
+and ambition, might, perhaps, succeed in turning Comus's latent
+energies into a groove which would provide him, if not with a
+career, at least with an occupation, and the young serious face
+opposite looked as if its owner lacked neither character or
+ambition.  Francesca's speculations took a more personal turn.  Out
+of the well-filled coffers with which her imagination was toying,
+an inconsiderable sum might eventually be devoted to the leasing,
+or even perhaps the purchase of, the house in Blue Street when the
+present convenient arrangement should have come to an end, and
+Francesca and the Van der Meulen would not be obliged to seek fresh
+quarters.
+
+A woman's voice, talking in a discreet undertone on the other side
+of Courtenay Youghal, broke in on her bridge-building.
+
+"Tons of money and really very presentable.  Just the wife for a
+rising young politician.  Go in and win her before she's snapped up
+by some fortune hunter."
+
+Youghal and his instructress in worldly wisdom were looking
+straight across the table at the Leonardo da Vinci girl with the
+grave reflective eyes and the over-emphasised air of repose.
+Francesca felt a quick throb of anger against her match-making
+neighbour; why, she asked herself, must some women, with no end or
+purpose of their own to serve, except the sheer love of meddling in
+the affairs of others, plunge their hands into plots and schemings
+of this sort, in which the happiness of more than one person was
+concerned?  And more clearly than ever she realised how thoroughly
+she detested Courtenay Youghal.  She had disliked him as an evil
+influence, setting before her son an example of showy ambition that
+he was not in the least likely to follow, and providing him with a
+model of extravagant dandyism that he was only too certain to copy.
+In her heart she knew that Comus would have embarked just as surely
+on his present course of idle self-indulgence if he had never known
+of the existence of Youghal, but she chose to regard that young man
+as her son's evil genius, and now he seemed likely to justify more
+than ever the character she had fastened on to him.  For once in
+his life Comus appeared to have an idea of behaving sensibly and
+making some use of his opportunities, and almost at the same moment
+Courtenay Youghal arrived on the scene as a possible and very
+dangerous rival.  Against the good looks and fitful powers of
+fascination that Comus could bring into the field, the young
+politician could match half-a-dozen dazzling qualities which would
+go far to recommend him in the eyes of a woman of the world, still
+more in those of a young girl in search of an ideal.  Good-looking
+in his own way, if not on such showy lines as Comus, always well
+turned-out, witty, self-confident without being bumptious, with a
+conspicuous Parliamentary career alongside him, and heaven knew
+what else in front of him, Courtenay Youghal certainly was not a
+rival whose chances could be held very lightly.  Francesca laughed
+bitterly to herself as she remembered that a few hours ago she had
+entertained the idea of begging for his good offices in helping on
+Comus's wooing.  One consolation, at least, she found for herself:
+if Youghal really meant to step in and try and cut out his young
+friend, the latter at any rate had snatched a useful start.  Comus
+had mentioned Miss de Frey at luncheon that day, casually and
+dispassionately; if the subject of the dinner guests had not come
+up he would probably not have mentioned her at all.  But they were
+obviously already very good friends.  It was part and parcel of the
+state of domestic tension at Blue Street that Francesca should only
+have come to know of this highly interesting heiress by an
+accidental sorting of guests at a dinner party.
+
+Lady Caroline's voice broke in on her reflections; it was a gentle
+purring voice, that possessed an uncanny quality of being able to
+make itself heard down the longest dinner table.
+
+"The dear Archdeacon is getting so absent-minded.  He read a list
+of box-holders for the opera as the First Lesson the other Sunday,
+instead of the families and lots of the tribes of Israel that
+entered Canaan.  Fortunately no one noticed the mistake."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+
+On a conveniently secluded bench facing the Northern Pheasantry in
+the Zoological Society's Gardens, Regent's Park, Courtenay Youghal
+sat immersed in mature flirtation with a lady, who, though
+certainly young in fact and appearance, was some four or five years
+his senior.   When he was a schoolboy of sixteen, Molly McQuade had
+personally conducted him to the Zoo and stood him dinner afterwards
+at Kettner's, and whenever the two of them happened to be in town
+on the anniversary of that bygone festivity they religiously
+repeated the programme in its entirety.  Even the menu of the
+dinner was adhered to as nearly as possible; the original selection
+of food and wine that schoolboy exuberance, tempered by schoolboy
+shyness, had pitched on those many years ago, confronted Youghal on
+those occasions, as a drowning man's past life is said to rise up
+and parade itself in his last moments of consciousness.
+
+The flirtation which was thus perennially restored to its old-time
+footing owed its longevity more to the enterprising solicitude of
+Miss McQuade than to any conscious sentimental effort on the part
+of Youghal himself.  Molly McQuade was known to her neighbours in a
+minor hunting shire as a hard-riding conventionally unconventional
+type of young woman, who came naturally into the classification, "a
+good sort."  She was just sufficiently good-looking, sufficiently
+reticent about her own illnesses, when she had any, and
+sufficiently appreciative of her neighbours' gardens, children and
+hunters to be generally popular.  Most men liked her, and the
+percentage of women who disliked her was not inconveniently high.
+One of these days, it was assumed, she would marry a brewer or a
+Master of Otter Hounds, and, after a brief interval, be known to
+the world as the mother of a boy or two at Malvern or some similar
+seat of learning.  The romantic side of her nature was altogether
+unguessed by the countryside.
+
+Her romances were mostly in serial form and suffered perhaps in
+fervour from their disconnected course what they gained in length
+of days.  Her affectionate interest in the several young men who
+figured in her affairs of the heart was perfectly honest, and she
+certainly made no attempt either to conceal their separate
+existences, or to play them off one against the other.  Neither
+could it be said that she was a husband hunter; she had made up her
+mind what sort of man she was likely to marry, and her forecast did
+not differ very widely from that formed by her local acquaintances.
+If her married life were eventually to turn out a failure, at least
+she looked forward to it with very moderate expectations.  Her love
+affairs she put on a very different footing and apparently they
+were the all-absorbing element in her life.  She possessed the
+happily constituted temperament which enables a man or woman to be
+a "pluralist," and to observe the sage precaution of not putting
+all one's eggs into one basket.  Her demands were not exacting; she
+required of her affinity that he should be young, good-looking, and
+at least, moderately amusing; she would have preferred him to be
+invariably faithful, but, with her own example before her, she was
+prepared for the probability, bordering on certainty, that he would
+be nothing of the sort.  The philosophy of the "Garden of Kama" was
+the compass by which she steered her barque and thus far, if she
+had encountered some storms and buffeting, she had at least escaped
+being either shipwrecked or becalmed.
+
+Courtenay Youghal had not been designed by Nature to fulfil the
+role of an ardent or devoted lover, and he scrupulously respected
+the limits which Nature had laid down.  For Molly, however, he had
+a certain responsive affection.  She had always obviously admired
+him, and at the same time she never beset him with crude flattery;
+the principal reason why the flirtation had stood the test of so
+many years was the fact that it only flared into active existence
+at convenient intervals.  In an age when the telephone has
+undermined almost every fastness of human privacy, and the sanctity
+of one's seclusion depends often on the ability for tactful
+falsehood shown by a club pageboy, Youghal was duly appreciative of
+the circumstance that his lady fair spent a large part of the year
+pursuing foxes, in lieu of pursuing him.  Also the honestly
+admitted fact that, in her human hunting, she rode after more than
+one quarry, made the inevitable break-up of the affair a matter to
+which both could look forward without a sense of coming
+embarrassment and recrimination.  When the time for gathering ye
+rosebuds should be over, neither of them could accuse the other of
+having wrecked his or her entire life.  At the most they would only
+have disorganised a week-end.
+
+On this particular afternoon, when old reminiscences had been gone
+through, and the intervening gossip of past months duly recounted,
+a lull in the conversation made itself rather obstinately felt.
+Molly had already guessed that matters were about to slip into a
+new phase; the affair had reached maturity long ago, and a new
+phase must be in the nature of a wane.
+
+"You're a clever brute," she said, suddenly, with an air of
+affectionate regret; "I always knew you'd get on in the House, but
+I hardly expected you to come to the front so soon."
+
+"I'm coming to the front," admitted Youghal, judicially; "the
+problem is, shall I be able to stay there.  Unless something
+happens in the financial line before long, I don't see how I'm to
+stay in Parliament at all.  Economy is out of the question.  It
+would open people's eyes, I fancy, if they knew how little I exist
+on as it is.  And I'm living so far beyond my income that we may
+almost be said to be living apart."
+
+"It will have to be a rich wife, I suppose," said Molly, slowly;
+"that's the worst of success, it imposes so many conditions.  I
+rather knew, from something in your manner, that you were drifting
+that way."
+
+Youghal said nothing in the way of contradiction; he gazed
+steadfastly at the aviary in front of him as though exotic
+pheasants were for the moment the most absorbing study in the
+world.  As a matter of fact, his mind was centred on the image of
+Elaine de Frey, with her clear untroubled eyes and her Leonardo da
+Vinci air.  He was wondering whether he was likely to fall into a
+frame of mind concerning her which would be in the least like
+falling in love.
+
+"I shall mind horribly," continued Molly, after a pause, "but, of
+course, I have always known that something of the sort would have
+to happen one of these days.  When a man goes into politics he
+can't call his soul his own, and I suppose his heart becomes an
+impersonal possession in the same way."
+
+"Most people who know me would tell you that I haven't got a
+heart," said Youghal.
+
+"I've often felt inclined to agree with them," said Molly; "and
+then, now and again, I think you have a heart tucked away
+somewhere."
+
+"I hope I have," said Youghal, "because I'm trying to break to you
+the fact that I think I'm falling in love with somebody."
+
+Molly McQuade turned sharply to look at her companion, who still
+fixed his gaze on the pheasant run in front of him.
+
+"Don't tell me you're losing your head over somebody useless,
+someone without money," she said; "I don't think I could stand
+that."
+
+For the moment she feared that Courtenay's selfishness might have
+taken an unexpected turn, in which ambition had given way to the
+fancy of the hour; he might be going to sacrifice his Parliamentary
+career for a life of stupid lounging in momentarily attractive
+company.  He quickly undeceived her.
+
+"She's got heaps of money."
+
+Molly gave a grunt of relief.  Her affection for Courtenay had
+produced the anxiety which underlay her first question; a natural
+jealousy prompted the next one.
+
+"Is she young and pretty and all that sort of thing, or is she just
+a good sort with a sympathetic manner and nice eyes?  As a rule
+that's the kind that goes with a lot of money."
+
+"Young and quite good-looking in her way, and a distinct style of
+her own.  Some people would call her beautiful.  As a political
+hostess I should think she'd be splendid.  I imagine I'm rather in
+love with her."
+
+"And is she in love with you?"
+
+Youghal threw back his head with the slight assertive movement that
+Molly knew and liked.
+
+"She's a girl who I fancy would let judgment influence her a lot.
+And without being stupidly conceited, I think I may say she might
+do worse than throw herself away on me.  I'm young and quite good-
+looking, and I'm making a name for myself in the House; she'll be
+able to read all sorts of nice and horrid things about me in the
+papers at breakfast-time.  I can be brilliantly amusing at times,
+and I understand the value of silence; there is no fear that I
+shall ever degenerate into that fearsome thing--a cheerful
+talkative husband.  For a girl with money and social ambitions I
+should think I was rather a good thing."
+
+"You are certainly in love, Courtenay," said Molly, "but it's the
+old love and not a new one.  I'm rather glad.  I should have hated
+to have you head-over-heels in love with a pretty woman, even for a
+short time.  You'll be much happier as it is.  And I'm going to put
+all my feelings in the background, and tell you to go in and win.
+You've got to marry a rich woman, and if she's nice and will make a
+good hostess, so much the better for everybody.  You'll be happier
+in your married life than I shall be in mine, when it comes; you'll
+have other interests to absorb you.  I shall just have the garden
+and dairy and nursery and lending library, as like as two peas to
+all the gardens and dairies and nurseries for hundreds of miles
+round.  You won't care for your wife enough to be worried every
+time she has a finger-ache, and you'll like her well enough to be
+pleased to meet her sometimes at your own house.  I shouldn't
+wonder if you were quite happy.  She will probably be miserable,
+but any woman who married you would be."
+
+There was a short pause; they were both staring at the pheasant
+cages.  Then Molly spoke again, with the swift nervous tone of a
+general who is hurriedly altering the disposition of his forces for
+a strategic retreat.
+
+"When you are safely married and honey-mooned and all that sort of
+thing, and have put your wife through her paces as a political
+hostess, some time, when the House isn't sitting, you must come
+down by yourself, and do a little hunting with us.  Will you?  It
+won't be quite the same as old times, but it will be something to
+look forward to when I'm reading the endless paragraphs about your
+fashionable political wedding."
+
+"You're looking forward pretty far," laughed Youghal; "the lady may
+take your view as to the probable unhappiness of a future shared
+with me, and I may have to content myself with penurious political
+bachelorhood.  Anyhow, the present is still with us.  We dine at
+Kettner's to-night, don't we?"
+
+"Rather," said Molly, "though it will be more or less a throat-
+lumpy feast as far as I am concerned.  We shall have to drink to
+the health of the future Mrs. Youghal.  By the way, it's rather
+characteristic of you that you haven't told me who she is, and of
+me that I haven't asked.  And now, like a dear boy, trot away and
+leave me.  I haven't got to say good-bye to you yet, but I'm going
+to take a quiet farewell of the Pheasantry.  We've had some jolly
+good talks, you and I, sitting on this seat, haven't we?  And I
+know, as well as I know anything, that this is the last of them.
+Eight o'clock to-night, as punctually as possible."
+
+She watched his retreating figure with eyes that grew slowly misty;
+he had been such a jolly comely boy-friend, and they had had such
+good times together.  The mist deepened on her lashes as she looked
+round at the familiar rendezvous where they had so often kept tryst
+since the day when they had first come there together, he a
+schoolboy and she but lately out of her teens.  For the moment she
+felt herself in the thrall of a very real sorrow.
+
+Then, with the admirable energy of one who is only in town for a
+fleeting fortnight, she raced away to have tea with a world-faring
+naval admirer at his club.  Pluralism is a merciful narcotic.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+
+Elaine de Frey sat at ease--at bodily ease--at any rate--in a low
+wicker chair placed under the shade of a group of cedars in the
+heart of a stately spacious garden that had almost made up its mind
+to be a park.  The shallow stone basin of an old fountain, on whose
+wide ledge a leaden-moulded otter for ever preyed on a leaden
+salmon, filled a conspicuous place in the immediate foreground.
+Around its rim ran an inscription in Latin, warning mortal man that
+time flows as swiftly as water and exhorting him to make the most
+of his hours; after which piece of Jacobean moralising it set
+itself shamelessly to beguile all who might pass that way into an
+abandonment of contemplative repose.  On all sides of it a stretch
+of smooth turf spread away, broken up here and there by groups of
+dwarfish chestnut and mulberry trees, whose leaves and branches
+cast a laced pattern of shade beneath them.  On one side the lawn
+sloped gently down to a small lake, whereon floated a quartette of
+swans, their movements suggestive of a certain mournful
+listlessness, as though a weary dignity of caste held them back
+from the joyous bustling life of the lesser waterfowl.  Elaine
+liked to imagine that they re-embodied the souls of unhappy boys
+who had been forced by family interests to become high
+ecclesiastical dignitaries and had grown prematurely Right
+Reverend.  A low stone balustrade fenced part of the shore of the
+lake, making a miniature terrace above its level, and here roses
+grew in a rich multitude.  Other rose bushes, carefully pruned and
+tended, formed little oases of colour and perfume amid the restful
+green of the sward, and in the distance the eye caught the
+variegated blaze of a many-hued hedge of rhododendron.  With these
+favoured exceptions flowers were hard to find in this well-ordered
+garden; the misguided tyranny of staring geranium beds and
+beflowered archways leading to nowhere, so dear to the suburban
+gardener, found no expression here.  Magnificent Amherst pheasants,
+whose plumage challenged and almost shamed the peacock on his own
+ground, stepped to and fro over the emerald turf with the assured
+self-conscious pride of reigning sultans.  It was a garden where
+summer seemed a part-proprietor rather than a hurried visitor.
+
+By the side of Elaine's chair under the shadow of the cedars a
+wicker table was set out with the paraphernalia of afternoon tea.
+On some cushions at her feet reclined Courtenay Youghal, smoothly
+preened and youthfully elegant, the personification of decorative
+repose; equally decorative, but with the showy restlessness of a
+dragonfly, Comus disported his flannelled person over a
+considerable span of the available foreground.
+
+The intimacy existing between the two young men had suffered no
+immediate dislocation from the circumstance that they were tacitly
+paying court to the same lady.  It was an intimacy founded not in
+the least on friendship or community of tastes and ideas, but owed
+its existence to the fact that each was amused and interested by
+the other.  Youghal found Comus, for the time being at any rate,
+just as amusing and interesting as a rival for Elaine's favour as
+he had been in the role of scapegrace boy-about-Town; Comus for his
+part did not wish to lose touch with Youghal, who among other
+attractions possessed the recommendation of being under the ban of
+Comus's mother.  She disapproved, it is true, of a great many of
+her son's friends and associates, but this particular one was a
+special and persistent source of irritation to her from the fact
+that he figured prominently and more or less successfully in the
+public life of the day.  There was something peculiarly
+exasperating in reading a brilliant and incisive attack on the
+Government's rash handling of public expenditure delivered by a
+young man who encouraged her son in every imaginable extravagance.
+The actual extent of Youghal's influence over the boy was of the
+slightest; Comus was quite capable of deriving encouragement to
+rash outlay and frivolous conversation from an anchorite or an
+East-end parson if he had been thrown into close companionship with
+such an individual.  Francesca, however, exercised a mother's
+privilege in assuming her son's bachelor associates to be
+industrious in labouring to achieve his undoing.  Therefore the
+young politician was a source of unconcealed annoyance to her, and
+in the same degree as she expressed her disapproval of him Comus
+was careful to maintain and parade the intimacy.  Its existence, or
+rather its continued existence, was one of the things that faintly
+puzzled the young lady whose sought-for favour might have been
+expected to furnish an occasion for its rapid dissolution.
+
+With two suitors, one of whom at least she found markedly
+attractive, courting her at the same moment, Elaine should have had
+reasonable cause for being on good terms with the world, and with
+herself in particular.  Happiness was not, however, at this
+auspicious moment, her dominant mood.  The grave calm of her face
+masked as usual a certain degree of grave perturbation.  A
+succession of well-meaning governesses and a plentiful supply of
+moralising aunts on both sides of her family, had impressed on her
+young mind the theoretical fact that wealth is a great
+responsibility.  The consciousness of her responsibility set her
+continually wondering, not as to her own fitness to discharge her
+"stewardship," but as to the motives and merits of people with whom
+she came in contact.  The knowledge that there was so much in the
+world that she could buy, invited speculation as to how much there
+was that was worth buying.  Gradually she had come to regard her
+mind as a sort of appeal court before whose secret sittings were
+examined and judged the motives and actions, the motives
+especially, of the world in general.  In her schoolroom days she
+had sat in conscientious judgment on the motives that guided or
+misguided Charles and Cromwell and Monck, Wallenstein and
+Savonarola.  In her present stage she was equally occupied in
+examining the political sincerity of the Secretary for Foreign
+Affairs, the good-faith of a honey-tongued but possibly loyal-
+hearted waiting-maid, and the disinterestedness of a whole circle
+of indulgent and flattering acquaintances.  Even more absorbing,
+and in her eyes, more urgently necessary, was the task of
+dissecting and appraising the characters of the two young men who
+were favouring her with their attentions.  And herein lay cause for
+much thinking and some perturbation.  Youghal, for example, might
+have baffled a more experienced observer of human nature.  Elaine
+was too clever to confound his dandyism with foppishness or self-
+advertisement.  He admired his own toilet effect in a mirror from a
+genuine sense of pleasure in a thing good to look upon, just as he
+would feel a sensuous appreciation of the sight of a well-bred,
+well-matched, well-turned-out pair of horses.  Behind his careful
+political flippancy and cynicism one might also detect a certain
+careless sincerity, which would probably in the long run save him
+from moderate success, and turn him into one of the brilliant
+failures of his day.  Beyond this it was difficult to form an exact
+appreciation of Courtenay Youghal, and Elaine, who liked to have
+her impressions distinctly labelled and pigeon-holed, was
+perpetually scrutinising the outer surface of his characteristics
+and utterances, like a baffled art critic vainly searching beneath
+the varnish and scratches of a doubtfully assigned picture for an
+enlightening signature.  The young man added to her perplexities by
+his deliberate policy of never trying to show himself in a
+favourable light even when most anxious to impart a favourable
+impression.  He preferred that people should hunt for his good
+qualities, and merely took very good care that as far as possible
+they should never draw blank; even in the matter of selfishness,
+which was the anchor-sheet of his existence, he contrived to be
+noted, and justly noted, for doing remarkably unselfish things.  As
+a ruler he would have been reasonably popular; as a husband he
+would probably be unendurable.
+
+Comus was to a certain extent as great a mystification as Youghal,
+but here Elaine was herself responsible for some of the perplexity
+which enshrouded his character in her eyes.  She had taken more
+than a passing fancy for the boy--for the boy as he might be, that
+was to say--and she was desperately unwilling to see him and
+appraise him as he really was.  Thus the mental court of appeal was
+constantly engaged in examining witnesses as to character, most of
+whom signally failed to give any testimony which would support the
+favourable judgment which the tribunal was so anxious to arrive at.
+A woman with wider experience of the world's ways and shortcomings
+would probably have contented herself with an endeavour to find out
+whether her liking for the boy outweighed her dislike of his
+characteristics; Elaine took her judgments too seriously to
+approach the matter from such a simple and convenient standpoint.
+The fact that she was much more than half in love with Comus made
+it dreadfully important that she should discover him to have a
+lovable soul, and Comus, it must be confessed, did little to help
+forward the discovery.
+
+"At any rate he is honest," she would observe to herself, after
+some outspoken admission of unprincipled conduct on his part, and
+then she would ruefully recall certain episodes in which he had
+figured, from which honesty had been conspicuously absent.  What
+she tried to label honesty in his candour was probably only a
+cynical defiance of the laws of right and wrong.
+
+"You look more than usually thoughtful this afternoon," said Comus
+to her, "as if you had invented this summer day and were trying to
+think out improvements."
+
+"If I had the power to create improvements anywhere I think I
+should begin with you," retorted Elaine.
+
+"I'm sure it's much better to leave me as I am," protested Comus;
+"you're like a relative of mine up in Argyllshire, who spends his
+time producing improved breeds of sheep and pigs and chickens.  So
+patronising and irritating to the Almighty I should think, to go
+about putting superior finishing touches to Creation."
+
+Elaine frowned, and then laughed, and finally gave a little sigh.
+
+"It's not easy to talk sense to you," she said.
+
+"Whatever else you take in hand," said Youghal, "you must never
+improve this garden.  It's what our idea of Heaven might be like if
+the Jews hadn't invented one for us on totally different lines.
+It's dreadful that we should accept them as the impresarios of our
+religious dreamland instead of the Greeks."
+
+"You are not very fond of the Jews," said Elaine.
+
+"I've travelled and lived a good deal in Eastern Europe," said
+Youghal.
+
+"It seems largely a question of geography," said Elaine; "in
+England no one really is anti-Semitic."
+
+Youghal shook his head.  "I know a great many Jews who are."
+
+Servants had quietly, almost reverently, placed tea and its
+accessories on the wicker table, and quietly receded from the
+landscape.  Elaine sat like a grave young goddess about to dispense
+some mysterious potion to her devotees.  Her mind was still sitting
+in judgment on the Jewish question.
+
+Comus scrambled to his feet.
+
+"It's too hot for tea," he said; "I shall go and feed the swans."
+
+And he walked off with a little silver basket-dish containing brown
+bread-and-butter.
+
+Elaine laughed quietly.
+
+"It's so like Comus," she said, "to go off with our one dish of
+bread-and-butter."
+
+Youghal chuckled responsively.  It was an undoubted opportunity for
+him to put in some disparaging criticism of Comus, and Elaine sat
+alert in readiness to judge the critic and reserve judgment on the
+criticised.
+
+"His selfishness is splendid but absolutely futile," said Youghal;
+"now my selfishness is commonplace, but always thoroughly practical
+and calculated.  He will have great difficulty in getting the swans
+to accept his offering, and he incurs the odium of reducing us to a
+bread-and-butterless condition.  Incidentally he will get very
+hot."
+
+Elaine again had the sense of being thoroughly baffled.  If Youghal
+had said anything unkind it was about himself.
+
+"If my cousin Suzette had been here," she observed, with the shadow
+of a malicious smile on her lips, "I believe she would have gone
+into a flood of tears at the loss of her bread-and-butter, and
+Comus would have figured ever after in her mind as something black
+and destroying and hateful.  In fact I don't really know why we
+took our loss so unprotestingly."
+
+"For two reasons," said Youghal; "you are rather fond of Comus.
+And I--am not very fond of bread-and-butter."
+
+The jesting remark brought a throb of pleasure to Elaine's heart.
+She had known full well that she cared for Comus, but now that
+Courtenay Youghal had openly proclaimed the fact as something
+unchallenged and understood matters seemed placed at once on a more
+advanced footing.  The warm sunlit garden grew suddenly into a
+Heaven that held the secret of eternal happiness.  Youth and
+comeliness would always walk here, under the low-boughed mulberry
+trees, as unchanging as the leaden otter that for ever preyed on
+the leaden salmon on the edge of the old fountain, and somehow the
+lovers would always wear the aspect of herself and the boy who was
+talking to the four white swans by the water steps.  Youghal was
+right; this was the real Heaven of one's dreams and longings,
+immeasurably removed from that Rue de la Paix Paradise about which
+one professed utterly insincere hankerings in places of public
+worship.  Elaine drank her tea in a happy silence; besides being a
+brilliant talker Youghal understood the rarer art of being a non-
+talker on occasion.
+
+Comus came back across the grass swinging the empty basket-dish in
+his hand.
+
+"Swans were very pleased," he cried, gaily, "and said they hoped I
+would keep the bread-and-butter dish as a souvenir of a happy tea-
+party.  I may really have it, mayn't I?" he continued in an anxious
+voice; "it will do to keep studs and things in.  You don't want
+it."
+
+"It's got the family crest on it," said Elaine.  Some of the
+happiness had died out of her eyes.
+
+"I'll have that scratched off and my own put on," said Comus.
+
+"It's been in the family for generations," protested Elaine, who
+did not share Comus's view that because you were rich your lesser
+possessions could have no value in your eyes.
+
+"I want it dreadfully," said Comus, sulkily, "and you've heaps of
+other things to put bread-and-butter in."
+
+For the moment he was possessed by an overmastering desire to keep
+the dish at all costs; a look of greedy determination dominated his
+face, and he had not for an instant relaxed his grip of the coveted
+object.
+
+Elaine was genuinely angry by this time, and was busily telling
+herself that it was absurd to be put out over such a trifle; at the
+same moment a sense of justice was telling her that Comus was
+displaying a good deal of rather shabby selfishness.  And somehow
+her chief anxiety at the moment was to keep Courtenay Youghal from
+seeing that she was angry.
+
+"I know you don't really want it, so I'm going to keep it,"
+persisted Comus.
+
+"It's too hot to argue," said Elaine.
+
+"Happy mistress of your destinies," laughed Youghal; "you can suit
+your disputations to the desired time and temperature.  I have to
+go and argue, or what is worse, listen to other people's arguments,
+in a hot and doctored atmosphere suitable to an invalid lizard."
+
+"You haven't got to argue about a bread-and-butter dish," said
+Elaine.
+
+"Chiefly about bread-and-butter," said Youghal; "our great
+preoccupation is other people's bread-and-butter.  They earn or
+produce the material, but we busy ourselves with making rules how
+it shall be cut up, and the size of the slices, and how much butter
+shall go on how much bread.  That is what is called legislation.
+If we could only make rules as to how the bread-and-butter should
+be digested we should be quite happy."
+
+Elaine had been brought up to regard Parliaments as something to be
+treated with cheerful solemnity, like illness or family re-unions.
+Youghal's flippant disparagement of the career in which he was
+involved did not, however, jar on her susceptibilities.  She knew
+him to be not only a lively and effective debater but an
+industrious worker on committees.  If he made light of his labours,
+at least he afforded no one else a loophole for doing so.  And
+certainly, the Parliamentary atmosphere was not inviting on this
+hot afternoon.
+
+"When must you go?" she asked, sympathetically.
+
+Youghal looked ruefully at his watch.  Before he could answer, a
+cheerful hoot came through the air, as of an owl joyously
+challenging the sunlight with a foreboding of the coming night.  He
+sprang laughing to his feet.
+
+"Listen!  My summons back to my galley," he cried.  "The Gods have
+given me an hour in this enchanted garden, so I must not complain."
+
+Then in a lower voice he almost whispered, "It's the Persian debate
+to-night,"
+
+It was the one hint he had given in the midst of his talking and
+laughing that he was really keenly enthralled in the work that lay
+before him.  It was the one little intimate touch that gave Elaine
+the knowledge that he cared for her opinion of his work.
+
+Comus, who had emptied his cigarette-case, became suddenly
+clamorous at the prospect of being temporarily stranded without a
+smoke.  Youghal took the last remaining cigarette from his own case
+and gravely bisected it.
+
+"Friendship could go no further," he observed, as he gave one-half
+to the doubtfully appeased Comus, and lit the other himself.
+
+"There are heaps more in the hall," said Elaine.
+
+"It was only done for the Saint Martin of Tours effect," said
+Youghal; "I hate smoking when I'm rushing through the air.  Good-
+bye."
+
+The departing galley-slave stepped forth into the sunlight, radiant
+and confident.  A few minutes later Elaine could see glimpses of
+his white car as it rushed past the rhododendron bushes.  He woos
+best who leaves first, particularly if he goes forth to battle or
+the semblance of battle.
+
+Somehow Elaine's garden of Eternal Youth had already become clouded
+in its imagery.  The girl-figure who walked in it was still
+distinctly and unchangingly herself, but her companion was more
+blurred and undefined, as a picture that has been superimposed on
+another.
+
+Youghal sped townward well satisfied with himself.  To-morrow, he
+reflected, Elaine would read his speech in her morning paper, and
+he knew in advance that it was not going to be one of his worst
+efforts.  He knew almost exactly where the punctuations of laughter
+and applause would burst in, he knew that nimble fingers in the
+Press Gallery would be taking down each gibe and argument as he
+flung it at the impassive Minister confronting him, and that the
+fair lady of his desire would be able to judge what manner of young
+man this was who spent his afternoon in her garden, lazily chaffing
+himself and his world.
+
+And he further reflected, with an amused chuckle, that she would be
+vividly reminded of Comus for days to come, when she took her
+afternoon tea, and saw the bread-and-butter reposing in an
+unaccustomed dish.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+
+Towards four o'clock on a hot afternoon Francesca stepped out from
+a shop entrance near the Piccadilly end of Bond Street and ran
+almost into the arms of Merla Blathlington.  The afternoon seemed
+to get instantly hotter.  Merla was one of those human flies that
+buzz; in crowded streets, at bazaars and in warm weather, she
+attained to the proportions of a human bluebottle.  Lady Caroline
+Benaresq had openly predicted that a special fly-paper was being
+reserved for her accommodation in another world; others, however,
+held the opinion that she would be miraculously multiplied in a
+future state, and that four or more Merla Blathlingtons, according
+to deserts, would be in perpetual and unremitting attendance on
+each lost soul.
+
+"Here we are," she cried, with a glad eager buzz, "popping in and
+out of shops like rabbits; not that rabbits do pop in and out of
+shops very extensively."
+
+It was evidently one of her bluebottle days.
+
+"Don't you love Bond Street?" she gabbled on.  "There's something
+so unusual and distinctive about it; no other street anywhere else
+is quite like it.  Don't you know those ikons and images and things
+scattered up and down Europe, that are supposed to have been
+painted or carved, as the case may be, by St. Luke or Zaccheus, or
+somebody of that sort; I always like to think that some notable
+person of those times designed Bond Street.  St. Paul, perhaps.  He
+travelled about a lot."
+
+"Not in Middlesex, though," said Francesca.
+
+"One can't be sure," persisted Merla; "when one wanders about as
+much as he did one gets mixed up and forgets where one HAS been.  I
+can never remember whether I've been to the Tyrol twice and St.
+Moritz once, or the other way about; I always have to ask my maid.
+And there's something about the name Bond that suggests St. Paul;
+didn't he write a lot about the bond and the free?"
+
+"I fancy he wrote in Hebrew or Greek," objected Francesca; "the
+word wouldn't have the least resemblance."
+
+"So dreadfully non-committal to go about pamphleteering in those
+bizarre languages," complained Merla; "that's what makes all those
+people so elusive.  As soon as you try to pin them down to a
+definite statement about anything you're told that some vitally
+important word has fifteen other meanings in the original.  I
+wonder our Cabinet Ministers and politicians don't adopt a sort of
+dog-Latin or Esperanto jargon to deliver their speeches in; what a
+lot of subsequent explaining away would be saved.  But to go back
+to Bond Street--not that we've left it--"
+
+"I'm afraid I must leave it now," said Francesca, preparing to turn
+up Grafton Street; "Good-bye."
+
+"Must you be going?  Come and have tea somewhere.  I know of a cosy
+little place where one can talk undisturbed."
+
+Francesca repressed a shudder and pleaded an urgent engagement.
+
+"I know where you're going," said Merla, with the resentful buzz of
+a bluebottle that finds itself thwarted by the cold unreasoning
+resistance of a windowpane.  "You're going to play bridge at Serena
+Golackly's.  She never asks me to her bridge parties."
+
+Francesca shuddered openly this time; the prospect of having to
+play bridge anywhere in the near neighbourhood of Merla's voice was
+not one that could be contemplated with ordinary calmness.
+
+"Good-bye," she said again firmly, and passed out of earshot; it
+was rather like leaving the machinery section of an exhibition.
+Merla's diagnosis of her destination had been a correct one;
+Francesca made her way slowly through the hot streets in the
+direction of Serena Golackly's house on the far side of Berkeley
+Square.  To the blessed certainty of finding a game of bridge, she
+hopefully added the possibility of hearing some fragments of news
+which might prove interesting and enlightening.  And of
+enlightenment on a particular subject, in which she was acutely and
+personally interested, she stood in some need.  Comus of late had
+been provokingly reticent as to his movements and doings; partly,
+perhaps, because it was his nature to be provoking, partly because
+the daily bickerings over money matters were gradually choking
+other forms of conversation.  Francesca had seen him once or twice
+in the Park in the desirable company of Elaine de Frey, and from
+time to time she heard of the young people as having danced
+together at various houses; on the other hand, she had seen and
+heard quite as much evidence to connect the heiress's name with
+that of Courtenay Youghal.  Beyond this meagre and conflicting and
+altogether tantalising information, her knowledge of the present
+position of affairs did not go.  If either of the young men was
+seriously "making the running," it was probable that she would hear
+some sly hint or open comment about it from one of Serena's gossip-
+laden friends, without having to go out of her way to introduce the
+subject and unduly disclose her own state of ignorance.  And a game
+of bridge, played for moderately high points, gave ample excuse for
+convenient lapses into reticence; if questions took an
+embarrassingly inquisitive turn, one could always find refuge in a
+defensive spade.
+
+The afternoon was too warm to make bridge a generally popular
+diversion, and Serena's party was a comparatively small one.  Only
+one table was incomplete when Francesca made her appearance on the
+scene; at it was seated Serena herself, confronted by Ada
+Spelvexit, whom everyone was wont to explain as "one of the
+Cheshire Spelvexits," as though any other variety would have been
+intolerable.  Ada Spelvexit was one of those naturally stagnant
+souls who take infinite pleasure in what are called "movements."
+"Most of the really great lessons I have learned have been taught
+me by the Poor," was one of her favourite statements.  The one
+great lesson that the Poor in general would have liked to have
+taught her, that their kitchens and sickrooms were not unreservedly
+at her disposal as private lecture halls, she had never been able
+to assimilate.  She was ready to give them unlimited advice as to
+how they should keep the wolf from their doors, but in return she
+claimed and enforced for herself the penetrating powers of an east
+wind or a dust storm.  Her visits among her wealthier acquaintances
+were equally extensive and enterprising, and hardly more welcome;
+in country-house parties, while partaking to the fullest extent of
+the hospitality offered her, she made a practice of unburdening
+herself of homilies on the evils of leisure and luxury, which did
+not particularly endear her to her fellow guests.  Hostesses
+regarded her philosophically as a form of social measles which
+everyone had to have once.
+
+The third prospective player, Francesca noted without any special
+enthusiasm, was Lady Caroline Benaresq.  Lady Caroline was far from
+being a remarkably good bridge player, but she always managed to
+domineer mercilessly over any table that was favoured with her
+presence, and generally managed to win.  A domineering player
+usually inflicts the chief damage and demoralisation on his
+partner; Lady Caroline's special achievement was to harass and
+demoralise partner and opponents alike.
+
+"Weak and weak," she announced in her gentle voice, as she cut her
+hostess for a partner; "I suppose we had better play only five
+shillings a hundred."
+
+Francesca wondered at the old woman's moderate assessment of the
+stake, knowing her fondness for highish play and her usual good
+luck in card holding.
+
+"I don't mind what we play," said Ada Spelvexit, with an incautious
+parade of elegant indifference; as a matter of fact she was
+inwardly relieved and rejoicing at the reasonable figure proposed
+by Lady Caroline, and she would certainly have demurred if a higher
+stake had been suggested.  She was not as a rule a successful
+player, and money lost at cards was always a poignant bereavement
+to her.
+
+"Then as you don't mind we'll make it ten shillings a hundred,"
+said Lady Caroline, with the pleased chuckle of one who has spread
+a net in the sight of a bird and disproved the vanity of the
+proceeding.
+
+It proved a tiresome ding-dong rubber, with the strength of the
+cards slightly on Francesca's side, and the luck of the table going
+mostly the other way.  She was too keen a player not to feel a
+certain absorption in the game once it had started, but she was
+conscious to-day of a distracting interest that competed with the
+momentary importance of leads and discards and declarations.  The
+little accumulations of talk that were unpent during the dealing of
+the hands became as noteworthy to her alert attention as the play
+of the hands themselves.
+
+"Yes, quite a small party this afternoon," said Serena, in reply to
+a seemingly casual remark on Francesca's part; "and two or three
+non-players, which is unusual on a Wednesday.  Canon Besomley was
+here just before you came; you know, the big preaching man."
+
+"I've been to hear him scold the human race once or twice," said
+Francesca.
+
+"A strong man with a wonderfully strong message," said Ada
+Spelvexit, in an impressive and assertive tone.
+
+"The sort of popular pulpiteer who spanks the vices of his age and
+lunches with them afterwards," said Lady Caroline.
+
+"Hardly a fair summary of the man and his work," protested Ada.
+"I've been to hear him many times when I've been depressed or
+discouraged, and I simply can't tell you the impression his words
+leave--"
+
+"At least you can tell us what you intend to make trumps," broke in
+Lady Caroline, gently.
+
+"Diamonds," pronounced Ada, after a rather flurried survey of her
+hand.
+
+"Doubled," said Lady Caroline, with increased gentleness, and a few
+minutes later she was pencilling an addition of twenty-four to her
+score.
+
+"I stayed with his people down in Herefordshire last May," said
+Ada, returning to the unfinished theme of the Canon; "such an
+exquisite rural retreat, and so restful and healing to the nerves.
+Real country scenery; apple blossom everywhere."
+
+"Surely only on the apple trees," said Lady Caroline.
+
+Ada Spelvexit gave up the attempt to reproduce the decorative
+setting of the Canon's homelife, and fell back on the small but
+practical consolation of scoring the odd trick in her opponent's
+declaration of hearts.
+
+"If you had led your highest club to start with, instead of the
+nine, we should have saved the trick," remarked Lady Caroline to
+her partner in a tone of coldly, gentle reproof; "it's no use, my
+dear," she continued, as Serena flustered out a halting apology,
+"no earthly use to attempt to play bridge at one table and try to
+see and hear what's going on at two or three other tables."
+
+"I can generally manage to attend to more than one thing at a
+time," said Serena, rashly; "I think I must have a sort of double
+brain."
+
+"Much better to economise and have one really good one," observed
+Lady Caroline.
+
+"La belle dame sans merci scoring a verbal trick or two as usual,"
+said a player at another table in a discreet undertone.
+
+"Did I tell you Sir Edward Roan is coming to my next big evening,"
+said Serena, hurriedly, by way, perhaps, of restoring herself a
+little in her own esteem.
+
+"Poor dear, good Sir Edward.  What have you made trumps?" asked
+Lady Caroline, in one breath.
+
+"Clubs," said Francesca; "and pray, why these adjectives of
+commiseration?"
+
+Francesca was a Ministerialist by family interest and allegiance,
+and was inclined to take up the cudgels at the suggested
+disparagement aimed at the Foreign Secretary.
+
+"He amuses me so much," purred Lady Caroline.  Her amusement was
+usually of the sort that a sporting cat derives from watching the
+Swedish exercises of a well-spent and carefully thought-out mouse.
+
+"Really?  He has been rather a brilliant success at the Foreign
+Office, you know," said Francesca.
+
+"He reminds one so of a circus elephant--infinitely more
+intelligent than the people who direct him, but quite content to go
+on putting his foot down or taking it up as may be required, quite
+unconcerned whether he steps on a meringue or a hornet's nest in
+the process of going where he's expected to go."
+
+"How can you say such things?" protested Francesca.
+
+"I can't," said Lady Caroline; "Courtenay Youghal said it in the
+House last night.  Didn't you read the debate?  He was really
+rather in form.  I disagree entirely with his point of view, of
+course, but some of the things he says have just enough truth
+behind them to redeem them from being merely smart; for instance,
+his summing up of the Government's attitude towards our
+embarrassing Colonial Empire in the wistful phrase 'happy is the
+country that has no geography.'"
+
+"What an absurdly unjust thing to say," put in Francesca; "I
+daresay some of our Party at some time have taken up that attitude,
+but every one knows that Sir Edward is a sound Imperialist at
+heart."
+
+"Most politicians are something or other at heart, but no one would
+be rash enough to insure a politician against heart failure.
+Particularly when he happens to be in office."
+
+"Anyhow, I don't see that the Opposition leaders would have acted
+any differently in the present case," said Francesca.
+
+"One should always speak guardedly of the Opposition leaders," said
+Lady Caroline, in her gentlest voice; "one never knows what a turn
+in the situation may do for them."
+
+"You mean they may one day be at the head of affairs?" asked
+Serena, briskly.
+
+"I mean they may one day lead the Opposition.  One never knows."
+
+Lady Caroline had just remembered that her hostess was on the
+Opposition side in politics.
+
+Francesca and her partner scored four tricks in clubs; the game
+stood irresolutely at twenty-four all.
+
+"If you had followed the excellent lyrical advice given to the Maid
+of Athens and returned my heart we should have made two more tricks
+and gone game," said Lady Caroline to her partner.
+
+"Mr. Youghal seems pushing himself to the fore of late," remarked
+Francesca, as Serena took up the cards to deal.  Since the young
+politician's name had been introduced into their conversation the
+opportunity for turning the talk more directly on him and his
+affairs was too good to be missed.
+
+"I think he's got a career before him," said Serena; "the House
+always fills when he's speaking, and that's a good sign.  And then
+he's young and got rather an attractive personality, which is
+always something in the political world."
+
+"His lack of money will handicap him, unless he can find himself a
+rich wife or persuade someone to die and leave him a fat legacy,"
+said Francesca; "since M.P.'s have become the recipients of a
+salary rather more is expected and demanded of them in the
+expenditure line than before."
+
+"Yes, the House of Commons still remains rather at the opposite
+pole to the Kingdom of Heaven as regards entrance qualifications,"
+observed Lady Caroline.
+
+"There ought to be no difficulty about Youghal picking up a girl
+with money," said Serena; "with his prospects he would make an
+excellent husband for any woman with social ambitions."
+
+And she half sighed, as though she almost regretted that a previous
+matrimonial arrangement precluded her from entering into the
+competition on her own account.
+
+Francesca, under an assumption of languid interest, was watching
+Lady Caroline narrowly for some hint of suppressed knowledge of
+Youghal's courtship of Miss de Frey.
+
+"Whom are you marrying and giving in marriage?"
+
+The question came from George St. Michael, who had strayed over
+from a neighbouring table, attracted by the fragments of small-talk
+that had reached his ears.
+
+St. Michael was one of those dapper bird-like illusorily-active
+men, who seem to have been in a certain stage of middle-age for as
+long as human memory can recall them.  A close-cut peaked beard
+lent a certain dignity to his appearance--a loan which the rest of
+his features and mannerisms were continually and successfully
+repudiating.  His profession, if he had one, was submerged in his
+hobby, which consisted of being an advance-agent for small
+happenings or possible happenings that were or seemed imminent in
+the social world around him; he found a perpetual and unflagging
+satisfaction in acquiring and retailing any stray items of gossip
+or information, particularly of a matrimonial nature, that chanced
+to come his way.  Given the bare outline of an officially announced
+engagement he would immediately fill it in with all manner of
+details, true or, at any rate, probable, drawn from his own
+imagination or from some equally exclusive source.  The Morning
+Post might content itself with the mere statement of the
+arrangement which would shortly take place, but it was St.
+Michael's breathless little voice that proclaimed how the
+contracting parties had originally met over a salmon-fishing
+incident, why the Guards' Chapel would not be used, why her Aunt
+Mary had at first opposed the match, how the question of the
+children's religious upbringing had been compromised, etc., etc.,
+to all whom it might interest and to many whom it might not.
+Beyond his industriously-earned pre-eminence in this special branch
+of intelligence, he was chiefly noteworthy for having a wife
+reputed to be the tallest and thinnest woman in the Home Counties.
+The two were sometimes seen together in Society, where they passed
+under the collective name of St. Michael and All Angles.
+
+"We are trying to find a rich wife for Courtenay Youghal," said
+Serena, in answer to St. Michael's question.
+
+"Ah, there I'm afraid you're a little late," he observed, glowing
+with the importance of pending revelation; "I'm afraid you're a
+little late," he repeated, watching the effect of his words as a
+gardener might watch the development of a bed of carefully tended
+asparagus.  "I think the young gentleman has been before you and
+already found himself a rich mate in prospect."
+
+He lowered his voice as he spoke, not with a view to imparting
+impressive mystery to his statement, but because there were other
+table groups within hearing to whom he hoped presently to have the
+privilege of re-disclosing his revelation.
+
+"Do you mean--?" began Serena.
+
+"Miss de Frey," broke in St. Michael, hurriedly, fearful lest his
+revelation should be forestalled, even in guesswork; "quite an
+ideal choice, the very wife for a man who means to make his mark in
+politics.  Twenty-four thousand a year, with prospects of more to
+come, and a charming place of her own not too far from town.  Quite
+the type of girl, too, who will make a good political hostess,
+brains without being brainy, you know.  Just the right thing.  Of
+course, it would be premature to make any definite announcement at
+present--"
+
+"It would hardly be premature for my partner to announce what she
+means to make trumps," interrupted Lady Caroline, in a voice of
+such sinister gentleness that St. Michael fled headlong back to his
+own table.
+
+"Oh, is it me?  I beg your pardon.  I leave it," said Serena.
+
+"Thank you.  No trumps," declared Lady Caroline.  The hand was
+successful, and the rubber ultimately fell to her with a
+comfortable margin of honours.  The same partners cut together
+again, and this time the cards went distinctly against Francesca
+and Ada Spelvexit, and a heavily piled-up score confronted them at
+the close of the rubber.  Francesca was conscious that a certain
+amount of rather erratic play on her part had at least contributed
+to the result.  St. Michael's incursion into the conversation had
+proved rather a powerful distraction to her ordinarily sound
+bridge-craft.
+
+Ada Spelvexit emptied her purse of several gold pieces and infused
+a corresponding degree of superiority into her manner.
+
+"I must be going now," she announced; "I'm dining early.  I have to
+give an address to some charwomen afterwards."
+
+"Why?" asked Lady Caroline, with a disconcerting directness that
+was one of her most formidable characteristics.
+
+"Oh, well, I have some things to say to them that I daresay they
+will like to hear," said Ada, with a thin laugh.
+
+Her statement was received with a silence that betokened profound
+unbelief in any such probability.
+
+"I go about a good deal among working-class women," she added.
+
+"No one has ever said it," observed Lady Caroline, "but how
+painfully true it is that the poor have us always with them."
+
+Ada Spelvexit hastened her departure; the marred impressiveness of
+her retreat came as a culminating discomfiture on the top of her
+ill-fortune at the card-table.  Possibly, however, the
+multiplication of her own annoyances enabled her to survey
+charwomen's troubles with increased cheerfulness.  None of them, at
+any rate, had spent an afternoon with Lady Caroline.
+
+Francesca cut in at another table and with better fortune attending
+on her, succeeded in winning back most of her losses.  A sense of
+satisfaction was distinctly dominant as she took leave of her
+hostess.  St. Michael's gossip, or rather the manner in which it
+had been received, had given her a clue to the real state of
+affairs, which, however slender and conjectural, at least pointed
+in the desired direction.  At first she had been horribly afraid
+lest she should be listening to a definite announcement which would
+have been the death-blow to her hopes, but as the recitation went
+on without any of those assured little minor details which St.
+Michael so loved to supply, she had come to the conclusion that it
+was merely a piece of intelligent guesswork.  And if Lady Caroline
+had really believed in the story of Elaine de Frey's virtual
+engagement to Courtenay Youghal she would have taken a malicious
+pleasure in encouraging St. Michael in his confidences, and in
+watching Francesca's discomfiture under the recital.  The irritated
+manner in which she had cut short the discussion betrayed the fact,
+that, as far as the old woman's information went, it was Comus and
+not Courtenay Youghal who held the field.  And in this particular
+case Lady Caroline's information was likely to be nearer the truth
+than St. Michael's confident gossip.
+
+Francesca always gave a penny to the first crossing-sweeper or
+match-seller she chanced across after a successful sitting at
+bridge.  This afternoon she had come out of the fray some fifteen
+shillings to the bad, but she gave two pennies to a crossing-
+sweeper at the north-west corner of Berkeley Square as a sort of
+thank-offering to the Gods.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+
+It was a fresh rain-repentant afternoon, following a morning that
+had been sultry and torrentially wet by turns; the sort of
+afternoon that impels people to talk graciously of the rain as
+having done a lot of good, its chief merit in their eyes probably
+having been its recognition of the art of moderation.  Also it was
+an afternoon that invited bodily activity after the convalescent
+languor of the earlier part of the day.  Elaine had instinctively
+found her way into her riding-habit and sent an order down to the
+stables--a blessed oasis that still smelt sweetly of horse and hay
+and cleanliness in a world that reeked of petrol, and now she set
+her mare at a smart pace through a succession of long-stretching
+country lanes.  She was due some time that afternoon at a garden-
+party, but she rode with determination in an opposite direction.
+In the first place neither Comus or Courtenay would be at the
+party, which fact seemed to remove any valid reason that could be
+thought of for inviting her attendance thereat; in the second place
+about a hundred human beings would be gathered there, and human
+gatherings were not her most crying need at the present moment.
+Since her last encounter with her wooers, under the cedars in her
+own garden, Elaine realised that she was either very happy or
+cruelly unhappy, she could not quite determine which.  She seemed
+to have what she most wanted in the world lying at her feet, and
+she was dreadfully uncertain in her more reflective moments whether
+she really wanted to stretch out her hand and take it.  It was all
+very like some situation in an Arabian Nights tale or a story of
+Pagan Hellas, and consequently the more puzzling and disconcerting
+to a girl brought up on the methodical lines of Victorian
+Christianity.  Her appeal court was in permanent session these last
+few days, but it gave no decisions, at least none that she would
+listen to.  And the ride on her fast light-stepping little mare,
+alone and unattended, through the fresh-smelling leafy lanes into
+unexplored country, seemed just what she wanted at the moment.  The
+mare made some small delicate pretence of being roadshy, not the
+staring dolt-like kind of nervousness that shows itself in an
+irritating hanging-back as each conspicuous wayside object presents
+itself, but the nerve-flutter of an imaginative animal that merely
+results in a quick whisk of the head and a swifter bound forward.
+She might have paraphrased the mental attitude of the immortalised
+Peter Bell into
+
+
+A basket underneath a tree
+A yellow tiger is to me,
+If it is nothing more.
+
+
+The more really alarming episodes of the road, the hoot and whir of
+a passing motor-car or the loud vibrating hum of a wayside
+threshing-machine, were treated with indifference.
+
+On turning a corner out of a narrow coppice-bordered lane into a
+wider road that sloped steadily upward in a long stretch of hill
+Elaine saw, coming toward her at no great distance, a string of
+yellow-painted vans, drawn for the most part by skewbald or
+speckled horses.  A certain rakish air about these oncoming road-
+craft proclaimed them as belonging to a travelling wild-beast show,
+decked out in the rich primitive colouring that one's taste in
+childhood would have insisted on before it had been schooled in the
+artistic value of dulness.  It was an unlooked-for and distinctly
+unwelcome encounter.  The mare had already commenced a sixfold
+scrutiny with nostrils, eyes and daintily-pricked ears; one ear
+made hurried little backward movements to hear what Elaine was
+saying about the eminent niceness and respectability of the
+approaching caravan, but even Elaine felt that she would be unable
+satisfactorily to explain the elephants and camels that would
+certainly form part of the procession.  To turn back would seem
+rather craven, and the mare might take fright at the manoeuvre and
+try to bolt; a gate standing ajar at the entrance to a farmyard
+lane provided a convenient way out of the difficulty.
+
+As Elaine pushed her way through she became aware of a man standing
+just inside the lane, who made a movement forward to open the gate
+for her.
+
+"Thank you.  I'm just getting out of the way of a wild-beast show,"
+she explained; "my mare is tolerant of motors and traction-engines,
+but I expect camels--hullo," she broke off, recognising the man as
+an old acquaintance, "I heard you had taken rooms in a farmhouse
+somewhere.  Fancy meeting you in this way."
+
+In the not very distant days of her little-girlhood, Tom Keriway
+had been a man to be looked upon with a certain awe and envy;
+indeed the glamour of his roving career would have fired the
+imagination, and wistful desire to do likewise, of many young
+Englishmen.  It seemed to be the grown-up realisation of the games
+played in dark rooms in winter fire-lit evenings, and the dreams
+dreamed over favourite books of adventure.  Making Vienna his
+headquarters, almost his home, he had rambled where he listed
+through the lands of the Near and Middle East as leisurely and
+thoroughly as tamer souls might explore Paris.  He had wandered
+through Hungarian horse-fairs, hunted shy crafty beasts on lonely
+Balkan hillsides, dropped himself pebble-wise into the stagnant
+human pool of some Bulgarian monastery, threaded his way through
+the strange racial mosaic of Salonika, listened with amused
+politeness to the shallow ultra-modern opinions of a voluble editor
+or lawyer in some wayside Russian town, or learned wisdom from a
+chance tavern companion, one of the atoms of the busy ant-stream of
+men and merchandise that moves untiringly round the shores of the
+Black Sea.  And far and wide as he might roam he always managed to
+turn up at frequent intervals, at ball and supper and theatre, in
+the gay Hauptstadt of the Habsburgs, haunting his favourite cafes
+and wine-vaults, skimming through his favourite news-sheets,
+greeting old acquaintances and friends, from ambassadors down to
+cobblers in the social scale.  He seldom talked of his travels, but
+it might be said that his travels talked of him; there was an air
+about him that a German diplomat once summed up in a phrase:  "a
+man that wolves have sniffed at."
+
+And then two things happened, which he had not mapped out in his
+route; a severe illness shook half the life and all the energy out
+of him, and a heavy money loss brought him almost to the door of
+destitution.  With something, perhaps, of the impulse which drives
+a stricken animal away from its kind, Tom Keriway left the haunts
+where he had known so much happiness, and withdrew into the shelter
+of a secluded farmhouse lodging; more than ever he became to Elaine
+a hearsay personality.  And now the chance meeting with the caravan
+had flung her across the threshold of his retreat.
+
+"What a charming little nook you've got hold of," she exclaimed
+with instinctive politeness, and then looked searchingly round, and
+discovered that she had spoken the truth; it really was charming.
+The farmhouse had that intensely English look that one seldom sees
+out of Normandy.  Over the whole scene of rickyard, garden,
+outbuildings, horsepond and orchard, brooded that air which seems
+rightfully to belong to out-of-the-way farmyards, an air of wakeful
+dreaminess which suggests that here, man and beast and bird have
+got up so early that the rest of the world has never caught them up
+and never will.
+
+Elaine dismounted, and Keriway led the mare round to a little
+paddock by the side of a great grey barn.  At the end of the lane
+they could see the show go past, a string of lumbering vans and
+great striding beasts that seemed to link the vast silences of the
+desert with the noises and sights and smells, the naphtha-flares
+and advertisement hoardings and trampled orange-peel, of an endless
+succession of towns.
+
+"You had better let the caravan pass well on its way before you get
+on the road again," said Keriway; "the smell of the beasts may make
+your mare nervous and restive going home."
+
+Then he called to a boy who was busy with a hoe among some
+defiantly prosperous weeds, to fetch the lady a glass of milk and a
+piece of currant loaf.
+
+"I don't know when I've seen anything so utterly charming and
+peaceful," said Elaine, propping herself on a seat that a pear-tree
+had obligingly designed in the fantastic curve of its trunk.
+
+"Charming, certainly," said Keriway, "but too full of the stress of
+its own little life struggle to be peaceful.  Since I have lived
+here I've learnt, what I've always suspected, that a country
+farmhouse, set away in a world of its own, is one of the most
+wonderful studies of interwoven happenings and tragedies that can
+be imagined.  It is like the old chronicles of medieval Europe in
+the days when there was a sort of ordered anarchy between feudal
+lords and overlords, and burg-grafs, and mitred abbots, and prince-
+bishops, robber barons and merchant guilds, and Electors and so
+forth, all striving and contending and counter-plotting, and
+interfering with each other under some vague code of loosely-
+applied rules.  Here one sees it reproduced under one's eyes, like
+a musty page of black-letter come to life.  Look at one little
+section of it, the poultry-life on the farm.  Villa poultry, dull
+egg-machines, with records kept of how many ounces of food they
+eat, and how many pennyworths of eggs they lay, give you no idea of
+the wonder-life of these farm-birds; their feuds and jealousies,
+and carefully maintained prerogatives, their unsparing tyrannies
+and persecutions, their calculated courage and bravado or
+sedulously hidden cowardice, it might all be some human chapter
+from the annals of the old Rhineland or medieval Italy.  And then,
+outside their own bickering wars and hates, the grim enemies that
+come up against them from the woodlands; the hawk that dashes among
+the coops like a moss-trooper raiding the border, knowing well that
+a charge of shot may tear him to bits at any moment.  And the
+stoat, a creeping slip of brown fur a few inches long, intently and
+unstayably out for blood.  And the hunger-taught master of craft,
+the red fox, who has waited perhaps half the afternoon for his
+chance while the fowls were dusting themselves under the hedge, and
+just as they were turning supper-ward to the yard one has stopped a
+moment to give her feathers a final shake and found death springing
+upon her.  Do you know," he continued, as Elaine fed herself and
+the mare with morsels of currant-loaf, "I don't think any tragedy
+in literature that I have ever come across impressed me so much as
+the first one, that I spelled out slowly for myself in words of
+three letters:  the bad fox has got the red hen.  There was
+something so dramatically complete about it; the badness of the
+fox, added to all the traditional guile of his race, seemed to
+heighten the horror of the hen's fate, and there was such a
+suggestion of masterful malice about the word 'got.'  One felt that
+a countryside in arms would not get that hen away from the bad fox.
+They used to think me a slow dull reader for not getting on with my
+lesson, but I used to sit and picture to myself the red hen, with
+its wings beating helplessly, screeching in terrified protest, or
+perhaps, if he had got it by the neck, with beak wide agape and
+silent, and eyes staring, as it left the farmyard for ever.  I have
+seen blood-spillings and down-crushings and abject defeat here and
+there in my time, but the red hen has remained in my mind as the
+type of helpless tragedy."  He was silent for a moment as if he
+were again musing over the three-letter drama that had so dwelt in
+his childhood's imagination.  "Tell me some of the things you have
+seen in your time," was the request that was nearly on Elaine's
+lips, but she hastily checked herself and substituted another.
+
+"Tell me more about the farm, please."
+
+And he told her of a whole world, or rather of several intermingled
+worlds, set apart in this sleepy hollow in the hills, of beast lore
+and wood lore and farm craft, at times touching almost the border
+of witchcraft--passing lightly here, not with the probing eagerness
+of those who know nothing, but with the averted glance of those who
+fear to see too much.  He told her of those things that slept and
+those that prowled when the dusk fell, of strange hunting cats, of
+the yard swine and the stalled cattle, of the farm folk themselves,
+as curious and remote in their way, in their ideas and fears and
+wants and tragedies, as the brutes and feathered stock that they
+tended.  It seemed to Elaine as if a musty store of old-world
+children's books had been fetched down from some cobwebbed lumber-
+room and brought to life.  Sitting there in the little paddock,
+grown thickly with tall weeds and rank grasses, and shadowed by the
+weather-beaten old grey barn, listening to this chronicle of
+wonderful things, half fanciful, half very real, she could scarcely
+believe that a few miles away there was a garden-party in full
+swing, with smart frocks and smart conversation, fashionable
+refreshments and fashionable music, and a fevered undercurrent of
+social strivings and snubbings.  Did Vienna and the Balkan
+Mountains and the Black Sea seem as remote and hard to believe in,
+she wondered, to the man sitting by her side, who had discovered or
+invented this wonderful fairyland?  Was it a true and merciful
+arrangement of fate and life that the things of the moment thrust
+out the after-taste of the things that had been?  Here was one who
+had held much that was priceless in the hollow of his hand and lost
+it all, and he was happy and absorbed and well-content with the
+little wayside corner of the world into which he had crept.  And
+Elaine, who held so many desirable things in the hollow of her
+hand, could not make up her mind to be even moderately happy.  She
+did not even know whether to take this hero of her childhood down
+from his pedestal, or to place him on a higher one; on the whole
+she was inclined to resent rather than approve the idea that ill-
+health and misfortune could so completely subdue and tame an
+erstwhile bold and roving spirit.
+
+The mare was showing signs of delicately-hinted impatience; the
+paddock, with its teasing insects and very indifferent grazing, had
+not thrust out the image of her own comfortable well-foddered
+loose-box.  Elaine divested her habit of some remaining crumbs of
+bun-loaf and jumped lightly on to her saddle.  As she rode slowly
+down the lane, with Keriway escorting her as far as its gate, she
+looked round at what had seemed to her, a short while ago, just a
+picturesque old farmstead, a place of bee-hives and hollyhocks and
+gabled cart-sheds; now it was in her eyes a magic city, with an
+undercurrent of reality beneath its magic.
+
+"You are a person to be envied," she said to Keriway; "you have
+created a fairyland, and you are living in it yourself."
+
+"Envied?"
+
+He shot the question out with sudden bitterness.  She looked down
+and saw the wistful misery that had come into his face.
+
+"Once," he said to her, "in a German paper I read a short story
+about a tame crippled crane that lived in the park of some small
+town.  I forget what happened in the story, but there was one line
+that I shall always remember:  'it was lame, that is why it was
+tame.'"
+
+He had created a fairyland, but assuredly he was not living in it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+
+In the warmth of a late June morning the long shaded stretch of
+raked earth, gravel-walk and rhododendron bush that is known
+affectionately as the Row was alive with the monotonous movement
+and alert stagnation appropriate to the time and place.  The
+seekers after health, the seekers after notoriety and recognition,
+and the lovers of good exercise were all well represented on the
+galloping ground; the gravel-walk and chairs and long seats held a
+population whose varied instincts and motives would have baffled a
+social catalogue-maker.  The children, handled or in perambulators,
+might be excused from instinct or motive; they were brought.
+
+Pleasingly conspicuous among a bunch of indifferent riders pacing
+along by the rails where the onlookers were thickest was Courtenay
+Youghal, on his handsome plum-roan gelding Anne de Joyeuse.  That
+delicately stepping animal had taken a prize at Islington and
+nearly taken the life of a stable-boy of whom he disapproved, but
+his strongest claims to distinction were his good looks and his
+high opinion of himself.  Youghal evidently believed in thorough
+accord between horse and rider.
+
+"Please stop and talk to me," said a quiet beckoning voice from the
+other side of the rails, and Youghal drew rein and greeted Lady
+Veula Croot.  Lady Veula had married into a family of commercial
+solidity and enterprising political nonentity.  She had a devoted
+husband, some blonde teachable children, and a look of unutterable
+weariness in her eyes.  To see her standing at the top of an
+expensively horticultured staircase receiving her husband's guests
+was rather like watching an animal performing on a music-hall
+stage.
+
+One always tells oneself that the animal likes it, and one always
+knows that it doesn't.
+
+"Lady Veula is an ardent Free Trader, isn't she?" someone once
+remarked to Lady Caroline.
+
+"I wonder," said Lady Caroline, in her gently questioning voice; "a
+woman whose dresses are made in Paris and whose marriage has been
+made in Heaven might be equally biassed for and against free
+imports."
+
+Lady Veula looked at Youghal and his mount with slow critical
+appraisement, and there was a note of blended raillery and
+wistfulness in her voice.
+
+"You two dear things, I should love to stroke you both, but I'm not
+sure how Joyeuse would take it.  So I'll stroke you down verbally
+instead.  I admired your attack on Sir Edward immensely, though of
+course I don't agree with a word of it.  Your description of him
+building a hedge round the German cuckoo and hoping he was
+isolating it was rather sweet.  Seriously though, I regard him as
+one of the pillars of the Administration."
+
+"So do I," said Youghal; "the misfortune is that he is merely
+propping up a canvas roof.  It's just his regrettable solidity and
+integrity that makes him so expensively dangerous.  The average
+Briton arrives at the same judgment about Roan's handling of
+foreign affairs as Omar does of the Supreme Being in his dealings
+with the world:  He's a good fellow and 'twill all be well.'"
+
+Lady Veula laughed lightly.  "My Party is in power so I may
+exercise the privilege of being optimistic.  Who is that who bowed
+to you?" she continued, as a dark young man with an inclination to
+stoutness passed by them on foot; "I've seen him about a good deal
+lately.  He's been to one or two of my dances."
+
+"Andrei Drakoloff," said Youghal; "he's just produced a play that
+has had a big success in Moscow and is certain to be extremely
+popular all over Russia.  In the first three acts the heroine is
+supposed to be dying of consumption; in the last act they find she
+is really dying of cancer."
+
+"Are the Russians really such a gloomy people?"
+
+"Gloom-loving but not in the least gloomy.  They merely take their
+sadness pleasurably, just as we are accused of taking our pleasures
+sadly.  Have you noticed that dreadful Klopstock youth has been
+pounding past us at shortening intervals.  He'll come up and talk
+if he half catches your eye."
+
+"I only just know him.  Isn't he at an agricultural college or
+something of the sort?"
+
+"Yes, studying to be a gentleman farmer, he told me.  I didn't ask
+if both subjects were compulsory."
+
+"You're really rather dreadful," said Lady Veula, trying to look as
+if she thought so; "remember, we are all equal in the sight of
+Heaven."
+
+For a preacher of wholesome truths her voice rather lacked
+conviction.
+
+"If I and Ernest Klopstock are really equal in the sight of
+Heaven," said Youghal, with intense complacency, "I should
+recommend Heaven to consult an eye specialist."
+
+There was a heavy spattering of loose earth, and a squelching of
+saddle-leather, as the Klopstock youth lumbered up to the rails and
+delivered himself of loud, cheerful greetings. Joyeuse laid his
+ears well back as the ungainly bay cob and his appropriately
+matched rider drew up beside him; his verdict was reflected and
+endorsed by the cold stare of Youghal's eyes.
+
+"I've been having a nailing fine time," recounted the newcomer with
+clamorous enthusiasm; "I was over in Paris last month and had lots
+of strawberries there, then I had a lot more in London, and now
+I've been having a late crop of them in Herefordshire, so I've had
+quite a lot this year."  And he laughed as one who had deserved
+well and received well of Fate.
+
+"The charm of that story," said Youghal, "is that it can be told in
+any drawing-room."  And with a sweep of his wide-brimmed hat to
+Lady Veula he turned the impatient Joyeuse into the moving stream
+of horse and horsemen.
+
+"That woman reminds me of some verse I've read and liked," thought
+Youghal, as Joyeuse sprang into a light showy canter that gave full
+recognition to the existence of observant human beings along the
+side walk.  "Ah, I have it."
+
+And he quoted almost aloud, as one does in the exhilaration of a
+canter:
+
+
+"How much I loved that way you had
+Of smiling most, when very sad,
+A smile which carried tender hints
+Of sun and spring,
+And yet, more than all other thing,
+Of weariness beyond all words."
+
+
+And having satisfactorily fitted Lady Veula on to a quotation he
+dismissed her from his mind.  With the constancy of her sex she
+thought about him, his good looks and his youth and his railing
+tongue, till late in the afternoon.
+
+While Youghal was putting Joyeuse through his paces under the elm
+trees of the Row a little drama in which he was directly interested
+was being played out not many hundred yards away.  Elaine and Comus
+were indulging themselves in two pennyworths of Park chair, drawn
+aside just a little from the serried rows of sitters who were set
+out like bedded plants over an acre or so of turf.  Comus was, for
+the moment, in a mood of pugnacious gaiety, disbursing a fund of
+pointed criticism and unsparing anecdote concerning those of the
+promenaders or loungers whom he knew personally or by sight.
+Elaine was rather quieter than usual, and the grave serenity of the
+Leonardo da Vinci portrait seemed intensified in her face this
+morning.  In his leisurely courtship Comus had relied almost
+exclusively on his physical attraction and the fitful drollery of
+his wit and high spirits, and these graces had gone far to make him
+seem a very desirable and rather lovable thing in Elaine's eyes.
+But he had left out of account the disfavour which he constantly
+risked and sometimes incurred from his frank and undisguised
+indifference to other people's interests and wishes, including, at
+times, Elaine's.  And the more that she felt that she liked him the
+more she was irritated by his lack of consideration for her.
+Without expecting that her every wish should become a law to him
+she would at least have liked it to reach the formality of a Second
+Reading.  Another important factor he had also left out of his
+reckoning, namely the presence on the scene of another suitor, who
+also had youth and wit to recommend him, and who certainly did not
+lack physical attractions.  Comus, marching carelessly through
+unknown country to effect what seemed already an assured victory,
+made the mistake of disregarding the existence of an unbeaten army
+on his flank.
+
+To-day Elaine felt that, without having actually quarrelled, she
+and Comus had drifted a little bit out of sympathy with one
+another.  The fault she knew was scarcely hers, in fact from the
+most good-natured point of view it could hardly be denied that it
+was almost entirely his.  The incident of the silver dish had
+lacked even the attraction of novelty; it had been one of a series,
+all bearing a strong connecting likeness.  There had been small
+unrepaid loans which Elaine would not have grudged in themselves,
+though the application for them brought a certain qualm of
+distaste; with the perversity which seemed inseparable from his
+doings, Comus had always flung away a portion of his borrowings in
+some ostentatious piece of glaring and utterly profitless
+extravagance, which outraged all the canons of her upbringing
+without bringing him an atom of understandable satisfaction.  Under
+these repeated discouragements it was not surprising that some
+small part of her affection should have slipped away, but she had
+come to the Park that morning with an unconfessed expectation of
+being gently wooed back to the mood of gracious forgetfulness that
+she was only too eager to assume.  It was almost worth while being
+angry with Comus for the sake of experiencing the pleasure of being
+coaxed into friendliness again with the charm which he knew so well
+how to exert.  It was delicious here under the trees on this
+perfect June morning, and Elaine had the blessed assurance that
+most of the women within range were envying her the companionship
+of the handsome merry-hearted youth who sat by her side.  With
+special complacence she contemplated her cousin Suzette, who was
+self-consciously but not very elatedly basking in the attentions of
+her fiance, an earnest-looking young man who was superintendent of
+a People's something-or-other on the south side of the river, and
+whose clothes Comus had described as having been made in Southwark
+rather than in anger.
+
+Most of the pleasures in life must be paid for, and the chair-
+ticket vendor in due time made his appearance in quest of pennies.
+
+Comus paid him from out of a varied assortment of coins and then
+balanced the remainder in the palm of his hand.  Elaine felt a
+sudden foreknowledge of something disagreeable about to happen and
+a red spot deepened in her cheeks.
+
+"Four shillings and fivepence and a half-penny," said Comus,
+reflectively.  "It's a ridiculous sum to last me for the next three
+days, and I owe a card debt of over two pounds."
+
+"Yes?" commented Elaine dryly and with an apparent lack of interest
+in his exchequer statement.  Surely, she was thinking hurriedly to
+herself, he could not be foolish enough to broach the matter of
+another loan.
+
+"The card debt is rather a nuisance," pursued Comus, with
+fatalistic persistency.
+
+"You won seven pounds last week, didn't you?" asked Elaine; "don't
+you put by any of your winnings to balance losses?"
+
+"The four shillings and the fivepence and the half-penny represent
+the rearguard of the seven pounds," said Comus; "the rest have
+fallen by the way.  If I can pay the two pounds to-day I daresay I
+shall win something more to go on with; I'm holding rather good
+cards just now.  But if I can't pay it of course I shan't show up
+at the club.  So you see the fix I am in."
+
+Elaine took no notice of this indirect application.  The Appeal
+Court was assembling in haste to consider new evidence, and this
+time there was the rapidity of sudden determination about its
+movement.
+
+The conversation strayed away from the fateful topic for a few
+moments and then Comus brought it deliberately back to the danger
+zone.
+
+"It would be awfully nice if you would let me have a fiver for a
+few days, Elaine," he said quickly; "if you don't I really don't
+know what I shall do."
+
+"If you are really bothered about your card debt I will send you
+the two pounds by messenger boy early this afternoon."  She spoke
+quietly and with great decision.  "And I shall not be at the
+Connor's dance to-night," she continued; "it's too hot for dancing.
+I'm going home now; please don't bother to accompany me, I
+particularly wish to go alone."
+
+Comus saw that he had overstepped the mark of her good nature.
+Wisely he made no immediate attempt to force himself back into her
+good graces.  He would wait till her indignation had cooled.
+
+His tactics would have been excellent if he had not forgotten that
+unbeaten army on his flank.
+
+Elaine de Frey had known very clearly what qualities she had wanted
+in Comus, and she had known, against all efforts at self-deception,
+that he fell far short of those qualities.  She had been willing to
+lower her standard of moral requirements in proportion as she was
+fond of the boy, but there was a point beyond which she would not
+go.  He had hurt her pride besides alarming her sense of caution.
+
+Suzette, on whom she felt a thoroughly justified tendency to look
+down, had at any rate an attentive and considerate lover.  Elaine
+walked towards the Park gates feeling that in one essential Suzette
+possessed something that had been denied to her, and at the gates
+she met Joyeuse and his spruce young rider preparing to turn
+homeward.
+
+"Get rid of Joyeuse and come and take me out to lunch somewhere,"
+demanded Elaine.
+
+"How jolly," said Youghal.  "Let's go to the Corridor Restaurant.
+The head waiter there is an old Viennese friend of mine and looks
+after me beautifully.  I've never been there with a lady before,
+and he's sure to ask me afterwards, in his fatherly way, if we're
+engaged."
+
+The lunch was a success in every way.  There was just enough
+orchestral effort to immerse the conversation without drowning it,
+and Youghal was an attentive and inspired host.  Through an open
+doorway Elaine could see the cafe reading-room, with its imposing
+array of Neue Freie Presse, Berliner Tageblatt, and other exotic
+newspapers hanging on the wall.  She looked across at the young man
+seated opposite her, who gave one the impression of having centred
+the most serious efforts of his brain on his toilet and his food,
+and recalled some of the flattering remarks that the press had
+bestowed on his recent speeches.
+
+"Doesn't it make you conceited, Courtenay," she asked, "to look at
+all those foreign newspapers hanging there and know that most of
+them have got paragraphs and articles about your Persian speech?"
+
+Youghal laughed.
+
+"There's always a chastening corrective in the thought that some of
+them may have printed your portrait.  When once you've seen your
+features hurriedly reproduced in the Matin, for instance, you feel
+you would like to be a veiled Turkish woman for the rest of your
+life."
+
+And Youghal gazed long and lovingly at his reflection in the
+nearest mirror, as an antidote against possible incitements to
+humility in the portrait gallery of fame.
+
+Elaine felt a certain soothed satisfaction in the fact that this
+young man, whose knowledge of the Middle East was an embarrassment
+to Ministers at question time and in debate, was showing himself
+equally well-informed on the subject of her culinary likes and
+dislikes.  If Suzette could have been forced to attend as a witness
+at a neighbouring table she would have felt even happier.
+
+"Did the head waiter ask if we were engaged?" asked Elaine, when
+Courtenay had settled the bill, and she had finished collecting her
+sunshade and gloves and other impedimenta from the hands of
+obsequious attendants.
+
+"Yes," said Youghal, "and he seemed quite crestfallen when I had to
+say 'no.'"
+
+"It would be horrid to disappoint him when he's looked after us so
+charmingly," said Elaine; "tell him that we are."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+
+The Rutland Galleries were crowded, especially in the neighbourhood
+of the tea-buffet, by a fashionable throng of art-patrons which had
+gathered to inspect Mervyn Quentock's collection of Society
+portraits.  Quentock was a young artist whose abilities were just
+receiving due recognition from the critics; that the recognition
+was not overdue he owed largely to his perception of the fact that
+if one hides one's talent under a bushel one must be careful to
+point out to everyone the exact bushel under which it is hidden.
+There are two manners of receiving recognition:  one is to be
+discovered so long after one's death that one's grandchildren have
+to write to the papers to establish their relationship; the other
+is to be discovered, like the infant Moses, at the very outset of
+one's career.  Mervyn Quentock had chosen the latter and happier
+manner.  In an age when many aspiring young men strive to advertise
+their wares by imparting to them a freakish imbecility, Quentock
+turned out work that was characterised by a pleasing delicate
+restraint, but he contrived to herald his output with a certain
+fanfare of personal eccentricity, thereby compelling an attention
+which might otherwise have strayed past his studio.  In appearance
+he was the ordinary cleanly young Englishman, except, perhaps, that
+his eyes rather suggested a library edition of the Arabian Nights;
+his clothes matched his appearance and showed no taint of the
+sartorial disorder by which the bourgeois of the garden-city and
+the Latin Quarter anxiously seeks to proclaim his kinship with art
+and thought.  His eccentricity took the form of flying in the face
+of some of the prevailing social currents of the day, but as a
+reactionary, never as a reformer.  He produced a gasp of admiring
+astonishment in fashionable circles by refusing to paint actresses-
+-except, of course, those who had left the legitimate drama to
+appear between the boards of Debrett.  He absolutely declined to
+execute portraits of Americans unless they hailed from certain
+favoured States.  His "water-colour-line," as a New York paper
+phrased it, earned for him a crop of angry criticisms and a shoal
+of Transatlantic commissions, and criticism and commissions were
+the things that Quentock most wanted.
+
+"Of course he is perfectly right," said Lady Caroline Benaresq,
+calmly rescuing a piled-up plate of caviare sandwiches from the
+neighbourhood of a trio of young ladies who had established
+themselves hopefully within easy reach of it.  "Art," she
+continued, addressing herself to the Rev. Poltimore Vardon, "has
+always been geographically exclusive.  London may be more important
+from most points of view than Venice, but the art of portrait
+painting, which would never concern itself with a Lord Mayor,
+simply grovels at the feet of the Doges.  As a Socialist I'm bound
+to recognise the right of Ealing to compare itself with Avignon,
+but one cannot expect the Muses to put the two on a level."
+
+"Exclusiveness," said the Reverend Poltimore, "has been the
+salvation of Art, just as the lack of it is proving the downfall of
+religion.  My colleagues of the cloth go about zealously
+proclaiming the fact that Christianity, in some form or other, is
+attracting shoals of converts among all sorts of races and tribes,
+that one had scarcely ever heard of, except in reviews of books of
+travel that one never read.  That sort of thing was all very well
+when the world was more sparsely populated, but nowadays, when it
+simply teems with human beings, no one is particularly impressed by
+the fact that a few million, more or less, of converts, of a low
+stage of mental development, have accepted the teachings of some
+particular religion.  It not only chills one's enthusiasm, it
+positively shakes one's convictions when one hears that the things
+one has been brought up to believe as true are being very
+favourably spoken of by Buriats and Samoyeds and Kanakas."
+
+The Rev. Poltimore Vardon had once seen a resemblance in himself to
+Voltaire, and had lived alongside the comparison ever since.
+
+"No modern cult or fashion," he continued, "would be favourably
+influenced by considerations based on statistics; fancy adopting a
+certain style of hat or cut of coat, because it was being largely
+worn in Lancashire and the Midlands; fancy favouring a certain
+brand of champagne because it was being extensively patronised in
+German summer resorts.  No wonder that religion is falling into
+disuse in this country under such ill-directed methods."
+
+"You can't prevent the heathen being converted if they choose to
+be," said Lady Caroline; "this is an age of toleration."
+
+"You could always deny it," said the Rev. Poltimore, "like the
+Belgians do with regrettable occurrences in the Congo.  But I would
+go further than that.  I would stimulate the waning enthusiasm for
+Christianity in this country by labelling it as the exclusive
+possession of a privileged few.  If one could induce the Duchess of
+Pelm, for instance, to assert that the Kingdom of Heaven, as far as
+the British Isles are concerned, is strictly limited to herself,
+two of the under-gardeners at Pelmby, and, possibly, but not
+certainly, the Dean of Dunster, there would be an instant reshaping
+of the popular attitude towards religious convictions and
+observances.  Once let the idea get about that the Christian Church
+is rather more exclusive than the Lawn at Ascot, and you would have
+a quickening of religious life such as this generation has never
+witnessed.  But as long as the clergy and the religious
+organisations advertise their creed on the lines of 'Everybody
+ought to believe in us:  millions do,' one can expect nothing but
+indifference and waning faith."
+
+"Time is just as exclusive in its way as Art," said Lady Caroline.
+
+"In what way?" said the Reverend Poltimore.
+
+"Your pleasantries about religion would have sounded quite clever
+and advanced in the early 'nineties.  To-day they have a dreadfully
+warmed-up flavour.  That is the great delusion of you would-be
+advanced satirists; you imagine you can sit down comfortably for a
+couple of decades saying daring and startling things about the age
+you live in, which, whatever other defects it may have, is
+certainly not standing still.  The whole of the Sherard Blaw school
+of discursive drama suggests, to my mind, Early Victorian furniture
+in a travelling circus.  However, you will always have relays of
+people from the suburbs to listen to the Mocking Bird of yesterday,
+and sincerely imagine it is the harbinger of something new and
+revolutionising."
+
+"WOULD you mind passing that plate of sandwiches," asked one of the
+trio of young ladies, emboldened by famine.
+
+"With pleasure," said Lady Caroline, deftly passing her a nearly
+empty plate of bread-and-butter.
+
+"I meant the place of caviare sandwiches.  So sorry to trouble
+you," persisted the young lady
+
+Her sorrow was misapplied; Lady Caroline had turned her attention
+to a newcomer.
+
+"A very interesting exhibition," Ada Spelvexit was saying;
+"faultless technique, as far as I am a judge of technique, and
+quite a master-touch in the way of poses.  But have you noticed how
+very animal his art is?  He seems to shut out the soul from his
+portraits.  I nearly cried when I saw dear Winifred depicted simply
+as a good-looking healthy blonde."
+
+"I wish you had," said Lady Caroline; "the spectacle of a strong,
+brave woman weeping at a private view in the Rutland Galleries
+would have been so sensational.  It would certainly have been
+reproduced in the next Drury Lane drama.  And I'm so unlucky; I
+never see these sensational events.  I was ill with appendicitis,
+you know, when Lulu Braminguard dramatically forgave her husband,
+after seventeen years of estrangement, during a State luncheon
+party at Windsor.  The old queen was furious about it.  She said it
+was so disrespectful to the cook to be thinking of such a thing at
+such a time."
+
+Lady Caroline's recollections of things that hadn't happened at the
+Court of Queen Victoria were notoriously vivid; it was the very
+widespread fear that she might one day write a book of
+reminiscences that made her so universally respected.
+
+"As for his full-length picture of Lady Brickfield," continued Ada,
+ignoring Lady Caroline's commentary as far as possible, "all the
+expression seems to have been deliberately concentrated in the
+feet; beautiful feet, no doubt, but still, hardly the most
+distinctive part of a human being."
+
+"To paint the right people at the wrong end may be an eccentricity,
+but it is scarcely an indiscretion," pronounced Lady Caroline.
+
+One of the portraits which attracted more than a passing flutter of
+attention was a costume study of Francesca Bassington.  Francesca
+had secured some highly desirable patronage for the young artist,
+and in return he had enriched her pantheon of personal possessions
+with a clever piece of work into which he had thrown an unusual
+amount of imaginative detail.  He had painted her in a costume of
+the great Louis's brightest period, seated in front of a tapestry
+that was so prominent in the composition that it could scarcely be
+said to form part of the background.  Flowers and fruit, in exotic
+profusion, were its dominant note; quinces, pomegranates, passion-
+flowers, giant convolvulus, great mauve-pink roses, and grapes that
+were already being pressed by gleeful cupids in a riotous Arcadian
+vintage, stood out on its woven texture.  The same note was struck
+in the beflowered satin of the lady's kirtle, and in the
+pomegranate pattern of the brocade that draped the couch on which
+she was seated.  The artist had called his picture "Recolte."  And
+after one had taken in all the details of fruit and flower and
+foliage that earned the composition its name, one noted the
+landscape that showed through a broad casement in the left-hand
+corner.  It was a landscape clutched in the grip of winter, naked,
+bleak, black-frozen; a winter in which things died and knew no
+rewakening.  If the picture typified harvest, it was a harvest of
+artificial growth.
+
+"It leaves a great deal to the imagination, doesn't it?" said Ada
+Spelvexit, who had edged away from the range of Lady Caroline's
+tongue.
+
+"At any rate one can tell who it's meant for," said Serena
+Golackly.
+
+"Oh, yes, it's a good likeness of dear Francesca," admitted Ada;
+"of course, it flatters her."
+
+"That, too, is a fault on the right side in portrait painting,"
+said Serena; "after all, if posterity is going to stare at one for
+centuries it's only kind and reasonable to be looking just a little
+better than one's best."
+
+"What a curiously unequal style the artist has," continued Ada,
+almost as if she felt a personal grievance against him; "I was just
+noticing what a lack of soul there was in most of his portraits.
+Dear Winifred, you know, who speaks so beautifully and feelingly at
+my gatherings for old women, he's made her look just an ordinary
+dairy-maidish blonde; and Francesca, who is quite the most soulless
+woman I've ever met, well, he's given her quite--"
+
+"Hush," said Serena, "the Bassington boy is just behind you."
+
+Comus stood looking at the portrait of his mother with the feeling
+of one who comes suddenly across a once-familiar half-forgotten
+acquaintance in unfamiliar surroundings.  The likeness was
+undoubtedly a good one, but the artist had caught an expression in
+Francesca's eyes which few people had ever seen there.  It was the
+expression of a woman who had forgotten for one short moment to be
+absorbed in the small cares and excitements of her life, the money
+worries and little social plannings, and had found time to send a
+look of half-wistful friendliness to some sympathetic companion.
+Comus could recall that look, fitful and fleeting, in his mother's
+eyes when she had been a few years younger, before her world had
+grown to be such a committee-room of ways and means.  Almost as a
+re-discovery he remembered that she had once figured in his boyish
+mind as a "rather good sort," more ready to see the laughable side
+of a piece of mischief than to labour forth a reproof.  That the
+bygone feeling of good fellowship had been stamped out was, he
+knew, probably in great part his own doing, and it was possible
+that the old friendliness was still there under the surface of
+things, ready to show itself again if he willed it, and friends
+were becoming scarcer with him than enemies in these days.  Looking
+at the picture with its wistful hint of a long ago comradeship,
+Comus made up his mind that he very much wanted things to be back
+on their earlier footing, and to see again on his mother's face the
+look that the artist had caught and perpetuated in its momentary
+flitting.  If the projected Elaine-marriage came off, and in spite
+of recent maladroit behaviour on his part he still counted it an
+assured thing, much of the immediate cause for estrangement between
+himself and his mother would be removed, or at any rate, easily
+removable.  With the influence of Elaine's money behind him he
+promised himself that he would find some occupation that would
+remove from himself the reproach of being a waster and idler.
+There were lots of careers, he told himself, that were open to a
+man with solid financial backing and good connections.  There might
+yet be jolly times ahead, in which his mother would have her share
+of the good things that were going, and carking thin-lipped Henry
+Greech and other of Comus's detractors could take their sour looks
+and words out of sight and hearing.  Thus, staring at the picture
+as though he were studying its every detail, and seeing really only
+that wistful friendly smile, Comus made his plans and dispositions
+for a battle that was already fought and lost.
+
+The crowd grew thicker in the galleries, cheerfully enduring an
+amount of overcrowding that would have been fiercely resented in a
+railway carriage.  Near the entrance Mervyn Quentock was talking to
+a Serene Highness, a lady who led a life of obtrusive usefulness,
+largely imposed on her by a good-natured inability to say "No."
+"That woman creates a positive draught with the number of bazaars
+she opens," a frivolously-spoken ex-Cabinet Minister had once
+remarked.  At the present moment she was being whimsically
+apologetic.
+
+"When I think of the legions of well-meaning young men and women to
+whom I've given away prizes for proficiency in art-school
+curriculum, I feel that I ought not to show my face inside a
+picture gallery.  I always imagine that my punishment in another
+world will be perpetually sharpening pencils and cleaning palettes
+for unending relays of misguided young people whom I deliberately
+encouraged in their artistic delusions."
+
+"Do you suppose we shall all get appropriate punishments in another
+world for our sins in this?" asked Quentock.
+
+"Not so much for our sins as for our indiscretions; they are the
+things which do the most harm and cause the greatest trouble.  I
+feel certain that Christopher Columbus will undergo the endless
+torment of being discovered by parties of American tourists.  You
+see I am quite old fashioned in my ideas about the terrors and
+inconveniences of the next world.  And now I must be running away;
+I've got to open a Free Library somewhere.  You know the sort of
+thing that happens--one unveils a bust of Carlyle and makes a
+speech about Ruskin, and then people come in their thousands and
+read 'Rabid Ralph, or Should he have Bitten Her?'  Don't forget,
+please, I'm going to have the medallion with the fat cupid sitting
+on a sundial.  And just one thing more--perhaps I ought not to ask
+you, but you have such nice kind eyes, you embolden one to make
+daring requests, would you send me the recipe for those lovely
+chestnut-and-chicken-liver sandwiches?  I know the ingredients of
+course, but it's the proportions that make such a difference--just
+how much liver to how much chestnut, and what amount of red pepper
+and other things.  Thank you so much.  I really am going now."
+
+Staring round with a vague half-smile at everybody within nodding
+distance, Her Serene Highness made one of her characteristic exits,
+which Lady Caroline declared always reminded her of a scrambled egg
+slipping off a piece of toast.  At the entrance she stopped for a
+moment to exchange a word or two with a young man who had just
+arrived.  From a corner where he was momentarily hemmed in by a
+group of tea-consuming dowagers, Comus recognised the newcomer as
+Courtenay Youghal, and began slowly to labour his way towards him.
+Youghal was not at the moment the person whose society he most
+craved for in the world, but there was at least the possibility
+that he might provide an opportunity for a game of bridge, which
+was the dominant desire of the moment.  The young politician was
+already surrounded by a group of friends and acquaintances, and was
+evidently being made the recipient of a salvo of congratulation--
+presumably on his recent performances in the Foreign Office debate,
+Comus concluded.  But Youghal himself seemed to be announcing the
+event with which the congratulations were connected.  Had some
+dramatic catastrophe overtaken the Government, Comus wondered.  And
+then, as he pressed nearer, a chance word, the coupling of two
+names, told him the news.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+
+After the momentous lunch at the Corridor Restaurant Elaine had
+returned to Manchester Square (where she was staying with one of
+her numerous aunts) in a frame of mind that embraced a tangle of
+competing emotions.  In the first place she was conscious of a
+dominant feeling of relief; in a moment of impetuosity, not wholly
+uninfluenced by pique, she had settled the problem which hours of
+hard thinking and serious heart-searching had brought no nearer to
+solution, and, although she felt just a little inclined to be
+scared at the headlong manner of her final decision, she had now
+very little doubt in her own mind that the decision had been the
+right one.  In fact the wonder seemed rather that she should have
+been so long in doubt as to which of her wooers really enjoyed her
+honest approval.  She had been in love, these many weeks past with
+an imaginary Comus, but now that she had definitely walked out of
+her dreamland she saw that nearly all the qualities that had
+appealed to her on his behalf had been absent from, or only
+fitfully present in, the character of the real Comus.  And now that
+she had installed Youghal in the first place of her affections he
+had rapidly acquired in her eyes some of the qualities which ranked
+highest in her estimation.  Like the proverbial buyer she had the
+happy feminine tendency of magnifying the worth of her possession
+as soon as she had acquired it.  And Courtenay Youghal gave Elaine
+some justification for her sense of having chosen wisely.  Above
+all other things, selfish and cynical though he might appear at
+times, he was unfailingly courteous and considerate towards her.
+That was a circumstance which would always have carried weight with
+her in judging any man; in this case its value was enormously
+heightened by contrast with the behaviour of her other wooer.  And
+Youghal had in her eyes the advantage which the glamour of combat,
+even the combat of words and wire-pulling, throws over the fighter.
+He stood well in the forefront of a battle which however carefully
+stage-managed, however honeycombed with personal insincerities and
+overlaid with calculated mock-heroics, really meant something,
+really counted for good or wrong in the nation's development and
+the world's history.  Shrewd parliamentary observers might have
+warned her that Youghal would never stand much higher in the
+political world than he did at present, as a brilliant Opposition
+freelance, leading lively and rather meaningless forays against the
+dull and rather purposeless foreign policy of a Government that was
+scarcely either to be blamed for or congratulated on its handling
+of foreign affairs.  The young politician had not the strength of
+character or convictions that keeps a man naturally in the
+forefront of affairs and gives his counsels a sterling value, and
+on the other hand his insincerity was not deep enough to allow him
+to pose artificially and successfully as a leader of men and shaper
+of movements.  For the moment, however, his place in public life
+was sufficiently marked out to give him a secure footing in that
+world where people are counted individually and not in herds.  The
+woman whom he would make his wife would have the chance, too, if
+she had the will and the skill, to become an individual who
+counted.
+
+There was balm to Elaine in this reflection, yet it did not wholly
+suffice to drive out the feeling of pique which Comus had called
+into being by his slighting view of her as a convenient cash supply
+in moments of emergency.  She found a certain satisfaction in
+scrupulously observing her promise, made earlier on that eventful
+day, and sent off a messenger with the stipulated loan.  Then a
+reaction of compunction set in, and she reminded herself that in
+fairness she ought to write and tell her news in as friendly a
+fashion as possible to her dismissed suitor before it burst upon
+him from some other quarter.  They had parted on more or less
+quarrelling terms it was true, but neither of them had foreseen the
+finality of the parting nor the permanence of the breach between
+them; Comus might even now be thinking himself half-forgiven, and
+the awakening would be rather cruel.  The letter, however, did not
+prove an easy one to write; not only did it present difficulties of
+its own but it suffered from the competing urgency of a desire to
+be doing something far pleasanter than writing explanatory and
+valedictory phrases.  Elaine was possessed with an unusual but
+quite overmastering hankering to visit her cousin Suzette Brankley.
+They met but rarely at each other's houses and very seldom anywhere
+else, and Elaine for her part was never conscious of feeling that
+their opportunities for intercourse lacked anything in the way of
+adequacy.  Suzette accorded her just that touch of patronage which
+a moderately well-off and immoderately dull girl will usually try
+to mete out to an acquaintance who is known to be wealthy and
+suspected of possessing brains.  In return Elaine armed herself
+with that particular brand of mock humility which can be so
+terribly disconcerting if properly wielded.  No quarrel of any
+description stood between them and one could not legitimately have
+described them as enemies, but they never disarmed in one another's
+presence.  A misfortune of any magnitude falling on one of them
+would have been sincerely regretted by the other, but any minor
+discomfiture would have produced a feeling very much akin to
+satisfaction.  Human nature knows millions of these inconsequent
+little feuds, springing up and flourishing apart from any basis of
+racial, political, religious or economic causes, as a hint perhaps
+to crass unseeing altruists that enmity has its place and purpose
+in the world as well as benevolence.
+
+Elaine had not personally congratulated Suzette since the formal
+announcement of her engagement to the young man with the
+dissentient tailoring effects.  The impulse to go and do so now,
+overmastered her sense of what was due to Comus in the way of
+explanation.  The letter was still in its blank unwritten stage, an
+unmarshalled sequence of sentences forming in her brain, when she
+ordered her car and made a hurried but well-thought-out change into
+her most sumptuously sober afternoon toilette.  Suzette, she felt
+tolerably sure, would still be in the costume that she had worn in
+the Park that morning, a costume that aimed at elaboration of
+detail, and was damned with overmuch success.
+
+Suzette's mother welcomed her unexpected visitor with obvious
+satisfaction.  Her daughter's engagement, she explained, was not so
+brilliant from the social point of view as a girl of Suzette's
+attractions and advantages might have legitimately aspired to, but
+Egbert was a thoroughly commendable and dependable young man, who
+would very probably win his way before long to membership of the
+County Council.
+
+"From there, of course, the road would be open to him to higher
+things."
+
+"Yes," said Elaine, "he might become an alderman."
+
+"Have you seen their photographs, taken together?" asked Mrs.
+Brankley, abandoning the subject of Egbert's prospective career.
+
+"No, do show me," said Elaine, with a flattering show of interest;
+"I've never seen that sort of thing before.  It used to be the
+fashion once for engaged couples to be photographed together,
+didn't it?"
+
+"It's VERY much the fashion now," said Mrs. Brankley assertively,
+but some of the complacency had filtered out of her voice.  Suzette
+came into the room, wearing the dress that she had worn in the Park
+that morning.
+
+"Of course, you've been hearing all about THE engagement from
+mother," she cried, and then set to work conscientiously to cover
+the same ground.
+
+"We met at Grindelwald, you know.  He always calls me his Ice
+Maiden because we first got to know each other on the skating rink.
+Quite romantic, wasn't it?  Then we asked him to tea one day, and
+we got to be quite friendly.  Then he proposed."
+
+"He wasn't the only one who was smitten with Suzette," Mrs.
+Brankley hastened to put in, fearful lest Elaine might suppose that
+Egbert had had things all his own way.  "There was an American
+millionaire who was quite taken with her, and a Polish count of a
+very old family.  I assure you I felt quite nervous at some of our
+tea-parties."
+
+Mrs. Brankley had given Grindelwald a sinister but rather alluring
+reputation among a large circle of untravelled friends as a place
+where the insolence of birth and wealth was held in precarious
+check from breaking forth into scenes of savage violence.
+
+"My marriage with Egbert will, of course, enlarge the sphere of my
+life enormously," pursued Suzette.
+
+"Yes," said Elaine; her eyes were rather remorselessly taking in
+the details of her cousin's toilette.  It is said that nothing is
+sadder than victory except defeat.  Suzette began to feel that the
+tragedy of both was concentrated in the creation which had given
+her such unalloyed gratification, till Elaine had come on the
+scene.
+
+"A woman can be so immensely helpful in the social way to a man who
+is making a career for himself.  And I'm so glad to find that we've
+a great many ideas in common.  We each made out a list of our idea
+of the hundred best books, and quite a number of them were the
+same."
+
+"He looks bookish," said Elaine, with a critical glance at the
+photograph.
+
+"Oh, he's not at all a bookworm," said Suzette quickly, "though
+he's tremendously well-read.  He's quite the man of action."
+
+"Does he hunt?" asked Elaine.
+
+"No, he doesn't get much time or opportunity for riding."
+
+"What a pity," commented Elaine; "I don't think I could marry a man
+who wasn't fond of riding."
+
+"Of course that's a matter of taste," said Suzette, stiffly;
+"horsey men are not usually gifted with overmuch brains, are they?"
+
+"There is as much difference between a horseman and a horsey man as
+there is between a well-dressed man and a dressy one," said Elaine,
+judicially; "and you may have noticed how seldom a dressy woman
+really knows how to dress.  As an old lady of my acquaintance
+observed the other day, some people are born with a sense of how to
+clothe themselves, others acquire it, others look as if their
+clothes had been thrust upon them."
+
+She gave Lady Caroline her due quotation marks, but the sudden
+tactfulness with which she looked away from her cousin's frock was
+entirely her own idea.
+
+A young man entering the room at this moment caused a diversion
+that was rather welcome to Suzette.
+
+"Here comes Egbert," she announced, with an air of subdued triumph;
+it was at least a satisfaction to be able to produce the captive of
+her charms, alive and in good condition, on the scene.  Elaine
+might be as critical as she pleased, but a live lover outweighed
+any number of well-dressed straight-riding cavaliers who existed
+only as a distant vision of the delectable husband.
+
+Egbert was one of those men who have no small talk, but possess an
+inexhaustible supply of the larger variety.  In whatever society he
+happened to be, and particularly in the immediate neighbourhood of
+an afternoon-tea table, with a limited audience of womenfolk, he
+gave the impression of someone who was addressing a public meeting,
+and would be happy to answer questions afterwards.  A suggestion of
+gas-lit mission-halls, wet umbrellas, and discreet applause seemed
+to accompany him everywhere.  He was an exponent, among other
+things, of what he called New Thought, which seemed to lend itself
+conveniently to the employment of a good deal of rather stale
+phraseology.  Probably in the course of some thirty odd years of
+existence he had never been of any notable use to man, woman, child
+or animal, but it was his firmly-announced intention to leave the
+world a better, happier, purer place than he had found it; against
+the danger of any relapse to earlier conditions after his
+disappearance from the scene, he was, of course, powerless to
+guard.  'Tis not in mortals to insure succession, and Egbert was
+admittedly mortal.
+
+Elaine found him immensely entertaining, and would certainly have
+exerted herself to draw him out if such a proceeding had been at
+all necessary.  She listened to his conversation with the
+complacent appreciation that one bestows on a stage tragedy, from
+whose calamities one can escape at any moment by the simple process
+of leaving one's seat.  When at last he checked the flow of his
+opinions by a hurried reference to his watch, and declared that he
+must be moving on elsewhere, Elaine almost expected a vote of
+thanks to be accorded him, or to be asked to signify herself in
+favour of some resolution by holding up her hand.
+
+When the young man had bidden the company a rapid business-like
+farewell, tempered in Suzette's case by the exact degree of tender
+intimacy that it would have been considered improper to omit or
+overstep, Elaine turned to her expectant cousin with an air of
+cordial congratulation.
+
+"He is exactly the husband I should have chosen for you, Suzette."
+
+For the second time that afternoon Suzette felt a sense of waning
+enthusiasm for one of her possessions.
+
+Mrs. Brankley detected the note of ironical congratulation in her
+visitor's verdict.
+
+"I suppose she means he's not her idea of a husband, but, he's good
+enough for Suzette," she observed to herself, with a snort that
+expressed itself somewhere in the nostrils of the brain.  Then with
+a smiling air of heavy patronage she delivered herself of her one
+idea of a damaging counter-stroke.
+
+"And when are we to hear of your engagement, my dear?"
+
+"Now," said Elaine quietly, but with electrical effect; "I came to
+announce it to you but I wanted to hear all about Suzette first.
+It will be formally announced in the papers in a day or two."
+
+"But who is it?  Is it the young man who was with you in the Park
+this morning?" asked Suzette.
+
+"Let me see, who was I with in the Park this morning?  A very good-
+looking dark boy?  Oh no, not Comus Bassington.  Someone you know
+by name, anyway, and I expect you've seen his portrait in the
+papers."
+
+"A flying-man?" asked Mrs. Brankley.
+
+"Courtenay Youghal," said Elaine.
+
+Mrs. Brankley and Suzette had often rehearsed in the privacy of
+their minds the occasion when Elaine should come to pay her
+personal congratulations to her engaged cousin.  It had never been
+in the least like this.
+
+On her return from her enjoyable afternoon visit Elaine found an
+express messenger letter waiting for her.  It was from Comus,
+thanking her for her loan--and returning it.
+
+"I suppose I ought never to have asked you for it," he wrote, "but
+you are always so deliciously solemn about money matters that I
+couldn't resist.  Just heard the news of your engagement to
+Courtenay.  Congrats. to you both.  I'm far too stoney broke to buy
+you a wedding present so I'm going to give you back the bread-and-
+butter dish.  Luckily it still has your crest on it.  I shall love
+to think of you and Courtenay eating bread-and-butter out of it for
+the rest of your lives."
+
+That was all he had to say on the matter about which Elaine had
+been preparing to write a long and kindly-expressed letter, closing
+a rather momentous chapter in her life and his.  There was not a
+trace of regret or upbraiding in his note; he had walked out of
+their mutual fairyland as abruptly as she had, and to all
+appearances far more unconcernedly.  Reading the letter again and
+again Elaine could come to no decision as to whether this was
+merely a courageous gibe at defeat, or whether it represented the
+real value that Comus set on the thing that he had lost.
+
+And she would never know.  If Comus possessed one useless gift to
+perfection it was the gift of laughing at Fate even when it had
+struck him hardest.  One day, perhaps, the laughter and mockery
+would be silent on his lips, and Fate would have the advantage of
+laughing last.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+
+A door closed and Francesca Bassington sat alone in her well-
+beloved drawing-room.  The visitor who had been enjoying the
+hospitality of her afternoon-tea table had just taken his
+departure.  The tete-a-tete had not been a pleasant one, at any
+rate as far as Francesca was concerned, but at least it had brought
+her the information for which she had been seeking.  Her role of
+looker-on from a tactful distance had necessarily left her much in
+the dark concerning the progress of the all-important wooing, but
+during the last few hours she had, on slender though significant
+evidence, exchanged her complacent expectancy for a conviction that
+something had gone wrong.  She had spent the previous evening at
+her brother's house, and had naturally seen nothing of Comus in
+that uncongenial quarter; neither had he put in an appearance at
+the breakfast table the following morning.  She had met him in the
+hall at eleven o'clock, and he had hurried past her, merely
+imparting the information that he would not be in till dinner that
+evening.  He spoke in his sulkiest tone, and his face wore a look
+of defeat, thinly masked by an air of defiance; it was not the
+defiance of a man who is losing, but of one who has already lost.
+
+Francesca's conviction that things had gone wrong between Comus and
+Elaine de Frey grew in strength as the day wore on.  She lunched at
+a friend's house, but it was not a quarter where special social
+information of any importance was likely to come early to hand.
+Instead of the news she was hankering for, she had to listen to
+trivial gossip and speculation on the flirtations and "cases" and
+"affairs" of a string of acquaintances whose matrimonial projects
+interested her about as much as the nesting arrangements of the
+wildfowl in St. James's Park.
+
+"Of course," said her hostess, with the duly impressive emphasis of
+a privileged chronicler, "we've always regarded Claire as the
+marrying one of the family, so when Emily came to us and said,
+'I've got some news for you,' we all said, 'Claire's engaged!'
+'Oh, no,' said Emily, 'it's not Claire this time, it's me.'  So
+then we had to guess who the lucky man was.  'It can't be Captain
+Parminter,' we all said, 'because he's always been sweet on Joan.'
+And then Emily said--"
+
+The recording voice reeled off the catalogue of inane remarks with
+a comfortable purring complacency that held out no hope of an early
+abandoning of the topic.  Francesca sat and wondered why the
+innocent acceptance of a cutlet and a glass of indifferent claret
+should lay one open to such unsparing punishment.
+
+A stroll homeward through the Park after lunch brought no further
+enlightenment on the subject that was uppermost in her mind; what
+was worse, it brought her, without possibility of escape, within
+hailing distance of Merla Blathington, who fastened on to her with
+the enthusiasm of a lonely tsetse fly encountering an outpost of
+civilisation.
+
+"Just think," she buzzed inconsequently, "my sister in
+Cambridgeshire has hatched out thirty-three White Orpington
+chickens in her incubator!"
+
+"What eggs did she put in it?" asked Francesca.
+
+"Oh, some very special strain of White Orpington."
+
+"Then I don't see anything remarkable in the result.  If she had
+put in crocodile's eggs and hatched out White Orpingtons, there
+might have been something to write to Country Life about."
+
+"What funny fascinating things these little green park-chairs are,"
+said Merla, starting off on a fresh topic; "they always look so
+quaint and knowing when they're stuck away in pairs by themselves
+under the trees, as if they were having a heart-to-heart talk or
+discussing a piece of very private scandal.  If they could only
+speak, what tragedies and comedies they could tell us of, what
+flirtations and proposals."
+
+"Let us be devoutly thankful that they can't," said Francesca, with
+a shuddering recollection of the luncheon-table conversation.
+
+"Of course, it would make one very careful what one said before
+them--or above them rather," Merla rattled on, and then, to
+Francesca's infinite relief, she espied another acquaintance
+sitting in unprotected solitude, who promised to supply a more
+durable audience than her present rapidly moving companion.
+Francesca was free to return to her drawing-room in Blue Street to
+await with such patience as she could command the coming of some
+visitor who might be able to throw light on the subject that was
+puzzling and disquieting her.  The arrival of George St. Michael
+boded bad news, but at any rate news, and she gave him an almost
+cordial welcome.
+
+"Well, you see I wasn't far wrong about Miss de Frey and Courtenay
+Youghal, was I?" he chirruped, almost before he had seated himself.
+Francesca was to be spared any further spinning-out of her period
+of uncertainty.  "Yes, it's officially given out," he went on, "and
+it's to appear in the Morning Post to-morrow.  I heard it from
+Colonel Deel this morning, and he had it direct from Youghal
+himself.  Yes, please, one lump; I'm not fashionable, you see."  He
+had made the same remark about the sugar in his tea with unfailing
+regularity for at least thirty years.  Fashions in sugar are
+apparently stationary.  "They say," he continued, hurriedly, "that
+he proposed to her on the Terrace of the House, and a division bell
+rang, and he had to hurry off before she had time to give her
+answer, and when he got back she simply said, 'the Ayes have it.'"
+St. Michael paused in his narrative to give an appreciative giggle.
+
+"Just the sort of inanity that would go the rounds," remarked
+Francesca, with the satisfaction of knowing that she was making the
+criticism direct to the author and begetter of the inanity in
+question.  Now that the blow had fallen and she knew the full
+extent of its weight, her feeling towards the bringer of bad news,
+who sat complacently nibbling at her tea-cakes and scattering
+crumbs of tiresome small-talk at her feet, was one of wholehearted
+dislike.  She could sympathise with, or at any rate understand, the
+tendency of oriental despots to inflict death or ignominious
+chastisement on messengers bearing tidings of misfortune and
+defeat, and St. Michael, she perfectly well knew, was thoroughly
+aware of the fact that her hopes and wishes had been centred on the
+possibility of having Elaine for a daughter-in-law; every purring
+remark that his mean little soul prompted him to contribute to the
+conversation had an easily recognizable undercurrent of malice.
+Fortunately for her powers of polite endurance, which had been put
+to such searching and repeated tests that day, St. Michael had
+planned out for himself a busy little time-table of afternoon
+visits, at each of which his self-appointed task of forestalling
+and embellishing the newspaper announcements of the Youghal-de Frey
+engagement would be hurriedly but thoroughly performed.
+
+"They'll be quite one of the best-looking and most interesting
+couples of the Season, won't they?" he cried, by way of farewell.
+The door closed and Francesca Bassington sat alone in her drawing-
+room.
+
+Before she could give way to the bitter luxury of reflection on the
+downfall of her hopes, it was prudent to take precautionary
+measures against unwelcome intrusion.  Summoning the maid who had
+just speeded the departing St. Michael, she gave the order:  "I am
+not at home this afternoon to Lady Caroline Benaresq."  On second
+thoughts she extended the taboo to all possible callers, and sent a
+telephone message to catch Comus at his club, asking him to come
+and see her as soon as he could manage before it was time to dress
+for dinner.  Then she sat down to think, and her thinking was
+beyond the relief of tears.
+
+She had built herself a castle of hopes, and it had not been a
+castle in Spain, but a structure well on the probable side of the
+Pyrenees.  There had been a solid foundation on which to build.
+Miss de Frey's fortune was an assured and unhampered one, her
+liking for Comus had been an obvious fact; his courtship of her a
+serious reality.  The young people had been much together in
+public, and their names had naturally been coupled in the match-
+making gossip of the day.  The only serious shadow cast over the
+scene had been the persistent presence, in foreground or
+background, of Courtenay Youghal.  And now the shadow suddenly
+stood forth as the reality, and the castle of hopes was a ruin, a
+hideous mortification of dust and debris, with the skeleton
+outlines of its chambers still standing to make mockery of its
+discomfited architect.  The daily anxiety about Comus and his
+extravagant ways and intractable disposition had been gradually
+lulled by the prospect of his making an advantageous marriage,
+which would have transformed him from a ne'er-do-well and
+adventurer into a wealthy idler.  He might even have been moulded,
+by the resourceful influence of an ambitious wife, into a man with
+some definite purpose in life.  The prospect had vanished with
+cruel suddenness, and the anxieties were crowding back again, more
+insistent than ever.  The boy had had his one good chance in the
+matrimonial market and missed it; if he were to transfer his
+attentions to some other well-dowered girl he would be marked down
+at once as a fortune-hunter, and that would constitute a heavy
+handicap to the most plausible of wooers.  His liking for Elaine
+had evidently been genuine in its way, though perhaps it would have
+been rash to read any deeper sentiment into it, but even with the
+spur of his own inclination to assist him he had failed to win the
+prize that had seemed so temptingly within his reach.  And in the
+dashing of his prospects, Francesca saw the threatening of her own.
+The old anxiety as to her precarious tenure of her present quarters
+put on again all its familiar terrors.  One day, she foresaw, in
+the horribly near future, George St. Michael would come pattering
+up her stairs with the breathless intelligence that Emmeline
+Chetrof was going to marry somebody or other in the Guards or the
+Record Office as the case might be, and then there would be an
+uprooting of her life from its home and haven in Blue Street and a
+wandering forth to some cheap unhappy far-off dwelling, where the
+stately Van der Meulen and its companion host of beautiful and
+desirable things would be stuffed and stowed away in soulless
+surroundings, like courtly emigres fallen on evil days.  It was
+unthinkable, but the trouble was that it had to be thought about.
+And if Comus had played his cards well and transformed himself from
+an encumbrance into a son with wealth at his command, the tragedy
+which she saw looming in front of her might have been avoided or at
+the worst whittled down to easily bearable proportions.  With money
+behind one, the problem of where to live approaches more nearly to
+the simple question of where do you wish to live, and a rich
+daughter-in-law would have surely seen to it that she did not have
+to leave her square mile of Mecca and go out into the wilderness of
+bricks and mortar.  If the house in Blue Street could not have been
+compounded for there were other desirable residences which would
+have been capable of consoling Francesca for her lost Eden.  And
+now the detested Courtenay Youghal, with his mocking eyes and air
+of youthful cynicism, had stepped in and overthrown those golden
+hopes and plans whose non-fulfilment would make such a world of
+change in her future.  Assuredly she had reason to feel bitter
+against that young man, and she was not disposed to take a very
+lenient view of Comus's own mismanagement of the affair; her
+greeting when he at last arrived, was not couched in a sympathetic
+strain.
+
+"So you have lost your chance with the heiress," she remarked
+abruptly.
+
+"Yes," said Comus, coolly; "Courtenay Youghal has added her to his
+other successes."
+
+"And you have added her to your other failures," pursued Francesca,
+relentlessly; her temper had been tried that day beyond ordinary
+limits.
+
+"I thought you seemed getting along so well with her," she
+continued, as Comus remained uncommunicative.
+
+"We hit it off rather well together," said Comus, and added with
+deliberate bluntness, "I suppose she got rather sick at my
+borrowing money from her.  She thought it was all I was after."
+
+"You borrowed money from her!" said Francesca; "you were fool
+enough to borrow money from a girl who was favourably disposed
+towards you, and with Courtenay Youghal in the background waiting
+to step in and oust you!"
+
+Francesca's voice trembled with misery and rage.  This great stroke
+of good luck that had seemed about to fall into their laps had been
+thrust aside by an act or series of acts of wanton paltry folly.
+The good ship had been lost for the sake of the traditional
+ha'porth of tar.  Comus had paid some pressing tailor's or
+tobacconist's bill with a loan unwillingly put at his disposal by
+the girl he was courting, and had flung away his chances of
+securing a wealthy and in every way desirable bride.  Elaine de
+Frey and her fortune might have been the making of Comus, but he
+had hurried in as usual to effect his own undoing.  Calmness did
+not in this case come with reflection; the more Francesca thought
+about the matter, the more exasperated she grew.  Comus threw
+himself down in a low chair and watched her without a trace of
+embarrassment or concern at her mortification.  He had come to her
+feeling rather sorry for himself, and bitterly conscious of his
+defeat, and she had met him with a taunt and without the least hint
+of sympathy; he determined that she should be tantalised with the
+knowledge of how small and stupid a thing had stood between the
+realisation and ruin of her hopes for him.
+
+"And to think she should be captured by Courtenay Youghal," said
+Francesca, bitterly; "I've always deplored your intimacy with that
+young man."
+
+"It's hardly my intimacy with him that's made Elaine accept him,"
+said Comus.
+
+Francesca realised the futility of further upbraiding.  Through the
+tears of vexation that stood in her eyes, she looked across at the
+handsome boy who sat opposite her, mocking at his own misfortune,
+perversely indifferent to his folly, seemingly almost indifferent
+to its consequences.
+
+"Comus," she said quietly and wearily, "you are an exact reversal
+of the legend of Pandora's Box.  You have all the charm and
+advantages that a boy could want to help him on in the world, and
+behind it all there is the fatal damning gift of utter
+hopelessness."
+
+"I think," said Comus, "that is the best description that anyone
+has ever given of me."
+
+For the moment there was a flush of sympathy and something like
+outspoken affection between mother and son.  They seemed very much
+alone in the world just now, and in the general overturn of hopes
+and plans, there flickered a chance that each might stretch out a
+hand to the other, and summon back to their lives an old dead love
+that was the best and strongest feeling either of them had known.
+But the sting of disappointment was too keen, and the flood of
+resentment mounted too high on either side to allow the chance more
+than a moment in which to flicker away into nothingness.  The old
+fatal topic of estrangement came to the fore, the question of
+immediate ways and means, and mother and son faced themselves again
+as antagonists on a well-disputed field.
+
+"What is done is done," said Francesca, with a movement of tragic
+impatience that belied the philosophy of her words; "there is
+nothing to be gained by crying over spilt milk.  There is the
+present and the future to be thought about, though.  One can't go
+on indefinitely as a tenant-for-life in a fools' paradise."  Then
+she pulled herself together and proceeded to deliver an ultimatum
+which the force of circumstances no longer permitted her to hold in
+reserve.
+
+"It's not much use talking to you about money, as I know from long
+experience, but I can only tell you this, that in the middle of the
+Season I'm already obliged to be thinking of leaving Town.  And
+you, I'm afraid, will have to be thinking of leaving England at
+equally short notice.  Henry told me the other day that he can get
+you something out in West Africa.  You've had your chance of doing
+something better for yourself from the financial point of view, and
+you've thrown it away for the sake of borrowing a little ready
+money for your luxuries, so now you must take what you can get.
+The pay won't be very good at first, but living is not dear out
+there."
+
+"West Africa," said Comus, reflectively; "it's a sort of modern
+substitute for the old-fashioned oubliette, a convenient depository
+for tiresome people.  Dear Uncle Henry may talk lugubriously about
+the burden of Empire, but he evidently recognises its uses as a
+refuse consumer."
+
+"My dear Comus, you are talking of the West Africa of yesterday.
+While you have been wasting your time at school, and worse than
+wasting your time in the West End, other people have been grappling
+with the study of tropical diseases, and the West African coast
+country is being rapidly transformed from a lethal chamber into a
+sanatorium."
+
+Comus laughed mockingly.
+
+"What a beautiful bit of persuasive prose; it reminds one of the
+Psalms and even more of a company prospectus.  If you were honest
+you'd confess that you lifted it straight out of a rubber or
+railway promotion scheme.  Seriously, mother, if I must grub about
+for a living, why can't I do it in England?  I could go into a
+brewery for instance."
+
+Francesca shook her head decisively; she could foresee the sort of
+steady work Comus was likely to accomplish, with the lodestone of
+Town and the minor attractions of race-meetings and similar
+festivities always beckoning to him from a conveniently attainable
+distance, but apart from that aspect of the case there was a
+financial obstacle in the way of his obtaining any employment at
+home.
+
+"Breweries and all those sort of things necessitate money to start
+with; one has to pay premiums or invest capital in the undertaking,
+and so forth.  And as we have no money available, and can scarcely
+pay our debts as it is, it's no use thinking about it."
+
+"Can't we sell something?" asked Comus.
+
+He made no actual suggestion as to what should be sacrificed, but
+he was looking straight at the Van der Meulen.
+
+For a moment Francesca felt a stifling sensation of weakness, as
+though her heart was going to stop beating.  Then she sat forward
+in her chair and spoke with energy, almost fierceness.
+
+"When I am dead my things can be sold and dispersed.  As long as I
+am alive I prefer to keep them by me."
+
+In her holy place, with all her treasured possessions around her,
+this dreadful suggestion had been made.  Some of her cherished
+household gods, souvenirs and keepsakes from past days, would,
+perhaps, not have fetched a very considerable sum in the auction-
+room, others had a distinct value of their own, but to her they
+were all precious.  And the Van der Meulen, at which Comus had
+looked with impious appraising eyes, was the most sacred of them
+all.  When Francesca had been away from her Town residence or had
+been confined to her bedroom through illness, the great picture
+with its stately solemn representation of a long-ago battle-scene,
+painted to flatter the flattery-loving soul of a warrior-king who
+was dignified even in his campaigns--this was the first thing she
+visited on her return to Town or convalescence.  If an alarm of
+fire had been raised it would have been the first thing for whose
+safety she would have troubled.  And Comus had almost suggested
+that it should be parted with, as one sold railway shares and other
+soulless things.
+
+Scolding, she had long ago realised, was a useless waste of time
+and energy where Comus was concerned, but this evening she unloosed
+her tongue for the mere relief that it gave to her surcharged
+feelings.  He sat listening without comment, though she purposely
+let fall remarks that she hoped might sting him into self-defence
+or protest.  It was an unsparing indictment, the more damaging in
+that it was so irrefutably true, the more tragic in that it came
+from perhaps the one person in the world whose opinion he had ever
+cared for.  And he sat through it as silent and seemingly unmoved
+as though she had been rehearsing a speech for some drawing-room
+comedy.  When she had had her say his method of retort was not the
+soft answer that turneth away wrath but the inconsequent one that
+shelves it.
+
+"Let's go and dress for dinner."
+
+The meal, like so many that Francesca and Comus had eaten in each
+other's company of late, was a silent one.  Now that the full
+bearings of the disaster had been discussed in all its aspects
+there was nothing more to be said.  Any attempt at ignoring the
+situation, and passing on to less controversial topics would have
+been a mockery and pretence which neither of them would have
+troubled to sustain.  So the meal went forward with its dragged-out
+dreary intimacy of two people who were separated by a gulf of
+bitterness, and whose hearts were hard with resentment against one
+another.
+
+Francesca felt a sense of relief when she was able to give the maid
+the order to serve her coffee upstairs.  Comus had a sullen scowl
+on his face, but he looked up as she rose to leave the room, and
+gave his half-mocking little laugh.
+
+"You needn't look so tragic," he said, "You're going to have your
+own way.  I'll go out to that West African hole."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+
+Comus found his way to his seat in the stalls of the Straw Exchange
+Theatre and turned to watch the stream of distinguished and
+distinguishable people who made their appearance as a matter of
+course at a First Night in the height of the Season.  Pit and
+gallery were already packed with a throng, tense, expectant and
+alert, that waited for the rise of the curtain with the eager
+patience of a terrier watching a dilatory human prepare for outdoor
+exercises.  Stalls and boxes filled slowly and hesitatingly with a
+crowd whose component units seemed for the most part to recognise
+the probability that they were quite as interesting as any play
+they were likely to see.  Those who bore no particular face-value
+themselves derived a certain amount of social dignity from the near
+neighbourhood of obvious notabilities; if one could not obtain
+recognition oneself there was some vague pleasure in being able to
+recognise notoriety at intimately close quarters.
+
+"Who is that woman with the auburn hair and a rather effective
+belligerent gleam in her eyes?" asked a man sitting just behind
+Comus; "she looks as if she might have created the world in six
+days and destroyed it on the seventh."
+
+"I forget her name," said his neighbour; "she writes.  She's the
+author of that book, 'The Woman who wished it was Wednesday,' you
+know.  It used to be the convention that women writers should be
+plain and dowdy; now we have gone to the other extreme and build
+them on extravagantly decorative lines."
+
+A buzz of recognition came from the front rows of the pit, together
+with a craning of necks on the part of those in less favoured
+seats.  It heralded the arrival of Sherard Blaw, the dramatist who
+had discovered himself, and who had given so ungrudgingly of his
+discovery to the world.  Lady Caroline, who was already directing
+little conversational onslaughts from her box, gazed gently for a
+moment at the new arrival, and then turned to the silver-haired
+Archdeacon sitting beside her.
+
+"They say the poor man is haunted by the fear that he will die
+during a general election, and that his obituary notices will be
+seriously curtailed by the space taken up by the election results.
+The curse of our party system, from his point of view, is that it
+takes up so much room in the press."
+
+The Archdeacon smiled indulgently.  As a man he was so exquisitely
+worldly that he fully merited the name of the Heavenly Worldling
+bestowed on him by an admiring duchess, and withal his texture was
+shot with a pattern of such genuine saintliness that one felt that
+whoever else might hold the keys of Paradise he, at least,
+possessed a private latchkey to that abode.
+
+"Is it not significant of the altered grouping of things," he
+observed, "that the Church, as represented by me, sympathises with
+the message of Sherard Blaw, while neither the man nor his message
+find acceptance with unbelievers like you, Lady Caroline."
+
+Lady Caroline blinked her eyes.  "My dear Archdeacon," she said,
+"no one can be an unbeliever nowadays.  The Christian Apologists
+have left one nothing to disbelieve."
+
+The Archdeacon rose with a delighted chuckle.  "I must go and tell
+that to De la Poulett," he said, indicating a clerical figure
+sitting in the third row of the stalls; "he spends his life
+explaining from his pulpit that the glory of Christianity consists
+in the fact that though it is not true it has been found necessary
+to invent it."
+
+The door of the box opened and Courtenay Youghal entered, bringing
+with him subtle suggestion of chaminade and an atmosphere of
+political tension.  The Government had fallen out of the good
+graces of a section of its supporters, and those who were not in
+the know were busy predicting a serious crisis over a forthcoming
+division in the Committee stage of an important Bill.  This was
+Saturday night, and unless some successful cajolery were effected
+between now and Monday afternoon, Ministers would be, seemingly, in
+danger of defeat.
+
+"Ah, here is Youghal," said the Archdeacon; "he will be able to
+tell us what is going to happen in the next forty-eight hours.  I
+hear the Prime Minister says it is a matter of conscience, and they
+will stand or fall by it."
+
+His hopes and sympathies were notoriously on the Ministerial side.
+
+Youghal greeted Lady Caroline and subsided gracefully into a chair
+well in the front of the box.  A buzz of recognition rippled slowly
+across the house.
+
+"For the Government to fall on a matter of conscience," he said,
+"would be like a man cutting himself with a safety razor."
+
+Lady Caroline purred a gentle approval.
+
+"I'm afraid it's true, Archdeacon," she said.
+
+No one can effectively defend a Government when it's been in office
+several years.  The Archdeacon took refuge in light skirmishing.
+
+"I believe Lady Caroline sees the makings of a great Socialist
+statesman in you, Youghal," he observed.
+
+"Great Socialist statesmen aren't made, they're stillborn," replied
+Youghal.
+
+"What is the play about to-night?" asked a pale young woman who had
+taken no part in the talk.
+
+"I don't know," said Lady Caroline, "but I hope it's dull.  If
+there is any brilliant conversation in it I shall burst into
+tears."
+
+In the front row of the upper circle a woman with a restless
+starling-voice was discussing the work of a temporarily fashionable
+composer, chiefly in relation to her own emotions, which she seemed
+to think might prove generally interesting to those around her.
+
+"Whenever I hear his music I feel that I want to go up into a
+mountain and pray.  Can you understand that feeling?"
+
+The girl to whom she was unburdening herself shook her head.
+
+"You see, I've heard his music chiefly in Switzerland, and we were
+up among the mountains all the time, so it wouldn't have made any
+difference."
+
+"In that case," said the woman, who seemed to have emergency
+emotions to suit all geographical conditions, "I should have wanted
+to be in a great silent plain by the side of a rushing river."
+
+"What I think is so splendid about his music--" commenced another
+starling-voice on the further side of the girl.  Like sheep that
+feed greedily before the coming of a storm the starling-voices
+seemed impelled to extra effort by the knowledge of four imminent
+intervals of acting during which they would be hushed into
+constrained silence.
+
+In the back row of the dress circle a late-comer, after a cursory
+glance at the programme, had settled down into a comfortable
+narrative, which was evidently the resumed thread of an unfinished
+taxi-drive monologue.
+
+"We all said 'it can't be Captain Parminter, because he's always
+been sweet on Joan,' and then Emily said--"
+
+The curtain went up, and Emily's contribution to the discussion had
+to be held over till the entr'acte.
+
+The play promised to be a success.  The author, avoiding the
+pitfall of brilliancy, had aimed at being interesting and as far as
+possible, bearing in mind that his play was a comedy, he had
+striven to be amusing.  Above all he had remembered that in the
+laws of stage proportions it is permissible and generally desirable
+that the part should be greater than the whole; hence he had been
+careful to give the leading lady such a clear and commanding lead
+over the other characters of the play that it was impossible for
+any of them ever to get on level terms with her.  The action of the
+piece was now and then delayed thereby, but the duration of its run
+would be materially prolonged.
+
+The curtain came down on the first act amid an encouraging
+instalment of applause, and the audience turned its back on the
+stage and began to take a renewed interest in itself.  The
+authoress of "The Woman who wished it was Wednesday" had swept like
+a convalescent whirlwind, subdued but potentially tempestuous, into
+Lady Caroline's box.
+
+"I've just trodden with all my weight on the foot of an eminent
+publisher as I was leaving my seat," she cried, with a peal of
+delighted laughter.  "He was such a dear about it; I said I hoped I
+hadn't hurt him, and he said, 'I suppose you think, who drives hard
+bargains should himself be hard.'  Wasn't it pet-lamb of him?"
+
+"I've never trodden on a pet lamb," said Lady Caroline, "so I've no
+idea what its behaviour would be under the circumstances."
+
+"Tell me," said the authoress, coming to the front of the box, the
+better to survey the house, and perhaps also with a charitable
+desire to make things easy for those who might pardonably wish to
+survey her, "tell me, please, where is the girl sitting whom
+Courtenay Youghal is engaged to?"
+
+Elaine was pointed out to her, sitting in the fourth row of the
+stalls, on the opposite side of the house to where Comus had his
+seat.  Once during the interval she had turned to give him a
+friendly nod of recognition as he stood in one of the side
+gangways, but he was absorbed at the moment in looking at himself
+in the glass panel.  The grave brown eyes and the mocking green-
+grey ones had looked their last into each other's depths.
+
+For Comus this first-night performance, with its brilliant
+gathering of spectators, its groups and coteries of lively talkers,
+even its counterfoil of dull chatterers, its pervading atmosphere
+of stage and social movement, and its intruding undercurrent of
+political flutter, all this composed a tragedy in which he was the
+chief character.  It was the life he knew and loved and basked in,
+and it was the life he was leaving.  It would go on reproducing
+itself again and again, with its stage interest and social interest
+and intruding outside interests, with the same lively chattering
+crowd, the people who had done things being pointed out by people
+who recognised them to people who didn't--it would all go on with
+unflagging animation and sparkle and enjoyment, and for him it
+would have stopped utterly.  He would be in some unheard-of sun-
+blistered wilderness, where natives and pariah dogs and raucous-
+throated crows fringed round mockingly on one's loneliness, where
+one rode for sweltering miles for the chance of meeting a collector
+or police officer, with whom most likely on closer acquaintance one
+had hardly two ideas in common, where female society was
+represented at long intervals by some climate-withered woman
+missionary or official's wife, where food and sickness and
+veterinary lore became at last the three outstanding subjects on
+which the mind settled or rather sank.  That was the life he
+foresaw and dreaded, and that was the life he was going to.  For a
+boy who went out to it from the dulness of some country rectory,
+from a neighbourhood where a flower show and a cricket match formed
+the social landmarks of the year, the feeling of exile might not be
+very crushing, might indeed be lost in the sense of change and
+adventure.  But Comus had lived too thoroughly in the centre of
+things to regard life in a backwater as anything else than
+stagnation, and stagnation while one is young he justly regarded as
+an offence against nature and reason, in keeping with the perverted
+mockery that sends decrepit invalids touring painfully about the
+world and shuts panthers up in narrow cages.  He was being put
+aside, as a wine is put aside, but to deteriorate instead of
+gaining in the process, to lose the best time of his youth and
+health and good looks in a world where youth and health and good
+looks count for much and where time never returns lost possessions.
+And thus, as the curtain swept down on the close of each act, Comus
+felt a sense of depression and deprivation sweep down on himself;
+bitterly he watched his last evening of social gaiety slipping away
+to its end.  In less than an hour it would be over; in a few
+months' time it would be an unreal memory.
+
+In the third interval, as he gazed round at the chattering house,
+someone touched him on the arm.  It was Lady Veula Croot.
+
+"I suppose in a week's time you'll be on the high seas," she said.
+"I'm coming to your farewell dinner, you know; your mother has just
+asked me.  I'm not going to talk the usual rot to you about how
+much you will like it and so on.  I sometimes think that one of the
+advantages of Hell will be that no one will have the impertinence
+to point out to you that you're really better off than you would be
+anywhere else.  What do you think of the play?  Of course one can
+foresee the end; she will come to her husband with the announcement
+that their longed-for child is going to be born, and that will
+smooth over everything.  So conveniently effective, to wind up a
+comedy with the commencement of someone else's tragedy.  And every
+one will go away saying 'I'm glad it had a happy ending.'"
+
+Lady Veula moved back to her seat, with her pleasant smile on her
+lips and the look of infinite weariness in her eyes.
+
+The interval, the last interval, was drawing to a close and the
+house began to turn with fidgetty attention towards the stage for
+the unfolding of the final phase of the play.  Francesca sat in
+Serena Golackly's box listening to Colonel Springfield's story of
+what happened to a pigeon-cote in his compound at Poona.  Everyone
+who knew the Colonel had to listen to that story a good many times,
+but Lady Caroline had mitigated the boredom of the infliction, and
+in fact invested it with a certain sporting interest, by offering a
+prize to the person who heard it oftenest in the course of the
+Season, the competitors being under an honourable understanding not
+to lead up to the subject.  Ada Spelvexit and a boy in the Foreign
+Office were at present at the top of the list with five recitals
+each to their score, but the former was suspected of doubtful
+adherence to the rules and spirit of the competition.
+
+"And there, dear lady," concluded the Colonel, "were the eleven
+dead pigeons.  What had become of the bandicoot no one ever knew."
+
+Francesca thanked him for his story, and complacently inscribed the
+figure 4 on the margin of her theatre programme.  Almost at the
+same moment she heard George St. Michael's voice pattering out a
+breathless piece of intelligence for the edification of Serena
+Golackly and anyone else who might care to listen.  Francesca
+galvanised into sudden attention.
+
+"Emmeline Chetrof to a fellow in the Indian Forest Department.
+He's got nothing but his pay and they can't be married for four or
+five years; an absurdly long engagement, don't you think so?  All
+very well to wait seven years for a wife in patriarchal times, when
+you probably had others to go on with, and you lived long enough to
+celebrate your own tercentenary, but under modern conditions it
+seems a foolish arrangement."
+
+St. Michael spoke almost with a sense of grievance.  A marriage
+project that tied up all the small pleasant nuptial gossip-items
+about bridesmaids and honeymoon and recalcitrant aunts and so
+forth, for an indefinite number of years seemed scarcely decent in
+his eyes, and there was little satisfaction or importance to be
+derived from early and special knowledge of an event which loomed
+as far distant as a Presidential Election or a change of Viceroy.
+But to Francesca, who had listened with startled apprehension at
+the mention of Emmeline Chetrof's name, the news came in a flood of
+relief and thankfulness.  Short of entering a nunnery and taking
+celibate vows, Emmeline could hardly have behaved more conveniently
+than in tying herself up to a lover whose circumstances made it
+necessary to relegate marriage to the distant future.  For four or
+five years Francesca was assured of undisturbed possession of the
+house in Blue Street, and after that period who knew what might
+happen?  The engagement might stretch on indefinitely, it might
+even come to nothing under the weight of its accumulated years, as
+sometimes happened with these protracted affairs.  Emmeline might
+lose her fancy for her absentee lover, and might never replace him
+with another.  A golden possibility of perpetual tenancy of her
+present home began to float once more through Francesca's mind.  As
+long as Emmeline had been unbespoken in the marriage market there
+had always been the haunting likelihood of seeing the dreaded
+announcement, "a marriage has been arranged and will shortly take
+place," in connection with her name.  And now a marriage had been
+arranged and would not shortly take place, might indeed never take
+place.  St. Michael's information was likely to be correct in this
+instance; he would never have invented a piece of matrimonial
+intelligence which gave such little scope for supplementary detail
+of the kind he loved to supply.  As Francesca turned to watch the
+fourth act of the play, her mind was singing a paean of
+thankfulness and exultation.  It was as though some artificer sent
+by the Gods had reinforced with a substantial cord the horsehair
+thread that held up the sword of Damocles over her head.  Her love
+for her home, for her treasured household possessions, and her
+pleasant social life was able to expand once more in present
+security, and feed on future hope.  She was still young enough to
+count four or five years as a long time, and to-night she was
+optimistic enough to prophesy smooth things of the future that lay
+beyond that span.  Of the fourth act, with its carefully held back
+but obviously imminent reconciliation between the leading
+characters, she took in but little, except that she vaguely
+understood it to have a happy ending.  As the lights went up she
+looked round on the dispersing audience with a feeling of
+friendliness uppermost in her mind; even the sight of Elaine de
+Frey and Courtenay Youghal leaving the theatre together did not
+inspire her with a tenth part of the annoyance that their entrance
+had caused her.  Serena's invitation to go on to the Savoy for
+supper fitted in exactly with her mood of exhilaration.  It would
+be a fit and appropriate wind-up to an auspicious evening.  The
+cold chicken and modest brand of Chablis waiting for her at home
+should give way to a banquet of more festive nature.
+
+In the crush of the vestibule, friends and enemies, personal and
+political, were jostled and locked together in the general effort
+to rejoin temporarily estranged garments and secure the attendance
+of elusive vehicles.  Lady Caroline found herself at close quarters
+with the estimable Henry Greech, and experienced some of the joy
+which comes to the homeward wending sportsman when a chance shot
+presents itself on which he may expend his remaining cartridges.
+
+"So the Government is going to climb down, after all," she said,
+with a provocative assumption of private information on the
+subject.
+
+"I assure you the Government will do nothing of the kind," replied
+the Member of Parliament with befitting dignity; "the Prime
+Minister told me last night that under no circumstances--"
+
+"My dear Mr. Greech," said Lady Caroline, "we all know that Prime
+Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other wedded couples
+they sometimes live apart."
+
+For her, at any rate, the comedy had had a happy ending.
+
+Comus made his way slowly and lingeringly from the stalls, so
+slowly that the lights were already being turned down and great
+shroud-like dust-cloths were being swaythed over the ornamental
+gilt-work.  The laughing, chattering, yawning throng had filtered
+out of the vestibule, and was melting away in final groups from the
+steps of the theatre.  An impatient attendant gave him his coat and
+locked up the cloak room.  Comus stepped out under the portico; he
+looked at the posters announcing the play, and in anticipation he
+could see other posters announcing its 200th performance.  Two
+hundred performances; by that time the Straw Exchange Theatre would
+be to him something so remote and unreal that it would hardly seem
+to exist or to have ever existed except in his fancy.  And to the
+laughing chattering throng that would pass in under that portico to
+the 200th performance, he would be, to those that had known him,
+something equally remote and non-existent.  "The good-looking
+Bassington boy?  Oh, dead, or rubber-growing or sheep-farming or
+something of that sort."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+
+The farewell dinner which Francesca had hurriedly organised in
+honour of her son's departure threatened from the outset to be a
+doubtfully successful function.  In the first place, as he observed
+privately, there was very little of Comus and a good deal of
+farewell in it.  His own particular friends were unrepresented.
+Courtenay Youghal was out of the question; and though Francesca
+would have stretched a point and welcomed some of his other male
+associates of whom she scarcely approved, he himself had been
+opposed to including any of them in the invitations.  On the other
+hand, as Henry Greech had provided Comus with this job that he was
+going out to, and was, moreover, finding part of the money for the
+necessary outfit, Francesca had felt it her duty to ask him and his
+wife to the dinner; the obtuseness that seems to cling to some
+people like a garment throughout their life had caused Mr. Greech
+to accept the invitation.  When Comus heard of the circumstance he
+laughed long and boisterously; his spirits, Francesca noted, seemed
+to be rising fast as the hour for departure drew near.
+
+The other guests included Serena Golackly and Lady Veula, the
+latter having been asked on the inspiration of the moment at the
+theatrical first-night.  In the height of the Season it was not
+easy to get together a goodly selection of guests at short notice,
+and Francesca had gladly fallen in with Serena's suggestion of
+bringing with her Stephen Thorle, who was alleged, in loose
+feminine phrasing, to "know all about" tropical Africa.  His
+travels and experiences in those regions probably did not cover
+much ground or stretch over any great length of time, but he was
+one of those individuals who can describe a continent on the
+strength of a few days' stay in a coast town as intimately and
+dogmatically as a paleontologist will reconstruct an extinct mammal
+from the evidence of a stray shin bone.  He had the loud
+penetrating voice and the prominent penetrating eyes of a man who
+can do no listening in the ordinary way and whose eyes have to
+perform the function of listening for him.  His vanity did not
+necessarily make him unbearable, unless one had to spend much time
+in his society, and his need for a wide field of audience and
+admiration was mercifully calculated to spread his operations over
+a considerable human area.  Moreover, his craving for attentive
+listeners forced him to interest himself in a wonderful variety of
+subjects on which he was able to discourse fluently and with a
+certain semblance of special knowledge.  Politics he avoided; the
+ground was too well known, and there was a definite no to every
+definite yes that could be put forward.  Moreover, argument was not
+congenial to his disposition, which preferred an unchallenged flow
+of dissertation modified by occasional helpful questions which
+formed the starting point for new offshoots of word-spinning.  The
+promotion of cottage industries, the prevention of juvenile street
+trading, the extension of the Borstal prison system, the
+furtherance of vague talkative religious movements the fostering of
+inter-racial ententes, all found in him a tireless exponent, a
+fluent and entertaining, though perhaps not very convincing,
+advocate.  With the real motive power behind these various causes
+he was not very closely identified; to the spade-workers who
+carried on the actual labours of each particular movement he bore
+the relation of a trowel-worker, delving superficially at the
+surface, but able to devote a proportionately far greater amount of
+time to the advertisement of his progress and achievements.  Such
+was Stephen Thorle, a governess in the nursery of Chelsea-bred
+religions, a skilled window-dresser in the emporium of his own
+personality, and needless to say, evanescently popular amid a wide
+but shifting circle of acquaintances.  He improved on the record of
+a socially much-travelled individual whose experience has become
+classical, and went to most of the best houses--twice.
+
+His inclusion as a guest at this particular dinner-party was not a
+very happy inspiration.  He was inclined to patronise Comus, as
+well as the African continent, and on even slighter acquaintance.
+With the exception of Henry Greech, whose feelings towards his
+nephew had been soured by many years of overt antagonism, there was
+an uncomfortable feeling among those present that the topic of the
+black-sheep export trade, as Comus would have himself expressed it,
+was being given undue prominence in what should have been a festive
+farewell banquet.  And Comus, in whose honour the feast was given,
+did not contribute much towards its success; though his spirits
+seemed strung up to a high pitch his merriment was more the
+merriment of a cynical and amused onlooker than of one who responds
+to the gaiety of his companions.  Sometimes he laughed quietly to
+himself at some chance remark of a scarcely mirth-provoking nature,
+and Lady Veula, watching him narrowly, came to the conclusion that
+an element of fear was blended with his seemingly buoyant spirits.
+Once or twice he caught her eye across the table, and a certain
+sympathy seemed to grow up between them, as though they were both
+consciously watching some lugubrious comedy that was being played
+out before them.
+
+An untoward little incident had marked the commencement of the
+meal.  A small still-life picture that hung over the sideboard had
+snapped its cord and slid down with an alarming clatter on to the
+crowded board beneath it.  The picture itself was scarcely damaged,
+but its fall had been accompanied by a tinkle of broken glass, and
+it was found that a liqueur glass, one out of a set of seven that
+would be impossible to match, had been shivered into fragments.
+Francesca's almost motherly love for her possessions made her
+peculiarly sensible to a feeling of annoyance and depression at the
+accident, but she turned politely to listen to Mrs. Greech's
+account of a misfortune in which four soup-plates were involved.
+Mrs. Henry was not a brilliant conversationalist, and her flank was
+speedily turned by Stephen Thorle, who recounted a slum experience
+in which two entire families did all their feeding out of one
+damaged soup-plate.
+
+"The gratitude of those poor creatures when I presented them with a
+set of table crockery apiece, the tears in their eyes and in their
+voices when they thanked me, would be impossible to describe."
+
+"Thank you all the same for describing it," said Comus.
+
+The listening eyes went swiftly round the table to gather evidence
+as to how this rather disconcerting remark had been received, but
+Thorle's voice continued uninterruptedly to retail stories of East-
+end gratitude, never failing to mention the particular deeds of
+disinterested charity on his part which had evoked and justified
+the gratitude.  Mrs. Greech had to suppress the interesting sequel
+to her broken-crockery narrative, to wit, how she subsequently
+matched the shattered soup-plates at Harrod's.  Like an imported
+plant species that sometimes flourishes exceedingly, and makes
+itself at home to the dwarfing and overshadowing of all native
+species, Thorle dominated the dinner-party and thrust its original
+purport somewhat into the background.  Serena began to look
+helplessly apologetic.  It was altogether rather a relief when the
+filling of champagne glasses gave Francesca an excuse for bringing
+matters back to their intended footing.
+
+"We must all drink a health," she said; "Comus, my own dear boy, a
+safe and happy voyage to you, much prosperity in the life you are
+going out to, and in due time a safe and happy return--"
+
+Her hand gave an involuntary jerk in the act of raising the glass,
+and the wine went streaming across the tablecloth in a froth of
+yellow bubbles.  It certainly was not turning out a comfortable or
+auspicious dinner party.
+
+"My dear mother," cried Comus, "you must have been drinking healths
+all the afternoon to make your hand so unsteady."
+
+He laughed gaily and with apparent carelessness, but again Lady
+Veula caught the frightened note in his laughter.  Mrs. Henry, with
+practical sympathy, was telling Francesca two good ways for getting
+wine stains out of tablecloths.  The smaller economies of life were
+an unnecessary branch of learning for Mrs. Greech, but she studied
+them as carefully and conscientiously as a stay-at-home plain-
+dwelling English child commits to memory the measurements and
+altitudes of the world's principal mountain peaks.  Some women of
+her temperament and mentality know by heart the favourite colours,
+flowers and hymn-tunes of all the members of the Royal Family; Mrs.
+Greech would possibly have failed in an examination of that nature,
+but she knew what to do with carrots that have been over-long in
+storage.
+
+Francesca did not renew her speech-making; a chill seemed to have
+fallen over all efforts at festivity, and she contented herself
+with refilling her glass and simply drinking to her boy's good
+health.  The others followed her example, and Comus drained his
+glass with a brief "thank you all very much."  The sense of
+constraint which hung over the company was not, however, marked by
+any uncomfortable pause in the conversation.  Henry Greech was a
+fluent thinker, of the kind that prefer to do their thinking aloud;
+the silence that descended on him as a mantle in the House of
+Commons was an official livery of which he divested himself as
+thoroughly as possible in private life.  He did not propose to sit
+through dinner as a mere listener to Mr. Thorle's personal
+narrative of philanthropic movements and experiences, and took the
+first opportunity of launching himself into a flow of satirical
+observations on current political affairs.  Lady Veula was inured
+to this sort of thing in her own home circle, and sat listening
+with the stoical indifference with which an Esquimau might accept
+the occurrence of one snowstorm the more, in the course of an
+Arctic winter.  Serena Golackly felt a certain relief at the fact
+that her imported guest was not, after all, monopolising the
+conversation.  But the latter was too determined a personality to
+allow himself to be thrust aside for many minutes by the talkative
+M.P.  Henry Greech paused for an instant to chuckle at one of his
+own shafts of satire, and immediately Thorle's penetrating voice
+swept across the table.
+
+"Oh, you politicians!" he exclaimed, with pleasant superiority;
+"you are always fighting about how things should be done, and the
+consequence is you are never able to do anything.  Would you like
+me to tell you what a Unitarian horsedealer said to me at Brindisi
+about politicians?"
+
+A Unitarian horsedealer at Brindisi had all the allurement of the
+unexpected.  Henry Greech's witticisms at the expense of the Front
+Opposition bench were destined to remain as unfinished as his
+wife's history of the broken soup-plates.  Thorle was primed with
+an ample succession of stories and themes, chiefly concerning
+poverty, thriftlessness, reclamation, reformed characters, and so
+forth, which carried him in an almost uninterrupted sequence
+through the remainder of the dinner.
+
+"What I want to do is to make people think," he said, turning his
+prominent eyes on to his hostess; "it's so hard to make people
+think."
+
+"At any rate you give them the opportunity," said Comus,
+cryptically.
+
+As the ladies rose to leave the table Comus crossed over to pick up
+one of Lady Veula's gloves that had fallen to the floor.
+
+"I did not know you kept a dog," said Lady Veula.
+
+"We don't," said Comus, "there isn't one in the house."
+
+"I could have sworn I saw one follow you across the hall this
+evening," she said.
+
+"A small black dog, something like a schipperke?" asked Comus in a
+low voice.
+
+"Yes, that was it."
+
+"I saw it myself to-night; it ran from behind my chair just as I
+was sitting down.  Don't say anything to the others about it; it
+would frighten my mother."
+
+"Have you ever seen it before?" Lady Veula asked quickly.
+
+"Once, when I was six years old.  It followed my father
+downstairs."
+
+Lady Veula said nothing.  She knew that Comus had lost his father
+at the age of six.
+
+In the drawing-room Serena made nervous excuses for her talkative
+friend.
+
+"Really, rather an interesting man, you know, and up to the eyes in
+all sorts of movements.  Just the sort of person to turn loose at a
+drawing-room meeting, or to send down to a mission-hall in some
+unheard-of neighbourhood.  Given a sounding-board and a harmonium,
+and a titled woman of some sort in the chair, and he'll be
+perfectly happy; I must say I hadn't realised how overpowering he
+might be at a small dinner-party."
+
+"I should say he was a very good man," said Mrs. Greech; she had
+forgiven the mutilation of her soup-plate story.
+
+The party broke up early as most of the guests had other
+engagements to keep.  With a belated recognition of the farewell
+nature of the occasion they made pleasant little good-bye remarks
+to Comus, with the usual predictions of prosperity and
+anticipations of an ultimate auspicious return.  Even Henry Greech
+sank his personal dislike of the boy for the moment, and made
+hearty jocular allusions to a home-coming, which, in the elder
+man's eyes, seemed possibly pleasantly remote.  Lady Veula alone
+made no reference to the future; she simply said, "Good-bye,
+Comus," but her voice was the kindest of all and he responded with
+a look of gratitude.  The weariness in her eyes was more marked
+than ever as she lay back against the cushions of her carriage.
+
+"What a tragedy life is," she said, aloud to herself.
+
+Serena and Stephen Thorle were the last to leave, and Francesca
+stood alone for a moment at the head of the stairway watching Comus
+laughing and chatting as he escorted the departing guests to the
+door.  The ice-wall was melting under the influence of coming
+separation, and never had he looked more adorably handsome in her
+eyes, never had his merry laugh and mischief-loving gaiety seemed
+more infectious than on this night of his farewell banquet.  She
+was glad enough that he was going away from a life of idleness and
+extravagance and temptation, but she began to suspect that she
+would miss, for a little while at any rate, the high-spirited boy
+who could be so attractive in his better moods.  Her impulse, after
+the guests had gone, was to call him to her and hold him once more
+in her arms, and repeat her wishes for his happiness and good-luck
+in the land he was going to, and her promise of his welcome back,
+some not too distant day, to the land he was leaving.  She wanted
+to forget, and to make him forget, the months of irritable jangling
+and sharp discussions, the months of cold aloofness and
+indifference and to remember only that he was her own dear Comus as
+in the days of yore, before he had grown from an unmanageable
+pickle into a weariful problem.  But she feared lest she should
+break down, and she did not wish to cloud his light-hearted gaiety
+on the very eve of his departure.  She watched him for a moment as
+he stood in the hall, settling his tie before a mirror, and then
+went quietly back to her drawing-room.  It had not been a very
+successful dinner party, and the general effect it had left on her
+was one of depression.
+
+Comus, with a lively musical-comedy air on his lips, and a look of
+wretchedness in his eyes, went out to visit the haunts that he was
+leaving so soon.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+
+Elaine Youghal sat at lunch in the Speise Saal of one of Vienna's
+costlier hotels.  The double-headed eagle, with its "K.u.K."
+legend, everywhere met the eye and announced the imperial favour in
+which the establishment basked.  Some several square yards of
+yellow bunting, charged with the image of another double-headed
+eagle, floating from the highest flag-staff above the building,
+betrayed to the initiated the fact that a Russian Grand Duke was
+concealed somewhere on the premises.  Unannounced by heraldic
+symbolism but unconcealable by reason of nature's own blazonry,
+were several citizens and citizenesses of the great republic of the
+Western world.  One or two Cobdenite members of the British
+Parliament engaged in the useful task of proving that the cost of
+living in Vienna was on an exorbitant scale, flitted with
+restrained importance through a land whose fatness they had come to
+spy out; every fancied over-charge in their bills was welcome as
+providing another nail in the coffin of their fiscal opponents.  It
+is the glory of democracies that they may be misled but never
+driven.  Here and there, like brave deeds in a dust-patterned
+world, flashed and glittered the sumptuous uniforms of
+representatives of the Austrian military caste.  Also in evidence,
+at discreet intervals, were stray units of the Semetic tribe that
+nineteen centuries of European neglect had been unable to mislay.
+
+Elaine sitting with Courtenay at an elaborately appointed luncheon
+table, gay with high goblets of Bohemian glassware, was mistress of
+three discoveries.  First, to her disappointment, that if you
+frequent the more expensive hotels of Europe you must be prepared
+to find, in whatever country you may chance to be staying, a
+depressing international likeness between them all.  Secondly, to
+her relief, that one is not expected to be sentimentally amorous
+during a modern honeymoon.  Thirdly, rather to her dismay, that
+Courtenay Youghal did not necessarily expect her to be markedly
+affectionate in private.  Someone had described him, after their
+marriage, as one of Nature's bachelors, and she began to see how
+aptly the description fitted him.
+
+"Will those Germans on our left never stop talking?" she asked, as
+an undying flow of Teutonic small talk rattled and jangled across
+the intervening stretch of carpet.  "Not one of those three women
+has ceased talking for an instant since we've been sitting here."
+
+"They will presently, if only for a moment," said Courtenay; "when
+the dish you have ordered comes in there will be a deathly silence
+at the next table.  No German can see a plat brought in for someone
+else without being possessed with a great fear that it represents a
+more toothsome morsel or a better money's worth than what he has
+ordered for himself."
+
+The exuberant Teutonic chatter was balanced on the other side of
+the room by an even more penetrating conversation unflaggingly
+maintained by a party of Americans, who were sitting in judgment on
+the cuisine of the country they were passing through, and finding
+few extenuating circumstances.
+
+"What Mr. Lonkins wants is a real DEEP cherry pie," announced a
+lady in a tone of dramatic and honest conviction.
+
+"Why, yes, that is so," corroborated a gentleman who was apparently
+the Mr. Lonkins in question; "a real DEEP cherry pie."
+
+"We had the same trouble way back in Paris," proclaimed another
+lady; "little Jerome and the girls don't want to eat any more creme
+renversee.  I'd give anything if they could get some real cherry
+pie."
+
+"Real DEEP cherry pie," assented Mr. Lonkins.
+
+"Way down in Ohio we used to have peach pie that was real good,"
+said Mrs. Lonkins, turning on a tap of reminiscence that presently
+flowed to a cascade.  The subject of pies seemed to lend itself to
+indefinite expansion.
+
+"Do those people think of nothing but their food?" asked Elaine, as
+the virtues of roasted mutton suddenly came to the fore and
+received emphatic recognition, even the absent and youthful Jerome
+being quoted in its favour.
+
+"On the contrary," said Courtenay, "they are a widely-travelled
+set, and the man has had a notably interesting career.  It is a
+form of home-sickness with them to discuss and lament the cookery
+and foods that they've never had the leisure to stay at home and
+digest.  The Wandering Jew probably babbled unremittingly about
+some breakfast dish that took so long to prepare that he had never
+time to eat it."
+
+A waiter deposited a dish of Wiener Nierenbraten in front of
+Elaine.  At the same moment a magic hush fell upon the three German
+ladies at the adjoining table, and the flicker of a great fear
+passed across their eyes.  Then they burst forth again into
+tumultuous chatter.  Courtenay had proved a reliable prophet.
+
+Almost at the same moment as the luncheon-dish appeared on the
+scene, two ladies arrived at a neighbouring table, and bowed with
+dignified cordiality to Elaine and Courtenay.  They were two of the
+more worldly and travelled of Elaine's extensive stock of aunts,
+and they happened to be making a short stay at the same hotel as
+the young couple.  They were far too correct and rationally minded
+to intrude themselves on their niece, but it was significant of
+Elaine's altered view as to the sanctity of honeymoon life that she
+secretly rather welcomed the presence of her two relatives in the
+hotel, and had found time and occasion to give them more of her
+society than she would have considered necessary or desirable a few
+weeks ago.  The younger of the two she rather liked, in a
+restrained fashion, as one likes an unpretentious watering-place or
+a restaurant that does not try to give one a musical education in
+addition to one's dinner.  One felt instinctively about her that
+she would never wear rather more valuable diamonds than any other
+woman in the room, and would never be the only person to be saved
+in a steamboat disaster or hotel fire.  As a child she might have
+been perfectly well able to recite "On Linden when the sun was
+low," but one felt certain that nothing ever induced her to do so.
+The elder aunt, Mrs. Goldbrook, did not share her sister's
+character as a human rest-cure; most people found her rather
+disturbing, chiefly, perhaps, from her habit of asking unimportant
+questions with enormous solemnity.  Her manner of enquiring after a
+trifling ailment gave one the impression that she was more
+concerned with the fortunes of the malady than with oneself, and
+when one got rid of a cold one felt that she almost expected to be
+given its postal address.  Probably her manner was merely the
+defensive outwork of an innate shyness, but she was not a woman who
+commanded confidences.
+
+"A telephone call for Courtenay," commented the younger of the two
+women as Youghal hurriedly flashed through the room; "the telephone
+system seems to enter very largely into that young man's life."
+
+"The telephone has robbed matrimony of most of its sting," said the
+elder; "so much more discreet than pen and ink communications which
+get read by the wrong people."
+
+Elaine's aunts were conscientiously worldly; they were the natural
+outcome of a stock that had been conscientiously straight-laced for
+many generations.
+
+Elaine had progressed to the pancake stage before Courtenay
+returned.
+
+"Sorry to be away so long," he said, "but I've arranged something
+rather nice for to-night.  There's rather a jolly masquerade ball
+on.  I've 'phoned about getting a costume for you and it's alright.
+It will suit you beautifully, and I've got my harlequin dress with
+me.  Madame Kelnicort, excellent soul, is going to chaperone you,
+and she'll take you back any time you like; I'm quite unreliable
+when I get into fancy dress.  I shall probably keep going till some
+unearthly hour of the morning."
+
+A masquerade ball in a strange city hardly represented Elaine's
+idea of enjoyment.  Carefully to disguise one's identity in a
+neighbourhood where one was entirely unknown seemed to her rather
+meaningless.  With Courtenay, of course, it was different; he
+seemed to have friends and acquaintances everywhere.  However, the
+matter had progressed to a point which would have made a refusal to
+go seem rather ungracious.  Elaine finished her pancake and began
+to take a polite interest in her costume.
+
+"What is your character?" asked Madame Kelnicort that evening, as
+they uncloaked, preparatory to entering the already crowded ball-
+room.
+
+"I believe I'm supposed to represent Marjolaine de Montfort,
+whoever she may have been," said Elaine.  "Courtenay declares he
+only wanted to marry me because I'm his ideal of her."
+
+"But what a mistake to go as a character you know nothing about.
+To enjoy a masquerade ball you ought to throw away your own self
+and be the character you represent.  Now Courtenay has been
+Harlequin since half-way through dinner; I could see it dancing in
+his eyes.  At about six o'clock to-morrow morning he will fall
+asleep and wake up a member of the British House of Parliament on
+his honeymoon, but to-night he is unrestrainedly Harlequin."
+
+Elaine stood in the ball-room surrounded by a laughing jostling
+throng of pierrots, jockeys, Dresden-china shepherdesses, Roumanian
+peasant-girls and all the lively make-believe creatures that form
+the ingredients of a fancy-dress ball.  As she stood watching them
+she experienced a growing feeling of annoyance, chiefly with
+herself.  She was assisting, as the French say, at one of the
+gayest scenes of Europe's gayest capital, and she was conscious of
+being absolutely unaffected by the gaiety around her.  The costumes
+were certainly interesting to look at, and the music good to listen
+to, and to that extent she was amused, but the ABANDON of the scene
+made no appeal to her.  It was like watching a game of which you
+did not know the rules, and in the issue of which you were not
+interested.  Elaine began to wonder what was the earliest moment at
+which she could drag Madame Kelnicort away from the revel without
+being guilty of sheer cruelty.  Then Courtenay wriggled out of the
+crush and came towards her, a joyous laughing Courtenay, looking
+younger and handsomer than she had ever seen him.  She could
+scarcely recognise in him to-night the rising young debater who
+made embarrassing onslaughts on the Government's foreign policy
+before a crowded House of Commons.  He claimed her for the dance
+that was just starting, and steered her dexterously into the heart
+of the waltzing crowd.
+
+"You look more like Marjolaine than I should have thought a mortal
+woman of these days could look," he declared, "only Marjolaine did
+smile sometimes.  You have rather the air of wondering if you'd
+left out enough tea for the servants' breakfast.  Don't mind my
+teasing; I love you to look like that, and besides, it makes a
+splendid foil to my Harlequin--my selfishness coming to the fore
+again, you see.  But you really are to go home the moment you're
+bored; the excellent Kelnicort gets heaps of dances throughout the
+winter, so don't mind sacrificing her."
+
+A little later in the evening Elaine found herself standing out a
+dance with a grave young gentleman from the Russian Embassy.
+
+"Monsieur Courtenay enjoys himself, doesn't he?" he observed, as
+the youthful-looking harlequin flashed past them, looking like some
+restless gorgeous-hued dragonfly; "why is it that the good God has
+given your countrymen the boon of eternal youth?  Some of your
+countrywomen, too, but all of the men."
+
+Elaine could think of many of her countrymen who were not and never
+could have been youthful, but as far as Courtenay was concerned she
+recognised the fitness of the remark.  And the recognition carried
+with it a sense of depression.  Would he always remain youthful and
+keen on gaiety and revelling while she grew staid and retiring?
+She had thrust the lively intractable Comus out of her mind, as by
+his perverseness he had thrust himself out of her heart, and she
+had chosen the brilliant young man of affairs as her husband.  He
+had honestly let her see the selfish side of his character while he
+was courting her, but she had been prepared to make due sacrifices
+to the selfishness of a public man who had his career to consider
+above all other things.  Would she also have to make sacrifices to
+the harlequin spirit which was now revealing itself as an
+undercurrent in his nature?  When one has inured oneself to the
+idea of a particular form of victimisation it is disconcerting to
+be confronted with another.  Many a man who would patiently undergo
+martyrdom for religion's sake would be furiously unwilling to be a
+martyr to neuralgia.
+
+"I think that is why you English love animals so much," pursued the
+young diplomat; "you are such splendid animals yourselves.  You are
+lively because you want to be lively, not because people are
+looking on at you.  Monsieur Courtenay is certainly an animal.  I
+mean it as a high compliment."
+
+"Am I an animal?" asked Elaine.
+
+"I was going to say you are an angel," said the Russian, in some
+embarrassment, "but I do not think that would do; angels and
+animals would never get on together.  To get on with animals you
+must have a sense of humour, and I don't suppose angels have any
+sense of humour; you see it would be no use to them as they never
+hear any jokes."
+
+"Perhaps," said Elaine, with a tinge of bitterness in her voice,
+"perhaps I am a vegetable."
+
+"I think you most remind me of a picture," said the Russian.
+
+It was not the first time Elaine had heard the simile.
+
+"I know," she said, "the Narrow Gallery at the Louvre; attributed
+to Leonardo da Vinci."
+
+Evidently the impression she made on people was solely one of
+externals.
+
+Was that how Courtenay regarded her?  Was that to be her function
+and place in life, a painted background, a decorative setting to
+other people's triumphs and tragedies?  Somehow to-night she had
+the feeling that a general might have who brought imposing forces
+into the field and could do nothing with them.  She possessed youth
+and good looks, considerable wealth, and had just made what would
+be thought by most people a very satisfactory marriage.  And
+already she seemed to be standing aside as an onlooker where she
+had expected herself to be taking a leading part.
+
+"Does this sort of thing appeal to you?" she asked the young
+Russian, nodding towards the gay scrimmage of masqueraders and
+rather prepared to hear an amused negative."
+
+"But yes, of course," he answered; "costume balls, fancy fairs,
+cafe chantant, casino, anything that is not real life appeals to us
+Russians.  Real life with us is the sort of thing that Maxim Gorki
+deals in.  It interests us immensely, but we like to get away from
+it sometimes."
+
+Madame Kelnicort came up with another prospective partner, and
+Elaine delivered her ukase:  one more dance and then back to the
+hotel.  Without any special regret she made her retreat from the
+revel which Courtenay was enjoying under the impression that it was
+life and the young Russian under the firm conviction that it was
+not.
+
+Elaine breakfasted at her aunts' table the next morning at much her
+usual hour.  Courtenay was sleeping the sleep of a happy tired
+animal.  He had given instructions to be called at eleven o'clock,
+from which time onward the Neue Freie Presse, the Zeit, and his
+toilet would occupy his attention till he appeared at the luncheon
+table.  There were not many people breakfasting when Elaine arrived
+on the scene, but the room seemed to be fuller than it really was
+by reason of a penetrating voice that was engaged in recounting how
+far the standard of Viennese breakfast fare fell below the
+expectations and desires of little Jerome and the girls.
+
+"If ever little Jerome becomes President of the United States,"
+said Elaine, "I shall be able to contribute quite an informing
+article on his gastronomic likes and dislikes to the papers."
+
+The aunts were discreetly inquisitive as to the previous evening's
+entertainment.
+
+"If Elaine would flirt mildly with somebody it would be such a good
+thing," said Mrs. Goldbrook; "it would remind Courtenay that he's
+not the only attractive young man in the world."
+
+Elaine, however, did not gratify their hopes; she referred to the
+ball with the detachment she would have shown in describing a
+drawing-room show of cottage industries.  It was not difficult to
+discern in her description of the affair the confession that she
+had been slightly bored.  From Courtenay, later in the day, the
+aunts received a much livelier impression of the festivities, from
+which it was abundantly clear that he at any rate had managed to
+amuse himself.  Neither did it appear that his good opinion of his
+own attractions had suffered any serious shock.  He was distinctly
+in a very good temper.
+
+"The secret of enjoying a honeymoon," said Mrs. Goldbrook
+afterwards to her sister, "is not to attempt too much."
+
+"You mean--?"
+
+"Courtenay is content to try and keep one person amused and happy,
+and he thoroughly succeeds."
+
+"I certainly don't think Elaine is going to be very happy," said
+her sister, "but at least Courtenay saved her from making the
+greatest mistake she could have made--marrying that young
+Bassington."
+
+"He has also," said Mrs. Goldbrook, "helped her to make the next
+biggest mistake of her life--marrying Courtenay Youghal.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+
+It was late afternoon by the banks of a swiftly rushing river, a
+river that gave back a haze of heat from its waters as though it
+were some stagnant steaming lagoon, and yet seemed to be whirling
+onward with the determination of a living thing, perpetually eager
+and remorseless, leaping savagely at any obstacle that attempted to
+stay its course; an unfriendly river, to whose waters you committed
+yourself at your peril.  Under the hot breathless shade of the
+trees on its shore arose that acrid all-pervading smell that seems
+to hang everywhere about the tropics, a smell as of some monstrous
+musty still-room where herbs and spices have been crushed and
+distilled and stored for hundreds of years, and where the windows
+have seldom been opened.  In the dazzling heat that still held
+undisputed sway over the scene, insects and birds seemed
+preposterously alive and active, flitting their gay colours through
+the sunbeams, and crawling over the baked dust in the full swing
+and pursuit of their several businesses; the flies engaged in
+Heaven knows what, and the fly-catchers busy with the flies.
+Beasts and humans showed no such indifference to the temperature;
+the sun would have to slant yet further downward before the earth
+would become a fit arena for their revived activities.  In the
+sheltered basement of a wayside rest-house a gang of native
+hammock-bearers slept or chattered drowsily through the last hours
+of the long mid-day halt; wide awake, yet almost motionless in the
+thrall of a heavy lassitude, their European master sat alone in an
+upper chamber, staring out through a narrow window-opening at the
+native village, spreading away in thick clusters of huts girt
+around with cultivated vegetation.  It seemed a vast human ant-
+hill, which would presently be astir with its teeming human life,
+as though the Sun God in his last departing stride had roused it
+with a careless kick.  Even as Comus watched he could see the
+beginnings of the evening's awakening.  Women, squatting in front
+of their huts, began to pound away at the rice or maize that would
+form the evening meal, girls were collecting their water pots
+preparatory to a walk down to the river, and enterprising goats
+made tentative forays through gaps in the ill-kept fences of
+neighbouring garden plots; their hurried retreats showed that here
+at least someone was keeping alert and wakeful vigil.  Behind a hut
+perched on a steep hillside, just opposite to the rest-house, two
+boys were splitting wood with a certain languid industry; further
+down the road a group of dogs were leisurely working themselves up
+to quarrelling pitch.  Here and there, bands of evil-looking pigs
+roamed about, busy with foraging excursions that came unpleasantly
+athwart the border-line of scavenging.  And from the trees that
+bounded and intersected the village rose the horrible, tireless,
+spiteful-sounding squawking of the iron-throated crows.
+
+Comus sat and watched it all with a sense of growing aching
+depression.  It was so utterly trivial to his eyes, so devoid of
+interest, and yet it was so real, so serious, so implacable in its
+continuity.  The brain grew tired with the thought of its unceasing
+reproduction.  It had all gone on, as it was going on now, by the
+side of the great rushing swirling river, this tilling and planting
+and harvesting, marketing and store-keeping, feast-making and
+fetish-worship and love-making, burying and giving in marriage,
+child-bearing and child-rearing, all this had been going on, in the
+shimmering, blistering heat and the warm nights, while he had been
+a youngster at school, dimly recognising Africa as a division of
+the earth's surface that it was advisable to have a certain nodding
+acquaintance with.
+
+It had been going on in all its trifling detail, all its serious
+intensity, when his father and his grandfather in their day had
+been little boys at school, it would go on just as intently as ever
+long after Comus and his generation had passed away, just as the
+shadows would lengthen and fade under the mulberry trees in that
+far away English garden, round the old stone fountain where a
+leaden otter for ever preyed on a leaden salmon.
+
+Comus rose impatiently from his seat, and walked wearily across the
+hut to another window-opening which commanded a broad view of the
+river.  There was something which fascinated and then depressed one
+in its ceaseless hurrying onward sweep, its tons of water rushing
+on for all time, as long as the face of the earth should remain
+unchanged.  On its further shore could be seen spread out at
+intervals other teeming villages, with their cultivated plots and
+pasture clearings, their moving dots which meant cattle and goats
+and dogs and children.  And far up its course, lost in the forest
+growth that fringed its banks, were hidden away yet more villages,
+human herding-grounds where men dwelt and worked and bartered,
+squabbled and worshipped, sickened and perished, while the river
+went by with its endless swirl and rush of gleaming waters.  One
+could well understand primitive early races making propitiatory
+sacrifices to the spirit of a great river on whose shores they
+dwelt.  Time and the river were the two great forces that seemed to
+matter here.
+
+It was almost a relief to turn back to that other outlook and watch
+the village life that was now beginning to wake in earnest.  The
+procession of water-fetchers had formed itself in a long chattering
+line that stretched river-wards.  Comus wondered how many tens of
+thousands of times that procession had been formed since first the
+village came into existence.  They had been doing it while he was
+playing in the cricket-fields at school, while he was spending
+Christmas holidays in Paris, while he was going his careless round
+of theatres, dances, suppers and card-parties, just as they were
+doing it now; they would be doing it when there was no one alive
+who remembered Comus Bassington.  This thought recurred again and
+again with painful persistence, a morbid growth arising in part
+from his loneliness.
+
+Staring dumbly out at the toiling sweltering human ant-hill Comus
+marvelled how missionary enthusiasts could labour hopefully at the
+work of transplanting their religion, with its homegrown accretions
+of fatherly parochial benevolence, in this heat-blistered, fever-
+scourged wilderness, where men lived like groundbait and died like
+flies.  Demons one might believe in, if one did not hold one's
+imagination in healthy check, but a kindly all-managing God, never.
+Somewhere in the west country of England Comus had an uncle who
+lived in a rose-smothered rectory and taught a wholesome gentle-
+hearted creed that expressed itself in the spirit of "Little lamb,
+who made thee?" and faithfully reflected the beautiful homely
+Christ-child sentiment of Saxon Europe.  What a far away, unreal
+fairy story it all seemed here in this West African land, where the
+bodies of men were of as little account as the bubbles that floated
+on the oily froth of the great flowing river, and where it required
+a stretch of wild profitless imagination to credit them with
+undying souls.  In the life he had come from Comus had been
+accustomed to think of individuals as definite masterful
+personalities, making their several marks on the circumstances that
+revolved around them; they did well or ill, or in most cases
+indifferently, and were criticised, praised, blamed, thwarted or
+tolerated, or given way to.  In any case, humdrum or outstanding,
+they had their spheres of importance, little or big.  They
+dominated a breakfast table or harassed a Government, according to
+their capabilities or opportunities, or perhaps they merely had
+irritating mannerisms.  At any rate it seemed highly probable that
+they had souls.  Here a man simply made a unit in an unnumbered
+population, an inconsequent dot in a loosely-compiled deathroll.
+Even his own position as a white man exalted conspicuously above a
+horde of black natives did not save Comus from the depressing sense
+of nothingness which his first experience of fever had thrown over
+him.  He was a lost, soulless body in this great uncaring land; if
+he died another would take his place, his few effects would be
+inventoried and sent down to the coast, someone else would finish
+off any tea or whisky that he left behind--that would be all.
+
+It was nearly time to be starting towards the next halting place
+where he would dine or at any rate eat something.  But the
+lassitude which the fever had bequeathed him made the tedium of
+travelling through interminable forest-tracks a weariness to be
+deferred as long as possible.  The bearers were nothing loth to let
+another half-hour or so slip by, and Comus dragged a battered
+paper-covered novel from the pocket of his coat.  It was a story
+dealing with the elaborately tangled love affairs of a surpassingly
+uninteresting couple, and even in his almost bookless state Comus
+had not been able to plough his way through more than two-thirds of
+its dull length; bound up with the cover, however, were some pages
+of advertisement, and these the exile scanned with a hungry
+intentness that the romance itself could never have commanded.  The
+name of a shop, of a street, the address of a restaurant, came to
+him as a bitter reminder of the world he had lost, a world that ate
+and drank and flirted, gambled and made merry, a world that debated
+and intrigued and wire-pulled, fought or compromised political
+battles--and recked nothing of its outcasts wandering through
+forest paths and steamy swamps or lying in the grip of fever.
+Comus read and re-read those few lines of advertisement, just as he
+treasured a much-crumpled programme of a first-night performance at
+the Straw Exchange Theatre; they seemed to make a little more real
+the past that was already so shadowy and so utterly remote.  For a
+moment he could almost capture the sensation of being once again in
+those haunts that he loved; then he looked round and pushed the
+book wearily from him.  The steaming heat, the forest, the rushing
+river hemmed him in on all sides.
+
+The two boys who had been splitting wood ceased from their labours
+and straightened their backs; suddenly the smaller of the two gave
+the other a resounding whack with a split lath that he still held
+in his hand, and flew up the hillside with a scream of laughter and
+simulated terror, the bigger lad following in hot pursuit.  Up and
+down the steep bush-grown slope they raced and twisted and dodged,
+coming sometimes to close quarters in a hurricane of squeals and
+smacks, rolling over and over like fighting kittens, and breaking
+away again to start fresh provocation and fresh pursuit.  Now and
+again they would lie for a time panting in what seemed the last
+stage of exhaustion, and then they would be off in another wild
+scamper, their dusky bodies flitting through the bushes,
+disappearing and reappearing with equal suddenness.  Presently two
+girls of their own age, who had returned from the water-fetching,
+sprang out on them from ambush, and the four joined in one joyous
+gambol that lit up the hillside with shrill echoes and glimpses of
+flying limbs.  Comus sat and watched, at first with an amused
+interest, then with a returning flood of depression and heart-ache.
+Those wild young human kittens represented the joy of life, he was
+the outsider, the lonely alien, watching something in which he
+could not join, a happiness in which he had no part or lot.  He
+would pass presently out of the village and his bearers' feet would
+leave their indentations in the dust; that would be his most
+permanent memorial in this little oasis of teeming life.  And that
+other life, in which he once moved with such confident sense of his
+own necessary participation in it, how completely he had passed out
+of it.  Amid all its laughing throngs, its card parties and race-
+meetings and country-house gatherings, he was just a mere name,
+remembered or forgotten, Comus Bassington, the boy who went away.
+He had loved himself very well and never troubled greatly whether
+anyone else really loved him, and now he realised what he had made
+of his life.  And at the same time he knew that if his chance were
+to come again he would throw it away just as surely, just as
+perversely.  Fate played with him with loaded dice; he would lose
+always.
+
+One person in the whole world had cared for him, for longer than he
+could remember, cared for him perhaps more than he knew, cared for
+him perhaps now.  But a wall of ice had mounted up between him and
+her, and across it there blew that cold-breath that chills or kills
+affection.
+
+The words of a well-known old song, the wistful cry of a lost
+cause, rang with insistent mockery through his brain:
+
+
+"Better loved you canna be,
+Will ye ne'er come back again?"
+
+
+If it was love that was to bring him back he must be an exile for
+ever.  His epitaph in the mouths of those that remembered him would
+be, Comus Bassington, the boy who never came back.
+
+And in his unutterable loneliness he bowed his head on his arms,
+that he might not see the joyous scrambling frolic on yonder
+hillside.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+
+The bleak rawness of a grey December day held sway over St. James's
+Park, that sanctuary of lawn and tree and pool, into which the
+bourgeois innovator has rushed ambitiously time and again, to find
+that he must take the patent leather from off his feet, for the
+ground on which he stands is hallowed ground.
+
+In the lonely hour of early afternoon, when the workers had gone
+back to their work, and the loiterers were scarcely yet gathered
+again, Francesca Bassington made her way restlessly along the
+stretches of gravelled walk that bordered the ornamental water.
+The overmastering unhappiness that filled her heart and stifled her
+thinking powers found answering echo in her surroundings.  There is
+a sorrow that lingers in old parks and gardens that the busy
+streets have no leisure to keep by them; the dead must bury their
+dead in Whitehall or the Place de la Concorde, but there are
+quieter spots where they may still keep tryst with the living and
+intrude the memory of their bygone selves on generations that have
+almost forgotten them.  Even in tourist-trampled Versailles the
+desolation of a tragedy that cannot die haunts the terraces and
+fountains like a bloodstain that will not wash out; in the Saxon
+Garden at Warsaw there broods the memory of long-dead things,
+coeval with the stately trees that shade its walks, and with the
+carp that swim to-day in its ponds as they doubtless swam there
+when "Lieber Augustin" was a living person and not as yet an
+immortal couplet.  And St. James's Park, with its lawns and walks
+and waterfowl, harbours still its associations with a bygone order
+of men and women, whose happiness and sadness are woven into its
+history, dim and grey as they were once bright and glowing, like
+the faded pattern worked into the fabric of an old tapestry.  It
+was here that Francesca had made her way when the intolerable
+inaction of waiting had driven her forth from her home.  She was
+waiting for that worst news of all, the news which does not kill
+hope, because there has been none to kill, but merely ends
+suspense.  An early message had said that Comus was ill, which
+might have meant much or little; then there had come that morning a
+cablegram which only meant one thing; in a few hours she would get
+a final message, of which this was the preparatory forerunner.  She
+already knew as much as that awaited message would tell her.  She
+knew that she would never see Comus again, and she knew now that
+she loved him beyond all things that the world could hold for her.
+It was no sudden rush of pity or compunction that clouded her
+judgment or gilded her recollection of him; she saw him as he was,
+the beautiful, wayward, laughing boy, with his naughtiness, his
+exasperating selfishness, his insurmountable folly and
+perverseness, his cruelty that spared not even himself, and as he
+was, as he always had been, she knew that he was the one thing that
+the Fates had willed that she should love.  She did not stop to
+accuse or excuse herself for having sent him forth to what was to
+prove his death.  It was, doubtless, right and reasonable that he
+should have gone out there, as hundreds of other men went out, in
+pursuit of careers; the terrible thing was that he would never come
+back.  The old cruel hopelessness that had always chequered her
+pride and pleasure in his good looks and high spirits and fitfully
+charming ways had dealt her a last crushing blow; he was dying
+somewhere thousands of miles away without hope of recovery, without
+a word of love to comfort him, and without hope or shred of
+consolation she was waiting to hear of the end.  The end; that last
+dreadful piece of news which would write "nevermore" across his
+life and hers.
+
+The lively bustle in the streets had been a torture that she could
+not bear.  It wanted but two days to Christmas and the gaiety of
+the season, forced or genuine, rang out everywhere.  Christmas
+shopping, with its anxious solicitude or self-centred absorption,
+overspread the West End and made the pavements scarcely passable at
+certain favoured points.  Proud parents, parcel-laden and
+surrounded by escorts of their young people, compared notes with
+one another on the looks and qualities of their offspring and
+exchanged loud hurried confidences on the difficulty or success
+which each had experienced in getting the right presents for one
+and all.  Shouted directions where to find this or that article at
+its best mingled with salvos of Christmas good wishes.  To
+Francesca, making her way frantically through the carnival of
+happiness with that lonely deathbed in her eyes, it had seemed a
+callous mockery of her pain; could not people remember that there
+were crucifixions as well as joyous birthdays in the world?  Every
+mother that she passed happy in the company of a fresh-looking
+clean-limbed schoolboy son sent a fresh stab at her heart, and the
+very shops had their bitter memories.  There was the tea-shop where
+he and she had often taken tea together, or, in the days of their
+estrangement, sat with their separate friends at separate tables.
+There were other shops where extravagantly-incurred bills had
+furnished material for those frequently recurring scenes of
+recrimination, and the Colonial outfitters, where, as he had
+phrased it in whimsical mockery, he had bought grave-clothes for
+his burying-alive.  The "oubliette!"  She remembered the bitter
+petulant name he had flung at his destined exile.  There at least
+he had been harder on himself than the Fates were pleased to will;
+never, as long as Francesca lived and had a brain that served her,
+would she be able to forget.  That narcotic would never be given to
+her.  Unrelenting, unsparing memory would be with her always to
+remind her of those last days of tragedy.  Already her mind was
+dwelling on the details of that ghastly farewell dinner-party and
+recalling one by one the incidents of ill-omen that had marked it;
+how they had sat down seven to table and how one liqueur glass in
+the set of seven had been shivered into fragments; how her glass
+had slipped from her hand as she raised it to her lips to wish
+Comus a safe return; and the strange, quiet hopelessness of Lady
+Veula's "good-bye"; she remembered now how it had chilled and
+frightened her at the moment.
+
+The park was filling again with its floating population of
+loiterers, and Francesca's footsteps began to take a homeward
+direction.  Something seemed to tell her that the message for which
+she waited had arrived and was lying there on the hall table.  Her
+brother, who had announced his intention of visiting her early in
+the afternoon would have gone by now; he knew nothing of this
+morning's bad news--the instinct of a wounded animal to creep away
+by itself had prompted her to keep her sorrow from him as long as
+possible.  His visit did not necessitate her presence; he was
+bringing an Austrian friend, who was compiling a work on the
+Franco-Flemish school of painting, to inspect the Van der Meulen,
+which Henry Greech hoped might perhaps figure as an illustration in
+the book.  They were due to arrive shortly after lunch, and
+Francesca had left a note of apology, pleading an urgent engagement
+elsewhere.  As she turned to make her way across the Mall into the
+Green Park a gentle voice hailed her from a carriage that was just
+drawing up by the sidewalk.  Lady Caroline Benaresq had been
+favouring the Victoria Memorial with a long unfriendly stare.
+
+"In primitive days," she remarked, "I believe it was the fashion
+for great chiefs and rulers to have large numbers of their
+relatives and dependents killed and buried with them; in these more
+enlightened times we have invented quite another way of making a
+great Sovereign universally regretted.  My dear Francesca," she
+broke off suddenly, catching the misery that had settled in the
+other's eyes, "what is the matter?  Have you had bad news from out
+there?"
+
+"I am waiting for very bad news," said Francesca, and Lady Caroline
+knew what had happened.
+
+"I wish I could say something; I can't."  Lady Caroline spoke in a
+harsh, grunting voice that few people had ever heard her use.
+
+Francesca crossed the Mall and the carriage drove on.
+
+"Heaven help that poor woman," said Lady Caroline; which was, for
+her, startlingly like a prayer.
+
+As Francesca entered the hall she gave a quick look at the table;
+several packages, evidently an early batch of Christmas presents,
+were there, and two or three letters.  On a salver by itself was
+the cablegram for which she had waited.  A maid, who had evidently
+been on the lookout for her, brought her the salver.  The servants
+were well aware of the dreadful thing that was happening, and there
+was pity on the girl's face and in her voice.
+
+"This came for you ten minutes ago, ma'am, and Mr. Greech has been
+here, ma'am, with another gentleman, and was sorry you weren't at
+home.  Mr. Greech said he would call again in about half-an-hour."
+
+Francesca carried the cablegram unopened into the drawing-room and
+sat down for a moment to think.  There was no need to read it yet,
+for she knew what she would find written there.  For a few pitiful
+moments Comus would seem less hopelessly lost to her if she put off
+the reading of that last terrible message.  She rose and crossed
+over to the windows and pulled down the blinds, shutting out the
+waning December day, and then reseated herself.  Perhaps in the
+shadowy half-light her boy would come and sit with her again for
+awhile and let her look her last upon his loved face; she could
+never touch him again or hear his laughing, petulant voice, but
+surely she might look on her dead.  And her starving eyes saw only
+the hateful soulless things of bronze and silver and porcelain that
+she had set up and worshipped as gods; look where she would they
+were there around her, the cold ruling deities of the home that
+held no place for her dead boy.  He had moved in and out among
+them, the warm, living, breathing thing that had been hers to love,
+and she had turned her eyes from that youthful comely figure to
+adore a few feet of painted canvas, a musty relic of a long
+departed craftsman.  And now he was gone from her sight, from her
+touch, from her hearing for ever, without even a thought to flash
+between them for all the dreary years that she should live, and
+these things of canvas and pigment and wrought metal would stay
+with her.  They were her soul.  And what shall it profit a man if
+he save his soul and slay his heart in torment?
+
+On a small table by her side was Mervyn Quentock's portrait of her-
+-the prophetic symbol of her tragedy; the rich dead harvest of
+unreal things that had never known life, and the bleak thrall of
+black unending Winter, a Winter in which things died and knew no
+re-awakening.
+
+Francesca turned to the small envelope lying in her lap; very
+slowly she opened it and read the short message.  Then she sat numb
+and silent for a long, long time, or perhaps only for minutes.  The
+voice of Henry Greech in the hall, enquiring for her, called her to
+herself. Hurriedly she crushed the piece of paper out of sight; he
+would have to be told, of course, but just yet her pain seemed too
+dreadful to be laid bare.  "Comus is dead" was a sentence beyond
+her power to speak.
+
+"I have bad news for you, Francesca, I'm sorry to say," Henry
+announced.  Had he heard, too?
+
+"Henneberg has been here and looked at the picture," he continued,
+seating himself by her side, "and though he admired it immensely as
+a work of art he gave me a disagreeable surprise by assuring me
+that it's not a genuine Van der Meulen.  It's a splendid copy, but
+still, unfortunately, only a copy."
+
+Henry paused and glanced at his sister to see how she had taken the
+unwelcome announcement.  Even in the dim light he caught some of
+the anguish in her eyes.
+
+"My dear Francesca," he said soothingly, laying his hand
+affectionately on her arm, "I know that this must be a great
+disappointment to you, you've always set such store by this
+picture, but you mustn't take it too much to heart.  These
+disagreeable discoveries come at times to most picture fanciers and
+owners.  Why, about twenty per cent. of the alleged Old Masters in
+the Louvre are supposed to be wrongly attributed.  And there are
+heaps of similar cases in this country.  Lady Dovecourt was telling
+me the other day that they simply daren't have an expert in to
+examine the Van Dykes at Columbey for fear of unwelcome
+disclosures.  And besides, your picture is such an excellent copy
+that it's by no means without a value of its own.  You must get
+over the disappointment you naturally feel, and take a
+philosophical view of the matter. . . "
+
+Francesca sat in stricken silence, crushing the folded morsel of
+paper tightly in her hand and wondering if the thin, cheerful voice
+with its pitiless, ghastly mockery of consolation would never stop.
+
+
+
+
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+<title>The Unbearable Bassington</title>
+</head>
+<body>
+<h2>
+<a href="#startoftext">The Unbearable Bassington, by  Saki</a>
+</h2>
+<pre>
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Unbearable Bassington, by  Saki
+(#2 in our series by  Saki)
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: The Unbearable Bassington
+
+Author:  Saki
+
+Release Date: Jun, 1996  [EBook #555]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on April 7, 1996]
+[Most recently updated: August 27, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
+
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+</pre>
+<p>
+<a name="startoftext"></a>
+Transcribed from the 1913 John Lane edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+THE UNBEARABLE BASSINGTON<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER I<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Francesca Bassington sat in the drawing-room of her house in Blue Street,
+W., regaling herself and her estimable brother Henry with China tea
+and small cress sandwiches.&nbsp; The meal was of that elegant proportion
+which, while ministering sympathetically to the desires of the moment,
+is happily reminiscent of a satisfactory luncheon and blessedly expectant
+of an elaborate dinner to come.<br>
+<br>
+In her younger days Francesca had been known as the beautiful Miss Greech;
+at forty, although much of the original beauty remained, she was just
+dear Francesca Bassington.&nbsp; No one would have dreamed of calling
+her sweet, but a good many people who scarcely knew her were punctilious
+about putting in the &ldquo;dear.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Her enemies, in their honester moments, would have admitted that she
+was svelte and knew how to dress, but they would have agreed with her
+friends in asserting that she had no soul.&nbsp; When one&rsquo;s friends
+and enemies agree on any particular point they are usually wrong.&nbsp;
+Francesca herself, if pressed in an unguarded moment to describe her
+soul, would probably have described her drawing-room.&nbsp; Not that
+she would have considered that the one had stamped the impress of its
+character on the other, so that close scrutiny might reveal its outstanding
+features, and even suggest its hidden places, but because she might
+have dimly recognised that her drawing-room was her soul.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca was one of those women towards whom Fate appears to have the
+best intentions and never to carry them into practice.&nbsp; With the
+advantages put at her disposal she might have been expected to command
+a more than average share of feminine happiness.&nbsp; So many of the
+things that make for fretfulness, disappointment and discouragement
+in a woman&rsquo;s life were removed from her path that she might well
+have been considered the fortunate Miss Greech, or later, lucky Francesca
+Bassington.&nbsp; And she was not of the perverse band of those who
+make a rock-garden of their souls by dragging into them all the stoney
+griefs and unclaimed troubles they can find lying around them.&nbsp;
+Francesca loved the smooth ways and pleasant places of life; she liked
+not merely to look on the bright side of things but to live there and
+stay there.&nbsp; And the fact that things had, at one time and another,
+gone badly with her and cheated her of some of her early illusions made
+her cling the closer to such good fortune as remained to her now that
+she seemed to have reached a calmer period of her life.&nbsp; To undiscriminating
+friends she appeared in the guise of a rather selfish woman, but it
+was merely the selfishness of one who had seen the happy and unhappy
+sides of life and wished to enjoy to the utmost what was left to her
+of the former.&nbsp; The vicissitudes of fortune had not soured her,
+but they had perhaps narrowed her in the sense of making her concentrate
+much of her sympathies on things that immediately pleased and amused
+her, or that recalled and perpetuated the pleasing and successful incidents
+of other days.&nbsp; And it was her drawing-room in particular that
+enshrined the memorials or tokens of past and present happiness.<br>
+<br>
+Into that comfortable quaint-shaped room of angles and bays and alcoves
+had sailed, as into a harbour, those precious personal possessions and
+trophies that had survived the buffetings and storms of a not very tranquil
+married life.&nbsp; Wherever her eyes might turn she saw the embodied
+results of her successes, economies, good luck, good management or good
+taste.&nbsp; The battle had more than once gone against her, but she
+had somehow always contrived to save her baggage train, and her complacent
+gaze could roam over object after object that represented the spoils
+of victory or the salvage of honourable defeat.&nbsp; The delicious
+bronze Fremiet on the mantelpiece had been the outcome of a Grand Prix
+sweepstake of many years ago; a group of Dresden figures of some considerable
+value had been bequeathed to her by a discreet admirer, who had added
+death to his other kindnesses; another group had been a self-bestowed
+present, purchased in blessed and unfading memory of a wonderful nine-days&rsquo;
+bridge winnings at a country-house party.&nbsp; There were old Persian
+and Bokharan rugs and Worcester tea-services of glowing colour, and
+little treasures of antique silver that each enshrined a history or
+a memory in addition to its own intrinsic value.&nbsp; It amused her
+at times to think of the bygone craftsmen and artificers who had hammered
+and wrought and woven in far distant countries and ages, to produce
+the wonderful and beautiful things that had come, one way and another,
+into her possession.&nbsp; Workers in the studios of medieval Italian
+towns and of later Paris, in the bazaars of Baghdad and of Central Asia,
+in old-time English workshops and German factories, in all manner of
+queer hidden corners where craft secrets were jealously guarded, nameless
+unremembered men and men whose names were world-renowned and deathless.<br>
+<br>
+And above all her other treasures, dominating in her estimation every
+other object that the room contained, was the great Van der Meulen that
+had come from her father&rsquo;s home as part of her wedding dowry.&nbsp;
+It fitted exactly into the central wall panel above the narrow buhl
+cabinet, and filled exactly its right space in the composition and balance
+of the room.&nbsp; From wherever you sat it seemed to confront you as
+the dominating feature of its surroundings.&nbsp; There was a pleasing
+serenity about the great pompous battle scene with its solemn courtly
+warriors bestriding their heavily prancing steeds, grey or skewbald
+or dun, all gravely in earnest, and yet somehow conveying the impression
+that their campaigns were but vast serious picnics arranged in the grand
+manner.&nbsp; Francesca could not imagine the drawing-room without the
+crowning complement of the stately well-hung picture, just as she could
+not imagine herself in any other setting than this house in Blue Street
+with its crowded Pantheon of cherished household gods.<br>
+<br>
+And herein sprouted one of the thorns that obtruded through the rose-leaf
+damask of what might otherwise have been Francesca&rsquo;s peace of
+mind.&nbsp; One&rsquo;s happiness always lies in the future rather than
+in the past.&nbsp; With due deference to an esteemed lyrical authority
+one may safely say that a sorrow&rsquo;s crown of sorrow is anticipating
+unhappier things.&nbsp; The house in Blue Street had been left to her
+by her old friend Sophie Chetrof, but only until such time as her niece
+Emmeline Chetrof should marry, when it was to pass to her as a wedding
+present.&nbsp; Emmeline was now seventeen and passably good-looking,
+and four or five years were all that could be safely allotted to the
+span of her continued spinsterhood.&nbsp; Beyond that period lay chaos,
+the wrenching asunder of Francesca from the sheltering habitation that
+had grown to be her soul.&nbsp; It is true that in imagination she had
+built herself a bridge across the chasm, a bridge of a single span.&nbsp;
+The bridge in question was her schoolboy son Comus, now being educated
+somewhere in the southern counties, or rather one should say the bridge
+consisted of the possibility of his eventual marriage with Emmeline,
+in which case Francesca saw herself still reigning, a trifle squeezed
+and incommoded perhaps, but still reigning in the house in Blue Street.&nbsp;
+The Van der Meulen would still catch its requisite afternoon light in
+its place of honour, the Fremiet and the Dresden and Old Worcester would
+continue undisturbed in their accustomed niches.&nbsp; Emmeline could
+have the Japanese snuggery, where Francesca sometimes drank her after-dinner
+coffee, as a separate drawing-room, where she could put her own things.&nbsp;
+The details of the bridge structure had all been carefully thought out.&nbsp;
+Only - it was an unfortunate circumstance that Comus should have been
+the span on which everything balanced.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca&rsquo;s husband had insisted on giving the boy that strange
+Pagan name, and had not lived long enough to judge as to the appropriateness,
+or otherwise, of its significance.&nbsp; In seventeen years and some
+odd months Francesca had had ample opportunity for forming an opinion
+concerning her son&rsquo;s characteristics.&nbsp; The spirit of mirthfulness
+which one associates with the name certainly ran riot in the boy, but
+it was a twisted wayward sort of mirth of which Francesca herself could
+seldom see the humorous side.&nbsp; In her brother Henry, who sat eating
+small cress sandwiches as solemnly as though they had been ordained
+in some immemorial Book of Observances, fate had been undisguisedly
+kind to her.&nbsp; He might so easily have married some pretty helpless
+little woman, and lived at Notting Hill Gate, and been the father of
+a long string of pale, clever useless children, who would have had birthdays
+and the sort of illnesses that one is expected to send grapes to, and
+who would have painted fatuous objects in a South Kensington manner
+as Christmas offerings to an aunt whose cubic space for lumber was limited.&nbsp;
+Instead of committing these unbrotherly actions, which are so frequent
+in family life that they might almost be called brotherly, Henry had
+married a woman who had both money and a sense of repose, and their
+one child had the brilliant virtue of never saying anything which even
+its parents could consider worth repeating.&nbsp; Then he had gone into
+Parliament, possibly with the idea of making his home life seem less
+dull; at any rate it redeemed his career from insignificance, for no
+man whose death can produce the item &ldquo;another by-election&rdquo;
+on the news posters can be wholly a nonentity.&nbsp; Henry, in short,
+who might have been an embarrassment and a handicap, had chosen rather
+to be a friend and counsellor, at times even an emergency bank balance;
+Francesca on her part, with the partiality which a clever and lazily-inclined
+woman often feels for a reliable fool, not only sought his counsel but
+frequently followed it.&nbsp; When convenient, moreover, she repaid
+his loans.<br>
+<br>
+Against this good service on the part of Fate in providing her with
+Henry for a brother, Francesca could well set the plaguy malice of the
+destiny that had given her Comus for a son.&nbsp; The boy was one of
+those untameable young lords of misrule that frolic and chafe themselves
+through nursery and preparatory and public-school days with the utmost
+allowance of storm and dust and dislocation and the least possible amount
+of collar-work, and come somehow with a laugh through a series of catastrophes
+that has reduced everyone else concerned to tears or Cassandra-like
+forebodings.&nbsp; Sometimes they sober down in after-life and become
+uninteresting, forgetting that they were ever lords of anything; sometimes
+Fate plays royally into their hands, and they do great things in a spacious
+manner, and are thanked by Parliaments and the Press and acclaimed by
+gala-day crowds.&nbsp; But in most cases their tragedy begins when they
+leave school and turn themselves loose in a world that has grown too
+civilised and too crowded and too empty to have any place for them.&nbsp;
+And they are very many.<br>
+<br>
+Henry Greech had made an end of biting small sandwiches, and settled
+down like a dust-storm refreshed, to discuss one of the fashionably
+prevalent topics of the moment, the prevention of destitution.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It is a question that is only being nibbled at, smelt at, one
+might say, at the present moment,&rdquo; he observed, &ldquo;but it
+is one that will have to engage our serious attention and consideration
+before long.&nbsp; The first thing that we shall have to do is to get
+out of the dilettante and academic way of approaching it.&nbsp; We must
+collect and assimilate hard facts.&nbsp; It is a subject that ought
+to appeal to all thinking minds, and yet, you know, I find it surprisingly
+difficult to interest people in it.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Francesca made some monosyllabic response, a sort of sympathetic grunt
+which was meant to indicate that she was, to a certain extent, listening
+and appreciating.&nbsp; In reality she was reflecting that Henry possibly
+found it difficult to interest people in any topic that he enlarged
+on.&nbsp; His talents lay so thoroughly in the direction of being uninteresting,
+that even as an eye-witness of the massacre of St. Bartholomew he would
+probably have infused a flavour of boredom into his descriptions of
+the event.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I was speaking down in Leicestershire the other day on this subject,&rdquo;
+continued Henry, &ldquo;and I pointed out at some length a thing that
+few people ever stop to consider - &rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Francesca went over immediately but decorously to the majority that
+will not stop to consider.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Did you come across any of the Barnets when you were down there?&rdquo;
+she interrupted; &ldquo;Eliza Barnet is rather taken up with all those
+subjects.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+In the propagandist movements of Sociology, as in other arenas of life
+and struggle, the fiercest competition and rivalry is frequently to
+be found between closely allied types and species.&nbsp; Eliza Barnet
+shared many of Henry Greech&rsquo;s political and social views, but
+she also shared his fondness for pointing things out at some length;
+there had been occasions when she had extensively occupied the strictly
+limited span allotted to the platform oratory of a group of speakers
+of whom Henry Greech had been an impatient unit.&nbsp; He might see
+eye to eye with her on the leading questions of the day, but he persistently
+wore mental blinkers as far as her estimable qualities were concerned,
+and the mention of her name was a skilful lure drawn across the trail
+of his discourse; if Francesca had to listen to his eloquence on any
+subject she much preferred that it should be a disparagement of Eliza
+Barnet rather than the prevention of destitution.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve no doubt she means well,&rdquo; said Henry, &ldquo;but
+it would be a good thing if she could be induced to keep her own personality
+a little more in the background, and not to imagine that she is the
+necessary mouthpiece of all the progressive thought in the countryside.&nbsp;
+I fancy Canon Besomley must have had her in his mind when he said that
+some people came into the world to shake empires and others to move
+amendments.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Francesca laughed with genuine amusement.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I suppose she is really wonderfully well up in all the subjects
+she talks about,&rdquo; was her provocative comment.<br>
+<br>
+Henry grew possibly conscious of the fact that he was being drawn out
+on the subject of Eliza Barnet, and he presently turned on to a more
+personal topic.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;From the general air of tranquillity about the house I presume
+Comus has gone back to Thaleby,&rdquo; he observed.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Francesca, &ldquo;he went back yesterday.&nbsp;
+Of course, I&rsquo;m very fond of him, but I bear the separation well.&nbsp;
+When he&rsquo;s here it&rsquo;s rather like having a live volcano in
+the house, a volcano that in its quietest moments asks incessant questions
+and uses strong scent.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It is only a temporary respite,&rdquo; said Henry; &ldquo;in
+a year or two he will be leaving school, and then what?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Francesca closed her eyes with the air of one who seeks to shut out
+a distressing vision.&nbsp; She was not fond of looking intimately at
+the future in the presence of another person, especially when the future
+was draped in doubtfully auspicious colours.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;And then what?&rdquo; persisted Henry.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Then I suppose he will be upon my hands.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Exactly.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t sit there looking judicial.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m quite
+ready to listen to suggestions if you&rsquo;ve any to make.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;In the case of any ordinary boy,&rdquo; said Henry, &ldquo;I
+might make lots of suggestions as to the finding of suitable employment.&nbsp;
+From what we know of Comus it would be rather a waste of time for either
+of us to look for jobs which he wouldn&rsquo;t look at when we&rsquo;d
+got them for him.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;He must do something,&rdquo; said Francesca.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I know he must; but he never will.&nbsp; At least, he&rsquo;ll
+never stick to anything.&nbsp; The most hopeful thing to do with him
+will be to marry him to an heiress.&nbsp; That would solve the financial
+side of his problem.&nbsp; If he had unlimited money at his disposal,
+he might go into the wilds somewhere and shoot big game.&nbsp; I never
+know what the big game have done to deserve it, but they do help to
+deflect the destructive energies of some of our social misfits.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Henry, who never killed anything larger or fiercer than a trout, was
+scornfully superior on the subject of big game shooting.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca brightened at the matrimonial suggestion.&nbsp; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t
+know about an heiress,&rdquo; she said reflectively.&nbsp; &ldquo;There&rsquo;s
+Emmeline Chetrof of course.&nbsp; One could hardly call her an heiress,
+but she&rsquo;s got a comfortable little income of her own and I suppose
+something more will come to her from her grandmother.&nbsp; Then, of
+course, you know this house goes to her when she marries.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;That would be very convenient,&rdquo; said Henry, probably following
+a line of thought that his sister had trodden many hundreds of times
+before him.&nbsp; &ldquo;Do she and Comus hit it off at all well together?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Oh, well enough in boy and girl fashion,&rdquo; said Francesca.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I must arrange for them to see more of each other in future.&nbsp;
+By the way, that little brother of hers that she dotes on, Lancelot,
+goes to Thaleby this term.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll write and tell Comus to
+be specially kind to him; that will be a sure way to Emmeline&rsquo;s
+heart.&nbsp; Comus has been made a prefect, you know.&nbsp; Heaven knows
+why.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It can only be for prominence in games,&rdquo; sniffed Henry;
+&ldquo;I think we may safely leave work and conduct out of the question.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Comus was not a favourite with his uncle.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca had turned to her writing cabinet and was hastily scribbling
+a letter to her son in which the delicate health, timid disposition
+and other inevitable attributes of the new boy were brought to his notice,
+and commanded to his care.&nbsp; When she had sealed and stamped the
+envelope Henry uttered a belated caution.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Perhaps on the whole it would be wiser to say nothing about the
+boy to Comus.&nbsp; He doesn&rsquo;t always respond to directions you
+know.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Francesca did know, and already was more than half of her brother&rsquo;s
+opinion; but the woman who can sacrifice a clean unspoiled penny stamp
+is probably yet unborn.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER II<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Lancelot Chetrof stood at the end of a long bare passage, restlessly
+consulting his watch and fervently wishing himself half an hour older
+with a certain painful experience already registered in the past; unfortunately
+it still belonged to the future, and what was still more horrible, to
+the immediate future.&nbsp; Like many boys new to a school he had cultivated
+an unhealthy passion for obeying rules and requirements, and his zeal
+in this direction had proved his undoing.&nbsp; In his hurry to be doing
+two or three estimable things at once he had omitted to study the notice-board
+in more than a perfunctory fashion and had thereby missed a football
+practice specially ordained for newly-joined boys.&nbsp; His fellow
+juniors of a term&rsquo;s longer standing had graphically enlightened
+him as to the inevitable consequences of his lapse; the dread which
+attaches to the unknown was, at any rate, deleted from his approaching
+doom, though at the moment he felt scarcely grateful for the knowledge
+placed at his disposal with such lavish solicitude.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll get six of the very best, over the back of a chair,&rdquo;
+said one.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;ll draw a chalk line across you, of course you know,&rdquo;
+said another.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;A chalk line?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Rather.&nbsp; So that every cut can be aimed exactly at the same
+spot.&nbsp; It hurts much more that way.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Lancelot tried to nourish a wan hope that there might be an element
+of exaggeration in this uncomfortably realistic description.<br>
+<br>
+Meanwhile in the prefects&rsquo; room at the other end of the passage,
+Comus Bassington and a fellow prefect sat also waiting on time, but
+in a mood of far more pleasurable expectancy.&nbsp; Comus was one of
+the most junior of the prefect caste, but by no means the least well-known,
+and outside the masters&rsquo; common-room he enjoyed a certain fitful
+popularity, or at any rate admiration.&nbsp; At football he was too
+erratic to be a really brilliant player, but he tackled as if the act
+of bringing his man headlong to the ground was in itself a sensuous
+pleasure, and his weird swear-words whenever he got hurt were eagerly
+treasured by those who were fortunate enough to hear them.&nbsp; At
+athletics in general he was a showy performer, and although new to the
+functions of a prefect he had already established a reputation as an
+effective and artistic caner.&nbsp; In appearance he exactly fitted
+his fanciful Pagan name.&nbsp; His large green-grey eyes seemed for
+ever asparkle with goblin mischief and the joy of revelry, and the curved
+lips might have been those of some wickedly-laughing faun; one almost
+expected to see embryo horns fretting the smoothness of his sleek dark
+hair.&nbsp; The chin was firm, but one looked in vain for a redeeming
+touch of ill-temper in the handsome, half-mocking, half-petulant face.&nbsp;
+With a strain of sourness in him Comus might have been leavened into
+something creative and masterful; fate had fashioned him with a certain
+whimsical charm, and left him all unequipped for the greater purposes
+of life.&nbsp; Perhaps no one would have called him a lovable character,
+but in many respects he was adorable; in all respects he was certainly
+damned.<br>
+<br>
+Rutley, his companion of the moment, sat watching him and wondering,
+from the depths of a very ordinary brain, whether he liked or hated
+him; it was easy to do either.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not really your turn to cane,&rdquo; he said.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I know it&rsquo;s not,&rdquo; said Comus, fingering a very serviceable-looking
+cane as lovingly as a pious violinist might handle his Strad.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I gave Greyson some mint-chocolate to let me toss whether I caned
+or him, and I won.&nbsp; He was rather decent over it and let me have
+half the chocolate back.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The droll lightheartedness which won Comus Bassington such measure of
+popularity as he enjoyed among his fellows did not materially help to
+endear him to the succession of masters with whom he came in contact
+during the course of his schooldays.&nbsp; He amused and interested
+such of them as had the saving grace of humour at their disposal, but
+if they sighed when he passed from their immediate responsibility it
+was a sigh of relief rather than of regret.&nbsp; The more enlightened
+and experienced of them realised that he was something outside the scope
+of the things that they were called upon to deal with.&nbsp; A man who
+has been trained to cope with storms, to foresee their coming, and to
+minimise their consequences, may be pardoned if he feels a certain reluctance
+to measure himself against a tornado.<br>
+<br>
+Men of more limited outlook and with a correspondingly larger belief
+in their own powers were ready to tackle the tornado had time permitted.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I think I could tame young Bassington if I had your opportunities,&rdquo;
+a form-master once remarked to a colleague whose House had the embarrassing
+distinction of numbering Comus among its inmates.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Heaven forbid that I should try,&rdquo; replied the housemaster.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;But why?&rdquo; asked the reformer.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Because Nature hates any interference with her own arrangements,
+and if you start in to tame the obviously untameable you are taking
+a fearful responsibility on yourself.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Nonsense; boys are Nature&rsquo;s raw material.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Millions of boys are.&nbsp; There are just a few, and Bassington
+is one of them, who are Nature&rsquo;s highly finished product when
+they are in the schoolboy stage, and we, who are supposed to be moulding
+raw material, are quite helpless when we come in contact with them.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;But what happens to them when they grow up?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;They never do grow up,&rdquo; said the housemaster; &ldquo;that
+is their tragedy.&nbsp; Bassington will certainly never grow out of
+his present stage.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Now you are talking in the language of Peter Pan,&rdquo; said
+the form-master.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I am not thinking in the manner of Peter Pan,&rdquo; said the
+other.&nbsp; &ldquo;With all reverence for the author of that masterpiece
+I should say he had a wonderful and tender insight into the child mind
+and knew nothing whatever about boys.&nbsp; To make only one criticism
+on that particular work, can you imagine a lot of British boys, or boys
+of any country that one knows of, who would stay contentedly playing
+children&rsquo;s games in an underground cave when there were wolves
+and pirates and Red Indians to be had for the asking on the other side
+of the trap door?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The form-master laughed.&nbsp; &ldquo;You evidently think that the &lsquo;Boy
+who would not grow up&rsquo; must have been written by a &lsquo;grown-up
+who could never have been a boy.&rsquo;&nbsp; Perhaps that is the meaning
+of the &lsquo;Never-never Land.&rsquo;&nbsp; I daresay you&rsquo;re
+right in your criticism, but I don&rsquo;t agree with you about Bassington.&nbsp;
+He&rsquo;s a handful to deal with, as anyone knows who has come in contact
+with him, but if one&rsquo;s hands weren&rsquo;t full with a thousand
+and one other things I hold to my opinion that he could be tamed.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+And he went his way, having maintained a form-master&rsquo;s inalienable
+privilege of being in the right.<br>
+<br>
+* * * * *<br>
+<br>
+In the prefects&rsquo; room, Comus busied himself with the exact position
+of a chair planted out in the middle of the floor.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I think everything&rsquo;s ready,&rdquo; he said.<br>
+<br>
+Rutley glanced at the clock with the air of a Roman elegant in the Circus,
+languidly awaiting the introduction of an expected Christian to an expectant
+tiger.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;The kid is due in two minutes,&rdquo; he said.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;d jolly well better not be late,&rdquo; said Comus.<br>
+<br>
+Comus had gone through the mill of many scorching castigations in his
+earlier school days, and was able to appreciate to the last ounce the
+panic that must be now possessing his foredoomed victim, probably at
+this moment hovering miserably outside the door.&nbsp; After all, that
+was part of the fun of the thing, and most things have their amusing
+side if one knows where to look for it.<br>
+<br>
+There was a knock at the door, and Lancelot entered in response to a
+hearty friendly summons to &ldquo;come in.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve come to be caned,&rdquo; he said breathlessly; adding
+by way of identification, &ldquo;my name&rsquo;s Chetrof.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s quite bad enough in itself,&rdquo; said Comus, &ldquo;but
+there is probably worse to follow.&nbsp; You are evidently keeping something
+back from us.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I missed a footer practice,&rdquo; said Lancelot<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Six,&rdquo; said Comus briefly, picking up his cane.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t see the notice on the board,&rdquo; hazarded Lancelot
+as a forlorn hope.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;We are always pleased to listen to excuses, and our charge is
+two extra cuts.&nbsp; That will be eight.&nbsp; Get over.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+And Comus indicated the chair that stood in sinister isolation in the
+middle of the room.&nbsp; Never had an article of furniture seemed more
+hateful in Lancelot&rsquo;s eyes.&nbsp; Comus could well remember the
+time when a chair stuck in the middle of a room had seemed to him the
+most horrible of manufactured things.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Lend me a piece of chalk,&rdquo; he said to his brother prefect.<br>
+<br>
+Lancelot ruefully recognised the truth of the chalk-line story.<br>
+<br>
+Comus drew the desired line with an anxious exactitude which he would
+have scorned to apply to a diagram of Euclid or a map of the Russo-Persian
+frontier.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Bend a little more forward,&rdquo; he said to the victim, &ldquo;and
+much tighter.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t trouble to look pleasant, because I
+can&rsquo;t see your face anyway.&nbsp; It may sound unorthodox to say
+so, but this is going to hurt you much more than it will hurt me.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+There was a carefully measured pause, and then Lancelot was made vividly
+aware of what a good cane can be made to do in really efficient hands.&nbsp;
+At the second cut he projected himself hurriedly off the chair.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Now I&rsquo;ve lost count,&rdquo; said Comus; &ldquo;we shall
+have to begin all over again.&nbsp; Kindly get back into the same position.&nbsp;
+If you get down again before I&rsquo;ve finished Rutley will hold you
+over and you&rsquo;ll get a dozen.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Lancelot got back on to the chair, and was re-arranged to the taste
+of his executioner.&nbsp; He stayed there somehow or other while Comus
+made eight accurate and agonisingly effective shots at the chalk line.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;By the way,&rdquo; he said to his gasping and gulping victim
+when the infliction was over, &ldquo;you said Chetrof, didn&rsquo;t
+you?&nbsp; I believe I&rsquo;ve been asked to be kind to you.&nbsp;
+As a beginning you can clean out my study this afternoon.&nbsp; Be awfully
+careful how you dust the old china.&nbsp; If you break any don&rsquo;t
+come and tell me but just go and drown yourself somewhere; it will save
+you from a worse fate.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know where your study is,&rdquo; said Lancelot
+between his chokes.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;d better find it or I shall have to beat you, really
+hard this time.&nbsp; Here, you&rsquo;d better keep this chalk in your
+pocket, it&rsquo;s sure to come in handy later on.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t
+stop to thank me for all I&rsquo;ve done, it only embarrasses me.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+As Comus hadn&rsquo;t got a study Lancelot spent a feverish half-hour
+in looking for it, incidentally missing another footer practice.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Everything is very jolly here,&rdquo; wrote Lancelot to his sister
+Emmeline.&nbsp; &ldquo;The prefects can give you an awful hot time if
+they like, but most of them are rather decent.&nbsp; Some are Beasts.&nbsp;
+Bassington is a prefect though only a junior one.&nbsp; He is the Limit
+as Beasts go.&nbsp; At least I think so.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Schoolboy reticence went no further, but Emmeline filled in the gaps
+for herself with the lavish splendour of feminine imagination.&nbsp;
+Francesca&rsquo;s bridge went crashing into the abyss.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER III<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+On the evening of a certain November day, two years after the events
+heretofore chronicled, Francesca Bassington steered her way through
+the crowd that filled the rooms of her friend Serena Golackly, bestowing
+nods of vague recognition as she went, but with eyes that were obviously
+intent on focussing one particular figure.&nbsp; Parliament had pulled
+its energies together for an Autumn Session, and both political Parties
+were fairly well represented in the throng.&nbsp; Serena had a harmless
+way of inviting a number of more or less public men and women to her
+house, and hoping that if you left them together long enough they would
+constitute a <i>salon</i>.&nbsp; In pursuance of the same instinct she
+planted the flower borders at her week-end cottage retreat in Surrey
+with a large mixture of bulbs, and called the result a Dutch garden.&nbsp;
+Unfortunately, though you may bring brilliant talkers into your home,
+you cannot always make them talk brilliantly, or even talk at all; what
+is worse you cannot restrict the output of those starling-voiced dullards
+who seem to have, on all subjects, so much to say that was well worth
+leaving unsaid.&nbsp; One group that Francesca passed was discussing
+a Spanish painter, who was forty-three, and had painted thousands of
+square yards of canvas in his time, but of whom no one in London had
+heard till a few months ago; now the starling-voices seemed determined
+that one should hear of very little else.&nbsp; Three women knew how
+his name was pronounced, another always felt that she must go into a
+forest and pray whenever she saw his pictures, another had noticed that
+there were always pomegranates in his later compositions, and a man
+with an indefensible collar knew what the pomegranates &ldquo;meant.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+&ldquo;What I think so splendid about him,&rdquo; said a stout lady
+in a loud challenging voice, &ldquo;is the way he defies all the conventions
+of art while retaining all that the conventions stand for.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Ah, but have you noticed - &rdquo; put in the man with the atrocious
+collar, and Francesca pushed desperately on, wondering dimly as she
+went, what people found so unsupportable in the affliction of deafness.&nbsp;
+Her progress was impeded for a moment by a couple engaged in earnest
+and voluble discussion of some smouldering question of the day; a thin
+spectacled young man with the receding forehead that so often denotes
+advanced opinions, was talking to a spectacled young woman with a similar
+type of forehead, and exceedingly untidy hair.&nbsp; It was her ambition
+in life to be taken for a Russian girl-student, and she had spent weeks
+of patient research in trying to find out exactly where you put the
+tea-leaves in a samovar.&nbsp; She had once been introduced to a young
+Jewess from Odessa, who had died of pneumonia the following week; the
+experience, slight as it was, constituted the spectacled young lady
+an authority on all things Russian in the eyes of her immediate set.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Talk is helpful, talk is needful,&rdquo; the young man was saying,
+&ldquo;but what we have got to do is to lift the subject out of the
+furrow of indisciplined talk and place it on the threshing-floor of
+practical discussion.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The young woman took advantage of the rhetorical full-stop to dash in
+with the remark which was already marshalled on the tip of her tongue.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;In emancipating the serfs of poverty we must be careful to avoid
+the mistakes which Russian bureaucracy stumbled into when liberating
+the serfs of the soil.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+She paused in her turn for the sake of declamatory effect, but recovered
+her breath quickly enough to start afresh on level terms with the young
+man, who had jumped into the stride of his next sentence.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;They got off to a good start that time,&rdquo; said Francesca
+to herself; &ldquo;I suppose it&rsquo;s the Prevention of Destitution
+they&rsquo;re hammering at.&nbsp; What on earth would become of these
+dear good people if anyone started a crusade for the prevention of mediocrity?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Midway through one of the smaller rooms, still questing for an elusive
+presence, she caught sight of someone that she knew, and the shadow
+of a frown passed across her face.&nbsp; The object of her faintly signalled
+displeasure was Courtenay Youghal, a political spur-winner who seemed
+absurdly youthful to a generation that had never heard of Pitt.&nbsp;
+It was Youghal&rsquo;s ambition - or perhaps his hobby - to infuse into
+the greyness of modern political life some of the colour of Disraelian
+dandyism, tempered with the correctness of Anglo-Saxon taste, and supplemented
+by the flashes of wit that were inherent from the Celtic strain in him.&nbsp;
+His success was only a half-measure.&nbsp; The public missed in him
+that touch of blatancy which it looks for in its rising public men;
+the decorative smoothness of his chestnut-golden hair, and the lively
+sparkle of his epigrams were counted to him for good, but the restrained
+sumptuousness of his waistcoats and cravats were as wasted efforts.&nbsp;
+If he had habitually smoked cigarettes in a pink coral mouthpiece, or
+worn spats of Mackenzie tartan, the great heart of the voting-man, and
+the gush of the paragraph-makers might have been unreservedly his.&nbsp;
+The art of public life consists to a great extent of knowing exactly
+where to stop and going a bit further.<br>
+<br>
+It was not Youghal&rsquo;s lack of political sagacity that had brought
+the momentary look of disapproval into Francesca&rsquo;s face.&nbsp;
+The fact was that Comus, who had left off being a schoolboy and was
+now a social problem, had lately enrolled himself among the young politician&rsquo;s
+associates and admirers, and as the boy knew and cared nothing about
+politics, and merely copied Youghal&rsquo;s waistcoats, and, less successfully,
+his conversation, Francesca felt herself justified in deploring the
+intimacy.&nbsp; To a woman who dressed well on comparatively nothing
+a year it was an anxious experience to have a son who dressed sumptuously
+on absolutely nothing.<br>
+<br>
+The cloud that had passed over her face when she caught sight of the
+offending Youghal was presently succeeded by a smile of gratified achievement,
+as she encountered a bow of recognition and welcome from a portly middle-aged
+gentleman, who seemed genuinely anxious to include her in the rather
+meagre group that he had gathered about him.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;We were just talking about my new charge,&rdquo; he observed
+genially, including in the &ldquo;we&rdquo; his somewhat depressed-looking
+listeners, who in all human probability had done none of the talking.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I was just telling them, and you may be interested to hear this
+- &rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Francesca, with Spartan stoicism, continued to wear an ingratiating
+smile, though the character of the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear
+and will not hearken, seemed to her at that moment a beautiful one.<br>
+<br>
+Sir Julian Jull had been a member of a House of Commons distinguished
+for its high standard of well-informed mediocrity, and had harmonised
+so thoroughly with his surroundings that the most attentive observer
+of Parliamentary proceedings could scarcely have told even on which
+side of the House he sat.&nbsp; A baronetcy bestowed on him by the Party
+in power had at least removed that doubt; some weeks later he had been
+made Governor of some West Indian dependency, whether as a reward for
+having accepted the baronetcy, or as an application of a theory that
+West Indian islands get the Governors they deserve, it would have been
+hard to say.&nbsp; To Sir Julian the appointment was, doubtless, one
+of some importance; during the span of his Governorship the island might
+possibly be visited by a member of the Royal Family, or at the least
+by an earthquake, and in either case his name would get into the papers.&nbsp;
+To the public the matter was one of absolute indifference; &ldquo;who
+is he and where is it?&rdquo; would have correctly epitomised the sum
+total of general information on the personal and geographical aspects
+of the case.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca, however, from the moment she had heard of the likelihood
+of the appointment, had taken a deep and lively interest in Sir Julian.&nbsp;
+As a Member of Parliament he had not filled any very pressing social
+want in her life, and on the rare occasions when she took tea on the
+Terrace of the House she was wont to lapse into rapt contemplation of
+St. Thomas&rsquo;s Hospital whenever she saw him within bowing distance.&nbsp;
+But as Governor of an island he would, of course, want a private secretary,
+and as a friend and colleague of Henry Greech, to whom he was indebted
+for many little acts of political support (they had once jointly drafted
+an amendment which had been ruled out of order), what was more natural
+and proper than that he should let his choice fall on Henry&rsquo;s
+nephew Comus?&nbsp; While privately doubting whether the boy would make
+the sort of secretary that any public man would esteem as a treasure,
+Henry was thoroughly in agreement with Francesca as to the excellence
+and desirability of an arrangement which would transplant that troublesome&rsquo;
+young animal from the too restricted and conspicuous area that centres
+in the parish of St. James&rsquo;s to some misty corner of the British
+dominion overseas.&nbsp; Brother and sister had conspired to give an
+elaborate and at the same time cosy little luncheon to Sir Julian on
+the very day that his appointment was officially announced, and the
+question of the secretaryship had been mooted and sedulously fostered
+as occasion permitted, until all that was now needed to clinch the matter
+was a formal interview between His Excellency and Comus.&nbsp; The boy
+had from the first shewn very little gratification at the prospect of
+his deportation.&nbsp; To live on a remote shark-girt island, as he
+expressed it, with the Jull family as his chief social mainstay, and
+Sir Julian&rsquo;s conversation as a daily item of his existence, did
+not inspire him with the same degree of enthusiasm as was displayed
+by his mother and uncle, who, after all, were not making the experiment.&nbsp;
+Even the necessity for an entirely new outfit did not appeal to his
+imagination with the force that might have been expected.&nbsp; But,
+however lukewarm his adhesion to the project might be, Francesca and
+her brother were clearly determined that no lack of deft persistence
+on their part should endanger its success.&nbsp; It was for the purpose
+of reminding Sir Julian of his promise to meet Comus at lunch on the
+following day, and definitely settle the matter of the secretaryship
+that Francesca was now enduring the ordeal of a long harangue on the
+value of the West Indian group as an Imperial asset.&nbsp; Other listeners
+dexterously detached themselves one by one, but Francesca&rsquo;s patience
+outlasted even Sir Julian&rsquo;s flow of commonplaces, and her devotion
+was duly rewarded by a renewed acknowledgment of the lunch engagement
+and its purpose.&nbsp; She pushed her way back through the throng of
+starling-voiced chatterers fortified by a sense of well-earned victory.&nbsp;
+Dear Serena&rsquo;s absurd <i>salons</i> served some good purpose after
+all.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca was not an early riser and her breakfast was only just beginning
+to mobilise on the breakfast-table next morning when a copy of <i>The
+Times</i>, sent by special messenger from her brother&rsquo;s house,
+was brought up to her room.&nbsp; A heavy margin of blue pencilling
+drew her attention to a prominently-printed letter which bore the ironical
+heading: &ldquo;Julian Jull, Proconsul.&rdquo;&nbsp; The matter of the
+letter was a cruel dis-interment of some fatuous and forgotten speeches
+made by Sir Julian to his constituents not many years ago, in which
+the value of some of our Colonial possessions, particularly certain
+West Indian islands, was decried in a medley of pomposity, ignorance
+and amazingly cheap humour.&nbsp; The extracts given sounded weak and
+foolish enough, taken by themselves, but the writer of the letter had
+interlarded them with comments of his own, which sparkled with an ironical
+brilliance that was Cervantes-like in its polished cruelty.&nbsp; Remembering
+her ordeal of the previous evening Francesca permitted herself a certain
+feeling of amusement as she read the merciless stabs inflicted on the
+newly-appointed Governor; then she came to the signature at the foot
+of the letter, and the laughter died out of her eyes.&nbsp; &ldquo;Comus
+Bassington&rdquo; stared at her from above a thick layer of blue pencil
+lines marked by Henry Greech&rsquo;s shaking hand.<br>
+<br>
+Comus could no more have devised such a letter than he could have written
+an Episcopal charge to the clergy of any given diocese.&nbsp; It was
+obviously the work of Courtenay Youghal, and Comus, for a palpable purpose
+of his own, had wheedled him into foregoing for once the pride of authorship
+in a clever piece of political raillery, and letting his young friend
+stand sponsor instead.&nbsp; It was a daring stroke, and there could
+be no question as to its success; the secretaryship and the distant
+shark-girt island faded away into the horizon of impossible things.&nbsp;
+Francesca, forgetting the golden rule of strategy which enjoins a careful
+choosing of ground and opportunity before entering on hostilities, made
+straight for the bathroom door, behind which a lively din of splashing
+betokened that Comus had at least begun his toilet.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You wicked boy, what have you done?&rdquo; she cried, reproachfully.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Me washee,&rdquo; came a cheerful shout; &ldquo;me washee from
+the neck all the way down to the merrythought, and now washee down from
+the merrythought to - &rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You have ruined your future.&nbsp; <i>The Times</i> has printed
+that miserable letter with your signature.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+A loud squeal of joy came from the bath.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh, Mummy!&nbsp;
+Let me see!&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+There were sounds as of a sprawling dripping body clambering hastily
+out of the bath.&nbsp; Francesca fled.&nbsp; One cannot effectively
+scold a moist nineteen-year old boy clad only in a bath-towel and a
+cloud of steam.<br>
+<br>
+Another messenger arrived before Francesca&rsquo;s breakfast was over.&nbsp;
+This one brought a letter from Sir Julian Jull, excusing himself from
+fulfilment of the luncheon engagement.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER IV<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Francesca prided herself on being able to see things from other people&rsquo;s
+points of view, which meant, as it usually does, that she could see
+her own point of view from various aspects.&nbsp; As regards Comus,
+whose doings and non-doings bulked largely in her thoughts at the present
+moment, she had mapped out in her mind so clearly what his outlook in
+life ought to be, that she was peculiarly unfitted to understand the
+drift of his feelings or the impulses that governed them.&nbsp; Fate
+had endowed her with a son; in limiting the endowment to a solitary
+offspring Fate had certainly shown a moderation which Francesca was
+perfectly willing to acknowledge and be thankful for; but then, as she
+pointed out to a certain complacent friend of hers who cheerfully sustained
+an endowment of half-a-dozen male offsprings and a girl or two, her
+one child was Comus.&nbsp; Moderation in numbers was more than counterbalanced
+in his case by extravagance in characteristics.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca mentally compared her son with hundreds of other young men
+whom she saw around her, steadily, and no doubt happily, engaged in
+the process of transforming themselves from nice boys into useful citizens.&nbsp;
+Most of them had occupations, or were industriously engaged in qualifying
+for such; in their leisure moments they smoked reasonably-priced cigarettes,
+went to the cheaper seats at music-halls, watched an occasional cricket
+match at Lord&rsquo;s with apparent interest, saw most of the world&rsquo;s
+spectacular events through the medium of the cinematograph, and were
+wont to exchange at parting seemingly superfluous injunctions to &ldquo;be
+good.&rdquo;&nbsp; The whole of Bond Street and many of the tributary
+thoroughfares of Piccadilly might have been swept off the face of modern
+London without in any way interfering with the supply of their daily
+wants.&nbsp; They were doubtless dull as acquaintances, but as sons
+they would have been eminently restful.&nbsp; With a growing sense of
+irritation Francesca compared these deserving young men with her own
+intractable offspring, and wondered why Fate should have singled her
+out to be the parent of such a vexatious variant from a comfortable
+and desirable type.&nbsp; As far as remunerative achievement was concerned,
+Comus copied the insouciance of the field lily with a dangerous fidelity.&nbsp;
+Like his mother he looked round with wistful irritation at the example
+afforded by contemporary youth, but he concentrated his attention exclusively
+on the richer circles of his acquaintance, young men who bought cars
+and polo ponies as unconcernedly as he might purchase a carnation for
+his buttonhole, and went for trips to Cairo or the Tigris valley with
+less difficulty and finance-stretching than he encountered in contriving
+a week-end at Brighton.<br>
+<br>
+Gaiety and good-looks had carried Comus successfully and, on the whole,
+pleasantly, through schooldays and a recurring succession of holidays;
+the same desirable assets were still at his service to advance him along
+his road, but it was a disconcerting experience to find that they could
+not be relied on to go all distances at all times.&nbsp; In an animal
+world, and a fiercely competitive animal world at that, something more
+was needed than the decorative <i>abandon</i> of the field lily, and
+it was just that something more which Comus seemed unable or unwilling
+to provide on his own account; it was just the lack of that something
+more which left him sulking with Fate over the numerous breakdowns and
+stumbling-blocks that held him up on what he expected to be a triumphal
+or, at any rate, unimpeded progress.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca was, in her own way, fonder of Comus than of anyone else in
+the world, and if he had been browning his skin somewhere east of Suez
+she would probably have kissed his photograph with genuine fervour every
+night before going to bed; the appearance of a cholera scare or rumour
+of native rising in the columns of her daily news-sheet would have caused
+her a flutter of anxiety, and she would have mentally likened herself
+to a Spartan mother sacrificing her best-beloved on the altar of State
+necessities.&nbsp; But with the best-beloved installed under her roof,
+occupying an unreasonable amount of cubic space, and demanding daily
+sacrifices instead of providing the raw material for one, her feelings
+were tinged with irritation rather than affection.&nbsp; She might have
+forgiven Comus generously for misdeeds of some gravity committed in
+another continent, but she could never overlook the fact that out of
+a dish of five plovers&rsquo; eggs he was certain to take three.&nbsp;
+The absent may be always wrong, but they are seldom in a position to
+be inconsiderate.<br>
+<br>
+Thus a wall of ice had grown up gradually between mother and son, a
+barrier across which they could hold converse, but which gave a wintry
+chill even to the sparkle of their lightest words.&nbsp; The boy had
+the gift of being irresistibly amusing when he chose to exert himself
+in that direction, and after a long series of moody or jangling meal-sittings
+he would break forth into a torrential flow of small talk, scandal and
+malicious anecdote, true or more generally invented, to which Francesca
+listened with a relish and appreciation, that was all the more flattering
+from being so unwillingly bestowed.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;If you chose your friends from a rather more reputable set you
+would be doubtless less amusing, but there would be compensating advantages.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Francesca snapped the remark out at lunch one day when she had been
+betrayed into a broader smile than she considered the circumstances
+of her attitude towards Comus warranted.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to move in quite decent society to-night,&rdquo;
+replied Comus with a pleased chuckle; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to meet
+you and Uncle Henry and heaps of nice dull God-fearing people at dinner.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Francesca gave a little gasp of surprise and annoyance.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t mean to say Caroline has asked you to dinner
+to-night?&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;and of course without telling me.&nbsp;
+How exceedingly like her!&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Lady Caroline Benaresq had reached that age when you can say and do
+what you like in defiance of people&rsquo;s most sensitive feelings
+and most cherished antipathies.&nbsp; Not that she had waited to attain
+her present age before pursuing that line of conduct; she came of a
+family whose individual members went through life, from the nursery
+to the grave, with as much tact and consideration as a cactus-hedge
+might show in going through a crowded bathing tent.&nbsp; It was a compensating
+mercy that they disagreed rather more among themselves than they did
+with the outside world; every known variety and shade of religion and
+politics had been pressed into the family service to avoid the possibility
+of any agreement on the larger essentials of life, and such unlooked-for
+happenings as the Home Rule schism, the Tariff-Reform upheaval and the
+Suffragette crusade were thankfully seized on as furnishing occasion
+for further differences and sub-divisions.&nbsp; Lady Caroline&rsquo;s
+favourite scheme of entertaining was to bring jarring and antagonistic
+elements into close contact and play them remorselessly one against
+the other.&nbsp; &ldquo;One gets much better results under those circumstances&rdquo;
+she used to observe, &ldquo;than by asking people who wish to meet each
+other.&nbsp; Few people talk as brilliantly to impress a friend as they
+do to depress an enemy.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+She admitted that her theory broke down rather badly if you applied
+it to Parliamentary debates.&nbsp; At her own dinner table its success
+was usually triumphantly vindicated.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Who else is to be there?&rdquo; Francesca asked, with some pardonable
+misgiving.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Courtenay Youghal.&nbsp; He&rsquo;ll probably sit next to you,
+so you&rsquo;d better think out a lot of annihilating remarks in readiness.&nbsp;
+And Elaine de Frey.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think I&rsquo;ve heard of her.&nbsp; Who is she?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Nobody in particular, but rather nice-looking in a solemn sort
+of way, and almost indecently rich.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Marry her&rdquo; was the advice which sprang to Francesca&rsquo;s
+lips, but she choked it back with a salted almond, having a rare perception
+of the fact that words are sometimes given to us to defeat our purposes.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Caroline has probably marked her down for Toby or one of the
+grand-nephews,&rdquo; she said, carelessly; &ldquo;a little money would
+be rather useful in that quarter, I imagine.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Comus tucked in his underlip with just the shade of pugnacity that she
+wanted to see.<br>
+<br>
+An advantageous marriage was so obviously the most sensible course for
+him to embark on that she scarcely dared to hope that he would seriously
+entertain it; yet there was just a chance that if he got as far as the
+flirtation stage with an attractive (and attracted) girl who was also
+an heiress, the sheer perversity of his nature might carry him on to
+more definite courtship, if only from the desire to thrust other more
+genuinely enamoured suitors into the background.&nbsp; It was a forlorn
+hope; so forlorn that the idea even crossed her mind of throwing herself
+on the mercy of her <i>b&ecirc;te</i> <i>noire</i>, Courtenay Youghal,
+and trying to enlist the influence which he seemed to possess over Comus
+for the purpose of furthering her hurriedly conceived project.&nbsp;
+Anyhow, the dinner promised to be more interesting than she had originally
+anticipated.<br>
+<br>
+Lady Caroline was a professed Socialist in politics, chiefly, it was
+believed, because she was thus enabled to disagree with most of the
+Liberals and Conservatives, and all the Socialists of the day.&nbsp;
+She did not permit her Socialism, however, to penetrate below stairs;
+her cook and butler had every encouragement to be Individualists.&nbsp;
+Francesca, who was a keen and intelligent food critic, harboured no
+misgivings as to her hostess&rsquo;s kitchen and cellar departments;
+some of the human side-dishes at the feast gave her more ground for
+uneasiness.&nbsp; Courtenay Youghal, for instance, would probably be
+brilliantly silent; her brother Henry would almost certainly be the
+reverse.<br>
+<br>
+The dinner party was a large one and Francesca arrived late with little
+time to take preliminary stock of the guests; a card with the name,
+&ldquo;Miss de Frey,&rdquo; immediately opposite her own place at the
+other side of the table, indicated, however, the whereabouts of the
+heiress.&nbsp; It was characteristic of Francesca that she first carefully
+read the menu from end to end, and then indulged in an equally careful
+though less open scrutiny of the girl who sat opposite her, the girl
+who was nobody in particular, but whose income was everything that could
+be desired.&nbsp; She was pretty in a restrained nut-brown fashion,
+and had a look of grave reflective calm that probably masked a speculative
+unsettled temperament.&nbsp; Her pose, if one wished to be critical,
+was just a little too elaborately careless.&nbsp; She wore some excellently
+set rubies with that indefinable air of having more at home that is
+so difficult to improvise.&nbsp; Francesca was distinctly pleased with
+her survey.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You seem interested in your <i>vis-&agrave;-vis</i>,&rdquo; said
+Courtenay Youghal.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I almost think I&rsquo;ve seen her before,&rdquo; said Francesca;
+&ldquo;her face seems familiar to me.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;The narrow gallery at the Louvre; attributed to Leonardo da Vinci,&rdquo;
+said Youghal.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; said Francesca, her feelings divided between
+satisfaction at capturing an elusive impression and annoyance that Youghal
+should have been her helper.&nbsp; A stronger tinge of annoyance possessed
+her when she heard the voice of Henry Greech raised in painful prominence
+at Lady Caroline&rsquo;s end of the table.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I called on the Trudhams yesterday,&rdquo; he announced; &ldquo;it
+was their Silver Wedding, you know, at least the day before was.&nbsp;
+Such lots of silver presents, quite a show.&nbsp; Of course there were
+a great many duplicates, but still, very nice to have.&nbsp; I think
+they were very pleased to get so many.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;We must not grudge them their show of presents after their twenty-five
+years of married life,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline, gently; &ldquo;it
+is the silver lining to their cloud.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+A third of the guests present were related to the Trudhams.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Lady Caroline is beginning well,&rdquo; murmured Courtenay Youghal.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I should hardly call twenty-five years of married life a cloud,&rdquo;
+said Henry Greech, lamely.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t let&rsquo;s talk about married life,&rdquo; said
+a tall handsome woman, who looked like some modern painter&rsquo;s conception
+of the goddess Bellona; &ldquo;it&rsquo;s my misfortune to write eternally
+about husbands and wives and their variants.&nbsp; My public expects
+it of me.&nbsp; I do so envy journalists who can write about plagues
+and strikes and Anarchist plots, and other pleasing things, instead
+of being tied down to one stale old topic.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Who is that woman and what has she written?&rdquo; Francesca
+asked Youghal; she dimly remembered having seen her at one of Serena
+Golackly&rsquo;s gatherings, surrounded by a little Court of admirers.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I forget her name; she has a villa at San Remo or Mentone, or
+somewhere where one does have villas, and plays an extraordinary good
+game of bridge.&nbsp; Also she has the reputation, rather rare in your
+sex, of being a wonderfully sound judge of wine.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;But what has she written?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Oh, several novels of the thinnish ice order.&nbsp; Her last
+one, &lsquo;The Woman who wished it was Wednesday,&rsquo; has been banned
+at all the libraries.&nbsp; I expect you&rsquo;ve read it.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see why you should think so,&rdquo; said Francesca,
+coldly.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Only because Comus lent me your copy yesterday,&rdquo; said Youghal.&nbsp;
+He threw back his handsome head and gave her a sidelong glance of quizzical
+amusement.&nbsp; He knew that she hated his intimacy with Comus, and
+he was secretly rather proud of his influence over the boy, shallow
+and negative though he knew it to be.&nbsp; It had been, on his part,
+an unsought intimacy, and it would probably fall to pieces the moment
+he tried seriously to take up the <i>r&ocirc;le</i> of mentor.&nbsp;
+The fact that Comus&rsquo;s mother openly disapproved of the friendship
+gave it perhaps its chief interest in the young politician&rsquo;s eyes.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca turned her attention to her brother&rsquo;s end of the table.&nbsp;
+Henry Greech had willingly availed himself of the invitation to leave
+the subject of married life, and had launched forthwith into the equally
+well-worn theme of current politics.&nbsp; He was not a person who was
+in much demand for public meetings, and the House showed no great impatience
+to hear his views on the topics of the moment; its impatience, indeed,
+was manifested rather in the opposite direction.&nbsp; Hence he was
+prone to unburden himself of accumulated political wisdom as occasion
+presented itself - sometimes, indeed, to assume an occasion that was
+hardly visible to the naked intelligence.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Our opponents are engaged in a hopelessly uphill struggle, and
+they know it,&rdquo; he chirruped, defiantly; &ldquo;they&rsquo;ve become
+possessed, like the Gadarene swine, with a whole legion of - &rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Surely the Gadarene swine went downhill,&rdquo; put in Lady Caroline
+in a gently enquiring voice.<br>
+<br>
+Henry Greech hastily abandoned simile and fell back on platitude and
+the safer kinds of fact.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca did not regard her brother&rsquo;s views on statecraft either
+in the light of gospel or revelation; as Comus once remarked, they more
+usually suggested exodus.&nbsp; In the present instance she found distraction
+in a renewed scrutiny of the girl opposite her, who seemed to be only
+moderately interested in the conversational efforts of the diners on
+either side of her.&nbsp; Comus who was looking and talking his best,
+was sitting at the further end of the table, and Francesca was quick
+to notice in which direction the girl&rsquo;s glances were continually
+straying.&nbsp; Once or twice the eyes of the young people met and a
+swift flush of pleasure and a half-smile that spoke of good understanding
+came to the heiress&rsquo;s face.&nbsp; It did not need the gift of
+the traditional intuition of her sex to enable Francesca to guess that
+the girl with the desirable banking account was already considerably
+attracted by the lively young Pagan who had, when he cared to practise
+it, such an art of winning admiration.&nbsp; For the first time for
+many, many months Francesca saw her son&rsquo;s prospects in a rose-coloured
+setting, and she began, unconsciously, to wonder exactly how much wealth
+was summed up in the expressive label &ldquo;almost indecently rich.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+A wife with a really large fortune and a correspondingly big dower of
+character and ambition, might, perhaps, succeed in turning Comus&rsquo;s
+latent energies into a groove which would provide him, if not with a
+career, at least with an occupation, and the young serious face opposite
+looked as if its owner lacked neither character or ambition.&nbsp; Francesca&rsquo;s
+speculations took a more personal turn.&nbsp; Out of the well-filled
+coffers with which her imagination was toying, an inconsiderable sum
+might eventually be devoted to the leasing, or even perhaps the purchase
+of, the house in Blue Street when the present convenient arrangement
+should have come to an end, and Francesca and the Van der Meulen would
+not be obliged to seek fresh quarters.<br>
+<br>
+A woman&rsquo;s voice, talking in a discreet undertone on the other
+side of Courtenay Youghal, broke in on her bridge-building.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Tons of money and really very presentable.&nbsp; Just the wife
+for a rising young politician.&nbsp; Go in and win her before she&rsquo;s
+snapped up by some fortune hunter.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Youghal and his instructress in worldly wisdom were looking straight
+across the table at the Leonardo da Vinci girl with the grave reflective
+eyes and the over-emphasised air of repose.&nbsp; Francesca felt a quick
+throb of anger against her match-making neighbour; why, she asked herself,
+must some women, with no end or purpose of their own to serve, except
+the sheer love of meddling in the affairs of others, plunge their hands
+into plots and schemings of this sort, in which the happiness of more
+than one person was concerned?&nbsp; And more clearly than ever she
+realised how thoroughly she detested Courtenay Youghal.&nbsp; She had
+disliked him as an evil influence, setting before her son an example
+of showy ambition that he was not in the least likely to follow, and
+providing him with a model of extravagant dandyism that he was only
+too certain to copy.&nbsp; In her heart she knew that Comus would have
+embarked just as surely on his present course of idle self-indulgence
+if he had never known of the existence of Youghal, but she chose to
+regard that young man as her son&rsquo;s evil genius, and now he seemed
+likely to justify more than ever the character she had fastened on to
+him.&nbsp; For once in his life Comus appeared to have an idea of behaving
+sensibly and making some use of his opportunities, and almost at the
+same moment Courtenay Youghal arrived on the scene as a possible and
+very dangerous rival.&nbsp; Against the good looks and fitful powers
+of fascination that Comus could bring into the field, the young politician
+could match half-a-dozen dazzling qualities which would go far to recommend
+him in the eyes of a woman of the world, still more in those of a young
+girl in search of an ideal.&nbsp; Good-looking in his own way, if not
+on such showy lines as Comus, always well turned-out, witty, self-confident
+without being bumptious, with a conspicuous Parliamentary career alongside
+him, and heaven knew what else in front of him, Courtenay Youghal certainly
+was not a rival whose chances could be held very lightly.&nbsp; Francesca
+laughed bitterly to herself as she remembered that a few hours ago she
+had entertained the idea of begging for his good offices in helping
+on Comus&rsquo;s wooing.&nbsp; One consolation, at least, she found
+for herself: if Youghal really meant to step in and try and cut out
+his young friend, the latter at any rate had snatched a useful start.&nbsp;
+Comus had mentioned Miss de Frey at luncheon that day, casually and
+dispassionately; if the subject of the dinner guests had not come up
+he would probably not have mentioned her at all.&nbsp; But they were
+obviously already very good friends.&nbsp; It was part and parcel of
+the state of domestic tension at Blue Street that Francesca should only
+have come to know of this highly interesting heiress by an accidental
+sorting of guests at a dinner party.<br>
+<br>
+Lady Caroline&rsquo;s voice broke in on her reflections; it was a gentle
+purring voice, that possessed an uncanny quality of being able to make
+itself heard down the longest dinner table.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;The dear Archdeacon is getting so absent-minded.&nbsp; He read
+a list of box-holders for the opera as the First Lesson the other Sunday,
+instead of the families and lots of the tribes of Israel that entered
+Canaan.&nbsp; Fortunately no one noticed the mistake.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER V<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+On a conveniently secluded bench facing the Northern Pheasantry in the
+Zoological Society&rsquo;s Gardens, Regent&rsquo;s Park, Courtenay Youghal
+sat immersed in mature flirtation with a lady, who, though certainly
+young in fact and appearance, was some four or five years his senior.&nbsp;
+ When he was a schoolboy of sixteen, Molly McQuade had personally conducted
+him to the Zoo and stood him dinner afterwards at Kettner&rsquo;s, and
+whenever the two of them happened to be in town on the anniversary of
+that bygone festivity they religiously repeated the programme in its
+entirety.&nbsp; Even the menu of the dinner was adhered to as nearly
+as possible; the original selection of food and wine that schoolboy
+exuberance, tempered by schoolboy shyness, had pitched on those many
+years ago, confronted Youghal on those occasions, as a drowning man&rsquo;s
+past life is said to rise up and parade itself in his last moments of
+consciousness.<br>
+<br>
+The flirtation which was thus perennially restored to its old-time footing
+owed its longevity more to the enterprising solicitude of Miss McQuade
+than to any conscious sentimental effort on the part of Youghal himself.&nbsp;
+Molly McQuade was known to her neighbours in a minor hunting shire as
+a hard-riding conventionally unconventional type of young woman, who
+came naturally into the classification, &ldquo;a good sort.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+She was just sufficiently good-looking, sufficiently reticent about
+her own illnesses, when she had any, and sufficiently appreciative of
+her neighbours&rsquo; gardens, children and hunters to be generally
+popular.&nbsp; Most men liked her, and the percentage of women who disliked
+her was not inconveniently high.&nbsp; One of these days, it was assumed,
+she would marry a brewer or a Master of Otter Hounds, and, after a brief
+interval, be known to the world as the mother of a boy or two at Malvern
+or some similar seat of learning.&nbsp; The romantic side of her nature
+was altogether unguessed by the countryside.<br>
+<br>
+Her romances were mostly in serial form and suffered perhaps in fervour
+from their disconnected course what they gained in length of days.&nbsp;
+Her affectionate interest in the several young men who figured in her
+affairs of the heart was perfectly honest, and she certainly made no
+attempt either to conceal their separate existences, or to play them
+off one against the other.&nbsp; Neither could it be said that she was
+a husband hunter; she had made up her mind what sort of man she was
+likely to marry, and her forecast did not differ very widely from that
+formed by her local acquaintances.&nbsp; If her married life were eventually
+to turn out a failure, at least she looked forward to it with very moderate
+expectations.&nbsp; Her love affairs she put on a very different footing
+and apparently they were the all-absorbing element in her life.&nbsp;
+She possessed the happily constituted temperament which enables a man
+or woman to be a &ldquo;pluralist,&rdquo; and to observe the sage precaution
+of not putting all one&rsquo;s eggs into one basket.&nbsp; Her demands
+were not exacting; she required of her affinity that he should be young,
+good-looking, and at least, moderately amusing; she would have preferred
+him to be invariably faithful, but, with her own example before her,
+she was prepared for the probability, bordering on certainty, that he
+would be nothing of the sort.&nbsp; The philosophy of the &ldquo;Garden
+of Kama&rdquo; was the compass by which she steered her barque and thus
+far, if she had encountered some storms and buffeting, she had at least
+escaped being either shipwrecked or becalmed.<br>
+<br>
+Courtenay Youghal had not been designed by Nature to fulfil the <i>r&ocirc;le</i>
+of an ardent or devoted lover, and he scrupulously respected the limits
+which Nature had laid down.&nbsp; For Molly, however, he had a certain
+responsive affection.&nbsp; She had always obviously admired him, and
+at the same time she never beset him with crude flattery; the principal
+reason why the flirtation had stood the test of so many years was the
+fact that it only flared into active existence at convenient intervals.&nbsp;
+In an age when the telephone has undermined almost every fastness of
+human privacy, and the sanctity of one&rsquo;s seclusion depends often
+on the ability for tactful falsehood shown by a club pageboy, Youghal
+was duly appreciative of the circumstance that his lady fair spent a
+large part of the year pursuing foxes, in lieu of pursuing him.&nbsp;
+Also the honestly admitted fact that, in her human hunting, she rode
+after more than one quarry, made the inevitable break-up of the affair
+a matter to which both could look forward without a sense of coming
+embarrassment and recrimination.&nbsp; When the time for gathering ye
+rosebuds should be over, neither of them could accuse the other of having
+wrecked his or her entire life.&nbsp; At the most they would only have
+disorganised a week-end.<br>
+<br>
+On this particular afternoon, when old reminiscences had been gone through,
+and the intervening gossip of past months duly recounted, a lull in
+the conversation made itself rather obstinately felt.&nbsp; Molly had
+already guessed that matters were about to slip into a new phase; the
+affair had reached maturity long ago, and a new phase must be in the
+nature of a wane.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re a clever brute,&rdquo; she said, suddenly, with
+an air of affectionate regret; &ldquo;I always knew you&rsquo;d get
+on in the House, but I hardly expected you to come to the front so soon.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m coming to the front,&rdquo; admitted Youghal, judicially;
+&ldquo;the problem is, shall I be able to stay there.&nbsp; Unless something
+happens in the financial line before long, I don&rsquo;t see how I&rsquo;m
+to stay in Parliament at all.&nbsp; Economy is out of the question.&nbsp;
+It would open people&rsquo;s eyes, I fancy, if they knew how little
+I exist on as it is.&nbsp; And I&rsquo;m living so far beyond my income
+that we may almost be said to be living apart.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It will have to be a rich wife, I suppose,&rdquo; said Molly,
+slowly; &ldquo;that&rsquo;s the worst of success, it imposes so many
+conditions.&nbsp; I rather knew, from something in your manner, that
+you were drifting that way.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Youghal said nothing in the way of contradiction; he gazed steadfastly
+at the aviary in front of him as though exotic pheasants were for the
+moment the most absorbing study in the world.&nbsp; As a matter of fact,
+his mind was centred on the image of Elaine de Frey, with her clear
+untroubled eyes and her Leonardo da Vinci air.&nbsp; He was wondering
+whether he was likely to fall into a frame of mind concerning her which
+would be in the least like falling in love.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I shall mind horribly,&rdquo; continued Molly, after a pause,
+&ldquo;but, of course, I have always known that something of the sort
+would have to happen one of these days.&nbsp; When a man goes into politics
+he can&rsquo;t call his soul his own, and I suppose his heart becomes
+an impersonal possession in the same way.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Most people who know me would tell you that I haven&rsquo;t got
+a heart,&rdquo; said Youghal.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve often felt inclined to agree with them,&rdquo; said
+Molly; &ldquo;and then, now and again, I think you have a heart tucked
+away somewhere.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I hope I have,&rdquo; said Youghal, &ldquo;because I&rsquo;m
+trying to break to you the fact that I think I&rsquo;m falling in love
+with somebody.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Molly McQuade turned sharply to look at her companion, who still fixed
+his gaze on the pheasant run in front of him.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t tell me you&rsquo;re losing your head over somebody
+useless, someone without money,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t
+think I could stand that.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+For the moment she feared that Courtenay&rsquo;s selfishness might have
+taken an unexpected turn, in which ambition had given way to the fancy
+of the hour; he might be going to sacrifice his Parliamentary career
+for a life of stupid lounging in momentarily attractive company.&nbsp;
+He quickly undeceived her.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;She&rsquo;s got heaps of money.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Molly gave a grunt of relief.&nbsp; Her affection for Courtenay had
+produced the anxiety which underlay her first question; a natural jealousy
+prompted the next one.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Is she young and pretty and all that sort of thing, or is she
+just a good sort with a sympathetic manner and nice eyes?&nbsp; As a
+rule that&rsquo;s the kind that goes with a lot of money.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Young and quite good-looking in her way, and a distinct style
+of her own.&nbsp; Some people would call her beautiful.&nbsp; As a political
+hostess I should think she&rsquo;d be splendid.&nbsp; I imagine I&rsquo;m
+rather in love with her.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;And is she in love with you?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Youghal threw back his head with the slight assertive movement that
+Molly knew and liked.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;She&rsquo;s a girl who I fancy would let judgment influence her
+a lot.&nbsp; And without being stupidly conceited, I think I may say
+she might do worse than throw herself away on me.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m young
+and quite good-looking, and I&rsquo;m making a name for myself in the
+House; she&rsquo;ll be able to read all sorts of nice and horrid things
+about me in the papers at breakfast-time.&nbsp; I can be brilliantly
+amusing at times, and I understand the value of silence; there is no
+fear that I shall ever degenerate into that fearsome thing - a cheerful
+talkative husband.&nbsp; For a girl with money and social ambitions
+I should think I was rather a good thing.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You are certainly in love, Courtenay,&rdquo; said Molly, &ldquo;but
+it&rsquo;s the old love and not a new one.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m rather glad.&nbsp;
+I should have hated to have you head-over-heels in love with a pretty
+woman, even for a short time.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll be much happier as
+it is.&nbsp; And I&rsquo;m going to put all my feelings in the background,
+and tell you to go in and win.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ve got to marry a rich
+woman, and if she&rsquo;s nice and will make a good hostess, so much
+the better for everybody.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll be happier in your married
+life than I shall be in mine, when it comes; you&rsquo;ll have other
+interests to absorb you.&nbsp; I shall just have the garden and dairy
+and nursery and lending library, as like as two peas to all the gardens
+and dairies and nurseries for hundreds of miles round.&nbsp; You won&rsquo;t
+care for your wife enough to be worried every time she has a finger-ache,
+and you&rsquo;ll like her well enough to be pleased to meet her sometimes
+at your own house.&nbsp; I shouldn&rsquo;t wonder if you were quite
+happy.&nbsp; She will probably be miserable, but any woman who married
+you would be.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+There was a short pause; they were both staring at the pheasant cages.&nbsp;
+Then Molly spoke again, with the swift nervous tone of a general who
+is hurriedly altering the disposition of his forces for a strategic
+retreat.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;When you are safely married and honey-mooned and all that sort
+of thing, and have put your wife through her paces as a political hostess,
+some time, when the House isn&rsquo;t sitting, you must come down by
+yourself, and do a little hunting with us.&nbsp; Will you?&nbsp; It
+won&rsquo;t be quite the same as old times, but it will be something
+to look forward to when I&rsquo;m reading the endless paragraphs about
+your fashionable political wedding.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re looking forward pretty far,&rdquo; laughed Youghal;
+&ldquo;the lady may take your view as to the probable unhappiness of
+a future shared with me, and I may have to content myself with penurious
+political bachelorhood.&nbsp; Anyhow, the present is still with us.&nbsp;
+We dine at Kettner&rsquo;s to-night, don&rsquo;t we?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Rather,&rdquo; said Molly, &ldquo;though it will be more or less
+a throat-lumpy feast as far as I am concerned.&nbsp; We shall have to
+drink to the health of the future Mrs. Youghal.&nbsp; By the way, it&rsquo;s
+rather characteristic of you that you haven&rsquo;t told me who she
+is, and of me that I haven&rsquo;t asked.&nbsp; And now, like a dear
+boy, trot away and leave me.&nbsp; I haven&rsquo;t got to say good-bye
+to you yet, but I&rsquo;m going to take a quiet farewell of the Pheasantry.&nbsp;
+We&rsquo;ve had some jolly good talks, you and I, sitting on this seat,
+haven&rsquo;t we?&nbsp; And I know, as well as I know anything, that
+this is the last of them.&nbsp; Eight o&rsquo;clock to-night, as punctually
+as possible.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+She watched his retreating figure with eyes that grew slowly misty;
+he had been such a jolly comely boy-friend, and they had had such good
+times together.&nbsp; The mist deepened on her lashes as she looked
+round at the familiar rendezvous where they had so often kept tryst
+since the day when they had first come there together, he a schoolboy
+and she but lately out of her teens.&nbsp; For the moment she felt herself
+in the thrall of a very real sorrow.<br>
+<br>
+Then, with the admirable energy of one who is only in town for a fleeting
+fortnight, she raced away to have tea with a world-faring naval admirer
+at his club.&nbsp; Pluralism is a merciful narcotic.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER VI<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Elaine de Frey sat at ease - at bodily ease - at any rate - in a low
+wicker chair placed under the shade of a group of cedars in the heart
+of a stately spacious garden that had almost made up its mind to be
+a park.&nbsp; The shallow stone basin of an old fountain, on whose wide
+ledge a leaden-moulded otter for ever preyed on a leaden salmon, filled
+a conspicuous place in the immediate foreground.&nbsp; Around its rim
+ran an inscription in Latin, warning mortal man that time flows as swiftly
+as water and exhorting him to make the most of his hours; after which
+piece of Jacobean moralising it set itself shamelessly to beguile all
+who might pass that way into an abandonment of contemplative repose.&nbsp;
+On all sides of it a stretch of smooth turf spread away, broken up here
+and there by groups of dwarfish chestnut and mulberry trees, whose leaves
+and branches cast a laced pattern of shade beneath them.&nbsp; On one
+side the lawn sloped gently down to a small lake, whereon floated a
+quartette of swans, their movements suggestive of a certain mournful
+listlessness, as though a weary dignity of caste held them back from
+the joyous bustling life of the lesser waterfowl.&nbsp; Elaine liked
+to imagine that they re-embodied the souls of unhappy boys who had been
+forced by family interests to become high ecclesiastical dignitaries
+and had grown prematurely Right Reverend.&nbsp; A low stone balustrade
+fenced part of the shore of the lake, making a miniature terrace above
+its level, and here roses grew in a rich multitude.&nbsp; Other rose
+bushes, carefully pruned and tended, formed little oases of colour and
+perfume amid the restful green of the sward, and in the distance the
+eye caught the variegated blaze of a many-hued hedge of rhododendron.&nbsp;
+With these favoured exceptions flowers were hard to find in this well-ordered
+garden; the misguided tyranny of staring geranium beds and beflowered
+archways leading to nowhere, so dear to the suburban gardener, found
+no expression here.&nbsp; Magnificent Amherst pheasants, whose plumage
+challenged and almost shamed the peacock on his own ground, stepped
+to and fro over the emerald turf with the assured self-conscious pride
+of reigning sultans.&nbsp; It was a garden where summer seemed a part-proprietor
+rather than a hurried visitor.<br>
+<br>
+By the side of Elaine&rsquo;s chair under the shadow of the cedars a
+wicker table was set out with the paraphernalia of afternoon tea.&nbsp;
+On some cushions at her feet reclined Courtenay Youghal, smoothly preened
+and youthfully elegant, the personification of decorative repose; equally
+decorative, but with the showy restlessness of a dragonfly, Comus disported
+his flannelled person over a considerable span of the available foreground.<br>
+<br>
+The intimacy existing between the two young men had suffered no immediate
+dislocation from the circumstance that they were tacitly paying court
+to the same lady.&nbsp; It was an intimacy founded not in the least
+on friendship or community of tastes and ideas, but owed its existence
+to the fact that each was amused and interested by the other.&nbsp;
+Youghal found Comus, for the time being at any rate, just as amusing
+and interesting as a rival for Elaine&rsquo;s favour as he had been
+in the <i>r&ocirc;le</i> of scapegrace boy-about-Town; Comus for his
+part did not wish to lose touch with Youghal, who among other attractions
+possessed the recommendation of being under the ban of Comus&rsquo;s
+mother.&nbsp; She disapproved, it is true, of a great many of her son&rsquo;s
+friends and associates, but this particular one was a special and persistent
+source of irritation to her from the fact that he figured prominently
+and more or less successfully in the public life of the day.&nbsp; There
+was something peculiarly exasperating in reading a brilliant and incisive
+attack on the Government&rsquo;s rash handling of public expenditure
+delivered by a young man who encouraged her son in every imaginable
+extravagance.&nbsp; The actual extent of Youghal&rsquo;s influence over
+the boy was of the slightest; Comus was quite capable of deriving encouragement
+to rash outlay and frivolous conversation from an anchorite or an East-end
+parson if he had been thrown into close companionship with such an individual.&nbsp;
+Francesca, however, exercised a mother&rsquo;s privilege in assuming
+her son&rsquo;s bachelor associates to be industrious in labouring to
+achieve his undoing.&nbsp; Therefore the young politician was a source
+of unconcealed annoyance to her, and in the same degree as she expressed
+her disapproval of him Comus was careful to maintain and parade the
+intimacy.&nbsp; Its existence, or rather its continued existence, was
+one of the things that faintly puzzled the young lady whose sought-for
+favour might have been expected to furnish an occasion for its rapid
+dissolution.<br>
+<br>
+With two suitors, one of whom at least she found markedly attractive,
+courting her at the same moment, Elaine should have had reasonable cause
+for being on good terms with the world, and with herself in particular.&nbsp;
+Happiness was not, however, at this auspicious moment, her dominant
+mood.&nbsp; The grave calm of her face masked as usual a certain degree
+of grave perturbation.&nbsp; A succession of well-meaning governesses
+and a plentiful supply of moralising aunts on both sides of her family,
+had impressed on her young mind the theoretical fact that wealth is
+a great responsibility.&nbsp; The consciousness of her responsibility
+set her continually wondering, not as to her own fitness to discharge
+her &ldquo;stewardship,&rdquo; but as to the motives and merits of people
+with whom she came in contact.&nbsp; The knowledge that there was so
+much in the world that she could buy, invited speculation as to how
+much there was that was worth buying.&nbsp; Gradually she had come to
+regard her mind as a sort of appeal court before whose secret sittings
+were examined and judged the motives and actions, the motives especially,
+of the world in general.&nbsp; In her schoolroom days she had sat in
+conscientious judgment on the motives that guided or misguided Charles
+and Cromwell and Monck, Wallenstein and Savonarola.&nbsp; In her present
+stage she was equally occupied in examining the political sincerity
+of the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, the good-faith of a honey-tongued
+but possibly loyal-hearted waiting-maid, and the disinterestedness of
+a whole circle of indulgent and flattering acquaintances.&nbsp; Even
+more absorbing, and in her eyes, more urgently necessary, was the task
+of dissecting and appraising the characters of the two young men who
+were favouring her with their attentions.&nbsp; And herein lay cause
+for much thinking and some perturbation.&nbsp; Youghal, for example,
+might have baffled a more experienced observer of human nature.&nbsp;
+Elaine was too clever to confound his dandyism with foppishness or self-advertisement.&nbsp;
+He admired his own toilet effect in a mirror from a genuine sense of
+pleasure in a thing good to look upon, just as he would feel a sensuous
+appreciation of the sight of a well-bred, well-matched, well-turned-out
+pair of horses.&nbsp; Behind his careful political flippancy and cynicism
+one might also detect a certain careless sincerity, which would probably
+in the long run save him from moderate success, and turn him into one
+of the brilliant failures of his day.&nbsp; Beyond this it was difficult
+to form an exact appreciation of Courtenay Youghal, and Elaine, who
+liked to have her impressions distinctly labelled and pigeon-holed,
+was perpetually scrutinising the outer surface of his characteristics
+and utterances, like a baffled art critic vainly searching beneath the
+varnish and scratches of a doubtfully assigned picture for an enlightening
+signature.&nbsp; The young man added to her perplexities by his deliberate
+policy of never trying to show himself in a favourable light even when
+most anxious to impart a favourable impression.&nbsp; He preferred that
+people should hunt for his good qualities, and merely took very good
+care that as far as possible they should never draw blank; even in the
+matter of selfishness, which was the anchor-sheet of his existence,
+he contrived to be noted, and justly noted, for doing remarkably unselfish
+things.&nbsp; As a ruler he would have been reasonably popular; as a
+husband he would probably be unendurable.<br>
+<br>
+Comus was to a certain extent as great a mystification as Youghal, but
+here Elaine was herself responsible for some of the perplexity which
+enshrouded his character in her eyes.&nbsp; She had taken more than
+a passing fancy for the boy - for the boy as he might be, that was to
+say - and she was desperately unwilling to see him and appraise him
+as he really was.&nbsp; Thus the mental court of appeal was constantly
+engaged in examining witnesses as to character, most of whom signally
+failed to give any testimony which would support the favourable judgment
+which the tribunal was so anxious to arrive at.&nbsp; A woman with wider
+experience of the world&rsquo;s ways and shortcomings would probably
+have contented herself with an endeavour to find out whether her liking
+for the boy outweighed her dislike of his characteristics; Elaine took
+her judgments too seriously to approach the matter from such a simple
+and convenient standpoint.&nbsp; The fact that she was much more than
+half in love with Comus made it dreadfully important that she should
+discover him to have a lovable soul, and Comus, it must be confessed,
+did little to help forward the discovery.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;At any rate he is honest,&rdquo; she would observe to herself,
+after some outspoken admission of unprincipled conduct on his part,
+and then she would ruefully recall certain episodes in which he had
+figured, from which honesty had been conspicuously absent.&nbsp; What
+she tried to label honesty in his candour was probably only a cynical
+defiance of the laws of right and wrong.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You look more than usually thoughtful this afternoon,&rdquo;
+said Comus to her, &ldquo;as if you had invented this summer day and
+were trying to think out improvements.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;If I had the power to create improvements anywhere I think I
+should begin with you,&rdquo; retorted Elaine.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sure it&rsquo;s much better to leave me as I am,&rdquo;
+protested Comus; &ldquo;you&rsquo;re like a relative of mine up in Argyllshire,
+who spends his time producing improved breeds of sheep and pigs and
+chickens.&nbsp; So patronising and irritating to the Almighty I should
+think, to go about putting superior finishing touches to Creation.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Elaine frowned, and then laughed, and finally gave a little sigh.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not easy to talk sense to you,&rdquo; she said.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Whatever else you take in hand,&rdquo; said Youghal, &ldquo;you
+must never improve this garden.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s what our idea of Heaven
+might be like if the Jews hadn&rsquo;t invented one for us on totally
+different lines.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s dreadful that we should accept them
+as the impresarios of our religious dreamland instead of the Greeks.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You are not very fond of the Jews,&rdquo; said Elaine.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve travelled and lived a good deal in Eastern Europe,&rdquo;
+said Youghal.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It seems largely a question of geography,&rdquo; said Elaine;
+&ldquo;in England no one really is anti-Semitic.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Youghal shook his head.&nbsp; &ldquo;I know a great many Jews who are.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Servants had quietly, almost reverently, placed tea and its accessories
+on the wicker table, and quietly receded from the landscape.&nbsp; Elaine
+sat like a grave young goddess about to dispense some mysterious potion
+to her devotees.&nbsp; Her mind was still sitting in judgment on the
+Jewish question.<br>
+<br>
+Comus scrambled to his feet.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s too hot for tea,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I shall go
+and feed the swans.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+And he walked off with a little silver basket-dish containing brown
+bread-and-butter.<br>
+<br>
+Elaine laughed quietly.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s so like Comus,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;to go off with
+our one dish of bread-and-butter.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Youghal chuckled responsively.&nbsp; It was an undoubted opportunity
+for him to put in some disparaging criticism of Comus, and Elaine sat
+alert in readiness to judge the critic and reserve judgment on the criticised.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;His selfishness is splendid but absolutely futile,&rdquo; said
+Youghal; &ldquo;now my selfishness is commonplace, but always thoroughly
+practical and calculated.&nbsp; He will have great difficulty in getting
+the swans to accept his offering, and he incurs the odium of reducing
+us to a bread-and-butterless condition.&nbsp; Incidentally he will get
+very hot.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Elaine again had the sense of being thoroughly baffled.&nbsp; If Youghal
+had said anything unkind it was about himself.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;If my cousin Suzette had been here,&rdquo; she observed, with
+the shadow of a malicious smile on her lips, &ldquo;I believe she would
+have gone into a flood of tears at the loss of her bread-and-butter,
+and Comus would have figured ever after in her mind as something black
+and destroying and hateful.&nbsp; In fact I don&rsquo;t really know
+why we took our loss so unprotestingly.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;For two reasons,&rdquo; said Youghal; &ldquo;you are rather fond
+of Comus.&nbsp; And I - am not very fond of bread-and-butter.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The jesting remark brought a throb of pleasure to Elaine&rsquo;s heart.&nbsp;
+She had known full well that she cared for Comus, but now that Courtenay
+Youghal had openly proclaimed the fact as something unchallenged and
+understood matters seemed placed at once on a more advanced footing.&nbsp;
+The warm sunlit garden grew suddenly into a Heaven that held the secret
+of eternal happiness.&nbsp; Youth and comeliness would always walk here,
+under the low-boughed mulberry trees, as unchanging as the leaden otter
+that for ever preyed on the leaden salmon on the edge of the old fountain,
+and somehow the lovers would always wear the aspect of herself and the
+boy who was talking to the four white swans by the water steps.&nbsp;
+Youghal was right; this was the real Heaven of one&rsquo;s dreams and
+longings, immeasurably removed from that Rue de la Paix Paradise about
+which one professed utterly insincere hankerings in places of public
+worship.&nbsp; Elaine drank her tea in a happy silence; besides being
+a brilliant talker Youghal understood the rarer art of being a non-talker
+on occasion.<br>
+<br>
+Comus came back across the grass swinging the empty basket-dish in his
+hand.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Swans were very pleased,&rdquo; he cried, gaily, &ldquo;and said
+they hoped I would keep the bread-and-butter dish as a souvenir of a
+happy tea-party.&nbsp; I may really have it, mayn&rsquo;t I?&rdquo;
+he continued in an anxious voice; &ldquo;it will do to keep studs and
+things in.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t want it.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s got the family crest on it,&rdquo; said Elaine.&nbsp;
+Some of the happiness had died out of her eyes.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have that scratched off and my own put on,&rdquo;
+said Comus.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s been in the family for generations,&rdquo; protested
+Elaine, who did not share Comus&rsquo;s view that because you were rich
+your lesser possessions could have no value in your eyes.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I want it dreadfully,&rdquo; said Comus, sulkily, &ldquo;and
+you&rsquo;ve heaps of other things to put bread-and-butter in.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+For the moment he was possessed by an overmastering desire to keep the
+dish at all costs; a look of greedy determination dominated his face,
+and he had not for an instant relaxed his grip of the coveted object.<br>
+<br>
+Elaine was genuinely angry by this time, and was busily telling herself
+that it was absurd to be put out over such a trifle; at the same moment
+a sense of justice was telling her that Comus was displaying a good
+deal of rather shabby selfishness.&nbsp; And somehow her chief anxiety
+at the moment was to keep Courtenay Youghal from seeing that she was
+angry.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I know you don&rsquo;t really want it, so I&rsquo;m going to
+keep it,&rdquo; persisted Comus.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s too hot to argue,&rdquo; said Elaine.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Happy mistress of your destinies,&rdquo; laughed Youghal; &ldquo;you
+can suit your disputations to the desired time and temperature.&nbsp;
+I have to go and argue, or what is worse, listen to other people&rsquo;s
+arguments, in a hot and doctored atmosphere suitable to an invalid lizard.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You haven&rsquo;t got to argue about a bread-and-butter dish,&rdquo;
+said Elaine.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Chiefly about bread-and-butter,&rdquo; said Youghal; &ldquo;our
+great preoccupation is other people&rsquo;s bread-and-butter.&nbsp;
+They earn or produce the material, but we busy ourselves with making
+rules how it shall be cut up, and the size of the slices, and how much
+butter shall go on how much bread.&nbsp; That is what is called legislation.&nbsp;
+If we could only make rules as to how the bread-and-butter should be
+digested we should be quite happy.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Elaine had been brought up to regard Parliaments as something to be
+treated with cheerful solemnity, like illness or family re-unions.&nbsp;
+Youghal&rsquo;s flippant disparagement of the career in which he was
+involved did not, however, jar on her susceptibilities.&nbsp; She knew
+him to be not only a lively and effective debater but an industrious
+worker on committees.&nbsp; If he made light of his labours, at least
+he afforded no one else a loophole for doing so.&nbsp; And certainly,
+the Parliamentary atmosphere was not inviting on this hot afternoon.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;When must you go?&rdquo; she asked, sympathetically.<br>
+<br>
+Youghal looked ruefully at his watch.&nbsp; Before he could answer,
+a cheerful hoot came through the air, as of an owl joyously challenging
+the sunlight with a foreboding of the coming night.&nbsp; He sprang
+laughing to his feet.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Listen!&nbsp; My summons back to my galley,&rdquo; he cried.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The Gods have given me an hour in this enchanted garden, so I
+must not complain.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Then in a lower voice he almost whispered, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s the Persian
+debate to-night,&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+It was the one hint he had given in the midst of his talking and laughing
+that he was really keenly enthralled in the work that lay before him.&nbsp;
+It was the one little intimate touch that gave Elaine the knowledge
+that he cared for her opinion of his work.<br>
+<br>
+Comus, who had emptied his cigarette-case, became suddenly clamorous
+at the prospect of being temporarily stranded without a smoke.&nbsp;
+Youghal took the last remaining cigarette from his own case and gravely
+bisected it.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Friendship could go no further,&rdquo; he observed, as he gave
+one-half to the doubtfully appeased Comus, and lit the other himself.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;There are heaps more in the hall,&rdquo; said Elaine.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It was only done for the Saint Martin of Tours effect,&rdquo;
+said Youghal; &ldquo;I hate smoking when I&rsquo;m rushing through the
+air.&nbsp; Good-bye.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The departing galley-slave stepped forth into the sunlight, radiant
+and confident.&nbsp; A few minutes later Elaine could see glimpses of
+his white car as it rushed past the rhododendron bushes.&nbsp; He woos
+best who leaves first, particularly if he goes forth to battle or the
+semblance of battle.<br>
+<br>
+Somehow Elaine&rsquo;s garden of Eternal Youth had already become clouded
+in its imagery.&nbsp; The girl-figure who walked in it was still distinctly
+and unchangingly herself, but her companion was more blurred and undefined,
+as a picture that has been superimposed on another.<br>
+<br>
+Youghal sped townward well satisfied with himself.&nbsp; To-morrow,
+he reflected, Elaine would read his speech in her morning paper, and
+he knew in advance that it was not going to be one of his worst efforts.&nbsp;
+He knew almost exactly where the punctuations of laughter and applause
+would burst in, he knew that nimble fingers in the Press Gallery would
+be taking down each gibe and argument as he flung it at the impassive
+Minister confronting him, and that the fair lady of his desire would
+be able to judge what manner of young man this was who spent his afternoon
+in her garden, lazily chaffing himself and his world.<br>
+<br>
+And he further reflected, with an amused chuckle, that she would be
+vividly reminded of Comus for days to come, when she took her afternoon
+tea, and saw the bread-and-butter reposing in an unaccustomed dish.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER VII<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Towards four o&rsquo;clock on a hot afternoon Francesca stepped out
+from a shop entrance near the Piccadilly end of Bond Street and ran
+almost into the arms of Merla Blathlington.&nbsp; The afternoon seemed
+to get instantly hotter.&nbsp; Merla was one of those human flies that
+buzz; in crowded streets, at bazaars and in warm weather, she attained
+to the proportions of a human bluebottle.&nbsp; Lady Caroline Benaresq
+had openly predicted that a special fly-paper was being reserved for
+her accommodation in another world; others, however, held the opinion
+that she would be miraculously multiplied in a future state, and that
+four or more Merla Blathlingtons, according to deserts, would be in
+perpetual and unremitting attendance on each lost soul.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Here we are,&rdquo; she cried, with a glad eager buzz, &ldquo;popping
+in and out of shops like rabbits; not that rabbits do pop in and out
+of shops very extensively.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+It was evidently one of her bluebottle days.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you love Bond Street?&rdquo; she gabbled on.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s something so unusual and distinctive about it;
+no other street anywhere else is quite like it.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you
+know those ikons and images and things scattered up and down Europe,
+that are supposed to have been painted or carved, as the case may be,
+by St. Luke or Zaccheus, or somebody of that sort; I always like to
+think that some notable person of those times designed Bond Street.&nbsp;
+St. Paul, perhaps.&nbsp; He travelled about a lot.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Not in Middlesex, though,&rdquo; said Francesca.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;One can&rsquo;t be sure,&rdquo; persisted Merla; &ldquo;when
+one wanders about as much as he did one gets mixed up and forgets where
+one <i>has</i> been.&nbsp; I can never remember whether I&rsquo;ve been
+to the Tyrol twice and St. Moritz once, or the other way about; I always
+have to ask my maid.&nbsp; And there&rsquo;s something about the name
+Bond that suggests St. Paul; didn&rsquo;t he write a lot about the bond
+and the free?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I fancy he wrote in Hebrew or Greek,&rdquo; objected Francesca;
+&ldquo;the word wouldn&rsquo;t have the least resemblance.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;So dreadfully non-committal to go about pamphleteering in those
+bizarre languages,&rdquo; complained Merla; &ldquo;that&rsquo;s what
+makes all those people so elusive.&nbsp; As soon as you try to pin them
+down to a definite statement about anything you&rsquo;re told that some
+vitally important word has fifteen other meanings in the original.&nbsp;
+I wonder our Cabinet Ministers and politicians don&rsquo;t adopt a sort
+of dog-Latin or Esperanto jargon to deliver their speeches in; what
+a lot of subsequent explaining away would be saved.&nbsp; But to go
+back to Bond Street - not that we&rsquo;ve left it - &rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid I must leave it now,&rdquo; said Francesca,
+preparing to turn up Grafton Street; &ldquo;Good-bye.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Must you be going?&nbsp; Come and have tea somewhere.&nbsp; I
+know of a cosy little place where one can talk undisturbed.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Francesca repressed a shudder and pleaded an urgent engagement.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I know where you&rsquo;re going,&rdquo; said Merla, with the
+resentful buzz of a bluebottle that finds itself thwarted by the cold
+unreasoning resistance of a windowpane.&nbsp; &ldquo;You&rsquo;re going
+to play bridge at Serena Golackly&rsquo;s.&nbsp; She never asks me to
+her bridge parties.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Francesca shuddered openly this time; the prospect of having to play
+bridge anywhere in the near neighbourhood of Merla&rsquo;s voice was
+not one that could be contemplated with ordinary calmness.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Good-bye,&rdquo; she said again firmly, and passed out of earshot;
+it was rather like leaving the machinery section of an exhibition.&nbsp;
+Merla&rsquo;s diagnosis of her destination had been a correct one; Francesca
+made her way slowly through the hot streets in the direction of Serena
+Golackly&rsquo;s house on the far side of Berkeley Square.&nbsp; To
+the blessed certainty of finding a game of bridge, she hopefully added
+the possibility of hearing some fragments of news which might prove
+interesting and enlightening.&nbsp; And of enlightenment on a particular
+subject, in which she was acutely and personally interested, she stood
+in some need.&nbsp; Comus of late had been provokingly reticent as to
+his movements and doings; partly, perhaps, because it was his nature
+to be provoking, partly because the daily bickerings over money matters
+were gradually choking other forms of conversation.&nbsp; Francesca
+had seen him once or twice in the Park in the desirable company of Elaine
+de Frey, and from time to time she heard of the young people as having
+danced together at various houses; on the other hand, she had seen and
+heard quite as much evidence to connect the heiress&rsquo;s name with
+that of Courtenay Youghal.&nbsp; Beyond this meagre and conflicting
+and altogether tantalising information, her knowledge of the present
+position of affairs did not go.&nbsp; If either of the young men was
+seriously &ldquo;making the running,&rdquo; it was probable that she
+would hear some sly hint or open comment about it from one of Serena&rsquo;s
+gossip-laden friends, without having to go out of her way to introduce
+the subject and unduly disclose her own state of ignorance.&nbsp; And
+a game of bridge, played for moderately high points, gave ample excuse
+for convenient lapses into reticence; if questions took an embarrassingly
+inquisitive turn, one could always find refuge in a defensive spade.<br>
+<br>
+The afternoon was too warm to make bridge a generally popular diversion,
+and Serena&rsquo;s party was a comparatively small one.&nbsp; Only one
+table was incomplete when Francesca made her appearance on the scene;
+at it was seated Serena herself, confronted by Ada Spelvexit, whom everyone
+was wont to explain as &ldquo;one of the Cheshire Spelvexits,&rdquo;
+as though any other variety would have been intolerable.&nbsp; Ada Spelvexit
+was one of those naturally stagnant souls who take infinite pleasure
+in what are called &ldquo;movements.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Most of the
+really great lessons I have learned have been taught me by the Poor,&rdquo;
+was one of her favourite statements.&nbsp; The one great lesson that
+the Poor in general would have liked to have taught her, that their
+kitchens and sickrooms were not unreservedly at her disposal as private
+lecture halls, she had never been able to assimilate.&nbsp; She was
+ready to give them unlimited advice as to how they should keep the wolf
+from their doors, but in return she claimed and enforced for herself
+the penetrating powers of an east wind or a dust storm.&nbsp; Her visits
+among her wealthier acquaintances were equally extensive and enterprising,
+and hardly more welcome; in country-house parties, while partaking to
+the fullest extent of the hospitality offered her, she made a practice
+of unburdening herself of homilies on the evils of leisure and luxury,
+which did not particularly endear her to her fellow guests.&nbsp; Hostesses
+regarded her philosophically as a form of social measles which everyone
+had to have once.<br>
+<br>
+The third prospective player, Francesca noted without any special enthusiasm,
+was Lady Caroline Benaresq.&nbsp; Lady Caroline was far from being a
+remarkably good bridge player, but she always managed to domineer mercilessly
+over any table that was favoured with her presence, and generally managed
+to win.&nbsp; A domineering player usually inflicts the chief damage
+and demoralisation on his partner; Lady Caroline&rsquo;s special achievement
+was to harass and demoralise partner and opponents alike.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Weak and weak,&rdquo; she announced in her gentle voice, as she
+cut her hostess for a partner; &ldquo;I suppose we had better play only
+five shillings a hundred.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Francesca wondered at the old woman&rsquo;s moderate assessment of the
+stake, knowing her fondness for highish play and her usual good luck
+in card holding.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t mind what we play,&rdquo; said Ada Spelvexit, with
+an incautious parade of elegant indifference; as a matter of fact she
+was inwardly relieved and rejoicing at the reasonable figure proposed
+by Lady Caroline, and she would certainly have demurred if a higher
+stake had been suggested.&nbsp; She was not as a rule a successful player,
+and money lost at cards was always a poignant bereavement to her.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Then as you don&rsquo;t mind we&rsquo;ll make it ten shillings
+a hundred,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline, with the pleased chuckle of one
+who has spread a net in the sight of a bird and disproved the vanity
+of the proceeding.<br>
+<br>
+It proved a tiresome ding-dong rubber, with the strength of the cards
+slightly on Francesca&rsquo;s side, and the luck of the table going
+mostly the other way.&nbsp; She was too keen a player not to feel a
+certain absorption in the game once it had started, but she was conscious
+to-day of a distracting interest that competed with the momentary importance
+of leads and discards and declarations.&nbsp; The little accumulations
+of talk that were unpent during the dealing of the hands became as noteworthy
+to her alert attention as the play of the hands themselves.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Yes, quite a small party this afternoon,&rdquo; said Serena,
+in reply to a seemingly casual remark on Francesca&rsquo;s part; &ldquo;and
+two or three non-players, which is unusual on a Wednesday.&nbsp; Canon
+Besomley was here just before you came; you know, the big preaching
+man.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been to hear him scold the human race once or twice,&rdquo;
+said Francesca.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;A strong man with a wonderfully strong message,&rdquo; said Ada
+Spelvexit, in an impressive and assertive tone.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;The sort of popular pulpiteer who spanks the vices of his age
+and lunches with them afterwards,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Hardly a fair summary of the man and his work,&rdquo; protested
+Ada.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been to hear him many times when I&rsquo;ve
+been depressed or discouraged, and I simply can&rsquo;t tell you the
+impression his words leave - &rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;At least you can tell us what you intend to make trumps,&rdquo;
+broke in Lady Caroline, gently.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Diamonds,&rdquo; pronounced Ada, after a rather flurried survey
+of her hand.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Doubled,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline, with increased gentleness,
+and a few minutes later she was pencilling an addition of twenty-four
+to her score.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I stayed with his people down in Herefordshire last May,&rdquo;
+said Ada, returning to the unfinished theme of the Canon; &ldquo;such
+an exquisite rural retreat, and so restful and healing to the nerves.&nbsp;
+Real country scenery; apple blossom everywhere.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Surely only on the apple trees,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline.<br>
+<br>
+Ada Spelvexit gave up the attempt to reproduce the decorative setting
+of the Canon&rsquo;s homelife, and fell back on the small but practical
+consolation of scoring the odd trick in her opponent&rsquo;s declaration
+of hearts.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;If you had led your highest club to start with, instead of the
+nine, we should have saved the trick,&rdquo; remarked Lady Caroline
+to her partner in a tone of coldly, gentle reproof; &ldquo;it&rsquo;s
+no use, my dear,&rdquo; she continued, as Serena flustered out a halting
+apology, &ldquo;no earthly use to attempt to play bridge at one table
+and try to see and hear what&rsquo;s going on at two or three other
+tables.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I can generally manage to attend to more than one thing at a
+time,&rdquo; said Serena, rashly; &ldquo;I think I must have a sort
+of double brain.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Much better to economise and have one really good one,&rdquo;
+observed Lady Caroline.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;<i>La belle dame sans merci</i> scoring a verbal trick or two
+as usual,&rdquo; said a player at another table in a discreet undertone.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Did I tell you Sir Edward Roan is coming to my next big evening,&rdquo;
+said Serena, hurriedly, by way, perhaps, of restoring herself a little
+in her own esteem.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Poor dear, good Sir Edward.&nbsp; What have you made trumps?&rdquo;
+asked Lady Caroline, in one breath.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Clubs,&rdquo; said Francesca; &ldquo;and pray, why these adjectives
+of commiseration?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Francesca was a Ministerialist by family interest and allegiance, and
+was inclined to take up the cudgels at the suggested disparagement aimed
+at the Foreign Secretary.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;He amuses me so much,&rdquo; purred Lady Caroline.&nbsp; Her
+amusement was usually of the sort that a sporting cat derives from watching
+the Swedish exercises of a well-spent and carefully thought-out mouse.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Really?&nbsp; He has been rather a brilliant success at the Foreign
+Office, you know,&rdquo; said Francesca.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;He reminds one so of a circus elephant - infinitely more intelligent
+than the people who direct him, but quite content to go on putting his
+foot down or taking it up as may be required, quite unconcerned whether
+he steps on a meringue or a hornet&rsquo;s nest in the process of going
+where he&rsquo;s expected to go.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;How can you say such things?&rdquo; protested Francesca.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline; &ldquo;Courtenay Youghal
+said it in the House last night.&nbsp; Didn&rsquo;t you read the debate?&nbsp;
+He was really rather in form.&nbsp; I disagree entirely with his point
+of view, of course, but some of the things he says have just enough
+truth behind them to redeem them from being merely smart; for instance,
+his summing up of the Government&rsquo;s attitude towards our embarrassing
+Colonial Empire in the wistful phrase &lsquo;happy is the country that
+has no geography.&rsquo;&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;What an absurdly unjust thing to say,&rdquo; put in Francesca;
+&ldquo;I daresay some of our Party at some time have taken up that attitude,
+but every one knows that Sir Edward is a sound Imperialist at heart.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Most politicians are something or other at heart, but no one
+would be rash enough to insure a politician against heart failure.&nbsp;
+Particularly when he happens to be in office.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Anyhow, I don&rsquo;t see that the Opposition leaders would have
+acted any differently in the present case,&rdquo; said Francesca.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;One should always speak guardedly of the Opposition leaders,&rdquo;
+said Lady Caroline, in her gentlest voice; &ldquo;one never knows what
+a turn in the situation may do for them.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You mean they may one day be at the head of affairs?&rdquo; asked
+Serena, briskly.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I mean they may one day lead the Opposition.&nbsp; One never
+knows.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Lady Caroline had just remembered that her hostess was on the Opposition
+side in politics.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca and her partner scored four tricks in clubs; the game stood
+irresolutely at twenty-four all.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;If you had followed the excellent lyrical advice given to the
+Maid of Athens and returned my heart we should have made two more tricks
+and gone game,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline to her partner.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Mr. Youghal seems pushing himself to the fore of late,&rdquo;
+remarked Francesca, as Serena took up the cards to deal.&nbsp; Since
+the young politician&rsquo;s name had been introduced into their conversation
+the opportunity for turning the talk more directly on him and his affairs
+was too good to be missed.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I think he&rsquo;s got a career before him,&rdquo; said Serena;
+&ldquo;the House always fills when he&rsquo;s speaking, and that&rsquo;s
+a good sign.&nbsp; And then he&rsquo;s young and got rather an attractive
+personality, which is always something in the political world.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;His lack of money will handicap him, unless he can find himself
+a rich wife or persuade someone to die and leave him a fat legacy,&rdquo;
+said Francesca; &ldquo;since M.P.&rsquo;s have become the recipients
+of a salary rather more is expected and demanded of them in the expenditure
+line than before.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Yes, the House of Commons still remains rather at the opposite
+pole to the Kingdom of Heaven as regards entrance qualifications,&rdquo;
+observed Lady Caroline.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;There ought to be no difficulty about Youghal picking up a girl
+with money,&rdquo; said Serena; &ldquo;with his prospects he would make
+an excellent husband for any woman with social ambitions.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+And she half sighed, as though she almost regretted that a previous
+matrimonial arrangement precluded her from entering into the competition
+on her own account.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca, under an assumption of languid interest, was watching Lady
+Caroline narrowly for some hint of suppressed knowledge of Youghal&rsquo;s
+courtship of Miss de Frey.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Whom are you marrying and giving in marriage?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The question came from George St. Michael, who had strayed over from
+a neighbouring table, attracted by the fragments of small-talk that
+had reached his ears.<br>
+<br>
+St. Michael was one of those dapper bird-like illusorily-active men,
+who seem to have been in a certain stage of middle-age for as long as
+human memory can recall them.&nbsp; A close-cut peaked beard lent a
+certain dignity to his appearance - a loan which the rest of his features
+and mannerisms were continually and successfully repudiating.&nbsp;
+His profession, if he had one, was submerged in his hobby, which consisted
+of being an advance-agent for small happenings or possible happenings
+that were or seemed imminent in the social world around him; he found
+a perpetual and unflagging satisfaction in acquiring and retailing any
+stray items of gossip or information, particularly of a matrimonial
+nature, that chanced to come his way.&nbsp; Given the bare outline of
+an officially announced engagement he would immediately fill it in with
+all manner of details, true or, at any rate, probable, drawn from his
+own imagination or from some equally exclusive source.&nbsp; The <i>Morning
+Post</i> might content itself with the mere statement of the arrangement
+which would shortly take place, but it was St. Michael&rsquo;s breathless
+little voice that proclaimed how the contracting parties had originally
+met over a salmon-fishing incident, why the Guards&rsquo; Chapel would
+not be used, why her Aunt Mary had at first opposed the match, how the
+question of the children&rsquo;s religious upbringing had been compromised,
+etc., etc., to all whom it might interest and to many whom it might
+not.&nbsp; Beyond his industriously-earned pre-eminence in this special
+branch of intelligence, he was chiefly noteworthy for having a wife
+reputed to be the tallest and thinnest woman in the Home Counties.&nbsp;
+The two were sometimes seen together in Society, where they passed under
+the collective name of St. Michael and All Angles.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;We are trying to find a rich wife for Courtenay Youghal,&rdquo;
+said Serena, in answer to St. Michael&rsquo;s question.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Ah, there I&rsquo;m afraid you&rsquo;re a little late,&rdquo;
+he observed, glowing with the importance of pending revelation; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m
+afraid you&rsquo;re a little late,&rdquo; he repeated, watching the
+effect of his words as a gardener might watch the development of a bed
+of carefully tended asparagus.&nbsp; &ldquo;I think the young gentleman
+has been before you and already found himself a rich mate in prospect.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+He lowered his voice as he spoke, not with a view to imparting impressive
+mystery to his statement, but because there were other table groups
+within hearing to whom he hoped presently to have the privilege of re-disclosing
+his revelation.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Do you mean - ?&rdquo; began Serena.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Miss de Frey,&rdquo; broke in St. Michael, hurriedly, fearful
+lest his revelation should be forestalled, even in guesswork; &ldquo;quite
+an ideal choice, the very wife for a man who means to make his mark
+in politics.&nbsp; Twenty-four thousand a year, with prospects of more
+to come, and a charming place of her own not too far from town.&nbsp;
+Quite the type of girl, too, who will make a good political hostess,
+brains without being brainy, you know.&nbsp; Just the right thing.&nbsp;
+Of course, it would be premature to make any definite announcement at
+present - &rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It would hardly be premature for my partner to announce what
+she means to make trumps,&rdquo; interrupted Lady Caroline, in a voice
+of such sinister gentleness that St. Michael fled headlong back to his
+own table.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Oh, is it me?&nbsp; I beg your pardon.&nbsp; I leave it,&rdquo;
+said Serena.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Thank you.&nbsp; No trumps,&rdquo; declared Lady Caroline.&nbsp;
+The hand was successful, and the rubber ultimately fell to her with
+a comfortable margin of honours.&nbsp; The same partners cut together
+again, and this time the cards went distinctly against Francesca and
+Ada Spelvexit, and a heavily piled-up score confronted them at the close
+of the rubber.&nbsp; Francesca was conscious that a certain amount of
+rather erratic play on her part had at least contributed to the result.&nbsp;
+St. Michael&rsquo;s incursion into the conversation had proved rather
+a powerful distraction to her ordinarily sound bridge-craft.<br>
+<br>
+Ada Spelvexit emptied her purse of several gold pieces and infused a
+corresponding degree of superiority into her manner.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I must be going now,&rdquo; she announced; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m dining
+early.&nbsp; I have to give an address to some charwomen afterwards.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Why?&rdquo; asked Lady Caroline, with a disconcerting directness
+that was one of her most formidable characteristics.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Oh, well, I have some things to say to them that I daresay they
+will like to hear,&rdquo; said Ada, with a thin laugh.<br>
+<br>
+Her statement was received with a silence that betokened profound unbelief
+in any such probability.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I go about a good deal among working-class women,&rdquo; she
+added.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;No one has ever said it,&rdquo; observed Lady Caroline, &ldquo;but
+how painfully true it is that the poor have us always with them.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Ada Spelvexit hastened her departure; the marred impressiveness of her
+retreat came as a culminating discomfiture on the top of her ill-fortune
+at the card-table.&nbsp; Possibly, however, the multiplication of her
+own annoyances enabled her to survey charwomen&rsquo;s troubles with
+increased cheerfulness.&nbsp; None of them, at any rate, had spent an
+afternoon with Lady Caroline.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca cut in at another table and with better fortune attending
+on her, succeeded in winning back most of her losses.&nbsp; A sense
+of satisfaction was distinctly dominant as she took leave of her hostess.&nbsp;
+St. Michael&rsquo;s gossip, or rather the manner in which it had been
+received, had given her a clue to the real state of affairs, which,
+however slender and conjectural, at least pointed in the desired direction.&nbsp;
+At first she had been horribly afraid lest she should be listening to
+a definite announcement which would have been the death-blow to her
+hopes, but as the recitation went on without any of those assured little
+minor details which St. Michael so loved to supply, she had come to
+the conclusion that it was merely a piece of intelligent guesswork.&nbsp;
+And if Lady Caroline had really believed in the story of Elaine de Frey&rsquo;s
+virtual engagement to Courtenay Youghal she would have taken a malicious
+pleasure in encouraging St. Michael in his confidences, and in watching
+Francesca&rsquo;s discomfiture under the recital.&nbsp; The irritated
+manner in which she had cut short the discussion betrayed the fact,
+that, as far as the old woman&rsquo;s information went, it was Comus
+and not Courtenay Youghal who held the field.&nbsp; And in this particular
+case Lady Caroline&rsquo;s information was likely to be nearer the truth
+than St. Michael&rsquo;s confident gossip.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca always gave a penny to the first crossing-sweeper or match-seller
+she chanced across after a successful sitting at bridge.&nbsp; This
+afternoon she had come out of the fray some fifteen shillings to the
+bad, but she gave two pennies to a crossing-sweeper at the north-west
+corner of Berkeley Square as a sort of thank-offering to the Gods.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER VIII<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+It was a fresh rain-repentant afternoon, following a morning that had
+been sultry and torrentially wet by turns; the sort of afternoon that
+impels people to talk graciously of the rain as having done a lot of
+good, its chief merit in their eyes probably having been its recognition
+of the art of moderation.&nbsp; Also it was an afternoon that invited
+bodily activity after the convalescent languor of the earlier part of
+the day.&nbsp; Elaine had instinctively found her way into her riding-habit
+and sent an order down to the stables - a blessed oasis that still smelt
+sweetly of horse and hay and cleanliness in a world that reeked of petrol,
+and now she set her mare at a smart pace through a succession of long-stretching
+country lanes.&nbsp; She was due some time that afternoon at a garden-party,
+but she rode with determination in an opposite direction.&nbsp; In the
+first place neither Comus or Courtenay would be at the party, which
+fact seemed to remove any valid reason that could be thought of for
+inviting her attendance thereat; in the second place about a hundred
+human beings would be gathered there, and human gatherings were not
+her most crying need at the present moment.&nbsp; Since her last encounter
+with her wooers, under the cedars in her own garden, Elaine realised
+that she was either very happy or cruelly unhappy, she could not quite
+determine which.&nbsp; She seemed to have what she most wanted in the
+world lying at her feet, and she was dreadfully uncertain in her more
+reflective moments whether she really wanted to stretch out her hand
+and take it.&nbsp; It was all very like some situation in an Arabian
+Nights tale or a story of Pagan Hellas, and consequently the more puzzling
+and disconcerting to a girl brought up on the methodical lines of Victorian
+Christianity.&nbsp; Her appeal court was in permanent session these
+last few days, but it gave no decisions, at least none that she would
+listen to.&nbsp; And the ride on her fast light-stepping little mare,
+alone and unattended, through the fresh-smelling leafy lanes into unexplored
+country, seemed just what she wanted at the moment.&nbsp; The mare made
+some small delicate pretence of being roadshy, not the staring dolt-like
+kind of nervousness that shows itself in an irritating hanging-back
+as each conspicuous wayside object presents itself, but the nerve-flutter
+of an imaginative animal that merely results in a quick whisk of the
+head and a swifter bound forward.&nbsp; She might have paraphrased the
+mental attitude of the immortalised Peter Bell into<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+A basket underneath a tree<br>
+A yellow tiger is to me,<br>
+If it is nothing more.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The more really alarming episodes of the road, the hoot and whir of
+a passing motor-car or the loud vibrating hum of a wayside threshing-machine,
+were treated with indifference.<br>
+<br>
+On turning a corner out of a narrow coppice-bordered lane into a wider
+road that sloped steadily upward in a long stretch of hill Elaine saw,
+coming toward her at no great distance, a string of yellow-painted vans,
+drawn for the most part by skewbald or speckled horses.&nbsp; A certain
+rakish air about these oncoming road-craft proclaimed them as belonging
+to a travelling wild-beast show, decked out in the rich primitive colouring
+that one&rsquo;s taste in childhood would have insisted on before it
+had been schooled in the artistic value of dulness.&nbsp; It was an
+unlooked-for and distinctly unwelcome encounter.&nbsp; The mare had
+already commenced a sixfold scrutiny with nostrils, eyes and daintily-pricked
+ears; one ear made hurried little backward movements to hear what Elaine
+was saying about the eminent niceness and respectability of the approaching
+caravan, but even Elaine felt that she would be unable satisfactorily
+to explain the elephants and camels that would certainly form part of
+the procession.&nbsp; To turn back would seem rather craven, and the
+mare might take fright at the manoeuvre and try to bolt; a gate standing
+ajar at the entrance to a farmyard lane provided a convenient way out
+of the difficulty.<br>
+<br>
+As Elaine pushed her way through she became aware of a man standing
+just inside the lane, who made a movement forward to open the gate for
+her.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Thank you.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m just getting out of the way of a wild-beast
+show,&rdquo; she explained; &ldquo;my mare is tolerant of motors and
+traction-engines, but I expect camels - hullo,&rdquo; she broke off,
+recognising the man as an old acquaintance, &ldquo;I heard you had taken
+rooms in a farmhouse somewhere.&nbsp; Fancy meeting you in this way.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+In the not very distant days of her little-girlhood, Tom Keriway had
+been a man to be looked upon with a certain awe and envy; indeed the
+glamour of his roving career would have fired the imagination, and wistful
+desire to do likewise, of many young Englishmen.&nbsp; It seemed to
+be the grown-up realisation of the games played in dark rooms in winter
+fire-lit evenings, and the dreams dreamed over favourite books of adventure.&nbsp;
+Making Vienna his headquarters, almost his home, he had rambled where
+he listed through the lands of the Near and Middle East as leisurely
+and thoroughly as tamer souls might explore Paris.&nbsp; He had wandered
+through Hungarian horse-fairs, hunted shy crafty beasts on lonely Balkan
+hillsides, dropped himself pebble-wise into the stagnant human pool
+of some Bulgarian monastery, threaded his way through the strange racial
+mosaic of Salonika, listened with amused politeness to the shallow ultra-modern
+opinions of a voluble editor or lawyer in some wayside Russian town,
+or learned wisdom from a chance tavern companion, one of the atoms of
+the busy ant-stream of men and merchandise that moves untiringly round
+the shores of the Black Sea.&nbsp; And far and wide as he might roam
+he always managed to turn up at frequent intervals, at ball and supper
+and theatre, in the gay Hauptstadt of the Habsburgs, haunting his favourite
+caf&eacute;s and wine-vaults, skimming through his favourite news-sheets,
+greeting old acquaintances and friends, from ambassadors down to cobblers
+in the social scale.&nbsp; He seldom talked of his travels, but it might
+be said that his travels talked of him; there was an air about him that
+a German diplomat once summed up in a phrase: &ldquo;a man that wolves
+have sniffed at.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+And then two things happened, which he had not mapped out in his route;
+a severe illness shook half the life and all the energy out of him,
+and a heavy money loss brought him almost to the door of destitution.&nbsp;
+With something, perhaps, of the impulse which drives a stricken animal
+away from its kind, Tom Keriway left the haunts where he had known so
+much happiness, and withdrew into the shelter of a secluded farmhouse
+lodging; more than ever he became to Elaine a hearsay personality.&nbsp;
+And now the chance meeting with the caravan had flung her across the
+threshold of his retreat.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;What a charming little nook you&rsquo;ve got hold of,&rdquo;
+she exclaimed with instinctive politeness, and then looked searchingly
+round, and discovered that she had spoken the truth; it really was charming.&nbsp;
+The farmhouse had that intensely English look that one seldom sees out
+of Normandy.&nbsp; Over the whole scene of rickyard, garden, outbuildings,
+horsepond and orchard, brooded that air which seems rightfully to belong
+to out-of-the-way farmyards, an air of wakeful dreaminess which suggests
+that here, man and beast and bird have got up so early that the rest
+of the world has never caught them up and never will.<br>
+<br>
+Elaine dismounted, and Keriway led the mare round to a little paddock
+by the side of a great grey barn.&nbsp; At the end of the lane they
+could see the show go past, a string of lumbering vans and great striding
+beasts that seemed to link the vast silences of the desert with the
+noises and sights and smells, the naphtha-flares and advertisement hoardings
+and trampled orange-peel, of an endless succession of towns.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You had better let the caravan pass well on its way before you
+get on the road again,&rdquo; said Keriway; &ldquo;the smell of the
+beasts may make your mare nervous and restive going home.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Then he called to a boy who was busy with a hoe among some defiantly
+prosperous weeds, to fetch the lady a glass of milk and a piece of currant
+loaf.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know when I&rsquo;ve seen anything so utterly charming
+and peaceful,&rdquo; said Elaine, propping herself on a seat that a
+pear-tree had obligingly designed in the fantastic curve of its trunk.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Charming, certainly,&rdquo; said Keriway, &ldquo;but too full
+of the stress of its own little life struggle to be peaceful.&nbsp;
+Since I have lived here I&rsquo;ve learnt, what I&rsquo;ve always suspected,
+that a country farmhouse, set away in a world of its own, is one of
+the most wonderful studies of interwoven happenings and tragedies that
+can be imagined.&nbsp; It is like the old chronicles of medieval Europe
+in the days when there was a sort of ordered anarchy between feudal
+lords and overlords, and burg-grafs, and mitred abbots, and prince-bishops,
+robber barons and merchant guilds, and Electors and so forth, all striving
+and contending and counter-plotting, and interfering with each other
+under some vague code of loosely-applied rules.&nbsp; Here one sees
+it reproduced under one&rsquo;s eyes, like a musty page of black-letter
+come to life.&nbsp; Look at one little section of it, the poultry-life
+on the farm.&nbsp; Villa poultry, dull egg-machines, with records kept
+of how many ounces of food they eat, and how many pennyworths of eggs
+they lay, give you no idea of the wonder-life of these farm-birds; their
+feuds and jealousies, and carefully maintained prerogatives, their unsparing
+tyrannies and persecutions, their calculated courage and bravado or
+sedulously hidden cowardice, it might all be some human chapter from
+the annals of the old Rhineland or medieval Italy.&nbsp; And then, outside
+their own bickering wars and hates, the grim enemies that come up against
+them from the woodlands; the hawk that dashes among the coops like a
+moss-trooper raiding the border, knowing well that a charge of shot
+may tear him to bits at any moment.&nbsp; And the stoat, a creeping
+slip of brown fur a few inches long, intently and unstayably out for
+blood.&nbsp; And the hunger-taught master of craft, the red fox, who
+has waited perhaps half the afternoon for his chance while the fowls
+were dusting themselves under the hedge, and just as they were turning
+supper-ward to the yard one has stopped a moment to give her feathers
+a final shake and found death springing upon her.&nbsp; Do you know,&rdquo;
+he continued, as Elaine fed herself and the mare with morsels of currant-loaf,
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think any tragedy in literature that I have ever
+come across impressed me so much as the first one, that I spelled out
+slowly for myself in words of three letters: the bad fox has got the
+red hen.&nbsp; There was something so dramatically complete about it;
+the badness of the fox, added to all the traditional guile of his race,
+seemed to heighten the horror of the hen&rsquo;s fate, and there was
+such a suggestion of masterful malice about the word &lsquo;got.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+One felt that a countryside in arms would not get that hen away from
+the bad fox.&nbsp; They used to think me a slow dull reader for not
+getting on with my lesson, but I used to sit and picture to myself the
+red hen, with its wings beating helplessly, screeching in terrified
+protest, or perhaps, if he had got it by the neck, with beak wide agape
+and silent, and eyes staring, as it left the farmyard for ever.&nbsp;
+I have seen blood-spillings and down-crushings and abject defeat here
+and there in my time, but the red hen has remained in my mind as the
+type of helpless tragedy.&rdquo;&nbsp; He was silent for a moment as
+if he were again musing over the three-letter drama that had so dwelt
+in his childhood&rsquo;s imagination.&nbsp; &ldquo;Tell me some of the
+things you have seen in your time,&rdquo; was the request that was nearly
+on Elaine&rsquo;s lips, but she hastily checked herself and substituted
+another.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Tell me more about the farm, please.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+And he told her of a whole world, or rather of several intermingled
+worlds, set apart in this sleepy hollow in the hills, of beast lore
+and wood lore and farm craft, at times touching almost the border of
+witchcraft - passing lightly here, not with the probing eagerness of
+those who know nothing, but with the averted glance of those who fear
+to see too much.&nbsp; He told her of those things that slept and those
+that prowled when the dusk fell, of strange hunting cats, of the yard
+swine and the stalled cattle, of the farm folk themselves, as curious
+and remote in their way, in their ideas and fears and wants and tragedies,
+as the brutes and feathered stock that they tended.&nbsp; It seemed
+to Elaine as if a musty store of old-world children&rsquo;s books had
+been fetched down from some cobwebbed lumber-room and brought to life.&nbsp;
+Sitting there in the little paddock, grown thickly with tall weeds and
+rank grasses, and shadowed by the weather-beaten old grey barn, listening
+to this chronicle of wonderful things, half fanciful, half very real,
+she could scarcely believe that a few miles away there was a garden-party
+in full swing, with smart frocks and smart conversation, fashionable
+refreshments and fashionable music, and a fevered undercurrent of social
+strivings and snubbings.&nbsp; Did Vienna and the Balkan Mountains and
+the Black Sea seem as remote and hard to believe in, she wondered, to
+the man sitting by her side, who had discovered or invented this wonderful
+fairyland?&nbsp; Was it a true and merciful arrangement of fate and
+life that the things of the moment thrust out the after-taste of the
+things that had been?&nbsp; Here was one who had held much that was
+priceless in the hollow of his hand and lost it all, and he was happy
+and absorbed and well-content with the little wayside corner of the
+world into which he had crept.&nbsp; And Elaine, who held so many desirable
+things in the hollow of her hand, could not make up her mind to be even
+moderately happy.&nbsp; She did not even know whether to take this hero
+of her childhood down from his pedestal, or to place him on a higher
+one; on the whole she was inclined to resent rather than approve the
+idea that ill-health and misfortune could so completely subdue and tame
+an erstwhile bold and roving spirit.<br>
+<br>
+The mare was showing signs of delicately-hinted impatience; the paddock,
+with its teasing insects and very indifferent grazing, had not thrust
+out the image of her own comfortable well-foddered loose-box.&nbsp;
+Elaine divested her habit of some remaining crumbs of bun-loaf and jumped
+lightly on to her saddle.&nbsp; As she rode slowly down the lane, with
+Keriway escorting her as far as its gate, she looked round at what had
+seemed to her, a short while ago, just a picturesque old farmstead,
+a place of bee-hives and hollyhocks and gabled cart-sheds; now it was
+in her eyes a magic city, with an undercurrent of reality beneath its
+magic.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You are a person to be envied,&rdquo; she said to Keriway; &ldquo;you
+have created a fairyland, and you are living in it yourself.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Envied?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+He shot the question out with sudden bitterness.&nbsp; She looked down
+and saw the wistful misery that had come into his face.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Once,&rdquo; he said to her, &ldquo;in a German paper I read
+a short story about a tame crippled crane that lived in the park of
+some small town.&nbsp; I forget what happened in the story, but there
+was one line that I shall always remember: &lsquo;it was lame, that
+is why it was tame.&rsquo;&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+He had created a fairyland, but assuredly he was not living in it.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER IX<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+In the warmth of a late June morning the long shaded stretch of raked
+earth, gravel-walk and rhododendron bush that is known affectionately
+as the Row was alive with the monotonous movement and alert stagnation
+appropriate to the time and place.&nbsp; The seekers after health, the
+seekers after notoriety and recognition, and the lovers of good exercise
+were all well represented on the galloping ground; the gravel-walk and
+chairs and long seats held a population whose varied instincts and motives
+would have baffled a social catalogue-maker.&nbsp; The children, handled
+or in perambulators, might be excused from instinct or motive; they
+were brought.<br>
+<br>
+Pleasingly conspicuous among a bunch of indifferent riders pacing along
+by the rails where the onlookers were thickest was Courtenay Youghal,
+on his handsome plum-roan gelding Anne de Joyeuse.&nbsp; That delicately
+stepping animal had taken a prize at Islington and nearly taken the
+life of a stable-boy of whom he disapproved, but his strongest claims
+to distinction were his good looks and his high opinion of himself.&nbsp;
+Youghal evidently believed in thorough accord between horse and rider.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Please stop and talk to me,&rdquo; said a quiet beckoning voice
+from the other side of the rails, and Youghal drew rein and greeted
+Lady Veula Croot.&nbsp; Lady Veula had married into a family of commercial
+solidity and enterprising political nonentity.&nbsp; She had a devoted
+husband, some blonde teachable children, and a look of unutterable weariness
+in her eyes.&nbsp; To see her standing at the top of an expensively
+horticultured staircase receiving her husband&rsquo;s guests was rather
+like watching an animal performing on a music-hall stage.<br>
+<br>
+One always tells oneself that the animal likes it, and one always knows
+that it doesn&rsquo;t.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Lady Veula is an ardent Free Trader, isn&rsquo;t she?&rdquo;
+someone once remarked to Lady Caroline.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I wonder,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline, in her gently questioning
+voice; &ldquo;a woman whose dresses are made in Paris and whose marriage
+has been made in Heaven might be equally biassed for and against free
+imports.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Lady Veula looked at Youghal and his mount with slow critical appraisement,
+and there was a note of blended raillery and wistfulness in her voice.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You two dear things, I should love to stroke you both, but I&rsquo;m
+not sure how Joyeuse would take it.&nbsp; So I&rsquo;ll stroke you down
+verbally instead.&nbsp; I admired your attack on Sir Edward immensely,
+though of course I don&rsquo;t agree with a word of it.&nbsp; Your description
+of him building a hedge round the German cuckoo and hoping he was isolating
+it was rather sweet.&nbsp; Seriously though, I regard him as one of
+the pillars of the Administration.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;So do I,&rdquo; said Youghal; &ldquo;the misfortune is that he
+is merely propping up a canvas roof.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s just his regrettable
+solidity and integrity that makes him so expensively dangerous.&nbsp;
+The average Briton arrives at the same judgment about Roan&rsquo;s handling
+of foreign affairs as Omar does of the Supreme Being in his dealings
+with the world: He&rsquo;s a good fellow and &lsquo;twill all be well.&rsquo;&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Lady Veula laughed lightly.&nbsp; &ldquo;My Party is in power so I may
+exercise the privilege of being optimistic.&nbsp; Who is that who bowed
+to you?&rdquo; she continued, as a dark young man with an inclination
+to stoutness passed by them on foot; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve seen him about
+a good deal lately.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s been to one or two of my dances.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Andrei Drakoloff,&rdquo; said Youghal; &ldquo;he&rsquo;s just
+produced a play that has had a big success in Moscow and is certain
+to be extremely popular all over Russia.&nbsp; In the first three acts
+the heroine is supposed to be dying of consumption; in the last act
+they find she is really dying of cancer.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Are the Russians really such a gloomy people?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Gloom-loving but not in the least gloomy.&nbsp; They merely take
+their sadness pleasurably, just as we are accused of taking our pleasures
+sadly.&nbsp; Have you noticed that dreadful Klopstock youth has been
+pounding past us at shortening intervals.&nbsp; He&rsquo;ll come up
+and talk if he half catches your eye.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I only just know him.&nbsp; Isn&rsquo;t he at an agricultural
+college or something of the sort?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Yes, studying to be a gentleman farmer, he told me.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t
+ask if both subjects were compulsory.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re really rather dreadful,&rdquo; said Lady Veula,
+trying to look as if she thought so; &ldquo;remember, we are all equal
+in the sight of Heaven.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+For a preacher of wholesome truths her voice rather lacked conviction.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;If I and Ernest Klopstock are really equal in the sight of Heaven,&rdquo;
+said Youghal, with intense complacency, &ldquo;I should recommend Heaven
+to consult an eye specialist.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+There was a heavy spattering of loose earth, and a squelching of saddle-leather,
+as the Klopstock youth lumbered up to the rails and delivered himself
+of loud, cheerful greetings. Joyeuse laid his ears well back as the
+ungainly bay cob and his appropriately matched rider drew up beside
+him; his verdict was reflected and endorsed by the cold stare of Youghal&rsquo;s
+eyes.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been having a nailing fine time,&rdquo; recounted
+the newcomer with clamorous enthusiasm; &ldquo;I was over in Paris last
+month and had lots of strawberries there, then I had a lot more in London,
+and now I&rsquo;ve been having a late crop of them in Herefordshire,
+so I&rsquo;ve had quite a lot this year.&rdquo;&nbsp; And he laughed
+as one who had deserved well and received well of Fate.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;The charm of that story,&rdquo; said Youghal, &ldquo;is that
+it can be told in any drawing-room.&rdquo;&nbsp; And with a sweep of
+his wide-brimmed hat to Lady Veula he turned the impatient Joyeuse into
+the moving stream of horse and horsemen.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;That woman reminds me of some verse I&rsquo;ve read and liked,&rdquo;
+thought Youghal, as Joyeuse sprang into a light showy canter that gave
+full recognition to the existence of observant human beings along the
+side walk.&nbsp; &ldquo;Ah, I have it.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+And he quoted almost aloud, as one does in the exhilaration of a canter:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;How much I loved that way you had<br>
+Of smiling most, when very sad,<br>
+A smile which carried tender hints<br>
+Of sun and spring,<br>
+And yet, more than all other thing,<br>
+Of weariness beyond all words.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+And having satisfactorily fitted Lady Veula on to a quotation he dismissed
+her from his mind.&nbsp; With the constancy of her sex she thought about
+him, his good looks and his youth and his railing tongue, till late
+in the afternoon.<br>
+<br>
+While Youghal was putting Joyeuse through his paces under the elm trees
+of the Row a little drama in which he was directly interested was being
+played out not many hundred yards away.&nbsp; Elaine and Comus were
+indulging themselves in two pennyworths of Park chair, drawn aside just
+a little from the serried rows of sitters who were set out like bedded
+plants over an acre or so of turf.&nbsp; Comus was, for the moment,
+in a mood of pugnacious gaiety, disbursing a fund of pointed criticism
+and unsparing anecdote concerning those of the promenaders or loungers
+whom he knew personally or by sight.&nbsp; Elaine was rather quieter
+than usual, and the grave serenity of the Leonardo da Vinci portrait
+seemed intensified in her face this morning.&nbsp; In his leisurely
+courtship Comus had relied almost exclusively on his physical attraction
+and the fitful drollery of his wit and high spirits, and these graces
+had gone far to make him seem a very desirable and rather lovable thing
+in Elaine&rsquo;s eyes.&nbsp; But he had left out of account the disfavour
+which he constantly risked and sometimes incurred from his frank and
+undisguised indifference to other people&rsquo;s interests and wishes,
+including, at times, Elaine&rsquo;s.&nbsp; And the more that she felt
+that she liked him the more she was irritated by his lack of consideration
+for her.&nbsp; Without expecting that her every wish should become a
+law to him she would at least have liked it to reach the formality of
+a Second Reading.&nbsp; Another important factor he had also left out
+of his reckoning, namely the presence on the scene of another suitor,
+who also had youth and wit to recommend him, and who certainly did not
+lack physical attractions.&nbsp; Comus, marching carelessly through
+unknown country to effect what seemed already an assured victory, made
+the mistake of disregarding the existence of an unbeaten army on his
+flank.<br>
+<br>
+To-day Elaine felt that, without having actually quarrelled, she and
+Comus had drifted a little bit out of sympathy with one another.&nbsp;
+The fault she knew was scarcely hers, in fact from the most good-natured
+point of view it could hardly be denied that it was almost entirely
+his.&nbsp; The incident of the silver dish had lacked even the attraction
+of novelty; it had been one of a series, all bearing a strong connecting
+likeness.&nbsp; There had been small unrepaid loans which Elaine would
+not have grudged in themselves, though the application for them brought
+a certain qualm of distaste; with the perversity which seemed inseparable
+from his doings, Comus had always flung away a portion of his borrowings
+in some ostentatious piece of glaring and utterly profitless extravagance,
+which outraged all the canons of her upbringing without bringing him
+an atom of understandable satisfaction.&nbsp; Under these repeated discouragements
+it was not surprising that some small part of her affection should have
+slipped away, but she had come to the Park that morning with an unconfessed
+expectation of being gently wooed back to the mood of gracious forgetfulness
+that she was only too eager to assume.&nbsp; It was almost worth while
+being angry with Comus for the sake of experiencing the pleasure of
+being coaxed into friendliness again with the charm which he knew so
+well how to exert.&nbsp; It was delicious here under the trees on this
+perfect June morning, and Elaine had the blessed assurance that most
+of the women within range were envying her the companionship of the
+handsome merry-hearted youth who sat by her side.&nbsp; With special
+complacence she contemplated her cousin Suzette, who was self-consciously
+but not very elatedly basking in the attentions of her fianc&eacute;,
+an earnest-looking young man who was superintendent of a People&rsquo;s
+something-or-other on the south side of the river, and whose clothes
+Comus had described as having been made in Southwark rather than in
+anger.<br>
+<br>
+Most of the pleasures in life must be paid for, and the chair-ticket
+vendor in due time made his appearance in quest of pennies.<br>
+<br>
+Comus paid him from out of a varied assortment of coins and then balanced
+the remainder in the palm of his hand.&nbsp; Elaine felt a sudden foreknowledge
+of something disagreeable about to happen and a red spot deepened in
+her cheeks.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Four shillings and fivepence and a half-penny,&rdquo; said Comus,
+reflectively.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a ridiculous sum to last me for
+the next three days, and I owe a card debt of over two pounds.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Yes?&rdquo; commented Elaine dryly and with an apparent lack
+of interest in his exchequer statement.&nbsp; Surely, she was thinking
+hurriedly to herself, he could not be foolish enough to broach the matter
+of another loan.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;The card debt is rather a nuisance,&rdquo; pursued Comus, with
+fatalistic persistency.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You won seven pounds last week, didn&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; asked
+Elaine; &ldquo;don&rsquo;t you put by any of your winnings to balance
+losses?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;The four shillings and the fivepence and the half-penny represent
+the rearguard of the seven pounds,&rdquo; said Comus; &ldquo;the rest
+have fallen by the way.&nbsp; If I can pay the two pounds to-day I daresay
+I shall win something more to go on with; I&rsquo;m holding rather good
+cards just now.&nbsp; But if I can&rsquo;t pay it of course I shan&rsquo;t
+show up at the club.&nbsp; So you see the fix I am in.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Elaine took no notice of this indirect application.&nbsp; The Appeal
+Court was assembling in haste to consider new evidence, and this time
+there was the rapidity of sudden determination about its movement.<br>
+<br>
+The conversation strayed away from the fateful topic for a few moments
+and then Comus brought it deliberately back to the danger zone.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It would be awfully nice if you would let me have a fiver for
+a few days, Elaine,&rdquo; he said quickly; &ldquo;if you don&rsquo;t
+I really don&rsquo;t know what I shall do.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;If you are really bothered about your card debt I will send you
+the two pounds by messenger boy early this afternoon.&rdquo;&nbsp; She
+spoke quietly and with great decision.&nbsp; &ldquo;And I shall not
+be at the Connor&rsquo;s dance to-night,&rdquo; she continued; &ldquo;it&rsquo;s
+too hot for dancing.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m going home now; please don&rsquo;t
+bother to accompany me, I particularly wish to go alone.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Comus saw that he had overstepped the mark of her good nature.&nbsp;
+Wisely he made no immediate attempt to force himself back into her good
+graces.&nbsp; He would wait till her indignation had cooled.<br>
+<br>
+His tactics would have been excellent if he had not forgotten that unbeaten
+army on his flank.<br>
+<br>
+Elaine de Frey had known very clearly what qualities she had wanted
+in Comus, and she had known, against all efforts at self-deception,
+that he fell far short of those qualities.&nbsp; She had been willing
+to lower her standard of moral requirements in proportion as she was
+fond of the boy, but there was a point beyond which she would not go.&nbsp;
+He had hurt her pride besides alarming her sense of caution.<br>
+<br>
+Suzette, on whom she felt a thoroughly justified tendency to look down,
+had at any rate an attentive and considerate lover.&nbsp; Elaine walked
+towards the Park gates feeling that in one essential Suzette possessed
+something that had been denied to her, and at the gates she met Joyeuse
+and his spruce young rider preparing to turn homeward.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Get rid of Joyeuse and come and take me out to lunch somewhere,&rdquo;
+demanded Elaine.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;How jolly,&rdquo; said Youghal.&nbsp; &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s go to
+the Corridor Restaurant.&nbsp; The head waiter there is an old Viennese
+friend of mine and looks after me beautifully.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve never
+been there with a lady before, and he&rsquo;s sure to ask me afterwards,
+in his fatherly way, if we&rsquo;re engaged.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The lunch was a success in every way.&nbsp; There was just enough orchestral
+effort to immerse the conversation without drowning it, and Youghal
+was an attentive and inspired host.&nbsp; Through an open doorway Elaine
+could see the caf&eacute; reading-room, with its imposing array of <i>Neue
+Freie</i> <i>Presse, Berliner Tageblatt</i>, and other exotic newspapers
+hanging on the wall.&nbsp; She looked across at the young man seated
+opposite her, who gave one the impression of having centred the most
+serious efforts of his brain on his toilet and his food, and recalled
+some of the flattering remarks that the press had bestowed on his recent
+speeches.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Doesn&rsquo;t it make you conceited, Courtenay,&rdquo; she asked,
+&ldquo;to look at all those foreign newspapers hanging there and know
+that most of them have got paragraphs and articles about your Persian
+speech?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Youghal laughed.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s always a chastening corrective in the thought that
+some of them may have printed your portrait.&nbsp; When once you&rsquo;ve
+seen your features hurriedly reproduced in the <i>Matin</i>, for instance,
+you feel you would like to be a veiled Turkish woman for the rest of
+your life.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+And Youghal gazed long and lovingly at his reflection in the nearest
+mirror, as an antidote against possible incitements to humility in the
+portrait gallery of fame.<br>
+<br>
+Elaine felt a certain soothed satisfaction in the fact that this young
+man, whose knowledge of the Middle East was an embarrassment to Ministers
+at question time and in debate, was showing himself equally well-informed
+on the subject of her culinary likes and dislikes.&nbsp; If Suzette
+could have been forced to attend as a witness at a neighbouring table
+she would have felt even happier.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Did the head waiter ask if we were engaged?&rdquo; asked Elaine,
+when Courtenay had settled the bill, and she had finished collecting
+her sunshade and gloves and other impedimenta from the hands of obsequious
+attendants.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Youghal, &ldquo;and he seemed quite crestfallen
+when I had to say &lsquo;no.&rsquo;&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It would be horrid to disappoint him when he&rsquo;s looked after
+us so charmingly,&rdquo; said Elaine; &ldquo;tell him that we are.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER X<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The Rutland Galleries were crowded, especially in the neighbourhood
+of the tea-buffet, by a fashionable throng of art-patrons which had
+gathered to inspect Mervyn Quentock&rsquo;s collection of Society portraits.&nbsp;
+Quentock was a young artist whose abilities were just receiving due
+recognition from the critics; that the recognition was not overdue he
+owed largely to his perception of the fact that if one hides one&rsquo;s
+talent under a bushel one must be careful to point out to everyone the
+exact bushel under which it is hidden.&nbsp; There are two manners of
+receiving recognition: one is to be discovered so long after one&rsquo;s
+death that one&rsquo;s grandchildren have to write to the papers to
+establish their relationship; the other is to be discovered, like the
+infant Moses, at the very outset of one&rsquo;s career.&nbsp; Mervyn
+Quentock had chosen the latter and happier manner.&nbsp; In an age when
+many aspiring young men strive to advertise their wares by imparting
+to them a freakish imbecility, Quentock turned out work that was characterised
+by a pleasing delicate restraint, but he contrived to herald his output
+with a certain fanfare of personal eccentricity, thereby compelling
+an attention which might otherwise have strayed past his studio.&nbsp;
+In appearance he was the ordinary cleanly young Englishman, except,
+perhaps, that his eyes rather suggested a library edition of the Arabian
+Nights; his clothes matched his appearance and showed no taint of the
+sartorial disorder by which the bourgeois of the garden-city and the
+Latin Quarter anxiously seeks to proclaim his kinship with art and thought.&nbsp;
+His eccentricity took the form of flying in the face of some of the
+prevailing social currents of the day, but as a reactionary, never as
+a reformer.&nbsp; He produced a gasp of admiring astonishment in fashionable
+circles by refusing to paint actresses - except, of course, those who
+had left the legitimate drama to appear between the boards of Debrett.&nbsp;
+He absolutely declined to execute portraits of Americans unless they
+hailed from certain favoured States.&nbsp; His &ldquo;water-colour-line,&rdquo;
+as a New York paper phrased it, earned for him a crop of angry criticisms
+and a shoal of Transatlantic commissions, and criticism and commissions
+were the things that Quentock most wanted.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Of course he is perfectly right,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline Benaresq,
+calmly rescuing a piled-up plate of caviare sandwiches from the neighbourhood
+of a trio of young ladies who had established themselves hopefully within
+easy reach of it.&nbsp; &ldquo;Art,&rdquo; she continued, addressing
+herself to the Rev. Poltimore Vardon, &ldquo;has always been geographically
+exclusive.&nbsp; London may be more important from most points of view
+than Venice, but the art of portrait painting, which would never concern
+itself with a Lord Mayor, simply grovels at the feet of the Doges.&nbsp;
+As a Socialist I&rsquo;m bound to recognise the right of Ealing to compare
+itself with Avignon, but one cannot expect the Muses to put the two
+on a level.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Exclusiveness,&rdquo; said the Reverend Poltimore, &ldquo;has
+been the salvation of Art, just as the lack of it is proving the downfall
+of religion.&nbsp; My colleagues of the cloth go about zealously proclaiming
+the fact that Christianity, in some form or other, is attracting shoals
+of converts among all sorts of races and tribes, that one had scarcely
+ever heard of, except in reviews of books of travel that one never read.&nbsp;
+That sort of thing was all very well when the world was more sparsely
+populated, but nowadays, when it simply teems with human beings, no
+one is particularly impressed by the fact that a few million, more or
+less, of converts, of a low stage of mental development, have accepted
+the teachings of some particular religion.&nbsp; It not only chills
+one&rsquo;s enthusiasm, it positively shakes one&rsquo;s convictions
+when one hears that the things one has been brought up to believe as
+true are being very favourably spoken of by Buriats and Samoyeds and
+Kanakas.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The Rev. Poltimore Vardon had once seen a resemblance in himself to
+Voltaire, and had lived alongside the comparison ever since.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;No modern cult or fashion,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;would
+be favourably influenced by considerations based on statistics; fancy
+adopting a certain style of hat or cut of coat, because it was being
+largely worn in Lancashire and the Midlands; fancy favouring a certain
+brand of champagne because it was being extensively patronised in German
+summer resorts.&nbsp; No wonder that religion is falling into disuse
+in this country under such ill-directed methods.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t prevent the heathen being converted if they choose
+to be,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline; &ldquo;this is an age of toleration.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You could always deny it,&rdquo; said the Rev. Poltimore, &ldquo;like
+the Belgians do with regrettable occurrences in the Congo.&nbsp; But
+I would go further than that.&nbsp; I would stimulate the waning enthusiasm
+for Christianity in this country by labelling it as the exclusive possession
+of a privileged few.&nbsp; If one could induce the Duchess of Pelm,
+for instance, to assert that the Kingdom of Heaven, as far as the British
+Isles are concerned, is strictly limited to herself, two of the under-gardeners
+at Pelmby, and, possibly, but not certainly, the Dean of Dunster, there
+would be an instant reshaping of the popular attitude towards religious
+convictions and observances.&nbsp; Once let the idea get about that
+the Christian Church is rather more exclusive than the Lawn at Ascot,
+and you would have a quickening of religious life such as this generation
+has never witnessed.&nbsp; But as long as the clergy and the religious
+organisations advertise their creed on the lines of &lsquo;Everybody
+ought to believe in us: millions do,&rsquo; one can expect nothing but
+indifference and waning faith.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Time is just as exclusive in its way as Art,&rdquo; said Lady
+Caroline.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;In what way?&rdquo; said the Reverend Poltimore.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Your pleasantries about religion would have sounded quite clever
+and advanced in the early &lsquo;nineties.&nbsp; To-day they have a
+dreadfully warmed-up flavour.&nbsp; That is the great delusion of you
+would-be advanced satirists; you imagine you can sit down comfortably
+for a couple of decades saying daring and startling things about the
+age you live in, which, whatever other defects it may have, is certainly
+not standing still.&nbsp; The whole of the Sherard Blaw school of discursive
+drama suggests, to my mind, Early Victorian furniture in a travelling
+circus.&nbsp; However, you will always have relays of people from the
+suburbs to listen to the Mocking Bird of yesterday, and sincerely imagine
+it is the harbinger of something new and revolutionising.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;<i>Would</i> you mind passing that plate of sandwiches,&rdquo;
+asked one of the trio of young ladies, emboldened by famine.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;With pleasure,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline, deftly passing her
+a nearly empty plate of bread-and-butter.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I meant the place of caviare sandwiches.&nbsp; So sorry to trouble
+you,&rdquo; persisted the young lady<br>
+<br>
+Her sorrow was misapplied; Lady Caroline had turned her attention to
+a newcomer.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;A very interesting exhibition,&rdquo; Ada Spelvexit was saying;
+&ldquo;faultless technique, as far as I am a judge of technique, and
+quite a master-touch in the way of poses.&nbsp; But have you noticed
+how very animal his art is?&nbsp; He seems to shut out the soul from
+his portraits.&nbsp; I nearly cried when I saw dear Winifred depicted
+simply as a good-looking healthy blonde.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I wish you had,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline; &ldquo;the spectacle
+of a strong, brave woman weeping at a private view in the Rutland Galleries
+would have been so sensational.&nbsp; It would certainly have been reproduced
+in the next Drury Lane drama.&nbsp; And I&rsquo;m so unlucky; I never
+see these sensational events.&nbsp; I was ill with appendicitis, you
+know, when Lulu Braminguard dramatically forgave her husband, after
+seventeen years of estrangement, during a State luncheon party at Windsor.&nbsp;
+The old queen was furious about it.&nbsp; She said it was so disrespectful
+to the cook to be thinking of such a thing at such a time.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Lady Caroline&rsquo;s recollections of things that hadn&rsquo;t happened
+at the Court of Queen Victoria were notoriously vivid; it was the very
+widespread fear that she might one day write a book of reminiscences
+that made her so universally respected.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;As for his full-length picture of Lady Brickfield,&rdquo; continued
+Ada, ignoring Lady Caroline&rsquo;s commentary as far as possible, &ldquo;all
+the expression seems to have been deliberately concentrated in the feet;
+beautiful feet, no doubt, but still, hardly the most distinctive part
+of a human being.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;To paint the right people at the wrong end may be an eccentricity,
+but it is scarcely an indiscretion,&rdquo; pronounced Lady Caroline.<br>
+<br>
+One of the portraits which attracted more than a passing flutter of
+attention was a costume study of Francesca Bassington.&nbsp; Francesca
+had secured some highly desirable patronage for the young artist, and
+in return he had enriched her pantheon of personal possessions with
+a clever piece of work into which he had thrown an unusual amount of
+imaginative detail.&nbsp; He had painted her in a costume of the great
+Louis&rsquo;s brightest period, seated in front of a tapestry that was
+so prominent in the composition that it could scarcely be said to form
+part of the background.&nbsp; Flowers and fruit, in exotic profusion,
+were its dominant note; quinces, pomegranates, passion-flowers, giant
+convolvulus, great mauve-pink roses, and grapes that were already being
+pressed by gleeful cupids in a riotous Arcadian vintage, stood out on
+its woven texture.&nbsp; The same note was struck in the beflowered
+satin of the lady&rsquo;s kirtle, and in the pomegranate pattern of
+the brocade that draped the couch on which she was seated.&nbsp; The
+artist had called his picture &ldquo;Recolte.&rdquo;&nbsp; And after
+one had taken in all the details of fruit and flower and foliage that
+earned the composition its name, one noted the landscape that showed
+through a broad casement in the left-hand corner.&nbsp; It was a landscape
+clutched in the grip of winter, naked, bleak, black-frozen; a winter
+in which things died and knew no rewakening.&nbsp; If the picture typified
+harvest, it was a harvest of artificial growth.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It leaves a great deal to the imagination, doesn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+said Ada Spelvexit, who had edged away from the range of Lady Caroline&rsquo;s
+tongue.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;At any rate one can tell who it&rsquo;s meant for,&rdquo; said
+Serena Golackly.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Oh, yes, it&rsquo;s a good likeness of dear Francesca,&rdquo;
+admitted Ada; &ldquo;of course, it flatters her.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;That, too, is a fault on the right side in portrait painting,&rdquo;
+said Serena; &ldquo;after all, if posterity is going to stare at one
+for centuries it&rsquo;s only kind and reasonable to be looking just
+a little better than one&rsquo;s best.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;What a curiously unequal style the artist has,&rdquo; continued
+Ada, almost as if she felt a personal grievance against him; &ldquo;I
+was just noticing what a lack of soul there was in most of his portraits.&nbsp;
+Dear Winifred, you know, who speaks so beautifully and feelingly at
+my gatherings for old women, he&rsquo;s made her look just an ordinary
+dairy-maidish blonde; and Francesca, who is quite the most soulless
+woman I&rsquo;ve ever met, well, he&rsquo;s given her quite - &rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Hush,&rdquo; said Serena, &ldquo;the Bassington boy is just behind
+you.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Comus stood looking at the portrait of his mother with the feeling of
+one who comes suddenly across a once-familiar half-forgotten acquaintance
+in unfamiliar surroundings.&nbsp; The likeness was undoubtedly a good
+one, but the artist had caught an expression in Francesca&rsquo;s eyes
+which few people had ever seen there.&nbsp; It was the expression of
+a woman who had forgotten for one short moment to be absorbed in the
+small cares and excitements of her life, the money worries and little
+social plannings, and had found time to send a look of half-wistful
+friendliness to some sympathetic companion.&nbsp; Comus could recall
+that look, fitful and fleeting, in his mother&rsquo;s eyes when she
+had been a few years younger, before her world had grown to be such
+a committee-room of ways and means.&nbsp; Almost as a re-discovery he
+remembered that she had once figured in his boyish mind as a &ldquo;rather
+good sort,&rdquo; more ready to see the laughable side of a piece of
+mischief than to labour forth a reproof.&nbsp; That the bygone feeling
+of good fellowship had been stamped out was, he knew, probably in great
+part his own doing, and it was possible that the old friendliness was
+still there under the surface of things, ready to show itself again
+if he willed it, and friends were becoming scarcer with him than enemies
+in these days.&nbsp; Looking at the picture with its wistful hint of
+a long ago comradeship, Comus made up his mind that he very much wanted
+things to be back on their earlier footing, and to see again on his
+mother&rsquo;s face the look that the artist had caught and perpetuated
+in its momentary flitting.&nbsp; If the projected Elaine-marriage came
+off, and in spite of recent maladroit behaviour on his part he still
+counted it an assured thing, much of the immediate cause for estrangement
+between himself and his mother would be removed, or at any rate, easily
+removable.&nbsp; With the influence of Elaine&rsquo;s money behind him
+he promised himself that he would find some occupation that would remove
+from himself the reproach of being a waster and idler.&nbsp; There were
+lots of careers, he told himself, that were open to a man with solid
+financial backing and good connections.&nbsp; There might yet be jolly
+times ahead, in which his mother would have her share of the good things
+that were going, and carking thin-lipped Henry Greech and other of Comus&rsquo;s
+detractors could take their sour looks and words out of sight and hearing.&nbsp;
+Thus, staring at the picture as though he were studying its every detail,
+and seeing really only that wistful friendly smile, Comus made his plans
+and dispositions for a battle that was already fought and lost.<br>
+<br>
+The crowd grew thicker in the galleries, cheerfully enduring an amount
+of overcrowding that would have been fiercely resented in a railway
+carriage.&nbsp; Near the entrance Mervyn Quentock was talking to a Serene
+Highness, a lady who led a life of obtrusive usefulness, largely imposed
+on her by a good-natured inability to say &ldquo;No.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;That
+woman creates a positive draught with the number of bazaars she opens,&rdquo;
+a frivolously-spoken ex-Cabinet Minister had once remarked.&nbsp; At
+the present moment she was being whimsically apologetic.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;When I think of the legions of well-meaning young men and women
+to whom I&rsquo;ve given away prizes for proficiency in art-school curriculum,
+I feel that I ought not to show my face inside a picture gallery.&nbsp;
+I always imagine that my punishment in another world will be perpetually
+sharpening pencils and cleaning palettes for unending relays of misguided
+young people whom I deliberately encouraged in their artistic delusions.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Do you suppose we shall all get appropriate punishments in another
+world for our sins in this?&rdquo; asked Quentock.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Not so much for our sins as for our indiscretions; they are the
+things which do the most harm and cause the greatest trouble.&nbsp;
+I feel certain that Christopher Columbus will undergo the endless torment
+of being discovered by parties of American tourists.&nbsp; You see I
+am quite old fashioned in my ideas about the terrors and inconveniences
+of the next world.&nbsp; And now I must be running away; I&rsquo;ve
+got to open a Free Library somewhere.&nbsp; You know the sort of thing
+that happens - one unveils a bust of Carlyle and makes a speech about
+Ruskin, and then people come in their thousands and read &lsquo;Rabid
+Ralph, or Should he have Bitten Her?&rsquo;&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t forget,
+please, I&rsquo;m going to have the medallion with the fat cupid sitting
+on a sundial.&nbsp; And just one thing more - perhaps I ought not to
+ask you, but you have such nice kind eyes, you embolden one to make
+daring requests, would you send me the recipe for those lovely chestnut-and-chicken-liver
+sandwiches?&nbsp; I know the ingredients of course, but it&rsquo;s the
+proportions that make such a difference - just how much liver to how
+much chestnut, and what amount of red pepper and other things.&nbsp;
+Thank you so much.&nbsp; I really am going now.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Staring round with a vague half-smile at everybody within nodding distance,
+Her Serene Highness made one of her characteristic exits, which Lady
+Caroline declared always reminded her of a scrambled egg slipping off
+a piece of toast.&nbsp; At the entrance she stopped for a moment to
+exchange a word or two with a young man who had just arrived.&nbsp;
+From a corner where he was momentarily hemmed in by a group of tea-consuming
+dowagers, Comus recognised the newcomer as Courtenay Youghal, and began
+slowly to labour his way towards him.&nbsp; Youghal was not at the moment
+the person whose society he most craved for in the world, but there
+was at least the possibility that he might provide an opportunity for
+a game of bridge, which was the dominant desire of the moment.&nbsp;
+The young politician was already surrounded by a group of friends and
+acquaintances, and was evidently being made the recipient of a salvo
+of congratulation - presumably on his recent performances in the Foreign
+Office debate, Comus concluded.&nbsp; But Youghal himself seemed to
+be announcing the event with which the congratulations were connected.&nbsp;
+Had some dramatic catastrophe overtaken the Government, Comus wondered.&nbsp;
+And then, as he pressed nearer, a chance word, the coupling of two names,
+told him the news.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER XI<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+After the momentous lunch at the Corridor Restaurant Elaine had returned
+to Manchester Square (where she was staying with one of her numerous
+aunts) in a frame of mind that embraced a tangle of competing emotions.&nbsp;
+In the first place she was conscious of a dominant feeling of relief;
+in a moment of impetuosity, not wholly uninfluenced by pique, she had
+settled the problem which hours of hard thinking and serious heart-searching
+had brought no nearer to solution, and, although she felt just a little
+inclined to be scared at the headlong manner of her final decision,
+she had now very little doubt in her own mind that the decision had
+been the right one.&nbsp; In fact the wonder seemed rather that she
+should have been so long in doubt as to which of her wooers really enjoyed
+her honest approval.&nbsp; She had been in love, these many weeks past
+with an imaginary Comus, but now that she had definitely walked out
+of her dreamland she saw that nearly all the qualities that had appealed
+to her on his behalf had been absent from, or only fitfully present
+in, the character of the real Comus.&nbsp; And now that she had installed
+Youghal in the first place of her affections he had rapidly acquired
+in her eyes some of the qualities which ranked highest in her estimation.&nbsp;
+Like the proverbial buyer she had the happy feminine tendency of magnifying
+the worth of her possession as soon as she had acquired it.&nbsp; And
+Courtenay Youghal gave Elaine some justification for her sense of having
+chosen wisely.&nbsp; Above all other things, selfish and cynical though
+he might appear at times, he was unfailingly courteous and considerate
+towards her.&nbsp; That was a circumstance which would always have carried
+weight with her in judging any man; in this case its value was enormously
+heightened by contrast with the behaviour of her other wooer.&nbsp;
+And Youghal had in her eyes the advantage which the glamour of combat,
+even the combat of words and wire-pulling, throws over the fighter.&nbsp;
+He stood well in the forefront of a battle which however carefully stage-managed,
+however honeycombed with personal insincerities and overlaid with calculated
+mock-heroics, really meant something, really counted for good or wrong
+in the nation&rsquo;s development and the world&rsquo;s history.&nbsp;
+Shrewd parliamentary observers might have warned her that Youghal would
+never stand much higher in the political world than he did at present,
+as a brilliant Opposition freelance, leading lively and rather meaningless
+forays against the dull and rather purposeless foreign policy of a Government
+that was scarcely either to be blamed for or congratulated on its handling
+of foreign affairs.&nbsp; The young politician had not the strength
+of character or convictions that keeps a man naturally in the forefront
+of affairs and gives his counsels a sterling value, and on the other
+hand his insincerity was not deep enough to allow him to pose artificially
+and successfully as a leader of men and shaper of movements.&nbsp; For
+the moment, however, his place in public life was sufficiently marked
+out to give him a secure footing in that world where people are counted
+individually and not in herds.&nbsp; The woman whom he would make his
+wife would have the chance, too, if she had the will and the skill,
+to become an individual who counted.<br>
+<br>
+There was balm to Elaine in this reflection, yet it did not wholly suffice
+to drive out the feeling of pique which Comus had called into being
+by his slighting view of her as a convenient cash supply in moments
+of emergency.&nbsp; She found a certain satisfaction in scrupulously
+observing her promise, made earlier on that eventful day, and sent off
+a messenger with the stipulated loan.&nbsp; Then a reaction of compunction
+set in, and she reminded herself that in fairness she ought to write
+and tell her news in as friendly a fashion as possible to her dismissed
+suitor before it burst upon him from some other quarter.&nbsp; They
+had parted on more or less quarrelling terms it was true, but neither
+of them had foreseen the finality of the parting nor the permanence
+of the breach between them; Comus might even now be thinking himself
+half-forgiven, and the awakening would be rather cruel.&nbsp; The letter,
+however, did not prove an easy one to write; not only did it present
+difficulties of its own but it suffered from the competing urgency of
+a desire to be doing something far pleasanter than writing explanatory
+and valedictory phrases.&nbsp; Elaine was possessed with an unusual
+but quite overmastering hankering to visit her cousin Suzette Brankley.&nbsp;
+They met but rarely at each other&rsquo;s houses and very seldom anywhere
+else, and Elaine for her part was never conscious of feeling that their
+opportunities for intercourse lacked anything in the way of adequacy.&nbsp;
+Suzette accorded her just that touch of patronage which a moderately
+well-off and immoderately dull girl will usually try to mete out to
+an acquaintance who is known to be wealthy and suspected of possessing
+brains.&nbsp; In return Elaine armed herself with that particular brand
+of mock humility which can be so terribly disconcerting if properly
+wielded.&nbsp; No quarrel of any description stood between them and
+one could not legitimately have described them as enemies, but they
+never disarmed in one another&rsquo;s presence.&nbsp; A misfortune of
+any magnitude falling on one of them would have been sincerely regretted
+by the other, but any minor discomfiture would have produced a feeling
+very much akin to satisfaction.&nbsp; Human nature knows millions of
+these inconsequent little feuds, springing up and flourishing apart
+from any basis of racial, political, religious or economic causes, as
+a hint perhaps to crass unseeing altruists that enmity has its place
+and purpose in the world as well as benevolence.<br>
+<br>
+Elaine had not personally congratulated Suzette since the formal announcement
+of her engagement to the young man with the dissentient tailoring effects.&nbsp;
+The impulse to go and do so now, overmastered her sense of what was
+due to Comus in the way of explanation.&nbsp; The letter was still in
+its blank unwritten stage, an unmarshalled sequence of sentences forming
+in her brain, when she ordered her car and made a hurried but well-thought-out
+change into her most sumptuously sober afternoon toilette.&nbsp; Suzette,
+she felt tolerably sure, would still be in the costume that she had
+worn in the Park that morning, a costume that aimed at elaboration of
+detail, and was damned with overmuch success.<br>
+<br>
+Suzette&rsquo;s mother welcomed her unexpected visitor with obvious
+satisfaction.&nbsp; Her daughter&rsquo;s engagement, she explained,
+was not so brilliant from the social point of view as a girl of Suzette&rsquo;s
+attractions and advantages might have legitimately aspired to, but Egbert
+was a thoroughly commendable and dependable young man, who would very
+probably win his way before long to membership of the County Council.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;From there, of course, the road would be open to him to higher
+things.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Elaine, &ldquo;he might become an alderman.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Have you seen their photographs, taken together?&rdquo; asked
+Mrs. Brankley, abandoning the subject of Egbert&rsquo;s prospective
+career.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;No, do show me,&rdquo; said Elaine, with a flattering show of
+interest; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never seen that sort of thing before.&nbsp;
+It used to be the fashion once for engaged couples to be photographed
+together, didn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s <i>very</i> much the fashion now,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Brankley assertively, but some of the complacency had filtered out of
+her voice.&nbsp; Suzette came into the room, wearing the dress that
+she had worn in the Park that morning.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Of course, you&rsquo;ve been hearing all about <i>the</i> engagement
+from mother,&rdquo; she cried, and then set to work conscientiously
+to cover the same ground.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;We met at Grindelwald, you know.&nbsp; He always calls me his
+Ice Maiden because we first got to know each other on the skating rink.&nbsp;
+Quite romantic, wasn&rsquo;t it?&nbsp; Then we asked him to tea one
+day, and we got to be quite friendly.&nbsp; Then he proposed.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;He wasn&rsquo;t the only one who was smitten with Suzette,&rdquo;
+Mrs. Brankley hastened to put in, fearful lest Elaine might suppose
+that Egbert had had things all his own way.&nbsp; &ldquo;There was an
+American millionaire who was quite taken with her, and a Polish count
+of a very old family.&nbsp; I assure you I felt quite nervous at some
+of our tea-parties.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Mrs. Brankley had given Grindelwald a sinister but rather alluring reputation
+among a large circle of untravelled friends as a place where the insolence
+of birth and wealth was held in precarious check from breaking forth
+into scenes of savage violence.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;My marriage with Egbert will, of course, enlarge the sphere of
+my life enormously,&rdquo; pursued Suzette.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Elaine; her eyes were rather remorselessly taking
+in the details of her cousin&rsquo;s toilette.&nbsp; It is said that
+nothing is sadder than victory except defeat.&nbsp; Suzette began to
+feel that the tragedy of both was concentrated in the creation which
+had given her such unalloyed gratification, till Elaine had come on
+the scene.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;A woman can be so immensely helpful in the social way to a man
+who is making a career for himself.&nbsp; And I&rsquo;m so glad to find
+that we&rsquo;ve a great many ideas in common.&nbsp; We each made out
+a list of our idea of the hundred best books, and quite a number of
+them were the same.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;He looks bookish,&rdquo; said Elaine, with a critical glance
+at the photograph.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Oh, he&rsquo;s not at all a bookworm,&rdquo; said Suzette quickly,
+&ldquo;though he&rsquo;s tremendously well-read.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s quite
+the man of action.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Does he hunt?&rdquo; asked Elaine.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;No, he doesn&rsquo;t get much time or opportunity for riding.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;What a pity,&rdquo; commented Elaine; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think
+I could marry a man who wasn&rsquo;t fond of riding.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Of course that&rsquo;s a matter of taste,&rdquo; said Suzette,
+stiffly; &ldquo;horsey men are not usually gifted with overmuch brains,
+are they?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;There is as much difference between a horseman and a horsey man
+as there is between a well-dressed man and a dressy one,&rdquo; said
+Elaine, judicially; &ldquo;and you may have noticed how seldom a dressy
+woman really knows how to dress.&nbsp; As an old lady of my acquaintance
+observed the other day, some people are born with a sense of how to
+clothe themselves, others acquire it, others look as if their clothes
+had been thrust upon them.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+She gave Lady Caroline her due quotation marks, but the sudden tactfulness
+with which she looked away from her cousin&rsquo;s frock was entirely
+her own idea.<br>
+<br>
+A young man entering the room at this moment caused a diversion that
+was rather welcome to Suzette.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Here comes Egbert,&rdquo; she announced, with an air of subdued
+triumph; it was at least a satisfaction to be able to produce the captive
+of her charms, alive and in good condition, on the scene.&nbsp; Elaine
+might be as critical as she pleased, but a live lover outweighed any
+number of well-dressed straight-riding cavaliers who existed only as
+a distant vision of the delectable husband.<br>
+<br>
+Egbert was one of those men who have no small talk, but possess an inexhaustible
+supply of the larger variety.&nbsp; In whatever society he happened
+to be, and particularly in the immediate neighbourhood of an afternoon-tea
+table, with a limited audience of womenfolk, he gave the impression
+of someone who was addressing a public meeting, and would be happy to
+answer questions afterwards.&nbsp; A suggestion of gas-lit mission-halls,
+wet umbrellas, and discreet applause seemed to accompany him everywhere.&nbsp;
+He was an exponent, among other things, of what he called New Thought,
+which seemed to lend itself conveniently to the employment of a good
+deal of rather stale phraseology.&nbsp; Probably in the course of some
+thirty odd years of existence he had never been of any notable use to
+man, woman, child or animal, but it was his firmly-announced intention
+to leave the world a better, happier, purer place than he had found
+it; against the danger of any relapse to earlier conditions after his
+disappearance from the scene, he was, of course, powerless to guard.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Tis not in mortals to insure succession, and Egbert was admittedly
+mortal.<br>
+<br>
+Elaine found him immensely entertaining, and would certainly have exerted
+herself to draw him out if such a proceeding had been at all necessary.&nbsp;
+She listened to his conversation with the complacent appreciation that
+one bestows on a stage tragedy, from whose calamities one can escape
+at any moment by the simple process of leaving one&rsquo;s seat.&nbsp;
+When at last he checked the flow of his opinions by a hurried reference
+to his watch, and declared that he must be moving on elsewhere, Elaine
+almost expected a vote of thanks to be accorded him, or to be asked
+to signify herself in favour of some resolution by holding up her hand.<br>
+<br>
+When the young man had bidden the company a rapid business-like farewell,
+tempered in Suzette&rsquo;s case by the exact degree of tender intimacy
+that it would have been considered improper to omit or overstep, Elaine
+turned to her expectant cousin with an air of cordial congratulation.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;He is exactly the husband I should have chosen for you, Suzette.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+For the second time that afternoon Suzette felt a sense of waning enthusiasm
+for one of her possessions.<br>
+<br>
+Mrs. Brankley detected the note of ironical congratulation in her visitor&rsquo;s
+verdict.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I suppose she means he&rsquo;s not her idea of a husband, but,
+he&rsquo;s good enough for Suzette,&rdquo; she observed to herself,
+with a snort that expressed itself somewhere in the nostrils of the
+brain.&nbsp; Then with a smiling air of heavy patronage she delivered
+herself of her one idea of a damaging counter-stroke.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;And when are we to hear of your engagement, my dear?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Now,&rdquo; said Elaine quietly, but with electrical effect;
+&ldquo;I came to announce it to you but I wanted to hear all about Suzette
+first.&nbsp; It will be formally announced in the papers in a day or
+two.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;But who is it?&nbsp; Is it the young man who was with you in
+the Park this morning?&rdquo; asked Suzette.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Let me see, who was I with in the Park this morning?&nbsp; A
+very good-looking dark boy?&nbsp; Oh no, not Comus Bassington.&nbsp;
+Someone you know by name, anyway, and I expect you&rsquo;ve seen his
+portrait in the papers.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;A flying-man?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Brankley.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Courtenay Youghal,&rdquo; said Elaine.<br>
+<br>
+Mrs. Brankley and Suzette had often rehearsed in the privacy of their
+minds the occasion when Elaine should come to pay her personal congratulations
+to her engaged cousin.&nbsp; It had never been in the least like this.<br>
+<br>
+On her return from her enjoyable afternoon visit Elaine found an express
+messenger letter waiting for her.&nbsp; It was from Comus, thanking
+her for her loan - and returning it.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I suppose I ought never to have asked you for it,&rdquo; he wrote,
+&ldquo;but you are always so deliciously solemn about money matters
+that I couldn&rsquo;t resist.&nbsp; Just heard the news of your engagement
+to Courtenay.&nbsp; Congrats. to you both.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m far too stoney
+broke to buy you a wedding present so I&rsquo;m going to give you back
+the bread-and-butter dish.&nbsp; Luckily it still has your crest on
+it.&nbsp; I shall love to think of you and Courtenay eating bread-and-butter
+out of it for the rest of your lives.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+That was all he had to say on the matter about which Elaine had been
+preparing to write a long and kindly-expressed letter, closing a rather
+momentous chapter in her life and his.&nbsp; There was not a trace of
+regret or upbraiding in his note; he had walked out of their mutual
+fairyland as abruptly as she had, and to all appearances far more unconcernedly.&nbsp;
+Reading the letter again and again Elaine could come to no decision
+as to whether this was merely a courageous gibe at defeat, or whether
+it represented the real value that Comus set on the thing that he had
+lost.<br>
+<br>
+And she would never know.&nbsp; If Comus possessed one useless gift
+to perfection it was the gift of laughing at Fate even when it had struck
+him hardest.&nbsp; One day, perhaps, the laughter and mockery would
+be silent on his lips, and Fate would have the advantage of laughing
+last.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER XII<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+A door closed and Francesca Bassington sat alone in her well-beloved
+drawing-room.&nbsp; The visitor who had been enjoying the hospitality
+of her afternoon-tea table had just taken his departure.&nbsp; The t&ecirc;te-&agrave;-t&ecirc;te
+had not been a pleasant one, at any rate as far as Francesca was concerned,
+but at least it had brought her the information for which she had been
+seeking.&nbsp; Her r&ocirc;le of looker-on from a tactful distance had
+necessarily left her much in the dark concerning the progress of the
+all-important wooing, but during the last few hours she had, on slender
+though significant evidence, exchanged her complacent expectancy for
+a conviction that something had gone wrong.&nbsp; She had spent the
+previous evening at her brother&rsquo;s house, and had naturally seen
+nothing of Comus in that uncongenial quarter; neither had he put in
+an appearance at the breakfast table the following morning.&nbsp; She
+had met him in the hall at eleven o&rsquo;clock, and he had hurried
+past her, merely imparting the information that he would not be in till
+dinner that evening.&nbsp; He spoke in his sulkiest tone, and his face
+wore a look of defeat, thinly masked by an air of defiance; it was not
+the defiance of a man who is losing, but of one who has already lost.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca&rsquo;s conviction that things had gone wrong between Comus
+and Elaine de Frey grew in strength as the day wore on.&nbsp; She lunched
+at a friend&rsquo;s house, but it was not a quarter where special social
+information of any importance was likely to come early to hand.&nbsp;
+Instead of the news she was hankering for, she had to listen to trivial
+gossip and speculation on the flirtations and &ldquo;cases&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;affairs&rdquo; of a string of acquaintances whose matrimonial
+projects interested her about as much as the nesting arrangements of
+the wildfowl in St. James&rsquo;s Park.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; said her hostess, with the duly impressive
+emphasis of a privileged chronicler, &ldquo;we&rsquo;ve always regarded
+Claire as the marrying one of the family, so when Emily came to us and
+said, &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve got some news for you,&rsquo; we all said, &lsquo;Claire&rsquo;s
+engaged!&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Oh, no,&rsquo; said Emily, &lsquo;it&rsquo;s
+not Claire this time, it&rsquo;s me.&rsquo;&nbsp; So then we had to
+guess who the lucky man was.&nbsp; &lsquo;It can&rsquo;t be Captain
+Parminter,&rsquo; we all said, &lsquo;because he&rsquo;s always been
+sweet on Joan.&rsquo;&nbsp; And then Emily said - &rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The recording voice reeled off the catalogue of inane remarks with a
+comfortable purring complacency that held out no hope of an early abandoning
+of the topic.&nbsp; Francesca sat and wondered why the innocent acceptance
+of a cutlet and a glass of indifferent claret should lay one open to
+such unsparing punishment.<br>
+<br>
+A stroll homeward through the Park after lunch brought no further enlightenment
+on the subject that was uppermost in her mind; what was worse, it brought
+her, without possibility of escape, within hailing distance of Merla
+Blathington, who fastened on to her with the enthusiasm of a lonely
+tsetse fly encountering an outpost of civilisation.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Just think,&rdquo; she buzzed inconsequently, &ldquo;my sister
+in Cambridgeshire has hatched out thirty-three White Orpington chickens
+in her incubator!&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;What eggs did she put in it?&rdquo; asked Francesca.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Oh, some very special strain of White Orpington.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Then I don&rsquo;t see anything remarkable in the result.&nbsp;
+If she had put in crocodile&rsquo;s eggs and hatched out White Orpingtons,
+there might have been something to write to <i>Country Life</i> about.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;What funny fascinating things these little green park-chairs
+are,&rdquo; said Merla, starting off on a fresh topic; &ldquo;they always
+look so quaint and knowing when they&rsquo;re stuck away in pairs by
+themselves under the trees, as if they were having a heart-to-heart
+talk or discussing a piece of very private scandal.&nbsp; If they could
+only speak, what tragedies and comedies they could tell us of, what
+flirtations and proposals.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Let us be devoutly thankful that they can&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said
+Francesca, with a shuddering recollection of the luncheon-table conversation.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Of course, it would make one very careful what one said before
+them - or above them rather,&rdquo; Merla rattled on, and then, to Francesca&rsquo;s
+infinite relief, she espied another acquaintance sitting in unprotected
+solitude, who promised to supply a more durable audience than her present
+rapidly moving companion.&nbsp; Francesca was free to return to her
+drawing-room in Blue Street to await with such patience as she could
+command the coming of some visitor who might be able to throw light
+on the subject that was puzzling and disquieting her.&nbsp; The arrival
+of George St. Michael boded bad news, but at any rate news, and she
+gave him an almost cordial welcome.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Well, you see I wasn&rsquo;t far wrong about Miss de Frey and
+Courtenay Youghal, was I?&rdquo; he chirruped, almost before he had
+seated himself.&nbsp; Francesca was to be spared any further spinning-out
+of her period of uncertainty.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes, it&rsquo;s officially
+given out,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;and it&rsquo;s to appear in the
+<i>Morning Post</i> to-morrow.&nbsp; I heard it from Colonel Deel this
+morning, and he had it direct from Youghal himself.&nbsp; Yes, please,
+one lump; I&rsquo;m not fashionable, you see.&rdquo;&nbsp; He had made
+the same remark about the sugar in his tea with unfailing regularity
+for at least thirty years.&nbsp; Fashions in sugar are apparently stationary.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;They say,&rdquo; he continued, hurriedly, &ldquo;that he proposed
+to her on the Terrace of the House, and a division bell rang, and he
+had to hurry off before she had time to give her answer, and when he
+got back she simply said, &lsquo;the Ayes have it.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp;
+St. Michael paused in his narrative to give an appreciative giggle.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Just the sort of inanity that would go the rounds,&rdquo; remarked
+Francesca, with the satisfaction of knowing that she was making the
+criticism direct to the author and begetter of the inanity in question.&nbsp;
+Now that the blow had fallen and she knew the full extent of its weight,
+her feeling towards the bringer of bad news, who sat complacently nibbling
+at her tea-cakes and scattering crumbs of tiresome small-talk at her
+feet, was one of wholehearted dislike.&nbsp; She could sympathise with,
+or at any rate understand, the tendency of oriental despots to inflict
+death or ignominious chastisement on messengers bearing tidings of misfortune
+and defeat, and St. Michael, she perfectly well knew, was thoroughly
+aware of the fact that her hopes and wishes had been centred on the
+possibility of having Elaine for a daughter-in-law; every purring remark
+that his mean little soul prompted him to contribute to the conversation
+had an easily recognizable undercurrent of malice.&nbsp; Fortunately
+for her powers of polite endurance, which had been put to such searching
+and repeated tests that day, St. Michael had planned out for himself
+a busy little time-table of afternoon visits, at each of which his self-appointed
+task of forestalling and embellishing the newspaper announcements of
+the Youghal-de Frey engagement would be hurriedly but thoroughly performed.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;ll be quite one of the best-looking and most interesting
+couples of the Season, won&rsquo;t they?&rdquo; he cried, by way of
+farewell.&nbsp; The door closed and Francesca Bassington sat alone in
+her drawing-room.<br>
+<br>
+Before she could give way to the bitter luxury of reflection on the
+downfall of her hopes, it was prudent to take precautionary measures
+against unwelcome intrusion.&nbsp; Summoning the maid who had just speeded
+the departing St. Michael, she gave the order: &ldquo;I am not at home
+this afternoon to Lady Caroline Benaresq.&rdquo;&nbsp; On second thoughts
+she extended the taboo to all possible callers, and sent a telephone
+message to catch Comus at his club, asking him to come and see her as
+soon as he could manage before it was time to dress for dinner.&nbsp;
+Then she sat down to think, and her thinking was beyond the relief of
+tears.<br>
+<br>
+She had built herself a castle of hopes, and it had not been a castle
+in Spain, but a structure well on the probable side of the Pyrenees.&nbsp;
+There had been a solid foundation on which to build.&nbsp; Miss de Frey&rsquo;s
+fortune was an assured and unhampered one, her liking for Comus had
+been an obvious fact; his courtship of her a serious reality.&nbsp;
+The young people had been much together in public, and their names had
+naturally been coupled in the match-making gossip of the day.&nbsp;
+The only serious shadow cast over the scene had been the persistent
+presence, in foreground or background, of Courtenay Youghal.&nbsp; And
+now the shadow suddenly stood forth as the reality, and the castle of
+hopes was a ruin, a hideous mortification of dust and d&eacute;bris,
+with the skeleton outlines of its chambers still standing to make mockery
+of its discomfited architect.&nbsp; The daily anxiety about Comus and
+his extravagant ways and intractable disposition had been gradually
+lulled by the prospect of his making an advantageous marriage, which
+would have transformed him from a ne&rsquo;er-do-well and adventurer
+into a wealthy idler.&nbsp; He might even have been moulded, by the
+resourceful influence of an ambitious wife, into a man with some definite
+purpose in life.&nbsp; The prospect had vanished with cruel suddenness,
+and the anxieties were crowding back again, more insistent than ever.&nbsp;
+The boy had had his one good chance in the matrimonial market and missed
+it; if he were to transfer his attentions to some other well-dowered
+girl he would be marked down at once as a fortune-hunter, and that would
+constitute a heavy handicap to the most plausible of wooers.&nbsp; His
+liking for Elaine had evidently been genuine in its way, though perhaps
+it would have been rash to read any deeper sentiment into it, but even
+with the spur of his own inclination to assist him he had failed to
+win the prize that had seemed so temptingly within his reach.&nbsp;
+And in the dashing of his prospects, Francesca saw the threatening of
+her own.&nbsp; The old anxiety as to her precarious tenure of her present
+quarters put on again all its familiar terrors.&nbsp; One day, she foresaw,
+in the horribly near future, George St. Michael would come pattering
+up her stairs with the breathless intelligence that Emmeline Chetrof
+was going to marry somebody or other in the Guards or the Record Office
+as the case might be, and then there would be an uprooting of her life
+from its home and haven in Blue Street and a wandering forth to some
+cheap unhappy far-off dwelling, where the stately Van der Meulen and
+its companion host of beautiful and desirable things would be stuffed
+and stowed away in soulless surroundings, like courtly &eacute;migr&eacute;s
+fallen on evil days.&nbsp; It was unthinkable, but the trouble was that
+it had to be thought about.&nbsp; And if Comus had played his cards
+well and transformed himself from an encumbrance into a son with wealth
+at his command, the tragedy which she saw looming in front of her might
+have been avoided or at the worst whittled down to easily bearable proportions.&nbsp;
+With money behind one, the problem of where to live approaches more
+nearly to the simple question of where do you wish to live, and a rich
+daughter-in-law would have surely seen to it that she did not have to
+leave her square mile of Mecca and go out into the wilderness of bricks
+and mortar.&nbsp; If the house in Blue Street could not have been compounded
+for there were other desirable residences which would have been capable
+of consoling Francesca for her lost Eden.&nbsp; And now the detested
+Courtenay Youghal, with his mocking eyes and air of youthful cynicism,
+had stepped in and overthrown those golden hopes and plans whose non-fulfilment
+would make such a world of change in her future.&nbsp; Assuredly she
+had reason to feel bitter against that young man, and she was not disposed
+to take a very lenient view of Comus&rsquo;s own mismanagement of the
+affair; her greeting when he at last arrived, was not couched in a sympathetic
+strain.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;So you have lost your chance with the heiress,&rdquo; she remarked
+abruptly.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Comus, coolly; &ldquo;Courtenay Youghal has
+added her to his other successes.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;And you have added her to your other failures,&rdquo; pursued
+Francesca, relentlessly; her temper had been tried that day beyond ordinary
+limits.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I thought you seemed getting along so well with her,&rdquo; she
+continued, as Comus remained uncommunicative.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;We hit it off rather well together,&rdquo; said Comus, and added
+with deliberate bluntness, &ldquo;I suppose she got rather sick at my
+borrowing money from her.&nbsp; She thought it was all I was after.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You borrowed money from her!&rdquo; said Francesca; &ldquo;you
+were fool enough to borrow money from a girl who was favourably disposed
+towards you, and with Courtenay Youghal in the background waiting to
+step in and oust you!&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Francesca&rsquo;s voice trembled with misery and rage.&nbsp; This great
+stroke of good luck that had seemed about to fall into their laps had
+been thrust aside by an act or series of acts of wanton paltry folly.&nbsp;
+The good ship had been lost for the sake of the traditional ha&rsquo;porth
+of tar.&nbsp; Comus had paid some pressing tailor&rsquo;s or tobacconist&rsquo;s
+bill with a loan unwillingly put at his disposal by the girl he was
+courting, and had flung away his chances of securing a wealthy and in
+every way desirable bride.&nbsp; Elaine de Frey and her fortune might
+have been the making of Comus, but he had hurried in as usual to effect
+his own undoing.&nbsp; Calmness did not in this case come with reflection;
+the more Francesca thought about the matter, the more exasperated she
+grew.&nbsp; Comus threw himself down in a low chair and watched her
+without a trace of embarrassment or concern at her mortification.&nbsp;
+He had come to her feeling rather sorry for himself, and bitterly conscious
+of his defeat, and she had met him with a taunt and without the least
+hint of sympathy; he determined that she should be tantalised with the
+knowledge of how small and stupid a thing had stood between the realisation
+and ruin of her hopes for him.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;And to think she should be captured by Courtenay Youghal,&rdquo;
+said Francesca, bitterly; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve always deplored your intimacy
+with that young man.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s hardly my intimacy with him that&rsquo;s made Elaine
+accept him,&rdquo; said Comus.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca realised the futility of further upbraiding.&nbsp; Through
+the tears of vexation that stood in her eyes, she looked across at the
+handsome boy who sat opposite her, mocking at his own misfortune, perversely
+indifferent to his folly, seemingly almost indifferent to its consequences.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Comus,&rdquo; she said quietly and wearily, &ldquo;you are an
+exact reversal of the legend of Pandora&rsquo;s Box.&nbsp; You have
+all the charm and advantages that a boy could want to help him on in
+the world, and behind it all there is the fatal damning gift of utter
+hopelessness.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Comus, &ldquo;that is the best description
+that anyone has ever given of me.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+For the moment there was a flush of sympathy and something like outspoken
+affection between mother and son.&nbsp; They seemed very much alone
+in the world just now, and in the general overturn of hopes and plans,
+there flickered a chance that each might stretch out a hand to the other,
+and summon back to their lives an old dead love that was the best and
+strongest feeling either of them had known.&nbsp; But the sting of disappointment
+was too keen, and the flood of resentment mounted too high on either
+side to allow the chance more than a moment in which to flicker away
+into nothingness.&nbsp; The old fatal topic of estrangement came to
+the fore, the question of immediate ways and means, and mother and son
+faced themselves again as antagonists on a well-disputed field.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;What is done is done,&rdquo; said Francesca, with a movement
+of tragic impatience that belied the philosophy of her words; &ldquo;there
+is nothing to be gained by crying over spilt milk.&nbsp; There is the
+present and the future to be thought about, though.&nbsp; One can&rsquo;t
+go on indefinitely as a tenant-for-life in a fools&rsquo; paradise.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Then she pulled herself together and proceeded to deliver an ultimatum
+which the force of circumstances no longer permitted her to hold in
+reserve.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not much use talking to you about money, as I know
+from long experience, but I can only tell you this, that in the middle
+of the Season I&rsquo;m already obliged to be thinking of leaving Town.&nbsp;
+And you, I&rsquo;m afraid, will have to be thinking of leaving England
+at equally short notice.&nbsp; Henry told me the other day that he can
+get you something out in West Africa.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ve had your chance
+of doing something better for yourself from the financial point of view,
+and you&rsquo;ve thrown it away for the sake of borrowing a little ready
+money for your luxuries, so now you must take what you can get.&nbsp;
+The pay won&rsquo;t be very good at first, but living is not dear out
+there.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;West Africa,&rdquo; said Comus, reflectively; &ldquo;it&rsquo;s
+a sort of modern substitute for the old-fashioned <i>oubliette</i>,
+a convenient depository for tiresome people.&nbsp; Dear Uncle Henry
+may talk lugubriously about the burden of Empire, but he evidently recognises
+its uses as a refuse consumer.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;My dear Comus, you are talking of the West Africa of yesterday.&nbsp;
+While you have been wasting your time at school, and worse than wasting
+your time in the West End, other people have been grappling with the
+study of tropical diseases, and the West African coast country is being
+rapidly transformed from a lethal chamber into a sanatorium.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Comus laughed mockingly.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;What a beautiful bit of persuasive prose; it reminds one of the
+Psalms and even more of a company prospectus.&nbsp; If you were honest
+you&rsquo;d confess that you lifted it straight out of a rubber or railway
+promotion scheme.&nbsp; Seriously, mother, if I must grub about for
+a living, why can&rsquo;t I do it in England?&nbsp; I could go into
+a brewery for instance.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Francesca shook her head decisively; she could foresee the sort of steady
+work Comus was likely to accomplish, with the lodestone of Town and
+the minor attractions of race-meetings and similar festivities always
+beckoning to him from a conveniently attainable distance, but apart
+from that aspect of the case there was a financial obstacle in the way
+of his obtaining any employment at home.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Breweries and all those sort of things necessitate money to start
+with; one has to pay premiums or invest capital in the undertaking,
+and so forth.&nbsp; And as we have no money available, and can scarcely
+pay our debts as it is, it&rsquo;s no use thinking about it.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Can&rsquo;t we sell something?&rdquo; asked Comus.<br>
+<br>
+He made no actual suggestion as to what should be sacrificed, but he
+was looking straight at the Van der Meulen.<br>
+<br>
+For a moment Francesca felt a stifling sensation of weakness, as though
+her heart was going to stop beating.&nbsp; Then she sat forward in her
+chair and spoke with energy, almost fierceness.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;When I am dead my things can be sold and dispersed.&nbsp; As
+long as I am alive I prefer to keep them by me.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+In her holy place, with all her treasured possessions around her, this
+dreadful suggestion had been made.&nbsp; Some of her cherished household
+gods, souvenirs and keepsakes from past days, would, perhaps, not have
+fetched a very considerable sum in the auction-room, others had a distinct
+value of their own, but to her they were all precious.&nbsp; And the
+Van der Meulen, at which Comus had looked with impious appraising eyes,
+was the most sacred of them all.&nbsp; When Francesca had been away
+from her Town residence or had been confined to her bedroom through
+illness, the great picture with its stately solemn representation of
+a long-ago battle-scene, painted to flatter the flattery-loving soul
+of a warrior-king who was dignified even in his campaigns - this was
+the first thing she visited on her return to Town or convalescence.&nbsp;
+If an alarm of fire had been raised it would have been the first thing
+for whose safety she would have troubled.&nbsp; And Comus had almost
+suggested that it should be parted with, as one sold railway shares
+and other soulless things.<br>
+<br>
+Scolding, she had long ago realised, was a useless waste of time and
+energy where Comus was concerned, but this evening she unloosed her
+tongue for the mere relief that it gave to her surcharged feelings.&nbsp;
+He sat listening without comment, though she purposely let fall remarks
+that she hoped might sting him into self-defence or protest.&nbsp; It
+was an unsparing indictment, the more damaging in that it was so irrefutably
+true, the more tragic in that it came from perhaps the one person in
+the world whose opinion he had ever cared for.&nbsp; And he sat through
+it as silent and seemingly unmoved as though she had been rehearsing
+a speech for some drawing-room comedy.&nbsp; When she had had her say
+his method of retort was not the soft answer that turneth away wrath
+but the inconsequent one that shelves it.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s go and dress for dinner.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The meal, like so many that Francesca and Comus had eaten in each other&rsquo;s
+company of late, was a silent one.&nbsp; Now that the full bearings
+of the disaster had been discussed in all its aspects there was nothing
+more to be said.&nbsp; Any attempt at ignoring the situation, and passing
+on to less controversial topics would have been a mockery and pretence
+which neither of them would have troubled to sustain.&nbsp; So the meal
+went forward with its dragged-out dreary intimacy of two people who
+were separated by a gulf of bitterness, and whose hearts were hard with
+resentment against one another.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca felt a sense of relief when she was able to give the maid
+the order to serve her coffee upstairs.&nbsp; Comus had a sullen scowl
+on his face, but he looked up as she rose to leave the room, and gave
+his half-mocking little laugh.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You needn&rsquo;t look so tragic,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;You&rsquo;re
+going to have your own way.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll go out to that West African
+hole.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER XIII<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Comus found his way to his seat in the stalls of the Straw Exchange
+Theatre and turned to watch the stream of distinguished and distinguishable
+people who made their appearance as a matter of course at a First Night
+in the height of the Season.&nbsp; Pit and gallery were already packed
+with a throng, tense, expectant and alert, that waited for the rise
+of the curtain with the eager patience of a terrier watching a dilatory
+human prepare for outdoor exercises.&nbsp; Stalls and boxes filled slowly
+and hesitatingly with a crowd whose component units seemed for the most
+part to recognise the probability that they were quite as interesting
+as any play they were likely to see.&nbsp; Those who bore no particular
+face-value themselves derived a certain amount of social dignity from
+the near neighbourhood of obvious notabilities; if one could not obtain
+recognition oneself there was some vague pleasure in being able to recognise
+notoriety at intimately close quarters.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Who is that woman with the auburn hair and a rather effective
+belligerent gleam in her eyes?&rdquo; asked a man sitting just behind
+Comus; &ldquo;she looks as if she might have created the world in six
+days and destroyed it on the seventh.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I forget her name,&rdquo; said his neighbour; &ldquo;she writes.&nbsp;
+She&rsquo;s the author of that book, &lsquo;The Woman who wished it
+was Wednesday,&rsquo; you know.&nbsp; It used to be the convention that
+women writers should be plain and dowdy; now we have gone to the other
+extreme and build them on extravagantly decorative lines.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+A buzz of recognition came from the front rows of the pit, together
+with a craning of necks on the part of those in less favoured seats.&nbsp;
+It heralded the arrival of Sherard Blaw, the dramatist who had discovered
+himself, and who had given so ungrudgingly of his discovery to the world.&nbsp;
+Lady Caroline, who was already directing little conversational onslaughts
+from her box, gazed gently for a moment at the new arrival, and then
+turned to the silver-haired Archdeacon sitting beside her.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;They say the poor man is haunted by the fear that he will die
+during a general election, and that his obituary notices will be seriously
+curtailed by the space taken up by the election results.&nbsp; The curse
+of our party system, from his point of view, is that it takes up so
+much room in the press.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The Archdeacon smiled indulgently.&nbsp; As a man he was so exquisitely
+worldly that he fully merited the name of the Heavenly Worldling bestowed
+on him by an admiring duchess, and withal his texture was shot with
+a pattern of such genuine saintliness that one felt that whoever else
+might hold the keys of Paradise he, at least, possessed a private latchkey
+to that abode.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Is it not significant of the altered grouping of things,&rdquo;
+he observed, &ldquo;that the Church, as represented by me, sympathises
+with the message of Sherard Blaw, while neither the man nor his message
+find acceptance with unbelievers like you, Lady Caroline.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Lady Caroline blinked her eyes.&nbsp; &ldquo;My dear Archdeacon,&rdquo;
+she said, &ldquo;no one can be an unbeliever nowadays.&nbsp; The Christian
+Apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The Archdeacon rose with a delighted chuckle.&nbsp; &ldquo;I must go
+and tell that to De la Poulett,&rdquo; he said, indicating a clerical
+figure sitting in the third row of the stalls; &ldquo;he spends his
+life explaining from his pulpit that the glory of Christianity consists
+in the fact that though it is not true it has been found necessary to
+invent it.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The door of the box opened and Courtenay Youghal entered, bringing with
+him subtle suggestion of chaminade and an atmosphere of political tension.&nbsp;
+The Government had fallen out of the good graces of a section of its
+supporters, and those who were not in the know were busy predicting
+a serious crisis over a forthcoming division in the Committee stage
+of an important Bill.&nbsp; This was Saturday night, and unless some
+successful cajolery were effected between now and Monday afternoon,
+Ministers would be, seemingly, in danger of defeat.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Ah, here is Youghal,&rdquo; said the Archdeacon; &ldquo;he will
+be able to tell us what is going to happen in the next forty-eight hours.&nbsp;
+I hear the Prime Minister says it is a matter of conscience, and they
+will stand or fall by it.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+His hopes and sympathies were notoriously on the Ministerial side.<br>
+<br>
+Youghal greeted Lady Caroline and subsided gracefully into a chair well
+in the front of the box.&nbsp; A buzz of recognition rippled slowly
+across the house.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;For the Government to fall on a matter of conscience,&rdquo;
+he said, &ldquo;would be like a man cutting himself with a safety razor.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Lady Caroline purred a gentle approval.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid it&rsquo;s true, Archdeacon,&rdquo; she said.<br>
+<br>
+No one can effectively defend a Government when it&rsquo;s been in office
+several years.&nbsp; The Archdeacon took refuge in light skirmishing.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I believe Lady Caroline sees the makings of a great Socialist
+statesman in you, Youghal,&rdquo; he observed.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Great Socialist statesmen aren&rsquo;t made, they&rsquo;re stillborn,&rdquo;
+replied Youghal.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;What is the play about to-night?&rdquo; asked a pale young woman
+who had taken no part in the talk.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline, &ldquo;but I hope
+it&rsquo;s dull.&nbsp; If there is any brilliant conversation in it
+I shall burst into tears.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+In the front row of the upper circle a woman with a restless starling-voice
+was discussing the work of a temporarily fashionable composer, chiefly
+in relation to her own emotions, which she seemed to think might prove
+generally interesting to those around her.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Whenever I hear his music I feel that I want to go up into a
+mountain and pray.&nbsp; Can you understand that feeling?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The girl to whom she was unburdening herself shook her head.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You see, I&rsquo;ve heard his music chiefly in Switzerland, and
+we were up among the mountains all the time, so it wouldn&rsquo;t have
+made any difference.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;In that case,&rdquo; said the woman, who seemed to have emergency
+emotions to suit all geographical conditions, &ldquo;I should have wanted
+to be in a great silent plain by the side of a rushing river.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;What I think is so splendid about his music - &rdquo; commenced
+another starling-voice on the further side of the girl.&nbsp; Like sheep
+that feed greedily before the coming of a storm the starling-voices
+seemed impelled to extra effort by the knowledge of four imminent intervals
+of acting during which they would be hushed into constrained silence.<br>
+<br>
+In the back row of the dress circle a late-comer, after a cursory glance
+at the programme, had settled down into a comfortable narrative, which
+was evidently the resumed thread of an unfinished taxi-drive monologue.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;We all said &lsquo;it can&rsquo;t be Captain Parminter, because
+he&rsquo;s always been sweet on Joan,&rsquo; and then Emily said - &rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The curtain went up, and Emily&rsquo;s contribution to the discussion
+had to be held over till the entr&rsquo;acte.<br>
+<br>
+The play promised to be a success.&nbsp; The author, avoiding the pitfall
+of brilliancy, had aimed at being interesting and as far as possible,
+bearing in mind that his play was a comedy, he had striven to be amusing.&nbsp;
+Above all he had remembered that in the laws of stage proportions it
+is permissible and generally desirable that the part should be greater
+than the whole; hence he had been careful to give the leading lady such
+a clear and commanding lead over the other characters of the play that
+it was impossible for any of them ever to get on level terms with her.&nbsp;
+The action of the piece was now and then delayed thereby, but the duration
+of its run would be materially prolonged.<br>
+<br>
+The curtain came down on the first act amid an encouraging instalment
+of applause, and the audience turned its back on the stage and began
+to take a renewed interest in itself.&nbsp; The authoress of &ldquo;The
+Woman who wished it was Wednesday&rdquo; had swept like a convalescent
+whirlwind, subdued but potentially tempestuous, into Lady Caroline&rsquo;s
+box.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve just trodden with all my weight on the foot of an
+eminent publisher as I was leaving my seat,&rdquo; she cried, with a
+peal of delighted laughter.&nbsp; &ldquo;He was such a dear about it;
+I said I hoped I hadn&rsquo;t hurt him, and he said, &lsquo;I suppose
+you think, who drives hard bargains should himself be hard.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Wasn&rsquo;t it pet-lamb of him?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never trodden on a pet lamb,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline,
+&ldquo;so I&rsquo;ve no idea what its behaviour would be under the circumstances.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; said the authoress, coming to the front of the
+box, the better to survey the house, and perhaps also with a charitable
+desire to make things easy for those who might pardonably wish to survey
+her, &ldquo;tell me, please, where is the girl sitting whom Courtenay
+Youghal is engaged to?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Elaine was pointed out to her, sitting in the fourth row of the stalls,
+on the opposite side of the house to where Comus had his seat.&nbsp;
+Once during the interval she had turned to give him a friendly nod of
+recognition as he stood in one of the side gangways, but he was absorbed
+at the moment in looking at himself in the glass panel.&nbsp; The grave
+brown eyes and the mocking green-grey ones had looked their last into
+each other&rsquo;s depths.<br>
+<br>
+For Comus this first-night performance, with its brilliant gathering
+of spectators, its groups and coteries of lively talkers, even its counterfoil
+of dull chatterers, its pervading atmosphere of stage and social movement,
+and its intruding undercurrent of political flutter, all this composed
+a tragedy in which he was the chief character.&nbsp; It was the life
+he knew and loved and basked in, and it was the life he was leaving.&nbsp;
+It would go on reproducing itself again and again, with its stage interest
+and social interest and intruding outside interests, with the same lively
+chattering crowd, the people who had done things being pointed out by
+people who recognised them to people who didn&rsquo;t - it would all
+go on with unflagging animation and sparkle and enjoyment, and for him
+it would have stopped utterly.&nbsp; He would be in some unheard-of
+sun-blistered wilderness, where natives and pariah dogs and raucous-throated
+crows fringed round mockingly on one&rsquo;s loneliness, where one rode
+for sweltering miles for the chance of meeting a collector or police
+officer, with whom most likely on closer acquaintance one had hardly
+two ideas in common, where female society was represented at long intervals
+by some climate-withered woman missionary or official&rsquo;s wife,
+where food and sickness and veterinary lore became at last the three
+outstanding subjects on which the mind settled or rather sank.&nbsp;
+That was the life he foresaw and dreaded, and that was the life he was
+going to.&nbsp; For a boy who went out to it from the dulness of some
+country rectory, from a neighbourhood where a flower show and a cricket
+match formed the social landmarks of the year, the feeling of exile
+might not be very crushing, might indeed be lost in the sense of change
+and adventure.&nbsp; But Comus had lived too thoroughly in the centre
+of things to regard life in a backwater as anything else than stagnation,
+and stagnation while one is young he justly regarded as an offence against
+nature and reason, in keeping with the perverted mockery that sends
+decrepit invalids touring painfully about the world and shuts panthers
+up in narrow cages.&nbsp; He was being put aside, as a wine is put aside,
+but to deteriorate instead of gaining in the process, to lose the best
+time of his youth and health and good looks in a world where youth and
+health and good looks count for much and where time never returns lost
+possessions.&nbsp; And thus, as the curtain swept down on the close
+of each act, Comus felt a sense of depression and deprivation sweep
+down on himself; bitterly he watched his last evening of social gaiety
+slipping away to its end.&nbsp; In less than an hour it would be over;
+in a few months&rsquo; time it would be an unreal memory.<br>
+<br>
+In the third interval, as he gazed round at the chattering house, someone
+touched him on the arm.&nbsp; It was Lady Veula Croot.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I suppose in a week&rsquo;s time you&rsquo;ll be on the high
+seas,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m coming to your farewell
+dinner, you know; your mother has just asked me.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m not
+going to talk the usual rot to you about how much you will like it and
+so on.&nbsp; I sometimes think that one of the advantages of Hell will
+be that no one will have the impertinence to point out to you that you&rsquo;re
+really better off than you would be anywhere else.&nbsp; What do you
+think of the play?&nbsp; Of course one can foresee the end; she will
+come to her husband with the announcement that their longed-for child
+is going to be born, and that will smooth over everything.&nbsp; So
+conveniently effective, to wind up a comedy with the commencement of
+someone else&rsquo;s tragedy.&nbsp; And every one will go away saying
+&lsquo;I&rsquo;m glad it had a happy ending.&rsquo;&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Lady Veula moved back to her seat, with her pleasant smile on her lips
+and the look of infinite weariness in her eyes.<br>
+<br>
+The interval, the last interval, was drawing to a close and the house
+began to turn with fidgetty attention towards the stage for the unfolding
+of the final phase of the play.&nbsp; Francesca sat in Serena Golackly&rsquo;s
+box listening to Colonel Springfield&rsquo;s story of what happened
+to a pigeon-cote in his compound at Poona.&nbsp; Everyone who knew the
+Colonel had to listen to that story a good many times, but Lady Caroline
+had mitigated the boredom of the infliction, and in fact invested it
+with a certain sporting interest, by offering a prize to the person
+who heard it oftenest in the course of the Season, the competitors being
+under an honourable understanding not to lead up to the subject.&nbsp;
+Ada Spelvexit and a boy in the Foreign Office were at present at the
+top of the list with five recitals each to their score, but the former
+was suspected of doubtful adherence to the rules and spirit of the competition.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;And there, dear lady,&rdquo; concluded the Colonel, &ldquo;were
+the eleven dead pigeons.&nbsp; What had become of the bandicoot no one
+ever knew.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Francesca thanked him for his story, and complacently inscribed the
+figure 4 on the margin of her theatre programme.&nbsp; Almost at the
+same moment she heard George St. Michael&rsquo;s voice pattering out
+a breathless piece of intelligence for the edification of Serena Golackly
+and anyone else who might care to listen.&nbsp; Francesca galvanised
+into sudden attention.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Emmeline Chetrof to a fellow in the Indian Forest Department.&nbsp;
+He&rsquo;s got nothing but his pay and they can&rsquo;t be married for
+four or five years; an absurdly long engagement, don&rsquo;t you think
+so?&nbsp; All very well to wait seven years for a wife in patriarchal
+times, when you probably had others to go on with, and you lived long
+enough to celebrate your own tercentenary, but under modern conditions
+it seems a foolish arrangement.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+St. Michael spoke almost with a sense of grievance.&nbsp; A marriage
+project that tied up all the small pleasant nuptial gossip-items about
+bridesmaids and honeymoon and recalcitrant aunts and so forth, for an
+indefinite number of years seemed scarcely decent in his eyes, and there
+was little satisfaction or importance to be derived from early and special
+knowledge of an event which loomed as far distant as a Presidential
+Election or a change of Viceroy.&nbsp; But to Francesca, who had listened
+with startled apprehension at the mention of Emmeline Chetrof&rsquo;s
+name, the news came in a flood of relief and thankfulness.&nbsp; Short
+of entering a nunnery and taking celibate vows, Emmeline could hardly
+have behaved more conveniently than in tying herself up to a lover whose
+circumstances made it necessary to relegate marriage to the distant
+future.&nbsp; For four or five years Francesca was assured of undisturbed
+possession of the house in Blue Street, and after that period who knew
+what might happen?&nbsp; The engagement might stretch on indefinitely,
+it might even come to nothing under the weight of its accumulated years,
+as sometimes happened with these protracted affairs.&nbsp; Emmeline
+might lose her fancy for her absentee lover, and might never replace
+him with another.&nbsp; A golden possibility of perpetual tenancy of
+her present home began to float once more through Francesca&rsquo;s
+mind.&nbsp; As long as Emmeline had been unbespoken in the marriage
+market there had always been the haunting likelihood of seeing the dreaded
+announcement, &ldquo;a marriage has been arranged and will shortly take
+place,&rdquo; in connection with her name.&nbsp; And now a marriage
+had been arranged and would not shortly take place, might indeed never
+take place.&nbsp; St. Michael&rsquo;s information was likely to be correct
+in this instance; he would never have invented a piece of matrimonial
+intelligence which gave such little scope for supplementary detail of
+the kind he loved to supply.&nbsp; As Francesca turned to watch the
+fourth act of the play, her mind was singing a paean of thankfulness
+and exultation.&nbsp; It was as though some artificer sent by the Gods
+had reinforced with a substantial cord the horsehair thread that held
+up the sword of Damocles over her head.&nbsp; Her love for her home,
+for her treasured household possessions, and her pleasant social life
+was able to expand once more in present security, and feed on future
+hope.&nbsp; She was still young enough to count four or five years as
+a long time, and to-night she was optimistic enough to prophesy smooth
+things of the future that lay beyond that span.&nbsp; Of the fourth
+act, with its carefully held back but obviously imminent reconciliation
+between the leading characters, she took in but little, except that
+she vaguely understood it to have a happy ending.&nbsp; As the lights
+went up she looked round on the dispersing audience with a feeling of
+friendliness uppermost in her mind; even the sight of Elaine de Frey
+and Courtenay Youghal leaving the theatre together did not inspire her
+with a tenth part of the annoyance that their entrance had caused her.&nbsp;
+Serena&rsquo;s invitation to go on to the Savoy for supper fitted in
+exactly with her mood of exhilaration.&nbsp; It would be a fit and appropriate
+wind-up to an auspicious evening.&nbsp; The cold chicken and modest
+brand of Chablis waiting for her at home should give way to a banquet
+of more festive nature.<br>
+<br>
+In the crush of the vestibule, friends and enemies, personal and political,
+were jostled and locked together in the general effort to rejoin temporarily
+estranged garments and secure the attendance of elusive vehicles.&nbsp;
+Lady Caroline found herself at close quarters with the estimable Henry
+Greech, and experienced some of the joy which comes to the homeward
+wending sportsman when a chance shot presents itself on which he may
+expend his remaining cartridges.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;So the Government is going to climb down, after all,&rdquo; she
+said, with a provocative assumption of private information on the subject.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I assure you the Government will do nothing of the kind,&rdquo;
+replied the Member of Parliament with befitting dignity; &ldquo;the
+Prime Minister told me last night that under no circumstances - &rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;My dear Mr. Greech,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline, &ldquo;we all
+know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other wedded
+couples they sometimes live apart.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+For her, at any rate, the comedy had had a happy ending.<br>
+<br>
+Comus made his way slowly and lingeringly from the stalls, so slowly
+that the lights were already being turned down and great shroud-like
+dust-cloths were being swaythed over the ornamental gilt-work.&nbsp;
+The laughing, chattering, yawning throng had filtered out of the vestibule,
+and was melting away in final groups from the steps of the theatre.&nbsp;
+An impatient attendant gave him his coat and locked up the cloak room.&nbsp;
+Comus stepped out under the portico; he looked at the posters announcing
+the play, and in anticipation he could see other posters announcing
+its 200th performance.&nbsp; Two hundred performances; by that time
+the Straw Exchange Theatre would be to him something so remote and unreal
+that it would hardly seem to exist or to have ever existed except in
+his fancy.&nbsp; And to the laughing chattering throng that would pass
+in under that portico to the 200th performance, he would be, to those
+that had known him, something equally remote and non-existent.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The good-looking Bassington boy?&nbsp; Oh, dead, or rubber-growing
+or sheep-farming or something of that sort.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER XIV<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The farewell dinner which Francesca had hurriedly organised in honour
+of her son&rsquo;s departure threatened from the outset to be a doubtfully
+successful function.&nbsp; In the first place, as he observed privately,
+there was very little of Comus and a good deal of farewell in it.&nbsp;
+His own particular friends were unrepresented.&nbsp; Courtenay Youghal
+was out of the question; and though Francesca would have stretched a
+point and welcomed some of his other male associates of whom she scarcely
+approved, he himself had been opposed to including any of them in the
+invitations.&nbsp; On the other hand, as Henry Greech had provided Comus
+with this job that he was going out to, and was, moreover, finding part
+of the money for the necessary outfit, Francesca had felt it her duty
+to ask him and his wife to the dinner; the obtuseness that seems to
+cling to some people like a garment throughout their life had caused
+Mr. Greech to accept the invitation.&nbsp; When Comus heard of the circumstance
+he laughed long and boisterously; his spirits, Francesca noted, seemed
+to be rising fast as the hour for departure drew near.<br>
+<br>
+The other guests included Serena Golackly and Lady Veula, the latter
+having been asked on the inspiration of the moment at the theatrical
+first-night.&nbsp; In the height of the Season it was not easy to get
+together a goodly selection of guests at short notice, and Francesca
+had gladly fallen in with Serena&rsquo;s suggestion of bringing with
+her Stephen Thorle, who was alleged, in loose feminine phrasing, to
+&ldquo;know all about&rdquo; tropical Africa.&nbsp; His travels and
+experiences in those regions probably did not cover much ground or stretch
+over any great length of time, but he was one of those individuals who
+can describe a continent on the strength of a few days&rsquo; stay in
+a coast town as intimately and dogmatically as a paleontologist will
+reconstruct an extinct mammal from the evidence of a stray shin bone.&nbsp;
+He had the loud penetrating voice and the prominent penetrating eyes
+of a man who can do no listening in the ordinary way and whose eyes
+have to perform the function of listening for him.&nbsp; His vanity
+did not necessarily make him unbearable, unless one had to spend much
+time in his society, and his need for a wide field of audience and admiration
+was mercifully calculated to spread his operations over a considerable
+human area.&nbsp; Moreover, his craving for attentive listeners forced
+him to interest himself in a wonderful variety of subjects on which
+he was able to discourse fluently and with a certain semblance of special
+knowledge.&nbsp; Politics he avoided; the ground was too well known,
+and there was a definite no to every definite yes that could be put
+forward.&nbsp; Moreover, argument was not congenial to his disposition,
+which preferred an unchallenged flow of dissertation modified by occasional
+helpful questions which formed the starting point for new offshoots
+of word-spinning.&nbsp; The promotion of cottage industries, the prevention
+of juvenile street trading, the extension of the Borstal prison system,
+the furtherance of vague talkative religious movements the fostering
+of inter-racial <i>ententes</i>, all found in him a tireless exponent,
+a fluent and entertaining, though perhaps not very convincing, advocate.&nbsp;
+With the real motive power behind these various causes he was not very
+closely identified; to the spade-workers who carried on the actual labours
+of each particular movement he bore the relation of a trowel-worker,
+delving superficially at the surface, but able to devote a proportionately
+far greater amount of time to the advertisement of his progress and
+achievements.&nbsp; Such was Stephen Thorle, a governess in the nursery
+of Chelsea-bred religions, a skilled window-dresser in the emporium
+of his own personality, and needless to say, evanescently popular amid
+a wide but shifting circle of acquaintances.&nbsp; He improved on the
+record of a socially much-travelled individual whose experience has
+become classical, and went to most of the best houses - twice.<br>
+<br>
+His inclusion as a guest at this particular dinner-party was not a very
+happy inspiration.&nbsp; He was inclined to patronise Comus, as well
+as the African continent, and on even slighter acquaintance.&nbsp; With
+the exception of Henry Greech, whose feelings towards his nephew had
+been soured by many years of overt antagonism, there was an uncomfortable
+feeling among those present that the topic of the black-sheep export
+trade, as Comus would have himself expressed it, was being given undue
+prominence in what should have been a festive farewell banquet.&nbsp;
+And Comus, in whose honour the feast was given, did not contribute much
+towards its success; though his spirits seemed strung up to a high pitch
+his merriment was more the merriment of a cynical and amused onlooker
+than of one who responds to the gaiety of his companions.&nbsp; Sometimes
+he laughed quietly to himself at some chance remark of a scarcely mirth-provoking
+nature, and Lady Veula, watching him narrowly, came to the conclusion
+that an element of fear was blended with his seemingly buoyant spirits.&nbsp;
+Once or twice he caught her eye across the table, and a certain sympathy
+seemed to grow up between them, as though they were both consciously
+watching some lugubrious comedy that was being played out before them.<br>
+<br>
+An untoward little incident had marked the commencement of the meal.&nbsp;
+A small still-life picture that hung over the sideboard had snapped
+its cord and slid down with an alarming clatter on to the crowded board
+beneath it.&nbsp; The picture itself was scarcely damaged, but its fall
+had been accompanied by a tinkle of broken glass, and it was found that
+a liqueur glass, one out of a set of seven that would be impossible
+to match, had been shivered into fragments.&nbsp; Francesca&rsquo;s
+almost motherly love for her possessions made her peculiarly sensible
+to a feeling of annoyance and depression at the accident, but she turned
+politely to listen to Mrs. Greech&rsquo;s account of a misfortune in
+which four soup-plates were involved.&nbsp; Mrs. Henry was not a brilliant
+conversationalist, and her flank was speedily turned by Stephen Thorle,
+who recounted a slum experience in which two entire families did all
+their feeding out of one damaged soup-plate.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;The gratitude of those poor creatures when I presented them with
+a set of table crockery apiece, the tears in their eyes and in their
+voices when they thanked me, would be impossible to describe.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Thank you all the same for describing it,&rdquo; said Comus.<br>
+<br>
+The listening eyes went swiftly round the table to gather evidence as
+to how this rather disconcerting remark had been received, but Thorle&rsquo;s
+voice continued uninterruptedly to retail stories of East-end gratitude,
+never failing to mention the particular deeds of disinterested charity
+on his part which had evoked and justified the gratitude.&nbsp; Mrs.
+Greech had to suppress the interesting sequel to her broken-crockery
+narrative, to wit, how she subsequently matched the shattered soup-plates
+at Harrod&rsquo;s.&nbsp; Like an imported plant species that sometimes
+flourishes exceedingly, and makes itself at home to the dwarfing and
+overshadowing of all native species, Thorle dominated the dinner-party
+and thrust its original purport somewhat into the background.&nbsp;
+Serena began to look helplessly apologetic.&nbsp; It was altogether
+rather a relief when the filling of champagne glasses gave Francesca
+an excuse for bringing matters back to their intended footing.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;We must all drink a health,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;Comus, my
+own dear boy, a safe and happy voyage to you, much prosperity in the
+life you are going out to, and in due time a safe and happy return -
+&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Her hand gave an involuntary jerk in the act of raising the glass, and
+the wine went streaming across the tablecloth in a froth of yellow bubbles.&nbsp;
+It certainly was not turning out a comfortable or auspicious dinner
+party.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;My dear mother,&rdquo; cried Comus, &ldquo;you must have been
+drinking healths all the afternoon to make your hand so unsteady.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+He laughed gaily and with apparent carelessness, but again Lady Veula
+caught the frightened note in his laughter.&nbsp; Mrs. Henry, with practical
+sympathy, was telling Francesca two good ways for getting wine stains
+out of tablecloths.&nbsp; The smaller economies of life were an unnecessary
+branch of learning for Mrs. Greech, but she studied them as carefully
+and conscientiously as a stay-at-home plain-dwelling English child commits
+to memory the measurements and altitudes of the world&rsquo;s principal
+mountain peaks.&nbsp; Some women of her temperament and mentality know
+by heart the favourite colours, flowers and hymn-tunes of all the members
+of the Royal Family; Mrs. Greech would possibly have failed in an examination
+of that nature, but she knew what to do with carrots that have been
+over-long in storage.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca did not renew her speech-making; a chill seemed to have fallen
+over all efforts at festivity, and she contented herself with refilling
+her glass and simply drinking to her boy&rsquo;s good health.&nbsp;
+The others followed her example, and Comus drained his glass with a
+brief &ldquo;thank you all very much.&rdquo;&nbsp; The sense of constraint
+which hung over the company was not, however, marked by any uncomfortable
+pause in the conversation.&nbsp; Henry Greech was a fluent thinker,
+of the kind that prefer to do their thinking aloud; the silence that
+descended on him as a mantle in the House of Commons was an official
+livery of which he divested himself as thoroughly as possible in private
+life.&nbsp; He did not propose to sit through dinner as a mere listener
+to Mr. Thorle&rsquo;s personal narrative of philanthropic movements
+and experiences, and took the first opportunity of launching himself
+into a flow of satirical observations on current political affairs.&nbsp;
+Lady Veula was inured to this sort of thing in her own home circle,
+and sat listening with the stoical indifference with which an Esquimau
+might accept the occurrence of one snowstorm the more, in the course
+of an Arctic winter.&nbsp; Serena Golackly felt a certain relief at
+the fact that her imported guest was not, after all, monopolising the
+conversation.&nbsp; But the latter was too determined a personality
+to allow himself to be thrust aside for many minutes by the talkative
+M.P.&nbsp; Henry Greech paused for an instant to chuckle at one of his
+own shafts of satire, and immediately Thorle&rsquo;s penetrating voice
+swept across the table.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Oh, you politicians!&rdquo; he exclaimed, with pleasant superiority;
+&ldquo;you are always fighting about how things should be done, and
+the consequence is you are never able to do anything.&nbsp; Would you
+like me to tell you what a Unitarian horsedealer said to me at Brindisi
+about politicians?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+A Unitarian horsedealer at Brindisi had all the allurement of the unexpected.&nbsp;
+Henry Greech&rsquo;s witticisms at the expense of the Front Opposition
+bench were destined to remain as unfinished as his wife&rsquo;s history
+of the broken soup-plates.&nbsp; Thorle was primed with an ample succession
+of stories and themes, chiefly concerning poverty, thriftlessness, reclamation,
+reformed characters, and so forth, which carried him in an almost uninterrupted
+sequence through the remainder of the dinner.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;What I want to do is to make people think,&rdquo; he said, turning
+his prominent eyes on to his hostess; &ldquo;it&rsquo;s so hard to make
+people think.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;At any rate you give them the opportunity,&rdquo; said Comus,
+cryptically.<br>
+<br>
+As the ladies rose to leave the table Comus crossed over to pick up
+one of Lady Veula&rsquo;s gloves that had fallen to the floor.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I did not know you kept a dog,&rdquo; said Lady Veula.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;We don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said Comus, &ldquo;there isn&rsquo;t one
+in the house.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I could have sworn I saw one follow you across the hall this
+evening,&rdquo; she said.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;A small black dog, something like a schipperke?&rdquo; asked
+Comus in a low voice.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Yes, that was it.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I saw it myself to-night; it ran from behind my chair just as
+I was sitting down.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t say anything to the others about
+it; it would frighten my mother.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Have you ever seen it before?&rdquo; Lady Veula asked quickly.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Once, when I was six years old.&nbsp; It followed my father downstairs.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Lady Veula said nothing.&nbsp; She knew that Comus had lost his father
+at the age of six.<br>
+<br>
+In the drawing-room Serena made nervous excuses for her talkative friend.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Really, rather an interesting man, you know, and up to the eyes
+in all sorts of movements.&nbsp; Just the sort of person to turn loose
+at a drawing-room meeting, or to send down to a mission-hall in some
+unheard-of neighbourhood.&nbsp; Given a sounding-board and a harmonium,
+and a titled woman of some sort in the chair, and he&rsquo;ll be perfectly
+happy; I must say I hadn&rsquo;t realised how overpowering he might
+be at a small dinner-party.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I should say he was a very good man,&rdquo; said Mrs. Greech;
+she had forgiven the mutilation of her soup-plate story.<br>
+<br>
+The party broke up early as most of the guests had other engagements
+to keep.&nbsp; With a belated recognition of the farewell nature of
+the occasion they made pleasant little good-bye remarks to Comus, with
+the usual predictions of prosperity and anticipations of an ultimate
+auspicious return.&nbsp; Even Henry Greech sank his personal dislike
+of the boy for the moment, and made hearty jocular allusions to a home-coming,
+which, in the elder man&rsquo;s eyes, seemed possibly pleasantly remote.&nbsp;
+Lady Veula alone made no reference to the future; she simply said, &ldquo;Good-bye,
+Comus,&rdquo; but her voice was the kindest of all and he responded
+with a look of gratitude.&nbsp; The weariness in her eyes was more marked
+than ever as she lay back against the cushions of her carriage.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;What a tragedy life is,&rdquo; she said, aloud to herself.<br>
+<br>
+Serena and Stephen Thorle were the last to leave, and Francesca stood
+alone for a moment at the head of the stairway watching Comus laughing
+and chatting as he escorted the departing guests to the door.&nbsp;
+The ice-wall was melting under the influence of coming separation, and
+never had he looked more adorably handsome in her eyes, never had his
+merry laugh and mischief-loving gaiety seemed more infectious than on
+this night of his farewell banquet.&nbsp; She was glad enough that he
+was going away from a life of idleness and extravagance and temptation,
+but she began to suspect that she would miss, for a little while at
+any rate, the high-spirited boy who could be so attractive in his better
+moods.&nbsp; Her impulse, after the guests had gone, was to call him
+to her and hold him once more in her arms, and repeat her wishes for
+his happiness and good-luck in the land he was going to, and her promise
+of his welcome back, some not too distant day, to the land he was leaving.&nbsp;
+She wanted to forget, and to make him forget, the months of irritable
+jangling and sharp discussions, the months of cold aloofness and indifference
+and to remember only that he was her own dear Comus as in the days of
+yore, before he had grown from an unmanageable pickle into a weariful
+problem.&nbsp; But she feared lest she should break down, and she did
+not wish to cloud his light-hearted gaiety on the very eve of his departure.&nbsp;
+She watched him for a moment as he stood in the hall, settling his tie
+before a mirror, and then went quietly back to her drawing-room.&nbsp;
+It had not been a very successful dinner party, and the general effect
+it had left on her was one of depression.<br>
+<br>
+Comus, with a lively musical-comedy air on his lips, and a look of wretchedness
+in his eyes, went out to visit the haunts that he was leaving so soon.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER XV<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Elaine Youghal sat at lunch in the Speise Saal of one of Vienna&rsquo;s
+costlier hotels.&nbsp; The double-headed eagle, with its &ldquo;K.u.K.&rdquo;
+legend, everywhere met the eye and announced the imperial favour in
+which the establishment basked.&nbsp; Some several square yards of yellow
+bunting, charged with the image of another double-headed eagle, floating
+from the highest flag-staff above the building, betrayed to the initiated
+the fact that a Russian Grand Duke was concealed somewhere on the premises.&nbsp;
+Unannounced by heraldic symbolism but unconcealable by reason of nature&rsquo;s
+own blazonry, were several citizens and citizenesses of the great republic
+of the Western world.&nbsp; One or two Cobdenite members of the British
+Parliament engaged in the useful task of proving that the cost of living
+in Vienna was on an exorbitant scale, flitted with restrained importance
+through a land whose fatness they had come to spy out; every fancied
+over-charge in their bills was welcome as providing another nail in
+the coffin of their fiscal opponents.&nbsp; It is the glory of democracies
+that they may be misled but never driven.&nbsp; Here and there, like
+brave deeds in a dust-patterned world, flashed and glittered the sumptuous
+uniforms of representatives of the Austrian military caste.&nbsp; Also
+in evidence, at discreet intervals, were stray units of the Semetic
+tribe that nineteen centuries of European neglect had been unable to
+mislay.<br>
+<br>
+Elaine sitting with Courtenay at an elaborately appointed luncheon table,
+gay with high goblets of Bohemian glassware, was mistress of three discoveries.&nbsp;
+First, to her disappointment, that if you frequent the more expensive
+hotels of Europe you must be prepared to find, in whatever country you
+may chance to be staying, a depressing international likeness between
+them all.&nbsp; Secondly, to her relief, that one is not expected to
+be sentimentally amorous during a modern honeymoon.&nbsp; Thirdly, rather
+to her dismay, that Courtenay Youghal did not necessarily expect her
+to be markedly affectionate in private.&nbsp; Someone had described
+him, after their marriage, as one of Nature&rsquo;s bachelors, and she
+began to see how aptly the description fitted him.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Will those Germans on our left never stop talking?&rdquo; she
+asked, as an undying flow of Teutonic small talk rattled and jangled
+across the intervening stretch of carpet.&nbsp; &ldquo;Not one of those
+three women has ceased talking for an instant since we&rsquo;ve been
+sitting here.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;They will presently, if only for a moment,&rdquo; said Courtenay;
+&ldquo;when the dish you have ordered comes in there will be a deathly
+silence at the next table.&nbsp; No German can see a <i>plat</i> brought
+in for someone else without being possessed with a great fear that it
+represents a more toothsome morsel or a better money&rsquo;s worth than
+what he has ordered for himself.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The exuberant Teutonic chatter was balanced on the other side of the
+room by an even more penetrating conversation unflaggingly maintained
+by a party of Americans, who were sitting in judgment on the cuisine
+of the country they were passing through, and finding few extenuating
+circumstances.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;What Mr. Lonkins wants is a real <i>deep</i> cherry pie,&rdquo;
+announced a lady in a tone of dramatic and honest conviction.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Why, yes, that is so,&rdquo; corroborated a gentleman who was
+apparently the Mr. Lonkins in question; &ldquo;a real <i>deep</i> cherry
+pie.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;We had the same trouble way back in Paris,&rdquo; proclaimed
+another lady; &ldquo;little Jerome and the girls don&rsquo;t want to
+eat any more <i>cr&egrave;me renvers&eacute;e</i>.&nbsp; I&rsquo;d give
+anything if they could get some real cherry pie.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Real <i>deep</i> cherry pie,&rdquo; assented Mr. Lonkins.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Way down in Ohio we used to have peach pie that was real good,&rdquo;
+said Mrs. Lonkins, turning on a tap of reminiscence that presently flowed
+to a cascade.&nbsp; The subject of pies seemed to lend itself to indefinite
+expansion.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Do those people think of nothing but their food?&rdquo; asked
+Elaine, as the virtues of roasted mutton suddenly came to the fore and
+received emphatic recognition, even the absent and youthful Jerome being
+quoted in its favour.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;On the contrary,&rdquo; said Courtenay, &ldquo;they are a widely-travelled
+set, and the man has had a notably interesting career.&nbsp; It is a
+form of home-sickness with them to discuss and lament the cookery and
+foods that they&rsquo;ve never had the leisure to stay at home and digest.&nbsp;
+The Wandering Jew probably babbled unremittingly about some breakfast
+dish that took so long to prepare that he had never time to eat it.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+A waiter deposited a dish of Wiener Nierenbraten in front of Elaine.&nbsp;
+At the same moment a magic hush fell upon the three German ladies at
+the adjoining table, and the flicker of a great fear passed across their
+eyes.&nbsp; Then they burst forth again into tumultuous chatter.&nbsp;
+Courtenay had proved a reliable prophet.<br>
+<br>
+Almost at the same moment as the luncheon-dish appeared on the scene,
+two ladies arrived at a neighbouring table, and bowed with dignified
+cordiality to Elaine and Courtenay.&nbsp; They were two of the more
+worldly and travelled of Elaine&rsquo;s extensive stock of aunts, and
+they happened to be making a short stay at the same hotel as the young
+couple.&nbsp; They were far too correct and rationally minded to intrude
+themselves on their niece, but it was significant of Elaine&rsquo;s
+altered view as to the sanctity of honeymoon life that she secretly
+rather welcomed the presence of her two relatives in the hotel, and
+had found time and occasion to give them more of her society than she
+would have considered necessary or desirable a few weeks ago.&nbsp;
+The younger of the two she rather liked, in a restrained fashion, as
+one likes an unpretentious watering-place or a restaurant that does
+not try to give one a musical education in addition to one&rsquo;s dinner.&nbsp;
+One felt instinctively about her that she would never wear rather more
+valuable diamonds than any other woman in the room, and would never
+be the only person to be saved in a steamboat disaster or hotel fire.&nbsp;
+As a child she might have been perfectly well able to recite &ldquo;On
+Linden when the sun was low,&rdquo; but one felt certain that nothing
+ever induced her to do so.&nbsp; The elder aunt, Mrs. Goldbrook, did
+not share her sister&rsquo;s character as a human rest-cure; most people
+found her rather disturbing, chiefly, perhaps, from her habit of asking
+unimportant questions with enormous solemnity.&nbsp; Her manner of enquiring
+after a trifling ailment gave one the impression that she was more concerned
+with the fortunes of the malady than with oneself, and when one got
+rid of a cold one felt that she almost expected to be given its postal
+address.&nbsp; Probably her manner was merely the defensive outwork
+of an innate shyness, but she was not a woman who commanded confidences.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;A telephone call for Courtenay,&rdquo; commented the younger
+of the two women as Youghal hurriedly flashed through the room; &ldquo;the
+telephone system seems to enter very largely into that young man&rsquo;s
+life.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;The telephone has robbed matrimony of most of its sting,&rdquo;
+said the elder; &ldquo;so much more discreet than pen and ink communications
+which get read by the wrong people.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Elaine&rsquo;s aunts were conscientiously worldly; they were the natural
+outcome of a stock that had been conscientiously straight-laced for
+many generations.<br>
+<br>
+Elaine had progressed to the pancake stage before Courtenay returned.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Sorry to be away so long,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but I&rsquo;ve
+arranged something rather nice for to-night.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s rather
+a jolly masquerade ball on.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve &lsquo;phoned about getting
+a costume for you and it&rsquo;s alright.&nbsp; It will suit you beautifully,
+and I&rsquo;ve got my harlequin dress with me.&nbsp; Madame Kelnicort,
+excellent soul, is going to chaperone you, and she&rsquo;ll take you
+back any time you like; I&rsquo;m quite unreliable when I get into fancy
+dress.&nbsp; I shall probably keep going till some unearthly hour of
+the morning.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+A masquerade ball in a strange city hardly represented Elaine&rsquo;s
+idea of enjoyment.&nbsp; Carefully to disguise one&rsquo;s identity
+in a neighbourhood where one was entirely unknown seemed to her rather
+meaningless.&nbsp; With Courtenay, of course, it was different; he seemed
+to have friends and acquaintances everywhere.&nbsp; However, the matter
+had progressed to a point which would have made a refusal to go seem
+rather ungracious.&nbsp; Elaine finished her pancake and began to take
+a polite interest in her costume.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;What is your character?&rdquo; asked Madame Kelnicort that evening,
+as they uncloaked, preparatory to entering the already crowded ball-room.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I believe I&rsquo;m supposed to represent Marjolaine de Montfort,
+whoever she may have been,&rdquo; said Elaine.&nbsp; &ldquo;Courtenay
+declares he only wanted to marry me because I&rsquo;m his ideal of her.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;But what a mistake to go as a character you know nothing about.&nbsp;
+To enjoy a masquerade ball you ought to throw away your own self and
+be the character you represent.&nbsp; Now Courtenay has been Harlequin
+since half-way through dinner; I could see it dancing in his eyes.&nbsp;
+At about six o&rsquo;clock to-morrow morning he will fall asleep and
+wake up a member of the British House of Parliament on his honeymoon,
+but to-night he is unrestrainedly Harlequin.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Elaine stood in the ball-room surrounded by a laughing jostling throng
+of pierrots, jockeys, Dresden-china shepherdesses, Roumanian peasant-girls
+and all the lively make-believe creatures that form the ingredients
+of a fancy-dress ball.&nbsp; As she stood watching them she experienced
+a growing feeling of annoyance, chiefly with herself.&nbsp; She was
+assisting, as the French say, at one of the gayest scenes of Europe&rsquo;s
+gayest capital, and she was conscious of being absolutely unaffected
+by the gaiety around her.&nbsp; The costumes were certainly interesting
+to look at, and the music good to listen to, and to that extent she
+was amused, but the <i>abandon</i> of the scene made no appeal to her.&nbsp;
+It was like watching a game of which you did not know the rules, and
+in the issue of which you were not interested.&nbsp; Elaine began to
+wonder what was the earliest moment at which she could drag Madame Kelnicort
+away from the revel without being guilty of sheer cruelty.&nbsp; Then
+Courtenay wriggled out of the crush and came towards her, a joyous laughing
+Courtenay, looking younger and handsomer than she had ever seen him.&nbsp;
+She could scarcely recognise in him to-night the rising young debater
+who made embarrassing onslaughts on the Government&rsquo;s foreign policy
+before a crowded House of Commons.&nbsp; He claimed her for the dance
+that was just starting, and steered her dexterously into the heart of
+the waltzing crowd.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You look more like Marjolaine than I should have thought a mortal
+woman of these days could look,&rdquo; he declared, &ldquo;only Marjolaine
+did smile sometimes.&nbsp; You have rather the air of wondering if you&rsquo;d
+left out enough tea for the servants&rsquo; breakfast.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t
+mind my teasing; I love you to look like that, and besides, it makes
+a splendid foil to my Harlequin - my selfishness coming to the fore
+again, you see.&nbsp; But you really are to go home the moment you&rsquo;re
+bored; the excellent Kelnicort gets heaps of dances throughout the winter,
+so don&rsquo;t mind sacrificing her.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+A little later in the evening Elaine found herself standing out a dance
+with a grave young gentleman from the Russian Embassy.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Monsieur Courtenay enjoys himself, doesn&rsquo;t he?&rdquo; he
+observed, as the youthful-looking harlequin flashed past them, looking
+like some restless gorgeous-hued dragonfly; &ldquo;why is it that the
+good God has given your countrymen the boon of eternal youth?&nbsp;
+Some of your countrywomen, too, but all of the men.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Elaine could think of many of her countrymen who were not and never
+could have been youthful, but as far as Courtenay was concerned she
+recognised the fitness of the remark.&nbsp; And the recognition carried
+with it a sense of depression.&nbsp; Would he always remain youthful
+and keen on gaiety and revelling while she grew staid and retiring?&nbsp;
+She had thrust the lively intractable Comus out of her mind, as by his
+perverseness he had thrust himself out of her heart, and she had chosen
+the brilliant young man of affairs as her husband.&nbsp; He had honestly
+let her see the selfish side of his character while he was courting
+her, but she had been prepared to make due sacrifices to the selfishness
+of a public man who had his career to consider above all other things.&nbsp;
+Would she also have to make sacrifices to the harlequin spirit which
+was now revealing itself as an undercurrent in his nature?&nbsp; When
+one has inured oneself to the idea of a particular form of victimisation
+it is disconcerting to be confronted with another.&nbsp; Many a man
+who would patiently undergo martyrdom for religion&rsquo;s sake would
+be furiously unwilling to be a martyr to neuralgia.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I think that is why you English love animals so much,&rdquo;
+pursued the young diplomat; &ldquo;you are such splendid animals yourselves.&nbsp;
+You are lively because you want to be lively, not because people are
+looking on at you.&nbsp; Monsieur Courtenay is certainly an animal.&nbsp;
+I mean it as a high compliment.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Am I an animal?&rdquo; asked Elaine.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I was going to say you are an angel,&rdquo; said the Russian,
+in some embarrassment, &ldquo;but I do not think that would do; angels
+and animals would never get on together.&nbsp; To get on with animals
+you must have a sense of humour, and I don&rsquo;t suppose angels have
+any sense of humour; you see it would be no use to them as they never
+hear any jokes.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Perhaps,&rdquo; said Elaine, with a tinge of bitterness in her
+voice, &ldquo;perhaps I am a vegetable.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I think you most remind me of a picture,&rdquo; said the Russian.<br>
+<br>
+It was not the first time Elaine had heard the simile.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I know,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;the Narrow Gallery at the Louvre;
+attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Evidently the impression she made on people was solely one of externals.<br>
+<br>
+Was that how Courtenay regarded her?&nbsp; Was that to be her function
+and place in life, a painted background, a decorative setting to other
+people&rsquo;s triumphs and tragedies?&nbsp; Somehow to-night she had
+the feeling that a general might have who brought imposing forces into
+the field and could do nothing with them.&nbsp; She possessed youth
+and good looks, considerable wealth, and had just made what would be
+thought by most people a very satisfactory marriage.&nbsp; And already
+she seemed to be standing aside as an onlooker where she had expected
+herself to be taking a leading part.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Does this sort of thing appeal to you?&rdquo; she asked the young
+Russian, nodding towards the gay scrimmage of masqueraders and rather
+prepared to hear an amused negative.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;But yes, of course,&rdquo; he answered; &ldquo;costume balls,
+fancy fairs, caf&eacute; chantant, casino, anything that is not real
+life appeals to us Russians.&nbsp; Real life with us is the sort of
+thing that Maxim Gorki deals in.&nbsp; It interests us immensely, but
+we like to get away from it sometimes.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Madame Kelnicort came up with another prospective partner, and Elaine
+delivered her ukase: one more dance and then back to the hotel.&nbsp;
+Without any special regret she made her retreat from the revel which
+Courtenay was enjoying under the impression that it was life and the
+young Russian under the firm conviction that it was not.<br>
+<br>
+Elaine breakfasted at her aunts&rsquo; table the next morning at much
+her usual hour.&nbsp; Courtenay was sleeping the sleep of a happy tired
+animal.&nbsp; He had given instructions to be called at eleven o&rsquo;clock,
+from which time onward the <i>Neue Freie Presse</i>, the <i>Zeit</i>,
+and his toilet would occupy his attention till he appeared at the luncheon
+table.&nbsp; There were not many people breakfasting when Elaine arrived
+on the scene, but the room seemed to be fuller than it really was by
+reason of a penetrating voice that was engaged in recounting how far
+the standard of Viennese breakfast fare fell below the expectations
+and desires of little Jerome and the girls.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;If ever little Jerome becomes President of the United States,&rdquo;
+said Elaine, &ldquo;I shall be able to contribute quite an informing
+article on his gastronomic likes and dislikes to the papers.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The aunts were discreetly inquisitive as to the previous evening&rsquo;s
+entertainment.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;If Elaine would flirt mildly with somebody it would be such a
+good thing,&rdquo; said Mrs. Goldbrook; &ldquo;it would remind Courtenay
+that he&rsquo;s not the only attractive young man in the world.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Elaine, however, did not gratify their hopes; she referred to the ball
+with the detachment she would have shown in describing a drawing-room
+show of cottage industries.&nbsp; It was not difficult to discern in
+her description of the affair the confession that she had been slightly
+bored.&nbsp; From Courtenay, later in the day, the aunts received a
+much livelier impression of the festivities, from which it was abundantly
+clear that he at any rate had managed to amuse himself.&nbsp; Neither
+did it appear that his good opinion of his own attractions had suffered
+any serious shock.&nbsp; He was distinctly in a very good temper.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;The secret of enjoying a honeymoon,&rdquo; said Mrs. Goldbrook
+afterwards to her sister, &ldquo;is not to attempt too much.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You mean - ?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Courtenay is content to try and keep one person amused and happy,
+and he thoroughly succeeds.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I certainly don&rsquo;t think Elaine is going to be very happy,&rdquo;
+said her sister, &ldquo;but at least Courtenay saved her from making
+the greatest mistake she could have made - marrying that young Bassington.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;He has also,&rdquo; said Mrs. Goldbrook, &ldquo;helped her to
+make the next biggest mistake of her life - marrying Courtenay Youghal.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER XVI<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+It was late afternoon by the banks of a swiftly rushing river, a river
+that gave back a haze of heat from its waters as though it were some
+stagnant steaming lagoon, and yet seemed to be whirling onward with
+the determination of a living thing, perpetually eager and remorseless,
+leaping savagely at any obstacle that attempted to stay its course;
+an unfriendly river, to whose waters you committed yourself at your
+peril.&nbsp; Under the hot breathless shade of the trees on its shore
+arose that acrid all-pervading smell that seems to hang everywhere about
+the tropics, a smell as of some monstrous musty still-room where herbs
+and spices have been crushed and distilled and stored for hundreds of
+years, and where the windows have seldom been opened.&nbsp; In the dazzling
+heat that still held undisputed sway over the scene, insects and birds
+seemed preposterously alive and active, flitting their gay colours through
+the sunbeams, and crawling over the baked dust in the full swing and
+pursuit of their several businesses; the flies engaged in Heaven knows
+what, and the fly-catchers busy with the flies.&nbsp; Beasts and humans
+showed no such indifference to the temperature; the sun would have to
+slant yet further downward before the earth would become a fit arena
+for their revived activities.&nbsp; In the sheltered basement of a wayside
+rest-house a gang of native hammock-bearers slept or chattered drowsily
+through the last hours of the long mid-day halt; wide awake, yet almost
+motionless in the thrall of a heavy lassitude, their European master
+sat alone in an upper chamber, staring out through a narrow window-opening
+at the native village, spreading away in thick clusters of huts girt
+around with cultivated vegetation.&nbsp; It seemed a vast human ant-hill,
+which would presently be astir with its teeming human life, as though
+the Sun God in his last departing stride had roused it with a careless
+kick.&nbsp; Even as Comus watched he could see the beginnings of the
+evening&rsquo;s awakening.&nbsp; Women, squatting in front of their
+huts, began to pound away at the rice or maize that would form the evening
+meal, girls were collecting their water pots preparatory to a walk down
+to the river, and enterprising goats made tentative forays through gaps
+in the ill-kept fences of neighbouring garden plots; their hurried retreats
+showed that here at least someone was keeping alert and wakeful vigil.&nbsp;
+Behind a hut perched on a steep hillside, just opposite to the rest-house,
+two boys were splitting wood with a certain languid industry; further
+down the road a group of dogs were leisurely working themselves up to
+quarrelling pitch.&nbsp; Here and there, bands of evil-looking pigs
+roamed about, busy with foraging excursions that came unpleasantly athwart
+the border-line of scavenging.&nbsp; And from the trees that bounded
+and intersected the village rose the horrible, tireless, spiteful-sounding
+squawking of the iron-throated crows.<br>
+<br>
+Comus sat and watched it all with a sense of growing aching depression.&nbsp;
+It was so utterly trivial to his eyes, so devoid of interest, and yet
+it was so real, so serious, so implacable in its continuity.&nbsp; The
+brain grew tired with the thought of its unceasing reproduction.&nbsp;
+It had all gone on, as it was going on now, by the side of the great
+rushing swirling river, this tilling and planting and harvesting, marketing
+and store-keeping, feast-making and fetish-worship and love-making,
+burying and giving in marriage, child-bearing and child-rearing, all
+this had been going on, in the shimmering, blistering heat and the warm
+nights, while he had been a youngster at school, dimly recognising Africa
+as a division of the earth&rsquo;s surface that it was advisable to
+have a certain nodding acquaintance with.<br>
+<br>
+It had been going on in all its trifling detail, all its serious intensity,
+when his father and his grandfather in their day had been little boys
+at school, it would go on just as intently as ever long after Comus
+and his generation had passed away, just as the shadows would lengthen
+and fade under the mulberry trees in that far away English garden, round
+the old stone fountain where a leaden otter for ever preyed on a leaden
+salmon.<br>
+<br>
+Comus rose impatiently from his seat, and walked wearily across the
+hut to another window-opening which commanded a broad view of the river.&nbsp;
+There was something which fascinated and then depressed one in its ceaseless
+hurrying onward sweep, its tons of water rushing on for all time, as
+long as the face of the earth should remain unchanged.&nbsp; On its
+further shore could be seen spread out at intervals other teeming villages,
+with their cultivated plots and pasture clearings, their moving dots
+which meant cattle and goats and dogs and children.&nbsp; And far up
+its course, lost in the forest growth that fringed its banks, were hidden
+away yet more villages, human herding-grounds where men dwelt and worked
+and bartered, squabbled and worshipped, sickened and perished, while
+the river went by with its endless swirl and rush of gleaming waters.&nbsp;
+One could well understand primitive early races making propitiatory
+sacrifices to the spirit of a great river on whose shores they dwelt.&nbsp;
+Time and the river were the two great forces that seemed to matter here.<br>
+<br>
+It was almost a relief to turn back to that other outlook and watch
+the village life that was now beginning to wake in earnest.&nbsp; The
+procession of water-fetchers had formed itself in a long chattering
+line that stretched river-wards.&nbsp; Comus wondered how many tens
+of thousands of times that procession had been formed since first the
+village came into existence.&nbsp; They had been doing it while he was
+playing in the cricket-fields at school, while he was spending Christmas
+holidays in Paris, while he was going his careless round of theatres,
+dances, suppers and card-parties, just as they were doing it now; they
+would be doing it when there was no one alive who remembered Comus Bassington.&nbsp;
+This thought recurred again and again with painful persistence, a morbid
+growth arising in part from his loneliness.<br>
+<br>
+Staring dumbly out at the toiling sweltering human ant-hill Comus marvelled
+how missionary enthusiasts could labour hopefully at the work of transplanting
+their religion, with its homegrown accretions of fatherly parochial
+benevolence, in this heat-blistered, fever-scourged wilderness, where
+men lived like groundbait and died like flies.&nbsp; Demons one might
+believe in, if one did not hold one&rsquo;s imagination in healthy check,
+but a kindly all-managing God, never.&nbsp; Somewhere in the west country
+of England Comus had an uncle who lived in a rose-smothered rectory
+and taught a wholesome gentle-hearted creed that expressed itself in
+the spirit of &ldquo;Little lamb, who made thee?&rdquo; and faithfully
+reflected the beautiful homely Christ-child sentiment of Saxon Europe.&nbsp;
+What a far away, unreal fairy story it all seemed here in this West
+African land, where the bodies of men were of as little account as the
+bubbles that floated on the oily froth of the great flowing river, and
+where it required a stretch of wild profitless imagination to credit
+them with undying souls.&nbsp; In the life he had come from Comus had
+been accustomed to think of individuals as definite masterful personalities,
+making their several marks on the circumstances that revolved around
+them; they did well or ill, or in most cases indifferently, and were
+criticised, praised, blamed, thwarted or tolerated, or given way to.&nbsp;
+In any case, humdrum or outstanding, they had their spheres of importance,
+little or big.&nbsp; They dominated a breakfast table or harassed a
+Government, according to their capabilities or opportunities, or perhaps
+they merely had irritating mannerisms.&nbsp; At any rate it seemed highly
+probable that they had souls.&nbsp; Here a man simply made a unit in
+an unnumbered population, an inconsequent dot in a loosely-compiled
+deathroll.&nbsp; Even his own position as a white man exalted conspicuously
+above a horde of black natives did not save Comus from the depressing
+sense of nothingness which his first experience of fever had thrown
+over him.&nbsp; He was a lost, soulless body in this great uncaring
+land; if he died another would take his place, his few effects would
+be inventoried and sent down to the coast, someone else would finish
+off any tea or whisky that he left behind - that would be all.<br>
+<br>
+It was nearly time to be starting towards the next halting place where
+he would dine or at any rate eat something.&nbsp; But the lassitude
+which the fever had bequeathed him made the tedium of travelling through
+interminable forest-tracks a weariness to be deferred as long as possible.&nbsp;
+The bearers were nothing loth to let another half-hour or so slip by,
+and Comus dragged a battered paper-covered novel from the pocket of
+his coat.&nbsp; It was a story dealing with the elaborately tangled
+love affairs of a surpassingly uninteresting couple, and even in his
+almost bookless state Comus had not been able to plough his way through
+more than two-thirds of its dull length; bound up with the cover, however,
+were some pages of advertisement, and these the exile scanned with a
+hungry intentness that the romance itself could never have commanded.&nbsp;
+The name of a shop, of a street, the address of a restaurant, came to
+him as a bitter reminder of the world he had lost, a world that ate
+and drank and flirted, gambled and made merry, a world that debated
+and intrigued and wire-pulled, fought or compromised political battles
+- and recked nothing of its outcasts wandering through forest paths
+and steamy swamps or lying in the grip of fever.&nbsp; Comus read and
+re-read those few lines of advertisement, just as he treasured a much-crumpled
+programme of a first-night performance at the Straw Exchange Theatre;
+they seemed to make a little more real the past that was already so
+shadowy and so utterly remote.&nbsp; For a moment he could almost capture
+the sensation of being once again in those haunts that he loved; then
+he looked round and pushed the book wearily from him.&nbsp; The steaming
+heat, the forest, the rushing river hemmed him in on all sides.<br>
+<br>
+The two boys who had been splitting wood ceased from their labours and
+straightened their backs; suddenly the smaller of the two gave the other
+a resounding whack with a split lath that he still held in his hand,
+and flew up the hillside with a scream of laughter and simulated terror,
+the bigger lad following in hot pursuit.&nbsp; Up and down the steep
+bush-grown slope they raced and twisted and dodged, coming sometimes
+to close quarters in a hurricane of squeals and smacks, rolling over
+and over like fighting kittens, and breaking away again to start fresh
+provocation and fresh pursuit.&nbsp; Now and again they would lie for
+a time panting in what seemed the last stage of exhaustion, and then
+they would be off in another wild scamper, their dusky bodies flitting
+through the bushes, disappearing and reappearing with equal suddenness.&nbsp;
+Presently two girls of their own age, who had returned from the water-fetching,
+sprang out on them from ambush, and the four joined in one joyous gambol
+that lit up the hillside with shrill echoes and glimpses of flying limbs.&nbsp;
+Comus sat and watched, at first with an amused interest, then with a
+returning flood of depression and heart-ache.&nbsp; Those wild young
+human kittens represented the joy of life, he was the outsider, the
+lonely alien, watching something in which he could not join, a happiness
+in which he had no part or lot.&nbsp; He would pass presently out of
+the village and his bearers&rsquo; feet would leave their indentations
+in the dust; that would be his most permanent memorial in this little
+oasis of teeming life.&nbsp; And that other life, in which he once moved
+with such confident sense of his own necessary participation in it,
+how completely he had passed out of it.&nbsp; Amid all its laughing
+throngs, its card parties and race-meetings and country-house gatherings,
+he was just a mere name, remembered or forgotten, Comus Bassington,
+the boy who went away.&nbsp; He had loved himself very well and never
+troubled greatly whether anyone else really loved him, and now he realised
+what he had made of his life.&nbsp; And at the same time he knew that
+if his chance were to come again he would throw it away just as surely,
+just as perversely.&nbsp; Fate played with him with loaded dice; he
+would lose always.<br>
+<br>
+One person in the whole world had cared for him, for longer than he
+could remember, cared for him perhaps more than he knew, cared for him
+perhaps now.&nbsp; But a wall of ice had mounted up between him and
+her, and across it there blew that cold-breath that chills or kills
+affection.<br>
+<br>
+The words of a well-known old song, the wistful cry of a lost cause,
+rang with insistent mockery through his brain:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Better loved you canna be,<br>
+Will ye ne&rsquo;er come back again?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+If it was love that was to bring him back he must be an exile for ever.&nbsp;
+His epitaph in the mouths of those that remembered him would be, Comus
+Bassington, the boy who never came back.<br>
+<br>
+And in his unutterable loneliness he bowed his head on his arms, that
+he might not see the joyous scrambling frolic on yonder hillside.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER XVII<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The bleak rawness of a grey December day held sway over St. James&rsquo;s
+Park, that sanctuary of lawn and tree and pool, into which the bourgeois
+innovator has rushed ambitiously time and again, to find that he must
+take the patent leather from off his feet, for the ground on which he
+stands is hallowed ground.<br>
+<br>
+In the lonely hour of early afternoon, when the workers had gone back
+to their work, and the loiterers were scarcely yet gathered again, Francesca
+Bassington made her way restlessly along the stretches of gravelled
+walk that bordered the ornamental water.&nbsp; The overmastering unhappiness
+that filled her heart and stifled her thinking powers found answering
+echo in her surroundings.&nbsp; There is a sorrow that lingers in old
+parks and gardens that the busy streets have no leisure to keep by them;
+the dead must bury their dead in Whitehall or the Place de la Concorde,
+but there are quieter spots where they may still keep tryst with the
+living and intrude the memory of their bygone selves on generations
+that have almost forgotten them.&nbsp; Even in tourist-trampled Versailles
+the desolation of a tragedy that cannot die haunts the terraces and
+fountains like a bloodstain that will not wash out; in the Saxon Garden
+at Warsaw there broods the memory of long-dead things, coeval with the
+stately trees that shade its walks, and with the carp that swim to-day
+in its ponds as they doubtless swam there when &ldquo;Lieber Augustin&rdquo;
+was a living person and not as yet an immortal couplet.&nbsp; And St.
+James&rsquo;s Park, with its lawns and walks and waterfowl, harbours
+still its associations with a bygone order of men and women, whose happiness
+and sadness are woven into its history, dim and grey as they were once
+bright and glowing, like the faded pattern worked into the fabric of
+an old tapestry.&nbsp; It was here that Francesca had made her way when
+the intolerable inaction of waiting had driven her forth from her home.&nbsp;
+She was waiting for that worst news of all, the news which does not
+kill hope, because there has been none to kill, but merely ends suspense.&nbsp;
+An early message had said that Comus was ill, which might have meant
+much or little; then there had come that morning a cablegram which only
+meant one thing; in a few hours she would get a final message, of which
+this was the preparatory forerunner.&nbsp; She already knew as much
+as that awaited message would tell her.&nbsp; She knew that she would
+never see Comus again, and she knew now that she loved him beyond all
+things that the world could hold for her.&nbsp; It was no sudden rush
+of pity or compunction that clouded her judgment or gilded her recollection
+of him; she saw him as he was, the beautiful, wayward, laughing boy,
+with his naughtiness, his exasperating selfishness, his insurmountable
+folly and perverseness, his cruelty that spared not even himself, and
+as he was, as he always had been, she knew that he was the one thing
+that the Fates had willed that she should love.&nbsp; She did not stop
+to accuse or excuse herself for having sent him forth to what was to
+prove his death.&nbsp; It was, doubtless, right and reasonable that
+he should have gone out there, as hundreds of other men went out, in
+pursuit of careers; the terrible thing was that he would never come
+back.&nbsp; The old cruel hopelessness that had always chequered her
+pride and pleasure in his good looks and high spirits and fitfully charming
+ways had dealt her a last crushing blow; he was dying somewhere thousands
+of miles away without hope of recovery, without a word of love to comfort
+him, and without hope or shred of consolation she was waiting to hear
+of the end.&nbsp; The end; that last dreadful piece of news which would
+write &ldquo;nevermore&rdquo; across his life and hers.<br>
+<br>
+The lively bustle in the streets had been a torture that she could not
+bear.&nbsp; It wanted but two days to Christmas and the gaiety of the
+season, forced or genuine, rang out everywhere.&nbsp; Christmas shopping,
+with its anxious solicitude or self-centred absorption, overspread the
+West End and made the pavements scarcely passable at certain favoured
+points.&nbsp; Proud parents, parcel-laden and surrounded by escorts
+of their young people, compared notes with one another on the looks
+and qualities of their offspring and exchanged loud hurried confidences
+on the difficulty or success which each had experienced in getting the
+right presents for one and all.&nbsp; Shouted directions where to find
+this or that article at its best mingled with salvos of Christmas good
+wishes.&nbsp; To Francesca, making her way frantically through the carnival
+of happiness with that lonely deathbed in her eyes, it had seemed a
+callous mockery of her pain; could not people remember that there were
+crucifixions as well as joyous birthdays in the world?&nbsp; Every mother
+that she passed happy in the company of a fresh-looking clean-limbed
+schoolboy son sent a fresh stab at her heart, and the very shops had
+their bitter memories.&nbsp; There was the tea-shop where he and she
+had often taken tea together, or, in the days of their estrangement,
+sat with their separate friends at separate tables.&nbsp; There were
+other shops where extravagantly-incurred bills had furnished material
+for those frequently recurring scenes of recrimination, and the Colonial
+outfitters, where, as he had phrased it in whimsical mockery, he had
+bought grave-clothes for his burying-alive.&nbsp; The &ldquo;oubliette!&rdquo;&nbsp;
+She remembered the bitter petulant name he had flung at his destined
+exile.&nbsp; There at least he had been harder on himself than the Fates
+were pleased to will; never, as long as Francesca lived and had a brain
+that served her, would she be able to forget.&nbsp; That narcotic would
+never be given to her.&nbsp; Unrelenting, unsparing memory would be
+with her always to remind her of those last days of tragedy.&nbsp; Already
+her mind was dwelling on the details of that ghastly farewell dinner-party
+and recalling one by one the incidents of ill-omen that had marked it;
+how they had sat down seven to table and how one liqueur glass in the
+set of seven had been shivered into fragments; how her glass had slipped
+from her hand as she raised it to her lips to wish Comus a safe return;
+and the strange, quiet hopelessness of Lady Veula&rsquo;s &ldquo;good-bye&rdquo;;
+she remembered now how it had chilled and frightened her at the moment.<br>
+<br>
+The park was filling again with its floating population of loiterers,
+and Francesca&rsquo;s footsteps began to take a homeward direction.&nbsp;
+Something seemed to tell her that the message for which she waited had
+arrived and was lying there on the hall table.&nbsp; Her brother, who
+had announced his intention of visiting her early in the afternoon would
+have gone by now; he knew nothing of this morning&rsquo;s bad news -
+the instinct of a wounded animal to creep away by itself had prompted
+her to keep her sorrow from him as long as possible.&nbsp; His visit
+did not necessitate her presence; he was bringing an Austrian friend,
+who was compiling a work on the Franco-Flemish school of painting, to
+inspect the Van der Meulen, which Henry Greech hoped might perhaps figure
+as an illustration in the book.&nbsp; They were due to arrive shortly
+after lunch, and Francesca had left a note of apology, pleading an urgent
+engagement elsewhere.&nbsp; As she turned to make her way across the
+Mall into the Green Park a gentle voice hailed her from a carriage that
+was just drawing up by the sidewalk.&nbsp; Lady Caroline Benaresq had
+been favouring the Victoria Memorial with a long unfriendly stare.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;In primitive days,&rdquo; she remarked, &ldquo;I believe it was
+the fashion for great chiefs and rulers to have large numbers of their
+relatives and dependents killed and buried with them; in these more
+enlightened times we have invented quite another way of making a great
+Sovereign universally regretted.&nbsp; My dear Francesca,&rdquo; she
+broke off suddenly, catching the misery that had settled in the other&rsquo;s
+eyes, &ldquo;what is the matter?&nbsp; Have you had bad news from out
+there?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I am waiting for very bad news,&rdquo; said Francesca, and Lady
+Caroline knew what had happened.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I wish I could say something; I can&rsquo;t.&rdquo;&nbsp; Lady
+Caroline spoke in a harsh, grunting voice that few people had ever heard
+her use.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca crossed the Mall and the carriage drove on.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Heaven help that poor woman,&rdquo; said Lady Caroline; which
+was, for her, startlingly like a prayer.<br>
+<br>
+As Francesca entered the hall she gave a quick look at the table; several
+packages, evidently an early batch of Christmas presents, were there,
+and two or three letters.&nbsp; On a salver by itself was the cablegram
+for which she had waited.&nbsp; A maid, who had evidently been on the
+lookout for her, brought her the salver.&nbsp; The servants were well
+aware of the dreadful thing that was happening, and there was pity on
+the girl&rsquo;s face and in her voice.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;This came for you ten minutes ago, ma&rsquo;am, and Mr. Greech
+has been here, ma&rsquo;am, with another gentleman, and was sorry you
+weren&rsquo;t at home.&nbsp; Mr. Greech said he would call again in
+about half-an-hour.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Francesca carried the cablegram unopened into the drawing-room and sat
+down for a moment to think.&nbsp; There was no need to read it yet,
+for she knew what she would find written there.&nbsp; For a few pitiful
+moments Comus would seem less hopelessly lost to her if she put off
+the reading of that last terrible message.&nbsp; She rose and crossed
+over to the windows and pulled down the blinds, shutting out the waning
+December day, and then reseated herself.&nbsp; Perhaps in the shadowy
+half-light her boy would come and sit with her again for awhile and
+let her look her last upon his loved face; she could never touch him
+again or hear his laughing, petulant voice, but surely she might look
+on her dead.&nbsp; And her starving eyes saw only the hateful soulless
+things of bronze and silver and porcelain that she had set up and worshipped
+as gods; look where she would they were there around her, the cold ruling
+deities of the home that held no place for her dead boy.&nbsp; He had
+moved in and out among them, the warm, living, breathing thing that
+had been hers to love, and she had turned her eyes from that youthful
+comely figure to adore a few feet of painted canvas, a musty relic of
+a long departed craftsman.&nbsp; And now he was gone from her sight,
+from her touch, from her hearing for ever, without even a thought to
+flash between them for all the dreary years that she should live, and
+these things of canvas and pigment and wrought metal would stay with
+her.&nbsp; They were her soul.&nbsp; And what shall it profit a man
+if he save his soul and slay his heart in torment?<br>
+<br>
+On a small table by her side was Mervyn Quentock&rsquo;s portrait of
+her - the prophetic symbol of her tragedy; the rich dead harvest of
+unreal things that had never known life, and the bleak thrall of black
+unending Winter, a Winter in which things died and knew no re-awakening.<br>
+<br>
+Francesca turned to the small envelope lying in her lap; very slowly
+she opened it and read the short message.&nbsp; Then she sat numb and
+silent for a long, long time, or perhaps only for minutes.&nbsp; The
+voice of Henry Greech in the hall, enquiring for her, called her to
+herself. Hurriedly she crushed the piece of paper out of sight; he would
+have to be told, of course, but just yet her pain seemed too dreadful
+to be laid bare.&nbsp; &ldquo;Comus is dead&rdquo; was a sentence beyond
+her power to speak.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I have bad news for you, Francesca, I&rsquo;m sorry to say,&rdquo;
+Henry announced.&nbsp; Had he heard, too?<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Henneberg has been here and looked at the picture,&rdquo; he
+continued, seating himself by her side, &ldquo;and though he admired
+it immensely as a work of art he gave me a disagreeable surprise by
+assuring me that it&rsquo;s not a genuine Van der Meulen.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
+a splendid copy, but still, unfortunately, only a copy.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Henry paused and glanced at his sister to see how she had taken the
+unwelcome announcement.&nbsp; Even in the dim light he caught some of
+the anguish in her eyes.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;My dear Francesca,&rdquo; he said soothingly, laying his hand
+affectionately on her arm, &ldquo;I know that this must be a great disappointment
+to you, you&rsquo;ve always set such store by this picture, but you
+mustn&rsquo;t take it too much to heart.&nbsp; These disagreeable discoveries
+come at times to most picture fanciers and owners.&nbsp; Why, about
+twenty per cent. of the alleged Old Masters in the Louvre are supposed
+to be wrongly attributed.&nbsp; And there are heaps of similar cases
+in this country.&nbsp; Lady Dovecourt was telling me the other day that
+they simply daren&rsquo;t have an expert in to examine the Van Dykes
+at Columbey for fear of unwelcome disclosures.&nbsp; And besides, your
+picture is such an excellent copy that it&rsquo;s by no means without
+a value of its own.&nbsp; You must get over the disappointment you naturally
+feel, and take a philosophical view of the matter. . . &rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Francesca sat in stricken silence, crushing the folded morsel of paper
+tightly in her hand and wondering if the thin, cheerful voice with its
+pitiless, ghastly mockery of consolation would never stop.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE UNBEARABLE BASSINGTON ***<br>
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