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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Woman With The Fan, by Robert Hichens
+
+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 Woman With The Fan
+
+Author: Robert Hichens
+
+Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8549]
+Posting Date: July 24, 2009
+MZ
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMAN WITH THE FAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WOMAN WITH THE FAN
+
+By Robert Hichens
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+IN a large and cool drawing-room of London a few people were
+scattered about, listening to a soprano voice that was singing to the
+accompaniment of a piano. The sound of the voice came from an inner
+room, towards which most of these people were looking earnestly. Only
+one or two seemed indifferent to the fascination of the singer.
+
+A little woman, with oily black hair and enormous dark eyes, leaned back
+on a sofa, playing with a scarlet fan and glancing sideways at a thin,
+elderly man, who gazed into the distance from which the voice came. His
+mouth worked slightly under his stiff white moustache, and his eyes, in
+colour a faded blue, were fixed and stern. Upon his knees his thin and
+lemon-coloured hands twitched nervously, as if they longed to grasp
+something and hold it fast. The little dark woman glanced down at
+these hands, and then sharply up at the elderly man’s face. A faint and
+malicious smile curved her full lips, which were artificially reddened,
+and she turned her shoulder to him with deliberation and looked about
+the room.
+
+On all the faces in it, except one, she perceived intent expressions.
+A sleek and plump man, with hanging cheeks, a hooked nose, and hair
+slightly tinged with grey and parted in the middle, was the exception.
+He sat in a low chair, pouting his lips, playing with his single
+eyeglass, and looking as sulky as an ill-conditioned school-boy. Once
+or twice he crossed and uncrossed his short legs with a sort of abrupt
+violence, laid his fat, white hands on the arms of the chair, lifted
+them, glanced at his rosy and shining nails, and frowned. Then he shut
+his little eyes so tightly that the skin round them became wrinkled,
+and, stretching out his feet, seemed almost angrily endeavouring to fall
+asleep.
+
+A tall young man, who was sitting alone not far off, cast a glance of
+contempt at him, and then, as if vexed at having bestowed upon him even
+this slight attention, leaned forward, listening with eagerness to the
+soprano voice. The little dark woman observed him carefully above the
+scarlet feathers of her fan, which she now held quite still. His face
+was lean and brown. His eyes were long and black, heavy-lidded, and
+shaded by big lashes which curled upward. His features were good. The
+nose and chin were short and decided, but the mouth was melancholy,
+almost weak. On his upper lip grew a short moustache, turned up at the
+ends. His body was slim and muscular.
+
+After watching him for a little while the dark woman looked again at the
+elderly man beside her, and then quickly back to the young fellow. She
+seemed to be comparing the two attentions, of age and of youth. Perhaps
+she found something horrible in the process for she suddenly lost her
+expression of sparkling and birdlike sarcasm, and bending her arm, as if
+overcome with lassitude, she let her fan drop on her knees, and stared
+moodily at the carpet.
+
+A very tall woman, with snow-white hair and a face in which nobility and
+weariness were mated, let fall two tears, and a huge man, with short,
+bronze-coloured hair and a protruding lower jaw, who was sitting
+opposite to her, noticed them and suddenly looked proud.
+
+The light soprano voice went on singing an Italian song about a summer
+night in Venice, about stars, dark waters and dark palaces, heat, and
+the sound of music, and of gondoliers calling over the lagoons to their
+comrades. It was an exquisite voice; not large, but flexible and very
+warm. The pianoforte accompaniment was rather uneasy and faltering. Now
+and then, when it became blurred and wavering, the voice was abruptly
+hard and decisive, once even piercing and almost shrewish. Then the
+pianist, as if attacked by fear, played louder and hurried the tempo,
+the little dark woman smiled mischievously, the white-haired woman put
+her handkerchief to her eyes, and the young man looked as if he wished
+to commit murder. But the huge man with the bronze hair went on looking
+equably proud.
+
+When the voice died away there was distinct, though slight, applause,
+which partially drowned the accompanist’s muddled conclusion. Then a
+woman walked in from the second drawing-room with an angry expression on
+her face.
+
+She was tall and slight. Her hair and eyes were light yellow-brown, and
+the former had a natural wave in it. Her shoulders and bust were superb,
+and her small head was beautifully set on a lovely, rather long, neck.
+She had an oval face, with straight, delicate features, now slightly
+distorted by temper. But the most remarkable thing about her was her
+complexion. Her skin was exquisite, delicately smooth and white, warmly
+white like a white rose. She did nothing to add to its natural beauty,
+though nearly every woman in London declared that she had a special
+preparation and always slept in a mask coated thickly with it. The Bond
+Street oracles never received a visit from her. She had been born
+with an enchanting complexion, a marvellous skin. She was young, just
+twenty-four. She let herself alone because she knew improvement--in
+that direction--was not possible. The mask coated with Juliet paste,
+or Aphrodite ivorine, existed only in the radiant imaginations of her
+carefully-arranged acquaintances.
+
+In appearance she was a siren. By nature she was a siren too. But she
+had a temper and sometimes showed it. She showed it now.
+
+As she walked in slowly all the scattered people leaned forward,
+murmuring their thanks, and the men stood up and gathered round her.
+
+“Beautiful! Beautiful!” muttered the thin, elderly man in a hoarse
+voice, striking his fingers repeatedly against the palms of his withered
+hands.
+
+The young man looked at the singer and said nothing; but the anger in
+her face was reflected in his, and mingled with a flaming of sympathy
+that made his appearance almost startling. The white-haired woman
+clasped the singer’s hands and said, “Thank you, dearest!” in a
+thrilling voice, and the little dark woman with the red fan cried out,
+“Viola, you simply pack up Venice, carry it over the Continent and set
+it down here in London!”
+
+Lady Holme frowned slightly.
+
+“Thank you, thank you, you good-natured dears,” she said with an attempt
+at lightness. Then, hearing the thin rustle of a dress, she turned
+sharply and cast an unfriendly glance at a mild young woman with a very
+pointed nose, on which a pair of eyeglasses sat astride, who came meekly
+forward, looking self-conscious, and smiling with one side of her mouth.
+The man with the protruding jaw, who was Lord Holme, said to her, in a
+loud bass voice:
+
+“Thanks, Miss Filberte, thanks.”
+
+“Oh, not at all, Lord Holme,” replied the accompanist with a sudden
+air of rather foolish delight. “I consider it an honour to accompany an
+amateur who sings like Lady Holme.”
+
+She laid a slight emphasis on the word “amateur.”
+
+Lady Holme suddenly walked forward to an empty part of the drawing-room.
+The elderly man, whose name was Sir Donald Ulford, made a movement as
+if to follow her, then cleared his throat and stood still looking
+after her. Lord Holme stuck out his under jaw. But Lady Cardington, the
+white-haired woman spoke to him softly, and he leaned over to her and
+replied. The sleek man, whose name was Mr. Bry, began to talk about
+Tschaikowsky to Mrs. Henry Wolfstein, the woman with the red fan. He
+uttered his remarks authoritatively in a slow and languid voice, looking
+at the pointed toes of his shoes. Conversation became general.
+
+Robin Pierce, the tall young man, stood alone for a few minutes. Two or
+three times he glanced towards Lady Holme, who had sat down on a sofa,
+and was opening and shutting a small silver box which she had picked up
+from a table near her. Then he walked quietly up the room and sat down
+beside her.
+
+“Why on earth didn’t you accompany yourself?” he asked in a low voice.
+“You knew what a muddler that girl was, I suppose.”
+
+“Yes. She plays like a distracted black beetle--horrid creature!”
+
+“Then--why?”
+
+“I look ridiculous sitting at the piano.”
+
+“Ridiculous--you--”
+
+“Well, I hold them far more when I stand up. They can’t get away from me
+then.”
+
+“And you’d rather have your singing ruined than part for a moment with a
+scrap of your physical influence, of the influence that comes from your
+beauty, not your talent--your face, not your soul. Viola, you’re just
+the same.”
+
+“Lady Holme,” she said.
+
+“P’sh! Why?”
+
+“My little husband’s fussy.”
+
+“And much you care if he is.”
+
+“Oh, yes, I do. He sprawls when he fusses and knocks things over, and
+then, when I’ve soothed him, he always goes and does Sandow exercises
+and gets bigger. And he’s big enough as it is. I must keep him quiet.”
+
+“But you can’t keep the other men quiet. With your face and your
+voice--”
+
+“Oh, it isn’t the voice,” she said with contempt.
+
+He looked at her rather sadly.
+
+“Why will you put such an exaggerated value on your appearance? Why will
+you never allow that three-quarters at least of your attraction comes
+from something else?”
+
+“What?”
+
+“Your personality--your self.”
+
+“My soul!” she said, suddenly putting on a farcically rapt and yearning
+expression and speaking in a hollow, hungry voice. “Are we in the
+prehistoric Eighties?”
+
+“We are in the unchanging world.”
+
+“Unchanging! My dear boy!”
+
+“Yes, unchanging,” he repeated obstinately.
+
+He pressed his lips together and looked away. Miss Filberte was cackling
+and smiling on a settee, with a man whose figure presented a succession
+of curves, and who kept on softly patting his hands together and swaying
+gently backwards and forwards.
+
+“Well, Mr. Pierce, what’s the matter?”
+
+“Mr. Pierce!” he said, almost savagely.
+
+“Yes, of the English Embassy in Rome, rising young diplomat and full of
+early Eighty yearns--”
+
+“How the deuce can you be as you are and yet sing as you do?” he
+exclaimed, turning on her. “You say you care for nothing but the outside
+of things--the husk, the shell, the surface. You think men care for
+nothing else. Yet when you sing you--you--”
+
+“What do I do?”
+
+“It’s as if another woman than you were singing in you--a woman totally
+unlike you, a woman who believes in, and loves, the real beauty which
+you care nothing about.”
+
+“The real beauty that rules the world is lodged in the epidermis,” she
+said, opening her fan and smiling slowly. “If this”--she touched her
+face--“were to be changed into--shall we say a Filberte countenance?”
+
+“Oh!” he exclaimed.
+
+“There! You see, directly I put the matter before you, you have to agree
+with me!”
+
+“No one could sing like you and have a face like a silly sheep.”
+
+“Poor Miss Filberte! Well, then, suppose me disfigured and singing
+better than ever--what man would listen to me?”
+
+“I should.”
+
+“For half a minute. Then you’d say, ‘Poor wretch, she’s lost her voice!’
+No, no, it’s my face that sings to the world, my face the world loves to
+listen to, my face that makes me friends and--enemies.”
+
+She looked into his eyes with impertinent directness.
+
+“It’s my face that’s made Mr. Robin Pierce deceive himself into the
+belief that he only worships women for their souls, their lovely
+natures, their--”
+
+“Do you know that in a way you are a singularly modest woman?” he
+suddenly interrupted.
+
+“Am I? How?”
+
+“In thinking that you hold people only by your appearance, that your
+personality has nothing to say in the matter.”
+
+“I am modest, but not so modest as that.”
+
+“Well, then?”
+
+“Personality is a crutch, a pretty good crutch; but so long as men are
+men they will put crutches second and--something else first. Yes, I know
+I’m a little bit vulgar, but everybody in London is.”
+
+“I wish you lived in Rome.”
+
+“I’ve seen people being vulgar there too. Besides, there may be reasons
+why it would not be good for me to live in Rome.”
+
+She glanced at him again less impertinently, and suddenly her whole body
+looked softer and kinder.
+
+“You must put up with my face, Robin,” she added. “It’s no good wishing
+me to be ugly. It’s no use. I can’t be.”
+
+She laughed. Her ill-humour had entirely vanished.
+
+“If you were--” he said. “If you were--!”
+
+“What then?”
+
+“Do you think no one would stick to you--stick to you for yourself?”
+
+“Oh, yes.”
+
+“Who, then?”
+
+“Quite several old ladies. It’s very strange, but old ladies of a
+certain class--the almost obsolete class that wears caps and connects
+piety with black brocade--like me. They think me ‘a bright young thing.’
+And so I am.”
+
+“I don’t know what you are. Sometimes I seem to divine what you are, and
+then--then your face is like a cloud which obscures you--except when you
+are singing.”
+
+She laughed frankly.
+
+“Poor Robin! It was always your great fault--trying to plumb shallows
+and to take high dives into water half a foot deep.”
+
+He was silent for a minute. At last he said:
+
+“And your husband?”
+
+“Fritz!”
+
+His forehead contracted.
+
+“Fritz--yes. What does he do? Try to walk in ocean depths?”
+
+“You needn’t sneer at Fritz,” she said sharply.
+
+“I beg your pardon.”
+
+“Fritz doesn’t bother about shallows and depths. He loves me absurdly,
+and that’s quite enough for him.”
+
+“And for you.”
+
+She nodded gravely.
+
+“And what would Fritz do if you were to lose your beauty? Would he be
+like all the other men? Would he cease to care?”
+
+For the first time Lady Holme looked really thoughtful--almost painfully
+thoughtful.
+
+“One’s husband,” she said slowly. “Perhaps he’s different. He--he ought
+to be different.”
+
+A faint suggestion of terror came into her large brown eyes.
+
+“There’s a strong tie, you know, whatever people may say, a very strong
+tie in marriage,” she murmured, as if she were thinking out something
+for herself. “Fritz ought to love me, even if--if--”
+
+She broke off and looked about the room. Robin Pierce glanced round too
+over the chattering guests sitting or standing in easy or lazy postures,
+smiling vaguely, or looking grave and indifferent. Mrs. Wolfstein was
+laughing, and yawned suddenly in the midst of her mirth. Lady Cardington
+said something apparently tragic, to Mr. Bry, who was polishing his
+eyeglass and pouting out his dewy lips. Sir Donald Ulford, wandering
+round the walls, was examining the pictures upon them. Lady Manby, a
+woman with a pyramid of brown hair and an aggressively flat back, was
+telling a story. Evidently it was a comic history of disaster. Her
+gestures were full of deliberate exaggeration, and she appeared to be
+impersonating by turns two or three different people, each of whom had
+a perfectly ridiculous personality. Lord Holme burst into a roar of
+laughter. His big bass voice vibrated through the room. Suddenly Lady
+Holme laughed too.
+
+“Why are you laughing?” Robin Pierce asked rather harshly. “You didn’t
+hear what Lady Manby said.”
+
+“No, but Fritz is so infectious. I believe there are laughter microbes.
+What a noise he makes! It’s really a scandal.”
+
+And she laughed again joyously.
+
+“You don’t know much about women if you think any story of Lady Manby’s
+is necessary, to prompt my mirth. Poor dear old Fritz is quite enough.
+There he goes again!”
+
+Robin Pierce began to look stiff with constraint, and just then Sir
+Donald Ulford, in his progress round the walls, reached the sofa where
+they were sitting.
+
+“You are very fortunate to possess this Cuyp, Lady Holme,” he said in a
+voice from which all resonance had long ago departed.
+
+“Alas, Sir Donald, cows distress me! They call up sad memories. I was
+chased by one in the park at Grantoun when I was a child. A fly had
+stung it, so it tried to kill me. This struck me as unreason run riot,
+and ever since then I have wished the Spaniards would go a step farther
+and make cow-fights the national pastime. I hate cows frankly.”
+
+Sir Donald sat down in an armchair and looked, with his faded blue eyes,
+into the eyes of his hostess. His drawn yellow face was melancholy, like
+the face of one who had long been an invalid. People who knew him
+well, however, said there was nothing the matter with him, and that his
+appearance had not altered during the last twenty years.
+
+“You can hate nothing beautiful,” he said with a sort of hollow
+assurance.
+
+“I think cows hideous.”
+
+“Cuyp’s?”
+
+“All cows. You’ve never had one running after you.”
+
+She took up her gloves, which she had laid down on the table beside her,
+and began to pull them gently through her fingers. Both Sir Donald and
+Robin looked at her hands, which were not only beautiful in shape but
+extraordinarily intelligent in their movements. Whatever they did they
+did well, without hesitation or bungling. Nobody had ever seen them
+tremble.
+
+“Do you consider that anything that can be dangerous for a moment must
+be hideous for ever?” asked Sir Donald, after a slight pause.
+
+“I’m sure I don’t know. But I truly think cows hideous--I truly do.”
+
+“Don’t put on your gloves,” exclaimed Robin at this moment.
+
+Sir Donald glanced at him and said:
+
+“Thank you.”
+
+“Why not?” said Lady Holme.
+
+It was obvious to both men that there was no need to answer her
+question. She laid the gloves in her lap, smoothed them with her small
+fingers, and kept silence. Silence was characteristic of her. When she
+was in society she sometimes sat quite calmly and composedly without
+uttering a word. After watching her for a minute or two, Sir Donald
+said:
+
+“You must know Venice very well and understand it completely.”
+
+“Oh, I’ve been there, of course.”
+
+“Recently?”
+
+“Not so very long ago. After my marriage Fritz took me all over Europe.”
+
+“And you loved Venice.”
+
+Sir Donald did not ask a question, he made a statement.
+
+“No. It didn’t agree with me. It depressed me. We were there in the
+mosquito season.”
+
+“What has that to do with it?”
+
+“My dear Sir Donald, if you’d ever had a hole in your net you’d know.
+I made Fritz take me away after two days, and I’ve never been back. I
+don’t want to have my one beauty ruined.”
+
+Sir Donald did not pay the reasonable compliment. He only stretched out
+his lean hands over his knees, and said:
+
+“Venice is the only ideal city in Europe.”
+
+“You forget Paris.”
+
+“Paris!” said Sir Donald. “Paris is a suburb of London and New York.
+Paris is no longer the city of light, but the city of pornography and
+dressmakers.”
+
+“Well, I don’t know exactly what pornography is--unless it’s some new
+process for taking snapshots. But I do know what gowns are, and I love
+Paris. The Venice shops are failures and the Venice mosquitoes are
+successes, and I hate Venice.”
+
+An expression of lemon-coloured amazement appeared upon Sir Donald’s
+face, and he glanced at Robin Pierce as if requesting the answer to
+a riddle. Robin looked rather as if he were enjoying himself, but the
+puzzled melancholy grew deeper on Sir Donald’s face. With the air of a
+man determined to reassure his mind upon some matter, however, he spoke
+again.
+
+“You visited the European capitals?” he said.
+
+“Yes, all of them.”
+
+“Constantinople?”
+
+“Terrible place! Dogs, dogs, nothing but dogs.”
+
+“Did you like Petersburg?”
+
+“No, I couldn’t bear it. I caught cold there.”
+
+“And that was why you hated it?”
+
+“Yes. I went out one night with Fritz on the Neva to hear a woman in
+a boat singing--a peasant girl with high cheek-bones--and I caught a
+frightful chill.”
+
+“Ah!” said Sir Donald. “What was the song? I know a good many of the
+Northern peasant songs.”
+
+Suddenly Lady Holme got up, letting her gloves fall to the ground.
+
+“I’ll sing it to you,” she said.
+
+Robin Pierce touched her arm.
+
+“For Heaven’s sake not to Miss Filberte’s accompaniment!”
+
+“Very well. But come and sit where you can see me.”
+
+“I won’t,” he said with brusque obstinacy.
+
+“Madman!” she answered. “Anyhow, you come, Sir Donald.”
+
+And she walked lightly away towards the piano, followed by Sir Donald,
+who walked lightly too, but uncertainly, on his thin, stick-like legs.
+
+“What are you up to, Vi?” said Lord Holme, as she came near to him.
+
+“I’m going to sing something for Sir Donald.”
+
+“Capital! Where’s Miss Filberte?”
+
+“Here I am!” piped a thin alto voice.
+
+There was a rustle of skirts as the accompanist rose hastily from her
+chair.
+
+“Sit down, please, Miss Filberte,” said Lady Holme in a voice of ice.
+
+Miss Filberte sat down like one who has been knocked on the head with a
+hammer, and Lady Holme went alone to the piano, turned the button that
+raised the music-stool, sat down too, holding herself very upright,
+and played some notes. For a moment, while she played, her face was
+so determined and pitiless that Mr. Bry, unaware that she was still
+thinking about Miss Filberte, murmured to Lady Cardington:
+
+“Evidently we are in for a song about Jael with the butter in the lordly
+dish omitted.”
+
+Then an expression of sorrowful youth stole into Lady Holme’s eyes,
+changed her mouth to softness and her cheeks to curving innocence.
+She leaned a little way from the piano towards her audience and sang,
+looking up into vacancy as if her world were hidden there. The song had
+the clear melancholy and the passion of a Northern night. It brought
+the stars out within that room and set purple distances before the
+eyes. Water swayed in it, but languidly, as water sways at night in calm
+weather, when the black spars of ships at anchor in sheltered harbours
+are motionless as fingers of skeletons pointing towards the moon.
+Mysterious lights lay round a silent shore. And in the wide air, on the
+wide waters, one woman was singing to herself of a sorrow that was deep
+as the grave, and that no one upon the earth knew of save she who sang.
+The song was very short. It had only two little verses. When it was
+over, Sir Donald, who had been watching the singer, returned to the
+sofa, where Robin Pierce was sitting with his eyes shut and, again
+striking his fingers against the palms of his hands, said: “I have heard
+that song at night on the Neva, and yet I never heard it before.”
+
+People began getting up to go away. It was past eleven o’clock. Sir
+Donald and Robin Pierce stood together, saying good-bye to Lady Holme.
+As she held out her hand to the former, she said:
+
+“Oh, Sir Donald, you know Russia, don’t you?”
+
+“I do.”
+
+“Then I want you to tell me the name of that stuff they carry down
+the Neva in boats--the stuff that has such a horrible smell. That song
+always reminds me of it, and Fritz can’t remember the name.”
+
+“Nor can I,” said Sir Donald, rather abruptly. “Good-night, Lady Holme.”
+
+He walked out of the room, followed by Robin.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+LORD HOLME’S house was in Cadogan Square. When Sir Donald had put on his
+coat in the hall he turned to Robin Pierce and said:
+
+“Which way do you go?”
+
+“To Half Moon Street,” said Robin.
+
+“We might walk, if you like. I am going the same way.
+
+“Certainly.”
+
+They set out slowly. It was early in the year. Showers of rain had
+fallen during the day. The night was warm, and the damp earth in
+the Square garden steamed as if it were oppressed and were breathing
+wearily. The sky was dark and cloudy, and the air was impregnated with a
+scent to which many things had contributed, each yielding a fragment of
+the odour peculiar to it. Rain, smoke, various trees and plants, the wet
+paint on a railing, the damp straw laid before the house of an invalid,
+the hothouse flowers carried by a woman in a passing carriage--these and
+other things were represented in the heavy atmosphere which was full of
+the sensation of life. Sir Donald expanded his nostrils.
+
+“London, London!” he said. “I should know it if I were blind.”
+
+“Yes. The London smell is not to be confused with the smell of any other
+place. You have been back a good while, I believe?”
+
+“Three years. I am laid on the London shelf now.”
+
+“You have had a long life of work--interesting work.”
+
+“Yes. Diplomacy has interesting moments. I have seen many countries. I
+have been transferred from Copenhagen to Teheran, visited the Sultan of
+Morocco at Fez, and--” he stopped. After a pause he added: “And now I
+sit in London clubs and look out of bay windows.”
+
+They walked on slowly.
+
+“Have you known our hostess of to-night long?” Sir Donald asked
+presently.
+
+“A good while--quite a good while. But I’m very much away at Rome now.
+Since I have been there she has married.”
+
+“I have only met her to speak to once before to-night, though I have
+seen her about very often and heard her sing.”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+“To me she is an enigma,” Sir Donald continued with some hesitation. “I
+cannot make her out at all.”
+
+Robin Pierce smiled in the dark and thrust his hands deep down in the
+pockets of his overcoat.
+
+“I don’t know,” Sir Donald resumed, after a slight pause, “I don’t know
+what is your--whether you care much for beauty in its innumerable forms.
+Many young men don’t, I believe.”
+
+“I do,” said Robin. “My mother is an Italian, you know, and not an
+Italian Philistine.”
+
+“Then you can help me, perhaps. Does Lady Holme care for beauty? But she
+must. It is impossible that she does not.”
+
+“Do you think so? Why?”
+
+“I really cannot reconcile myself to the idea that such performances as
+hers are matters of chance.”
+
+“They are not. Lady Holme is not a woman who chances things before the
+cruel world in which she, you and I live, Sir Donald.”
+
+“Exactly. I felt sure of that. Then we come to calculation of effects,
+to consideration of that very interesting question--self-consciousness
+in art.”
+
+“Do you feel that Lady Holme is self-conscious when she is singing?”
+
+“No. And that is just the point. She must, I suppose, have studied
+till she has reached that last stage of accomplishment in which the
+self-consciousness present is so perfectly concealed that it seems to be
+eliminated.”
+
+“Exactly. She has an absolute command over her means.”
+
+“One cannot deny it. No musician could contest it. But the question that
+interests me lies behind all this. There is more than accomplishment in
+her performance. There is temperament, there is mind, there is emotion
+and complete understanding. I am scarcely speaking strongly enough in
+saying complete--perhaps infinitely subtle would be nearer the mark.
+What do you say?”
+
+“I don’t think if you said that there appears to be an infinitely subtle
+understanding at work in Lady Holme’s singing you would be going at all
+too far.”
+
+“Appears to be?”
+
+Sir Donald stopped for a moment on the pavement under a gas-lamp. As the
+light fell on him he looked like a weary old ghost longing to fade away
+into the dark shadows of the London night.
+
+“You say ‘appears to be,’” he repeated.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“May I ask why?”
+
+“Well, would you undertake to vouch for Lady Holme’s understanding--I
+mean for the infinite subtlety of it?”
+
+Sir Donald began to walk on once more.
+
+“I cannot find it in her conversation,” he said.
+
+“Nor can I, nor can anyone.”
+
+“She is full of personal fascination, of course.”
+
+“You mean because of her personal beauty?”
+
+“No, it’s more than that, I think. It’s the woman herself. She is
+suggestive somehow. She makes one’s imagination work. Of course she is
+beautiful.”
+
+“And she thinks that is everything. She would part with her voice, her
+intelligence--she is very intelligent in the quick, frivolous fashion
+that is necessary for London--that personal fascination you speak of,
+everything rather than her white-rose complexion and the wave in her
+hair.”
+
+“Really, really?”
+
+“Yes. She thinks the outside everything. She believes the world is
+governed, love is won and held, happiness is gained and kept by the husk
+of things. She told me only to-night that it is her face which sings
+to us all, not her voice; that were she to sing as well and be an ugly
+woman we should not care to listen to her.”
+
+“H’m! H’m!”
+
+“Absurd, isn’t it?”
+
+“What will be the approach of old age to her?”
+
+There was a suspicion of bitterness in his voice.
+
+“The coming of the King of Terrors,” said Pierce. “But she cannot hear
+his footsteps yet.”
+
+“They are loud enough in some ears. Ah, we, are at your door already?”
+
+“Will you be good-natured and come in for a little while?”
+
+“I’m afraid--isn’t it rather late?”
+
+“Only half-past eleven.”
+
+“Well, thank you.”
+
+They stepped into the little hall. As they did so a valet appeared at
+the head of the stairs leading to the servants’ quarters.
+
+“If you please, sir,” he said to Pierce, “this note has just come. I was
+to ask if you would read it directly you returned.”
+
+“Will you excuse me?” said Pierce to Sir Donald, tearing open the
+envelope.
+
+He glanced at the note.
+
+“Is it to ask you to go somewhere to-night?” Sir Donald said.
+
+“Yes, but--”
+
+“I will go.”
+
+“Please don’t. It is only from a friend who is just round the corner in
+Stratton Street. If you will not mind his joining us here I will send
+him a message.”
+
+He said a few words to his man.
+
+“That will be all right. Do come upstairs.”
+
+“You are sure I am not in the way?”
+
+“I hope you will not find my friend in the way; that’s all. He’s an odd
+fellow at the best of times, and to-night he’s got an attack of what he
+calls the blacks--his form of blues. But he’s very talented. Carey is
+his name--Rupert Carey. You don’t happen to know him?”
+
+“No. If I may say so, your room is charming.”
+
+They were on the first floor now, in a chamber rather barely furnished
+and hung with blue-grey linen, against which were fastened several old
+Italian pictures in black frames. On the floor were some Eastern rugs in
+which faded and originally pale colours mingled. A log fire was burning
+on an open hearth, at right angles to which stood an immense sofa with a
+square back. This sofa was covered with dull blue stuff. Opposite to
+it was a large and low armchair, also covered in blue. A Steinway grand
+piano stood out in the middle of the room. It was open and there were
+no ornaments or photographs upon it. Its shining dark case reflected the
+flames which sprang up from the logs. Several dwarf bookcases of black
+wood were filled with volumes, some in exquisite bindings, some paper
+covered. On the top of the bookcases stood four dragon china vases
+filled with carnations of various colours. Electric lights burned just
+under the ceiling, but they were hidden from sight. In an angle of the
+wall, on a black ebony pedestal, stood an extremely beautiful marble
+statuette of a nude girl holding a fan. Under this, on a plaque, was
+written, “_Une Danseuse de Tunisie_.”
+
+Sir Donald went up to it, and stood before it for two or three minutes
+in silence.
+
+“I see indeed you do care for beauty,” he said at length. “But--forgive
+me--that fan makes that statuette wicked.”
+
+“Yes, but a thousand times more charming. Carey said just the same thing
+when he saw it. I wonder I wonder what Lady Holme would say.”
+
+They sat down on the sofa by the wood fire.
+
+“Carey could probably tell us!” Pierce added.
+
+“Oh, then your friend knows Lady Holme?”
+
+“He did once. I believe he isn’t allowed to now. Ah, here is Carey!”
+
+A quick step was audible on the stairs, the door was opened, and a
+broad, middle-sized young man, with red hair, a huge red moustache
+and fierce red-brown eyes, entered swiftly with an air of ruthless
+determination.
+
+“I came, but I shall be devilish bad company to-night,” he said at once,
+looking at Sir Donald.
+
+“We’ll cheer you up. Let me introduce you to Sir Donald Ulford--Mr.
+Rupert Carey.”
+
+Carey shook Sir Donald by the hand.
+
+“Glad to meet you,” he said abruptly. “I’ve carried your Persian
+poems round the world with me. They lay in my trunk cheek by jowl with
+God-forsaken, glorious old Omar.”
+
+A dusky red flush appeared in Sir Donald’s hollow cheeks.
+
+“Really,” he said, with obvious embarrassment, “I--they were a great
+failure. ‘Obviously the poems of a man likely to be successful in
+dealing with finance,’ as _The Times_ said in reviewing them.”
+
+“Well, in the course of your career you’ve done some good things for
+England financially, haven’t you?--not very publicly, perhaps, but as a
+minister abroad.”
+
+“Yes. To come forward as a poet was certainly a mistake.”
+
+“Any fool could see the faults in your book. True Persia all the same
+though. I saw all the faults and read ‘em twenty times.”
+
+He flung himself down in the big armchair. Sir Donald could see now that
+there was a shining of misery in his big, rather ugly, eyes.
+
+“Where have you two been?” he continued, with a directness that was
+almost rude.
+
+“Dining with the Holmes,” answered Pierce.
+
+“That ruffian! Did she sing?”
+
+“Yes, twice.”
+
+“Wish I’d heard her. Here am I playing Saul without a David. Many people
+there?”
+
+“Several. Lady Cardington--”
+
+“That white-haired enchantress! There’s a Niobe--weeping not for her
+children, she never had any, but for her youth. She is the religion of
+half Mayfair, though I don’t know whether she’s got a religion. Men
+who wouldn’t look at her when she was sixteen, twenty-six, thirty-six,
+worship her now she’s sixty. And she weeps for her youth! Who else?”
+
+“Mrs. Wolfstein.”
+
+“A daughter of Israel; coarse, intelligent, brutal to her reddened
+finger-tips. I’d trust her to judge a singer, actor, painter, writer.
+But I wouldn’t trust her with my heart or half a crown.”
+
+“Lady Manby.”
+
+“Humour in petticoats. She’s so infernally full of humour that there’s
+no room in her for anything else. I doubt if she’s got lungs. I’m sure
+she hasn’t got a heart or a brain.”
+
+“But if she is so full of humour,” said Sir Donald mildly, “how does
+she--?”
+
+“How does a great writer fail over an addition sum? How does a man who
+speaks eight languages talk imbecility in them all? How is it that a
+bird isn’t an angel? I wish to Heaven we knew. Well, Robin?”
+
+“Of course, Mr. Bry.”
+
+Carey’s violent face expressed disgust in every line.
+
+“One of the most finished of London types,” he exclaimed. “No other city
+supplies quite the same sort of man to take the colour out of things.
+He’s enormously clever, enormously abominable, and should have been
+strangled at birth merely because of his feet. Why he’s not Chinese
+I can’t conceive; why he dines out every night I can. He’s a human
+cruet-stand without the oil. He’s so monstrously intelligent that he
+knows what a beast he is, and doesn’t mind. Not a bad set of people to
+talk with, unless Lady Holme was in a temper and you were next to her,
+or you were left stranded with Holme when the women went out of the
+dining-room.”
+
+“You think Holme a poor talker?” asked Sir Donald.
+
+“Precious poor. His brain is muscle-bound, I believe. Robin, you know
+I’m miserable to-night you offer me nothing to drink.”
+
+“I beg your pardon. Help yourself. And, Sir Donald, what will you--?”
+
+“Nothing, thank you.”
+
+“Try one of those cigars.”
+
+Sir Donald took one and lit it quietly, looking at Carey, who seemed to
+interest him a good deal.
+
+“Why are you miserable, Carey?” said Pierce, as the former buried his
+moustache in a tall whisky-and-soda.
+
+“Because I’m alive and don’t want to be dead. Reason enough.”
+
+“Because you’re an unmitigated egoist,” rejoined Pierce.
+
+“Yes, I am an egoist. Introduce me to a man who is not, will you?”
+
+“And what about women?”
+
+“Many women are not egoists. But you have been dining with one of the
+most finished egoists in London to-night.”
+
+“Lady Holme?” said Sir Donald, shifting into the left-hand corner of the
+sofa.
+
+“Yes, Viola Holme, once Lady Viola Grantoun; whom I mustn’t know any
+more.”
+
+“I’m not sure that you are right, Carey,” said Pierce, rather coldly.
+
+“What!”
+
+“Can a true and perfect egoist be in love?”
+
+“Certainly. Is not even an egoist an animal?”
+
+Pierce’s lips tightened for a second, and his right hand strained itself
+round his knee, on which it was lying.
+
+“And how much can she be in love?”
+
+“Very much.”
+
+“Do you mean with her body?”
+
+“Yes, I do; and with the spirit that lives in it. I don’t believe
+there’s any life but this. A church is more fantastic to me than the
+room in which Punch belabours Judy. But I say that there is spirit in
+lust, in hunger, in everything. When I want a drink my spirit wants it.
+Viola Holme’s spirit--a flame that will be blown out at death--takes
+part in her love for that great brute Holme. And yet she’s one of the
+most pronounced egoists in London.”
+
+“Do you care to tell us any reason you may have for saying so?” said Sir
+Donald.
+
+As he spoke, his voice, brought into sharp contrast with the changeful
+and animated voice of Carey, sounded almost preposterously thin and worn
+out.
+
+“She is always conscious of herself in every situation, in every
+relation of life. While she loves even she thinks to herself, ‘How
+beautifully I am loving!’ And she never forgets for a single moment
+that she is a fascinating woman. If she were being murdered she would be
+saying silently, while the knife went in, ‘What an attractive creature,
+what an unreplaceable personage they are putting an end to!’”
+
+“Rupert, you are really too absurd!” exclaimed Pierce, laughing
+reluctantly.
+
+“I’m not absurd. I see straight. Lady Holme is an egoist--a magnificent,
+an adorable egoist, fine enough in her brilliant selfishness to stand
+quite alone.”
+
+“And you mean to tell us that any woman can do that?” exclaimed Pierce.
+
+“Who am I that I should pronounce a verdict upon the great mystery? What
+do I know of women?”
+
+“Far too much, I’m afraid,” said Pierce.
+
+“Nothing, I have never been married, and only the married man knows
+anything of women. The Frenchmen are wrong. It is not the mistress who
+informs, it is the loving wife. For me the sex remains mysterious, like
+the heroine of my realm of dreams.”
+
+“You are talking great nonsense, Rupert.”
+
+“I always do when I am depressed, and I am very specially depressed
+to-night.”
+
+“But why? There must be some very special reason.”
+
+“There is. I, too, dined out and met at dinner a young man whose one
+desire in life appears to be to deprive living creatures of life.”
+
+Sir Donald moved slightly.
+
+“You’re not a sportsman, then, Mr. Carey?” he said.
+
+“Indeed, I am. I’ve shot big game, the Lord forgive me, and found big
+pleasure in doing it. Yet this young man depressed me. He was so robust,
+so perfectly happy, so supremely self-satisfied, and, according to his
+own account, so enormously destructive, that he made me feel very sick.
+He is married. He married a widow who has an ear-trumpet and a big
+shooting in Scotland. If she could be induced to crawl in underwood, or
+stand on a cairn against a skyline, I’m sure he’d pot at her for the fun
+of the thing.”
+
+“What is his name?” asked Sir Donald.
+
+“I didn’t catch it. My host called him Leo. He has--”
+
+“Ah! He is my only son.”
+
+Pierce looked very uncomfortable, but Carey replied calmly:
+
+“Really. I wonder he hasn’t shot you long ago.”
+
+Sir Donald smiled.
+
+“Doesn’t he depress you?” added Carey.
+
+“He does, I’m sorry to say, but scarcely so much as I depress him.”
+
+“I think Lady Holme would like him.”
+
+For once Sir Donald looked really expressive, of surprise and disgust.
+
+“Oh, I can’t think so!” he said.
+
+“Yes, yes, she would. She doesn’t care honestly for art-loving men. Her
+idea of a real man, the sort of man a woman marries, or bolts with, or
+goes off her head for, is a huge mass of bones and muscles and thews and
+sinews that knows not beauty. And your son would adore her, Sir Donald.
+Better not let him, though. Holme’s a jealous devil.”
+
+“Totally without reason,” said Pierce, with a touch of bitterness.
+
+“No doubt. It’s part of his Grand Turk nature. He ought to possess
+a Yildiz. He’s out of place in London where marital jealousy is more
+unfashionable than pegtop trousers.”
+
+He buried himself in his glass. Sir Donald rose to go.
+
+“I hope I may see you again,” he said rather tentatively at parting. “I
+am to be found in the Albany.”
+
+They both said they would call, and he slipped away gently.
+
+“There’s a sensitive man,” said Carey when he had gone. “A sort of male
+Lady Cardington. Both of them are morbidly conscious of their age and
+carry it about with them as if it were a crime. Yet they’re both worth
+knowing. People with that temperament who don’t use hair-dye must have
+grit. His son’s awful.”
+
+“And his poems?”
+
+“Very crude, very faulty, very shy, but the real thing. But he’ll never
+publish anything again. It must have been torture to him to reveal as
+much as he did in that book. He must find others to express him, and
+such as him, to the world.”
+
+“Lady Holmes?”
+
+“_Par exemple_. Deuced odd that while the dumb understand the whole
+show the person who’s describing it quite accurately to them often knows
+nothing about it. Paradox, irony, blasted eternal cussedness of life!
+Did you ever know Lady Ulford?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“She was a horse-dealer’s daughter.”
+
+“Rupert!”
+
+“On my honour! One of those women who are all shirt and collar and
+nattiness, with a gold fox for a tie-pin and a hunting-crop under the
+arm. She was killed schooling a horse in Mexico after making Ulford shy
+and uncomfortable for fifteen years. Lady Cardington and a Texas cowboy
+would have been as well suited to one another. Ulford’s been like a
+wistful ghost, they tell me, ever since her death. I should like to see
+him and his son together.”
+
+A hard and almost vicious gleam shone for as instant in his eyes.
+
+“You’re as cruel as a Spaniard at a bull-fight.”
+
+“My boy, I’ve been gored by the bull.”
+
+Pierce was silent for a minute. He thought of Lady Holme’s white-rose
+complexion and of the cessation of Carey’s acquaintance with the Holmes.
+No one seemed to know exactly why Carey went to the house in Cadogan
+Square no more.
+
+“For God’s sake give me another drink, Robin, and make it a stiff one.”
+
+Pierce poured out the whisky and thought:
+
+“Could it have been that?”
+
+Carey emptied the tumbler and heaved a long sigh.
+
+“When d’you go back to Rome?”
+
+“Beginning of July.”
+
+“You’ll be there in the dead season.”
+
+“I like Rome then. The heat doesn’t hurt me and I love the peace.
+Antiquity seems to descend upon the city in August, returning to its own
+when America is far away.”
+
+Carey stared at him hard.
+
+“A rising diplomatist oughtn’t to live in the past,” he said bluntly.
+
+“I like ruins.”
+
+“Unless they’re women.”
+
+“If I loved a woman I could love her when she became what is called a
+ruin.”
+
+“If you were an old man who had crumbled gradually with her.”
+
+“As a young man, too. I was discussing--or rather flitting about,
+dinner-party fashion--that very subject to-night.”
+
+“With whom?”
+
+“Viola.”
+
+“The deuce! What line did you take?”
+
+“That one loves--if one loves--the kernel, not the shell.”
+
+“And she?”
+
+“You know her--the opposite.”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+“And you, Carey?”
+
+“I! I think if the shell is a beautiful shell and becomes suddenly
+broken it makes a devil of a lot of difference in what most people think
+of the kernel.”
+
+“It wouldn’t to me.”
+
+“I think it would.”
+
+“You take Viola’s side then?”
+
+“And when did I ever do anything else? I’m off.”
+
+He got up, nodded good-night, and was gone in a moment. Pierce heard him
+singing in a deep voice as he went down the stairs, and smiled with a
+faint contempt.
+
+“How odd it is that nobody will believe a man if he’s fool enough to
+hint at the truth of his true self,” he thought. “And Carey--who’s so
+clever about people!”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+WHEN the last guest had grimaced at her and left the drawing-room, Lady
+Holme stood with her hand on the mantelpiece, facing a tall mirror. She
+was alone for the moment. Her husband had accompanied Mrs. Wolfstein
+downstairs, and Lady Holme could hear his big, booming voice below,
+interrupted now and then by her impudent soprano. She spoke English with
+a slight foreign accent which men generally liked and women loathed.
+Lady Holme loathed it. But she was not fond of her own sex. She believed
+that all women were untrustworthy. She often said that she had never met
+a woman who was not a liar, and when she said it she had no doubt
+that, for once, a woman was speaking the truth. Now, as she heard Mrs.
+Wolfstein’s curiously improper laugh, she frowned. The face in the
+mirror changed and looked almost old.
+
+This struck her unpleasantly. She kept the frown in its place and stared
+from under it, examining her features closely, fancying herself really
+an old woman, her whimsical fascination dead in its decaying home, her
+powers faded if not fled for ever. She might do what she liked then.
+It would all be of no use. Even the voice would be cracked and thin,
+unresponsive, unwieldy. The will would be phlegmatic. If it were not,
+the limbs and features would not easily obey its messages. The figure,
+now beautiful, would perhaps be marred by the ungracious thickness, the
+piteous fleshiness that Time often adds assiduously to ageing bodies, as
+if with an ironic pretence of generously giving in one direction
+while taking away in another. Decay would be setting in, life becoming
+perpetual loss. The precious years would be gone irrevocably.
+
+She let the frown go and looked again on her beauty and smiled. The
+momentary bitterness passed. For there were many precious years to come
+for her, many years of power. She was young. Her health was superb. Her
+looks were of the kind that lasts. She thought of a famous actress whom
+she resembled closely. This actress was already forty-three, and was
+still a lovely woman, still toured about the world winning the hearts of
+men, was still renowned for her personal charm, worshipped not only
+for her talent but for her delicious skin, her great romantic eyes, her
+thick, waving hair.
+
+Lady Holme laughed. In twenty years what Robin Pierce called her “husk”
+ would still be an exquisite thing, and she would be going about without
+hearing the horrible tap, tap of the crutch in whose sustaining power
+she really believed so little. She knew men, and she said to herself, as
+she had said to Robin, that for them beauty lies in the epidermis.
+
+“Hullo, Vi, lookin’ in the glass! ‘Pon my soul, your vanity’s
+disgustin’. A plain woman like you ought to keep away from such
+things--leave ‘em to the Mrs. Wolfsteins--what?”
+
+Lady Holme turned round in time to see her husband’s blunt, brown
+features twisted in the grimace which invariably preceded his portentous
+laugh.
+
+“I admire Mrs. Wolfstein,” she said.
+
+The laugh burst like a bomb.
+
+“You admire another woman! Why, you’re incapable of it. The Lord defend
+me from hypocrisy, and there’s no greater hypocrisy than one woman
+takin’ Heaven to witness that she thinks another a stunnin’ beauty.”
+
+“You know nothing about it, Fritz. Mrs. Wolfstein’s eyes would be lovely
+if they hadn’t that pawnbroking expression.”
+
+“Good, good! Now we’re goin’ to hear the voice of truth. Think it went
+well, eh?”
+
+He threw himself down on a sofa and began to light a cigarette.
+
+“The evening? No, I don’t.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+He crossed his long legs and leaned back, resting his head on a cushion,
+and puffing the smoke towards the ceiling.
+
+“They all seemed cheery--what? Even Lady Cardington only cried when you
+were squallin’.”
+
+It was Lord Holme’s habit to speak irreverently of anything he happened
+to admire.
+
+“She had reason to cry. Miss Filberte’s accompaniment was a tragedy. She
+never comes here again.”
+
+“What’s the row with her? I thought her fingers got about over the piano
+awful quick.”
+
+“They did--on the wrong notes.”
+
+She came and sat down beside him.
+
+“You don’t understand music, Fritz, thank goodness.”
+
+“I know I don’t. But why thank what’s-his-name?”
+
+“Because the men that do are usually such anaemic, dolly things, such
+shaved poodles with their Sunday bows on.”
+
+“What about that chap Pierce? He’s up to all the scales and thingumies,
+isn’t he?”
+
+“Robin--”
+
+“Pierce I said.”
+
+“And I said Robin.”
+
+Lord Holme frowned and stuck out his under jaw. When he was irritated
+he always made haste to look like a prize-fighter. His prominent
+cheek-bones, and the abnormal development of bone in the lower part
+of his face, helped the illusion whose creation was begun by his
+expression.
+
+“Look here, Vi,” he said gruffly. “If you get up to any nonsense
+there’ll be another Carey business. I give you the tip, and you can just
+take it in time. Don’t you make any mistake. I’m not a Brenford, or a
+Godley-Halstoun, or a Pennisford, to sit by and--”
+
+“What a pity it is that your body’s so big and your intelligence so
+small!” she interrupted gently. “Why aren’t there Sandow exercises for
+increasing the brain?”
+
+“I’ve quite enough brain to rub along with very well. If I’d chosen to
+take it I could have been undersecretary---”
+
+“You’ve told me that so many times, old darling, and I really can’t
+believe it. The Premier’s very silly. Everybody knows that. But he’s
+still got just a faint idea of the few things the country won’t stand.
+And you are one of them, you truly are. You don’t go down even with
+the Primrose League, and they simply worship at the shrine of the great
+Ar-rar.”
+
+“Fool or not, I’d kick out Pierce as I kicked out Carey if I thought--”
+
+“And suppose I wouldn’t let you?”
+
+Her voice had suddenly changed. There was in it the sharp sound which
+had so overwhelmed Miss Filberte.
+
+Lord Holme sat straight up and looked at his wife.
+
+“Suppose--what?”
+
+“Suppose I declined to let you behave ridiculously a second time.”
+
+“Ridiculously! I like that! Do you stick out that Carey didn’t love
+you?”
+
+“Half London loves me. I’m one of the most attractive women in it.
+That’s why you married me, blessed boy.”
+
+“Carey’s a violent ass. Red-headed men always are. There’s a chap at
+White’s--”
+
+“I know, I know. You told me about him when you forbade poor Mr. Carey
+the house. But Robin’s hair is black and he’s the gentlest creature in
+diplomacy.”
+
+“I wouldn’t trust him a yard.”
+
+“Believe me, he doesn’t wish you to. He’s far too clever to desire the
+impossible.”
+
+“Then he can stop desirin’ you.”
+
+“Don’t be insulting, Fritz. Remember that by birth you are a gentleman.”
+
+Lord Holme bit through his cigarette.
+
+“Sometimes I wish you were an ugly woman,” he muttered.
+
+“And if I were?”
+
+She leaned forward quite eagerly on the sofa and her whimsical,
+spoilt-child manner dropped away from her.
+
+“You ain’t.”
+
+“Don’t be silly. I know I’m not, of course. But if I were to become
+one?”
+
+“What?”
+
+“Really, Fritz, there’s no sort of continuity in your mental processes.
+If I were to become an ugly woman, what would you feel about me then?”
+
+“How the deuce could you become ugly?”
+
+“Oh, in a hundred ways. I might have smallpox and be pitted for life,
+or be scalded in the face as poor people’s babies often are, or have
+vitriol thrown over me as lots of women do in Paris, or any number of
+things.”
+
+“What rot! Who’d throw vitriol over you, I should like to know?”
+
+He lit a fresh cigarette with tender solicitude. Lady Holme began to
+look irritated.
+
+“Do use your imagination!” she cried.
+
+“Haven’t got one, thank God!” he returned philosophically.
+
+“I insist upon your imagining me ugly. Do you hear, I insist upon it.”
+
+She laid one soft hand on his knee and squeezed his leg with all her
+might.
+
+“Now you’re to imagine me ugly and just the same as I am now.”
+
+“You wouldn’t be the same.”
+
+“Yes, I should. I should be the same woman, with the same heart and
+feelings and desires and things as I have now. Only the face would be
+altered.”
+
+“Well, go ahead, but don’t pinch so, old girl.”
+
+“I pinch you to make you exert your mind. Now tell me truly--truly;
+would you love me as you do now, would you be jealous of me, would
+you--”
+
+“I say, wait a bit! Don’t drive on at such a rate. How ugly are you?”
+
+“Very ugly; worse than Miss Filberte.”
+
+“Miss Filberte’s not so bad.”
+
+“Yes, she is, Fritz, you know she is. But I mean ever so much worse;
+with a purple complexion, perhaps, like Mrs. Armington, whose husband
+insisted on a judicial separation; or a broken nose, or something wrong
+with my mouth--”
+
+“What wrong?”
+
+“Oh, dear, anything! What _l’homme qui vir_ had--or a frightful scar
+across my cheek. Could you love me as you do now? I should be the same
+woman, remember.”
+
+“Then it’d be all the same to me, I s’pose. Let’s turn in.”
+
+He got up, went over to the hearth, on which a small wood fire was
+burning, straddled his legs, bent his knees and straightened them
+several times, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his trousers,
+which were rather tight and horsey and defined his immense limbs. An
+expression of profound self-satisfaction illumined his face as he looked
+at his wife, giving it a slightly leery expression, as of a shrewd
+rustic. His large blunt features seemed to broaden, his big brown eyes
+twinkled, and his lips, which were thick and very red and had a cleft
+down their middle, parted under his short bronze moustache, exposing two
+level rows of square white teeth.
+
+“It’s jolly difficult to imagine you an ugly woman,” he said, with a
+deep chuckle.
+
+“I do wish you’d keep your legs still,” said Lady Holme. “What earthly
+pleasure can it give you to go on like that? Would you love me as you do
+now?”
+
+“You’d be jolly sick if I didn’t, wouldn’t you, Vi, eh?”
+
+“I wonder if it ever occurs to you that you’re hideously conceited,
+Fritz?”
+
+She spoke with a touch of real anger, real exasperation.
+
+“No more than any other Englishman that’s worth his salt and ever does
+any good in the world. I ain’t a timid molly-coddle, if that’s what you
+mean.”
+
+He took one large hand out of his pocket, scratched his cheek
+and yawned. As he did so he looked as unconcerned, as free from
+self-consciousness, as much a slave to every impulse born of passing
+physical sensation as a wild animal in a wood or out on a prairie.
+
+“Otherwise life ain’t worth tuppence,” he added through his yawn.
+
+Lady Holme sat looking at him for a moment in silence. She was really
+irritated by his total lack of interest in what she wanted to interest
+in him, irritated, too, because her curiosity remained unsatisfied. But
+that abrupt look and action of absolutely unconscious animalism, chasing
+the leeriness of the contented man’s conceit, turned her to softness
+if not to cheerfulness. She adored Fritz like that. His open-mouthed,
+gaping yawn moved something in her to tenderness. She would have liked
+to kiss him while he was yawning and to pass her hands over his short
+hair, which was like a mat and grew as strongly as the hair which he
+shaved every morning from his brown cheeks.
+
+“Well, what about bed, old girl?” he said, stretching himself.
+
+Lady Holme did not reply. Some part of him, some joint, creaked as
+he forced his clasped hands downward and backward. She was listening
+eagerly for a repetition of the little sound.
+
+“What! Is mum the word?” he said, bending forward to stare into her
+face.
+
+At this moment the door opened, and a footman came in to extinguish the
+lights and close the piano. By mistake he let the lid of the latter
+drop with a bang. Lady Holme, who had just got up to go to bed, started
+violently. She said nothing but stared at him for an instant with an
+expression of cold rebuke on her face. The man reddened. Lord Holme was
+already on the stairs. He yawned again noisily, and turned the sound
+eventually into a sort of roaring chant up and down the scale as he
+mounted towards the next floor. Lady Holme came slowly after him. She
+had a very individual walk, moving from the hips and nearly always
+taking small, slow steps. Her sapphire-blue gown trailed behind her with
+a pretty noise over the carpet.
+
+When her French maid had locked up her jewels and helped her to undress,
+she dismissed her, and called out to Lord Holme, who was in the next
+room, the door of which was slightly open.
+
+“Fritz!”
+
+“Girlie?”
+
+His mighty form, attired in pale blue pyjamas, stood in the doorway.
+In his hand he grasped a toothbrush, and there were dabs of white
+tooth-powder on his cheeks and chin.
+
+“Finish your toilet and make haste.”
+
+He disappeared. There was a prolonged noise of brushing and the gurgling
+and splashing of water. Lady Holme sat down on the white couch at the
+foot of the great bed. She was wrapped in a soft white gown made like a
+burnous, a veritable Arab garment, with a white silk hood at the back,
+and now she put up her hands and, with great precision, drew the hood up
+over her head. The burnous, thus adjusted, made her look very young. She
+had thrust her bare feet into white slippers without heels, and now she
+drew up her legs lightly and easily and crossed them under her, assuming
+an Eastern attitude and the expression of supreme impassivity which
+suits it. A long mirror was just opposite to her. She swayed to and fro,
+looking into it.
+
+“Allah-Akbar!” she murmured. “Allah-Akbar! I am a fatalist. Everything
+is ordained, so why should I bother? I will live for the day. I will
+live for the night. Allah-Akbar, Allah-Akbar!”
+
+The sound of water gushing from a reversed tumbler into a full basin was
+followed by the reappearance of Lord Holme, looking very clean and very
+sleepy.
+
+Lady Holme stopped swaying.
+
+“You look like a kid of twelve years old in that thing, Vi,” he
+observed, surveying her with his hands on his hips.
+
+“I am a woman with a philosophy,” she returned with dignity.
+
+“A philosophy! What the deuce is that?”
+
+“You didn’t learn much at Eton and Christchurch.”
+
+“I learnt to use my fists and to make love to the women.”
+
+“You’re a brute!” she exclaimed with most unphilosophic vehemence.
+
+“And that’s why you worship the ground I tread on,” he rejoined equably.
+“And that’s why I’ve always had a good time with the women ever since I
+stood six foot in my stockin’s when I was sixteen.”
+
+Lady Holme looked really indignant. Her face was contorted by a spasm.
+She was one of those unfortunate women who are capable of retrospective
+jealousy.
+
+“I won’t--how dare you speak to me of those women?” she said bitterly.
+“You insult me.”
+
+“Hang it, there’s no one since you, Vi. You know that. And what would
+you have thought of a great, hulkin’ chap like me who’d never--well, all
+right. I’ll dry up. But you know well enough you wouldn’t have looked at
+me.”
+
+“I wonder why I ever did.”
+
+“No, you don’t. I’m just the chap to suit you. You’re full of whimsies
+and need a sledge-hammer fellow to keep you quiet. It you’d married that
+ass, Carey, or that--”
+
+“Fritz, once for all, I won’t have my friends abused. I allowed you to
+have your own way about Rupert Carey, but I will not have Robin Pierce
+or anyone else insulted. Please understand that. I married to be more
+free, not more--”
+
+“You married because you’d fallen jolly well in love with me, that’s why
+you married, and that’s why you’re a damned lucky woman. Come to bed.
+You won’t, eh?”
+
+He made a stride, snatched Lady Holme up as if she were a bundle, and
+carried her off to bed.
+
+She was on the point of bursting into angry tears, but when she found
+herself snatched up, her slippers tumbling off, the hood of the burnous
+falling over her eyes, her face crushed anyhow against her husband’s
+sinewy chest, she suddenly felt oddly contented, disinclined to protest
+or to struggle.
+
+Lord Holme did not trouble himself to ask what she was feeling or why
+she was feeling it.
+
+He thought of himself--the surest way to fasten upon a man the thoughts
+of others.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+ROBIN PIERCE and Carey were old acquaintances, if not exactly old
+friends. They had been for a time at Harrow together. Pierce had six
+thousand a year and worked hard for a few hundreds. Carey had a thousand
+and did nothing. He had never done anything definite, anything to earn a
+living. Yet his talents were notorious. He played the piano well for
+an amateur, was an extraordinarily clever mimic, acted better than most
+people who were not on the stage, and could write very entertaining
+verse with a pungent, sub-acid flavour. But he had no creative power and
+no perseverance. As a critic of the performances of others he was cruel
+but discerning, giving no quarter, but giving credit where it was due.
+He loathed a bad workman more than a criminal, and would rather have
+crushed an incompetent human being than a worm. Secretly he despised
+himself. His own laziness was as disgusting to him as a disease, and
+was as incurable as are certain diseases. He was now thirty-four and
+realised that he was never going to do anything with his life. Already
+he had travelled over the world, seen a hundred, done a hundred things.
+He had an enormous acquaintance in Society and among artists; writers,
+actors, painters--all the people who did things and did them well. As a
+rule they liked him, despite his bizarre bluntness of speech and manner,
+and they invariably spoke of him as a man of great talent; he said
+because he was so seldom fool enough to do anything that could reveal
+incompetence. His mother, who was a widow, lived in the north, in an
+old family mansion, half house, half castle, near the sea coast of
+Cumberland. He had one sister, who was married to an American.
+
+Carey always declared that he was that _rara avis_ an atheist, and that
+he had been born an atheist. He affirmed that even when a child he had
+never, for a moment, felt that there could be any other life than
+this earth-life. Few people believed him. There are few people who can
+believe in a child atheist.
+
+Pierce had a totally different character. He seemed to be more dreamy
+and was more energetic, talked much less and accomplished much more. It
+had always been his ambition to be a successful diplomat, and in many
+respects he was well fitted for a diplomatic career. He had a talent for
+languages, great ease of manner, self-possession, patience and cunning.
+He loved foreign life. Directly he set foot in a country which was
+not his own he felt stimulated. He felt that he woke up, that his mind
+became more alert, his imagination more lively. He delighted in change,
+in being brought into contact with a society which required study to be
+understood. His present fate contented him well enough. He liked Rome
+and was liked there. As his mother was a Roman he had many Italian
+connections, and he was far more at ease with Romans than with the
+average London man. His father and mother lived almost perpetually
+in large hotels. The former, who was enormously rich, was a _malade
+imaginaire_. He invariably spoke of his quite normal health as if it
+were some deadly disease, and always treated himself, and insisted on
+being treated, as if he were an exceptionally distinguished invalid.
+In the course of years his friends had learned to take his view of the
+matter, and he was at this time almost universally spoken of as “that
+poor Sir Henry Pierce whose life has been one long martyrdom.” Poor
+Sir Henry was fortunate in the possession of a wife who really was a
+martyr--to him. Nobody had ever discovered whether Lady Pierce knew, or
+did not know, that her husband was quite as well as most people. There
+are many women with such secrets. Robin’s parents were at present taking
+baths and drinking waters in Germany. They were later going for an
+“after cure” to Switzerland, and then to Italy to “keep warm” during the
+autumn. As they never lived in London, Robin had no home there except
+his little house in Half Moon Street. He had one brother, renowned as
+a polo player, and one sister, who was married to a rising politician,
+Lord Evelyn Clowes, a young man with a voluble talent, a peculiar power
+of irritating Chancellors of the Exchequer, and hair so thick that he
+was adored by the caricaturists.
+
+Robin Pierce and Carey saw little of each other now, being generally
+separated by a good many leagues of land and sea, but when they met they
+were still fairly intimate. They had some real regard for each
+other. Carey felt at ease in giving his violence to the quiet and
+self-possessed young secretary, who was three years his junior, but who
+sometimes seemed to him the elder of the two, perhaps because calm is
+essentially the senior of storm. He had even allowed Robin to guess
+at the truth of his feeling for Lady Holme, though he had never been
+explicit, on the subject to him or to anyone. There were moments
+when Robin wished he had not been permitted to guess, for Lady Holme
+attracted him far more than any other woman he had seen, and he had
+proposed to her before she had been carried off by her husband. He
+admired her beauty, but he did not believe that it was her beauty which
+had led him into love. He was sure that he loved the woman in her,
+the hidden woman whom Lord Holme and the world at large--including
+Carey--knew nothing about. He thought that Lady Holme herself did not
+understand this hidden woman, did not realise, as he did, that she
+existed. She spoke to him sometimes in Lady Holme’s singing, sometimes
+in an expression in her eyes when she was serious, sometimes even in
+a bodily attitude. For Robin, half fantastically, put faith in the
+eloquence of line as a revealer of character, of soul. But she did not
+speak to him in Lady Holme’s conversation. He really thought this hidden
+woman was obscured by the lovely window--he conceived it as a window of
+exquisite stained glass, jewelled but concealing--through which she was
+condemned to look for ever, through which, too, all men must look at
+her. He really wished sometimes, as he had said, that Lady Holme were
+ugly, for he had a fancy that perhaps then, and only then, would
+the hidden woman arise and be seen as a person may be seen through
+unstained, clear glass. He really felt that what he loved would be there
+to love if the face that ruled was ruined; would not only still be
+there to love, but would become more powerful, more true to itself, more
+understanding of itself, more reliant, purer, braver. And he had learnt
+to cherish this fancy till it had become a little monomania. Robin
+thought that the world misunderstood him, but he knew the world too well
+to say so. He never risked being laughed at. He felt sure that he
+was passionate, that he was capable of romantic deeds, of Quixotic
+self-sacrifice, of a devotion that might well be sung by poets, and that
+would certainly be worshipped by ardent women. And he said to himself
+that Lady Holme was the one woman who could set free, if the occasion
+came, this passionate, unusual and surely admirable captive at present
+chained within him, doomed to inactivity and the creeping weakness that
+comes from enforced repose.
+
+Carey’s passion for Lady Holme had come into being shortly before
+her marriage. No one knew much about it, or about the rupture of all
+relations between him and the Holmes which had eventually taken place.
+But the fact that Carey had lost his head about Lady Holme was known
+to half London. For Carey, when carried away, was singularly reckless;
+singularly careless of consequences and of what people thought. It was
+difficult to influence him, but when influenced he was almost painfully
+open in his acknowledgment of the power that had reached him. As a rule,
+however, despite his apparent definiteness, his decisive violence, there
+seemed to be something fluid in his character, something that divided
+and flowed away from anything which sought to grasp and hold it. He
+had impetus but not balance; swiftness, but a swiftness that was
+uncontrolled. He resembled a machine without a brake.
+
+It was soon after his rupture with the Holmes that his intimates began
+to notice that he was becoming inclined to drink too much. When Pierce
+returned to London from Rome he was immediately conscious of the slight
+alteration in his friend. Once he remonstrated with Carey about it.
+Carey was silent for a moment. Then he said abruptly:
+
+“My heart wants to be drowned.”
+
+Lord Holme hated Carey. Yet Lady Holme had not loved him; though she had
+not objected to him more than to other men because he loved her. She had
+been brought up in a society which is singularly free from prejudices,
+which has no time to study carefully questions of so-called honour,
+which has little real religious feeling, and a desire for gaiety which
+perhaps takes the place of a desire for morals. Intrigues are one of the
+chief amusements of this society, which oscillates from London to Paris
+as the pendulum of a clock oscillates from right to left. Lady Holme,
+however, happened to be protected doubly against the dangers--or joys
+by the way--to which so many of her companions fell cheerful, and even
+chattering, victims. She had a husband who though extremely stupid was
+extremely masterful, and, for the time at any rate, she sincerely loved
+him. She was a faithful wife and had no desire to be anything else,
+though she liked to be, and usually was, in the fashion. But though
+faithful to Lord Holme she had, as has been said, both the appearance
+and the temperament of a siren. She enjoyed governing men, and those who
+were governed by her, who submitted obviously to the power of her beauty
+and the charm of manner that seemed to emanate from it, and to be one
+with it, were more attractive to her than those who were not. She
+was inclined to admire a man for loving her, as a serious and
+solemn-thinking woman, with bandeaux and convictions, admires a
+clergyman for doing his duty. Carey had done his duty with such fiery
+ardour that, though she did not prevent her husband from kicking him out
+of the house, she could not refrain from thinking well of him.
+
+Her thoughts of Robin Pierce were perhaps a little more confused.
+
+She had not accepted him. Carey would have said that he was not “her
+type.” Although strong and active he was not the huge mass of bones and
+muscles and thews and sinews, ignorant of beauty and devoid of the love
+of art, which Carey had described as her ideal. There was melancholy and
+there was subtlety in him. When Lady Holme was a girl this melancholy
+and subtlety had not appealed to her sufficiently to induce her to
+become Lady Viola Pierce. Nevertheless, Robin’s affection for her, and
+the peculiar form it took--of idealising her secret nature and wishing
+her obvious beauty away--had won upon the egoism of her. Although she
+laughed at his absurdity, as she called it, and honestly held to her
+Pagan belief that physical beauty was all in all to the world she wished
+to influence, it pleased her sometimes to fancy that perhaps he was
+right, that perhaps her greatest loveliness was hidden and dwelt apart.
+The thought was flattering, and though her knowledge of men rejected the
+idea that such a loveliness alone could ever command an empire worth the
+ruling, she could have no real objection to being credited with a double
+share of charm--the charm of face and manner which everyone, including
+herself, was aware that she possessed, and that other stranger, more dim
+and mysterious charm at whose altar Robin burnt an agreeably perfumed
+incense.
+
+She had a peculiar power of awakening in others that which she usually
+seemed not to possess herself--imagination, passion, not only physical
+but ethereal and of the mind; a tenderness for old sorrows, desire for
+distant, fleeting, misty glories not surely of this earth. She was
+a brilliant suggestionist, but not in conversation. Her face and her
+voice, when she sang, were luring to the lovers of beauty. When she sang
+she often expressed for them the under-thoughts and under-feelings of
+secretly romantic, secretly wistful men and women, and drew them to her
+as if by a spell. But her talk and manner in conversation were so unlike
+her singing, so little accorded with the look that often came into her
+eyes while she sang, that she was a perpetual puzzle to such elderly
+men as Sir Donald Ulford, to such young men as Robin Pierce, and even to
+some women. They came about her like beggars who have heard a chink of
+gold, and she showed them a purse that seemed to be empty.
+
+Was it the _milieu_ in which she lived, the influence of a vulgar and
+greedy age, which prevented her from showing her true self except in
+her art? Or was she that stupefying enigma sometimes met with, an
+unintelligent genius?
+
+There were some who wondered.
+
+In her singing she seemed to understand, to love, to pity, to enthrone.
+In her life she often seemed not to understand, not to love, not to
+pity, not to place high.
+
+She sang of Venice, and those who cannot even think of the city in the
+sea without a flutter of the heart, a feeling not far from soft pain in
+its tenderness and gratitude, listened to the magic bells at sunset, and
+glided in the fairy barques across the liquid plains of gold. She
+spoke of Venice, and they heard only the famished voice of the mosquito
+uttering its midnight grace before meat.
+
+Which was the real Venice?
+
+Which was the real woman?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+ON the following day, which was warm and damp; Lady Holme drove to Bond
+Street, bought two new hats, had her hand read by a palmist who called
+himself “Cupido,” looked in at a ladies’ club and then went to Mrs.
+Wolfstein, with whom she was engaged to lunch. She did not wish to lunch
+with her. She disliked Mrs. Wolfstein as she disliked most women, but
+she had not been able to get out of it. Mrs. Wolfstein had overheard
+her saying to Lady Cardington that she had nothing particular to do till
+four that day, and had immediately “pinned her.” Besides disliking
+Mrs. Wolfstein, Lady Holme was a little afraid of her. Like many clever
+Jewesses, Mrs. Wolfstein was a ruthless conversationalist, and enjoyed
+showing off at the expense of others, even when they were her guests.
+She had sometimes made Lady Holme feel stupid, even feel as if a good
+talker might occasionally gain, and keep, an advantage over a lovely
+woman who did not talk so well. The sensation passed, but the fact that
+it had ever been did not draw Lady Holme any closer to the woman with
+the “pawnbroking expression” in her eyes.
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein was not in the most exclusive set in London, but she was
+in the smart set, which is no longer exclusive although it sometimes
+hopes it is. She knew the racing people, nearly all the most fashionable
+Jews, and those very numerous English patricians who like to go where
+money is. She also knew the whole of Upper Bohemia, and was a _persona
+gratissima_ in that happy land of talent and jealousy. She entertained
+a great deal, generally at modish restaurants. Many French and Germans
+were to be met with at her parties; and it was impossible to be with
+either them or her for many minutes without hearing the most hearty and
+whole-souled abuse of English aspirations, art, letters and cooking.
+The respectability, the pictures, the books and the boiled cabbage of
+Britain all came impartially under the lash.
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein’s origin was obscure. That she was a Jewess was known to
+everybody, but few could say with certainty whether she was a German,
+a Spanish, a Polish or an Eastern Jewess. She had much of the covert
+coarseness and open impudence of a Levantine, and occasionally said
+things which made people wonder whether, before she became Amalia
+Wolfstein, she had not perhaps been--well really--something very strange
+somewhere a long way off.
+
+Her husband was shocking to look at: small, mean, bald, Semitic and
+nervous, with large ears which curved outwards from his head like
+leaves, and cheeks blue from much shaving. He was said to hide behind
+his anxious manner an acuteness that was diabolic, and to have earned
+his ill-health by sly dissipations for which he had paid enormous
+sums. There were two Wolfstein children, a boy and a girl of eleven and
+twelve; small, swarthy, frog-like, self-possessed. They already spoke
+three languages, and their protruding eyes looked almost diseased with
+intelligence.
+
+The Wolfstein house, which was in Curzon Street, was not pretty,
+Apparently neither Mrs. Wolfstein nor her husband, who was a financier
+and company promoter on a very large scale, had good taste in furniture
+and decoration. The mansion was spacious but dingy. There was a great
+deal of chocolate and fiery yellow paint. There were many stuffy brown
+carpets, and tables which were unnecessarily solid. In the hall were
+pillars which looked as if they were made of brawn, and arches
+with lozenges of azure paint in which golden stars appeared rather
+meretriciously. A plaster statue of Hebe, with crinkly hair and staring
+eyeballs, stood in a corner without improving matters. That part of the
+staircase which was not concealed by the brown carpet was dirty white.
+An immense oil painting of a heap of dead pheasants, rabbits and wild
+duck, lying beside a gun and a pair of leather gaiters, immediately
+faced the hall door, which was opened by two enormous men with yellow
+complexions and dissipated eyes. Mrs. Wolfstein was at home, and one
+of the enormous men lethargically showed Lady Holme upstairs into a
+drawing-room which suggested a Gordon Hotel. She waited for about five
+minutes on a brown and yellow sofa near a table on which lay some books
+and several paper-knives, and then Mrs. Wolfstein appeared. She was
+dressed very smartly in blue and red, and looked either Oriental or
+Portuguese, as she came in. Lady Holme was not quite certain which.
+
+“Dear person!” she said, taking Lady Holme’s hands in hers, which were
+covered with unusually large rings. “Now, I’ve got a confession to make.
+What a delicious hat!”
+
+Lady Holme felt certain the confession was of something unpleasant,
+but she only said, in the rather languid manner she generally affected
+towards women:
+
+“Well? My ear is at the grating.”
+
+“My lunch is at the Carlton.”
+
+Lady Holme was pleased. At the Carlton one can always look about.
+
+“And--it’s a woman’s lunch.”
+
+Lady Holme’s countenance fell quite frankly.
+
+“I knew you’d be horrified. You think us such bores, and so we are. But
+I couldn’t resist being malicious to win such a triumph. You at a hen
+lunch! It’ll be the talk of London. Can you forgive me?”
+
+“Of course.”
+
+“And can you stand it?”
+
+Lady Holme looked definitely dubious.
+
+“I’ll tell you who’ll be there--Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mrs.
+Trent--do you know her? Spanish looking, and’s divorced two husbands,
+and’s called the scarlet woman because she always dresses in red--Sally
+Perceval, Miss Burns and Pimpernel Schley.”
+
+“Pimpernel Schley! Who is she?”
+
+“The American actress who plays all the improper modern parts. Directly
+a piece is produced in Paris that we run over to see--you know the sort!
+the Grand Duke and foreign Royalty species--she has it adapted for her.
+Of course it’s Bowdlerised as to words, but she manages to get back all
+that’s been taken out in her acting. Young America’s crazy about her.
+She’s going to play over here.”
+
+“Oh!”
+
+Lady Holme’s voice was not encouraging, but Mrs. Wolfstein was not
+sensitive. She chattered gaily all the way to the Haymarket. When they
+came into the Palm Court they found Lady Cardington already there,
+seated tragically in an armchair, and looking like a weary empress.
+The band was playing on the balcony just outside the glass wall which
+divides the great dining-room from the court, and several people were
+dotted about waiting for friends, or simply killing time by indulging
+curiosity. Among them was a large, broad-shouldered young man, with
+a round face, contemptuous blue eyes and a mouth with chubby, pouting
+lips. He was well dressed, but there was a touch of horseyness in the
+cut of his trousers, the arrangement of his tie. He sat close to the
+band, tipping his green chair backwards and smoking a cigarette.
+
+As Mrs. Wolfstein and Lady Holme went up to greet Lady Cardington, Sally
+Perceval and Mrs. Trent came in together, followed almost immediately by
+Lady Manby.
+
+Sally Perceval was a very pretty young married woman, who spent most
+of her time racing, gambling and going to house parties. She looked
+excessively fragile and consumptive, but had lived hard and never had
+a day’s illness in her life. She was accomplished, not at all
+intellectual, clever at games, a fine horsewoman and an excellent
+swimmer. She had been all over the world with her husband, who was very
+handsome and almost idiotic, and who could not have told you what
+the Taj was, whether Thebes was in Egypt or India, or what was the
+difference, if any, between the Golden Gate and the Golden Horn.
+Mrs. Trent was large, sultry, well-informed and supercilious; had the
+lustrous eyes of a Spaniard, and spoke in a warm contralto voice. Her
+figure was magnificent, and she prided herself on having a masculine
+intellect. Her enemies said that she had a more than masculine temper.
+
+Lady Manby had been presented by Providence with a face like a teapot,
+her nose being the spout and her cheeks the bulging sides. She saw
+everything in caricature. If war were spoken of, her imagination
+immediately conjured up visions of unwashed majors conspicuously absurd
+in toeless boots, of fat colonels forced to make merry on dead rats,
+of field-marshals surprised by the enemy in their nightshirts, and of
+common soldiers driven to repair their own clothes and preposterously
+at work on women’s tasks. She adored the clergy for their pious humours,
+the bench for its delicious attempts at dignity, the bar for its
+grotesque travesties of passionate conviction--lies with their wigs
+on--the world political for its intrigues dressed up in patriotism.
+A Lord Chancellor in full state seemed to her the most delightfully
+ridiculous phenomenon in a delightfully ridiculous universe. And she had
+once been obliged to make a convulsive exit from an English cathedral,
+in which one hundred colonial bishops were singing a solemn hymn,
+entirely devastated by the laughter waked in her by this most sacred
+spectacle.
+
+Miss Burns, who hurried in breathlessly ten minutes late, was very thin,
+badly dressed and insignificant-looking, wore her hair short, and could
+not see you if you were more than four feet away from her. She had been
+on various lonely and distant travelling excursions, about which she had
+written books, had consorted merrily with naked savages, sat in the oily
+huts of Esquimaux, and penetrated into the interior of China dressed as
+a man. Her lack of affectation hit you in the face on a first meeting,
+and her sincerity was perpetually embroiling her with the persistent
+liars who, massed together, formed what is called decent society.
+
+“I know I’m late,” she said, pushing her round black hat askew on her
+shaggy little head. “I know I’ve kept you all waiting. Pardon!”
+
+“Indeed you haven’t,” replied Mrs. Wolfstein. “Pimpernel Schley isn’t
+here yet. She lives in the hotel, so of course she’ll turn up last.”
+
+Mrs. Trent put one hand on her hip and stared insolently at the various
+groups of people in the court, Lady Cardington sighed, and Lady Holme
+assumed a vacant look, which suited her mental attitude at the moment.
+She generally began to feel rather vacant if she were long alone with
+women.
+
+Another ten minutes passed.
+
+“I’m famishing,” said Sally Perceval. “I’ve been at the Bath Club
+diving, and I do so want my grub. Let’s skip in.”
+
+“It really is too bad--oh, here she comes!” said Mrs. Wolfstein.
+
+Many heads in the Palm Court were turned towards the stairs, down which
+a demure figure was walking with extreme slowness. The big young man
+with the round face got up from his chair and looked greedy, and
+the waiters standing by the desk just inside the door glanced round,
+whispered, and smiled quickly before gliding off to their different
+little tables.
+
+Pimpernel Schley was alone, but she moved as if she were leading a quiet
+procession of vestal virgins. She was dressed in white, with a black
+velvet band round her tiny waist and a large black hat. Her shining,
+straw-coloured hair was fluffed out with a sort of ostentatious
+innocence on either side of a broad parting, and she kept her round chin
+tucked well in as she made what was certainly an effective entrance. Her
+arms hung down at her sides, and in one hand she carried a black fan.
+She wore no gloves, and many diamond rings glittered on her small
+fingers, the rosy nails of which were trimmed into points. As she drew
+near to Mrs. Wolfstein’s party she walked slower and slower, as if she
+felt that she was arriving at a destination much too soon.
+
+Lady Holme watched her as she approached, examined her with that
+piercing scrutiny in which the soul of one woman is thrust out, like a
+spear, towards the soul of another. She noticed at once that Miss Schley
+resembled her, had something of her charm of fairness. It was a fainter,
+more virginal charm than hers. The colouring of hair and eyes was
+lighter. The complexion was a more dead, less warm, white. But there was
+certainly a resemblance. Miss Schley was almost exactly her height, too,
+and--
+
+Lady Holme glanced swiftly round the Palm Court. Of all the women
+gathered there Pimpernel Schley and herself were nearest akin in
+appearance.
+
+As she recognised this fact Lady Holme felt hostile to Miss Schley.
+
+Not until the latter was almost touching her hostess did she lift her
+eyes from the ground. Then she stood still, looked up calmly, and said,
+in a drawling and infantine voice:
+
+“I had to see my trunks unpacked, but I was bound to be on time. I
+wouldn’t have come down to-day for any soul in the world but you. I
+would not.”
+
+It was a pretty speaking voice, clear and youthful, with a choir-boyish
+sound in it, and remarkably free from nasal twang, but it was not a
+lady’s voice. It sounded like the frontispiece of a summer number become
+articulate.
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein began to introduce Miss Schley to her guests, none of
+whom, it seemed, knew her. She bowed to each of them, still with the
+vestal virgin air, and said, “Glad to know you!” to each in turn without
+looking at anyone. Then Mrs. Wolfstein led the way into the restaurant.
+
+Everyone looked at the party of women as they came in and ranged
+themselves round a table in the middle of the big room. Lady Cardington
+sat on one side of Mrs. Wolfstein and Lady Holme on the other, between
+her and Mrs. Trent. Miss Schley was exactly opposite. She kept her eyes
+eternally cast down like a nun at Benediction. All the quite young men
+who could see her were looking at her with keen interest, and two
+or three of them--probably up from Sandhurst--had already assumed
+expressions calculated to alarm modesty. Others looked mournfully
+fatuous, as if suddenly a prey to lasting and romantic grief. The older
+men were more impartial in their observation of Mrs. Wolfstein’s guests.
+And all the women, without exception, fixed their eyes upon Lady Holme’s
+hat.
+
+Lady Cardington, who seemed oppressed by grief, said to Mrs. Wolfstein:
+
+“Did you see that article in the _Daily Mail_ this morning?”
+
+“Which one?”
+
+“On the suggestion to found a school in which the only thing to be
+taught would be happiness.”
+
+“Who’s going to be the teacher?”
+
+“Some man. I forget the name.”
+
+“A man!” said Mrs. Trent, in a slow, veiled contralto voice. “Why, men
+are always furious if they think we have any pleasure which they can’t
+deprive us of at a minute’s notice. A man is the last two-legged thing
+to be a happiness teacher.”
+
+“Whom would you have then?” said Lady Cardington.
+
+“Nobody, or a child.”
+
+“Of which sex?” said Mrs. Wolfstein.
+
+“The sex of a child,” replied Mrs. Trent.
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein laughed rather loudly.
+
+“I think children are the most greedy, unsatisfied individuals in--” she
+began.
+
+“I was not alluding to Curzon Street children,” observed Mrs. Trent,
+interrupting. “When I speak in general terms of anything I always except
+London.”
+
+“Why?” said Sally Perceval.
+
+“Because it’s no more natural, no more central, no more in line with the
+truth of things than you are, Sally.”
+
+“But, my dear, you surely aren’t a belated follower of Tolstoi!” cried
+Mrs. Wolfstein. “You don’t want us all to live like day labourers.”
+
+“I don’t want anybody to do anything, but if happiness is to be taught
+it must not be by a man or by a Londoner.”
+
+“I had no idea you had been caught by the cult of simplicity,” said Mrs.
+Wolfstein. “But you are so clever. You reveal your dislikes but conceal
+your preferences. Most women think that if they only conceal their
+dislikes they are quite perfectly subtle.”
+
+“Subtle people are delicious,” said Lady Manby, putting her mouth on
+one side. “They remind me of a kleptomaniac I once knew who had a little
+pocket closed by a flap let into the front of her gown. When she dined
+out she filled it with scraps. Once she dined with us and I saw her,
+when she thought no one was watching, peppering her pocket with cayenne,
+and looking so delightfully sly and thieving. Subtle people are always
+peppering their little pockets and thinking nobody sees them.”
+
+“And lots of people don’t,” said Mrs. Wolfstein.
+
+“The vices are divinely comic,” continued Lady Manby, looking every
+moment more like a teapot. “I think it’s such a mercy. Fancy what a lot
+of fun we should lose if there were no drunkards, for instance!”
+
+Lady Cardington looked shocked.
+
+“The virtues are often more comic than the vices,” said Mrs. Trent,
+with calm authority. “Dramatists know that. Think of the dozens of good
+farces whose foundation is supreme respectability in contact with the
+wicked world.”
+
+“I didn’t know anyone called respectability a virtue,” cried Sally
+Perceval.
+
+“Oh, all the English do in their hearts,” said Mrs. Wolfstein.
+“Pimpernel, are you Yankees as bad?”
+
+Miss Schley was eating _sole a la Colbert_ with her eyes on her plate.
+She ate very slowly and took tiny morsels. Now she looked up.
+
+“We’re pretty respectable over in America, I suppose,” she drawled. “Why
+not? What harm does it do anyway?”
+
+“Well, it limits the inventive faculties for one thing. If one is
+strictly respectable life is plain sailing.”
+
+“Oh, life is never that,” said Mrs. Trent, “for women.”
+
+Lady Cardington seemed touched by this remark.
+
+“Never, never,” she said in her curious voice--a voice in which tears
+seemed for ever to be lingering. “We women are always near the rocks.”
+
+“Or on them,” said Mrs. Trent, thinking doubtless of the two husbands
+she had divorced.
+
+“I like a good shipwreck,” exclaimed Miss Burns in a loud tenor voice.
+“I was in two before I was thirty, one off Hayti and one off Java, and
+I enjoyed them both thoroughly. They wake folks up and make them show
+their mettle.”
+
+“It’s always dangerous to speak figuratively if she’s anywhere about,”
+ murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Holme. “She’ll talk about lowering boats
+and life-preservers now till the end of lunch.”
+
+Lady Holme started. She had not been listening to the conversation but
+had been looking at Miss Schley. She had noticed instantly the effect
+created in the room by the actress’s presence in it. The magic of a
+name flits, like a migratory bird, across the Atlantic. Numbers of the
+youthful loungers of London had been waiting impatiently during the last
+weeks for the arrival of this pale and demure star. Now that she
+had come their interest in her was keen. Her peculiar reputation for
+ingeniously tricking Mrs. Bowdler, secretary to Mrs. Grundy, rendered
+her very piquant, and this piquancy was increased by her ostentatiously
+vestal appearance.
+
+Lady Holme was sometimes clairvoyante. At this moment every nerve in her
+body seemed telling her that the silent girl, who sat there nibbling her
+lunch composedly, was going to be the rage in London. It did not matter
+at all whether she had talent or not. Lady Holme saw that directly,
+as she glanced from one little table to another at the observant,
+whispering men.
+
+She felt angry with Miss Schley for resembling her in colouring, for
+resembling her in another respect--capacity for remaining calmly silent
+in the midst of fashionable chatterboxes.
+
+“Will she?” she said to Mrs. Wolfstein.
+
+“Yes. If she’d never been shipwrecked she’d have been almost
+entertaining, but--there’s Sir Donald Ulford trying to attract your
+attention.”
+
+“Where?”
+
+She looked and saw Sir Donald sitting opposite to the large young man
+with the contemptuous blue eyes and the chubby mouth. They both seemed
+very bored. Sir Donald bowed.
+
+“Who is that with him?” asked Lady Holme.
+
+“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “He looks like a Cupid who’s been
+through Sandow’s school. He oughtn’t to wear anything but wings.”
+
+“It’s Sir Donald’s son, Leo,” said Lady Cardington.
+
+Pimpernel Schley lifted her eyes for an instant from her plate, glanced
+at Leo Ulford, and cast them down again.
+
+“Leo Ulford’s a blackguard,” observed Mrs. Trent. “And when a fair man’s
+a blackguard he’s much more dangerous than a dark man.”
+
+All the women stared at Leo Ulford with a certain eagerness.
+
+“He’s good-looking,” said Sally Perceval. “But I always distrust
+cherubic people. They’re bound to do you if they get the chance. Isn’t
+he married?”
+
+“Yes,” said Mrs. Trent. “He married a deaf heiress.”
+
+“Intelligent of him!” remarked Mrs. Wolfstein. “I always wish I’d
+married a blind millionaire instead of Henry. Being a Jew, Henry sees
+not only all there is to see, but all there isn’t. Sir Donald and his
+Cupid son don’t seem to have much to say to one another.”
+
+“Oh, don’t you know that family affection’s the dumbest thing on earth?”
+ said Mrs. Trent.
+
+“Too deep for speech,” said Lady Manby. “I love to see fathers and sons
+together, the fathers trying to look younger than they are and the sons
+older. It’s the most comic relationship, and breeds shyness as the West
+African climate breeds fever.”
+
+“I know the whole of the West African coast by heart,” declared Miss
+Burns, wagging her head, and moving her brown hands nervously among her
+knives and forks. “And I never caught anything there.”
+
+“Not even a husband,” murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Manby.
+
+“In fact, I never felt better in my life than I did at Old Calabar,”
+ continued Miss Burns. “But there my mind was occupied. I was studying
+the habits of alligators.”
+
+“They’re very bad, aren’t they?” asked Lady Manby, in a tone of earnest
+inquiry.
+
+“I prefer to study the habits of men,” said Sally Perceval, who was
+always surrounded by a troup of young racing men and athletes, who
+admired her swimming feats.
+
+“Men are very disappointing, I think,” observed Mrs. Trent. “They are
+like a lot of beads all threaded on one string.”
+
+“And what’s the string?” asked Sally Perceval.
+
+“Vanity. Men are far vainer than we are. Their indifference to the
+little arts we practise shows it. A woman whose head is bald covers it
+with a wig. Without a wig she would feel that she was an outcast totally
+powerless to attract. But a bald-headed man has no idea of diffidence.
+He does not bother about a wig because he expects to be adored without
+one.”
+
+“And the worst of it is that he is adored,” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “Look
+at my passion for Henry.”
+
+They began to talk about their husbands. Lady Holme did not join in. She
+and Pimpernel Schley were very silent members of the party. Even Miss
+Burns, who was--so she said--a spinster by conviction not by
+necessity, plunged into the husband question, and gave some very daring
+illustrations of the marriage customs of certain heathen tribes.
+
+Pimpernel Schley hardly spoke at all. When someone, turning to her,
+asked her what she thought about the subject under discussion, she
+lifted her pale eyes and said, with the choir-boy drawl:
+
+“I’ve got no husband and never had one, so I guess I’m no kind of a
+judge.”
+
+“I guess she’s a judge of other women’s husbands, though,” said Mrs.
+Wolfstein to Lady Cardington. “That child is going to devastate London.”
+
+Now and then Lady Holme glanced towards Sir Donald and his son. They
+seemed as untalkative as she was. Sir Donald kept on looking towards
+Mrs. Wolfstein’s table. So did Leo. But whereas Leo Ulford’s eyes were
+fixed on Pimpernel Schley, Sir Donald’s met the eyes of Lady Holme. She
+felt annoyed; not because Sir Donald was looking at her, but because his
+son was not.
+
+How these women talked about their husbands! Lady Cardington, who was
+a widow, spoke of husbands as if they were a race which was gradually
+dying out. She thought the modern woman was beginning to get a little
+tired of the institution of matrimony, and to care much less for men
+than was formerly the case. Being contradicted by Mrs. Trent, she gave
+her reasons for this belief. One was that whereas American matinee girls
+used to go mad over the “leading men” of the stage they now went mad
+over the leading women. She also instanced the many beautiful London
+women, universally admired, who were over thirty and still remained
+spinsters. Mrs. Trent declared that they were abnormal, and that, till
+the end of time, women would always wish to be wives. Mrs. Wolfstein
+agreed with her on various grounds. One was that it was the instinct
+of woman to buy and to rule, and that if she were rich she could
+now acquire a husband as, in former days, people acquired slaves--by
+purchase. This remark led to the old question of American heiresses and
+the English nobility, and to a prolonged discussion as to whether or not
+most women ruled their husbands.
+
+Women nearly always argue from personal experience, and consequently
+Lady Cardington--whose husband had treated her badly--differed on this
+point from Mrs. Wolfstein, who always did precisely what she pleased,
+regardless of Mr. Wolfstein’s wishes. Mrs. Trent affirmed that for her
+part she thought women should treat their husbands as they treated their
+servants, and dismiss them if they didn’t behave themselves, without
+giving them a character. She had done so twice, and would do it a
+third time if the occasion arose. Sally Perceval attacked her for this,
+pleading slangily that men would be men, and that their failings
+ought to be winked at; and Miss Burns, as usual, brought the marital
+proceedings of African savages upon the carpet. Lady Manby turned the
+whole thing into a joke by a farcical description of the Private Enquiry
+proceedings of a jealous woman of her acquaintance, who had donned a
+canary-coloured wig as a disguise, and dogged her husband’s footsteps
+in the streets of London, only to find that he went out at odd times to
+visit a grandmother from whom he had expectations, and who happened to
+live in St. John’s Wood.
+
+The foreign waiters, who moved round the table handing the dishes,
+occasionally exchanged furtive glances which seemed indicative of
+suppressed amusement, and the men who were lunching near, many of whom
+were now smoking cigarettes, became more and more intent upon Mrs.
+Wolfstein and her guests. As they were getting up to go into the Palm
+Court for coffee and liqueurs, Lady Cardington again referred to the
+article on the proposed school for happiness, which had apparently made
+a deep impression upon her.
+
+“I wonder if happiness can be taught,” she said. “If it can--”
+
+“It can’t,” said Mrs. Trent, with more than her usual sledge-hammer
+bluntness. “We aren’t meant to be happy here.”
+
+“Who doesn’t mean us to be happy?” asked poor Lady Cardington in a
+deplorable voice.
+
+“First--our husbands.”
+
+“It’s cowardly not to be happy,” cried Miss Burns, pushing her hat over
+her left eye as a tribute to the close of lunch. “In a savage state
+you’ll always find--”
+
+The remainder of her remark was lost in the _frou-frou_ of skirts as the
+eight women began slowly to thread their way between the tables to the
+door.
+
+Lady Holme found herself immediately behind Miss Schley, who moved with
+impressive deliberation and the extreme composure of a well-brought-up
+child thoroughly accustomed to being shown off to visitors. Her
+straw-coloured hair was done low in the nape of her snowy neck, and,
+as she took her little steps, her white skirt trailed over the carpet
+behind her with a sort of virginal slyness. As she passed Leo Ulford it
+brushed gently against him, and he drummed the large fingers of his left
+hand with sudden violence on the tablecloth, at the same time pursing
+his chubby lips and then opening his mouth as if he were going to say
+something.
+
+Sir Donald rose and bowed. Mrs. Wolfstein murmured a word to him in
+passing, and they had not been sipping their coffee for more than two or
+three minutes before he joined them with his son.
+
+Sir Donald came up at once to Lady Holme.
+
+“May I present my son to you, Lady Holme?” he said.
+
+“Certainly.”
+
+“Leo, I wish to introduce you to Lady Holme.”
+
+Leo Ulford bowed rather ungracefully. Standing up he looked more than
+ever like a huge boy, and he had much of the expression that is often
+characteristic of huge boys--an expression in which impudence seems to
+float forward from a background of surliness.
+
+Lady Holme said nothing. Leo Ulford sat down beside her in an armchair.
+
+“Better weather,” he remarked.
+
+Then he called a waiter, and said to him, in a hectoring voice:
+
+“Bring me a Kummel and make haste about it.”
+
+He lit a cigarette that was almost as big as a cigar, and turned again
+to Lady Holme.
+
+“I’ve been in the Sahara gazelle shooting,” he continued.
+
+He spoke in a rather thick, lumbering voice and very loud, probably
+because he was married to a deaf woman.
+
+“Just come back,” he added.
+
+“Oh!” said Lady Holme.
+
+She was sitting perfectly upright on her chair, and noticed that her
+companion’s eyes travelled calmly and critically over her figure with
+an unveiled deliberation that was exceptionally brazen even in a modern
+London man. Lady Holme did not mind it. Indeed, she rather liked it. She
+knew at once, by that look, the type of man with whom she had to deal.
+In Leo Ulford there was something of Lord Holme, as in Pimpernel Schley
+there was perhaps a touch of herself. Having finished his stare, Leo
+Ulford continued:
+
+“Jolly out there. No rot. Do as you like and no one to bother you.
+Gazelle are awfully shy beasts though.”
+
+“They must have suited you,” said Lady Holme, very gravely.
+
+“Why?” he asked, taking the glass of Kummel which the waiter had brought
+and setting it down on a table by him.
+
+“Aren’t you a shy--er--beast?”
+
+He stared at her calmly for a moment, and then said:
+
+“I say, you’re too sharp, Lady Holme.”
+
+He turned his head towards Pimpernel Schley, who was sitting a little
+way off with her soft, white chin tucked well in, looking steadily down
+into a cup half full of Turkish coffee and speaking to nobody.
+
+“Who’s that girl?” he asked.
+
+“That’s Miss Pimpernel Schley. A pretty name, isn’t it?”
+
+“Is it? An American of course.”
+
+“Of course.”
+
+“What cheek they have? What’s she do?”
+
+“I believe she acts in--well, a certain sort of plays.”
+
+A slow smile overspread Leo Ulford’s face and made him look more like a
+huge boy than ever.
+
+“What certain sort?” he asked. “The sort I’d like?”
+
+“Very probably. But I know nothing of your tastes.”
+
+She did--everything almost. There are a good many Leo Ulfords lounging
+about London.
+
+“I like anything that’s a bit lively, with no puritanic humbug about
+it.”
+
+“Well, you surely can’t suppose that there can be any puritanic humbug
+about Miss Schley or anything she has to do with!”
+
+He glanced again at Pimpernel Schley and then at Lady Holme. The smile
+on his face became a grin. Then his huge shoulders began to shake
+gently.
+
+“I do love talking to women,” he said, on the tide of a prolonged
+chuckle. “When they aren’t deaf.”
+
+Lady Holme still remained perfectly grave.
+
+“Do you? Why?” she inquired.
+
+“Can’t you guess why?”
+
+“Our charity to our sister women?”
+
+She was smiling now.
+
+“You teach me such a lot,” he said.
+
+He drank his Kummel.
+
+“I always learn something when I talk to a woman. I’ve learnt something
+from you.”
+
+Lady Holme did not ask him what it was. She saw that he was now more
+intent on her than he had been on Miss Schley, and she got up to go,
+feeling more cheerful than she had since she left the _atelier_ of
+“Cupido.”
+
+“Don’t go.”
+
+“I must.”
+
+“Already! May I come and call?”
+
+“Your father knows my address.”
+
+“Oh, I say--but--”
+
+“You’re not going already!” cried Mrs. Wolfstein, who was having a
+second glass of Benedictine and beginning to talk rather outrageously
+and with a more than usually pronounced foreign accent.
+
+“I must, really.”
+
+“I’m afraid my son has bored you,” murmured Sir Donald, in his worn-out
+voice.
+
+“No, I like him,” she replied, loud enough for Leo to hear.
+
+Sir Donald did not look particularly gratified at this praise of his
+achievement. Lady Holme took an airy leave of everybody. When she came
+to Pimpernel Schley she said:
+
+“I wish you a great success, Miss Schley.”
+
+“Many thanks,” drawled the vestal virgin, who was still looking into her
+coffee cup.
+
+“I must come to your first night. Have you ever acted in London?”
+
+“Never.”
+
+“You won’t be nervous?”
+
+“Nervous! Don’t know the word.”
+
+She bent to sip her coffee.
+
+When Lady Holme reached the door of the Carlton, and was just entering
+one of the revolving cells to gain the pavement, she heard Lady
+Cardington’s low voice behind her.
+
+“Let me drive you home, dear.”
+
+At the moment she felt inclined to be alone. She had even just refused
+Sir Donald’s earnest request to accompany her to her carriage. Had any
+other woman made her this offer she would certainly have refused it. But
+few people refused any request of Lady Cardington’s. Lady Holme, like
+the rest of the world, felt the powerful influence that lay in her
+gentleness as a nerve lies in a body. And then had she not wept when
+Lady Holme sang a tender song to her? In a moment they were driving up
+the Haymarket together in Lady Cardington’s barouche.
+
+The weather had grown brighter. Wavering gleams of light broke through
+the clouds and lay across the city, giving a peculiarly unctuous look to
+the slimy streets, in which there were a good many pedestrians more
+or less splashed with mud. There was a certain hopefulness in the
+atmosphere, and yet a pathos such as there always is in Spring, when it
+walks through London ways, bearing itself half nervously, like a country
+cousin.
+
+“I don’t like this time of year,” said Lady Cardington.
+
+She was leaning back and glancing anxiously about her.
+
+“But why not?” asked Lady Holme. “What’s the matter with it?”
+
+“Youth.”
+
+“But surely--”
+
+“The year’s too young. And at my age one feels very often as if the
+advantage of youth were an unfair advantage.”
+
+“Dare I ask--?”
+
+She checked herself, looking at her companion’s snow-white hair, which
+was arranged in such a way that it looked immensely thick under the big
+black hat she wore--a hat half grandmotherly and half coquettish, that
+certainly suited her to perfection.
+
+“Spring--” she was beginning rather quickly; but Lady Cardington
+interrupted her.
+
+“Fifty-eight,” she said.
+
+She laughed anxiously and looked at Lady Holme.
+
+“Didn’t you think I was older?”
+
+“I don’t know that I ever thought about it,” replied Lady Holme, with
+the rather careless frankness she often used towards women.
+
+“Of course not. Why should you, or anyone? When a woman’s once
+over fifty it really doesn’t matter much whether she’s fifty-one or
+seventy-one. Does it?”
+
+Lady Holme thought for a moment. Then she said:
+
+“I really don’t know. You see, I’m not a man.”
+
+Lady Cardington’s forehead puckered and her mouth drooped piteously.
+
+“A woman’s real life is very short,” she said. “But her desire for real
+life can last very long--her silly, useless desire.”
+
+“But if her looks remain?”
+
+“They don’t.”
+
+“You think it is a question of looks?”
+
+“Do you think it is?” asked Lady Cardington. “But how can you know
+anything about it, at your age, and with your appearance?”
+
+“I suppose we all have our different opinions as to what men are and
+what men want,” Lady Holme said, more thoughtfully than usual.
+
+“Men! Men!” Lady Cardington exclaimed, with a touch of irritation
+unusual in her. “Why should we women do, and be, everything for men?”
+
+“I don’t know, but we do and we are. There are some men, though, who
+think it isn’t a question of looks, or think they think so.”
+
+“Who?” said Lady Cardington, quickly.
+
+“Oh, there are some,” answered Lady Holme, evasively, “who believe in
+mental charm more than in physical charm, or say they do. And mental
+charm doesn’t age so obviously as physical--as the body does, I suppose.
+Perhaps we ought to pin our faith to it. What do you think of Miss
+Schley?”
+
+Lady Cardington glanced at her with a kind of depressed curiosity.
+
+“She pins her faith to the other thing,” she said.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“She’s pretty. Do you know she reminds me faintly of you.”
+
+Lady Holme felt acute irritation at this remark, but she only said:
+
+“Does she?”
+
+“Something in her colouring. I’m sure she’s a man’s woman, but I can’t
+say I found her interesting.”
+
+“Men’s women seldom are interesting to us. They don’t care to be,” said
+Lady Holme.
+
+Suddenly she thought that possibly between Pimpernel Schley and herself
+there were resemblances unconnected with colouring.
+
+“I suppose not. But still--ah, here’s Cadogan Square!”
+
+She kissed Lady Holme lightly on the cheek.
+
+“Fifty-eight!” Lady Holme said to herself as she went into the house.
+“Just think of being fifty-eight if one has been a man’s woman! Perhaps
+it’s better after all to be an everybody’s woman. Well, but how’s it
+done?”
+
+She looked quite puzzled as she came into the drawing-room, where Robin
+Pierce had been waiting impatiently for twenty minutes.
+
+“Robin,” she said seriously, “I’m very unhappy.”
+
+“Not so unhappy as I have been for the last half hour,” he said, taking
+her hand and holding it. “What is it?”
+
+“I’m dreadfully afraid I’m a man’s woman. Do you think I am?”
+
+He could not help smiling as he looked into her solemn eyes.
+
+“I do indeed. Why should you be upset about it?”
+
+“I don’t know. Lady Cardington’s been saying things--and I met a rather
+abominable little person at lunch, a little person like a baby that’s
+been about a great deal in a former state, and altogether--Let’s have
+tea.”
+
+“By all means.”
+
+“And now soothe me, Robin. I’m dreadfully strung up. Soothe me. Tell
+me, I’m an everybody’s woman and that I shall never be _de trop_ in the
+world--not even when I’m fifty-eight.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE success of Pimpernel Schley in London was great and immediate, and
+preceded her appearance upon the stage. To some people, who thought they
+knew their London, it was inexplicable. Miss Schley was pretty and knew
+how to dress. These facts, though of course denied by some, as all facts
+in London are, were undeniable. But Miss Schley had nothing to say. She
+was not a brilliant talker, as so many of her countrywomen are. She
+was not vivacious in manner, except on rare occasions. She was not
+interested in all the questions of the day. She was not--a great many
+things. But she was one thing.
+
+She was exquisitely sly.
+
+Her slyness was definite and pervasive. In her it took the place of wit.
+It took the place of culture. It even took the place of vivacity. It was
+a sort of maid-of-all-work in her personality and never seemed to tire.
+The odd thing was that it did not seem to tire others. They found it
+permanently piquant. Men said of Miss Schley, “She’s a devilish clever
+little thing. She don’t say much, but she’s up to every move on the
+board.” Women were impressed by her. There was something in her supreme
+and snowy composure that suggested inflexible will. Nothing ever put her
+out or made her look as if she were in a false position.
+
+London was captivated by the abnormal combination of snow and slyness
+which she presented to it, and began at once to make much of her.
+
+At one time the English were supposed to be cold; and rather gloried in
+the supposition. But recently a change has taken place in the national
+character--at any rate as exhibited in London. Rigidity has gone out
+of fashion. It is condemned as insular, and unless you are cosmopolitan
+nowadays you are nothing, or worse than nothing. The smart Englishwoman
+is beginning to be almost as restless as a Neapolitan. She is in
+a continual flutter of movement, as if her body were threaded with
+trembling wires. She uses a great deal of gesture. She is noisy about
+nothing. She is vivacious at all costs, and would rather suggest
+hysteria than British phlegm.
+
+Miss Schley’s calm was therefore in no danger of being drowned in any
+pervasive calm about her. On the contrary, it stood out. It became
+very individual. Her composed speechlessness in the midst of uneasy
+chatter--the Englishwoman is seldom really self-possessed--carried with
+it a certain dignity which took the place of breeding. She was always
+at her ease, and to be always at your ease makes a deep impression upon
+London, which is full of self-consciousness.
+
+She began to be the fashion at once. A great lady, who had a passion for
+supplying smart men with what they wanted, saw that they were going to
+want Miss Schley and promptly took her up. Other women followed suit.
+Miss Schley had a double triumph. She was run after by women as well
+as by men. She got her little foot in everywhere, and in no time. Her
+personal character was not notoriously bad. The slyness had taken care
+of that. But even if it had been, if only the papers had not been too
+busy in the matter, she might have had success. Some people do whose
+names have figured upon the evening bills exposed at the street corners.
+Hers had not and was not likely to. It was her art to look deliberately
+pure and good, and to suggest, in a way almost indefinable and very
+perpetual, that she could be anything and everything, and perhaps
+had been, under the perfumed shadow of the rose. The fact that the
+suggestion seemed to be conveyed with intention was the thing that took
+corrupt old London’s fancy and made Miss Schley a pet.
+
+Her name of Pimpernel was not against her.
+
+Men liked it for its innocence, and laughed as they mentioned it in the
+clubs, as who should say:
+
+“We know the sort of Pimpernel we mean.”
+
+Miss Schley’s social success brought her into Lady Holme’s set, and
+people noticed, what Lady Holme had been the first to notice, the faint
+likeness between them. Lady Holme was not exquisitely sly. Her voice was
+not like a choir-boy’s; her manner was not like the manner of an image;
+her eyes were not for ever cast down. Even her characteristic silence
+was far less perpetual than the equally characteristic silence of Miss
+Schley. But men said they were the same colour. What men said women
+began to think, and it was not an assertion wholly without foundation.
+At a little distance there was an odd resemblance in the one white face
+and fair hair to the other. Miss Schley’s way of moving, too, had a sort
+of reference to Lady Holme’s individual walk. There were several things
+characteristic of Lady Holme which Miss Schley seemed to reproduce, as
+it were, with a sly exaggeration. Her hair was similar, but paler, her
+whiteness more dead, her silence more perpetual, her composure more
+enigmatically serene, her gait slower, with diminished steps.
+
+It was all a little like an imitation, with just a touch of caricature
+added.
+
+One or two friends remarked upon it to Lady Holme, who heard them very
+airily.
+
+“Are we alike?” she said. “I daresay, but you mustn’t expect me to see
+it. One never knows the sort of impression one produces on the world.
+I think Miss Schley a very attractive little creature, and as to her
+social gifts, I bow to them.”
+
+“But she has none,” cried Mrs. Wolfstein, who was one of those who had
+drawn Lady Holme’s attention to the likeness.
+
+“How can you say so? Everyone is at her feet.”
+
+“Her feet, perhaps. They are lovely. But she has no gifts. That’s why
+she gets on. Gifted people are a drug in the market. London’s sick of
+them. They worry. Pimpernel’s found that out and gone in for the savage
+state. I mean mentally of course.”
+
+“Her mind dwells in a wigwam,” said Lady Manby. “And wears glass beads
+and little bits of coloured cloth.”
+
+“But her acting?” asked Lady Holme, with careless indifference.
+
+“Oh, that’s improper but not brilliant,” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “The
+American critics says it’s beneath contempt.”
+
+“But not beneath popularity, I suppose?” said Lady Holme.
+
+“No, she’s enormously popular. Newspaper notices don’t matter to
+Pimpernel. Are you going to ask her to your house? You might. She’s
+longing to come. Everybody else has, and she knew you first.”
+
+Lady Holme began to realise why she could never like Mrs. Wolfstein. The
+latter would try to manage other people’s affairs.
+
+“I had no idea she would care about it,” she answered, rather coldly.
+
+“My dear--an American! And your house! You’re absurdly modest. She’s
+simply pining to come. May I tell her to?”
+
+“I should prefer to invite her myself,” said Lady Holme, with a distinct
+touch of hauteur which made Mrs. Wolfstein smile maliciously.
+
+When Lady Holme was alone she realised that she had, half unconsciously,
+meant that Miss Schley should find that there was at any rate one house
+in London whose door did not at once fly open to welcome her demure
+presence. But now? She certainly did not intend to be a marked exception
+to a rule that was apparently very general. If people were going to talk
+about her exclusion of Miss Schley, she would certainly not exclude
+her. She asked herself why she wished to, and said to herself that Miss
+Schley’s slyness bored her. But she knew that the real reason of the
+secret hostility she felt towards the American was the fact of their
+resemblance to each other. Until Miss Schley appeared in London
+she--Viola Holme--had been original both in her beauty and in her manner
+of presenting it to the world. Miss Schley was turning her into a type.
+
+It was too bad. Any woman would have disliked it.
+
+She wondered whether Miss Schley recognised the likeness. But of course
+people had spoken to her about it. Mrs. Wolfstein was her bosom friend.
+The Jewess had met her first at Carlsbad and, with that terrible social
+flair which often dwells in Israel, had at once realised her fitness for
+a London success and resolved to “get her over.” Women of the Wolfstein
+species are seldom jealously timorous of the triumphs of other women.
+A certain coarse cleverness, a certain ingrained assurance and
+unconquerable self-confidence keeps them hardy. And they generally have
+a noble reliance on the power of the tongue. Being incapable of any
+fear of Miss Schley, Mrs. Wolfstein, ever on the look-out for means of
+improving her already satisfactory position in the London world, saw
+one in the vestal virgin and resolved to launch her in England. She was
+delighted with the result. Miss Schley had already added several very
+desirable people to the Wolfstein visiting-list. In return “Henry” had
+“put her on to” one or two very good things in the City. Everything
+would be most satisfactory if only Lady Holme were not tiresome about
+the Cadogan Square door.
+
+“She hates you, Pimpernel,” said Mrs. Wolfstein to her friend.
+
+“Why?” drawled Miss Schley.
+
+“You know why perfectly well. You reproduce her looks. I’m perfectly
+certain she’s dreading your first night. She’s afraid people will begin
+to think that extraordinary colourless charm she and you possess stagey.
+Besides, you have certain mannerisms--you don’t imitate her, Pimpernel?”
+
+The pawnbroking expression was remarkably apparent for a moment in Mrs.
+Wolfstein’s eyes.
+
+“I haven’t started to yet.”
+
+“Yet?”
+
+“Well, if she don’t ask me to number thirty-eight--‘tis thirty-eight?”
+
+“Forty-two.”
+
+“Forty-two Cadogan Square, I might be tempted. I came out as a mimic,
+you know, at Corsher and Byall’s in Philadelphia.”
+
+Miss Schley gazed reflectively upon the brown carpet of Mrs. Wolfstein’s
+boudoir.
+
+“Folks said I wasn’t bad,” she added meditatively.
+
+“I think I ought to warn Viola,” said Mrs. Wolfstein.
+
+She was peculiarly intimate with people of distinction when they weren’t
+there. Miss Schley looked as if she had not heard. She often did when
+anything of importance to her was said. It was important to her to be
+admitted to Lady Holme’s house. Everybody went there. It was one of the
+very smartest houses in London, and since everybody knew that she had
+been introduced to Lady Holme, since half the world was comparing their
+faces and would soon begin to compare their mannerisms--well, it
+would be better that she should not be forced into any revival of her
+Philadelphia talents.
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein did not warn Lady Holme. She was far too fond of being
+amused to do anything so short-sighted. Indeed, from that moment she was
+inclined to conspire to keep the Cadogan Square door shut against her
+friend. She did not go so far as that; for she had a firm faith in
+Pimpernel’s cuteness and was aware that she would be found out. But she
+remained passive and kept her eyes wide open.
+
+Miss Schley was only going to act for a month in London. Her managers
+had taken a theatre for her from the first of June till the first of
+July. As she was to appear in a play she had already acted in all over
+the States, and as her American company was coming over to support her,
+she had nothing to do in the way of preparation. Having arrived early
+in the year, she had nearly three months of idleness to enjoy. Her
+conversation with Mrs. Wolfstein took place in the latter days of March.
+And it was just at this period that Lady Holme began seriously to debate
+whether she should, or should not, open her door to the American. She
+knew Miss Schley was determined to come to her house. She knew her
+house was one of those to which any woman setting out on the conquest of
+London would wish to come. She did not want Miss Schley there, but she
+resolved to invite her if peopled talked too much about her not being
+invited. And she wished to be informed if they did. One day she spoke to
+Robin Pierce about it. Lord Holme’s treatment of Carey had not yet been
+applied to him. They met at a private view in Bond Street, given by a
+painter who was adored by the smart world, and, as yet, totally unknown
+in every other circle. The exhibition was of portraits of beautiful
+women, and all the beautiful women and their admirers crowded the rooms.
+Both Lady Holme and Miss Schley had been included among the sitters of
+the painter, and--was it by chance or design?--their portraits hung side
+by side upon the brown-paper-covered walls. Lady Holme was not aware of
+this when she caught Robin’s eye through a crevice in the picture hats
+and called him to her with a little nod.
+
+“Is there tea?”
+
+“Yes. In the last room.”
+
+“Take me there. Oh, there’s Ashley Greaves. Avoid him, like a dear, till
+I’ve looked at something.”
+
+Ashley Greaves was the painter. There was nothing of the Bohemian about
+him. He looked like a heavy cavalry officer as he stood in the centre of
+the room talking to a small, sharp-featured old lady in a poke bonnet.
+
+“He’s safe. Lady Blower’s got hold of him.”
+
+“Poor wretch! She ought to have a keeper. Strong tea, Robin.”
+
+They found a settee in a corner walled in by the backs of tea-drinking
+beauties.
+
+“I want to ask you something,” said Lady Holme, confidentially. “You go
+about and hear what they’re saying.”
+
+“And greater nonsense it seems each new season.”
+
+“Nonsense keeps us alive.”
+
+“Is it the oxygen self-administered by an almost moribund society?”
+
+“It’s the perfume that prevents us from noticing the stuffiness of the
+room. But, Robin, tell me--what is the nonsense of now?”
+
+“Religious, political, theatrical, divorce court or what, Lady Holme?”
+
+He looked at her with a touch of mischief in his dark face, which
+told her, and was meant to tell her, that he was on the alert, and had
+divined that she had a purpose in thus pleasantly taking possession of
+him.
+
+“Oh, the people--nonsense. You know perfectly what I mean.”
+
+“Whom are they chattering about most at the moment? You’ll be
+contemptuous if I tell you.”
+
+“It’s a woman, then?”
+
+“When isn’t it?”
+
+“Do I know her?”
+
+“Slightly.”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Miss Schley.”
+
+“Really?”
+
+Lady Holme’s voice sounded perfectly indifferent and just faintly
+surprised. There was no hint of irritation in it.
+
+“And what are they saying about Miss Schley?” she added, sipping her tea
+and glancing about the crowded room.
+
+“Oh, many things, and among the many one that’s more untrue than all the
+rest put together.”
+
+“What’s that?”
+
+“It’s too absurd. I don’t think I’ll tell you.”
+
+“But why not? If it’s too absurd it’s sure to be amusing.”
+
+“I don’t think so.”
+
+His voice sounded almost angry.
+
+“Tell me, Robin.”
+
+He looked at her quickly with a warm light in his dark eyes.
+
+“If you only knew how I--”
+
+“Hush! Go on about Miss Schley.”
+
+“They’re saying that she’s wonderfully like you, and that--have some
+more tea?”
+
+“That--?”
+
+“That you hate it.”
+
+Lady Holme smiled, as if she were very much entertained.
+
+“But why should I hate it?”
+
+“I don’t know. But women invent reasons for everything.”
+
+“What have they invented for this?”
+
+“Oh--well--that you like to--I can’t tell you it all, really. But in
+substance it comes to this! They are saying, or implying--”
+
+“Implication is the most subtle of the social arts.”
+
+“It’s the meanest--implying that all that’s natural to you, that sets
+you apart from others, is an assumption to make you stand out from the
+rest of the crowd, and that you hate Miss Schley because she happens
+to have assumed some of the same characteristics, and so makes you seem
+less unique than you did before.”
+
+Lady Holme said nothing for a moment. Then she remarked:
+
+“I’m sure no woman said ‘less unique.’”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“Now did anyone? Confess!”
+
+“What d’you suppose they did say?”
+
+“More commonplace.”
+
+He could not help laughing.
+
+“As if you were ever commonplace!” he exclaimed, rather relieved by her
+manner.
+
+“That’s not the question. But then Miss Schley’s said to be like me not
+only in appearance but in other ways? Are we really so Siamese?”
+
+“I can’t see the faintest beginning of a resemblance.”
+
+“Ah, now you’re falling into exaggeration in the other direction.”
+
+“Well, not in realities. Perhaps in one or two trifling mannerisms--I
+believe she imitates you deliberately.”
+
+“I think I must ask her to the house.”
+
+“Why should you?”
+
+“Well, perhaps you might tell me.”
+
+“I don’t understand.”
+
+“Aren’t people saying that the reason I don’t ask her is because I am
+piqued at the supposed resemblance between us?”
+
+“Oh, people will say anything. If we are to model our lives according to
+their ridiculous ideas--”
+
+“Well, but we do.”
+
+“Unless we follow the dictates of our own natures, our own souls.”
+
+He lowered his voice almost to a whisper.
+
+“Be yourself, be the woman who sings, and no one--not even a fool--will
+ever say again that you resemble a nonentity like Miss Schley. You
+see--you see now that even socially it is a mistake not to be your
+real self. You can be imitated by a cute little Yankee who has neither
+imagination nor brains, only the sort of slyness that is born out of the
+gutter.”
+
+“My dear Robin, remember where we are. You--a diplomatist!”
+
+She put her finger to her lips and got up.
+
+“We must look at something or Ashley Greaves will be furious.”
+
+They made their way into the galleries, which were almost impassable. In
+the distance Lady Holme caught sight of Miss Schley with Mrs. Wolfstein.
+They were surrounded by young men. She looked hard at the American’s
+pale face, saying to herself, “Is that like me? Is that like me?” Her
+conversation with Robin Pierce had made her feel excited. She had
+not shown it. She had seemed, indeed, almost oddly indifferent. But
+something combative was awake within her. She wondered whether the
+American was consciously imitating her. What an impertinence! But Miss
+Schley was impertinence personified. Her impertinence was her _raison
+d’etre_. Without it she would almost cease to be. She would at any rate
+be as nothing.
+
+Followed by Robin, Lady Holme made her way slowly towards the Jewess and
+the American.
+
+They were now standing together before the pictures, and had been joined
+by Ashley Greaves, who was beginning to look very warm and expressive,
+despite his cavalry moustache. Their backs were towards the room, and
+Lady Holme and Robin drew near to them without being perceived. Mrs.
+Wolfstein had a loud voice and did not control it in a crowd. On the
+contrary, she generally raised it, as if she wished to be heard by those
+whom she was not addressing.
+
+“Sargent invariably brings out the secret of his sitters,” she was
+saying to Ashley Greaves as Lady Holme and Robin came near and stood
+for an instant wedged in by people, unable to move forward or backward.
+“You’ve brought out the similarities between Pimpernel and Lady Holme.
+I never saw anything so clever. You show us not only what we all saw but
+what we all passed over though it was there to see. There is an absurd
+likeness, and you’ve blazoned it.”
+
+Robin stole a glance at his companion. Ashley Greaves said, in a thin
+voice that did not accord with his physique:
+
+“My idea was to indicate the strong link there is between the English
+woman and the American woman. If I may say so, these two portraits, as
+it were, personify the two countries, and--er--and--er--”
+
+His mind appeared to give way. He strove to continue, to say something
+memorable, conscious of his conspicuous and central position. But his
+intellect, possibly over-heated and suffering from lack of air, declined
+to back him up, and left him murmuring rather hopelessly:
+
+“The one nation--er--and the other--yes--the give and take--the give and
+take. You see my meaning? Yes, yes.”
+
+Miss Schley said nothing. She looked at Lady Holme’s portrait and
+at hers with serenity, and seemed quite unconscious of the many eyes
+fastened upon her.
+
+“You feel the strong link, I hope, Pimpernel?” said Mrs. Wolfstein, with
+her most violent foreign accent. “Hands across the Herring Pond!”
+
+“Mr. Greaves has been too cute for words,” she replied. “I wish Lady
+Holme could cast her eye on them.”
+
+She looked up at nothing, with a sudden air of seeing something
+interesting that was happening along way off.
+
+“Philadelphia!” murmured Mrs. Wolfstein, with an undercurrent of
+laughter.
+
+It was very like Lady Holme’s look when she was singing. Robin Pierce
+saw it and pressed his lips together. At this moment the crowd shifted
+and left a gap through which Lady Holme immediately glided towards
+Ashley Greaves. He saw her and came forward to meet her with eagerness,
+holding out his hand, and smiling mechanically with even more than his
+usual intention.
+
+“What a success!” she said.
+
+“If it is, your portrait makes it so.”
+
+“And where is my portrait?”
+
+Robin Pierce nipped in the bud a rather cynical smile. The painter wiped
+his forehead with a white silk handkerchief.
+
+“Can’t you guess? Look where the crowd is thickest.”
+
+The people had again closed densely round the two pictures.
+
+“You are an artist in more ways than one, I’m afraid,” said Lady Holme.
+“Don’t turn my head more than the heat has.”
+
+The searching expression, that indicated the strong desire to say
+something memorable, once more contorted the painter’s face.
+
+“He who would essay to fix beauty on canvas,” he began, in a rather
+piercing voice, “should combine two gifts.”
+
+He paused and lifted his upper lip two or three times, employing his
+under-jaw as a lever.
+
+“Yes?” said Lady Holme, encouragingly.
+
+“The gift of the brush which perpetuates and the gift of--er--gift of
+the--”
+
+His intellect once more retreated from him into some distant place and
+left him murmuring:
+
+“Beauty demands all, beauty demands all. Yes, yes! Sacrifice! Sacrifice!
+Isn’t it so?”
+
+He tugged at his large moustache, with an abrupt assumption of the
+cavalry officer’s manner, which he doubtless deemed to be in accordance
+with his momentary muddle-headedness.
+
+“And you give it what it wants most--the touch of the ideal. It blesses
+you. Can we get through?”
+
+She had glanced at Robin while she spoke the first words. Ashley
+Greaves, with an expression of sudden relief, began very politely to
+hustle the crowd, which yielded to his persuasive shoulders, and Lady
+Holme found herself within looking distance of the two portraits, and
+speaking distance of Mrs. Wolfstein and Miss Schley. She greeted them
+with a nod that was more gay and friendly than her usual salutations to
+women, which often lacked _bonhomie_. Mrs. Wolfstein’s too expressive
+face lit up.
+
+“The sensation is complete!” she exclaimed loudly.
+
+“Hope you’re well,” murmured Miss Schley, letting her pale eyes rest on
+Lady Holme for about a quarter of a second, and then becoming acutely
+attentive to vacancy.
+
+Lady Holme was now in front of the pictures. She looked at Miss Schley’s
+portrait with apparent interest, while Mrs. Wolfstein looked at her with
+an interest that was maliciously real.
+
+“Well?” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “Well?”
+
+“There’s an extraordinary resemblance!” said Lady Holme. “It’s
+wonderfully like.”
+
+“Even you see it! Ashley, you ought to be triumphant--”
+
+“Wonderfully like--Miss Schley,” added Lady Holme, cutting gently
+through Mrs. Wolfstein’s rather noisy outburst.
+
+She turned to the American.
+
+“I have been wondering whether you won’t come in one day and see my
+little home. Everyone wants you, I know, but if you have a minute some
+Wednesday--”
+
+“I’ll be delighted.”
+
+“Next Wednesday, then?”
+
+“Thanks. Next Wednesday.”
+
+“Cadogan Square--the red book will tell you. But I’ll send cards. I must
+be running away now.”
+
+When she had gone, followed by Robin, Mrs. Wolfstein said to Miss
+Schley:
+
+“She’s been conquered by fear of Philadelphia.”
+
+“Wait till I give her Noo York,” returned the American, placidly.
+
+It seemed that Lady Holme’s secret hostility to Miss Schley was returned
+by the vestal virgin.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+LORD HOLME seldom went to parties and never to private views. He thought
+such things “all damned rot.” Few functions connected with the
+arts appealed to his frankly Philistine spirit, which rejoiced in
+celebrations linked with the glories of the body; boxing and wrestling
+matches, acrobatic performances, weight-lifting exhibitions, and so
+forth. He regretted that bear-baiting and cock-fighting were no longer
+legal in England, and had, on two occasions, travelled from London to
+South America solely in order to witness prize fights.
+
+As he so seldom put in an appearance at smart gatherings he had not
+yet encountered Miss Schley, nor had he heard a whisper of her
+much-talked-of resemblance to his wife. Her name was known to him as
+that of a woman whom one or two of his “pals” began to call a “deuced
+pretty girl” but his interest in her was not greatly awakened. The
+number of deuced pretty girls that had been in his life, and in the
+lives of his pals, was legion. They came and went like feathers dancing
+on the wind. The mere report of them, therefore, casual and drifting,
+could not excite his permanent attention, or fix their names and the
+record of their charms in his somewhat treacherous memory. Lady Holme
+had not once mentioned the American to him. She was a woman who knew how
+to be silent, and sometimes she was silent by instinct without saying to
+herself why.
+
+Lord Holme never appeared on her Wednesdays; and, indeed, those days
+were a rather uncertain factor among the London joys. If Lady Holme
+was to be found in her house at all, she was usually to be found on
+a Wednesday afternoon. She herself considered that she was at home on
+Wednesdays, but this idea of hers was often a mere delusion, especially
+when the season had fully set in. There were a thousand things to be
+done. She frequently forgot what the day of the week was. Unluckily she
+forgot it on the Wednesday succeeding her invitation to Miss Schley.
+The American duly turned up in Cadogan Square and was informed that Lady
+Holme was not to be seen. She left her card and drove away in her coupe
+with a decidedly stony expression upon her white face.
+
+That day it chanced that Lord Holme came in just before his wife
+and carelessly glanced over the cards which had been left during the
+afternoon. He was struck by the name of Pimpernel. It tickled his
+fancy somehow. As he looked at it he grinned. He looked at it again
+and vaguely recalled some shreds of the club gossip about Miss Schley’s
+attractions. When Lady Holme walked quietly into her drawing-room two or
+three minutes later he met her with Miss Schley’s card in his hand.
+
+“What have you got there, Fritz?” she said.
+
+He gave her the card.
+
+“You never told me you’d run up against her,” he remarked.
+
+Lady Holme looked at the card and then, quickly, at her husband.
+
+“Why--do you know Miss Schley?” she asked.
+
+“Not I.”
+
+“Well then?”
+
+“Fellows say she’s deuced takin’. That’s all. And she’s got a fetchin’
+name--eh? Pimpernel.”
+
+He repeated it twice and began to grin once more, and to bend and
+straighten his legs in the way which sometimes irritated his wife. Lady
+Holme was again looking at the card.
+
+“Surely it isn’t Wednesday?” she said.
+
+“Yes, it is. What did you think it was?”
+
+“Tuesday--Monday--I don’t know.”
+
+“Where’d you meet her?”
+
+“Whom? Miss Schley? At the Carlton. A lunch of Amalia Wolfstein’s.”
+
+“Is she pretty?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+There was no hesitation before the reply.
+
+“What colour?
+
+“Oh!--not Albino.”
+
+Lord Holme stared.
+
+“What d’you mean by that, girlie?”
+
+“That Miss Schley is remarkably fair--fairer than I am.”
+
+“Is she as pretty as you?
+
+“You can find out for yourself. I’m going to ask her to
+something--presently.”
+
+In the last word, in the pause that preceded it, there was the creeping
+sound of the reluctance Lady Holme felt in allowing Miss Schley to draw
+any closer to her life. Lord Holme did not notice it. He only said:
+
+“Right you are. Pimpernel--I should like to have a squint at her.”
+
+“Very well. You shall.”
+
+“Pimpernel,” repeated Lord Holme, in a loud bass voice, as he lounged
+out of the room, grinning. The name tickled his fancy immensely. That
+was evident.
+
+Lady Holme fully intended to ask Miss Schley to the “something” already
+mentioned immediately. But somehow several days slipped by and it was
+difficult to find an unoccupied hour. The Holme cards had, of course,
+duly gone to the Carlton, but there the matter had ended, so far as Lady
+Holme was concerned. Miss Schley, however, was not so heedless as the
+woman she resembled. She began to return with some assiduity to the
+practice of the talent of the old Philadelphia days. In those days she
+used to do a “turn” in the course of which she imitated some of the
+popular public favourites of the States, and for each of her imitations
+she made up to resemble the person mimicked. She now concentrated
+this talent upon Lady Holme, but naturally the methods she employed in
+Society were far more subtle than those she had formerly used upon
+the stage. They were scarcely less effective. She slightly changed her
+fashion of doing her hair, puffing it out less at the sides, wearing
+it a little higher at the back. The change accentuated her physical
+resemblance to Lady Holme. She happened to get the name of the
+dressmaker who made most of the latter’s gowns, and happened to give her
+an order that was executed with remarkable rapidity. But all this was
+only the foundation upon which she based, as it were, the structure of
+her delicate revenge.
+
+That consisted in a really admirable hint--it could not be called
+more--of Lady Holme’s characteristic mannerisms.
+
+Lady Holme was not an affected woman, but, like all women of the world
+who are greatly admired and much talked about, she had certain little
+ways of looking, moving, speaking, being quiet, certain little habits
+of laughter, of gravity, that were her own property. Perhaps originally
+natural to her, they had become slightly accentuated as time went on,
+and many tongues and eyes admired them. That which had been unconscious
+had become conscious. The faraway look came a little more abruptly, went
+a little more reluctantly; than it had in the young girl’s days. The
+wistful smile lingered more often on the lips of the twenties than on
+the lips of the teens. Few noticed any change, perhaps, but there had
+been a slight change, and it made things easier for Miss Schley.
+
+Her eye was observant although it was generally cast down. Society began
+to smile secretly at her talented exercises. Only a select few, like
+Mrs. Wolfstein, knew exactly what she was doing and why she was doing
+it, but the many were entertained, as children are, without analysing
+the cause of their amusement.
+
+Two people, however, were indignant--Robin Pierce and Rupert Carey.
+
+Robin Pierce, who had an instinct that was almost feminine in its
+subtlety, raged internally, and Rupert Carey, who, naturally acute, was
+always specially shrewd when his heart was in the game, openly showed
+his distaste for Miss Schley, and went about predicting her complete
+failure to capture the London public as an actress.
+
+“She’s done it as a woman,” someone replied to him.
+
+“Not the public, only the smart fools,” returned Carey.
+
+“The smart fools have more influence on the public every day.”
+
+Carey only snorted. He was in one of his evil moods that afternoon. He
+left the club in which the conversation had taken place, and, casting
+about for something to do, some momentary solace for his irritation and
+_ennui_, he bethought him of Sir Donald Ulford’s invitation and resolved
+to make a call at the Albany. Sir Donald would be out, of course, but
+anyhow he would chance it and shoot a card.
+
+Sir Donald’s servant said he was in. Carey was glad. Here was an hour
+filled up.
+
+With his usual hasty, decisive step he followed the man through a dark
+and Oriental-looking vestibule into a library, where Sir Donald was
+sitting at a bureau of teakwood, slowly writing upon a large, oblong
+sheet of foolscap with a very pointed pen.
+
+He got up, looking rather startled, and held out his hand.
+
+“I am glad to see you. I hoped you would come.”
+
+“I’m disturbing a new poem,” said Carey.
+
+Sir Donald’s faded face acknowledged it.
+
+“Sorry. I’ll go.”
+
+“No, no. I have infinite leisure, and I write now merely for myself. I
+shall never publish anything more. The maunderings of the old are really
+most thoroughly at home in the waste-paper basket. Do sit down.”
+
+Carey threw himself into a deep chair and looked round. It was a room
+of books and Oriental china. The floor was covered with an exquisite
+Persian carpet, rich and delicate in colour, with one of those vague
+and elaborate designs that stir the imagination as it is stirred by a
+strange perfume in a dark bazaar where shrouded merchants sit.
+
+“I light it with wax candles,” said Sir Donald, handing Carey a cigar.
+
+“It’s a good room to think in, or to be sad in.”
+
+He struck a match on his boot.
+
+“You like to shut out London,” he continued.
+
+“Yes. Yet I live in it.”
+
+“And hate it. So do I. London’s like a black-browed brute that gets an
+unholy influence over you. It would turn Mark Tapley into an Ibsen man.
+Yet one can’t get away from it.”
+
+“It holds interesting minds and interesting faces.”
+
+“Didn’t Persia?”
+
+“Lethargy dwells there and in all Eastern lands.”
+
+“You have made up your mind to spend the rest of your days in the fog?”
+
+“No. Indeed, only to-day I acquired a Campo Santo with cypress trees, in
+which I intend to make a home for any dying romance that still lingers
+within me.”
+
+He spoke with a sort of wistful whimsicality. Carey stared hard at him.
+
+“A Campo Santo’s a place for the dead.”
+
+“Why not for the dying? Don’t they need holy ground as much?”
+
+“And where’s this holy ground of yours?”
+
+Sir Donald got up from his chair, went over to the bureau, opened a
+drawer, and took out of it a large photograph rolled round a piece of
+wood, which he handed to Carey, who swiftly spread it out on his knees.
+
+“That is it.”
+
+“I say, Sir Donald, d’you mind my asking for a whisky-and-soda?”
+
+“I beg your pardon.”
+
+He hastily touched a bell and ordered it. Meanwhile Carey examined the
+photograph.
+
+“What do you think of it?” Sir Donald asked.
+
+“Well--Italy obviously.”
+
+“Yes, and a conventional part of Italy.”
+
+“Maggiore?”
+
+“No, Como.”
+
+“The playground of the honeymoon couple.”
+
+“Not where my Campo Santo is. They go to Cadenabbia, Bellagio, Villa
+D’Este sometimes.”
+
+“I see the fascination. But it looks haunted. You’ve bought it?”
+
+“Yes. The matter was arranged to-day.”
+
+The photograph showed a large, long house, or rather two houses divided
+by a piazza with slender columns. In the foreground was water. Through
+the arches of the piazza water was also visible, a cascade falling in
+the black cleft of a mountain gorge dark with the night of cypresses.
+To the right of the house, rising from the lake, was a tall old wall
+overgrown with masses of creeping plants and climbing roses. Over it
+more cypresses looked, and at the base of it, near the house, were a
+flight of worn steps disappearing into the lake, and an arched doorway
+with an elaborately-wrought iron grille. Beneath the photograph was
+written, “_Casa Felice_.”
+
+“Casa Felice, h’m!” said Carey, with his eyes on the photograph.
+
+“You think the name inappropriate?”
+
+“Who knows? One can be wretched among sunbeams. One might be gay among
+cypresses. And Casa Felice belongs to you?”
+
+“From to-day.”
+
+“Old--of course?”
+
+“Yes. There is a romance connected with the house.”
+
+“What is it?”
+
+“Long ago two guilty lovers deserted their respective mates and the
+brilliant world they had figured in, and fled there together.”
+
+“And quarrelled and were generally wretched there for how many months?”
+
+“For eight years.”
+
+“The devil! Fidelity gone mad!”
+
+“It is said that during those years the mistress never left the garden,
+except to plunge into the lake on moonlight nights and swim through the
+silver with her lover.”
+
+Carey was silent. He did not take his eyes from the photograph,
+which seemed to fascinate him. When the servant came in with the
+whisky-and-soda he started.
+
+“Not a place to be alone in,” he said.
+
+He drank, and stared again at the photograph.
+
+“There’s something about the place that holds one even in a photograph,”
+ he added.
+
+“One can feel the strange intrigue that made the house a hermitage. It
+has been a hermitage ever since.”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+“An old Italian lady, very rich, owned it, but never lived there. She
+recently died, and her heir consented to sell it to me.”
+
+“Well, I should like to see it in the flesh--or the bricks and mortar.
+But it’s not a place to be alone in,” repeated Carey. “It wants a woman
+if ever a house did.”
+
+“What sort of woman?”
+
+Sir Donald had sat down again on the chair opposite, and was looking
+with his exhausted eyes through the smoke of the cigars at Carey.
+
+“A fair woman, a woman with a white face, a slim woman with eyes that
+are cords to draw men to her and bind them to her, and a voice that can
+sing them into the islands of the sirens.”
+
+“Are there such women in a world that has forgotten Ulysses?”
+
+“Don’t you know it?”
+
+He rolled the photograph round the piece of wood and laid it on a table.
+
+“I can only think of one who at all answers to your description.”
+
+“The one of whom I was thinking.”
+
+“Lady Holme?”
+
+“Of course.”
+
+“Don’t you think she would be dreadfully bored in Casa Felice?”
+
+“Horribly, horribly. Unless--”
+
+“Unless?”
+
+“Who knows what? But there’s very often an unless hanging about, like
+a man at a street corner, that--” He broke off, then added abruptly,
+“Invite me to Casa Felice some day.”
+
+“I do.”
+
+“When will you be going there?”
+
+“As soon as the London season is over. Some time in August. Will you
+come then?”
+
+“The house is ready for you?”
+
+“It will be. The necessary repairs will be begun now. I have bought it
+furnished.”
+
+“The lovers’ furniture?”
+
+“Yes. I shall add a number of my own things, picked up on my
+wanderings.”
+
+“I’ll come in August if you’ll have me. But I’ll give you the season to
+think whether you’ll have me or whether you won’t. I’m a horrible
+bore in a house--the lazy man who does nothing and knows a lot. Casa
+Felice--Casa Felice. You won’t alter the name?”
+
+“Would you advise me to?”
+
+“I don’t know. To keep it is to tempt the wrath of the gods, but I
+should keep it.”
+
+He poured out another whisky-and-soda and suddenly began to curse Miss
+Schley.
+
+Sir Donald had spoken to her after Mrs. Wolfstein’s lunch.
+
+“She’s imitating Lady Holme,” said Carey.
+
+“I cannot see the likeness,” Sir Donald said. “Miss Schley seems to me
+uninteresting and common.”
+
+“She is.”
+
+“And Lady Holme’s personality is, on the contrary; interesting and
+uncommon.”
+
+“Of course. Pimpernel Schley would be an outrage in that Campo Santo of
+yours. And yet there is a likeness, and she’s accentuating it every day
+she lives.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Ask the women why they do the cursed things they do do.”
+
+“You are a woman-hater?”
+
+“Not I. Didn’t I say just now that Casa Felice wanted a woman? But the
+devil generally dwells where the angel dwells--cloud and moon together.
+Now you want to get on with that poem.”
+
+Half London was smiling gently at the resemblance between Lady Holme
+and Miss Schley before the former made up her mind to ask the latter
+to “something.” And when, moved to action by certain evidences of the
+Philadelphia talent which could not be misunderstood, she did make up
+her mind, she resolved that the “something” should be very large and by
+no means very intimate. Safety wanders in crowds.
+
+She sent out cards for a reception, one of those affairs that begin
+about eleven, are tremendous at half past, look thin at twelve, and have
+faded away long before the clock strikes one.
+
+Lord Holme hated them. On several occasions he had been known to throw
+etiquette to the winds and not to turn up when his wife was giving them.
+He always made what he considered to be a good excuse. Generally he had
+“gone into the country to look at a horse.” As Lady Holme sent out her
+cards, and saw her secretary writing the words, “Miss Pimpernel Schley,”
+ on an envelope which contained one, she asked herself whether her
+husband would be likely to play her false this time.
+
+“Shall you be here on the twelfth?” she asked him casually.
+
+“Why? What’s up on the twelfth?”
+
+“I’m going to have one of those things you hate--before the Arkell House
+ball. I chose that night so that everyone should run away early! You
+won’t be obliged to look at a horse in the country that particular day?”
+
+She spoke laughingly, as if she wanted him to say no, but would not be
+very angry if he didn’t. Lord Holme tugged his moustache and looked very
+serious indeed.
+
+“Another!” he ejaculated. “We’re always havin’ ‘em. Any music?”
+
+“No, no, nothing. There are endless dinners that night, and Mrs.
+Crutchby’s concert with Calve, and the ball. People will only run in and
+say something silly and run out again.”
+
+“Who’s comin’?”
+
+“Everybody. All the tiresome dears that have had their cards left.”
+
+Lord Holme stared at his varnished boots and looked rather like a
+puzzled boy at a _viva voce_ examination.
+
+“The worst of it is, I can’t be in the country lookin’ at a horse that
+night,” he said with depression.
+
+“Why not?”
+
+She hastily added:
+
+“But why should you? You ought to be here.”
+
+“I’d rather be lookin’ at a horse. But I’m booked for the dinner to
+Rowley at the Nation Club that night. I might say the speeches were too
+long and I couldn’t get away. Eh?”
+
+He looked at her for support.
+
+“You really ought to be here, Fritz,” she answered.
+
+It ended there. Lady Holme knew her husband pretty well. She fancied
+that the speeches at the dinner given to Sir Jacob Rowley, ex-Governor
+of some place she knew nothing about, would turn out to be very lengthy
+indeed--speeches to keep a man far from his home till after midnight.
+
+On the evening of the twelfth Lord Holme had not arrived when the first
+of his wife’s guests came slowly up the stairs, and Lady Holme began
+gently to make his excuses to all the tiresome dears who had had their
+cards left at forty-two Cadogan Square. There were a great many
+tiresome dears. The stream flowed steadily, and towards half-past eleven
+resembled a flood-tide.
+
+Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mr. Bry, Sally Perceval had one by one
+appeared, and Robin Pierce’s dark head was visible mounting slowly amid
+a throng of other heads of all shapes, sizes and tints.
+
+Lady Holme was looking particularly well. She was dressed in black.
+Of course black suits everybody. It suited her even better than most
+people, and her gown was a triumph. She was going on to the Arkell House
+ball, and wore the Holme diamonds, which were superb, and which she had
+recently had reset. She was in perfect health, and felt unusually
+young and unusually defiant. As she stood at the top of the staircase,
+smiling, shaking hands with people, and watching Robin Pierce
+coming slowly nearer, she wondered a little at certain secret
+uneasinesses--they could scarcely be called tremors--which had recently
+oppressed her. How absurd of her to have been troubled, even lightly,
+by the impertinent proceedings of an American actress, a nobody from the
+States, without position, without distinction, without even a husband.
+How could it matter to her what such a little person--she always called
+Pimpernel Schley a little person in her thoughts--did or did not do?
+As Robin came towards her she almost--but not quite--wished that the
+speeches at the dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley had not been so long as
+they evidently had been, and that her husband were standing beside her,
+looking enormous and enormously bored.
+
+“What a crowd!”
+
+“Yes. We can’t talk now. Are you going to Arkell House?”
+
+Robin nodded.
+
+“Take me in to supper there.”
+
+“May I? Thank you. I’m going with Rupert Carey.”
+
+“Really!”
+
+At this moment Lady Holme’s eyes and manner wandered. She had just
+caught a glimpse of Mrs. Wolfstein, a mass of jewels, and of Pimpernel
+Schley at the foot of the staircase, had just noticed that the latter
+happened to be dressed in black.
+
+“Bye-bye!” she added.
+
+Robin Pierce walked on into the drawing-rooms looking rather
+preoccupied.
+
+Everybody came slowly up the stairs. It was impossible to do anything
+else. But it seemed to Lady Holme that Miss Schley walked far more
+slowly than the rest of the tiresome dears, with a deliberation that
+had a touch of insolence in it. Her straw-coloured hair was done exactly
+like Lady Holme’s, but she wore no diamonds in it. Indeed, she had on
+no jewels. And this absence of jewels, and her black gown, made her skin
+look almost startlingly white, if possible whiter than Lady Holme’s.
+She smiled quietly as she mounted the stairs, as if she were wrapt in a
+pleasant, innocent dream which no one knew anything about.
+
+Amalia Wolfstein was certainly a splendid--a too splendid--foil to her.
+The Jewess was dressed in the most vivid orange colour, and was very
+much made up. Her large eyebrows were heavily darkened. Her lips were
+scarlet. Her eyes, which moved incessantly, had a lustre which suggested
+oil with a strong light shining on it. “Henry” followed in her wake,
+looking intensely nervous, and unnaturally alive and observant, as if
+he were searching in the crowd for a bit of gold that someone had
+accidentally dropped. When anyone spoke to him he replied with extreme
+vivacity but in the fewest possible words. He held his spare figure
+slightly sideways as he walked, and his bald head glistened under the
+electric lamps. Behind them, in the distance, was visible the yellow and
+sunken face of Sir Donald Ulford.
+
+When Miss Schley gained the top of the staircase Lady Holme saw that
+their gowns were almost exactly alike. Hers was sewn with diamonds, but
+otherwise there was scarcely any difference. And she suddenly felt as if
+the difference made by the jewels was not altogether in her favour, as
+if she were one of those women who look their best when they are not
+wearing any ornaments. Possibly Mrs. Wolfstein made all jewellery seem
+vulgar for the moment. She looked like an exceedingly smart jeweller’s
+shop rather too brilliantly illuminated; “as if she were for sale,” as
+an old and valued friend of hers aptly murmured into the ear of someone
+who had known her ever since she began to give good dinners.
+
+“Here we are! I’m chaperoning Pimpernel. But her mother arrives
+to-morrow,” began Mrs. Wolfstein, with her strongest accent, while
+Miss Schley put out a limp hand to meet Lady Holme’s and very slightly
+accentuated her smile.
+
+“Your mother? I shall be delighted to meet her. I hope you’ll bring her
+one day,” said Lady Holme; thinking more emphatically than ever that for
+a woman with a complexion as perfect as hers it was a mistake to wear
+many jewels.
+
+“I’ll be most pleased, but mother don’t go around much,” replied Miss
+Schley.
+
+“Does she know London?”
+
+“She does not. She spends most of her time sitting around in Susanville,
+but she’s bound to look after me in this great city.”
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein was by this time in violent conversation with a pale
+young man, who always looked as if he were on the point of fainting, but
+who went literally everywhere. Miss Schley glanced up into Lady Holme’s
+eyes.
+
+“I hoped to make the acquaintance of Lord Holme to-night,” she murmured.
+“Folks tell me he’s a most beautiful man. Isn’t he anywhere around?”
+
+She looked away into vacancy, ardently. Lady Holme felt a slight
+tingling sensation in her cool skin. For a moment it seemed to her as if
+she watched herself in caricature, distorted perhaps by a mirror with a
+slight flaw in it.
+
+“My husband was obliged to dine out to-night; unfortunately. I hope
+he’ll be here in a moment, but he may be kept, as there are to be some
+dreadful speeches afterwards. I can’t think why elderly men always want
+to get up and talk nonsense about the Royal family after a heavy dinner.
+It’s so bad for the digestion and the--ah, Sir Donald! Sweet of you to
+turn up. Your boy’s been so unkind. I asked him to call, or he asked to
+call, and he’s never been near me.”
+
+Miss Schley drifted away and was swallowed by the crowd. Sir Donald had
+arrived at the top of the stairs.
+
+“Leo’s been away in Scotland ever since he had the pleasure of meeting
+you. He only came back to-night.”
+
+“Then I’m not quite so hurt. He’s always running about, I suppose, to
+kill things, like my husband.”
+
+“He does manage a good deal in that way. If you are going to the Arkell
+House ball you’ll meet him there. He and his wife are both--”
+
+“How did do! Oh, Charley, I never expected to see you. I thought it
+wasn’t the thing for the 2nd to turn up at little hay parties like this.
+Kitty Barringlave is in the far room, dreadfully bored. Go and cheer her
+up. Tell her what’ll win the Cup. She’s pale and peaky with ignorance
+about Ascot this year. Both going to Arkell House, Sir Donald, did you
+say? Bring your son to me, won’t you? But of course you’re a wise man
+trotting off to bed.”
+
+“No. The Duke is a very old friend of mine, and so--”
+
+“Perfect. We’ll meet then. They say it’s really locomotor ataxia, poor
+fellow I but--ah, there’s Fritz!”
+
+Sir Donald looked at her with a sudden inquiring shrewdness, that lit up
+his faded eyes and made them for a moment almost young. He had caught a
+sound of vexation in her voice, which reminded him oddly of the sound
+in her singing voice when Miss Filberte was making a fiasco of the
+accompaniment. Lord Holme was visible and audible in the hall. His
+immense form towered above his guests, and his tremendous bass voice
+dominated the hum of conversation round him. Lady Holme could see from
+where she stood that he was in a jovial and audacious mood. The dinner
+to Sir Jacob Rowley had evidently been well cooked and gay. Fritz had
+the satisfied and rather larky air of a man who has been having one good
+time and intends to have another. She glanced into the drawing-rooms.
+They were crammed. She saw in the distance Lady Cardington talking to
+Sir Donald Ulford. Both of them looked rather pathetic. Mrs. Wolfstein
+was not far off, standing in the midst of a group and holding forth with
+almost passionate vivacity and self-possession. Her husband was gliding
+sideways through the crowd with his peculiarly furtive and watchful air,
+which always suggested the old nursery game, “Here I am on Tom Tiddler’s
+ground, picking up gold and silver.” Lady Manby was laughing in a corner
+with an archdeacon who looked like a guardsman got up in fancy dress.
+Mr. Bry, his eyeglass fixed in his left eye, came towards the staircase,
+moving delicately like Agag, and occasionally dropping a cold or
+sarcastic word to an acquaintance. He reached Lady Holme when Lord Holme
+was half-way up the stairs, and at once saw him.
+
+“A giant refreshed with wine,” he observed, dropping his eyeglass.
+
+It was such a perfect description of Lord Holme in his present condition
+that two or three people who were standing with Lady Holme smiled,
+looking down the staircase. Lady Holme did not smile. She continued
+chattering, but her face wore a discontented expression. Mr. Bry noticed
+it. There were very few things he did not notice, although he claimed to
+be the most short-sighted man in London.
+
+“Why is your husband so dutiful to-night?” he murmured to his hostess.
+“I thought he always had to go into the country to look at a gee-gee on
+these occasions.”
+
+“He had to be in town for the dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley. I begged him
+to come back in--How did do! How did do! Yes, very. Mr. Raleigh, do tell
+the opera people not to put on Romeo too often this season. Of course
+Melba’s splendid in it, and all that, but still--”
+
+Mr. Bry fixed his eyeglass again, and began to smile gently like an
+evil-minded baby. Lord Holme’s brown face was full in view, grinning.
+His eyes were looking about with unusual vivacity.
+
+“How early you are, Fritz! Good boy. I want you to look after--”
+
+“I say, Vi, why didn’t you tell me?”
+
+Mr. Bry, letting his eyeglass fall, looked abstracted and lent an
+attentive ear. If he were not playing prompter to social comedies he
+generally stood in the wings, watching and listening to them with a cold
+amusement that was seldom devoid of a spice of venom.
+
+“Tell you what, Fritz?”
+
+“That Miss Schley was comin’ to-night. Everyone’s talking about her. I
+sat next Laycock at dinner and he was ravin’. Told me she was to be here
+and I didn’t know it. Rather ridiculous, you know. Where is she?”
+
+“Somewhere in the rooms.”
+
+“What’s she like?”
+
+“Oh!--I don’t know. She’s in black. Go and look for her.”
+
+Lord Holme strode on. As he passed Mr. Bry he said:
+
+“I say, Bry, d’you know Miss Pimpernel Schley?”
+
+“Naturally.”
+
+“Come with me, there’s a good chap, and--what’s she like?”
+
+As they went on into the drawing-rooms Mr. Bry dropped out:
+
+“Some people say she’s like Lady Holme.”
+
+“Like Vi! Is she? Laycock’s been simply ravin’--simply ravin’--and
+Laycock’s not a feller to--where is she?
+
+“We shall come to her. So there was no gee-gee to look at in the country
+to-night?”
+
+Lord Holme burst into a roar of laughter.
+
+“There’s the vestal tending her lamp,” said Mr. Bry a moment later.
+
+“The what up to what?”
+
+“Miss Pimpernel Schley keeping the fire of adoration carefully alight.”
+
+“Where?”
+
+“There.”
+
+“Oh, I see! Jove, what a skin, though! Eh! Isn’t it? She is deuced like
+Vi at a distance. Vi looks up just like that when she’s singin’. Doesn’t
+she, though? Eh?”
+
+He went on towards her.
+
+Mr. Bry followed him, murmuring.
+
+“The giant refreshed with wine. No gee-gee to-night. No gee-gee.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+“THE brougham is at the door, my lady.”
+
+“Tell his lordship.”
+
+The butler went out, and Lady Holme’s maid put a long black cloak
+carefully over her mistress’s shoulders. While she did this Lady Holme
+stood quite still gazing into vacancy. They were in the now deserted
+yellow drawing-room, which was still brilliantly lit, and full of the
+already weary-looking flowers which had been arranged for the reception.
+The last guest had gone and the carriage was waiting to take the Holmes
+to Arkell House.
+
+The maid did something to the diamonds in Lady Holme’s hair with deft
+fingers, and the light touch seemed to wake Lady Holme from a reverie.
+She went to a mirror and looked into it steadily. The maid stood behind.
+After a moment Lady Holme lifted her hand suddenly to her head, as
+if she were going to take off her tiara. The maid could not repress
+a slight movement of startled astonishment. Lady Holme saw it in the
+glass, dropped her hand, and said:
+
+“C’est tout, Josephine. Vous pouvez vous en aller.”
+
+“Merci, miladi.”
+
+She went out quietly.
+
+Two or three minutes passed. Then Lord Holme’s deep bass voice was
+audible, humming vigorously:
+
+
+  “Ina, Ina, oh, you should have seen her!
+     Seen her with her eyes cast down.
+       She looked upon the floor,
+         And all the Johnnies swore
+   That Ina, Ina--oh, you should have seen her!--
+     That Ina was the _chic_-est girl in town.”
+
+
+Lady Holme frowned.
+
+“Fritz!” she called rather sharply.
+
+Lord Holme appeared with a coat thrown over his arm and a hat in his
+hand. His brown face was beaming with self-satisfaction.
+
+“Well, old girl, ready? What’s up now?”
+
+“I wish you wouldn’t sing those horrible music-hall songs. You know I
+hate them.”
+
+“Music-hall! I like that. Why, it’s the best thing in _The Chick from
+the Army and Navy_ at the Blue Theatre.”
+
+“It’s disgustingly vulgar.”
+
+“What next? Why, I saw the Lord Chan--”
+
+“I daresay you did. Vulgarity will appeal to the Saints of Heaven next
+season if things go on as they’re going now. Come along.”
+
+She went out of the room, walking more quickly than she usually walked,
+and holding herself very upright. Lord Holme followed, forming the words
+of his favourite song with his lips, and screwing up his eyes as if he
+were looking at an improper peepshow. When they were in the electric
+brougham, which spun along with scarcely any noise, he began:
+
+“I say, Vi, how long’ve you known Miss Schley?”
+
+“I don’t know. Some weeks.”
+
+“Why didn’t you tell me?”
+
+“I did. I said I had met her at Mrs. Wolfstein’s lunch.”
+
+“No, but why didn’t you tell me how like you she was?”
+
+There was complete silence in the brougham for a minute. Then Lady Holme
+said:
+
+“I had no idea she was like me.”
+
+“Then you’re blind, old girl. She’s like you if you’d been a chorus-girl
+and known a lot of things you don’t know.”
+
+“Really. Perhaps she has been a chorus-girl.”
+
+“I’ll bet she has, whether she says so or not.”
+
+He gave a deep chuckle. Lady Holme’s gown rustled as she leaned back in
+her corner.
+
+“And she’s goin’ to Arkell House. Americans are the very devil for
+gettin’ on. Laycock was tellin’ me to-night that--”
+
+“I don’t wish to hear Mr. Laycock’s stories, Fritz. They don’t amuse
+me.”
+
+“Well, p’r’aps they’re hardly the thing for you, Vi. But they’re deuced
+amusin’ for all that.”
+
+He chuckled again. Lady Holme felt an intense desire to commit some
+act of physical violence. She shut her eyes. In a minute she heard her
+husband once more beginning to hum the refrain about Ina. How utterly
+careless he was of her desires and requests. There was something animal
+in his forgetfulness and indifference. She had loved the animal in him.
+She did love it. Something deep down in her nature answered eagerly to
+its call. But at moments she hated it almost with fury. She hated it now
+and longed to use the whip, as the tamer in a menagerie uses it when one
+of his beasts shows its teeth, or sulkily refuses to perform one of its
+tricks.
+
+Lord Holme went on calmly humming till the brougham stopped in the long
+line of carriages that stretched away into the night from the great
+portico of Arkell House.
+
+People were already going in to supper when the Holmes arrived. The
+Duke, upon whom a painful malady was beginning to creep, was bravely
+welcoming his innumerable guests. He found it already impossible to go
+unaided up and down stairs, and sat in a large armchair close to the
+ball-room, with one of his pretty daughters near him, talking brightly,
+and occasionally stealing wistful glances at the dancers, who were
+visible through a high archway to his left. He was a thin, middle-aged
+man, with a curious, transparent look in his face--something crystalline
+that was nearly beautiful.
+
+The Duchess was swarthy and masterful, very intelligent and _grande
+dame_. Vivacity was easy to her. People said she had been a good hostess
+in her cradle, and that she had presided over the ceremony of her own
+baptism in a most autocratic and successful manner. It was quite likely.
+
+After a word with the Duke, Lady Holme went slowly towards the ballroom
+with her husband. She did not mean to dance, and began to refuse the
+requests of would-be partners with charming protestations of fatigue.
+Lord Holme was scanning the ballroom with his big brown eyes.
+
+“Are you going to dance, Fritz?” asked Lady Holme, nodding to Robin
+Pierce, whom she had just seen standing at a little distance with Rupert
+Carey.
+
+The latter had not seen her yet, but as Robin returned her nod he looked
+hastily round.
+
+“Yes, I promised Miss Schley to struggle through a waltz with her.
+Wonder if she’s dancin’?”
+
+Lady Holme bowed, a little ostentatiously, to Rupert Carey. Her husband
+saw it and began at once to look pugilistic. He could not say anything,
+for at this moment two or three men strolled up to speak to Lady Holme.
+While she was talking to them, Pimpernel Schley came in sight waltzing
+with Mr. Laycock, one of those abnormally thin, narrow-featured, smart
+men, with bold, inexpressive ayes, in whom London abounds.
+
+Lord Holme’s under-jaw resumed its natural position, and he walked away
+and was lost in the crowd, following the two dancers.
+
+“Take me in to supper, Robin. I’m tired.”
+
+“This way. I thought you were never coming.”
+
+“People stayed so late. I can’t think why. I’m sure it was dreadfully
+dull and foolish. How odd Mr. Carey’s looking! When I bowed to him just
+now he didn’t return it, but only stared at me as if I were a stranger.”
+
+Robin Pierce made no rejoinder. They descended the great staircase and
+went towards the picture-gallery.
+
+“Find a corner where we can really talk.”
+
+“Yes, yes.”
+
+He spoke eagerly.
+
+“Here--this is perfect.”
+
+They sat down at a table for two that was placed in an angle of the
+great room. Upon the walls above them looked down a Murillo and a
+Velasquez. Lady Holme was under the Murillo, which represented three
+Spanish street boys playing a game in the dust with pieces of money.
+
+“A table for two,” said Robin Pierce. “I have always said that the
+Duchess understands the art of entertaining better than anyone in
+London, except you--when you choose.”
+
+“To-night I really couldn’t choose. Later on, I’m going to give two or
+three concerts. Is anything the matter with Mr. Carey?”
+
+“Do you think so?”
+
+“Well, I hope it isn’t true what people are saying.”
+
+“What are they saying?”
+
+“That’s he’s not very judicious in one way.”
+
+A footman poured champagne into her glass. Robin Pierce touched the
+glass.
+
+“That way?”
+
+“Yes. It would be too sad.”
+
+“Let us hope it isn’t true, then.”
+
+“You know him well. Is it true?”
+
+“Would you care if it was?”
+
+He looked at her earnestly.
+
+“Yes. I like Mr. Carey.”
+
+There was a rather unusual sound of sincerity in her voice.
+
+“And what is it that you like in him?”
+
+“Oh, I don’t know. He talks shocking nonsense, of course, and is down on
+people and things. And he’s absurdly unsophisticated at moments, though
+he knows the world so well. He’s not like you--not a diplomat. But I
+believe if he had a chance he might do something great.”
+
+Robin felt as if the hidden woman had suddenly begun to speak. Why did
+she speak about Rupert Carey?
+
+“Do you like a man to do something great?” he said.
+
+“Oh, yes. All women do.”
+
+“But I perpetually hear you laughing at the big people--the Premiers,
+the Chancellors, the Archbishops, the Generals of the world.”
+
+“Because I’ve always known them. And really they are so often quite
+absurd and tiresome.”
+
+“And--Rupert Carey?”
+
+“Oh, he’s nothing at all, poor fellow! Still there’s something in his
+face that makes me think he could do an extraordinary thing if he had
+the chance. I saw it there to-night when he didn’t bow to me. There’s
+Sir Donald’s son. And what a dreadful-looking woman just behind him.”
+
+Leo Ulford was coming down the gallery with a gaunt, aristocratic,
+harsh-featured girl. Behind him walked Mr. Bry, conducting a very young
+old woman, immensely smart, immensely vivacious, and immensely pink, who
+moved with an unnecessary alertness that was birdlike, and turned her
+head about sharply on a long, thin neck decorated with a large diamond
+dog-collar. Slung at her side there was a tiny jewelled tube.
+
+“That’s Mrs. Leo.”
+
+“She must be over sixty.”
+
+“She is.”
+
+The quartet sat down at the next table. Leo Ulford did not see Lady
+Holme at once. When he caught sight of her, he got up, came to her,
+stood over her and pressed her hand.
+
+“Been away,” he explained. “Only back to-night.”
+
+“I’ve been complaining to your father about you.”
+
+A slow smile overspread his chubby face.
+
+“May I see you again after supper?”
+
+“If you can find me.”
+
+“I can always manage to find what I want,” he returned, still smiling.
+
+When he had gone back to his table Robin Pierce said:
+
+“How insolent Englishmen are allowed to be in Society! It always strikes
+me after I’ve been a long time abroad. Doesn’t anybody mind it?”
+
+“Do you mean that you consider Mr. Ulford insolent?”
+
+“In manner. Yes, I do.”
+
+“Well, I think there’s something like Fritz about him.”
+
+Robin Pierce could not tell from the way this was said what would be a
+safe remark to make. He therefore changed the subject.
+
+“Do you know what Sir Donald’s been doing?” he said.
+
+“No. What?”
+
+“Buying a Campo Santo.”
+
+“A Campo Santo! Is he going to bury himself, then? What do you mean,
+Robin?”
+
+“He called it a Campo Santo to Carey. It’s really a wonderful house in
+Italy, on Como. Casa Felice is the name of it. I know it well.”
+
+“Casa Felice. How delicious! But is it the place for Sir Donald?”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“For an old, tired man. Casa Felice. Won’t the name seem an irony to him
+when he’s there?”
+
+“You think an old man can’t be happy anywhere?”
+
+“I can’t imagine being happy old.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“Oh!”--she lowered her voice--“if you want to know, look at Mrs.
+Ulford.”
+
+“Your husk theory again. A question of looks. But you will grow old
+gracefully--some day in the far future.”
+
+“I don’t think I shall grow old at all.”
+
+“Then--?”
+
+“I think I shall die before that comes--say at forty-five. I couldn’t
+live with wrinkles all over my face. No, Robin, I couldn’t. And--look at
+Mrs. Ulford!--perhaps an ear-trumpet set with opals.”
+
+“What do the wrinkles matter? But some day you’ll find I’m right. You’ll
+tell me so. You’ll acknowledge that your charm comes from within, and
+has survived the mutilation of the husk.”
+
+“Mutilation! What a hideous sound that word has. Why don’t all mutilated
+people commit suicide at once? I should. Is Sir Donald going to live in
+his happy house?”
+
+“Naturally. He’ll be there this August. He’s invited Rupert Carey to
+stay there with him.”
+
+“And you?”
+
+“Not yet.”
+
+“I suppose he will. Everybody always asks you everywhere. Diplomacy is
+so universally--”
+
+She broke off. Far away, at the end of the gallery, she had caught sight
+of Miss Schley coming in with her husband. They sat down at a table near
+the door. Robin Pierce followed her eyes and understood her silence.
+
+“Are you going on the first?” he asked.
+
+“What to?”
+
+“Miss Schley’s first night.”
+
+“Is it on the first? I didn’t know. We can’t. We’re dining at Brayley
+House that evening.”
+
+“What a pity!” he said, with a light touch of half playful malice. “You
+would have seen her as she really is--from all accounts.”
+
+“And what is Miss Schley really?”
+
+“The secret enemy of censors.”
+
+“Oh!”
+
+“You dislike her. Why?”
+
+“I don’t dislike her at all.”
+
+“Do you like her?”
+
+“No. I like very few women. I don’t understand them.”
+
+“At any rate you understand--say Miss Schley--better than a man would.”
+
+“Oh--a man!”
+
+“I believe all women think all men fools.”
+
+Lady Holme laughed, not very gaily.
+
+“Don’t they?” he insisted.
+
+“In certain ways, in certain relations of life, I suppose most men
+are--rather short-sighted.”
+
+“Like Mr. Bry.”
+
+“Mr. Bry is the least short-sighted man I know. That’s why he always
+wears an eyeglass.”
+
+“To create an illusion?”
+
+“Who knows?”
+
+She looked down the long room. Between the heads of innumerable men and
+women she could see Miss Schley. Her husband was hidden. She would have
+preferred to see him. Miss Schley’s head was by no means expressive of
+the naked truth. It merely looked cool, self-possessed, and--so Lady
+Holme said to herself--extremely American. What she meant by that she
+could, perhaps, hardly have explained.
+
+“Do you admire Miss Schley’s appearance?”
+
+Robin Pierce spoke again with a touch of humorous malice. He knew Lady
+Holme so well that he had no objection to seem wanting in tact to her
+when he had a secret end to gain. She looked at him sharply; leaning
+forward over the table and opening her eyes very wide.
+
+“Why are you forgetting your manners to-night and bombarding me with
+questions?”
+
+“The usual reason--devouring curiosity.”
+
+She hesitated, looking at him. Then suddenly her face changed.
+Something, some imp of adorable frankness, peeped out of it at him, and
+her whole body seemed confiding.
+
+“Miss Schley is going about London imitating me. Now, isn’t that true?
+Isn’t she?”
+
+“I believe she is. Damned impertinence!”
+
+He muttered the last words under his breath.
+
+“How can I admire her?”
+
+There was something in the way she said that which touched him. He
+leaned forward to her.
+
+“Why not punish her for it?”
+
+“How?”
+
+“Reveal what she can’t imitate.”
+
+“What’s that?”
+
+“All you hide and I divine.”
+
+“Go on.”
+
+“She mimics the husk. She couldn’t mimic the kernel.”
+
+“Ice, my lady?”
+
+Lady Holme started. Till the footman spoke she had not quite realised
+how deeply interested she was in the conversation. She helped herself to
+some ice.
+
+“You can go on, Mr. Pierce,” she said when the man had gone.
+
+“But you understand.”
+
+She shook her head, smiling. Her body still looked soft and attractive,
+and deliciously feminine.
+
+“Miss Schley happens to have some vague resemblance to you in height and
+colouring. She is a clever mimic. She used to be a professional mimic.”
+
+“Really!”
+
+“That was how she first became known.”
+
+“In America?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Why should she imitate me?”
+
+“Have you been nice to her?”
+
+“I don’t know. Yes. Nice enough.”
+
+Robin shook his head.
+
+“You think she dislikes me then?”
+
+“Do women want definite reasons for half the things they do? Miss Schley
+may not say to herself that she dislikes you, any more than you say to
+yourself that you dislike her. Nevertheless--”
+
+“We should never get on. No.”
+
+“Consider yourselves enemies--for no reasons, or secret woman’s reasons.
+It’s safer.”
+
+Lady Holme looked down the gallery again. Miss Schley’s fair head was
+bending forward to some invisible person.
+
+“And the mimicry?” she asked, turning again to Robin.
+
+“Can only be applied to mannerisms, to the ninety-ninth part, the
+inconsiderable fraction of your charm. Miss Schley could never imitate
+the hidden woman, the woman who sings, the woman who laughs at, denies
+herself when she is not singing.”
+
+“But no one cares for her--if she exists.”
+
+There was a hint of secret bitterness in her voice when she said that.
+
+“Give her a chance--and find out. But you know already that numbers do.”
+
+He tried to look into her eyes, but she avoided his gaze and got up.
+
+“Take me back to the ballroom.”
+
+“You are going to dance?”
+
+“I want to see who’s here.”
+
+As they passed the next table Lady Holme nodded to Leo Ulford. He bowed
+in return and indicated that he was following almost immediately. Mrs.
+Ulford put down her ear-trumpet, turned her head sharply, and looked at
+Lady Holme sideways, fluttering her pink eyelids.
+
+“How exactly like a bird she is,” murmured Lady Holme.
+
+“Exactly--moulting.”
+
+Lady Holme meant as she walked down the gallery; to stop and speak a
+few gay words to Miss Schley and her husband, but when she drew near to
+their table Lord Holme was holding forth with such unusual volubility,
+and Miss Schley was listening with such profound attention, that it did
+not seem worth while, and she went quietly on, thinking they did not see
+her. Lord Holme did not. But the American smiled faintly as Lady Holme
+and Robin disappeared into the hall. Then she said, in reply to her
+animated companion:
+
+“I’m sure if I am like Lady Holme I ought to say _Te Deum_ and think
+myself a lucky girl. I ought, indeed.”
+
+Lady Holme had not been in the ballroom five minutes before Leo Ulford
+came up smiling.
+
+“Here I am,” he remarked, as if the statement were certain to give
+universal satisfaction.
+
+Robin looked black and moved a step closer to Lady Holme.
+
+“Thank you, Mr. Pierce,” she said.
+
+She took Leo Ulford’s arm, nodded to Robin, and walked away.
+
+Robin stood looking after her. He started when he heard Carey’s voice
+saying:
+
+“Why d’you let her dance with that blackguard?”
+
+“Hulloa, Carey?”
+
+“Come to the supper-room. I want to have a yarn with you. And
+all this”--he made a wavering, yet violent, gesture towards the
+dancers--“might be a Holbein.”
+
+“A dance of death? What nonsense you talk!”
+
+“Come to the supper-room.”
+
+Robin looked at his friend narrowly.
+
+“You’re bored. Let’s go and take a stroll down Park Lane.”
+
+“No. Well, then, if you won’t--”
+
+“I’ll come.”
+
+He put his arm through Carey’s, and they went out together.
+
+Lady Holme was generally agreeable to men. She was particularly charming
+to Leo Ulford that night. He was not an interesting man, but he seemed
+to interest her very much. They sat out together for a long time in the
+corner of a small drawing-room, far away from the music. She had said to
+Robin Pierce that she thought there was something about Leo Ulford
+that was like her husband, and when she talked to him she found the
+resemblance even greater than she had supposed.
+
+Lord Holme and Leo Ulford were of a similar type. Both were strong,
+healthy, sensual, slangy, audacious in a dull kind of fashion--Lady
+Holme did not call it dull--serenely and perpetually intent upon having
+everything their own way in life. Both lived for the body and ignored
+the soul, as they would have ignored a man with a fine brain, a
+passionate heart, a narrow chest and undeveloped muscles. Such a man
+they would have summed up as “a rotter.” If they ever thought of the
+soul at all, it was probably under some such comprehensive name. Both
+had the same simple and blatant aim in life, an aim which governed all
+their actions and was the generator of most of their thoughts. This
+aim, expressed in their own terse language, was “to do themselves
+jolly well.” Both had, so far, succeeded in their ambition. Both were,
+consequently, profoundly convinced of their own cleverness. Intellectual
+conceit--the conceit of the brain--is as nothing to physical
+conceit--the conceit of the body. Acute intelligence is always
+capable of uneasiness, can always make room for a doubt. But the
+self-satisfaction of the little-brained and big-muscled man who has
+never had a rebuff or a day’s illness is cased in triple brass. Lady
+Holme knew this self-satisfaction well. She had seen it staring out of
+her husband’s big brown eyes. She saw it now in the boyish eyes of Leo
+Ulford. She was at home with it and rather liked it. In truth, it had
+at least one merit--from the woman’s point of view--it was decisively
+masculine.
+
+Whether Leo Ulford was, or was not, a blackguard; as Mrs. Trent had
+declared, did not matter to her. Three-quarters of the men she knew were
+blackguards according to the pinched ideas of Little Peddlington; and
+Mrs. Trent might originally have issued from there.
+
+She got on easily with Leo Ulford because she was experienced in the
+treatment of his type. She knew exactly what to do with it; how to lead
+it on, how to fend it off, how to throw cold water on its enterprise
+without dashing it too greatly, how to banish any little, sulky
+cloud that might appear on the brassy horizon without seeming to be
+solicitous.
+
+The type is amazingly familiar to the woman of the London world. She can
+recognize it at a glance, and can send it in its armchair canter round
+the circus with scarce a crack of the ring-mistress’s whip.
+
+To-night Lady Holme enjoyed governing it more than usual, and for a
+subtle reason.
+
+In testing her power upon Leo Ulford she was secretly practising her
+siren’s art, with a view that would have surprised and disgusted him,
+still more amazed him, had he known it. She was firing at the dummy
+in order that later she might make sure of hitting the living man. Leo
+Ulford was the dummy. The living man would be Fritz.
+
+Both dummy and living man were profoundly ignorant of her moving
+principle. The one was radiant with self-satisfaction under her
+fusillade. The other, ignorant of it so far, would have been furious in
+the knowledge of it.
+
+She knew-and laughed at the men.
+
+Presently she turned the conversation, which was getting a little too
+personal--on Leo Ulford’s side--to a subject very present in her mind
+that night.
+
+“Did you have a talk with Miss Schley the other day after I left?”
+ she asked. “I ran away on purpose to give you a chance. Wasn’t it
+good-natured of me, when I was really longing to stay?”
+
+Leo Ulford stretched out his long legs slowly, his type’s way of
+purring.
+
+“I’d rather have gone on yarning with you.”
+
+“Then you did have a talk! She was at my house to-night, looking quite
+delicious. You know she’s conquered London?”
+
+“That sort’s up to every move on the board.”
+
+“What do you mean? What board?”
+
+She looked at him with innocent inquiry.
+
+“I wish men didn’t know so much,” she added; with a sort of soft
+vexation. “You have so many opportunities of acquiring knowledge and we
+so few--if we respect the _convenances_.”
+
+“Miss Schley wouldn’t respect ‘em.”
+
+He chuckled, and again drew up and then stretched out his legs, slowly
+and luxuriously.
+
+“How can you know?”
+
+“She’s not the sort that does. She’s the sort that’s always kicking over
+the traces and keeping it dark. I know ‘em.”
+
+“I think you’re rather unkind. Miss Schley’s mother arrives to-morrow.”
+
+Leo Ulford put up his hands to his baby moustache and shook with
+laughter.
+
+“That’s the only thing she wanted to set her up in business,” he
+ejaculated. “A marmar. I do love those Americans!”
+
+“But you speak as if Mrs. Schley were a stage property!”
+
+“I’ll bet she is. Wait till you see her. Why, it’s a regular profession
+in the States, being a marmar. I tell you what--”
+
+He leaned forward and fixed his blue eyes on Lady Holme, with an air of
+profound acuteness.
+
+“Are you going to see her?”
+
+“Mrs. Schley? I daresay.”
+
+“Well, you remember what I tell you. She’ll be as dry as a dog-biscuit,
+wear a cap and spectacles with gold rims, and say nothing but ‘Oh,
+my, yes indeed!’ to everything that’s said to her. Does she come from
+Susanville?”
+
+“How extraordinary! I believe she does.”
+
+Leo Ulford’s laugh was triumphant and prolonged.
+
+“That’s where they breed marmars!” he exclaimed, when he was able to
+speak. “Women are stunning.”
+
+“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,” said Lady Holme, preserving a
+quiet air of pupilage. “But perhaps it’s better I shouldn’t. Anyhow, I
+am quite sure Miss Schley’s mother will be worthy of her daughter.”
+
+“You may bet your bottom dollar on that. She’ll be what they call ‘a
+sootable marmar.’ I must get my wife to shoot a card on her.”
+
+“I hope you’ll introduce me to Mrs. Ulford. I should like to know her.”
+
+“Yours isn’t the voice to talk down a trumpet,” said Leo Ulford, with a
+sudden air of surliness.
+
+“I should like to know her now I know you and your father.”
+
+At the mention of his father Leo Ulford’s discontented expression
+increased.
+
+“My father’s a rotter,” he said. “Never cared for anything. No shot to
+speak of. He can sit on a horse all right. Had to, in South America
+and Morocco and all those places. But he never really cared about it,
+I don’t believe. Why, he’d rather look at a picture than a thoroughbred
+any day!”
+
+At this moment Sir Donald wandered into the room, with his hands behind
+his thin back, and his eyes searching the walls. The Duke possessed a
+splendid collection of pictures.
+
+“There he is!” said Leo, gruffly.
+
+“He doesn’t see us. Go and tell him I’m here.”
+
+“Why? he might go out again if we keep mum.”
+
+“But I want to speak to him. Sir Donald! Sir Donald!”
+
+Sir Donald turned round at the second summons and came towards them,
+looking rather embarrassed.
+
+“Hulloa, pater!” said Leo.
+
+Sir Donald nodded to his son with a conscientious effort to seem
+familiar and genial.
+
+“Hulloa!” he rejoined in a hollow voice.
+
+“Your boy has been instructing me in American mysteries,” said Lady
+Holme. “Do take me to the ballroom, Sir Donald.”
+
+Leo Ulford’s good humour returned as abruptly as it had departed.
+Her glance at him, as she spoke, had seemed to hint at a secret
+understanding between them in which no one--certainly not his
+father--was included.
+
+“Pater can tell you all about the pictures,” he said, with a comfortable
+assurance, which he did not strive to disguise, that she would be
+supremely bored.
+
+He stared at her hard, gave a short laugh, and lounged away.
+
+When he had gone, Sir Donald still seemed embarrassed. He looked at Lady
+Holme apologetically, and in his faded eyes she saw an expression
+that reminded her of Lady Cardington. It was surely old age asking
+forgiveness for its existence.
+
+She did not feel much pity for it, but with the woman of the world’s
+natural instinct to smooth rough places--especially for a man--she began
+to devote herself to cheering Sir Donald up, as they slowly made their
+way through room after room towards the distant sound of the music.
+
+“I hear you’ve been plunging!” she began gaily.
+
+Sir Donald looked vague.
+
+“I’m afraid I scarcely--”
+
+“Forgive me. I catch slang from my husband. He’s ruining my English. I
+mean that I hear you’ve been investing--shall I say your romance?--in
+a wonderful place abroad, with a fascinating name. I hope you’ll get
+enormous interest.”
+
+A faint colour, it was like the ghost of a blush, rose in Sir Donald’s
+withered cheeks.
+
+“Ah, Mr. Carey--”
+
+He checked himself abruptly, remembering whet he had heard from Robin
+Pierce.
+
+“No, Mr. Pierce was my informant. He knows your place and says it’s too
+wonderful. I adore the name.”
+
+“Casa Felice. You would not advise me to change it, then?”
+
+“Change it! Why?”
+
+“Well, I--one should not, perhaps, insist beforehand that one is going
+to have happiness, which must always lie on the knees of the gods.”
+
+“Oh, I believe in defiance.”
+
+There was an audacious sound in her voice. Her long talk with Leo Ulford
+had given her back her belief in herself, her confidence in her beauty,
+her reliance on her youth.
+
+“You have a right to believe in it. But Casa Felice is mine.”
+
+“Even to buy it was a defiance--in a way.”
+
+“Perhaps so. But then--”
+
+“But then you have set out and you must not turn back, Sir Donald.
+Baptise your wonderful house yourself by filling it with happiness.
+Another gave it its name. Give it yourself the reason for the name.”
+
+Happiness seemed to shine suddenly in the sound of her speaking voice,
+as it shone in her singing voice when the theme of her song was joy. Sir
+Donald’s manner lost its self-consciousness, its furtive diffidence.
+
+“You--you come and give my house its real baptism,” he said, with a
+flash of ardour that, issuing from him, was like fire bursting out of a
+dreary marsh land. “Will you? This August?”
+
+“But,” she hesitated. “Isn’t Mr. Carey coming?”
+
+At this moment they came into a big drawing-room that immediately
+preceded the ballroom, with which it communicated by an immense doorway
+hung with curtains of white velvet. They could see in the distance the
+dancers moving rather indifferently in a lancers. Lord Holme and Miss
+Schley were dancing in the set nearest to the doorway, and on the side
+that faced the drawing-room. Directly Lady Holme saw the ballroom she
+saw them. A sudden sense of revolt, the defiance of joy carried on into
+the defiance of anger, rose up in her.
+
+“If Mr. Carey is coming I’ll come too, and baptise your house,” she
+said.
+
+Sir Donald looked surprised, but he answered, with a swiftness that did
+not seem to belong to old age:
+
+“That is a bargain, Lady Holme. I regard that as a bargain.”
+
+“I’ll not go back on it.”
+
+There was a hard sound in her voice.
+
+They entered the ballroom just as the band played the closing bars
+of the lancers, and the many sets began to break up and melt into a
+formless crowd which dispersed in various directions. The largest
+number of people moved towards the archway near which the Duke was still
+sitting, bravely exerting himself to be cheerful. Lady Holme and Sir
+Donald became involved in this section of the crowd, and naturally
+followed in its direction. Lord Holme and Miss Schley were at a short
+distance behind them, and Lady Holme was aware of this. The double
+defiance was still alive in her, and was strengthened by a clear sound
+which reached her ears for a moment, then was swallowed up by the hum of
+conversation from many intervening voices--the sound of the American’s
+drawling tones raised to say something she could not catch. As she
+came out into the hall, close to the Duke’s chair, she saw Rupert Carey
+trying to make his way into the ballroom against the stream of dancers.
+His face was flushed. There were drops of perspiration on his forehead,
+and the violent expression that was perpetually visible in his red-brown
+eyes, lighting them up as with a flame, seemed partially obscured as if
+by a haze. The violence of them was no longer vivid but glassy.
+
+Lady Holme did not notice all this. The crowd was round her, and she was
+secretly preoccupied. She merely saw that Rupert Carey was close to her,
+and she knew who was following behind her. A strong impulse came upon
+her and she yielded to it without hesitation. As she reached Rupert
+Carey she stopped and held out her hand.
+
+“Mr. Carey,” she said, “I’ve been wanting to speak to you all the
+evening. Why didn’t you ask me to dance?”
+
+She spoke very distinctly. Carey stood still and stared at her, and now
+she noticed the flush on his face and the unnatural expression in his
+eyes. She understood at once what was the matter and repented of her
+action. But it was too late to draw back. Carey stared dully for an
+instant, as if he scarcely knew who she was. Then, with a lurch, he came
+closer to her, and, with a wavering movement, tried to find her hand,
+which she had withdrawn.
+
+“Where is it?” he muttered in a thick voice. “Where is it?”
+
+He groped frantically.
+
+“Sir Donald!” Lady Holme whispered sharply, while the people nearest to
+them began to exchange glances of surprise or of amusement.
+
+She pressed his arm and he tried to draw her on. But Carey was exactly
+in front of her. It was impossible for her to escape. He found her hand
+at last, took it limply in his, bent down and began to kiss it, mumbling
+some loud but incoherent words.
+
+The Duke, who from his chair, was a witness of the scene, tried to raise
+himself up, and a vivid spot of scarlet burned in his almost transparent
+cheeks. His daughter hastened forward to stop his effort. Lady Holme
+dragged her hand away violently, and Carey suddenly burst into tears.
+Sir Donald hurried Lady Holme on, and Carey tried to follow, but was
+forcibly prevented by two men.
+
+When at length Lady Holme found herself at the other end of the great
+hall, she turned and saw her husband coming towards her with a look of
+fury on his face.
+
+“I wish to go home,” she said to him in a low voice.
+
+She withdrew her hand from Sir Donald’s arm and quietly bade him
+good-bye. Lord Holme did not say a word.
+
+“Where is the Duchess?” Lady Holme added. “Ah, there she is!”
+
+She saw the Duchess hurriedly going towards the place where the Duke was
+sitting, intercepted her swiftly, and bade her good-night.
+
+“Now, Fritz!” she said.
+
+She was conscious that a number of people were watching her, and her
+voice and manner were absolutely unembarrassed. A footman took the
+number of her cloak from Lord Holme and fetched the cloak. A voice cried
+in the distance, “Lord Holme’s carriage!” Another, and nearer voice,
+echoed the call. She passed slowly between two lines of men over a broad
+strip of carpet to the portico, and stepped into the brougham.
+
+As it glided away into the night she heard her husband’s loud breathing.
+
+He did not speak for two or three minutes, but breathed like a man who
+had been running, and moved violently in the carriage as if to keep
+still were intolerable to him. The window next to him was up. He let it
+down. Then he turned right round to his wife, who was leaning back in
+her corner wrapped up in her black cloak.
+
+“With the Duke sittin’ there!” he said in a loud voice. “With the Duke
+sittin’ there!”
+
+There was a sound of outrage in the voice.
+
+“Didn’t I kick that sweep out of the house?” he added. “Didn’t I?”
+
+“I believe you asked Mr. Carey not to call anymore.”
+
+Lady Holme’s voice had no excitement in it.
+
+“Asked him! I--”
+
+“Don’t make such a noise, Fritz. The men will hear you.”
+
+“I told him if he ever came again I’d have him put out.”
+
+“Well, he never has come again.”
+
+“What d’you mean by speakin’ to him? What d’you mean by it?”
+
+Lady Holme knew that her husband was a thoroughly conventional man, and,
+like all conventional men, had a horror of a public scene in which any
+woman belonging to him was mixed up. Such a scene alone was quite enough
+to rouse his wrath. But there was in his present anger something deeper,
+more brutal, than any rage caused by a breach of the conventions. His
+jealousy was stirred.
+
+“He didn’t speak to you. You spoke to him.”
+
+Lady Holme did not deny it.
+
+“I heard every word you said,” continued Lord Holme, beginning to
+breathe hard again. “I--I--”
+
+Lady Holme felt that he was longing to strike her, that if he had been
+the same man, but a collier or a labourer, born in another class of
+life, he would not have hesitated to beat her. The tradition in which he
+had been brought up controlled him. But she knew that if he could have
+beaten her he would have hated her less, that his sense of bitter wrong
+would have at once diminished. In self-control it grew. The spark rose
+to a flame.
+
+“You’re a damned shameful woman!” he said.
+
+The brougham drew up softly before their house. Lord Holme, who was
+seated on the side next the house, got out first. He did not wait on the
+pavement to assist his wife, but walked up the steps, opened the door,
+and went into the hall. Lady Holme followed. She saw her husband, with
+the light behind him, standing with his hand on the handle of the hall
+door. For an instant she thought that he was going to shut her out. He
+actually pushed the door till the light was almost hidden. Then he flung
+it open with a bang, threw down his hat and strode upstairs.
+
+If he had shut her out! She found herself wondering what would have
+become of her, where she would have gone. She would have had to go to
+the Coburg, or to Claridge’s, without a maid, without luggage. As she
+slowly came upstairs she heard her husband go into the drawing-room. Was
+he waiting for her there? or did he wish to avoid her? When she
+reached the broad landing she hesitated. She was half inclined to go in
+audaciously, to laugh in his face; turn his fury into ridicule, tell him
+she was the sort of woman who is born to do as she likes, to live as she
+chooses, to think of nothing but her own will, consult nothing but her
+whims of the moment. But she went on and into her bedroom.
+
+Josephine was there and began to take the diamonds out of her hair. Lady
+Holme did not say a word. She was listening intently for the sound of
+any movement below. She heard nothing. When she was undressed, and there
+was nothing more for the maid to do, she began to feel uneasy, as if
+she would rather not dismiss the girl. But it was very late. Josephine
+strangled her yawns with difficulty. There was no excuse for keeping her
+up any longer.
+
+“You can go.”
+
+The maid went out, leaving Lady Holme standing in the middle of the big
+bedroom. Next to it on one side was Lord Holme’s dressing-room. On the
+other side there was a door leading into Lady Holme’s boudoir. Almost
+directly after Josephine had gone Lady Holme heard the outer door of
+this room opened, and the heavy step of her husband. It moved about
+the room, stopped, moved about again. What could he be doing? She stood
+where she was, listening. Suddenly the door between the rooms was thrown
+open and Lord Holme appeared.
+
+“Where’s the red book?” he said.
+
+“The red book!”
+
+“Where is it? D’you hear?”
+
+“What do you want it for?”
+
+“That sweep’s address.”
+
+“What are you going to do? Write to him?”
+
+“Write to him!” said Lord Holme, with bitter contempt. “I’m goin’ to
+thrash him. Where is it?”
+
+“You are going now?”
+
+“I’ve not come up to answer questions. I’ve come for the red book. Where
+is it?”
+
+“The little drawer at the top on the right hand of the writing-table.”
+
+Lord Holme turned back into the boudoir, went to the writing-table,
+found the book, opened it, found the address and wrote it down on a bit
+of paper. He folded the paper up anyhow and thrust it into his waistcoat
+pocket. Then, without saying another word to his wife, or looking at
+her, he went out and down the staircase.
+
+She followed him on to the landing, and stood there till she heard the
+hall door shut with a bang.
+
+A clock below struck four. She went back into the bedroom and sank into
+an armchair.
+
+A slight sense of confusion floated over her mind for a moment, like a
+cloud. She was not accustomed to scenes. There had been one certainly
+when Rupert Carey was forbidden to come to the house any more, but it
+had been brief, and she had not been present at it. She had only heard
+of it afterwards. Lord Holme had been angry then, and she had rather
+liked his anger. She took it as, in some degree, a measure of his
+attachment to her. And then she had had no feeling of being in the wrong
+or of humiliation. She had been charming to Carey, as she was charming
+to all men. He had lost his head. He had mistaken the relations existing
+between her and her husband, and imagined that such a woman as she was
+must be unhappily mated with such a man as Lord Holme. The passionate
+desire to console a perfectly-contented woman had caused him to go too
+far, and bring down upon himself a fiat of exile, which he could not
+defy since Lady Holme permitted it to go forth, and evidently was not
+rendered miserable by it. So the acquaintance with Rupert Carey had
+ceased, and life had slipped along once more on wheels covered with
+india-rubber tyres.
+
+And now she had renewed the acquaintance publicly and with disastrous
+results.
+
+As she sat there she began to wonder at herself, at the strength of her
+temper, the secret violence of her nature. She had yielded like a
+child to a sudden impulse. She had not thought of consequences. She had
+ignored her worldly knowledge. She had considered nothing, but had acted
+abruptly, as any ignorant, uneducated woman might have acted. She had
+been the slave of a mood. Or had she been the slave of another woman--of
+a woman whom she despised?
+
+Miss Schley had certainly been the cause of the whole affair. Lady Holme
+had spoken to Rupert Carey merely because she knew that her husband was
+immediately behind her with the American. There had been within her at
+that moment something of a broad, comprehensive feeling, mingled with
+the more limited personal feeling of anger against another woman’s
+successful impertinence, a sentiment of revolt in which womanhood seemed
+to rise up against the selfish tyrannies of men. As she had walked
+in the crowd, and heard for an instant Miss Schley’s drawlling voice
+speaking to her husband, she had felt as if the forbidding of the
+acquaintance between herself and Rupert Carey had been an act of
+tyranny, as if the acquaintance between Miss Schley and her husband were
+a worse act of tyranny. The feeling was wholly unreasonable, of course.
+How could Lord Holme know that she wished to impose a veto, even as
+he had? And what reason was there for such a veto? That lay deep down
+within her as woman’s instinct. No man could have understood it.
+
+And now Lord Holme had gone out in the dead of the night to thrash
+Carey.
+
+She began to think about Carey.
+
+How disgusting he had been. A drunken man must be one of two
+things--either terrible or absurd. Carey had been absurd--disgusting
+and absurd. It had been better for him if he had been terrible. But
+mumblings and tears! She remembered what she had said of Carey to Robin
+Pierce--that something in his eyes, one of those expressions which are
+the children of the eyes, or of the lines about the eyes, told her that
+he was capable of doing something great. What an irony that her remark
+to Robin had been succeeded by such a scene! And she heard again the
+ugly sound of Carey’s incoherent exclamations, and felt again the limp
+clasp of his hot, weak hand, and saw again the tears running over his
+flushed, damp face. It was all very nauseous. And yet--had she been
+wrong in what she had said of him? Did she even think that she had been
+wrong now, after what had passed?
+
+What kind of great action had she thought he would be capable of if a
+chance to do something great were thrown in his way? She said to herself
+that she had spoken at random, as one perpetually speaks in Society. And
+then she remembered Carey’s eyes. They were ugly eyes. She had always
+thought them ugly. Yet, now and then, there was something in them,
+something to hold a woman--no, perhaps not that--but something to
+startle a woman, to make her think, wonder, even to make her trust. And
+the scene which had just occurred, with all its weakness, its fatuity,
+its maundering display of degradation and the inability of any
+self-government, had not somehow destroyed the impression made upon
+Lady Holme by that something in Carey’s eyes. What she had said to Robin
+Pierce she might not choose ever to say again. She would not choose
+ever to say it again--of that she was certain--but she had not ceased to
+think it.
+
+A conviction based upon no evidence that could be brought forward to
+convince anyone is the last thing that can be destroyed in a woman’s
+heart.
+
+It was nearly six o’clock when Lady Holme heard a step coming up the
+stairs. She was still sitting in the deep chair, and had scarcely moved.
+The step startled her. She put her hands on the arms of the chair and
+leaned forward. The step passed her bedroom. She heard the door of the
+dressing-room opened and then someone moving about.
+
+“Fritz!” she called. “Fritz!”
+
+There was no answer. She got up and went quickly to the dressing-room.
+Her husband was there in his shirt sleeves. His evening coat and
+waistcoat were lying half on a chair, half on the floor, and he was in
+the act of unfastening his collar. She looked into his face, trying to
+read it.
+
+“Well?” she said. “Well?”
+
+“Go to bed!” he said brutally.
+
+“What have you done?”
+
+“That’s my business. Go to bed. D’you hear?”
+
+She hesitated. Then she said:
+
+“How dare you speak to me like that? Have you seen Mr. Carey?”
+
+Lord Holme suddenly took his wife by the shoulders; pushed her out of
+the room, shut the door, and locked it.
+
+They always slept in the same bedroom. Was he not going to bed at all?
+What had happened? Lady Holme could not tell from his face or manner
+anything of what had occurred. She looked at her clock and saw her
+husband had been out of the house for two hours. Indignation and
+curiosity fought within her; and she became conscious of an excitement
+such as she had never felt before. Sleep was impossible, but she got
+into bed and lay there listening to the noises made by her husband in
+his dressing-room. She could just hear them faintly through the door.
+Presently they ceased. A profound silence reigned. There was a sofa
+in the dressing-room. Could he be trying to sleep on it? Such a thing
+seemed incredible to her. For Lord Holme, although he could rough it
+when he was shooting or hunting, at home or abroad, and cared little for
+inconvenience when there was anything to kill, was devoted to comfort in
+ordinary life, and extremely exigent in his own houses. For nothing, for
+nobody, had Lady Holme ever known him to allow himself to be put out.
+
+She strained her ears as she lay in bed. For a long time the silence
+lasted. She began to think her husband must have left the dressing-room,
+when she heard a noise as if something--some piece of furniture--had
+been kicked, and then a stentorian “Damn!”
+
+Suddenly she burst out laughing. She shook against the pillows. She
+laughed and laughed weakly; helplessly, till the tears ran down her
+cheeks. And with those tears ran away her anger, the hot, strained
+sensation that had been within her even since the scene at Arkell House.
+If she had womanly pride it melted ignominiously. If she had feminine
+dignity--that pure and sacred panoply which man ignores at his own
+proper peril--it disappeared. The “poor old Fritz” feeling, which was
+the most human, simple, happy thing in her heart, started into vivacity
+as she realised the long legs flowing into air over the edge of the
+short sofa, the pent-up fury--fury of the too large body on the
+too small resting-place--which found a partial vent in the hallowed
+objurgation of the British Philistine.
+
+With every moment that she lay in the big bed she was punishing
+Fritz. She nestled down among the pillows. She stretched out her limbs
+luxuriously. How easy it was to punish a man! Lying there she recalled
+her husband’s words, each detail of his treatment of her since she had
+spoken to Carey. He had called her “a damned shameful woman.” That was
+of all the worst offence. She told herself that she ought to, that
+she must, for that expression alone, hate Fritz for ever. And then,
+immediately, she knew that she had forgiven it already, without effort,
+without thought.
+
+She understood the type with which she had to deal, the absurd
+boyishness that was linked with the brutality of it, the lack of mind
+to give words their true, their inmost meaning. Words are instruments of
+torture, or the pattering confetti of a carnival, not by themselves but
+by the mind that sends them forth. Fritz’s exclamation might have roused
+eternal enmity in her if it had been uttered by another man. Coming from
+Fritz it won its pardon easily by having a brother, “Damn.”
+
+She wondered how long her husband would be ruled by his sense of
+outrage.
+
+Towards seven she heard another movement; another indignant exclamation,
+then the creak of furniture, a step, a rattling at the door. She turned
+on her side towards the wall, shut her eyes and breathed lightly and
+regularly. The key revolved, the door opened and closed, and she heard
+feet shuffling cautiously over the carpet. A moment and Fritz was in
+bed. Another moment, a long sigh, and he was asleep.
+
+Lady Holme still lay awake. Now that her attention was no longer fixed
+upon her husband’s immediate proceedings she began to wonder again what
+had happened between him and Rupert Carey. She would find out in the
+morning.
+
+And presently she too slept.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+IN the morning Lord Holme woke very late and in a different humour. Lady
+Holme was already up, sitting by a little table and pouring out tea,
+when he stretched himself, yawned, turned over, uttered two or three
+booming, incohorent exclamations, and finally raised himself on one arm,
+exhibiting a touzled head and a pair of blinking eyes, stared solemnly
+at his wife’s white figure and at the tea-table, and ejaculated:
+
+“Eh?”
+
+“Tea?” she returned, lifting up the silver teapot and holding it towards
+him with an encouraging, half-playful gesture.
+
+Lord Holme yawned again, put up his hands to his hair, and then looked
+steadily at the teapot, which his wife was moving about in the sunbeams
+that were shining in at the window. The morning was fine.
+
+“Tea, Fritz?”
+
+He smiled and began to roll out of bed. But the action woke up his
+memory, and when he was on his feet he looked at his wife again more
+doubtfully. She saw that he was beginning, sleepily but definitely,
+to consider whether he should go on being absolutely furious about the
+events of the preceding night, and acted with promptitude.
+
+“Don’t be frightened,” she said quickly. “I’ve made up my mind to
+forgive you. You’re only a great schoolboy after all. Come along.”
+
+She began to pour out the tea. It made a pleasant little noise falling
+into the cup. The sun was wonderfully bright in the pretty room, almost
+Italian in its golden warmth. Lady Holme’s black Pomeranian, Pixie,
+stood on its hind legs to greet him. He came up to the sofa, still
+looking undecided, but with a wavering light of dawning satisfaction in
+his eyes.
+
+“You behaved damned badly last night,” he growled.
+
+He sat down beside his wife with a bump. She put up her hand to his
+rough, brown cheek.
+
+“We both behaved atrociously,” she answered. “There’s your tea.”
+
+She poured in the cream and buttered a thin piece of toast. Lord Holme
+sipped. As he put the cup down she held the piece of toast up to his
+mouth. He took a bite.
+
+“And we both do the Christian act and forgive each other,” she added.
+
+He leaned back. Sleep was flowing away from him, full consciousness of
+life and events returning to him.
+
+“What made you speak to that feller?” he said.
+
+“Drink your tea. I don’t know. He looked miserable at being avoided,
+and--”
+
+“Miserable! He was drunk. He’s done for himself in London, and pretty
+near done for you too.”
+
+As he thought about it all a cloud began to settle over his face. Lady
+Holme saw it and said:
+
+“That depends on you, Fritz.”
+
+She nestled against him, put her hand over his, and kept on lifting his
+hand softly and then letting it fall on his knee, as she went on:
+
+“That all depends on you.”
+
+“How?”
+
+He began to look at her hand and his, following their movements almost
+like a child.
+
+“If we are all right together, obviously all right, very, very
+par-ti-cu-lar-ly all right--voyez vous, mon petit chou?--they will think
+nothing of it. ‘Poor Mr. Carey! What a pity the Duke’s champagne is so
+good!’ That’s what they’ll say. But if we--you and I--are not on
+perfect terms, if you behave like a bear that’s been sitting on a wasps’
+nest--why then they’ll say--they’ll say--”
+
+“What’ll they say?”
+
+“They’ll say, ‘That was really a most painful scene at the Duke’s. She’s
+evidently been behaving quite abominably. Those yellow women always
+bring about all the tragedies--’”
+
+“Yellow women!” Lord Holme ejaculated.
+
+He looked hard at his wife. It was evident that his mind was tacking.
+
+“Miss Schley heard what you said to the feller,” he added.
+
+“People who never speak hear everything--naturally.”
+
+“How d’you mean--never speak? Why, she’s full of talk.”
+
+“How well she listened to him!” was Lady Holme’s mental comment.
+
+“If half the world heard it doesn’t matter if you and I choose it
+shouldn’t. Unless--”
+
+“Unless what?”
+
+“Unless you did anything last night--afterwards--that will make a
+scandal?”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+“Did you?”
+
+“That’s all right.”
+
+He applied himself with energy to the toast. Lady Holme recognised, with
+a chagrin which she concealed, that Lord Holme was not going to allow
+himself to be “managed” into any revelation. She recognised it so
+thoroughly that she left the subject at once.
+
+“We’d better forgive and forget,” she said. “After all, we are married
+and I suppose we must stick together.”
+
+There was a clever note of regret in her voice.
+
+“Are you sorry?” Lord Holme said, with a manner that suggested a
+readiness to be surly.
+
+“For what?”
+
+“That we’re married?”
+
+She sat calmly considering.
+
+“Am I? Well, I must think. It’s so difficult to be sure. I must compare
+you with other men--”
+
+“If it comes to that, I might do a bit of comparin’ too.”
+
+“I should be the last to prevent you, old boy. But I’m sure you’ve often
+done it already and always made up your mind afterwards that she wasn’t
+quite up to the marrying mark.”
+
+“Who wasn’t?”
+
+“The other--horrid creature.”
+
+He could not repress a chuckle.
+
+“You’re deuced conceited,” he said.
+
+“You’ve made me so.”
+
+“I--how?”
+
+“By marrying me first and adoring me afterwards.”
+
+They had finished tea and were no longer preoccupied with cups and
+saucers. It was very bright in the room, very silent. Lord Holme looked
+at his wife and remembered how much she was admired by other men, how
+many men would give--whatever men are ready to give--to see her as she
+was just then. It occurred to him that he would have been rather a fool
+if he had yielded to his violent impulse and shut her out of the house
+the previous night.
+
+“You’re never to speak to that cad again,” he said. “D’you hear?”
+
+“Whisper it close in my ear and I’ll try to hear. Your voice is
+so--what’s your expression--so infernally soft.”
+
+He put his great arm round her.
+
+“D’you hear?”
+
+“I’m trying.”
+
+“I’ll make you.”
+
+Whether Lord Holme succeeded or not, Lady Holme had no opportunity--even
+if she desired it--of speaking to Rupert Carey for some time. He left
+London and went up to the North to stay with his mother. The only person
+he saw before he went was Robin Pierce. He came round to Half Moon
+Street early on the afternoon of the day after the Arkell House Ball.
+Robin was at home and Carey walked in with his usual decision. He was
+very pale, and his face looked very hard. Robin received him coldly
+and did not ask him to sit down. That was not necessary, of course. But
+Robin was standing by the door and did not move back into the room.
+
+“I’m going North to-night,” said Carey.
+
+“Are you?”
+
+“Yes. If you don’t mind I’ll sit down.”
+
+Robin said nothing. Carey threw himself into an armchair.
+
+“Going to see the mater. A funny thing--but she’s always glad to see
+me.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“Mothers have a knack that way. Lucky for sons like me.”
+
+There was intense bitterness in his voice, but there was a sound of
+tenderness too. Robin shut the door but did not sit down.
+
+“Are you going to be in the country long?”
+
+“Don’t know. What time did you leave Arkell House last night?”
+
+“Not till after Lady Holme left.”
+
+“Oh!”
+
+He was silent for a moment, biting his red moustache.
+
+“Were you in the hall after the last lancers?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“You weren’t?”
+
+He spoke quickly, with a sort of relief, hesitated then added
+sardonically:
+
+“But of course you know--and much worse than the worst. The art of
+conversation isn’t dead yet, whatever the--perhaps you saw me being got
+out?”
+
+“No, I didn’t.”
+
+“But you do know?”
+
+“Naturally.”
+
+“I say, I wish you’d let me have--”
+
+He checked himself abruptly, and muttered:
+
+“Good God! What a brute I am.”
+
+He sprang up and walked about the room. Presently he stopped in front of
+the statuette of the “_Danseuse de Tunisie_.”
+
+“Is it the woman that does it all, or the fan?” he said. “I don’t know.
+Sometimes I think it’s one, and sometimes the other. Without the fan
+there’s purity, what’s meant from the beginning--”
+
+“By whom?” said Robin. “I thought you were an atheist?”
+
+“Oh, God! I don’t know what I am.”
+
+He turned away from the statuette.
+
+“With the fan there’s so much more than purity, than what was meant to
+complete us--as devils--men. But--mothers don’t carry the fan. And I’m
+going North to-night.”
+
+“Do you mean to say that Lady Holme--?”
+
+Robin’s voice was stern.
+
+“Why did she say that to me?”
+
+“What did she say?”
+
+“That she wished to speak to me, to dance with me.”
+
+“She said that? How can you know?”
+
+“Oh, I wasn’t so drunk that I couldn’t hear the voice from Eden. Pierce,
+you know her. She likes you. Tell her to forgive as much as she can.
+Will you? And tell her not to carry the fan again when fools like me are
+about.”
+
+And then, without more words, he went out of the room and left Robin
+standing alone.
+
+Robin looked at the statuette, and remembered what Sir Donald Ulford
+had said directly he saw it--“Forgive me, that fan makes that statuette
+wicked.”
+
+“Poor old Carey!” he murmured.
+
+His indignation at Carey’s conduct, which had been hot, had nearly died
+away.
+
+“If I had told him what she said about him at supper!” he thought.
+
+And then he began to wonder whether Lady Holme had changed her mind on
+that subject. Surely she must have changed it. But one never knew--with
+women. He took up his hat and gloves and went out. If Lady Holme was in
+he meant to give her Carey’s message. It was impossible to be jealous of
+Carey now.
+
+Lady Holme was not in.
+
+As Robin walked away from Cadogan Square he was not sure whether he was
+glad or sorry that he had not been able to see her.
+
+After his cup of early morning tea Lord Holme had seemed to be “dear
+old Fritz” again, and Lady Holme felt satisfied with herself despite the
+wagging tongues of London. She knew she had done an incautious thing.
+She knew, too, that Carey had failed her. Her impulse had been to use
+him as a weapon. He had proved a broken reed. And this failure on his
+part was likely to correct for ever her incautious tendencies. That
+was what she told herself, with some contempt for men. She did not
+tell herself that the use to which she had intended to put Carey was an
+unworthy one. Women as beautiful, and as successful in their beauty, as
+she was seldom tell themselves these medicinal truths.
+
+She went about as usual, and on several occasions took Lord Holme with
+her. And though she saw a light of curiosity in many eyes, and saw lips
+almost forced open by the silent questions lurking within many minds,
+it was as she had said it would be. The immediate future had been in
+Fritz’s hands, and he had made it safe enough.
+
+He had made it safe. Even the Duchess of Arkell was quite charming, and
+laid the whole burden of blame--where it always ought to be laid,
+of course--upon the man’s shoulders. Rupert Carey was quite done
+for socially. Everyone said so. Even Upper Bohemia thought blatant
+intemperance--in a Duke’s house--an unnecessary defiance flung at the
+Blue Ribbon Army. Only Amalia Wolfstein, who had never succeeded in
+getting an invitation to Arkell House, remarked that “It was probably
+the champagne’s fault. She had always noticed that where the host and
+hostess were dry the champagne was apt to be sweet.”
+
+Yes, Fritz had made it safe, but:
+
+Circumstances presently woke in Lady Holme’s mind a rather disagreeable
+suspicion that though Fritz had “come round” with such an admirable
+promptitude he had reserved to himself a right to retaliate, that he
+perhaps presumed to fancy that her defiant action, and its very public
+and unpleasant result, gave to him a greater license than he had
+possessed before.
+
+Some days after the early morning tea Lord Holme said to his wife:
+
+“I say, Vi, we’ve got nothing on the first, have we?”
+
+There was a perceptible pause before she replied.
+
+“Yes, we have. We’ve accepted a dinner at Brayley House.”
+
+Lord Holme looked exceedingly put out.
+
+“Brayley House. What rot!” he exclaimed. “I hate those hind-leg affairs.
+Why on earth did you accept it?”
+
+“Dear boy, you told me to. But why?”
+
+“Why what?”
+
+“Why are you so anxious to be free for the first?”
+
+“Well, it’s Miss Schley’s _debut_ at the British. Everyone’s goin’ and
+Laycock says--”
+
+“I’m not very interested in Mr. Laycock’s aphorisms, Fritz. I prefer
+yours, I truly do.”
+
+“Oh, well, I’m as good as Laycock, I know. Still--”
+
+“You’re a thousand times better. And so everybody’s going, on Miss
+Schley’s first night? I only wish we could, but we can’t. Let’s put up
+with number two. We’re free on the second.”
+
+Lord Holme did not look at all appeased.
+
+“That’s not the same thing,” he said.
+
+“What’s the difference? She doesn’t change the play, I suppose?”
+
+“No. But naturally on the first night she wants all her friends to come
+up to the scratch, muster round--don’t you know?--and give her a hand.”
+
+“And she thinks your hand, being enormous, would be valuable? But we
+can’t throw over Brayley House.”
+
+Lord Holme’s square jaw began to work, a sure sign of acute irritation.
+
+“If there’s a dull, dreary house in London, it’s Brayley House,” he
+grumbled. “The cookin’s awful--poison--and the wine’s worse. Why, last
+time Laycock was there they actually gave him--”
+
+“Poor dear Mr. Laycock! Did they really? But what can we do? I’m sure I
+don’t want to be poisoned either. I love life.”
+
+She was looking brilliant. Lord Holme began to straddle his legs.
+
+“And there’s the box!” he said. “A box next the stage that holds six in
+a row can’t stand empty on a first night, eh? It’d throw a damper on the
+whole house.”
+
+“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand. What box?”
+
+“Hang it all!--ours.”
+
+“I didn’t know we had a box for this important social function.”
+
+Lady Holme really made a great effort to keep the ice out of her voice,
+but one or two fragments floated in nevertheless.
+
+“Well, I tell you I’ve taken a box and asked Laycock--”
+
+The reiterated mention of this hallowed name was a little too much for
+Lady Holme’s equanimity.
+
+“If Mr. Laycock’s going the box won’t be empty. So that’s all right,”
+ she rejoined. “Mr. Laycock will make enough noise to give the critics a
+lead. And I suppose that’s all Miss Schley wants.”
+
+“But it isn’t!” said Lord Holme, violently letting himself down at the
+knees and shooting himself up again.
+
+“What does she want?”
+
+“She wants you to be there.”
+
+“Me! Why?”
+
+“Because she’s taken a deuce of a fancy to you.”
+
+“Really!”
+
+An iceberg had entered the voice now.
+
+“Yes, thinks you the smartest woman in London, and all that. So you
+are.”
+
+“I’m very sorry, but even the smartest woman in London can’t throw over
+the Brayley’s. Take another box for the second.”
+
+Lord Holme looked fearfully sulky and lounged out of the room.
+
+On the following morning he strode into Lady Holme’s boudoir about
+twelve with a radiant face.
+
+“It’s all right!” he exclaimed. “Talk of diplomatists! I ought to be an
+ambassador.”
+
+He flung himself into a chair, grinning with satisfaction like a
+schoolboy.
+
+“What is it?” asked Lady Holme, looking up from her writing-table.
+
+“I’ve been to Lady Brayley, explained the whole thing, and got us both
+off. After all, she was a friend of my mother’s, and knew me in kilts
+and all that, so she ought to be ready to do me a favour. She looked
+a bit grim, but she’s done it. You’ve--only got to tip her a note of
+thanks.”
+
+“You’re mad then, Fritz!”
+
+Lady Holme stood up suddenly.
+
+“Never saner.”
+
+He put one hand into the breast pocket of his coat and pulled out an
+envelope.
+
+“Here’s what she says to you.”
+
+Lady Holme tore the note open.
+
+
+            “BRAYLEY HOUSE, W.
+
+  “DEAR VIOLA,--Holme tells me you made a mistake when you accepted
+  my invitation for the first, and that you have long been pledged
+  to be present on that date at some theatrical performance or other.
+  I am sorry I did not know sooner, but of course I release you with
+  pleasure from your engagement with me, and I have already filled up
+  your places.--Believe me, yours always sincerely,
+
+            “MARTHA BRAYLEY.”
+
+
+Lady Holme read this note carefully, folded it up, laid it quietly on
+the writing-table and repeated:
+
+“You’re mad, Fritz.”
+
+“What d’you mean--mad?”
+
+“You’ve made Martha Brayley my enemy for life.”
+
+“Rubbish!”
+
+“I beg your pardon. And for--for--”
+
+She stopped. It was wiser not to go on. Perhaps her face spoke for her,
+even to so dull an observer as Lord Holme, for he suddenly said, with a
+complete change of tone:
+
+“I forgave you about Carey.”
+
+“Oh, I see! You want a _quid pro quo_. Thank you, Fritz.”
+
+“Don’t forget to tip Lady Brayley a note of thanks,” he said rather
+loudly, getting up from his chair.
+
+“Oh, thanks! You certainly ought to be an ambassador--at the court of
+some savage monarch.”
+
+He said nothing, but walked out of the room whistling the refrain about
+Ina.
+
+When he had gone Lady Holme sat down and wrote two notes. One was to
+Lady Brayley and was charmingly apologetic, saying that the confusion
+was entirely owing to Fritz’s muddle-headedness, and that she was in
+despair at her misfortune--which was almost literally true. The other
+was to Sir Donald Ulford, begging him to join them in their box on the
+first, and asking whether it was possible to persuade Mr. and Mrs. Leo
+Ulford to come with him. If he thought so she would go at once and leave
+cards on Mrs. Ulford, whom she was longing to know.
+
+Both notes went off by hand before lunch.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE Ulfords accepted for the first. Lady Holme left cards on Mrs.
+Leo and told her husband that the box was filled up. He received the
+information with indifference. So long as his wife was there to please
+Miss Schley, and Mr. Laycock to “give her a hand and show ‘em all
+whether she was popular,” he was satisfied. Having gained his point,
+he was once again in excellent humour. Possibly Lady Holme would have
+appreciated his large gaieties more if she had not divined their cause.
+But she expressed no dissatisfaction with them, and indeed increased
+them by her own brilliant serenity during the days that intervened
+between the Martha Brayley incident and the first night.
+
+Lord Holme had no suspicion that during these days she was inwardly
+debating whether she would go to the theatre or not.
+
+It would be very easy to be unwell. She was going out incessantly and
+could be over-fatigued. She could have woman’s great stand-by in moments
+of crisis--a bad attack of neuralgia. It was the simplest matter in the
+world. The only question was--all things considered, was it worth while?
+By “all things considered” she meant Leo Ulford. The touch of Fritz in
+him made him a valuable ally at this moment. Fritz and Miss Schley were
+not going to have things quite all their own way. And then Mrs. Leo! She
+would put Fritz next the ear-trumpet. She had enough sense of humour to
+smile to herself at the thought of him there. On the whole, she fancied
+the neuralgia would not attack her at the critical instant.
+
+Only when she thought of what her husband had said about the American’s
+desire for her presence did she hesitate again. Her suspicions were
+aroused. Miss Schley was not anxious that she should be conspicuously
+in the theatre merely because she was the smartest woman in London. That
+was certain. Besides, she was not the smartest woman in London. She was
+far too well-born to be that in these great days of the _demi-mondaine_.
+She remembered Robin Pierce’s warning at the Arkell House
+ball--“Consider yourselves enemies for no reasons or secret woman’s
+reasons. It’s safer.”
+
+When do women want the bulky, solid reasons obtusely demanded by men
+before they can be enemies? Where man insists on an insult, a blow, they
+will be satisfied with a look--perhaps not even at them but only at the
+skirt of their gown--with a turn of the head, with nothing at all. For
+what a man calls nothing can be the world and all that there is in it
+to a woman. Lady Holme knew that she and the American had been enemies
+since the moment when the latter had moved with the tiny steps that
+so oddly caricatured her own individual walk down the stairs at the
+Carlton. She wanted no tiresome reasons; nor did Miss Schley. Robin was
+right, of course. He understood women. But then--?
+
+Should she go to the theatre?
+
+The night came and she went. Whether an extraordinary white lace gown,
+which arrived from Paris in the morning, and fitted too perfectly for
+words, had anything to do with the eventual decision was not known to
+anybody but herself.
+
+Boxes are no longer popular in London except at the Opera. The British
+Theatre was new, and the management, recognising that people prefer
+stalls, had given up all the available space to them, and only left room
+for two large boxes, which faced each other on a level with the dress
+circle and next the stage. Lord Holme had one. Mrs. Wolfstein had taken
+the other.
+
+Miss Schley’s personal success in London brought together a rather
+special audience. There were some of the usual people who go to first
+nights--critics, ladies who describe dresses, fashionable lawyers and
+doctors. But there were also numbers of people who are scarcely ever
+seen on these occasions, people who may be found in the ground and grand
+tier boxes at Covent Garden during the summer season. These thronged the
+stalls, and every one of them was a dear friend of Lady Holme’s.
+Among them were Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Sally Perceval with her
+magnificently handsome and semi-idiotic husband, old Lady Blower, in a
+green cap that suggested the bathing season, Robin Pierce and Mr. Bry.
+Smart Americans were scattered all over the house. Most of them had
+already seen the play in New York during the preceding winter, and
+nearly everyone in the stalls had seen the French original in Paris. The
+French piece had been quite shocking and quite delicious. Every Royalty
+_de passage_ in Paris had been to see it, and one wandering monarch
+had gone three nights running, and had laughed until his
+gentleman-in-waiting thought the heir to his throne was likely to
+succeed much sooner than was generally expected.
+
+The Holmes came in early. Lady Holme hated arriving anywhere early, but
+Lord Holme was in such a prodigious fuss about being in plenty of time
+to give Miss Schley a “rousin’ welcome,” that she yielded to his bass
+protestations, and had the satisfaction of entering their box at least
+seven minutes before the curtain went up. The stalls, of course, were
+empty, and as they gradually filled she saw the faces of her friends
+looking up at her with an amazement that under other circumstances might
+have been amusing, but under these was rather irritating. Mr. Laycock
+arrived two minutes after they did, and was immediately engaged in a
+roaring conversation by Fritz. He was a man who talked a great deal
+without having anything to say, who had always had much success with
+women, perhaps because he had always treated them very badly, who
+dressed, danced and shot well, and who had never, even for a moment,
+really cared for anyone but himself. A common enough type.
+
+Sir Donald appeared next, looking even more ghostly than usual. He sat
+down by Lady Holme, a little behind her. He seemed depressed, but the
+expression in his pale blue eyes when they first rested upon her made
+her thoroughly realise one thing--that it was one of her conquering
+nights. His eyes travelled quickly from her face to her throat, to
+her gown. She wore no jewels. Sir Donald had a fastidious taste in
+beauty--the taste that instinctively rejects excess of any kind. Her
+appeal to it had never been so great as to-night. She knew it, and felt
+that she had never found Sir Donald so attractive as to-night.
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Ulford came in just as the curtain was going up, and the
+introductions had to be gone through with a certain mysterious caution,
+and the sitting arrangements made with as little noise as possible. Lady
+Holme managed them deftly. Mr. Laycock sat nearest the stage, then Leo
+Ulford next to her, on her right. Sir Donald was on her other side,
+Mrs. Leo sat in the place of honour, with Lord Holme between her and Sir
+Donald. She was intensely pink. Even her gown was of that colour, and
+she wore a pink aigrette in her hair, fastened with a diamond ornament.
+Her thin, betraying throat was clasped by the large dog-collar she had
+worn at Arkell House. She cast swift, bird-like glances, full of a
+sort of haggard inquiry, towards Lady Holme as she settled down in
+her arm-chair in the corner. Lord Holme looked at her and at her
+ear-trumpet, and Lady Holme was glad she had decided not to have
+neuralgia. There are little compensations about all women even in the
+tiresome moments of their lives. Whether this moment was going to be
+tiresome or not she could not yet decide.
+
+The Wolfstein party had come in at the same time as the Leo Ulfords,
+and the box opposite presented an interesting study of Jewish types.
+For Mrs. Wolfstein and “Henry” were accompanied by four immensely
+rich compatriots, three of whom were members of the syndicate that was
+“backing” Miss Schley. The fourth was the wife of one of them, and a
+cousin of Henry’s, whom she resembled, but on a greatly enlarged
+scale. Both she and Amalia blazed with jewels, and both were slightly
+overdressed and looked too animated. Lady Holme saw Sir Donald glance at
+them, and then again at her, and began to think more definitely that the
+evening would not be tiresome.
+
+Leo Ulford seemed at present forced into a certain constraint by the
+family element in the box. He looked at his father sideways, then at
+Lady Holme, drummed one hand on his knee, and was evidently uncertain of
+himself. During the opening scene of the play he found an opportunity to
+whisper to Lady Holme:
+
+“I never can talk when pater’s there!”
+
+She whispered back:
+
+“We mustn’t talk now.”
+
+Then she looked towards the stage with apparent interest. Mrs. Leo sat
+sideways with her trumpet lifted up towards her ear, Lord Holme had
+his eyes fixed on the stage, and held his hands ready for the “rousin’
+welcome.” Mr. Laycock, at the end of the row, was also all attention.
+Lady Holme glanced from one to the other, and murmured to Sir Donald
+with a smile:
+
+“I think we shall find to-night that the claque is not abolished in
+England.”
+
+He raised his eyebrows and looked distressed.
+
+“I have very little hope of her acting,” he murmured back.
+
+Lady Holme put her fan to her lips.
+
+“‘Sh! No sacrilege!” she said in an under voice.
+
+She saw Leo Ulford shoot an angry glance at his father. Mrs. Wolfstein
+nodded and smiled at her from the opposite box, and it struck Lady Holme
+that her smile was more definitely malicious than usual, and that her
+large black eyes were full of a sort of venomous anticipation. Mrs.
+Wolfstein had at all times an almost frightfully expressive face.
+To-night it had surely discarded every shred of reticence, and
+proclaimed an eager expectation of something which Lady Holme could not
+divine, but which must surely be very disagreeable to her. What could it
+possibly be? And was it in any way connected with Miss Schley’s anxiety
+that she should be there that night? She began to wish that the American
+would appear, but Miss Schley had nothing to do in the first act till
+near the end, and then had only one short scene to bring down the
+curtain. Lady Holme knew this because she had seen the play in Paris.
+She thought the American version very dull. The impropriety had been
+removed and with it all the fun. People began to yawn and to assume
+the peculiar blank expression--the bankrupt face--that is indicative of
+thwarted anticipation. Only the Americans who had seen the piece in New
+York preserved their lively looks and an appearance of being on the _qui
+vive_.
+
+Lord Holme’s blunt brown features gradually drooped, seemed to become
+definitely elongated. As time went on he really began to look almost
+lantern-jawed. He bent forward and tried to catch Mr. Laycock’s eye and
+to telegraph an urgent question, but only succeeded in meeting the surly
+blue eyes of Leo Ulford, whom he met to-night for the first time. In
+his despair he turned towards Mrs. Leo, and at once encountered the
+ear-trumpet. He glanced at it with apprehension, and, after a moment of
+vital hesitation, was about to pour into it the provender, “Have you
+any notion when she’s comin’ on?” when there was a sudden rather languid
+slapping of applause, and he jerked round hastily to find Miss Schley
+already on the stage and welcomed without any of the assistance which he
+was specially there to give. He lifted belated hands, but met a glance
+from his wife which made him drop them silently. There was a satire in
+her eyes, a sort of humorous, half-urging patronage that pierced the
+hide of his self-satisfied and lethargic mind. She seemed sitting there
+ready to beat time to his applause, nod her head to it as to a childish
+strain of jigging music. And this apparent preparation for a semi-comic,
+semi-pitiful benediction sent his hands suddenly to his knees.
+
+He stared at the stage. Miss Schley was looking wonderfully like Viola,
+he thought, on the instant, more like than she did in real life; like
+Viola gone to the bad, though become a very reticent, yet very definite,
+_cocotte_. There was not much in the scene, but Miss Schley, without
+apparent effort and with a profound demureness, turned the dulness of
+it into something that was--not French, certainly not that--but that was
+quite as outrageous as the French had been, though in a different way;
+something without definite nationality, but instinct with the slyness
+of acute and unscrupulous womankind. The extraordinary thing was the
+marvellous resemblance this acute and unscrupulous womanhood bore to
+Lady Holme’s, even through all its obvious difference from hers. All her
+little mannerisms of voice, look, manner and movement, were there but
+turned towards commonness, even towards a naive but very self-conscious
+impropriety. Had she been a public performer instead of merely a woman
+of the world, the whole audience must have at once recognised the
+imitation. As it was, her many friends in the house noticed it, and
+during the short progress of the scene various heads were turned in her
+direction, various faces glanced up at the big box in which she sat,
+leaning one arm on the ledge, and looking towards Miss Schley with an
+expression of quiet observation--a little indifferent--on her white
+face. Even Sir Donald, who was next to her, and who once--in the most
+definite moment of Miss Schley’s ingenious travesty--looked at her for
+an instant, could not discern that she was aware of what was amusing or
+enraging all her acquaintances.
+
+Naturally she had grasped the situation at once, had discovered at once
+why Miss Schley was anxious for her to be there. As she sat in the
+box looking on at this gross impertinence, she seemed to herself to be
+watching herself after a long _degringolade_, which had brought her, not
+to the gutter, but to the smart restaurant, the smart music-hall,
+the smart night club; the smart everything else that is beyond the
+borderland of even a lax society. This was Miss Schley’s comment upon
+her. The sting of it lay in this fact, that it followed immediately
+upon the heels of the unpleasant scene at Arkell House. Otherwise, she
+thought it would not have troubled her. Now it did trouble her. She felt
+not only indignant with Miss Schley. She felt also secretly distressed
+in a more subtle way. Miss Schley’s performance was calculated, coming
+at this moment, to make her world doubtful just when it had been turned
+from doubt. A good caricature fixes the attention upon the oddities, or
+the absurdities, latent in the original. But this caricature did more.
+It suggested hidden possibilities which she, by her own indiscreet
+action at the ball, had made perhaps to seem probabilities to many
+people.
+
+Here, before her friends, was set a woman strangely like her, but
+evidently a bad woman. Lady Holme was certain that the result of Miss
+Schley’s performance would be that were she to do things now which, done
+before the Arkell House ball and this first night, would not have been
+noticed, or would have been merely smiled at, they would be commented
+upon with acrimony, exaggerated, even condemned.
+
+Miss Schley was turning upon her one of those mirrors which distorts by
+enlarging. Society would be likely to see her permanently distorted, and
+not only in mannerisms but in character.
+
+It happened that this fact was specially offensive to her on this
+particular evening, and at this particular moment of her life.
+
+While she sat there and watched the scene run its course, and saw,
+without seeming to see, the effect it had upon those whom she knew well
+in the house--saw Mrs. Wolfstein’s eager delight in it, Lady Manby’s
+broad amusement, Robin Pierce’s carefully-controlled indignation,
+Mr. Bry’s sardonic and always cold gratification, Lady Cardington’s
+surprised, half-tragic wonder--she was oscillating between two courses,
+one a course of reserve, of stern self-control and abnegation, the other
+a course of defiance, of reckless indulgence of the strong temper that
+dwelt within her, and that occasionally showed itself for a moment, as
+it had on the evening of Miss Filberte’s fiasco. That temper was flaming
+now unseen. Was she going to throw cold water over the flame, or to fan
+it? She did not know.
+
+When the curtain fell, the critics, who sometimes seem to enjoy
+personally what they call very sad and disgraceful in print, were
+smiling at one another. The blank faces of the men about town in the
+stalls were shining almost unctuously. The smart Americans were busily
+saying to everyone, “Didn’t we say so?” The whole house was awake. Miss
+Schley might not be much of an actress. Numbers of people were already
+bustling about to say that she could not act at all. But she had
+banished dulness. She had shut the yawning lips, and stopped that uneasy
+cough which is the expression of the relaxed mind rather than of the
+relaxed throat.
+
+Lady Holme sat back a little in the box.
+
+“What d’you think of her?” she said to Sir Donald. “I think she’s rather
+piquant, not anywhere near Granier, of course, but still--”
+
+“I think her performance entirely odious,” he said, with an unusual
+emphasis that was almost violent. “Entirely odious.”
+
+He got up from his seat, striking his thin fingers against the palms of
+his hands.
+
+“Vulgar and offensive,” he said, almost as if to himself, and with a
+sort of passion. “Vulgar and offensive!”
+
+Suddenly he turned away and went out of the box.
+
+“I say--”
+
+Lady Holme, who had been watching Sir Donald’s disordered exit, looked
+round to Leo.
+
+“I say--” he repeated. “What’s up with pater?”
+
+“He doesn’t seem to be enjoying the play.”
+
+Leo Ulford looked unusually grave, even thoughtful, as if he were
+pondering over some serious question. He kept his blue eyes fixed upon
+Lady Holme. At last he said, in a voice much lower than usual:
+
+“Poor chap!”
+
+“Who’s a poor chap?”
+
+Leo jerked his head towards the door.
+
+“Your father? Why?”
+
+“Why--at his age!”
+
+The last words were full of boyish contempt.
+
+“I don’t understand.”
+
+“Yes, you do. To be like that at his age. What’s the good? As if--” He
+smiled slowly at her. “I’m glad I’m young,” he said.
+
+“I’m glad you’re young too,” she answered. “But you’re quite wrong about
+Sir Donald.”
+
+She let her eyes rest on his. He shook his head.
+
+“No, I’m not. I guessed it that day at the Carlton. All through lunch he
+looked at you.”
+
+“But what has all this to do with Miss Schley’s performance?”
+
+“Because she’s something like you, but low down, where you’d never go.”
+
+He drew his chair a little closer to hers.
+
+“Would you?” he added, almost in a whisper.
+
+Mr. Laycock, who was in raptures over Miss Schley’s performance, had got
+up to speak to Fritz, but found the latter being steadily hypnotised by
+Mrs. Leo’s trumpet, which went up towards his mouth whenever he opened
+it. He bellowed distracted nothings but could not make her hear,
+obtaining no more fortunate result than a persistent flutter of pink
+eyelids, and a shrill, reiterated “The what? The what?”
+
+A sharp tap came presently on the box door, and Mrs. Wolfstein’s painted
+face appeared. Lord Holme sprang up with undisguised relief.
+
+“What d’you think of Pimpernel? Ah, Mr. Laycock--I heard your faithful
+hands.”
+
+“Stunnin’!” roared Lord Holme, “simply stunnin’!”
+
+“Stunnin’! stunnin’!” exclaimed Mr. Laycock; “Rippin’! There’s no other
+word. Simply rippin’!”
+
+“The what? The what?” cried Mrs. Ulford.
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein bent down, with expansive affection, over Lady Holme’s
+chair, and clasped the left hand which Lady Holme carelessly raised to a
+level with her shoulder.
+
+“You dear person! Nice of you to come, and in such a gown too! The
+angels wear white lace thrown together by Victorine--it is Victorine? I
+was certain!--I’m sure. D’you like Pimpernel?”
+
+Her too lustrous eyes--even Mrs. Wolfstein’s eyes looked
+over-dressed--devoured Lady Holme, and her large, curving features were
+almost riotously interrogative.
+
+“Yes,” Lady Holme said. “Quite.”
+
+“She’s startled everybody.”
+
+“Startled!--why?”
+
+“Oh, well--she has! There’s money in it, don’t you think?”
+
+“Henry,” who had accompanied his wife, and who was standing sideways
+at the back of the box looking like a thief in the night, came a step
+forward at the mention of money.
+
+“I’m afraid I’m no judge of that. Your husband would know better.”
+
+“Plenty of money,” said “Henry,” in a low voice that seemed to issue
+from the bridge of his nose; “it ought to bring a good six thousand
+into the house for the four weeks. That’s--for Miss Schley--for the
+Syndicate--ten per cent. on the gross, and twenty-five per cent.--”
+
+He found himself in mental arithmetic.
+
+“The--swan with the golden eggs!” said Lady Holme, lightly, turning once
+more to Leo Ulford. “You mustn’t kill Miss Schley.”
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein looked at Mr. Laycock and murmured to him:
+
+“Pimpernel does any killing that’s going about--for herself. What d’you
+say, Franky?”
+
+They went out of the box together, followed by “Henry,” who was still
+buzzing calculations, like a Jewish bee.
+
+Lord Holme resolutely tore himself from the ear-trumpet, and was
+preparing to follow, with the bellowed excuse that he was “sufferin’
+from toothache” and had been ordered to “do as much smokin’ as
+possible,” when the curtain rose on the second act.
+
+Miss Schley was engaged to a supper-party that evening and did not wish
+to be late. Lord Holme sat down again looking scarcely pleasant.
+
+“Do as much--the what?” cried Mrs. Ulford, holding the trumpet at right
+angles to her pink face.
+
+Leo Ulford leant backwards and hissed “Hush!” at her. She looked at him
+and then at Lady Holme, and a sudden expression of old age came into her
+bird-like face and seemed to overspread her whole body. She dropped the
+trumpet and touched the diamonds that glittered in the front of her low
+gown with trembling hands.
+
+Mr. Laycock slipped into the box when the curtain had been up two or
+three minutes, but Sir Donald did not return.
+
+“I b’lieve he’s bolted,” Leo whispered to Lady Holme. “Just like him.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Oh!--I’m here, for one thing.”
+
+He looked at her victoriously.
+
+“You’ll have a letter from him to-morrow. Poor old chap!”
+
+He spoke contemptuously.
+
+For the first time Lord Holme seemed consciously and unfavourably
+observant of his wife and Leo. His under-jaw began to move. But Miss
+Schley came on to the stage again, and he thrust his head eagerly
+forward.
+
+During the rest of the evening Miss Schley did not relax her ingenious
+efforts of mimicry, but she took care not to make them too prominent.
+She had struck her most resonant note in the first act, and during the
+two remaining acts she merely kept her impersonation to its original
+lines. Lady Holme watched the whole performance imperturbably, but
+before the final curtain fell she knew that she was not going to
+throw cold water on that flame which was burning within her. Fritz’s
+behaviour, perhaps, decided which of the two actions should be carried
+out--the douching or the fanning. Possibly Leo Ulford had something to
+say in the matter too. Or did the faces of friends below in the stalls
+play their part in the silent drama which moved step by step with the
+spoken drama on the stage? Lady Holme did not ask questions of herself.
+When Mr. Laycock and Fritz were furiously performing the duties of a
+claque at the end of the play, she got up smiling, and nodded to Mrs.
+Wolfstein in token of her pleasure in Miss Schley’s success, her opinion
+that it had been worthily earned. As she nodded she touched one hand
+with the other, making a silent applause that Mrs. Wolfstein and all her
+friends might see. Then she let Leo Ulford put on her cloak and called
+pretty words down Mrs. Leo’s trumpet, all the while nearly deafened by
+Fritz’s demonstrations, which even outran Mr. Laycock’s.
+
+When at last they died away she said to Leo:
+
+“We are going on to the Elwyns. Shall you be there?”
+
+He stood over her, while Mrs. Ulford watched him, drooping her head
+sideways.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“We can talk it all over quietly. Fritz!”
+
+“What’s that about the Elwyns?” said Lord Holme.
+
+“I was telling Mr. Ulford that we are going on there.”
+
+“I’m not. Never heard of it.”
+
+Lady Holme was on the point of retorting that it was he who had told her
+to accept the invitation on the ground that “the Elwyns always do you
+better than anyone in London, whether they’re second-raters or not,” but
+a look in Leo Ulford’s eyes checked her.
+
+“Very well,” she said. “Go to the club if you like; but I must peep
+in for five minutes. Mrs. Ulford, didn’t you think Miss Schley rather
+delicious--?”
+
+She went out of the box with one hand on a pink arm, talking gently into
+the trumpet.
+
+“You goin’ to the Elwyns?” said Lord Holme, gruffly, to Leo Ulford as
+they got their coats and prepared to follow.
+
+“Depends on my wife. If she’s done up--”
+
+“Ah!” said Lord Holme, striking a match, and holding out his cigarette
+case, regardless of regulations.
+
+A momentary desire to look in at the Elwyns’ possessed him. Then he
+thought of a supper-party and forgot it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+MRS. WOLFSTEIN was right. There was money in Miss Schley’s performance.
+Her sly impropriety appealed with extraordinary force to the peculiar
+respectability characteristic of the British temperament, and her
+celebrity, hitherto mainly social, was suddenly and enormously
+increased. Already a popular person, she became a popular actress, and
+was soon as well-known to the world in the streets and the suburbs as
+to the world in the drawing-rooms of Mayfair. And this public celebrity
+greatly increased the value that was put upon her in private--especially
+the value put upon her by men.
+
+The average man adores being connected openly with the woman who is the
+rage of the moment. It flatters his vanity and makes him feel good
+all over. It even frequently turns his head and makes him almost as
+intoxicated as a young girl with adulation received at her first ball.
+
+The combination of Miss Schley herself and Miss Schley’s celebrity--or
+notoriety--had undoubtedly turned Lord Holme’s head. Perhaps he had not
+the desire to conceal the fact. Certainly he had not the finesse. He
+presented his turned head to the world with an audacious simplicity that
+was almost laughable, and that had in it an element of boyishness not
+wholly unattractive to those who looked on--the casual ones to whom
+even the tragedies of a highly-civilised society bring but a quiet and
+cynical amusement.
+
+Lady Holme was not one of these. Her strong temper was token of a vivid
+temperament. Till now this vivid temperament had been rocked in the
+cradle of an easy, a contented, a very successful life. Such storms as
+had come to her had quickly passed away. The sun had never been far off.
+Her egoism had been constantly flattered. Her will had been perpetually
+paramount. Even the tyranny of Lord Holme had been but as the tyranny
+of a selfish, thoughtless, pleasure-seeking boy who, after all, was
+faithful to her and was fond of her. His temperamental indifference to
+any feelings but his own had been often concealed and overlaid by his
+strong physical passion for his wife’s beauty, his profound satisfaction
+in having carried off and in possessing a woman admired and sought by
+many others.
+
+Suddenly life presented to Lady Holme its seamy side; Fate attacking
+her in her woman’s vanity, her egoism, even in her love. The vision
+startled. The blow stung. She was conscious of confusion, of cloud, then
+of a terrible orderliness, of a clear light. In the confusion she seemed
+to hear voices never heard before, voices that dared to jeer at her; in
+the cloud to see phantoms of gigantic size menacing her, impending over
+her. The orderliness, the clear light were more frightful to her. They
+left less to her imagination; had, as it were, no ragged edges. In
+them she faced a definite catastrophe, saw it whole, as one sees a near
+object in the magical atmosphere of the East, outlined with burning
+blue, quivering with relentless gold. She saw herself in the dust,
+pelted, mocked at.
+
+That seemed at first to be incredible. But she saw it so plainly that
+she could not even pretend to herself that she was deceived by some
+unusual play of light or combination of shadows. What she saw--was:
+
+Her husband had thrown off his allegiance to her and transferred his
+admiration, perhaps his affection, to the woman who had most deftly and
+delicately insulted her in the face of all her world. And he had done
+this with the most abominable publicity. That was what she saw in a
+clear light like the light of the East. That was what sent a lash across
+her temperament, scarring it perhaps, but waking it into all it could
+ever have of life. In each woman there is hidden a second woman, more
+fierce and tender, more evil and good, more strong and fervent than the
+woman who hides her in the ordinary hours of life; a woman who weeps
+blood where the other woman weeps tears, who strikes with a flaming
+sword where the other woman strikes with a willow wand.
+
+This woman now rose up in Lady Holme, rose up to do battle.
+
+The laughing, frivolous world was all unconscious of her. Lord Holme was
+unconscious of her. But she was at last fully conscious of herself.
+
+This woman remembered Robin Pierce’s odd belief and the light words
+with which she had chastised it. He had persistently kept faith in, and
+sought for, a far-away being. But she was a being of light and glory.
+His kernel of the husk was still a siren, but a siren with a heart, with
+an exquisite imagination, with a fragrance of dreams about her, a lilt
+of eternal music in her voice, the beaming, wonder of things unearthly
+in her eyes. Poor Robin! Lady Holme found it in her heart to pity him
+as she realised herself. But then she turned her pity aside and
+concentrated it elsewhere. The egoism of her was not dead though the
+hidden woman had sprung up in vivid life. Her intellect was spurred
+into energy by the suffering of her pride and of her heart. Memory was
+restless and full of the passion of recall.
+
+She remembered the night when she softly drew up the hood of her
+dressing-gown above her head and, rocking herself to and fro, murmured
+the “Allah-Akbar” of a philosophic fatalist--“I will live for the day. I
+will live for the night.” What an absurd patter that was on the lips
+of a woman. And she remembered the conversation with Fritz that had
+preceded her monologue. She had asked him then whether he could love
+her if her beauty were taken from her. It had never occurred to her that
+while her beauty still remained her spell upon him might be weakened,
+might be broken. That it was broken now she did not say to herself.
+All she did say to herself was that she must strike an effective blow
+against this impertinent woman. She had some pride but not enough to
+keep her passive. She was not one of those women who would rather lose
+all they have than struggle to keep it. She meant to struggle, but she
+had no wish that the world should know what she was doing. Pride rose
+in her when she thought of cold eyes watching the battle, cold voices
+commenting on it--Amalia Wolfstein’s eyes, Mr. Bry’s voice, a hundred
+other eyes and voices. Her quickened intellect, her woman’s heart would
+teach her to be subtle. The danger lay in her temper. But since the
+scene at Arkell House she had thoroughly realised its impetuosity and
+watched it warily as one watches an enemy. She did not intend to be
+ruined by anything within her. The outside chances of life were many
+enough and deadly enough to deal with. Strength and daring were needed
+to ward them off. The chances that had their origin within the soul,
+the character--not really chances at all--must be controlled, foreseen,
+forestalled.
+
+And yet she had not douched the flame of defiance which she had felt
+burning within her on the night of Pimpernel Schley’s first appearance
+on the London stage. She had fanned it. At the Elwyns’ ball she had
+fanned it. Temper had led her that night. Deliberately, and knowing
+perfectly well who was her guide, she had let it lead her. She had been
+like a human being who says, “To do this will be a sin. Very well,
+I choose to sin. But I will sin carefully.” At the Elwyns she had
+discovered why her husband had not come with her. She had stayed late to
+please Leo Ulford. Mr. Laycock had come in about two in the morning and
+had described to Leo the festivity devised by Lord Holme in honour
+of Miss Schley, at which he had just been present. And Leo Ulford had
+repeated the description to her. She had deceived him into thinking that
+she had known of the supper-party and approved of it. But, after this
+deception, she had given a looser rein to her temper. She had let
+herself go, careless whether she set the poor pink eyelids of Mrs. Leo
+fluttering or not.
+
+The hint of Fritz which she recognised in Leo Ulford had vaguely
+attracted her to him from the first. How her world would have laughed at
+such a domestic sentiment! She found herself wondering whether it were
+Miss Schley’s physical resemblance to her which had first attracted
+Fritz, the touch of his wife in a woman who was not his wife and who was
+what men call “a rascal.” Perhaps Fritz loved Miss Schley’s imitation
+of her. She thought a great deal about that--turning it over and over in
+her mind, bringing to bear on it the white light of her knowledge of her
+husband’s character. Did he see in the American his wife transformed,
+made common, sly, perhaps wicked, set on the outside edge of decent
+life, or further--over the border? And did he delight in that? If
+so, ought she not to--? Then her mind was busy. Should she change? If
+herself changed were his ideal, why not give him what he wanted? Why let
+another woman give it to him? But at this point she recognised a fact
+recognised by thousands of women with exasperation, sometimes with
+despair--that men would often hate in their wives the thing that draws
+them to women not their wives. The Pimpernel Schleys of the world
+know this masculine propensity of seeking different things--opposites,
+even--in the wife and the woman beyond the edge of the hearthstone, a
+propensity perhaps more tragic to wives than any other that exists in
+husbands. And having recognised this fact, Lady Holme knew that it would
+be worse than useless for her to imitate Miss Schley’s imitation of her.
+Then, travelling along the road of thought swiftly as women in such a
+case always travel, she reached another point. She began to consider
+the advice of Robin Pierce, given before she had begun to feel with such
+intensity, to consider it as a soldier might consider a plan of campaign
+drawn up by another.
+
+Should she, instead of descending, of following the demure steps of the
+American to the lower places, strive to ascend?
+
+Could she ascend? Was Robin Pierce right? She thought for a long time
+about his conception of her. The singing woman; would she be the most
+powerful enemy that could confront Miss Schley? And, if she would be,
+could the singing woman be made continuous in the speech and the actions
+of the life without music? She remembered a man she had known who
+stammered when he spoke, but never stammered when he sang. And she
+thought she resembled this man. Robin Pierce had always believed that
+she could speak without the stammer even as she sang without it. She had
+never cared to. She had trusted absolutely in her beauty. Now her trust
+was shaken. She thought of the crutch.
+
+Realising herself she had said within herself, “Poor Robin!” seeing
+perhaps the tigress where he saw the angel. Now she asked herself
+whether the angel could conquer where the tigress might fail. People had
+come round her like beggars who have heard the chink of gold and she had
+showed them an empty purse. Could she show them something else? And if
+she could, would her husband join the beggars? Would he care to have
+even one piece of gold?
+
+Whether Lord Holme’s obvious infatuation had carried him very far she
+did not know. She did not stop to ask. A woman capable, as she was, of
+retrospective jealousy, an egoist accustomed to rule, buffeted in
+heart and pride, is swift not sluggish. And then how can one know these
+things? Jealousy rushes because it is ignorant.
+
+Lord Holme and she were apparently on good terms. She was subtle, he was
+careless. As she did not interfere with him his humour was excellent.
+She had carried self-control so far as never to allude to the fact
+that she knew about the supper-party. Yet it had actually got into the
+papers. Paragraphs had been written about a wonderful ornament of ice,
+representing the American eagle perched on the wrist of a glittering
+maiden, which had stood in the middle of the table. Of course she had
+seen them, and of course Lord Holme thought she had not seen them as she
+had never spoken of them. He went his way rejoicing, and there seemed
+to be sunshine in the Cadogan Square house. And meanwhile the world was
+smiling at the apparent triumph of impertinence, and wondering how long
+it would last, how far it would go. The few who were angry--Sir Donald
+was one of them--were in a mean minority.
+
+Robin Pierce was angry too, but not with so much single-heartedness as
+was Sir Donald. It could not quite displease him if the Holmes drifted
+apart. Yet he was fond enough of Lady Holme, and he was subtle enough,
+to be sorry for any sorrow of hers, and to understand it--at any rate,
+partially--without much explanation. Perhaps he would have been more
+sorry if Leo Ulford had not come into Lady Holme’s life, and if the
+defiance within her had not driven her into an intimacy that distressed
+Mrs. Leo and puzzled Sir Donald.
+
+Robin’s time in London was very nearly at an end. The season was at its
+height. Every day was crowded with engagements. It was almost impossible
+to find a quiet moment even to give to a loved one. But Robin was
+determined to have at least one hour with Lady Holme before he started
+for Italy. He told her so, and begged her to arrange it. She put him off
+again and again, then at last made an engagement, then broke it. In her
+present condition of mind to break faith with a man was a pleasure with
+a bitter savour. But Robin was not to be permanently avoided. He had
+obstinacy. He meant to have his hour, and perhaps Lady Holme always
+secretly meant that he should have it. At any rate she made another
+appointment and kept it.
+
+She came one afternoon to his house in Half Moon Street. She had never
+been there before. She had never meant to go there. To do so was an
+imprudence. That fact was another of the pleasures with a bitter savour.
+
+Robin met her at the head of the stairs, with an air of still excitement
+not common in his look and bearing. He followed her into the blue room
+where Sir Donald had talked with Carey. The “_Danseuse de Tunisie_”
+ still presided over it, holding her little marble fan. The open
+fireplace was filled with roses. The tea-table was already set by the
+great square couch. Robin shut the door and took out a matchbox.
+
+“I am going to make tea,” he said.
+
+“Bachelor fashion?”
+
+She sat down on the couch and looked round quickly, taking in all the
+details of the room. He saw her eyes rest on the woman with the fan, but
+she said nothing about it. He lit a silver spirit lamp and then sat down
+beside her.
+
+“At last!” he said.
+
+Lady Holme leaned back in her corner. She was dressed in black, with a
+small, rather impertinent black toque, in which one pale blue wing of a
+bird stood up. Her face looked gay and soft, and Robin, who had cunning,
+recognised that quality of his in her.
+
+“I oughtn’t to be here.”
+
+“Absurd. Why not?”
+
+“Fritz has a jealous temperament.”
+
+She spoke with a simple naturalness that moved the diplomat within him
+to a strong admiration.
+
+“You can act far better than Miss Schley,” he said, with intentional
+bluntness.
+
+“I love her acting.”
+
+“I’m going away. I shan’t see you for an age. Don’t give me a theatrical
+performance to-day.”
+
+“Can a woman do anything else?”
+
+“Yes. She can be a woman.”
+
+“That’s stupid--or terrible. What a dear little lamp that is! I like
+your room.”
+
+Robin looked at the blue-grey linen on the walls, at the pale blue wing
+in her hat, then at her white face.
+
+“Viola,” he said, leaning forward, “it’s bad to waste anything in this
+life, but the worst thing of all is to waste unhappiness. If I could
+teach you to be niggardly of your tears!”
+
+“What do you mean?”
+
+She spoke with sudden sharpness.
+
+“I never cry. Nothing’s worth a tear,” she added.
+
+“Yes, some things are. But not what you are going to weep for.”
+
+Her face had changed. The gaiety had gone out of it, and it looked
+hesitating.
+
+“You think I am going to shed tears?” she said. “Why?”
+
+“I am glad you let me tell you. For the loss of nothing--a coin that
+never came out of the mint, that won’t pass current anywhere.”
+
+“I’ve lost nothing,” she exclaimed, “nothing. You’re talking nonsense.”
+
+He made no reply, but looked at the small, steady flame of the lamp. She
+followed his eyes, and, when he saw that she was looking at it too, he
+said:
+
+“Isn’t a little, steady flame like that beautiful?”
+
+She laughed.
+
+“When it means tea--yes. Does it mean tea?”
+
+“If you can wait a few minutes.”
+
+“I suppose I must. Have you heard anything of Mr. Carey?”
+
+Robin looked at her narrowly.
+
+“What made you think of him just then?”
+
+“I don’t know. Being here, I suppose. He often comes here, doesn’t he?”
+
+“Then this room holds more of his personality than of mine?”
+
+There was an under sound of vexation in his voice.
+
+“Have you heard anything?”
+
+“No. But no doubt he’s still in the North with his mother.”
+
+“How domestic. I hope there is a stool of repentance in the family
+house.”
+
+“I wonder if you could ever repent of anything.”
+
+“Do you think there is anything I ought to repent of?”
+
+“Oh, yes.”
+
+“What?”
+
+“You might have married a man who knew the truth of you, and you married
+a man incapable of ever knowing it.”
+
+He half expected an outburst of anger to follow his daring speech, but
+she sat quite still, looking at him steadily. She had taken off her
+gloves, and her hands lay lightly, one resting on the other.
+
+“You mean, I might have married you.”
+
+“I’m not worth much, but at least I could never have betrayed the white
+angel in you.”
+
+She leaned towards him and spoke earnestly, almost like a child to an
+older person in whom it has faith.
+
+“Do you think such an angel could do anything in--in this sort of
+world?”
+
+“Modern London?”
+
+She nodded, keeping her eyes still on him. He guessed at once of what
+she was thinking.
+
+“Do anything--is rather vague,” he replied evasively. “What sort of
+thing?”
+
+Suddenly she threw off all reserve and let her temper go.
+
+“If an angel were striving with a common American, do you mean to tell
+me you don’t know which would go to the wall in our world?” she cried.
+“Robin, you may be a thousand things, but you aren’t a fool. Nor am
+I--not _au fond_. And yet I have thought--I have wondered--”
+
+She stopped.
+
+“What?” he asked.
+
+“Whether, if there is an angel in me, it mightn’t be as well to trot it
+out.”
+
+The self-consciousness of the slang prevented him from hating it.
+
+“Ah!” he said. “When have you wondered?”
+
+“Lately. It’s your fault. You have insisted so much upon the existence
+of the celestial being that at last I’ve become almost credulous. It’s
+very absurd and I’m still hanging back.”
+
+“Call credulity belief and you needn’t be ashamed of it.”
+
+“And if I believe, what then?”
+
+“Then a thousand things. Belief sheds strength through all the tissues
+of the mind, the heart, the temperament. Disbelief sheds weakness. The
+one knits together, the other dissolves.”
+
+“There are people who think angels frightfully boring company.”
+
+“I know.”
+
+“Well then?”
+
+Suddenly Robin got up and spoke almost brutally.
+
+“Do you think I don’t see that you are trying to find out from me what I
+think would be the best means of--”
+
+The look in her face stopped him.
+
+“I think the water is boiling,” he said, going over to the lamp.
+
+“It ought to bubble,” she answered quietly.
+
+He lifted up the lid of the silver bowl and peeped in.
+
+“It is bubbling.”
+
+For a moment he was busy pouring the water into the teapot. While he did
+this there was a silence between them. Lady Holme got up from the sofa
+and walked about the room. When she came to the “_Danseuse de Tunisie_”
+ she stopped in front of it.
+
+“How strange that fan is,” she said.
+
+Robin shut the lid of the teapot and came over to her.
+
+“Do you like it?”
+
+“The fan?”
+
+“The whole thing?”
+
+“It’s lovely, but I fancy it would have been lovelier without the fan.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+She considered, holding her head slightly on one side and half closing
+her eyes.
+
+“The woman’s of eternity, but the fan’s of a day,” she said presently.
+“It belittles her, I think. It makes her _chic_ when she might have
+been--”
+
+She stopped.
+
+“Throw away your fan!” he said in a low, eager voice.
+
+“I?”
+
+“Yes. Be the woman, the eternal woman. You’ve never been her yet, but
+you could be. Now is the moment. You’re unhappy.”
+
+“No,” she said sharply.
+
+“Yes, you are. Viola, don’t imagine I can’t understand. You care for him
+and he’s hurting you--hurting you by being just himself, all he can ever
+be. It’s the fan he cares for.”
+
+“And you tell me to throw it away!”
+
+She spoke with sudden passion. They stood still for a moment in front of
+the statuette, looking at each other silently. Then Robin said, with a
+sort of bitter surprise:
+
+“But you can’t love him like that!”
+
+“I do.”
+
+It gave her an odd, sharp pleasure to speak the truth to him.
+
+“What are you going to do, then?” he asked, after a pause.
+
+He spoke without emotion, accepting the situation.
+
+“To do? What do you mean?”
+
+“Come and sit down. I’ll tell you.”
+
+He took her hand and led her back to the sofa. When she had sat down, he
+poured out tea, put in cream and gave it to her.
+
+“Nothing to eat,” she said.
+
+He poured out his tea and sat down in a chair opposite to her, and close
+to her.
+
+“May I dare to speak frankly?” he asked. “I’ve known you so long, and
+I’ve--I’ve loved you very much, and I still do.”
+
+“Go on!” she answered.
+
+“You thought your beauty was everything, that so long as it lasted you
+were safe from unhappiness. Well, to-day you are beautiful, and yet--”
+
+“But what does he care for?” she said. “What do men care for? You
+pretend that it’s something romantic, something good even. Really, it’s
+impudent--just that--cold and impudent. You’re a fool, Robin, you’re a
+fool!”
+
+“Am I? Thank God there are men--and men. You can’t be what Carey said.”
+
+For once he had spoken incautiously. He had blurted out something he
+never meant to say.
+
+“Mr. Carey!” she exclaimed quickly, curiously. “What did Mr. Carey say I
+was?”
+
+“Oh--”
+
+“No, Robin, you are to tell me. No diplomatic lies.”
+
+A sudden, almost brutal desire came into him to tell her the truth, to
+revel in plain speaking for once, and to see how she would bear it.
+
+“He said you were an egoist, that you were fine enough in your brilliant
+selfishness to stand quite alone--”
+
+A faint smile moved the narrow corners of her lips at the last words. He
+went on.
+
+“--That your ideal of a real man, the sort of man a woman loses her head
+for, was--”
+
+He stopped. Carey’s description of the Lord Holme and Leo Ulford type
+had not been very delicate.
+
+“Was--?” she said, with insistence. “Was--?”
+
+Robin thought how she had hurt him, and said:
+
+“Carey said, a huge mass of bones, muscles, thews, sinews, that cares
+nothing for beauty.”
+
+“Beauty! That doesn’t care for beauty! But then--?”
+
+“Carey meant--yes, I’m sure Carey meant real beauty.”
+
+“What do you mean by ‘real beauty’?”
+
+“An inner light that radiates outward, but whose abiding-place is
+hidden--perhaps. But one can’t say. One can only understand and love.”
+
+“Oh. And Mr. Carey said that. Was he--was he at all that evening as he
+was at Arkell House? Was he talking nonsense or was he serious?”
+
+“Difficult to say! But he was not as he was at Arkell House. Which knows
+you best--Carey or I?”
+
+“Neither of you. I don’t know myself.”
+
+“What are you going to do?”
+
+“I don’t know. The only thing I know is that you can’t tell me what to
+do.”
+
+“No, I can’t.”
+
+“But perhaps I can tell you.”
+
+She put down her cup and looked at him with a sort of grave kindness
+that he had never seen in her face before.
+
+“What to do?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Give up loving the white angel. Perhaps it isn’t there. Perhaps it
+doesn’t exist. And if it does--perhaps it’s a poor, feeble thing that’s
+no good to me, no good to me.”
+
+Suddenly she put her arms on the back of the couch, leaned her face on
+them and began to cry gently.
+
+Robin was terribly startled. He got up, stretched out his hands to her
+in an impulsive gesture, then drew them back, turned and went to the
+window.
+
+She was crying for Fritz.
+
+That was absurd and horrible. Yet he knew that those tears came from
+the heart of the hidden woman he had so long believed in, proved her
+existence, showed that she could love.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+AS Lady Holme had foreseen, the impertinent mimicry of Miss Schley
+concentrated a great deal of attention upon the woman mimicked. Many
+people, accepting the American’s cleverness as a fashionable fact, also
+accepted her imitation as the imitation of a fact more surreptitious,
+and credited Lady Holme with a secret leading towards the improper never
+before suspected by them. They remembered the break between the Holmes
+and Carey, the strange scene at the Arkell House ball, and began to
+whisper many things of Lady Holme, and to turn a tide of pity and of
+sympathy upon her husband. On this tide Lord Holme and the American
+might be said to float merrily like corks, unabashed in the eye of the
+sun. Their intimacy was condoned on all sides as a natural result of
+Lady Holme’s conduct. Most of that which had been accomplished by
+Lord and Lady Holme together after their reconciliation over the first
+breakfast was undone. The silent tongue began to wag, and to murmur the
+usual platitudes about the poor fellow who could not find sympathy at
+home and so was obliged, against his will, to seek for it outside.
+
+All this Lady Holme had foreseen as she sat in her box at the British
+Theatre.
+
+The wrong impression of her was enthroned. She had to reckon with it.
+This fact, fully recognised by her, made her wish to walk warily where
+otherwise her temper might have led her to walk heedlessly. She wanted
+to do an unusual thing, to draw her husband’s attention to an intimacy
+which was concealed from the world--the intimacy between herself and Leo
+Ulford.
+
+After her visit to the house in Half Moon Street she began to see a
+great deal of Leo Ulford. Carey had been right when he said that they
+would get on together. She understood him easily and thoroughly, and
+for that very reason he was attracted by her. Men delight to feel that a
+woman is understanding them; women that no man can ever understand them.
+Under the subtle influence of Lady Holme’s complete comprehension of
+him, Leo Ulford’s nature expanded, stretched itself as his long legs
+stretched themselves when his mind was purring. There was not much in
+him to reveal, but what there was he revealed, and Lady Holme seemed to
+be profoundly interested in the contents of his soul.
+
+But she was not interested in the contents of his soul in public places
+on which the world’s eye is fixed. She refused to allow Leo to do what
+he desired, and assumed an air of almost possessive friendship before
+Society. His natural inclination for the blatant was firmly checked
+by her. She cared nothing for him really, but her woman’s instinct had
+divined that he was the type of man most likely to rouse the slumbering
+passion of Fritz, if Fritz were led to suspect that she was attracted
+to him. Men like Lord Holme are most easily jealous of the men who most
+closely resemble them. Their conceit leads them to put an exaggerated
+value upon their own qualities in others, upon the resemblance to their
+own physique exhibited by others.
+
+Leo Ulford was rather like a younger and coarser Lord Holme. In him Lady
+Holme recognised an effective weapon for the chastisement, if not for
+the eventual reclamation, of her husband. It was characteristic of her
+that this was the weapon she chose, the weapon she still continued to
+rely on even after her conversation with Robin Pierce. Her faith in
+white angels was very small. Perpetual contact with the world of to-day,
+with life as lived by women of her order, had created within her far
+other faiths, faiths in false gods, a natural inclination to bow the
+knee in the house of Rimmon rather than before the altars guarded by the
+Eternities.
+
+And then--she knew Lord Holme; knew what attracted him, what stirred
+him, what moved him to excitement, what was likely to hold him. She felt
+sure that he and such men as he yield the homage they would refuse to
+the angel to the siren. Instead of seeking the angel within herself,
+therefore, she sought the siren. Instead of striving to develope that
+part of her which was spiritual, she fixed all her attention upon that
+part of her which was fleshly, which was physical. She neglected the
+flame and began to make pretty patterns with the ashes.
+
+Robin came to bid her good-bye before leaving London for Rome. The
+weeping woman was gone. He looked into the hard, white face of a woman
+who smiled. They talked rather constrainedly for a few minutes. Then
+suddenly he said:
+
+“Once it was a painted window, now it’s an iron shutter.”
+
+He got up from his chair and clasped his hands together behind his back.
+
+“What on earth do you mean?” she asked, still smiling.
+
+“Your face,” he answered. “One could see you obscurely before. One can
+see nothing now.”
+
+“You talk great nonsense, Robin. It’s a good thing you’re going back to
+Rome.”
+
+“At least I shall find the spirit of beauty there,” he said, almost with
+bitterness. “Over here it is treated as if it were Jezebel. It’s trodden
+down. It’s thrown to the dogs.”
+
+“Poor spirit!”
+
+She laughed lightly.
+
+“Do you understand what they’re saying of you?” he went on.
+
+“Where?”
+
+“All over London.”
+
+“Perhaps.”
+
+“But--do you?”
+
+“Perhaps I don’t care to.”
+
+“They’re saying--‘Poor thing! But it’s her own fault.’”
+
+There was a silence. In it he looked at her hard, mercilessly. She
+returned his gaze, still smiling.
+
+“And it is your own fault,” he went on after a moment. “If you had
+been yourself she couldn’t have insulted you first and humiliated you
+afterwards. Oh, how I hate it! And yet--yet there are moments when I am
+like the others, when I feel--‘She has deserved it.’”
+
+“When will you be in Rome?” she said.
+
+“And even now,” he continued, ignoring her remark, “even now, what are
+you doing? Oh, Viola, you’re a prey to the modern madness for crawling
+in the dirt instead of walking upright in the sun. You might be a
+goddess and you prefer to be an insect. Isn’t it mad of you? Isn’t it?”
+
+He was really excited, really passionate. His face showed that. There
+was fire in his eyes. His lips worked convulsively when he was not
+speaking. And yet there was just a faint ring of the accomplished
+orator’s music in his voice, a music which suggests a listening ear--and
+that ear the orator’s own.
+
+Perhaps she heard it. At any rate his passionate attack did not seem to
+move her.
+
+“I prefer to be what I am,” was all she said.
+
+“What you are! But you don’t know what you are.”
+
+“And how can you pretend to know?” she asked. “Is a man more subtle
+about a woman than she is about herself?”
+
+He did not answer for a moment. Then he said bluntly:
+
+“Promise me one thing before I go away.”
+
+“I don’t know. What is it?”
+
+“Promise me not to--not to--”
+
+He hesitated. The calm of her face seemed almost to confuse him.
+
+“Well?” she said. “Go on.”
+
+“Promise me not to justify anything people are saying, not to justify it
+with--with that fellow Ulford.”
+
+“Good-bye,” she answered, holding out her hand.
+
+He recognised that the time for his advice had gone by, if it had ever
+been.
+
+“What a way--what a way for us to--” he almost stammered.
+
+He recovered his self-possession with an effort and took her hand.
+
+“At least,” he said in a low, quiet voice, “believe it is less jealousy
+that speaks within me than love--love for you, for the woman you are
+trampling in the dust.”
+
+He looked into her eyes and went out. She did not see him again before
+he left England. And she was glad. She did not want to see him. Perhaps
+it was the first time in her life that the affection of a man whom she
+really liked was distasteful to her. It made her uneasy, doubtful of
+herself just then, to be loved as Robin loved her.
+
+Carey had come back to town, but he went nowhere. He was in bad odour.
+Sir Donald Ulford was almost the only person he saw anything of at this
+time. It seemed that Sir Donald had taken a fancy to Carey. At any rate,
+such friendly feeling as he had did not seem lessened after Carey’s
+exhibition at Arkell House. When Carey returned to Stratton Street, Sir
+Donald paid him a visit and stayed some time. No allusion was made to
+the painful circumstances under which they had last seen each other
+until Sir Donald was on the point of going away. Then he said:
+
+“You have not forgotten that I expect you at Casa Felice towards the end
+of August?”
+
+Carey looked violently astonished.
+
+“Still?” he said.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+Suddenly Carey shot out his hand and grasped Sir Donald’s.
+
+“You aren’t afraid to have a drunken beast like me in Casa Felice! It’s
+a damned dangerous experiment.”
+
+“I don’t think so.”
+
+“It’s your own lookout, you know. I absolve you from the invitation.”
+
+“I repeat it, then.”
+
+“I accept it, then--again.”
+
+Sir Donald went away thoughtfully. When he reached the Albany he found
+Mrs. Leo Ulford waiting for him in tears. They had a long interview.
+
+Many people fancied that Sir Donald looked more ghostly, more faded even
+than usual as the season wore on. They said he was getting too old to
+go about so much as he did, and that it was a pity Society “got such a
+hold” on men who ought to have had enough of it long ago. One night he
+met Lady Holme at the Opera. She was in her box and he in the stalls.
+After the second act she called him to her with a gay little nod of
+invitation. Lady Cardington had been with her during the act, but left
+the box when the curtain fell to see some friends close by. When
+Sir Donald tapped at the door Lady Holme was quite alone. He came in
+quietly--even his walk was rather ghostly--and sat down beside her.
+
+“You don’t look well,” she said after they had greeted each other.
+
+“I am quite well,” he answered, with evident constraint.
+
+“I haven’t seen you to speak to since that little note of yours.”
+
+A very faint colour rose in his faded cheeks.
+
+“After Miss Schley’s first night?” he murmured.
+
+His yellow fingers moved restlessly.
+
+“Do you know that your son told me you would write?” she continued.
+
+She was leaning back in her chair, half hidden by the curtain of the
+box.
+
+“Leo!”
+
+Sir Donald’s voice was almost sharp and startling.
+
+“How should he--you spoke about me then?”
+
+There was a flash of light in his pale, almost colourless eyes.
+
+“I wondered where you had gone, and he said you would write next day.”
+
+“That was all?”
+
+“Why, how suspicious you are!”
+
+She spoke banteringly.
+
+“Suspicious! No--but Leo does not understand me very well. I was rather
+old when he was born, and I have never been able to be much with him. He
+was educated in England, and my duties of course lay abroad.”
+
+He paused, looking at her and moving his thin white moustache. Then, in
+an uneasy voice, he added:
+
+“You must not take my character altogether from Leo.”
+
+“Nor you mine altogether from Miss Schley,” said Lady Holme.
+
+She scarcely knew why she said it. She thought herself stupid,
+ridiculous almost, for saying it. Yet she could not help speaking.
+Perhaps she relied on Sir Donald’s age. Or perhaps--but who knows why
+a woman is cautious or incautious in moments the least expected? God
+guides her, perhaps, or the devil--or merely a bottle imp. Men never
+know, and that is why they find her adorable.
+
+Sir Donald said nothing for a moment, only made the familiar movement
+with his hands that was a sign in him of concealed excitement or
+emotion. His eyes were fixed upon the ledge of the box. Lady Holme was
+puzzled by his silence and, at last, was on the point of making a remark
+on some other subject--Plancon’s singing--when he spoke, like a man
+who had made up his mind firmly to take an unusual, perhaps a difficult
+course.
+
+“I wish to take it from you,” he said. “Give me the right one, not an
+imitation of an imitation.”
+
+She knew at once what he meant and was surprised. Had Leo Ulford been
+talking?
+
+“Lady Holme,” he went on, “I am taking a liberty. I know that. It’s a
+thing I have never done before, knowingly. Don’t think me unconscious
+of what I am doing. But I am an old man, and old men can sometimes
+venture--allowance is sometimes made for them. I want to claim that
+allowance now for what I am going to say.”
+
+“Well?” she said, neither hardly nor gently.
+
+In truth she scarcely knew whether she wished him to speak or not.
+
+“My son is--Leo is not a safe friend for you at this moment.”
+
+Again the dull, brick-red flush rose in his cheeks. There was an odd,
+flattened look just above his cheekbones near his eyes, and the eyes
+themselves had a strange expression as of determination and guilt
+mingled.
+
+“Your son?” Lady Holme said. “But--”
+
+“I do not wish to assume anything, but I--well, my daughter-in-law
+sometimes comes to me.”
+
+“Sometimes!” said Lady Holme.
+
+“Leo is not a good husband,” Sir Donald said. “But that is not the
+point. He is also a bad--friend.”
+
+“Why don’t you say lover?” she almost whispered.
+
+He grasped his knee with one hand and moved the hand rapidly to and fro.
+
+“I must say of him to you that where his pleasure or his vanity is
+concerned he is unscrupulous.”
+
+“Why say all this to a woman?”
+
+“You mean that you know as much as I?”
+
+“Don’t you think it likely?”
+
+“Henrietta--”
+
+“Who is that?”
+
+“My daughter-in-law has done everything for Leo--too much. She gets
+nothing--not even gratitude. I am sorry to say he has no sense of
+chivalry towards women. You know him, I daresay. But do you know him
+thwarted?”
+
+“Ah, you don’t think so badly of me after all?” she said quickly.
+
+“I--I think of you that--that--”
+
+He stopped.
+
+“I think that I could not bear to see the whiteness of your wings
+smirched by a child of mine.” he added.
+
+“You too!” she said.
+
+Suddenly tears started into her eyes.
+
+“Another believer in the angel!” she thought.
+
+“May I come in?”
+
+It was Mr. Bry’s cold voice. His discontented, sleek face was peeping
+round the door.
+
+Sir Donald got up to go.
+
+As Lady Holme drove away from Covent Garden that night she was haunted
+by a feverish, embittering thought:
+
+“Will everyone notice it but Fritz?”
+
+Lord Holme indeed seemed scarcely the same man who had forbidden Carey
+to come any more to his house, who had been jealous of Robin Pierce, who
+had even once said that he almost wished his wife were an ugly woman.
+The Grand Turk nature within him, if not actually dead, was certainly
+in abeyance. He was so intent on his own affairs that he paid no heed
+at all to his wife’s, even when they might be said to be also his. Leo
+Ulford was becoming difficult to manage, and Lord Holme still gaily
+went his way. As Lady Holme thought over Sir Donald’s words she felt a
+crushing weight of depression sink down upon her. The brougham rolled
+smoothly on through the lighted streets. She did not glance out of the
+windows, or notice the passing crowds. In the silence and darkness of
+her own soul she was trying not to feel, trying to think.
+
+A longing to be incautious, to do something startling, desperate, came
+to her.
+
+It was evident that Mrs. Ulford had been complaining to Sir Donald about
+his son’s conduct. With whom? Lady Holme could not doubt that it was
+with herself. She had read, with one glance at the fluttering pink
+eyelids, the story of the Leo Ulford’s _menage_. Now, she was not
+preoccupied with any regret for her own cruelty or for another woman’s
+misery. The egoism spoken of by Carey was not dead in her yet, but very
+much alive. As she sat in the corner of the brougham, pressing herself
+against the padded wall, she was angry for herself, pitiful for herself.
+And she was jealous--horribly jealous. That woke up her imagination,
+all the intensity of her. Where was Fritz to-night? She did not know.
+Suddenly the dense ignorance in which every human being lives, and must
+live to the end of time, towered above her like a figure in a nightmare.
+What do we know, what can we ever know of each other? In each human
+being dwells the most terrible, the most ruthless power that exists--the
+power of silence.
+
+Fritz had that power; stupid, blundering, self-contented Fritz.
+
+She pulled the check-string and gave the order, “Home!”
+
+In her present condition she felt unable to go into Society.
+
+When she got to Cadogan Square she said to the footman who opened the
+door:
+
+“His lordship isn’t in yet?”
+
+“No, my lady.”
+
+“Did he say what time he would be in to-night?”
+
+“No, my lady.”
+
+The man paused, then added:
+
+“His lordship told Mr. Lucas not to wait up.”
+
+“Mr. Lucas” was Lord Holme’s valet.
+
+It seemed to Lady Holme as if there were a significant, even a slightly
+mocking, sound in the footman’s voice. She stared at him. He was a thin,
+swarthy young man, with lantern jaws and a very long, pale chin. When
+she looked at him he dropped his eyes.
+
+“Bring me some lemonade to the drawing-room in ten minutes,” she said.
+
+“Yes, my lady.”
+
+“In ten minutes, not before. Turn on all the lights in the
+drawing-room.”
+
+“Yes, my lady.”
+
+The man went before her up the staircase, turned on the lights, stood
+aside to let her pass and then went softly down. Lady Holme rang for
+Josephine.
+
+“Take my cloak and then go to bed,” she said.
+
+Josephine took the cloak and went out, shutting the door.
+
+“Ten minutes!” Lady Holme said to herself.
+
+She sat down on the sofa on which she had sat for a moment alone after
+her song at the dinner-party, the song murdered by Miss Filberte. The
+empty, brilliantly-lit rooms seemed unusually large. She glanced round
+them with inward-looking eyes. Here she was at midnight sitting quite
+alone in her own house. And she wished to do something decisive,
+startling as the cannon shot sometimes fired from a ship to disperse a
+fog wreath. That was the reason why she had told the footman to come in
+ten minutes. She thought that in ten minutes she might make up her mind.
+If she decided upon doing something that required an emissary the man
+would be there.
+
+She looked at the little silver box she had taken up that night when she
+was angry, then at the grand piano in the further room. The two things
+suggested to her two women--the woman of hot temper and the woman of
+sweetness and romance. What was she to-night, and what was she going to
+do? Nothing, probably. What could she do? Again she glanced round the
+rooms. It seemed to her that she was like an actress in an intense,
+passionate _role_, who is paralysed by what is called in the theatre “a
+stage wait.” She ought to play a tremendous scene, now, at once, but the
+person with whom she was to play it did not come on to the stage. She
+had worked herself up for the scene. The emotion, the passion, the
+force, the fury were alive, were red hot within her, and she could not
+set them free. She remained alone upon the stage in a sort of horror of
+dumbness, a horror of inaction.
+
+The footman came in quietly with the lemonade on a tray. He put it down
+on a table by Lady Holme.
+
+“Is there anything else, my lady?”
+
+She supposed that the question was meant as a very discreet hint to her
+that the man would be glad to go to bed. For a moment she did not reply,
+but kept him waiting. She was thinking rapidly, considering whether she
+would do the desperate thing or not, whether she would summon one of
+the actors for the violent scene her nature demanded persistently that
+night.
+
+After the opera she had been due at a ball to which Leo Ulford was
+going. She had promised to go in to supper with him and to arrive by a
+certain hour. He was wondering, waiting, now, at this moment. She knew
+that. The house was in Eaton Square, not far off. Should she send the
+footman with a note to Leo, saying that she was too tired to come to the
+ball but that she was sitting up at home? That was what she was rapidly
+considering while the footman stood waiting. Leo would come, and
+then--presently--Lord Holme would come. And then? Then doubtless would
+happen the scene she longed for, longed for with a sort of almost crazy
+desire such as she had never felt before.
+
+She glanced up and saw an astonished expression upon the footman’s pale
+face. How long had she kept him there waiting? She had no idea.
+
+“There is nothing else,” she said slowly.
+
+She paused, then added, reluctantly:
+
+“You can go to bed.”
+
+The man went softly out of the room. As he shut the door she breathed
+a deep sigh, that was almost a sob. So difficult had she found it to
+govern herself, not to do the crazy thing.
+
+She poured out the lemonade and put ice into it.
+
+As she did so she made grimaces, absurd grimaces of pain and misery,
+like those on the faces of the two women in Mantegna’s picture of Christ
+and the Marys in the Brera at Milan. They are grotesque, yet wonderfully
+moving in their pitiless realism. But tears fall from the eyes of
+Mantegna’s women and no tears fell from Lady Holme’s eyes. Still making
+grimaces, she sipped the lemonade. Then she put down the glass, leaned
+back on the sofa and shut her eyes. Her face ceased to move, and became
+beautiful again in its stillness. She remained motionless for a long
+time, trying to obtain the mastery over herself. In act she had obtained
+it already, but not in emotion. Indeed, the relinquishing of violence,
+the sending of the footman to bed, seemed to have increased the passion
+within her. And now she felt it rising till she was afraid of being
+herself, afraid of being this solitary woman, feeling intensely and able
+to do nothing. It seemed to her as if such a passion of jealousy, and
+desire for immediate expression of it in action, as flamed within her,
+must wreak disaster upon her like some fell disease, as if she were in
+immediate danger, even in immediate physical danger. She lay still like
+one determined to meet it bravely, without flinching, without a sign of
+cowardice.
+
+But suddenly she felt that she had made a mistake in dismissing the
+footman, that the pain of inaction was too great for her to bear. She
+could not just--do nothing. She could not, and she got up swiftly and
+rang the bell. The man did not return. She pressed the bell again. After
+three or four minutes he came in, looking rather flushed and put out.
+
+“I want you to take a note to Eaton Square,” she said. “It will be ready
+in five minutes.”
+
+“Yes, my lady.”
+
+She went to her writing table and wrote this note to Leo Ulford:
+
+
+  “DEAR MR. ULFORD,--I am grieved to play you false, but I am too
+  tired to-night to come on. Probably you are amusing yourself. I
+  am sitting here alone over such a dull book. One can’t go to bed
+  at twelve, somehow, even if one is tired. The habit of the season’s
+  against early hours and one couldn’t sleep. Be nice and come in for
+  five minutes on your way home, and tell me all about it. I know you
+  pass the end of the square, so it won’t be out of your way.--Yours
+  very sincerely,   V. H.”
+
+
+After writing this note Lady Holme hesitated for a moment, then she went
+to a writing table, opened a drawer and took out a tiny, flat key. She
+enclosed it in two sheets of thick note paper, folded the note also
+round it, and put it into an envelope which she carefully closed.
+After writing Leo Ulford’s name on the envelope she rang again for the
+footman.
+
+“Take this to Eaton Square,” she said, naming the number of the house.
+“And give it to Mr. Ulford yourself. Go in a hansom. When you have given
+Mr. Ulford the note come straight back in the hansom and let me know.
+After that you can go to bed. Do you understand?”
+
+“Yes, my lady.”
+
+The man went out.
+
+Lady Holme stood up to give him the note. She remained standing after he
+had gone. An extraordinary sensation of relief had come to her. Action
+had lessened her pain, had removed much of the pressure of emotion upon
+her heart. For a moment she felt almost happy.
+
+She sat down again and took up a book. It was a book of poems written by
+a very young girl whom she knew. There was a great deal about sorrow in
+the poems, and sorrow was always alluded to as a person; now flitting
+through a forest in the autumn among the dying leaves, now bending over
+a bed, now walking by the sea at sunset watching departing ships, now
+standing near the altar at a wedding. The poems were not good. On the
+other hand, they were not very bad.
+
+They had some grace, some delicacy here and there, now and then a touch
+of real, if by no means exquisite, sentiment. At this moment Lady Holme
+found them soothing. There was a certain music in them and very little
+reality. They seemed to represent life as a pensive phantasmagoria
+of bird songs, fading flowers, dying lights, soft winds and rains and
+sighing echoes.
+
+She read on and on. Sometimes a hard thought intruded itself upon her
+mind--the thought of Leo Ulford with the latch-key of her husband’s
+house in his hand. That thought made the poems seem to her remarkably
+unlike life.
+
+She looked at the clock. The footman had been away long enough to do his
+errand. Just as she was thinking this he came into the room.
+
+“Well?” she said.
+
+“I gave Mr. Ulford the note, my lady.”
+
+“Then you can go to bed. Good-night. I’ll put out the lights here.”
+
+“Thank you, my lady.”
+
+As he went away she turned again to the poems; but now she could not
+read them. Her eyes rested upon them, but her mind took in nothing of
+their meaning. Presently--very soon--she laid the book down and sat
+listening. The footman had shut the drawing-room door. She got up and
+opened it. She wanted to hear the sound of the latch-key being put into
+the front door by Leo Ulford. It seemed to her as if that sound would
+be like the _leit motif_ of her determination to govern, to take her own
+way, to strike a blow against the selfish egoism of men. After opening
+the door she sat down close to it and waited, listening.
+
+Some minutes passed. Then she heard--not the key put into the hall
+door; it had not occurred to her that she was much too far away to hear
+that--but the bang of the door being shut.
+
+Quickly she closed the drawing-room door, went back to the distant sofa,
+sat down upon it and began to turn over the poems once more. She even
+read one quite carefully. As she finished it the door was opened.
+
+She looked up gaily to greet Leo and saw her husband coming into the
+room.
+
+She was greatly startled. It had never occurred to her that Fritz was
+quite as likely to arrive before Leo Ulford as Leo Ulford to arrive
+before Fritz. Why had she never thought of so obvious a possibility? She
+could not imagine. The difference between the actuality and her intense
+and angry conception of what it would be, benumbed her mind for an
+instant. She was completely confused. She sat still with the book of
+poems on her lap, and gazed at Lord Holme as he came towards her, taking
+long steps and straddling his legs as if he imagined he had a horse
+under him. The gay expression had abruptly died away from her face and
+she looked almost stupid.
+
+“Hulloa!” said Lord Holme, as he saw her.
+
+She said nothing.
+
+“Thought you were goin’ to the Blaxtons to-night,” he added.
+
+She made a strong effort and smiled.
+
+“I meant to, but I felt tired after the opera.”
+
+“Why don’t you toddle off to bed then?”
+
+“I feel tired, I don’t feel sleepy.”
+
+Lord Holme stared at her, put his hand into his trousers pocket and
+pulled out his cigarette-case. Lady Holme knew that he had been in a
+good humour when he came home, and that the sight of her sitting up in
+the drawing-room had displeased him. She had seen a change come into his
+face. He had been looking gay. He began to look glum and turned his eyes
+away from her.
+
+“What have you been up to?” she asked, with a sudden light gaiety and
+air of comradeship.
+
+“Club--playin’ bridge,” he answered, lighting a cigarette.
+
+He shot a glance at her sideways as he spoke, a glance that was meant
+to be crafty. If she had not been excited and horribly jealous, such
+a glance would probably have amused her, even made her laugh. Fritz’s
+craft was very transparent. But she could not laugh now. She knew he was
+telling her the first lie that had occurred to him.
+
+“Lucky?” she asked, still preserving her light and casual manner.
+
+“Middlin’,” he jerked out.
+
+He sat down in an armchair and slowly stretched his legs, staring up at
+the ceiling. Lady Holme began to think rapidly, feverishly.
+
+Had he locked the front door when he came in? Very much depended upon
+whether he had or had not. The servants had all gone to bed. Not one of
+them would see that the house was closed for the night. Fritz was a
+very casual person. He often forgot to do things he had promised to do,
+things that ought to be done. On the other hand, there were moments
+when his memory was excellent. If she only knew which mood had been his
+to-night she thought she would feel calmer. The uncertainty in which she
+was made mind and body tingle. If Fritz had remembered to lock the door,
+Leo Ulford would try to get in, fail, and go away. But if he had
+not remembered, at any moment Leo Ulford might walk into the room
+triumphantly with the latch-key in his hand. And it was nearly half-past
+twelve.
+
+She wished intensely that she knew what Fritz had done.
+
+“What’s up?” he said abruptly.
+
+“Up?” she said with an uncontrollable start.
+
+“Yes, with you?”
+
+“Nothing. What d’you mean?”
+
+“Why, you looked as if--don’t you b’lieve I’ve been playin’ bridge?”
+
+“Of course I do. Really, Fritz, how absurd you are!”
+
+It was evident that he, too, was not quite easy to-night. If he had a
+conscience, surely it was pricking him. Fierce anger flamed up again
+suddenly in Lady Holme, and the longing to lash her husband. Yet even
+this anger did not take away the anxiety that beset her, the wish that
+she had not done the crazy thing. The fact of her husband’s return
+before Leo’s arrival seemed to have altered her action, made it far more
+damning. To have been found with Leo would have been compromising, would
+have roused Fritz’s anger. She wanted to rouse his anger. She had meant
+to rouse it. But when she looked at Fritz she did not like the thought
+of Leo walking in at this hour holding the latch-key in his hand. What
+had Fritz done that night to Rupert Carey? What would he do to-night
+if--?
+
+“What the deuce is up with you?”
+
+Lord Holme drew in his legs, sat up and stared with a sort of uneasy
+inquiry which he tried to make hard. She laughed quickly, nervously.
+
+“I’m tired, I tell you. It was awfully hot at the opera.”
+
+She put some more ice into the lemonade, and added:
+
+“By the way, Fritz, I suppose you locked up all right?”
+
+“Locked up what?”
+
+“The front door. All the servants have gone to bed, you know.”
+
+No sooner had she spoken the last words than she regretted them. If Leo
+did get in they took away all excuse. She might have pretended he had
+been let in. He would have had to back her up. It would have been mean
+of her, of course. Still, seeing her husband there, Leo would have
+understood, would have forgiven her. Women are always forgiven such
+subterfuges in unfortunate moments. What a fool she was to-night!
+
+“That don’t matter,” said her husband, shortly.
+
+“But--but it does. You know how many burglaries there are. Why, only
+the other night Mrs. Arthur came home from a ball and met two men on the
+stairs.”
+
+“I pity any men I found on my stairs,” he returned composedly, touching
+the muscle of his left arm with his right hand.
+
+He chuckled.
+
+“They’d be sorry for themselves, I’ll bet,” he added.
+
+He put down his cigarette and took out another slowly, leisurely. Lady
+Holme longed to strike him. His conceited composure added fuel to the
+flame of her anxiety.
+
+“Well, anyhow, I don’t care to run these risks in a place like London,
+Fritz,” she said almost angrily. “Have you locked up or not?”
+
+“Damned if I remember,” he drawled.
+
+She did not know whether he was deliberately trying to irritate her or
+whether he really had forgotten, but she felt it impossible to remain
+any longer in uncertainty.
+
+“Very well, then, I shall go down and see,” she said.
+
+And she laid the book of poems on a table and prepared to get up from
+the sofa.
+
+“Rot!” said Lord Holme; “if you’re nervous, I’ll go.”
+
+She leaned back.
+
+“Very well.”
+
+“In a minute.”
+
+He struck a match and let it out.
+
+“Do go now, there’s a good dog,” she said coaxingly.
+
+He struck another match and held it head downwards.
+
+“You needn’t hurry a feller.”
+
+He tapped his cigarette gently on his knee, and applied the flame to it.
+
+“That’s better.”
+
+Lady Holme moved violently on the sofa. She had a pricking sensation all
+over her body, and her face felt suddenly very hot, as if she had fever.
+A ridiculous, but painful idea started up suddenly in her mind. Could
+Fritz suspect anything? Was he playing with her? She dismissed it at
+once as the distorted child of a guilty conscience. Fritz was not that
+sort of man. He might be a brute sometimes, but he was never a subtle
+brute. He blew two thin lines of smoke out through his nostrils, now
+with a sort of sensuous, almost languid, deliberation, and watched them
+fade away in the brilliantly-lit room. Lady Holme resolved to adopt
+another manner, more in accord with her condition of tense nervousness.
+
+“When I ask you to do a thing, Fritz, you might have the decency to
+do it,” she said sharply. “You’re forgetting what’s due to me--to any
+woman.”
+
+“Don’t fuss at this time of night.”
+
+“I want to go to bed, but I’m not going till I know the house is
+properly shut up. Please go at once and see.”
+
+“I never knew you were such a coward,” he rejoined without stirring.
+“Who was at the opera?”
+
+“I won’t talk to you till you do what I ask.”
+
+“That’s a staggerin’ blow.”
+
+She sprang up with an exclamation of anger. Her nerves were on edge and
+she felt inclined to scream out.
+
+“I never thought you could be so--such a cad to a woman, Fritz,” she
+said.
+
+She moved towards the door. As she did so she heard a cab in the square
+outside, a rattle of wheels, then silence. It had stopped. Her heart
+seemed to stand still too. She knew now that she was a coward, though
+not in the way Fritz meant. She was a coward with regard to him.
+Her jealousy had prompted her to do a mad thing. In doing it she had
+actually meant to produce a violent scene. It had seemed to her that
+such a scene would relieve the tension of her nerves, of her heart,
+would clear the air. But now that the scene seemed imminent--if Fritz
+had forgotten, and she was certain he had forgotten, to lock the
+door--she felt heart and nerves were failing her. She felt that she
+had risked too much, far too much. With almost incredible swiftness she
+remembered her imprudence in speaking to Carey at Arkell House and how
+it had only served to put a weapon into her husband’s hand, a weapon he
+had not scrupled to use in his selfish way to further his own pleasure
+and her distress. That stupid failure had not sufficiently warned her,
+and now she was on the edge of some greater disaster. She was positive
+that Leo Ulford was in the cab which had just stopped, and it was too
+late now to prevent him from entering the house. Lord Holme had got
+up from his chair and stood facing her. He looked quite pleasant. She
+thought of the change that would come into his face in a moment and
+turned cold.
+
+“Don’t cut up so deuced rough,” he said; “I’ll go and lock up.”
+
+So he had forgotten. He took a step towards the drawing-room door.
+But now she felt that at all costs she must prevent him from going
+downstairs, must gain a moment somehow. Suddenly she swayed slightly.
+
+“I feel--awfully faint,” she said.
+
+She went feebly, but quickly, to the window which looked on to the
+Square, drew away the curtain, opened the window and leaned out. The cab
+had stopped before their door, and she saw Leo Ulford standing on the
+pavement with his back to the house. He was feeling in his pocket,
+evidently for some money to give to the cabman. If she could only
+attract his attention somehow and send him away! She glanced back. Fritz
+was coming towards her with a look of surprise on his face.
+
+“Leave me alone,” she said unevenly. “I only want some air.”
+
+“But--”
+
+“Leave me--oh, do leave me alone!”
+
+He stopped, but stood staring at her in blank amazement. She dared not
+do anything. Leo Ulford stretched out his arm towards the cabman, who
+bent down from his perch. He took the money, looked at it, then bent
+down again, showing it to Leo and muttering something. Doubtless he was
+saying that it was not enough. She turned round again sharply to Fritz.
+
+“Fritz,” she said, “be a good dog. Go upstairs to my room and fetch me
+some eau de Cologne, will you?”
+
+“But--”
+
+“It’s on my dressing-table--the gold bottle on the right. You know. I
+feel so bad. I’ll stay here. The air will bring me round perhaps.”
+
+She caught hold of the curtain, like a person on the point of swooning.
+
+“All right,” he said, and he went out of the room.
+
+She watched till he was gone, then darted to the window and leaned out.
+
+She was too late. The cab was driving off and Leo was gone. He must have
+entered the house.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+BEFORE she had time to leave the window she heard a step in the room.
+She turned and saw Leo Ulford, smiling broadly--like a great boy--and
+holding up the latch-key she had sent him. At the sight of her face his
+smile died away.
+
+“Go--go!” she whispered, putting out her hand. “Go at once!”
+
+“Go! But you told me--”
+
+“Go! My husband’s come back. He’s in the house. Go quickly. Don’t make a
+sound. I’ll explain to-morrow.”
+
+She made a rapid, repeated gesture of her hands towards the door,
+frowning. Leo Ulford stood for an instant looking heavy and sulky, then,
+pushing out his rosy lips in a sort of indignant pout, he swung round
+on his heels. As he did so, Lord Holme came into the room holding the
+bottle of eau de Cologne. When he saw Leo he stopped. Leo stopped too,
+and they stood for a moment staring at each other. Lady Holme, who was
+still by the open window, did not move. There was complete silence in
+the room. Then Leo dropped the latch-key. It fell on the thick carpet
+without a noise. He made a hasty, lumbering movement to pick it up, but
+Lord Holme was too quick for him. When Lady Holme saw the key in her
+husband’s hand she moved at last and came forward into the middle of the
+room.
+
+“Mr. Ulford’s come to tell me about the Blaxtons’ dance,” she said.
+
+She spoke in her usual light voice, without tremor or uncertainty. Her
+face was perfectly calm and smiling. Leo Ulford cleared his throat.
+
+“Yes,” he said loudly, “about the Blaxtons’ dance.”
+
+Lord Holme stood looking at the latch-key. Suddenly his face swelled up
+and became bloated, and large veins stood out in his brown forehead.
+
+“What’s this key?” he said.
+
+He held it out towards his wife. Neither she nor Leo Ulford replied to
+his question.
+
+“What’s this key?” he repeated.
+
+“The key of Mr. Ulford’s house, I suppose,” said Lady Holme. “How should
+I know?”
+
+“I’m not askin’ you,” said her husband.
+
+He came a step nearer to Leo.
+
+“Why the devil don’t you answer?” he said to him.
+
+“It’s my latch-key,” said Leo, with an attempt at a laugh.
+
+Lord Holme flung it in his face.
+
+“You damned liar!” he said. “It’s mine.”
+
+And he struck him full in the face where the key had just struck him.
+
+Leo returned the blow. When she saw that, Lady Holme passed the two men
+and went quickly out of the room, shutting the door behind her. Holding
+her hands over her ears, she hurried upstairs to her bedroom. It was in
+darkness. She felt about on the wall for the button that turned on
+the electric light, but could not find it. Her hands, usually deft and
+certain in their movements, seemed to have lost the sense of touch. It
+was as if they had abruptly been deprived of their minds. She felt
+and felt. She knew the button was there. Suddenly the room was full of
+light. Without being aware of it she had found the button and turned
+it. In the light she looked down at her hands and saw that they were
+trembling violently. She went to the door and shut it. Then she sat down
+on the sofa at the foot of the bed. She clasped her hands together in
+her lap, but they went on trembling. Pulses were beating in her eyelids.
+She felt utterly degraded, like a scrupulously clean person who has been
+rolled in the dirt. And she fancied she heard a faint and mysterious
+sound, pathetic and terrible, but very far away--the white angel in her
+weeping.
+
+And the believers in the angel--were they weeping too?
+
+She found herself wondering as a sleeper wonders in a dream.
+
+Presently she got up. She could not sit there and see her hands
+trembling. She did not walk about the room, but went over to the
+dressing-table and stood by it, resting her hands upon it and leaning
+forward. The attitude seemed to relieve her. She remained there for a
+long time, scarcely thinking at all, only feeling degraded, unclean. The
+sight of physical violence in her own drawing-room, caused by her, had
+worked havoc in her. She had always thought she understood the brute in
+man. She had often consciously administered to it. She had coaxed
+it, flattered it, played upon it even--surely--loved it. Now she had
+suddenly seen it rush out into the full light, and it had turned her
+sick.
+
+The gold things on the dressing-table--bottles, brushes, boxes,
+trays--looked offensive. They were like lies against life, frauds.
+Everything in the pretty room was like a lie and a fraud. There ought to
+be dirt, ugliness about her. She ought to stand with her feet in mud and
+look on blackness. The angel in her shuddered at the siren in her now,
+as at a witch with power to evoke Satanic things, and she forgot the
+trembling of her hands in the sensation of the trembling of her soul.
+The blow of Fritz, the blow of Leo Ulford, had both struck her. She felt
+a beaten creature.
+
+The door opened. She did not turn round, but she saw in the glass her
+husband come in. His coat was torn. His waistcoat and shirt were almost
+in rags. There was blood on his face and on his right hand. In his
+eyes there was an extraordinary light, utterly unlike the light of
+intelligence, but brilliant, startling; flame from the fire by which the
+animal in human nature warms itself. In the glass she saw him look at
+her. The light seemed to stream over her, to scorch her. He went into
+his dressing-room without a word, and she heard the noise of water being
+poured out and used for washing. He must be bathing his wounds, getting
+rid of the red stains.
+
+She sat down on the sofa at the foot of the bed and listened to the
+noise of the water. At last it stopped and she heard drawers being
+violently opened and shut, then a tearing sound. After a silence her
+husband came into the room again with his forehead bound up in a silk
+handkerchief, which was awkwardly knotted behind his head. Part of
+another silk handkerchief was loosely tied round his right hand. He came
+forward, stood in front of her and looked at her, and she saw now that
+there was an expression almost of exultation on his face. She felt
+something fall into her lap. It was the latch-key she had sent to Leo
+Ulford.
+
+“I can tell you he’s sorry he ever saw that--damned sorry,” said Lord
+Holme.
+
+And he laughed.
+
+Lady Holme took the key up carefully and put it down on the sofa. She
+was realising something, realising that her husband was feeling happy.
+When she had laid down the key she looked up at him and there was an
+intense scrutiny in her eyes. Suddenly it seemed to her as if she were
+standing up and looking down on him, as if she were the judge, he the
+culprit in this matter. The numbness left her mind. She was able to
+think swiftly again and her hands stopped trembling. That look of
+exultation in her husband’s eyes had changed everything.
+
+“Sit down, I want to speak to you,” she said.
+
+She was surprised by the calm sound of her own voice.
+
+Lord Holme looked astonished. He shifted the bandage on his hand and
+stood where he was.
+
+“Sit down,” she repeated.
+
+“Well!” he said.
+
+And he sat down.
+
+“I suppose you came up here to turn me out of the house?” she said.
+
+“You deserve it,” he muttered.
+
+But even now he did not look angry. There was a sort of savage glow on
+his face. It was evident that the violent physical effort he had just
+made, and the success of it, had irresistibly swept away his fury for
+the moment. It might return. Probably it would return. But for the
+moment it was gone. Lady Holme knew Fritz, and she knew that he
+was feeling good all over. The fact that he could feel thus in such
+circumstances set the brute in him before her as it had never been set
+before--in a glare of light.
+
+“And what do you deserve?” she asked.
+
+All her terror had gone utterly. She felt mistress of herself.
+
+“When I went to thrash Carey he was so drunk I couldn’t touch him. This
+feller showed fight but he was a baby in my hands. I could do anything I
+liked with him,” said Lord Holme. “Gad! Talk of boxin’--”
+
+He looked at his bandaged hand and laughed again triumphantly. Then,
+suddenly, a sense of other things than his physical strength seemed to
+return upon him. His face changed, grew lowering, and he thrust forward
+his under jaw, opening his mouth to speak. Lady Holme did not give him
+time.
+
+“Yes, I sent Leo Ulford the latch-key,” she said. “You needn’t ask. I
+sent it, and told him to come to-night. D’you know why?”
+
+Lord Holme’s face grew scarlet.
+
+“Because you’re a--”
+
+She stopped him before he could say the irrevocable word.
+
+“Because I mean to have the same liberty as the man I’ve married,”
+ she said. “I asked Leo Ulford here, and I intended you should find him
+here.”
+
+“You didn’t. You thought I wasn’t comin’ home.”
+
+“Why should I have thought such a thing?” she said, swiftly, sharply.
+
+Her voice had an edge to it.
+
+“You meant not to come home, then?”
+
+She read his stupidity at a glance, the guilty mind that had blundered,
+thinking its intention known when it was not known. He began to deny it,
+but she stopped him. At this moment, and exactly when she ought surely
+to have been crushed by the weight of Fritz’s fury, she dominated him.
+Afterwards she wondered at herself, but not now.
+
+“You meant not to come home?”
+
+For once Lord Holme showed a certain adroitness. Instead of replying to
+his wife he retorted:
+
+“You meant me to find Ulford here! That’s a good ‘un! Why, you tried all
+you knew to keep him out.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Well, then?”
+
+“I wanted--but you’d never understand.”
+
+“He does,” said Lord Holme.
+
+He laughed again, got up and walked about the room, fingering his
+bandages. Then suddenly, he turned on Lady Holme and said savagely:
+
+“And you do.”
+
+“I?”
+
+“Yes, you. There’s lots of fellers that would--”
+
+“Stop!” said Lady Holme, in a voice of sharp decision.
+
+She got up too. She felt that she could not say what she meant to say
+sitting down.
+
+“Fritz,” she added, “you’re a fool. You may be worse. I believe you
+are. But one thing’s certain--you’re a fool. Even in wickedness you’re a
+blunderer.”
+
+“And what are you?” he said.
+
+“I!” she answered, coming a step nearer. “I’m not wicked.”
+
+A sudden, strange desire came to her, a desire--as she had slangily
+expressed it to Robin Pierce--to “trot out” the white angel whom she had
+for so long ignored or even brow-beaten. Was the white angel there? Some
+there were who believed so. Robin Pierce, Sir Donald, perhaps others.
+And these few believers gave Lady Holme courage. She remembered them,
+she relied on them at this moment.
+
+“I’m not wicked,” she repeated.
+
+She looked into her husband’s face.
+
+“Don’t you know that?”
+
+He was silent.
+
+“Perhaps you’d rather I was,” she continued. “Don’t men prefer it?”
+
+He stared first at her, then at the carpet. A puzzled look came into his
+face.
+
+“But I don’t care,” she said, gathering resolution, and secretly
+calling, calling on the hidden woman, yet always with a doubt as to
+whether she was there in her place of concealment. “I don’t care. I
+can’t change my nature because of that. And surely--surely there must be
+some men who prefer refinement to vulgarity, purity to--”
+
+“Ulford, eh?” he interrupted.
+
+The retort struck like a whip on Lady Holme’s temper. She forgot the
+believers in the angel and the angel too.
+
+“How dare you?” she exclaimed. “As if I--”
+
+He took up the latch-key and thrust it into her face. His sense of
+physical triumph was obviously dying away, his sense of personal outrage
+returning.
+
+“Good women don’t do things like that,” he said. “If it was known in
+London you’d be done for.”
+
+“And you--may you do what you like openly, brazenly?”
+
+“Men’s different,” he said.
+
+The words and the satisfied way in which they were said made Lady Holme
+feel suddenly almost mad with rage. The truth of the statement, and the
+disgrace that it was truth, stirred her to the depths. At that moment
+she hated her husband, she hated all men. She remembered what Lady
+Cardington had said in the carriage as they were driving away from the
+Carlton after Mrs. Wolfstein’s lunch, and her sense of impotent fury
+was made more bitter by the consciousness that women had chosen that
+men should be “different,” or at least--if not that--had smilingly given
+them a license to be so. She wanted to say, to call out, so much that
+she said nothing. Lord Holme thought that for once he had been clever,
+almost intellectual. This was indeed a night of many triumphs for him.
+An intoxication of power surged up to his brain.
+
+“Men’s made different and treated differently,” he said. “And they’d
+never stand anything else.”
+
+Lady Holme sat down again on the sofa. She put her right hand on her
+left hand and held it tightly in her lap.
+
+“You mean,” she said, in a hard, quiet voice, “that you may humiliate
+your wife in the eyes of London and that she must just pretend that she
+enjoys it and go on being devoted to you? Well, I will not do either the
+one or the other. I will not endure humiliation quietly, and as to my
+devotion to you--I daresay it wouldn’t take much to kill it. Perhaps
+it’s dead already.”
+
+No lie, perhaps, ever sounded more like truth than hers. At that moment
+she thought that probably it was truth.
+
+“Eh?” said Lord Holme.
+
+He looked suddenly less triumphant. His blunt features seemed altered
+in shape by the expression of blatant, boyish surprise, even amazement,
+that overspread them. His wife saw that, despite the incident of Leo
+Ulford’s midnight visit, Fritz had not really suspected her of the
+uttermost faithlessness, that it had not occurred to him that perhaps
+her love for him was dead, that love was alive in her for another man.
+Had his conceit then no limits?
+
+And then suddenly another thought flashed into her mind. Was he, too,
+a firm, even a fanatical, believer in the angel? She had never numbered
+Fritz among that little company of believers. Him she had always set
+among the men who worship the sirens of the world. But now--? Can there
+be two men in one man as there can be two women in one woman? Suddenly
+Fritz was new to her, newer to her than on the day when she first met
+him. And he was complex. Fritz complex! She changed the word conceit.
+She called it trust. And tears rushed into her eyes. There were tears in
+her heart too. She looked up at her husband. The silk bandage over
+his forehead had been white. Now it was faintly red. As she looked she
+thought that the colour of the red deepened.
+
+“Come here, Fritz,” she said softly.
+
+He moved nearer.
+
+“Bend down!”
+
+“Eh?”
+
+“Bend down your head.”
+
+He bent down his huge form with a movement that had in it some
+resemblance to the movement of a child. She put up her hand and touched
+the bandage where it was red. She took her hand away. It was damp.
+
+A moment later Fritz was sitting in a low chair by the wash-hand stand
+in an obedient attitude, and a woman--was she siren or angel?--was
+bathing an ugly wound.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+AFTER that night Lady Holme began to do something she had never done
+before--to idealise her husband. Hitherto she had loved him without
+weaving pretty fancies round him, loved him crudely for his strength,
+his animalism, his powerful egoism and imperturbable self-satisfaction.
+She had loved him almost as a savage woman might love, though without
+her sense of slavery. Now a change came over her. She thought of Fritz
+in a different way, the new Fritz, the Fritz who was a believer in the
+angel. It seemed to her that he could be kept faithful most easily,
+most surely, by such an appeal as Robin Pierce would have loved. She had
+sought to rouse, to play upon the instincts of the primitive man. She
+had not gone very far, it is true, but her methods had been common,
+ordinary. She had undervalued Fritz’s nature. That was what she felt
+now. He had behaved badly to her, had wronged her, but he had believed
+in her very much. She resolved to make his belief more intense. An
+expression on his face--only that--had wrought a vital change in her
+feeling towards him, her conception of him. She ranged him henceforth
+with Sir Donald, with Robin Pierce. He stood among the believers in the
+angel.
+
+She called upon the angel passionately, feverishly.
+
+There was strength in Lady Holme’s character, and not merely strength
+of temper. When she was roused, confident, she could be resolute,
+persistent; could shut her eyes to side issues and go onward looking
+straight before her. Now she went onward and she felt a new force within
+her, a force that would not condescend to pettiness, to any groping in
+the mud.
+
+Lord Holme was puzzled. He felt the change in his wife, but did not
+understand it. Since the fracas with Leo Ulford their relations had
+slightly altered. Vaguely, confusedly, he was conscious of being pitied,
+yes, surely pitied by his wife. She shed a faint compassion, like a
+light cloud, over the glory of his wrongdoing. And the glory was abated.
+He felt a little doubtful of himself, almost as a son feels sometimes
+in the presence of his mother. For the first time he began to think of
+himself, now and then, as the inferior of his wife, began even, now and
+then, to think of man as the inferior of woman--in certain ways. Such a
+state of mind was very novel in him. He stared at it as a baby stares
+at its toes, with round amazement, inwardly saying, “Is this phenomenon
+part of me?”
+
+There was a new gentleness in Viola, a new tenderness. Both put him--as
+one lifted and dropped--a step below her. He pulled his bronze moustache
+over it with vigour.
+
+His wife showed no desire to control his proceedings, to know what
+he was about. When she spoke of Miss Schley she spoke kindly,
+sympathetically, but with a dainty, delicate pity, as one who secretly
+murmurs, “If she had only had a chance!” Lord Holme began to think it
+a sad thing that she had not had a chance. The mere thought sent the
+American a step down from her throne. She stood below him now, as he
+stood below Viola. It seemed to him that there was less resemblance
+between his wife and Miss Schley than he had fancied. He even said so to
+Lady Holme. The angel smiled. Somebody else in her smiled too. Once he
+remarked to the angel, _a propos de bottes_, “We men are awful brutes
+sometimes.” Then he paused. As she said nothing, only looked very kind,
+he added, “I’ll bet you think so, Vi?”
+
+It sounded like a question, but she preferred to give no answer, and he
+walked away shaking his head over the brutishness of men.
+
+The believers in the angel naturally welcomed the development in Lady
+Holme and the unbelievers laughed at it, especially those who had been
+at Arkell House and those who had been influenced by Pimpernel Schley’s
+clever imitation. One night at the opera, when _Tannhauser_ was being
+given, Mr. Bry said of it, “I seem to hear the voice of Venus raised in
+the prayer of Elizabeth.” Mrs. Wolfstein lifted large eyebrows over it,
+and remarked to Henry, in exceptionally guttural German:
+
+“If this goes on Pimpernel’s imitation will soon be completely out of
+date.”
+
+To be out of date--in Mrs. Wolfstein’s opinion--was to be irremediably
+damned. Lady Cardington, Sir Donald Ulford, and one or two others began
+to feel as if their dream took form and stepped out of the mystic realm
+towards the light of day. Sir Donald seemed specially moved by the
+change. It was almost as if something within him blossomed, warmed by
+the breath of spring.
+
+Lady Holme wondered whether he knew of the fight between her husband and
+his son. She dared not ask him and he only mentioned Leo once. Then
+he said that Leo had gone down to his wife’s country place in
+Hertfordshire. Lady Holme could not tell by his intonation whether he
+had guessed that there was a special reason for this departure. She was
+glad Leo had gone. The developing angel did not want to meet the man who
+had suffered from the siren’s common conduct. Leo was not worth much.
+She knew that. But she realised now the meanness of having used him
+merely as a weapon against Fritz, and not only the meanness, but the
+vulgarity of the action. There were moments in which she was fully
+conscious that, despite her rank, she had not endured unsmirched close
+contact with the rampant commonness of London.
+
+One of the last great events of the season was to be a charity concert,
+got up by a Royal Princess in connection with a committee of well-known
+women to start a club for soldiers and sailors. Various amateurs and
+professionals were asked to take part in it, among them Lady Holme and
+Miss Schley. The latter had already accepted the invitation when Lady
+Holme received the Royal request, which was made _viva voce_ and was
+followed by a statement about the composition of the programme, in which
+“that clever Miss Schley” was named.
+
+Lady Holme hesitated. She had not met the American for some time and
+did not wish to meet her. Since she had bathed her husband’s wound she
+knew--she could not have told how--that Miss Schley’s power over him had
+lessened. She did not know what had happened between them. She did not
+know that anything had happened. And, as part of this new effort of
+hers, she had had the strength to beat down the vehement, the terrible
+curiosity--cold steel and fire combined--that is a part of jealousy.
+That curiosity, she told herself, belonged to the siren, not to the
+angel. But at this Royal request her temper waked, and with it many
+other children of her temperament. It was as if she had driven them into
+a dark cave and had rolled a great stone to the cave’s mouth. Now the
+stone was pushed back, and in the darkness she heard them stirring,
+whispering, preparing to come forth.
+
+The Royal lady looked slightly surprised. She coughed and glanced at a
+watch she wore at her side.
+
+“I shall be delighted to do anything, ma’am,” Lady Holme said quickly.
+
+When she received the programme she found that her two songs came
+immediately after “Some Imitations” by Miss Pimpernel Schley.
+
+She stood for a moment with the programme in her hand.
+
+“Some Imitations”; there was a certain crudeness about the statement, a
+crudeness and an indefiniteness combined. Who were to be the victims? At
+this moment, perhaps, they were being studied. Was she to be pilloried
+again as she had been pilloried that night at the British Theatre? The
+calm malice of the American was capable of any impudent act. It seemed
+to Lady Holme that she had perhaps been very foolish in promising to
+appear in the same programme with Miss Schley. Was it by accident that
+their names were put together? Lady Holme did not know who had arranged
+the order of the performances, but it occurred to her that there was
+attraction to the public in the contiguity, and that probably it was a
+matter of design. No other two women had been discussed and compared,
+smiled over and whispered about that season by Society as she and Miss
+Schley had been.
+
+For a moment, while she looked at the programme, she thought of the
+strange complications of feeling that are surely the fruit of an extreme
+civilisation. She saw herself caught in a spider’s web of apparently
+frail, yet really powerful, threads spun by an invisible spider. Her
+world was full of gossamer playing the part of iron, of gossamer that
+was compelling, that made and kept prisoners. What freedom was there
+for her and women like her, what reality of freedom? Even beauty, birth,
+money were gossamer to hold the fly. For they concentrated the gaze of
+those terrible watchful eyes which govern lives, dominating actions,
+even dominating thoughts.
+
+She moved, had always moved, in a maze of complications. She saw them
+tiny yet intense, like ants in their hill. They stirred minds, hearts,
+as the ants stirred twigs, leaves, blossoms, and carried them to the
+hill for their own purposes. In this maze free will was surely lost. The
+beautiful woman of the world seems to the world to be a dominant being,
+to be imposing the yoke of her will on those around her. But is she
+anything but a slave?
+
+Why were she and Miss Schley enemies? Why had they been enemies from the
+moment they met? There was perhaps a reason for their hostility now,
+a reason in Fritz. But at the beginning what reason had there been?
+Civilisation manufactures reasons as the spider manufactures threads,
+because it is the deadly enemy of peace--manufactures reasons for all
+those thoughts and actions which are destructive of inward and exterior
+peace.
+
+For a moment it seemed to Lady Holme as if she and the American
+were merely victims of the morbid conditions amid which they lived;
+conditions which caused the natural vanity of women to become a
+destroying fever, the natural striving of women to please a venomous
+battle, the natural desire of women to be loved a fracas, in which
+clothes were the armour, modes of hair-dressing, manicure, perfumes,
+dyes, powder-puffs the weapons.
+
+What a tremendous, noisy nothingness it was, this state of being! How
+could an angel be natural in it,--be an angel at all?
+
+She laid down the programme and sighed. She felt a vague yet violent
+desire for release, for a fierce change, for something that would brush
+away the spider’s web and set free her wings. Yet where would she fly?
+She did not know; probably against a window-pane. And the change would
+never come. She and Fritz--what could they ever be but a successful
+couple known in a certain world and never moving beyond its orbit?
+
+Perhaps for the first time the longing that she had often expressed
+in her singing, obedient to poet and composer, invaded her own soul.
+Without music she was what with music she had often seemed to be--a
+creature of wayward and romantic desires, a yearning spirit, a soaring
+flame.
+
+At that moment she could have sung better than she had ever sung.
+
+On the programme the names of her songs did not appear. They were
+represented by the letters A and B. She had not decided yet what she
+would sing. But now, moved by feeling to the longing for some action in
+which she might express it, she resolved to sing something in which she
+could at least flutter the wings she longed to free, something in
+which the angel could lift its voice, something that would delight
+the believers in the angel and be as far removed from Miss Schley’s
+imitations as possible.
+
+After a time she chose two songs. One was English, by a young composer,
+and was called “Away.” It breathed something of the spirit of the East.
+The man who had written it had travelled much in the East, had drawn
+into his lungs the air, into his nostrils the perfume, into his soul
+the meaning of desert places. There was distance in his music. There
+was mystery. There was the call of the God of Gold who lives in the sun.
+There was the sound of feet that travel. The second song she chose was
+French. The poem was derived from a writing of Jalalu’d dinu’r Rumi, and
+told this story.
+
+One day a man came to knock upon the door of the being he loved. A voice
+cried from within the house, “_Qui est la_?” “_C’est moi_!” replied
+the man. There was a pause. Then the voice answered, “This house cannot
+shelter us both together.” Sadly the lover went away, went into the
+great solitude, fasted and prayed. When a long year had passed he came
+once more to the house of the one he loved, and struck again upon
+the door. The voice from within cried, “_Qui est la_?” “_C’est toi_!”
+ whispered the lover. Then the door was opened swiftly and he passed in
+with outstretched arms.
+
+Having decided that she would sing these two songs, Lady Holme sat down
+to go through them at the piano. Just as she struck the first chord of
+the desert song a footman came in to know whether she was at home to
+Lady Cardington. She answered “Yes.” In her present mood she longed
+to give out her feeling to an audience, and Lady Cardington was very
+sympathetic.
+
+In a minute she came in, looking as usual blanched and tired, dressed in
+black with some pale yellow roses in the front of her gown. Seeing Lady
+Holme at the piano she said, in her low voice with a thrill in it:
+
+“You are singing? Let me listen, let me listen.”
+
+She did not come up to shake hands, but at once sat down at a short
+distance from the piano, leaned back, and gazed at Lady Holme with a
+strange expression of weary, yet almost passionate, expectation.
+
+Lady Holme looked at her and at the desert song. Suddenly she thought
+she would not sing it to Lady Cardington. There was too wild a spell
+in it for this auditor. She played a little prelude and sang an Italian
+song, full, as a warm flower of sweetness, of the sweetness of love. The
+refrain was soft as golden honey, soft and languorous, strangely sweet
+and sad. There was an exquisite music in the words of the refrain, and
+the music they were set to made their appeal more clinging, like the
+appeal of white arms, of red, parting lips.
+
+
+  “Torna in fior di giovinezza
+       Isaotta Blanzesmano,
+       Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano:
+   Nell’amore ogni dolcezza.”
+
+
+Tears came into Lady Cardington’s eyes as she listened, brimmed over and
+fell down upon her blanched cheeks. Each time the refrain recurred she
+moved her lips: “Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano: Nell’amore ogni dolcezza.”
+
+Lady Holme’s voice was like honey as she sang, and tears were in her
+eyes too. Each time the refrain fell from her heart she seemed to see
+another world, empty of gossamer threads, a world of spread wings,
+a world of--but such poetry and music do not tell you! Nor can you
+imagine. You can only dream and wonder, as when you look at the horizon
+line and pray for the things beyond.
+
+
+  “Tutto--tutto al mondo a vano:
+   Nell’amore ogni dolcezza.”
+
+
+“Why do you sing like that to-day?” said Lady Cardington, wiping her
+eyes gently.
+
+“I feel like that to-day,” Lady Holme said, keeping her hands on the
+keys in the last chord. There was a vagueness in her eyes, a sort of
+faint cloud of fear. While she was singing she had thought, “Have I
+known the love that shows the vanity of the world? Have I known the
+love in which alone all sweetness lives?” The thought had come in like a
+firefly through an open window. “Have I? Have I?”
+
+And something within her felt a stab of pain, something within her soul
+and yet surely a thousand miles away.
+
+“Tutto--tutto al mondo e vano,” murmured Lady Cardington. “We feel that
+and we feel it, and--do you?”
+
+“To-day I seem to,” answered Lady Holme.
+
+“When you sing that song you look like the love that gives all sweetness
+to men. Sing like that, look like that, and you--If Sir Donald had heard
+you!”
+
+Lady Holme got up from the piano.
+
+“Sir Donald!” she said.
+
+She came to sit down near Lady Cardington.
+
+“Sir Donald! Why do you say that?”
+
+And she searched Lady Cardington’s eyes with eyes full of inquiry.
+
+Lady Cardington looked away. The wistful power that generally seemed a
+part of her personality had surely died out in her. There was something
+nervous in her expression, deprecating in her attitude.
+
+“Why do you speak about Sir Donald?” Lady Holme said.
+
+“Don’t you know?”
+
+Lady Cardington looked up. There was an extraordinary sadness in her
+eyes, mingled with a faint defiance.
+
+“Know what?”
+
+“That Sir Donald is madly in love with you?”
+
+“Sir Donald! Sir Donald--madly anything!”
+
+She laughed, not as if she were amused, but as if she wished to do
+something else and chose to laugh instead. Lady Cardington sat straight
+up.
+
+“You don’t understand anything but youth,” she said.
+
+There was a sound of keen bitterness in her low voice.
+
+“And yet,” she added, after a pause, “you can sing till you break the
+heart of age--break its heart.”
+
+Suddenly she burst into a flood of tears. Lady Holme was so surprised
+that she did absolutely nothing, did not attempt to console, to inquire.
+She sat and looked at Lady Cardington’s tall figure swayed by grief,
+listened to the sound of her hoarse, gasping sobs. And then, abruptly,
+as if someone came into the room and told her, she understood.
+
+“You love Sir Donald,” she said.
+
+Lady Cardington looked up. Her tear-stained, distorted face seemed very
+old.
+
+“We both regret the same thing in the same way,” she said. “We were both
+wretched in--in the time when we ought to have been happy. I thought--I
+had a ridiculous idea we might console each other. You shattered my
+hope.”
+
+“I’m sorry,” Lady Holme said.
+
+And she said it with more tenderness than she had ever before used to a
+woman.
+
+Lady Cardington pressed a pocket-handkerchief against her eyes.
+
+“Sing me that song again,” she whispered. “Don’t say anything more. Just
+sing it again and I’ll go.”
+
+Lady Holme went to the piano.
+
+
+  “Torna in fior di giovinezza
+       Isaotta Blanzesmano,
+       Dice: Tutto al mondo a vano:
+   Nell’amore ogni dolcezza.”
+
+
+When the last note died away she looked towards the sofa. Lady
+Cardington was gone. Lady Holme leaned her arm on the piano and put her
+chin in her hand.
+
+“How awful to be old!” she thought.
+
+Half aloud she repeated the last words of the refrain: “Nell’amore ogni
+dolcezza.” And then she murmured:
+
+“Poor Sir Donald!”
+
+And then she repeated, “Poor--” and stopped. Again the faint cloud of
+fear was in her eyes.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE Charity Concert was to be given in Manchester House, one of the
+private palaces of London, and as Royalty had promised to be present,
+all the tickets were quickly sold. Among those who bought them were most
+of the guests who had been present at the Holmes’ dinner-party when Lady
+Holme lost her temper and was consoled by Robin Pierce. Robin of course
+was in Rome, but Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mrs. Wolfstein, Sir
+Donald, Mr. Bry took seats. Rupert Carey also bought a ticket. He was
+not invited to great houses any more, but on this public occasion no one
+with a guinea to spend was unwelcome. To Lady Holme’s surprise the day
+before the concert Fritz informed her that he was going too.
+
+“You, Fritz!” she exclaimed. “But it’s in the afternoon.”
+
+“What o’ that?”
+
+“You’ll be bored to death. You’ll go to sleep. Probably you’ll snore.”
+
+“Not I.”
+
+He straddled his legs and looked attentively at the toes of his boots.
+Lady Holme wondered why he was going. Had Miss Schley made a point of
+it? She longed to know. The cruel curiosity which the angel was ever
+trying to beat down rose up in her powerfully.
+
+“I say--”
+
+Her husband was speaking with some hesitation.
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Let’s have a squint at the programme, will you?”
+
+“Here it is.”
+
+She gave it to him and watched him narrowly as he looked quickly over
+it.
+
+“Hulloa!” he said.
+
+“What’s the matter?”
+
+“Some Imitations,” he said. “What’s that mean?”
+
+“Didn’t you know Miss Schley was a mimic?”
+
+“A mimic--not I! She’s an actress.”
+
+“Yes--now.”
+
+“Now? When was she anythin’ else?”
+
+“When she began in America. She was a mimic in the music-halls.”
+
+“The deuce she was!”
+
+He stood looking very grave and puzzled for a minute, then he stared
+hard at his wife.
+
+“What did she mimic?”
+
+“I don’t know--people.”
+
+Again there was a silence. Then he said--
+
+“I say, I don’t know that I want you to sing at that affair to-morrow.”
+
+“But I must. Why not?”
+
+He hesitated, shifting from one foot to the other almost like a great
+boy.
+
+“I don’t know what she’s up to,” he answered at last.
+
+“Miss Schley?”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+Lady Holme felt her heart beat faster. Was her husband going to open up
+a discussion of the thing that had been turning her life to gall during
+these last weeks--his flirtation, his _liaison_--if it were a _liaison_;
+she did not know--with the American? The woman who had begun to idealise
+Fritz and the woman who was desperately jealous of him both seemed to be
+quivering within her.
+
+“Do you mean--?” she began.
+
+She stopped, then spoke again in a quiet voice.
+
+“Do you mean that you think Miss Schley is going to do something unusual
+at the concert tomorrow?”
+
+“I dunno. She’s the devil.”
+
+There was a reluctant admiration in his voice, as there always is in
+the voice of a man when he describes a woman as gifted with infernal
+attributes, and this sound stung Lady Holme. It seemed to set that angel
+upon whom she was calling in the dust, to make of that angel a puppet,
+an impotent, even a contemptible thing.
+
+“My dear Fritz,” she said in a rather loud, clear voice, like the voice
+of one speaking to a child, “my dear Fritz, you’re surely aware that I
+have been the subject of Miss Schley’s talent ever since she arrived in
+London?”
+
+“You! What d’you mean?”
+
+“You surely can’t be so blind as not to have seen what all London has
+seen?”
+
+“What’s all London seen?’
+
+“Why, that Miss Schley’s been mimicking me!”
+
+“Mimickin’ you!”
+
+The brown of his large cheeks was invaded by red.
+
+“But you have noticed it. I remember your speaking about it.”
+
+“Not I!” he exclaimed with energy.
+
+“Yes. You spoke of the likeness between us, in expression, in ways of
+looking and moving.”
+
+“That--I thought it was natural.”
+
+“You thought it was natural?”
+
+There was a profound, if very bitter, compassion in her voice.
+
+“Poor old boy!” she added.
+
+Lord Holme looked desperately uncomfortable. His legs were in a most
+violent, even a most pathetic commotion, and he tugged his moustache
+with the fingers of both hands.
+
+“Damned cheek!” he muttered. “Damned cheek!”
+
+He turned suddenly as if he were going to stride about the room.
+
+“Don’t get angry,” said his wife. “I never did.”
+
+He swung round and faced her.
+
+“D’you mean you’ve always known she was mimickin’ you?”
+
+“Of course. From the very start.”
+
+His face got redder.
+
+“I’ll teach her to let my wife alone,” he muttered. “To dare--my wife!”
+
+“I’m afraid it’s a little late in the day to begin now,” Lady Holme
+said. “Society’s been laughing over it, and your apparent appreciation
+of it, the best part of the season.”
+
+“My what?”
+
+“Your apparent enjoyment of the performance.”
+
+And then she went quietly out of the room and shut the door gently
+behind her. But directly the door was shut she became another woman. Her
+mouth was distorted, her eyes shone, she rushed upstairs to her bedroom,
+locked herself in, threw herself down on the bed and pressed her face
+furiously against the coverlet.
+
+The fact that she had spoken at last to her husband of the insult she
+had been silently enduring, the insult he had made so far more bitter
+than it need have been by his conduct, had broken down something within
+her, some wall of pride behind which had long been gathering a flood
+of feeling. She cried now frantically, with a sort of despairing rage,
+cried and crushed herself against the bed, beating the pillows with her
+hands, grinding her teeth.
+
+What was the use of it all? What was the use of being beautiful, of
+being young, rich? What was the use of having married a man she had
+loved? What was the use? What was the use?
+
+“What’s the use?” she sobbed the words out again and again.
+
+For the man was a fool, Fritz was a fool. She thought of him at that
+moment as half-witted. For he saw nothing, nothing. He was a blind man
+led by his animal passions, and when at last he was forced to see, when
+she came and, as it were, lifted his eyelids with her fingers, and said
+to him, “Look! Look at what has been done to me!” he could only be angry
+for himself, because the insult had attained him, because she happened
+to be his wife. It seemed to her, while she was crying there, that
+stupidity combined with egoism must have the power to kill even that
+vital, enduring thing, a woman’s love. She had begun to idealise Fritz,
+but how could she go on idealising him? And she began for the first time
+really to understand--or to begin to understand--that there actually was
+something within her which was hungry, unsatisfied, something which was
+not animal but mental, or was it spiritual?--something not sensual, not
+cerebral, which cried aloud for sustenance. And this something did not,
+could never, cry to Fritz. It knew he could not give it what it wanted.
+Then to whom did it cry? She did not know.
+
+Presently she grew calmer and sat upon the bed, looking straight before
+her. Her mind returned upon itself. She seemed to go back to that point
+of time, just before Lady Cardington called, when she had the programme
+in her hand and thought of the gossamer threads that were as iron in her
+life, and in such lives as hers; then to move on to that other point of
+time when she laid down the programme, sighed, and was conscious of a
+violent desire for release, for something to come and lift a powerful
+hand and brush away the spider’s web.
+
+But now, returning to this further moment in her life, she asked herself
+what would be left to her if the spider’s web were gone? The believers
+in the angel? Perhaps she no longer included Fritz among them. The
+impotence of his mind seemed to her an impotence of heart just then. He
+was to her like a numbed creature, incapable of movement, incapable of
+thought, incapable of belief. Credulity--yes, but not belief. And
+so, when she looked at the believers, she saw but a few people: Robin
+Pierce, Sir Donald--whom else?
+
+And then she heard, as if far off, the song she would sing on the morrow
+at Manchester House.
+
+
+  “Torna in fior di giovinezza
+       Isaotta Blanzesmano,
+       Dice: Tutto al mondo a vano:
+   Nell’amore ogni dolcezza.”
+
+
+And then she cried again, but no longer frantically; quietly, with a
+sort of childish despair and confusion. In her heart there had opened
+a dark space, a gulf. She peered into it and heard, deep down in it,
+hollow echoes resounding, and she recoiled from a vision of emptiness.
+
+  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
+
+On the following day Fritz drove her himself to Manchester House in a
+new motor he had recently bought. All the morning he had stayed at home
+and fidgeted about the house. It was obvious to his wife that he was in
+an unusually distracted frame of mind. He wanted to tell her something,
+yet could not do so. She saw that plainly, and she felt almost certain
+that since their interview of the previous day he had seen Miss Schley.
+She fancied that there had been a scene of some kind between them, and
+she guessed that Fritz had been hopelessly worsted in it and was very
+sorry for himself. There was a beaten look in his face, a very different
+look from that which had startled her when he came into her room after
+thrashing Leo Ulford. This time, however, her curiosity was not awake,
+and the fact that it was not awake marked a change in her. She felt
+to-day as if she did not care what Fritz had been doing or was going
+to do. She had suffered, she had concealed her suffering, she had tried
+vulgarly to pay Fritz out, she had failed. At the critical moment she
+had played the woman after he had played the man. He had thrashed the
+intruder whom she was using as a weapon, and she had bathed his wounds,
+made much of him, idealised him. She had done what any uneducated street
+woman would have done for “her man.” And now she had suddenly come to
+feel as if there had always been an emptiness in her life, as if Fritz
+never had, never could fill it. The abruptness of the onset of this new
+feeling confused her. She did not know that a woman could be subject
+to a change of this kind. She did not understand it, realise what it
+portended, what would result from it. But she felt that, for the moment,
+at any rate, she could not get up any excitement about Fritz, his
+feelings, his doings. Whenever she thought of him she thought of his
+blundering stupidity, his blindness, sensuality and egoism. No doubt she
+loved him. Only, to-day, she did not feel as if she loved him or anyone.
+Yet she did not feel dull. On the contrary, she was highly strung,
+unusually sensitive. What she was most acutely conscious of was a
+sensation of lonely excitement, of solitary expectation. Fritz fidgeted
+about the house, and the fact that he did so gave her no more concern
+than if a little dog had been running to and fro. She did not want him
+to tell her what was the matter. On the other hand, she did want him not
+to tell her. Simply she did not care.
+
+He said nothing. Perhaps something in her look, her manner, kept him
+dumb.
+
+When they were in the motor on the way to Manchester House, he said:
+
+“I bet you’ll cut out everybody.”
+
+“Oh, there are all sorts of stars.”
+
+“Well, mind you put ‘em all out.”
+
+It was evident to her that for some reason or other he was particularly
+anxious she should shine that afternoon. She meant to. She knew she was
+going to. But she had no desire to shine in order to gratify Fritz’s
+egoism. Probably he had just had a quarrel with Miss Schley and
+wanted to punish her through his wife. The idea was not a pretty one.
+Unfortunately that circumstance did not ensure its not being a true one.
+
+“Mind you do, eh?” reiterated her husband, giving the steering wheel a
+twist and turning the car up Hamilton Place.
+
+“I shall try to sing well, naturally,” she replied coldly. “I always
+do.”
+
+“Of course--I know.”
+
+There was something almost servile in his manner, an anxiety which was
+quite foreign to it as a rule.
+
+“That’s a stunnin’ dress,” he added. “Keep your cloak well over it.”
+
+She said nothing.
+
+“What’s the row?” he asked. “Anythin’ up?”
+
+“I’m thinking over my songs.”
+
+“Oh, I see.”
+
+She had silenced him for the moment.
+
+Very soon they were in a long line of carriages and motors moving slowly
+towards Manchester House.
+
+“Goin’ to be a deuce of a crowd,” said Fritz.
+
+“Naturally.”
+
+“Wonder who’ll be there?”
+
+“Everybody who’s still in town.”
+
+She bowed to a man in a hansom.
+
+“Who’s that?”
+
+“Plancon. He’s singing.”
+
+“How long’ll it be before you come on?”
+
+“Quite an hour, I think.”
+
+“Better than bein’ first, isn’t it?”
+
+“Of course.”
+
+“What are you goin’ to sing?”
+
+“Oh--”
+
+She was about to say something impatient about his not knowing one tune
+from another, but she checked herself, and answered quietly:
+
+“An Italian song and a French song.”
+
+“What about?”
+
+“Take care of that carriage in front--love.”
+
+He looked at her sideways.
+
+“You’re the one to sing about that,” he said.
+
+She felt that he was admiring her beauty as if it were new to him. She
+did not care.
+
+At last they reached Manchester House. Fritz’s place was taken by
+his chauffeur, and they got out. The crowd was enormous. Many people
+recognised Lady Holme and greeted her. Others, who did not know her
+personally, looked at her with open curiosity. A powdered footman came
+to show her to the improvised artists’ room. Fritz prepared to follow.
+
+“Aren’t you going into the concert-room?” she said.
+
+“Presently.”
+
+“But--”
+
+“I’ll take you up first.”
+
+“Very well,” she said. “But it isn’t the least necessary.”
+
+He only stuck out his under jaw. She realised that Miss Schley would
+be in the artists’ room and said nothing more. They made their way very
+slowly to the great landing on the first floor of the house, from which
+a maze of reception rooms opened. Mr. and Mrs. Ongrin, the immensely
+rich Australians who were the owners of the house, were standing there
+ready to receive the two Royal Princesses who were expected, and Mr.
+Ongrin took from a basket on a table beside him a great bouquet of
+honey-coloured roses, and offered it to Lady Holme with a hearty word of
+thanks to her for singing.
+
+She took the roses with a look of pleasure.
+
+“How sweet of you! They suit my song,” she said.
+
+She was thinking of the Italian song.
+
+Mr. Ongrin, who was a large, loose-limbed man, with straw-coloured hair
+turning grey, and a broken nose, looked genial and confused, and she
+went on, still closely followed by Fritz.
+
+“This is the room for the performers, my lady,” said the footman,
+showing them into a large, green drawing-room, with folding doors at one
+end shut off by an immense screen.
+
+“Is the platform behind the screen?” Lady Holme asked.
+
+“Yes, my lady. The ladies’ cloak-room is on the left--that door, my
+lady.”
+
+There were already several people in the room, standing about and
+looking tentative. Lady Holme knew most of them. One was a French
+actor who was going to give a monologue; very short, very stout, very
+intelligent-looking, with a face that seemed almost too flexible to be
+human. Two or three were singers from the Opera House. Another was an
+aristocratic amateur, an intimate friend of Lady Holme’s, who had a
+beautiful contralto voice. Several of the committee were there too,
+making themselves agreeable to the artists. Lady Holme began to speak
+to the French actor. Fritz stood by. He scarcely understood a word of
+French, and always looked rather contemptuous when it was talked in
+his presence. The French actor appealed to him on some point in the
+conversation. He straddled his legs, uttered a loud, “Oh, wee! Oh, wee!
+wee!” and laughed.
+
+“Lord Holme est tout a fait de mon avis!” cried the comedian.
+
+“Evidemment,” she answered, wishing Fritz would go. Miss Schley had not
+come yet. She was certain to be effectively late, as she had been at
+Mrs. Wolfstein’s lunch-party. Lady Holme did not feel as if she cared
+whether she came early or late, whether she were there or not. She was
+still companioned by her curious sensation of the morning, a sensation
+of odd loneliness and detachment, combined with excitement--but an
+excitement which had nothing to do with the present. It seemed to her as
+if she were a person leaning out of a window and looking eagerly along
+a road. People were in the room behind her, voices were speaking, things
+were happening there, but they had nothing to do with her. That which
+had to do with her was coming down the road. She could not see yet what
+it was, but she could hear the faint sound of its approach.
+
+The comedian spoke to someone else. She went into the cloak-room and
+took off her motor cloak. As she glanced into a mirror to see if all the
+details of her gown were perfect, she was struck by the expression on
+her face, as if she had seen it on the face of a stranger. For a moment
+she looked at herself as at a stranger, seeing her beauty with a curious
+detachment, and admiring it without personal vanity or egoism, or any
+small, triumphant feeling. Yet it was not her beauty which fascinated
+her eyes, but an imaginative look in them and in the whole face. For
+the first time she fully realised why she had a curious, an evocative,
+influence on certain people, why she called the hidden children of the
+secret places of their souls, why those children heard, and stretched
+out their hands, and lifted their eyes and opened their lips.
+
+There was a summoning, and yet a distant expression in her eyes. She
+saw it herself. They were like eyes that had looked on magic, that would
+look on magic again.
+
+A maid came to help her. In a moment she had picked up her bouquet of
+roses and her music-case, and was back in the green drawing-room.
+
+There were more people in it now. Fritz was still hovering about looking
+remarkably out of place and strangely ill at ease. To-day his usual
+imperturbable self-confidence had certainly deserted him. He spoke
+to people but his eyes were on the door. Lady Holme knew that he
+was waiting for Miss Schley. She felt a sort of vague pity for his
+uneasiness. It was time for the concert to begin, but the Princesses
+had not yet arrived. A murmur of many voices came from the hidden room
+beyond the screen where the audience was assembled. Several of the
+performers began to look rather strung up. They smiled and talked with
+slightly more vivacity than was quite natural in them. One or two of the
+singers glanced over their songs, and pointed out certain effects they
+meant to make to the principal accompanist, an abnormally thin boy
+with thick dark hair and flushed cheeks. He expressed comprehension,
+emphasising it by finger-taps on the music and a continual, “I see!
+I see!” Two or three of the members of the committee looked at their
+watches, and the murmur of conversation in the hidden concert-room rose
+into a dull roar.
+
+Lady Holme sat down on a sofa. Sometimes when she was going to sing she
+felt nervous. There are very few really accomplished artists who do
+not. But to-day she was not at all nervous. She knew she was going to do
+well--as well as when she sang to Lady Cardington, even better. She felt
+almost as if she were made of music, as if music were part of her, ran
+in her veins like blood, shone in her eyes like light, beat in her heart
+like the pulse of life. But she felt also as if she were still at a
+window, looking down a road, and listening to the sound of an approach.
+
+“Did you see him?”
+
+A lady near her was speaking to a friend.
+
+“Yes. Doesn’t he look shocking? Such an alteration!”
+
+“Poor fellow! I wonder he cares to go about.”
+
+“And he’s so clever. He helped me in a concert once--the Gordon boys,
+you know--and I assure you--”
+
+She did not catch anything more, but she felt a conviction that they
+were speaking of Rupert Carey, and that he must be in the concert-room.
+Poor Carey! She thought of the Arkell House ball, but only for a moment.
+Then someone spoke to her. A moment later Miss Schley came slowly
+into the room, accompanied by a very small, wiry-looking old woman,
+dreadfully dressed, and by Leo Ulford, who was carrying a bouquet of red
+carnations. The kind care of Mr. Ongrin had provided a bouquet for each
+lady who was performing.
+
+As Leo came in he looked round swiftly, furtively. He saw Fritz, and
+a flush went over his face. Then Lady Holme saw him look at her with a
+scowl, exactly like the scowl of an evil-tempered schoolboy. She bowed
+to him slightly. He ignored the recognition, and spoke to Miss Schley
+with a heavy assumption of ignominious devotion and intimacy. Lady Holme
+could scarcely help smiling. She read the little story very plainly--the
+little common story of Leo’s desire to take a revenge for his thrashing
+fitting in with some similar desire of Miss Schley’s; on her part
+probably a wish to punish Fritz for having ventured to say something
+about her impudent mimicry of his wife. Easy to read it was,
+common-minded, common-hearted humanity in full sail to petty triumph,
+petty revenge. But all this was taking place in the room behind Lady
+Holme, and she was leaning from the window watching the white road. But
+Fritz? She glanced round the drawing-room and saw that he was moved by
+the story as they had meant him to be moved. The angry jealousy of the
+primitive, sensual man was aflame, His possessive sense, one of the
+strongest, if not the strongest, of such a man’s senses, was outraged.
+And he showed it.
+
+He was standing with a middle-aged lady, one of the committee, but he
+had ceased from talking to her, and was staring at Miss Schley and Leo
+with the peculiar inflated look on his face that was characteristic of
+him when his passions were fully roused. Every feature seemed to swell
+and become bloated, as if under the influence of a disease or physical
+seizure. The middle-aged lady looked at him with obvious astonishment,
+then turned away and spoke to the French actor.
+
+Miss Schley moved slowly into the middle of the room. She did not seem
+to see Fritz. Two or three people came to speak to her. She smiled but
+did not say much. The little wiry-looking old lady, her mother from
+Susanville, stood by her in an effaced manner, and Leo, holding the
+bouquet, remained close beside her, standing over her in his impudent
+fashion like a privileged guardian and lover.
+
+Lady Holme was watching Fritz. The necessary suppression of his anger
+at such a moment, and in such surroundings, suppression of any
+demonstration of it at least, was evidently torturing him. Someone--a
+man--spoke to him. His wife saw that he seemed to choke something down
+before he could get out a word in reply. Directly he had answered he
+moved away from the man towards Miss Schley, but he did not go up to
+her. He did not trust himself to do that. He stood still again, staring.
+Leo bent protectively over the American. She smiled at him demurely
+beneath lowered eyelids. The little old lady shook out her rusty black
+dress and assumed an absurd air of social sprightliness, making a mouth
+bunched up like an old-fashioned purse sharply drawn together by a
+string.
+
+There was a sudden lull in the roar of conversation from the
+concert-room, succeeded by a wide rustling noise. The Princesses had
+at length arrived, and the audience was standing up as they came in and
+took their seats. After a brief silence the rustling noise was renewed
+as the audience sat down again. Then the pianist hurried up to a
+grave-looking girl who was tenderly holding a violin, took her hand and
+led her away behind the screen. A moment later the opening bars of a
+duet were audible.
+
+The people in the artists’ room began to sit down with a slight air of
+resignation. The French actor looked at the very pointed toes of his
+varnished boots and composed his india-rubber features into a solemn,
+almost priestly, expression. Lady Holme went over to a sofa near the
+screen and listened attentively to the duet, but from time to time
+she glanced towards the middle of the room where Miss Schley was
+still calmly standing up with Leo holding the bouquet. The mother from
+Susanville had subsided on a small chair with gilt legs, spread out
+her meagre gown, and assumed the aspect of a roosting bird at twilight.
+Fritz stood up with his back against the wall, staring at Miss Schley.
+His face still looked bloated. Presently Miss Schley glanced at him,
+as if by accident, looked surprised at seeing him there, and nodded
+demurely. He made a movement forward from the wall, but she immediately
+began to whisper to Leo Ulford, and after remaining for a moment in an
+attitude of angry hesitation he moved backward again. His face flushed
+scarlet.
+
+Lady Holme realised that he was making a fool of himself. She saw
+several pairs of eyes turned towards him, slight smiles appearing
+on several faces. The French actor had begun to watch him with an
+expression of close criticism, as a stage manager watches an actor at
+rehearsal. But she did not feel as if she cared what Fritz was doing.
+The sound of the violin had emphasised her odd sensation of having
+nothing to do with what was going on in the room. Just for one hour
+Fritz’s conduct could not affect her.
+
+Very soon people began to whisper round her. Artists find it very
+difficult to listen to other artists on these occasions. In a minute or
+two almost everybody was speaking with an air of mystery. Miss Schley
+put her lips to Leo Ulford’s ear. Evidently she had a great deal to say
+to him. He began to pout his lips in smiles. They both looked across at
+Lord Holme. Then Miss Schley went on murmuring words into Leo’s ear and
+Leo began to shake with silent laughter. Lord Holme clenched his hands
+at his sides. The French actor, still watching him closely, put up a
+fat forefinger and meditatively traced the outline of his own profile,
+pushing out his large flexible lips when the finger was drawing near to
+them. The whole room was full of the tickling noise of half-whispered
+conversation.
+
+Presently the music stopped. Instantly the tickling noise stopped too.
+There was languid applause--the applause of smart people on a summer
+afternoon--from beyond the screen. Then the grave girl reappeared,
+looking graver and hot. Those who had been busily talking while she
+was playing gathered round her to express their delight in her kind
+accompaniment. The pianist hurried up to a stout man with a low,
+turned-down collar and a white satin tie, whose double chin, and general
+air of rather fatuous prosperity, proclaimed him the possessor of a
+tenor voice, and Miss Schley walked quietly, but with determination, up
+to where Lady Holme was sitting and took a seat beside her.
+
+“Glad to meet you again,” she drawled.
+
+She called Leo Ulford with a sharp nod. He hesitated, and began to look
+supremely uncomfortable, twisting the bouquet of carnations round and
+round in nervous hands.
+
+“I’ve been simply expiring all season to hear you sing,” Miss Schley
+continued.
+
+“How sweet of you!”
+
+“That is so. Mr. Ulford, please bring my flowers.”
+
+Leo had no alternative but to obey. He came slowly towards the sofa,
+while the tenor and the pianist vanished behind the screen. That he
+was sufficiently sensitive to be conscious of the awkwardness of the
+situation Miss Schley had pleasantly contrived was very apparent.
+He glowered upon Lady Holme, forcing his boyish face to assume a
+coarsely-determined and indifferent expression. But somehow the body,
+which she knew her husband had thrashed, looked all the time as if it
+were being thrashed again.
+
+The voice of the hidden tenor rose in “_Celeste Aida!_” and Lady Holme
+listened with an air of definite attention, taking no notice of Leo. The
+music gave her a perfect excuse for ignoring him. But Miss Schley did
+not intend to be interfered with by anything so easily trampled upon as
+an art. Speaking in her most clear and choir-boyish tones, she said to
+Leo Ulford:
+
+“Sit down, Mr. Ulford. You fidget me standing.”
+
+Then turning again to Lady Holme she continued:
+
+“Mr. Ulford’s been so lovely and kind. He came up all the way from
+Hertfordshire just to take care of marmar and me to-day. Marmar’s fair
+and crazy about him. She says he’s the most lovely feller in Europe.”
+
+Leo twisted the bouquet. He was sitting now on the edge of a chair, and
+shooting furtive glances in the direction of Lord Holme, who had begun
+to look extremely stupid, overwhelmed by the cool impudence of the
+American.
+
+“Your husband looks as if he were perched around on a keg of
+rattlesnakes,” continued Miss Schley, her clear voice mingling with the
+passionate tenor cry, “_Celeste Aida!_” “Ain’t he feeling well to-day?”
+
+“I believe he is perfectly well,” said Lady Holme, in a very low voice.
+
+It was odd, perhaps, but she did not feel at all angry, embarrassed,
+or even slightly annoyed, by Miss Schley’s very deliberate attempt to
+distress her. Of course she understood perfectly what had happened and
+was happening. Fritz had spoken to the actress about her mimicry of
+his wife, had probably spoken blunderingly, angrily. Miss Schley was
+secretly furious at his having found out what she had been doing, still
+more furious at his having dared to criticise any proceeding of hers. To
+revenge herself at one stroke on both Lord and Lady Holme she had turned
+to Leo Ulford, whose destiny it evidently was to be used as a weapon
+against others. Long ago Lady Holme had distracted Leo’s wandering
+glances from the American and fixed them on herself. With the instinct
+to be common of an utterly common nature Miss Schley had resolved to
+awake a double jealousy--of husband and wife--by exhibiting Leo Ulford
+as her _ami intime_, perhaps as the latest victim to her fascination. It
+was the vulgar action of a vulgar woman, but it failed of its effect
+in one direction. Lord Holme was stirred, but Lady Holme was utterly
+indifferent. Miss Schley’s quick instinct told her so and she was
+puzzled. She did not understand Lady Holme. That was scarcely strange,
+for to-day Lady Holme did not understand herself. The curious mental
+detachment of which she had been conscious for some time had increased
+until it began surely to link itself with something physical, something
+sympathetic in the body that replied to it. She asked herself whether
+the angel were spreading her wings at last. All the small, sordid
+details of which lives lived in society, lives such as hers, are full,
+details which assume often an extraordinary importance, a significance
+like that of molecules seen through a magnifying glass, had suddenly
+become to her as nothing. A profound indifference had softly invaded her
+towards the petty side of life. Miss Schley, Leo Ulford, even Fritz in
+his suppressed rage and jealousy of a male animal openly trampled upon,
+had nothing to do with her, could have no effect on her at this moment.
+She remembered that she had once sighed for release. Well, it seemed to
+her as if release were at hand.
+
+The tenor finished his romance. Again the muffled applause sounded. As
+the singer came from behind the screen, wiping beads of perspiration
+from his self-satisfied face, Lady Holme got up and congratulated him.
+Then she crossed over to her husband.
+
+“Why don’t you go into the concert-room, Fritz? You’re missing
+everything, and you’re only in the way here.”
+
+She did not speak unkindly. He said nothing, only cleared his throat.
+
+“Go in,” she said. “I should like to have you there while I am singing.”
+
+He cleared his throat again.
+
+“Right you are.”
+
+He stared into her eyes with a sort of savage admiration.
+
+“Cut her out,” he said. “Cut her out! You can, and--damn her!--she
+deserves it.”
+
+Then he turned and went out.
+
+Lady Holme felt rather sick for a moment. She knew she was going to sing
+well, she wished to sing well--but not in order to punish Miss Schley
+for having punished Fritz. Was everything she did to accomplish some
+sordid result? Was even her singing--the one thing in which Robin Pierce
+and some other divined a hidden truth that was beautiful--was even that
+to play its contemptible part in the social drama in which she was so
+inextricably entangled? Those gossamer threads were iron strands indeed.
+
+Someone else was singing--her friend with the contralto voice.
+
+She sat down alone in a corner. Presently the French actor began to
+give one of his famous monologues. She heard his wonderfully varied
+elocution, his voice--intelligence made audible and dashed with flying
+lights of humour rising and falling subtly, yet always with a curious
+sound of inevitable simplicity. She heard gentle titterings from the
+concealed audience, then a definite laugh, then a peal of laughter quite
+gloriously indiscreet. The people were waking up. And she felt as if
+they were being prepared for her. But why had Fritz looked like that,
+spoken like that? It seemed to spoil everything. To-day she felt too far
+away from--too far beyond, that was the truth--Miss Schley to want to
+enter into any rivalry with her. She wished very much that she had been
+placed first on the programme. Then there could have been no question of
+her cutting out the American.
+
+As she was thinking this Miss Schley slowly crossed the room and came up
+to her.
+
+“Lady Holme,” she said, “I come next.”
+
+“Do you?”
+
+“I do. And then you follow after.”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Say, would you mind changing it? It don’t do to have two recitations
+one after the other. There ought to be something different in between.”
+
+Lady Holme looked at her quite eagerly, almost with gratitude.
+
+“I’ll sing next,” she said quickly.
+
+“Much obliged to you, I’m sure. You’re perfectly sweet.”
+
+Lady Holme saw again a faint look of surprise on the American’s white
+face, succeeded instantly by an expression of satisfaction. She realised
+that Miss Schley had some hidden disagreeable reason for her request.
+She even guessed what it was. But she only felt glad that, whatever
+happened, no one could accuse her of trying to efface any effect made by
+Miss Schley upon the audience. As she sang before the “imitations,”
+ if any effect were to be effaced it must be her own. The voice of the
+French actor ceased, almost drowned in a ripple of laughter, a burst
+of quite warm applause. He reappeared looking calm and magisterial. The
+applause continued, and he had to go back and bow his thanks. The tenor,
+who had not been recalled, looked cross and made a movement of his
+double chin that suggested bridling.
+
+“Now, Miss Schley!” said the pianist. “You come now!”
+
+“Lady Holme has very kindly consented to go first,” she replied.
+
+Then she turned to the French actor and, in atrocious but very
+self-possessed French, began to congratulate him on his performance.
+
+“Oh, well--” the pianist hurried up to Lady Holme. “You have
+really--very well then--these are the songs! Which do you sing first?
+Very hot, isn’t it?”
+
+He wiped his long fingers with a silk pocket-handkerchief and took the
+music she offered to him.
+
+“The Princesses seem very pleased,” he added. “Marteau--charming
+composer, yes--very pleased indeed. Which one? ‘_C’est toi_’? Certainly,
+certainly.”
+
+He wiped his hands again and held out one to lead Lady Holme to the
+platform. But she ignored it gently and went on alone. He followed,
+carrying the music and perspiring. As they disappeared Miss Schley got
+up and moved to a chair close by the screen that hid the platform. She
+beckoned to Leo Ulford and he followed her.
+
+As Lady Holme stepped on to the low platform, edged with a bank of
+flowers, it seemed to her as if with one glance she saw everyone in the
+crowded room, and felt at least something swiftly of each one’s feeling.
+
+The two Princesses sat together looking kind and serious. As she
+curtseyed to them they bowed to her and smiled. Behind them she saw a
+compact mass of acquaintances: Lady Cardington sitting with Sir Donald
+and looking terribly sad, even self-conscious, yet eager; Mrs. Wolfstein
+with Mr. Laycock; Mr. Bry, his eyeglass fixed, a white carnation in his
+coat; Lady Manby laughing with a fat old man who wore a fez, and many
+others. At the back she saw Fritz, standing up and staring at her with
+eyes that seemed almost to cry, “Cut her out!” And in the fourth row she
+saw a dreary, even a horrible, sight--Rupert Carey’s face, disfigured
+by the vice which was surely destroying him, red, bloated, dreadfully
+coarsened, spotted. From the midst of the wreckage of the flesh his
+strange eyes looked out with a vivid expression of hopelessness. Yet in
+them burned fires, and in fire there is an essence of fierce purity. The
+soul in those eyes seemed longing to burn up the corruption of his body,
+longing to destroy the ruined temple, longing to speak and say, “I am in
+prison, but do not judge of the prisoner by examining the filthiness of
+his cell.”
+
+As Lady Holme took in the audience with a glance there was a rustle
+of paper. Almost everyone was looking to see if the programme had been
+altered. Lady Holme saw that suddenly Fritz had realised the change that
+had been made, and what it meant. An expression of anger came into his
+face.
+
+She felt that she saw more swiftly, and saw into more profoundly to-day
+than ever before in her life; that she had a strangely clear vision of
+minds as well as of faces, that she was vivid, penetrating. And she
+had time, before she began to sing, for an odd thought of the person
+drowning who flashes back over the ways of his past, who is, as it were,
+allowed one instant of exceptional life before he is handed over to
+death. This thought was clear, clean cut in her mind for a moment, and
+she put herself in the sounding arms of the sea.
+
+Then the pianist began his prelude, and she moved a step forward to the
+flowers and opened her lips to sing.
+
+She sang by heart the little story drawn from the writing of Jalalu’d
+dinu’r Rumi. The poet who had taken it had made a charming poem of it,
+delicate, fragile, and yet dramatic and touched with fervour, porcelain
+with firelight gleaming on it here and there. Lady Holme had usually a
+power of identifying herself thoroughly with what she was singing, of
+concentrating herself with ease upon it, and so compelling her hearers
+to be concentrated upon her subject and upon her. To-day she was deeper
+down in words and music, in the little drama of them, than ever before.
+She was the man who knocked at the door, the loved one who cried from
+within the house. She gave the reply, “_C’est moi_!” with the eagerness
+of that most eager of all things--Hope. Then, as she sang gravely, with
+tender rebuke, “This house cannot shelter us both together,” she was
+in the heart of love, that place of understanding. Afterwards, as one
+carried by Fate through the sky, she was the man set down in a desert
+place, fasting, praying, educating himself to be more worthy of love.
+Then came the return, the question, “_Qui est la_?” the reply;--reply
+of the solitary place, the denied desire, the longing to mount, the
+educated heart--“_C’est toi_!” the swiftly-opening door, the rush of
+feet that were welcome, of outstretched arms for which waited a great
+possession.
+
+Something within her lived the song very fully and completely. For once
+she did not think at all of what effect she was making. She was not
+unconscious of the audience. She was acutely conscious of the presence
+of people, and of individuals whom she knew; of Fritz, of Lady
+Cardington, Sir Donald, even of poor, horrible Rupert Carey. But with
+the unusual consciousness was linked a strange indifference, a sense
+of complete detachment. And this enabled her to live simultaneously two
+lives--Lady Holme’s and another’s. Who was the other? She did not ask,
+but she felt as if in that moment a prisoner within her was released.
+And yet, directly the song was over and the eager applause broke out, a
+bitterness came into her heart. Her sense, banished for the moment,
+of her own personality and circumstances returned upon her, and that
+“_C’est toi_!” of the educated heart seemed suddenly an irony as she
+looked at Fritz’s face. Had any lover gone into the desert for her,
+fasted and prayed for her, learned for her sake the right answer to the
+ceaseless question that echoes in every woman’s heart?
+
+The pianist modulated, struck the chord of a new key, paused, then broke
+into a languid, honey-sweet prelude. Lady Holme sang the Italian song
+which had made Lady Cardington cry.
+
+Afterwards, she often thought of her singing of that particular song on
+that particular occasion as people think of the frail bridges that span
+the gulfs between one fate and another. And it seemed to her that
+while she was crossing this bridge, that was a song, she had a faint
+premonition of the land that lay before her on the far side of the gulf.
+She did not see clearly any features of the landscape, but surely she
+saw that it was different from all that she had known. Perhaps she
+deceived herself. Perhaps she fancied that she had divined something
+that was in reality hidden from her. One thing, however, is
+certain--that she made a very exceptional effect upon her audience. Many
+of them, when later they heard of an incident that occurred within a
+very short time, felt almost awestricken for a moment. It seemed to them
+that they had been visited by one of the messengers--the forerunners of
+destiny--that they had heard a whispering voice say, “Listen well! This
+is the voice of the Future singing.”
+
+Many people in London on the following day said, “We felt in her singing
+that something extraordinary must be going to happen to her.” And some
+of them at any rate, probably spoke the exact truth.
+
+Lady Holme herself, while she sang her second song, really felt this
+sensation--that it was her swan song. If once we touch perfection we
+feel the black everlasting curtain being drawn round us. We have
+done what we were meant to do and can do no more. Let the race of men
+continue. Our course is run out. To strive beyond the goal is to offer
+oneself up to the derision of the gods. In her song, Lady Holme felt
+that suddenly, and with great ease, she touched the perfection that it
+was possible for her to reach. She felt that, and she saw what she had
+done--in the eyes of Lady Cardington that wept, in Sir Donald’s eyes,
+which had become young as the eyes of Spring, and in the eyes of that
+poor prisoner who was the real Rupert Carey. When she sang the first
+refrain she knew.
+
+
+  “Torna in fior di giovinezza
+       Isaotta Blanzesmano,
+       Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano:
+   Nell’amore ogni dolcezza.”
+
+
+She understood while she sang--she had never understood before, nor
+could conceive why she understood now--what love had been to the world,
+was being, would be so long as there was a world. The sweetness of love
+did not merely present itself to her imagination, but penetrated her
+soul. And that penetration, while it carried with it and infused through
+her whole being a delicate radiance, that was as the radiance of
+light in the midst of surrounding blackness--beams of the moon in
+a forest--carried with it also into her heart a frightful sense of
+individual isolation, of having missed the figure of Truth in the
+jostling crowd of shams.
+
+Fritz stood there against the wall. Yes--Fritz. And he was savagely
+rejoicing in the effect she was making upon the audience, because he
+thought, hoped, that it would lessen the triumph of the woman who was
+punishing him.
+
+She had missed the figure of Truth. That was very certain. And as she
+sang the refrain for the last time she seemed to herself to be searching
+for the form that must surely be very wonderful, searching for it in the
+many eyes that were fixed upon her. She looked at Sir Donald:
+
+
+  “Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano:”
+
+
+She looked at Rupert Carey:
+
+
+  “Nell’amore ogni dolcezza.”
+
+
+She still looked at Carey, and the hideous wreckage of the flesh was no
+longer visible to her. She saw only his burning eyes.
+
+Directly she had finished singing she asked for her motor cloak. While
+they were fetching it she had to go back twice to the platform to bow to
+the applause.
+
+Miss Schley, who was looking angry, said to her:
+
+“You’re not going away before my show?”
+
+“I want to go to the concert room, where I can hear better, and see,”
+ she replied.
+
+Miss Schley looked at her doubtfully, but had to go to the platform. As
+she slowly disappeared behind the screen Lady Holme drew the cloak round
+her, pulled down her veil and went quickly away.
+
+She wanted--more, she required--to be alone.
+
+At the hall door she sent a footman to find the motor car. When it came
+up she said to the chauffeur:
+
+“Take me home quickly and then come back for his lordship.”
+
+She got in.
+
+As the car went off swiftly she noticed that the streets were shining
+with wet.
+
+“Has it been raining?” she asked.
+
+“Raining hard, my lady.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+ON the following morning the newspapers contained an account of the
+concert at Manchester House. They contained also an account of a motor
+accident which had occurred the same afternoon between Hyde Park Corner
+and Knightsbridge.
+
+On the wet pavement Lord Holme’s new car, which was taking Lady Holme
+to Cadogan Square at a rapid pace, skidded and overturned, pinning Lady
+Holme beneath it. While she was on the ground a hansom cab ran into the
+car.
+
+At their breakfasts her friends, her acquaintances, her enemies and the
+general public read of her beautiful singing at the concert, and read
+also the following paragraph, which closed the description of the
+accident:
+
+
+  “We deeply regret to learn that Lady Holme was severely injured in
+  the face by the accident. Full particulars have not reached us, but
+  we understand that an immediate operation is necessary and will be
+  performed to-day by Mr. Bernard Crispin the famous surgeon. Her
+  ladyship is suffering great pain, and it is feared that she will be
+  permanently disfigured.”
+
+
+The fierce change which Lady Holme had longed for was a reality. One
+life, the life of the siren, had come to an end. But the eyes of the
+woman must still see light. The heart of the woman must still beat on.
+
+Death stretched out a hand in the darkness and found the hand of Birth.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+ON a warm but overcast day, at the end of the following September, a
+woman, whose face was completely hidden by a thick black veil, drove
+up to the boat landing of the town of Como in a hired victoria. She was
+alone, but behind her followed a second carriage containing an Italian
+maid and a large quantity of luggage. When the victoria stopped at
+the water’s edge the woman got out slowly, and stood for a moment,
+apparently looking for something. There were many boats ranged along the
+quay, their white awnings thrown back, their oars resting on the painted
+seats. Beside one, which was larger than the others, soberly decorated
+in brown with touches of gold, and furnished with broad seats not unlike
+small armchairs, stood two bold-looking Italian lads dressed in white
+sailors’ suits. One of them, after staring for a brief instant at the
+veiled woman, went up to her and said in Italian:
+
+“Is the signora for Casa Felice?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+The boy took off his round hat with a gallant gesture.
+
+“The boat is here, signora.”
+
+He led the way to the brown-and-gold craft, and helped the lady to get
+into it. She sat down on one of the big seats.
+
+“That is the luggage,” she said, speaking Italian in a low voice, and
+pointing to the second carriage from which the maid was stepping. The
+two boatmen hastened towards it. In a few minutes maid and luggage were
+installed in a big black gondola, oared by two men standing up, and the
+brown boat, with the two lads in white and the veiled woman, glided out
+on the calm water.
+
+The day was a grey dream, mystical in its colourless silence. Blue Italy
+was shrouded as the woman’s face was shrouded. The speechlessness of
+Nature environed her speechlessness. She was an enigma set in an enigma,
+and the two rowers looked at her and at the sunless sky, and bent to
+their oars gravely. A melancholy stole into their sensitive dark
+faces. This new _padrona_ had already cast a shadow upon their buoyant
+temperaments.
+
+She noticed it and clasped her hands together in her lap. She was not
+accustomed yet to her new _role_ in life.
+
+The boat stole on. Como was left behind. The thickly-wooded shores of
+the lake, dotted with many villas, the tall green mountains covered with
+chestnut trees, framed the long, winding riband of water which was the
+way to Casa Felice. There were not many other boats out. The steamer
+had already started for Bellagio, and was far away near the point
+where Torno nestles around its sheltered harbour. The black gondola was
+quickly left behind. Its load of luggage weighed it down. The brown boat
+was alone in the grey dream of the sunless autumn day.
+
+Behind her veil Lady Holme was watching the two Italian boys, whose
+lithe bodies bent to their oars, whose dark eyes were often turned
+upon her with a staring scrutiny, with the morose and almost violent
+expression that is the child of frustrated curiosity.
+
+Was it true? Was she in real life, or sitting there, watching, thinking,
+striving to endure, in a dream? Since the accident which had for ever
+changed her life she had felt many sensations, a torrent of sensations,
+but never one exactly like this, never one so full of emptiness, chaos,
+grey vacancy, eternal stillness, unreal oppression and almost magical
+solitude as this. She had thought she had suffered all things that she
+could suffer. She had not yet suffered this. Someone, the Governing
+Power, had held this in reserve. Now it was being sent forth by decree.
+Now it was coming upon her. Now it was enveloping her. Now it was
+rolling round her and billowing away on every side to unimaginably
+remote horizons.
+
+Another and a new emotion of horror was to be hers. Would the attack of
+the hidden one upon her never end? Was that quiver of poisoned arrows
+inexhaustible?
+
+She leaned back against the cushions without feeling them. She wanted to
+sink back as the mortally wounded sink, to sink down, far down, into the
+gulf where surely the dying go to find, with their freezing lips, the
+frozen lips of Death. She shut her eyes.
+
+Presently, with the faint splash of the oars in the water, there mingled
+a low sound of music. The rower nearest to her was singing in an
+under voice to keep his boy’s heart from succumbing to the spell of
+melancholy. She listened, still wrapped in this dreadful chaos that
+was dreamlike. At first the music was a murmur. But presently it
+grew louder. She could distinguish words now and then. Once she heard
+_carissima_, a moment afterwards _amore_. Then the poison in which the
+tip of this last arrow had been curiously steeped began its work in
+her. The quivering creature hidden within her cowered, shrank, put up
+trembling hands, cried out, “I cannot endure this thing. I do not know
+how to. I have never learnt the way. This is impossible for me. This is
+a demand I have not the capacity to fulfil!” And, even while it cowered
+and cried out, knew, “This I must endure. This demand I shall be made
+to fulfil. Nothing will serve me; no outstretched hands, no wailings of
+despair, no prayers, no curses even will save me. For I am the soul in
+the hands of the vivisector.”
+
+Along the lake, past the old home of La Taglioni, past the Villa Pasta
+with its long garden, past little Torno with its great round oleanders
+and its houses crowding to the shore, the boatman sang. Gathering
+courage as his own voice dispersed his melancholy, and the warm hopes of
+his youth spread their wings once more, roused by the words of love his
+lips were uttering, he fearlessly sent out his song. Love in the South
+was in it, love in the sun, embraces in warm scented nights, longings
+in moonlight, attainment in darkness. The boy had forgotten the veiled
+lady, whose shrouded face and whose silence had for a moment saddened
+him. His hot, bold nature reasserted itself, the fire of his youth
+blazed up again. He sang as if only the other boatman had been there and
+they had seen the girls they loved among the trees upon the shore.
+
+And the soul writhed, like an animal stretched and strapped upon the
+board, to whom no anaesthetic, had been given.
+
+Never before would it have been possible to Lady Holme to believe that
+the mere sound of a word could inflict such torment upon a heart as the
+sound of the word _amore_, coming from the boatman’s lips, now inflicted
+upon hers. Each time it came, with its soft beauty, its languor of
+sweetness--like a word reclining--it flayed her soul alive, and showed
+her red, raw bareness.
+
+Yet she did not ask the man to stop singing. Few people in the hands
+of Fate ask Fate for favours. Instinct speaks in the soul and says, “Be
+silent.”
+
+The boat rounded the point of Torno and came at once into a lonelier
+region of the lake. Autumn was more definite here. Its sadness spoke
+more plainly. Habitations on the shores were fewer. The mountains were
+more grim, though grander. And their greyness surely closed in a little
+upon the boat, the rowers, the veiled woman who was being taken to Casa
+Felice.
+
+Perhaps to combat the gathering gloom of Nature the boatman sang more
+loudly, with the full force of his voice. But suddenly he seemed to be
+struck by the singular contrast opposed to his expansive energy by the
+silent figure opposite to him. A conscious look came into his face. His
+voice died away abruptly. After a pause he said,
+
+“Perhaps the signora is not fond of music?”
+
+Lady Holme wanted to speak, but she could not. She and this bright-eyed
+boy were not in the same world. That was what she felt. He did not know
+it, but she knew it. And one world cannot speak through infinite space
+with another.
+
+She said nothing. The boy looked over his shoulder at his companion.
+Then, in silence, they both rowed on.
+
+And now that the song had ceased she was again in the grey chaos of the
+dream, in the irrevocable emptiness, the intense, the enormous solitude
+that was like the solitude of an unpeopled eternity in which man had no
+lot.
+
+Presently, with a stroke of his right oar, the boy who had sung turned
+the boat’s prow toward the shore, and Lady Holme saw a large, lonely
+house confronting them on the nearer bank of the lake. It stood apart.
+For a long distance on either side of it there was no other habitation.
+The flat, yellow facade rose out of the water. Behind was a dim tangle
+of densely-growing trees rising up on the steep mountain side towards
+the grey sky. Lady Holme could not yet see details. The boat was still
+too far out upon the lake. Nor would she have been able to note details
+if she had seen them. Only a sort of heavy impression that this house
+had a pale, haunted aspect forced itself dully upon her.
+
+“Ecco Casa Felice, signora!” said the foremost rower, half timidly,
+pointing with his brown hand.
+
+She made an intense effort and uttered some reply. The boy was
+encouraged and began to tell her about the beauties of the house, the
+gardens, the chasm behind the piazza down which the waterfall rushed, to
+dive beneath the house and lose itself in the lake. She tried to listen,
+but she could not. The strangeness of her being alone, hidden behind
+a dense veil, of her coming to such a retired house in the autumn to
+remain there in utter solitude, with no object except that of being
+safe from the intrusion of anyone who knew her, of being hidden from
+all watching eyes that had ever looked upon her--the strangeness of it
+obsessed her, was both powerful and unreal. That she should be one of
+those lonely women of whom the world speaks with a lightly-contemptuous
+pity seemed incredible to her. Yet what woman was lonelier than she?
+
+The boat drew in toward the shore and she began to see the house more
+plainly. It was large, and the flat facade was broken in the middle
+by an open piazza with round arches and slender columns. This piazza
+divided the house in two. The villa was in fact composed of two square
+buildings connected together by it. From the boat, looking up, Lady
+Holme saw a fierce mountain gorge rising abruptly behind the house.
+Huge cypresses grew on its sides, towering above the slate roof, and she
+heard the loud noise of falling water. It seemed to add to the weight of
+her desolation.
+
+The boat stopped at a flight of worn stone steps. One of the boys sprang
+out and rang a bell, and presently an Italian man-servant opened a tall
+iron gate set in a crumbling stone arch, and showed more stone steps
+leading upward between walls covered with dripping lichen. The boat boy
+came to help Lady Holme out.
+
+For a moment she did not move. The dreamlike feeling had come upon her
+with such force that her limbs refused to obey her will. The sound of
+the falling water in the mountain gorge had sent her farther adrift into
+the grey, unpeopled eternity, into the vague chaos. But the boy held
+out his hand, took hers. The strong clasp recalled her. She got up. The
+Italian man-servant preceded her up the steps into a long garden built
+up high above the lake on a creeper-covered wall. To the left was the
+house door. She stood still for an instant looking out over the wide
+expanse of unruffled grey water. Then, putting her hand up to her veil
+as if to keep it more closely over her face, she slowly went into the
+house.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+DESPAIR had driven Lady Holme to Casa Felice. When she had found that
+the accident had disfigured her frightfully, and that the disfigurement
+would be permanent, she had at first thought of killing herself. But
+then she had been afraid. Life had abruptly become a horror to her. She
+felt that it must be a horror to her always. Yet she dared not leave
+it then, in her home in London, in the midst of the sights and sounds
+connected with her former happiness. After the operation, and the
+verdict of the doctors, that no more could be done than had been done,
+she had had an access of almost crazy misery, in which all the secret
+violence of her nature had rushed to the surface from the depths. Shut
+up alone in her room, she had passed a day and a night without food. She
+had lain upon the floor. She had torn her clothes into fragments. The
+animal that surely dwells at the door of the soul of each human being
+had had its way in her, had ravaged her, humiliated her, turned her to
+savagery. Then at last she had slept, still lying upon the floor. And
+she had waked feeling worn out but calm, desperately calm. She defied
+the doctors. What did they know of women, of what women can do to
+regain a vanished beauty? She would call in specialists, beauty doctors,
+quacks, the people who fill the papers with their advertisements.
+
+Then began a strange defile of rag-tag humanity to the Cadogan Square
+door--women, men, of all nationalities and pretensions. But the evil was
+beyond their power. At last an American specialist, who had won renown
+by turning a famous woman of sixty into the semblance of a woman of
+six-and-thirty--for a short time--was called in. Lady Holme knew
+that his verdict must be final. If he could do nothing to restore her
+vanished loveliness nothing could be done. After being closeted with her
+for a long time he came out of her room. There were tears in his eyes.
+To the footman who opened the hall door, and who stared in surprise, he
+explained his emotion thus.
+
+“Poor lady,” he said. “It’s a hopeless case.”
+
+“Ah!” said the man, who was the pale footman Lady Holme had sent with
+the latch-key to Leo Ulford.
+
+“Hopeless. It’s a hard thing to have to tell a lady she’ll always
+be--be--”
+
+“What, sir?” said the footman.
+
+“Well--what people won’t enjoy looking at.”
+
+He winked his eyes. He was a little bald man, with a hatchet face that
+did not suggest emotion.
+
+“And judging by part of the left side of the face, I guess she must have
+been almost a beauty once,” he added, stepping into the square.
+
+That was Lady Holme now. She had to realise herself as a woman whom
+people would rather not look at.
+
+All this time she had not seen Fritz. He had asked to see her. He had
+even tried to insist on seeing her, but so long as there was any hope in
+her of recovering her lost beauty she had refused to let him come near
+her. The thought of his eyes staring upon the tragic change in her face
+sent cold creeping through her veins. But when the American had gone she
+realised that there was nothing to wait for, that if she were ever to
+let Fritz see her again it had better be now. The bandages in which
+her face had been swathed had been removed. She went to a mirror and,
+setting her teeth and clenching her hands, looked into it steadily.
+
+She did not recognise herself. As she stood there she felt as if a
+dreadful stranger had come into the room and was confronting her.
+
+The accident, and the surgical treatment that had followed upon it,
+had greatly altered the face. The nose, once fine and delicate, was
+now coarse and misshapen. A wound had permanently distorted the mouth,
+producing a strange, sneering expression. The whole of the right side of
+the face was puffy and heavy-looking, and drawn down towards the chin.
+It was also at present discoloured. For as Lady Holme lay under the car
+she had been badly burnt. The raw, red tinge would no doubt fade away
+with time, but the face must always remain unsightly, even a little
+grotesque, must always show to the casual passer-by a woman who had been
+the victim of a dreadful accident.
+
+Lady Holme stared at this woman for a long time. There were no tears in
+her eyes. Then she went to the dressing-table and began to make up her
+face. Slowly, deliberately, with a despairing carefulness, she covered
+it with pigments till she looked like a woman in Regent Street. Her face
+became a frightful mask, and even then the fact that she was disfigured
+was not concealed. The application of the pigments began to cause her
+pain. The right side of her face throbbed. She looked dreadfully old,
+too, with this mass of paint and powder upon her--like a hag, she
+thought. And it was obvious that she was trying to hide something.
+Anyone, man or woman, looking upon her, would divine that so much art
+could only be used for the concealment of a dreadful disability. People,
+seeing this mask, would suppose--what might they not suppose? The pain
+in her face became horrible. Suddenly, with a cry, she began to undo
+what she had done. When she had finished she rang the bell. Her maid
+knocked at the door. Without opening it she called out:
+
+“Is his lordship in the house?”
+
+“Yes, my lady. His lordship has just come in.”
+
+“Go and ask him to come up and see me.”
+
+“Yes, my lady.”
+
+Lady Holme sat down on the sofa at the foot of the bed. She was
+trembling violently. She sat looking on the ground and trying to control
+her limbs. A sort of dreadful humbleness surged through her, as if she
+were a guilty creature about to cringe before a judge. She trembled till
+the sofa on which she was sitting shook. She caught hold of the cushions
+and made a strong effort to sit still. The handle of the door turned.
+
+“Don’t come in!” she cried out sharply.
+
+But the door opened and her husband appeared on the threshold. As he did
+so she turned swiftly so that only part of the left side of her face was
+towards him.
+
+“Vi!” he said. “Poor old girl, I--”
+
+He was coming forward when she called out again “Stay there, Fritz!”
+
+He stopped.
+
+“Why?” he asked.
+
+“I--I--wait a minute. Shut the door.”
+
+He shut the door. She was still looking away from him.
+
+“Do you understand?” she said, still in a sharp voice.
+
+“Understand what?”
+
+“That I’m altered, that the accident’s altered me--very much?”
+
+“I know. The doctor said something. But you look all right.”
+
+“From there.”
+
+The trembling seized her again.
+
+“Well, but--it can’t be so bad--”
+
+“It is. Don’t move! Fritz--”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“You--do you care for me?”
+
+“Of course I do, old girl. Why, you know--”
+
+Suddenly she turned round, stood up and faced him desperately.
+
+“Do you care for me, Fritz?” she said.
+
+There was a dead silence. It seemed to last for a long while. At length
+it was broken by a woman’s voice crying:
+
+“Fritz,--Fritz--it isn’t my fault! It isn’t my fault!”
+
+“Good God!” Lord Holme said slowly.
+
+“It isn’t my fault, Fritz! It isn’t my fault!”
+
+“Good God! but--the doctor didn’t--Oh--wait a minute--”
+
+A door opened and shut. He was gone. Lady Holme fell down on the sofa.
+She was alone, but she kept on sobbing:
+
+“It isn’t my fault, Fritz! It isn’t my fault, Fritz!”
+
+And while she sobbed the words she knew that her life with Fritz Holme
+had come to an end. The chapter was closed.
+
+From that day she had only one desire--to hide herself. The season was
+over. London was empty. She could travel. She resolved to disappear.
+Fritz had stayed on in the house, but she would not see him again, and
+he did not press her to. She knew why. He dreaded to look at her. She
+would see no one. At first there had been streams of callers, but now
+almost everybody had left town. Only Sir Donald came to the door each
+day and inquired after her health. One afternoon a note was brought to
+her. It was from Fritz, saying that he had been “feeling a bit chippy,”
+ and the doctor advised him to run over to Homburg. But he wished to know
+what she meant to do. Would she go down to her father?--her mother, Lady
+St. Loo, was dead, and her father was an old man--or what? Would she
+come to Homburg too?
+
+When she read those words she laughed out loud. Then she sent for the
+_New York Herald_ and looked for the Homburg notes. She found Miss
+Pimpernel Schley’s name among the list of the newest arrivals. That
+evening she wrote to her husband:
+
+
+  “Do not bother about me. Go to Homburg. I need rest and I want to
+  be alone. Perhaps I may go to some quiet place in Switzerland with
+  my maid. I’ll let you know if I leave town. Good-bye.
+
+                                              “VIOLA HOLME.”
+
+
+At first she had put only Viola. Then she added the second word. Viola
+alone suggested an intimacy which no longer existed between her and the
+man she had married.
+
+The next day Lord Holme crossed the Channel. She was left with the
+servants.
+
+Till then she had not been out of the house, but two days afterwards,
+swathed in a thick veil, she went for a drive in the Park, and on
+returning from it found Sir Donald on the door-step. He looked frailer
+than ever and very old. Lady Holme would have preferred to avoid him.
+Since that interview with her husband the idea of meeting anyone she
+knew terrified her. But he came at once to help her out of the carriage.
+Her face was invisible, but he knew her, and he greeted her in a rather
+shaky voice. She could see that he was deeply moved, and thanked him for
+his many inquiries.
+
+“But why are you still in London?” she said.
+
+“You are still in London,” he replied.
+
+She was about to say good-bye on the door-step; but he kept her hand in
+his and said:
+
+“Let me come in and speak to you for a moment.”
+
+“Very well,” she said.
+
+When they were in the drawing-room she still kept the veil over her
+face, and remained standing.
+
+“Sir Donald,” she said, “you cared for me, I know; you were fond of me.”
+
+“Were?” he answered.
+
+“Yes--were. I am no longer the woman you--other people--cared for.”
+
+“If there is any change--” he began.
+
+“I know. You are going to say it is not in the woman, the real woman.
+But I say it is. The change is in what, to men, is the real woman. This
+change has destroyed any feeling my husband may have had for me.”
+
+“It could never destroy mine,” Sir Donald said quietly.
+
+“Yes, it could--yours especially, because you are a worshipper of
+beauty, and Fritz never worshipped anything except himself. I am going
+to let you say good-bye to me without seeing me. Remember me as I was.”
+
+“But--what do you mean? You speak as if you would no longer go into the
+world.”
+
+“I go into the world! You haven’t seen me, Sir Donald.”
+
+She saw an expression of nervous apprehension come into his face as he
+glanced at her veil.
+
+“What are you going to do, then?” he said.
+
+“I don’t know. I--I want a hiding-place.”
+
+She saw tears come into his old, faded eyes.
+
+“Hush!” he said. “Don’t-”
+
+“A hiding-place. I want to travel a long way off and be quite alone, and
+think, and see how I can go on, if I can go on.”
+
+Her voice was quite steady.
+
+“If I could do something--anything for you!” he murmured.
+
+“You fancy you are still speaking to the woman who sang, Sir Donald.”
+
+“Would you--” Suddenly he spoke with some eagerness. “You want to go
+away, to be alone?”
+
+“Yes, I must.”
+
+“Let me lend you Casa Felice!”
+
+“Casa Felice!”
+
+She laughed.
+
+“To be sure; I was to baptise it, wasn’t I?”
+
+“Ah, that--will you have it for a while?”
+
+“But you are going there!”
+
+“I will not go. It is all ready. The servants are engaged. You will
+be perfectly looked after, perfectly comfortable. Let me feel I can do
+something for you. Try it. You will find beauty there--peace. And I--I
+shall be on the lake, not far off.”
+
+“I must be alone,” she said wearily.
+
+“You shall be. I will never come unless you send for me.”
+
+“I should never send for you or for anyone.”
+
+She did not say then what she would do, but three days later she
+accepted Sir Donald’s offer.
+
+And now she was alone in Casa Felice. She had not even brought her
+French maid, but had engaged an Italian. She was resolved to isolate
+herself with people who had never seen her as a beautiful woman.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+LADY HOLME never forgot that first evening at Casa Felice. The
+strangeness of it was greater than the strangeness of any nightmare.
+When she was shut up in her bedroom in London she had thought she
+realised all the meaning of the word loneliness. Now she knew that then
+she had not begun to realise it. For she had been in her own house, in
+the city which contained a troop of her friends, in the city where she
+had reigned. And although she knew that she would reign no more, she had
+not grasped the exact meaning of that knowledge in London. She had known
+a fact but not fully felt it. She had known what she now was but not
+fully felt what she now was. Even when Fritz, muttering almost terrified
+exclamations, had stumbled out of the bedroom, she had not heard the
+dull clamour of finality as she heard it now.
+
+She was an exile. She was an outcast among women. She was no longer
+a beautiful woman, she was not even a plain woman--she was a
+dreadful-looking human being.
+
+The Italian servants by whom she was surrounded suddenly educated her in
+the lore of exact knowledge of herself and her present situation.
+
+Italians are the most charming of the nations, but Italians of the lower
+classes are often very unreserved in the display of their most fugitive
+sensations, their most passing moods. The men, especially when they are
+young, are highly susceptible to beauty in women. They are also--and
+the second emotion springs naturally enough from the first--almost
+childishly averse from female ugliness. It is a common thing in Italy
+to hear of men of the lower classes speak of a woman’s plainness with
+brutality, with a manner almost of personal offence. They often shrink
+from personal ugliness as Englishmen seldom do, like children shrinking
+from something abnormal--a frightening dwarf, a spectre.
+
+Now that Lady Holme had reached the “hiding-place” for which she had
+longed, she resolved to be brutal with herself. Till now she had almost
+perpetually concealed her disfigured face. Even her servants had not
+seen it. But in this lonely house, among these strangers, she knew that
+the inevitable moment was come when she must begin the new life, the
+terrible life that was henceforth to be hers. In her bedroom she took
+off her hat and veil, and without glancing into the glass she came
+downstairs. In the hall she met the butler. She saw him start.
+
+“Can I have tea?” she said, looking at him steadily.
+
+“Yes, signora,” he answered, looking down.
+
+“In the piazza, please.”
+
+She went out through the open door into the piazza. The boy who had sung
+in the boat was there, watering some geraniums in pots. As she came out
+he glanced up curiously, at the same time pulling off his hat. When he
+saw her his mouth gaped, and an expression of pitiless repulsion came
+into his eyes. It died out almost instantaneously, and he smiled and
+began to speak about the flowers. But Lady Holme had received her
+education. She knew what she was to youth that instinctively loves
+beauty.
+
+She sat down in a cane chair. It seemed to her as if people were
+scourging her with thongs of steel, as if she were bleeding from the
+strokes.
+
+She looked out across the lake.
+
+The butler brought tea and put it beside her. She did not hear him
+come or go. Behind her the waterfall roared down between the cypresses.
+Before her the lake spread out its grey, unruffled surface. And this was
+the baptism of Casa Felice, her baptism into a new life. Her agony was
+the more intense because she had never been an intellectual woman, had
+never lived the inner life. Always she had depended on outward things.
+Always she had been accustomed to bustle, movement, excitement,
+perpetual intercourse with people who paid her homage. Always she had
+lived for the world, and worshipped, because she had seen those around
+her worshipping, the body.
+
+And now all was taken from her. Without warning, without a moment
+for preparation, she was cast down into Hell. Even her youth was made
+useless to her.
+
+When she thought of that she began to cry, sitting there by the stone
+balustrade of the piazza, to cry convulsively. She remembered her pity
+for old age, for the monstrous loss it cannot cease from advertising.
+And now she, in her youth, had passed it on the road to the pit. Lady
+Cardington was a beautiful woman. She pitied herself bitterly because
+she was morbid, as many beautiful women are when they approach old age.
+But she was beautiful. She would always be beautiful. She might not
+think it, but she was still a power, could still inspire love. In
+her blanched face framed in white hair there was in truth a wonderful
+attraction.
+
+Whiteness--Lady Holme shuddered when she thought of whiteness,
+remembering what the glass had shown her.
+
+Fritz--his animal passion for her--his horror of her now--Miss
+Schley--their petty, concealed strife--Rupert Carey’s love--Leo Ulford’s
+desire of conquest--his father’s strange, pathetic devotion--Winter
+falling at the feet of Spring--figures and events from the panorama of
+her life now ended flickered through her almost numbed mind, while the
+tears still ran down her face.
+
+And Robin Pierce?
+
+As she thought of him more life quickened in her mind.
+
+Since her accident he had written to her several times, ardent,
+tender letters, recalling all he had said to her, recounting again his
+adoration of her for her nature, her soul, the essence of her, the woman
+in her, telling her that this terror which had come upon her only made
+her dearer to him, that--as she knew--he had impiously dared almost to
+long for it, as for an order of release that would take effect in the
+liberation of her true self.
+
+These letters she had read, but they had not stirred her. She had told
+herself that Robin did not know, that he was a self-deceiver, that he
+did not understand his own nature, which was allied to the nature of
+every living man. But now, seeking some, even the smallest solace in
+the intense agony of desolation that was upon her, she caught--in her
+bleeding woman’s heart--at this hand stretched out from Rome. She got
+up, went to her bedroom, unlocked her despatch-box, took out these
+letters of Robin’s. They had not stirred her, yet she had kept them.
+Now she came down once more to the piazza, sat by the tea-table, opened
+them, read them, re-read them, whispered them over again and again.
+Something she must have; some hand she must catch at. She could not die
+in this freezing cold which she had never known, this cold that came out
+of the Inferno, at whose cavern mouth she stood. And Robin said he was
+there--Robin said he was there.
+
+She did not love Robin. It seemed to her now that it would be grotesque
+for her to love any man. Her face was not meant for love. But as she
+read these ardent, romantic letters, written since the tragedy that had
+overtaken her, she began to ask herself, with a fierce anxiety, whether
+what Robin affirmed could be the truth? Was he unlike other men? Was his
+nature capable of a devotion of the soul to another soul, of a devotion
+to which any physical ugliness, even any physical horror, would count as
+nothing?
+
+After that last scene with Fritz she felt as if he were no longer her
+husband, as if he were only a man who had fled from her in fear. She
+did not think any more of his rights, her duties. He had abandoned his
+rights. What duties could she have towards a man who was frightened when
+he looked at her? And indeed all the social and moral questions to which
+the average woman of the world pays--because she must pay--attention had
+suddenly ceased to exist for Lady Holme. She was no longer a woman of
+the world. All worldly matters had sunk down beneath her feet with her
+lost beauty. She had wanted to be free. Well, now she was surely free.
+Who would care what she did in the future?
+
+Robin said he was there.
+
+She thought that, unless she could feel that in world there was one man
+who wanted to take care of her, she must destroy herself. The thought
+grew in her as she sat there, till she said to herself, “If it is true
+what he says, perhaps I shall be able to live. If it is not true--”
+ She looked over the stone balustrade at the grey waters of the lake.
+Twilight was darkening over them.
+
+Late that evening, when she was sitting in the big drawing-room staring
+at the floor, the butler came in with a telegram. She opened it and
+read:
+
+
+  “Sir Donald has told me you are at Casa Felice; arrive to-morrow
+  from Rome--ROBIN.”
+
+
+“No answer,” she said.
+
+So he was coming--to-morrow. The awful sense of desolation lifted
+slightly from her. A human being was travelling to her, was wanting to
+see her. To see her! She shuddered. Then fiercely she asked herself why
+she was afraid. She would not be afraid. She would trust in Robin. He
+was unlike other men. There had always been in him something that
+set him apart, a strangeness, a romance, a love of hidden things, a
+subtlety. If only he would still care for her, still feel towards her
+as he had felt, she could face the future, she thought. They might be
+apart. That did not matter. She had no thought of a close connection, of
+frequent intercourse even. She only wanted desperately, frantically,
+to know that someone who had loved her could love her still in spite of
+what had happened. If she could retain one deep affection she felt that
+she could live.
+
+The morrow would convince her.
+
+That night she did not sleep. She lay in bed and heard the water falling
+in the gorge, and when the dawn began to break she did a thing she had
+not done for a long time.
+
+She got out of bed, knelt down and prayed--prayed to Him who had dealt
+terribly with her that He would be merciful when Robin came.
+
+When it was daylight and the Italian maid knocked at her door she told
+her to get out a plain, dark dress. She did her hair herself with the
+utmost simplicity. That at least was still beautiful. Then she went down
+and walked in the high garden above the lake. The greyness had lifted
+and the sky was blue. The mellowness rather than the sadness of autumn
+was apparent, throned on the tall mountains whose woods were bathed in
+sunshine. All along the great old wall, that soared forty feet from
+the water, roses were climbing. Scarlet and white geraniums bloomed in
+discoloured ancient vases. Clumps of oleanders showed pink showers
+of blossoms. Tall bamboos reared their thin heads towards the tufted
+summits of palms that suggested Africa. Monstrous cypresses aspired,
+with a sort of haughty resignation, above their brother trees. The bees
+went to and fro. Flies circled and settled. Lizards glided across the
+warm stones and rustled into hiding among the ruddy fallen leaves. And
+always the white water sang in the gorge as it rushed towards the piazza
+of Casa Felice.
+
+And Lady Holme tried to hope.
+
+Yet, as she walked slowly to and fro amid the almost rank luxuriance
+of the garden, she was gnawed by a terrible anxiety. The dreadful
+humbleness, the shrinking cowardice of the unsightly human being invaded
+her. She strove to put them from her. She strove to call Robin’s own
+arguments and assertions to her aid. What she had been she still was
+in all essentials. Her self was unharmed, existed, could love, hate, be
+tender, be passionate as before. Viola was there still within her,
+the living spirit to which a name had been given when she was a little
+child. The talent was there which had spoken, which could still speak,
+through her voice. The beating heart was there which could still speak
+through her actions. The mysteries of the soul still pursued their
+secret courses within her, like far-off subterranean streams. The
+essential part of her remained as it had been. Only a little outside bit
+of a framework had been twisted awry. Could that matter very much? Had
+she not perhaps been morbid in her despair?
+
+She determined to take courage. She told herself that if she allowed
+this dreadful, invading humbleness way in her she would lose all power
+to dominate another by showing that she had ceased to dominate herself.
+If she met Robin in fear and trembling she would actually teach him to
+despise her. If she showed that she thought herself changed,
+horrible, he would inevitably catch her thought and turn it to her own
+destruction. Men despise those who despise themselves. She knew that,
+and she argued with herself, fought with herself. If Robin loved the
+angel; surely he could still love. For if there were an angel within
+her it had not been harmed. And she leaned on the stone wall and prayed
+again while the roses touched her altered face.
+
+It seemed to her then that courage was sent to her. She felt less
+terrified of what was before her, as if something had risen up within
+her upon which she could lean, as if her soul began to support the
+trembling, craven thing that would betray her, began to teach it how to
+be still.
+
+She did not feel happy, but she felt less desperately miserable than she
+had felt since the accident.
+
+After _dejeuner_ she walked again in the garden. As the time drew near
+for Robin to arrive, the dreadful feverish anxiety of the early morning
+awoke again within her. She had not conquered herself. Again the thought
+of suicide came upon her, and she felt that her life or death were in
+the hands of this man whom yet she did not love. They were in his hands
+because he was a human being and she was one. There are straits in
+which the child of life, whom the invisible hand that is extended in
+a religion has not yet found, must find in the darkness a human hand
+stretched out to it or sink down in utter terror and perhaps perish.
+Lady Holme was in such a strait. She knew it. She said to herself quite
+plainly that if Robin failed to stretch out his hand to her she could
+not go on living. It was clear to her that her life or death depended
+upon whether he remained true to what he had said was his ideal, or
+whether he proved false to it and showed himself such a man as Fritz, as
+a thousand others.
+
+She sickened with anxiety as the moments passed.
+
+Now, leaning upon the wall, she began to scan the lake. Presently she
+saw the steamer approaching the landing-stage of Carate on the opposite
+bank. The train from Rome had arrived. But Robin would doubtless come
+by boat. There was at least another hour to wait. She left the wall
+and walked quickly up and down, moving her hands and her lips. Now she
+almost wished he were not coming. She recalled the whole story of her
+acquaintance with Robin--his adoration of her when she was a girl, his
+wish to marry her, his melancholy when she refused him, his persistent
+affection for her after she had married Fritz, his persistent belief
+that there was that within her which Fritz did not understand and could
+never satisfy, his persistent obstinacy in asserting that he had the
+capacity to understand and content this hidden want. Was that true?
+
+Fritz had cared for nothing but the body, yet she had loved Fritz. She
+did not love Robin. Yet there was a feeling in her that if he proved
+true to his ideal now she might love him in the end. If only he would
+love her--after he knew.
+
+She heard a sound of oars. The blood rushed to her face. She drew back
+from the wall and hurried into her house. All the morning she had been
+making up her mind to go to meet Robin at once in the sunlight, to let
+him know all at once. But now, in terror, she went to her room. With
+trembling hands she pinned on a hat; she took out of a drawer the thick
+veil she wore when travelling and tied it tightly over her face. Panic
+seized her.
+
+There was a knock at the door, the announcement that a signore was
+waiting in the drawing-room for the signora.
+
+Lady Holme felt an almost ungovernable sensation of physical nausea. She
+went to her dressing-case and drank one or two burning drops of eau de
+Cologne. Then she pulled down the veil under her chin and stood in the
+middle of the room for several minutes without moving. Then she went
+downstairs quickly and went quickly into the drawing-room.
+
+Robin was there, standing by the window. He looked excited, with an
+excitement of happiness, and this gave to him an aspect of almost boyish
+youth. His long black eyes shone with eagerness when she came into the
+room. But when he saw the veil his face changed.
+
+“You don’t trust me!” he said, without any greeting.
+
+She went up to him and put out her hand.
+
+“Robin!” she said.
+
+“You don’t trust me,” he repeated.
+
+He took her hand. His was hot.
+
+“Robin--I’m a coward,” she said.
+
+Her voice quivered.
+
+“Oh, my dearest!” he exclaimed, melted in a moment.
+
+He took her other hand, and she felt his hands throbbing. His clasp
+was so ardent that it startled her into forgetting everything for one
+instant, everything that except these clasping hands loved her hands,
+loved her. That instant was exquisitely sweet to her. There was a
+stinging sweetness in it, a mystery of sweetness, as if their four hands
+were four souls longing to be lost in one another.
+
+“Now you’ll trust me,” he said.
+
+She released her hands and immediately her terror of doubt returned.
+
+“Let us go into the garden,” she answered.
+
+He followed her to the path beside the wall.
+
+“I looked for you from here,” she said.
+
+“I did not see you.”
+
+“No. When I heard the boat I--Robin, I’m afraid--I’m afraid.”
+
+“Of me, Viola?”
+
+He laughed joyously.
+
+“Take off your veil,” he said.
+
+“No, no--not yet. I want to tell you first--”
+
+“To tell me what?”
+
+“That my--that my--Robin, I’m not beautiful now.”
+
+Her voice quivered again.
+
+“You tell me so,” he answered.
+
+“It’s true.”
+
+“I don’t believe it.”
+
+“But,” she began, almost desperately, “it’s true, Robin, oh, it’s true!
+When Fritz--”
+
+She stopped. She was choking.
+
+“Oh--Fritz!” he said with scathing contempt.
+
+“No, no, listen! You’ve got to listen.” She put her hand on his arm.
+“When Fritz saw me--afterwards he--he was afraid of me. He couldn’t
+speak to me. He just looked and said--and said--”
+
+Tears were running down behind the veil. He put up his hand to hers,
+which still touched his arm.
+
+“Don’t tell me what he said. What do I care? Viola, you know I’ve almost
+longed for this--no, not that, but--can’t you understand that when one
+loves a woman one loves something hidden, something mystical? It’s so
+much more than a face that one loves. One doesn’t want to live in a
+house merely because it’s got a nice front door.”
+
+He laughed again as if he were half ashamed of his own feeling.
+
+“Is that true, Robin?”
+
+The sound of her voice told him that he need not be afraid to be
+passionate.
+
+“Sit down here,” he said.
+
+They had reached an old stone bench at the end of the garden where the
+woods began. Two cypresses towered behind it, sad-looking sentinels.
+There was a gap in the wall here through which the lake could be seen as
+one sat upon the bench.
+
+“I want to make you understand, to make you trust me.”
+
+She sat down without speaking, and he sat beside her.
+
+“Viola,” he said, “there are many men who love only what they can see,
+and never think of the spirit behind it. They care only for a woman’s
+body. For them the woman’s body is the woman. I put it rather brutally.
+What they can touch, what they can kiss, what they can hold in their
+arms is all to them. They are unconscious of the distant, untameable
+woman, the lawless woman who may be free in the body that is captive,
+who may be unknown in the body that is familiar, who may even be pure in
+the body that is defiled as she is immortal though her body is mortal.
+These men love the flesh only. But there are at least some men who love
+the spirit. They love the flesh, too, because it manifests the spirit,
+but to them the spirit is the real thing. They are always stretching out
+their arms to that. The hearth can’t satisfy them. They demand the fire.
+The fire, the fire!” he repeated, as if the word warmed him. “I’ve so
+often thought of this, imagined this. It’s as if I’d actually foreseen
+it.”
+
+He spoke with gathering excitement.
+
+“What?” she murmured.
+
+“That some day the woman men--those men I’ve spoken of--loved would
+be struck down, and the real woman, the woman of the true beauty, the
+mystic, the spirit woman, would be set free. If this had not happened
+you could perhaps never have known who was the man that really loved
+you--that loved the real you, the you that lies so far beyond the flesh,
+the you that has sung and suffered--”
+
+“Ah, suffered!” she said.
+
+But there was a note of something that was not sorrow in her voice.
+
+“If you want to know the man I mean,” Robin said, “lift up your veil,
+Viola.”
+
+She sat quite still for a moment, a moment that seemed very long. Then
+she put up both hands to her head, untied the veil and let it fall into
+her lap. He looked at her, and there was silence. They heard the bees
+humming. There were many among the roses on the wall. She had turned her
+face fully towards him, but she kept her eyes on the veil that lay in
+her lap. It was covered with little raised black spots. She began to
+count them. As the number mounted she felt her body turning gradually
+cold.
+
+“Fifteen--sixteen-seventeen”--she formed the words with her
+lips, striving to concentrate her whole soul upon this useless
+triviality--“eighteen--nineteen--twenty.”
+
+Little drops of moisture came out upon her temples. Still the silence
+continued. She knew that all this time Robin was looking into her face.
+She felt his eyes like two knives piercing her face.
+
+“Twenty-one--twenty-two--”
+
+“Viola!”
+
+He spoke at last and his voice was extraordinary. It was husky, and
+sounded desperate and guilty.
+
+“Well?” she said, still looking at the spots.
+
+“Now you know the man I spoke of.”
+
+Yes, it was a desperate voice and hard in its desperation.
+
+“You mean that you are the man?”
+
+Still she did not look up. After a pause she heard him say:
+
+“Yes, that I am the man.”
+
+Then she looked up. His face was scarlet, like a face flushed with
+guilt. His eyes met hers with a staring glance, yet they were furtive.
+His hands were clenched on his knees. When she looked at him he began to
+smile.
+
+“Viola,” he said, “Viola.”
+
+He unclenched his hands and put them out towards her, as if to take her
+hands. She did not move.
+
+“Poor Robin!” she said.
+
+“Poor--but--what do you mean?” he stammered.
+
+He never turned his eyes from her face.
+
+“Poor Robin!--but it isn’t your fault.”
+
+Then she put out her hand and touched his gently.
+
+“My fault?
+
+“That it was all a fancy, all a weaving of words. You want to be what
+you thought you were, but you can’t be.”
+
+“You’re wrong, Viola, you’re utterly wrong--”
+
+“Hush, Robin! That woman you spoke of--that woman knows.”
+
+He cleared his throat, got up, went over to the wall, leaned his arms
+upon it and hid his face on them. There were tears in his eyes. At
+that moment he was suffering more than she was. His soul was rent by an
+abject sense of loss, an abject sense of guilty impotence and shame.
+It was frightful that he could not be what he wished to be, what he had
+thought he was. He longed to comfort her and could not do anything
+but plunge a sword into her heart. He longed to surround her with
+tenderness--yes, he was sure he longed--but he could only hold up to
+her in the sun her loneliness. And he had lost--what had he not lost? A
+dream of years, an imagination that had been his inseparable and dearest
+companion. His loneliness was intense in that moment as was hers. The
+tears seemed to scald his eyes. In his heart he cursed God for not
+permitting him to be what he longed to be, to feel what he longed to
+feel. It seemed to him monstrous, intolerable, that even our emotions
+are arranged for us as are arranged the events of our lives. He felt
+like a doll, a horrible puppet.
+
+“Poor old Robin!”
+
+She was standing beside him, and in her voice there was, just for a
+moment, the sound that sometimes comes into a mother’s voice when she
+speaks to her little child in the dark.
+
+At the moment when he knew he did not love the white angel she stood
+beside him.
+
+And she thought that she was only a wretched woman.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+ROBIN had gone. He had gone, still protesting that Lady Holme was
+deceiving herself, protesting desperately, with the mistaken chivalry of
+one who was not only a gentleman to his finger-tips but who was also
+an almost fanatical lover of his own romance. After recovering from
+the first shock of his disillusion, and her strange reception of it,
+so different from anything he could have imagined possible in her, or
+indeed in any woman who had lived as she had, he had said everything
+that was passionate, everything that fitted in with his old
+protestations when she was beautiful. He had spoken, perhaps, even more
+to recall himself than to convince her, but he had not succeeded in
+either effort, and a strange, mingled sense of tragic sadness and
+immense relief invaded him as the width of waterway grew steadily larger
+between his boat and Casa Felice. He could have wept for her and for
+himself. He could even have wept for humanity. Yet he felt the comfort
+of one from whom an almost intolerable strain has just been removed. To
+a man of his calibre, sensitive, almost feminine in his subtlety, the
+situation had been exquisitely painful. He had felt what Viola was
+feeling as well as what he was feeling. He had struggled like a creature
+taken in a net. And how useless it had all been! He found himself
+horribly inferior to her. Her behaviour at this critical moment had
+proved to him that in his almost fantastic conception of her he had
+shown real insight. Then why had his heart betrayed his intellect? Why
+had his imagination proved true metal, his affection false? He asked
+himself these questions. He searched his own nature, as many a man has
+done in moments when he has found himself unworthy. And he was met by
+mystery, by the “It was impossible for me!” which stings the soul that
+would be strong. He remembered Carey’s words that night in Half Moon
+Street when Sir Donald had accompanied him home after the dinner in
+Cadogan Square. Sir Donald had gone. He and Carey were alone, and he had
+said that if one loves, one loves the kernel not the shell. And Carey
+had said, “I think if the shell is a beautiful shell, and becomes
+suddenly broken, it makes a devil of a lot of difference in what most
+people think of the kernel.” And when he--Robin--had replied, “It
+wouldn’t to me,” Carey had abruptly exclaimed, “I think it would.” After
+Carey had gone Robin remembered very well saying to himself that it was
+strange no man will believe you if you hint at the truth of your true
+self. That night he had not known his true self and Carey had known it.
+But then, had he loved the shell only? He could not believe it. He
+felt bewildered. Even now, as the boat crept onward through the
+falling darkness, he felt that he loved Viola, but as someone who had
+disappeared or who was dead. This woman whom he had just left was not
+Viola. And yet she was. When he was not looking at her and she spoke to
+him, the past seemed to take the form of the present. When she had worn
+the veil and had touched him all his pulses had leaped. But when she had
+touched him with those same hands after the veil had fallen, there
+had been frost in his veins. Nothing in his body had responded. The
+independence of the flesh appalled him. It had a mind of its own then.
+It chose and acted quite apart from the spirit which dwelt in it. It
+even defied that spirit. And the eyes? They had become almost a terror
+to him. He thought of them as a slave thinks of a cruel master.
+Were they to coerce his soul? Were they to force his heart from its
+allegiance? He had always been accustomed to think that the spirit was
+essentially the governing thing in man, that indestructible, fierce,
+beautiful flame which surely outlives death and time. But now he found
+himself thinking of the flesh, the corruptible part of man that mingles
+its dust with the earth, as dominant over the spirit. For the first
+time, and because of his impotence to force his body to feel as his
+spirit wished it to feel, he doubted if there were a future for the
+soul, if there were such a condition as immortality. He reached Villa
+d’Este in a condition of profound depression, almost bordering on
+despair.
+
+Meanwhile Viola, standing by the garden wall, had watched the boat
+that carried Robin disappear on the water. Till it was only a speck she
+watched. It vanished. Evening came on. Still she stood there. She did
+not feel very sad. The strange, dreamlike sensation of the preceding day
+had returned to her, but with a larger vagueness that robbed it of some
+of its former poignancy. It seemed to her that she felt as a spirit
+might feel--detached. She remembered once seeing a man, who called
+himself an “illusionist,” displaying a woman’s figure suspended
+apparently in mid-air. He took a wand and passed it over, under, around
+the woman to show that she was unattached to anything, that she did not
+rest upon anything. Viola thought that she was like that woman. She was
+not embittered. She was not even crushed. Her impulse of pity, when she
+understood what Robin was feeling, had been absolutely genuine. It had
+rushed upon her. It remained with her. But now it was far less definite,
+and embraced not only Robin but surely other men whom she had never
+known or even seen. They could not help themselves. It was not their
+fault. They were made in a certain way. They were governed. It seemed to
+her that she looked out vaguely over a world of slaves, the serfs of God
+who have never been emancipated. She had no hope. But just then she had
+no fear. The past did not ebb from her, nor did the future steal towards
+her. The tides were stilled. The pulses of life were stopped. Everything
+was wrapped in a cold, grey calm. She had never been a very thoughtful
+woman. She had not had much time for thought. That is what she herself
+would probably have said. Seldom had she puzzled her head over the
+mysteries of existence. Even now, when she confronted the great mystery
+of her own, she did not think very definitely. Before Robin came her
+mind had been in a fever. Now that he was gone the fever had gone with
+him. Would it ever return? She did not ask or wonder.
+
+The night fell and the servant came to summon her to dinner. She shook
+her head.
+
+“The signora will not eat anything?”
+
+“No, thank you.”
+
+She took her arms from the wall and looked at the man.
+
+“Could I have the boat?”
+
+“The signora wishes to go on the lake?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“I will tell Paolo.”
+
+Two or three minutes later the boy who had sung came to say that the
+boat was ready.
+
+Lady Holme fetched a cloak, and went down the dark stone staircase
+between the lichen-covered walls to the tall iron gate. The boat was
+lying by the outer steps. She got in and Paolo took the oars.
+
+“Where does the signora wish to go?”
+
+“Anywhere out on the lake.”
+
+He pushed off. Soon the noise of the waterfall behind Casa Felice died
+away, the spectral facade faded and only the plash of the oars and the
+tinkle of fishermen’s bells above the nets, floating here and there in
+the lake, were audible. The distant lights of mountain villages gleamed
+along the shores, and the lights of the stars gleamed in the clear sky.
+
+Now that she was away from the land Lady Holme became more conscious of
+herself and of life. The gentle movement of the boat promoted an echoing
+mental movement in her. Thoughts glided through the shadows of her soul
+as the boat glided through the shadows of the night. Her mind was like a
+pilgrim, wandering in the darkness cast by the soul.
+
+She felt, first, immensely ignorant. She had scarcely ever, perhaps
+never, consciously felt immensely ignorant before. She felt also very
+poor, very small and very dingy, like a woman very badly dressed. She
+felt, finally, that she was the most insignificant of all the living
+things under the stars to the stars and all they watched, but that, to
+herself, she was of a burning, a flaming significance.
+
+There seemed to be bells everywhere in the lake. The water was full of
+their small, persistent voices.
+
+So had her former life been full of small, persistent voices, but
+now, abruptly, they were all struck into silence, and she was left
+listening--for what? For some far-off but larger voice beyond?
+
+“What am I to do? What am I to do?”
+
+Now she began to say this within herself. The grey calm was floating
+away from her spirit, and she began to realise what had happened that
+afternoon. She remembered that just before Robin came she had made up
+her mind that, though she did not love him, he held the matter of her
+life or death in his power. Well, if that were so, he had decided. The
+dice had been thrown and death had come up. No hand had been stretched
+out in the darkness to the child.
+
+She looked round her. On every side she saw smooth water, a still
+surface which hid depths. At the prow of the boat shone a small lantern,
+which cast before the boat an arrow of light. And as the boat moved
+this arrow perpetually attacked the darkness in front. It was like the
+curiosity of man attacking the impenetrable mysteries of God. It seemed
+to penetrate, but always new darkness disclosed itself beyond, new
+darkness flowed silently around.
+
+Was the darkness the larger voice?
+
+She did not say this to herself. Her mind was not of the definite
+species that frames such silent questions often. But, like all human
+beings plunged in the strangeness of a terror that is absolutely new,
+and left to struggle in it quite alone, she thought a thousand things
+that she did not even know she thought, her mind touched many verges of
+which she was not aware. There were within her tremendous activities
+of which she was scarcely conscious. She was like a woman who wakes at
+night without knowing why, and hears afterwards that there was a tumult
+in the city where she dwelt.
+
+Gradually, along devious ways, she came to the thought that life had
+done with her. It seemed to her that life said to her, “Woman, what
+have I to do with thee?” The man who had sworn to protect her could
+not endure to look at her. The man who had vowed that he loved her soul
+shrank before her face. She had never been a friend to women. Why should
+they wish to be her friends now? They would not wish it. And if they did
+she felt their friendship would be useless to her, more--horrible. She
+would rather have shown her shattered face to a thousand men than to ten
+women. She had never “bothered” much about religion. No God seemed near
+her now. She had no sense of being chastened because she was loved. On
+the other hand, she did feel as if she had been caught by a torturer who
+did not mean to let her go.
+
+It became obvious to her that there was no place for her in life, and
+presently she returned to the conclusion that, totally unloved, she
+could not continue to exist.
+
+She began definitely to contemplate self-destruction.
+
+She looked at the little arrow of light beyond the boat’s prow. Like
+that little arrow she must go out into the darkness. When? Could she go
+to-night? If not, probably she could never go at all by her own will and
+act. It should be done to-night then, abruptly, without much thought.
+For thought is dangerous and often paralysing.
+
+She spoke to the boat boy. He answered. They fell into conversation.
+She asked him about his family, his life, whether he would have to be
+a soldier; whether he had a sweetheart. She forced herself to listen
+attentively to his replies. He was a responsive boy and soon began to
+talk volubly, letting the oars trail idly in the water. With energy he
+paraded his joyous youth before her. Even in his touches of melancholy
+there was hope. His happiness confirmed her in her resolution. She put
+herself in contrast with this boy, and her heart sank below the sources
+of tears into a dry place, like the valley of bones.
+
+“Will you turn towards Casa Feli--towards the house now,” she said
+presently.
+
+The boat swung round, and instantly the boy began to sing.
+
+“Yes, I can do it to-night,” she thought.
+
+His happy singing entered like iron into her soul.
+
+When the pale facade of Casa Felice was visible once more, detaching
+itself from the surrounding darkness, she said to the boy carelessly:
+
+“Where do you put the boat at night?”
+
+“The signora has not seen?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Under the house. There is deep water there. One can swim for five
+minutes without coming out into the open.”
+
+“I should like to see that place. Can I get out of the boat there?”
+
+“Si, signora. There is a staircase leading into the piazza by the
+waterfall.”
+
+“Then row in.”
+
+“Si, signora.”
+
+He was beginning to sing again, but suddenly he stopped, looked over his
+shoulder and listened.
+
+“What is it?” she asked quickly.
+
+“There is a boat, signora.”
+
+“Where.”
+
+She looked into the darkness but saw nothing.
+
+“Close to the house, signora.”
+
+“But how do you know?”
+
+“I heard the oars. The man in the boat was not rowing, but just as
+I began to sing he began to row. When I stopped singing he stopped
+rowing.”
+
+“You didn’t see the boat?”
+
+“No, signora. It carries no light.”
+
+He looked at her mysteriously.
+
+“_It may be the contrabbandieri_.”
+
+“Smugglers?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+He turned his head over his shoulder and whistled, in a peculiar way.
+There was no reply. Then he bent down over the gunwale of the boat till
+his ear nearly touched the water, and listened.
+
+“The boat has stopped. It must be near us.”
+
+His whole body seemed quivering with attentive life, like a terrier’s
+when it stands to be unchained.
+
+“Might it not be a fisherman?” asked Lady Holme.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“This is not the hour.”
+
+“Some tourists, perhaps, making an excursion?”
+
+“It is too far. They never come here at night.”
+
+His eyes stared, his attitude was so intensely alert and his manner so
+mysterious that, despite her desperate preoccupation, Lady Holme found
+herself distracted for a moment. Her mind was detached from herself, and
+fixed upon this hidden boat and its occupant or occupants.
+
+“You think it is _contrabbandieri_?” she whispered. He nodded.
+
+“I have been one, signora.”
+
+“You!”
+
+“Yes, when I was a boy, in the winter. Once, when we were running for
+the shore, on a December night, the _carabinieri_ fired on us and killed
+Gaetano Cremona.”
+
+“Your companion?”
+
+“Yes. He was sixteen and he died. The boat was full of his blood.”
+
+She shuddered.
+
+“Row in,” she said. “That boat must have gone.”
+
+“Non, signora. It has not. It is close by and the oars are out of the
+water.”
+
+He spoke with certainty, as if he saw the boat. Then, reluctantly, he
+dipped his oars in the lake, and rowed towards the house, keeping his
+head half turned and staring into the darkness with eyes that were still
+full of mystery and profound attention.
+
+Lady Holme looked over the water too, but she saw nothing upon its calm
+surface.
+
+“Go into the boat-house,” she said.
+
+Paolo nodded without speaking. His lips were parted.
+
+“Chi e la?” she heard him whisper to himself.
+
+They were close to the house now. Its high, pale front, full of
+shuttered windows, loomed over them, and the roar of the waterfall was
+loud in their ears. Paolo turned the boat towards his right, and, almost
+directly, Lady Holme saw a dark opening in the solid stone blocks on
+which the house was built. The boat glided through it into cover, and
+the arrow of light at the prow pierced ebon blackness, while the
+plash of the oars made a curious sound, full of sudden desolation and
+weariness. A bat flitted over the arrow of light and vanished, and the
+head of a swimming rat was visible for a moment, pursued by a wrinkle on
+the water.
+
+“How dark it is here,” Lady Holme said in a low voice. “And what strange
+noises there are.”
+
+There was terror in the sound of the waterfall heard under this
+curving roof of stone. It sounded like a quantity of disputing voices,
+quarrelling in the blackness of the night. The arrow of light lay on a
+step, and the boat’s prow grated gently against a large ring of rusty
+iron.
+
+“And you tie up the boat here at night?” she asked as she got up.
+
+“Si, signora.”
+
+While she stood on the step, close to the black water, he passed the
+rope through the ring, and tied it deftly in a loose knot that any
+backward movement of the boat would tighten. She watched with profound
+attention his hands moving quickly in the faint light cast by the
+lantern.
+
+“How well you tie it,” she said.
+
+He smiled.
+
+“Si, signora.”
+
+“Is it easy to untie?”
+
+“Si, signora.”
+
+“Show me, will you? It--it holds so well that I should have thought it
+would be difficult.”
+
+He looked up at her with a flash of surprise. Something in her voice had
+caught his young attention sharply. She smiled at him when she saw the
+keen inquiry in his large eyes.
+
+“I’m interested in all these little things you do so well,” she said.
+
+He flushed with pride, and immediately untied the knot, carefully,
+showing her exactly how he did it.
+
+“Thank you. I see. It’s very ingenious.”
+
+“Si, signora. I can do many things like that.”
+
+“You are a clever boy, Paolo.”
+
+He tied the knot again, unhooked the lantern; jumped out of the boat,
+and lighted her up the staircase to a heavy wooden door. In another
+moment she stood on the piazza close to the waterfall. The cold spray
+from it fell on her face. He pushed the door to, but did not lock it.
+
+“You leave it like that at night?” she asked.
+
+“Non, signora. Before I go to bed I lock it.”
+
+“I see.”
+
+She saw a key sticking out from the door.
+
+“_A rivederci_, Paolo.”
+
+“_A rivederci_, signora.”
+
+He took off his hat and went swiftly away. The light of the lantern
+danced on the pavement of the piazza, and, for one instant, on the white
+foam of the water falling between the cypresses.
+
+When Viola was alone on the piazza she went to the stone balustrade and
+looked over it at the lake. Was there a boat close by? She could not see
+it. The chiming bells of the fishermen came up to her, mingling with the
+noise of the cascade. She took out her watch and held it up close to
+her eyes. The hour was half-past nine. She wondered what time Italian
+servants went to bed.
+
+The butler came out and begged to know if she would not eat something.
+He seemed so distressed at her having missed dinner, that she went into
+the house, sat down at the dining table and made a pretence of eating. A
+clock struck ten as she finished.
+
+“It is so warm that I am going to sit out in the piazza,” she said.
+
+“Will the signora take coffee?”
+
+“No--yes, bring me some there. And tell my maid--tell the servants they
+needn’t sit up. I may stay out quite late. If I do, I’ll lock the door
+on to the piazza when I go in.”
+
+“Si, signora.”
+
+When she reached the piazza she saw a shining red spark just above
+the balustrade. Paolo was there smoking a black cigar and leaning over
+sideways.
+
+“What are you looking for?” she asked.
+
+“That boat, signora. It has not gone.”
+
+“How do you know? It may have gone when we were in the boat-house.”
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“You could not have heard the oars through the noise of the waterfall.”
+
+“Si, signora. It has not gone. Shall I take the boat and--”
+
+“No, no,” she interrupted quickly. “What does it matter? Go and have
+supper.”
+
+“I have had it, signora.”
+
+“Then, when you have finished smoking, you’d better go to bed.”
+
+She forced herself to smile lightly.
+
+“Boys like you need plenty of sleep.”
+
+“Four hours is enough, signora.”
+
+“No, no. You should go to bed early.”
+
+She saw an odd expression come into his face. He looked over at the
+water, then at her, with a curious dawning significance, that would
+almost have been impudent if it had not been immensely young and full of
+a kind of gnomish sympathy.
+
+“I’ll go to bed, signora!” he said.
+
+Then he looked at her again and there were doubt and wonder in his eyes.
+
+She turned away, with a sickness at her heart. She knew exactly what he
+had thought, was thinking. The suspicion had crossed his mind that
+she knew why the hidden boat was there, that she wished no one else to
+suspect why it was there. And then had followed the thought, “Ma--per
+questa signora--non e possibile.”
+
+At certain crises of feeling, a tiny incident will often determine some
+vital act. So it was now. The fleeting glance in a carelessly expressive
+boy’s eyes at this moment gave to Lady Holme’s mind the last touch it
+needed to acquire the impetus which would carry it over the edge of the
+precipice into the abyss. The look in Paolo’s eyes said to her, “Life
+has done with you. Throw it away.” And she knew that though she had
+thought she had already decided to throw it away that night, she had
+really not decided. Secretly she had been hesitating. Now there was no
+more hesitation in her. She drank her coffee and had the cup taken away,
+and ordered the lights in the drawing-room to be put out.
+
+“When I come in I shall go straight up to bed,” she said. “Leave me a
+candle in the hall.”
+
+The lights went out behind the windows. Blank darkness replaced the
+yellow gleam that had shone upon them. The two houses on either side of
+the piazza were wrapped in silence. Presently there was a soft noise of
+feet crossing the pavement. It was Paolo going to lock the door leading
+to the boathouse. Lady Holme moved round sharply in her chair to watch
+him. He bent down. With a swift turn of his brown wrists he secured the
+door and pulled the key out of the lock. She opened her lips to call out
+something to him, but when she saw him look at the key doubtfully, then
+towards her, she said nothing. And he put it back into the keyhole. When
+he did that she sighed. Perhaps a doubt had again come into his young
+mind. But, if so, it had come too late. He slipped away smiling, half
+ironically, to himself.
+
+Lady Holme sat still. She had wrapped a white cloth cloak round her.
+She put up her hand to the disfigured side of her face, and touched it,
+trying to see its disfigurement as the blind see, by feeling. She kept
+her hand there, and her hand recognized ugliness vividly. After two or
+three minutes she took her hand away, got up and walked to and fro in
+the piazza, very near to the balustrade.
+
+Now she was thinking fiercely.
+
+She thought of Fritz. What would he feel when he knew? Shocked for a
+moment, no doubt. After all, they had been very close to each other, in
+body at least, if not in soul. And the memory of the body would surely
+cause him to suffer a little, to think, “I held it often, and now it is
+sodden and cold.” At least he must think something like that, and his
+body must shudder in sympathy with the catastrophe that had overtaken
+its old companion. She felt a painful yearning to see Fritz again. Yet
+she did not say to herself that she loved him any more. Even before the
+accident she had begun to realise that she had not found in Fritz the
+face of truth among the crowd of shams which all women seek, ignorantly
+or not. And since the accident--there are things that kill even a
+woman’s love abruptly. And for a dead love there is no resurrection.
+
+Yet to-night she felt infinitely tender over Fritz, as if she stood by
+him again and saw the bandage darkened by the red stain.
+
+Then she thought of the song she had sung to Lady Cardington, the song
+which had surely opened the eyes of her own drowsy, if not actually
+sleeping, heart:
+
+
+  “Tutto al mondo e vano:
+   Nell’amore ogni dolcezza.”
+
+
+It was horribly true to her to-night. She could imagine now, in her
+utter desolation, that for love a woman could easily sacrifice the
+world. But she had had the world--all she called the world--ruthlessly
+taken from her, and nothing had been given to her to fill its place.
+Possibly before the accident she might have recoiled from the idea of
+giving up the world for love. But now, as she walked to and fro, it
+seemed to her as if a woman isolated from everything with love possessed
+the world and all that is therein. Vaguely she remembered the story she
+had heard about this very house, Casa Felice. There had been a romance
+connected with it. Two lovers had fled here, had lived here for a long
+time. She imagined them now, sitting together at night in this piazza,
+hearing the waterfall together, looking at the calm lake together,
+watching the stars together. The sound of the water was terrible to her.
+To them how beautiful it must have been, how beautiful the light of the
+stars, and the lonely gardens stretching along the lake, and the dim
+paths between the cypresses, and the great silence that floated over the
+lake to listen to the waterfall. And all these things were terrible to
+her--all. Not one was beautiful. Each one seemed to threaten her, to
+say to her, “Leave us, we are not for such as you.” Well, she would obey
+these voices. She would go. She wrapped the cloak more closely round
+her, went to the balustrade and leaned over it looking at the water.
+
+It seemed to her as if her life had been very trivial. She thought now
+that she had never really enjoyed anything. She looked upon her life as
+if it were down there in the water just beneath her, and she saw it as
+a broken thing, a thing in many fragments. And the fragments, however
+carefully and deftly arranged, could surely never have been fitted
+together and become a complete whole. Everything in her life had been
+awry as her face was now awry, and she had not realised it. Her love for
+Fritz, and his--what he had called his, at least--for her, had seemed to
+her once to be a round and beautiful thing, a circle of passion without
+a flaw. How distorted, misshapen, absurd it had really been. Nothing
+in her life had been carried through to a definite end. Even her petty
+struggle with Miss Schley had been left unfinished. Those who had loved
+her had been like spectres, and now, like spectres, had faded away. And
+all through their spectral love she had clung to Fritz. She had clasped
+the sand like a mad-woman, and never felt the treacherous grains
+shifting between her arms at the touch of every wind.
+
+A sudden passionate fury of longing woke in her to have one week, one
+day, one hour of life, one hour of life now that her eyes were open, one
+moment only--even one moment. She felt that she had had nothing, that
+every other human being must have known the _dolcezza_, the ineffable,
+the mysterious ecstasy, the one and only thing worth the having,
+that she alone had been excluded, when she was beautiful, from the
+participation in joy that was her right, and that now, in her ugliness,
+she was irrevocably cast out from it.
+
+It was unjust. Suddenly she faced a God without justice in His heart,
+all-powerful and not just. She faced such a God and she knew Hell.
+
+Swiftly she turned from the balustrade, went to the door by the
+waterfall, unlocked it and descended the stone staircase. It was very
+dark. She had to feel her way. When she reached the last step she could
+just see the boat lying against it in the black water. She put out her
+hand and felt for the ring through which the rope was slipped. The rope
+was wet. It took her some minutes to undo it. Then she got into the
+boat. Her eyes were more accustomed to the darkness now, and she could
+see the arched opening which gave access to the lake. She found the
+oars, pushed them into the rowlocks, and pulled gently to the opening.
+The boat struck against the wall and grated along it. She stood up and
+thrust one hand against the stone, leaning over to the side. The boat
+went away swiftly, and she nearly fell into the water, but managed
+to save herself by a rapid movement. She sank down, feeling horribly
+afraid. Yet, a moment after, she asked herself why she had not let
+herself go. It was too dark there under the house. Out in the open air
+it would be different, it would be easier. She wanted the stars above
+her. She did not know why she wanted them, why she wanted anything now.
+
+The boat slipped out from the low archway into the open water.
+
+It was a pale and delicate night, one of those autumn nights that are
+full of a white mystery. A thin mist lay about the water, floated among
+the lower woods. Higher up, the mountains rose out of it. Their green
+sides looked black and soft in the starlight, their summits strangely
+remote and inaccessible. Through the mist, here and there, shone faintly
+the lights of the scattered villages. The bells in the water were still
+ringing languidly, and their voices emphasised the pervading silence, a
+silence full of the pensive melancholy of Nature in decline.
+
+Viola rowed slowly out towards the middle of the lake. Awe had come upon
+her. There seemed a mystical presence in the night, something far away
+but attentive, a mind concentrated upon the night, upon Nature, upon
+herself. She was very conscious of it, and it seemed to her not as if
+eyes, but as if a soul were watching her and everything about her; the
+stars and the mountains, the white mist, even the movement of the boat.
+This concentrated, mystical attention oppressed her. It was like a soft,
+impalpable weight laid upon her. She rowed faster.
+
+But now it seemed to her as if she were being followed. Casa Felice had
+already disappeared. The shore was hidden in the darkness. She could
+only see vaguely the mountain-tops. She paused, then dipped the oars
+again, but again--after two or three strokes--she had the sensation
+that she was being followed. She recalled Paolo’s action when they were
+returning to Casa Felice in the evening, leaned over the boat’s side and
+put her ear close to the water.
+
+When she did so she heard the plash of oars--rhythmical, steady, and
+surely very near. For a moment she listened. Then a sort of panic
+seized her. She remembered the incident of the evening, the hidden boat,
+Paolo’s assertion that it was waiting near the house, that it had not
+gone. He had said, too, that the unseen rower had begun to row when he
+began to sing, had stopped rowing when he stopped singing. A conviction
+came to her that this same rower as now following her. But why? Who was
+it? She knew nobody on the lake, except Robin. And he--no, it could not
+be Robin.
+
+The ash of the oars became more distinct. Her unreasoning fear
+increased. With the mystical attention of the great and hidden mind was
+now blent a crude human attention. She began to feel really terrified,
+and, seizing her oars, she pulled frantically towards the middle of the
+lake.
+
+“Viola!”
+
+Out of the darkness it came.
+
+“Viola!”
+
+She stopped and began to tremble. Who--what--could be calling her by
+name, here, in the night? She heard the sound of oars plainly now. Then
+she saw a thing like a black shadow. It was the prow of an advancing
+boat. She sat quite still, with her hands on the oars. The boat came on
+till she could see the figure of one man in it, standing up, and rowing,
+as the Italian boatmen do when they are alone, with his face set towards
+the prow. A few strong strokes and it was beside her, and she was
+looking into Rupert Carey’s eyes.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+SHE sat still without saying anything. It seemed to her as if she were
+on the platform at Manchester House singing the Italian song. Then
+the disfigured face of Carey--disfigured by vice as hers now by the
+accident--had become as nothing to her. She had seen only his eyes. She
+saw only his eyes now. He remained standing up in the faint light with
+the oars in his hands looking at her. Round about them tinkled the bells
+above the nets.
+
+“You heard me call?” he said at last, almost roughly.
+
+She nodded.
+
+“How did you--?” she began, and stopped.
+
+“I was there this evening when you came in. I heard your boy singing. I
+was under the shadow of the woods.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+All this time she was gazing into Carey’s eyes, and had not seen in them
+that he was looking, for the first time, at her altered face. She did
+not realise this. She did not remember that her face was altered. The
+expression in his eyes made her forget it.
+
+“I wanted something of you.”
+
+“What?”
+
+He let the oars go, and sat down on the little seat. They were close to
+each other now. The sides of the boats touched. He did not answer her
+question.
+
+“I know I’ve no business to speak to you,” he said. “No business to come
+after you. I know that. But I was always a selfish, violent, headlong
+brute, and it seems I can’t change.”
+
+“But what do you want with me?”
+
+Suddenly she remembered--put her hands up to her face with a swift
+gesture, then dropped them again. What did it matter now? He was the
+last man who would look upon her in life. And now that she remembered
+her own condition she saw his. She saw the terror of his life in his
+marred features, aged, brutalised by excess. She saw, and was glad for a
+moment, as if she met someone unexpectedly on her side of the stream of
+fate. Let him look upon her. She was looking upon him.
+
+“What do you want?” she repeated.
+
+“I want a saviour,” he said, staring always straight at her, and
+speaking without tenderness.
+
+“A saviour!”
+
+For a moment she thought of the Bible, of religion; then of her
+sensation that she had been caught by a torturer who would not let her
+go.
+
+“Have you come to me because you think I can tell you of saviour?” she
+said.
+
+And she began to laugh.
+
+“But don’t you see me?” she exclaimed. “Don’t you see what I am now?”
+
+Suddenly she felt angry with him because his eyes did not seem to see
+the dreadful change in her appearance.
+
+“Don’t you think I want a saviour too?” she exclaimed.
+
+“I don’t think about you,” he said with a sort of deliberate brutality.
+“I think about myself. Men generally do when they come to women.”
+
+“Or go away from them,” she said.
+
+She was thinking of Robin then, and Fritz.
+
+“Did you know Robin Pierce was here to-day?” she asked.
+
+“Yes. I saw him leave you.”
+
+“You saw--but how long have you been watching?”
+
+“A long time.”
+
+“Where do you come from?”
+
+He pointed towards the distant lights behind her and before him.
+
+“Opposite. I was to have stayed with Ulford in Casa Felice. I’m staying
+with him over there.”
+
+“With Sir Donald?”
+
+“Yes. He’s ill. He wants somebody.”
+
+“Sir Donald’s afraid of me now,” she said, watching him closely. “I told
+him to live with his memory of me. Will he do that?”
+
+“I think he will. Poor old chap! he’s had hard knocks. They’ve made him
+afraid of life.”
+
+“Why didn’t you keep your memory of me?” she said, with sudden nervous
+anger. “You too? If you hadn’t come to-night it would never have been
+destroyed.”
+
+Her extreme tension of the nerves impelled her to an exhibition of
+fierce bitterness which she could not control. She remembered how he
+had loved her, with what violence and almost crazy frankness. Why had he
+come? He might have remembered her as she was.
+
+“I hate you for coming,” she said, almost under her breath.
+
+“I don’t care. I had to come.”
+
+“Why? Why?”
+
+“I told you. I want a saviour. I’m down in the pit. I can’t get out. You
+can see that for yourself.”
+
+“Yes,” she answered, “I can see that.”
+
+“Give me a hand, Viola, and--you’ll make me do something I’ve never
+done, never been able to do.”
+
+“What?” she half whispered.
+
+“Believe there’s a God--who cares.”
+
+She drew in her breath sharply. Something warm surged through her. It
+was not like fire. It was more like the warmth that comes from a warm
+hand laid on a cold one. It surged through her and went away like a
+travelling flood.
+
+“What are you saying?” she said in a low voice. “You are mad to come
+here to-night, to say this to me to-night.”
+
+“No. It’s just to-night it had to be said.”
+
+Suddenly she resolved to tell him. He was in the pit. So was she. Well,
+the condemned can be frank with one another though all the free have to
+practise subterfuge.
+
+“You don’t know,” she said, and her voice was quiet now. “You don’t know
+why it was mad of you to come to-night. I’ll tell you. I’ve come out
+here and I’m not going back again.”
+
+He kept his eyes on hers, but did not speak.
+
+“I’m going to stay out here,” she said.
+
+And she let her hand fall over the side of the boat till her fingers
+touched the water.
+
+“No,” he said. “You can’t do that.”
+
+“Yes. I shall do it. I want to hide my face in the water.”
+
+“Give me a hand first, Viola.”
+
+Again the warmth went through her.
+
+“Nobody else can.”
+
+“And you’ve looked at me!” she said.
+
+There was a profound amazement in her voice.
+
+“It’s only when I look at you,” he said, “that I know there are stars
+somewhere beyond the pit’s mouth.”
+
+“When you look at me--now?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“But you are blind then?” she said.
+
+“Or are the others blind?” he asked.
+
+Instinctively, really without knowing what she did, she put up her hand
+to her face, touched it, and no longer felt that it was ugly. For a
+moment it seemed to her that her beauty was restored.
+
+“What do you see?” she asked. “But--but it’s so dark here.”
+
+“Not too dark to see a helping hand--if there is one,” he answered.
+
+And he stretched out his arm into her boat and took her right hand from
+the oar it was holding.
+
+“And there is one,” he added.
+
+She felt a hand that loved her hand, and there was no veil over her
+face. How strange that was. How utterly impossible it seemed. Yet it
+was so. No woman can be deceived in the touch of a hand on hers. If it
+loves--she knows.
+
+“What are you going to do, Viola?”
+
+“I don’t know.”
+
+There was a sound almost of shame, a humble sound, in her voice.
+
+“I can’t do anything,” she murmured. “You would know that to-morrow, in
+sunlight.”
+
+“To-morrow I’ll come in sunlight.”
+
+“No, no. I shall not be there.”
+
+“I shall come.”
+
+“Oh!--good-night,” she said.
+
+She began to feel extraordinarily, terribly excited. She could not tell
+whether it was an excitement of horror, of joy--what it was. But it
+mounted to her brain and rushed into her heart. It was in her veins like
+an intoxicant, and in her eyes like fire, and thrilled in her nerves
+and beat in her arteries. And it seemed to be an excitement full of
+passionate contradictions. She was at the same time like a woman on a
+throne and a woman in the dust--radiant as one worshipped, bowed as one
+beaten.
+
+“Good-night, good-night,” she repeated, scarcely knowing what she said.
+
+Her hand struggled in his hand.
+
+“Viola, if you destroy yourself you destroy two people.”
+
+She scarcely heard him speaking.
+
+“D’you understand?”
+
+“No, no. Not to-night. I can’t understand anything to-night.”
+
+“Then to-morrow.”
+
+“Yes, to-morrow-to-morrow.”
+
+He would not let go her hand, and now his was arbitrary, the hand of a
+master rather than of a lover.
+
+“You won’t dare to murder me,” he said.
+
+“Murder--what do you mean?”
+
+He had used the word to arrest her attention, which was wandering almost
+as the attention of a madwoman wanders.
+
+“If you hide your face in the water I shall never see those stars above
+the pit’s mouth.”
+
+“I can’t help it--I can’t help anything. It’s not my fault, it’s not my
+fault.”
+
+“It will be your fault. It will be your crime.”
+
+“Your hand is driving me mad,” she gasped.
+
+She meant it, felt that it was so. He let her go instantly. She began to
+row back towards Casa Felice. And now that mystical attention of which
+she had been conscious, that soul watching the night, her in the night,
+was surely profounder, watched with more intensity as a spectator
+bending down to see a struggle. Never before had she felt as if beyond
+human life there was life compared with which human life was as death.
+And now she told herself that she was mad, that this shock of human
+passion coming suddenly upon her loneliness had harmed her brain, that
+this cry for salvation addressed to one who looked upon herself as
+destroyed had deafened reason within her.
+
+His boat kept up with hers. She did not look at him. Casa Felice came in
+sight. She pulled harder, like a mad creature. Her boat shot under the
+archway into the darkness. Somehow--how, she did not know--she guided it
+to the steps, left it, rushed up the staircase in the dark and came out
+on to the piazza. There she stopped where the waterfall could cast its
+spray upon her face. She stayed till her hair and cheeks and hands were
+wet. Then she went to the balustrade. His boat was below and he was
+looking up. She saw the tragic mask of his face down in the thin mist
+that floated about the water, and now she imagined him in the pit,
+gazing up and seeking those stars in which he still believed though he
+could not see them.
+
+“Go away,” she said, not knowing why she said it or if she wished him to
+go, only knowing that she had lost the faculty of self-control and might
+say, do, be anything in that moment.
+
+“I can’t bear it.”
+
+She did not know what she meant she could not bear.
+
+He made a strange answer. He said:
+
+“If you will go into the house, open the windows and sing to me--the
+last song I heard you sing--I’ll go. But to-morrow I’ll come and touch
+my helping hand, and after to-morrow, and every day.”
+
+“Sing--?” she said vacantly. “To-night!”
+
+“Go into the house. Open the window. I shall hear you.”
+
+He spoke almost sternly.
+
+She crossed the piazza slowly. A candle was burning in the hall. She
+took it up and went into the drawing-room, which was in black darkness.
+There was a piano in it, close to a tall window which looked on to the
+lake. She set the candle down on the piano, went to the window, unbarred
+the shutters and threw the window open. Instantly she heard the sound
+of oars as Carey sent his boat towards the water beneath the window. She
+drew back, went again to the piano, sat down, opened it, put her hands
+on the keys. How could she sing? But she must make him go away. While
+he was there she could not think, could not grip herself, could not--She
+struck a chord. The sound of music, the doing of a familiar action,
+had a strange effect upon her. She felt as if she recovered clear
+consciousness after an anaesthetic. She struck another chord. What did
+he want? The concert--that song. Her fingers found the prelude, her lips
+the poetry, her voice the music. And then suddenly her heart found
+the meaning, more than the meaning, the eternal meanings of the things
+unutterable, the things that lie beyond the world in the deep souls of
+the women who are the saviours of men.
+
+When she had finished she went to the window. He was still standing in
+the boat and looking up, with the whiteness of the mist about him.
+
+“When you sing I can see those stars,” he said. “Do you understand?”
+
+She bent down.
+
+“I don’t know--I don’t think I understand anything,” she whispered.
+“But--I’ll try--I’ll try to live.”
+
+Her voice was so faint, such an inward voice, that it seemed impossible
+he could have heard it. But he struck the oars at once into the water
+and sent the boat out into the shadows of the night.
+
+And she stood there looking into the white silence, which was broken
+only by the faint voices of the fishermen’s bells, and said to herself
+again and again, like a wondering child:
+
+“There must be a God, there must be; a God who cares!”
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+IN London during the ensuing winter people warmly discussed, and many of
+them warmly condemned, a certain Italian episode, in which a woman and
+a man, once well-known and, in their very different ways, widely popular
+in Society, were the actors.
+
+In the deep autumn Sir Donald Ulford had died rather suddenly, and it
+was found in his will that he had left his newly-acquired property, Casa
+Felice, to Lady Holme, who--as everybody had long ago discovered--was
+already living there in strict retirement, while her husband was amusing
+himself in various Continental towns. This legacy was considered by a
+great number of persons to be “a very strange one;” but it was not this
+which caused the gossip now flitting from boudoir to boudoir and from
+club to club.
+
+It had become known that Rupert Carey, whose unfortunate vice had been
+common talk ever since the Arkell House ball, was a perpetual visitor to
+Casa Felice, and presently it was whispered that he was actually living
+there with Lady Holme, and that Lord Holme was going to apply to the
+Courts for a divorce. Thereupon many successful ladies began to wag
+bitter tongues. It seemed to be generally agreed that the affair was
+rendered peculiarly disgraceful by the fact that Lady Holme was no
+longer a beautiful woman. If she had still been lovely they could have
+understood it! The wildest rumours as to the terrible result of the
+accident upon her had been afloat, and already she had become almost
+a legend. It was stated that when poor Lord Holme had first seen her,
+after the operation, the shock had nearly turned his brain. And now it
+was argued that the only decent thing for a woman in such a plight to
+do was to preserve at least her dignity, and to retire modestly from
+the fray in which she could no longer hope to hold her own. That she had
+indeed retired, but apparently with a man, roused much pious scorn and
+pinched regret in those whose lives were passed amid the crash of broken
+commandments.
+
+One day, at a tea, a certain lady, animadverted strongly upon Lady
+Holme’s conduct, and finally remarked:
+
+“It’s grotesque! A woman who is disfigured, and a man who is, or at any
+rate was, a drunkard! Really it’s the most disgusting thing I ever heard
+of!”
+
+Lady Cardington happened to be in the room and she suddenly flushed.
+
+“I don’t think we know very much about it,” she said, and her voice was
+rather louder than usual.
+
+“But Lord Holme is going to--” began the lady who had been speaking.
+
+“He may be, and he may succeed. But my sympathies are not with him. He
+left his wife when she needed him.”
+
+“But what could he have done for her?”
+
+“He could have loved her,” said Lady Cardington.
+
+The flush glowed hotter in the face that was generally as white as
+ivory.
+
+There was a moment of silence in the room. Then Lady Cardington, getting
+up to go, added:
+
+“Whatever happens, I shall admire Mr. Carey as long as I live, and I
+wish there were many more men like him in the world.”
+
+She went out, leaving a tense astonishment behind her.
+
+Her romantic heart, still young and ardent, though often aching with
+sorrow, and always yearning for the ideal love that it had never found,
+had divined the truth these chattering women had not imagination enough
+to conceive of, soul enough to appreciate if they had conceived of it.
+
+In that Italian winter, far away from London, a very beautiful drama
+of human life was being enacted, not the less but the more beautiful
+because the man and woman who took part in it had been scourged by fate,
+had suffered cruel losses, were in the eyes of many who had known them
+well pariahs--Rupert Carey through his fault, Lady Holme through her
+misfortune.
+
+Long ago, at the Arkell House ball, Lady Holme had said to Robin
+Pierce that if Rupert Carey had the chance she could imagine him doing
+something great. The chance was given him now of doing one of the
+greatest things a human being can do--of winning a soul that is in
+despair back to hope, of winning a heart that is sceptical of love back
+to belief in love. It was a great thing to do, and Carey set about doing
+it in a strange way. He cast himself down in his degradation at the feet
+of this woman whom he was resolved to help, and he said, “Help me!” He
+came to this woman who was on the brink of self-destruction and he said,
+“Teach me to live!”
+
+It was a strange way he took, but perhaps he was right--perhaps it
+was the only way. The words he spoke at midnight on the lake were as
+nothing. His eyes, his acts in sunlight the next day, and day after day,
+were everything. He forced Viola to realise that she was indeed the only
+woman who could save him from the vice he had become the slave of, lift
+him up out of that pit in which he could not see the stars. At first she
+could not believe it, or could believe it only in moments of exaltation.
+Lord Holme and Robin Pierce had rendered her terrified of life and of
+herself in life. She was inclined to cringe before all humanity like a
+beaten dog. There were moments, many moments at first, when she cringed
+before Rupert Carey. But his eyes always told her the same story. They
+never saw the marred face, but always the white angel. The soul in them
+clung to that, asked to be protected by that. And so, at last, the white
+angel--one hides somewhere surely in every woman--was released.
+
+There were sad, horrible moments in this drama of the Italian winter.
+The lonely house in the woods was a witness to painful, even tragic,
+scenes. Viola’s love for Rupert Carey was reluctant in its dawning
+and he could not rise at once, or easily, out of the pit into the full
+starlight to which he aspired. After the death of Sir Donald, when the
+winter set in, he asked her to let him live in the house on the opposite
+side of the piazza from the house in which she dwelt. They were people
+of the world, and knew what the world might say, but they were also
+human beings in distress, and they felt as if they had passed into a
+region in which the meaning of the world’s voices was lost, as the cry
+of an angry child is lost in the vastness of the desert. She agreed to
+his request, and they lived thus, innocently, till the winter was over
+and the spring came to bring to Italy its radiance once more.
+
+Even the spring was not an idyll. Rupert Carey had struggled upward,
+but Viola, too, had much to forget and very much to learn. The egoist,
+spoken of by Carey himself one night in Half Moon Street, was slow to
+fade in the growing radiance that played about the angel’s feet. But
+it knew, and Carey knew also, that it was no longer fine enough in
+its brilliant selfishness to stand quite alone. With the death of the
+physical beauty there came a modesty of heart. With the understanding,
+bitter and terrible as it was, that the great, conquering outward thing
+was destroyed, came the desire, the imperious need, to find and to
+develop if possible the inner things which, perhaps, conquer less
+easily, but which retain their conquests to the end. There was growth in
+Casa Felice, slow but stubborn, growth in the secret places of the soul,
+till there came a time when not merely the white angel, but the whole
+woman, angel and that which had perhaps been devil too, was able to
+accept the yoke laid upon her with patience, was able to say, “I can
+endure it bravely.”
+
+Lord Holme presently took his case to the Courts. It was undefended and
+he won it. Not long ago Viola Holme became Viola Carey.
+
+When Robin Pierce heard of it in Rome he sat for a long time in deep
+thought. Even now, even after all that had passed, he felt a thrill of
+pain that was like the pain of jealousy. He wished for the impossible,
+he wished that he had been born with his friend’s nature; that, instead
+of the man who could only talk of being, he were the man who could be.
+And yet, in the past, he had sometimes surely defended Viola against
+Carey’s seeming condemnation! He had defended and not loved--but Carey
+had judged and loved.
+
+Carey had judged and loved, yet Carey had said he did not believe in a
+God. Robin wondered if he believed now.
+
+Robin was in Rome, and could not hear the words of a man and a woman who
+were sitting one night, after the marriage, upon a piazza above the Lake
+of Como.
+
+The man said:
+
+“Do you remember Robin’s ‘_Danseuse de Tunisie_’?”
+
+“The woman with the fan?”
+
+“Yes. I see her now without the fan. With it she was a siren, perhaps,
+but without it she is--”
+
+“What is she without it?”
+
+“Eternal woman. Ah, how much better than the siren!”
+
+There was a silence filled only by the voice of the waterfall between
+the cypresses. Then the woman spoke, rather softly.
+
+“You taught her what she could be without the fan. You have done the
+great thing.”
+
+“And do you know what you have done?”
+
+“I?”
+
+“Yes. You have taught me to see the stars and to feel the soul beyond
+the stars.”
+
+“No, it was not I.”
+
+Again there was a silence. Then the man said:
+
+“No, thank God--it was not you.”
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg’s The Woman With The Fan, by Robert Hichens
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diff --git a/8549-0.zip b/8549-0.zip
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>The Woman With The Fan, by Robert Hichens</title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Woman With The Fan, by Robert Hichens
+
+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 Woman With The Fan
+
+Author: Robert Hichens
+
+Release Date: July 24, 2009 [EBook #8549]
+Last Updated: September 24, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMAN WITH THE FAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE WOMAN WITH THE FAN
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Robert Hichens
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER XX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER XXI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_EPIL"> EPILOGUE </a>
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      IN a large and cool drawing-room of London a few people were scattered
+      about, listening to a soprano voice that was singing to the accompaniment
+      of a piano. The sound of the voice came from an inner room, towards which
+      most of these people were looking earnestly. Only one or two seemed
+      indifferent to the fascination of the singer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little woman, with oily black hair and enormous dark eyes, leaned back
+      on a sofa, playing with a scarlet fan and glancing sideways at a thin,
+      elderly man, who gazed into the distance from which the voice came. His
+      mouth worked slightly under his stiff white moustache, and his eyes, in
+      colour a faded blue, were fixed and stern. Upon his knees his thin and
+      lemon-coloured hands twitched nervously, as if they longed to grasp
+      something and hold it fast. The little dark woman glanced down at these
+      hands, and then sharply up at the elderly man&rsquo;s face. A faint and
+      malicious smile curved her full lips, which were artificially reddened,
+      and she turned her shoulder to him with deliberation and looked about the
+      room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On all the faces in it, except one, she perceived intent expressions. A
+      sleek and plump man, with hanging cheeks, a hooked nose, and hair slightly
+      tinged with grey and parted in the middle, was the exception. He sat in a
+      low chair, pouting his lips, playing with his single eyeglass, and looking
+      as sulky as an ill-conditioned school-boy. Once or twice he crossed and
+      uncrossed his short legs with a sort of abrupt violence, laid his fat,
+      white hands on the arms of the chair, lifted them, glanced at his rosy and
+      shining nails, and frowned. Then he shut his little eyes so tightly that
+      the skin round them became wrinkled, and, stretching out his feet, seemed
+      almost angrily endeavouring to fall asleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A tall young man, who was sitting alone not far off, cast a glance of
+      contempt at him, and then, as if vexed at having bestowed upon him even
+      this slight attention, leaned forward, listening with eagerness to the
+      soprano voice. The little dark woman observed him carefully above the
+      scarlet feathers of her fan, which she now held quite still. His face was
+      lean and brown. His eyes were long and black, heavy-lidded, and shaded by
+      big lashes which curled upward. His features were good. The nose and chin
+      were short and decided, but the mouth was melancholy, almost weak. On his
+      upper lip grew a short moustache, turned up at the ends. His body was slim
+      and muscular.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After watching him for a little while the dark woman looked again at the
+      elderly man beside her, and then quickly back to the young fellow. She
+      seemed to be comparing the two attentions, of age and of youth. Perhaps
+      she found something horrible in the process for she suddenly lost her
+      expression of sparkling and birdlike sarcasm, and bending her arm, as if
+      overcome with lassitude, she let her fan drop on her knees, and stared
+      moodily at the carpet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A very tall woman, with snow-white hair and a face in which nobility and
+      weariness were mated, let fall two tears, and a huge man, with short,
+      bronze-coloured hair and a protruding lower jaw, who was sitting opposite
+      to her, noticed them and suddenly looked proud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The light soprano voice went on singing an Italian song about a summer
+      night in Venice, about stars, dark waters and dark palaces, heat, and the
+      sound of music, and of gondoliers calling over the lagoons to their
+      comrades. It was an exquisite voice; not large, but flexible and very
+      warm. The pianoforte accompaniment was rather uneasy and faltering. Now
+      and then, when it became blurred and wavering, the voice was abruptly hard
+      and decisive, once even piercing and almost shrewish. Then the pianist, as
+      if attacked by fear, played louder and hurried the tempo, the little dark
+      woman smiled mischievously, the white-haired woman put her handkerchief to
+      her eyes, and the young man looked as if he wished to commit murder. But
+      the huge man with the bronze hair went on looking equably proud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the voice died away there was distinct, though slight, applause,
+      which partially drowned the accompanist&rsquo;s muddled conclusion. Then a woman
+      walked in from the second drawing-room with an angry expression on her
+      face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was tall and slight. Her hair and eyes were light yellow-brown, and
+      the former had a natural wave in it. Her shoulders and bust were superb,
+      and her small head was beautifully set on a lovely, rather long, neck. She
+      had an oval face, with straight, delicate features, now slightly distorted
+      by temper. But the most remarkable thing about her was her complexion. Her
+      skin was exquisite, delicately smooth and white, warmly white like a white
+      rose. She did nothing to add to its natural beauty, though nearly every
+      woman in London declared that she had a special preparation and always
+      slept in a mask coated thickly with it. The Bond Street oracles never
+      received a visit from her. She had been born with an enchanting
+      complexion, a marvellous skin. She was young, just twenty-four. She let
+      herself alone because she knew improvement&mdash;in that direction&mdash;was
+      not possible. The mask coated with Juliet paste, or Aphrodite ivorine,
+      existed only in the radiant imaginations of her carefully-arranged
+      acquaintances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In appearance she was a siren. By nature she was a siren too. But she had
+      a temper and sometimes showed it. She showed it now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As she walked in slowly all the scattered people leaned forward, murmuring
+      their thanks, and the men stood up and gathered round her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beautiful! Beautiful!&rdquo; muttered the thin, elderly man in a hoarse voice,
+      striking his fingers repeatedly against the palms of his withered hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man looked at the singer and said nothing; but the anger in her
+      face was reflected in his, and mingled with a flaming of sympathy that
+      made his appearance almost startling. The white-haired woman clasped the
+      singer&rsquo;s hands and said, &ldquo;Thank you, dearest!&rdquo; in a thrilling voice, and
+      the little dark woman with the red fan cried out, &ldquo;Viola, you simply pack
+      up Venice, carry it over the Continent and set it down here in London!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme frowned slightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you, thank you, you good-natured dears,&rdquo; she said with an attempt
+      at lightness. Then, hearing the thin rustle of a dress, she turned sharply
+      and cast an unfriendly glance at a mild young woman with a very pointed
+      nose, on which a pair of eyeglasses sat astride, who came meekly forward,
+      looking self-conscious, and smiling with one side of her mouth. The man
+      with the protruding jaw, who was Lord Holme, said to her, in a loud bass
+      voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks, Miss Filberte, thanks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, not at all, Lord Holme,&rdquo; replied the accompanist with a sudden air of
+      rather foolish delight. &ldquo;I consider it an honour to accompany an amateur
+      who sings like Lady Holme.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laid a slight emphasis on the word &ldquo;amateur.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme suddenly walked forward to an empty part of the drawing-room.
+      The elderly man, whose name was Sir Donald Ulford, made a movement as if
+      to follow her, then cleared his throat and stood still looking after her.
+      Lord Holme stuck out his under jaw. But Lady Cardington, the white-haired
+      woman spoke to him softly, and he leaned over to her and replied. The
+      sleek man, whose name was Mr. Bry, began to talk about Tschaikowsky to
+      Mrs. Henry Wolfstein, the woman with the red fan. He uttered his remarks
+      authoritatively in a slow and languid voice, looking at the pointed toes
+      of his shoes. Conversation became general.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin Pierce, the tall young man, stood alone for a few minutes. Two or
+      three times he glanced towards Lady Holme, who had sat down on a sofa, and
+      was opening and shutting a small silver box which she had picked up from a
+      table near her. Then he walked quietly up the room and sat down beside
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why on earth didn&rsquo;t you accompany yourself?&rdquo; he asked in a low voice.
+      &ldquo;You knew what a muddler that girl was, I suppose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. She plays like a distracted black beetle&mdash;horrid creature!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then&mdash;why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I look ridiculous sitting at the piano.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ridiculous&mdash;you&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I hold them far more when I stand up. They can&rsquo;t get away from me
+      then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you&rsquo;d rather have your singing ruined than part for a moment with a
+      scrap of your physical influence, of the influence that comes from your
+      beauty, not your talent&mdash;your face, not your soul. Viola, you&rsquo;re just
+      the same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lady Holme,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;P&rsquo;sh! Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My little husband&rsquo;s fussy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And much you care if he is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes, I do. He sprawls when he fusses and knocks things over, and
+      then, when I&rsquo;ve soothed him, he always goes and does Sandow exercises and
+      gets bigger. And he&rsquo;s big enough as it is. I must keep him quiet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you can&rsquo;t keep the other men quiet. With your face and your voice&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it isn&rsquo;t the voice,&rdquo; she said with contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at her rather sadly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why will you put such an exaggerated value on your appearance? Why will
+      you never allow that three-quarters at least of your attraction comes from
+      something else?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your personality&mdash;your self.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My soul!&rdquo; she said, suddenly putting on a farcically rapt and yearning
+      expression and speaking in a hollow, hungry voice. &ldquo;Are we in the
+      prehistoric Eighties?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are in the unchanging world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unchanging! My dear boy!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, unchanging,&rdquo; he repeated obstinately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He pressed his lips together and looked away. Miss Filberte was cackling
+      and smiling on a settee, with a man whose figure presented a succession of
+      curves, and who kept on softly patting his hands together and swaying
+      gently backwards and forwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Mr. Pierce, what&rsquo;s the matter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Pierce!&rdquo; he said, almost savagely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, of the English Embassy in Rome, rising young diplomat and full of
+      early Eighty yearns&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How the deuce can you be as you are and yet sing as you do?&rdquo; he
+      exclaimed, turning on her. &ldquo;You say you care for nothing but the outside
+      of things&mdash;the husk, the shell, the surface. You think men care for
+      nothing else. Yet when you sing you&mdash;you&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do I do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s as if another woman than you were singing in you&mdash;a woman
+      totally unlike you, a woman who believes in, and loves, the real beauty
+      which you care nothing about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The real beauty that rules the world is lodged in the epidermis,&rdquo; she
+      said, opening her fan and smiling slowly. &ldquo;If this&rdquo;&mdash;she touched her
+      face&mdash;&ldquo;were to be changed into&mdash;shall we say a Filberte
+      countenance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; he exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There! You see, directly I put the matter before you, you have to agree
+      with me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one could sing like you and have a face like a silly sheep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor Miss Filberte! Well, then, suppose me disfigured and singing better
+      than ever&mdash;what man would listen to me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For half a minute. Then you&rsquo;d say, &lsquo;Poor wretch, she&rsquo;s lost her voice!&rsquo; 
+      No, no, it&rsquo;s my face that sings to the world, my face the world loves to
+      listen to, my face that makes me friends and&mdash;enemies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked into his eyes with impertinent directness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s my face that&rsquo;s made Mr. Robin Pierce deceive himself into the belief
+      that he only worships women for their souls, their lovely natures, their&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know that in a way you are a singularly modest woman?&rdquo; he suddenly
+      interrupted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I? How?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In thinking that you hold people only by your appearance, that your
+      personality has nothing to say in the matter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am modest, but not so modest as that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Personality is a crutch, a pretty good crutch; but so long as men are men
+      they will put crutches second and&mdash;something else first. Yes, I know
+      I&rsquo;m a little bit vulgar, but everybody in London is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you lived in Rome.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve seen people being vulgar there too. Besides, there may be reasons
+      why it would not be good for me to live in Rome.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She glanced at him again less impertinently, and suddenly her whole body
+      looked softer and kinder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must put up with my face, Robin,&rdquo; she added. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s no good wishing me
+      to be ugly. It&rsquo;s no use. I can&rsquo;t be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed. Her ill-humour had entirely vanished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you were&mdash;&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If you were&mdash;!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think no one would stick to you&mdash;stick to you for yourself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite several old ladies. It&rsquo;s very strange, but old ladies of a certain
+      class&mdash;the almost obsolete class that wears caps and connects piety
+      with black brocade&mdash;like me. They think me &lsquo;a bright young thing.&rsquo; 
+      And so I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what you are. Sometimes I seem to divine what you are, and
+      then&mdash;then your face is like a cloud which obscures you&mdash;except
+      when you are singing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed frankly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor Robin! It was always your great fault&mdash;trying to plumb shallows
+      and to take high dives into water half a foot deep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was silent for a minute. At last he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And your husband?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fritz!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His forehead contracted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fritz&mdash;yes. What does he do? Try to walk in ocean depths?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You needn&rsquo;t sneer at Fritz,&rdquo; she said sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fritz doesn&rsquo;t bother about shallows and depths. He loves me absurdly, and
+      that&rsquo;s quite enough for him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She nodded gravely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what would Fritz do if you were to lose your beauty? Would he be like
+      all the other men? Would he cease to care?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For the first time Lady Holme looked really thoughtful&mdash;almost
+      painfully thoughtful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One&rsquo;s husband,&rdquo; she said slowly. &ldquo;Perhaps he&rsquo;s different. He&mdash;he
+      ought to be different.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A faint suggestion of terror came into her large brown eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a strong tie, you know, whatever people may say, a very strong
+      tie in marriage,&rdquo; she murmured, as if she were thinking out something for
+      herself. &ldquo;Fritz ought to love me, even if&mdash;if&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She broke off and looked about the room. Robin Pierce glanced round too
+      over the chattering guests sitting or standing in easy or lazy postures,
+      smiling vaguely, or looking grave and indifferent. Mrs. Wolfstein was
+      laughing, and yawned suddenly in the midst of her mirth. Lady Cardington
+      said something apparently tragic, to Mr. Bry, who was polishing his
+      eyeglass and pouting out his dewy lips. Sir Donald Ulford, wandering round
+      the walls, was examining the pictures upon them. Lady Manby, a woman with
+      a pyramid of brown hair and an aggressively flat back, was telling a
+      story. Evidently it was a comic history of disaster. Her gestures were
+      full of deliberate exaggeration, and she appeared to be impersonating by
+      turns two or three different people, each of whom had a perfectly
+      ridiculous personality. Lord Holme burst into a roar of laughter. His big
+      bass voice vibrated through the room. Suddenly Lady Holme laughed too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why are you laughing?&rdquo; Robin Pierce asked rather harshly. &ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t
+      hear what Lady Manby said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, but Fritz is so infectious. I believe there are laughter microbes.
+      What a noise he makes! It&rsquo;s really a scandal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And she laughed again joyously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t know much about women if you think any story of Lady Manby&rsquo;s is
+      necessary, to prompt my mirth. Poor dear old Fritz is quite enough. There
+      he goes again!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin Pierce began to look stiff with constraint, and just then Sir Donald
+      Ulford, in his progress round the walls, reached the sofa where they were
+      sitting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are very fortunate to possess this Cuyp, Lady Holme,&rdquo; he said in a
+      voice from which all resonance had long ago departed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Alas, Sir Donald, cows distress me! They call up sad memories. I was
+      chased by one in the park at Grantoun when I was a child. A fly had stung
+      it, so it tried to kill me. This struck me as unreason run riot, and ever
+      since then I have wished the Spaniards would go a step farther and make
+      cow-fights the national pastime. I hate cows frankly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald sat down in an armchair and looked, with his faded blue eyes,
+      into the eyes of his hostess. His drawn yellow face was melancholy, like
+      the face of one who had long been an invalid. People who knew him well,
+      however, said there was nothing the matter with him, and that his
+      appearance had not altered during the last twenty years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can hate nothing beautiful,&rdquo; he said with a sort of hollow assurance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think cows hideous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cuyp&rsquo;s?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All cows. You&rsquo;ve never had one running after you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She took up her gloves, which she had laid down on the table beside her,
+      and began to pull them gently through her fingers. Both Sir Donald and
+      Robin looked at her hands, which were not only beautiful in shape but
+      extraordinarily intelligent in their movements. Whatever they did they did
+      well, without hesitation or bungling. Nobody had ever seen them tremble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you consider that anything that can be dangerous for a moment must be
+      hideous for ever?&rdquo; asked Sir Donald, after a slight pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m sure I don&rsquo;t know. But I truly think cows hideous&mdash;I truly do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t put on your gloves,&rdquo; exclaimed Robin at this moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald glanced at him and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo; said Lady Holme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was obvious to both men that there was no need to answer her question.
+      She laid the gloves in her lap, smoothed them with her small fingers, and
+      kept silence. Silence was characteristic of her. When she was in society
+      she sometimes sat quite calmly and composedly without uttering a word.
+      After watching her for a minute or two, Sir Donald said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must know Venice very well and understand it completely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;ve been there, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Recently?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not so very long ago. After my marriage Fritz took me all over Europe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you loved Venice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald did not ask a question, he made a statement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. It didn&rsquo;t agree with me. It depressed me. We were there in the
+      mosquito season.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What has that to do with it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Sir Donald, if you&rsquo;d ever had a hole in your net you&rsquo;d know. I
+      made Fritz take me away after two days, and I&rsquo;ve never been back. I don&rsquo;t
+      want to have my one beauty ruined.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald did not pay the reasonable compliment. He only stretched out
+      his lean hands over his knees, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Venice is the only ideal city in Europe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You forget Paris.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Paris!&rdquo; said Sir Donald. &ldquo;Paris is a suburb of London and New York. Paris
+      is no longer the city of light, but the city of pornography and
+      dressmakers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I don&rsquo;t know exactly what pornography is&mdash;unless it&rsquo;s some new
+      process for taking snapshots. But I do know what gowns are, and I love
+      Paris. The Venice shops are failures and the Venice mosquitoes are
+      successes, and I hate Venice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An expression of lemon-coloured amazement appeared upon Sir Donald&rsquo;s face,
+      and he glanced at Robin Pierce as if requesting the answer to a riddle.
+      Robin looked rather as if he were enjoying himself, but the puzzled
+      melancholy grew deeper on Sir Donald&rsquo;s face. With the air of a man
+      determined to reassure his mind upon some matter, however, he spoke again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You visited the European capitals?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, all of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Constantinople?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Terrible place! Dogs, dogs, nothing but dogs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you like Petersburg?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I couldn&rsquo;t bear it. I caught cold there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that was why you hated it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I went out one night with Fritz on the Neva to hear a woman in a
+      boat singing&mdash;a peasant girl with high cheek-bones&mdash;and I caught
+      a frightful chill.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said Sir Donald. &ldquo;What was the song? I know a good many of the
+      Northern peasant songs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Lady Holme got up, letting her gloves fall to the ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll sing it to you,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin Pierce touched her arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For Heaven&rsquo;s sake not to Miss Filberte&rsquo;s accompaniment!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well. But come and sit where you can see me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t,&rdquo; he said with brusque obstinacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madman!&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;Anyhow, you come, Sir Donald.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And she walked lightly away towards the piano, followed by Sir Donald, who
+      walked lightly too, but uncertainly, on his thin, stick-like legs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you up to, Vi?&rdquo; said Lord Holme, as she came near to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to sing something for Sir Donald.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Capital! Where&rsquo;s Miss Filberte?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here I am!&rdquo; piped a thin alto voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a rustle of skirts as the accompanist rose hastily from her
+      chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down, please, Miss Filberte,&rdquo; said Lady Holme in a voice of ice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Filberte sat down like one who has been knocked on the head with a
+      hammer, and Lady Holme went alone to the piano, turned the button that
+      raised the music-stool, sat down too, holding herself very upright, and
+      played some notes. For a moment, while she played, her face was so
+      determined and pitiless that Mr. Bry, unaware that she was still thinking
+      about Miss Filberte, murmured to Lady Cardington:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Evidently we are in for a song about Jael with the butter in the lordly
+      dish omitted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then an expression of sorrowful youth stole into Lady Holme&rsquo;s eyes,
+      changed her mouth to softness and her cheeks to curving innocence. She
+      leaned a little way from the piano towards her audience and sang, looking
+      up into vacancy as if her world were hidden there. The song had the clear
+      melancholy and the passion of a Northern night. It brought the stars out
+      within that room and set purple distances before the eyes. Water swayed in
+      it, but languidly, as water sways at night in calm weather, when the black
+      spars of ships at anchor in sheltered harbours are motionless as fingers
+      of skeletons pointing towards the moon. Mysterious lights lay round a
+      silent shore. And in the wide air, on the wide waters, one woman was
+      singing to herself of a sorrow that was deep as the grave, and that no one
+      upon the earth knew of save she who sang. The song was very short. It had
+      only two little verses. When it was over, Sir Donald, who had been
+      watching the singer, returned to the sofa, where Robin Pierce was sitting
+      with his eyes shut and, again striking his fingers against the palms of
+      his hands, said: &ldquo;I have heard that song at night on the Neva, and yet I
+      never heard it before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      People began getting up to go away. It was past eleven o&rsquo;clock. Sir Donald
+      and Robin Pierce stood together, saying good-bye to Lady Holme. As she
+      held out her hand to the former, she said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Sir Donald, you know Russia, don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I want you to tell me the name of that stuff they carry down the
+      Neva in boats&mdash;the stuff that has such a horrible smell. That song
+      always reminds me of it, and Fritz can&rsquo;t remember the name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor can I,&rdquo; said Sir Donald, rather abruptly. &ldquo;Good-night, Lady Holme.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked out of the room, followed by Robin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      LORD HOLME&rsquo;S house was in Cadogan Square. When Sir Donald had put on his
+      coat in the hall he turned to Robin Pierce and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which way do you go?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To Half Moon Street,&rdquo; said Robin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We might walk, if you like. I am going the same way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They set out slowly. It was early in the year. Showers of rain had fallen
+      during the day. The night was warm, and the damp earth in the Square
+      garden steamed as if it were oppressed and were breathing wearily. The sky
+      was dark and cloudy, and the air was impregnated with a scent to which
+      many things had contributed, each yielding a fragment of the odour
+      peculiar to it. Rain, smoke, various trees and plants, the wet paint on a
+      railing, the damp straw laid before the house of an invalid, the hothouse
+      flowers carried by a woman in a passing carriage&mdash;these and other
+      things were represented in the heavy atmosphere which was full of the
+      sensation of life. Sir Donald expanded his nostrils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;London, London!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I should know it if I were blind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. The London smell is not to be confused with the smell of any other
+      place. You have been back a good while, I believe?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Three years. I am laid on the London shelf now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have had a long life of work&mdash;interesting work.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Diplomacy has interesting moments. I have seen many countries. I
+      have been transferred from Copenhagen to Teheran, visited the Sultan of
+      Morocco at Fez, and&mdash;&rdquo; he stopped. After a pause he added: &ldquo;And now I
+      sit in London clubs and look out of bay windows.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They walked on slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you known our hostess of to-night long?&rdquo; Sir Donald asked presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A good while&mdash;quite a good while. But I&rsquo;m very much away at Rome
+      now. Since I have been there she has married.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have only met her to speak to once before to-night, though I have seen
+      her about very often and heard her sing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To me she is an enigma,&rdquo; Sir Donald continued with some hesitation. &ldquo;I
+      cannot make her out at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin Pierce smiled in the dark and thrust his hands deep down in the
+      pockets of his overcoat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; Sir Donald resumed, after a slight pause, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know
+      what is your&mdash;whether you care much for beauty in its innumerable
+      forms. Many young men don&rsquo;t, I believe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do,&rdquo; said Robin. &ldquo;My mother is an Italian, you know, and not an Italian
+      Philistine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you can help me, perhaps. Does Lady Holme care for beauty? But she
+      must. It is impossible that she does not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think so? Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I really cannot reconcile myself to the idea that such performances as
+      hers are matters of chance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are not. Lady Holme is not a woman who chances things before the
+      cruel world in which she, you and I live, Sir Donald.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly. I felt sure of that. Then we come to calculation of effects, to
+      consideration of that very interesting question&mdash;self-consciousness
+      in art.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you feel that Lady Holme is self-conscious when she is singing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. And that is just the point. She must, I suppose, have studied till
+      she has reached that last stage of accomplishment in which the
+      self-consciousness present is so perfectly concealed that it seems to be
+      eliminated.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly. She has an absolute command over her means.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One cannot deny it. No musician could contest it. But the question that
+      interests me lies behind all this. There is more than accomplishment in
+      her performance. There is temperament, there is mind, there is emotion and
+      complete understanding. I am scarcely speaking strongly enough in saying
+      complete&mdash;perhaps infinitely subtle would be nearer the mark. What do
+      you say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think if you said that there appears to be an infinitely subtle
+      understanding at work in Lady Holme&rsquo;s singing you would be going at all
+      too far.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Appears to be?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald stopped for a moment on the pavement under a gas-lamp. As the
+      light fell on him he looked like a weary old ghost longing to fade away
+      into the dark shadows of the London night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You say &lsquo;appears to be,&rsquo;&rdquo; he repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I ask why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, would you undertake to vouch for Lady Holme&rsquo;s understanding&mdash;I
+      mean for the infinite subtlety of it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald began to walk on once more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot find it in her conversation,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor can I, nor can anyone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is full of personal fascination, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean because of her personal beauty?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, it&rsquo;s more than that, I think. It&rsquo;s the woman herself. She is
+      suggestive somehow. She makes one&rsquo;s imagination work. Of course she is
+      beautiful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And she thinks that is everything. She would part with her voice, her
+      intelligence&mdash;she is very intelligent in the quick, frivolous fashion
+      that is necessary for London&mdash;that personal fascination you speak of,
+      everything rather than her white-rose complexion and the wave in her
+      hair.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really, really?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. She thinks the outside everything. She believes the world is
+      governed, love is won and held, happiness is gained and kept by the husk
+      of things. She told me only to-night that it is her face which sings to us
+      all, not her voice; that were she to sing as well and be an ugly woman we
+      should not care to listen to her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H&rsquo;m! H&rsquo;m!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Absurd, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What will be the approach of old age to her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a suspicion of bitterness in his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The coming of the King of Terrors,&rdquo; said Pierce. &ldquo;But she cannot hear his
+      footsteps yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are loud enough in some ears. Ah, we, are at your door already?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you be good-natured and come in for a little while?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid&mdash;isn&rsquo;t it rather late?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only half-past eleven.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They stepped into the little hall. As they did so a valet appeared at the
+      head of the stairs leading to the servants&rsquo; quarters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you please, sir,&rdquo; he said to Pierce, &ldquo;this note has just come. I was
+      to ask if you would read it directly you returned.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you excuse me?&rdquo; said Pierce to Sir Donald, tearing open the
+      envelope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced at the note.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it to ask you to go somewhere to-night?&rdquo; Sir Donald said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please don&rsquo;t. It is only from a friend who is just round the corner in
+      Stratton Street. If you will not mind his joining us here I will send him
+      a message.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He said a few words to his man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That will be all right. Do come upstairs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are sure I am not in the way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope you will not find my friend in the way; that&rsquo;s all. He&rsquo;s an odd
+      fellow at the best of times, and to-night he&rsquo;s got an attack of what he
+      calls the blacks&mdash;his form of blues. But he&rsquo;s very talented. Carey is
+      his name&mdash;Rupert Carey. You don&rsquo;t happen to know him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. If I may say so, your room is charming.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They were on the first floor now, in a chamber rather barely furnished and
+      hung with blue-grey linen, against which were fastened several old Italian
+      pictures in black frames. On the floor were some Eastern rugs in which
+      faded and originally pale colours mingled. A log fire was burning on an
+      open hearth, at right angles to which stood an immense sofa with a square
+      back. This sofa was covered with dull blue stuff. Opposite to it was a
+      large and low armchair, also covered in blue. A Steinway grand piano stood
+      out in the middle of the room. It was open and there were no ornaments or
+      photographs upon it. Its shining dark case reflected the flames which
+      sprang up from the logs. Several dwarf bookcases of black wood were filled
+      with volumes, some in exquisite bindings, some paper covered. On the top
+      of the bookcases stood four dragon china vases filled with carnations of
+      various colours. Electric lights burned just under the ceiling, but they
+      were hidden from sight. In an angle of the wall, on a black ebony
+      pedestal, stood an extremely beautiful marble statuette of a nude girl
+      holding a fan. Under this, on a plaque, was written, &ldquo;<i>Une Danseuse de
+      Tunisie</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald went up to it, and stood before it for two or three minutes in
+      silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see indeed you do care for beauty,&rdquo; he said at length. &ldquo;But&mdash;forgive
+      me&mdash;that fan makes that statuette wicked.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, but a thousand times more charming. Carey said just the same thing
+      when he saw it. I wonder I wonder what Lady Holme would say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They sat down on the sofa by the wood fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Carey could probably tell us!&rdquo; Pierce added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, then your friend knows Lady Holme?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He did once. I believe he isn&rsquo;t allowed to now. Ah, here is Carey!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A quick step was audible on the stairs, the door was opened, and a broad,
+      middle-sized young man, with red hair, a huge red moustache and fierce
+      red-brown eyes, entered swiftly with an air of ruthless determination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I came, but I shall be devilish bad company to-night,&rdquo; he said at once,
+      looking at Sir Donald.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll cheer you up. Let me introduce you to Sir Donald Ulford&mdash;Mr.
+      Rupert Carey.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Carey shook Sir Donald by the hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Glad to meet you,&rdquo; he said abruptly. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve carried your Persian poems
+      round the world with me. They lay in my trunk cheek by jowl with
+      God-forsaken, glorious old Omar.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A dusky red flush appeared in Sir Donald&rsquo;s hollow cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really,&rdquo; he said, with obvious embarrassment, &ldquo;I&mdash;they were a great
+      failure. &lsquo;Obviously the poems of a man likely to be successful in dealing
+      with finance,&rsquo; as <i>The Times</i> said in reviewing them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, in the course of your career you&rsquo;ve done some good things for
+      England financially, haven&rsquo;t you?&mdash;not very publicly, perhaps, but as
+      a minister abroad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. To come forward as a poet was certainly a mistake.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Any fool could see the faults in your book. True Persia all the same
+      though. I saw all the faults and read &lsquo;em twenty times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He flung himself down in the big armchair. Sir Donald could see now that
+      there was a shining of misery in his big, rather ugly, eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where have you two been?&rdquo; he continued, with a directness that was almost
+      rude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dining with the Holmes,&rdquo; answered Pierce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That ruffian! Did she sing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, twice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wish I&rsquo;d heard her. Here am I playing Saul without a David. Many people
+      there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Several. Lady Cardington&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That white-haired enchantress! There&rsquo;s a Niobe&mdash;weeping not for her
+      children, she never had any, but for her youth. She is the religion of
+      half Mayfair, though I don&rsquo;t know whether she&rsquo;s got a religion. Men who
+      wouldn&rsquo;t look at her when she was sixteen, twenty-six, thirty-six, worship
+      her now she&rsquo;s sixty. And she weeps for her youth! Who else?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Wolfstein.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A daughter of Israel; coarse, intelligent, brutal to her reddened
+      finger-tips. I&rsquo;d trust her to judge a singer, actor, painter, writer. But
+      I wouldn&rsquo;t trust her with my heart or half a crown.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lady Manby.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Humour in petticoats. She&rsquo;s so infernally full of humour that there&rsquo;s no
+      room in her for anything else. I doubt if she&rsquo;s got lungs. I&rsquo;m sure she
+      hasn&rsquo;t got a heart or a brain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if she is so full of humour,&rdquo; said Sir Donald mildly, &ldquo;how does she&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How does a great writer fail over an addition sum? How does a man who
+      speaks eight languages talk imbecility in them all? How is it that a bird
+      isn&rsquo;t an angel? I wish to Heaven we knew. Well, Robin?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, Mr. Bry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Carey&rsquo;s violent face expressed disgust in every line.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One of the most finished of London types,&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;No other city
+      supplies quite the same sort of man to take the colour out of things. He&rsquo;s
+      enormously clever, enormously abominable, and should have been strangled
+      at birth merely because of his feet. Why he&rsquo;s not Chinese I can&rsquo;t
+      conceive; why he dines out every night I can. He&rsquo;s a human cruet-stand
+      without the oil. He&rsquo;s so monstrously intelligent that he knows what a
+      beast he is, and doesn&rsquo;t mind. Not a bad set of people to talk with,
+      unless Lady Holme was in a temper and you were next to her, or you were
+      left stranded with Holme when the women went out of the dining-room.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think Holme a poor talker?&rdquo; asked Sir Donald.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Precious poor. His brain is muscle-bound, I believe. Robin, you know I&rsquo;m
+      miserable to-night you offer me nothing to drink.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon. Help yourself. And, Sir Donald, what will you&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing, thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Try one of those cigars.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald took one and lit it quietly, looking at Carey, who seemed to
+      interest him a good deal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why are you miserable, Carey?&rdquo; said Pierce, as the former buried his
+      moustache in a tall whisky-and-soda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I&rsquo;m alive and don&rsquo;t want to be dead. Reason enough.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because you&rsquo;re an unmitigated egoist,&rdquo; rejoined Pierce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I am an egoist. Introduce me to a man who is not, will you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what about women?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Many women are not egoists. But you have been dining with one of the most
+      finished egoists in London to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lady Holme?&rdquo; said Sir Donald, shifting into the left-hand corner of the
+      sofa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Viola Holme, once Lady Viola Grantoun; whom I mustn&rsquo;t know any
+      more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not sure that you are right, Carey,&rdquo; said Pierce, rather coldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can a true and perfect egoist be in love?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly. Is not even an egoist an animal?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pierce&rsquo;s lips tightened for a second, and his right hand strained itself
+      round his knee, on which it was lying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And how much can she be in love?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very much.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean with her body?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I do; and with the spirit that lives in it. I don&rsquo;t believe there&rsquo;s
+      any life but this. A church is more fantastic to me than the room in which
+      Punch belabours Judy. But I say that there is spirit in lust, in hunger,
+      in everything. When I want a drink my spirit wants it. Viola Holme&rsquo;s
+      spirit&mdash;a flame that will be blown out at death&mdash;takes part in
+      her love for that great brute Holme. And yet she&rsquo;s one of the most
+      pronounced egoists in London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you care to tell us any reason you may have for saying so?&rdquo; said Sir
+      Donald.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he spoke, his voice, brought into sharp contrast with the changeful and
+      animated voice of Carey, sounded almost preposterously thin and worn out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is always conscious of herself in every situation, in every relation
+      of life. While she loves even she thinks to herself, &lsquo;How beautifully I am
+      loving!&rsquo; And she never forgets for a single moment that she is a
+      fascinating woman. If she were being murdered she would be saying
+      silently, while the knife went in, &lsquo;What an attractive creature, what an
+      unreplaceable personage they are putting an end to!&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rupert, you are really too absurd!&rdquo; exclaimed Pierce, laughing
+      reluctantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not absurd. I see straight. Lady Holme is an egoist&mdash;a
+      magnificent, an adorable egoist, fine enough in her brilliant selfishness
+      to stand quite alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you mean to tell us that any woman can do that?&rdquo; exclaimed Pierce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who am I that I should pronounce a verdict upon the great mystery? What
+      do I know of women?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Far too much, I&rsquo;m afraid,&rdquo; said Pierce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing, I have never been married, and only the married man knows
+      anything of women. The Frenchmen are wrong. It is not the mistress who
+      informs, it is the loving wife. For me the sex remains mysterious, like
+      the heroine of my realm of dreams.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are talking great nonsense, Rupert.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I always do when I am depressed, and I am very specially depressed
+      to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why? There must be some very special reason.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is. I, too, dined out and met at dinner a young man whose one
+      desire in life appears to be to deprive living creatures of life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald moved slightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re not a sportsman, then, Mr. Carey?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed, I am. I&rsquo;ve shot big game, the Lord forgive me, and found big
+      pleasure in doing it. Yet this young man depressed me. He was so robust,
+      so perfectly happy, so supremely self-satisfied, and, according to his own
+      account, so enormously destructive, that he made me feel very sick. He is
+      married. He married a widow who has an ear-trumpet and a big shooting in
+      Scotland. If she could be induced to crawl in underwood, or stand on a
+      cairn against a skyline, I&rsquo;m sure he&rsquo;d pot at her for the fun of the
+      thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is his name?&rdquo; asked Sir Donald.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t catch it. My host called him Leo. He has&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! He is my only son.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pierce looked very uncomfortable, but Carey replied calmly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really. I wonder he hasn&rsquo;t shot you long ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doesn&rsquo;t he depress you?&rdquo; added Carey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He does, I&rsquo;m sorry to say, but scarcely so much as I depress him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think Lady Holme would like him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For once Sir Donald looked really expressive, of surprise and disgust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I can&rsquo;t think so!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, yes, she would. She doesn&rsquo;t care honestly for art-loving men. Her
+      idea of a real man, the sort of man a woman marries, or bolts with, or
+      goes off her head for, is a huge mass of bones and muscles and thews and
+      sinews that knows not beauty. And your son would adore her, Sir Donald.
+      Better not let him, though. Holme&rsquo;s a jealous devil.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Totally without reason,&rdquo; said Pierce, with a touch of bitterness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No doubt. It&rsquo;s part of his Grand Turk nature. He ought to possess a
+      Yildiz. He&rsquo;s out of place in London where marital jealousy is more
+      unfashionable than pegtop trousers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He buried himself in his glass. Sir Donald rose to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope I may see you again,&rdquo; he said rather tentatively at parting. &ldquo;I am
+      to be found in the Albany.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They both said they would call, and he slipped away gently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a sensitive man,&rdquo; said Carey when he had gone. &ldquo;A sort of male
+      Lady Cardington. Both of them are morbidly conscious of their age and
+      carry it about with them as if it were a crime. Yet they&rsquo;re both worth
+      knowing. People with that temperament who don&rsquo;t use hair-dye must have
+      grit. His son&rsquo;s awful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And his poems?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very crude, very faulty, very shy, but the real thing. But he&rsquo;ll never
+      publish anything again. It must have been torture to him to reveal as much
+      as he did in that book. He must find others to express him, and such as
+      him, to the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lady Holmes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Par exemple</i>. Deuced odd that while the dumb understand the whole
+      show the person who&rsquo;s describing it quite accurately to them often knows
+      nothing about it. Paradox, irony, blasted eternal cussedness of life! Did
+      you ever know Lady Ulford?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She was a horse-dealer&rsquo;s daughter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rupert!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On my honour! One of those women who are all shirt and collar and
+      nattiness, with a gold fox for a tie-pin and a hunting-crop under the arm.
+      She was killed schooling a horse in Mexico after making Ulford shy and
+      uncomfortable for fifteen years. Lady Cardington and a Texas cowboy would
+      have been as well suited to one another. Ulford&rsquo;s been like a wistful
+      ghost, they tell me, ever since her death. I should like to see him and
+      his son together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A hard and almost vicious gleam shone for as instant in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re as cruel as a Spaniard at a bull-fight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My boy, I&rsquo;ve been gored by the bull.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pierce was silent for a minute. He thought of Lady Holme&rsquo;s white-rose
+      complexion and of the cessation of Carey&rsquo;s acquaintance with the Holmes.
+      No one seemed to know exactly why Carey went to the house in Cadogan
+      Square no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For God&rsquo;s sake give me another drink, Robin, and make it a stiff one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pierce poured out the whisky and thought:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could it have been that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Carey emptied the tumbler and heaved a long sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When d&rsquo;you go back to Rome?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beginning of July.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll be there in the dead season.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like Rome then. The heat doesn&rsquo;t hurt me and I love the peace.
+      Antiquity seems to descend upon the city in August, returning to its own
+      when America is far away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Carey stared at him hard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A rising diplomatist oughtn&rsquo;t to live in the past,&rdquo; he said bluntly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like ruins.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unless they&rsquo;re women.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I loved a woman I could love her when she became what is called a
+      ruin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you were an old man who had crumbled gradually with her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As a young man, too. I was discussing&mdash;or rather flitting about,
+      dinner-party fashion&mdash;that very subject to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With whom?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Viola.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The deuce! What line did you take?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That one loves&mdash;if one loves&mdash;the kernel, not the shell.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know her&mdash;the opposite.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you, Carey?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I! I think if the shell is a beautiful shell and becomes suddenly broken
+      it makes a devil of a lot of difference in what most people think of the
+      kernel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It wouldn&rsquo;t to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think it would.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You take Viola&rsquo;s side then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And when did I ever do anything else? I&rsquo;m off.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up, nodded good-night, and was gone in a moment. Pierce heard him
+      singing in a deep voice as he went down the stairs, and smiled with a
+      faint contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How odd it is that nobody will believe a man if he&rsquo;s fool enough to hint
+      at the truth of his true self,&rdquo; he thought. &ldquo;And Carey&mdash;who&rsquo;s so
+      clever about people!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      WHEN the last guest had grimaced at her and left the drawing-room, Lady
+      Holme stood with her hand on the mantelpiece, facing a tall mirror. She
+      was alone for the moment. Her husband had accompanied Mrs. Wolfstein
+      downstairs, and Lady Holme could hear his big, booming voice below,
+      interrupted now and then by her impudent soprano. She spoke English with a
+      slight foreign accent which men generally liked and women loathed. Lady
+      Holme loathed it. But she was not fond of her own sex. She believed that
+      all women were untrustworthy. She often said that she had never met a
+      woman who was not a liar, and when she said it she had no doubt that, for
+      once, a woman was speaking the truth. Now, as she heard Mrs. Wolfstein&rsquo;s
+      curiously improper laugh, she frowned. The face in the mirror changed and
+      looked almost old.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This struck her unpleasantly. She kept the frown in its place and stared
+      from under it, examining her features closely, fancying herself really an
+      old woman, her whimsical fascination dead in its decaying home, her powers
+      faded if not fled for ever. She might do what she liked then. It would all
+      be of no use. Even the voice would be cracked and thin, unresponsive,
+      unwieldy. The will would be phlegmatic. If it were not, the limbs and
+      features would not easily obey its messages. The figure, now beautiful,
+      would perhaps be marred by the ungracious thickness, the piteous
+      fleshiness that Time often adds assiduously to ageing bodies, as if with
+      an ironic pretence of generously giving in one direction while taking away
+      in another. Decay would be setting in, life becoming perpetual loss. The
+      precious years would be gone irrevocably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She let the frown go and looked again on her beauty and smiled. The
+      momentary bitterness passed. For there were many precious years to come
+      for her, many years of power. She was young. Her health was superb. Her
+      looks were of the kind that lasts. She thought of a famous actress whom
+      she resembled closely. This actress was already forty-three, and was still
+      a lovely woman, still toured about the world winning the hearts of men,
+      was still renowned for her personal charm, worshipped not only for her
+      talent but for her delicious skin, her great romantic eyes, her thick,
+      waving hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme laughed. In twenty years what Robin Pierce called her &ldquo;husk&rdquo;
+       would still be an exquisite thing, and she would be going about without
+      hearing the horrible tap, tap of the crutch in whose sustaining power she
+      really believed so little. She knew men, and she said to herself, as she
+      had said to Robin, that for them beauty lies in the epidermis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hullo, Vi, lookin&rsquo; in the glass! &lsquo;Pon my soul, your vanity&rsquo;s disgustin&rsquo;.
+      A plain woman like you ought to keep away from such things&mdash;leave &lsquo;em
+      to the Mrs. Wolfsteins&mdash;what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme turned round in time to see her husband&rsquo;s blunt, brown features
+      twisted in the grimace which invariably preceded his portentous laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I admire Mrs. Wolfstein,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The laugh burst like a bomb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You admire another woman! Why, you&rsquo;re incapable of it. The Lord defend me
+      from hypocrisy, and there&rsquo;s no greater hypocrisy than one woman takin&rsquo; 
+      Heaven to witness that she thinks another a stunnin&rsquo; beauty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know nothing about it, Fritz. Mrs. Wolfstein&rsquo;s eyes would be lovely
+      if they hadn&rsquo;t that pawnbroking expression.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good, good! Now we&rsquo;re goin&rsquo; to hear the voice of truth. Think it went
+      well, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He threw himself down on a sofa and began to light a cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The evening? No, I don&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He crossed his long legs and leaned back, resting his head on a cushion,
+      and puffing the smoke towards the ceiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They all seemed cheery&mdash;what? Even Lady Cardington only cried when
+      you were squallin&rsquo;.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Lord Holme&rsquo;s habit to speak irreverently of anything he happened to
+      admire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She had reason to cry. Miss Filberte&rsquo;s accompaniment was a tragedy. She
+      never comes here again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the row with her? I thought her fingers got about over the piano
+      awful quick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They did&mdash;on the wrong notes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She came and sat down beside him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t understand music, Fritz, thank goodness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know I don&rsquo;t. But why thank what&rsquo;s-his-name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because the men that do are usually such anaemic, dolly things, such
+      shaved poodles with their Sunday bows on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What about that chap Pierce? He&rsquo;s up to all the scales and thingumies,
+      isn&rsquo;t he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Robin&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pierce I said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I said Robin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme frowned and stuck out his under jaw. When he was irritated he
+      always made haste to look like a prize-fighter. His prominent cheek-bones,
+      and the abnormal development of bone in the lower part of his face, helped
+      the illusion whose creation was begun by his expression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here, Vi,&rdquo; he said gruffly. &ldquo;If you get up to any nonsense there&rsquo;ll
+      be another Carey business. I give you the tip, and you can just take it in
+      time. Don&rsquo;t you make any mistake. I&rsquo;m not a Brenford, or a
+      Godley-Halstoun, or a Pennisford, to sit by and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a pity it is that your body&rsquo;s so big and your intelligence so
+      small!&rdquo; she interrupted gently. &ldquo;Why aren&rsquo;t there Sandow exercises for
+      increasing the brain?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve quite enough brain to rub along with very well. If I&rsquo;d chosen to
+      take it I could have been undersecretary&mdash;-&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve told me that so many times, old darling, and I really can&rsquo;t
+      believe it. The Premier&rsquo;s very silly. Everybody knows that. But he&rsquo;s still
+      got just a faint idea of the few things the country won&rsquo;t stand. And you
+      are one of them, you truly are. You don&rsquo;t go down even with the Primrose
+      League, and they simply worship at the shrine of the great Ar-rar.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fool or not, I&rsquo;d kick out Pierce as I kicked out Carey if I thought&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And suppose I wouldn&rsquo;t let you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice had suddenly changed. There was in it the sharp sound which had
+      so overwhelmed Miss Filberte.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme sat straight up and looked at his wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose&mdash;what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose I declined to let you behave ridiculously a second time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ridiculously! I like that! Do you stick out that Carey didn&rsquo;t love you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Half London loves me. I&rsquo;m one of the most attractive women in it. That&rsquo;s
+      why you married me, blessed boy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Carey&rsquo;s a violent ass. Red-headed men always are. There&rsquo;s a chap at
+      White&rsquo;s&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know, I know. You told me about him when you forbade poor Mr. Carey the
+      house. But Robin&rsquo;s hair is black and he&rsquo;s the gentlest creature in
+      diplomacy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t trust him a yard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Believe me, he doesn&rsquo;t wish you to. He&rsquo;s far too clever to desire the
+      impossible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then he can stop desirin&rsquo; you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be insulting, Fritz. Remember that by birth you are a gentleman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme bit through his cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sometimes I wish you were an ugly woman,&rdquo; he muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And if I were?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She leaned forward quite eagerly on the sofa and her whimsical,
+      spoilt-child manner dropped away from her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ain&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be silly. I know I&rsquo;m not, of course. But if I were to become one?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really, Fritz, there&rsquo;s no sort of continuity in your mental processes. If
+      I were to become an ugly woman, what would you feel about me then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How the deuce could you become ugly?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, in a hundred ways. I might have smallpox and be pitted for life, or
+      be scalded in the face as poor people&rsquo;s babies often are, or have vitriol
+      thrown over me as lots of women do in Paris, or any number of things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What rot! Who&rsquo;d throw vitriol over you, I should like to know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He lit a fresh cigarette with tender solicitude. Lady Holme began to look
+      irritated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do use your imagination!&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Haven&rsquo;t got one, thank God!&rdquo; he returned philosophically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I insist upon your imagining me ugly. Do you hear, I insist upon it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laid one soft hand on his knee and squeezed his leg with all her
+      might.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now you&rsquo;re to imagine me ugly and just the same as I am now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You wouldn&rsquo;t be the same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I should. I should be the same woman, with the same heart and
+      feelings and desires and things as I have now. Only the face would be
+      altered.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, go ahead, but don&rsquo;t pinch so, old girl.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I pinch you to make you exert your mind. Now tell me truly&mdash;truly;
+      would you love me as you do now, would you be jealous of me, would you&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say, wait a bit! Don&rsquo;t drive on at such a rate. How ugly are you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very ugly; worse than Miss Filberte.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Filberte&rsquo;s not so bad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, she is, Fritz, you know she is. But I mean ever so much worse; with
+      a purple complexion, perhaps, like Mrs. Armington, whose husband insisted
+      on a judicial separation; or a broken nose, or something wrong with my
+      mouth&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What wrong?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, dear, anything! What <i>l&rsquo;homme qui vir</i> had&mdash;or a frightful
+      scar across my cheek. Could you love me as you do now? I should be the
+      same woman, remember.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then it&rsquo;d be all the same to me, I s&rsquo;pose. Let&rsquo;s turn in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up, went over to the hearth, on which a small wood fire was
+      burning, straddled his legs, bent his knees and straightened them several
+      times, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his trousers, which were
+      rather tight and horsey and defined his immense limbs. An expression of
+      profound self-satisfaction illumined his face as he looked at his wife,
+      giving it a slightly leery expression, as of a shrewd rustic. His large
+      blunt features seemed to broaden, his big brown eyes twinkled, and his
+      lips, which were thick and very red and had a cleft down their middle,
+      parted under his short bronze moustache, exposing two level rows of square
+      white teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s jolly difficult to imagine you an ugly woman,&rdquo; he said, with a deep
+      chuckle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do wish you&rsquo;d keep your legs still,&rdquo; said Lady Holme. &ldquo;What earthly
+      pleasure can it give you to go on like that? Would you love me as you do
+      now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;d be jolly sick if I didn&rsquo;t, wouldn&rsquo;t you, Vi, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder if it ever occurs to you that you&rsquo;re hideously conceited,
+      Fritz?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She spoke with a touch of real anger, real exasperation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No more than any other Englishman that&rsquo;s worth his salt and ever does any
+      good in the world. I ain&rsquo;t a timid molly-coddle, if that&rsquo;s what you mean.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took one large hand out of his pocket, scratched his cheek and yawned.
+      As he did so he looked as unconcerned, as free from self-consciousness, as
+      much a slave to every impulse born of passing physical sensation as a wild
+      animal in a wood or out on a prairie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Otherwise life ain&rsquo;t worth tuppence,&rdquo; he added through his yawn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme sat looking at him for a moment in silence. She was really
+      irritated by his total lack of interest in what she wanted to interest in
+      him, irritated, too, because her curiosity remained unsatisfied. But that
+      abrupt look and action of absolutely unconscious animalism, chasing the
+      leeriness of the contented man&rsquo;s conceit, turned her to softness if not to
+      cheerfulness. She adored Fritz like that. His open-mouthed, gaping yawn
+      moved something in her to tenderness. She would have liked to kiss him
+      while he was yawning and to pass her hands over his short hair, which was
+      like a mat and grew as strongly as the hair which he shaved every morning
+      from his brown cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, what about bed, old girl?&rdquo; he said, stretching himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme did not reply. Some part of him, some joint, creaked as he
+      forced his clasped hands downward and backward. She was listening eagerly
+      for a repetition of the little sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What! Is mum the word?&rdquo; he said, bending forward to stare into her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this moment the door opened, and a footman came in to extinguish the
+      lights and close the piano. By mistake he let the lid of the latter drop
+      with a bang. Lady Holme, who had just got up to go to bed, started
+      violently. She said nothing but stared at him for an instant with an
+      expression of cold rebuke on her face. The man reddened. Lord Holme was
+      already on the stairs. He yawned again noisily, and turned the sound
+      eventually into a sort of roaring chant up and down the scale as he
+      mounted towards the next floor. Lady Holme came slowly after him. She had
+      a very individual walk, moving from the hips and nearly always taking
+      small, slow steps. Her sapphire-blue gown trailed behind her with a pretty
+      noise over the carpet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When her French maid had locked up her jewels and helped her to undress,
+      she dismissed her, and called out to Lord Holme, who was in the next room,
+      the door of which was slightly open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fritz!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Girlie?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His mighty form, attired in pale blue pyjamas, stood in the doorway. In
+      his hand he grasped a toothbrush, and there were dabs of white
+      tooth-powder on his cheeks and chin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Finish your toilet and make haste.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He disappeared. There was a prolonged noise of brushing and the gurgling
+      and splashing of water. Lady Holme sat down on the white couch at the foot
+      of the great bed. She was wrapped in a soft white gown made like a
+      burnous, a veritable Arab garment, with a white silk hood at the back, and
+      now she put up her hands and, with great precision, drew the hood up over
+      her head. The burnous, thus adjusted, made her look very young. She had
+      thrust her bare feet into white slippers without heels, and now she drew
+      up her legs lightly and easily and crossed them under her, assuming an
+      Eastern attitude and the expression of supreme impassivity which suits it.
+      A long mirror was just opposite to her. She swayed to and fro, looking
+      into it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Allah-Akbar!&rdquo; she murmured. &ldquo;Allah-Akbar! I am a fatalist. Everything is
+      ordained, so why should I bother? I will live for the day. I will live for
+      the night. Allah-Akbar, Allah-Akbar!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The sound of water gushing from a reversed tumbler into a full basin was
+      followed by the reappearance of Lord Holme, looking very clean and very
+      sleepy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme stopped swaying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You look like a kid of twelve years old in that thing, Vi,&rdquo; he observed,
+      surveying her with his hands on his hips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am a woman with a philosophy,&rdquo; she returned with dignity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A philosophy! What the deuce is that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t learn much at Eton and Christchurch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I learnt to use my fists and to make love to the women.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re a brute!&rdquo; she exclaimed with most unphilosophic vehemence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that&rsquo;s why you worship the ground I tread on,&rdquo; he rejoined equably.
+      &ldquo;And that&rsquo;s why I&rsquo;ve always had a good time with the women ever since I
+      stood six foot in my stockin&rsquo;s when I was sixteen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme looked really indignant. Her face was contorted by a spasm. She
+      was one of those unfortunate women who are capable of retrospective
+      jealousy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t&mdash;how dare you speak to me of those women?&rdquo; she said
+      bitterly. &ldquo;You insult me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hang it, there&rsquo;s no one since you, Vi. You know that. And what would you
+      have thought of a great, hulkin&rsquo; chap like me who&rsquo;d never&mdash;well, all
+      right. I&rsquo;ll dry up. But you know well enough you wouldn&rsquo;t have looked at
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder why I ever did.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, you don&rsquo;t. I&rsquo;m just the chap to suit you. You&rsquo;re full of whimsies and
+      need a sledge-hammer fellow to keep you quiet. It you&rsquo;d married that ass,
+      Carey, or that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fritz, once for all, I won&rsquo;t have my friends abused. I allowed you to
+      have your own way about Rupert Carey, but I will not have Robin Pierce or
+      anyone else insulted. Please understand that. I married to be more free,
+      not more&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You married because you&rsquo;d fallen jolly well in love with me, that&rsquo;s why
+      you married, and that&rsquo;s why you&rsquo;re a damned lucky woman. Come to bed. You
+      won&rsquo;t, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made a stride, snatched Lady Holme up as if she were a bundle, and
+      carried her off to bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was on the point of bursting into angry tears, but when she found
+      herself snatched up, her slippers tumbling off, the hood of the burnous
+      falling over her eyes, her face crushed anyhow against her husband&rsquo;s
+      sinewy chest, she suddenly felt oddly contented, disinclined to protest or
+      to struggle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme did not trouble himself to ask what she was feeling or why she
+      was feeling it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought of himself&mdash;the surest way to fasten upon a man the
+      thoughts of others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      ROBIN PIERCE and Carey were old acquaintances, if not exactly old friends.
+      They had been for a time at Harrow together. Pierce had six thousand a
+      year and worked hard for a few hundreds. Carey had a thousand and did
+      nothing. He had never done anything definite, anything to earn a living.
+      Yet his talents were notorious. He played the piano well for an amateur,
+      was an extraordinarily clever mimic, acted better than most people who
+      were not on the stage, and could write very entertaining verse with a
+      pungent, sub-acid flavour. But he had no creative power and no
+      perseverance. As a critic of the performances of others he was cruel but
+      discerning, giving no quarter, but giving credit where it was due. He
+      loathed a bad workman more than a criminal, and would rather have crushed
+      an incompetent human being than a worm. Secretly he despised himself. His
+      own laziness was as disgusting to him as a disease, and was as incurable
+      as are certain diseases. He was now thirty-four and realised that he was
+      never going to do anything with his life. Already he had travelled over
+      the world, seen a hundred, done a hundred things. He had an enormous
+      acquaintance in Society and among artists; writers, actors, painters&mdash;all
+      the people who did things and did them well. As a rule they liked him,
+      despite his bizarre bluntness of speech and manner, and they invariably
+      spoke of him as a man of great talent; he said because he was so seldom
+      fool enough to do anything that could reveal incompetence. His mother, who
+      was a widow, lived in the north, in an old family mansion, half house,
+      half castle, near the sea coast of Cumberland. He had one sister, who was
+      married to an American.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Carey always declared that he was that <i>rara avis</i> an atheist, and
+      that he had been born an atheist. He affirmed that even when a child he
+      had never, for a moment, felt that there could be any other life than this
+      earth-life. Few people believed him. There are few people who can believe
+      in a child atheist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pierce had a totally different character. He seemed to be more dreamy and
+      was more energetic, talked much less and accomplished much more. It had
+      always been his ambition to be a successful diplomat, and in many respects
+      he was well fitted for a diplomatic career. He had a talent for languages,
+      great ease of manner, self-possession, patience and cunning. He loved
+      foreign life. Directly he set foot in a country which was not his own he
+      felt stimulated. He felt that he woke up, that his mind became more alert,
+      his imagination more lively. He delighted in change, in being brought into
+      contact with a society which required study to be understood. His present
+      fate contented him well enough. He liked Rome and was liked there. As his
+      mother was a Roman he had many Italian connections, and he was far more at
+      ease with Romans than with the average London man. His father and mother
+      lived almost perpetually in large hotels. The former, who was enormously
+      rich, was a <i>malade imaginaire</i>. He invariably spoke of his quite
+      normal health as if it were some deadly disease, and always treated
+      himself, and insisted on being treated, as if he were an exceptionally
+      distinguished invalid. In the course of years his friends had learned to
+      take his view of the matter, and he was at this time almost universally
+      spoken of as &ldquo;that poor Sir Henry Pierce whose life has been one long
+      martyrdom.&rdquo; Poor Sir Henry was fortunate in the possession of a wife who
+      really was a martyr&mdash;to him. Nobody had ever discovered whether Lady
+      Pierce knew, or did not know, that her husband was quite as well as most
+      people. There are many women with such secrets. Robin&rsquo;s parents were at
+      present taking baths and drinking waters in Germany. They were later going
+      for an &ldquo;after cure&rdquo; to Switzerland, and then to Italy to &ldquo;keep warm&rdquo;
+       during the autumn. As they never lived in London, Robin had no home there
+      except his little house in Half Moon Street. He had one brother, renowned
+      as a polo player, and one sister, who was married to a rising politician,
+      Lord Evelyn Clowes, a young man with a voluble talent, a peculiar power of
+      irritating Chancellors of the Exchequer, and hair so thick that he was
+      adored by the caricaturists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin Pierce and Carey saw little of each other now, being generally
+      separated by a good many leagues of land and sea, but when they met they
+      were still fairly intimate. They had some real regard for each other.
+      Carey felt at ease in giving his violence to the quiet and self-possessed
+      young secretary, who was three years his junior, but who sometimes seemed
+      to him the elder of the two, perhaps because calm is essentially the
+      senior of storm. He had even allowed Robin to guess at the truth of his
+      feeling for Lady Holme, though he had never been explicit, on the subject
+      to him or to anyone. There were moments when Robin wished he had not been
+      permitted to guess, for Lady Holme attracted him far more than any other
+      woman he had seen, and he had proposed to her before she had been carried
+      off by her husband. He admired her beauty, but he did not believe that it
+      was her beauty which had led him into love. He was sure that he loved the
+      woman in her, the hidden woman whom Lord Holme and the world at large&mdash;including
+      Carey&mdash;knew nothing about. He thought that Lady Holme herself did not
+      understand this hidden woman, did not realise, as he did, that she
+      existed. She spoke to him sometimes in Lady Holme&rsquo;s singing, sometimes in
+      an expression in her eyes when she was serious, sometimes even in a bodily
+      attitude. For Robin, half fantastically, put faith in the eloquence of
+      line as a revealer of character, of soul. But she did not speak to him in
+      Lady Holme&rsquo;s conversation. He really thought this hidden woman was
+      obscured by the lovely window&mdash;he conceived it as a window of
+      exquisite stained glass, jewelled but concealing&mdash;through which she
+      was condemned to look for ever, through which, too, all men must look at
+      her. He really wished sometimes, as he had said, that Lady Holme were
+      ugly, for he had a fancy that perhaps then, and only then, would the
+      hidden woman arise and be seen as a person may be seen through unstained,
+      clear glass. He really felt that what he loved would be there to love if
+      the face that ruled was ruined; would not only still be there to love, but
+      would become more powerful, more true to itself, more understanding of
+      itself, more reliant, purer, braver. And he had learnt to cherish this
+      fancy till it had become a little monomania. Robin thought that the world
+      misunderstood him, but he knew the world too well to say so. He never
+      risked being laughed at. He felt sure that he was passionate, that he was
+      capable of romantic deeds, of Quixotic self-sacrifice, of a devotion that
+      might well be sung by poets, and that would certainly be worshipped by
+      ardent women. And he said to himself that Lady Holme was the one woman who
+      could set free, if the occasion came, this passionate, unusual and surely
+      admirable captive at present chained within him, doomed to inactivity and
+      the creeping weakness that comes from enforced repose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Carey&rsquo;s passion for Lady Holme had come into being shortly before her
+      marriage. No one knew much about it, or about the rupture of all relations
+      between him and the Holmes which had eventually taken place. But the fact
+      that Carey had lost his head about Lady Holme was known to half London.
+      For Carey, when carried away, was singularly reckless; singularly careless
+      of consequences and of what people thought. It was difficult to influence
+      him, but when influenced he was almost painfully open in his
+      acknowledgment of the power that had reached him. As a rule, however,
+      despite his apparent definiteness, his decisive violence, there seemed to
+      be something fluid in his character, something that divided and flowed
+      away from anything which sought to grasp and hold it. He had impetus but
+      not balance; swiftness, but a swiftness that was uncontrolled. He
+      resembled a machine without a brake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was soon after his rupture with the Holmes that his intimates began to
+      notice that he was becoming inclined to drink too much. When Pierce
+      returned to London from Rome he was immediately conscious of the slight
+      alteration in his friend. Once he remonstrated with Carey about it. Carey
+      was silent for a moment. Then he said abruptly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My heart wants to be drowned.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme hated Carey. Yet Lady Holme had not loved him; though she had
+      not objected to him more than to other men because he loved her. She had
+      been brought up in a society which is singularly free from prejudices,
+      which has no time to study carefully questions of so-called honour, which
+      has little real religious feeling, and a desire for gaiety which perhaps
+      takes the place of a desire for morals. Intrigues are one of the chief
+      amusements of this society, which oscillates from London to Paris as the
+      pendulum of a clock oscillates from right to left. Lady Holme, however,
+      happened to be protected doubly against the dangers&mdash;or joys by the
+      way&mdash;to which so many of her companions fell cheerful, and even
+      chattering, victims. She had a husband who though extremely stupid was
+      extremely masterful, and, for the time at any rate, she sincerely loved
+      him. She was a faithful wife and had no desire to be anything else, though
+      she liked to be, and usually was, in the fashion. But though faithful to
+      Lord Holme she had, as has been said, both the appearance and the
+      temperament of a siren. She enjoyed governing men, and those who were
+      governed by her, who submitted obviously to the power of her beauty and
+      the charm of manner that seemed to emanate from it, and to be one with it,
+      were more attractive to her than those who were not. She was inclined to
+      admire a man for loving her, as a serious and solemn-thinking woman, with
+      bandeaux and convictions, admires a clergyman for doing his duty. Carey
+      had done his duty with such fiery ardour that, though she did not prevent
+      her husband from kicking him out of the house, she could not refrain from
+      thinking well of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her thoughts of Robin Pierce were perhaps a little more confused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had not accepted him. Carey would have said that he was not &ldquo;her
+      type.&rdquo; Although strong and active he was not the huge mass of bones and
+      muscles and thews and sinews, ignorant of beauty and devoid of the love of
+      art, which Carey had described as her ideal. There was melancholy and
+      there was subtlety in him. When Lady Holme was a girl this melancholy and
+      subtlety had not appealed to her sufficiently to induce her to become Lady
+      Viola Pierce. Nevertheless, Robin&rsquo;s affection for her, and the peculiar
+      form it took&mdash;of idealising her secret nature and wishing her obvious
+      beauty away&mdash;had won upon the egoism of her. Although she laughed at
+      his absurdity, as she called it, and honestly held to her Pagan belief
+      that physical beauty was all in all to the world she wished to influence,
+      it pleased her sometimes to fancy that perhaps he was right, that perhaps
+      her greatest loveliness was hidden and dwelt apart. The thought was
+      flattering, and though her knowledge of men rejected the idea that such a
+      loveliness alone could ever command an empire worth the ruling, she could
+      have no real objection to being credited with a double share of charm&mdash;the
+      charm of face and manner which everyone, including herself, was aware that
+      she possessed, and that other stranger, more dim and mysterious charm at
+      whose altar Robin burnt an agreeably perfumed incense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had a peculiar power of awakening in others that which she usually
+      seemed not to possess herself&mdash;imagination, passion, not only
+      physical but ethereal and of the mind; a tenderness for old sorrows,
+      desire for distant, fleeting, misty glories not surely of this earth. She
+      was a brilliant suggestionist, but not in conversation. Her face and her
+      voice, when she sang, were luring to the lovers of beauty. When she sang
+      she often expressed for them the under-thoughts and under-feelings of
+      secretly romantic, secretly wistful men and women, and drew them to her as
+      if by a spell. But her talk and manner in conversation were so unlike her
+      singing, so little accorded with the look that often came into her eyes
+      while she sang, that she was a perpetual puzzle to such elderly men as Sir
+      Donald Ulford, to such young men as Robin Pierce, and even to some women.
+      They came about her like beggars who have heard a chink of gold, and she
+      showed them a purse that seemed to be empty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was it the <i>milieu</i> in which she lived, the influence of a vulgar and
+      greedy age, which prevented her from showing her true self except in her
+      art? Or was she that stupefying enigma sometimes met with, an
+      unintelligent genius?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were some who wondered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In her singing she seemed to understand, to love, to pity, to enthrone. In
+      her life she often seemed not to understand, not to love, not to pity, not
+      to place high.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sang of Venice, and those who cannot even think of the city in the sea
+      without a flutter of the heart, a feeling not far from soft pain in its
+      tenderness and gratitude, listened to the magic bells at sunset, and
+      glided in the fairy barques across the liquid plains of gold. She spoke of
+      Venice, and they heard only the famished voice of the mosquito uttering
+      its midnight grace before meat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Which was the real Venice?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Which was the real woman?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      ON the following day, which was warm and damp; Lady Holme drove to Bond
+      Street, bought two new hats, had her hand read by a palmist who called
+      himself &ldquo;Cupido,&rdquo; looked in at a ladies&rsquo; club and then went to Mrs.
+      Wolfstein, with whom she was engaged to lunch. She did not wish to lunch
+      with her. She disliked Mrs. Wolfstein as she disliked most women, but she
+      had not been able to get out of it. Mrs. Wolfstein had overheard her
+      saying to Lady Cardington that she had nothing particular to do till four
+      that day, and had immediately &ldquo;pinned her.&rdquo; Besides disliking Mrs.
+      Wolfstein, Lady Holme was a little afraid of her. Like many clever
+      Jewesses, Mrs. Wolfstein was a ruthless conversationalist, and enjoyed
+      showing off at the expense of others, even when they were her guests. She
+      had sometimes made Lady Holme feel stupid, even feel as if a good talker
+      might occasionally gain, and keep, an advantage over a lovely woman who
+      did not talk so well. The sensation passed, but the fact that it had ever
+      been did not draw Lady Holme any closer to the woman with the &ldquo;pawnbroking
+      expression&rdquo; in her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Wolfstein was not in the most exclusive set in London, but she was in
+      the smart set, which is no longer exclusive although it sometimes hopes it
+      is. She knew the racing people, nearly all the most fashionable Jews, and
+      those very numerous English patricians who like to go where money is. She
+      also knew the whole of Upper Bohemia, and was a <i>persona gratissima</i>
+      in that happy land of talent and jealousy. She entertained a great deal,
+      generally at modish restaurants. Many French and Germans were to be met
+      with at her parties; and it was impossible to be with either them or her
+      for many minutes without hearing the most hearty and whole-souled abuse of
+      English aspirations, art, letters and cooking. The respectability, the
+      pictures, the books and the boiled cabbage of Britain all came impartially
+      under the lash.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Wolfstein&rsquo;s origin was obscure. That she was a Jewess was known to
+      everybody, but few could say with certainty whether she was a German, a
+      Spanish, a Polish or an Eastern Jewess. She had much of the covert
+      coarseness and open impudence of a Levantine, and occasionally said things
+      which made people wonder whether, before she became Amalia Wolfstein, she
+      had not perhaps been&mdash;well really&mdash;something very strange
+      somewhere a long way off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her husband was shocking to look at: small, mean, bald, Semitic and
+      nervous, with large ears which curved outwards from his head like leaves,
+      and cheeks blue from much shaving. He was said to hide behind his anxious
+      manner an acuteness that was diabolic, and to have earned his ill-health
+      by sly dissipations for which he had paid enormous sums. There were two
+      Wolfstein children, a boy and a girl of eleven and twelve; small, swarthy,
+      frog-like, self-possessed. They already spoke three languages, and their
+      protruding eyes looked almost diseased with intelligence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Wolfstein house, which was in Curzon Street, was not pretty,
+      Apparently neither Mrs. Wolfstein nor her husband, who was a financier and
+      company promoter on a very large scale, had good taste in furniture and
+      decoration. The mansion was spacious but dingy. There was a great deal of
+      chocolate and fiery yellow paint. There were many stuffy brown carpets,
+      and tables which were unnecessarily solid. In the hall were pillars which
+      looked as if they were made of brawn, and arches with lozenges of azure
+      paint in which golden stars appeared rather meretriciously. A plaster
+      statue of Hebe, with crinkly hair and staring eyeballs, stood in a corner
+      without improving matters. That part of the staircase which was not
+      concealed by the brown carpet was dirty white. An immense oil painting of
+      a heap of dead pheasants, rabbits and wild duck, lying beside a gun and a
+      pair of leather gaiters, immediately faced the hall door, which was opened
+      by two enormous men with yellow complexions and dissipated eyes. Mrs.
+      Wolfstein was at home, and one of the enormous men lethargically showed
+      Lady Holme upstairs into a drawing-room which suggested a Gordon Hotel.
+      She waited for about five minutes on a brown and yellow sofa near a table
+      on which lay some books and several paper-knives, and then Mrs. Wolfstein
+      appeared. She was dressed very smartly in blue and red, and looked either
+      Oriental or Portuguese, as she came in. Lady Holme was not quite certain
+      which.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear person!&rdquo; she said, taking Lady Holme&rsquo;s hands in hers, which were
+      covered with unusually large rings. &ldquo;Now, I&rsquo;ve got a confession to make.
+      What a delicious hat!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme felt certain the confession was of something unpleasant, but
+      she only said, in the rather languid manner she generally affected towards
+      women:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well? My ear is at the grating.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My lunch is at the Carlton.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme was pleased. At the Carlton one can always look about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And&mdash;it&rsquo;s a woman&rsquo;s lunch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme&rsquo;s countenance fell quite frankly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I knew you&rsquo;d be horrified. You think us such bores, and so we are. But I
+      couldn&rsquo;t resist being malicious to win such a triumph. You at a hen lunch!
+      It&rsquo;ll be the talk of London. Can you forgive me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And can you stand it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme looked definitely dubious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tell you who&rsquo;ll be there&mdash;Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mrs.
+      Trent&mdash;do you know her? Spanish looking, and&rsquo;s divorced two husbands,
+      and&rsquo;s called the scarlet woman because she always dresses in red&mdash;Sally
+      Perceval, Miss Burns and Pimpernel Schley.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pimpernel Schley! Who is she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The American actress who plays all the improper modern parts. Directly a
+      piece is produced in Paris that we run over to see&mdash;you know the
+      sort! the Grand Duke and foreign Royalty species&mdash;she has it adapted
+      for her. Of course it&rsquo;s Bowdlerised as to words, but she manages to get
+      back all that&rsquo;s been taken out in her acting. Young America&rsquo;s crazy about
+      her. She&rsquo;s going to play over here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme&rsquo;s voice was not encouraging, but Mrs. Wolfstein was not
+      sensitive. She chattered gaily all the way to the Haymarket. When they
+      came into the Palm Court they found Lady Cardington already there, seated
+      tragically in an armchair, and looking like a weary empress. The band was
+      playing on the balcony just outside the glass wall which divides the great
+      dining-room from the court, and several people were dotted about waiting
+      for friends, or simply killing time by indulging curiosity. Among them was
+      a large, broad-shouldered young man, with a round face, contemptuous blue
+      eyes and a mouth with chubby, pouting lips. He was well dressed, but there
+      was a touch of horseyness in the cut of his trousers, the arrangement of
+      his tie. He sat close to the band, tipping his green chair backwards and
+      smoking a cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Mrs. Wolfstein and Lady Holme went up to greet Lady Cardington, Sally
+      Perceval and Mrs. Trent came in together, followed almost immediately by
+      Lady Manby.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sally Perceval was a very pretty young married woman, who spent most of
+      her time racing, gambling and going to house parties. She looked
+      excessively fragile and consumptive, but had lived hard and never had a
+      day&rsquo;s illness in her life. She was accomplished, not at all intellectual,
+      clever at games, a fine horsewoman and an excellent swimmer. She had been
+      all over the world with her husband, who was very handsome and almost
+      idiotic, and who could not have told you what the Taj was, whether Thebes
+      was in Egypt or India, or what was the difference, if any, between the
+      Golden Gate and the Golden Horn. Mrs. Trent was large, sultry,
+      well-informed and supercilious; had the lustrous eyes of a Spaniard, and
+      spoke in a warm contralto voice. Her figure was magnificent, and she
+      prided herself on having a masculine intellect. Her enemies said that she
+      had a more than masculine temper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Manby had been presented by Providence with a face like a teapot, her
+      nose being the spout and her cheeks the bulging sides. She saw everything
+      in caricature. If war were spoken of, her imagination immediately conjured
+      up visions of unwashed majors conspicuously absurd in toeless boots, of
+      fat colonels forced to make merry on dead rats, of field-marshals
+      surprised by the enemy in their nightshirts, and of common soldiers driven
+      to repair their own clothes and preposterously at work on women&rsquo;s tasks.
+      She adored the clergy for their pious humours, the bench for its delicious
+      attempts at dignity, the bar for its grotesque travesties of passionate
+      conviction&mdash;lies with their wigs on&mdash;the world political for its
+      intrigues dressed up in patriotism. A Lord Chancellor in full state seemed
+      to her the most delightfully ridiculous phenomenon in a delightfully
+      ridiculous universe. And she had once been obliged to make a convulsive
+      exit from an English cathedral, in which one hundred colonial bishops were
+      singing a solemn hymn, entirely devastated by the laughter waked in her by
+      this most sacred spectacle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Burns, who hurried in breathlessly ten minutes late, was very thin,
+      badly dressed and insignificant-looking, wore her hair short, and could
+      not see you if you were more than four feet away from her. She had been on
+      various lonely and distant travelling excursions, about which she had
+      written books, had consorted merrily with naked savages, sat in the oily
+      huts of Esquimaux, and penetrated into the interior of China dressed as a
+      man. Her lack of affectation hit you in the face on a first meeting, and
+      her sincerity was perpetually embroiling her with the persistent liars
+      who, massed together, formed what is called decent society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know I&rsquo;m late,&rdquo; she said, pushing her round black hat askew on her
+      shaggy little head. &ldquo;I know I&rsquo;ve kept you all waiting. Pardon!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed you haven&rsquo;t,&rdquo; replied Mrs. Wolfstein. &ldquo;Pimpernel Schley isn&rsquo;t here
+      yet. She lives in the hotel, so of course she&rsquo;ll turn up last.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Trent put one hand on her hip and stared insolently at the various
+      groups of people in the court, Lady Cardington sighed, and Lady Holme
+      assumed a vacant look, which suited her mental attitude at the moment. She
+      generally began to feel rather vacant if she were long alone with women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another ten minutes passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m famishing,&rdquo; said Sally Perceval. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been at the Bath Club diving,
+      and I do so want my grub. Let&rsquo;s skip in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It really is too bad&mdash;oh, here she comes!&rdquo; said Mrs. Wolfstein.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many heads in the Palm Court were turned towards the stairs, down which a
+      demure figure was walking with extreme slowness. The big young man with
+      the round face got up from his chair and looked greedy, and the waiters
+      standing by the desk just inside the door glanced round, whispered, and
+      smiled quickly before gliding off to their different little tables.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pimpernel Schley was alone, but she moved as if she were leading a quiet
+      procession of vestal virgins. She was dressed in white, with a black
+      velvet band round her tiny waist and a large black hat. Her shining,
+      straw-coloured hair was fluffed out with a sort of ostentatious innocence
+      on either side of a broad parting, and she kept her round chin tucked well
+      in as she made what was certainly an effective entrance. Her arms hung
+      down at her sides, and in one hand she carried a black fan. She wore no
+      gloves, and many diamond rings glittered on her small fingers, the rosy
+      nails of which were trimmed into points. As she drew near to Mrs.
+      Wolfstein&rsquo;s party she walked slower and slower, as if she felt that she
+      was arriving at a destination much too soon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme watched her as she approached, examined her with that piercing
+      scrutiny in which the soul of one woman is thrust out, like a spear,
+      towards the soul of another. She noticed at once that Miss Schley
+      resembled her, had something of her charm of fairness. It was a fainter,
+      more virginal charm than hers. The colouring of hair and eyes was lighter.
+      The complexion was a more dead, less warm, white. But there was certainly
+      a resemblance. Miss Schley was almost exactly her height, too, and&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme glanced swiftly round the Palm Court. Of all the women gathered
+      there Pimpernel Schley and herself were nearest akin in appearance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As she recognised this fact Lady Holme felt hostile to Miss Schley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not until the latter was almost touching her hostess did she lift her eyes
+      from the ground. Then she stood still, looked up calmly, and said, in a
+      drawling and infantine voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had to see my trunks unpacked, but I was bound to be on time. I
+      wouldn&rsquo;t have come down to-day for any soul in the world but you. I would
+      not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a pretty speaking voice, clear and youthful, with a choir-boyish
+      sound in it, and remarkably free from nasal twang, but it was not a lady&rsquo;s
+      voice. It sounded like the frontispiece of a summer number become
+      articulate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Wolfstein began to introduce Miss Schley to her guests, none of whom,
+      it seemed, knew her. She bowed to each of them, still with the vestal
+      virgin air, and said, &ldquo;Glad to know you!&rdquo; to each in turn without looking
+      at anyone. Then Mrs. Wolfstein led the way into the restaurant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everyone looked at the party of women as they came in and ranged
+      themselves round a table in the middle of the big room. Lady Cardington
+      sat on one side of Mrs. Wolfstein and Lady Holme on the other, between her
+      and Mrs. Trent. Miss Schley was exactly opposite. She kept her eyes
+      eternally cast down like a nun at Benediction. All the quite young men who
+      could see her were looking at her with keen interest, and two or three of
+      them&mdash;probably up from Sandhurst&mdash;had already assumed
+      expressions calculated to alarm modesty. Others looked mournfully fatuous,
+      as if suddenly a prey to lasting and romantic grief. The older men were
+      more impartial in their observation of Mrs. Wolfstein&rsquo;s guests. And all
+      the women, without exception, fixed their eyes upon Lady Holme&rsquo;s hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Cardington, who seemed oppressed by grief, said to Mrs. Wolfstein:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you see that article in the <i>Daily Mail</i> this morning?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which one?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the suggestion to found a school in which the only thing to be taught
+      would be happiness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s going to be the teacher?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some man. I forget the name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man!&rdquo; said Mrs. Trent, in a slow, veiled contralto voice. &ldquo;Why, men are
+      always furious if they think we have any pleasure which they can&rsquo;t deprive
+      us of at a minute&rsquo;s notice. A man is the last two-legged thing to be a
+      happiness teacher.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whom would you have then?&rdquo; said Lady Cardington.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nobody, or a child.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of which sex?&rdquo; said Mrs. Wolfstein.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sex of a child,&rdquo; replied Mrs. Trent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Wolfstein laughed rather loudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think children are the most greedy, unsatisfied individuals in&mdash;&rdquo;
+       she began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was not alluding to Curzon Street children,&rdquo; observed Mrs. Trent,
+      interrupting. &ldquo;When I speak in general terms of anything I always except
+      London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; said Sally Perceval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because it&rsquo;s no more natural, no more central, no more in line with the
+      truth of things than you are, Sally.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, my dear, you surely aren&rsquo;t a belated follower of Tolstoi!&rdquo; cried
+      Mrs. Wolfstein. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t want us all to live like day labourers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t want anybody to do anything, but if happiness is to be taught it
+      must not be by a man or by a Londoner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had no idea you had been caught by the cult of simplicity,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+      Wolfstein. &ldquo;But you are so clever. You reveal your dislikes but conceal
+      your preferences. Most women think that if they only conceal their
+      dislikes they are quite perfectly subtle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Subtle people are delicious,&rdquo; said Lady Manby, putting her mouth on one
+      side. &ldquo;They remind me of a kleptomaniac I once knew who had a little
+      pocket closed by a flap let into the front of her gown. When she dined out
+      she filled it with scraps. Once she dined with us and I saw her, when she
+      thought no one was watching, peppering her pocket with cayenne, and
+      looking so delightfully sly and thieving. Subtle people are always
+      peppering their little pockets and thinking nobody sees them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And lots of people don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said Mrs. Wolfstein.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The vices are divinely comic,&rdquo; continued Lady Manby, looking every moment
+      more like a teapot. &ldquo;I think it&rsquo;s such a mercy. Fancy what a lot of fun we
+      should lose if there were no drunkards, for instance!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Cardington looked shocked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The virtues are often more comic than the vices,&rdquo; said Mrs. Trent, with
+      calm authority. &ldquo;Dramatists know that. Think of the dozens of good farces
+      whose foundation is supreme respectability in contact with the wicked
+      world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t know anyone called respectability a virtue,&rdquo; cried Sally
+      Perceval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, all the English do in their hearts,&rdquo; said Mrs. Wolfstein. &ldquo;Pimpernel,
+      are you Yankees as bad?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Schley was eating <i>sole a la Colbert</i> with her eyes on her
+      plate. She ate very slowly and took tiny morsels. Now she looked up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We&rsquo;re pretty respectable over in America, I suppose,&rdquo; she drawled. &ldquo;Why
+      not? What harm does it do anyway?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it limits the inventive faculties for one thing. If one is strictly
+      respectable life is plain sailing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, life is never that,&rdquo; said Mrs. Trent, &ldquo;for women.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Cardington seemed touched by this remark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never, never,&rdquo; she said in her curious voice&mdash;a voice in which tears
+      seemed for ever to be lingering. &ldquo;We women are always near the rocks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or on them,&rdquo; said Mrs. Trent, thinking doubtless of the two husbands she
+      had divorced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like a good shipwreck,&rdquo; exclaimed Miss Burns in a loud tenor voice. &ldquo;I
+      was in two before I was thirty, one off Hayti and one off Java, and I
+      enjoyed them both thoroughly. They wake folks up and make them show their
+      mettle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s always dangerous to speak figuratively if she&rsquo;s anywhere about,&rdquo;
+       murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Holme. &ldquo;She&rsquo;ll talk about lowering boats
+      and life-preservers now till the end of lunch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme started. She had not been listening to the conversation but had
+      been looking at Miss Schley. She had noticed instantly the effect created
+      in the room by the actress&rsquo;s presence in it. The magic of a name flits,
+      like a migratory bird, across the Atlantic. Numbers of the youthful
+      loungers of London had been waiting impatiently during the last weeks for
+      the arrival of this pale and demure star. Now that she had come their
+      interest in her was keen. Her peculiar reputation for ingeniously tricking
+      Mrs. Bowdler, secretary to Mrs. Grundy, rendered her very piquant, and
+      this piquancy was increased by her ostentatiously vestal appearance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme was sometimes clairvoyante. At this moment every nerve in her
+      body seemed telling her that the silent girl, who sat there nibbling her
+      lunch composedly, was going to be the rage in London. It did not matter at
+      all whether she had talent or not. Lady Holme saw that directly, as she
+      glanced from one little table to another at the observant, whispering men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She felt angry with Miss Schley for resembling her in colouring, for
+      resembling her in another respect&mdash;capacity for remaining calmly
+      silent in the midst of fashionable chatterboxes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will she?&rdquo; she said to Mrs. Wolfstein.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. If she&rsquo;d never been shipwrecked she&rsquo;d have been almost entertaining,
+      but&mdash;there&rsquo;s Sir Donald Ulford trying to attract your attention.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked and saw Sir Donald sitting opposite to the large young man with
+      the contemptuous blue eyes and the chubby mouth. They both seemed very
+      bored. Sir Donald bowed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is that with him?&rdquo; asked Lady Holme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; said Mrs. Wolfstein. &ldquo;He looks like a Cupid who&rsquo;s been
+      through Sandow&rsquo;s school. He oughtn&rsquo;t to wear anything but wings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s Sir Donald&rsquo;s son, Leo,&rdquo; said Lady Cardington.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pimpernel Schley lifted her eyes for an instant from her plate, glanced at
+      Leo Ulford, and cast them down again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leo Ulford&rsquo;s a blackguard,&rdquo; observed Mrs. Trent. &ldquo;And when a fair man&rsquo;s a
+      blackguard he&rsquo;s much more dangerous than a dark man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All the women stared at Leo Ulford with a certain eagerness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He&rsquo;s good-looking,&rdquo; said Sally Perceval. &ldquo;But I always distrust cherubic
+      people. They&rsquo;re bound to do you if they get the chance. Isn&rsquo;t he married?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Mrs. Trent. &ldquo;He married a deaf heiress.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Intelligent of him!&rdquo; remarked Mrs. Wolfstein. &ldquo;I always wish I&rsquo;d married
+      a blind millionaire instead of Henry. Being a Jew, Henry sees not only all
+      there is to see, but all there isn&rsquo;t. Sir Donald and his Cupid son don&rsquo;t
+      seem to have much to say to one another.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, don&rsquo;t you know that family affection&rsquo;s the dumbest thing on earth?&rdquo;
+       said Mrs. Trent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too deep for speech,&rdquo; said Lady Manby. &ldquo;I love to see fathers and sons
+      together, the fathers trying to look younger than they are and the sons
+      older. It&rsquo;s the most comic relationship, and breeds shyness as the West
+      African climate breeds fever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know the whole of the West African coast by heart,&rdquo; declared Miss
+      Burns, wagging her head, and moving her brown hands nervously among her
+      knives and forks. &ldquo;And I never caught anything there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not even a husband,&rdquo; murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Manby.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In fact, I never felt better in my life than I did at Old Calabar,&rdquo;
+       continued Miss Burns. &ldquo;But there my mind was occupied. I was studying the
+      habits of alligators.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They&rsquo;re very bad, aren&rsquo;t they?&rdquo; asked Lady Manby, in a tone of earnest
+      inquiry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I prefer to study the habits of men,&rdquo; said Sally Perceval, who was always
+      surrounded by a troup of young racing men and athletes, who admired her
+      swimming feats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men are very disappointing, I think,&rdquo; observed Mrs. Trent. &ldquo;They are like
+      a lot of beads all threaded on one string.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what&rsquo;s the string?&rdquo; asked Sally Perceval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Vanity. Men are far vainer than we are. Their indifference to the little
+      arts we practise shows it. A woman whose head is bald covers it with a
+      wig. Without a wig she would feel that she was an outcast totally
+      powerless to attract. But a bald-headed man has no idea of diffidence. He
+      does not bother about a wig because he expects to be adored without one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the worst of it is that he is adored,&rdquo; said Mrs. Wolfstein. &ldquo;Look at
+      my passion for Henry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They began to talk about their husbands. Lady Holme did not join in. She
+      and Pimpernel Schley were very silent members of the party. Even Miss
+      Burns, who was&mdash;so she said&mdash;a spinster by conviction not by
+      necessity, plunged into the husband question, and gave some very daring
+      illustrations of the marriage customs of certain heathen tribes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pimpernel Schley hardly spoke at all. When someone, turning to her, asked
+      her what she thought about the subject under discussion, she lifted her
+      pale eyes and said, with the choir-boy drawl:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got no husband and never had one, so I guess I&rsquo;m no kind of a
+      judge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I guess she&rsquo;s a judge of other women&rsquo;s husbands, though,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+      Wolfstein to Lady Cardington. &ldquo;That child is going to devastate London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now and then Lady Holme glanced towards Sir Donald and his son. They
+      seemed as untalkative as she was. Sir Donald kept on looking towards Mrs.
+      Wolfstein&rsquo;s table. So did Leo. But whereas Leo Ulford&rsquo;s eyes were fixed on
+      Pimpernel Schley, Sir Donald&rsquo;s met the eyes of Lady Holme. She felt
+      annoyed; not because Sir Donald was looking at her, but because his son
+      was not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How these women talked about their husbands! Lady Cardington, who was a
+      widow, spoke of husbands as if they were a race which was gradually dying
+      out. She thought the modern woman was beginning to get a little tired of
+      the institution of matrimony, and to care much less for men than was
+      formerly the case. Being contradicted by Mrs. Trent, she gave her reasons
+      for this belief. One was that whereas American matinee girls used to go
+      mad over the &ldquo;leading men&rdquo; of the stage they now went mad over the leading
+      women. She also instanced the many beautiful London women, universally
+      admired, who were over thirty and still remained spinsters. Mrs. Trent
+      declared that they were abnormal, and that, till the end of time, women
+      would always wish to be wives. Mrs. Wolfstein agreed with her on various
+      grounds. One was that it was the instinct of woman to buy and to rule, and
+      that if she were rich she could now acquire a husband as, in former days,
+      people acquired slaves&mdash;by purchase. This remark led to the old
+      question of American heiresses and the English nobility, and to a
+      prolonged discussion as to whether or not most women ruled their husbands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Women nearly always argue from personal experience, and consequently Lady
+      Cardington&mdash;whose husband had treated her badly&mdash;differed on
+      this point from Mrs. Wolfstein, who always did precisely what she pleased,
+      regardless of Mr. Wolfstein&rsquo;s wishes. Mrs. Trent affirmed that for her
+      part she thought women should treat their husbands as they treated their
+      servants, and dismiss them if they didn&rsquo;t behave themselves, without
+      giving them a character. She had done so twice, and would do it a third
+      time if the occasion arose. Sally Perceval attacked her for this, pleading
+      slangily that men would be men, and that their failings ought to be winked
+      at; and Miss Burns, as usual, brought the marital proceedings of African
+      savages upon the carpet. Lady Manby turned the whole thing into a joke by
+      a farcical description of the Private Enquiry proceedings of a jealous
+      woman of her acquaintance, who had donned a canary-coloured wig as a
+      disguise, and dogged her husband&rsquo;s footsteps in the streets of London,
+      only to find that he went out at odd times to visit a grandmother from
+      whom he had expectations, and who happened to live in St. John&rsquo;s Wood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The foreign waiters, who moved round the table handing the dishes,
+      occasionally exchanged furtive glances which seemed indicative of
+      suppressed amusement, and the men who were lunching near, many of whom
+      were now smoking cigarettes, became more and more intent upon Mrs.
+      Wolfstein and her guests. As they were getting up to go into the Palm
+      Court for coffee and liqueurs, Lady Cardington again referred to the
+      article on the proposed school for happiness, which had apparently made a
+      deep impression upon her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder if happiness can be taught,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;If it can&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It can&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said Mrs. Trent, with more than her usual sledge-hammer
+      bluntness. &ldquo;We aren&rsquo;t meant to be happy here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who doesn&rsquo;t mean us to be happy?&rdquo; asked poor Lady Cardington in a
+      deplorable voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;First&mdash;our husbands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s cowardly not to be happy,&rdquo; cried Miss Burns, pushing her hat over
+      her left eye as a tribute to the close of lunch. &ldquo;In a savage state you&rsquo;ll
+      always find&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The remainder of her remark was lost in the <i>frou-frou</i> of skirts as
+      the eight women began slowly to thread their way between the tables to the
+      door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme found herself immediately behind Miss Schley, who moved with
+      impressive deliberation and the extreme composure of a well-brought-up
+      child thoroughly accustomed to being shown off to visitors. Her
+      straw-coloured hair was done low in the nape of her snowy neck, and, as
+      she took her little steps, her white skirt trailed over the carpet behind
+      her with a sort of virginal slyness. As she passed Leo Ulford it brushed
+      gently against him, and he drummed the large fingers of his left hand with
+      sudden violence on the tablecloth, at the same time pursing his chubby
+      lips and then opening his mouth as if he were going to say something.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald rose and bowed. Mrs. Wolfstein murmured a word to him in
+      passing, and they had not been sipping their coffee for more than two or
+      three minutes before he joined them with his son.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald came up at once to Lady Holme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I present my son to you, Lady Holme?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leo, I wish to introduce you to Lady Holme.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Leo Ulford bowed rather ungracefully. Standing up he looked more than ever
+      like a huge boy, and he had much of the expression that is often
+      characteristic of huge boys&mdash;an expression in which impudence seems
+      to float forward from a background of surliness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme said nothing. Leo Ulford sat down beside her in an armchair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better weather,&rdquo; he remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he called a waiter, and said to him, in a hectoring voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bring me a Kummel and make haste about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He lit a cigarette that was almost as big as a cigar, and turned again to
+      Lady Holme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been in the Sahara gazelle shooting,&rdquo; he continued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke in a rather thick, lumbering voice and very loud, probably
+      because he was married to a deaf woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just come back,&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; said Lady Holme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was sitting perfectly upright on her chair, and noticed that her
+      companion&rsquo;s eyes travelled calmly and critically over her figure with an
+      unveiled deliberation that was exceptionally brazen even in a modern
+      London man. Lady Holme did not mind it. Indeed, she rather liked it. She
+      knew at once, by that look, the type of man with whom she had to deal. In
+      Leo Ulford there was something of Lord Holme, as in Pimpernel Schley there
+      was perhaps a touch of herself. Having finished his stare, Leo Ulford
+      continued:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jolly out there. No rot. Do as you like and no one to bother you. Gazelle
+      are awfully shy beasts though.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They must have suited you,&rdquo; said Lady Holme, very gravely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; he asked, taking the glass of Kummel which the waiter had brought
+      and setting it down on a table by him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t you a shy&mdash;er&mdash;beast?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared at her calmly for a moment, and then said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say, you&rsquo;re too sharp, Lady Holme.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned his head towards Pimpernel Schley, who was sitting a little way
+      off with her soft, white chin tucked well in, looking steadily down into a
+      cup half full of Turkish coffee and speaking to nobody.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s that girl?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s Miss Pimpernel Schley. A pretty name, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it? An American of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What cheek they have? What&rsquo;s she do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe she acts in&mdash;well, a certain sort of plays.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A slow smile overspread Leo Ulford&rsquo;s face and made him look more like a
+      huge boy than ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What certain sort?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;The sort I&rsquo;d like?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very probably. But I know nothing of your tastes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She did&mdash;everything almost. There are a good many Leo Ulfords
+      lounging about London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like anything that&rsquo;s a bit lively, with no puritanic humbug about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you surely can&rsquo;t suppose that there can be any puritanic humbug
+      about Miss Schley or anything she has to do with!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced again at Pimpernel Schley and then at Lady Holme. The smile on
+      his face became a grin. Then his huge shoulders began to shake gently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do love talking to women,&rdquo; he said, on the tide of a prolonged chuckle.
+      &ldquo;When they aren&rsquo;t deaf.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme still remained perfectly grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you? Why?&rdquo; she inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you guess why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our charity to our sister women?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was smiling now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You teach me such a lot,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drank his Kummel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I always learn something when I talk to a woman. I&rsquo;ve learnt something
+      from you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme did not ask him what it was. She saw that he was now more
+      intent on her than he had been on Miss Schley, and she got up to go,
+      feeling more cheerful than she had since she left the <i>atelier</i> of
+      &ldquo;Cupido.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Already! May I come and call?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your father knows my address.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I say&mdash;but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re not going already!&rdquo; cried Mrs. Wolfstein, who was having a second
+      glass of Benedictine and beginning to talk rather outrageously and with a
+      more than usually pronounced foreign accent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must, really.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid my son has bored you,&rdquo; murmured Sir Donald, in his worn-out
+      voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I like him,&rdquo; she replied, loud enough for Leo to hear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald did not look particularly gratified at this praise of his
+      achievement. Lady Holme took an airy leave of everybody. When she came to
+      Pimpernel Schley she said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you a great success, Miss Schley.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Many thanks,&rdquo; drawled the vestal virgin, who was still looking into her
+      coffee cup.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must come to your first night. Have you ever acted in London?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You won&rsquo;t be nervous?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nervous! Don&rsquo;t know the word.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She bent to sip her coffee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Lady Holme reached the door of the Carlton, and was just entering one
+      of the revolving cells to gain the pavement, she heard Lady Cardington&rsquo;s
+      low voice behind her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me drive you home, dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the moment she felt inclined to be alone. She had even just refused Sir
+      Donald&rsquo;s earnest request to accompany her to her carriage. Had any other
+      woman made her this offer she would certainly have refused it. But few
+      people refused any request of Lady Cardington&rsquo;s. Lady Holme, like the rest
+      of the world, felt the powerful influence that lay in her gentleness as a
+      nerve lies in a body. And then had she not wept when Lady Holme sang a
+      tender song to her? In a moment they were driving up the Haymarket
+      together in Lady Cardington&rsquo;s barouche.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The weather had grown brighter. Wavering gleams of light broke through the
+      clouds and lay across the city, giving a peculiarly unctuous look to the
+      slimy streets, in which there were a good many pedestrians more or less
+      splashed with mud. There was a certain hopefulness in the atmosphere, and
+      yet a pathos such as there always is in Spring, when it walks through
+      London ways, bearing itself half nervously, like a country cousin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t like this time of year,&rdquo; said Lady Cardington.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was leaning back and glancing anxiously about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why not?&rdquo; asked Lady Holme. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter with it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Youth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But surely&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The year&rsquo;s too young. And at my age one feels very often as if the
+      advantage of youth were an unfair advantage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dare I ask&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She checked herself, looking at her companion&rsquo;s snow-white hair, which was
+      arranged in such a way that it looked immensely thick under the big black
+      hat she wore&mdash;a hat half grandmotherly and half coquettish, that
+      certainly suited her to perfection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Spring&mdash;&rdquo; she was beginning rather quickly; but Lady Cardington
+      interrupted her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fifty-eight,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed anxiously and looked at Lady Holme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t you think I was older?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know that I ever thought about it,&rdquo; replied Lady Holme, with the
+      rather careless frankness she often used towards women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course not. Why should you, or anyone? When a woman&rsquo;s once over fifty
+      it really doesn&rsquo;t matter much whether she&rsquo;s fifty-one or seventy-one. Does
+      it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme thought for a moment. Then she said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I really don&rsquo;t know. You see, I&rsquo;m not a man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Cardington&rsquo;s forehead puckered and her mouth drooped piteously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A woman&rsquo;s real life is very short,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;But her desire for real
+      life can last very long&mdash;her silly, useless desire.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if her looks remain?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They don&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think it is a question of looks?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think it is?&rdquo; asked Lady Cardington. &ldquo;But how can you know
+      anything about it, at your age, and with your appearance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose we all have our different opinions as to what men are and what
+      men want,&rdquo; Lady Holme said, more thoughtfully than usual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men! Men!&rdquo; Lady Cardington exclaimed, with a touch of irritation unusual
+      in her. &ldquo;Why should we women do, and be, everything for men?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know, but we do and we are. There are some men, though, who think
+      it isn&rsquo;t a question of looks, or think they think so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who?&rdquo; said Lady Cardington, quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, there are some,&rdquo; answered Lady Holme, evasively, &ldquo;who believe in
+      mental charm more than in physical charm, or say they do. And mental charm
+      doesn&rsquo;t age so obviously as physical&mdash;as the body does, I suppose.
+      Perhaps we ought to pin our faith to it. What do you think of Miss
+      Schley?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Cardington glanced at her with a kind of depressed curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She pins her faith to the other thing,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She&rsquo;s pretty. Do you know she reminds me faintly of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme felt acute irritation at this remark, but she only said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something in her colouring. I&rsquo;m sure she&rsquo;s a man&rsquo;s woman, but I can&rsquo;t say
+      I found her interesting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men&rsquo;s women seldom are interesting to us. They don&rsquo;t care to be,&rdquo; said
+      Lady Holme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly she thought that possibly between Pimpernel Schley and herself
+      there were resemblances unconnected with colouring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose not. But still&mdash;ah, here&rsquo;s Cadogan Square!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She kissed Lady Holme lightly on the cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fifty-eight!&rdquo; Lady Holme said to herself as she went into the house.
+      &ldquo;Just think of being fifty-eight if one has been a man&rsquo;s woman! Perhaps
+      it&rsquo;s better after all to be an everybody&rsquo;s woman. Well, but how&rsquo;s it
+      done?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked quite puzzled as she came into the drawing-room, where Robin
+      Pierce had been waiting impatiently for twenty minutes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Robin,&rdquo; she said seriously, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m very unhappy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not so unhappy as I have been for the last half hour,&rdquo; he said, taking
+      her hand and holding it. &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m dreadfully afraid I&rsquo;m a man&rsquo;s woman. Do you think I am?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He could not help smiling as he looked into her solemn eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do indeed. Why should you be upset about it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know. Lady Cardington&rsquo;s been saying things&mdash;and I met a
+      rather abominable little person at lunch, a little person like a baby
+      that&rsquo;s been about a great deal in a former state, and altogether&mdash;Let&rsquo;s
+      have tea.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By all means.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now soothe me, Robin. I&rsquo;m dreadfully strung up. Soothe me. Tell me,
+      I&rsquo;m an everybody&rsquo;s woman and that I shall never be <i>de trop</i> in the
+      world&mdash;not even when I&rsquo;m fifty-eight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      THE success of Pimpernel Schley in London was great and immediate, and
+      preceded her appearance upon the stage. To some people, who thought they
+      knew their London, it was inexplicable. Miss Schley was pretty and knew
+      how to dress. These facts, though of course denied by some, as all facts
+      in London are, were undeniable. But Miss Schley had nothing to say. She
+      was not a brilliant talker, as so many of her countrywomen are. She was
+      not vivacious in manner, except on rare occasions. She was not interested
+      in all the questions of the day. She was not&mdash;a great many things.
+      But she was one thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was exquisitely sly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her slyness was definite and pervasive. In her it took the place of wit.
+      It took the place of culture. It even took the place of vivacity. It was a
+      sort of maid-of-all-work in her personality and never seemed to tire. The
+      odd thing was that it did not seem to tire others. They found it
+      permanently piquant. Men said of Miss Schley, &ldquo;She&rsquo;s a devilish clever
+      little thing. She don&rsquo;t say much, but she&rsquo;s up to every move on the
+      board.&rdquo; Women were impressed by her. There was something in her supreme
+      and snowy composure that suggested inflexible will. Nothing ever put her
+      out or made her look as if she were in a false position.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      London was captivated by the abnormal combination of snow and slyness
+      which she presented to it, and began at once to make much of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At one time the English were supposed to be cold; and rather gloried in
+      the supposition. But recently a change has taken place in the national
+      character&mdash;at any rate as exhibited in London. Rigidity has gone out
+      of fashion. It is condemned as insular, and unless you are cosmopolitan
+      nowadays you are nothing, or worse than nothing. The smart Englishwoman is
+      beginning to be almost as restless as a Neapolitan. She is in a continual
+      flutter of movement, as if her body were threaded with trembling wires.
+      She uses a great deal of gesture. She is noisy about nothing. She is
+      vivacious at all costs, and would rather suggest hysteria than British
+      phlegm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Schley&rsquo;s calm was therefore in no danger of being drowned in any
+      pervasive calm about her. On the contrary, it stood out. It became very
+      individual. Her composed speechlessness in the midst of uneasy chatter&mdash;the
+      Englishwoman is seldom really self-possessed&mdash;carried with it a
+      certain dignity which took the place of breeding. She was always at her
+      ease, and to be always at your ease makes a deep impression upon London,
+      which is full of self-consciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She began to be the fashion at once. A great lady, who had a passion for
+      supplying smart men with what they wanted, saw that they were going to
+      want Miss Schley and promptly took her up. Other women followed suit. Miss
+      Schley had a double triumph. She was run after by women as well as by men.
+      She got her little foot in everywhere, and in no time. Her personal
+      character was not notoriously bad. The slyness had taken care of that. But
+      even if it had been, if only the papers had not been too busy in the
+      matter, she might have had success. Some people do whose names have
+      figured upon the evening bills exposed at the street corners. Hers had not
+      and was not likely to. It was her art to look deliberately pure and good,
+      and to suggest, in a way almost indefinable and very perpetual, that she
+      could be anything and everything, and perhaps had been, under the perfumed
+      shadow of the rose. The fact that the suggestion seemed to be conveyed
+      with intention was the thing that took corrupt old London&rsquo;s fancy and made
+      Miss Schley a pet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her name of Pimpernel was not against her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Men liked it for its innocence, and laughed as they mentioned it in the
+      clubs, as who should say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We know the sort of Pimpernel we mean.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Schley&rsquo;s social success brought her into Lady Holme&rsquo;s set, and people
+      noticed, what Lady Holme had been the first to notice, the faint likeness
+      between them. Lady Holme was not exquisitely sly. Her voice was not like a
+      choir-boy&rsquo;s; her manner was not like the manner of an image; her eyes were
+      not for ever cast down. Even her characteristic silence was far less
+      perpetual than the equally characteristic silence of Miss Schley. But men
+      said they were the same colour. What men said women began to think, and it
+      was not an assertion wholly without foundation. At a little distance there
+      was an odd resemblance in the one white face and fair hair to the other.
+      Miss Schley&rsquo;s way of moving, too, had a sort of reference to Lady Holme&rsquo;s
+      individual walk. There were several things characteristic of Lady Holme
+      which Miss Schley seemed to reproduce, as it were, with a sly
+      exaggeration. Her hair was similar, but paler, her whiteness more dead,
+      her silence more perpetual, her composure more enigmatically serene, her
+      gait slower, with diminished steps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was all a little like an imitation, with just a touch of caricature
+      added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One or two friends remarked upon it to Lady Holme, who heard them very
+      airily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are we alike?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I daresay, but you mustn&rsquo;t expect me to see it.
+      One never knows the sort of impression one produces on the world. I think
+      Miss Schley a very attractive little creature, and as to her social gifts,
+      I bow to them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But she has none,&rdquo; cried Mrs. Wolfstein, who was one of those who had
+      drawn Lady Holme&rsquo;s attention to the likeness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can you say so? Everyone is at her feet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her feet, perhaps. They are lovely. But she has no gifts. That&rsquo;s why she
+      gets on. Gifted people are a drug in the market. London&rsquo;s sick of them.
+      They worry. Pimpernel&rsquo;s found that out and gone in for the savage state. I
+      mean mentally of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her mind dwells in a wigwam,&rdquo; said Lady Manby. &ldquo;And wears glass beads and
+      little bits of coloured cloth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But her acting?&rdquo; asked Lady Holme, with careless indifference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that&rsquo;s improper but not brilliant,&rdquo; said Mrs. Wolfstein. &ldquo;The
+      American critics says it&rsquo;s beneath contempt.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But not beneath popularity, I suppose?&rdquo; said Lady Holme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, she&rsquo;s enormously popular. Newspaper notices don&rsquo;t matter to
+      Pimpernel. Are you going to ask her to your house? You might. She&rsquo;s
+      longing to come. Everybody else has, and she knew you first.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme began to realise why she could never like Mrs. Wolfstein. The
+      latter would try to manage other people&rsquo;s affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had no idea she would care about it,&rdquo; she answered, rather coldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear&mdash;an American! And your house! You&rsquo;re absurdly modest. She&rsquo;s
+      simply pining to come. May I tell her to?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should prefer to invite her myself,&rdquo; said Lady Holme, with a distinct
+      touch of hauteur which made Mrs. Wolfstein smile maliciously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Lady Holme was alone she realised that she had, half unconsciously,
+      meant that Miss Schley should find that there was at any rate one house in
+      London whose door did not at once fly open to welcome her demure presence.
+      But now? She certainly did not intend to be a marked exception to a rule
+      that was apparently very general. If people were going to talk about her
+      exclusion of Miss Schley, she would certainly not exclude her. She asked
+      herself why she wished to, and said to herself that Miss Schley&rsquo;s slyness
+      bored her. But she knew that the real reason of the secret hostility she
+      felt towards the American was the fact of their resemblance to each other.
+      Until Miss Schley appeared in London she&mdash;Viola Holme&mdash;had been
+      original both in her beauty and in her manner of presenting it to the
+      world. Miss Schley was turning her into a type.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was too bad. Any woman would have disliked it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She wondered whether Miss Schley recognised the likeness. But of course
+      people had spoken to her about it. Mrs. Wolfstein was her bosom friend.
+      The Jewess had met her first at Carlsbad and, with that terrible social
+      flair which often dwells in Israel, had at once realised her fitness for a
+      London success and resolved to &ldquo;get her over.&rdquo; Women of the Wolfstein
+      species are seldom jealously timorous of the triumphs of other women. A
+      certain coarse cleverness, a certain ingrained assurance and unconquerable
+      self-confidence keeps them hardy. And they generally have a noble reliance
+      on the power of the tongue. Being incapable of any fear of Miss Schley,
+      Mrs. Wolfstein, ever on the look-out for means of improving her already
+      satisfactory position in the London world, saw one in the vestal virgin
+      and resolved to launch her in England. She was delighted with the result.
+      Miss Schley had already added several very desirable people to the
+      Wolfstein visiting-list. In return &ldquo;Henry&rdquo; had &ldquo;put her on to&rdquo; one or two
+      very good things in the City. Everything would be most satisfactory if
+      only Lady Holme were not tiresome about the Cadogan Square door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She hates you, Pimpernel,&rdquo; said Mrs. Wolfstein to her friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; drawled Miss Schley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know why perfectly well. You reproduce her looks. I&rsquo;m perfectly
+      certain she&rsquo;s dreading your first night. She&rsquo;s afraid people will begin to
+      think that extraordinary colourless charm she and you possess stagey.
+      Besides, you have certain mannerisms&mdash;you don&rsquo;t imitate her,
+      Pimpernel?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The pawnbroking expression was remarkably apparent for a moment in Mrs.
+      Wolfstein&rsquo;s eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t started to yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, if she don&rsquo;t ask me to number thirty-eight&mdash;&lsquo;tis
+      thirty-eight?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forty-two.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forty-two Cadogan Square, I might be tempted. I came out as a mimic, you
+      know, at Corsher and Byall&rsquo;s in Philadelphia.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Schley gazed reflectively upon the brown carpet of Mrs. Wolfstein&rsquo;s
+      boudoir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Folks said I wasn&rsquo;t bad,&rdquo; she added meditatively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I ought to warn Viola,&rdquo; said Mrs. Wolfstein.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was peculiarly intimate with people of distinction when they weren&rsquo;t
+      there. Miss Schley looked as if she had not heard. She often did when
+      anything of importance to her was said. It was important to her to be
+      admitted to Lady Holme&rsquo;s house. Everybody went there. It was one of the
+      very smartest houses in London, and since everybody knew that she had been
+      introduced to Lady Holme, since half the world was comparing their faces
+      and would soon begin to compare their mannerisms&mdash;well, it would be
+      better that she should not be forced into any revival of her Philadelphia
+      talents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Wolfstein did not warn Lady Holme. She was far too fond of being
+      amused to do anything so short-sighted. Indeed, from that moment she was
+      inclined to conspire to keep the Cadogan Square door shut against her
+      friend. She did not go so far as that; for she had a firm faith in
+      Pimpernel&rsquo;s cuteness and was aware that she would be found out. But she
+      remained passive and kept her eyes wide open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Schley was only going to act for a month in London. Her managers had
+      taken a theatre for her from the first of June till the first of July. As
+      she was to appear in a play she had already acted in all over the States,
+      and as her American company was coming over to support her, she had
+      nothing to do in the way of preparation. Having arrived early in the year,
+      she had nearly three months of idleness to enjoy. Her conversation with
+      Mrs. Wolfstein took place in the latter days of March. And it was just at
+      this period that Lady Holme began seriously to debate whether she should,
+      or should not, open her door to the American. She knew Miss Schley was
+      determined to come to her house. She knew her house was one of those to
+      which any woman setting out on the conquest of London would wish to come.
+      She did not want Miss Schley there, but she resolved to invite her if
+      peopled talked too much about her not being invited. And she wished to be
+      informed if they did. One day she spoke to Robin Pierce about it. Lord
+      Holme&rsquo;s treatment of Carey had not yet been applied to him. They met at a
+      private view in Bond Street, given by a painter who was adored by the
+      smart world, and, as yet, totally unknown in every other circle. The
+      exhibition was of portraits of beautiful women, and all the beautiful
+      women and their admirers crowded the rooms. Both Lady Holme and Miss
+      Schley had been included among the sitters of the painter, and&mdash;was
+      it by chance or design?&mdash;their portraits hung side by side upon the
+      brown-paper-covered walls. Lady Holme was not aware of this when she
+      caught Robin&rsquo;s eye through a crevice in the picture hats and called him to
+      her with a little nod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there tea?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. In the last room.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take me there. Oh, there&rsquo;s Ashley Greaves. Avoid him, like a dear, till
+      I&rsquo;ve looked at something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ashley Greaves was the painter. There was nothing of the Bohemian about
+      him. He looked like a heavy cavalry officer as he stood in the centre of
+      the room talking to a small, sharp-featured old lady in a poke bonnet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He&rsquo;s safe. Lady Blower&rsquo;s got hold of him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor wretch! She ought to have a keeper. Strong tea, Robin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They found a settee in a corner walled in by the backs of tea-drinking
+      beauties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to ask you something,&rdquo; said Lady Holme, confidentially. &ldquo;You go
+      about and hear what they&rsquo;re saying.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And greater nonsense it seems each new season.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nonsense keeps us alive.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it the oxygen self-administered by an almost moribund society?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s the perfume that prevents us from noticing the stuffiness of the
+      room. But, Robin, tell me&mdash;what is the nonsense of now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Religious, political, theatrical, divorce court or what, Lady Holme?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at her with a touch of mischief in his dark face, which told
+      her, and was meant to tell her, that he was on the alert, and had divined
+      that she had a purpose in thus pleasantly taking possession of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, the people&mdash;nonsense. You know perfectly what I mean.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whom are they chattering about most at the moment? You&rsquo;ll be contemptuous
+      if I tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a woman, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do I know her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Slightly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Schley.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme&rsquo;s voice sounded perfectly indifferent and just faintly
+      surprised. There was no hint of irritation in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what are they saying about Miss Schley?&rdquo; she added, sipping her tea
+      and glancing about the crowded room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, many things, and among the many one that&rsquo;s more untrue than all the
+      rest put together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s too absurd. I don&rsquo;t think I&rsquo;ll tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why not? If it&rsquo;s too absurd it&rsquo;s sure to be amusing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice sounded almost angry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me, Robin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at her quickly with a warm light in his dark eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you only knew how I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hush! Go on about Miss Schley.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They&rsquo;re saying that she&rsquo;s wonderfully like you, and that&mdash;have some
+      more tea?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That you hate it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme smiled, as if she were very much entertained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why should I hate it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know. But women invent reasons for everything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have they invented for this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;well&mdash;that you like to&mdash;I can&rsquo;t tell you it all,
+      really. But in substance it comes to this! They are saying, or implying&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Implication is the most subtle of the social arts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s the meanest&mdash;implying that all that&rsquo;s natural to you, that sets
+      you apart from others, is an assumption to make you stand out from the
+      rest of the crowd, and that you hate Miss Schley because she happens to
+      have assumed some of the same characteristics, and so makes you seem less
+      unique than you did before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme said nothing for a moment. Then she remarked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m sure no woman said &lsquo;less unique.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now did anyone? Confess!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What d&rsquo;you suppose they did say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;More commonplace.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He could not help laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As if you were ever commonplace!&rdquo; he exclaimed, rather relieved by her
+      manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s not the question. But then Miss Schley&rsquo;s said to be like me not
+      only in appearance but in other ways? Are we really so Siamese?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t see the faintest beginning of a resemblance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, now you&rsquo;re falling into exaggeration in the other direction.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, not in realities. Perhaps in one or two trifling mannerisms&mdash;I
+      believe she imitates you deliberately.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I must ask her to the house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, perhaps you might tell me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t people saying that the reason I don&rsquo;t ask her is because I am
+      piqued at the supposed resemblance between us?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, people will say anything. If we are to model our lives according to
+      their ridiculous ideas&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, but we do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unless we follow the dictates of our own natures, our own souls.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He lowered his voice almost to a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be yourself, be the woman who sings, and no one&mdash;not even a fool&mdash;will
+      ever say again that you resemble a nonentity like Miss Schley. You see&mdash;you
+      see now that even socially it is a mistake not to be your real self. You
+      can be imitated by a cute little Yankee who has neither imagination nor
+      brains, only the sort of slyness that is born out of the gutter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Robin, remember where we are. You&mdash;a diplomatist!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She put her finger to her lips and got up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We must look at something or Ashley Greaves will be furious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They made their way into the galleries, which were almost impassable. In
+      the distance Lady Holme caught sight of Miss Schley with Mrs. Wolfstein.
+      They were surrounded by young men. She looked hard at the American&rsquo;s pale
+      face, saying to herself, &ldquo;Is that like me? Is that like me?&rdquo; Her
+      conversation with Robin Pierce had made her feel excited. She had not
+      shown it. She had seemed, indeed, almost oddly indifferent. But something
+      combative was awake within her. She wondered whether the American was
+      consciously imitating her. What an impertinence! But Miss Schley was
+      impertinence personified. Her impertinence was her <i>raison d&rsquo;etre</i>.
+      Without it she would almost cease to be. She would at any rate be as
+      nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Followed by Robin, Lady Holme made her way slowly towards the Jewess and
+      the American.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were now standing together before the pictures, and had been joined
+      by Ashley Greaves, who was beginning to look very warm and expressive,
+      despite his cavalry moustache. Their backs were towards the room, and Lady
+      Holme and Robin drew near to them without being perceived. Mrs. Wolfstein
+      had a loud voice and did not control it in a crowd. On the contrary, she
+      generally raised it, as if she wished to be heard by those whom she was
+      not addressing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sargent invariably brings out the secret of his sitters,&rdquo; she was saying
+      to Ashley Greaves as Lady Holme and Robin came near and stood for an
+      instant wedged in by people, unable to move forward or backward. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve
+      brought out the similarities between Pimpernel and Lady Holme. I never saw
+      anything so clever. You show us not only what we all saw but what we all
+      passed over though it was there to see. There is an absurd likeness, and
+      you&rsquo;ve blazoned it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin stole a glance at his companion. Ashley Greaves said, in a thin
+      voice that did not accord with his physique:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My idea was to indicate the strong link there is between the English
+      woman and the American woman. If I may say so, these two portraits, as it
+      were, personify the two countries, and&mdash;er&mdash;and&mdash;er&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His mind appeared to give way. He strove to continue, to say something
+      memorable, conscious of his conspicuous and central position. But his
+      intellect, possibly over-heated and suffering from lack of air, declined
+      to back him up, and left him murmuring rather hopelessly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The one nation&mdash;er&mdash;and the other&mdash;yes&mdash;the give and
+      take&mdash;the give and take. You see my meaning? Yes, yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Schley said nothing. She looked at Lady Holme&rsquo;s portrait and at hers
+      with serenity, and seemed quite unconscious of the many eyes fastened upon
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You feel the strong link, I hope, Pimpernel?&rdquo; said Mrs. Wolfstein, with
+      her most violent foreign accent. &ldquo;Hands across the Herring Pond!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Greaves has been too cute for words,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;I wish Lady Holme
+      could cast her eye on them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked up at nothing, with a sudden air of seeing something
+      interesting that was happening along way off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Philadelphia!&rdquo; murmured Mrs. Wolfstein, with an undercurrent of laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was very like Lady Holme&rsquo;s look when she was singing. Robin Pierce saw
+      it and pressed his lips together. At this moment the crowd shifted and
+      left a gap through which Lady Holme immediately glided towards Ashley
+      Greaves. He saw her and came forward to meet her with eagerness, holding
+      out his hand, and smiling mechanically with even more than his usual
+      intention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a success!&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it is, your portrait makes it so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And where is my portrait?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin Pierce nipped in the bud a rather cynical smile. The painter wiped
+      his forehead with a white silk handkerchief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you guess? Look where the crowd is thickest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The people had again closed densely round the two pictures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are an artist in more ways than one, I&rsquo;m afraid,&rdquo; said Lady Holme.
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t turn my head more than the heat has.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The searching expression, that indicated the strong desire to say
+      something memorable, once more contorted the painter&rsquo;s face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He who would essay to fix beauty on canvas,&rdquo; he began, in a rather
+      piercing voice, &ldquo;should combine two gifts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused and lifted his upper lip two or three times, employing his
+      under-jaw as a lever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo; said Lady Holme, encouragingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The gift of the brush which perpetuates and the gift of&mdash;er&mdash;gift
+      of the&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His intellect once more retreated from him into some distant place and
+      left him murmuring:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beauty demands all, beauty demands all. Yes, yes! Sacrifice! Sacrifice!
+      Isn&rsquo;t it so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He tugged at his large moustache, with an abrupt assumption of the cavalry
+      officer&rsquo;s manner, which he doubtless deemed to be in accordance with his
+      momentary muddle-headedness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you give it what it wants most&mdash;the touch of the ideal. It
+      blesses you. Can we get through?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had glanced at Robin while she spoke the first words. Ashley Greaves,
+      with an expression of sudden relief, began very politely to hustle the
+      crowd, which yielded to his persuasive shoulders, and Lady Holme found
+      herself within looking distance of the two portraits, and speaking
+      distance of Mrs. Wolfstein and Miss Schley. She greeted them with a nod
+      that was more gay and friendly than her usual salutations to women, which
+      often lacked <i>bonhomie</i>. Mrs. Wolfstein&rsquo;s too expressive face lit up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sensation is complete!&rdquo; she exclaimed loudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hope you&rsquo;re well,&rdquo; murmured Miss Schley, letting her pale eyes rest on
+      Lady Holme for about a quarter of a second, and then becoming acutely
+      attentive to vacancy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme was now in front of the pictures. She looked at Miss Schley&rsquo;s
+      portrait with apparent interest, while Mrs. Wolfstein looked at her with
+      an interest that was maliciously real.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; said Mrs. Wolfstein. &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s an extraordinary resemblance!&rdquo; said Lady Holme. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s wonderfully
+      like.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even you see it! Ashley, you ought to be triumphant&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wonderfully like&mdash;Miss Schley,&rdquo; added Lady Holme, cutting gently
+      through Mrs. Wolfstein&rsquo;s rather noisy outburst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned to the American.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been wondering whether you won&rsquo;t come in one day and see my little
+      home. Everyone wants you, I know, but if you have a minute some Wednesday&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be delighted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Next Wednesday, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks. Next Wednesday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cadogan Square&mdash;the red book will tell you. But I&rsquo;ll send cards. I
+      must be running away now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When she had gone, followed by Robin, Mrs. Wolfstein said to Miss Schley:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She&rsquo;s been conquered by fear of Philadelphia.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait till I give her Noo York,&rdquo; returned the American, placidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed that Lady Holme&rsquo;s secret hostility to Miss Schley was returned
+      by the vestal virgin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      LORD HOLME seldom went to parties and never to private views. He thought
+      such things &ldquo;all damned rot.&rdquo; Few functions connected with the arts
+      appealed to his frankly Philistine spirit, which rejoiced in celebrations
+      linked with the glories of the body; boxing and wrestling matches,
+      acrobatic performances, weight-lifting exhibitions, and so forth. He
+      regretted that bear-baiting and cock-fighting were no longer legal in
+      England, and had, on two occasions, travelled from London to South America
+      solely in order to witness prize fights.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he so seldom put in an appearance at smart gatherings he had not yet
+      encountered Miss Schley, nor had he heard a whisper of her much-talked-of
+      resemblance to his wife. Her name was known to him as that of a woman whom
+      one or two of his &ldquo;pals&rdquo; began to call a &ldquo;deuced pretty girl&rdquo; but his
+      interest in her was not greatly awakened. The number of deuced pretty
+      girls that had been in his life, and in the lives of his pals, was legion.
+      They came and went like feathers dancing on the wind. The mere report of
+      them, therefore, casual and drifting, could not excite his permanent
+      attention, or fix their names and the record of their charms in his
+      somewhat treacherous memory. Lady Holme had not once mentioned the
+      American to him. She was a woman who knew how to be silent, and sometimes
+      she was silent by instinct without saying to herself why.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme never appeared on her Wednesdays; and, indeed, those days were
+      a rather uncertain factor among the London joys. If Lady Holme was to be
+      found in her house at all, she was usually to be found on a Wednesday
+      afternoon. She herself considered that she was at home on Wednesdays, but
+      this idea of hers was often a mere delusion, especially when the season
+      had fully set in. There were a thousand things to be done. She frequently
+      forgot what the day of the week was. Unluckily she forgot it on the
+      Wednesday succeeding her invitation to Miss Schley. The American duly
+      turned up in Cadogan Square and was informed that Lady Holme was not to be
+      seen. She left her card and drove away in her coupe with a decidedly stony
+      expression upon her white face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That day it chanced that Lord Holme came in just before his wife and
+      carelessly glanced over the cards which had been left during the
+      afternoon. He was struck by the name of Pimpernel. It tickled his fancy
+      somehow. As he looked at it he grinned. He looked at it again and vaguely
+      recalled some shreds of the club gossip about Miss Schley&rsquo;s attractions.
+      When Lady Holme walked quietly into her drawing-room two or three minutes
+      later he met her with Miss Schley&rsquo;s card in his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have you got there, Fritz?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave her the card.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You never told me you&rsquo;d run up against her,&rdquo; he remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme looked at the card and then, quickly, at her husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why&mdash;do you know Miss Schley?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not I.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fellows say she&rsquo;s deuced takin&rsquo;. That&rsquo;s all. And she&rsquo;s got a fetchin&rsquo; 
+      name&mdash;eh? Pimpernel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He repeated it twice and began to grin once more, and to bend and
+      straighten his legs in the way which sometimes irritated his wife. Lady
+      Holme was again looking at the card.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely it isn&rsquo;t Wednesday?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, it is. What did you think it was?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tuesday&mdash;Monday&mdash;I don&rsquo;t know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where&rsquo;d you meet her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whom? Miss Schley? At the Carlton. A lunch of Amalia Wolfstein&rsquo;s.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is she pretty?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no hesitation before the reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What colour?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&mdash;not Albino.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme stared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What d&rsquo;you mean by that, girlie?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That Miss Schley is remarkably fair&mdash;fairer than I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is she as pretty as you?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can find out for yourself. I&rsquo;m going to ask her to something&mdash;presently.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the last word, in the pause that preceded it, there was the creeping
+      sound of the reluctance Lady Holme felt in allowing Miss Schley to draw
+      any closer to her life. Lord Holme did not notice it. He only said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Right you are. Pimpernel&mdash;I should like to have a squint at her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well. You shall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pimpernel,&rdquo; repeated Lord Holme, in a loud bass voice, as he lounged out
+      of the room, grinning. The name tickled his fancy immensely. That was
+      evident.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme fully intended to ask Miss Schley to the &ldquo;something&rdquo; already
+      mentioned immediately. But somehow several days slipped by and it was
+      difficult to find an unoccupied hour. The Holme cards had, of course, duly
+      gone to the Carlton, but there the matter had ended, so far as Lady Holme
+      was concerned. Miss Schley, however, was not so heedless as the woman she
+      resembled. She began to return with some assiduity to the practice of the
+      talent of the old Philadelphia days. In those days she used to do a &ldquo;turn&rdquo;
+       in the course of which she imitated some of the popular public favourites
+      of the States, and for each of her imitations she made up to resemble the
+      person mimicked. She now concentrated this talent upon Lady Holme, but
+      naturally the methods she employed in Society were far more subtle than
+      those she had formerly used upon the stage. They were scarcely less
+      effective. She slightly changed her fashion of doing her hair, puffing it
+      out less at the sides, wearing it a little higher at the back. The change
+      accentuated her physical resemblance to Lady Holme. She happened to get
+      the name of the dressmaker who made most of the latter&rsquo;s gowns, and
+      happened to give her an order that was executed with remarkable rapidity.
+      But all this was only the foundation upon which she based, as it were, the
+      structure of her delicate revenge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That consisted in a really admirable hint&mdash;it could not be called
+      more&mdash;of Lady Holme&rsquo;s characteristic mannerisms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme was not an affected woman, but, like all women of the world who
+      are greatly admired and much talked about, she had certain little ways of
+      looking, moving, speaking, being quiet, certain little habits of laughter,
+      of gravity, that were her own property. Perhaps originally natural to her,
+      they had become slightly accentuated as time went on, and many tongues and
+      eyes admired them. That which had been unconscious had become conscious.
+      The faraway look came a little more abruptly, went a little more
+      reluctantly; than it had in the young girl&rsquo;s days. The wistful smile
+      lingered more often on the lips of the twenties than on the lips of the
+      teens. Few noticed any change, perhaps, but there had been a slight
+      change, and it made things easier for Miss Schley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eye was observant although it was generally cast down. Society began
+      to smile secretly at her talented exercises. Only a select few, like Mrs.
+      Wolfstein, knew exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it, but
+      the many were entertained, as children are, without analysing the cause of
+      their amusement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two people, however, were indignant&mdash;Robin Pierce and Rupert Carey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin Pierce, who had an instinct that was almost feminine in its
+      subtlety, raged internally, and Rupert Carey, who, naturally acute, was
+      always specially shrewd when his heart was in the game, openly showed his
+      distaste for Miss Schley, and went about predicting her complete failure
+      to capture the London public as an actress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She&rsquo;s done it as a woman,&rdquo; someone replied to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not the public, only the smart fools,&rdquo; returned Carey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The smart fools have more influence on the public every day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Carey only snorted. He was in one of his evil moods that afternoon. He
+      left the club in which the conversation had taken place, and, casting
+      about for something to do, some momentary solace for his irritation and <i>ennui</i>,
+      he bethought him of Sir Donald Ulford&rsquo;s invitation and resolved to make a
+      call at the Albany. Sir Donald would be out, of course, but anyhow he
+      would chance it and shoot a card.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald&rsquo;s servant said he was in. Carey was glad. Here was an hour
+      filled up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With his usual hasty, decisive step he followed the man through a dark and
+      Oriental-looking vestibule into a library, where Sir Donald was sitting at
+      a bureau of teakwood, slowly writing upon a large, oblong sheet of
+      foolscap with a very pointed pen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up, looking rather startled, and held out his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad to see you. I hoped you would come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m disturbing a new poem,&rdquo; said Carey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald&rsquo;s faded face acknowledged it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sorry. I&rsquo;ll go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no. I have infinite leisure, and I write now merely for myself. I
+      shall never publish anything more. The maunderings of the old are really
+      most thoroughly at home in the waste-paper basket. Do sit down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Carey threw himself into a deep chair and looked round. It was a room of
+      books and Oriental china. The floor was covered with an exquisite Persian
+      carpet, rich and delicate in colour, with one of those vague and elaborate
+      designs that stir the imagination as it is stirred by a strange perfume in
+      a dark bazaar where shrouded merchants sit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I light it with wax candles,&rdquo; said Sir Donald, handing Carey a cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a good room to think in, or to be sad in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He struck a match on his boot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You like to shut out London,&rdquo; he continued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Yet I live in it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And hate it. So do I. London&rsquo;s like a black-browed brute that gets an
+      unholy influence over you. It would turn Mark Tapley into an Ibsen man.
+      Yet one can&rsquo;t get away from it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It holds interesting minds and interesting faces.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t Persia?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lethargy dwells there and in all Eastern lands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have made up your mind to spend the rest of your days in the fog?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Indeed, only to-day I acquired a Campo Santo with cypress trees, in
+      which I intend to make a home for any dying romance that still lingers
+      within me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke with a sort of wistful whimsicality. Carey stared hard at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A Campo Santo&rsquo;s a place for the dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not for the dying? Don&rsquo;t they need holy ground as much?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And where&rsquo;s this holy ground of yours?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald got up from his chair, went over to the bureau, opened a
+      drawer, and took out of it a large photograph rolled round a piece of
+      wood, which he handed to Carey, who swiftly spread it out on his knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say, Sir Donald, d&rsquo;you mind my asking for a whisky-and-soda?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He hastily touched a bell and ordered it. Meanwhile Carey examined the
+      photograph.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you think of it?&rdquo; Sir Donald asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;Italy obviously.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, and a conventional part of Italy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Maggiore?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Como.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The playground of the honeymoon couple.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not where my Campo Santo is. They go to Cadenabbia, Bellagio, Villa
+      D&rsquo;Este sometimes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see the fascination. But it looks haunted. You&rsquo;ve bought it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. The matter was arranged to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The photograph showed a large, long house, or rather two houses divided by
+      a piazza with slender columns. In the foreground was water. Through the
+      arches of the piazza water was also visible, a cascade falling in the
+      black cleft of a mountain gorge dark with the night of cypresses. To the
+      right of the house, rising from the lake, was a tall old wall overgrown
+      with masses of creeping plants and climbing roses. Over it more cypresses
+      looked, and at the base of it, near the house, were a flight of worn steps
+      disappearing into the lake, and an arched doorway with an
+      elaborately-wrought iron grille. Beneath the photograph was written, &ldquo;<i>Casa
+      Felice</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Casa Felice, h&rsquo;m!&rdquo; said Carey, with his eyes on the photograph.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think the name inappropriate?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who knows? One can be wretched among sunbeams. One might be gay among
+      cypresses. And Casa Felice belongs to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old&mdash;of course?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. There is a romance connected with the house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Long ago two guilty lovers deserted their respective mates and the
+      brilliant world they had figured in, and fled there together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And quarrelled and were generally wretched there for how many months?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For eight years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The devil! Fidelity gone mad!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is said that during those years the mistress never left the garden,
+      except to plunge into the lake on moonlight nights and swim through the
+      silver with her lover.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Carey was silent. He did not take his eyes from the photograph, which
+      seemed to fascinate him. When the servant came in with the whisky-and-soda
+      he started.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a place to be alone in,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drank, and stared again at the photograph.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s something about the place that holds one even in a photograph,&rdquo;
+       he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One can feel the strange intrigue that made the house a hermitage. It has
+      been a hermitage ever since.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An old Italian lady, very rich, owned it, but never lived there. She
+      recently died, and her heir consented to sell it to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I should like to see it in the flesh&mdash;or the bricks and
+      mortar. But it&rsquo;s not a place to be alone in,&rdquo; repeated Carey. &ldquo;It wants a
+      woman if ever a house did.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What sort of woman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald had sat down again on the chair opposite, and was looking with
+      his exhausted eyes through the smoke of the cigars at Carey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A fair woman, a woman with a white face, a slim woman with eyes that are
+      cords to draw men to her and bind them to her, and a voice that can sing
+      them into the islands of the sirens.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are there such women in a world that has forgotten Ulysses?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you know it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He rolled the photograph round the piece of wood and laid it on a table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can only think of one who at all answers to your description.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The one of whom I was thinking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lady Holme?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you think she would be dreadfully bored in Casa Felice?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Horribly, horribly. Unless&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unless?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who knows what? But there&rsquo;s very often an unless hanging about, like a
+      man at a street corner, that&mdash;&rdquo; He broke off, then added abruptly,
+      &ldquo;Invite me to Casa Felice some day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When will you be going there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As soon as the London season is over. Some time in August. Will you come
+      then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The house is ready for you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will be. The necessary repairs will be begun now. I have bought it
+      furnished.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The lovers&rsquo; furniture?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I shall add a number of my own things, picked up on my wanderings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll come in August if you&rsquo;ll have me. But I&rsquo;ll give you the season to
+      think whether you&rsquo;ll have me or whether you won&rsquo;t. I&rsquo;m a horrible bore in
+      a house&mdash;the lazy man who does nothing and knows a lot. Casa Felice&mdash;Casa
+      Felice. You won&rsquo;t alter the name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you advise me to?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know. To keep it is to tempt the wrath of the gods, but I should
+      keep it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He poured out another whisky-and-soda and suddenly began to curse Miss
+      Schley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald had spoken to her after Mrs. Wolfstein&rsquo;s lunch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She&rsquo;s imitating Lady Holme,&rdquo; said Carey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot see the likeness,&rdquo; Sir Donald said. &ldquo;Miss Schley seems to me
+      uninteresting and common.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And Lady Holme&rsquo;s personality is, on the contrary; interesting and
+      uncommon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course. Pimpernel Schley would be an outrage in that Campo Santo of
+      yours. And yet there is a likeness, and she&rsquo;s accentuating it every day
+      she lives.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ask the women why they do the cursed things they do do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a woman-hater?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not I. Didn&rsquo;t I say just now that Casa Felice wanted a woman? But the
+      devil generally dwells where the angel dwells&mdash;cloud and moon
+      together. Now you want to get on with that poem.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Half London was smiling gently at the resemblance between Lady Holme and
+      Miss Schley before the former made up her mind to ask the latter to
+      &ldquo;something.&rdquo; And when, moved to action by certain evidences of the
+      Philadelphia talent which could not be misunderstood, she did make up her
+      mind, she resolved that the &ldquo;something&rdquo; should be very large and by no
+      means very intimate. Safety wanders in crowds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sent out cards for a reception, one of those affairs that begin about
+      eleven, are tremendous at half past, look thin at twelve, and have faded
+      away long before the clock strikes one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme hated them. On several occasions he had been known to throw
+      etiquette to the winds and not to turn up when his wife was giving them.
+      He always made what he considered to be a good excuse. Generally he had
+      &ldquo;gone into the country to look at a horse.&rdquo; As Lady Holme sent out her
+      cards, and saw her secretary writing the words, &ldquo;Miss Pimpernel Schley,&rdquo;
+       on an envelope which contained one, she asked herself whether her husband
+      would be likely to play her false this time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall you be here on the twelfth?&rdquo; she asked him casually.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why? What&rsquo;s up on the twelfth?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to have one of those things you hate&mdash;before the Arkell
+      House ball. I chose that night so that everyone should run away early! You
+      won&rsquo;t be obliged to look at a horse in the country that particular day?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She spoke laughingly, as if she wanted him to say no, but would not be
+      very angry if he didn&rsquo;t. Lord Holme tugged his moustache and looked very
+      serious indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Another!&rdquo; he ejaculated. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re always havin&rsquo; &lsquo;em. Any music?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no, nothing. There are endless dinners that night, and Mrs.
+      Crutchby&rsquo;s concert with Calve, and the ball. People will only run in and
+      say something silly and run out again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s comin&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everybody. All the tiresome dears that have had their cards left.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme stared at his varnished boots and looked rather like a puzzled
+      boy at a <i>viva voce</i> examination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The worst of it is, I can&rsquo;t be in the country lookin&rsquo; at a horse that
+      night,&rdquo; he said with depression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She hastily added:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why should you? You ought to be here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;d rather be lookin&rsquo; at a horse. But I&rsquo;m booked for the dinner to Rowley
+      at the Nation Club that night. I might say the speeches were too long and
+      I couldn&rsquo;t get away. Eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at her for support.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You really ought to be here, Fritz,&rdquo; she answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It ended there. Lady Holme knew her husband pretty well. She fancied that
+      the speeches at the dinner given to Sir Jacob Rowley, ex-Governor of some
+      place she knew nothing about, would turn out to be very lengthy indeed&mdash;speeches
+      to keep a man far from his home till after midnight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the evening of the twelfth Lord Holme had not arrived when the first of
+      his wife&rsquo;s guests came slowly up the stairs, and Lady Holme began gently
+      to make his excuses to all the tiresome dears who had had their cards left
+      at forty-two Cadogan Square. There were a great many tiresome dears. The
+      stream flowed steadily, and towards half-past eleven resembled a
+      flood-tide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mr. Bry, Sally Perceval had one by one
+      appeared, and Robin Pierce&rsquo;s dark head was visible mounting slowly amid a
+      throng of other heads of all shapes, sizes and tints.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme was looking particularly well. She was dressed in black. Of
+      course black suits everybody. It suited her even better than most people,
+      and her gown was a triumph. She was going on to the Arkell House ball, and
+      wore the Holme diamonds, which were superb, and which she had recently had
+      reset. She was in perfect health, and felt unusually young and unusually
+      defiant. As she stood at the top of the staircase, smiling, shaking hands
+      with people, and watching Robin Pierce coming slowly nearer, she wondered
+      a little at certain secret uneasinesses&mdash;they could scarcely be
+      called tremors&mdash;which had recently oppressed her. How absurd of her
+      to have been troubled, even lightly, by the impertinent proceedings of an
+      American actress, a nobody from the States, without position, without
+      distinction, without even a husband. How could it matter to her what such
+      a little person&mdash;she always called Pimpernel Schley a little person
+      in her thoughts&mdash;did or did not do? As Robin came towards her she
+      almost&mdash;but not quite&mdash;wished that the speeches at the dinner to
+      Sir Jacob Rowley had not been so long as they evidently had been, and that
+      her husband were standing beside her, looking enormous and enormously
+      bored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a crowd!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. We can&rsquo;t talk now. Are you going to Arkell House?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take me in to supper there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I? Thank you. I&rsquo;m going with Rupert Carey.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At this moment Lady Holme&rsquo;s eyes and manner wandered. She had just caught
+      a glimpse of Mrs. Wolfstein, a mass of jewels, and of Pimpernel Schley at
+      the foot of the staircase, had just noticed that the latter happened to be
+      dressed in black.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bye-bye!&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin Pierce walked on into the drawing-rooms looking rather preoccupied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everybody came slowly up the stairs. It was impossible to do anything
+      else. But it seemed to Lady Holme that Miss Schley walked far more slowly
+      than the rest of the tiresome dears, with a deliberation that had a touch
+      of insolence in it. Her straw-coloured hair was done exactly like Lady
+      Holme&rsquo;s, but she wore no diamonds in it. Indeed, she had on no jewels. And
+      this absence of jewels, and her black gown, made her skin look almost
+      startlingly white, if possible whiter than Lady Holme&rsquo;s. She smiled
+      quietly as she mounted the stairs, as if she were wrapt in a pleasant,
+      innocent dream which no one knew anything about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amalia Wolfstein was certainly a splendid&mdash;a too splendid&mdash;foil
+      to her. The Jewess was dressed in the most vivid orange colour, and was
+      very much made up. Her large eyebrows were heavily darkened. Her lips were
+      scarlet. Her eyes, which moved incessantly, had a lustre which suggested
+      oil with a strong light shining on it. &ldquo;Henry&rdquo; followed in her wake,
+      looking intensely nervous, and unnaturally alive and observant, as if he
+      were searching in the crowd for a bit of gold that someone had
+      accidentally dropped. When anyone spoke to him he replied with extreme
+      vivacity but in the fewest possible words. He held his spare figure
+      slightly sideways as he walked, and his bald head glistened under the
+      electric lamps. Behind them, in the distance, was visible the yellow and
+      sunken face of Sir Donald Ulford.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Miss Schley gained the top of the staircase Lady Holme saw that their
+      gowns were almost exactly alike. Hers was sewn with diamonds, but
+      otherwise there was scarcely any difference. And she suddenly felt as if
+      the difference made by the jewels was not altogether in her favour, as if
+      she were one of those women who look their best when they are not wearing
+      any ornaments. Possibly Mrs. Wolfstein made all jewellery seem vulgar for
+      the moment. She looked like an exceedingly smart jeweller&rsquo;s shop rather
+      too brilliantly illuminated; &ldquo;as if she were for sale,&rdquo; as an old and
+      valued friend of hers aptly murmured into the ear of someone who had known
+      her ever since she began to give good dinners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here we are! I&rsquo;m chaperoning Pimpernel. But her mother arrives
+      to-morrow,&rdquo; began Mrs. Wolfstein, with her strongest accent, while Miss
+      Schley put out a limp hand to meet Lady Holme&rsquo;s and very slightly
+      accentuated her smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your mother? I shall be delighted to meet her. I hope you&rsquo;ll bring her
+      one day,&rdquo; said Lady Holme; thinking more emphatically than ever that for a
+      woman with a complexion as perfect as hers it was a mistake to wear many
+      jewels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be most pleased, but mother don&rsquo;t go around much,&rdquo; replied Miss
+      Schley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does she know London?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She does not. She spends most of her time sitting around in Susanville,
+      but she&rsquo;s bound to look after me in this great city.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Wolfstein was by this time in violent conversation with a pale young
+      man, who always looked as if he were on the point of fainting, but who
+      went literally everywhere. Miss Schley glanced up into Lady Holme&rsquo;s eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hoped to make the acquaintance of Lord Holme to-night,&rdquo; she murmured.
+      &ldquo;Folks tell me he&rsquo;s a most beautiful man. Isn&rsquo;t he anywhere around?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked away into vacancy, ardently. Lady Holme felt a slight tingling
+      sensation in her cool skin. For a moment it seemed to her as if she
+      watched herself in caricature, distorted perhaps by a mirror with a slight
+      flaw in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My husband was obliged to dine out to-night; unfortunately. I hope he&rsquo;ll
+      be here in a moment, but he may be kept, as there are to be some dreadful
+      speeches afterwards. I can&rsquo;t think why elderly men always want to get up
+      and talk nonsense about the Royal family after a heavy dinner. It&rsquo;s so bad
+      for the digestion and the&mdash;ah, Sir Donald! Sweet of you to turn up.
+      Your boy&rsquo;s been so unkind. I asked him to call, or he asked to call, and
+      he&rsquo;s never been near me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Schley drifted away and was swallowed by the crowd. Sir Donald had
+      arrived at the top of the stairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leo&rsquo;s been away in Scotland ever since he had the pleasure of meeting
+      you. He only came back to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I&rsquo;m not quite so hurt. He&rsquo;s always running about, I suppose, to kill
+      things, like my husband.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He does manage a good deal in that way. If you are going to the Arkell
+      House ball you&rsquo;ll meet him there. He and his wife are both&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did do! Oh, Charley, I never expected to see you. I thought it wasn&rsquo;t
+      the thing for the 2nd to turn up at little hay parties like this. Kitty
+      Barringlave is in the far room, dreadfully bored. Go and cheer her up.
+      Tell her what&rsquo;ll win the Cup. She&rsquo;s pale and peaky with ignorance about
+      Ascot this year. Both going to Arkell House, Sir Donald, did you say?
+      Bring your son to me, won&rsquo;t you? But of course you&rsquo;re a wise man trotting
+      off to bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. The Duke is a very old friend of mine, and so&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perfect. We&rsquo;ll meet then. They say it&rsquo;s really locomotor ataxia, poor
+      fellow I but&mdash;ah, there&rsquo;s Fritz!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald looked at her with a sudden inquiring shrewdness, that lit up
+      his faded eyes and made them for a moment almost young. He had caught a
+      sound of vexation in her voice, which reminded him oddly of the sound in
+      her singing voice when Miss Filberte was making a fiasco of the
+      accompaniment. Lord Holme was visible and audible in the hall. His immense
+      form towered above his guests, and his tremendous bass voice dominated the
+      hum of conversation round him. Lady Holme could see from where she stood
+      that he was in a jovial and audacious mood. The dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley
+      had evidently been well cooked and gay. Fritz had the satisfied and rather
+      larky air of a man who has been having one good time and intends to have
+      another. She glanced into the drawing-rooms. They were crammed. She saw in
+      the distance Lady Cardington talking to Sir Donald Ulford. Both of them
+      looked rather pathetic. Mrs. Wolfstein was not far off, standing in the
+      midst of a group and holding forth with almost passionate vivacity and
+      self-possession. Her husband was gliding sideways through the crowd with
+      his peculiarly furtive and watchful air, which always suggested the old
+      nursery game, &ldquo;Here I am on Tom Tiddler&rsquo;s ground, picking up gold and
+      silver.&rdquo; Lady Manby was laughing in a corner with an archdeacon who looked
+      like a guardsman got up in fancy dress. Mr. Bry, his eyeglass fixed in his
+      left eye, came towards the staircase, moving delicately like Agag, and
+      occasionally dropping a cold or sarcastic word to an acquaintance. He
+      reached Lady Holme when Lord Holme was half-way up the stairs, and at once
+      saw him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A giant refreshed with wine,&rdquo; he observed, dropping his eyeglass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was such a perfect description of Lord Holme in his present condition
+      that two or three people who were standing with Lady Holme smiled, looking
+      down the staircase. Lady Holme did not smile. She continued chattering,
+      but her face wore a discontented expression. Mr. Bry noticed it. There
+      were very few things he did not notice, although he claimed to be the most
+      short-sighted man in London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why is your husband so dutiful to-night?&rdquo; he murmured to his hostess. &ldquo;I
+      thought he always had to go into the country to look at a gee-gee on these
+      occasions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He had to be in town for the dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley. I begged him to
+      come back in&mdash;How did do! How did do! Yes, very. Mr. Raleigh, do tell
+      the opera people not to put on Romeo too often this season. Of course
+      Melba&rsquo;s splendid in it, and all that, but still&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bry fixed his eyeglass again, and began to smile gently like an
+      evil-minded baby. Lord Holme&rsquo;s brown face was full in view, grinning. His
+      eyes were looking about with unusual vivacity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How early you are, Fritz! Good boy. I want you to look after&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say, Vi, why didn&rsquo;t you tell me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bry, letting his eyeglass fall, looked abstracted and lent an
+      attentive ear. If he were not playing prompter to social comedies he
+      generally stood in the wings, watching and listening to them with a cold
+      amusement that was seldom devoid of a spice of venom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell you what, Fritz?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That Miss Schley was comin&rsquo; to-night. Everyone&rsquo;s talking about her. I sat
+      next Laycock at dinner and he was ravin&rsquo;. Told me she was to be here and I
+      didn&rsquo;t know it. Rather ridiculous, you know. Where is she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Somewhere in the rooms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s she like?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&mdash;I don&rsquo;t know. She&rsquo;s in black. Go and look for her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme strode on. As he passed Mr. Bry he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say, Bry, d&rsquo;you know Miss Pimpernel Schley?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naturally.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come with me, there&rsquo;s a good chap, and&mdash;what&rsquo;s she like?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As they went on into the drawing-rooms Mr. Bry dropped out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some people say she&rsquo;s like Lady Holme.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like Vi! Is she? Laycock&rsquo;s been simply ravin&rsquo;&mdash;simply ravin&rsquo;&mdash;and
+      Laycock&rsquo;s not a feller to&mdash;where is she?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shall come to her. So there was no gee-gee to look at in the country
+      to-night?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme burst into a roar of laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s the vestal tending her lamp,&rdquo; said Mr. Bry a moment later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The what up to what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Pimpernel Schley keeping the fire of adoration carefully alight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I see! Jove, what a skin, though! Eh! Isn&rsquo;t it? She is deuced like Vi
+      at a distance. Vi looks up just like that when she&rsquo;s singin&rsquo;. Doesn&rsquo;t she,
+      though? Eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went on towards her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bry followed him, murmuring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The giant refreshed with wine. No gee-gee to-night. No gee-gee.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      &ldquo;THE brougham is at the door, my lady.&rdquo;
+     </h3>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell his lordship.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The butler went out, and Lady Holme&rsquo;s maid put a long black cloak
+      carefully over her mistress&rsquo;s shoulders. While she did this Lady Holme
+      stood quite still gazing into vacancy. They were in the now deserted
+      yellow drawing-room, which was still brilliantly lit, and full of the
+      already weary-looking flowers which had been arranged for the reception.
+      The last guest had gone and the carriage was waiting to take the Holmes to
+      Arkell House.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The maid did something to the diamonds in Lady Holme&rsquo;s hair with deft
+      fingers, and the light touch seemed to wake Lady Holme from a reverie. She
+      went to a mirror and looked into it steadily. The maid stood behind. After
+      a moment Lady Holme lifted her hand suddenly to her head, as if she were
+      going to take off her tiara. The maid could not repress a slight movement
+      of startled astonishment. Lady Holme saw it in the glass, dropped her
+      hand, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;C&rsquo;est tout, Josephine. Vous pouvez vous en aller.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Merci, miladi.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She went out quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two or three minutes passed. Then Lord Holme&rsquo;s deep bass voice was
+      audible, humming vigorously:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;Ina, Ina, oh, you should have seen her!
+     Seen her with her eyes cast down.
+       She looked upon the floor,
+         And all the Johnnies swore
+   That Ina, Ina&mdash;oh, you should have seen her!&mdash;
+     That Ina was the <i>chic</i>-est girl in town.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme frowned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fritz!&rdquo; she called rather sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme appeared with a coat thrown over his arm and a hat in his hand.
+      His brown face was beaming with self-satisfaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, old girl, ready? What&rsquo;s up now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you wouldn&rsquo;t sing those horrible music-hall songs. You know I hate
+      them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Music-hall! I like that. Why, it&rsquo;s the best thing in <i>The Chick from
+      the Army and Navy</i> at the Blue Theatre.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s disgustingly vulgar.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What next? Why, I saw the Lord Chan&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I daresay you did. Vulgarity will appeal to the Saints of Heaven next
+      season if things go on as they&rsquo;re going now. Come along.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She went out of the room, walking more quickly than she usually walked,
+      and holding herself very upright. Lord Holme followed, forming the words
+      of his favourite song with his lips, and screwing up his eyes as if he
+      were looking at an improper peepshow. When they were in the electric
+      brougham, which spun along with scarcely any noise, he began:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say, Vi, how long&rsquo;ve you known Miss Schley?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know. Some weeks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why didn&rsquo;t you tell me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did. I said I had met her at Mrs. Wolfstein&rsquo;s lunch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, but why didn&rsquo;t you tell me how like you she was?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was complete silence in the brougham for a minute. Then Lady Holme
+      said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had no idea she was like me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you&rsquo;re blind, old girl. She&rsquo;s like you if you&rsquo;d been a chorus-girl
+      and known a lot of things you don&rsquo;t know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really. Perhaps she has been a chorus-girl.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll bet she has, whether she says so or not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave a deep chuckle. Lady Holme&rsquo;s gown rustled as she leaned back in
+      her corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And she&rsquo;s goin&rsquo; to Arkell House. Americans are the very devil for gettin&rsquo; 
+      on. Laycock was tellin&rsquo; me to-night that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t wish to hear Mr. Laycock&rsquo;s stories, Fritz. They don&rsquo;t amuse me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, p&rsquo;r&rsquo;aps they&rsquo;re hardly the thing for you, Vi. But they&rsquo;re deuced
+      amusin&rsquo; for all that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He chuckled again. Lady Holme felt an intense desire to commit some act of
+      physical violence. She shut her eyes. In a minute she heard her husband
+      once more beginning to hum the refrain about Ina. How utterly careless he
+      was of her desires and requests. There was something animal in his
+      forgetfulness and indifference. She had loved the animal in him. She did
+      love it. Something deep down in her nature answered eagerly to its call.
+      But at moments she hated it almost with fury. She hated it now and longed
+      to use the whip, as the tamer in a menagerie uses it when one of his
+      beasts shows its teeth, or sulkily refuses to perform one of its tricks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme went on calmly humming till the brougham stopped in the long
+      line of carriages that stretched away into the night from the great
+      portico of Arkell House.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      People were already going in to supper when the Holmes arrived. The Duke,
+      upon whom a painful malady was beginning to creep, was bravely welcoming
+      his innumerable guests. He found it already impossible to go unaided up
+      and down stairs, and sat in a large armchair close to the ball-room, with
+      one of his pretty daughters near him, talking brightly, and occasionally
+      stealing wistful glances at the dancers, who were visible through a high
+      archway to his left. He was a thin, middle-aged man, with a curious,
+      transparent look in his face&mdash;something crystalline that was nearly
+      beautiful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duchess was swarthy and masterful, very intelligent and <i>grande dame</i>.
+      Vivacity was easy to her. People said she had been a good hostess in her
+      cradle, and that she had presided over the ceremony of her own baptism in
+      a most autocratic and successful manner. It was quite likely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a word with the Duke, Lady Holme went slowly towards the ballroom
+      with her husband. She did not mean to dance, and began to refuse the
+      requests of would-be partners with charming protestations of fatigue. Lord
+      Holme was scanning the ballroom with his big brown eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going to dance, Fritz?&rdquo; asked Lady Holme, nodding to Robin
+      Pierce, whom she had just seen standing at a little distance with Rupert
+      Carey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The latter had not seen her yet, but as Robin returned her nod he looked
+      hastily round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I promised Miss Schley to struggle through a waltz with her. Wonder
+      if she&rsquo;s dancin&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme bowed, a little ostentatiously, to Rupert Carey. Her husband
+      saw it and began at once to look pugilistic. He could not say anything,
+      for at this moment two or three men strolled up to speak to Lady Holme.
+      While she was talking to them, Pimpernel Schley came in sight waltzing
+      with Mr. Laycock, one of those abnormally thin, narrow-featured, smart
+      men, with bold, inexpressive ayes, in whom London abounds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme&rsquo;s under-jaw resumed its natural position, and he walked away
+      and was lost in the crowd, following the two dancers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take me in to supper, Robin. I&rsquo;m tired.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This way. I thought you were never coming.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;People stayed so late. I can&rsquo;t think why. I&rsquo;m sure it was dreadfully dull
+      and foolish. How odd Mr. Carey&rsquo;s looking! When I bowed to him just now he
+      didn&rsquo;t return it, but only stared at me as if I were a stranger.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin Pierce made no rejoinder. They descended the great staircase and
+      went towards the picture-gallery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Find a corner where we can really talk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke eagerly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here&mdash;this is perfect.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They sat down at a table for two that was placed in an angle of the great
+      room. Upon the walls above them looked down a Murillo and a Velasquez.
+      Lady Holme was under the Murillo, which represented three Spanish street
+      boys playing a game in the dust with pieces of money.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A table for two,&rdquo; said Robin Pierce. &ldquo;I have always said that the Duchess
+      understands the art of entertaining better than anyone in London, except
+      you&mdash;when you choose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To-night I really couldn&rsquo;t choose. Later on, I&rsquo;m going to give two or
+      three concerts. Is anything the matter with Mr. Carey?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I hope it isn&rsquo;t true what people are saying.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are they saying?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s he&rsquo;s not very judicious in one way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A footman poured champagne into her glass. Robin Pierce touched the glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. It would be too sad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us hope it isn&rsquo;t true, then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know him well. Is it true?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you care if it was?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at her earnestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I like Mr. Carey.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a rather unusual sound of sincerity in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what is it that you like in him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know. He talks shocking nonsense, of course, and is down on
+      people and things. And he&rsquo;s absurdly unsophisticated at moments, though he
+      knows the world so well. He&rsquo;s not like you&mdash;not a diplomat. But I
+      believe if he had a chance he might do something great.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin felt as if the hidden woman had suddenly begun to speak. Why did she
+      speak about Rupert Carey?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you like a man to do something great?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes. All women do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I perpetually hear you laughing at the big people&mdash;the Premiers,
+      the Chancellors, the Archbishops, the Generals of the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I&rsquo;ve always known them. And really they are so often quite absurd
+      and tiresome.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And&mdash;Rupert Carey?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, he&rsquo;s nothing at all, poor fellow! Still there&rsquo;s something in his face
+      that makes me think he could do an extraordinary thing if he had the
+      chance. I saw it there to-night when he didn&rsquo;t bow to me. There&rsquo;s Sir
+      Donald&rsquo;s son. And what a dreadful-looking woman just behind him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Leo Ulford was coming down the gallery with a gaunt, aristocratic,
+      harsh-featured girl. Behind him walked Mr. Bry, conducting a very young
+      old woman, immensely smart, immensely vivacious, and immensely pink, who
+      moved with an unnecessary alertness that was birdlike, and turned her head
+      about sharply on a long, thin neck decorated with a large diamond
+      dog-collar. Slung at her side there was a tiny jewelled tube.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s Mrs. Leo.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She must be over sixty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The quartet sat down at the next table. Leo Ulford did not see Lady Holme
+      at once. When he caught sight of her, he got up, came to her, stood over
+      her and pressed her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Been away,&rdquo; he explained. &ldquo;Only back to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been complaining to your father about you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A slow smile overspread his chubby face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I see you again after supper?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you can find me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can always manage to find what I want,&rdquo; he returned, still smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he had gone back to his table Robin Pierce said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How insolent Englishmen are allowed to be in Society! It always strikes
+      me after I&rsquo;ve been a long time abroad. Doesn&rsquo;t anybody mind it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean that you consider Mr. Ulford insolent?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In manner. Yes, I do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I think there&rsquo;s something like Fritz about him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin Pierce could not tell from the way this was said what would be a
+      safe remark to make. He therefore changed the subject.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know what Sir Donald&rsquo;s been doing?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. What?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Buying a Campo Santo.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A Campo Santo! Is he going to bury himself, then? What do you mean,
+      Robin?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He called it a Campo Santo to Carey. It&rsquo;s really a wonderful house in
+      Italy, on Como. Casa Felice is the name of it. I know it well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Casa Felice. How delicious! But is it the place for Sir Donald?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For an old, tired man. Casa Felice. Won&rsquo;t the name seem an irony to him
+      when he&rsquo;s there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think an old man can&rsquo;t be happy anywhere?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t imagine being happy old.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo;&mdash;she lowered her voice&mdash;&ldquo;if you want to know, look at Mrs.
+      Ulford.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your husk theory again. A question of looks. But you will grow old
+      gracefully&mdash;some day in the far future.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think I shall grow old at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I shall die before that comes&mdash;say at forty-five. I couldn&rsquo;t
+      live with wrinkles all over my face. No, Robin, I couldn&rsquo;t. And&mdash;look
+      at Mrs. Ulford!&mdash;perhaps an ear-trumpet set with opals.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do the wrinkles matter? But some day you&rsquo;ll find I&rsquo;m right. You&rsquo;ll
+      tell me so. You&rsquo;ll acknowledge that your charm comes from within, and has
+      survived the mutilation of the husk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mutilation! What a hideous sound that word has. Why don&rsquo;t all mutilated
+      people commit suicide at once? I should. Is Sir Donald going to live in
+      his happy house?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naturally. He&rsquo;ll be there this August. He&rsquo;s invited Rupert Carey to stay
+      there with him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose he will. Everybody always asks you everywhere. Diplomacy is so
+      universally&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She broke off. Far away, at the end of the gallery, she had caught sight
+      of Miss Schley coming in with her husband. They sat down at a table near
+      the door. Robin Pierce followed her eyes and understood her silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going on the first?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What to?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Schley&rsquo;s first night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it on the first? I didn&rsquo;t know. We can&rsquo;t. We&rsquo;re dining at Brayley
+      House that evening.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a pity!&rdquo; he said, with a light touch of half playful malice. &ldquo;You
+      would have seen her as she really is&mdash;from all accounts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what is Miss Schley really?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The secret enemy of censors.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You dislike her. Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t dislike her at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you like her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. I like very few women. I don&rsquo;t understand them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At any rate you understand&mdash;say Miss Schley&mdash;better than a man
+      would.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;a man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe all women think all men fools.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme laughed, not very gaily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t they?&rdquo; he insisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In certain ways, in certain relations of life, I suppose most men are&mdash;rather
+      short-sighted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like Mr. Bry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Bry is the least short-sighted man I know. That&rsquo;s why he always wears
+      an eyeglass.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To create an illusion?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who knows?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked down the long room. Between the heads of innumerable men and
+      women she could see Miss Schley. Her husband was hidden. She would have
+      preferred to see him. Miss Schley&rsquo;s head was by no means expressive of the
+      naked truth. It merely looked cool, self-possessed, and&mdash;so Lady
+      Holme said to herself&mdash;extremely American. What she meant by that she
+      could, perhaps, hardly have explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you admire Miss Schley&rsquo;s appearance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin Pierce spoke again with a touch of humorous malice. He knew Lady
+      Holme so well that he had no objection to seem wanting in tact to her when
+      he had a secret end to gain. She looked at him sharply; leaning forward
+      over the table and opening her eyes very wide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why are you forgetting your manners to-night and bombarding me with
+      questions?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The usual reason&mdash;devouring curiosity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated, looking at him. Then suddenly her face changed. Something,
+      some imp of adorable frankness, peeped out of it at him, and her whole
+      body seemed confiding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Schley is going about London imitating me. Now, isn&rsquo;t that true?
+      Isn&rsquo;t she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe she is. Damned impertinence!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He muttered the last words under his breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can I admire her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something in the way she said that which touched him. He leaned
+      forward to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not punish her for it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Reveal what she can&rsquo;t imitate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All you hide and I divine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She mimics the husk. She couldn&rsquo;t mimic the kernel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ice, my lady?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme started. Till the footman spoke she had not quite realised how
+      deeply interested she was in the conversation. She helped herself to some
+      ice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can go on, Mr. Pierce,&rdquo; she said when the man had gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head, smiling. Her body still looked soft and attractive,
+      and deliciously feminine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Schley happens to have some vague resemblance to you in height and
+      colouring. She is a clever mimic. She used to be a professional mimic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was how she first became known.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In America?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should she imitate me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you been nice to her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know. Yes. Nice enough.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think she dislikes me then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do women want definite reasons for half the things they do? Miss Schley
+      may not say to herself that she dislikes you, any more than you say to
+      yourself that you dislike her. Nevertheless&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We should never get on. No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Consider yourselves enemies&mdash;for no reasons, or secret woman&rsquo;s
+      reasons. It&rsquo;s safer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme looked down the gallery again. Miss Schley&rsquo;s fair head was
+      bending forward to some invisible person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the mimicry?&rdquo; she asked, turning again to Robin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can only be applied to mannerisms, to the ninety-ninth part, the
+      inconsiderable fraction of your charm. Miss Schley could never imitate the
+      hidden woman, the woman who sings, the woman who laughs at, denies herself
+      when she is not singing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But no one cares for her&mdash;if she exists.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a hint of secret bitterness in her voice when she said that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give her a chance&mdash;and find out. But you know already that numbers
+      do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried to look into her eyes, but she avoided his gaze and got up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take me back to the ballroom.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are going to dance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to see who&rsquo;s here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As they passed the next table Lady Holme nodded to Leo Ulford. He bowed in
+      return and indicated that he was following almost immediately. Mrs. Ulford
+      put down her ear-trumpet, turned her head sharply, and looked at Lady
+      Holme sideways, fluttering her pink eyelids.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How exactly like a bird she is,&rdquo; murmured Lady Holme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly&mdash;moulting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme meant as she walked down the gallery; to stop and speak a few
+      gay words to Miss Schley and her husband, but when she drew near to their
+      table Lord Holme was holding forth with such unusual volubility, and Miss
+      Schley was listening with such profound attention, that it did not seem
+      worth while, and she went quietly on, thinking they did not see her. Lord
+      Holme did not. But the American smiled faintly as Lady Holme and Robin
+      disappeared into the hall. Then she said, in reply to her animated
+      companion:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m sure if I am like Lady Holme I ought to say <i>Te Deum</i> and think
+      myself a lucky girl. I ought, indeed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme had not been in the ballroom five minutes before Leo Ulford
+      came up smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here I am,&rdquo; he remarked, as if the statement were certain to give
+      universal satisfaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin looked black and moved a step closer to Lady Holme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you, Mr. Pierce,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She took Leo Ulford&rsquo;s arm, nodded to Robin, and walked away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin stood looking after her. He started when he heard Carey&rsquo;s voice
+      saying:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why d&rsquo;you let her dance with that blackguard?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hulloa, Carey?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come to the supper-room. I want to have a yarn with you. And all this&rdquo;&mdash;he
+      made a wavering, yet violent, gesture towards the dancers&mdash;&ldquo;might be
+      a Holbein.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A dance of death? What nonsense you talk!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come to the supper-room.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin looked at his friend narrowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re bored. Let&rsquo;s go and take a stroll down Park Lane.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Well, then, if you won&rsquo;t&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his arm through Carey&rsquo;s, and they went out together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme was generally agreeable to men. She was particularly charming
+      to Leo Ulford that night. He was not an interesting man, but he seemed to
+      interest her very much. They sat out together for a long time in the
+      corner of a small drawing-room, far away from the music. She had said to
+      Robin Pierce that she thought there was something about Leo Ulford that
+      was like her husband, and when she talked to him she found the resemblance
+      even greater than she had supposed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme and Leo Ulford were of a similar type. Both were strong,
+      healthy, sensual, slangy, audacious in a dull kind of fashion&mdash;Lady
+      Holme did not call it dull&mdash;serenely and perpetually intent upon
+      having everything their own way in life. Both lived for the body and
+      ignored the soul, as they would have ignored a man with a fine brain, a
+      passionate heart, a narrow chest and undeveloped muscles. Such a man they
+      would have summed up as &ldquo;a rotter.&rdquo; If they ever thought of the soul at
+      all, it was probably under some such comprehensive name. Both had the same
+      simple and blatant aim in life, an aim which governed all their actions
+      and was the generator of most of their thoughts. This aim, expressed in
+      their own terse language, was &ldquo;to do themselves jolly well.&rdquo; Both had, so
+      far, succeeded in their ambition. Both were, consequently, profoundly
+      convinced of their own cleverness. Intellectual conceit&mdash;the conceit
+      of the brain&mdash;is as nothing to physical conceit&mdash;the conceit of
+      the body. Acute intelligence is always capable of uneasiness, can always
+      make room for a doubt. But the self-satisfaction of the little-brained and
+      big-muscled man who has never had a rebuff or a day&rsquo;s illness is cased in
+      triple brass. Lady Holme knew this self-satisfaction well. She had seen it
+      staring out of her husband&rsquo;s big brown eyes. She saw it now in the boyish
+      eyes of Leo Ulford. She was at home with it and rather liked it. In truth,
+      it had at least one merit&mdash;from the woman&rsquo;s point of view&mdash;it
+      was decisively masculine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether Leo Ulford was, or was not, a blackguard; as Mrs. Trent had
+      declared, did not matter to her. Three-quarters of the men she knew were
+      blackguards according to the pinched ideas of Little Peddlington; and Mrs.
+      Trent might originally have issued from there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She got on easily with Leo Ulford because she was experienced in the
+      treatment of his type. She knew exactly what to do with it; how to lead it
+      on, how to fend it off, how to throw cold water on its enterprise without
+      dashing it too greatly, how to banish any little, sulky cloud that might
+      appear on the brassy horizon without seeming to be solicitous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The type is amazingly familiar to the woman of the London world. She can
+      recognize it at a glance, and can send it in its armchair canter round the
+      circus with scarce a crack of the ring-mistress&rsquo;s whip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To-night Lady Holme enjoyed governing it more than usual, and for a subtle
+      reason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In testing her power upon Leo Ulford she was secretly practising her
+      siren&rsquo;s art, with a view that would have surprised and disgusted him,
+      still more amazed him, had he known it. She was firing at the dummy in
+      order that later she might make sure of hitting the living man. Leo Ulford
+      was the dummy. The living man would be Fritz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both dummy and living man were profoundly ignorant of her moving
+      principle. The one was radiant with self-satisfaction under her fusillade.
+      The other, ignorant of it so far, would have been furious in the knowledge
+      of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She knew-and laughed at the men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently she turned the conversation, which was getting a little too
+      personal&mdash;on Leo Ulford&rsquo;s side&mdash;to a subject very present in her
+      mind that night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you have a talk with Miss Schley the other day after I left?&rdquo; she
+      asked. &ldquo;I ran away on purpose to give you a chance. Wasn&rsquo;t it good-natured
+      of me, when I was really longing to stay?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Leo Ulford stretched out his long legs slowly, his type&rsquo;s way of purring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;d rather have gone on yarning with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you did have a talk! She was at my house to-night, looking quite
+      delicious. You know she&rsquo;s conquered London?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That sort&rsquo;s up to every move on the board.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean? What board?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him with innocent inquiry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish men didn&rsquo;t know so much,&rdquo; she added; with a sort of soft vexation.
+      &ldquo;You have so many opportunities of acquiring knowledge and we so few&mdash;if
+      we respect the <i>convenances</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Schley wouldn&rsquo;t respect &lsquo;em.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He chuckled, and again drew up and then stretched out his legs, slowly and
+      luxuriously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can you know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She&rsquo;s not the sort that does. She&rsquo;s the sort that&rsquo;s always kicking over
+      the traces and keeping it dark. I know &lsquo;em.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you&rsquo;re rather unkind. Miss Schley&rsquo;s mother arrives to-morrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Leo Ulford put up his hands to his baby moustache and shook with laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the only thing she wanted to set her up in business,&rdquo; he
+      ejaculated. &ldquo;A marmar. I do love those Americans!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you speak as if Mrs. Schley were a stage property!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll bet she is. Wait till you see her. Why, it&rsquo;s a regular profession in
+      the States, being a marmar. I tell you what&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He leaned forward and fixed his blue eyes on Lady Holme, with an air of
+      profound acuteness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going to see her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Schley? I daresay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you remember what I tell you. She&rsquo;ll be as dry as a dog-biscuit,
+      wear a cap and spectacles with gold rims, and say nothing but &lsquo;Oh, my, yes
+      indeed!&rsquo; to everything that&rsquo;s said to her. Does she come from Susanville?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How extraordinary! I believe she does.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Leo Ulford&rsquo;s laugh was triumphant and prolonged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s where they breed marmars!&rdquo; he exclaimed, when he was able to
+      speak. &ldquo;Women are stunning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid I don&rsquo;t quite understand,&rdquo; said Lady Holme, preserving a quiet
+      air of pupilage. &ldquo;But perhaps it&rsquo;s better I shouldn&rsquo;t. Anyhow, I am quite
+      sure Miss Schley&rsquo;s mother will be worthy of her daughter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You may bet your bottom dollar on that. She&rsquo;ll be what they call &lsquo;a
+      sootable marmar.&rsquo; I must get my wife to shoot a card on her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope you&rsquo;ll introduce me to Mrs. Ulford. I should like to know her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yours isn&rsquo;t the voice to talk down a trumpet,&rdquo; said Leo Ulford, with a
+      sudden air of surliness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like to know her now I know you and your father.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the mention of his father Leo Ulford&rsquo;s discontented expression
+      increased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My father&rsquo;s a rotter,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Never cared for anything. No shot to
+      speak of. He can sit on a horse all right. Had to, in South America and
+      Morocco and all those places. But he never really cared about it, I don&rsquo;t
+      believe. Why, he&rsquo;d rather look at a picture than a thoroughbred any day!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At this moment Sir Donald wandered into the room, with his hands behind
+      his thin back, and his eyes searching the walls. The Duke possessed a
+      splendid collection of pictures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There he is!&rdquo; said Leo, gruffly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He doesn&rsquo;t see us. Go and tell him I&rsquo;m here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why? he might go out again if we keep mum.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I want to speak to him. Sir Donald! Sir Donald!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald turned round at the second summons and came towards them,
+      looking rather embarrassed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hulloa, pater!&rdquo; said Leo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald nodded to his son with a conscientious effort to seem familiar
+      and genial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hulloa!&rdquo; he rejoined in a hollow voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your boy has been instructing me in American mysteries,&rdquo; said Lady Holme.
+      &ldquo;Do take me to the ballroom, Sir Donald.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Leo Ulford&rsquo;s good humour returned as abruptly as it had departed. Her
+      glance at him, as she spoke, had seemed to hint at a secret understanding
+      between them in which no one&mdash;certainly not his father&mdash;was
+      included.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pater can tell you all about the pictures,&rdquo; he said, with a comfortable
+      assurance, which he did not strive to disguise, that she would be
+      supremely bored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared at her hard, gave a short laugh, and lounged away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he had gone, Sir Donald still seemed embarrassed. He looked at Lady
+      Holme apologetically, and in his faded eyes she saw an expression that
+      reminded her of Lady Cardington. It was surely old age asking forgiveness
+      for its existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not feel much pity for it, but with the woman of the world&rsquo;s
+      natural instinct to smooth rough places&mdash;especially for a man&mdash;she
+      began to devote herself to cheering Sir Donald up, as they slowly made
+      their way through room after room towards the distant sound of the music.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hear you&rsquo;ve been plunging!&rdquo; she began gaily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald looked vague.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid I scarcely&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forgive me. I catch slang from my husband. He&rsquo;s ruining my English. I
+      mean that I hear you&rsquo;ve been investing&mdash;shall I say your romance?&mdash;in
+      a wonderful place abroad, with a fascinating name. I hope you&rsquo;ll get
+      enormous interest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A faint colour, it was like the ghost of a blush, rose in Sir Donald&rsquo;s
+      withered cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, Mr. Carey&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He checked himself abruptly, remembering whet he had heard from Robin
+      Pierce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Mr. Pierce was my informant. He knows your place and says it&rsquo;s too
+      wonderful. I adore the name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Casa Felice. You would not advise me to change it, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Change it! Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I&mdash;one should not, perhaps, insist beforehand that one is
+      going to have happiness, which must always lie on the knees of the gods.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I believe in defiance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an audacious sound in her voice. Her long talk with Leo Ulford
+      had given her back her belief in herself, her confidence in her beauty,
+      her reliance on her youth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have a right to believe in it. But Casa Felice is mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even to buy it was a defiance&mdash;in a way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps so. But then&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But then you have set out and you must not turn back, Sir Donald. Baptise
+      your wonderful house yourself by filling it with happiness. Another gave
+      it its name. Give it yourself the reason for the name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Happiness seemed to shine suddenly in the sound of her speaking voice, as
+      it shone in her singing voice when the theme of her song was joy. Sir
+      Donald&rsquo;s manner lost its self-consciousness, its furtive diffidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&mdash;you come and give my house its real baptism,&rdquo; he said, with a
+      flash of ardour that, issuing from him, was like fire bursting out of a
+      dreary marsh land. &ldquo;Will you? This August?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; she hesitated. &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t Mr. Carey coming?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At this moment they came into a big drawing-room that immediately preceded
+      the ballroom, with which it communicated by an immense doorway hung with
+      curtains of white velvet. They could see in the distance the dancers
+      moving rather indifferently in a lancers. Lord Holme and Miss Schley were
+      dancing in the set nearest to the doorway, and on the side that faced the
+      drawing-room. Directly Lady Holme saw the ballroom she saw them. A sudden
+      sense of revolt, the defiance of joy carried on into the defiance of
+      anger, rose up in her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If Mr. Carey is coming I&rsquo;ll come too, and baptise your house,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald looked surprised, but he answered, with a swiftness that did
+      not seem to belong to old age:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is a bargain, Lady Holme. I regard that as a bargain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll not go back on it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a hard sound in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They entered the ballroom just as the band played the closing bars of the
+      lancers, and the many sets began to break up and melt into a formless
+      crowd which dispersed in various directions. The largest number of people
+      moved towards the archway near which the Duke was still sitting, bravely
+      exerting himself to be cheerful. Lady Holme and Sir Donald became involved
+      in this section of the crowd, and naturally followed in its direction.
+      Lord Holme and Miss Schley were at a short distance behind them, and Lady
+      Holme was aware of this. The double defiance was still alive in her, and
+      was strengthened by a clear sound which reached her ears for a moment,
+      then was swallowed up by the hum of conversation from many intervening
+      voices&mdash;the sound of the American&rsquo;s drawling tones raised to say
+      something she could not catch. As she came out into the hall, close to the
+      Duke&rsquo;s chair, she saw Rupert Carey trying to make his way into the
+      ballroom against the stream of dancers. His face was flushed. There were
+      drops of perspiration on his forehead, and the violent expression that was
+      perpetually visible in his red-brown eyes, lighting them up as with a
+      flame, seemed partially obscured as if by a haze. The violence of them was
+      no longer vivid but glassy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme did not notice all this. The crowd was round her, and she was
+      secretly preoccupied. She merely saw that Rupert Carey was close to her,
+      and she knew who was following behind her. A strong impulse came upon her
+      and she yielded to it without hesitation. As she reached Rupert Carey she
+      stopped and held out her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Carey,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been wanting to speak to you all the evening.
+      Why didn&rsquo;t you ask me to dance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She spoke very distinctly. Carey stood still and stared at her, and now
+      she noticed the flush on his face and the unnatural expression in his
+      eyes. She understood at once what was the matter and repented of her
+      action. But it was too late to draw back. Carey stared dully for an
+      instant, as if he scarcely knew who she was. Then, with a lurch, he came
+      closer to her, and, with a wavering movement, tried to find her hand,
+      which she had withdrawn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is it?&rdquo; he muttered in a thick voice. &ldquo;Where is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He groped frantically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir Donald!&rdquo; Lady Holme whispered sharply, while the people nearest to
+      them began to exchange glances of surprise or of amusement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She pressed his arm and he tried to draw her on. But Carey was exactly in
+      front of her. It was impossible for her to escape. He found her hand at
+      last, took it limply in his, bent down and began to kiss it, mumbling some
+      loud but incoherent words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duke, who from his chair, was a witness of the scene, tried to raise
+      himself up, and a vivid spot of scarlet burned in his almost transparent
+      cheeks. His daughter hastened forward to stop his effort. Lady Holme
+      dragged her hand away violently, and Carey suddenly burst into tears. Sir
+      Donald hurried Lady Holme on, and Carey tried to follow, but was forcibly
+      prevented by two men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When at length Lady Holme found herself at the other end of the great
+      hall, she turned and saw her husband coming towards her with a look of
+      fury on his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish to go home,&rdquo; she said to him in a low voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She withdrew her hand from Sir Donald&rsquo;s arm and quietly bade him good-bye.
+      Lord Holme did not say a word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is the Duchess?&rdquo; Lady Holme added. &ldquo;Ah, there she is!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She saw the Duchess hurriedly going towards the place where the Duke was
+      sitting, intercepted her swiftly, and bade her good-night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, Fritz!&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was conscious that a number of people were watching her, and her voice
+      and manner were absolutely unembarrassed. A footman took the number of her
+      cloak from Lord Holme and fetched the cloak. A voice cried in the
+      distance, &ldquo;Lord Holme&rsquo;s carriage!&rdquo; Another, and nearer voice, echoed the
+      call. She passed slowly between two lines of men over a broad strip of
+      carpet to the portico, and stepped into the brougham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As it glided away into the night she heard her husband&rsquo;s loud breathing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not speak for two or three minutes, but breathed like a man who had
+      been running, and moved violently in the carriage as if to keep still were
+      intolerable to him. The window next to him was up. He let it down. Then he
+      turned right round to his wife, who was leaning back in her corner wrapped
+      up in her black cloak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With the Duke sittin&rsquo; there!&rdquo; he said in a loud voice. &ldquo;With the Duke
+      sittin&rsquo; there!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a sound of outrage in the voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t I kick that sweep out of the house?&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe you asked Mr. Carey not to call anymore.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme&rsquo;s voice had no excitement in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Asked him! I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t make such a noise, Fritz. The men will hear you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told him if he ever came again I&rsquo;d have him put out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, he never has come again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What d&rsquo;you mean by speakin&rsquo; to him? What d&rsquo;you mean by it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme knew that her husband was a thoroughly conventional man, and,
+      like all conventional men, had a horror of a public scene in which any
+      woman belonging to him was mixed up. Such a scene alone was quite enough
+      to rouse his wrath. But there was in his present anger something deeper,
+      more brutal, than any rage caused by a breach of the conventions. His
+      jealousy was stirred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He didn&rsquo;t speak to you. You spoke to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme did not deny it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I heard every word you said,&rdquo; continued Lord Holme, beginning to breathe
+      hard again. &ldquo;I&mdash;I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme felt that he was longing to strike her, that if he had been the
+      same man, but a collier or a labourer, born in another class of life, he
+      would not have hesitated to beat her. The tradition in which he had been
+      brought up controlled him. But she knew that if he could have beaten her
+      he would have hated her less, that his sense of bitter wrong would have at
+      once diminished. In self-control it grew. The spark rose to a flame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re a damned shameful woman!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The brougham drew up softly before their house. Lord Holme, who was seated
+      on the side next the house, got out first. He did not wait on the pavement
+      to assist his wife, but walked up the steps, opened the door, and went
+      into the hall. Lady Holme followed. She saw her husband, with the light
+      behind him, standing with his hand on the handle of the hall door. For an
+      instant she thought that he was going to shut her out. He actually pushed
+      the door till the light was almost hidden. Then he flung it open with a
+      bang, threw down his hat and strode upstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If he had shut her out! She found herself wondering what would have become
+      of her, where she would have gone. She would have had to go to the Coburg,
+      or to Claridge&rsquo;s, without a maid, without luggage. As she slowly came
+      upstairs she heard her husband go into the drawing-room. Was he waiting
+      for her there? or did he wish to avoid her? When she reached the broad
+      landing she hesitated. She was half inclined to go in audaciously, to
+      laugh in his face; turn his fury into ridicule, tell him she was the sort
+      of woman who is born to do as she likes, to live as she chooses, to think
+      of nothing but her own will, consult nothing but her whims of the moment.
+      But she went on and into her bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Josephine was there and began to take the diamonds out of her hair. Lady
+      Holme did not say a word. She was listening intently for the sound of any
+      movement below. She heard nothing. When she was undressed, and there was
+      nothing more for the maid to do, she began to feel uneasy, as if she would
+      rather not dismiss the girl. But it was very late. Josephine strangled her
+      yawns with difficulty. There was no excuse for keeping her up any longer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The maid went out, leaving Lady Holme standing in the middle of the big
+      bedroom. Next to it on one side was Lord Holme&rsquo;s dressing-room. On the
+      other side there was a door leading into Lady Holme&rsquo;s boudoir. Almost
+      directly after Josephine had gone Lady Holme heard the outer door of this
+      room opened, and the heavy step of her husband. It moved about the room,
+      stopped, moved about again. What could he be doing? She stood where she
+      was, listening. Suddenly the door between the rooms was thrown open and
+      Lord Holme appeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where&rsquo;s the red book?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The red book!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is it? D&rsquo;you hear?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you want it for?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That sweep&rsquo;s address.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you going to do? Write to him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Write to him!&rdquo; said Lord Holme, with bitter contempt. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to
+      thrash him. Where is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are going now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve not come up to answer questions. I&rsquo;ve come for the red book. Where
+      is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The little drawer at the top on the right hand of the writing-table.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme turned back into the boudoir, went to the writing-table, found
+      the book, opened it, found the address and wrote it down on a bit of
+      paper. He folded the paper up anyhow and thrust it into his waistcoat
+      pocket. Then, without saying another word to his wife, or looking at her,
+      he went out and down the staircase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She followed him on to the landing, and stood there till she heard the
+      hall door shut with a bang.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A clock below struck four. She went back into the bedroom and sank into an
+      armchair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A slight sense of confusion floated over her mind for a moment, like a
+      cloud. She was not accustomed to scenes. There had been one certainly when
+      Rupert Carey was forbidden to come to the house any more, but it had been
+      brief, and she had not been present at it. She had only heard of it
+      afterwards. Lord Holme had been angry then, and she had rather liked his
+      anger. She took it as, in some degree, a measure of his attachment to her.
+      And then she had had no feeling of being in the wrong or of humiliation.
+      She had been charming to Carey, as she was charming to all men. He had
+      lost his head. He had mistaken the relations existing between her and her
+      husband, and imagined that such a woman as she was must be unhappily mated
+      with such a man as Lord Holme. The passionate desire to console a
+      perfectly-contented woman had caused him to go too far, and bring down
+      upon himself a fiat of exile, which he could not defy since Lady Holme
+      permitted it to go forth, and evidently was not rendered miserable by it.
+      So the acquaintance with Rupert Carey had ceased, and life had slipped
+      along once more on wheels covered with india-rubber tyres.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now she had renewed the acquaintance publicly and with disastrous
+      results.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As she sat there she began to wonder at herself, at the strength of her
+      temper, the secret violence of her nature. She had yielded like a child to
+      a sudden impulse. She had not thought of consequences. She had ignored her
+      worldly knowledge. She had considered nothing, but had acted abruptly, as
+      any ignorant, uneducated woman might have acted. She had been the slave of
+      a mood. Or had she been the slave of another woman&mdash;of a woman whom
+      she despised?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Schley had certainly been the cause of the whole affair. Lady Holme
+      had spoken to Rupert Carey merely because she knew that her husband was
+      immediately behind her with the American. There had been within her at
+      that moment something of a broad, comprehensive feeling, mingled with the
+      more limited personal feeling of anger against another woman&rsquo;s successful
+      impertinence, a sentiment of revolt in which womanhood seemed to rise up
+      against the selfish tyrannies of men. As she had walked in the crowd, and
+      heard for an instant Miss Schley&rsquo;s drawlling voice speaking to her
+      husband, she had felt as if the forbidding of the acquaintance between
+      herself and Rupert Carey had been an act of tyranny, as if the
+      acquaintance between Miss Schley and her husband were a worse act of
+      tyranny. The feeling was wholly unreasonable, of course. How could Lord
+      Holme know that she wished to impose a veto, even as he had? And what
+      reason was there for such a veto? That lay deep down within her as woman&rsquo;s
+      instinct. No man could have understood it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now Lord Holme had gone out in the dead of the night to thrash Carey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She began to think about Carey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How disgusting he had been. A drunken man must be one of two things&mdash;either
+      terrible or absurd. Carey had been absurd&mdash;disgusting and absurd. It
+      had been better for him if he had been terrible. But mumblings and tears!
+      She remembered what she had said of Carey to Robin Pierce&mdash;that
+      something in his eyes, one of those expressions which are the children of
+      the eyes, or of the lines about the eyes, told her that he was capable of
+      doing something great. What an irony that her remark to Robin had been
+      succeeded by such a scene! And she heard again the ugly sound of Carey&rsquo;s
+      incoherent exclamations, and felt again the limp clasp of his hot, weak
+      hand, and saw again the tears running over his flushed, damp face. It was
+      all very nauseous. And yet&mdash;had she been wrong in what she had said
+      of him? Did she even think that she had been wrong now, after what had
+      passed?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What kind of great action had she thought he would be capable of if a
+      chance to do something great were thrown in his way? She said to herself
+      that she had spoken at random, as one perpetually speaks in Society. And
+      then she remembered Carey&rsquo;s eyes. They were ugly eyes. She had always
+      thought them ugly. Yet, now and then, there was something in them,
+      something to hold a woman&mdash;no, perhaps not that&mdash;but something
+      to startle a woman, to make her think, wonder, even to make her trust. And
+      the scene which had just occurred, with all its weakness, its fatuity, its
+      maundering display of degradation and the inability of any
+      self-government, had not somehow destroyed the impression made upon Lady
+      Holme by that something in Carey&rsquo;s eyes. What she had said to Robin Pierce
+      she might not choose ever to say again. She would not choose ever to say
+      it again&mdash;of that she was certain&mdash;but she had not ceased to
+      think it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A conviction based upon no evidence that could be brought forward to
+      convince anyone is the last thing that can be destroyed in a woman&rsquo;s
+      heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was nearly six o&rsquo;clock when Lady Holme heard a step coming up the
+      stairs. She was still sitting in the deep chair, and had scarcely moved.
+      The step startled her. She put her hands on the arms of the chair and
+      leaned forward. The step passed her bedroom. She heard the door of the
+      dressing-room opened and then someone moving about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fritz!&rdquo; she called. &ldquo;Fritz!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no answer. She got up and went quickly to the dressing-room. Her
+      husband was there in his shirt sleeves. His evening coat and waistcoat
+      were lying half on a chair, half on the floor, and he was in the act of
+      unfastening his collar. She looked into his face, trying to read it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go to bed!&rdquo; he said brutally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have you done?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s my business. Go to bed. D&rsquo;you hear?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated. Then she said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How dare you speak to me like that? Have you seen Mr. Carey?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme suddenly took his wife by the shoulders; pushed her out of the
+      room, shut the door, and locked it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They always slept in the same bedroom. Was he not going to bed at all?
+      What had happened? Lady Holme could not tell from his face or manner
+      anything of what had occurred. She looked at her clock and saw her husband
+      had been out of the house for two hours. Indignation and curiosity fought
+      within her; and she became conscious of an excitement such as she had
+      never felt before. Sleep was impossible, but she got into bed and lay
+      there listening to the noises made by her husband in his dressing-room.
+      She could just hear them faintly through the door. Presently they ceased.
+      A profound silence reigned. There was a sofa in the dressing-room. Could
+      he be trying to sleep on it? Such a thing seemed incredible to her. For
+      Lord Holme, although he could rough it when he was shooting or hunting, at
+      home or abroad, and cared little for inconvenience when there was anything
+      to kill, was devoted to comfort in ordinary life, and extremely exigent in
+      his own houses. For nothing, for nobody, had Lady Holme ever known him to
+      allow himself to be put out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She strained her ears as she lay in bed. For a long time the silence
+      lasted. She began to think her husband must have left the dressing-room,
+      when she heard a noise as if something&mdash;some piece of furniture&mdash;had
+      been kicked, and then a stentorian &ldquo;Damn!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly she burst out laughing. She shook against the pillows. She
+      laughed and laughed weakly; helplessly, till the tears ran down her
+      cheeks. And with those tears ran away her anger, the hot, strained
+      sensation that had been within her even since the scene at Arkell House.
+      If she had womanly pride it melted ignominiously. If she had feminine
+      dignity&mdash;that pure and sacred panoply which man ignores at his own
+      proper peril&mdash;it disappeared. The &ldquo;poor old Fritz&rdquo; feeling, which was
+      the most human, simple, happy thing in her heart, started into vivacity as
+      she realised the long legs flowing into air over the edge of the short
+      sofa, the pent-up fury&mdash;fury of the too large body on the too small
+      resting-place&mdash;which found a partial vent in the hallowed objurgation
+      of the British Philistine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With every moment that she lay in the big bed she was punishing Fritz. She
+      nestled down among the pillows. She stretched out her limbs luxuriously.
+      How easy it was to punish a man! Lying there she recalled her husband&rsquo;s
+      words, each detail of his treatment of her since she had spoken to Carey.
+      He had called her &ldquo;a damned shameful woman.&rdquo; That was of all the worst
+      offence. She told herself that she ought to, that she must, for that
+      expression alone, hate Fritz for ever. And then, immediately, she knew
+      that she had forgiven it already, without effort, without thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She understood the type with which she had to deal, the absurd boyishness
+      that was linked with the brutality of it, the lack of mind to give words
+      their true, their inmost meaning. Words are instruments of torture, or the
+      pattering confetti of a carnival, not by themselves but by the mind that
+      sends them forth. Fritz&rsquo;s exclamation might have roused eternal enmity in
+      her if it had been uttered by another man. Coming from Fritz it won its
+      pardon easily by having a brother, &ldquo;Damn.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She wondered how long her husband would be ruled by his sense of outrage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Towards seven she heard another movement; another indignant exclamation,
+      then the creak of furniture, a step, a rattling at the door. She turned on
+      her side towards the wall, shut her eyes and breathed lightly and
+      regularly. The key revolved, the door opened and closed, and she heard
+      feet shuffling cautiously over the carpet. A moment and Fritz was in bed.
+      Another moment, a long sigh, and he was asleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme still lay awake. Now that her attention was no longer fixed
+      upon her husband&rsquo;s immediate proceedings she began to wonder again what
+      had happened between him and Rupert Carey. She would find out in the
+      morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And presently she too slept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      IN the morning Lord Holme woke very late and in a different humour. Lady
+      Holme was already up, sitting by a little table and pouring out tea, when
+      he stretched himself, yawned, turned over, uttered two or three booming,
+      incohorent exclamations, and finally raised himself on one arm, exhibiting
+      a touzled head and a pair of blinking eyes, stared solemnly at his wife&rsquo;s
+      white figure and at the tea-table, and ejaculated:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tea?&rdquo; she returned, lifting up the silver teapot and holding it towards
+      him with an encouraging, half-playful gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme yawned again, put up his hands to his hair, and then looked
+      steadily at the teapot, which his wife was moving about in the sunbeams
+      that were shining in at the window. The morning was fine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tea, Fritz?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled and began to roll out of bed. But the action woke up his memory,
+      and when he was on his feet he looked at his wife again more doubtfully.
+      She saw that he was beginning, sleepily but definitely, to consider
+      whether he should go on being absolutely furious about the events of the
+      preceding night, and acted with promptitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be frightened,&rdquo; she said quickly. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve made up my mind to forgive
+      you. You&rsquo;re only a great schoolboy after all. Come along.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She began to pour out the tea. It made a pleasant little noise falling
+      into the cup. The sun was wonderfully bright in the pretty room, almost
+      Italian in its golden warmth. Lady Holme&rsquo;s black Pomeranian, Pixie, stood
+      on its hind legs to greet him. He came up to the sofa, still looking
+      undecided, but with a wavering light of dawning satisfaction in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You behaved damned badly last night,&rdquo; he growled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down beside his wife with a bump. She put up her hand to his rough,
+      brown cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We both behaved atrociously,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s your tea.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She poured in the cream and buttered a thin piece of toast. Lord Holme
+      sipped. As he put the cup down she held the piece of toast up to his
+      mouth. He took a bite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And we both do the Christian act and forgive each other,&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He leaned back. Sleep was flowing away from him, full consciousness of
+      life and events returning to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What made you speak to that feller?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drink your tea. I don&rsquo;t know. He looked miserable at being avoided, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miserable! He was drunk. He&rsquo;s done for himself in London, and pretty near
+      done for you too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As he thought about it all a cloud began to settle over his face. Lady
+      Holme saw it and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That depends on you, Fritz.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She nestled against him, put her hand over his, and kept on lifting his
+      hand softly and then letting it fall on his knee, as she went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That all depends on you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to look at her hand and his, following their movements almost
+      like a child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If we are all right together, obviously all right, very, very
+      par-ti-cu-lar-ly all right&mdash;voyez vous, mon petit chou?&mdash;they
+      will think nothing of it. &lsquo;Poor Mr. Carey! What a pity the Duke&rsquo;s
+      champagne is so good!&rsquo; That&rsquo;s what they&rsquo;ll say. But if we&mdash;you and I&mdash;are
+      not on perfect terms, if you behave like a bear that&rsquo;s been sitting on a
+      wasps&rsquo; nest&mdash;why then they&rsquo;ll say&mdash;they&rsquo;ll say&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;ll they say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They&rsquo;ll say, &lsquo;That was really a most painful scene at the Duke&rsquo;s. She&rsquo;s
+      evidently been behaving quite abominably. Those yellow women always bring
+      about all the tragedies&mdash;&lsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yellow women!&rdquo; Lord Holme ejaculated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked hard at his wife. It was evident that his mind was tacking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Schley heard what you said to the feller,&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;People who never speak hear everything&mdash;naturally.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How d&rsquo;you mean&mdash;never speak? Why, she&rsquo;s full of talk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How well she listened to him!&rdquo; was Lady Holme&rsquo;s mental comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If half the world heard it doesn&rsquo;t matter if you and I choose it
+      shouldn&rsquo;t. Unless&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unless what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unless you did anything last night&mdash;afterwards&mdash;that will make
+      a scandal?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He applied himself with energy to the toast. Lady Holme recognised, with a
+      chagrin which she concealed, that Lord Holme was not going to allow
+      himself to be &ldquo;managed&rdquo; into any revelation. She recognised it so
+      thoroughly that she left the subject at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We&rsquo;d better forgive and forget,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;After all, we are married and
+      I suppose we must stick together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a clever note of regret in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you sorry?&rdquo; Lord Holme said, with a manner that suggested a readiness
+      to be surly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That we&rsquo;re married?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat calmly considering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I? Well, I must think. It&rsquo;s so difficult to be sure. I must compare
+      you with other men&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it comes to that, I might do a bit of comparin&rsquo; too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should be the last to prevent you, old boy. But I&rsquo;m sure you&rsquo;ve often
+      done it already and always made up your mind afterwards that she wasn&rsquo;t
+      quite up to the marrying mark.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who wasn&rsquo;t?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The other&mdash;horrid creature.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He could not repress a chuckle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re deuced conceited,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve made me so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;how?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By marrying me first and adoring me afterwards.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They had finished tea and were no longer preoccupied with cups and
+      saucers. It was very bright in the room, very silent. Lord Holme looked at
+      his wife and remembered how much she was admired by other men, how many
+      men would give&mdash;whatever men are ready to give&mdash;to see her as
+      she was just then. It occurred to him that he would have been rather a
+      fool if he had yielded to his violent impulse and shut her out of the
+      house the previous night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re never to speak to that cad again,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;D&rsquo;you hear?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whisper it close in my ear and I&rsquo;ll try to hear. Your voice is so&mdash;what&rsquo;s
+      your expression&mdash;so infernally soft.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his great arm round her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;D&rsquo;you hear?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m trying.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll make you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether Lord Holme succeeded or not, Lady Holme had no opportunity&mdash;even
+      if she desired it&mdash;of speaking to Rupert Carey for some time. He left
+      London and went up to the North to stay with his mother. The only person
+      he saw before he went was Robin Pierce. He came round to Half Moon Street
+      early on the afternoon of the day after the Arkell House Ball. Robin was
+      at home and Carey walked in with his usual decision. He was very pale, and
+      his face looked very hard. Robin received him coldly and did not ask him
+      to sit down. That was not necessary, of course. But Robin was standing by
+      the door and did not move back into the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going North to-night,&rdquo; said Carey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. If you don&rsquo;t mind I&rsquo;ll sit down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin said nothing. Carey threw himself into an armchair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Going to see the mater. A funny thing&mdash;but she&rsquo;s always glad to see
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mothers have a knack that way. Lucky for sons like me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was intense bitterness in his voice, but there was a sound of
+      tenderness too. Robin shut the door but did not sit down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going to be in the country long?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t know. What time did you leave Arkell House last night?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not till after Lady Holme left.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was silent for a moment, biting his red moustache.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Were you in the hall after the last lancers?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You weren&rsquo;t?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke quickly, with a sort of relief, hesitated then added
+      sardonically:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But of course you know&mdash;and much worse than the worst. The art of
+      conversation isn&rsquo;t dead yet, whatever the&mdash;perhaps you saw me being
+      got out?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I didn&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you do know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naturally.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say, I wish you&rsquo;d let me have&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He checked himself abruptly, and muttered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good God! What a brute I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sprang up and walked about the room. Presently he stopped in front of
+      the statuette of the &ldquo;<i>Danseuse de Tunisie</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it the woman that does it all, or the fan?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know.
+      Sometimes I think it&rsquo;s one, and sometimes the other. Without the fan
+      there&rsquo;s purity, what&rsquo;s meant from the beginning&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By whom?&rdquo; said Robin. &ldquo;I thought you were an atheist?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, God! I don&rsquo;t know what I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned away from the statuette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With the fan there&rsquo;s so much more than purity, than what was meant to
+      complete us&mdash;as devils&mdash;men. But&mdash;mothers don&rsquo;t carry the
+      fan. And I&rsquo;m going North to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean to say that Lady Holme&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin&rsquo;s voice was stern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did she say that to me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did she say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That she wished to speak to me, to dance with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She said that? How can you know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I wasn&rsquo;t so drunk that I couldn&rsquo;t hear the voice from Eden. Pierce,
+      you know her. She likes you. Tell her to forgive as much as she can. Will
+      you? And tell her not to carry the fan again when fools like me are
+      about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, without more words, he went out of the room and left Robin
+      standing alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin looked at the statuette, and remembered what Sir Donald Ulford had
+      said directly he saw it&mdash;&ldquo;Forgive me, that fan makes that statuette
+      wicked.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor old Carey!&rdquo; he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His indignation at Carey&rsquo;s conduct, which had been hot, had nearly died
+      away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I had told him what she said about him at supper!&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then he began to wonder whether Lady Holme had changed her mind on
+      that subject. Surely she must have changed it. But one never knew&mdash;with
+      women. He took up his hat and gloves and went out. If Lady Holme was in he
+      meant to give her Carey&rsquo;s message. It was impossible to be jealous of
+      Carey now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme was not in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Robin walked away from Cadogan Square he was not sure whether he was
+      glad or sorry that he had not been able to see her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After his cup of early morning tea Lord Holme had seemed to be &ldquo;dear old
+      Fritz&rdquo; again, and Lady Holme felt satisfied with herself despite the
+      wagging tongues of London. She knew she had done an incautious thing. She
+      knew, too, that Carey had failed her. Her impulse had been to use him as a
+      weapon. He had proved a broken reed. And this failure on his part was
+      likely to correct for ever her incautious tendencies. That was what she
+      told herself, with some contempt for men. She did not tell herself that
+      the use to which she had intended to put Carey was an unworthy one. Women
+      as beautiful, and as successful in their beauty, as she was seldom tell
+      themselves these medicinal truths.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She went about as usual, and on several occasions took Lord Holme with
+      her. And though she saw a light of curiosity in many eyes, and saw lips
+      almost forced open by the silent questions lurking within many minds, it
+      was as she had said it would be. The immediate future had been in Fritz&rsquo;s
+      hands, and he had made it safe enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had made it safe. Even the Duchess of Arkell was quite charming, and
+      laid the whole burden of blame&mdash;where it always ought to be laid, of
+      course&mdash;upon the man&rsquo;s shoulders. Rupert Carey was quite done for
+      socially. Everyone said so. Even Upper Bohemia thought blatant
+      intemperance&mdash;in a Duke&rsquo;s house&mdash;an unnecessary defiance flung
+      at the Blue Ribbon Army. Only Amalia Wolfstein, who had never succeeded in
+      getting an invitation to Arkell House, remarked that &ldquo;It was probably the
+      champagne&rsquo;s fault. She had always noticed that where the host and hostess
+      were dry the champagne was apt to be sweet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, Fritz had made it safe, but:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Circumstances presently woke in Lady Holme&rsquo;s mind a rather disagreeable
+      suspicion that though Fritz had &ldquo;come round&rdquo; with such an admirable
+      promptitude he had reserved to himself a right to retaliate, that he
+      perhaps presumed to fancy that her defiant action, and its very public and
+      unpleasant result, gave to him a greater license than he had possessed
+      before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some days after the early morning tea Lord Holme said to his wife:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say, Vi, we&rsquo;ve got nothing on the first, have we?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a perceptible pause before she replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, we have. We&rsquo;ve accepted a dinner at Brayley House.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme looked exceedingly put out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Brayley House. What rot!&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;I hate those hind-leg affairs.
+      Why on earth did you accept it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear boy, you told me to. But why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why are you so anxious to be free for the first?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it&rsquo;s Miss Schley&rsquo;s <i>debut</i> at the British. Everyone&rsquo;s goin&rsquo; 
+      and Laycock says&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not very interested in Mr. Laycock&rsquo;s aphorisms, Fritz. I prefer
+      yours, I truly do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, well, I&rsquo;m as good as Laycock, I know. Still&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re a thousand times better. And so everybody&rsquo;s going, on Miss
+      Schley&rsquo;s first night? I only wish we could, but we can&rsquo;t. Let&rsquo;s put up
+      with number two. We&rsquo;re free on the second.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme did not look at all appeased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s not the same thing,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the difference? She doesn&rsquo;t change the play, I suppose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. But naturally on the first night she wants all her friends to come up
+      to the scratch, muster round&mdash;don&rsquo;t you know?&mdash;and give her a
+      hand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And she thinks your hand, being enormous, would be valuable? But we can&rsquo;t
+      throw over Brayley House.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme&rsquo;s square jaw began to work, a sure sign of acute irritation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If there&rsquo;s a dull, dreary house in London, it&rsquo;s Brayley House,&rdquo; he
+      grumbled. &ldquo;The cookin&rsquo;s awful&mdash;poison&mdash;and the wine&rsquo;s worse.
+      Why, last time Laycock was there they actually gave him&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor dear Mr. Laycock! Did they really? But what can we do? I&rsquo;m sure I
+      don&rsquo;t want to be poisoned either. I love life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was looking brilliant. Lord Holme began to straddle his legs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And there&rsquo;s the box!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;A box next the stage that holds six in a
+      row can&rsquo;t stand empty on a first night, eh? It&rsquo;d throw a damper on the
+      whole house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid I don&rsquo;t quite understand. What box?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hang it all!&mdash;ours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t know we had a box for this important social function.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme really made a great effort to keep the ice out of her voice,
+      but one or two fragments floated in nevertheless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I tell you I&rsquo;ve taken a box and asked Laycock&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The reiterated mention of this hallowed name was a little too much for
+      Lady Holme&rsquo;s equanimity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If Mr. Laycock&rsquo;s going the box won&rsquo;t be empty. So that&rsquo;s all right,&rdquo; she
+      rejoined. &ldquo;Mr. Laycock will make enough noise to give the critics a lead.
+      And I suppose that&rsquo;s all Miss Schley wants.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it isn&rsquo;t!&rdquo; said Lord Holme, violently letting himself down at the
+      knees and shooting himself up again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What does she want?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She wants you to be there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Me! Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because she&rsquo;s taken a deuce of a fancy to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An iceberg had entered the voice now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, thinks you the smartest woman in London, and all that. So you are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m very sorry, but even the smartest woman in London can&rsquo;t throw over
+      the Brayley&rsquo;s. Take another box for the second.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme looked fearfully sulky and lounged out of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the following morning he strode into Lady Holme&rsquo;s boudoir about twelve
+      with a radiant face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s all right!&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;Talk of diplomatists! I ought to be an
+      ambassador.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He flung himself into a chair, grinning with satisfaction like a
+      schoolboy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; asked Lady Holme, looking up from her writing-table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been to Lady Brayley, explained the whole thing, and got us both
+      off. After all, she was a friend of my mother&rsquo;s, and knew me in kilts and
+      all that, so she ought to be ready to do me a favour. She looked a bit
+      grim, but she&rsquo;s done it. You&rsquo;ve&mdash;only got to tip her a note of
+      thanks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re mad then, Fritz!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme stood up suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never saner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put one hand into the breast pocket of his coat and pulled out an
+      envelope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here&rsquo;s what she says to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme tore the note open.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+            &ldquo;BRAYLEY HOUSE, W.
+
+  &ldquo;DEAR VIOLA,&mdash;Holme tells me you made a mistake when you accepted
+  my invitation for the first, and that you have long been pledged
+  to be present on that date at some theatrical performance or other.
+  I am sorry I did not know sooner, but of course I release you with
+  pleasure from your engagement with me, and I have already filled up
+  your places.&mdash;Believe me, yours always sincerely,
+
+            &ldquo;MARTHA BRAYLEY.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme read this note carefully, folded it up, laid it quietly on the
+      writing-table and repeated:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re mad, Fritz.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What d&rsquo;you mean&mdash;mad?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve made Martha Brayley my enemy for life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rubbish!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon. And for&mdash;for&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped. It was wiser not to go on. Perhaps her face spoke for her,
+      even to so dull an observer as Lord Holme, for he suddenly said, with a
+      complete change of tone:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I forgave you about Carey.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I see! You want a <i>quid pro quo</i>. Thank you, Fritz.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t forget to tip Lady Brayley a note of thanks,&rdquo; he said rather
+      loudly, getting up from his chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, thanks! You certainly ought to be an ambassador&mdash;at the court of
+      some savage monarch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He said nothing, but walked out of the room whistling the refrain about
+      Ina.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he had gone Lady Holme sat down and wrote two notes. One was to Lady
+      Brayley and was charmingly apologetic, saying that the confusion was
+      entirely owing to Fritz&rsquo;s muddle-headedness, and that she was in despair
+      at her misfortune&mdash;which was almost literally true. The other was to
+      Sir Donald Ulford, begging him to join them in their box on the first, and
+      asking whether it was possible to persuade Mr. and Mrs. Leo Ulford to come
+      with him. If he thought so she would go at once and leave cards on Mrs.
+      Ulford, whom she was longing to know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both notes went off by hand before lunch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      THE Ulfords accepted for the first. Lady Holme left cards on Mrs. Leo and
+      told her husband that the box was filled up. He received the information
+      with indifference. So long as his wife was there to please Miss Schley,
+      and Mr. Laycock to &ldquo;give her a hand and show &lsquo;em all whether she was
+      popular,&rdquo; he was satisfied. Having gained his point, he was once again in
+      excellent humour. Possibly Lady Holme would have appreciated his large
+      gaieties more if she had not divined their cause. But she expressed no
+      dissatisfaction with them, and indeed increased them by her own brilliant
+      serenity during the days that intervened between the Martha Brayley
+      incident and the first night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme had no suspicion that during these days she was inwardly
+      debating whether she would go to the theatre or not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be very easy to be unwell. She was going out incessantly and
+      could be over-fatigued. She could have woman&rsquo;s great stand-by in moments
+      of crisis&mdash;a bad attack of neuralgia. It was the simplest matter in
+      the world. The only question was&mdash;all things considered, was it worth
+      while? By &ldquo;all things considered&rdquo; she meant Leo Ulford. The touch of Fritz
+      in him made him a valuable ally at this moment. Fritz and Miss Schley were
+      not going to have things quite all their own way. And then Mrs. Leo! She
+      would put Fritz next the ear-trumpet. She had enough sense of humour to
+      smile to herself at the thought of him there. On the whole, she fancied
+      the neuralgia would not attack her at the critical instant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only when she thought of what her husband had said about the American&rsquo;s
+      desire for her presence did she hesitate again. Her suspicions were
+      aroused. Miss Schley was not anxious that she should be conspicuously in
+      the theatre merely because she was the smartest woman in London. That was
+      certain. Besides, she was not the smartest woman in London. She was far
+      too well-born to be that in these great days of the <i>demi-mondaine</i>.
+      She remembered Robin Pierce&rsquo;s warning at the Arkell House ball&mdash;&ldquo;Consider
+      yourselves enemies for no reasons or secret woman&rsquo;s reasons. It&rsquo;s safer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When do women want the bulky, solid reasons obtusely demanded by men
+      before they can be enemies? Where man insists on an insult, a blow, they
+      will be satisfied with a look&mdash;perhaps not even at them but only at
+      the skirt of their gown&mdash;with a turn of the head, with nothing at
+      all. For what a man calls nothing can be the world and all that there is
+      in it to a woman. Lady Holme knew that she and the American had been
+      enemies since the moment when the latter had moved with the tiny steps
+      that so oddly caricatured her own individual walk down the stairs at the
+      Carlton. She wanted no tiresome reasons; nor did Miss Schley. Robin was
+      right, of course. He understood women. But then&mdash;?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Should she go to the theatre?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The night came and she went. Whether an extraordinary white lace gown,
+      which arrived from Paris in the morning, and fitted too perfectly for
+      words, had anything to do with the eventual decision was not known to
+      anybody but herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boxes are no longer popular in London except at the Opera. The British
+      Theatre was new, and the management, recognising that people prefer
+      stalls, had given up all the available space to them, and only left room
+      for two large boxes, which faced each other on a level with the dress
+      circle and next the stage. Lord Holme had one. Mrs. Wolfstein had taken
+      the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Schley&rsquo;s personal success in London brought together a rather special
+      audience. There were some of the usual people who go to first nights&mdash;critics,
+      ladies who describe dresses, fashionable lawyers and doctors. But there
+      were also numbers of people who are scarcely ever seen on these occasions,
+      people who may be found in the ground and grand tier boxes at Covent
+      Garden during the summer season. These thronged the stalls, and every one
+      of them was a dear friend of Lady Holme&rsquo;s. Among them were Lady
+      Cardington, Lady Manby, Sally Perceval with her magnificently handsome and
+      semi-idiotic husband, old Lady Blower, in a green cap that suggested the
+      bathing season, Robin Pierce and Mr. Bry. Smart Americans were scattered
+      all over the house. Most of them had already seen the play in New York
+      during the preceding winter, and nearly everyone in the stalls had seen
+      the French original in Paris. The French piece had been quite shocking and
+      quite delicious. Every Royalty <i>de passage</i> in Paris had been to see
+      it, and one wandering monarch had gone three nights running, and had
+      laughed until his gentleman-in-waiting thought the heir to his throne was
+      likely to succeed much sooner than was generally expected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Holmes came in early. Lady Holme hated arriving anywhere early, but
+      Lord Holme was in such a prodigious fuss about being in plenty of time to
+      give Miss Schley a &ldquo;rousin&rsquo; welcome,&rdquo; that she yielded to his bass
+      protestations, and had the satisfaction of entering their box at least
+      seven minutes before the curtain went up. The stalls, of course, were
+      empty, and as they gradually filled she saw the faces of her friends
+      looking up at her with an amazement that under other circumstances might
+      have been amusing, but under these was rather irritating. Mr. Laycock
+      arrived two minutes after they did, and was immediately engaged in a
+      roaring conversation by Fritz. He was a man who talked a great deal
+      without having anything to say, who had always had much success with
+      women, perhaps because he had always treated them very badly, who dressed,
+      danced and shot well, and who had never, even for a moment, really cared
+      for anyone but himself. A common enough type.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald appeared next, looking even more ghostly than usual. He sat
+      down by Lady Holme, a little behind her. He seemed depressed, but the
+      expression in his pale blue eyes when they first rested upon her made her
+      thoroughly realise one thing&mdash;that it was one of her conquering
+      nights. His eyes travelled quickly from her face to her throat, to her
+      gown. She wore no jewels. Sir Donald had a fastidious taste in beauty&mdash;the
+      taste that instinctively rejects excess of any kind. Her appeal to it had
+      never been so great as to-night. She knew it, and felt that she had never
+      found Sir Donald so attractive as to-night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. and Mrs. Ulford came in just as the curtain was going up, and the
+      introductions had to be gone through with a certain mysterious caution,
+      and the sitting arrangements made with as little noise as possible. Lady
+      Holme managed them deftly. Mr. Laycock sat nearest the stage, then Leo
+      Ulford next to her, on her right. Sir Donald was on her other side, Mrs.
+      Leo sat in the place of honour, with Lord Holme between her and Sir
+      Donald. She was intensely pink. Even her gown was of that colour, and she
+      wore a pink aigrette in her hair, fastened with a diamond ornament. Her
+      thin, betraying throat was clasped by the large dog-collar she had worn at
+      Arkell House. She cast swift, bird-like glances, full of a sort of haggard
+      inquiry, towards Lady Holme as she settled down in her arm-chair in the
+      corner. Lord Holme looked at her and at her ear-trumpet, and Lady Holme
+      was glad she had decided not to have neuralgia. There are little
+      compensations about all women even in the tiresome moments of their lives.
+      Whether this moment was going to be tiresome or not she could not yet
+      decide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Wolfstein party had come in at the same time as the Leo Ulfords, and
+      the box opposite presented an interesting study of Jewish types. For Mrs.
+      Wolfstein and &ldquo;Henry&rdquo; were accompanied by four immensely rich compatriots,
+      three of whom were members of the syndicate that was &ldquo;backing&rdquo; Miss
+      Schley. The fourth was the wife of one of them, and a cousin of Henry&rsquo;s,
+      whom she resembled, but on a greatly enlarged scale. Both she and Amalia
+      blazed with jewels, and both were slightly overdressed and looked too
+      animated. Lady Holme saw Sir Donald glance at them, and then again at her,
+      and began to think more definitely that the evening would not be tiresome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leo Ulford seemed at present forced into a certain constraint by the
+      family element in the box. He looked at his father sideways, then at Lady
+      Holme, drummed one hand on his knee, and was evidently uncertain of
+      himself. During the opening scene of the play he found an opportunity to
+      whisper to Lady Holme:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never can talk when pater&rsquo;s there!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She whispered back:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We mustn&rsquo;t talk now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she looked towards the stage with apparent interest. Mrs. Leo sat
+      sideways with her trumpet lifted up towards her ear, Lord Holme had his
+      eyes fixed on the stage, and held his hands ready for the &ldquo;rousin&rsquo; 
+      welcome.&rdquo; Mr. Laycock, at the end of the row, was also all attention. Lady
+      Holme glanced from one to the other, and murmured to Sir Donald with a
+      smile:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think we shall find to-night that the claque is not abolished in
+      England.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He raised his eyebrows and looked distressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have very little hope of her acting,&rdquo; he murmured back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme put her fan to her lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Sh! No sacrilege!&rdquo; she said in an under voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She saw Leo Ulford shoot an angry glance at his father. Mrs. Wolfstein
+      nodded and smiled at her from the opposite box, and it struck Lady Holme
+      that her smile was more definitely malicious than usual, and that her
+      large black eyes were full of a sort of venomous anticipation. Mrs.
+      Wolfstein had at all times an almost frightfully expressive face. To-night
+      it had surely discarded every shred of reticence, and proclaimed an eager
+      expectation of something which Lady Holme could not divine, but which must
+      surely be very disagreeable to her. What could it possibly be? And was it
+      in any way connected with Miss Schley&rsquo;s anxiety that she should be there
+      that night? She began to wish that the American would appear, but Miss
+      Schley had nothing to do in the first act till near the end, and then had
+      only one short scene to bring down the curtain. Lady Holme knew this
+      because she had seen the play in Paris. She thought the American version
+      very dull. The impropriety had been removed and with it all the fun.
+      People began to yawn and to assume the peculiar blank expression&mdash;the
+      bankrupt face&mdash;that is indicative of thwarted anticipation. Only the
+      Americans who had seen the piece in New York preserved their lively looks
+      and an appearance of being on the <i>qui vive</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme&rsquo;s blunt brown features gradually drooped, seemed to become
+      definitely elongated. As time went on he really began to look almost
+      lantern-jawed. He bent forward and tried to catch Mr. Laycock&rsquo;s eye and to
+      telegraph an urgent question, but only succeeded in meeting the surly blue
+      eyes of Leo Ulford, whom he met to-night for the first time. In his
+      despair he turned towards Mrs. Leo, and at once encountered the
+      ear-trumpet. He glanced at it with apprehension, and, after a moment of
+      vital hesitation, was about to pour into it the provender, &ldquo;Have you any
+      notion when she&rsquo;s comin&rsquo; on?&rdquo; when there was a sudden rather languid
+      slapping of applause, and he jerked round hastily to find Miss Schley
+      already on the stage and welcomed without any of the assistance which he
+      was specially there to give. He lifted belated hands, but met a glance
+      from his wife which made him drop them silently. There was a satire in her
+      eyes, a sort of humorous, half-urging patronage that pierced the hide of
+      his self-satisfied and lethargic mind. She seemed sitting there ready to
+      beat time to his applause, nod her head to it as to a childish strain of
+      jigging music. And this apparent preparation for a semi-comic,
+      semi-pitiful benediction sent his hands suddenly to his knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared at the stage. Miss Schley was looking wonderfully like Viola, he
+      thought, on the instant, more like than she did in real life; like Viola
+      gone to the bad, though become a very reticent, yet very definite, <i>cocotte</i>.
+      There was not much in the scene, but Miss Schley, without apparent effort
+      and with a profound demureness, turned the dulness of it into something
+      that was&mdash;not French, certainly not that&mdash;but that was quite as
+      outrageous as the French had been, though in a different way; something
+      without definite nationality, but instinct with the slyness of acute and
+      unscrupulous womankind. The extraordinary thing was the marvellous
+      resemblance this acute and unscrupulous womanhood bore to Lady Holme&rsquo;s,
+      even through all its obvious difference from hers. All her little
+      mannerisms of voice, look, manner and movement, were there but turned
+      towards commonness, even towards a naive but very self-conscious
+      impropriety. Had she been a public performer instead of merely a woman of
+      the world, the whole audience must have at once recognised the imitation.
+      As it was, her many friends in the house noticed it, and during the short
+      progress of the scene various heads were turned in her direction, various
+      faces glanced up at the big box in which she sat, leaning one arm on the
+      ledge, and looking towards Miss Schley with an expression of quiet
+      observation&mdash;a little indifferent&mdash;on her white face. Even Sir
+      Donald, who was next to her, and who once&mdash;in the most definite
+      moment of Miss Schley&rsquo;s ingenious travesty&mdash;looked at her for an
+      instant, could not discern that she was aware of what was amusing or
+      enraging all her acquaintances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Naturally she had grasped the situation at once, had discovered at once
+      why Miss Schley was anxious for her to be there. As she sat in the box
+      looking on at this gross impertinence, she seemed to herself to be
+      watching herself after a long <i>degringolade</i>, which had brought her,
+      not to the gutter, but to the smart restaurant, the smart music-hall, the
+      smart night club; the smart everything else that is beyond the borderland
+      of even a lax society. This was Miss Schley&rsquo;s comment upon her. The sting
+      of it lay in this fact, that it followed immediately upon the heels of the
+      unpleasant scene at Arkell House. Otherwise, she thought it would not have
+      troubled her. Now it did trouble her. She felt not only indignant with
+      Miss Schley. She felt also secretly distressed in a more subtle way. Miss
+      Schley&rsquo;s performance was calculated, coming at this moment, to make her
+      world doubtful just when it had been turned from doubt. A good caricature
+      fixes the attention upon the oddities, or the absurdities, latent in the
+      original. But this caricature did more. It suggested hidden possibilities
+      which she, by her own indiscreet action at the ball, had made perhaps to
+      seem probabilities to many people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, before her friends, was set a woman strangely like her, but
+      evidently a bad woman. Lady Holme was certain that the result of Miss
+      Schley&rsquo;s performance would be that were she to do things now which, done
+      before the Arkell House ball and this first night, would not have been
+      noticed, or would have been merely smiled at, they would be commented upon
+      with acrimony, exaggerated, even condemned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Schley was turning upon her one of those mirrors which distorts by
+      enlarging. Society would be likely to see her permanently distorted, and
+      not only in mannerisms but in character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It happened that this fact was specially offensive to her on this
+      particular evening, and at this particular moment of her life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While she sat there and watched the scene run its course, and saw, without
+      seeming to see, the effect it had upon those whom she knew well in the
+      house&mdash;saw Mrs. Wolfstein&rsquo;s eager delight in it, Lady Manby&rsquo;s broad
+      amusement, Robin Pierce&rsquo;s carefully-controlled indignation, Mr. Bry&rsquo;s
+      sardonic and always cold gratification, Lady Cardington&rsquo;s surprised,
+      half-tragic wonder&mdash;she was oscillating between two courses, one a
+      course of reserve, of stern self-control and abnegation, the other a
+      course of defiance, of reckless indulgence of the strong temper that dwelt
+      within her, and that occasionally showed itself for a moment, as it had on
+      the evening of Miss Filberte&rsquo;s fiasco. That temper was flaming now unseen.
+      Was she going to throw cold water over the flame, or to fan it? She did
+      not know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the curtain fell, the critics, who sometimes seem to enjoy personally
+      what they call very sad and disgraceful in print, were smiling at one
+      another. The blank faces of the men about town in the stalls were shining
+      almost unctuously. The smart Americans were busily saying to everyone,
+      &ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t we say so?&rdquo; The whole house was awake. Miss Schley might not be
+      much of an actress. Numbers of people were already bustling about to say
+      that she could not act at all. But she had banished dulness. She had shut
+      the yawning lips, and stopped that uneasy cough which is the expression of
+      the relaxed mind rather than of the relaxed throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme sat back a little in the box.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What d&rsquo;you think of her?&rdquo; she said to Sir Donald. &ldquo;I think she&rsquo;s rather
+      piquant, not anywhere near Granier, of course, but still&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think her performance entirely odious,&rdquo; he said, with an unusual
+      emphasis that was almost violent. &ldquo;Entirely odious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up from his seat, striking his thin fingers against the palms of
+      his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Vulgar and offensive,&rdquo; he said, almost as if to himself, and with a sort
+      of passion. &ldquo;Vulgar and offensive!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly he turned away and went out of the box.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme, who had been watching Sir Donald&rsquo;s disordered exit, looked
+      round to Leo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say&mdash;&rdquo; he repeated. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s up with pater?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He doesn&rsquo;t seem to be enjoying the play.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Leo Ulford looked unusually grave, even thoughtful, as if he were
+      pondering over some serious question. He kept his blue eyes fixed upon
+      Lady Holme. At last he said, in a voice much lower than usual:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor chap!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s a poor chap?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Leo jerked his head towards the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your father? Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why&mdash;at his age!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The last words were full of boyish contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you do. To be like that at his age. What&rsquo;s the good? As if&mdash;&rdquo;
+       He smiled slowly at her. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m glad I&rsquo;m young,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m glad you&rsquo;re young too,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;But you&rsquo;re quite wrong about
+      Sir Donald.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She let her eyes rest on his. He shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I&rsquo;m not. I guessed it that day at the Carlton. All through lunch he
+      looked at you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what has all this to do with Miss Schley&rsquo;s performance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because she&rsquo;s something like you, but low down, where you&rsquo;d never go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew his chair a little closer to hers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you?&rdquo; he added, almost in a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Laycock, who was in raptures over Miss Schley&rsquo;s performance, had got
+      up to speak to Fritz, but found the latter being steadily hypnotised by
+      Mrs. Leo&rsquo;s trumpet, which went up towards his mouth whenever he opened it.
+      He bellowed distracted nothings but could not make her hear, obtaining no
+      more fortunate result than a persistent flutter of pink eyelids, and a
+      shrill, reiterated &ldquo;The what? The what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sharp tap came presently on the box door, and Mrs. Wolfstein&rsquo;s painted
+      face appeared. Lord Holme sprang up with undisguised relief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What d&rsquo;you think of Pimpernel? Ah, Mr. Laycock&mdash;I heard your
+      faithful hands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stunnin&rsquo;!&rdquo; roared Lord Holme, &ldquo;simply stunnin&rsquo;!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stunnin&rsquo;! stunnin&rsquo;!&rdquo; exclaimed Mr. Laycock; &ldquo;Rippin&rsquo;! There&rsquo;s no other
+      word. Simply rippin&rsquo;!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The what? The what?&rdquo; cried Mrs. Ulford.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Wolfstein bent down, with expansive affection, over Lady Holme&rsquo;s
+      chair, and clasped the left hand which Lady Holme carelessly raised to a
+      level with her shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You dear person! Nice of you to come, and in such a gown too! The angels
+      wear white lace thrown together by Victorine&mdash;it is Victorine? I was
+      certain!&mdash;I&rsquo;m sure. D&rsquo;you like Pimpernel?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her too lustrous eyes&mdash;even Mrs. Wolfstein&rsquo;s eyes looked over-dressed&mdash;devoured
+      Lady Holme, and her large, curving features were almost riotously
+      interrogative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; Lady Holme said. &ldquo;Quite.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She&rsquo;s startled everybody.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Startled!&mdash;why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, well&mdash;she has! There&rsquo;s money in it, don&rsquo;t you think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Henry,&rdquo; who had accompanied his wife, and who was standing sideways at
+      the back of the box looking like a thief in the night, came a step forward
+      at the mention of money.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid I&rsquo;m no judge of that. Your husband would know better.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Plenty of money,&rdquo; said &ldquo;Henry,&rdquo; in a low voice that seemed to issue from
+      the bridge of his nose; &ldquo;it ought to bring a good six thousand into the
+      house for the four weeks. That&rsquo;s&mdash;for Miss Schley&mdash;for the
+      Syndicate&mdash;ten per cent. on the gross, and twenty-five per cent.&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He found himself in mental arithmetic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The&mdash;swan with the golden eggs!&rdquo; said Lady Holme, lightly, turning
+      once more to Leo Ulford. &ldquo;You mustn&rsquo;t kill Miss Schley.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Wolfstein looked at Mr. Laycock and murmured to him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pimpernel does any killing that&rsquo;s going about&mdash;for herself. What
+      d&rsquo;you say, Franky?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They went out of the box together, followed by &ldquo;Henry,&rdquo; who was still
+      buzzing calculations, like a Jewish bee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme resolutely tore himself from the ear-trumpet, and was preparing
+      to follow, with the bellowed excuse that he was &ldquo;sufferin&rsquo; from toothache&rdquo;
+       and had been ordered to &ldquo;do as much smokin&rsquo; as possible,&rdquo; when the curtain
+      rose on the second act.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Schley was engaged to a supper-party that evening and did not wish to
+      be late. Lord Holme sat down again looking scarcely pleasant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do as much&mdash;the what?&rdquo; cried Mrs. Ulford, holding the trumpet at
+      right angles to her pink face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leo Ulford leant backwards and hissed &ldquo;Hush!&rdquo; at her. She looked at him
+      and then at Lady Holme, and a sudden expression of old age came into her
+      bird-like face and seemed to overspread her whole body. She dropped the
+      trumpet and touched the diamonds that glittered in the front of her low
+      gown with trembling hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Laycock slipped into the box when the curtain had been up two or three
+      minutes, but Sir Donald did not return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I b&rsquo;lieve he&rsquo;s bolted,&rdquo; Leo whispered to Lady Holme. &ldquo;Just like him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&mdash;I&rsquo;m here, for one thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at her victoriously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll have a letter from him to-morrow. Poor old chap!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke contemptuously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the first time Lord Holme seemed consciously and unfavourably
+      observant of his wife and Leo. His under-jaw began to move. But Miss
+      Schley came on to the stage again, and he thrust his head eagerly forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the rest of the evening Miss Schley did not relax her ingenious
+      efforts of mimicry, but she took care not to make them too prominent. She
+      had struck her most resonant note in the first act, and during the two
+      remaining acts she merely kept her impersonation to its original lines.
+      Lady Holme watched the whole performance imperturbably, but before the
+      final curtain fell she knew that she was not going to throw cold water on
+      that flame which was burning within her. Fritz&rsquo;s behaviour, perhaps,
+      decided which of the two actions should be carried out&mdash;the douching
+      or the fanning. Possibly Leo Ulford had something to say in the matter
+      too. Or did the faces of friends below in the stalls play their part in
+      the silent drama which moved step by step with the spoken drama on the
+      stage? Lady Holme did not ask questions of herself. When Mr. Laycock and
+      Fritz were furiously performing the duties of a claque at the end of the
+      play, she got up smiling, and nodded to Mrs. Wolfstein in token of her
+      pleasure in Miss Schley&rsquo;s success, her opinion that it had been worthily
+      earned. As she nodded she touched one hand with the other, making a silent
+      applause that Mrs. Wolfstein and all her friends might see. Then she let
+      Leo Ulford put on her cloak and called pretty words down Mrs. Leo&rsquo;s
+      trumpet, all the while nearly deafened by Fritz&rsquo;s demonstrations, which
+      even outran Mr. Laycock&rsquo;s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When at last they died away she said to Leo:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are going on to the Elwyns. Shall you be there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood over her, while Mrs. Ulford watched him, drooping her head
+      sideways.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We can talk it all over quietly. Fritz!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s that about the Elwyns?&rdquo; said Lord Holme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was telling Mr. Ulford that we are going on there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not. Never heard of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme was on the point of retorting that it was he who had told her
+      to accept the invitation on the ground that &ldquo;the Elwyns always do you
+      better than anyone in London, whether they&rsquo;re second-raters or not,&rdquo; but a
+      look in Leo Ulford&rsquo;s eyes checked her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Go to the club if you like; but I must peep in for
+      five minutes. Mrs. Ulford, didn&rsquo;t you think Miss Schley rather delicious&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She went out of the box with one hand on a pink arm, talking gently into
+      the trumpet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You goin&rsquo; to the Elwyns?&rdquo; said Lord Holme, gruffly, to Leo Ulford as they
+      got their coats and prepared to follow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Depends on my wife. If she&rsquo;s done up&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said Lord Holme, striking a match, and holding out his cigarette
+      case, regardless of regulations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A momentary desire to look in at the Elwyns&rsquo; possessed him. Then he
+      thought of a supper-party and forgot it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      MRS. WOLFSTEIN was right. There was money in Miss Schley&rsquo;s performance.
+      Her sly impropriety appealed with extraordinary force to the peculiar
+      respectability characteristic of the British temperament, and her
+      celebrity, hitherto mainly social, was suddenly and enormously increased.
+      Already a popular person, she became a popular actress, and was soon as
+      well-known to the world in the streets and the suburbs as to the world in
+      the drawing-rooms of Mayfair. And this public celebrity greatly increased
+      the value that was put upon her in private&mdash;especially the value put
+      upon her by men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The average man adores being connected openly with the woman who is the
+      rage of the moment. It flatters his vanity and makes him feel good all
+      over. It even frequently turns his head and makes him almost as
+      intoxicated as a young girl with adulation received at her first ball.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The combination of Miss Schley herself and Miss Schley&rsquo;s celebrity&mdash;or
+      notoriety&mdash;had undoubtedly turned Lord Holme&rsquo;s head. Perhaps he had
+      not the desire to conceal the fact. Certainly he had not the finesse. He
+      presented his turned head to the world with an audacious simplicity that
+      was almost laughable, and that had in it an element of boyishness not
+      wholly unattractive to those who looked on&mdash;the casual ones to whom
+      even the tragedies of a highly-civilised society bring but a quiet and
+      cynical amusement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme was not one of these. Her strong temper was token of a vivid
+      temperament. Till now this vivid temperament had been rocked in the cradle
+      of an easy, a contented, a very successful life. Such storms as had come
+      to her had quickly passed away. The sun had never been far off. Her egoism
+      had been constantly flattered. Her will had been perpetually paramount.
+      Even the tyranny of Lord Holme had been but as the tyranny of a selfish,
+      thoughtless, pleasure-seeking boy who, after all, was faithful to her and
+      was fond of her. His temperamental indifference to any feelings but his
+      own had been often concealed and overlaid by his strong physical passion
+      for his wife&rsquo;s beauty, his profound satisfaction in having carried off and
+      in possessing a woman admired and sought by many others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly life presented to Lady Holme its seamy side; Fate attacking her
+      in her woman&rsquo;s vanity, her egoism, even in her love. The vision startled.
+      The blow stung. She was conscious of confusion, of cloud, then of a
+      terrible orderliness, of a clear light. In the confusion she seemed to
+      hear voices never heard before, voices that dared to jeer at her; in the
+      cloud to see phantoms of gigantic size menacing her, impending over her.
+      The orderliness, the clear light were more frightful to her. They left
+      less to her imagination; had, as it were, no ragged edges. In them she
+      faced a definite catastrophe, saw it whole, as one sees a near object in
+      the magical atmosphere of the East, outlined with burning blue, quivering
+      with relentless gold. She saw herself in the dust, pelted, mocked at.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That seemed at first to be incredible. But she saw it so plainly that she
+      could not even pretend to herself that she was deceived by some unusual
+      play of light or combination of shadows. What she saw&mdash;was:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her husband had thrown off his allegiance to her and transferred his
+      admiration, perhaps his affection, to the woman who had most deftly and
+      delicately insulted her in the face of all her world. And he had done this
+      with the most abominable publicity. That was what she saw in a clear light
+      like the light of the East. That was what sent a lash across her
+      temperament, scarring it perhaps, but waking it into all it could ever
+      have of life. In each woman there is hidden a second woman, more fierce
+      and tender, more evil and good, more strong and fervent than the woman who
+      hides her in the ordinary hours of life; a woman who weeps blood where the
+      other woman weeps tears, who strikes with a flaming sword where the other
+      woman strikes with a willow wand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This woman now rose up in Lady Holme, rose up to do battle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The laughing, frivolous world was all unconscious of her. Lord Holme was
+      unconscious of her. But she was at last fully conscious of herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This woman remembered Robin Pierce&rsquo;s odd belief and the light words with
+      which she had chastised it. He had persistently kept faith in, and sought
+      for, a far-away being. But she was a being of light and glory. His kernel
+      of the husk was still a siren, but a siren with a heart, with an exquisite
+      imagination, with a fragrance of dreams about her, a lilt of eternal music
+      in her voice, the beaming, wonder of things unearthly in her eyes. Poor
+      Robin! Lady Holme found it in her heart to pity him as she realised
+      herself. But then she turned her pity aside and concentrated it elsewhere.
+      The egoism of her was not dead though the hidden woman had sprung up in
+      vivid life. Her intellect was spurred into energy by the suffering of her
+      pride and of her heart. Memory was restless and full of the passion of
+      recall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She remembered the night when she softly drew up the hood of her
+      dressing-gown above her head and, rocking herself to and fro, murmured the
+      &ldquo;Allah-Akbar&rdquo; of a philosophic fatalist&mdash;&ldquo;I will live for the day. I
+      will live for the night.&rdquo; What an absurd patter that was on the lips of a
+      woman. And she remembered the conversation with Fritz that had preceded
+      her monologue. She had asked him then whether he could love her if her
+      beauty were taken from her. It had never occurred to her that while her
+      beauty still remained her spell upon him might be weakened, might be
+      broken. That it was broken now she did not say to herself. All she did say
+      to herself was that she must strike an effective blow against this
+      impertinent woman. She had some pride but not enough to keep her passive.
+      She was not one of those women who would rather lose all they have than
+      struggle to keep it. She meant to struggle, but she had no wish that the
+      world should know what she was doing. Pride rose in her when she thought
+      of cold eyes watching the battle, cold voices commenting on it&mdash;Amalia
+      Wolfstein&rsquo;s eyes, Mr. Bry&rsquo;s voice, a hundred other eyes and voices. Her
+      quickened intellect, her woman&rsquo;s heart would teach her to be subtle. The
+      danger lay in her temper. But since the scene at Arkell House she had
+      thoroughly realised its impetuosity and watched it warily as one watches
+      an enemy. She did not intend to be ruined by anything within her. The
+      outside chances of life were many enough and deadly enough to deal with.
+      Strength and daring were needed to ward them off. The chances that had
+      their origin within the soul, the character&mdash;not really chances at
+      all&mdash;must be controlled, foreseen, forestalled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet she had not douched the flame of defiance which she had felt
+      burning within her on the night of Pimpernel Schley&rsquo;s first appearance on
+      the London stage. She had fanned it. At the Elwyns&rsquo; ball she had fanned
+      it. Temper had led her that night. Deliberately, and knowing perfectly
+      well who was her guide, she had let it lead her. She had been like a human
+      being who says, &ldquo;To do this will be a sin. Very well, I choose to sin. But
+      I will sin carefully.&rdquo; At the Elwyns she had discovered why her husband
+      had not come with her. She had stayed late to please Leo Ulford. Mr.
+      Laycock had come in about two in the morning and had described to Leo the
+      festivity devised by Lord Holme in honour of Miss Schley, at which he had
+      just been present. And Leo Ulford had repeated the description to her. She
+      had deceived him into thinking that she had known of the supper-party and
+      approved of it. But, after this deception, she had given a looser rein to
+      her temper. She had let herself go, careless whether she set the poor pink
+      eyelids of Mrs. Leo fluttering or not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The hint of Fritz which she recognised in Leo Ulford had vaguely attracted
+      her to him from the first. How her world would have laughed at such a
+      domestic sentiment! She found herself wondering whether it were Miss
+      Schley&rsquo;s physical resemblance to her which had first attracted Fritz, the
+      touch of his wife in a woman who was not his wife and who was what men
+      call &ldquo;a rascal.&rdquo; Perhaps Fritz loved Miss Schley&rsquo;s imitation of her. She
+      thought a great deal about that&mdash;turning it over and over in her
+      mind, bringing to bear on it the white light of her knowledge of her
+      husband&rsquo;s character. Did he see in the American his wife transformed, made
+      common, sly, perhaps wicked, set on the outside edge of decent life, or
+      further&mdash;over the border? And did he delight in that? If so, ought
+      she not to&mdash;? Then her mind was busy. Should she change? If herself
+      changed were his ideal, why not give him what he wanted? Why let another
+      woman give it to him? But at this point she recognised a fact recognised
+      by thousands of women with exasperation, sometimes with despair&mdash;that
+      men would often hate in their wives the thing that draws them to women not
+      their wives. The Pimpernel Schleys of the world know this masculine
+      propensity of seeking different things&mdash;opposites, even&mdash;in the
+      wife and the woman beyond the edge of the hearthstone, a propensity
+      perhaps more tragic to wives than any other that exists in husbands. And
+      having recognised this fact, Lady Holme knew that it would be worse than
+      useless for her to imitate Miss Schley&rsquo;s imitation of her. Then,
+      travelling along the road of thought swiftly as women in such a case
+      always travel, she reached another point. She began to consider the advice
+      of Robin Pierce, given before she had begun to feel with such intensity,
+      to consider it as a soldier might consider a plan of campaign drawn up by
+      another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Should she, instead of descending, of following the demure steps of the
+      American to the lower places, strive to ascend?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Could she ascend? Was Robin Pierce right? She thought for a long time
+      about his conception of her. The singing woman; would she be the most
+      powerful enemy that could confront Miss Schley? And, if she would be,
+      could the singing woman be made continuous in the speech and the actions
+      of the life without music? She remembered a man she had known who
+      stammered when he spoke, but never stammered when he sang. And she thought
+      she resembled this man. Robin Pierce had always believed that she could
+      speak without the stammer even as she sang without it. She had never cared
+      to. She had trusted absolutely in her beauty. Now her trust was shaken.
+      She thought of the crutch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Realising herself she had said within herself, &ldquo;Poor Robin!&rdquo; seeing
+      perhaps the tigress where he saw the angel. Now she asked herself whether
+      the angel could conquer where the tigress might fail. People had come
+      round her like beggars who have heard the chink of gold and she had showed
+      them an empty purse. Could she show them something else? And if she could,
+      would her husband join the beggars? Would he care to have even one piece
+      of gold?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether Lord Holme&rsquo;s obvious infatuation had carried him very far she did
+      not know. She did not stop to ask. A woman capable, as she was, of
+      retrospective jealousy, an egoist accustomed to rule, buffeted in heart
+      and pride, is swift not sluggish. And then how can one know these things?
+      Jealousy rushes because it is ignorant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme and she were apparently on good terms. She was subtle, he was
+      careless. As she did not interfere with him his humour was excellent. She
+      had carried self-control so far as never to allude to the fact that she
+      knew about the supper-party. Yet it had actually got into the papers.
+      Paragraphs had been written about a wonderful ornament of ice,
+      representing the American eagle perched on the wrist of a glittering
+      maiden, which had stood in the middle of the table. Of course she had seen
+      them, and of course Lord Holme thought she had not seen them as she had
+      never spoken of them. He went his way rejoicing, and there seemed to be
+      sunshine in the Cadogan Square house. And meanwhile the world was smiling
+      at the apparent triumph of impertinence, and wondering how long it would
+      last, how far it would go. The few who were angry&mdash;Sir Donald was one
+      of them&mdash;were in a mean minority.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin Pierce was angry too, but not with so much single-heartedness as was
+      Sir Donald. It could not quite displease him if the Holmes drifted apart.
+      Yet he was fond enough of Lady Holme, and he was subtle enough, to be
+      sorry for any sorrow of hers, and to understand it&mdash;at any rate,
+      partially&mdash;without much explanation. Perhaps he would have been more
+      sorry if Leo Ulford had not come into Lady Holme&rsquo;s life, and if the
+      defiance within her had not driven her into an intimacy that distressed
+      Mrs. Leo and puzzled Sir Donald.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin&rsquo;s time in London was very nearly at an end. The season was at its
+      height. Every day was crowded with engagements. It was almost impossible
+      to find a quiet moment even to give to a loved one. But Robin was
+      determined to have at least one hour with Lady Holme before he started for
+      Italy. He told her so, and begged her to arrange it. She put him off again
+      and again, then at last made an engagement, then broke it. In her present
+      condition of mind to break faith with a man was a pleasure with a bitter
+      savour. But Robin was not to be permanently avoided. He had obstinacy. He
+      meant to have his hour, and perhaps Lady Holme always secretly meant that
+      he should have it. At any rate she made another appointment and kept it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She came one afternoon to his house in Half Moon Street. She had never
+      been there before. She had never meant to go there. To do so was an
+      imprudence. That fact was another of the pleasures with a bitter savour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin met her at the head of the stairs, with an air of still excitement
+      not common in his look and bearing. He followed her into the blue room
+      where Sir Donald had talked with Carey. The &ldquo;<i>Danseuse de Tunisie</i>&rdquo;
+       still presided over it, holding her little marble fan. The open fireplace
+      was filled with roses. The tea-table was already set by the great square
+      couch. Robin shut the door and took out a matchbox.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to make tea,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bachelor fashion?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat down on the couch and looked round quickly, taking in all the
+      details of the room. He saw her eyes rest on the woman with the fan, but
+      she said nothing about it. He lit a silver spirit lamp and then sat down
+      beside her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At last!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme leaned back in her corner. She was dressed in black, with a
+      small, rather impertinent black toque, in which one pale blue wing of a
+      bird stood up. Her face looked gay and soft, and Robin, who had cunning,
+      recognised that quality of his in her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I oughtn&rsquo;t to be here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Absurd. Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fritz has a jealous temperament.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She spoke with a simple naturalness that moved the diplomat within him to
+      a strong admiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can act far better than Miss Schley,&rdquo; he said, with intentional
+      bluntness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I love her acting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going away. I shan&rsquo;t see you for an age. Don&rsquo;t give me a theatrical
+      performance to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can a woman do anything else?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. She can be a woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s stupid&mdash;or terrible. What a dear little lamp that is! I like
+      your room.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin looked at the blue-grey linen on the walls, at the pale blue wing in
+      her hat, then at her white face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Viola,&rdquo; he said, leaning forward, &ldquo;it&rsquo;s bad to waste anything in this
+      life, but the worst thing of all is to waste unhappiness. If I could teach
+      you to be niggardly of your tears!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She spoke with sudden sharpness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never cry. Nothing&rsquo;s worth a tear,&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, some things are. But not what you are going to weep for.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her face had changed. The gaiety had gone out of it, and it looked
+      hesitating.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think I am going to shed tears?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad you let me tell you. For the loss of nothing&mdash;a coin that
+      never came out of the mint, that won&rsquo;t pass current anywhere.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve lost nothing,&rdquo; she exclaimed, &ldquo;nothing. You&rsquo;re talking nonsense.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made no reply, but looked at the small, steady flame of the lamp. She
+      followed his eyes, and, when he saw that she was looking at it too, he
+      said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t a little, steady flame like that beautiful?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When it means tea&mdash;yes. Does it mean tea?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you can wait a few minutes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose I must. Have you heard anything of Mr. Carey?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin looked at her narrowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What made you think of him just then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know. Being here, I suppose. He often comes here, doesn&rsquo;t he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then this room holds more of his personality than of mine?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an under sound of vexation in his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you heard anything?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. But no doubt he&rsquo;s still in the North with his mother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How domestic. I hope there is a stool of repentance in the family house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder if you could ever repent of anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think there is anything I ought to repent of?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You might have married a man who knew the truth of you, and you married a
+      man incapable of ever knowing it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He half expected an outburst of anger to follow his daring speech, but she
+      sat quite still, looking at him steadily. She had taken off her gloves,
+      and her hands lay lightly, one resting on the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean, I might have married you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not worth much, but at least I could never have betrayed the white
+      angel in you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She leaned towards him and spoke earnestly, almost like a child to an
+      older person in whom it has faith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think such an angel could do anything in&mdash;in this sort of
+      world?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Modern London?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She nodded, keeping her eyes still on him. He guessed at once of what she
+      was thinking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do anything&mdash;is rather vague,&rdquo; he replied evasively. &ldquo;What sort of
+      thing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly she threw off all reserve and let her temper go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If an angel were striving with a common American, do you mean to tell me
+      you don&rsquo;t know which would go to the wall in our world?&rdquo; she cried.
+      &ldquo;Robin, you may be a thousand things, but you aren&rsquo;t a fool. Nor am I&mdash;not
+      <i>au fond</i>. And yet I have thought&mdash;I have wondered&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whether, if there is an angel in me, it mightn&rsquo;t be as well to trot it
+      out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The self-consciousness of the slang prevented him from hating it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;When have you wondered?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lately. It&rsquo;s your fault. You have insisted so much upon the existence of
+      the celestial being that at last I&rsquo;ve become almost credulous. It&rsquo;s very
+      absurd and I&rsquo;m still hanging back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Call credulity belief and you needn&rsquo;t be ashamed of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And if I believe, what then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then a thousand things. Belief sheds strength through all the tissues of
+      the mind, the heart, the temperament. Disbelief sheds weakness. The one
+      knits together, the other dissolves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are people who think angels frightfully boring company.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Robin got up and spoke almost brutally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think I don&rsquo;t see that you are trying to find out from me what I
+      think would be the best means of&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The look in her face stopped him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think the water is boiling,&rdquo; he said, going over to the lamp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It ought to bubble,&rdquo; she answered quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lifted up the lid of the silver bowl and peeped in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is bubbling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment he was busy pouring the water into the teapot. While he did
+      this there was a silence between them. Lady Holme got up from the sofa and
+      walked about the room. When she came to the &ldquo;<i>Danseuse de Tunisie</i>&rdquo;
+       she stopped in front of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How strange that fan is,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin shut the lid of the teapot and came over to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you like it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The fan?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The whole thing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s lovely, but I fancy it would have been lovelier without the fan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She considered, holding her head slightly on one side and half closing her
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The woman&rsquo;s of eternity, but the fan&rsquo;s of a day,&rdquo; she said presently. &ldquo;It
+      belittles her, I think. It makes her <i>chic</i> when she might have been&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Throw away your fan!&rdquo; he said in a low, eager voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Be the woman, the eternal woman. You&rsquo;ve never been her yet, but you
+      could be. Now is the moment. You&rsquo;re unhappy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you are. Viola, don&rsquo;t imagine I can&rsquo;t understand. You care for him
+      and he&rsquo;s hurting you&mdash;hurting you by being just himself, all he can
+      ever be. It&rsquo;s the fan he cares for.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you tell me to throw it away!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She spoke with sudden passion. They stood still for a moment in front of
+      the statuette, looking at each other silently. Then Robin said, with a
+      sort of bitter surprise:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you can&rsquo;t love him like that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It gave her an odd, sharp pleasure to speak the truth to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you going to do, then?&rdquo; he asked, after a pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke without emotion, accepting the situation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To do? What do you mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come and sit down. I&rsquo;ll tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took her hand and led her back to the sofa. When she had sat down, he
+      poured out tea, put in cream and gave it to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing to eat,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He poured out his tea and sat down in a chair opposite to her, and close
+      to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I dare to speak frankly?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve known you so long, and I&rsquo;ve&mdash;I&rsquo;ve
+      loved you very much, and I still do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on!&rdquo; she answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You thought your beauty was everything, that so long as it lasted you
+      were safe from unhappiness. Well, to-day you are beautiful, and yet&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what does he care for?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;What do men care for? You pretend
+      that it&rsquo;s something romantic, something good even. Really, it&rsquo;s impudent&mdash;just
+      that&mdash;cold and impudent. You&rsquo;re a fool, Robin, you&rsquo;re a fool!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I? Thank God there are men&mdash;and men. You can&rsquo;t be what Carey
+      said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For once he had spoken incautiously. He had blurted out something he never
+      meant to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Carey!&rdquo; she exclaimed quickly, curiously. &ldquo;What did Mr. Carey say I
+      was?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Robin, you are to tell me. No diplomatic lies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sudden, almost brutal desire came into him to tell her the truth, to
+      revel in plain speaking for once, and to see how she would bear it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He said you were an egoist, that you were fine enough in your brilliant
+      selfishness to stand quite alone&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A faint smile moved the narrow corners of her lips at the last words. He
+      went on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&mdash;That your ideal of a real man, the sort of man a woman loses her
+      head for, was&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped. Carey&rsquo;s description of the Lord Holme and Leo Ulford type had
+      not been very delicate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was&mdash;?&rdquo; she said, with insistence. &ldquo;Was&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin thought how she had hurt him, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Carey said, a huge mass of bones, muscles, thews, sinews, that cares
+      nothing for beauty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beauty! That doesn&rsquo;t care for beauty! But then&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Carey meant&mdash;yes, I&rsquo;m sure Carey meant real beauty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean by &lsquo;real beauty&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An inner light that radiates outward, but whose abiding-place is hidden&mdash;perhaps.
+      But one can&rsquo;t say. One can only understand and love.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh. And Mr. Carey said that. Was he&mdash;was he at all that evening as
+      he was at Arkell House? Was he talking nonsense or was he serious?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Difficult to say! But he was not as he was at Arkell House. Which knows
+      you best&mdash;Carey or I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Neither of you. I don&rsquo;t know myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you going to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know. The only thing I know is that you can&rsquo;t tell me what to
+      do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I can&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But perhaps I can tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She put down her cup and looked at him with a sort of grave kindness that
+      he had never seen in her face before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give up loving the white angel. Perhaps it isn&rsquo;t there. Perhaps it
+      doesn&rsquo;t exist. And if it does&mdash;perhaps it&rsquo;s a poor, feeble thing
+      that&rsquo;s no good to me, no good to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly she put her arms on the back of the couch, leaned her face on
+      them and began to cry gently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin was terribly startled. He got up, stretched out his hands to her in
+      an impulsive gesture, then drew them back, turned and went to the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was crying for Fritz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was absurd and horrible. Yet he knew that those tears came from the
+      heart of the hidden woman he had so long believed in, proved her
+      existence, showed that she could love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      AS Lady Holme had foreseen, the impertinent mimicry of Miss Schley
+      concentrated a great deal of attention upon the woman mimicked. Many
+      people, accepting the American&rsquo;s cleverness as a fashionable fact, also
+      accepted her imitation as the imitation of a fact more surreptitious, and
+      credited Lady Holme with a secret leading towards the improper never
+      before suspected by them. They remembered the break between the Holmes and
+      Carey, the strange scene at the Arkell House ball, and began to whisper
+      many things of Lady Holme, and to turn a tide of pity and of sympathy upon
+      her husband. On this tide Lord Holme and the American might be said to
+      float merrily like corks, unabashed in the eye of the sun. Their intimacy
+      was condoned on all sides as a natural result of Lady Holme&rsquo;s conduct.
+      Most of that which had been accomplished by Lord and Lady Holme together
+      after their reconciliation over the first breakfast was undone. The silent
+      tongue began to wag, and to murmur the usual platitudes about the poor
+      fellow who could not find sympathy at home and so was obliged, against his
+      will, to seek for it outside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this Lady Holme had foreseen as she sat in her box at the British
+      Theatre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wrong impression of her was enthroned. She had to reckon with it. This
+      fact, fully recognised by her, made her wish to walk warily where
+      otherwise her temper might have led her to walk heedlessly. She wanted to
+      do an unusual thing, to draw her husband&rsquo;s attention to an intimacy which
+      was concealed from the world&mdash;the intimacy between herself and Leo
+      Ulford.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After her visit to the house in Half Moon Street she began to see a great
+      deal of Leo Ulford. Carey had been right when he said that they would get
+      on together. She understood him easily and thoroughly, and for that very
+      reason he was attracted by her. Men delight to feel that a woman is
+      understanding them; women that no man can ever understand them. Under the
+      subtle influence of Lady Holme&rsquo;s complete comprehension of him, Leo
+      Ulford&rsquo;s nature expanded, stretched itself as his long legs stretched
+      themselves when his mind was purring. There was not much in him to reveal,
+      but what there was he revealed, and Lady Holme seemed to be profoundly
+      interested in the contents of his soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But she was not interested in the contents of his soul in public places on
+      which the world&rsquo;s eye is fixed. She refused to allow Leo to do what he
+      desired, and assumed an air of almost possessive friendship before
+      Society. His natural inclination for the blatant was firmly checked by
+      her. She cared nothing for him really, but her woman&rsquo;s instinct had
+      divined that he was the type of man most likely to rouse the slumbering
+      passion of Fritz, if Fritz were led to suspect that she was attracted to
+      him. Men like Lord Holme are most easily jealous of the men who most
+      closely resemble them. Their conceit leads them to put an exaggerated
+      value upon their own qualities in others, upon the resemblance to their
+      own physique exhibited by others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leo Ulford was rather like a younger and coarser Lord Holme. In him Lady
+      Holme recognised an effective weapon for the chastisement, if not for the
+      eventual reclamation, of her husband. It was characteristic of her that
+      this was the weapon she chose, the weapon she still continued to rely on
+      even after her conversation with Robin Pierce. Her faith in white angels
+      was very small. Perpetual contact with the world of to-day, with life as
+      lived by women of her order, had created within her far other faiths,
+      faiths in false gods, a natural inclination to bow the knee in the house
+      of Rimmon rather than before the altars guarded by the Eternities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then&mdash;she knew Lord Holme; knew what attracted him, what stirred
+      him, what moved him to excitement, what was likely to hold him. She felt
+      sure that he and such men as he yield the homage they would refuse to the
+      angel to the siren. Instead of seeking the angel within herself,
+      therefore, she sought the siren. Instead of striving to develope that part
+      of her which was spiritual, she fixed all her attention upon that part of
+      her which was fleshly, which was physical. She neglected the flame and
+      began to make pretty patterns with the ashes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin came to bid her good-bye before leaving London for Rome. The weeping
+      woman was gone. He looked into the hard, white face of a woman who smiled.
+      They talked rather constrainedly for a few minutes. Then suddenly he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Once it was a painted window, now it&rsquo;s an iron shutter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up from his chair and clasped his hands together behind his back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What on earth do you mean?&rdquo; she asked, still smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your face,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;One could see you obscurely before. One can see
+      nothing now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You talk great nonsense, Robin. It&rsquo;s a good thing you&rsquo;re going back to
+      Rome.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At least I shall find the spirit of beauty there,&rdquo; he said, almost with
+      bitterness. &ldquo;Over here it is treated as if it were Jezebel. It&rsquo;s trodden
+      down. It&rsquo;s thrown to the dogs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor spirit!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed lightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you understand what they&rsquo;re saying of you?&rdquo; he went on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All over London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;do you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps I don&rsquo;t care to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They&rsquo;re saying&mdash;&lsquo;Poor thing! But it&rsquo;s her own fault.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a silence. In it he looked at her hard, mercilessly. She
+      returned his gaze, still smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it is your own fault,&rdquo; he went on after a moment. &ldquo;If you had been
+      yourself she couldn&rsquo;t have insulted you first and humiliated you
+      afterwards. Oh, how I hate it! And yet&mdash;yet there are moments when I
+      am like the others, when I feel&mdash;&lsquo;She has deserved it.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When will you be in Rome?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And even now,&rdquo; he continued, ignoring her remark, &ldquo;even now, what are you
+      doing? Oh, Viola, you&rsquo;re a prey to the modern madness for crawling in the
+      dirt instead of walking upright in the sun. You might be a goddess and you
+      prefer to be an insect. Isn&rsquo;t it mad of you? Isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was really excited, really passionate. His face showed that. There was
+      fire in his eyes. His lips worked convulsively when he was not speaking.
+      And yet there was just a faint ring of the accomplished orator&rsquo;s music in
+      his voice, a music which suggests a listening ear&mdash;and that ear the
+      orator&rsquo;s own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps she heard it. At any rate his passionate attack did not seem to
+      move her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I prefer to be what I am,&rdquo; was all she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What you are! But you don&rsquo;t know what you are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And how can you pretend to know?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;Is a man more subtle about
+      a woman than she is about herself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not answer for a moment. Then he said bluntly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Promise me one thing before I go away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know. What is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Promise me not to&mdash;not to&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He hesitated. The calm of her face seemed almost to confuse him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Promise me not to justify anything people are saying, not to justify it
+      with&mdash;with that fellow Ulford.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye,&rdquo; she answered, holding out her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He recognised that the time for his advice had gone by, if it had ever
+      been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a way&mdash;what a way for us to&mdash;&rdquo; he almost stammered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He recovered his self-possession with an effort and took her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At least,&rdquo; he said in a low, quiet voice, &ldquo;believe it is less jealousy
+      that speaks within me than love&mdash;love for you, for the woman you are
+      trampling in the dust.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked into her eyes and went out. She did not see him again before he
+      left England. And she was glad. She did not want to see him. Perhaps it
+      was the first time in her life that the affection of a man whom she really
+      liked was distasteful to her. It made her uneasy, doubtful of herself just
+      then, to be loved as Robin loved her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Carey had come back to town, but he went nowhere. He was in bad odour. Sir
+      Donald Ulford was almost the only person he saw anything of at this time.
+      It seemed that Sir Donald had taken a fancy to Carey. At any rate, such
+      friendly feeling as he had did not seem lessened after Carey&rsquo;s exhibition
+      at Arkell House. When Carey returned to Stratton Street, Sir Donald paid
+      him a visit and stayed some time. No allusion was made to the painful
+      circumstances under which they had last seen each other until Sir Donald
+      was on the point of going away. Then he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have not forgotten that I expect you at Casa Felice towards the end
+      of August?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Carey looked violently astonished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Still?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Carey shot out his hand and grasped Sir Donald&rsquo;s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You aren&rsquo;t afraid to have a drunken beast like me in Casa Felice! It&rsquo;s a
+      damned dangerous experiment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s your own lookout, you know. I absolve you from the invitation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I repeat it, then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I accept it, then&mdash;again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald went away thoughtfully. When he reached the Albany he found
+      Mrs. Leo Ulford waiting for him in tears. They had a long interview.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many people fancied that Sir Donald looked more ghostly, more faded even
+      than usual as the season wore on. They said he was getting too old to go
+      about so much as he did, and that it was a pity Society &ldquo;got such a hold&rdquo;
+       on men who ought to have had enough of it long ago. One night he met Lady
+      Holme at the Opera. She was in her box and he in the stalls. After the
+      second act she called him to her with a gay little nod of invitation. Lady
+      Cardington had been with her during the act, but left the box when the
+      curtain fell to see some friends close by. When Sir Donald tapped at the
+      door Lady Holme was quite alone. He came in quietly&mdash;even his walk
+      was rather ghostly&mdash;and sat down beside her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t look well,&rdquo; she said after they had greeted each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am quite well,&rdquo; he answered, with evident constraint.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t seen you to speak to since that little note of yours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A very faint colour rose in his faded cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After Miss Schley&rsquo;s first night?&rdquo; he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His yellow fingers moved restlessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know that your son told me you would write?&rdquo; she continued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was leaning back in her chair, half hidden by the curtain of the box.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leo!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald&rsquo;s voice was almost sharp and startling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How should he&mdash;you spoke about me then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a flash of light in his pale, almost colourless eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wondered where you had gone, and he said you would write next day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was all?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, how suspicious you are!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She spoke banteringly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suspicious! No&mdash;but Leo does not understand me very well. I was
+      rather old when he was born, and I have never been able to be much with
+      him. He was educated in England, and my duties of course lay abroad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused, looking at her and moving his thin white moustache. Then, in an
+      uneasy voice, he added:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must not take my character altogether from Leo.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor you mine altogether from Miss Schley,&rdquo; said Lady Holme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She scarcely knew why she said it. She thought herself stupid, ridiculous
+      almost, for saying it. Yet she could not help speaking. Perhaps she relied
+      on Sir Donald&rsquo;s age. Or perhaps&mdash;but who knows why a woman is
+      cautious or incautious in moments the least expected? God guides her,
+      perhaps, or the devil&mdash;or merely a bottle imp. Men never know, and
+      that is why they find her adorable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald said nothing for a moment, only made the familiar movement with
+      his hands that was a sign in him of concealed excitement or emotion. His
+      eyes were fixed upon the ledge of the box. Lady Holme was puzzled by his
+      silence and, at last, was on the point of making a remark on some other
+      subject&mdash;Plancon&rsquo;s singing&mdash;when he spoke, like a man who had
+      made up his mind firmly to take an unusual, perhaps a difficult course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish to take it from you,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Give me the right one, not an
+      imitation of an imitation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She knew at once what he meant and was surprised. Had Leo Ulford been
+      talking?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lady Holme,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;I am taking a liberty. I know that. It&rsquo;s a
+      thing I have never done before, knowingly. Don&rsquo;t think me unconscious of
+      what I am doing. But I am an old man, and old men can sometimes venture&mdash;allowance
+      is sometimes made for them. I want to claim that allowance now for what I
+      am going to say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; she said, neither hardly nor gently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In truth she scarcely knew whether she wished him to speak or not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My son is&mdash;Leo is not a safe friend for you at this moment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the dull, brick-red flush rose in his cheeks. There was an odd,
+      flattened look just above his cheekbones near his eyes, and the eyes
+      themselves had a strange expression as of determination and guilt mingled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your son?&rdquo; Lady Holme said. &ldquo;But&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not wish to assume anything, but I&mdash;well, my daughter-in-law
+      sometimes comes to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sometimes!&rdquo; said Lady Holme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leo is not a good husband,&rdquo; Sir Donald said. &ldquo;But that is not the point.
+      He is also a bad&mdash;friend.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you say lover?&rdquo; she almost whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He grasped his knee with one hand and moved the hand rapidly to and fro.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must say of him to you that where his pleasure or his vanity is
+      concerned he is unscrupulous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why say all this to a woman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean that you know as much as I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you think it likely?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Henrietta&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My daughter-in-law has done everything for Leo&mdash;too much. She gets
+      nothing&mdash;not even gratitude. I am sorry to say he has no sense of
+      chivalry towards women. You know him, I daresay. But do you know him
+      thwarted?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, you don&rsquo;t think so badly of me after all?&rdquo; she said quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I think of you that&mdash;that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think that I could not bear to see the whiteness of your wings smirched
+      by a child of mine.&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You too!&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly tears started into her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Another believer in the angel!&rdquo; she thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I come in?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Mr. Bry&rsquo;s cold voice. His discontented, sleek face was peeping
+      round the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Donald got up to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Lady Holme drove away from Covent Garden that night she was haunted by
+      a feverish, embittering thought:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will everyone notice it but Fritz?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme indeed seemed scarcely the same man who had forbidden Carey to
+      come any more to his house, who had been jealous of Robin Pierce, who had
+      even once said that he almost wished his wife were an ugly woman. The
+      Grand Turk nature within him, if not actually dead, was certainly in
+      abeyance. He was so intent on his own affairs that he paid no heed at all
+      to his wife&rsquo;s, even when they might be said to be also his. Leo Ulford was
+      becoming difficult to manage, and Lord Holme still gaily went his way. As
+      Lady Holme thought over Sir Donald&rsquo;s words she felt a crushing weight of
+      depression sink down upon her. The brougham rolled smoothly on through the
+      lighted streets. She did not glance out of the windows, or notice the
+      passing crowds. In the silence and darkness of her own soul she was trying
+      not to feel, trying to think.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A longing to be incautious, to do something startling, desperate, came to
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was evident that Mrs. Ulford had been complaining to Sir Donald about
+      his son&rsquo;s conduct. With whom? Lady Holme could not doubt that it was with
+      herself. She had read, with one glance at the fluttering pink eyelids, the
+      story of the Leo Ulford&rsquo;s <i>menage</i>. Now, she was not preoccupied with
+      any regret for her own cruelty or for another woman&rsquo;s misery. The egoism
+      spoken of by Carey was not dead in her yet, but very much alive. As she
+      sat in the corner of the brougham, pressing herself against the padded
+      wall, she was angry for herself, pitiful for herself. And she was jealous&mdash;horribly
+      jealous. That woke up her imagination, all the intensity of her. Where was
+      Fritz to-night? She did not know. Suddenly the dense ignorance in which
+      every human being lives, and must live to the end of time, towered above
+      her like a figure in a nightmare. What do we know, what can we ever know
+      of each other? In each human being dwells the most terrible, the most
+      ruthless power that exists&mdash;the power of silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fritz had that power; stupid, blundering, self-contented Fritz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She pulled the check-string and gave the order, &ldquo;Home!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In her present condition she felt unable to go into Society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she got to Cadogan Square she said to the footman who opened the
+      door:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His lordship isn&rsquo;t in yet?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, my lady.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did he say what time he would be in to-night?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, my lady.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man paused, then added:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His lordship told Mr. Lucas not to wait up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Lucas&rdquo; was Lord Holme&rsquo;s valet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to Lady Holme as if there were a significant, even a slightly
+      mocking, sound in the footman&rsquo;s voice. She stared at him. He was a thin,
+      swarthy young man, with lantern jaws and a very long, pale chin. When she
+      looked at him he dropped his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bring me some lemonade to the drawing-room in ten minutes,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, my lady.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In ten minutes, not before. Turn on all the lights in the drawing-room.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, my lady.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man went before her up the staircase, turned on the lights, stood
+      aside to let her pass and then went softly down. Lady Holme rang for
+      Josephine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take my cloak and then go to bed,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Josephine took the cloak and went out, shutting the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ten minutes!&rdquo; Lady Holme said to herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat down on the sofa on which she had sat for a moment alone after her
+      song at the dinner-party, the song murdered by Miss Filberte. The empty,
+      brilliantly-lit rooms seemed unusually large. She glanced round them with
+      inward-looking eyes. Here she was at midnight sitting quite alone in her
+      own house. And she wished to do something decisive, startling as the
+      cannon shot sometimes fired from a ship to disperse a fog wreath. That was
+      the reason why she had told the footman to come in ten minutes. She
+      thought that in ten minutes she might make up her mind. If she decided
+      upon doing something that required an emissary the man would be there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at the little silver box she had taken up that night when she
+      was angry, then at the grand piano in the further room. The two things
+      suggested to her two women&mdash;the woman of hot temper and the woman of
+      sweetness and romance. What was she to-night, and what was she going to
+      do? Nothing, probably. What could she do? Again she glanced round the
+      rooms. It seemed to her that she was like an actress in an intense,
+      passionate <i>role</i>, who is paralysed by what is called in the theatre
+      &ldquo;a stage wait.&rdquo; She ought to play a tremendous scene, now, at once, but
+      the person with whom she was to play it did not come on to the stage. She
+      had worked herself up for the scene. The emotion, the passion, the force,
+      the fury were alive, were red hot within her, and she could not set them
+      free. She remained alone upon the stage in a sort of horror of dumbness, a
+      horror of inaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The footman came in quietly with the lemonade on a tray. He put it down on
+      a table by Lady Holme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there anything else, my lady?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She supposed that the question was meant as a very discreet hint to her
+      that the man would be glad to go to bed. For a moment she did not reply,
+      but kept him waiting. She was thinking rapidly, considering whether she
+      would do the desperate thing or not, whether she would summon one of the
+      actors for the violent scene her nature demanded persistently that night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the opera she had been due at a ball to which Leo Ulford was going.
+      She had promised to go in to supper with him and to arrive by a certain
+      hour. He was wondering, waiting, now, at this moment. She knew that. The
+      house was in Eaton Square, not far off. Should she send the footman with a
+      note to Leo, saying that she was too tired to come to the ball but that
+      she was sitting up at home? That was what she was rapidly considering
+      while the footman stood waiting. Leo would come, and then&mdash;presently&mdash;Lord
+      Holme would come. And then? Then doubtless would happen the scene she
+      longed for, longed for with a sort of almost crazy desire such as she had
+      never felt before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She glanced up and saw an astonished expression upon the footman&rsquo;s pale
+      face. How long had she kept him there waiting? She had no idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is nothing else,&rdquo; she said slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused, then added, reluctantly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can go to bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man went softly out of the room. As he shut the door she breathed a
+      deep sigh, that was almost a sob. So difficult had she found it to govern
+      herself, not to do the crazy thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She poured out the lemonade and put ice into it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As she did so she made grimaces, absurd grimaces of pain and misery, like
+      those on the faces of the two women in Mantegna&rsquo;s picture of Christ and
+      the Marys in the Brera at Milan. They are grotesque, yet wonderfully
+      moving in their pitiless realism. But tears fall from the eyes of
+      Mantegna&rsquo;s women and no tears fell from Lady Holme&rsquo;s eyes. Still making
+      grimaces, she sipped the lemonade. Then she put down the glass, leaned
+      back on the sofa and shut her eyes. Her face ceased to move, and became
+      beautiful again in its stillness. She remained motionless for a long time,
+      trying to obtain the mastery over herself. In act she had obtained it
+      already, but not in emotion. Indeed, the relinquishing of violence, the
+      sending of the footman to bed, seemed to have increased the passion within
+      her. And now she felt it rising till she was afraid of being herself,
+      afraid of being this solitary woman, feeling intensely and able to do
+      nothing. It seemed to her as if such a passion of jealousy, and desire for
+      immediate expression of it in action, as flamed within her, must wreak
+      disaster upon her like some fell disease, as if she were in immediate
+      danger, even in immediate physical danger. She lay still like one
+      determined to meet it bravely, without flinching, without a sign of
+      cowardice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But suddenly she felt that she had made a mistake in dismissing the
+      footman, that the pain of inaction was too great for her to bear. She
+      could not just&mdash;do nothing. She could not, and she got up swiftly and
+      rang the bell. The man did not return. She pressed the bell again. After
+      three or four minutes he came in, looking rather flushed and put out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want you to take a note to Eaton Square,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It will be ready
+      in five minutes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, my lady.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She went to her writing table and wrote this note to Leo Ulford:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;DEAR MR. ULFORD,&mdash;I am grieved to play you false, but I am too
+  tired to-night to come on. Probably you are amusing yourself. I
+  am sitting here alone over such a dull book. One can&rsquo;t go to bed
+  at twelve, somehow, even if one is tired. The habit of the season&rsquo;s
+  against early hours and one couldn&rsquo;t sleep. Be nice and come in for
+  five minutes on your way home, and tell me all about it. I know you
+  pass the end of the square, so it won&rsquo;t be out of your way.&mdash;Yours
+  very sincerely,   V. H.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      After writing this note Lady Holme hesitated for a moment, then she went
+      to a writing table, opened a drawer and took out a tiny, flat key. She
+      enclosed it in two sheets of thick note paper, folded the note also round
+      it, and put it into an envelope which she carefully closed. After writing
+      Leo Ulford&rsquo;s name on the envelope she rang again for the footman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take this to Eaton Square,&rdquo; she said, naming the number of the house.
+      &ldquo;And give it to Mr. Ulford yourself. Go in a hansom. When you have given
+      Mr. Ulford the note come straight back in the hansom and let me know.
+      After that you can go to bed. Do you understand?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, my lady.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man went out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme stood up to give him the note. She remained standing after he
+      had gone. An extraordinary sensation of relief had come to her. Action had
+      lessened her pain, had removed much of the pressure of emotion upon her
+      heart. For a moment she felt almost happy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat down again and took up a book. It was a book of poems written by a
+      very young girl whom she knew. There was a great deal about sorrow in the
+      poems, and sorrow was always alluded to as a person; now flitting through
+      a forest in the autumn among the dying leaves, now bending over a bed, now
+      walking by the sea at sunset watching departing ships, now standing near
+      the altar at a wedding. The poems were not good. On the other hand, they
+      were not very bad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had some grace, some delicacy here and there, now and then a touch of
+      real, if by no means exquisite, sentiment. At this moment Lady Holme found
+      them soothing. There was a certain music in them and very little reality.
+      They seemed to represent life as a pensive phantasmagoria of bird songs,
+      fading flowers, dying lights, soft winds and rains and sighing echoes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She read on and on. Sometimes a hard thought intruded itself upon her mind&mdash;the
+      thought of Leo Ulford with the latch-key of her husband&rsquo;s house in his
+      hand. That thought made the poems seem to her remarkably unlike life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at the clock. The footman had been away long enough to do his
+      errand. Just as she was thinking this he came into the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I gave Mr. Ulford the note, my lady.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you can go to bed. Good-night. I&rsquo;ll put out the lights here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you, my lady.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As he went away she turned again to the poems; but now she could not read
+      them. Her eyes rested upon them, but her mind took in nothing of their
+      meaning. Presently&mdash;very soon&mdash;she laid the book down and sat
+      listening. The footman had shut the drawing-room door. She got up and
+      opened it. She wanted to hear the sound of the latch-key being put into
+      the front door by Leo Ulford. It seemed to her as if that sound would be
+      like the <i>leit motif</i> of her determination to govern, to take her own
+      way, to strike a blow against the selfish egoism of men. After opening the
+      door she sat down close to it and waited, listening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some minutes passed. Then she heard&mdash;not the key put into the hall
+      door; it had not occurred to her that she was much too far away to hear
+      that&mdash;but the bang of the door being shut.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Quickly she closed the drawing-room door, went back to the distant sofa,
+      sat down upon it and began to turn over the poems once more. She even read
+      one quite carefully. As she finished it the door was opened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked up gaily to greet Leo and saw her husband coming into the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was greatly startled. It had never occurred to her that Fritz was
+      quite as likely to arrive before Leo Ulford as Leo Ulford to arrive before
+      Fritz. Why had she never thought of so obvious a possibility? She could
+      not imagine. The difference between the actuality and her intense and
+      angry conception of what it would be, benumbed her mind for an instant.
+      She was completely confused. She sat still with the book of poems on her
+      lap, and gazed at Lord Holme as he came towards her, taking long steps and
+      straddling his legs as if he imagined he had a horse under him. The gay
+      expression had abruptly died away from her face and she looked almost
+      stupid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hulloa!&rdquo; said Lord Holme, as he saw her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thought you were goin&rsquo; to the Blaxtons to-night,&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She made a strong effort and smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I meant to, but I felt tired after the opera.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you toddle off to bed then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel tired, I don&rsquo;t feel sleepy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme stared at her, put his hand into his trousers pocket and pulled
+      out his cigarette-case. Lady Holme knew that he had been in a good humour
+      when he came home, and that the sight of her sitting up in the
+      drawing-room had displeased him. She had seen a change come into his face.
+      He had been looking gay. He began to look glum and turned his eyes away
+      from her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have you been up to?&rdquo; she asked, with a sudden light gaiety and air
+      of comradeship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Club&mdash;playin&rsquo; bridge,&rdquo; he answered, lighting a cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He shot a glance at her sideways as he spoke, a glance that was meant to
+      be crafty. If she had not been excited and horribly jealous, such a glance
+      would probably have amused her, even made her laugh. Fritz&rsquo;s craft was
+      very transparent. But she could not laugh now. She knew he was telling her
+      the first lie that had occurred to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lucky?&rdquo; she asked, still preserving her light and casual manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Middlin&rsquo;,&rdquo; he jerked out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down in an armchair and slowly stretched his legs, staring up at
+      the ceiling. Lady Holme began to think rapidly, feverishly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had he locked the front door when he came in? Very much depended upon
+      whether he had or had not. The servants had all gone to bed. Not one of
+      them would see that the house was closed for the night. Fritz was a very
+      casual person. He often forgot to do things he had promised to do, things
+      that ought to be done. On the other hand, there were moments when his
+      memory was excellent. If she only knew which mood had been his to-night
+      she thought she would feel calmer. The uncertainty in which she was made
+      mind and body tingle. If Fritz had remembered to lock the door, Leo Ulford
+      would try to get in, fail, and go away. But if he had not remembered, at
+      any moment Leo Ulford might walk into the room triumphantly with the
+      latch-key in his hand. And it was nearly half-past twelve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She wished intensely that she knew what Fritz had done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s up?&rdquo; he said abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Up?&rdquo; she said with an uncontrollable start.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing. What d&rsquo;you mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, you looked as if&mdash;don&rsquo;t you b&rsquo;lieve I&rsquo;ve been playin&rsquo; bridge?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course I do. Really, Fritz, how absurd you are!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was evident that he, too, was not quite easy to-night. If he had a
+      conscience, surely it was pricking him. Fierce anger flamed up again
+      suddenly in Lady Holme, and the longing to lash her husband. Yet even this
+      anger did not take away the anxiety that beset her, the wish that she had
+      not done the crazy thing. The fact of her husband&rsquo;s return before Leo&rsquo;s
+      arrival seemed to have altered her action, made it far more damning. To
+      have been found with Leo would have been compromising, would have roused
+      Fritz&rsquo;s anger. She wanted to rouse his anger. She had meant to rouse it.
+      But when she looked at Fritz she did not like the thought of Leo walking
+      in at this hour holding the latch-key in his hand. What had Fritz done
+      that night to Rupert Carey? What would he do to-night if&mdash;?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What the deuce is up with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme drew in his legs, sat up and stared with a sort of uneasy
+      inquiry which he tried to make hard. She laughed quickly, nervously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m tired, I tell you. It was awfully hot at the opera.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She put some more ice into the lemonade, and added:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By the way, Fritz, I suppose you locked up all right?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Locked up what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The front door. All the servants have gone to bed, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No sooner had she spoken the last words than she regretted them. If Leo
+      did get in they took away all excuse. She might have pretended he had been
+      let in. He would have had to back her up. It would have been mean of her,
+      of course. Still, seeing her husband there, Leo would have understood,
+      would have forgiven her. Women are always forgiven such subterfuges in
+      unfortunate moments. What a fool she was to-night!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That don&rsquo;t matter,&rdquo; said her husband, shortly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;but it does. You know how many burglaries there are. Why, only
+      the other night Mrs. Arthur came home from a ball and met two men on the
+      stairs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I pity any men I found on my stairs,&rdquo; he returned composedly, touching
+      the muscle of his left arm with his right hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He chuckled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They&rsquo;d be sorry for themselves, I&rsquo;ll bet,&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put down his cigarette and took out another slowly, leisurely. Lady
+      Holme longed to strike him. His conceited composure added fuel to the
+      flame of her anxiety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, anyhow, I don&rsquo;t care to run these risks in a place like London,
+      Fritz,&rdquo; she said almost angrily. &ldquo;Have you locked up or not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damned if I remember,&rdquo; he drawled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not know whether he was deliberately trying to irritate her or
+      whether he really had forgotten, but she felt it impossible to remain any
+      longer in uncertainty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well, then, I shall go down and see,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she laid the book of poems on a table and prepared to get up from the
+      sofa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rot!&rdquo; said Lord Holme; &ldquo;if you&rsquo;re nervous, I&rsquo;ll go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She leaned back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In a minute.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He struck a match and let it out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do go now, there&rsquo;s a good dog,&rdquo; she said coaxingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He struck another match and held it head downwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You needn&rsquo;t hurry a feller.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He tapped his cigarette gently on his knee, and applied the flame to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s better.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme moved violently on the sofa. She had a pricking sensation all
+      over her body, and her face felt suddenly very hot, as if she had fever. A
+      ridiculous, but painful idea started up suddenly in her mind. Could Fritz
+      suspect anything? Was he playing with her? She dismissed it at once as the
+      distorted child of a guilty conscience. Fritz was not that sort of man. He
+      might be a brute sometimes, but he was never a subtle brute. He blew two
+      thin lines of smoke out through his nostrils, now with a sort of sensuous,
+      almost languid, deliberation, and watched them fade away in the
+      brilliantly-lit room. Lady Holme resolved to adopt another manner, more in
+      accord with her condition of tense nervousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I ask you to do a thing, Fritz, you might have the decency to do
+      it,&rdquo; she said sharply. &ldquo;You&rsquo;re forgetting what&rsquo;s due to me&mdash;to any
+      woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t fuss at this time of night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to go to bed, but I&rsquo;m not going till I know the house is properly
+      shut up. Please go at once and see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never knew you were such a coward,&rdquo; he rejoined without stirring. &ldquo;Who
+      was at the opera?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t talk to you till you do what I ask.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s a staggerin&rsquo; blow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sprang up with an exclamation of anger. Her nerves were on edge and
+      she felt inclined to scream out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never thought you could be so&mdash;such a cad to a woman, Fritz,&rdquo; she
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She moved towards the door. As she did so she heard a cab in the square
+      outside, a rattle of wheels, then silence. It had stopped. Her heart
+      seemed to stand still too. She knew now that she was a coward, though not
+      in the way Fritz meant. She was a coward with regard to him. Her jealousy
+      had prompted her to do a mad thing. In doing it she had actually meant to
+      produce a violent scene. It had seemed to her that such a scene would
+      relieve the tension of her nerves, of her heart, would clear the air. But
+      now that the scene seemed imminent&mdash;if Fritz had forgotten, and she
+      was certain he had forgotten, to lock the door&mdash;she felt heart and
+      nerves were failing her. She felt that she had risked too much, far too
+      much. With almost incredible swiftness she remembered her imprudence in
+      speaking to Carey at Arkell House and how it had only served to put a
+      weapon into her husband&rsquo;s hand, a weapon he had not scrupled to use in his
+      selfish way to further his own pleasure and her distress. That stupid
+      failure had not sufficiently warned her, and now she was on the edge of
+      some greater disaster. She was positive that Leo Ulford was in the cab
+      which had just stopped, and it was too late now to prevent him from
+      entering the house. Lord Holme had got up from his chair and stood facing
+      her. He looked quite pleasant. She thought of the change that would come
+      into his face in a moment and turned cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t cut up so deuced rough,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll go and lock up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So he had forgotten. He took a step towards the drawing-room door. But now
+      she felt that at all costs she must prevent him from going downstairs,
+      must gain a moment somehow. Suddenly she swayed slightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel&mdash;awfully faint,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She went feebly, but quickly, to the window which looked on to the Square,
+      drew away the curtain, opened the window and leaned out. The cab had
+      stopped before their door, and she saw Leo Ulford standing on the pavement
+      with his back to the house. He was feeling in his pocket, evidently for
+      some money to give to the cabman. If she could only attract his attention
+      somehow and send him away! She glanced back. Fritz was coming towards her
+      with a look of surprise on his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave me alone,&rdquo; she said unevenly. &ldquo;I only want some air.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave me&mdash;oh, do leave me alone!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped, but stood staring at her in blank amazement. She dared not do
+      anything. Leo Ulford stretched out his arm towards the cabman, who bent
+      down from his perch. He took the money, looked at it, then bent down
+      again, showing it to Leo and muttering something. Doubtless he was saying
+      that it was not enough. She turned round again sharply to Fritz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fritz,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;be a good dog. Go upstairs to my room and fetch me
+      some eau de Cologne, will you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s on my dressing-table&mdash;the gold bottle on the right. You know. I
+      feel so bad. I&rsquo;ll stay here. The air will bring me round perhaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She caught hold of the curtain, like a person on the point of swooning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he said, and he went out of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She watched till he was gone, then darted to the window and leaned out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was too late. The cab was driving off and Leo was gone. He must have
+      entered the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      BEFORE she had time to leave the window she heard a step in the room. She
+      turned and saw Leo Ulford, smiling broadly&mdash;like a great boy&mdash;and
+      holding up the latch-key she had sent him. At the sight of her face his
+      smile died away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go&mdash;go!&rdquo; she whispered, putting out her hand. &ldquo;Go at once!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go! But you told me&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go! My husband&rsquo;s come back. He&rsquo;s in the house. Go quickly. Don&rsquo;t make a
+      sound. I&rsquo;ll explain to-morrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made a rapid, repeated gesture of her hands towards the door,
+      frowning. Leo Ulford stood for an instant looking heavy and sulky, then,
+      pushing out his rosy lips in a sort of indignant pout, he swung round on
+      his heels. As he did so, Lord Holme came into the room holding the bottle
+      of eau de Cologne. When he saw Leo he stopped. Leo stopped too, and they
+      stood for a moment staring at each other. Lady Holme, who was still by the
+      open window, did not move. There was complete silence in the room. Then
+      Leo dropped the latch-key. It fell on the thick carpet without a noise. He
+      made a hasty, lumbering movement to pick it up, but Lord Holme was too
+      quick for him. When Lady Holme saw the key in her husband&rsquo;s hand she moved
+      at last and came forward into the middle of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Ulford&rsquo;s come to tell me about the Blaxtons&rsquo; dance,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She spoke in her usual light voice, without tremor or uncertainty. Her
+      face was perfectly calm and smiling. Leo Ulford cleared his throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said loudly, &ldquo;about the Blaxtons&rsquo; dance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme stood looking at the latch-key. Suddenly his face swelled up
+      and became bloated, and large veins stood out in his brown forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s this key?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He held it out towards his wife. Neither she nor Leo Ulford replied to his
+      question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s this key?&rdquo; he repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The key of Mr. Ulford&rsquo;s house, I suppose,&rdquo; said Lady Holme. &ldquo;How should I
+      know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not askin&rsquo; you,&rdquo; said her husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came a step nearer to Leo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why the devil don&rsquo;t you answer?&rdquo; he said to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s my latch-key,&rdquo; said Leo, with an attempt at a laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme flung it in his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You damned liar!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he struck him full in the face where the key had just struck him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leo returned the blow. When she saw that, Lady Holme passed the two men
+      and went quickly out of the room, shutting the door behind her. Holding
+      her hands over her ears, she hurried upstairs to her bedroom. It was in
+      darkness. She felt about on the wall for the button that turned on the
+      electric light, but could not find it. Her hands, usually deft and certain
+      in their movements, seemed to have lost the sense of touch. It was as if
+      they had abruptly been deprived of their minds. She felt and felt. She
+      knew the button was there. Suddenly the room was full of light. Without
+      being aware of it she had found the button and turned it. In the light she
+      looked down at her hands and saw that they were trembling violently. She
+      went to the door and shut it. Then she sat down on the sofa at the foot of
+      the bed. She clasped her hands together in her lap, but they went on
+      trembling. Pulses were beating in her eyelids. She felt utterly degraded,
+      like a scrupulously clean person who has been rolled in the dirt. And she
+      fancied she heard a faint and mysterious sound, pathetic and terrible, but
+      very far away&mdash;the white angel in her weeping.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the believers in the angel&mdash;were they weeping too?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She found herself wondering as a sleeper wonders in a dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently she got up. She could not sit there and see her hands trembling.
+      She did not walk about the room, but went over to the dressing-table and
+      stood by it, resting her hands upon it and leaning forward. The attitude
+      seemed to relieve her. She remained there for a long time, scarcely
+      thinking at all, only feeling degraded, unclean. The sight of physical
+      violence in her own drawing-room, caused by her, had worked havoc in her.
+      She had always thought she understood the brute in man. She had often
+      consciously administered to it. She had coaxed it, flattered it, played
+      upon it even&mdash;surely&mdash;loved it. Now she had suddenly seen it
+      rush out into the full light, and it had turned her sick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gold things on the dressing-table&mdash;bottles, brushes, boxes, trays&mdash;looked
+      offensive. They were like lies against life, frauds. Everything in the
+      pretty room was like a lie and a fraud. There ought to be dirt, ugliness
+      about her. She ought to stand with her feet in mud and look on blackness.
+      The angel in her shuddered at the siren in her now, as at a witch with
+      power to evoke Satanic things, and she forgot the trembling of her hands
+      in the sensation of the trembling of her soul. The blow of Fritz, the blow
+      of Leo Ulford, had both struck her. She felt a beaten creature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door opened. She did not turn round, but she saw in the glass her
+      husband come in. His coat was torn. His waistcoat and shirt were almost in
+      rags. There was blood on his face and on his right hand. In his eyes there
+      was an extraordinary light, utterly unlike the light of intelligence, but
+      brilliant, startling; flame from the fire by which the animal in human
+      nature warms itself. In the glass she saw him look at her. The light
+      seemed to stream over her, to scorch her. He went into his dressing-room
+      without a word, and she heard the noise of water being poured out and used
+      for washing. He must be bathing his wounds, getting rid of the red stains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat down on the sofa at the foot of the bed and listened to the noise
+      of the water. At last it stopped and she heard drawers being violently
+      opened and shut, then a tearing sound. After a silence her husband came
+      into the room again with his forehead bound up in a silk handkerchief,
+      which was awkwardly knotted behind his head. Part of another silk
+      handkerchief was loosely tied round his right hand. He came forward, stood
+      in front of her and looked at her, and she saw now that there was an
+      expression almost of exultation on his face. She felt something fall into
+      her lap. It was the latch-key she had sent to Leo Ulford.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can tell you he&rsquo;s sorry he ever saw that&mdash;damned sorry,&rdquo; said Lord
+      Holme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme took the key up carefully and put it down on the sofa. She was
+      realising something, realising that her husband was feeling happy. When
+      she had laid down the key she looked up at him and there was an intense
+      scrutiny in her eyes. Suddenly it seemed to her as if she were standing up
+      and looking down on him, as if she were the judge, he the culprit in this
+      matter. The numbness left her mind. She was able to think swiftly again
+      and her hands stopped trembling. That look of exultation in her husband&rsquo;s
+      eyes had changed everything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down, I want to speak to you,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was surprised by the calm sound of her own voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme looked astonished. He shifted the bandage on his hand and stood
+      where he was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down,&rdquo; she repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he sat down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you came up here to turn me out of the house?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You deserve it,&rdquo; he muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But even now he did not look angry. There was a sort of savage glow on his
+      face. It was evident that the violent physical effort he had just made,
+      and the success of it, had irresistibly swept away his fury for the
+      moment. It might return. Probably it would return. But for the moment it
+      was gone. Lady Holme knew Fritz, and she knew that he was feeling good all
+      over. The fact that he could feel thus in such circumstances set the brute
+      in him before her as it had never been set before&mdash;in a glare of
+      light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what do you deserve?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All her terror had gone utterly. She felt mistress of herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I went to thrash Carey he was so drunk I couldn&rsquo;t touch him. This
+      feller showed fight but he was a baby in my hands. I could do anything I
+      liked with him,&rdquo; said Lord Holme. &ldquo;Gad! Talk of boxin&rsquo;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at his bandaged hand and laughed again triumphantly. Then,
+      suddenly, a sense of other things than his physical strength seemed to
+      return upon him. His face changed, grew lowering, and he thrust forward
+      his under jaw, opening his mouth to speak. Lady Holme did not give him
+      time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I sent Leo Ulford the latch-key,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You needn&rsquo;t ask. I sent
+      it, and told him to come to-night. D&rsquo;you know why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme&rsquo;s face grew scarlet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because you&rsquo;re a&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped him before he could say the irrevocable word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I mean to have the same liberty as the man I&rsquo;ve married,&rdquo; she
+      said. &ldquo;I asked Leo Ulford here, and I intended you should find him here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t. You thought I wasn&rsquo;t comin&rsquo; home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should I have thought such a thing?&rdquo; she said, swiftly, sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice had an edge to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You meant not to come home, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She read his stupidity at a glance, the guilty mind that had blundered,
+      thinking its intention known when it was not known. He began to deny it,
+      but she stopped him. At this moment, and exactly when she ought surely to
+      have been crushed by the weight of Fritz&rsquo;s fury, she dominated him.
+      Afterwards she wondered at herself, but not now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You meant not to come home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For once Lord Holme showed a certain adroitness. Instead of replying to
+      his wife he retorted:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You meant me to find Ulford here! That&rsquo;s a good &lsquo;un! Why, you tried all
+      you knew to keep him out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted&mdash;but you&rsquo;d never understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He does,&rdquo; said Lord Holme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed again, got up and walked about the room, fingering his
+      bandages. Then suddenly, he turned on Lady Holme and said savagely:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you. There&rsquo;s lots of fellers that would&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop!&rdquo; said Lady Holme, in a voice of sharp decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She got up too. She felt that she could not say what she meant to say
+      sitting down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fritz,&rdquo; she added, &ldquo;you&rsquo;re a fool. You may be worse. I believe you are.
+      But one thing&rsquo;s certain&mdash;you&rsquo;re a fool. Even in wickedness you&rsquo;re a
+      blunderer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what are you?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I!&rdquo; she answered, coming a step nearer. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not wicked.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sudden, strange desire came to her, a desire&mdash;as she had slangily
+      expressed it to Robin Pierce&mdash;to &ldquo;trot out&rdquo; the white angel whom she
+      had for so long ignored or even brow-beaten. Was the white angel there?
+      Some there were who believed so. Robin Pierce, Sir Donald, perhaps others.
+      And these few believers gave Lady Holme courage. She remembered them, she
+      relied on them at this moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not wicked,&rdquo; she repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked into her husband&rsquo;s face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you know that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps you&rsquo;d rather I was,&rdquo; she continued. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t men prefer it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared first at her, then at the carpet. A puzzled look came into his
+      face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I don&rsquo;t care,&rdquo; she said, gathering resolution, and secretly calling,
+      calling on the hidden woman, yet always with a doubt as to whether she was
+      there in her place of concealment. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t care. I can&rsquo;t change my nature
+      because of that. And surely&mdash;surely there must be some men who prefer
+      refinement to vulgarity, purity to&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ulford, eh?&rdquo; he interrupted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The retort struck like a whip on Lady Holme&rsquo;s temper. She forgot the
+      believers in the angel and the angel too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How dare you?&rdquo; she exclaimed. &ldquo;As if I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took up the latch-key and thrust it into her face. His sense of
+      physical triumph was obviously dying away, his sense of personal outrage
+      returning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good women don&rsquo;t do things like that,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If it was known in
+      London you&rsquo;d be done for.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you&mdash;may you do what you like openly, brazenly?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men&rsquo;s different,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The words and the satisfied way in which they were said made Lady Holme
+      feel suddenly almost mad with rage. The truth of the statement, and the
+      disgrace that it was truth, stirred her to the depths. At that moment she
+      hated her husband, she hated all men. She remembered what Lady Cardington
+      had said in the carriage as they were driving away from the Carlton after
+      Mrs. Wolfstein&rsquo;s lunch, and her sense of impotent fury was made more
+      bitter by the consciousness that women had chosen that men should be
+      &ldquo;different,&rdquo; or at least&mdash;if not that&mdash;had smilingly given them
+      a license to be so. She wanted to say, to call out, so much that she said
+      nothing. Lord Holme thought that for once he had been clever, almost
+      intellectual. This was indeed a night of many triumphs for him. An
+      intoxication of power surged up to his brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men&rsquo;s made different and treated differently,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And they&rsquo;d never
+      stand anything else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme sat down again on the sofa. She put her right hand on her left
+      hand and held it tightly in her lap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean,&rdquo; she said, in a hard, quiet voice, &ldquo;that you may humiliate your
+      wife in the eyes of London and that she must just pretend that she enjoys
+      it and go on being devoted to you? Well, I will not do either the one or
+      the other. I will not endure humiliation quietly, and as to my devotion to
+      you&mdash;I daresay it wouldn&rsquo;t take much to kill it. Perhaps it&rsquo;s dead
+      already.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No lie, perhaps, ever sounded more like truth than hers. At that moment
+      she thought that probably it was truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh?&rdquo; said Lord Holme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked suddenly less triumphant. His blunt features seemed altered in
+      shape by the expression of blatant, boyish surprise, even amazement, that
+      overspread them. His wife saw that, despite the incident of Leo Ulford&rsquo;s
+      midnight visit, Fritz had not really suspected her of the uttermost
+      faithlessness, that it had not occurred to him that perhaps her love for
+      him was dead, that love was alive in her for another man. Had his conceit
+      then no limits?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then suddenly another thought flashed into her mind. Was he, too, a
+      firm, even a fanatical, believer in the angel? She had never numbered
+      Fritz among that little company of believers. Him she had always set among
+      the men who worship the sirens of the world. But now&mdash;? Can there be
+      two men in one man as there can be two women in one woman? Suddenly Fritz
+      was new to her, newer to her than on the day when she first met him. And
+      he was complex. Fritz complex! She changed the word conceit. She called it
+      trust. And tears rushed into her eyes. There were tears in her heart too.
+      She looked up at her husband. The silk bandage over his forehead had been
+      white. Now it was faintly red. As she looked she thought that the colour
+      of the red deepened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come here, Fritz,&rdquo; she said softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved nearer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bend down!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bend down your head.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He bent down his huge form with a movement that had in it some resemblance
+      to the movement of a child. She put up her hand and touched the bandage
+      where it was red. She took her hand away. It was damp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A moment later Fritz was sitting in a low chair by the wash-hand stand in
+      an obedient attitude, and a woman&mdash;was she siren or angel?&mdash;was
+      bathing an ugly wound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      AFTER that night Lady Holme began to do something she had never done
+      before&mdash;to idealise her husband. Hitherto she had loved him without
+      weaving pretty fancies round him, loved him crudely for his strength, his
+      animalism, his powerful egoism and imperturbable self-satisfaction. She
+      had loved him almost as a savage woman might love, though without her
+      sense of slavery. Now a change came over her. She thought of Fritz in a
+      different way, the new Fritz, the Fritz who was a believer in the angel.
+      It seemed to her that he could be kept faithful most easily, most surely,
+      by such an appeal as Robin Pierce would have loved. She had sought to
+      rouse, to play upon the instincts of the primitive man. She had not gone
+      very far, it is true, but her methods had been common, ordinary. She had
+      undervalued Fritz&rsquo;s nature. That was what she felt now. He had behaved
+      badly to her, had wronged her, but he had believed in her very much. She
+      resolved to make his belief more intense. An expression on his face&mdash;only
+      that&mdash;had wrought a vital change in her feeling towards him, her
+      conception of him. She ranged him henceforth with Sir Donald, with Robin
+      Pierce. He stood among the believers in the angel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She called upon the angel passionately, feverishly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was strength in Lady Holme&rsquo;s character, and not merely strength of
+      temper. When she was roused, confident, she could be resolute, persistent;
+      could shut her eyes to side issues and go onward looking straight before
+      her. Now she went onward and she felt a new force within her, a force that
+      would not condescend to pettiness, to any groping in the mud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme was puzzled. He felt the change in his wife, but did not
+      understand it. Since the fracas with Leo Ulford their relations had
+      slightly altered. Vaguely, confusedly, he was conscious of being pitied,
+      yes, surely pitied by his wife. She shed a faint compassion, like a light
+      cloud, over the glory of his wrongdoing. And the glory was abated. He felt
+      a little doubtful of himself, almost as a son feels sometimes in the
+      presence of his mother. For the first time he began to think of himself,
+      now and then, as the inferior of his wife, began even, now and then, to
+      think of man as the inferior of woman&mdash;in certain ways. Such a state
+      of mind was very novel in him. He stared at it as a baby stares at its
+      toes, with round amazement, inwardly saying, &ldquo;Is this phenomenon part of
+      me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a new gentleness in Viola, a new tenderness. Both put him&mdash;as
+      one lifted and dropped&mdash;a step below her. He pulled his bronze
+      moustache over it with vigour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife showed no desire to control his proceedings, to know what he was
+      about. When she spoke of Miss Schley she spoke kindly, sympathetically,
+      but with a dainty, delicate pity, as one who secretly murmurs, &ldquo;If she had
+      only had a chance!&rdquo; Lord Holme began to think it a sad thing that she had
+      not had a chance. The mere thought sent the American a step down from her
+      throne. She stood below him now, as he stood below Viola. It seemed to him
+      that there was less resemblance between his wife and Miss Schley than he
+      had fancied. He even said so to Lady Holme. The angel smiled. Somebody
+      else in her smiled too. Once he remarked to the angel, <i>a propos de
+      bottes</i>, &ldquo;We men are awful brutes sometimes.&rdquo; Then he paused. As she
+      said nothing, only looked very kind, he added, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll bet you think so,
+      Vi?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It sounded like a question, but she preferred to give no answer, and he
+      walked away shaking his head over the brutishness of men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The believers in the angel naturally welcomed the development in Lady
+      Holme and the unbelievers laughed at it, especially those who had been at
+      Arkell House and those who had been influenced by Pimpernel Schley&rsquo;s
+      clever imitation. One night at the opera, when <i>Tannhauser</i> was being
+      given, Mr. Bry said of it, &ldquo;I seem to hear the voice of Venus raised in
+      the prayer of Elizabeth.&rdquo; Mrs. Wolfstein lifted large eyebrows over it,
+      and remarked to Henry, in exceptionally guttural German:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If this goes on Pimpernel&rsquo;s imitation will soon be completely out of
+      date.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To be out of date&mdash;in Mrs. Wolfstein&rsquo;s opinion&mdash;was to be
+      irremediably damned. Lady Cardington, Sir Donald Ulford, and one or two
+      others began to feel as if their dream took form and stepped out of the
+      mystic realm towards the light of day. Sir Donald seemed specially moved
+      by the change. It was almost as if something within him blossomed, warmed
+      by the breath of spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme wondered whether he knew of the fight between her husband and
+      his son. She dared not ask him and he only mentioned Leo once. Then he
+      said that Leo had gone down to his wife&rsquo;s country place in Hertfordshire.
+      Lady Holme could not tell by his intonation whether he had guessed that
+      there was a special reason for this departure. She was glad Leo had gone.
+      The developing angel did not want to meet the man who had suffered from
+      the siren&rsquo;s common conduct. Leo was not worth much. She knew that. But she
+      realised now the meanness of having used him merely as a weapon against
+      Fritz, and not only the meanness, but the vulgarity of the action. There
+      were moments in which she was fully conscious that, despite her rank, she
+      had not endured unsmirched close contact with the rampant commonness of
+      London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the last great events of the season was to be a charity concert,
+      got up by a Royal Princess in connection with a committee of well-known
+      women to start a club for soldiers and sailors. Various amateurs and
+      professionals were asked to take part in it, among them Lady Holme and
+      Miss Schley. The latter had already accepted the invitation when Lady
+      Holme received the Royal request, which was made <i>viva voce</i> and was
+      followed by a statement about the composition of the programme, in which
+      &ldquo;that clever Miss Schley&rdquo; was named.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme hesitated. She had not met the American for some time and did
+      not wish to meet her. Since she had bathed her husband&rsquo;s wound she knew&mdash;she
+      could not have told how&mdash;that Miss Schley&rsquo;s power over him had
+      lessened. She did not know what had happened between them. She did not
+      know that anything had happened. And, as part of this new effort of hers,
+      she had had the strength to beat down the vehement, the terrible curiosity&mdash;cold
+      steel and fire combined&mdash;that is a part of jealousy. That curiosity,
+      she told herself, belonged to the siren, not to the angel. But at this
+      Royal request her temper waked, and with it many other children of her
+      temperament. It was as if she had driven them into a dark cave and had
+      rolled a great stone to the cave&rsquo;s mouth. Now the stone was pushed back,
+      and in the darkness she heard them stirring, whispering, preparing to come
+      forth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Royal lady looked slightly surprised. She coughed and glanced at a
+      watch she wore at her side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall be delighted to do anything, ma&rsquo;am,&rdquo; Lady Holme said quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she received the programme she found that her two songs came
+      immediately after &ldquo;Some Imitations&rdquo; by Miss Pimpernel Schley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood for a moment with the programme in her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some Imitations&rdquo;; there was a certain crudeness about the statement, a
+      crudeness and an indefiniteness combined. Who were to be the victims? At
+      this moment, perhaps, they were being studied. Was she to be pilloried
+      again as she had been pilloried that night at the British Theatre? The
+      calm malice of the American was capable of any impudent act. It seemed to
+      Lady Holme that she had perhaps been very foolish in promising to appear
+      in the same programme with Miss Schley. Was it by accident that their
+      names were put together? Lady Holme did not know who had arranged the
+      order of the performances, but it occurred to her that there was
+      attraction to the public in the contiguity, and that probably it was a
+      matter of design. No other two women had been discussed and compared,
+      smiled over and whispered about that season by Society as she and Miss
+      Schley had been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment, while she looked at the programme, she thought of the
+      strange complications of feeling that are surely the fruit of an extreme
+      civilisation. She saw herself caught in a spider&rsquo;s web of apparently
+      frail, yet really powerful, threads spun by an invisible spider. Her world
+      was full of gossamer playing the part of iron, of gossamer that was
+      compelling, that made and kept prisoners. What freedom was there for her
+      and women like her, what reality of freedom? Even beauty, birth, money
+      were gossamer to hold the fly. For they concentrated the gaze of those
+      terrible watchful eyes which govern lives, dominating actions, even
+      dominating thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She moved, had always moved, in a maze of complications. She saw them tiny
+      yet intense, like ants in their hill. They stirred minds, hearts, as the
+      ants stirred twigs, leaves, blossoms, and carried them to the hill for
+      their own purposes. In this maze free will was surely lost. The beautiful
+      woman of the world seems to the world to be a dominant being, to be
+      imposing the yoke of her will on those around her. But is she anything but
+      a slave?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why were she and Miss Schley enemies? Why had they been enemies from the
+      moment they met? There was perhaps a reason for their hostility now, a
+      reason in Fritz. But at the beginning what reason had there been?
+      Civilisation manufactures reasons as the spider manufactures threads,
+      because it is the deadly enemy of peace&mdash;manufactures reasons for all
+      those thoughts and actions which are destructive of inward and exterior
+      peace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment it seemed to Lady Holme as if she and the American were
+      merely victims of the morbid conditions amid which they lived; conditions
+      which caused the natural vanity of women to become a destroying fever, the
+      natural striving of women to please a venomous battle, the natural desire
+      of women to be loved a fracas, in which clothes were the armour, modes of
+      hair-dressing, manicure, perfumes, dyes, powder-puffs the weapons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What a tremendous, noisy nothingness it was, this state of being! How
+      could an angel be natural in it,&mdash;be an angel at all?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She laid down the programme and sighed. She felt a vague yet violent
+      desire for release, for a fierce change, for something that would brush
+      away the spider&rsquo;s web and set free her wings. Yet where would she fly? She
+      did not know; probably against a window-pane. And the change would never
+      come. She and Fritz&mdash;what could they ever be but a successful couple
+      known in a certain world and never moving beyond its orbit?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps for the first time the longing that she had often expressed in her
+      singing, obedient to poet and composer, invaded her own soul. Without
+      music she was what with music she had often seemed to be&mdash;a creature
+      of wayward and romantic desires, a yearning spirit, a soaring flame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment she could have sung better than she had ever sung.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the programme the names of her songs did not appear. They were
+      represented by the letters A and B. She had not decided yet what she would
+      sing. But now, moved by feeling to the longing for some action in which
+      she might express it, she resolved to sing something in which she could at
+      least flutter the wings she longed to free, something in which the angel
+      could lift its voice, something that would delight the believers in the
+      angel and be as far removed from Miss Schley&rsquo;s imitations as possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a time she chose two songs. One was English, by a young composer,
+      and was called &ldquo;Away.&rdquo; It breathed something of the spirit of the East.
+      The man who had written it had travelled much in the East, had drawn into
+      his lungs the air, into his nostrils the perfume, into his soul the
+      meaning of desert places. There was distance in his music. There was
+      mystery. There was the call of the God of Gold who lives in the sun. There
+      was the sound of feet that travel. The second song she chose was French.
+      The poem was derived from a writing of Jalalu&rsquo;d dinu&rsquo;r Rumi, and told this
+      story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day a man came to knock upon the door of the being he loved. A voice
+      cried from within the house, &ldquo;<i>Qui est la</i>?&rdquo; &ldquo;<i>C&rsquo;est moi</i>!&rdquo;
+       replied the man. There was a pause. Then the voice answered, &ldquo;This house
+      cannot shelter us both together.&rdquo; Sadly the lover went away, went into the
+      great solitude, fasted and prayed. When a long year had passed he came
+      once more to the house of the one he loved, and struck again upon the
+      door. The voice from within cried, &ldquo;<i>Qui est la</i>?&rdquo; &ldquo;<i>C&rsquo;est toi</i>!&rdquo;
+       whispered the lover. Then the door was opened swiftly and he passed in
+      with outstretched arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having decided that she would sing these two songs, Lady Holme sat down to
+      go through them at the piano. Just as she struck the first chord of the
+      desert song a footman came in to know whether she was at home to Lady
+      Cardington. She answered &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo; In her present mood she longed to give out
+      her feeling to an audience, and Lady Cardington was very sympathetic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a minute she came in, looking as usual blanched and tired, dressed in
+      black with some pale yellow roses in the front of her gown. Seeing Lady
+      Holme at the piano she said, in her low voice with a thrill in it:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are singing? Let me listen, let me listen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not come up to shake hands, but at once sat down at a short
+      distance from the piano, leaned back, and gazed at Lady Holme with a
+      strange expression of weary, yet almost passionate, expectation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme looked at her and at the desert song. Suddenly she thought she
+      would not sing it to Lady Cardington. There was too wild a spell in it for
+      this auditor. She played a little prelude and sang an Italian song, full,
+      as a warm flower of sweetness, of the sweetness of love. The refrain was
+      soft as golden honey, soft and languorous, strangely sweet and sad. There
+      was an exquisite music in the words of the refrain, and the music they
+      were set to made their appeal more clinging, like the appeal of white
+      arms, of red, parting lips.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;Torna in fior di giovinezza
+       Isaotta Blanzesmano,
+       Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano:
+   Nell&rsquo;amore ogni dolcezza.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Tears came into Lady Cardington&rsquo;s eyes as she listened, brimmed over and
+      fell down upon her blanched cheeks. Each time the refrain recurred she
+      moved her lips: &ldquo;Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano: Nell&rsquo;amore ogni dolcezza.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme&rsquo;s voice was like honey as she sang, and tears were in her eyes
+      too. Each time the refrain fell from her heart she seemed to see another
+      world, empty of gossamer threads, a world of spread wings, a world of&mdash;but
+      such poetry and music do not tell you! Nor can you imagine. You can only
+      dream and wonder, as when you look at the horizon line and pray for the
+      things beyond.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;Tutto&mdash;tutto al mondo a vano:
+   Nell&rsquo;amore ogni dolcezza.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why do you sing like that to-day?&rdquo; said Lady Cardington, wiping her eyes
+      gently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel like that to-day,&rdquo; Lady Holme said, keeping her hands on the keys
+      in the last chord. There was a vagueness in her eyes, a sort of faint
+      cloud of fear. While she was singing she had thought, &ldquo;Have I known the
+      love that shows the vanity of the world? Have I known the love in which
+      alone all sweetness lives?&rdquo; The thought had come in like a firefly through
+      an open window. &ldquo;Have I? Have I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And something within her felt a stab of pain, something within her soul
+      and yet surely a thousand miles away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tutto&mdash;tutto al mondo e vano,&rdquo; murmured Lady Cardington. &ldquo;We feel
+      that and we feel it, and&mdash;do you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To-day I seem to,&rdquo; answered Lady Holme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When you sing that song you look like the love that gives all sweetness
+      to men. Sing like that, look like that, and you&mdash;If Sir Donald had
+      heard you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme got up from the piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir Donald!&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She came to sit down near Lady Cardington.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir Donald! Why do you say that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And she searched Lady Cardington&rsquo;s eyes with eyes full of inquiry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Cardington looked away. The wistful power that generally seemed a
+      part of her personality had surely died out in her. There was something
+      nervous in her expression, deprecating in her attitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why do you speak about Sir Donald?&rdquo; Lady Holme said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Cardington looked up. There was an extraordinary sadness in her eyes,
+      mingled with a faint defiance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Know what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That Sir Donald is madly in love with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir Donald! Sir Donald&mdash;madly anything!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed, not as if she were amused, but as if she wished to do
+      something else and chose to laugh instead. Lady Cardington sat straight
+      up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t understand anything but youth,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a sound of keen bitterness in her low voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet,&rdquo; she added, after a pause, &ldquo;you can sing till you break the
+      heart of age&mdash;break its heart.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly she burst into a flood of tears. Lady Holme was so surprised that
+      she did absolutely nothing, did not attempt to console, to inquire. She
+      sat and looked at Lady Cardington&rsquo;s tall figure swayed by grief, listened
+      to the sound of her hoarse, gasping sobs. And then, abruptly, as if
+      someone came into the room and told her, she understood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You love Sir Donald,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Cardington looked up. Her tear-stained, distorted face seemed very
+      old.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We both regret the same thing in the same way,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;We were both
+      wretched in&mdash;in the time when we ought to have been happy. I thought&mdash;I
+      had a ridiculous idea we might console each other. You shattered my hope.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m sorry,&rdquo; Lady Holme said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she said it with more tenderness than she had ever before used to a
+      woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Cardington pressed a pocket-handkerchief against her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sing me that song again,&rdquo; she whispered. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t say anything more. Just
+      sing it again and I&rsquo;ll go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme went to the piano.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;Torna in fior di giovinezza
+       Isaotta Blanzesmano,
+       Dice: Tutto al mondo a vano:
+   Nell&rsquo;amore ogni dolcezza.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      When the last note died away she looked towards the sofa. Lady Cardington
+      was gone. Lady Holme leaned her arm on the piano and put her chin in her
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How awful to be old!&rdquo; she thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Half aloud she repeated the last words of the refrain: &ldquo;Nell&rsquo;amore ogni
+      dolcezza.&rdquo; And then she murmured:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor Sir Donald!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then she repeated, &ldquo;Poor&mdash;&rdquo; and stopped. Again the faint cloud of
+      fear was in her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      THE Charity Concert was to be given in Manchester House, one of the
+      private palaces of London, and as Royalty had promised to be present, all
+      the tickets were quickly sold. Among those who bought them were most of
+      the guests who had been present at the Holmes&rsquo; dinner-party when Lady
+      Holme lost her temper and was consoled by Robin Pierce. Robin of course
+      was in Rome, but Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mrs. Wolfstein, Sir Donald,
+      Mr. Bry took seats. Rupert Carey also bought a ticket. He was not invited
+      to great houses any more, but on this public occasion no one with a guinea
+      to spend was unwelcome. To Lady Holme&rsquo;s surprise the day before the
+      concert Fritz informed her that he was going too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You, Fritz!&rdquo; she exclaimed. &ldquo;But it&rsquo;s in the afternoon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What o&rsquo; that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll be bored to death. You&rsquo;ll go to sleep. Probably you&rsquo;ll snore.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not I.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He straddled his legs and looked attentively at the toes of his boots.
+      Lady Holme wondered why he was going. Had Miss Schley made a point of it?
+      She longed to know. The cruel curiosity which the angel was ever trying to
+      beat down rose up in her powerfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her husband was speaking with some hesitation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s have a squint at the programme, will you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here it is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She gave it to him and watched him narrowly as he looked quickly over it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hulloa!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some Imitations,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s that mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t you know Miss Schley was a mimic?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A mimic&mdash;not I! She&rsquo;s an actress.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now? When was she anythin&rsquo; else?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When she began in America. She was a mimic in the music-halls.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The deuce she was!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood looking very grave and puzzled for a minute, then he stared hard
+      at his wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did she mimic?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know&mdash;people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again there was a silence. Then he said&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say, I don&rsquo;t know that I want you to sing at that affair to-morrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I must. Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He hesitated, shifting from one foot to the other almost like a great boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what she&rsquo;s up to,&rdquo; he answered at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Schley?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme felt her heart beat faster. Was her husband going to open up a
+      discussion of the thing that had been turning her life to gall during
+      these last weeks&mdash;his flirtation, his <i>liaison</i>&mdash;if it were
+      a <i>liaison</i>; she did not know&mdash;with the American? The woman who
+      had begun to idealise Fritz and the woman who was desperately jealous of
+      him both seemed to be quivering within her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean&mdash;?&rdquo; she began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped, then spoke again in a quiet voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean that you think Miss Schley is going to do something unusual
+      at the concert tomorrow?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dunno. She&rsquo;s the devil.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a reluctant admiration in his voice, as there always is in the
+      voice of a man when he describes a woman as gifted with infernal
+      attributes, and this sound stung Lady Holme. It seemed to set that angel
+      upon whom she was calling in the dust, to make of that angel a puppet, an
+      impotent, even a contemptible thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Fritz,&rdquo; she said in a rather loud, clear voice, like the voice of
+      one speaking to a child, &ldquo;my dear Fritz, you&rsquo;re surely aware that I have
+      been the subject of Miss Schley&rsquo;s talent ever since she arrived in
+      London?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You! What d&rsquo;you mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You surely can&rsquo;t be so blind as not to have seen what all London has
+      seen?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s all London seen?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, that Miss Schley&rsquo;s been mimicking me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mimickin&rsquo; you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The brown of his large cheeks was invaded by red.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you have noticed it. I remember your speaking about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not I!&rdquo; he exclaimed with energy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. You spoke of the likeness between us, in expression, in ways of
+      looking and moving.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&mdash;I thought it was natural.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You thought it was natural?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a profound, if very bitter, compassion in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor old boy!&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme looked desperately uncomfortable. His legs were in a most
+      violent, even a most pathetic commotion, and he tugged his moustache with
+      the fingers of both hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damned cheek!&rdquo; he muttered. &ldquo;Damned cheek!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned suddenly as if he were going to stride about the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t get angry,&rdquo; said his wife. &ldquo;I never did.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He swung round and faced her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;D&rsquo;you mean you&rsquo;ve always known she was mimickin&rsquo; you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course. From the very start.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His face got redder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll teach her to let my wife alone,&rdquo; he muttered. &ldquo;To dare&mdash;my
+      wife!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid it&rsquo;s a little late in the day to begin now,&rdquo; Lady Holme said.
+      &ldquo;Society&rsquo;s been laughing over it, and your apparent appreciation of it,
+      the best part of the season.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your apparent enjoyment of the performance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then she went quietly out of the room and shut the door gently behind
+      her. But directly the door was shut she became another woman. Her mouth
+      was distorted, her eyes shone, she rushed upstairs to her bedroom, locked
+      herself in, threw herself down on the bed and pressed her face furiously
+      against the coverlet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact that she had spoken at last to her husband of the insult she had
+      been silently enduring, the insult he had made so far more bitter than it
+      need have been by his conduct, had broken down something within her, some
+      wall of pride behind which had long been gathering a flood of feeling. She
+      cried now frantically, with a sort of despairing rage, cried and crushed
+      herself against the bed, beating the pillows with her hands, grinding her
+      teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was the use of it all? What was the use of being beautiful, of being
+      young, rich? What was the use of having married a man she had loved? What
+      was the use? What was the use?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the use?&rdquo; she sobbed the words out again and again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the man was a fool, Fritz was a fool. She thought of him at that
+      moment as half-witted. For he saw nothing, nothing. He was a blind man led
+      by his animal passions, and when at last he was forced to see, when she
+      came and, as it were, lifted his eyelids with her fingers, and said to
+      him, &ldquo;Look! Look at what has been done to me!&rdquo; he could only be angry for
+      himself, because the insult had attained him, because she happened to be
+      his wife. It seemed to her, while she was crying there, that stupidity
+      combined with egoism must have the power to kill even that vital, enduring
+      thing, a woman&rsquo;s love. She had begun to idealise Fritz, but how could she
+      go on idealising him? And she began for the first time really to
+      understand&mdash;or to begin to understand&mdash;that there actually was
+      something within her which was hungry, unsatisfied, something which was
+      not animal but mental, or was it spiritual?&mdash;something not sensual,
+      not cerebral, which cried aloud for sustenance. And this something did
+      not, could never, cry to Fritz. It knew he could not give it what it
+      wanted. Then to whom did it cry? She did not know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently she grew calmer and sat upon the bed, looking straight before
+      her. Her mind returned upon itself. She seemed to go back to that point of
+      time, just before Lady Cardington called, when she had the programme in
+      her hand and thought of the gossamer threads that were as iron in her
+      life, and in such lives as hers; then to move on to that other point of
+      time when she laid down the programme, sighed, and was conscious of a
+      violent desire for release, for something to come and lift a powerful hand
+      and brush away the spider&rsquo;s web.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But now, returning to this further moment in her life, she asked herself
+      what would be left to her if the spider&rsquo;s web were gone? The believers in
+      the angel? Perhaps she no longer included Fritz among them. The impotence
+      of his mind seemed to her an impotence of heart just then. He was to her
+      like a numbed creature, incapable of movement, incapable of thought,
+      incapable of belief. Credulity&mdash;yes, but not belief. And so, when she
+      looked at the believers, she saw but a few people: Robin Pierce, Sir
+      Donald&mdash;whom else?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then she heard, as if far off, the song she would sing on the morrow
+      at Manchester House.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;Torna in fior di giovinezza
+       Isaotta Blanzesmano,
+       Dice: Tutto al mondo a vano:
+   Nell&rsquo;amore ogni dolcezza.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      And then she cried again, but no longer frantically; quietly, with a sort
+      of childish despair and confusion. In her heart there had opened a dark
+      space, a gulf. She peered into it and heard, deep down in it, hollow
+      echoes resounding, and she recoiled from a vision of emptiness.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      On the following day Fritz drove her himself to Manchester House in a new
+      motor he had recently bought. All the morning he had stayed at home and
+      fidgeted about the house. It was obvious to his wife that he was in an
+      unusually distracted frame of mind. He wanted to tell her something, yet
+      could not do so. She saw that plainly, and she felt almost certain that
+      since their interview of the previous day he had seen Miss Schley. She
+      fancied that there had been a scene of some kind between them, and she
+      guessed that Fritz had been hopelessly worsted in it and was very sorry
+      for himself. There was a beaten look in his face, a very different look
+      from that which had startled her when he came into her room after
+      thrashing Leo Ulford. This time, however, her curiosity was not awake, and
+      the fact that it was not awake marked a change in her. She felt to-day as
+      if she did not care what Fritz had been doing or was going to do. She had
+      suffered, she had concealed her suffering, she had tried vulgarly to pay
+      Fritz out, she had failed. At the critical moment she had played the woman
+      after he had played the man. He had thrashed the intruder whom she was
+      using as a weapon, and she had bathed his wounds, made much of him,
+      idealised him. She had done what any uneducated street woman would have
+      done for &ldquo;her man.&rdquo; And now she had suddenly come to feel as if there had
+      always been an emptiness in her life, as if Fritz never had, never could
+      fill it. The abruptness of the onset of this new feeling confused her. She
+      did not know that a woman could be subject to a change of this kind. She
+      did not understand it, realise what it portended, what would result from
+      it. But she felt that, for the moment, at any rate, she could not get up
+      any excitement about Fritz, his feelings, his doings. Whenever she thought
+      of him she thought of his blundering stupidity, his blindness, sensuality
+      and egoism. No doubt she loved him. Only, to-day, she did not feel as if
+      she loved him or anyone. Yet she did not feel dull. On the contrary, she
+      was highly strung, unusually sensitive. What she was most acutely
+      conscious of was a sensation of lonely excitement, of solitary
+      expectation. Fritz fidgeted about the house, and the fact that he did so
+      gave her no more concern than if a little dog had been running to and fro.
+      She did not want him to tell her what was the matter. On the other hand,
+      she did want him not to tell her. Simply she did not care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He said nothing. Perhaps something in her look, her manner, kept him dumb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they were in the motor on the way to Manchester House, he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I bet you&rsquo;ll cut out everybody.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, there are all sorts of stars.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, mind you put &lsquo;em all out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was evident to her that for some reason or other he was particularly
+      anxious she should shine that afternoon. She meant to. She knew she was
+      going to. But she had no desire to shine in order to gratify Fritz&rsquo;s
+      egoism. Probably he had just had a quarrel with Miss Schley and wanted to
+      punish her through his wife. The idea was not a pretty one. Unfortunately
+      that circumstance did not ensure its not being a true one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mind you do, eh?&rdquo; reiterated her husband, giving the steering wheel a
+      twist and turning the car up Hamilton Place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall try to sing well, naturally,&rdquo; she replied coldly. &ldquo;I always do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course&mdash;I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something almost servile in his manner, an anxiety which was
+      quite foreign to it as a rule.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s a stunnin&rsquo; dress,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;Keep your cloak well over it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the row?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;Anythin&rsquo; up?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m thinking over my songs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had silenced him for the moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very soon they were in a long line of carriages and motors moving slowly
+      towards Manchester House.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Goin&rsquo; to be a deuce of a crowd,&rdquo; said Fritz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naturally.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wonder who&rsquo;ll be there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everybody who&rsquo;s still in town.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She bowed to a man in a hansom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Plancon. He&rsquo;s singing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How long&rsquo;ll it be before you come on?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite an hour, I think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better than bein&rsquo; first, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you goin&rsquo; to sing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was about to say something impatient about his not knowing one tune
+      from another, but she checked herself, and answered quietly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An Italian song and a French song.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What about?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take care of that carriage in front&mdash;love.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at her sideways.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re the one to sing about that,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She felt that he was admiring her beauty as if it were new to him. She did
+      not care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last they reached Manchester House. Fritz&rsquo;s place was taken by his
+      chauffeur, and they got out. The crowd was enormous. Many people
+      recognised Lady Holme and greeted her. Others, who did not know her
+      personally, looked at her with open curiosity. A powdered footman came to
+      show her to the improvised artists&rsquo; room. Fritz prepared to follow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t you going into the concert-room?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Presently.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll take you up first.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;But it isn&rsquo;t the least necessary.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He only stuck out his under jaw. She realised that Miss Schley would be in
+      the artists&rsquo; room and said nothing more. They made their way very slowly
+      to the great landing on the first floor of the house, from which a maze of
+      reception rooms opened. Mr. and Mrs. Ongrin, the immensely rich
+      Australians who were the owners of the house, were standing there ready to
+      receive the two Royal Princesses who were expected, and Mr. Ongrin took
+      from a basket on a table beside him a great bouquet of honey-coloured
+      roses, and offered it to Lady Holme with a hearty word of thanks to her
+      for singing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She took the roses with a look of pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How sweet of you! They suit my song,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was thinking of the Italian song.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Ongrin, who was a large, loose-limbed man, with straw-coloured hair
+      turning grey, and a broken nose, looked genial and confused, and she went
+      on, still closely followed by Fritz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the room for the performers, my lady,&rdquo; said the footman, showing
+      them into a large, green drawing-room, with folding doors at one end shut
+      off by an immense screen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is the platform behind the screen?&rdquo; Lady Holme asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, my lady. The ladies&rsquo; cloak-room is on the left&mdash;that door, my
+      lady.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There were already several people in the room, standing about and looking
+      tentative. Lady Holme knew most of them. One was a French actor who was
+      going to give a monologue; very short, very stout, very
+      intelligent-looking, with a face that seemed almost too flexible to be
+      human. Two or three were singers from the Opera House. Another was an
+      aristocratic amateur, an intimate friend of Lady Holme&rsquo;s, who had a
+      beautiful contralto voice. Several of the committee were there too, making
+      themselves agreeable to the artists. Lady Holme began to speak to the
+      French actor. Fritz stood by. He scarcely understood a word of French, and
+      always looked rather contemptuous when it was talked in his presence. The
+      French actor appealed to him on some point in the conversation. He
+      straddled his legs, uttered a loud, &ldquo;Oh, wee! Oh, wee! wee!&rdquo; and laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lord Holme est tout a fait de mon avis!&rdquo; cried the comedian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Evidemment,&rdquo; she answered, wishing Fritz would go. Miss Schley had not
+      come yet. She was certain to be effectively late, as she had been at Mrs.
+      Wolfstein&rsquo;s lunch-party. Lady Holme did not feel as if she cared whether
+      she came early or late, whether she were there or not. She was still
+      companioned by her curious sensation of the morning, a sensation of odd
+      loneliness and detachment, combined with excitement&mdash;but an
+      excitement which had nothing to do with the present. It seemed to her as
+      if she were a person leaning out of a window and looking eagerly along a
+      road. People were in the room behind her, voices were speaking, things
+      were happening there, but they had nothing to do with her. That which had
+      to do with her was coming down the road. She could not see yet what it
+      was, but she could hear the faint sound of its approach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The comedian spoke to someone else. She went into the cloak-room and took
+      off her motor cloak. As she glanced into a mirror to see if all the
+      details of her gown were perfect, she was struck by the expression on her
+      face, as if she had seen it on the face of a stranger. For a moment she
+      looked at herself as at a stranger, seeing her beauty with a curious
+      detachment, and admiring it without personal vanity or egoism, or any
+      small, triumphant feeling. Yet it was not her beauty which fascinated her
+      eyes, but an imaginative look in them and in the whole face. For the first
+      time she fully realised why she had a curious, an evocative, influence on
+      certain people, why she called the hidden children of the secret places of
+      their souls, why those children heard, and stretched out their hands, and
+      lifted their eyes and opened their lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a summoning, and yet a distant expression in her eyes. She saw
+      it herself. They were like eyes that had looked on magic, that would look
+      on magic again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A maid came to help her. In a moment she had picked up her bouquet of
+      roses and her music-case, and was back in the green drawing-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were more people in it now. Fritz was still hovering about looking
+      remarkably out of place and strangely ill at ease. To-day his usual
+      imperturbable self-confidence had certainly deserted him. He spoke to
+      people but his eyes were on the door. Lady Holme knew that he was waiting
+      for Miss Schley. She felt a sort of vague pity for his uneasiness. It was
+      time for the concert to begin, but the Princesses had not yet arrived. A
+      murmur of many voices came from the hidden room beyond the screen where
+      the audience was assembled. Several of the performers began to look rather
+      strung up. They smiled and talked with slightly more vivacity than was
+      quite natural in them. One or two of the singers glanced over their songs,
+      and pointed out certain effects they meant to make to the principal
+      accompanist, an abnormally thin boy with thick dark hair and flushed
+      cheeks. He expressed comprehension, emphasising it by finger-taps on the
+      music and a continual, &ldquo;I see! I see!&rdquo; Two or three of the members of the
+      committee looked at their watches, and the murmur of conversation in the
+      hidden concert-room rose into a dull roar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme sat down on a sofa. Sometimes when she was going to sing she
+      felt nervous. There are very few really accomplished artists who do not.
+      But to-day she was not at all nervous. She knew she was going to do well&mdash;as
+      well as when she sang to Lady Cardington, even better. She felt almost as
+      if she were made of music, as if music were part of her, ran in her veins
+      like blood, shone in her eyes like light, beat in her heart like the pulse
+      of life. But she felt also as if she were still at a window, looking down
+      a road, and listening to the sound of an approach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you see him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A lady near her was speaking to a friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Doesn&rsquo;t he look shocking? Such an alteration!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor fellow! I wonder he cares to go about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he&rsquo;s so clever. He helped me in a concert once&mdash;the Gordon boys,
+      you know&mdash;and I assure you&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not catch anything more, but she felt a conviction that they were
+      speaking of Rupert Carey, and that he must be in the concert-room. Poor
+      Carey! She thought of the Arkell House ball, but only for a moment. Then
+      someone spoke to her. A moment later Miss Schley came slowly into the
+      room, accompanied by a very small, wiry-looking old woman, dreadfully
+      dressed, and by Leo Ulford, who was carrying a bouquet of red carnations.
+      The kind care of Mr. Ongrin had provided a bouquet for each lady who was
+      performing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Leo came in he looked round swiftly, furtively. He saw Fritz, and a
+      flush went over his face. Then Lady Holme saw him look at her with a
+      scowl, exactly like the scowl of an evil-tempered schoolboy. She bowed to
+      him slightly. He ignored the recognition, and spoke to Miss Schley with a
+      heavy assumption of ignominious devotion and intimacy. Lady Holme could
+      scarcely help smiling. She read the little story very plainly&mdash;the
+      little common story of Leo&rsquo;s desire to take a revenge for his thrashing
+      fitting in with some similar desire of Miss Schley&rsquo;s; on her part probably
+      a wish to punish Fritz for having ventured to say something about her
+      impudent mimicry of his wife. Easy to read it was, common-minded,
+      common-hearted humanity in full sail to petty triumph, petty revenge. But
+      all this was taking place in the room behind Lady Holme, and she was
+      leaning from the window watching the white road. But Fritz? She glanced
+      round the drawing-room and saw that he was moved by the story as they had
+      meant him to be moved. The angry jealousy of the primitive, sensual man
+      was aflame, His possessive sense, one of the strongest, if not the
+      strongest, of such a man&rsquo;s senses, was outraged. And he showed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was standing with a middle-aged lady, one of the committee, but he had
+      ceased from talking to her, and was staring at Miss Schley and Leo with
+      the peculiar inflated look on his face that was characteristic of him when
+      his passions were fully roused. Every feature seemed to swell and become
+      bloated, as if under the influence of a disease or physical seizure. The
+      middle-aged lady looked at him with obvious astonishment, then turned away
+      and spoke to the French actor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Schley moved slowly into the middle of the room. She did not seem to
+      see Fritz. Two or three people came to speak to her. She smiled but did
+      not say much. The little wiry-looking old lady, her mother from
+      Susanville, stood by her in an effaced manner, and Leo, holding the
+      bouquet, remained close beside her, standing over her in his impudent
+      fashion like a privileged guardian and lover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme was watching Fritz. The necessary suppression of his anger at
+      such a moment, and in such surroundings, suppression of any demonstration
+      of it at least, was evidently torturing him. Someone&mdash;a man&mdash;spoke
+      to him. His wife saw that he seemed to choke something down before he
+      could get out a word in reply. Directly he had answered he moved away from
+      the man towards Miss Schley, but he did not go up to her. He did not trust
+      himself to do that. He stood still again, staring. Leo bent protectively
+      over the American. She smiled at him demurely beneath lowered eyelids. The
+      little old lady shook out her rusty black dress and assumed an absurd air
+      of social sprightliness, making a mouth bunched up like an old-fashioned
+      purse sharply drawn together by a string.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a sudden lull in the roar of conversation from the concert-room,
+      succeeded by a wide rustling noise. The Princesses had at length arrived,
+      and the audience was standing up as they came in and took their seats.
+      After a brief silence the rustling noise was renewed as the audience sat
+      down again. Then the pianist hurried up to a grave-looking girl who was
+      tenderly holding a violin, took her hand and led her away behind the
+      screen. A moment later the opening bars of a duet were audible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The people in the artists&rsquo; room began to sit down with a slight air of
+      resignation. The French actor looked at the very pointed toes of his
+      varnished boots and composed his india-rubber features into a solemn,
+      almost priestly, expression. Lady Holme went over to a sofa near the
+      screen and listened attentively to the duet, but from time to time she
+      glanced towards the middle of the room where Miss Schley was still calmly
+      standing up with Leo holding the bouquet. The mother from Susanville had
+      subsided on a small chair with gilt legs, spread out her meagre gown, and
+      assumed the aspect of a roosting bird at twilight. Fritz stood up with his
+      back against the wall, staring at Miss Schley. His face still looked
+      bloated. Presently Miss Schley glanced at him, as if by accident, looked
+      surprised at seeing him there, and nodded demurely. He made a movement
+      forward from the wall, but she immediately began to whisper to Leo Ulford,
+      and after remaining for a moment in an attitude of angry hesitation he
+      moved backward again. His face flushed scarlet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme realised that he was making a fool of himself. She saw several
+      pairs of eyes turned towards him, slight smiles appearing on several
+      faces. The French actor had begun to watch him with an expression of close
+      criticism, as a stage manager watches an actor at rehearsal. But she did
+      not feel as if she cared what Fritz was doing. The sound of the violin had
+      emphasised her odd sensation of having nothing to do with what was going
+      on in the room. Just for one hour Fritz&rsquo;s conduct could not affect her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very soon people began to whisper round her. Artists find it very
+      difficult to listen to other artists on these occasions. In a minute or
+      two almost everybody was speaking with an air of mystery. Miss Schley put
+      her lips to Leo Ulford&rsquo;s ear. Evidently she had a great deal to say to
+      him. He began to pout his lips in smiles. They both looked across at Lord
+      Holme. Then Miss Schley went on murmuring words into Leo&rsquo;s ear and Leo
+      began to shake with silent laughter. Lord Holme clenched his hands at his
+      sides. The French actor, still watching him closely, put up a fat
+      forefinger and meditatively traced the outline of his own profile, pushing
+      out his large flexible lips when the finger was drawing near to them. The
+      whole room was full of the tickling noise of half-whispered conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently the music stopped. Instantly the tickling noise stopped too.
+      There was languid applause&mdash;the applause of smart people on a summer
+      afternoon&mdash;from beyond the screen. Then the grave girl reappeared,
+      looking graver and hot. Those who had been busily talking while she was
+      playing gathered round her to express their delight in her kind
+      accompaniment. The pianist hurried up to a stout man with a low,
+      turned-down collar and a white satin tie, whose double chin, and general
+      air of rather fatuous prosperity, proclaimed him the possessor of a tenor
+      voice, and Miss Schley walked quietly, but with determination, up to where
+      Lady Holme was sitting and took a seat beside her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Glad to meet you again,&rdquo; she drawled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She called Leo Ulford with a sharp nod. He hesitated, and began to look
+      supremely uncomfortable, twisting the bouquet of carnations round and
+      round in nervous hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been simply expiring all season to hear you sing,&rdquo; Miss Schley
+      continued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How sweet of you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is so. Mr. Ulford, please bring my flowers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Leo had no alternative but to obey. He came slowly towards the sofa, while
+      the tenor and the pianist vanished behind the screen. That he was
+      sufficiently sensitive to be conscious of the awkwardness of the situation
+      Miss Schley had pleasantly contrived was very apparent. He glowered upon
+      Lady Holme, forcing his boyish face to assume a coarsely-determined and
+      indifferent expression. But somehow the body, which she knew her husband
+      had thrashed, looked all the time as if it were being thrashed again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The voice of the hidden tenor rose in &ldquo;<i>Celeste Aida!</i>&rdquo; and Lady
+      Holme listened with an air of definite attention, taking no notice of Leo.
+      The music gave her a perfect excuse for ignoring him. But Miss Schley did
+      not intend to be interfered with by anything so easily trampled upon as an
+      art. Speaking in her most clear and choir-boyish tones, she said to Leo
+      Ulford:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down, Mr. Ulford. You fidget me standing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then turning again to Lady Holme she continued:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Ulford&rsquo;s been so lovely and kind. He came up all the way from
+      Hertfordshire just to take care of marmar and me to-day. Marmar&rsquo;s fair and
+      crazy about him. She says he&rsquo;s the most lovely feller in Europe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Leo twisted the bouquet. He was sitting now on the edge of a chair, and
+      shooting furtive glances in the direction of Lord Holme, who had begun to
+      look extremely stupid, overwhelmed by the cool impudence of the American.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your husband looks as if he were perched around on a keg of
+      rattlesnakes,&rdquo; continued Miss Schley, her clear voice mingling with the
+      passionate tenor cry, &ldquo;<i>Celeste Aida!</i>&rdquo; &ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t he feeling well
+      to-day?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe he is perfectly well,&rdquo; said Lady Holme, in a very low voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was odd, perhaps, but she did not feel at all angry, embarrassed, or
+      even slightly annoyed, by Miss Schley&rsquo;s very deliberate attempt to
+      distress her. Of course she understood perfectly what had happened and was
+      happening. Fritz had spoken to the actress about her mimicry of his wife,
+      had probably spoken blunderingly, angrily. Miss Schley was secretly
+      furious at his having found out what she had been doing, still more
+      furious at his having dared to criticise any proceeding of hers. To
+      revenge herself at one stroke on both Lord and Lady Holme she had turned
+      to Leo Ulford, whose destiny it evidently was to be used as a weapon
+      against others. Long ago Lady Holme had distracted Leo&rsquo;s wandering glances
+      from the American and fixed them on herself. With the instinct to be
+      common of an utterly common nature Miss Schley had resolved to awake a
+      double jealousy&mdash;of husband and wife&mdash;by exhibiting Leo Ulford
+      as her <i>ami intime</i>, perhaps as the latest victim to her fascination.
+      It was the vulgar action of a vulgar woman, but it failed of its effect in
+      one direction. Lord Holme was stirred, but Lady Holme was utterly
+      indifferent. Miss Schley&rsquo;s quick instinct told her so and she was puzzled.
+      She did not understand Lady Holme. That was scarcely strange, for to-day
+      Lady Holme did not understand herself. The curious mental detachment of
+      which she had been conscious for some time had increased until it began
+      surely to link itself with something physical, something sympathetic in
+      the body that replied to it. She asked herself whether the angel were
+      spreading her wings at last. All the small, sordid details of which lives
+      lived in society, lives such as hers, are full, details which assume often
+      an extraordinary importance, a significance like that of molecules seen
+      through a magnifying glass, had suddenly become to her as nothing. A
+      profound indifference had softly invaded her towards the petty side of
+      life. Miss Schley, Leo Ulford, even Fritz in his suppressed rage and
+      jealousy of a male animal openly trampled upon, had nothing to do with
+      her, could have no effect on her at this moment. She remembered that she
+      had once sighed for release. Well, it seemed to her as if release were at
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tenor finished his romance. Again the muffled applause sounded. As the
+      singer came from behind the screen, wiping beads of perspiration from his
+      self-satisfied face, Lady Holme got up and congratulated him. Then she
+      crossed over to her husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you go into the concert-room, Fritz? You&rsquo;re missing everything,
+      and you&rsquo;re only in the way here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not speak unkindly. He said nothing, only cleared his throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go in,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I should like to have you there while I am singing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He cleared his throat again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Right you are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared into her eyes with a sort of savage admiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cut her out,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Cut her out! You can, and&mdash;damn her!&mdash;she
+      deserves it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he turned and went out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme felt rather sick for a moment. She knew she was going to sing
+      well, she wished to sing well&mdash;but not in order to punish Miss Schley
+      for having punished Fritz. Was everything she did to accomplish some
+      sordid result? Was even her singing&mdash;the one thing in which Robin
+      Pierce and some other divined a hidden truth that was beautiful&mdash;was
+      even that to play its contemptible part in the social drama in which she
+      was so inextricably entangled? Those gossamer threads were iron strands
+      indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Someone else was singing&mdash;her friend with the contralto voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat down alone in a corner. Presently the French actor began to give
+      one of his famous monologues. She heard his wonderfully varied elocution,
+      his voice&mdash;intelligence made audible and dashed with flying lights of
+      humour rising and falling subtly, yet always with a curious sound of
+      inevitable simplicity. She heard gentle titterings from the concealed
+      audience, then a definite laugh, then a peal of laughter quite gloriously
+      indiscreet. The people were waking up. And she felt as if they were being
+      prepared for her. But why had Fritz looked like that, spoken like that? It
+      seemed to spoil everything. To-day she felt too far away from&mdash;too
+      far beyond, that was the truth&mdash;Miss Schley to want to enter into any
+      rivalry with her. She wished very much that she had been placed first on
+      the programme. Then there could have been no question of her cutting out
+      the American.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As she was thinking this Miss Schley slowly crossed the room and came up
+      to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lady Holme,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I come next.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do. And then you follow after.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Say, would you mind changing it? It don&rsquo;t do to have two recitations one
+      after the other. There ought to be something different in between.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme looked at her quite eagerly, almost with gratitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll sing next,&rdquo; she said quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Much obliged to you, I&rsquo;m sure. You&rsquo;re perfectly sweet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme saw again a faint look of surprise on the American&rsquo;s white
+      face, succeeded instantly by an expression of satisfaction. She realised
+      that Miss Schley had some hidden disagreeable reason for her request. She
+      even guessed what it was. But she only felt glad that, whatever happened,
+      no one could accuse her of trying to efface any effect made by Miss Schley
+      upon the audience. As she sang before the &ldquo;imitations,&rdquo; if any effect were
+      to be effaced it must be her own. The voice of the French actor ceased,
+      almost drowned in a ripple of laughter, a burst of quite warm applause. He
+      reappeared looking calm and magisterial. The applause continued, and he
+      had to go back and bow his thanks. The tenor, who had not been recalled,
+      looked cross and made a movement of his double chin that suggested
+      bridling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, Miss Schley!&rdquo; said the pianist. &ldquo;You come now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lady Holme has very kindly consented to go first,&rdquo; she replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she turned to the French actor and, in atrocious but very
+      self-possessed French, began to congratulate him on his performance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, well&mdash;&rdquo; the pianist hurried up to Lady Holme. &ldquo;You have really&mdash;very
+      well then&mdash;these are the songs! Which do you sing first? Very hot,
+      isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He wiped his long fingers with a silk pocket-handkerchief and took the
+      music she offered to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Princesses seem very pleased,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;Marteau&mdash;charming
+      composer, yes&mdash;very pleased indeed. Which one? &lsquo;<i>C&rsquo;est toi</i>&rsquo;?
+      Certainly, certainly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He wiped his hands again and held out one to lead Lady Holme to the
+      platform. But she ignored it gently and went on alone. He followed,
+      carrying the music and perspiring. As they disappeared Miss Schley got up
+      and moved to a chair close by the screen that hid the platform. She
+      beckoned to Leo Ulford and he followed her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Lady Holme stepped on to the low platform, edged with a bank of
+      flowers, it seemed to her as if with one glance she saw everyone in the
+      crowded room, and felt at least something swiftly of each one&rsquo;s feeling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two Princesses sat together looking kind and serious. As she curtseyed
+      to them they bowed to her and smiled. Behind them she saw a compact mass
+      of acquaintances: Lady Cardington sitting with Sir Donald and looking
+      terribly sad, even self-conscious, yet eager; Mrs. Wolfstein with Mr.
+      Laycock; Mr. Bry, his eyeglass fixed, a white carnation in his coat; Lady
+      Manby laughing with a fat old man who wore a fez, and many others. At the
+      back she saw Fritz, standing up and staring at her with eyes that seemed
+      almost to cry, &ldquo;Cut her out!&rdquo; And in the fourth row she saw a dreary, even
+      a horrible, sight&mdash;Rupert Carey&rsquo;s face, disfigured by the vice which
+      was surely destroying him, red, bloated, dreadfully coarsened, spotted.
+      From the midst of the wreckage of the flesh his strange eyes looked out
+      with a vivid expression of hopelessness. Yet in them burned fires, and in
+      fire there is an essence of fierce purity. The soul in those eyes seemed
+      longing to burn up the corruption of his body, longing to destroy the
+      ruined temple, longing to speak and say, &ldquo;I am in prison, but do not judge
+      of the prisoner by examining the filthiness of his cell.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As Lady Holme took in the audience with a glance there was a rustle of
+      paper. Almost everyone was looking to see if the programme had been
+      altered. Lady Holme saw that suddenly Fritz had realised the change that
+      had been made, and what it meant. An expression of anger came into his
+      face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She felt that she saw more swiftly, and saw into more profoundly to-day
+      than ever before in her life; that she had a strangely clear vision of
+      minds as well as of faces, that she was vivid, penetrating. And she had
+      time, before she began to sing, for an odd thought of the person drowning
+      who flashes back over the ways of his past, who is, as it were, allowed
+      one instant of exceptional life before he is handed over to death. This
+      thought was clear, clean cut in her mind for a moment, and she put herself
+      in the sounding arms of the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the pianist began his prelude, and she moved a step forward to the
+      flowers and opened her lips to sing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sang by heart the little story drawn from the writing of Jalalu&rsquo;d
+      dinu&rsquo;r Rumi. The poet who had taken it had made a charming poem of it,
+      delicate, fragile, and yet dramatic and touched with fervour, porcelain
+      with firelight gleaming on it here and there. Lady Holme had usually a
+      power of identifying herself thoroughly with what she was singing, of
+      concentrating herself with ease upon it, and so compelling her hearers to
+      be concentrated upon her subject and upon her. To-day she was deeper down
+      in words and music, in the little drama of them, than ever before. She was
+      the man who knocked at the door, the loved one who cried from within the
+      house. She gave the reply, &ldquo;<i>C&rsquo;est moi</i>!&rdquo; with the eagerness of that
+      most eager of all things&mdash;Hope. Then, as she sang gravely, with
+      tender rebuke, &ldquo;This house cannot shelter us both together,&rdquo; she was in
+      the heart of love, that place of understanding. Afterwards, as one carried
+      by Fate through the sky, she was the man set down in a desert place,
+      fasting, praying, educating himself to be more worthy of love. Then came
+      the return, the question, &ldquo;<i>Qui est la</i>?&rdquo; the reply;&mdash;reply of
+      the solitary place, the denied desire, the longing to mount, the educated
+      heart&mdash;&ldquo;<i>C&rsquo;est toi</i>!&rdquo; the swiftly-opening door, the rush of feet
+      that were welcome, of outstretched arms for which waited a great
+      possession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something within her lived the song very fully and completely. For once
+      she did not think at all of what effect she was making. She was not
+      unconscious of the audience. She was acutely conscious of the presence of
+      people, and of individuals whom she knew; of Fritz, of Lady Cardington,
+      Sir Donald, even of poor, horrible Rupert Carey. But with the unusual
+      consciousness was linked a strange indifference, a sense of complete
+      detachment. And this enabled her to live simultaneously two lives&mdash;Lady
+      Holme&rsquo;s and another&rsquo;s. Who was the other? She did not ask, but she felt as
+      if in that moment a prisoner within her was released. And yet, directly
+      the song was over and the eager applause broke out, a bitterness came into
+      her heart. Her sense, banished for the moment, of her own personality and
+      circumstances returned upon her, and that &ldquo;<i>C&rsquo;est toi</i>!&rdquo; of the
+      educated heart seemed suddenly an irony as she looked at Fritz&rsquo;s face. Had
+      any lover gone into the desert for her, fasted and prayed for her, learned
+      for her sake the right answer to the ceaseless question that echoes in
+      every woman&rsquo;s heart?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The pianist modulated, struck the chord of a new key, paused, then broke
+      into a languid, honey-sweet prelude. Lady Holme sang the Italian song
+      which had made Lady Cardington cry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Afterwards, she often thought of her singing of that particular song on
+      that particular occasion as people think of the frail bridges that span
+      the gulfs between one fate and another. And it seemed to her that while
+      she was crossing this bridge, that was a song, she had a faint premonition
+      of the land that lay before her on the far side of the gulf. She did not
+      see clearly any features of the landscape, but surely she saw that it was
+      different from all that she had known. Perhaps she deceived herself.
+      Perhaps she fancied that she had divined something that was in reality
+      hidden from her. One thing, however, is certain&mdash;that she made a very
+      exceptional effect upon her audience. Many of them, when later they heard
+      of an incident that occurred within a very short time, felt almost
+      awestricken for a moment. It seemed to them that they had been visited by
+      one of the messengers&mdash;the forerunners of destiny&mdash;that they had
+      heard a whispering voice say, &ldquo;Listen well! This is the voice of the
+      Future singing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Many people in London on the following day said, &ldquo;We felt in her singing
+      that something extraordinary must be going to happen to her.&rdquo; And some of
+      them at any rate, probably spoke the exact truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme herself, while she sang her second song, really felt this
+      sensation&mdash;that it was her swan song. If once we touch perfection we
+      feel the black everlasting curtain being drawn round us. We have done what
+      we were meant to do and can do no more. Let the race of men continue. Our
+      course is run out. To strive beyond the goal is to offer oneself up to the
+      derision of the gods. In her song, Lady Holme felt that suddenly, and with
+      great ease, she touched the perfection that it was possible for her to
+      reach. She felt that, and she saw what she had done&mdash;in the eyes of
+      Lady Cardington that wept, in Sir Donald&rsquo;s eyes, which had become young as
+      the eyes of Spring, and in the eyes of that poor prisoner who was the real
+      Rupert Carey. When she sang the first refrain she knew.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;Torna in fior di giovinezza
+       Isaotta Blanzesmano,
+       Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano:
+   Nell&rsquo;amore ogni dolcezza.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      She understood while she sang&mdash;she had never understood before, nor
+      could conceive why she understood now&mdash;what love had been to the
+      world, was being, would be so long as there was a world. The sweetness of
+      love did not merely present itself to her imagination, but penetrated her
+      soul. And that penetration, while it carried with it and infused through
+      her whole being a delicate radiance, that was as the radiance of light in
+      the midst of surrounding blackness&mdash;beams of the moon in a forest&mdash;carried
+      with it also into her heart a frightful sense of individual isolation, of
+      having missed the figure of Truth in the jostling crowd of shams.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fritz stood there against the wall. Yes&mdash;Fritz. And he was savagely
+      rejoicing in the effect she was making upon the audience, because he
+      thought, hoped, that it would lessen the triumph of the woman who was
+      punishing him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had missed the figure of Truth. That was very certain. And as she sang
+      the refrain for the last time she seemed to herself to be searching for
+      the form that must surely be very wonderful, searching for it in the many
+      eyes that were fixed upon her. She looked at Sir Donald:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano:&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      She looked at Rupert Carey:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;Nell&rsquo;amore ogni dolcezza.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      She still looked at Carey, and the hideous wreckage of the flesh was no
+      longer visible to her. She saw only his burning eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Directly she had finished singing she asked for her motor cloak. While
+      they were fetching it she had to go back twice to the platform to bow to
+      the applause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Schley, who was looking angry, said to her:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re not going away before my show?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to go to the concert room, where I can hear better, and see,&rdquo; she
+      replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Schley looked at her doubtfully, but had to go to the platform. As
+      she slowly disappeared behind the screen Lady Holme drew the cloak round
+      her, pulled down her veil and went quickly away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She wanted&mdash;more, she required&mdash;to be alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the hall door she sent a footman to find the motor car. When it came up
+      she said to the chauffeur:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take me home quickly and then come back for his lordship.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She got in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the car went off swiftly she noticed that the streets were shining with
+      wet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has it been raining?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Raining hard, my lady.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      ON the following morning the newspapers contained an account of the
+      concert at Manchester House. They contained also an account of a motor
+      accident which had occurred the same afternoon between Hyde Park Corner
+      and Knightsbridge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the wet pavement Lord Holme&rsquo;s new car, which was taking Lady Holme to
+      Cadogan Square at a rapid pace, skidded and overturned, pinning Lady Holme
+      beneath it. While she was on the ground a hansom cab ran into the car.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At their breakfasts her friends, her acquaintances, her enemies and the
+      general public read of her beautiful singing at the concert, and read also
+      the following paragraph, which closed the description of the accident:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;We deeply regret to learn that Lady Holme was severely injured in
+  the face by the accident. Full particulars have not reached us, but
+  we understand that an immediate operation is necessary and will be
+  performed to-day by Mr. Bernard Crispin the famous surgeon. Her
+  ladyship is suffering great pain, and it is feared that she will be
+  permanently disfigured.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The fierce change which Lady Holme had longed for was a reality. One life,
+      the life of the siren, had come to an end. But the eyes of the woman must
+      still see light. The heart of the woman must still beat on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Death stretched out a hand in the darkness and found the hand of Birth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      ON a warm but overcast day, at the end of the following September, a
+      woman, whose face was completely hidden by a thick black veil, drove up to
+      the boat landing of the town of Como in a hired victoria. She was alone,
+      but behind her followed a second carriage containing an Italian maid and a
+      large quantity of luggage. When the victoria stopped at the water&rsquo;s edge
+      the woman got out slowly, and stood for a moment, apparently looking for
+      something. There were many boats ranged along the quay, their white
+      awnings thrown back, their oars resting on the painted seats. Beside one,
+      which was larger than the others, soberly decorated in brown with touches
+      of gold, and furnished with broad seats not unlike small armchairs, stood
+      two bold-looking Italian lads dressed in white sailors&rsquo; suits. One of
+      them, after staring for a brief instant at the veiled woman, went up to
+      her and said in Italian:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is the signora for Casa Felice?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy took off his round hat with a gallant gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The boat is here, signora.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He led the way to the brown-and-gold craft, and helped the lady to get
+      into it. She sat down on one of the big seats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is the luggage,&rdquo; she said, speaking Italian in a low voice, and
+      pointing to the second carriage from which the maid was stepping. The two
+      boatmen hastened towards it. In a few minutes maid and luggage were
+      installed in a big black gondola, oared by two men standing up, and the
+      brown boat, with the two lads in white and the veiled woman, glided out on
+      the calm water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The day was a grey dream, mystical in its colourless silence. Blue Italy
+      was shrouded as the woman&rsquo;s face was shrouded. The speechlessness of
+      Nature environed her speechlessness. She was an enigma set in an enigma,
+      and the two rowers looked at her and at the sunless sky, and bent to their
+      oars gravely. A melancholy stole into their sensitive dark faces. This new
+      <i>padrona</i> had already cast a shadow upon their buoyant temperaments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She noticed it and clasped her hands together in her lap. She was not
+      accustomed yet to her new <i>role</i> in life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boat stole on. Como was left behind. The thickly-wooded shores of the
+      lake, dotted with many villas, the tall green mountains covered with
+      chestnut trees, framed the long, winding riband of water which was the way
+      to Casa Felice. There were not many other boats out. The steamer had
+      already started for Bellagio, and was far away near the point where Torno
+      nestles around its sheltered harbour. The black gondola was quickly left
+      behind. Its load of luggage weighed it down. The brown boat was alone in
+      the grey dream of the sunless autumn day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Behind her veil Lady Holme was watching the two Italian boys, whose lithe
+      bodies bent to their oars, whose dark eyes were often turned upon her with
+      a staring scrutiny, with the morose and almost violent expression that is
+      the child of frustrated curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was it true? Was she in real life, or sitting there, watching, thinking,
+      striving to endure, in a dream? Since the accident which had for ever
+      changed her life she had felt many sensations, a torrent of sensations,
+      but never one exactly like this, never one so full of emptiness, chaos,
+      grey vacancy, eternal stillness, unreal oppression and almost magical
+      solitude as this. She had thought she had suffered all things that she
+      could suffer. She had not yet suffered this. Someone, the Governing Power,
+      had held this in reserve. Now it was being sent forth by decree. Now it
+      was coming upon her. Now it was enveloping her. Now it was rolling round
+      her and billowing away on every side to unimaginably remote horizons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another and a new emotion of horror was to be hers. Would the attack of
+      the hidden one upon her never end? Was that quiver of poisoned arrows
+      inexhaustible?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She leaned back against the cushions without feeling them. She wanted to
+      sink back as the mortally wounded sink, to sink down, far down, into the
+      gulf where surely the dying go to find, with their freezing lips, the
+      frozen lips of Death. She shut her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently, with the faint splash of the oars in the water, there mingled a
+      low sound of music. The rower nearest to her was singing in an under voice
+      to keep his boy&rsquo;s heart from succumbing to the spell of melancholy. She
+      listened, still wrapped in this dreadful chaos that was dreamlike. At
+      first the music was a murmur. But presently it grew louder. She could
+      distinguish words now and then. Once she heard <i>carissima</i>, a moment
+      afterwards <i>amore</i>. Then the poison in which the tip of this last
+      arrow had been curiously steeped began its work in her. The quivering
+      creature hidden within her cowered, shrank, put up trembling hands, cried
+      out, &ldquo;I cannot endure this thing. I do not know how to. I have never
+      learnt the way. This is impossible for me. This is a demand I have not the
+      capacity to fulfil!&rdquo; And, even while it cowered and cried out, knew, &ldquo;This
+      I must endure. This demand I shall be made to fulfil. Nothing will serve
+      me; no outstretched hands, no wailings of despair, no prayers, no curses
+      even will save me. For I am the soul in the hands of the vivisector.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Along the lake, past the old home of La Taglioni, past the Villa Pasta
+      with its long garden, past little Torno with its great round oleanders and
+      its houses crowding to the shore, the boatman sang. Gathering courage as
+      his own voice dispersed his melancholy, and the warm hopes of his youth
+      spread their wings once more, roused by the words of love his lips were
+      uttering, he fearlessly sent out his song. Love in the South was in it,
+      love in the sun, embraces in warm scented nights, longings in moonlight,
+      attainment in darkness. The boy had forgotten the veiled lady, whose
+      shrouded face and whose silence had for a moment saddened him. His hot,
+      bold nature reasserted itself, the fire of his youth blazed up again. He
+      sang as if only the other boatman had been there and they had seen the
+      girls they loved among the trees upon the shore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the soul writhed, like an animal stretched and strapped upon the
+      board, to whom no anaesthetic, had been given.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Never before would it have been possible to Lady Holme to believe that the
+      mere sound of a word could inflict such torment upon a heart as the sound
+      of the word <i>amore</i>, coming from the boatman&rsquo;s lips, now inflicted
+      upon hers. Each time it came, with its soft beauty, its languor of
+      sweetness&mdash;like a word reclining&mdash;it flayed her soul alive, and
+      showed her red, raw bareness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet she did not ask the man to stop singing. Few people in the hands of
+      Fate ask Fate for favours. Instinct speaks in the soul and says, &ldquo;Be
+      silent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boat rounded the point of Torno and came at once into a lonelier
+      region of the lake. Autumn was more definite here. Its sadness spoke more
+      plainly. Habitations on the shores were fewer. The mountains were more
+      grim, though grander. And their greyness surely closed in a little upon
+      the boat, the rowers, the veiled woman who was being taken to Casa Felice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps to combat the gathering gloom of Nature the boatman sang more
+      loudly, with the full force of his voice. But suddenly he seemed to be
+      struck by the singular contrast opposed to his expansive energy by the
+      silent figure opposite to him. A conscious look came into his face. His
+      voice died away abruptly. After a pause he said,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps the signora is not fond of music?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme wanted to speak, but she could not. She and this bright-eyed
+      boy were not in the same world. That was what she felt. He did not know
+      it, but she knew it. And one world cannot speak through infinite space
+      with another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She said nothing. The boy looked over his shoulder at his companion. Then,
+      in silence, they both rowed on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now that the song had ceased she was again in the grey chaos of the
+      dream, in the irrevocable emptiness, the intense, the enormous solitude
+      that was like the solitude of an unpeopled eternity in which man had no
+      lot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently, with a stroke of his right oar, the boy who had sung turned the
+      boat&rsquo;s prow toward the shore, and Lady Holme saw a large, lonely house
+      confronting them on the nearer bank of the lake. It stood apart. For a
+      long distance on either side of it there was no other habitation. The
+      flat, yellow facade rose out of the water. Behind was a dim tangle of
+      densely-growing trees rising up on the steep mountain side towards the
+      grey sky. Lady Holme could not yet see details. The boat was still too far
+      out upon the lake. Nor would she have been able to note details if she had
+      seen them. Only a sort of heavy impression that this house had a pale,
+      haunted aspect forced itself dully upon her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ecco Casa Felice, signora!&rdquo; said the foremost rower, half timidly,
+      pointing with his brown hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She made an intense effort and uttered some reply. The boy was encouraged
+      and began to tell her about the beauties of the house, the gardens, the
+      chasm behind the piazza down which the waterfall rushed, to dive beneath
+      the house and lose itself in the lake. She tried to listen, but she could
+      not. The strangeness of her being alone, hidden behind a dense veil, of
+      her coming to such a retired house in the autumn to remain there in utter
+      solitude, with no object except that of being safe from the intrusion of
+      anyone who knew her, of being hidden from all watching eyes that had ever
+      looked upon her&mdash;the strangeness of it obsessed her, was both
+      powerful and unreal. That she should be one of those lonely women of whom
+      the world speaks with a lightly-contemptuous pity seemed incredible to
+      her. Yet what woman was lonelier than she?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boat drew in toward the shore and she began to see the house more
+      plainly. It was large, and the flat facade was broken in the middle by an
+      open piazza with round arches and slender columns. This piazza divided the
+      house in two. The villa was in fact composed of two square buildings
+      connected together by it. From the boat, looking up, Lady Holme saw a
+      fierce mountain gorge rising abruptly behind the house. Huge cypresses
+      grew on its sides, towering above the slate roof, and she heard the loud
+      noise of falling water. It seemed to add to the weight of her desolation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boat stopped at a flight of worn stone steps. One of the boys sprang
+      out and rang a bell, and presently an Italian man-servant opened a tall
+      iron gate set in a crumbling stone arch, and showed more stone steps
+      leading upward between walls covered with dripping lichen. The boat boy
+      came to help Lady Holme out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment she did not move. The dreamlike feeling had come upon her
+      with such force that her limbs refused to obey her will. The sound of the
+      falling water in the mountain gorge had sent her farther adrift into the
+      grey, unpeopled eternity, into the vague chaos. But the boy held out his
+      hand, took hers. The strong clasp recalled her. She got up. The Italian
+      man-servant preceded her up the steps into a long garden built up high
+      above the lake on a creeper-covered wall. To the left was the house door.
+      She stood still for an instant looking out over the wide expanse of
+      unruffled grey water. Then, putting her hand up to her veil as if to keep
+      it more closely over her face, she slowly went into the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      DESPAIR had driven Lady Holme to Casa Felice. When she had found that the
+      accident had disfigured her frightfully, and that the disfigurement would
+      be permanent, she had at first thought of killing herself. But then she
+      had been afraid. Life had abruptly become a horror to her. She felt that
+      it must be a horror to her always. Yet she dared not leave it then, in her
+      home in London, in the midst of the sights and sounds connected with her
+      former happiness. After the operation, and the verdict of the doctors,
+      that no more could be done than had been done, she had had an access of
+      almost crazy misery, in which all the secret violence of her nature had
+      rushed to the surface from the depths. Shut up alone in her room, she had
+      passed a day and a night without food. She had lain upon the floor. She
+      had torn her clothes into fragments. The animal that surely dwells at the
+      door of the soul of each human being had had its way in her, had ravaged
+      her, humiliated her, turned her to savagery. Then at last she had slept,
+      still lying upon the floor. And she had waked feeling worn out but calm,
+      desperately calm. She defied the doctors. What did they know of women, of
+      what women can do to regain a vanished beauty? She would call in
+      specialists, beauty doctors, quacks, the people who fill the papers with
+      their advertisements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then began a strange defile of rag-tag humanity to the Cadogan Square door&mdash;women,
+      men, of all nationalities and pretensions. But the evil was beyond their
+      power. At last an American specialist, who had won renown by turning a
+      famous woman of sixty into the semblance of a woman of six-and-thirty&mdash;for
+      a short time&mdash;was called in. Lady Holme knew that his verdict must be
+      final. If he could do nothing to restore her vanished loveliness nothing
+      could be done. After being closeted with her for a long time he came out
+      of her room. There were tears in his eyes. To the footman who opened the
+      hall door, and who stared in surprise, he explained his emotion thus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor lady,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a hopeless case.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said the man, who was the pale footman Lady Holme had sent with the
+      latch-key to Leo Ulford.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hopeless. It&rsquo;s a hard thing to have to tell a lady she&rsquo;ll always be&mdash;be&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What, sir?&rdquo; said the footman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;what people won&rsquo;t enjoy looking at.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He winked his eyes. He was a little bald man, with a hatchet face that did
+      not suggest emotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And judging by part of the left side of the face, I guess she must have
+      been almost a beauty once,&rdquo; he added, stepping into the square.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was Lady Holme now. She had to realise herself as a woman whom people
+      would rather not look at.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this time she had not seen Fritz. He had asked to see her. He had even
+      tried to insist on seeing her, but so long as there was any hope in her of
+      recovering her lost beauty she had refused to let him come near her. The
+      thought of his eyes staring upon the tragic change in her face sent cold
+      creeping through her veins. But when the American had gone she realised
+      that there was nothing to wait for, that if she were ever to let Fritz see
+      her again it had better be now. The bandages in which her face had been
+      swathed had been removed. She went to a mirror and, setting her teeth and
+      clenching her hands, looked into it steadily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not recognise herself. As she stood there she felt as if a
+      dreadful stranger had come into the room and was confronting her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The accident, and the surgical treatment that had followed upon it, had
+      greatly altered the face. The nose, once fine and delicate, was now coarse
+      and misshapen. A wound had permanently distorted the mouth, producing a
+      strange, sneering expression. The whole of the right side of the face was
+      puffy and heavy-looking, and drawn down towards the chin. It was also at
+      present discoloured. For as Lady Holme lay under the car she had been
+      badly burnt. The raw, red tinge would no doubt fade away with time, but
+      the face must always remain unsightly, even a little grotesque, must
+      always show to the casual passer-by a woman who had been the victim of a
+      dreadful accident.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme stared at this woman for a long time. There were no tears in
+      her eyes. Then she went to the dressing-table and began to make up her
+      face. Slowly, deliberately, with a despairing carefulness, she covered it
+      with pigments till she looked like a woman in Regent Street. Her face
+      became a frightful mask, and even then the fact that she was disfigured
+      was not concealed. The application of the pigments began to cause her
+      pain. The right side of her face throbbed. She looked dreadfully old, too,
+      with this mass of paint and powder upon her&mdash;like a hag, she thought.
+      And it was obvious that she was trying to hide something. Anyone, man or
+      woman, looking upon her, would divine that so much art could only be used
+      for the concealment of a dreadful disability. People, seeing this mask,
+      would suppose&mdash;what might they not suppose? The pain in her face
+      became horrible. Suddenly, with a cry, she began to undo what she had
+      done. When she had finished she rang the bell. Her maid knocked at the
+      door. Without opening it she called out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is his lordship in the house?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, my lady. His lordship has just come in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go and ask him to come up and see me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, my lady.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme sat down on the sofa at the foot of the bed. She was trembling
+      violently. She sat looking on the ground and trying to control her limbs.
+      A sort of dreadful humbleness surged through her, as if she were a guilty
+      creature about to cringe before a judge. She trembled till the sofa on
+      which she was sitting shook. She caught hold of the cushions and made a
+      strong effort to sit still. The handle of the door turned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t come in!&rdquo; she cried out sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the door opened and her husband appeared on the threshold. As he did
+      so she turned swiftly so that only part of the left side of her face was
+      towards him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Vi!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Poor old girl, I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was coming forward when she called out again &ldquo;Stay there, Fritz!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I&mdash;wait a minute. Shut the door.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shut the door. She was still looking away from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you understand?&rdquo; she said, still in a sharp voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Understand what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That I&rsquo;m altered, that the accident&rsquo;s altered me&mdash;very much?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know. The doctor said something. But you look all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The trembling seized her again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, but&mdash;it can&rsquo;t be so bad&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is. Don&rsquo;t move! Fritz&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&mdash;do you care for me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course I do, old girl. Why, you know&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly she turned round, stood up and faced him desperately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you care for me, Fritz?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a dead silence. It seemed to last for a long while. At length it
+      was broken by a woman&rsquo;s voice crying:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fritz,&mdash;Fritz&mdash;it isn&rsquo;t my fault! It isn&rsquo;t my fault!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good God!&rdquo; Lord Holme said slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t my fault, Fritz! It isn&rsquo;t my fault!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good God! but&mdash;the doctor didn&rsquo;t&mdash;Oh&mdash;wait a minute&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A door opened and shut. He was gone. Lady Holme fell down on the sofa. She
+      was alone, but she kept on sobbing:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t my fault, Fritz! It isn&rsquo;t my fault, Fritz!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And while she sobbed the words she knew that her life with Fritz Holme had
+      come to an end. The chapter was closed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From that day she had only one desire&mdash;to hide herself. The season
+      was over. London was empty. She could travel. She resolved to disappear.
+      Fritz had stayed on in the house, but she would not see him again, and he
+      did not press her to. She knew why. He dreaded to look at her. She would
+      see no one. At first there had been streams of callers, but now almost
+      everybody had left town. Only Sir Donald came to the door each day and
+      inquired after her health. One afternoon a note was brought to her. It was
+      from Fritz, saying that he had been &ldquo;feeling a bit chippy,&rdquo; and the doctor
+      advised him to run over to Homburg. But he wished to know what she meant
+      to do. Would she go down to her father?&mdash;her mother, Lady St. Loo,
+      was dead, and her father was an old man&mdash;or what? Would she come to
+      Homburg too?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she read those words she laughed out loud. Then she sent for the <i>New
+      York Herald</i> and looked for the Homburg notes. She found Miss Pimpernel
+      Schley&rsquo;s name among the list of the newest arrivals. That evening she
+      wrote to her husband:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;Do not bother about me. Go to Homburg. I need rest and I want to
+  be alone. Perhaps I may go to some quiet place in Switzerland with
+  my maid. I&rsquo;ll let you know if I leave town. Good-bye.
+
+                                              &ldquo;VIOLA HOLME.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      At first she had put only Viola. Then she added the second word. Viola
+      alone suggested an intimacy which no longer existed between her and the
+      man she had married.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day Lord Holme crossed the Channel. She was left with the
+      servants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Till then she had not been out of the house, but two days afterwards,
+      swathed in a thick veil, she went for a drive in the Park, and on
+      returning from it found Sir Donald on the door-step. He looked frailer
+      than ever and very old. Lady Holme would have preferred to avoid him.
+      Since that interview with her husband the idea of meeting anyone she knew
+      terrified her. But he came at once to help her out of the carriage. Her
+      face was invisible, but he knew her, and he greeted her in a rather shaky
+      voice. She could see that he was deeply moved, and thanked him for his
+      many inquiries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why are you still in London?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are still in London,&rdquo; he replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was about to say good-bye on the door-step; but he kept her hand in
+      his and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me come in and speak to you for a moment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they were in the drawing-room she still kept the veil over her face,
+      and remained standing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir Donald,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;you cared for me, I know; you were fond of me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Were?&rdquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;were. I am no longer the woman you&mdash;other people&mdash;cared
+      for.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If there is any change&mdash;&rdquo; he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know. You are going to say it is not in the woman, the real woman. But
+      I say it is. The change is in what, to men, is the real woman. This change
+      has destroyed any feeling my husband may have had for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It could never destroy mine,&rdquo; Sir Donald said quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, it could&mdash;yours especially, because you are a worshipper of
+      beauty, and Fritz never worshipped anything except himself. I am going to
+      let you say good-bye to me without seeing me. Remember me as I was.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;what do you mean? You speak as if you would no longer go into
+      the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I go into the world! You haven&rsquo;t seen me, Sir Donald.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She saw an expression of nervous apprehension come into his face as he
+      glanced at her veil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you going to do, then?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know. I&mdash;I want a hiding-place.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She saw tears come into his old, faded eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hush!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t-&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A hiding-place. I want to travel a long way off and be quite alone, and
+      think, and see how I can go on, if I can go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice was quite steady.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I could do something&mdash;anything for you!&rdquo; he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You fancy you are still speaking to the woman who sang, Sir Donald.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you&mdash;&rdquo; Suddenly he spoke with some eagerness. &ldquo;You want to go
+      away, to be alone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I must.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me lend you Casa Felice!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Casa Felice!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To be sure; I was to baptise it, wasn&rsquo;t I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, that&mdash;will you have it for a while?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you are going there!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will not go. It is all ready. The servants are engaged. You will be
+      perfectly looked after, perfectly comfortable. Let me feel I can do
+      something for you. Try it. You will find beauty there&mdash;peace. And I&mdash;I
+      shall be on the lake, not far off.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must be alone,&rdquo; she said wearily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You shall be. I will never come unless you send for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should never send for you or for anyone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not say then what she would do, but three days later she accepted
+      Sir Donald&rsquo;s offer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now she was alone in Casa Felice. She had not even brought her French
+      maid, but had engaged an Italian. She was resolved to isolate herself with
+      people who had never seen her as a beautiful woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      LADY HOLME never forgot that first evening at Casa Felice. The strangeness
+      of it was greater than the strangeness of any nightmare. When she was shut
+      up in her bedroom in London she had thought she realised all the meaning
+      of the word loneliness. Now she knew that then she had not begun to
+      realise it. For she had been in her own house, in the city which contained
+      a troop of her friends, in the city where she had reigned. And although
+      she knew that she would reign no more, she had not grasped the exact
+      meaning of that knowledge in London. She had known a fact but not fully
+      felt it. She had known what she now was but not fully felt what she now
+      was. Even when Fritz, muttering almost terrified exclamations, had
+      stumbled out of the bedroom, she had not heard the dull clamour of
+      finality as she heard it now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was an exile. She was an outcast among women. She was no longer a
+      beautiful woman, she was not even a plain woman&mdash;she was a
+      dreadful-looking human being.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Italian servants by whom she was surrounded suddenly educated her in
+      the lore of exact knowledge of herself and her present situation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Italians are the most charming of the nations, but Italians of the lower
+      classes are often very unreserved in the display of their most fugitive
+      sensations, their most passing moods. The men, especially when they are
+      young, are highly susceptible to beauty in women. They are also&mdash;and
+      the second emotion springs naturally enough from the first&mdash;almost
+      childishly averse from female ugliness. It is a common thing in Italy to
+      hear of men of the lower classes speak of a woman&rsquo;s plainness with
+      brutality, with a manner almost of personal offence. They often shrink
+      from personal ugliness as Englishmen seldom do, like children shrinking
+      from something abnormal&mdash;a frightening dwarf, a spectre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that Lady Holme had reached the &ldquo;hiding-place&rdquo; for which she had
+      longed, she resolved to be brutal with herself. Till now she had almost
+      perpetually concealed her disfigured face. Even her servants had not seen
+      it. But in this lonely house, among these strangers, she knew that the
+      inevitable moment was come when she must begin the new life, the terrible
+      life that was henceforth to be hers. In her bedroom she took off her hat
+      and veil, and without glancing into the glass she came downstairs. In the
+      hall she met the butler. She saw him start.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can I have tea?&rdquo; she said, looking at him steadily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, signora,&rdquo; he answered, looking down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the piazza, please.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She went out through the open door into the piazza. The boy who had sung
+      in the boat was there, watering some geraniums in pots. As she came out he
+      glanced up curiously, at the same time pulling off his hat. When he saw
+      her his mouth gaped, and an expression of pitiless repulsion came into his
+      eyes. It died out almost instantaneously, and he smiled and began to speak
+      about the flowers. But Lady Holme had received her education. She knew
+      what she was to youth that instinctively loves beauty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat down in a cane chair. It seemed to her as if people were scourging
+      her with thongs of steel, as if she were bleeding from the strokes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked out across the lake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The butler brought tea and put it beside her. She did not hear him come or
+      go. Behind her the waterfall roared down between the cypresses. Before her
+      the lake spread out its grey, unruffled surface. And this was the baptism
+      of Casa Felice, her baptism into a new life. Her agony was the more
+      intense because she had never been an intellectual woman, had never lived
+      the inner life. Always she had depended on outward things. Always she had
+      been accustomed to bustle, movement, excitement, perpetual intercourse
+      with people who paid her homage. Always she had lived for the world, and
+      worshipped, because she had seen those around her worshipping, the body.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now all was taken from her. Without warning, without a moment for
+      preparation, she was cast down into Hell. Even her youth was made useless
+      to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she thought of that she began to cry, sitting there by the stone
+      balustrade of the piazza, to cry convulsively. She remembered her pity for
+      old age, for the monstrous loss it cannot cease from advertising. And now
+      she, in her youth, had passed it on the road to the pit. Lady Cardington
+      was a beautiful woman. She pitied herself bitterly because she was morbid,
+      as many beautiful women are when they approach old age. But she was
+      beautiful. She would always be beautiful. She might not think it, but she
+      was still a power, could still inspire love. In her blanched face framed
+      in white hair there was in truth a wonderful attraction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whiteness&mdash;Lady Holme shuddered when she thought of whiteness,
+      remembering what the glass had shown her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fritz&mdash;his animal passion for her&mdash;his horror of her now&mdash;Miss
+      Schley&mdash;their petty, concealed strife&mdash;Rupert Carey&rsquo;s love&mdash;Leo
+      Ulford&rsquo;s desire of conquest&mdash;his father&rsquo;s strange, pathetic devotion&mdash;Winter
+      falling at the feet of Spring&mdash;figures and events from the panorama
+      of her life now ended flickered through her almost numbed mind, while the
+      tears still ran down her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Robin Pierce?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As she thought of him more life quickened in her mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since her accident he had written to her several times, ardent, tender
+      letters, recalling all he had said to her, recounting again his adoration
+      of her for her nature, her soul, the essence of her, the woman in her,
+      telling her that this terror which had come upon her only made her dearer
+      to him, that&mdash;as she knew&mdash;he had impiously dared almost to long
+      for it, as for an order of release that would take effect in the
+      liberation of her true self.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These letters she had read, but they had not stirred her. She had told
+      herself that Robin did not know, that he was a self-deceiver, that he did
+      not understand his own nature, which was allied to the nature of every
+      living man. But now, seeking some, even the smallest solace in the intense
+      agony of desolation that was upon her, she caught&mdash;in her bleeding
+      woman&rsquo;s heart&mdash;at this hand stretched out from Rome. She got up, went
+      to her bedroom, unlocked her despatch-box, took out these letters of
+      Robin&rsquo;s. They had not stirred her, yet she had kept them. Now she came
+      down once more to the piazza, sat by the tea-table, opened them, read
+      them, re-read them, whispered them over again and again. Something she
+      must have; some hand she must catch at. She could not die in this freezing
+      cold which she had never known, this cold that came out of the Inferno, at
+      whose cavern mouth she stood. And Robin said he was there&mdash;Robin said
+      he was there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not love Robin. It seemed to her now that it would be grotesque
+      for her to love any man. Her face was not meant for love. But as she read
+      these ardent, romantic letters, written since the tragedy that had
+      overtaken her, she began to ask herself, with a fierce anxiety, whether
+      what Robin affirmed could be the truth? Was he unlike other men? Was his
+      nature capable of a devotion of the soul to another soul, of a devotion to
+      which any physical ugliness, even any physical horror, would count as
+      nothing?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that last scene with Fritz she felt as if he were no longer her
+      husband, as if he were only a man who had fled from her in fear. She did
+      not think any more of his rights, her duties. He had abandoned his rights.
+      What duties could she have towards a man who was frightened when he looked
+      at her? And indeed all the social and moral questions to which the average
+      woman of the world pays&mdash;because she must pay&mdash;attention had
+      suddenly ceased to exist for Lady Holme. She was no longer a woman of the
+      world. All worldly matters had sunk down beneath her feet with her lost
+      beauty. She had wanted to be free. Well, now she was surely free. Who
+      would care what she did in the future?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin said he was there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She thought that, unless she could feel that in world there was one man
+      who wanted to take care of her, she must destroy herself. The thought grew
+      in her as she sat there, till she said to herself, &ldquo;If it is true what he
+      says, perhaps I shall be able to live. If it is not true&mdash;&rdquo; She
+      looked over the stone balustrade at the grey waters of the lake. Twilight
+      was darkening over them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late that evening, when she was sitting in the big drawing-room staring at
+      the floor, the butler came in with a telegram. She opened it and read:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;Sir Donald has told me you are at Casa Felice; arrive to-morrow
+  from Rome&mdash;ROBIN.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No answer,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he was coming&mdash;to-morrow. The awful sense of desolation lifted
+      slightly from her. A human being was travelling to her, was wanting to see
+      her. To see her! She shuddered. Then fiercely she asked herself why she
+      was afraid. She would not be afraid. She would trust in Robin. He was
+      unlike other men. There had always been in him something that set him
+      apart, a strangeness, a romance, a love of hidden things, a subtlety. If
+      only he would still care for her, still feel towards her as he had felt,
+      she could face the future, she thought. They might be apart. That did not
+      matter. She had no thought of a close connection, of frequent intercourse
+      even. She only wanted desperately, frantically, to know that someone who
+      had loved her could love her still in spite of what had happened. If she
+      could retain one deep affection she felt that she could live.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The morrow would convince her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night she did not sleep. She lay in bed and heard the water falling
+      in the gorge, and when the dawn began to break she did a thing she had not
+      done for a long time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She got out of bed, knelt down and prayed&mdash;prayed to Him who had
+      dealt terribly with her that He would be merciful when Robin came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When it was daylight and the Italian maid knocked at her door she told her
+      to get out a plain, dark dress. She did her hair herself with the utmost
+      simplicity. That at least was still beautiful. Then she went down and
+      walked in the high garden above the lake. The greyness had lifted and the
+      sky was blue. The mellowness rather than the sadness of autumn was
+      apparent, throned on the tall mountains whose woods were bathed in
+      sunshine. All along the great old wall, that soared forty feet from the
+      water, roses were climbing. Scarlet and white geraniums bloomed in
+      discoloured ancient vases. Clumps of oleanders showed pink showers of
+      blossoms. Tall bamboos reared their thin heads towards the tufted summits
+      of palms that suggested Africa. Monstrous cypresses aspired, with a sort
+      of haughty resignation, above their brother trees. The bees went to and
+      fro. Flies circled and settled. Lizards glided across the warm stones and
+      rustled into hiding among the ruddy fallen leaves. And always the white
+      water sang in the gorge as it rushed towards the piazza of Casa Felice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Lady Holme tried to hope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet, as she walked slowly to and fro amid the almost rank luxuriance of
+      the garden, she was gnawed by a terrible anxiety. The dreadful humbleness,
+      the shrinking cowardice of the unsightly human being invaded her. She
+      strove to put them from her. She strove to call Robin&rsquo;s own arguments and
+      assertions to her aid. What she had been she still was in all essentials.
+      Her self was unharmed, existed, could love, hate, be tender, be passionate
+      as before. Viola was there still within her, the living spirit to which a
+      name had been given when she was a little child. The talent was there
+      which had spoken, which could still speak, through her voice. The beating
+      heart was there which could still speak through her actions. The mysteries
+      of the soul still pursued their secret courses within her, like far-off
+      subterranean streams. The essential part of her remained as it had been.
+      Only a little outside bit of a framework had been twisted awry. Could that
+      matter very much? Had she not perhaps been morbid in her despair?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She determined to take courage. She told herself that if she allowed this
+      dreadful, invading humbleness way in her she would lose all power to
+      dominate another by showing that she had ceased to dominate herself. If
+      she met Robin in fear and trembling she would actually teach him to
+      despise her. If she showed that she thought herself changed, horrible, he
+      would inevitably catch her thought and turn it to her own destruction. Men
+      despise those who despise themselves. She knew that, and she argued with
+      herself, fought with herself. If Robin loved the angel; surely he could
+      still love. For if there were an angel within her it had not been harmed.
+      And she leaned on the stone wall and prayed again while the roses touched
+      her altered face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to her then that courage was sent to her. She felt less
+      terrified of what was before her, as if something had risen up within her
+      upon which she could lean, as if her soul began to support the trembling,
+      craven thing that would betray her, began to teach it how to be still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not feel happy, but she felt less desperately miserable than she
+      had felt since the accident.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After <i>dejeuner</i> she walked again in the garden. As the time drew
+      near for Robin to arrive, the dreadful feverish anxiety of the early
+      morning awoke again within her. She had not conquered herself. Again the
+      thought of suicide came upon her, and she felt that her life or death were
+      in the hands of this man whom yet she did not love. They were in his hands
+      because he was a human being and she was one. There are straits in which
+      the child of life, whom the invisible hand that is extended in a religion
+      has not yet found, must find in the darkness a human hand stretched out to
+      it or sink down in utter terror and perhaps perish. Lady Holme was in such
+      a strait. She knew it. She said to herself quite plainly that if Robin
+      failed to stretch out his hand to her she could not go on living. It was
+      clear to her that her life or death depended upon whether he remained true
+      to what he had said was his ideal, or whether he proved false to it and
+      showed himself such a man as Fritz, as a thousand others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sickened with anxiety as the moments passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, leaning upon the wall, she began to scan the lake. Presently she saw
+      the steamer approaching the landing-stage of Carate on the opposite bank.
+      The train from Rome had arrived. But Robin would doubtless come by boat.
+      There was at least another hour to wait. She left the wall and walked
+      quickly up and down, moving her hands and her lips. Now she almost wished
+      he were not coming. She recalled the whole story of her acquaintance with
+      Robin&mdash;his adoration of her when she was a girl, his wish to marry
+      her, his melancholy when she refused him, his persistent affection for her
+      after she had married Fritz, his persistent belief that there was that
+      within her which Fritz did not understand and could never satisfy, his
+      persistent obstinacy in asserting that he had the capacity to understand
+      and content this hidden want. Was that true?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fritz had cared for nothing but the body, yet she had loved Fritz. She did
+      not love Robin. Yet there was a feeling in her that if he proved true to
+      his ideal now she might love him in the end. If only he would love her&mdash;after
+      he knew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She heard a sound of oars. The blood rushed to her face. She drew back
+      from the wall and hurried into her house. All the morning she had been
+      making up her mind to go to meet Robin at once in the sunlight, to let him
+      know all at once. But now, in terror, she went to her room. With trembling
+      hands she pinned on a hat; she took out of a drawer the thick veil she
+      wore when travelling and tied it tightly over her face. Panic seized her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a knock at the door, the announcement that a signore was waiting
+      in the drawing-room for the signora.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme felt an almost ungovernable sensation of physical nausea. She
+      went to her dressing-case and drank one or two burning drops of eau de
+      Cologne. Then she pulled down the veil under her chin and stood in the
+      middle of the room for several minutes without moving. Then she went
+      downstairs quickly and went quickly into the drawing-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin was there, standing by the window. He looked excited, with an
+      excitement of happiness, and this gave to him an aspect of almost boyish
+      youth. His long black eyes shone with eagerness when she came into the
+      room. But when he saw the veil his face changed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t trust me!&rdquo; he said, without any greeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She went up to him and put out her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Robin!&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t trust me,&rdquo; he repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took her hand. His was hot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Robin&mdash;I&rsquo;m a coward,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice quivered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, my dearest!&rdquo; he exclaimed, melted in a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took her other hand, and she felt his hands throbbing. His clasp was so
+      ardent that it startled her into forgetting everything for one instant,
+      everything that except these clasping hands loved her hands, loved her.
+      That instant was exquisitely sweet to her. There was a stinging sweetness
+      in it, a mystery of sweetness, as if their four hands were four souls
+      longing to be lost in one another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now you&rsquo;ll trust me,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She released her hands and immediately her terror of doubt returned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us go into the garden,&rdquo; she answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He followed her to the path beside the wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I looked for you from here,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not see you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. When I heard the boat I&mdash;Robin, I&rsquo;m afraid&mdash;I&rsquo;m afraid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of me, Viola?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed joyously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take off your veil,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no&mdash;not yet. I want to tell you first&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To tell me what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That my&mdash;that my&mdash;Robin, I&rsquo;m not beautiful now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice quivered again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You tell me so,&rdquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s true.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t believe it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; she began, almost desperately, &ldquo;it&rsquo;s true, Robin, oh, it&rsquo;s true!
+      When Fritz&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped. She was choking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;Fritz!&rdquo; he said with scathing contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no, listen! You&rsquo;ve got to listen.&rdquo; She put her hand on his arm. &ldquo;When
+      Fritz saw me&mdash;afterwards he&mdash;he was afraid of me. He couldn&rsquo;t
+      speak to me. He just looked and said&mdash;and said&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Tears were running down behind the veil. He put up his hand to hers, which
+      still touched his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t tell me what he said. What do I care? Viola, you know I&rsquo;ve almost
+      longed for this&mdash;no, not that, but&mdash;can&rsquo;t you understand that
+      when one loves a woman one loves something hidden, something mystical?
+      It&rsquo;s so much more than a face that one loves. One doesn&rsquo;t want to live in
+      a house merely because it&rsquo;s got a nice front door.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed again as if he were half ashamed of his own feeling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that true, Robin?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The sound of her voice told him that he need not be afraid to be
+      passionate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down here,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had reached an old stone bench at the end of the garden where the
+      woods began. Two cypresses towered behind it, sad-looking sentinels. There
+      was a gap in the wall here through which the lake could be seen as one sat
+      upon the bench.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to make you understand, to make you trust me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat down without speaking, and he sat beside her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Viola,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;there are many men who love only what they can see, and
+      never think of the spirit behind it. They care only for a woman&rsquo;s body.
+      For them the woman&rsquo;s body is the woman. I put it rather brutally. What
+      they can touch, what they can kiss, what they can hold in their arms is
+      all to them. They are unconscious of the distant, untameable woman, the
+      lawless woman who may be free in the body that is captive, who may be
+      unknown in the body that is familiar, who may even be pure in the body
+      that is defiled as she is immortal though her body is mortal. These men
+      love the flesh only. But there are at least some men who love the spirit.
+      They love the flesh, too, because it manifests the spirit, but to them the
+      spirit is the real thing. They are always stretching out their arms to
+      that. The hearth can&rsquo;t satisfy them. They demand the fire. The fire, the
+      fire!&rdquo; he repeated, as if the word warmed him. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve so often thought of
+      this, imagined this. It&rsquo;s as if I&rsquo;d actually foreseen it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke with gathering excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That some day the woman men&mdash;those men I&rsquo;ve spoken of&mdash;loved
+      would be struck down, and the real woman, the woman of the true beauty,
+      the mystic, the spirit woman, would be set free. If this had not happened
+      you could perhaps never have known who was the man that really loved you&mdash;that
+      loved the real you, the you that lies so far beyond the flesh, the you
+      that has sung and suffered&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, suffered!&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there was a note of something that was not sorrow in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you want to know the man I mean,&rdquo; Robin said, &ldquo;lift up your veil,
+      Viola.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat quite still for a moment, a moment that seemed very long. Then she
+      put up both hands to her head, untied the veil and let it fall into her
+      lap. He looked at her, and there was silence. They heard the bees humming.
+      There were many among the roses on the wall. She had turned her face fully
+      towards him, but she kept her eyes on the veil that lay in her lap. It was
+      covered with little raised black spots. She began to count them. As the
+      number mounted she felt her body turning gradually cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fifteen&mdash;sixteen-seventeen&rdquo;&mdash;she formed the words with her
+      lips, striving to concentrate her whole soul upon this useless triviality&mdash;&ldquo;eighteen&mdash;nineteen&mdash;twenty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Little drops of moisture came out upon her temples. Still the silence
+      continued. She knew that all this time Robin was looking into her face.
+      She felt his eyes like two knives piercing her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Twenty-one&mdash;twenty-two&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Viola!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke at last and his voice was extraordinary. It was husky, and
+      sounded desperate and guilty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; she said, still looking at the spots.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now you know the man I spoke of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, it was a desperate voice and hard in its desperation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean that you are the man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Still she did not look up. After a pause she heard him say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, that I am the man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she looked up. His face was scarlet, like a face flushed with guilt.
+      His eyes met hers with a staring glance, yet they were furtive. His hands
+      were clenched on his knees. When she looked at him he began to smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Viola,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;Viola.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He unclenched his hands and put them out towards her, as if to take her
+      hands. She did not move.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor Robin!&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor&mdash;but&mdash;what do you mean?&rdquo; he stammered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He never turned his eyes from her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor Robin!&mdash;but it isn&rsquo;t your fault.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she put out her hand and touched his gently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My fault?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That it was all a fancy, all a weaving of words. You want to be what you
+      thought you were, but you can&rsquo;t be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re wrong, Viola, you&rsquo;re utterly wrong&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hush, Robin! That woman you spoke of&mdash;that woman knows.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He cleared his throat, got up, went over to the wall, leaned his arms upon
+      it and hid his face on them. There were tears in his eyes. At that moment
+      he was suffering more than she was. His soul was rent by an abject sense
+      of loss, an abject sense of guilty impotence and shame. It was frightful
+      that he could not be what he wished to be, what he had thought he was. He
+      longed to comfort her and could not do anything but plunge a sword into
+      her heart. He longed to surround her with tenderness&mdash;yes, he was
+      sure he longed&mdash;but he could only hold up to her in the sun her
+      loneliness. And he had lost&mdash;what had he not lost? A dream of years,
+      an imagination that had been his inseparable and dearest companion. His
+      loneliness was intense in that moment as was hers. The tears seemed to
+      scald his eyes. In his heart he cursed God for not permitting him to be
+      what he longed to be, to feel what he longed to feel. It seemed to him
+      monstrous, intolerable, that even our emotions are arranged for us as are
+      arranged the events of our lives. He felt like a doll, a horrible puppet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor old Robin!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was standing beside him, and in her voice there was, just for a
+      moment, the sound that sometimes comes into a mother&rsquo;s voice when she
+      speaks to her little child in the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the moment when he knew he did not love the white angel she stood
+      beside him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she thought that she was only a wretched woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      ROBIN had gone. He had gone, still protesting that Lady Holme was
+      deceiving herself, protesting desperately, with the mistaken chivalry of
+      one who was not only a gentleman to his finger-tips but who was also an
+      almost fanatical lover of his own romance. After recovering from the first
+      shock of his disillusion, and her strange reception of it, so different
+      from anything he could have imagined possible in her, or indeed in any
+      woman who had lived as she had, he had said everything that was
+      passionate, everything that fitted in with his old protestations when she
+      was beautiful. He had spoken, perhaps, even more to recall himself than to
+      convince her, but he had not succeeded in either effort, and a strange,
+      mingled sense of tragic sadness and immense relief invaded him as the
+      width of waterway grew steadily larger between his boat and Casa Felice.
+      He could have wept for her and for himself. He could even have wept for
+      humanity. Yet he felt the comfort of one from whom an almost intolerable
+      strain has just been removed. To a man of his calibre, sensitive, almost
+      feminine in his subtlety, the situation had been exquisitely painful. He
+      had felt what Viola was feeling as well as what he was feeling. He had
+      struggled like a creature taken in a net. And how useless it had all been!
+      He found himself horribly inferior to her. Her behaviour at this critical
+      moment had proved to him that in his almost fantastic conception of her he
+      had shown real insight. Then why had his heart betrayed his intellect? Why
+      had his imagination proved true metal, his affection false? He asked
+      himself these questions. He searched his own nature, as many a man has
+      done in moments when he has found himself unworthy. And he was met by
+      mystery, by the &ldquo;It was impossible for me!&rdquo; which stings the soul that
+      would be strong. He remembered Carey&rsquo;s words that night in Half Moon
+      Street when Sir Donald had accompanied him home after the dinner in
+      Cadogan Square. Sir Donald had gone. He and Carey were alone, and he had
+      said that if one loves, one loves the kernel not the shell. And Carey had
+      said, &ldquo;I think if the shell is a beautiful shell, and becomes suddenly
+      broken, it makes a devil of a lot of difference in what most people think
+      of the kernel.&rdquo; And when he&mdash;Robin&mdash;had replied, &ldquo;It wouldn&rsquo;t to
+      me,&rdquo; Carey had abruptly exclaimed, &ldquo;I think it would.&rdquo; After Carey had
+      gone Robin remembered very well saying to himself that it was strange no
+      man will believe you if you hint at the truth of your true self. That
+      night he had not known his true self and Carey had known it. But then, had
+      he loved the shell only? He could not believe it. He felt bewildered. Even
+      now, as the boat crept onward through the falling darkness, he felt that
+      he loved Viola, but as someone who had disappeared or who was dead. This
+      woman whom he had just left was not Viola. And yet she was. When he was
+      not looking at her and she spoke to him, the past seemed to take the form
+      of the present. When she had worn the veil and had touched him all his
+      pulses had leaped. But when she had touched him with those same hands
+      after the veil had fallen, there had been frost in his veins. Nothing in
+      his body had responded. The independence of the flesh appalled him. It had
+      a mind of its own then. It chose and acted quite apart from the spirit
+      which dwelt in it. It even defied that spirit. And the eyes? They had
+      become almost a terror to him. He thought of them as a slave thinks of a
+      cruel master. Were they to coerce his soul? Were they to force his heart
+      from its allegiance? He had always been accustomed to think that the
+      spirit was essentially the governing thing in man, that indestructible,
+      fierce, beautiful flame which surely outlives death and time. But now he
+      found himself thinking of the flesh, the corruptible part of man that
+      mingles its dust with the earth, as dominant over the spirit. For the
+      first time, and because of his impotence to force his body to feel as his
+      spirit wished it to feel, he doubted if there were a future for the soul,
+      if there were such a condition as immortality. He reached Villa d&rsquo;Este in
+      a condition of profound depression, almost bordering on despair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile Viola, standing by the garden wall, had watched the boat that
+      carried Robin disappear on the water. Till it was only a speck she
+      watched. It vanished. Evening came on. Still she stood there. She did not
+      feel very sad. The strange, dreamlike sensation of the preceding day had
+      returned to her, but with a larger vagueness that robbed it of some of its
+      former poignancy. It seemed to her that she felt as a spirit might feel&mdash;detached.
+      She remembered once seeing a man, who called himself an &ldquo;illusionist,&rdquo;
+       displaying a woman&rsquo;s figure suspended apparently in mid-air. He took a
+      wand and passed it over, under, around the woman to show that she was
+      unattached to anything, that she did not rest upon anything. Viola thought
+      that she was like that woman. She was not embittered. She was not even
+      crushed. Her impulse of pity, when she understood what Robin was feeling,
+      had been absolutely genuine. It had rushed upon her. It remained with her.
+      But now it was far less definite, and embraced not only Robin but surely
+      other men whom she had never known or even seen. They could not help
+      themselves. It was not their fault. They were made in a certain way. They
+      were governed. It seemed to her that she looked out vaguely over a world
+      of slaves, the serfs of God who have never been emancipated. She had no
+      hope. But just then she had no fear. The past did not ebb from her, nor
+      did the future steal towards her. The tides were stilled. The pulses of
+      life were stopped. Everything was wrapped in a cold, grey calm. She had
+      never been a very thoughtful woman. She had not had much time for thought.
+      That is what she herself would probably have said. Seldom had she puzzled
+      her head over the mysteries of existence. Even now, when she confronted
+      the great mystery of her own, she did not think very definitely. Before
+      Robin came her mind had been in a fever. Now that he was gone the fever
+      had gone with him. Would it ever return? She did not ask or wonder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The night fell and the servant came to summon her to dinner. She shook her
+      head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The signora will not eat anything?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She took her arms from the wall and looked at the man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could I have the boat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The signora wishes to go on the lake?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will tell Paolo.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Two or three minutes later the boy who had sung came to say that the boat
+      was ready.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme fetched a cloak, and went down the dark stone staircase between
+      the lichen-covered walls to the tall iron gate. The boat was lying by the
+      outer steps. She got in and Paolo took the oars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where does the signora wish to go?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anywhere out on the lake.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He pushed off. Soon the noise of the waterfall behind Casa Felice died
+      away, the spectral facade faded and only the plash of the oars and the
+      tinkle of fishermen&rsquo;s bells above the nets, floating here and there in the
+      lake, were audible. The distant lights of mountain villages gleamed along
+      the shores, and the lights of the stars gleamed in the clear sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that she was away from the land Lady Holme became more conscious of
+      herself and of life. The gentle movement of the boat promoted an echoing
+      mental movement in her. Thoughts glided through the shadows of her soul as
+      the boat glided through the shadows of the night. Her mind was like a
+      pilgrim, wandering in the darkness cast by the soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She felt, first, immensely ignorant. She had scarcely ever, perhaps never,
+      consciously felt immensely ignorant before. She felt also very poor, very
+      small and very dingy, like a woman very badly dressed. She felt, finally,
+      that she was the most insignificant of all the living things under the
+      stars to the stars and all they watched, but that, to herself, she was of
+      a burning, a flaming significance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There seemed to be bells everywhere in the lake. The water was full of
+      their small, persistent voices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So had her former life been full of small, persistent voices, but now,
+      abruptly, they were all struck into silence, and she was left listening&mdash;for
+      what? For some far-off but larger voice beyond?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What am I to do? What am I to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now she began to say this within herself. The grey calm was floating away
+      from her spirit, and she began to realise what had happened that
+      afternoon. She remembered that just before Robin came she had made up her
+      mind that, though she did not love him, he held the matter of her life or
+      death in his power. Well, if that were so, he had decided. The dice had
+      been thrown and death had come up. No hand had been stretched out in the
+      darkness to the child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked round her. On every side she saw smooth water, a still surface
+      which hid depths. At the prow of the boat shone a small lantern, which
+      cast before the boat an arrow of light. And as the boat moved this arrow
+      perpetually attacked the darkness in front. It was like the curiosity of
+      man attacking the impenetrable mysteries of God. It seemed to penetrate,
+      but always new darkness disclosed itself beyond, new darkness flowed
+      silently around.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was the darkness the larger voice?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not say this to herself. Her mind was not of the definite species
+      that frames such silent questions often. But, like all human beings
+      plunged in the strangeness of a terror that is absolutely new, and left to
+      struggle in it quite alone, she thought a thousand things that she did not
+      even know she thought, her mind touched many verges of which she was not
+      aware. There were within her tremendous activities of which she was
+      scarcely conscious. She was like a woman who wakes at night without
+      knowing why, and hears afterwards that there was a tumult in the city
+      where she dwelt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gradually, along devious ways, she came to the thought that life had done
+      with her. It seemed to her that life said to her, &ldquo;Woman, what have I to
+      do with thee?&rdquo; The man who had sworn to protect her could not endure to
+      look at her. The man who had vowed that he loved her soul shrank before
+      her face. She had never been a friend to women. Why should they wish to be
+      her friends now? They would not wish it. And if they did she felt their
+      friendship would be useless to her, more&mdash;horrible. She would rather
+      have shown her shattered face to a thousand men than to ten women. She had
+      never &ldquo;bothered&rdquo; much about religion. No God seemed near her now. She had
+      no sense of being chastened because she was loved. On the other hand, she
+      did feel as if she had been caught by a torturer who did not mean to let
+      her go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It became obvious to her that there was no place for her in life, and
+      presently she returned to the conclusion that, totally unloved, she could
+      not continue to exist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She began definitely to contemplate self-destruction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at the little arrow of light beyond the boat&rsquo;s prow. Like that
+      little arrow she must go out into the darkness. When? Could she go
+      to-night? If not, probably she could never go at all by her own will and
+      act. It should be done to-night then, abruptly, without much thought. For
+      thought is dangerous and often paralysing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She spoke to the boat boy. He answered. They fell into conversation. She
+      asked him about his family, his life, whether he would have to be a
+      soldier; whether he had a sweetheart. She forced herself to listen
+      attentively to his replies. He was a responsive boy and soon began to talk
+      volubly, letting the oars trail idly in the water. With energy he paraded
+      his joyous youth before her. Even in his touches of melancholy there was
+      hope. His happiness confirmed her in her resolution. She put herself in
+      contrast with this boy, and her heart sank below the sources of tears into
+      a dry place, like the valley of bones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you turn towards Casa Feli&mdash;towards the house now,&rdquo; she said
+      presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boat swung round, and instantly the boy began to sing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I can do it to-night,&rdquo; she thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His happy singing entered like iron into her soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the pale facade of Casa Felice was visible once more, detaching
+      itself from the surrounding darkness, she said to the boy carelessly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where do you put the boat at night?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The signora has not seen?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Under the house. There is deep water there. One can swim for five minutes
+      without coming out into the open.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like to see that place. Can I get out of the boat there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Si, signora. There is a staircase leading into the piazza by the
+      waterfall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then row in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Si, signora.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was beginning to sing again, but suddenly he stopped, looked over his
+      shoulder and listened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; she asked quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a boat, signora.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked into the darkness but saw nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Close to the house, signora.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how do you know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I heard the oars. The man in the boat was not rowing, but just as I began
+      to sing he began to row. When I stopped singing he stopped rowing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t see the boat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, signora. It carries no light.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at her mysteriously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>It may be the contrabbandieri</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Smugglers?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned his head over his shoulder and whistled, in a peculiar way.
+      There was no reply. Then he bent down over the gunwale of the boat till
+      his ear nearly touched the water, and listened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The boat has stopped. It must be near us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His whole body seemed quivering with attentive life, like a terrier&rsquo;s when
+      it stands to be unchained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Might it not be a fisherman?&rdquo; asked Lady Holme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is not the hour.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some tourists, perhaps, making an excursion?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is too far. They never come here at night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His eyes stared, his attitude was so intensely alert and his manner so
+      mysterious that, despite her desperate preoccupation, Lady Holme found
+      herself distracted for a moment. Her mind was detached from herself, and
+      fixed upon this hidden boat and its occupant or occupants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think it is <i>contrabbandieri</i>?&rdquo; she whispered. He nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been one, signora.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, when I was a boy, in the winter. Once, when we were running for the
+      shore, on a December night, the <i>carabinieri</i> fired on us and killed
+      Gaetano Cremona.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your companion?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. He was sixteen and he died. The boat was full of his blood.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shuddered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Row in,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;That boat must have gone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Non, signora. It has not. It is close by and the oars are out of the
+      water.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke with certainty, as if he saw the boat. Then, reluctantly, he
+      dipped his oars in the lake, and rowed towards the house, keeping his head
+      half turned and staring into the darkness with eyes that were still full
+      of mystery and profound attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme looked over the water too, but she saw nothing upon its calm
+      surface.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go into the boat-house,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Paolo nodded without speaking. His lips were parted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chi e la?&rdquo; she heard him whisper to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were close to the house now. Its high, pale front, full of shuttered
+      windows, loomed over them, and the roar of the waterfall was loud in their
+      ears. Paolo turned the boat towards his right, and, almost directly, Lady
+      Holme saw a dark opening in the solid stone blocks on which the house was
+      built. The boat glided through it into cover, and the arrow of light at
+      the prow pierced ebon blackness, while the plash of the oars made a
+      curious sound, full of sudden desolation and weariness. A bat flitted over
+      the arrow of light and vanished, and the head of a swimming rat was
+      visible for a moment, pursued by a wrinkle on the water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How dark it is here,&rdquo; Lady Holme said in a low voice. &ldquo;And what strange
+      noises there are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was terror in the sound of the waterfall heard under this curving
+      roof of stone. It sounded like a quantity of disputing voices, quarrelling
+      in the blackness of the night. The arrow of light lay on a step, and the
+      boat&rsquo;s prow grated gently against a large ring of rusty iron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you tie up the boat here at night?&rdquo; she asked as she got up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Si, signora.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While she stood on the step, close to the black water, he passed the rope
+      through the ring, and tied it deftly in a loose knot that any backward
+      movement of the boat would tighten. She watched with profound attention
+      his hands moving quickly in the faint light cast by the lantern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How well you tie it,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Si, signora.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it easy to untie?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Si, signora.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Show me, will you? It&mdash;it holds so well that I should have thought
+      it would be difficult.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked up at her with a flash of surprise. Something in her voice had
+      caught his young attention sharply. She smiled at him when she saw the
+      keen inquiry in his large eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m interested in all these little things you do so well,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He flushed with pride, and immediately untied the knot, carefully, showing
+      her exactly how he did it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you. I see. It&rsquo;s very ingenious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Si, signora. I can do many things like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a clever boy, Paolo.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He tied the knot again, unhooked the lantern; jumped out of the boat, and
+      lighted her up the staircase to a heavy wooden door. In another moment she
+      stood on the piazza close to the waterfall. The cold spray from it fell on
+      her face. He pushed the door to, but did not lock it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You leave it like that at night?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Non, signora. Before I go to bed I lock it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She saw a key sticking out from the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>A rivederci</i>, Paolo.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>A rivederci</i>, signora.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took off his hat and went swiftly away. The light of the lantern danced
+      on the pavement of the piazza, and, for one instant, on the white foam of
+      the water falling between the cypresses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Viola was alone on the piazza she went to the stone balustrade and
+      looked over it at the lake. Was there a boat close by? She could not see
+      it. The chiming bells of the fishermen came up to her, mingling with the
+      noise of the cascade. She took out her watch and held it up close to her
+      eyes. The hour was half-past nine. She wondered what time Italian servants
+      went to bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The butler came out and begged to know if she would not eat something. He
+      seemed so distressed at her having missed dinner, that she went into the
+      house, sat down at the dining table and made a pretence of eating. A clock
+      struck ten as she finished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is so warm that I am going to sit out in the piazza,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will the signora take coffee?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;yes, bring me some there. And tell my maid&mdash;tell the
+      servants they needn&rsquo;t sit up. I may stay out quite late. If I do, I&rsquo;ll
+      lock the door on to the piazza when I go in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Si, signora.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When she reached the piazza she saw a shining red spark just above the
+      balustrade. Paolo was there smoking a black cigar and leaning over
+      sideways.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you looking for?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That boat, signora. It has not gone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you know? It may have gone when we were in the boat-house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could not have heard the oars through the noise of the waterfall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Si, signora. It has not gone. Shall I take the boat and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; she interrupted quickly. &ldquo;What does it matter? Go and have
+      supper.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have had it, signora.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, when you have finished smoking, you&rsquo;d better go to bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She forced herself to smile lightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Boys like you need plenty of sleep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Four hours is enough, signora.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no. You should go to bed early.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She saw an odd expression come into his face. He looked over at the water,
+      then at her, with a curious dawning significance, that would almost have
+      been impudent if it had not been immensely young and full of a kind of
+      gnomish sympathy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll go to bed, signora!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he looked at her again and there were doubt and wonder in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned away, with a sickness at her heart. She knew exactly what he
+      had thought, was thinking. The suspicion had crossed his mind that she
+      knew why the hidden boat was there, that she wished no one else to suspect
+      why it was there. And then had followed the thought, &ldquo;Ma&mdash;per questa
+      signora&mdash;non e possibile.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At certain crises of feeling, a tiny incident will often determine some
+      vital act. So it was now. The fleeting glance in a carelessly expressive
+      boy&rsquo;s eyes at this moment gave to Lady Holme&rsquo;s mind the last touch it
+      needed to acquire the impetus which would carry it over the edge of the
+      precipice into the abyss. The look in Paolo&rsquo;s eyes said to her, &ldquo;Life has
+      done with you. Throw it away.&rdquo; And she knew that though she had thought
+      she had already decided to throw it away that night, she had really not
+      decided. Secretly she had been hesitating. Now there was no more
+      hesitation in her. She drank her coffee and had the cup taken away, and
+      ordered the lights in the drawing-room to be put out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I come in I shall go straight up to bed,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Leave me a
+      candle in the hall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lights went out behind the windows. Blank darkness replaced the yellow
+      gleam that had shone upon them. The two houses on either side of the
+      piazza were wrapped in silence. Presently there was a soft noise of feet
+      crossing the pavement. It was Paolo going to lock the door leading to the
+      boathouse. Lady Holme moved round sharply in her chair to watch him. He
+      bent down. With a swift turn of his brown wrists he secured the door and
+      pulled the key out of the lock. She opened her lips to call out something
+      to him, but when she saw him look at the key doubtfully, then towards her,
+      she said nothing. And he put it back into the keyhole. When he did that
+      she sighed. Perhaps a doubt had again come into his young mind. But, if
+      so, it had come too late. He slipped away smiling, half ironically, to
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Holme sat still. She had wrapped a white cloth cloak round her. She
+      put up her hand to the disfigured side of her face, and touched it, trying
+      to see its disfigurement as the blind see, by feeling. She kept her hand
+      there, and her hand recognized ugliness vividly. After two or three
+      minutes she took her hand away, got up and walked to and fro in the
+      piazza, very near to the balustrade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now she was thinking fiercely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She thought of Fritz. What would he feel when he knew? Shocked for a
+      moment, no doubt. After all, they had been very close to each other, in
+      body at least, if not in soul. And the memory of the body would surely
+      cause him to suffer a little, to think, &ldquo;I held it often, and now it is
+      sodden and cold.&rdquo; At least he must think something like that, and his body
+      must shudder in sympathy with the catastrophe that had overtaken its old
+      companion. She felt a painful yearning to see Fritz again. Yet she did not
+      say to herself that she loved him any more. Even before the accident she
+      had begun to realise that she had not found in Fritz the face of truth
+      among the crowd of shams which all women seek, ignorantly or not. And
+      since the accident&mdash;there are things that kill even a woman&rsquo;s love
+      abruptly. And for a dead love there is no resurrection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet to-night she felt infinitely tender over Fritz, as if she stood by him
+      again and saw the bandage darkened by the red stain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she thought of the song she had sung to Lady Cardington, the song
+      which had surely opened the eyes of her own drowsy, if not actually
+      sleeping, heart:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;Tutto al mondo e vano:
+   Nell&rsquo;amore ogni dolcezza.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      It was horribly true to her to-night. She could imagine now, in her utter
+      desolation, that for love a woman could easily sacrifice the world. But
+      she had had the world&mdash;all she called the world&mdash;ruthlessly
+      taken from her, and nothing had been given to her to fill its place.
+      Possibly before the accident she might have recoiled from the idea of
+      giving up the world for love. But now, as she walked to and fro, it seemed
+      to her as if a woman isolated from everything with love possessed the
+      world and all that is therein. Vaguely she remembered the story she had
+      heard about this very house, Casa Felice. There had been a romance
+      connected with it. Two lovers had fled here, had lived here for a long
+      time. She imagined them now, sitting together at night in this piazza,
+      hearing the waterfall together, looking at the calm lake together,
+      watching the stars together. The sound of the water was terrible to her.
+      To them how beautiful it must have been, how beautiful the light of the
+      stars, and the lonely gardens stretching along the lake, and the dim paths
+      between the cypresses, and the great silence that floated over the lake to
+      listen to the waterfall. And all these things were terrible to her&mdash;all.
+      Not one was beautiful. Each one seemed to threaten her, to say to her,
+      &ldquo;Leave us, we are not for such as you.&rdquo; Well, she would obey these voices.
+      She would go. She wrapped the cloak more closely round her, went to the
+      balustrade and leaned over it looking at the water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to her as if her life had been very trivial. She thought now
+      that she had never really enjoyed anything. She looked upon her life as if
+      it were down there in the water just beneath her, and she saw it as a
+      broken thing, a thing in many fragments. And the fragments, however
+      carefully and deftly arranged, could surely never have been fitted
+      together and become a complete whole. Everything in her life had been awry
+      as her face was now awry, and she had not realised it. Her love for Fritz,
+      and his&mdash;what he had called his, at least&mdash;for her, had seemed
+      to her once to be a round and beautiful thing, a circle of passion without
+      a flaw. How distorted, misshapen, absurd it had really been. Nothing in
+      her life had been carried through to a definite end. Even her petty
+      struggle with Miss Schley had been left unfinished. Those who had loved
+      her had been like spectres, and now, like spectres, had faded away. And
+      all through their spectral love she had clung to Fritz. She had clasped
+      the sand like a mad-woman, and never felt the treacherous grains shifting
+      between her arms at the touch of every wind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sudden passionate fury of longing woke in her to have one week, one day,
+      one hour of life, one hour of life now that her eyes were open, one moment
+      only&mdash;even one moment. She felt that she had had nothing, that every
+      other human being must have known the <i>dolcezza</i>, the ineffable, the
+      mysterious ecstasy, the one and only thing worth the having, that she
+      alone had been excluded, when she was beautiful, from the participation in
+      joy that was her right, and that now, in her ugliness, she was irrevocably
+      cast out from it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was unjust. Suddenly she faced a God without justice in His heart,
+      all-powerful and not just. She faced such a God and she knew Hell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swiftly she turned from the balustrade, went to the door by the waterfall,
+      unlocked it and descended the stone staircase. It was very dark. She had
+      to feel her way. When she reached the last step she could just see the
+      boat lying against it in the black water. She put out her hand and felt
+      for the ring through which the rope was slipped. The rope was wet. It took
+      her some minutes to undo it. Then she got into the boat. Her eyes were
+      more accustomed to the darkness now, and she could see the arched opening
+      which gave access to the lake. She found the oars, pushed them into the
+      rowlocks, and pulled gently to the opening. The boat struck against the
+      wall and grated along it. She stood up and thrust one hand against the
+      stone, leaning over to the side. The boat went away swiftly, and she
+      nearly fell into the water, but managed to save herself by a rapid
+      movement. She sank down, feeling horribly afraid. Yet, a moment after, she
+      asked herself why she had not let herself go. It was too dark there under
+      the house. Out in the open air it would be different, it would be easier.
+      She wanted the stars above her. She did not know why she wanted them, why
+      she wanted anything now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boat slipped out from the low archway into the open water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a pale and delicate night, one of those autumn nights that are full
+      of a white mystery. A thin mist lay about the water, floated among the
+      lower woods. Higher up, the mountains rose out of it. Their green sides
+      looked black and soft in the starlight, their summits strangely remote and
+      inaccessible. Through the mist, here and there, shone faintly the lights
+      of the scattered villages. The bells in the water were still ringing
+      languidly, and their voices emphasised the pervading silence, a silence
+      full of the pensive melancholy of Nature in decline.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Viola rowed slowly out towards the middle of the lake. Awe had come upon
+      her. There seemed a mystical presence in the night, something far away but
+      attentive, a mind concentrated upon the night, upon Nature, upon herself.
+      She was very conscious of it, and it seemed to her not as if eyes, but as
+      if a soul were watching her and everything about her; the stars and the
+      mountains, the white mist, even the movement of the boat. This
+      concentrated, mystical attention oppressed her. It was like a soft,
+      impalpable weight laid upon her. She rowed faster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But now it seemed to her as if she were being followed. Casa Felice had
+      already disappeared. The shore was hidden in the darkness. She could only
+      see vaguely the mountain-tops. She paused, then dipped the oars again, but
+      again&mdash;after two or three strokes&mdash;she had the sensation that
+      she was being followed. She recalled Paolo&rsquo;s action when they were
+      returning to Casa Felice in the evening, leaned over the boat&rsquo;s side and
+      put her ear close to the water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she did so she heard the plash of oars&mdash;rhythmical, steady, and
+      surely very near. For a moment she listened. Then a sort of panic seized
+      her. She remembered the incident of the evening, the hidden boat, Paolo&rsquo;s
+      assertion that it was waiting near the house, that it had not gone. He had
+      said, too, that the unseen rower had begun to row when he began to sing,
+      had stopped rowing when he stopped singing. A conviction came to her that
+      this same rower as now following her. But why? Who was it? She knew nobody
+      on the lake, except Robin. And he&mdash;no, it could not be Robin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ash of the oars became more distinct. Her unreasoning fear increased.
+      With the mystical attention of the great and hidden mind was now blent a
+      crude human attention. She began to feel really terrified, and, seizing
+      her oars, she pulled frantically towards the middle of the lake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Viola!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of the darkness it came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Viola!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped and began to tremble. Who&mdash;what&mdash;could be calling
+      her by name, here, in the night? She heard the sound of oars plainly now.
+      Then she saw a thing like a black shadow. It was the prow of an advancing
+      boat. She sat quite still, with her hands on the oars. The boat came on
+      till she could see the figure of one man in it, standing up, and rowing,
+      as the Italian boatmen do when they are alone, with his face set towards
+      the prow. A few strong strokes and it was beside her, and she was looking
+      into Rupert Carey&rsquo;s eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      SHE sat still without saying anything. It seemed to her as if she were on
+      the platform at Manchester House singing the Italian song. Then the
+      disfigured face of Carey&mdash;disfigured by vice as hers now by the
+      accident&mdash;had become as nothing to her. She had seen only his eyes.
+      She saw only his eyes now. He remained standing up in the faint light with
+      the oars in his hands looking at her. Round about them tinkled the bells
+      above the nets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You heard me call?&rdquo; he said at last, almost roughly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did you&mdash;?&rdquo; she began, and stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was there this evening when you came in. I heard your boy singing. I
+      was under the shadow of the woods.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All this time she was gazing into Carey&rsquo;s eyes, and had not seen in them
+      that he was looking, for the first time, at her altered face. She did not
+      realise this. She did not remember that her face was altered. The
+      expression in his eyes made her forget it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted something of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He let the oars go, and sat down on the little seat. They were close to
+      each other now. The sides of the boats touched. He did not answer her
+      question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know I&rsquo;ve no business to speak to you,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;No business to come
+      after you. I know that. But I was always a selfish, violent, headlong
+      brute, and it seems I can&rsquo;t change.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what do you want with me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly she remembered&mdash;put her hands up to her face with a swift
+      gesture, then dropped them again. What did it matter now? He was the last
+      man who would look upon her in life. And now that she remembered her own
+      condition she saw his. She saw the terror of his life in his marred
+      features, aged, brutalised by excess. She saw, and was glad for a moment,
+      as if she met someone unexpectedly on her side of the stream of fate. Let
+      him look upon her. She was looking upon him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you want?&rdquo; she repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want a saviour,&rdquo; he said, staring always straight at her, and speaking
+      without tenderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A saviour!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment she thought of the Bible, of religion; then of her sensation
+      that she had been caught by a torturer who would not let her go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you come to me because you think I can tell you of saviour?&rdquo; she
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she began to laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But don&rsquo;t you see me?&rdquo; she exclaimed. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you see what I am now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly she felt angry with him because his eyes did not seem to see the
+      dreadful change in her appearance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you think I want a saviour too?&rdquo; she exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think about you,&rdquo; he said with a sort of deliberate brutality. &ldquo;I
+      think about myself. Men generally do when they come to women.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or go away from them,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was thinking of Robin then, and Fritz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you know Robin Pierce was here to-day?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I saw him leave you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You saw&mdash;but how long have you been watching?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A long time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where do you come from?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He pointed towards the distant lights behind her and before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Opposite. I was to have stayed with Ulford in Casa Felice. I&rsquo;m staying
+      with him over there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With Sir Donald?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. He&rsquo;s ill. He wants somebody.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir Donald&rsquo;s afraid of me now,&rdquo; she said, watching him closely. &ldquo;I told
+      him to live with his memory of me. Will he do that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think he will. Poor old chap! he&rsquo;s had hard knocks. They&rsquo;ve made him
+      afraid of life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why didn&rsquo;t you keep your memory of me?&rdquo; she said, with sudden nervous
+      anger. &ldquo;You too? If you hadn&rsquo;t come to-night it would never have been
+      destroyed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her extreme tension of the nerves impelled her to an exhibition of fierce
+      bitterness which she could not control. She remembered how he had loved
+      her, with what violence and almost crazy frankness. Why had he come? He
+      might have remembered her as she was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hate you for coming,&rdquo; she said, almost under her breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t care. I had to come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why? Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told you. I want a saviour. I&rsquo;m down in the pit. I can&rsquo;t get out. You
+      can see that for yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she answered, &ldquo;I can see that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me a hand, Viola, and&mdash;you&rsquo;ll make me do something I&rsquo;ve never
+      done, never been able to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo; she half whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Believe there&rsquo;s a God&mdash;who cares.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She drew in her breath sharply. Something warm surged through her. It was
+      not like fire. It was more like the warmth that comes from a warm hand
+      laid on a cold one. It surged through her and went away like a travelling
+      flood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you saying?&rdquo; she said in a low voice. &ldquo;You are mad to come here
+      to-night, to say this to me to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. It&rsquo;s just to-night it had to be said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly she resolved to tell him. He was in the pit. So was she. Well,
+      the condemned can be frank with one another though all the free have to
+      practise subterfuge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; she said, and her voice was quiet now. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t know
+      why it was mad of you to come to-night. I&rsquo;ll tell you. I&rsquo;ve come out here
+      and I&rsquo;m not going back again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He kept his eyes on hers, but did not speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to stay out here,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she let her hand fall over the side of the boat till her fingers
+      touched the water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t do that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I shall do it. I want to hide my face in the water.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me a hand first, Viola.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the warmth went through her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nobody else can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you&rsquo;ve looked at me!&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a profound amazement in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s only when I look at you,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that I know there are stars
+      somewhere beyond the pit&rsquo;s mouth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When you look at me&mdash;now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you are blind then?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or are the others blind?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Instinctively, really without knowing what she did, she put up her hand to
+      her face, touched it, and no longer felt that it was ugly. For a moment it
+      seemed to her that her beauty was restored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you see?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;But&mdash;but it&rsquo;s so dark here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not too dark to see a helping hand&mdash;if there is one,&rdquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he stretched out his arm into her boat and took her right hand from
+      the oar it was holding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And there is one,&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She felt a hand that loved her hand, and there was no veil over her face.
+      How strange that was. How utterly impossible it seemed. Yet it was so. No
+      woman can be deceived in the touch of a hand on hers. If it loves&mdash;she
+      knows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you going to do, Viola?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a sound almost of shame, a humble sound, in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t do anything,&rdquo; she murmured. &ldquo;You would know that to-morrow, in
+      sunlight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To-morrow I&rsquo;ll come in sunlight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no. I shall not be there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&mdash;good-night,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She began to feel extraordinarily, terribly excited. She could not tell
+      whether it was an excitement of horror, of joy&mdash;what it was. But it
+      mounted to her brain and rushed into her heart. It was in her veins like
+      an intoxicant, and in her eyes like fire, and thrilled in her nerves and
+      beat in her arteries. And it seemed to be an excitement full of passionate
+      contradictions. She was at the same time like a woman on a throne and a
+      woman in the dust&mdash;radiant as one worshipped, bowed as one beaten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-night, good-night,&rdquo; she repeated, scarcely knowing what she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her hand struggled in his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Viola, if you destroy yourself you destroy two people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She scarcely heard him speaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;D&rsquo;you understand?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no. Not to-night. I can&rsquo;t understand anything to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then to-morrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, to-morrow-to-morrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He would not let go her hand, and now his was arbitrary, the hand of a
+      master rather than of a lover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You won&rsquo;t dare to murder me,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Murder&mdash;what do you mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had used the word to arrest her attention, which was wandering almost
+      as the attention of a madwoman wanders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you hide your face in the water I shall never see those stars above
+      the pit&rsquo;s mouth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t help it&mdash;I can&rsquo;t help anything. It&rsquo;s not my fault, it&rsquo;s not
+      my fault.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will be your fault. It will be your crime.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your hand is driving me mad,&rdquo; she gasped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She meant it, felt that it was so. He let her go instantly. She began to
+      row back towards Casa Felice. And now that mystical attention of which she
+      had been conscious, that soul watching the night, her in the night, was
+      surely profounder, watched with more intensity as a spectator bending down
+      to see a struggle. Never before had she felt as if beyond human life there
+      was life compared with which human life was as death. And now she told
+      herself that she was mad, that this shock of human passion coming suddenly
+      upon her loneliness had harmed her brain, that this cry for salvation
+      addressed to one who looked upon herself as destroyed had deafened reason
+      within her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His boat kept up with hers. She did not look at him. Casa Felice came in
+      sight. She pulled harder, like a mad creature. Her boat shot under the
+      archway into the darkness. Somehow&mdash;how, she did not know&mdash;she
+      guided it to the steps, left it, rushed up the staircase in the dark and
+      came out on to the piazza. There she stopped where the waterfall could
+      cast its spray upon her face. She stayed till her hair and cheeks and
+      hands were wet. Then she went to the balustrade. His boat was below and he
+      was looking up. She saw the tragic mask of his face down in the thin mist
+      that floated about the water, and now she imagined him in the pit, gazing
+      up and seeking those stars in which he still believed though he could not
+      see them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go away,&rdquo; she said, not knowing why she said it or if she wished him to
+      go, only knowing that she had lost the faculty of self-control and might
+      say, do, be anything in that moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t bear it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not know what she meant she could not bear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He made a strange answer. He said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you will go into the house, open the windows and sing to me&mdash;the
+      last song I heard you sing&mdash;I&rsquo;ll go. But to-morrow I&rsquo;ll come and
+      touch my helping hand, and after to-morrow, and every day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sing&mdash;?&rdquo; she said vacantly. &ldquo;To-night!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go into the house. Open the window. I shall hear you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke almost sternly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She crossed the piazza slowly. A candle was burning in the hall. She took
+      it up and went into the drawing-room, which was in black darkness. There
+      was a piano in it, close to a tall window which looked on to the lake. She
+      set the candle down on the piano, went to the window, unbarred the
+      shutters and threw the window open. Instantly she heard the sound of oars
+      as Carey sent his boat towards the water beneath the window. She drew
+      back, went again to the piano, sat down, opened it, put her hands on the
+      keys. How could she sing? But she must make him go away. While he was
+      there she could not think, could not grip herself, could not&mdash;She
+      struck a chord. The sound of music, the doing of a familiar action, had a
+      strange effect upon her. She felt as if she recovered clear consciousness
+      after an anaesthetic. She struck another chord. What did he want? The
+      concert&mdash;that song. Her fingers found the prelude, her lips the
+      poetry, her voice the music. And then suddenly her heart found the
+      meaning, more than the meaning, the eternal meanings of the things
+      unutterable, the things that lie beyond the world in the deep souls of the
+      women who are the saviours of men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she had finished she went to the window. He was still standing in the
+      boat and looking up, with the whiteness of the mist about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When you sing I can see those stars,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Do you understand?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She bent down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know&mdash;I don&rsquo;t think I understand anything,&rdquo; she whispered.
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;I&rsquo;ll try&mdash;I&rsquo;ll try to live.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice was so faint, such an inward voice, that it seemed impossible he
+      could have heard it. But he struck the oars at once into the water and
+      sent the boat out into the shadows of the night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she stood there looking into the white silence, which was broken only
+      by the faint voices of the fishermen&rsquo;s bells, and said to herself again
+      and again, like a wondering child:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There must be a God, there must be; a God who cares!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_EPIL" id="link2H_EPIL">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      EPILOGUE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      IN London during the ensuing winter people warmly discussed, and many of
+      them warmly condemned, a certain Italian episode, in which a woman and a
+      man, once well-known and, in their very different ways, widely popular in
+      Society, were the actors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the deep autumn Sir Donald Ulford had died rather suddenly, and it was
+      found in his will that he had left his newly-acquired property, Casa
+      Felice, to Lady Holme, who&mdash;as everybody had long ago discovered&mdash;was
+      already living there in strict retirement, while her husband was amusing
+      himself in various Continental towns. This legacy was considered by a
+      great number of persons to be &ldquo;a very strange one;&rdquo; but it was not this
+      which caused the gossip now flitting from boudoir to boudoir and from club
+      to club.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had become known that Rupert Carey, whose unfortunate vice had been
+      common talk ever since the Arkell House ball, was a perpetual visitor to
+      Casa Felice, and presently it was whispered that he was actually living
+      there with Lady Holme, and that Lord Holme was going to apply to the
+      Courts for a divorce. Thereupon many successful ladies began to wag bitter
+      tongues. It seemed to be generally agreed that the affair was rendered
+      peculiarly disgraceful by the fact that Lady Holme was no longer a
+      beautiful woman. If she had still been lovely they could have understood
+      it! The wildest rumours as to the terrible result of the accident upon her
+      had been afloat, and already she had become almost a legend. It was stated
+      that when poor Lord Holme had first seen her, after the operation, the
+      shock had nearly turned his brain. And now it was argued that the only
+      decent thing for a woman in such a plight to do was to preserve at least
+      her dignity, and to retire modestly from the fray in which she could no
+      longer hope to hold her own. That she had indeed retired, but apparently
+      with a man, roused much pious scorn and pinched regret in those whose
+      lives were passed amid the crash of broken commandments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day, at a tea, a certain lady, animadverted strongly upon Lady Holme&rsquo;s
+      conduct, and finally remarked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s grotesque! A woman who is disfigured, and a man who is, or at any
+      rate was, a drunkard! Really it&rsquo;s the most disgusting thing I ever heard
+      of!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Cardington happened to be in the room and she suddenly flushed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think we know very much about it,&rdquo; she said, and her voice was
+      rather louder than usual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But Lord Holme is going to&mdash;&rdquo; began the lady who had been speaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He may be, and he may succeed. But my sympathies are not with him. He
+      left his wife when she needed him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what could he have done for her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He could have loved her,&rdquo; said Lady Cardington.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The flush glowed hotter in the face that was generally as white as ivory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a moment of silence in the room. Then Lady Cardington, getting
+      up to go, added:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whatever happens, I shall admire Mr. Carey as long as I live, and I wish
+      there were many more men like him in the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She went out, leaving a tense astonishment behind her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her romantic heart, still young and ardent, though often aching with
+      sorrow, and always yearning for the ideal love that it had never found,
+      had divined the truth these chattering women had not imagination enough to
+      conceive of, soul enough to appreciate if they had conceived of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In that Italian winter, far away from London, a very beautiful drama of
+      human life was being enacted, not the less but the more beautiful because
+      the man and woman who took part in it had been scourged by fate, had
+      suffered cruel losses, were in the eyes of many who had known them well
+      pariahs&mdash;Rupert Carey through his fault, Lady Holme through her
+      misfortune.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Long ago, at the Arkell House ball, Lady Holme had said to Robin Pierce
+      that if Rupert Carey had the chance she could imagine him doing something
+      great. The chance was given him now of doing one of the greatest things a
+      human being can do&mdash;of winning a soul that is in despair back to
+      hope, of winning a heart that is sceptical of love back to belief in love.
+      It was a great thing to do, and Carey set about doing it in a strange way.
+      He cast himself down in his degradation at the feet of this woman whom he
+      was resolved to help, and he said, &ldquo;Help me!&rdquo; He came to this woman who
+      was on the brink of self-destruction and he said, &ldquo;Teach me to live!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a strange way he took, but perhaps he was right&mdash;perhaps it
+      was the only way. The words he spoke at midnight on the lake were as
+      nothing. His eyes, his acts in sunlight the next day, and day after day,
+      were everything. He forced Viola to realise that she was indeed the only
+      woman who could save him from the vice he had become the slave of, lift
+      him up out of that pit in which he could not see the stars. At first she
+      could not believe it, or could believe it only in moments of exaltation.
+      Lord Holme and Robin Pierce had rendered her terrified of life and of
+      herself in life. She was inclined to cringe before all humanity like a
+      beaten dog. There were moments, many moments at first, when she cringed
+      before Rupert Carey. But his eyes always told her the same story. They
+      never saw the marred face, but always the white angel. The soul in them
+      clung to that, asked to be protected by that. And so, at last, the white
+      angel&mdash;one hides somewhere surely in every woman&mdash;was released.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were sad, horrible moments in this drama of the Italian winter. The
+      lonely house in the woods was a witness to painful, even tragic, scenes.
+      Viola&rsquo;s love for Rupert Carey was reluctant in its dawning and he could
+      not rise at once, or easily, out of the pit into the full starlight to
+      which he aspired. After the death of Sir Donald, when the winter set in,
+      he asked her to let him live in the house on the opposite side of the
+      piazza from the house in which she dwelt. They were people of the world,
+      and knew what the world might say, but they were also human beings in
+      distress, and they felt as if they had passed into a region in which the
+      meaning of the world&rsquo;s voices was lost, as the cry of an angry child is
+      lost in the vastness of the desert. She agreed to his request, and they
+      lived thus, innocently, till the winter was over and the spring came to
+      bring to Italy its radiance once more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even the spring was not an idyll. Rupert Carey had struggled upward, but
+      Viola, too, had much to forget and very much to learn. The egoist, spoken
+      of by Carey himself one night in Half Moon Street, was slow to fade in the
+      growing radiance that played about the angel&rsquo;s feet. But it knew, and
+      Carey knew also, that it was no longer fine enough in its brilliant
+      selfishness to stand quite alone. With the death of the physical beauty
+      there came a modesty of heart. With the understanding, bitter and terrible
+      as it was, that the great, conquering outward thing was destroyed, came
+      the desire, the imperious need, to find and to develop if possible the
+      inner things which, perhaps, conquer less easily, but which retain their
+      conquests to the end. There was growth in Casa Felice, slow but stubborn,
+      growth in the secret places of the soul, till there came a time when not
+      merely the white angel, but the whole woman, angel and that which had
+      perhaps been devil too, was able to accept the yoke laid upon her with
+      patience, was able to say, &ldquo;I can endure it bravely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Holme presently took his case to the Courts. It was undefended and he
+      won it. Not long ago Viola Holme became Viola Carey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Robin Pierce heard of it in Rome he sat for a long time in deep
+      thought. Even now, even after all that had passed, he felt a thrill of
+      pain that was like the pain of jealousy. He wished for the impossible, he
+      wished that he had been born with his friend&rsquo;s nature; that, instead of
+      the man who could only talk of being, he were the man who could be. And
+      yet, in the past, he had sometimes surely defended Viola against Carey&rsquo;s
+      seeming condemnation! He had defended and not loved&mdash;but Carey had
+      judged and loved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Carey had judged and loved, yet Carey had said he did not believe in a
+      God. Robin wondered if he believed now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin was in Rome, and could not hear the words of a man and a woman who
+      were sitting one night, after the marriage, upon a piazza above the Lake
+      of Como.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you remember Robin&rsquo;s &lsquo;<i>Danseuse de Tunisie</i>&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The woman with the fan?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I see her now without the fan. With it she was a siren, perhaps, but
+      without it she is&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is she without it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eternal woman. Ah, how much better than the siren!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a silence filled only by the voice of the waterfall between the
+      cypresses. Then the woman spoke, rather softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You taught her what she could be without the fan. You have done the great
+      thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And do you know what you have done?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. You have taught me to see the stars and to feel the soul beyond the
+      stars.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, it was not I.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again there was a silence. Then the man said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, thank God&mdash;it was not you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Woman With The Fan, by Robert Hichens
+
+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 Woman With The Fan
+
+Author: Robert Hichens
+
+Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8549]
+Posting Date: July 24, 2009
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMAN WITH THE FAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WOMAN WITH THE FAN
+
+By Robert Hichens
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+IN a large and cool drawing-room of London a few people were
+scattered about, listening to a soprano voice that was singing to the
+accompaniment of a piano. The sound of the voice came from an inner
+room, towards which most of these people were looking earnestly. Only
+one or two seemed indifferent to the fascination of the singer.
+
+A little woman, with oily black hair and enormous dark eyes, leaned back
+on a sofa, playing with a scarlet fan and glancing sideways at a thin,
+elderly man, who gazed into the distance from which the voice came. His
+mouth worked slightly under his stiff white moustache, and his eyes, in
+colour a faded blue, were fixed and stern. Upon his knees his thin and
+lemon-coloured hands twitched nervously, as if they longed to grasp
+something and hold it fast. The little dark woman glanced down at
+these hands, and then sharply up at the elderly man's face. A faint and
+malicious smile curved her full lips, which were artificially reddened,
+and she turned her shoulder to him with deliberation and looked about
+the room.
+
+On all the faces in it, except one, she perceived intent expressions.
+A sleek and plump man, with hanging cheeks, a hooked nose, and hair
+slightly tinged with grey and parted in the middle, was the exception.
+He sat in a low chair, pouting his lips, playing with his single
+eyeglass, and looking as sulky as an ill-conditioned school-boy. Once
+or twice he crossed and uncrossed his short legs with a sort of abrupt
+violence, laid his fat, white hands on the arms of the chair, lifted
+them, glanced at his rosy and shining nails, and frowned. Then he shut
+his little eyes so tightly that the skin round them became wrinkled,
+and, stretching out his feet, seemed almost angrily endeavouring to fall
+asleep.
+
+A tall young man, who was sitting alone not far off, cast a glance of
+contempt at him, and then, as if vexed at having bestowed upon him even
+this slight attention, leaned forward, listening with eagerness to the
+soprano voice. The little dark woman observed him carefully above the
+scarlet feathers of her fan, which she now held quite still. His face
+was lean and brown. His eyes were long and black, heavy-lidded, and
+shaded by big lashes which curled upward. His features were good. The
+nose and chin were short and decided, but the mouth was melancholy,
+almost weak. On his upper lip grew a short moustache, turned up at the
+ends. His body was slim and muscular.
+
+After watching him for a little while the dark woman looked again at the
+elderly man beside her, and then quickly back to the young fellow. She
+seemed to be comparing the two attentions, of age and of youth. Perhaps
+she found something horrible in the process for she suddenly lost her
+expression of sparkling and birdlike sarcasm, and bending her arm, as if
+overcome with lassitude, she let her fan drop on her knees, and stared
+moodily at the carpet.
+
+A very tall woman, with snow-white hair and a face in which nobility and
+weariness were mated, let fall two tears, and a huge man, with short,
+bronze-coloured hair and a protruding lower jaw, who was sitting
+opposite to her, noticed them and suddenly looked proud.
+
+The light soprano voice went on singing an Italian song about a summer
+night in Venice, about stars, dark waters and dark palaces, heat, and
+the sound of music, and of gondoliers calling over the lagoons to their
+comrades. It was an exquisite voice; not large, but flexible and very
+warm. The pianoforte accompaniment was rather uneasy and faltering. Now
+and then, when it became blurred and wavering, the voice was abruptly
+hard and decisive, once even piercing and almost shrewish. Then the
+pianist, as if attacked by fear, played louder and hurried the tempo,
+the little dark woman smiled mischievously, the white-haired woman put
+her handkerchief to her eyes, and the young man looked as if he wished
+to commit murder. But the huge man with the bronze hair went on looking
+equably proud.
+
+When the voice died away there was distinct, though slight, applause,
+which partially drowned the accompanist's muddled conclusion. Then a
+woman walked in from the second drawing-room with an angry expression on
+her face.
+
+She was tall and slight. Her hair and eyes were light yellow-brown, and
+the former had a natural wave in it. Her shoulders and bust were superb,
+and her small head was beautifully set on a lovely, rather long, neck.
+She had an oval face, with straight, delicate features, now slightly
+distorted by temper. But the most remarkable thing about her was her
+complexion. Her skin was exquisite, delicately smooth and white, warmly
+white like a white rose. She did nothing to add to its natural beauty,
+though nearly every woman in London declared that she had a special
+preparation and always slept in a mask coated thickly with it. The Bond
+Street oracles never received a visit from her. She had been born
+with an enchanting complexion, a marvellous skin. She was young, just
+twenty-four. She let herself alone because she knew improvement--in
+that direction--was not possible. The mask coated with Juliet paste,
+or Aphrodite ivorine, existed only in the radiant imaginations of her
+carefully-arranged acquaintances.
+
+In appearance she was a siren. By nature she was a siren too. But she
+had a temper and sometimes showed it. She showed it now.
+
+As she walked in slowly all the scattered people leaned forward,
+murmuring their thanks, and the men stood up and gathered round her.
+
+"Beautiful! Beautiful!" muttered the thin, elderly man in a hoarse
+voice, striking his fingers repeatedly against the palms of his withered
+hands.
+
+The young man looked at the singer and said nothing; but the anger in
+her face was reflected in his, and mingled with a flaming of sympathy
+that made his appearance almost startling. The white-haired woman
+clasped the singer's hands and said, "Thank you, dearest!" in a
+thrilling voice, and the little dark woman with the red fan cried out,
+"Viola, you simply pack up Venice, carry it over the Continent and set
+it down here in London!"
+
+Lady Holme frowned slightly.
+
+"Thank you, thank you, you good-natured dears," she said with an attempt
+at lightness. Then, hearing the thin rustle of a dress, she turned
+sharply and cast an unfriendly glance at a mild young woman with a very
+pointed nose, on which a pair of eyeglasses sat astride, who came meekly
+forward, looking self-conscious, and smiling with one side of her mouth.
+The man with the protruding jaw, who was Lord Holme, said to her, in a
+loud bass voice:
+
+"Thanks, Miss Filberte, thanks."
+
+"Oh, not at all, Lord Holme," replied the accompanist with a sudden
+air of rather foolish delight. "I consider it an honour to accompany an
+amateur who sings like Lady Holme."
+
+She laid a slight emphasis on the word "amateur."
+
+Lady Holme suddenly walked forward to an empty part of the drawing-room.
+The elderly man, whose name was Sir Donald Ulford, made a movement as
+if to follow her, then cleared his throat and stood still looking
+after her. Lord Holme stuck out his under jaw. But Lady Cardington, the
+white-haired woman spoke to him softly, and he leaned over to her and
+replied. The sleek man, whose name was Mr. Bry, began to talk about
+Tschaikowsky to Mrs. Henry Wolfstein, the woman with the red fan. He
+uttered his remarks authoritatively in a slow and languid voice, looking
+at the pointed toes of his shoes. Conversation became general.
+
+Robin Pierce, the tall young man, stood alone for a few minutes. Two or
+three times he glanced towards Lady Holme, who had sat down on a sofa,
+and was opening and shutting a small silver box which she had picked up
+from a table near her. Then he walked quietly up the room and sat down
+beside her.
+
+"Why on earth didn't you accompany yourself?" he asked in a low voice.
+"You knew what a muddler that girl was, I suppose."
+
+"Yes. She plays like a distracted black beetle--horrid creature!"
+
+"Then--why?"
+
+"I look ridiculous sitting at the piano."
+
+"Ridiculous--you--"
+
+"Well, I hold them far more when I stand up. They can't get away from me
+then."
+
+"And you'd rather have your singing ruined than part for a moment with a
+scrap of your physical influence, of the influence that comes from your
+beauty, not your talent--your face, not your soul. Viola, you're just
+the same."
+
+"Lady Holme," she said.
+
+"P'sh! Why?"
+
+"My little husband's fussy."
+
+"And much you care if he is."
+
+"Oh, yes, I do. He sprawls when he fusses and knocks things over, and
+then, when I've soothed him, he always goes and does Sandow exercises
+and gets bigger. And he's big enough as it is. I must keep him quiet."
+
+"But you can't keep the other men quiet. With your face and your
+voice--"
+
+"Oh, it isn't the voice," she said with contempt.
+
+He looked at her rather sadly.
+
+"Why will you put such an exaggerated value on your appearance? Why will
+you never allow that three-quarters at least of your attraction comes
+from something else?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Your personality--your self."
+
+"My soul!" she said, suddenly putting on a farcically rapt and yearning
+expression and speaking in a hollow, hungry voice. "Are we in the
+prehistoric Eighties?"
+
+"We are in the unchanging world."
+
+"Unchanging! My dear boy!"
+
+"Yes, unchanging," he repeated obstinately.
+
+He pressed his lips together and looked away. Miss Filberte was cackling
+and smiling on a settee, with a man whose figure presented a succession
+of curves, and who kept on softly patting his hands together and swaying
+gently backwards and forwards.
+
+"Well, Mr. Pierce, what's the matter?"
+
+"Mr. Pierce!" he said, almost savagely.
+
+"Yes, of the English Embassy in Rome, rising young diplomat and full of
+early Eighty yearns--"
+
+"How the deuce can you be as you are and yet sing as you do?" he
+exclaimed, turning on her. "You say you care for nothing but the outside
+of things--the husk, the shell, the surface. You think men care for
+nothing else. Yet when you sing you--you--"
+
+"What do I do?"
+
+"It's as if another woman than you were singing in you--a woman totally
+unlike you, a woman who believes in, and loves, the real beauty which
+you care nothing about."
+
+"The real beauty that rules the world is lodged in the epidermis," she
+said, opening her fan and smiling slowly. "If this"--she touched her
+face--"were to be changed into--shall we say a Filberte countenance?"
+
+"Oh!" he exclaimed.
+
+"There! You see, directly I put the matter before you, you have to agree
+with me!"
+
+"No one could sing like you and have a face like a silly sheep."
+
+"Poor Miss Filberte! Well, then, suppose me disfigured and singing
+better than ever--what man would listen to me?"
+
+"I should."
+
+"For half a minute. Then you'd say, 'Poor wretch, she's lost her voice!'
+No, no, it's my face that sings to the world, my face the world loves to
+listen to, my face that makes me friends and--enemies."
+
+She looked into his eyes with impertinent directness.
+
+"It's my face that's made Mr. Robin Pierce deceive himself into the
+belief that he only worships women for their souls, their lovely
+natures, their--"
+
+"Do you know that in a way you are a singularly modest woman?" he
+suddenly interrupted.
+
+"Am I? How?"
+
+"In thinking that you hold people only by your appearance, that your
+personality has nothing to say in the matter."
+
+"I am modest, but not so modest as that."
+
+"Well, then?"
+
+"Personality is a crutch, a pretty good crutch; but so long as men are
+men they will put crutches second and--something else first. Yes, I know
+I'm a little bit vulgar, but everybody in London is."
+
+"I wish you lived in Rome."
+
+"I've seen people being vulgar there too. Besides, there may be reasons
+why it would not be good for me to live in Rome."
+
+She glanced at him again less impertinently, and suddenly her whole body
+looked softer and kinder.
+
+"You must put up with my face, Robin," she added. "It's no good wishing
+me to be ugly. It's no use. I can't be."
+
+She laughed. Her ill-humour had entirely vanished.
+
+"If you were--" he said. "If you were--!"
+
+"What then?"
+
+"Do you think no one would stick to you--stick to you for yourself?"
+
+"Oh, yes."
+
+"Who, then?"
+
+"Quite several old ladies. It's very strange, but old ladies of a
+certain class--the almost obsolete class that wears caps and connects
+piety with black brocade--like me. They think me 'a bright young thing.'
+And so I am."
+
+"I don't know what you are. Sometimes I seem to divine what you are, and
+then--then your face is like a cloud which obscures you--except when you
+are singing."
+
+She laughed frankly.
+
+"Poor Robin! It was always your great fault--trying to plumb shallows
+and to take high dives into water half a foot deep."
+
+He was silent for a minute. At last he said:
+
+"And your husband?"
+
+"Fritz!"
+
+His forehead contracted.
+
+"Fritz--yes. What does he do? Try to walk in ocean depths?"
+
+"You needn't sneer at Fritz," she said sharply.
+
+"I beg your pardon."
+
+"Fritz doesn't bother about shallows and depths. He loves me absurdly,
+and that's quite enough for him."
+
+"And for you."
+
+She nodded gravely.
+
+"And what would Fritz do if you were to lose your beauty? Would he be
+like all the other men? Would he cease to care?"
+
+For the first time Lady Holme looked really thoughtful--almost painfully
+thoughtful.
+
+"One's husband," she said slowly. "Perhaps he's different. He--he ought
+to be different."
+
+A faint suggestion of terror came into her large brown eyes.
+
+"There's a strong tie, you know, whatever people may say, a very strong
+tie in marriage," she murmured, as if she were thinking out something
+for herself. "Fritz ought to love me, even if--if--"
+
+She broke off and looked about the room. Robin Pierce glanced round too
+over the chattering guests sitting or standing in easy or lazy postures,
+smiling vaguely, or looking grave and indifferent. Mrs. Wolfstein was
+laughing, and yawned suddenly in the midst of her mirth. Lady Cardington
+said something apparently tragic, to Mr. Bry, who was polishing his
+eyeglass and pouting out his dewy lips. Sir Donald Ulford, wandering
+round the walls, was examining the pictures upon them. Lady Manby, a
+woman with a pyramid of brown hair and an aggressively flat back, was
+telling a story. Evidently it was a comic history of disaster. Her
+gestures were full of deliberate exaggeration, and she appeared to be
+impersonating by turns two or three different people, each of whom had
+a perfectly ridiculous personality. Lord Holme burst into a roar of
+laughter. His big bass voice vibrated through the room. Suddenly Lady
+Holme laughed too.
+
+"Why are you laughing?" Robin Pierce asked rather harshly. "You didn't
+hear what Lady Manby said."
+
+"No, but Fritz is so infectious. I believe there are laughter microbes.
+What a noise he makes! It's really a scandal."
+
+And she laughed again joyously.
+
+"You don't know much about women if you think any story of Lady Manby's
+is necessary, to prompt my mirth. Poor dear old Fritz is quite enough.
+There he goes again!"
+
+Robin Pierce began to look stiff with constraint, and just then Sir
+Donald Ulford, in his progress round the walls, reached the sofa where
+they were sitting.
+
+"You are very fortunate to possess this Cuyp, Lady Holme," he said in a
+voice from which all resonance had long ago departed.
+
+"Alas, Sir Donald, cows distress me! They call up sad memories. I was
+chased by one in the park at Grantoun when I was a child. A fly had
+stung it, so it tried to kill me. This struck me as unreason run riot,
+and ever since then I have wished the Spaniards would go a step farther
+and make cow-fights the national pastime. I hate cows frankly."
+
+Sir Donald sat down in an armchair and looked, with his faded blue eyes,
+into the eyes of his hostess. His drawn yellow face was melancholy, like
+the face of one who had long been an invalid. People who knew him
+well, however, said there was nothing the matter with him, and that his
+appearance had not altered during the last twenty years.
+
+"You can hate nothing beautiful," he said with a sort of hollow
+assurance.
+
+"I think cows hideous."
+
+"Cuyp's?"
+
+"All cows. You've never had one running after you."
+
+She took up her gloves, which she had laid down on the table beside her,
+and began to pull them gently through her fingers. Both Sir Donald and
+Robin looked at her hands, which were not only beautiful in shape but
+extraordinarily intelligent in their movements. Whatever they did they
+did well, without hesitation or bungling. Nobody had ever seen them
+tremble.
+
+"Do you consider that anything that can be dangerous for a moment must
+be hideous for ever?" asked Sir Donald, after a slight pause.
+
+"I'm sure I don't know. But I truly think cows hideous--I truly do."
+
+"Don't put on your gloves," exclaimed Robin at this moment.
+
+Sir Donald glanced at him and said:
+
+"Thank you."
+
+"Why not?" said Lady Holme.
+
+It was obvious to both men that there was no need to answer her
+question. She laid the gloves in her lap, smoothed them with her small
+fingers, and kept silence. Silence was characteristic of her. When she
+was in society she sometimes sat quite calmly and composedly without
+uttering a word. After watching her for a minute or two, Sir Donald
+said:
+
+"You must know Venice very well and understand it completely."
+
+"Oh, I've been there, of course."
+
+"Recently?"
+
+"Not so very long ago. After my marriage Fritz took me all over Europe."
+
+"And you loved Venice."
+
+Sir Donald did not ask a question, he made a statement.
+
+"No. It didn't agree with me. It depressed me. We were there in the
+mosquito season."
+
+"What has that to do with it?"
+
+"My dear Sir Donald, if you'd ever had a hole in your net you'd know.
+I made Fritz take me away after two days, and I've never been back. I
+don't want to have my one beauty ruined."
+
+Sir Donald did not pay the reasonable compliment. He only stretched out
+his lean hands over his knees, and said:
+
+"Venice is the only ideal city in Europe."
+
+"You forget Paris."
+
+"Paris!" said Sir Donald. "Paris is a suburb of London and New York.
+Paris is no longer the city of light, but the city of pornography and
+dressmakers."
+
+"Well, I don't know exactly what pornography is--unless it's some new
+process for taking snapshots. But I do know what gowns are, and I love
+Paris. The Venice shops are failures and the Venice mosquitoes are
+successes, and I hate Venice."
+
+An expression of lemon-coloured amazement appeared upon Sir Donald's
+face, and he glanced at Robin Pierce as if requesting the answer to
+a riddle. Robin looked rather as if he were enjoying himself, but the
+puzzled melancholy grew deeper on Sir Donald's face. With the air of a
+man determined to reassure his mind upon some matter, however, he spoke
+again.
+
+"You visited the European capitals?" he said.
+
+"Yes, all of them."
+
+"Constantinople?"
+
+"Terrible place! Dogs, dogs, nothing but dogs."
+
+"Did you like Petersburg?"
+
+"No, I couldn't bear it. I caught cold there."
+
+"And that was why you hated it?"
+
+"Yes. I went out one night with Fritz on the Neva to hear a woman in
+a boat singing--a peasant girl with high cheek-bones--and I caught a
+frightful chill."
+
+"Ah!" said Sir Donald. "What was the song? I know a good many of the
+Northern peasant songs."
+
+Suddenly Lady Holme got up, letting her gloves fall to the ground.
+
+"I'll sing it to you," she said.
+
+Robin Pierce touched her arm.
+
+"For Heaven's sake not to Miss Filberte's accompaniment!"
+
+"Very well. But come and sit where you can see me."
+
+"I won't," he said with brusque obstinacy.
+
+"Madman!" she answered. "Anyhow, you come, Sir Donald."
+
+And she walked lightly away towards the piano, followed by Sir Donald,
+who walked lightly too, but uncertainly, on his thin, stick-like legs.
+
+"What are you up to, Vi?" said Lord Holme, as she came near to him.
+
+"I'm going to sing something for Sir Donald."
+
+"Capital! Where's Miss Filberte?"
+
+"Here I am!" piped a thin alto voice.
+
+There was a rustle of skirts as the accompanist rose hastily from her
+chair.
+
+"Sit down, please, Miss Filberte," said Lady Holme in a voice of ice.
+
+Miss Filberte sat down like one who has been knocked on the head with a
+hammer, and Lady Holme went alone to the piano, turned the button that
+raised the music-stool, sat down too, holding herself very upright,
+and played some notes. For a moment, while she played, her face was
+so determined and pitiless that Mr. Bry, unaware that she was still
+thinking about Miss Filberte, murmured to Lady Cardington:
+
+"Evidently we are in for a song about Jael with the butter in the lordly
+dish omitted."
+
+Then an expression of sorrowful youth stole into Lady Holme's eyes,
+changed her mouth to softness and her cheeks to curving innocence.
+She leaned a little way from the piano towards her audience and sang,
+looking up into vacancy as if her world were hidden there. The song had
+the clear melancholy and the passion of a Northern night. It brought
+the stars out within that room and set purple distances before the
+eyes. Water swayed in it, but languidly, as water sways at night in calm
+weather, when the black spars of ships at anchor in sheltered harbours
+are motionless as fingers of skeletons pointing towards the moon.
+Mysterious lights lay round a silent shore. And in the wide air, on the
+wide waters, one woman was singing to herself of a sorrow that was deep
+as the grave, and that no one upon the earth knew of save she who sang.
+The song was very short. It had only two little verses. When it was
+over, Sir Donald, who had been watching the singer, returned to the
+sofa, where Robin Pierce was sitting with his eyes shut and, again
+striking his fingers against the palms of his hands, said: "I have heard
+that song at night on the Neva, and yet I never heard it before."
+
+People began getting up to go away. It was past eleven o'clock. Sir
+Donald and Robin Pierce stood together, saying good-bye to Lady Holme.
+As she held out her hand to the former, she said:
+
+"Oh, Sir Donald, you know Russia, don't you?"
+
+"I do."
+
+"Then I want you to tell me the name of that stuff they carry down
+the Neva in boats--the stuff that has such a horrible smell. That song
+always reminds me of it, and Fritz can't remember the name."
+
+"Nor can I," said Sir Donald, rather abruptly. "Good-night, Lady Holme."
+
+He walked out of the room, followed by Robin.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+LORD HOLME'S house was in Cadogan Square. When Sir Donald had put on his
+coat in the hall he turned to Robin Pierce and said:
+
+"Which way do you go?"
+
+"To Half Moon Street," said Robin.
+
+"We might walk, if you like. I am going the same way.
+
+"Certainly."
+
+They set out slowly. It was early in the year. Showers of rain had
+fallen during the day. The night was warm, and the damp earth in
+the Square garden steamed as if it were oppressed and were breathing
+wearily. The sky was dark and cloudy, and the air was impregnated with a
+scent to which many things had contributed, each yielding a fragment of
+the odour peculiar to it. Rain, smoke, various trees and plants, the wet
+paint on a railing, the damp straw laid before the house of an invalid,
+the hothouse flowers carried by a woman in a passing carriage--these and
+other things were represented in the heavy atmosphere which was full of
+the sensation of life. Sir Donald expanded his nostrils.
+
+"London, London!" he said. "I should know it if I were blind."
+
+"Yes. The London smell is not to be confused with the smell of any other
+place. You have been back a good while, I believe?"
+
+"Three years. I am laid on the London shelf now."
+
+"You have had a long life of work--interesting work."
+
+"Yes. Diplomacy has interesting moments. I have seen many countries. I
+have been transferred from Copenhagen to Teheran, visited the Sultan of
+Morocco at Fez, and--" he stopped. After a pause he added: "And now I
+sit in London clubs and look out of bay windows."
+
+They walked on slowly.
+
+"Have you known our hostess of to-night long?" Sir Donald asked
+presently.
+
+"A good while--quite a good while. But I'm very much away at Rome now.
+Since I have been there she has married."
+
+"I have only met her to speak to once before to-night, though I have
+seen her about very often and heard her sing."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"To me she is an enigma," Sir Donald continued with some hesitation. "I
+cannot make her out at all."
+
+Robin Pierce smiled in the dark and thrust his hands deep down in the
+pockets of his overcoat.
+
+"I don't know," Sir Donald resumed, after a slight pause, "I don't know
+what is your--whether you care much for beauty in its innumerable forms.
+Many young men don't, I believe."
+
+"I do," said Robin. "My mother is an Italian, you know, and not an
+Italian Philistine."
+
+"Then you can help me, perhaps. Does Lady Holme care for beauty? But she
+must. It is impossible that she does not."
+
+"Do you think so? Why?"
+
+"I really cannot reconcile myself to the idea that such performances as
+hers are matters of chance."
+
+"They are not. Lady Holme is not a woman who chances things before the
+cruel world in which she, you and I live, Sir Donald."
+
+"Exactly. I felt sure of that. Then we come to calculation of effects,
+to consideration of that very interesting question--self-consciousness
+in art."
+
+"Do you feel that Lady Holme is self-conscious when she is singing?"
+
+"No. And that is just the point. She must, I suppose, have studied
+till she has reached that last stage of accomplishment in which the
+self-consciousness present is so perfectly concealed that it seems to be
+eliminated."
+
+"Exactly. She has an absolute command over her means."
+
+"One cannot deny it. No musician could contest it. But the question that
+interests me lies behind all this. There is more than accomplishment in
+her performance. There is temperament, there is mind, there is emotion
+and complete understanding. I am scarcely speaking strongly enough in
+saying complete--perhaps infinitely subtle would be nearer the mark.
+What do you say?"
+
+"I don't think if you said that there appears to be an infinitely subtle
+understanding at work in Lady Holme's singing you would be going at all
+too far."
+
+"Appears to be?"
+
+Sir Donald stopped for a moment on the pavement under a gas-lamp. As the
+light fell on him he looked like a weary old ghost longing to fade away
+into the dark shadows of the London night.
+
+"You say 'appears to be,'" he repeated.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"May I ask why?"
+
+"Well, would you undertake to vouch for Lady Holme's understanding--I
+mean for the infinite subtlety of it?"
+
+Sir Donald began to walk on once more.
+
+"I cannot find it in her conversation," he said.
+
+"Nor can I, nor can anyone."
+
+"She is full of personal fascination, of course."
+
+"You mean because of her personal beauty?"
+
+"No, it's more than that, I think. It's the woman herself. She is
+suggestive somehow. She makes one's imagination work. Of course she is
+beautiful."
+
+"And she thinks that is everything. She would part with her voice, her
+intelligence--she is very intelligent in the quick, frivolous fashion
+that is necessary for London--that personal fascination you speak of,
+everything rather than her white-rose complexion and the wave in her
+hair."
+
+"Really, really?"
+
+"Yes. She thinks the outside everything. She believes the world is
+governed, love is won and held, happiness is gained and kept by the husk
+of things. She told me only to-night that it is her face which sings
+to us all, not her voice; that were she to sing as well and be an ugly
+woman we should not care to listen to her."
+
+"H'm! H'm!"
+
+"Absurd, isn't it?"
+
+"What will be the approach of old age to her?"
+
+There was a suspicion of bitterness in his voice.
+
+"The coming of the King of Terrors," said Pierce. "But she cannot hear
+his footsteps yet."
+
+"They are loud enough in some ears. Ah, we, are at your door already?"
+
+"Will you be good-natured and come in for a little while?"
+
+"I'm afraid--isn't it rather late?"
+
+"Only half-past eleven."
+
+"Well, thank you."
+
+They stepped into the little hall. As they did so a valet appeared at
+the head of the stairs leading to the servants' quarters.
+
+"If you please, sir," he said to Pierce, "this note has just come. I was
+to ask if you would read it directly you returned."
+
+"Will you excuse me?" said Pierce to Sir Donald, tearing open the
+envelope.
+
+He glanced at the note.
+
+"Is it to ask you to go somewhere to-night?" Sir Donald said.
+
+"Yes, but--"
+
+"I will go."
+
+"Please don't. It is only from a friend who is just round the corner in
+Stratton Street. If you will not mind his joining us here I will send
+him a message."
+
+He said a few words to his man.
+
+"That will be all right. Do come upstairs."
+
+"You are sure I am not in the way?"
+
+"I hope you will not find my friend in the way; that's all. He's an odd
+fellow at the best of times, and to-night he's got an attack of what he
+calls the blacks--his form of blues. But he's very talented. Carey is
+his name--Rupert Carey. You don't happen to know him?"
+
+"No. If I may say so, your room is charming."
+
+They were on the first floor now, in a chamber rather barely furnished
+and hung with blue-grey linen, against which were fastened several old
+Italian pictures in black frames. On the floor were some Eastern rugs in
+which faded and originally pale colours mingled. A log fire was burning
+on an open hearth, at right angles to which stood an immense sofa with a
+square back. This sofa was covered with dull blue stuff. Opposite to
+it was a large and low armchair, also covered in blue. A Steinway grand
+piano stood out in the middle of the room. It was open and there were
+no ornaments or photographs upon it. Its shining dark case reflected the
+flames which sprang up from the logs. Several dwarf bookcases of black
+wood were filled with volumes, some in exquisite bindings, some paper
+covered. On the top of the bookcases stood four dragon china vases
+filled with carnations of various colours. Electric lights burned just
+under the ceiling, but they were hidden from sight. In an angle of the
+wall, on a black ebony pedestal, stood an extremely beautiful marble
+statuette of a nude girl holding a fan. Under this, on a plaque, was
+written, "_Une Danseuse de Tunisie_."
+
+Sir Donald went up to it, and stood before it for two or three minutes
+in silence.
+
+"I see indeed you do care for beauty," he said at length. "But--forgive
+me--that fan makes that statuette wicked."
+
+"Yes, but a thousand times more charming. Carey said just the same thing
+when he saw it. I wonder I wonder what Lady Holme would say."
+
+They sat down on the sofa by the wood fire.
+
+"Carey could probably tell us!" Pierce added.
+
+"Oh, then your friend knows Lady Holme?"
+
+"He did once. I believe he isn't allowed to now. Ah, here is Carey!"
+
+A quick step was audible on the stairs, the door was opened, and a
+broad, middle-sized young man, with red hair, a huge red moustache
+and fierce red-brown eyes, entered swiftly with an air of ruthless
+determination.
+
+"I came, but I shall be devilish bad company to-night," he said at once,
+looking at Sir Donald.
+
+"We'll cheer you up. Let me introduce you to Sir Donald Ulford--Mr.
+Rupert Carey."
+
+Carey shook Sir Donald by the hand.
+
+"Glad to meet you," he said abruptly. "I've carried your Persian
+poems round the world with me. They lay in my trunk cheek by jowl with
+God-forsaken, glorious old Omar."
+
+A dusky red flush appeared in Sir Donald's hollow cheeks.
+
+"Really," he said, with obvious embarrassment, "I--they were a great
+failure. 'Obviously the poems of a man likely to be successful in
+dealing with finance,' as _The Times_ said in reviewing them."
+
+"Well, in the course of your career you've done some good things for
+England financially, haven't you?--not very publicly, perhaps, but as a
+minister abroad."
+
+"Yes. To come forward as a poet was certainly a mistake."
+
+"Any fool could see the faults in your book. True Persia all the same
+though. I saw all the faults and read 'em twenty times."
+
+He flung himself down in the big armchair. Sir Donald could see now that
+there was a shining of misery in his big, rather ugly, eyes.
+
+"Where have you two been?" he continued, with a directness that was
+almost rude.
+
+"Dining with the Holmes," answered Pierce.
+
+"That ruffian! Did she sing?"
+
+"Yes, twice."
+
+"Wish I'd heard her. Here am I playing Saul without a David. Many people
+there?"
+
+"Several. Lady Cardington--"
+
+"That white-haired enchantress! There's a Niobe--weeping not for her
+children, she never had any, but for her youth. She is the religion of
+half Mayfair, though I don't know whether she's got a religion. Men
+who wouldn't look at her when she was sixteen, twenty-six, thirty-six,
+worship her now she's sixty. And she weeps for her youth! Who else?"
+
+"Mrs. Wolfstein."
+
+"A daughter of Israel; coarse, intelligent, brutal to her reddened
+finger-tips. I'd trust her to judge a singer, actor, painter, writer.
+But I wouldn't trust her with my heart or half a crown."
+
+"Lady Manby."
+
+"Humour in petticoats. She's so infernally full of humour that there's
+no room in her for anything else. I doubt if she's got lungs. I'm sure
+she hasn't got a heart or a brain."
+
+"But if she is so full of humour," said Sir Donald mildly, "how does
+she--?"
+
+"How does a great writer fail over an addition sum? How does a man who
+speaks eight languages talk imbecility in them all? How is it that a
+bird isn't an angel? I wish to Heaven we knew. Well, Robin?"
+
+"Of course, Mr. Bry."
+
+Carey's violent face expressed disgust in every line.
+
+"One of the most finished of London types," he exclaimed. "No other city
+supplies quite the same sort of man to take the colour out of things.
+He's enormously clever, enormously abominable, and should have been
+strangled at birth merely because of his feet. Why he's not Chinese
+I can't conceive; why he dines out every night I can. He's a human
+cruet-stand without the oil. He's so monstrously intelligent that he
+knows what a beast he is, and doesn't mind. Not a bad set of people to
+talk with, unless Lady Holme was in a temper and you were next to her,
+or you were left stranded with Holme when the women went out of the
+dining-room."
+
+"You think Holme a poor talker?" asked Sir Donald.
+
+"Precious poor. His brain is muscle-bound, I believe. Robin, you know
+I'm miserable to-night you offer me nothing to drink."
+
+"I beg your pardon. Help yourself. And, Sir Donald, what will you--?"
+
+"Nothing, thank you."
+
+"Try one of those cigars."
+
+Sir Donald took one and lit it quietly, looking at Carey, who seemed to
+interest him a good deal.
+
+"Why are you miserable, Carey?" said Pierce, as the former buried his
+moustache in a tall whisky-and-soda.
+
+"Because I'm alive and don't want to be dead. Reason enough."
+
+"Because you're an unmitigated egoist," rejoined Pierce.
+
+"Yes, I am an egoist. Introduce me to a man who is not, will you?"
+
+"And what about women?"
+
+"Many women are not egoists. But you have been dining with one of the
+most finished egoists in London to-night."
+
+"Lady Holme?" said Sir Donald, shifting into the left-hand corner of the
+sofa.
+
+"Yes, Viola Holme, once Lady Viola Grantoun; whom I mustn't know any
+more."
+
+"I'm not sure that you are right, Carey," said Pierce, rather coldly.
+
+"What!"
+
+"Can a true and perfect egoist be in love?"
+
+"Certainly. Is not even an egoist an animal?"
+
+Pierce's lips tightened for a second, and his right hand strained itself
+round his knee, on which it was lying.
+
+"And how much can she be in love?"
+
+"Very much."
+
+"Do you mean with her body?"
+
+"Yes, I do; and with the spirit that lives in it. I don't believe
+there's any life but this. A church is more fantastic to me than the
+room in which Punch belabours Judy. But I say that there is spirit in
+lust, in hunger, in everything. When I want a drink my spirit wants it.
+Viola Holme's spirit--a flame that will be blown out at death--takes
+part in her love for that great brute Holme. And yet she's one of the
+most pronounced egoists in London."
+
+"Do you care to tell us any reason you may have for saying so?" said Sir
+Donald.
+
+As he spoke, his voice, brought into sharp contrast with the changeful
+and animated voice of Carey, sounded almost preposterously thin and worn
+out.
+
+"She is always conscious of herself in every situation, in every
+relation of life. While she loves even she thinks to herself, 'How
+beautifully I am loving!' And she never forgets for a single moment
+that she is a fascinating woman. If she were being murdered she would be
+saying silently, while the knife went in, 'What an attractive creature,
+what an unreplaceable personage they are putting an end to!'"
+
+"Rupert, you are really too absurd!" exclaimed Pierce, laughing
+reluctantly.
+
+"I'm not absurd. I see straight. Lady Holme is an egoist--a magnificent,
+an adorable egoist, fine enough in her brilliant selfishness to stand
+quite alone."
+
+"And you mean to tell us that any woman can do that?" exclaimed Pierce.
+
+"Who am I that I should pronounce a verdict upon the great mystery? What
+do I know of women?"
+
+"Far too much, I'm afraid," said Pierce.
+
+"Nothing, I have never been married, and only the married man knows
+anything of women. The Frenchmen are wrong. It is not the mistress who
+informs, it is the loving wife. For me the sex remains mysterious, like
+the heroine of my realm of dreams."
+
+"You are talking great nonsense, Rupert."
+
+"I always do when I am depressed, and I am very specially depressed
+to-night."
+
+"But why? There must be some very special reason."
+
+"There is. I, too, dined out and met at dinner a young man whose one
+desire in life appears to be to deprive living creatures of life."
+
+Sir Donald moved slightly.
+
+"You're not a sportsman, then, Mr. Carey?" he said.
+
+"Indeed, I am. I've shot big game, the Lord forgive me, and found big
+pleasure in doing it. Yet this young man depressed me. He was so robust,
+so perfectly happy, so supremely self-satisfied, and, according to his
+own account, so enormously destructive, that he made me feel very sick.
+He is married. He married a widow who has an ear-trumpet and a big
+shooting in Scotland. If she could be induced to crawl in underwood, or
+stand on a cairn against a skyline, I'm sure he'd pot at her for the fun
+of the thing."
+
+"What is his name?" asked Sir Donald.
+
+"I didn't catch it. My host called him Leo. He has--"
+
+"Ah! He is my only son."
+
+Pierce looked very uncomfortable, but Carey replied calmly:
+
+"Really. I wonder he hasn't shot you long ago."
+
+Sir Donald smiled.
+
+"Doesn't he depress you?" added Carey.
+
+"He does, I'm sorry to say, but scarcely so much as I depress him."
+
+"I think Lady Holme would like him."
+
+For once Sir Donald looked really expressive, of surprise and disgust.
+
+"Oh, I can't think so!" he said.
+
+"Yes, yes, she would. She doesn't care honestly for art-loving men. Her
+idea of a real man, the sort of man a woman marries, or bolts with, or
+goes off her head for, is a huge mass of bones and muscles and thews and
+sinews that knows not beauty. And your son would adore her, Sir Donald.
+Better not let him, though. Holme's a jealous devil."
+
+"Totally without reason," said Pierce, with a touch of bitterness.
+
+"No doubt. It's part of his Grand Turk nature. He ought to possess
+a Yildiz. He's out of place in London where marital jealousy is more
+unfashionable than pegtop trousers."
+
+He buried himself in his glass. Sir Donald rose to go.
+
+"I hope I may see you again," he said rather tentatively at parting. "I
+am to be found in the Albany."
+
+They both said they would call, and he slipped away gently.
+
+"There's a sensitive man," said Carey when he had gone. "A sort of male
+Lady Cardington. Both of them are morbidly conscious of their age and
+carry it about with them as if it were a crime. Yet they're both worth
+knowing. People with that temperament who don't use hair-dye must have
+grit. His son's awful."
+
+"And his poems?"
+
+"Very crude, very faulty, very shy, but the real thing. But he'll never
+publish anything again. It must have been torture to him to reveal as
+much as he did in that book. He must find others to express him, and
+such as him, to the world."
+
+"Lady Holmes?"
+
+"_Par exemple_. Deuced odd that while the dumb understand the whole
+show the person who's describing it quite accurately to them often knows
+nothing about it. Paradox, irony, blasted eternal cussedness of life!
+Did you ever know Lady Ulford?"
+
+"No."
+
+"She was a horse-dealer's daughter."
+
+"Rupert!"
+
+"On my honour! One of those women who are all shirt and collar and
+nattiness, with a gold fox for a tie-pin and a hunting-crop under the
+arm. She was killed schooling a horse in Mexico after making Ulford shy
+and uncomfortable for fifteen years. Lady Cardington and a Texas cowboy
+would have been as well suited to one another. Ulford's been like a
+wistful ghost, they tell me, ever since her death. I should like to see
+him and his son together."
+
+A hard and almost vicious gleam shone for as instant in his eyes.
+
+"You're as cruel as a Spaniard at a bull-fight."
+
+"My boy, I've been gored by the bull."
+
+Pierce was silent for a minute. He thought of Lady Holme's white-rose
+complexion and of the cessation of Carey's acquaintance with the Holmes.
+No one seemed to know exactly why Carey went to the house in Cadogan
+Square no more.
+
+"For God's sake give me another drink, Robin, and make it a stiff one."
+
+Pierce poured out the whisky and thought:
+
+"Could it have been that?"
+
+Carey emptied the tumbler and heaved a long sigh.
+
+"When d'you go back to Rome?"
+
+"Beginning of July."
+
+"You'll be there in the dead season."
+
+"I like Rome then. The heat doesn't hurt me and I love the peace.
+Antiquity seems to descend upon the city in August, returning to its own
+when America is far away."
+
+Carey stared at him hard.
+
+"A rising diplomatist oughtn't to live in the past," he said bluntly.
+
+"I like ruins."
+
+"Unless they're women."
+
+"If I loved a woman I could love her when she became what is called a
+ruin."
+
+"If you were an old man who had crumbled gradually with her."
+
+"As a young man, too. I was discussing--or rather flitting about,
+dinner-party fashion--that very subject to-night."
+
+"With whom?"
+
+"Viola."
+
+"The deuce! What line did you take?"
+
+"That one loves--if one loves--the kernel, not the shell."
+
+"And she?"
+
+"You know her--the opposite."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"And you, Carey?"
+
+"I! I think if the shell is a beautiful shell and becomes suddenly
+broken it makes a devil of a lot of difference in what most people think
+of the kernel."
+
+"It wouldn't to me."
+
+"I think it would."
+
+"You take Viola's side then?"
+
+"And when did I ever do anything else? I'm off."
+
+He got up, nodded good-night, and was gone in a moment. Pierce heard him
+singing in a deep voice as he went down the stairs, and smiled with a
+faint contempt.
+
+"How odd it is that nobody will believe a man if he's fool enough to
+hint at the truth of his true self," he thought. "And Carey--who's so
+clever about people!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+WHEN the last guest had grimaced at her and left the drawing-room, Lady
+Holme stood with her hand on the mantelpiece, facing a tall mirror. She
+was alone for the moment. Her husband had accompanied Mrs. Wolfstein
+downstairs, and Lady Holme could hear his big, booming voice below,
+interrupted now and then by her impudent soprano. She spoke English with
+a slight foreign accent which men generally liked and women loathed.
+Lady Holme loathed it. But she was not fond of her own sex. She believed
+that all women were untrustworthy. She often said that she had never met
+a woman who was not a liar, and when she said it she had no doubt
+that, for once, a woman was speaking the truth. Now, as she heard Mrs.
+Wolfstein's curiously improper laugh, she frowned. The face in the
+mirror changed and looked almost old.
+
+This struck her unpleasantly. She kept the frown in its place and stared
+from under it, examining her features closely, fancying herself really
+an old woman, her whimsical fascination dead in its decaying home, her
+powers faded if not fled for ever. She might do what she liked then.
+It would all be of no use. Even the voice would be cracked and thin,
+unresponsive, unwieldy. The will would be phlegmatic. If it were not,
+the limbs and features would not easily obey its messages. The figure,
+now beautiful, would perhaps be marred by the ungracious thickness, the
+piteous fleshiness that Time often adds assiduously to ageing bodies, as
+if with an ironic pretence of generously giving in one direction
+while taking away in another. Decay would be setting in, life becoming
+perpetual loss. The precious years would be gone irrevocably.
+
+She let the frown go and looked again on her beauty and smiled. The
+momentary bitterness passed. For there were many precious years to come
+for her, many years of power. She was young. Her health was superb. Her
+looks were of the kind that lasts. She thought of a famous actress whom
+she resembled closely. This actress was already forty-three, and was
+still a lovely woman, still toured about the world winning the hearts of
+men, was still renowned for her personal charm, worshipped not only
+for her talent but for her delicious skin, her great romantic eyes, her
+thick, waving hair.
+
+Lady Holme laughed. In twenty years what Robin Pierce called her "husk"
+would still be an exquisite thing, and she would be going about without
+hearing the horrible tap, tap of the crutch in whose sustaining power
+she really believed so little. She knew men, and she said to herself, as
+she had said to Robin, that for them beauty lies in the epidermis.
+
+"Hullo, Vi, lookin' in the glass! 'Pon my soul, your vanity's
+disgustin'. A plain woman like you ought to keep away from such
+things--leave 'em to the Mrs. Wolfsteins--what?"
+
+Lady Holme turned round in time to see her husband's blunt, brown
+features twisted in the grimace which invariably preceded his portentous
+laugh.
+
+"I admire Mrs. Wolfstein," she said.
+
+The laugh burst like a bomb.
+
+"You admire another woman! Why, you're incapable of it. The Lord defend
+me from hypocrisy, and there's no greater hypocrisy than one woman
+takin' Heaven to witness that she thinks another a stunnin' beauty."
+
+"You know nothing about it, Fritz. Mrs. Wolfstein's eyes would be lovely
+if they hadn't that pawnbroking expression."
+
+"Good, good! Now we're goin' to hear the voice of truth. Think it went
+well, eh?"
+
+He threw himself down on a sofa and began to light a cigarette.
+
+"The evening? No, I don't."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+He crossed his long legs and leaned back, resting his head on a cushion,
+and puffing the smoke towards the ceiling.
+
+"They all seemed cheery--what? Even Lady Cardington only cried when you
+were squallin'."
+
+It was Lord Holme's habit to speak irreverently of anything he happened
+to admire.
+
+"She had reason to cry. Miss Filberte's accompaniment was a tragedy. She
+never comes here again."
+
+"What's the row with her? I thought her fingers got about over the piano
+awful quick."
+
+"They did--on the wrong notes."
+
+She came and sat down beside him.
+
+"You don't understand music, Fritz, thank goodness."
+
+"I know I don't. But why thank what's-his-name?"
+
+"Because the men that do are usually such anaemic, dolly things, such
+shaved poodles with their Sunday bows on."
+
+"What about that chap Pierce? He's up to all the scales and thingumies,
+isn't he?"
+
+"Robin--"
+
+"Pierce I said."
+
+"And I said Robin."
+
+Lord Holme frowned and stuck out his under jaw. When he was irritated
+he always made haste to look like a prize-fighter. His prominent
+cheek-bones, and the abnormal development of bone in the lower part
+of his face, helped the illusion whose creation was begun by his
+expression.
+
+"Look here, Vi," he said gruffly. "If you get up to any nonsense
+there'll be another Carey business. I give you the tip, and you can just
+take it in time. Don't you make any mistake. I'm not a Brenford, or a
+Godley-Halstoun, or a Pennisford, to sit by and--"
+
+"What a pity it is that your body's so big and your intelligence so
+small!" she interrupted gently. "Why aren't there Sandow exercises for
+increasing the brain?"
+
+"I've quite enough brain to rub along with very well. If I'd chosen to
+take it I could have been undersecretary---"
+
+"You've told me that so many times, old darling, and I really can't
+believe it. The Premier's very silly. Everybody knows that. But he's
+still got just a faint idea of the few things the country won't stand.
+And you are one of them, you truly are. You don't go down even with
+the Primrose League, and they simply worship at the shrine of the great
+Ar-rar."
+
+"Fool or not, I'd kick out Pierce as I kicked out Carey if I thought--"
+
+"And suppose I wouldn't let you?"
+
+Her voice had suddenly changed. There was in it the sharp sound which
+had so overwhelmed Miss Filberte.
+
+Lord Holme sat straight up and looked at his wife.
+
+"Suppose--what?"
+
+"Suppose I declined to let you behave ridiculously a second time."
+
+"Ridiculously! I like that! Do you stick out that Carey didn't love
+you?"
+
+"Half London loves me. I'm one of the most attractive women in it.
+That's why you married me, blessed boy."
+
+"Carey's a violent ass. Red-headed men always are. There's a chap at
+White's--"
+
+"I know, I know. You told me about him when you forbade poor Mr. Carey
+the house. But Robin's hair is black and he's the gentlest creature in
+diplomacy."
+
+"I wouldn't trust him a yard."
+
+"Believe me, he doesn't wish you to. He's far too clever to desire the
+impossible."
+
+"Then he can stop desirin' you."
+
+"Don't be insulting, Fritz. Remember that by birth you are a gentleman."
+
+Lord Holme bit through his cigarette.
+
+"Sometimes I wish you were an ugly woman," he muttered.
+
+"And if I were?"
+
+She leaned forward quite eagerly on the sofa and her whimsical,
+spoilt-child manner dropped away from her.
+
+"You ain't."
+
+"Don't be silly. I know I'm not, of course. But if I were to become
+one?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Really, Fritz, there's no sort of continuity in your mental processes.
+If I were to become an ugly woman, what would you feel about me then?"
+
+"How the deuce could you become ugly?"
+
+"Oh, in a hundred ways. I might have smallpox and be pitted for life,
+or be scalded in the face as poor people's babies often are, or have
+vitriol thrown over me as lots of women do in Paris, or any number of
+things."
+
+"What rot! Who'd throw vitriol over you, I should like to know?"
+
+He lit a fresh cigarette with tender solicitude. Lady Holme began to
+look irritated.
+
+"Do use your imagination!" she cried.
+
+"Haven't got one, thank God!" he returned philosophically.
+
+"I insist upon your imagining me ugly. Do you hear, I insist upon it."
+
+She laid one soft hand on his knee and squeezed his leg with all her
+might.
+
+"Now you're to imagine me ugly and just the same as I am now."
+
+"You wouldn't be the same."
+
+"Yes, I should. I should be the same woman, with the same heart and
+feelings and desires and things as I have now. Only the face would be
+altered."
+
+"Well, go ahead, but don't pinch so, old girl."
+
+"I pinch you to make you exert your mind. Now tell me truly--truly;
+would you love me as you do now, would you be jealous of me, would
+you--"
+
+"I say, wait a bit! Don't drive on at such a rate. How ugly are you?"
+
+"Very ugly; worse than Miss Filberte."
+
+"Miss Filberte's not so bad."
+
+"Yes, she is, Fritz, you know she is. But I mean ever so much worse;
+with a purple complexion, perhaps, like Mrs. Armington, whose husband
+insisted on a judicial separation; or a broken nose, or something wrong
+with my mouth--"
+
+"What wrong?"
+
+"Oh, dear, anything! What _l'homme qui vir_ had--or a frightful scar
+across my cheek. Could you love me as you do now? I should be the same
+woman, remember."
+
+"Then it'd be all the same to me, I s'pose. Let's turn in."
+
+He got up, went over to the hearth, on which a small wood fire was
+burning, straddled his legs, bent his knees and straightened them
+several times, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his trousers,
+which were rather tight and horsey and defined his immense limbs. An
+expression of profound self-satisfaction illumined his face as he looked
+at his wife, giving it a slightly leery expression, as of a shrewd
+rustic. His large blunt features seemed to broaden, his big brown eyes
+twinkled, and his lips, which were thick and very red and had a cleft
+down their middle, parted under his short bronze moustache, exposing two
+level rows of square white teeth.
+
+"It's jolly difficult to imagine you an ugly woman," he said, with a
+deep chuckle.
+
+"I do wish you'd keep your legs still," said Lady Holme. "What earthly
+pleasure can it give you to go on like that? Would you love me as you do
+now?"
+
+"You'd be jolly sick if I didn't, wouldn't you, Vi, eh?"
+
+"I wonder if it ever occurs to you that you're hideously conceited,
+Fritz?"
+
+She spoke with a touch of real anger, real exasperation.
+
+"No more than any other Englishman that's worth his salt and ever does
+any good in the world. I ain't a timid molly-coddle, if that's what you
+mean."
+
+He took one large hand out of his pocket, scratched his cheek
+and yawned. As he did so he looked as unconcerned, as free from
+self-consciousness, as much a slave to every impulse born of passing
+physical sensation as a wild animal in a wood or out on a prairie.
+
+"Otherwise life ain't worth tuppence," he added through his yawn.
+
+Lady Holme sat looking at him for a moment in silence. She was really
+irritated by his total lack of interest in what she wanted to interest
+in him, irritated, too, because her curiosity remained unsatisfied. But
+that abrupt look and action of absolutely unconscious animalism, chasing
+the leeriness of the contented man's conceit, turned her to softness
+if not to cheerfulness. She adored Fritz like that. His open-mouthed,
+gaping yawn moved something in her to tenderness. She would have liked
+to kiss him while he was yawning and to pass her hands over his short
+hair, which was like a mat and grew as strongly as the hair which he
+shaved every morning from his brown cheeks.
+
+"Well, what about bed, old girl?" he said, stretching himself.
+
+Lady Holme did not reply. Some part of him, some joint, creaked as
+he forced his clasped hands downward and backward. She was listening
+eagerly for a repetition of the little sound.
+
+"What! Is mum the word?" he said, bending forward to stare into her
+face.
+
+At this moment the door opened, and a footman came in to extinguish the
+lights and close the piano. By mistake he let the lid of the latter
+drop with a bang. Lady Holme, who had just got up to go to bed, started
+violently. She said nothing but stared at him for an instant with an
+expression of cold rebuke on her face. The man reddened. Lord Holme was
+already on the stairs. He yawned again noisily, and turned the sound
+eventually into a sort of roaring chant up and down the scale as he
+mounted towards the next floor. Lady Holme came slowly after him. She
+had a very individual walk, moving from the hips and nearly always
+taking small, slow steps. Her sapphire-blue gown trailed behind her with
+a pretty noise over the carpet.
+
+When her French maid had locked up her jewels and helped her to undress,
+she dismissed her, and called out to Lord Holme, who was in the next
+room, the door of which was slightly open.
+
+"Fritz!"
+
+"Girlie?"
+
+His mighty form, attired in pale blue pyjamas, stood in the doorway.
+In his hand he grasped a toothbrush, and there were dabs of white
+tooth-powder on his cheeks and chin.
+
+"Finish your toilet and make haste."
+
+He disappeared. There was a prolonged noise of brushing and the gurgling
+and splashing of water. Lady Holme sat down on the white couch at the
+foot of the great bed. She was wrapped in a soft white gown made like a
+burnous, a veritable Arab garment, with a white silk hood at the back,
+and now she put up her hands and, with great precision, drew the hood up
+over her head. The burnous, thus adjusted, made her look very young. She
+had thrust her bare feet into white slippers without heels, and now she
+drew up her legs lightly and easily and crossed them under her, assuming
+an Eastern attitude and the expression of supreme impassivity which
+suits it. A long mirror was just opposite to her. She swayed to and fro,
+looking into it.
+
+"Allah-Akbar!" she murmured. "Allah-Akbar! I am a fatalist. Everything
+is ordained, so why should I bother? I will live for the day. I will
+live for the night. Allah-Akbar, Allah-Akbar!"
+
+The sound of water gushing from a reversed tumbler into a full basin was
+followed by the reappearance of Lord Holme, looking very clean and very
+sleepy.
+
+Lady Holme stopped swaying.
+
+"You look like a kid of twelve years old in that thing, Vi," he
+observed, surveying her with his hands on his hips.
+
+"I am a woman with a philosophy," she returned with dignity.
+
+"A philosophy! What the deuce is that?"
+
+"You didn't learn much at Eton and Christchurch."
+
+"I learnt to use my fists and to make love to the women."
+
+"You're a brute!" she exclaimed with most unphilosophic vehemence.
+
+"And that's why you worship the ground I tread on," he rejoined equably.
+"And that's why I've always had a good time with the women ever since I
+stood six foot in my stockin's when I was sixteen."
+
+Lady Holme looked really indignant. Her face was contorted by a spasm.
+She was one of those unfortunate women who are capable of retrospective
+jealousy.
+
+"I won't--how dare you speak to me of those women?" she said bitterly.
+"You insult me."
+
+"Hang it, there's no one since you, Vi. You know that. And what would
+you have thought of a great, hulkin' chap like me who'd never--well, all
+right. I'll dry up. But you know well enough you wouldn't have looked at
+me."
+
+"I wonder why I ever did."
+
+"No, you don't. I'm just the chap to suit you. You're full of whimsies
+and need a sledge-hammer fellow to keep you quiet. It you'd married that
+ass, Carey, or that--"
+
+"Fritz, once for all, I won't have my friends abused. I allowed you to
+have your own way about Rupert Carey, but I will not have Robin Pierce
+or anyone else insulted. Please understand that. I married to be more
+free, not more--"
+
+"You married because you'd fallen jolly well in love with me, that's why
+you married, and that's why you're a damned lucky woman. Come to bed.
+You won't, eh?"
+
+He made a stride, snatched Lady Holme up as if she were a bundle, and
+carried her off to bed.
+
+She was on the point of bursting into angry tears, but when she found
+herself snatched up, her slippers tumbling off, the hood of the burnous
+falling over her eyes, her face crushed anyhow against her husband's
+sinewy chest, she suddenly felt oddly contented, disinclined to protest
+or to struggle.
+
+Lord Holme did not trouble himself to ask what she was feeling or why
+she was feeling it.
+
+He thought of himself--the surest way to fasten upon a man the thoughts
+of others.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+ROBIN PIERCE and Carey were old acquaintances, if not exactly old
+friends. They had been for a time at Harrow together. Pierce had six
+thousand a year and worked hard for a few hundreds. Carey had a thousand
+and did nothing. He had never done anything definite, anything to earn a
+living. Yet his talents were notorious. He played the piano well for
+an amateur, was an extraordinarily clever mimic, acted better than most
+people who were not on the stage, and could write very entertaining
+verse with a pungent, sub-acid flavour. But he had no creative power and
+no perseverance. As a critic of the performances of others he was cruel
+but discerning, giving no quarter, but giving credit where it was due.
+He loathed a bad workman more than a criminal, and would rather have
+crushed an incompetent human being than a worm. Secretly he despised
+himself. His own laziness was as disgusting to him as a disease, and
+was as incurable as are certain diseases. He was now thirty-four and
+realised that he was never going to do anything with his life. Already
+he had travelled over the world, seen a hundred, done a hundred things.
+He had an enormous acquaintance in Society and among artists; writers,
+actors, painters--all the people who did things and did them well. As a
+rule they liked him, despite his bizarre bluntness of speech and manner,
+and they invariably spoke of him as a man of great talent; he said
+because he was so seldom fool enough to do anything that could reveal
+incompetence. His mother, who was a widow, lived in the north, in an
+old family mansion, half house, half castle, near the sea coast of
+Cumberland. He had one sister, who was married to an American.
+
+Carey always declared that he was that _rara avis_ an atheist, and that
+he had been born an atheist. He affirmed that even when a child he had
+never, for a moment, felt that there could be any other life than
+this earth-life. Few people believed him. There are few people who can
+believe in a child atheist.
+
+Pierce had a totally different character. He seemed to be more dreamy
+and was more energetic, talked much less and accomplished much more. It
+had always been his ambition to be a successful diplomat, and in many
+respects he was well fitted for a diplomatic career. He had a talent for
+languages, great ease of manner, self-possession, patience and cunning.
+He loved foreign life. Directly he set foot in a country which was
+not his own he felt stimulated. He felt that he woke up, that his mind
+became more alert, his imagination more lively. He delighted in change,
+in being brought into contact with a society which required study to be
+understood. His present fate contented him well enough. He liked Rome
+and was liked there. As his mother was a Roman he had many Italian
+connections, and he was far more at ease with Romans than with the
+average London man. His father and mother lived almost perpetually
+in large hotels. The former, who was enormously rich, was a _malade
+imaginaire_. He invariably spoke of his quite normal health as if it
+were some deadly disease, and always treated himself, and insisted on
+being treated, as if he were an exceptionally distinguished invalid.
+In the course of years his friends had learned to take his view of the
+matter, and he was at this time almost universally spoken of as "that
+poor Sir Henry Pierce whose life has been one long martyrdom." Poor
+Sir Henry was fortunate in the possession of a wife who really was a
+martyr--to him. Nobody had ever discovered whether Lady Pierce knew, or
+did not know, that her husband was quite as well as most people. There
+are many women with such secrets. Robin's parents were at present taking
+baths and drinking waters in Germany. They were later going for an
+"after cure" to Switzerland, and then to Italy to "keep warm" during the
+autumn. As they never lived in London, Robin had no home there except
+his little house in Half Moon Street. He had one brother, renowned as
+a polo player, and one sister, who was married to a rising politician,
+Lord Evelyn Clowes, a young man with a voluble talent, a peculiar power
+of irritating Chancellors of the Exchequer, and hair so thick that he
+was adored by the caricaturists.
+
+Robin Pierce and Carey saw little of each other now, being generally
+separated by a good many leagues of land and sea, but when they met they
+were still fairly intimate. They had some real regard for each
+other. Carey felt at ease in giving his violence to the quiet and
+self-possessed young secretary, who was three years his junior, but who
+sometimes seemed to him the elder of the two, perhaps because calm is
+essentially the senior of storm. He had even allowed Robin to guess
+at the truth of his feeling for Lady Holme, though he had never been
+explicit, on the subject to him or to anyone. There were moments
+when Robin wished he had not been permitted to guess, for Lady Holme
+attracted him far more than any other woman he had seen, and he had
+proposed to her before she had been carried off by her husband. He
+admired her beauty, but he did not believe that it was her beauty which
+had led him into love. He was sure that he loved the woman in her,
+the hidden woman whom Lord Holme and the world at large--including
+Carey--knew nothing about. He thought that Lady Holme herself did not
+understand this hidden woman, did not realise, as he did, that she
+existed. She spoke to him sometimes in Lady Holme's singing, sometimes
+in an expression in her eyes when she was serious, sometimes even in
+a bodily attitude. For Robin, half fantastically, put faith in the
+eloquence of line as a revealer of character, of soul. But she did not
+speak to him in Lady Holme's conversation. He really thought this hidden
+woman was obscured by the lovely window--he conceived it as a window of
+exquisite stained glass, jewelled but concealing--through which she was
+condemned to look for ever, through which, too, all men must look at
+her. He really wished sometimes, as he had said, that Lady Holme were
+ugly, for he had a fancy that perhaps then, and only then, would
+the hidden woman arise and be seen as a person may be seen through
+unstained, clear glass. He really felt that what he loved would be there
+to love if the face that ruled was ruined; would not only still be
+there to love, but would become more powerful, more true to itself, more
+understanding of itself, more reliant, purer, braver. And he had learnt
+to cherish this fancy till it had become a little monomania. Robin
+thought that the world misunderstood him, but he knew the world too well
+to say so. He never risked being laughed at. He felt sure that he
+was passionate, that he was capable of romantic deeds, of Quixotic
+self-sacrifice, of a devotion that might well be sung by poets, and that
+would certainly be worshipped by ardent women. And he said to himself
+that Lady Holme was the one woman who could set free, if the occasion
+came, this passionate, unusual and surely admirable captive at present
+chained within him, doomed to inactivity and the creeping weakness that
+comes from enforced repose.
+
+Carey's passion for Lady Holme had come into being shortly before
+her marriage. No one knew much about it, or about the rupture of all
+relations between him and the Holmes which had eventually taken place.
+But the fact that Carey had lost his head about Lady Holme was known
+to half London. For Carey, when carried away, was singularly reckless;
+singularly careless of consequences and of what people thought. It was
+difficult to influence him, but when influenced he was almost painfully
+open in his acknowledgment of the power that had reached him. As a rule,
+however, despite his apparent definiteness, his decisive violence, there
+seemed to be something fluid in his character, something that divided
+and flowed away from anything which sought to grasp and hold it. He
+had impetus but not balance; swiftness, but a swiftness that was
+uncontrolled. He resembled a machine without a brake.
+
+It was soon after his rupture with the Holmes that his intimates began
+to notice that he was becoming inclined to drink too much. When Pierce
+returned to London from Rome he was immediately conscious of the slight
+alteration in his friend. Once he remonstrated with Carey about it.
+Carey was silent for a moment. Then he said abruptly:
+
+"My heart wants to be drowned."
+
+Lord Holme hated Carey. Yet Lady Holme had not loved him; though she had
+not objected to him more than to other men because he loved her. She had
+been brought up in a society which is singularly free from prejudices,
+which has no time to study carefully questions of so-called honour,
+which has little real religious feeling, and a desire for gaiety which
+perhaps takes the place of a desire for morals. Intrigues are one of the
+chief amusements of this society, which oscillates from London to Paris
+as the pendulum of a clock oscillates from right to left. Lady Holme,
+however, happened to be protected doubly against the dangers--or joys
+by the way--to which so many of her companions fell cheerful, and even
+chattering, victims. She had a husband who though extremely stupid was
+extremely masterful, and, for the time at any rate, she sincerely loved
+him. She was a faithful wife and had no desire to be anything else,
+though she liked to be, and usually was, in the fashion. But though
+faithful to Lord Holme she had, as has been said, both the appearance
+and the temperament of a siren. She enjoyed governing men, and those who
+were governed by her, who submitted obviously to the power of her beauty
+and the charm of manner that seemed to emanate from it, and to be one
+with it, were more attractive to her than those who were not. She
+was inclined to admire a man for loving her, as a serious and
+solemn-thinking woman, with bandeaux and convictions, admires a
+clergyman for doing his duty. Carey had done his duty with such fiery
+ardour that, though she did not prevent her husband from kicking him out
+of the house, she could not refrain from thinking well of him.
+
+Her thoughts of Robin Pierce were perhaps a little more confused.
+
+She had not accepted him. Carey would have said that he was not "her
+type." Although strong and active he was not the huge mass of bones and
+muscles and thews and sinews, ignorant of beauty and devoid of the love
+of art, which Carey had described as her ideal. There was melancholy and
+there was subtlety in him. When Lady Holme was a girl this melancholy
+and subtlety had not appealed to her sufficiently to induce her to
+become Lady Viola Pierce. Nevertheless, Robin's affection for her, and
+the peculiar form it took--of idealising her secret nature and wishing
+her obvious beauty away--had won upon the egoism of her. Although she
+laughed at his absurdity, as she called it, and honestly held to her
+Pagan belief that physical beauty was all in all to the world she wished
+to influence, it pleased her sometimes to fancy that perhaps he was
+right, that perhaps her greatest loveliness was hidden and dwelt apart.
+The thought was flattering, and though her knowledge of men rejected the
+idea that such a loveliness alone could ever command an empire worth the
+ruling, she could have no real objection to being credited with a double
+share of charm--the charm of face and manner which everyone, including
+herself, was aware that she possessed, and that other stranger, more dim
+and mysterious charm at whose altar Robin burnt an agreeably perfumed
+incense.
+
+She had a peculiar power of awakening in others that which she usually
+seemed not to possess herself--imagination, passion, not only physical
+but ethereal and of the mind; a tenderness for old sorrows, desire for
+distant, fleeting, misty glories not surely of this earth. She was
+a brilliant suggestionist, but not in conversation. Her face and her
+voice, when she sang, were luring to the lovers of beauty. When she sang
+she often expressed for them the under-thoughts and under-feelings of
+secretly romantic, secretly wistful men and women, and drew them to her
+as if by a spell. But her talk and manner in conversation were so unlike
+her singing, so little accorded with the look that often came into her
+eyes while she sang, that she was a perpetual puzzle to such elderly
+men as Sir Donald Ulford, to such young men as Robin Pierce, and even to
+some women. They came about her like beggars who have heard a chink of
+gold, and she showed them a purse that seemed to be empty.
+
+Was it the _milieu_ in which she lived, the influence of a vulgar and
+greedy age, which prevented her from showing her true self except in
+her art? Or was she that stupefying enigma sometimes met with, an
+unintelligent genius?
+
+There were some who wondered.
+
+In her singing she seemed to understand, to love, to pity, to enthrone.
+In her life she often seemed not to understand, not to love, not to
+pity, not to place high.
+
+She sang of Venice, and those who cannot even think of the city in the
+sea without a flutter of the heart, a feeling not far from soft pain in
+its tenderness and gratitude, listened to the magic bells at sunset, and
+glided in the fairy barques across the liquid plains of gold. She
+spoke of Venice, and they heard only the famished voice of the mosquito
+uttering its midnight grace before meat.
+
+Which was the real Venice?
+
+Which was the real woman?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+ON the following day, which was warm and damp; Lady Holme drove to Bond
+Street, bought two new hats, had her hand read by a palmist who called
+himself "Cupido," looked in at a ladies' club and then went to Mrs.
+Wolfstein, with whom she was engaged to lunch. She did not wish to lunch
+with her. She disliked Mrs. Wolfstein as she disliked most women, but
+she had not been able to get out of it. Mrs. Wolfstein had overheard
+her saying to Lady Cardington that she had nothing particular to do till
+four that day, and had immediately "pinned her." Besides disliking
+Mrs. Wolfstein, Lady Holme was a little afraid of her. Like many clever
+Jewesses, Mrs. Wolfstein was a ruthless conversationalist, and enjoyed
+showing off at the expense of others, even when they were her guests.
+She had sometimes made Lady Holme feel stupid, even feel as if a good
+talker might occasionally gain, and keep, an advantage over a lovely
+woman who did not talk so well. The sensation passed, but the fact that
+it had ever been did not draw Lady Holme any closer to the woman with
+the "pawnbroking expression" in her eyes.
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein was not in the most exclusive set in London, but she was
+in the smart set, which is no longer exclusive although it sometimes
+hopes it is. She knew the racing people, nearly all the most fashionable
+Jews, and those very numerous English patricians who like to go where
+money is. She also knew the whole of Upper Bohemia, and was a _persona
+gratissima_ in that happy land of talent and jealousy. She entertained
+a great deal, generally at modish restaurants. Many French and Germans
+were to be met with at her parties; and it was impossible to be with
+either them or her for many minutes without hearing the most hearty and
+whole-souled abuse of English aspirations, art, letters and cooking.
+The respectability, the pictures, the books and the boiled cabbage of
+Britain all came impartially under the lash.
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein's origin was obscure. That she was a Jewess was known to
+everybody, but few could say with certainty whether she was a German,
+a Spanish, a Polish or an Eastern Jewess. She had much of the covert
+coarseness and open impudence of a Levantine, and occasionally said
+things which made people wonder whether, before she became Amalia
+Wolfstein, she had not perhaps been--well really--something very strange
+somewhere a long way off.
+
+Her husband was shocking to look at: small, mean, bald, Semitic and
+nervous, with large ears which curved outwards from his head like
+leaves, and cheeks blue from much shaving. He was said to hide behind
+his anxious manner an acuteness that was diabolic, and to have earned
+his ill-health by sly dissipations for which he had paid enormous
+sums. There were two Wolfstein children, a boy and a girl of eleven and
+twelve; small, swarthy, frog-like, self-possessed. They already spoke
+three languages, and their protruding eyes looked almost diseased with
+intelligence.
+
+The Wolfstein house, which was in Curzon Street, was not pretty,
+Apparently neither Mrs. Wolfstein nor her husband, who was a financier
+and company promoter on a very large scale, had good taste in furniture
+and decoration. The mansion was spacious but dingy. There was a great
+deal of chocolate and fiery yellow paint. There were many stuffy brown
+carpets, and tables which were unnecessarily solid. In the hall were
+pillars which looked as if they were made of brawn, and arches
+with lozenges of azure paint in which golden stars appeared rather
+meretriciously. A plaster statue of Hebe, with crinkly hair and staring
+eyeballs, stood in a corner without improving matters. That part of the
+staircase which was not concealed by the brown carpet was dirty white.
+An immense oil painting of a heap of dead pheasants, rabbits and wild
+duck, lying beside a gun and a pair of leather gaiters, immediately
+faced the hall door, which was opened by two enormous men with yellow
+complexions and dissipated eyes. Mrs. Wolfstein was at home, and one
+of the enormous men lethargically showed Lady Holme upstairs into a
+drawing-room which suggested a Gordon Hotel. She waited for about five
+minutes on a brown and yellow sofa near a table on which lay some books
+and several paper-knives, and then Mrs. Wolfstein appeared. She was
+dressed very smartly in blue and red, and looked either Oriental or
+Portuguese, as she came in. Lady Holme was not quite certain which.
+
+"Dear person!" she said, taking Lady Holme's hands in hers, which were
+covered with unusually large rings. "Now, I've got a confession to make.
+What a delicious hat!"
+
+Lady Holme felt certain the confession was of something unpleasant,
+but she only said, in the rather languid manner she generally affected
+towards women:
+
+"Well? My ear is at the grating."
+
+"My lunch is at the Carlton."
+
+Lady Holme was pleased. At the Carlton one can always look about.
+
+"And--it's a woman's lunch."
+
+Lady Holme's countenance fell quite frankly.
+
+"I knew you'd be horrified. You think us such bores, and so we are. But
+I couldn't resist being malicious to win such a triumph. You at a hen
+lunch! It'll be the talk of London. Can you forgive me?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"And can you stand it?"
+
+Lady Holme looked definitely dubious.
+
+"I'll tell you who'll be there--Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mrs.
+Trent--do you know her? Spanish looking, and's divorced two husbands,
+and's called the scarlet woman because she always dresses in red--Sally
+Perceval, Miss Burns and Pimpernel Schley."
+
+"Pimpernel Schley! Who is she?"
+
+"The American actress who plays all the improper modern parts. Directly
+a piece is produced in Paris that we run over to see--you know the sort!
+the Grand Duke and foreign Royalty species--she has it adapted for her.
+Of course it's Bowdlerised as to words, but she manages to get back all
+that's been taken out in her acting. Young America's crazy about her.
+She's going to play over here."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+Lady Holme's voice was not encouraging, but Mrs. Wolfstein was not
+sensitive. She chattered gaily all the way to the Haymarket. When they
+came into the Palm Court they found Lady Cardington already there,
+seated tragically in an armchair, and looking like a weary empress.
+The band was playing on the balcony just outside the glass wall which
+divides the great dining-room from the court, and several people were
+dotted about waiting for friends, or simply killing time by indulging
+curiosity. Among them was a large, broad-shouldered young man, with
+a round face, contemptuous blue eyes and a mouth with chubby, pouting
+lips. He was well dressed, but there was a touch of horseyness in the
+cut of his trousers, the arrangement of his tie. He sat close to the
+band, tipping his green chair backwards and smoking a cigarette.
+
+As Mrs. Wolfstein and Lady Holme went up to greet Lady Cardington, Sally
+Perceval and Mrs. Trent came in together, followed almost immediately by
+Lady Manby.
+
+Sally Perceval was a very pretty young married woman, who spent most
+of her time racing, gambling and going to house parties. She looked
+excessively fragile and consumptive, but had lived hard and never had
+a day's illness in her life. She was accomplished, not at all
+intellectual, clever at games, a fine horsewoman and an excellent
+swimmer. She had been all over the world with her husband, who was very
+handsome and almost idiotic, and who could not have told you what
+the Taj was, whether Thebes was in Egypt or India, or what was the
+difference, if any, between the Golden Gate and the Golden Horn.
+Mrs. Trent was large, sultry, well-informed and supercilious; had the
+lustrous eyes of a Spaniard, and spoke in a warm contralto voice. Her
+figure was magnificent, and she prided herself on having a masculine
+intellect. Her enemies said that she had a more than masculine temper.
+
+Lady Manby had been presented by Providence with a face like a teapot,
+her nose being the spout and her cheeks the bulging sides. She saw
+everything in caricature. If war were spoken of, her imagination
+immediately conjured up visions of unwashed majors conspicuously absurd
+in toeless boots, of fat colonels forced to make merry on dead rats,
+of field-marshals surprised by the enemy in their nightshirts, and of
+common soldiers driven to repair their own clothes and preposterously
+at work on women's tasks. She adored the clergy for their pious humours,
+the bench for its delicious attempts at dignity, the bar for its
+grotesque travesties of passionate conviction--lies with their wigs
+on--the world political for its intrigues dressed up in patriotism.
+A Lord Chancellor in full state seemed to her the most delightfully
+ridiculous phenomenon in a delightfully ridiculous universe. And she had
+once been obliged to make a convulsive exit from an English cathedral,
+in which one hundred colonial bishops were singing a solemn hymn,
+entirely devastated by the laughter waked in her by this most sacred
+spectacle.
+
+Miss Burns, who hurried in breathlessly ten minutes late, was very thin,
+badly dressed and insignificant-looking, wore her hair short, and could
+not see you if you were more than four feet away from her. She had been
+on various lonely and distant travelling excursions, about which she had
+written books, had consorted merrily with naked savages, sat in the oily
+huts of Esquimaux, and penetrated into the interior of China dressed as
+a man. Her lack of affectation hit you in the face on a first meeting,
+and her sincerity was perpetually embroiling her with the persistent
+liars who, massed together, formed what is called decent society.
+
+"I know I'm late," she said, pushing her round black hat askew on her
+shaggy little head. "I know I've kept you all waiting. Pardon!"
+
+"Indeed you haven't," replied Mrs. Wolfstein. "Pimpernel Schley isn't
+here yet. She lives in the hotel, so of course she'll turn up last."
+
+Mrs. Trent put one hand on her hip and stared insolently at the various
+groups of people in the court, Lady Cardington sighed, and Lady Holme
+assumed a vacant look, which suited her mental attitude at the moment.
+She generally began to feel rather vacant if she were long alone with
+women.
+
+Another ten minutes passed.
+
+"I'm famishing," said Sally Perceval. "I've been at the Bath Club
+diving, and I do so want my grub. Let's skip in."
+
+"It really is too bad--oh, here she comes!" said Mrs. Wolfstein.
+
+Many heads in the Palm Court were turned towards the stairs, down which
+a demure figure was walking with extreme slowness. The big young man
+with the round face got up from his chair and looked greedy, and
+the waiters standing by the desk just inside the door glanced round,
+whispered, and smiled quickly before gliding off to their different
+little tables.
+
+Pimpernel Schley was alone, but she moved as if she were leading a quiet
+procession of vestal virgins. She was dressed in white, with a black
+velvet band round her tiny waist and a large black hat. Her shining,
+straw-coloured hair was fluffed out with a sort of ostentatious
+innocence on either side of a broad parting, and she kept her round chin
+tucked well in as she made what was certainly an effective entrance. Her
+arms hung down at her sides, and in one hand she carried a black fan.
+She wore no gloves, and many diamond rings glittered on her small
+fingers, the rosy nails of which were trimmed into points. As she drew
+near to Mrs. Wolfstein's party she walked slower and slower, as if she
+felt that she was arriving at a destination much too soon.
+
+Lady Holme watched her as she approached, examined her with that
+piercing scrutiny in which the soul of one woman is thrust out, like a
+spear, towards the soul of another. She noticed at once that Miss Schley
+resembled her, had something of her charm of fairness. It was a fainter,
+more virginal charm than hers. The colouring of hair and eyes was
+lighter. The complexion was a more dead, less warm, white. But there was
+certainly a resemblance. Miss Schley was almost exactly her height, too,
+and--
+
+Lady Holme glanced swiftly round the Palm Court. Of all the women
+gathered there Pimpernel Schley and herself were nearest akin in
+appearance.
+
+As she recognised this fact Lady Holme felt hostile to Miss Schley.
+
+Not until the latter was almost touching her hostess did she lift her
+eyes from the ground. Then she stood still, looked up calmly, and said,
+in a drawling and infantine voice:
+
+"I had to see my trunks unpacked, but I was bound to be on time. I
+wouldn't have come down to-day for any soul in the world but you. I
+would not."
+
+It was a pretty speaking voice, clear and youthful, with a choir-boyish
+sound in it, and remarkably free from nasal twang, but it was not a
+lady's voice. It sounded like the frontispiece of a summer number become
+articulate.
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein began to introduce Miss Schley to her guests, none of
+whom, it seemed, knew her. She bowed to each of them, still with the
+vestal virgin air, and said, "Glad to know you!" to each in turn without
+looking at anyone. Then Mrs. Wolfstein led the way into the restaurant.
+
+Everyone looked at the party of women as they came in and ranged
+themselves round a table in the middle of the big room. Lady Cardington
+sat on one side of Mrs. Wolfstein and Lady Holme on the other, between
+her and Mrs. Trent. Miss Schley was exactly opposite. She kept her eyes
+eternally cast down like a nun at Benediction. All the quite young men
+who could see her were looking at her with keen interest, and two
+or three of them--probably up from Sandhurst--had already assumed
+expressions calculated to alarm modesty. Others looked mournfully
+fatuous, as if suddenly a prey to lasting and romantic grief. The older
+men were more impartial in their observation of Mrs. Wolfstein's guests.
+And all the women, without exception, fixed their eyes upon Lady Holme's
+hat.
+
+Lady Cardington, who seemed oppressed by grief, said to Mrs. Wolfstein:
+
+"Did you see that article in the _Daily Mail_ this morning?"
+
+"Which one?"
+
+"On the suggestion to found a school in which the only thing to be
+taught would be happiness."
+
+"Who's going to be the teacher?"
+
+"Some man. I forget the name."
+
+"A man!" said Mrs. Trent, in a slow, veiled contralto voice. "Why, men
+are always furious if they think we have any pleasure which they can't
+deprive us of at a minute's notice. A man is the last two-legged thing
+to be a happiness teacher."
+
+"Whom would you have then?" said Lady Cardington.
+
+"Nobody, or a child."
+
+"Of which sex?" said Mrs. Wolfstein.
+
+"The sex of a child," replied Mrs. Trent.
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein laughed rather loudly.
+
+"I think children are the most greedy, unsatisfied individuals in--" she
+began.
+
+"I was not alluding to Curzon Street children," observed Mrs. Trent,
+interrupting. "When I speak in general terms of anything I always except
+London."
+
+"Why?" said Sally Perceval.
+
+"Because it's no more natural, no more central, no more in line with the
+truth of things than you are, Sally."
+
+"But, my dear, you surely aren't a belated follower of Tolstoi!" cried
+Mrs. Wolfstein. "You don't want us all to live like day labourers."
+
+"I don't want anybody to do anything, but if happiness is to be taught
+it must not be by a man or by a Londoner."
+
+"I had no idea you had been caught by the cult of simplicity," said Mrs.
+Wolfstein. "But you are so clever. You reveal your dislikes but conceal
+your preferences. Most women think that if they only conceal their
+dislikes they are quite perfectly subtle."
+
+"Subtle people are delicious," said Lady Manby, putting her mouth on
+one side. "They remind me of a kleptomaniac I once knew who had a little
+pocket closed by a flap let into the front of her gown. When she dined
+out she filled it with scraps. Once she dined with us and I saw her,
+when she thought no one was watching, peppering her pocket with cayenne,
+and looking so delightfully sly and thieving. Subtle people are always
+peppering their little pockets and thinking nobody sees them."
+
+"And lots of people don't," said Mrs. Wolfstein.
+
+"The vices are divinely comic," continued Lady Manby, looking every
+moment more like a teapot. "I think it's such a mercy. Fancy what a lot
+of fun we should lose if there were no drunkards, for instance!"
+
+Lady Cardington looked shocked.
+
+"The virtues are often more comic than the vices," said Mrs. Trent,
+with calm authority. "Dramatists know that. Think of the dozens of good
+farces whose foundation is supreme respectability in contact with the
+wicked world."
+
+"I didn't know anyone called respectability a virtue," cried Sally
+Perceval.
+
+"Oh, all the English do in their hearts," said Mrs. Wolfstein.
+"Pimpernel, are you Yankees as bad?"
+
+Miss Schley was eating _sole a la Colbert_ with her eyes on her plate.
+She ate very slowly and took tiny morsels. Now she looked up.
+
+"We're pretty respectable over in America, I suppose," she drawled. "Why
+not? What harm does it do anyway?"
+
+"Well, it limits the inventive faculties for one thing. If one is
+strictly respectable life is plain sailing."
+
+"Oh, life is never that," said Mrs. Trent, "for women."
+
+Lady Cardington seemed touched by this remark.
+
+"Never, never," she said in her curious voice--a voice in which tears
+seemed for ever to be lingering. "We women are always near the rocks."
+
+"Or on them," said Mrs. Trent, thinking doubtless of the two husbands
+she had divorced.
+
+"I like a good shipwreck," exclaimed Miss Burns in a loud tenor voice.
+"I was in two before I was thirty, one off Hayti and one off Java, and
+I enjoyed them both thoroughly. They wake folks up and make them show
+their mettle."
+
+"It's always dangerous to speak figuratively if she's anywhere about,"
+murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Holme. "She'll talk about lowering boats
+and life-preservers now till the end of lunch."
+
+Lady Holme started. She had not been listening to the conversation but
+had been looking at Miss Schley. She had noticed instantly the effect
+created in the room by the actress's presence in it. The magic of a
+name flits, like a migratory bird, across the Atlantic. Numbers of the
+youthful loungers of London had been waiting impatiently during the last
+weeks for the arrival of this pale and demure star. Now that she
+had come their interest in her was keen. Her peculiar reputation for
+ingeniously tricking Mrs. Bowdler, secretary to Mrs. Grundy, rendered
+her very piquant, and this piquancy was increased by her ostentatiously
+vestal appearance.
+
+Lady Holme was sometimes clairvoyante. At this moment every nerve in her
+body seemed telling her that the silent girl, who sat there nibbling her
+lunch composedly, was going to be the rage in London. It did not matter
+at all whether she had talent or not. Lady Holme saw that directly,
+as she glanced from one little table to another at the observant,
+whispering men.
+
+She felt angry with Miss Schley for resembling her in colouring, for
+resembling her in another respect--capacity for remaining calmly silent
+in the midst of fashionable chatterboxes.
+
+"Will she?" she said to Mrs. Wolfstein.
+
+"Yes. If she'd never been shipwrecked she'd have been almost
+entertaining, but--there's Sir Donald Ulford trying to attract your
+attention."
+
+"Where?"
+
+She looked and saw Sir Donald sitting opposite to the large young man
+with the contemptuous blue eyes and the chubby mouth. They both seemed
+very bored. Sir Donald bowed.
+
+"Who is that with him?" asked Lady Holme.
+
+"I don't know," said Mrs. Wolfstein. "He looks like a Cupid who's been
+through Sandow's school. He oughtn't to wear anything but wings."
+
+"It's Sir Donald's son, Leo," said Lady Cardington.
+
+Pimpernel Schley lifted her eyes for an instant from her plate, glanced
+at Leo Ulford, and cast them down again.
+
+"Leo Ulford's a blackguard," observed Mrs. Trent. "And when a fair man's
+a blackguard he's much more dangerous than a dark man."
+
+All the women stared at Leo Ulford with a certain eagerness.
+
+"He's good-looking," said Sally Perceval. "But I always distrust
+cherubic people. They're bound to do you if they get the chance. Isn't
+he married?"
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Trent. "He married a deaf heiress."
+
+"Intelligent of him!" remarked Mrs. Wolfstein. "I always wish I'd
+married a blind millionaire instead of Henry. Being a Jew, Henry sees
+not only all there is to see, but all there isn't. Sir Donald and his
+Cupid son don't seem to have much to say to one another."
+
+"Oh, don't you know that family affection's the dumbest thing on earth?"
+said Mrs. Trent.
+
+"Too deep for speech," said Lady Manby. "I love to see fathers and sons
+together, the fathers trying to look younger than they are and the sons
+older. It's the most comic relationship, and breeds shyness as the West
+African climate breeds fever."
+
+"I know the whole of the West African coast by heart," declared Miss
+Burns, wagging her head, and moving her brown hands nervously among her
+knives and forks. "And I never caught anything there."
+
+"Not even a husband," murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Manby.
+
+"In fact, I never felt better in my life than I did at Old Calabar,"
+continued Miss Burns. "But there my mind was occupied. I was studying
+the habits of alligators."
+
+"They're very bad, aren't they?" asked Lady Manby, in a tone of earnest
+inquiry.
+
+"I prefer to study the habits of men," said Sally Perceval, who was
+always surrounded by a troup of young racing men and athletes, who
+admired her swimming feats.
+
+"Men are very disappointing, I think," observed Mrs. Trent. "They are
+like a lot of beads all threaded on one string."
+
+"And what's the string?" asked Sally Perceval.
+
+"Vanity. Men are far vainer than we are. Their indifference to the
+little arts we practise shows it. A woman whose head is bald covers it
+with a wig. Without a wig she would feel that she was an outcast totally
+powerless to attract. But a bald-headed man has no idea of diffidence.
+He does not bother about a wig because he expects to be adored without
+one."
+
+"And the worst of it is that he is adored," said Mrs. Wolfstein. "Look
+at my passion for Henry."
+
+They began to talk about their husbands. Lady Holme did not join in. She
+and Pimpernel Schley were very silent members of the party. Even Miss
+Burns, who was--so she said--a spinster by conviction not by
+necessity, plunged into the husband question, and gave some very daring
+illustrations of the marriage customs of certain heathen tribes.
+
+Pimpernel Schley hardly spoke at all. When someone, turning to her,
+asked her what she thought about the subject under discussion, she
+lifted her pale eyes and said, with the choir-boy drawl:
+
+"I've got no husband and never had one, so I guess I'm no kind of a
+judge."
+
+"I guess she's a judge of other women's husbands, though," said Mrs.
+Wolfstein to Lady Cardington. "That child is going to devastate London."
+
+Now and then Lady Holme glanced towards Sir Donald and his son. They
+seemed as untalkative as she was. Sir Donald kept on looking towards
+Mrs. Wolfstein's table. So did Leo. But whereas Leo Ulford's eyes were
+fixed on Pimpernel Schley, Sir Donald's met the eyes of Lady Holme. She
+felt annoyed; not because Sir Donald was looking at her, but because his
+son was not.
+
+How these women talked about their husbands! Lady Cardington, who was
+a widow, spoke of husbands as if they were a race which was gradually
+dying out. She thought the modern woman was beginning to get a little
+tired of the institution of matrimony, and to care much less for men
+than was formerly the case. Being contradicted by Mrs. Trent, she gave
+her reasons for this belief. One was that whereas American matinee girls
+used to go mad over the "leading men" of the stage they now went mad
+over the leading women. She also instanced the many beautiful London
+women, universally admired, who were over thirty and still remained
+spinsters. Mrs. Trent declared that they were abnormal, and that, till
+the end of time, women would always wish to be wives. Mrs. Wolfstein
+agreed with her on various grounds. One was that it was the instinct
+of woman to buy and to rule, and that if she were rich she could
+now acquire a husband as, in former days, people acquired slaves--by
+purchase. This remark led to the old question of American heiresses and
+the English nobility, and to a prolonged discussion as to whether or not
+most women ruled their husbands.
+
+Women nearly always argue from personal experience, and consequently
+Lady Cardington--whose husband had treated her badly--differed on this
+point from Mrs. Wolfstein, who always did precisely what she pleased,
+regardless of Mr. Wolfstein's wishes. Mrs. Trent affirmed that for her
+part she thought women should treat their husbands as they treated their
+servants, and dismiss them if they didn't behave themselves, without
+giving them a character. She had done so twice, and would do it a
+third time if the occasion arose. Sally Perceval attacked her for this,
+pleading slangily that men would be men, and that their failings
+ought to be winked at; and Miss Burns, as usual, brought the marital
+proceedings of African savages upon the carpet. Lady Manby turned the
+whole thing into a joke by a farcical description of the Private Enquiry
+proceedings of a jealous woman of her acquaintance, who had donned a
+canary-coloured wig as a disguise, and dogged her husband's footsteps
+in the streets of London, only to find that he went out at odd times to
+visit a grandmother from whom he had expectations, and who happened to
+live in St. John's Wood.
+
+The foreign waiters, who moved round the table handing the dishes,
+occasionally exchanged furtive glances which seemed indicative of
+suppressed amusement, and the men who were lunching near, many of whom
+were now smoking cigarettes, became more and more intent upon Mrs.
+Wolfstein and her guests. As they were getting up to go into the Palm
+Court for coffee and liqueurs, Lady Cardington again referred to the
+article on the proposed school for happiness, which had apparently made
+a deep impression upon her.
+
+"I wonder if happiness can be taught," she said. "If it can--"
+
+"It can't," said Mrs. Trent, with more than her usual sledge-hammer
+bluntness. "We aren't meant to be happy here."
+
+"Who doesn't mean us to be happy?" asked poor Lady Cardington in a
+deplorable voice.
+
+"First--our husbands."
+
+"It's cowardly not to be happy," cried Miss Burns, pushing her hat over
+her left eye as a tribute to the close of lunch. "In a savage state
+you'll always find--"
+
+The remainder of her remark was lost in the _frou-frou_ of skirts as the
+eight women began slowly to thread their way between the tables to the
+door.
+
+Lady Holme found herself immediately behind Miss Schley, who moved with
+impressive deliberation and the extreme composure of a well-brought-up
+child thoroughly accustomed to being shown off to visitors. Her
+straw-coloured hair was done low in the nape of her snowy neck, and,
+as she took her little steps, her white skirt trailed over the carpet
+behind her with a sort of virginal slyness. As she passed Leo Ulford it
+brushed gently against him, and he drummed the large fingers of his left
+hand with sudden violence on the tablecloth, at the same time pursing
+his chubby lips and then opening his mouth as if he were going to say
+something.
+
+Sir Donald rose and bowed. Mrs. Wolfstein murmured a word to him in
+passing, and they had not been sipping their coffee for more than two or
+three minutes before he joined them with his son.
+
+Sir Donald came up at once to Lady Holme.
+
+"May I present my son to you, Lady Holme?" he said.
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"Leo, I wish to introduce you to Lady Holme."
+
+Leo Ulford bowed rather ungracefully. Standing up he looked more than
+ever like a huge boy, and he had much of the expression that is often
+characteristic of huge boys--an expression in which impudence seems to
+float forward from a background of surliness.
+
+Lady Holme said nothing. Leo Ulford sat down beside her in an armchair.
+
+"Better weather," he remarked.
+
+Then he called a waiter, and said to him, in a hectoring voice:
+
+"Bring me a Kummel and make haste about it."
+
+He lit a cigarette that was almost as big as a cigar, and turned again
+to Lady Holme.
+
+"I've been in the Sahara gazelle shooting," he continued.
+
+He spoke in a rather thick, lumbering voice and very loud, probably
+because he was married to a deaf woman.
+
+"Just come back," he added.
+
+"Oh!" said Lady Holme.
+
+She was sitting perfectly upright on her chair, and noticed that her
+companion's eyes travelled calmly and critically over her figure with
+an unveiled deliberation that was exceptionally brazen even in a modern
+London man. Lady Holme did not mind it. Indeed, she rather liked it. She
+knew at once, by that look, the type of man with whom she had to deal.
+In Leo Ulford there was something of Lord Holme, as in Pimpernel Schley
+there was perhaps a touch of herself. Having finished his stare, Leo
+Ulford continued:
+
+"Jolly out there. No rot. Do as you like and no one to bother you.
+Gazelle are awfully shy beasts though."
+
+"They must have suited you," said Lady Holme, very gravely.
+
+"Why?" he asked, taking the glass of Kummel which the waiter had brought
+and setting it down on a table by him.
+
+"Aren't you a shy--er--beast?"
+
+He stared at her calmly for a moment, and then said:
+
+"I say, you're too sharp, Lady Holme."
+
+He turned his head towards Pimpernel Schley, who was sitting a little
+way off with her soft, white chin tucked well in, looking steadily down
+into a cup half full of Turkish coffee and speaking to nobody.
+
+"Who's that girl?" he asked.
+
+"That's Miss Pimpernel Schley. A pretty name, isn't it?"
+
+"Is it? An American of course."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"What cheek they have? What's she do?"
+
+"I believe she acts in--well, a certain sort of plays."
+
+A slow smile overspread Leo Ulford's face and made him look more like a
+huge boy than ever.
+
+"What certain sort?" he asked. "The sort I'd like?"
+
+"Very probably. But I know nothing of your tastes."
+
+She did--everything almost. There are a good many Leo Ulfords lounging
+about London.
+
+"I like anything that's a bit lively, with no puritanic humbug about
+it."
+
+"Well, you surely can't suppose that there can be any puritanic humbug
+about Miss Schley or anything she has to do with!"
+
+He glanced again at Pimpernel Schley and then at Lady Holme. The smile
+on his face became a grin. Then his huge shoulders began to shake
+gently.
+
+"I do love talking to women," he said, on the tide of a prolonged
+chuckle. "When they aren't deaf."
+
+Lady Holme still remained perfectly grave.
+
+"Do you? Why?" she inquired.
+
+"Can't you guess why?"
+
+"Our charity to our sister women?"
+
+She was smiling now.
+
+"You teach me such a lot," he said.
+
+He drank his Kummel.
+
+"I always learn something when I talk to a woman. I've learnt something
+from you."
+
+Lady Holme did not ask him what it was. She saw that he was now more
+intent on her than he had been on Miss Schley, and she got up to go,
+feeling more cheerful than she had since she left the _atelier_ of
+"Cupido."
+
+"Don't go."
+
+"I must."
+
+"Already! May I come and call?"
+
+"Your father knows my address."
+
+"Oh, I say--but--"
+
+"You're not going already!" cried Mrs. Wolfstein, who was having a
+second glass of Benedictine and beginning to talk rather outrageously
+and with a more than usually pronounced foreign accent.
+
+"I must, really."
+
+"I'm afraid my son has bored you," murmured Sir Donald, in his worn-out
+voice.
+
+"No, I like him," she replied, loud enough for Leo to hear.
+
+Sir Donald did not look particularly gratified at this praise of his
+achievement. Lady Holme took an airy leave of everybody. When she came
+to Pimpernel Schley she said:
+
+"I wish you a great success, Miss Schley."
+
+"Many thanks," drawled the vestal virgin, who was still looking into her
+coffee cup.
+
+"I must come to your first night. Have you ever acted in London?"
+
+"Never."
+
+"You won't be nervous?"
+
+"Nervous! Don't know the word."
+
+She bent to sip her coffee.
+
+When Lady Holme reached the door of the Carlton, and was just entering
+one of the revolving cells to gain the pavement, she heard Lady
+Cardington's low voice behind her.
+
+"Let me drive you home, dear."
+
+At the moment she felt inclined to be alone. She had even just refused
+Sir Donald's earnest request to accompany her to her carriage. Had any
+other woman made her this offer she would certainly have refused it. But
+few people refused any request of Lady Cardington's. Lady Holme, like
+the rest of the world, felt the powerful influence that lay in her
+gentleness as a nerve lies in a body. And then had she not wept when
+Lady Holme sang a tender song to her? In a moment they were driving up
+the Haymarket together in Lady Cardington's barouche.
+
+The weather had grown brighter. Wavering gleams of light broke through
+the clouds and lay across the city, giving a peculiarly unctuous look to
+the slimy streets, in which there were a good many pedestrians more
+or less splashed with mud. There was a certain hopefulness in the
+atmosphere, and yet a pathos such as there always is in Spring, when it
+walks through London ways, bearing itself half nervously, like a country
+cousin.
+
+"I don't like this time of year," said Lady Cardington.
+
+She was leaning back and glancing anxiously about her.
+
+"But why not?" asked Lady Holme. "What's the matter with it?"
+
+"Youth."
+
+"But surely--"
+
+"The year's too young. And at my age one feels very often as if the
+advantage of youth were an unfair advantage."
+
+"Dare I ask--?"
+
+She checked herself, looking at her companion's snow-white hair, which
+was arranged in such a way that it looked immensely thick under the big
+black hat she wore--a hat half grandmotherly and half coquettish, that
+certainly suited her to perfection.
+
+"Spring--" she was beginning rather quickly; but Lady Cardington
+interrupted her.
+
+"Fifty-eight," she said.
+
+She laughed anxiously and looked at Lady Holme.
+
+"Didn't you think I was older?"
+
+"I don't know that I ever thought about it," replied Lady Holme, with
+the rather careless frankness she often used towards women.
+
+"Of course not. Why should you, or anyone? When a woman's once
+over fifty it really doesn't matter much whether she's fifty-one or
+seventy-one. Does it?"
+
+Lady Holme thought for a moment. Then she said:
+
+"I really don't know. You see, I'm not a man."
+
+Lady Cardington's forehead puckered and her mouth drooped piteously.
+
+"A woman's real life is very short," she said. "But her desire for real
+life can last very long--her silly, useless desire."
+
+"But if her looks remain?"
+
+"They don't."
+
+"You think it is a question of looks?"
+
+"Do you think it is?" asked Lady Cardington. "But how can you know
+anything about it, at your age, and with your appearance?"
+
+"I suppose we all have our different opinions as to what men are and
+what men want," Lady Holme said, more thoughtfully than usual.
+
+"Men! Men!" Lady Cardington exclaimed, with a touch of irritation
+unusual in her. "Why should we women do, and be, everything for men?"
+
+"I don't know, but we do and we are. There are some men, though, who
+think it isn't a question of looks, or think they think so."
+
+"Who?" said Lady Cardington, quickly.
+
+"Oh, there are some," answered Lady Holme, evasively, "who believe in
+mental charm more than in physical charm, or say they do. And mental
+charm doesn't age so obviously as physical--as the body does, I suppose.
+Perhaps we ought to pin our faith to it. What do you think of Miss
+Schley?"
+
+Lady Cardington glanced at her with a kind of depressed curiosity.
+
+"She pins her faith to the other thing," she said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"She's pretty. Do you know she reminds me faintly of you."
+
+Lady Holme felt acute irritation at this remark, but she only said:
+
+"Does she?"
+
+"Something in her colouring. I'm sure she's a man's woman, but I can't
+say I found her interesting."
+
+"Men's women seldom are interesting to us. They don't care to be," said
+Lady Holme.
+
+Suddenly she thought that possibly between Pimpernel Schley and herself
+there were resemblances unconnected with colouring.
+
+"I suppose not. But still--ah, here's Cadogan Square!"
+
+She kissed Lady Holme lightly on the cheek.
+
+"Fifty-eight!" Lady Holme said to herself as she went into the house.
+"Just think of being fifty-eight if one has been a man's woman! Perhaps
+it's better after all to be an everybody's woman. Well, but how's it
+done?"
+
+She looked quite puzzled as she came into the drawing-room, where Robin
+Pierce had been waiting impatiently for twenty minutes.
+
+"Robin," she said seriously, "I'm very unhappy."
+
+"Not so unhappy as I have been for the last half hour," he said, taking
+her hand and holding it. "What is it?"
+
+"I'm dreadfully afraid I'm a man's woman. Do you think I am?"
+
+He could not help smiling as he looked into her solemn eyes.
+
+"I do indeed. Why should you be upset about it?"
+
+"I don't know. Lady Cardington's been saying things--and I met a rather
+abominable little person at lunch, a little person like a baby that's
+been about a great deal in a former state, and altogether--Let's have
+tea."
+
+"By all means."
+
+"And now soothe me, Robin. I'm dreadfully strung up. Soothe me. Tell
+me, I'm an everybody's woman and that I shall never be _de trop_ in the
+world--not even when I'm fifty-eight."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE success of Pimpernel Schley in London was great and immediate, and
+preceded her appearance upon the stage. To some people, who thought they
+knew their London, it was inexplicable. Miss Schley was pretty and knew
+how to dress. These facts, though of course denied by some, as all facts
+in London are, were undeniable. But Miss Schley had nothing to say. She
+was not a brilliant talker, as so many of her countrywomen are. She
+was not vivacious in manner, except on rare occasions. She was not
+interested in all the questions of the day. She was not--a great many
+things. But she was one thing.
+
+She was exquisitely sly.
+
+Her slyness was definite and pervasive. In her it took the place of wit.
+It took the place of culture. It even took the place of vivacity. It was
+a sort of maid-of-all-work in her personality and never seemed to tire.
+The odd thing was that it did not seem to tire others. They found it
+permanently piquant. Men said of Miss Schley, "She's a devilish clever
+little thing. She don't say much, but she's up to every move on the
+board." Women were impressed by her. There was something in her supreme
+and snowy composure that suggested inflexible will. Nothing ever put her
+out or made her look as if she were in a false position.
+
+London was captivated by the abnormal combination of snow and slyness
+which she presented to it, and began at once to make much of her.
+
+At one time the English were supposed to be cold; and rather gloried in
+the supposition. But recently a change has taken place in the national
+character--at any rate as exhibited in London. Rigidity has gone out
+of fashion. It is condemned as insular, and unless you are cosmopolitan
+nowadays you are nothing, or worse than nothing. The smart Englishwoman
+is beginning to be almost as restless as a Neapolitan. She is in
+a continual flutter of movement, as if her body were threaded with
+trembling wires. She uses a great deal of gesture. She is noisy about
+nothing. She is vivacious at all costs, and would rather suggest
+hysteria than British phlegm.
+
+Miss Schley's calm was therefore in no danger of being drowned in any
+pervasive calm about her. On the contrary, it stood out. It became
+very individual. Her composed speechlessness in the midst of uneasy
+chatter--the Englishwoman is seldom really self-possessed--carried with
+it a certain dignity which took the place of breeding. She was always
+at her ease, and to be always at your ease makes a deep impression upon
+London, which is full of self-consciousness.
+
+She began to be the fashion at once. A great lady, who had a passion for
+supplying smart men with what they wanted, saw that they were going to
+want Miss Schley and promptly took her up. Other women followed suit.
+Miss Schley had a double triumph. She was run after by women as well
+as by men. She got her little foot in everywhere, and in no time. Her
+personal character was not notoriously bad. The slyness had taken care
+of that. But even if it had been, if only the papers had not been too
+busy in the matter, she might have had success. Some people do whose
+names have figured upon the evening bills exposed at the street corners.
+Hers had not and was not likely to. It was her art to look deliberately
+pure and good, and to suggest, in a way almost indefinable and very
+perpetual, that she could be anything and everything, and perhaps
+had been, under the perfumed shadow of the rose. The fact that the
+suggestion seemed to be conveyed with intention was the thing that took
+corrupt old London's fancy and made Miss Schley a pet.
+
+Her name of Pimpernel was not against her.
+
+Men liked it for its innocence, and laughed as they mentioned it in the
+clubs, as who should say:
+
+"We know the sort of Pimpernel we mean."
+
+Miss Schley's social success brought her into Lady Holme's set, and
+people noticed, what Lady Holme had been the first to notice, the faint
+likeness between them. Lady Holme was not exquisitely sly. Her voice was
+not like a choir-boy's; her manner was not like the manner of an image;
+her eyes were not for ever cast down. Even her characteristic silence
+was far less perpetual than the equally characteristic silence of Miss
+Schley. But men said they were the same colour. What men said women
+began to think, and it was not an assertion wholly without foundation.
+At a little distance there was an odd resemblance in the one white face
+and fair hair to the other. Miss Schley's way of moving, too, had a sort
+of reference to Lady Holme's individual walk. There were several things
+characteristic of Lady Holme which Miss Schley seemed to reproduce, as
+it were, with a sly exaggeration. Her hair was similar, but paler, her
+whiteness more dead, her silence more perpetual, her composure more
+enigmatically serene, her gait slower, with diminished steps.
+
+It was all a little like an imitation, with just a touch of caricature
+added.
+
+One or two friends remarked upon it to Lady Holme, who heard them very
+airily.
+
+"Are we alike?" she said. "I daresay, but you mustn't expect me to see
+it. One never knows the sort of impression one produces on the world.
+I think Miss Schley a very attractive little creature, and as to her
+social gifts, I bow to them."
+
+"But she has none," cried Mrs. Wolfstein, who was one of those who had
+drawn Lady Holme's attention to the likeness.
+
+"How can you say so? Everyone is at her feet."
+
+"Her feet, perhaps. They are lovely. But she has no gifts. That's why
+she gets on. Gifted people are a drug in the market. London's sick of
+them. They worry. Pimpernel's found that out and gone in for the savage
+state. I mean mentally of course."
+
+"Her mind dwells in a wigwam," said Lady Manby. "And wears glass beads
+and little bits of coloured cloth."
+
+"But her acting?" asked Lady Holme, with careless indifference.
+
+"Oh, that's improper but not brilliant," said Mrs. Wolfstein. "The
+American critics says it's beneath contempt."
+
+"But not beneath popularity, I suppose?" said Lady Holme.
+
+"No, she's enormously popular. Newspaper notices don't matter to
+Pimpernel. Are you going to ask her to your house? You might. She's
+longing to come. Everybody else has, and she knew you first."
+
+Lady Holme began to realise why she could never like Mrs. Wolfstein. The
+latter would try to manage other people's affairs.
+
+"I had no idea she would care about it," she answered, rather coldly.
+
+"My dear--an American! And your house! You're absurdly modest. She's
+simply pining to come. May I tell her to?"
+
+"I should prefer to invite her myself," said Lady Holme, with a distinct
+touch of hauteur which made Mrs. Wolfstein smile maliciously.
+
+When Lady Holme was alone she realised that she had, half unconsciously,
+meant that Miss Schley should find that there was at any rate one house
+in London whose door did not at once fly open to welcome her demure
+presence. But now? She certainly did not intend to be a marked exception
+to a rule that was apparently very general. If people were going to talk
+about her exclusion of Miss Schley, she would certainly not exclude
+her. She asked herself why she wished to, and said to herself that Miss
+Schley's slyness bored her. But she knew that the real reason of the
+secret hostility she felt towards the American was the fact of their
+resemblance to each other. Until Miss Schley appeared in London
+she--Viola Holme--had been original both in her beauty and in her manner
+of presenting it to the world. Miss Schley was turning her into a type.
+
+It was too bad. Any woman would have disliked it.
+
+She wondered whether Miss Schley recognised the likeness. But of course
+people had spoken to her about it. Mrs. Wolfstein was her bosom friend.
+The Jewess had met her first at Carlsbad and, with that terrible social
+flair which often dwells in Israel, had at once realised her fitness for
+a London success and resolved to "get her over." Women of the Wolfstein
+species are seldom jealously timorous of the triumphs of other women.
+A certain coarse cleverness, a certain ingrained assurance and
+unconquerable self-confidence keeps them hardy. And they generally have
+a noble reliance on the power of the tongue. Being incapable of any
+fear of Miss Schley, Mrs. Wolfstein, ever on the look-out for means of
+improving her already satisfactory position in the London world, saw
+one in the vestal virgin and resolved to launch her in England. She was
+delighted with the result. Miss Schley had already added several very
+desirable people to the Wolfstein visiting-list. In return "Henry" had
+"put her on to" one or two very good things in the City. Everything
+would be most satisfactory if only Lady Holme were not tiresome about
+the Cadogan Square door.
+
+"She hates you, Pimpernel," said Mrs. Wolfstein to her friend.
+
+"Why?" drawled Miss Schley.
+
+"You know why perfectly well. You reproduce her looks. I'm perfectly
+certain she's dreading your first night. She's afraid people will begin
+to think that extraordinary colourless charm she and you possess stagey.
+Besides, you have certain mannerisms--you don't imitate her, Pimpernel?"
+
+The pawnbroking expression was remarkably apparent for a moment in Mrs.
+Wolfstein's eyes.
+
+"I haven't started to yet."
+
+"Yet?"
+
+"Well, if she don't ask me to number thirty-eight--'tis thirty-eight?"
+
+"Forty-two."
+
+"Forty-two Cadogan Square, I might be tempted. I came out as a mimic,
+you know, at Corsher and Byall's in Philadelphia."
+
+Miss Schley gazed reflectively upon the brown carpet of Mrs. Wolfstein's
+boudoir.
+
+"Folks said I wasn't bad," she added meditatively.
+
+"I think I ought to warn Viola," said Mrs. Wolfstein.
+
+She was peculiarly intimate with people of distinction when they weren't
+there. Miss Schley looked as if she had not heard. She often did when
+anything of importance to her was said. It was important to her to be
+admitted to Lady Holme's house. Everybody went there. It was one of the
+very smartest houses in London, and since everybody knew that she had
+been introduced to Lady Holme, since half the world was comparing their
+faces and would soon begin to compare their mannerisms--well, it
+would be better that she should not be forced into any revival of her
+Philadelphia talents.
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein did not warn Lady Holme. She was far too fond of being
+amused to do anything so short-sighted. Indeed, from that moment she was
+inclined to conspire to keep the Cadogan Square door shut against her
+friend. She did not go so far as that; for she had a firm faith in
+Pimpernel's cuteness and was aware that she would be found out. But she
+remained passive and kept her eyes wide open.
+
+Miss Schley was only going to act for a month in London. Her managers
+had taken a theatre for her from the first of June till the first of
+July. As she was to appear in a play she had already acted in all over
+the States, and as her American company was coming over to support her,
+she had nothing to do in the way of preparation. Having arrived early
+in the year, she had nearly three months of idleness to enjoy. Her
+conversation with Mrs. Wolfstein took place in the latter days of March.
+And it was just at this period that Lady Holme began seriously to debate
+whether she should, or should not, open her door to the American. She
+knew Miss Schley was determined to come to her house. She knew her
+house was one of those to which any woman setting out on the conquest of
+London would wish to come. She did not want Miss Schley there, but she
+resolved to invite her if peopled talked too much about her not being
+invited. And she wished to be informed if they did. One day she spoke to
+Robin Pierce about it. Lord Holme's treatment of Carey had not yet been
+applied to him. They met at a private view in Bond Street, given by a
+painter who was adored by the smart world, and, as yet, totally unknown
+in every other circle. The exhibition was of portraits of beautiful
+women, and all the beautiful women and their admirers crowded the rooms.
+Both Lady Holme and Miss Schley had been included among the sitters of
+the painter, and--was it by chance or design?--their portraits hung side
+by side upon the brown-paper-covered walls. Lady Holme was not aware of
+this when she caught Robin's eye through a crevice in the picture hats
+and called him to her with a little nod.
+
+"Is there tea?"
+
+"Yes. In the last room."
+
+"Take me there. Oh, there's Ashley Greaves. Avoid him, like a dear, till
+I've looked at something."
+
+Ashley Greaves was the painter. There was nothing of the Bohemian about
+him. He looked like a heavy cavalry officer as he stood in the centre of
+the room talking to a small, sharp-featured old lady in a poke bonnet.
+
+"He's safe. Lady Blower's got hold of him."
+
+"Poor wretch! She ought to have a keeper. Strong tea, Robin."
+
+They found a settee in a corner walled in by the backs of tea-drinking
+beauties.
+
+"I want to ask you something," said Lady Holme, confidentially. "You go
+about and hear what they're saying."
+
+"And greater nonsense it seems each new season."
+
+"Nonsense keeps us alive."
+
+"Is it the oxygen self-administered by an almost moribund society?"
+
+"It's the perfume that prevents us from noticing the stuffiness of the
+room. But, Robin, tell me--what is the nonsense of now?"
+
+"Religious, political, theatrical, divorce court or what, Lady Holme?"
+
+He looked at her with a touch of mischief in his dark face, which
+told her, and was meant to tell her, that he was on the alert, and had
+divined that she had a purpose in thus pleasantly taking possession of
+him.
+
+"Oh, the people--nonsense. You know perfectly what I mean."
+
+"Whom are they chattering about most at the moment? You'll be
+contemptuous if I tell you."
+
+"It's a woman, then?"
+
+"When isn't it?"
+
+"Do I know her?"
+
+"Slightly."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Miss Schley."
+
+"Really?"
+
+Lady Holme's voice sounded perfectly indifferent and just faintly
+surprised. There was no hint of irritation in it.
+
+"And what are they saying about Miss Schley?" she added, sipping her tea
+and glancing about the crowded room.
+
+"Oh, many things, and among the many one that's more untrue than all the
+rest put together."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"It's too absurd. I don't think I'll tell you."
+
+"But why not? If it's too absurd it's sure to be amusing."
+
+"I don't think so."
+
+His voice sounded almost angry.
+
+"Tell me, Robin."
+
+He looked at her quickly with a warm light in his dark eyes.
+
+"If you only knew how I--"
+
+"Hush! Go on about Miss Schley."
+
+"They're saying that she's wonderfully like you, and that--have some
+more tea?"
+
+"That--?"
+
+"That you hate it."
+
+Lady Holme smiled, as if she were very much entertained.
+
+"But why should I hate it?"
+
+"I don't know. But women invent reasons for everything."
+
+"What have they invented for this?"
+
+"Oh--well--that you like to--I can't tell you it all, really. But in
+substance it comes to this! They are saying, or implying--"
+
+"Implication is the most subtle of the social arts."
+
+"It's the meanest--implying that all that's natural to you, that sets
+you apart from others, is an assumption to make you stand out from the
+rest of the crowd, and that you hate Miss Schley because she happens
+to have assumed some of the same characteristics, and so makes you seem
+less unique than you did before."
+
+Lady Holme said nothing for a moment. Then she remarked:
+
+"I'm sure no woman said 'less unique.'"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Now did anyone? Confess!"
+
+"What d'you suppose they did say?"
+
+"More commonplace."
+
+He could not help laughing.
+
+"As if you were ever commonplace!" he exclaimed, rather relieved by her
+manner.
+
+"That's not the question. But then Miss Schley's said to be like me not
+only in appearance but in other ways? Are we really so Siamese?"
+
+"I can't see the faintest beginning of a resemblance."
+
+"Ah, now you're falling into exaggeration in the other direction."
+
+"Well, not in realities. Perhaps in one or two trifling mannerisms--I
+believe she imitates you deliberately."
+
+"I think I must ask her to the house."
+
+"Why should you?"
+
+"Well, perhaps you might tell me."
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+"Aren't people saying that the reason I don't ask her is because I am
+piqued at the supposed resemblance between us?"
+
+"Oh, people will say anything. If we are to model our lives according to
+their ridiculous ideas--"
+
+"Well, but we do."
+
+"Unless we follow the dictates of our own natures, our own souls."
+
+He lowered his voice almost to a whisper.
+
+"Be yourself, be the woman who sings, and no one--not even a fool--will
+ever say again that you resemble a nonentity like Miss Schley. You
+see--you see now that even socially it is a mistake not to be your
+real self. You can be imitated by a cute little Yankee who has neither
+imagination nor brains, only the sort of slyness that is born out of the
+gutter."
+
+"My dear Robin, remember where we are. You--a diplomatist!"
+
+She put her finger to her lips and got up.
+
+"We must look at something or Ashley Greaves will be furious."
+
+They made their way into the galleries, which were almost impassable. In
+the distance Lady Holme caught sight of Miss Schley with Mrs. Wolfstein.
+They were surrounded by young men. She looked hard at the American's
+pale face, saying to herself, "Is that like me? Is that like me?" Her
+conversation with Robin Pierce had made her feel excited. She had
+not shown it. She had seemed, indeed, almost oddly indifferent. But
+something combative was awake within her. She wondered whether the
+American was consciously imitating her. What an impertinence! But Miss
+Schley was impertinence personified. Her impertinence was her _raison
+d'etre_. Without it she would almost cease to be. She would at any rate
+be as nothing.
+
+Followed by Robin, Lady Holme made her way slowly towards the Jewess and
+the American.
+
+They were now standing together before the pictures, and had been joined
+by Ashley Greaves, who was beginning to look very warm and expressive,
+despite his cavalry moustache. Their backs were towards the room, and
+Lady Holme and Robin drew near to them without being perceived. Mrs.
+Wolfstein had a loud voice and did not control it in a crowd. On the
+contrary, she generally raised it, as if she wished to be heard by those
+whom she was not addressing.
+
+"Sargent invariably brings out the secret of his sitters," she was
+saying to Ashley Greaves as Lady Holme and Robin came near and stood
+for an instant wedged in by people, unable to move forward or backward.
+"You've brought out the similarities between Pimpernel and Lady Holme.
+I never saw anything so clever. You show us not only what we all saw but
+what we all passed over though it was there to see. There is an absurd
+likeness, and you've blazoned it."
+
+Robin stole a glance at his companion. Ashley Greaves said, in a thin
+voice that did not accord with his physique:
+
+"My idea was to indicate the strong link there is between the English
+woman and the American woman. If I may say so, these two portraits, as
+it were, personify the two countries, and--er--and--er--"
+
+His mind appeared to give way. He strove to continue, to say something
+memorable, conscious of his conspicuous and central position. But his
+intellect, possibly over-heated and suffering from lack of air, declined
+to back him up, and left him murmuring rather hopelessly:
+
+"The one nation--er--and the other--yes--the give and take--the give and
+take. You see my meaning? Yes, yes."
+
+Miss Schley said nothing. She looked at Lady Holme's portrait and
+at hers with serenity, and seemed quite unconscious of the many eyes
+fastened upon her.
+
+"You feel the strong link, I hope, Pimpernel?" said Mrs. Wolfstein, with
+her most violent foreign accent. "Hands across the Herring Pond!"
+
+"Mr. Greaves has been too cute for words," she replied. "I wish Lady
+Holme could cast her eye on them."
+
+She looked up at nothing, with a sudden air of seeing something
+interesting that was happening along way off.
+
+"Philadelphia!" murmured Mrs. Wolfstein, with an undercurrent of
+laughter.
+
+It was very like Lady Holme's look when she was singing. Robin Pierce
+saw it and pressed his lips together. At this moment the crowd shifted
+and left a gap through which Lady Holme immediately glided towards
+Ashley Greaves. He saw her and came forward to meet her with eagerness,
+holding out his hand, and smiling mechanically with even more than his
+usual intention.
+
+"What a success!" she said.
+
+"If it is, your portrait makes it so."
+
+"And where is my portrait?"
+
+Robin Pierce nipped in the bud a rather cynical smile. The painter wiped
+his forehead with a white silk handkerchief.
+
+"Can't you guess? Look where the crowd is thickest."
+
+The people had again closed densely round the two pictures.
+
+"You are an artist in more ways than one, I'm afraid," said Lady Holme.
+"Don't turn my head more than the heat has."
+
+The searching expression, that indicated the strong desire to say
+something memorable, once more contorted the painter's face.
+
+"He who would essay to fix beauty on canvas," he began, in a rather
+piercing voice, "should combine two gifts."
+
+He paused and lifted his upper lip two or three times, employing his
+under-jaw as a lever.
+
+"Yes?" said Lady Holme, encouragingly.
+
+"The gift of the brush which perpetuates and the gift of--er--gift of
+the--"
+
+His intellect once more retreated from him into some distant place and
+left him murmuring:
+
+"Beauty demands all, beauty demands all. Yes, yes! Sacrifice! Sacrifice!
+Isn't it so?"
+
+He tugged at his large moustache, with an abrupt assumption of the
+cavalry officer's manner, which he doubtless deemed to be in accordance
+with his momentary muddle-headedness.
+
+"And you give it what it wants most--the touch of the ideal. It blesses
+you. Can we get through?"
+
+She had glanced at Robin while she spoke the first words. Ashley
+Greaves, with an expression of sudden relief, began very politely to
+hustle the crowd, which yielded to his persuasive shoulders, and Lady
+Holme found herself within looking distance of the two portraits, and
+speaking distance of Mrs. Wolfstein and Miss Schley. She greeted them
+with a nod that was more gay and friendly than her usual salutations to
+women, which often lacked _bonhomie_. Mrs. Wolfstein's too expressive
+face lit up.
+
+"The sensation is complete!" she exclaimed loudly.
+
+"Hope you're well," murmured Miss Schley, letting her pale eyes rest on
+Lady Holme for about a quarter of a second, and then becoming acutely
+attentive to vacancy.
+
+Lady Holme was now in front of the pictures. She looked at Miss Schley's
+portrait with apparent interest, while Mrs. Wolfstein looked at her with
+an interest that was maliciously real.
+
+"Well?" said Mrs. Wolfstein. "Well?"
+
+"There's an extraordinary resemblance!" said Lady Holme. "It's
+wonderfully like."
+
+"Even you see it! Ashley, you ought to be triumphant--"
+
+"Wonderfully like--Miss Schley," added Lady Holme, cutting gently
+through Mrs. Wolfstein's rather noisy outburst.
+
+She turned to the American.
+
+"I have been wondering whether you won't come in one day and see my
+little home. Everyone wants you, I know, but if you have a minute some
+Wednesday--"
+
+"I'll be delighted."
+
+"Next Wednesday, then?"
+
+"Thanks. Next Wednesday."
+
+"Cadogan Square--the red book will tell you. But I'll send cards. I must
+be running away now."
+
+When she had gone, followed by Robin, Mrs. Wolfstein said to Miss
+Schley:
+
+"She's been conquered by fear of Philadelphia."
+
+"Wait till I give her Noo York," returned the American, placidly.
+
+It seemed that Lady Holme's secret hostility to Miss Schley was returned
+by the vestal virgin.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+LORD HOLME seldom went to parties and never to private views. He thought
+such things "all damned rot." Few functions connected with the
+arts appealed to his frankly Philistine spirit, which rejoiced in
+celebrations linked with the glories of the body; boxing and wrestling
+matches, acrobatic performances, weight-lifting exhibitions, and so
+forth. He regretted that bear-baiting and cock-fighting were no longer
+legal in England, and had, on two occasions, travelled from London to
+South America solely in order to witness prize fights.
+
+As he so seldom put in an appearance at smart gatherings he had not
+yet encountered Miss Schley, nor had he heard a whisper of her
+much-talked-of resemblance to his wife. Her name was known to him as
+that of a woman whom one or two of his "pals" began to call a "deuced
+pretty girl" but his interest in her was not greatly awakened. The
+number of deuced pretty girls that had been in his life, and in the
+lives of his pals, was legion. They came and went like feathers dancing
+on the wind. The mere report of them, therefore, casual and drifting,
+could not excite his permanent attention, or fix their names and the
+record of their charms in his somewhat treacherous memory. Lady Holme
+had not once mentioned the American to him. She was a woman who knew how
+to be silent, and sometimes she was silent by instinct without saying to
+herself why.
+
+Lord Holme never appeared on her Wednesdays; and, indeed, those days
+were a rather uncertain factor among the London joys. If Lady Holme
+was to be found in her house at all, she was usually to be found on
+a Wednesday afternoon. She herself considered that she was at home on
+Wednesdays, but this idea of hers was often a mere delusion, especially
+when the season had fully set in. There were a thousand things to be
+done. She frequently forgot what the day of the week was. Unluckily she
+forgot it on the Wednesday succeeding her invitation to Miss Schley.
+The American duly turned up in Cadogan Square and was informed that Lady
+Holme was not to be seen. She left her card and drove away in her coupe
+with a decidedly stony expression upon her white face.
+
+That day it chanced that Lord Holme came in just before his wife
+and carelessly glanced over the cards which had been left during the
+afternoon. He was struck by the name of Pimpernel. It tickled his
+fancy somehow. As he looked at it he grinned. He looked at it again
+and vaguely recalled some shreds of the club gossip about Miss Schley's
+attractions. When Lady Holme walked quietly into her drawing-room two or
+three minutes later he met her with Miss Schley's card in his hand.
+
+"What have you got there, Fritz?" she said.
+
+He gave her the card.
+
+"You never told me you'd run up against her," he remarked.
+
+Lady Holme looked at the card and then, quickly, at her husband.
+
+"Why--do you know Miss Schley?" she asked.
+
+"Not I."
+
+"Well then?"
+
+"Fellows say she's deuced takin'. That's all. And she's got a fetchin'
+name--eh? Pimpernel."
+
+He repeated it twice and began to grin once more, and to bend and
+straighten his legs in the way which sometimes irritated his wife. Lady
+Holme was again looking at the card.
+
+"Surely it isn't Wednesday?" she said.
+
+"Yes, it is. What did you think it was?"
+
+"Tuesday--Monday--I don't know."
+
+"Where'd you meet her?"
+
+"Whom? Miss Schley? At the Carlton. A lunch of Amalia Wolfstein's."
+
+"Is she pretty?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+There was no hesitation before the reply.
+
+"What colour?
+
+"Oh!--not Albino."
+
+Lord Holme stared.
+
+"What d'you mean by that, girlie?"
+
+"That Miss Schley is remarkably fair--fairer than I am."
+
+"Is she as pretty as you?
+
+"You can find out for yourself. I'm going to ask her to
+something--presently."
+
+In the last word, in the pause that preceded it, there was the creeping
+sound of the reluctance Lady Holme felt in allowing Miss Schley to draw
+any closer to her life. Lord Holme did not notice it. He only said:
+
+"Right you are. Pimpernel--I should like to have a squint at her."
+
+"Very well. You shall."
+
+"Pimpernel," repeated Lord Holme, in a loud bass voice, as he lounged
+out of the room, grinning. The name tickled his fancy immensely. That
+was evident.
+
+Lady Holme fully intended to ask Miss Schley to the "something" already
+mentioned immediately. But somehow several days slipped by and it was
+difficult to find an unoccupied hour. The Holme cards had, of course,
+duly gone to the Carlton, but there the matter had ended, so far as Lady
+Holme was concerned. Miss Schley, however, was not so heedless as the
+woman she resembled. She began to return with some assiduity to the
+practice of the talent of the old Philadelphia days. In those days she
+used to do a "turn" in the course of which she imitated some of the
+popular public favourites of the States, and for each of her imitations
+she made up to resemble the person mimicked. She now concentrated
+this talent upon Lady Holme, but naturally the methods she employed in
+Society were far more subtle than those she had formerly used upon
+the stage. They were scarcely less effective. She slightly changed her
+fashion of doing her hair, puffing it out less at the sides, wearing
+it a little higher at the back. The change accentuated her physical
+resemblance to Lady Holme. She happened to get the name of the
+dressmaker who made most of the latter's gowns, and happened to give her
+an order that was executed with remarkable rapidity. But all this was
+only the foundation upon which she based, as it were, the structure of
+her delicate revenge.
+
+That consisted in a really admirable hint--it could not be called
+more--of Lady Holme's characteristic mannerisms.
+
+Lady Holme was not an affected woman, but, like all women of the world
+who are greatly admired and much talked about, she had certain little
+ways of looking, moving, speaking, being quiet, certain little habits
+of laughter, of gravity, that were her own property. Perhaps originally
+natural to her, they had become slightly accentuated as time went on,
+and many tongues and eyes admired them. That which had been unconscious
+had become conscious. The faraway look came a little more abruptly, went
+a little more reluctantly; than it had in the young girl's days. The
+wistful smile lingered more often on the lips of the twenties than on
+the lips of the teens. Few noticed any change, perhaps, but there had
+been a slight change, and it made things easier for Miss Schley.
+
+Her eye was observant although it was generally cast down. Society began
+to smile secretly at her talented exercises. Only a select few, like
+Mrs. Wolfstein, knew exactly what she was doing and why she was doing
+it, but the many were entertained, as children are, without analysing
+the cause of their amusement.
+
+Two people, however, were indignant--Robin Pierce and Rupert Carey.
+
+Robin Pierce, who had an instinct that was almost feminine in its
+subtlety, raged internally, and Rupert Carey, who, naturally acute, was
+always specially shrewd when his heart was in the game, openly showed
+his distaste for Miss Schley, and went about predicting her complete
+failure to capture the London public as an actress.
+
+"She's done it as a woman," someone replied to him.
+
+"Not the public, only the smart fools," returned Carey.
+
+"The smart fools have more influence on the public every day."
+
+Carey only snorted. He was in one of his evil moods that afternoon. He
+left the club in which the conversation had taken place, and, casting
+about for something to do, some momentary solace for his irritation and
+_ennui_, he bethought him of Sir Donald Ulford's invitation and resolved
+to make a call at the Albany. Sir Donald would be out, of course, but
+anyhow he would chance it and shoot a card.
+
+Sir Donald's servant said he was in. Carey was glad. Here was an hour
+filled up.
+
+With his usual hasty, decisive step he followed the man through a dark
+and Oriental-looking vestibule into a library, where Sir Donald was
+sitting at a bureau of teakwood, slowly writing upon a large, oblong
+sheet of foolscap with a very pointed pen.
+
+He got up, looking rather startled, and held out his hand.
+
+"I am glad to see you. I hoped you would come."
+
+"I'm disturbing a new poem," said Carey.
+
+Sir Donald's faded face acknowledged it.
+
+"Sorry. I'll go."
+
+"No, no. I have infinite leisure, and I write now merely for myself. I
+shall never publish anything more. The maunderings of the old are really
+most thoroughly at home in the waste-paper basket. Do sit down."
+
+Carey threw himself into a deep chair and looked round. It was a room
+of books and Oriental china. The floor was covered with an exquisite
+Persian carpet, rich and delicate in colour, with one of those vague
+and elaborate designs that stir the imagination as it is stirred by a
+strange perfume in a dark bazaar where shrouded merchants sit.
+
+"I light it with wax candles," said Sir Donald, handing Carey a cigar.
+
+"It's a good room to think in, or to be sad in."
+
+He struck a match on his boot.
+
+"You like to shut out London," he continued.
+
+"Yes. Yet I live in it."
+
+"And hate it. So do I. London's like a black-browed brute that gets an
+unholy influence over you. It would turn Mark Tapley into an Ibsen man.
+Yet one can't get away from it."
+
+"It holds interesting minds and interesting faces."
+
+"Didn't Persia?"
+
+"Lethargy dwells there and in all Eastern lands."
+
+"You have made up your mind to spend the rest of your days in the fog?"
+
+"No. Indeed, only to-day I acquired a Campo Santo with cypress trees, in
+which I intend to make a home for any dying romance that still lingers
+within me."
+
+He spoke with a sort of wistful whimsicality. Carey stared hard at him.
+
+"A Campo Santo's a place for the dead."
+
+"Why not for the dying? Don't they need holy ground as much?"
+
+"And where's this holy ground of yours?"
+
+Sir Donald got up from his chair, went over to the bureau, opened a
+drawer, and took out of it a large photograph rolled round a piece of
+wood, which he handed to Carey, who swiftly spread it out on his knees.
+
+"That is it."
+
+"I say, Sir Donald, d'you mind my asking for a whisky-and-soda?"
+
+"I beg your pardon."
+
+He hastily touched a bell and ordered it. Meanwhile Carey examined the
+photograph.
+
+"What do you think of it?" Sir Donald asked.
+
+"Well--Italy obviously."
+
+"Yes, and a conventional part of Italy."
+
+"Maggiore?"
+
+"No, Como."
+
+"The playground of the honeymoon couple."
+
+"Not where my Campo Santo is. They go to Cadenabbia, Bellagio, Villa
+D'Este sometimes."
+
+"I see the fascination. But it looks haunted. You've bought it?"
+
+"Yes. The matter was arranged to-day."
+
+The photograph showed a large, long house, or rather two houses divided
+by a piazza with slender columns. In the foreground was water. Through
+the arches of the piazza water was also visible, a cascade falling in
+the black cleft of a mountain gorge dark with the night of cypresses.
+To the right of the house, rising from the lake, was a tall old wall
+overgrown with masses of creeping plants and climbing roses. Over it
+more cypresses looked, and at the base of it, near the house, were a
+flight of worn steps disappearing into the lake, and an arched doorway
+with an elaborately-wrought iron grille. Beneath the photograph was
+written, "_Casa Felice_."
+
+"Casa Felice, h'm!" said Carey, with his eyes on the photograph.
+
+"You think the name inappropriate?"
+
+"Who knows? One can be wretched among sunbeams. One might be gay among
+cypresses. And Casa Felice belongs to you?"
+
+"From to-day."
+
+"Old--of course?"
+
+"Yes. There is a romance connected with the house."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Long ago two guilty lovers deserted their respective mates and the
+brilliant world they had figured in, and fled there together."
+
+"And quarrelled and were generally wretched there for how many months?"
+
+"For eight years."
+
+"The devil! Fidelity gone mad!"
+
+"It is said that during those years the mistress never left the garden,
+except to plunge into the lake on moonlight nights and swim through the
+silver with her lover."
+
+Carey was silent. He did not take his eyes from the photograph,
+which seemed to fascinate him. When the servant came in with the
+whisky-and-soda he started.
+
+"Not a place to be alone in," he said.
+
+He drank, and stared again at the photograph.
+
+"There's something about the place that holds one even in a photograph,"
+he added.
+
+"One can feel the strange intrigue that made the house a hermitage. It
+has been a hermitage ever since."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"An old Italian lady, very rich, owned it, but never lived there. She
+recently died, and her heir consented to sell it to me."
+
+"Well, I should like to see it in the flesh--or the bricks and mortar.
+But it's not a place to be alone in," repeated Carey. "It wants a woman
+if ever a house did."
+
+"What sort of woman?"
+
+Sir Donald had sat down again on the chair opposite, and was looking
+with his exhausted eyes through the smoke of the cigars at Carey.
+
+"A fair woman, a woman with a white face, a slim woman with eyes that
+are cords to draw men to her and bind them to her, and a voice that can
+sing them into the islands of the sirens."
+
+"Are there such women in a world that has forgotten Ulysses?"
+
+"Don't you know it?"
+
+He rolled the photograph round the piece of wood and laid it on a table.
+
+"I can only think of one who at all answers to your description."
+
+"The one of whom I was thinking."
+
+"Lady Holme?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"Don't you think she would be dreadfully bored in Casa Felice?"
+
+"Horribly, horribly. Unless--"
+
+"Unless?"
+
+"Who knows what? But there's very often an unless hanging about, like
+a man at a street corner, that--" He broke off, then added abruptly,
+"Invite me to Casa Felice some day."
+
+"I do."
+
+"When will you be going there?"
+
+"As soon as the London season is over. Some time in August. Will you
+come then?"
+
+"The house is ready for you?"
+
+"It will be. The necessary repairs will be begun now. I have bought it
+furnished."
+
+"The lovers' furniture?"
+
+"Yes. I shall add a number of my own things, picked up on my
+wanderings."
+
+"I'll come in August if you'll have me. But I'll give you the season to
+think whether you'll have me or whether you won't. I'm a horrible
+bore in a house--the lazy man who does nothing and knows a lot. Casa
+Felice--Casa Felice. You won't alter the name?"
+
+"Would you advise me to?"
+
+"I don't know. To keep it is to tempt the wrath of the gods, but I
+should keep it."
+
+He poured out another whisky-and-soda and suddenly began to curse Miss
+Schley.
+
+Sir Donald had spoken to her after Mrs. Wolfstein's lunch.
+
+"She's imitating Lady Holme," said Carey.
+
+"I cannot see the likeness," Sir Donald said. "Miss Schley seems to me
+uninteresting and common."
+
+"She is."
+
+"And Lady Holme's personality is, on the contrary; interesting and
+uncommon."
+
+"Of course. Pimpernel Schley would be an outrage in that Campo Santo of
+yours. And yet there is a likeness, and she's accentuating it every day
+she lives."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Ask the women why they do the cursed things they do do."
+
+"You are a woman-hater?"
+
+"Not I. Didn't I say just now that Casa Felice wanted a woman? But the
+devil generally dwells where the angel dwells--cloud and moon together.
+Now you want to get on with that poem."
+
+Half London was smiling gently at the resemblance between Lady Holme
+and Miss Schley before the former made up her mind to ask the latter
+to "something." And when, moved to action by certain evidences of the
+Philadelphia talent which could not be misunderstood, she did make up
+her mind, she resolved that the "something" should be very large and by
+no means very intimate. Safety wanders in crowds.
+
+She sent out cards for a reception, one of those affairs that begin
+about eleven, are tremendous at half past, look thin at twelve, and have
+faded away long before the clock strikes one.
+
+Lord Holme hated them. On several occasions he had been known to throw
+etiquette to the winds and not to turn up when his wife was giving them.
+He always made what he considered to be a good excuse. Generally he had
+"gone into the country to look at a horse." As Lady Holme sent out her
+cards, and saw her secretary writing the words, "Miss Pimpernel Schley,"
+on an envelope which contained one, she asked herself whether her
+husband would be likely to play her false this time.
+
+"Shall you be here on the twelfth?" she asked him casually.
+
+"Why? What's up on the twelfth?"
+
+"I'm going to have one of those things you hate--before the Arkell House
+ball. I chose that night so that everyone should run away early! You
+won't be obliged to look at a horse in the country that particular day?"
+
+She spoke laughingly, as if she wanted him to say no, but would not be
+very angry if he didn't. Lord Holme tugged his moustache and looked very
+serious indeed.
+
+"Another!" he ejaculated. "We're always havin' 'em. Any music?"
+
+"No, no, nothing. There are endless dinners that night, and Mrs.
+Crutchby's concert with Calve, and the ball. People will only run in and
+say something silly and run out again."
+
+"Who's comin'?"
+
+"Everybody. All the tiresome dears that have had their cards left."
+
+Lord Holme stared at his varnished boots and looked rather like a
+puzzled boy at a _viva voce_ examination.
+
+"The worst of it is, I can't be in the country lookin' at a horse that
+night," he said with depression.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+She hastily added:
+
+"But why should you? You ought to be here."
+
+"I'd rather be lookin' at a horse. But I'm booked for the dinner to
+Rowley at the Nation Club that night. I might say the speeches were too
+long and I couldn't get away. Eh?"
+
+He looked at her for support.
+
+"You really ought to be here, Fritz," she answered.
+
+It ended there. Lady Holme knew her husband pretty well. She fancied
+that the speeches at the dinner given to Sir Jacob Rowley, ex-Governor
+of some place she knew nothing about, would turn out to be very lengthy
+indeed--speeches to keep a man far from his home till after midnight.
+
+On the evening of the twelfth Lord Holme had not arrived when the first
+of his wife's guests came slowly up the stairs, and Lady Holme began
+gently to make his excuses to all the tiresome dears who had had their
+cards left at forty-two Cadogan Square. There were a great many
+tiresome dears. The stream flowed steadily, and towards half-past eleven
+resembled a flood-tide.
+
+Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mr. Bry, Sally Perceval had one by one
+appeared, and Robin Pierce's dark head was visible mounting slowly amid
+a throng of other heads of all shapes, sizes and tints.
+
+Lady Holme was looking particularly well. She was dressed in black.
+Of course black suits everybody. It suited her even better than most
+people, and her gown was a triumph. She was going on to the Arkell House
+ball, and wore the Holme diamonds, which were superb, and which she had
+recently had reset. She was in perfect health, and felt unusually
+young and unusually defiant. As she stood at the top of the staircase,
+smiling, shaking hands with people, and watching Robin Pierce
+coming slowly nearer, she wondered a little at certain secret
+uneasinesses--they could scarcely be called tremors--which had recently
+oppressed her. How absurd of her to have been troubled, even lightly,
+by the impertinent proceedings of an American actress, a nobody from the
+States, without position, without distinction, without even a husband.
+How could it matter to her what such a little person--she always called
+Pimpernel Schley a little person in her thoughts--did or did not do?
+As Robin came towards her she almost--but not quite--wished that the
+speeches at the dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley had not been so long as
+they evidently had been, and that her husband were standing beside her,
+looking enormous and enormously bored.
+
+"What a crowd!"
+
+"Yes. We can't talk now. Are you going to Arkell House?"
+
+Robin nodded.
+
+"Take me in to supper there."
+
+"May I? Thank you. I'm going with Rupert Carey."
+
+"Really!"
+
+At this moment Lady Holme's eyes and manner wandered. She had just
+caught a glimpse of Mrs. Wolfstein, a mass of jewels, and of Pimpernel
+Schley at the foot of the staircase, had just noticed that the latter
+happened to be dressed in black.
+
+"Bye-bye!" she added.
+
+Robin Pierce walked on into the drawing-rooms looking rather
+preoccupied.
+
+Everybody came slowly up the stairs. It was impossible to do anything
+else. But it seemed to Lady Holme that Miss Schley walked far more
+slowly than the rest of the tiresome dears, with a deliberation that
+had a touch of insolence in it. Her straw-coloured hair was done exactly
+like Lady Holme's, but she wore no diamonds in it. Indeed, she had on
+no jewels. And this absence of jewels, and her black gown, made her skin
+look almost startlingly white, if possible whiter than Lady Holme's.
+She smiled quietly as she mounted the stairs, as if she were wrapt in a
+pleasant, innocent dream which no one knew anything about.
+
+Amalia Wolfstein was certainly a splendid--a too splendid--foil to her.
+The Jewess was dressed in the most vivid orange colour, and was very
+much made up. Her large eyebrows were heavily darkened. Her lips were
+scarlet. Her eyes, which moved incessantly, had a lustre which suggested
+oil with a strong light shining on it. "Henry" followed in her wake,
+looking intensely nervous, and unnaturally alive and observant, as if
+he were searching in the crowd for a bit of gold that someone had
+accidentally dropped. When anyone spoke to him he replied with extreme
+vivacity but in the fewest possible words. He held his spare figure
+slightly sideways as he walked, and his bald head glistened under the
+electric lamps. Behind them, in the distance, was visible the yellow and
+sunken face of Sir Donald Ulford.
+
+When Miss Schley gained the top of the staircase Lady Holme saw that
+their gowns were almost exactly alike. Hers was sewn with diamonds, but
+otherwise there was scarcely any difference. And she suddenly felt as if
+the difference made by the jewels was not altogether in her favour, as
+if she were one of those women who look their best when they are not
+wearing any ornaments. Possibly Mrs. Wolfstein made all jewellery seem
+vulgar for the moment. She looked like an exceedingly smart jeweller's
+shop rather too brilliantly illuminated; "as if she were for sale," as
+an old and valued friend of hers aptly murmured into the ear of someone
+who had known her ever since she began to give good dinners.
+
+"Here we are! I'm chaperoning Pimpernel. But her mother arrives
+to-morrow," began Mrs. Wolfstein, with her strongest accent, while
+Miss Schley put out a limp hand to meet Lady Holme's and very slightly
+accentuated her smile.
+
+"Your mother? I shall be delighted to meet her. I hope you'll bring her
+one day," said Lady Holme; thinking more emphatically than ever that for
+a woman with a complexion as perfect as hers it was a mistake to wear
+many jewels.
+
+"I'll be most pleased, but mother don't go around much," replied Miss
+Schley.
+
+"Does she know London?"
+
+"She does not. She spends most of her time sitting around in Susanville,
+but she's bound to look after me in this great city."
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein was by this time in violent conversation with a pale
+young man, who always looked as if he were on the point of fainting, but
+who went literally everywhere. Miss Schley glanced up into Lady Holme's
+eyes.
+
+"I hoped to make the acquaintance of Lord Holme to-night," she murmured.
+"Folks tell me he's a most beautiful man. Isn't he anywhere around?"
+
+She looked away into vacancy, ardently. Lady Holme felt a slight
+tingling sensation in her cool skin. For a moment it seemed to her as if
+she watched herself in caricature, distorted perhaps by a mirror with a
+slight flaw in it.
+
+"My husband was obliged to dine out to-night; unfortunately. I hope
+he'll be here in a moment, but he may be kept, as there are to be some
+dreadful speeches afterwards. I can't think why elderly men always want
+to get up and talk nonsense about the Royal family after a heavy dinner.
+It's so bad for the digestion and the--ah, Sir Donald! Sweet of you to
+turn up. Your boy's been so unkind. I asked him to call, or he asked to
+call, and he's never been near me."
+
+Miss Schley drifted away and was swallowed by the crowd. Sir Donald had
+arrived at the top of the stairs.
+
+"Leo's been away in Scotland ever since he had the pleasure of meeting
+you. He only came back to-night."
+
+"Then I'm not quite so hurt. He's always running about, I suppose, to
+kill things, like my husband."
+
+"He does manage a good deal in that way. If you are going to the Arkell
+House ball you'll meet him there. He and his wife are both--"
+
+"How did do! Oh, Charley, I never expected to see you. I thought it
+wasn't the thing for the 2nd to turn up at little hay parties like this.
+Kitty Barringlave is in the far room, dreadfully bored. Go and cheer her
+up. Tell her what'll win the Cup. She's pale and peaky with ignorance
+about Ascot this year. Both going to Arkell House, Sir Donald, did you
+say? Bring your son to me, won't you? But of course you're a wise man
+trotting off to bed."
+
+"No. The Duke is a very old friend of mine, and so--"
+
+"Perfect. We'll meet then. They say it's really locomotor ataxia, poor
+fellow I but--ah, there's Fritz!"
+
+Sir Donald looked at her with a sudden inquiring shrewdness, that lit up
+his faded eyes and made them for a moment almost young. He had caught a
+sound of vexation in her voice, which reminded him oddly of the sound
+in her singing voice when Miss Filberte was making a fiasco of the
+accompaniment. Lord Holme was visible and audible in the hall. His
+immense form towered above his guests, and his tremendous bass voice
+dominated the hum of conversation round him. Lady Holme could see from
+where she stood that he was in a jovial and audacious mood. The dinner
+to Sir Jacob Rowley had evidently been well cooked and gay. Fritz had
+the satisfied and rather larky air of a man who has been having one good
+time and intends to have another. She glanced into the drawing-rooms.
+They were crammed. She saw in the distance Lady Cardington talking to
+Sir Donald Ulford. Both of them looked rather pathetic. Mrs. Wolfstein
+was not far off, standing in the midst of a group and holding forth with
+almost passionate vivacity and self-possession. Her husband was gliding
+sideways through the crowd with his peculiarly furtive and watchful air,
+which always suggested the old nursery game, "Here I am on Tom Tiddler's
+ground, picking up gold and silver." Lady Manby was laughing in a corner
+with an archdeacon who looked like a guardsman got up in fancy dress.
+Mr. Bry, his eyeglass fixed in his left eye, came towards the staircase,
+moving delicately like Agag, and occasionally dropping a cold or
+sarcastic word to an acquaintance. He reached Lady Holme when Lord Holme
+was half-way up the stairs, and at once saw him.
+
+"A giant refreshed with wine," he observed, dropping his eyeglass.
+
+It was such a perfect description of Lord Holme in his present condition
+that two or three people who were standing with Lady Holme smiled,
+looking down the staircase. Lady Holme did not smile. She continued
+chattering, but her face wore a discontented expression. Mr. Bry noticed
+it. There were very few things he did not notice, although he claimed to
+be the most short-sighted man in London.
+
+"Why is your husband so dutiful to-night?" he murmured to his hostess.
+"I thought he always had to go into the country to look at a gee-gee on
+these occasions."
+
+"He had to be in town for the dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley. I begged him
+to come back in--How did do! How did do! Yes, very. Mr. Raleigh, do tell
+the opera people not to put on Romeo too often this season. Of course
+Melba's splendid in it, and all that, but still--"
+
+Mr. Bry fixed his eyeglass again, and began to smile gently like an
+evil-minded baby. Lord Holme's brown face was full in view, grinning.
+His eyes were looking about with unusual vivacity.
+
+"How early you are, Fritz! Good boy. I want you to look after--"
+
+"I say, Vi, why didn't you tell me?"
+
+Mr. Bry, letting his eyeglass fall, looked abstracted and lent an
+attentive ear. If he were not playing prompter to social comedies he
+generally stood in the wings, watching and listening to them with a cold
+amusement that was seldom devoid of a spice of venom.
+
+"Tell you what, Fritz?"
+
+"That Miss Schley was comin' to-night. Everyone's talking about her. I
+sat next Laycock at dinner and he was ravin'. Told me she was to be here
+and I didn't know it. Rather ridiculous, you know. Where is she?"
+
+"Somewhere in the rooms."
+
+"What's she like?"
+
+"Oh!--I don't know. She's in black. Go and look for her."
+
+Lord Holme strode on. As he passed Mr. Bry he said:
+
+"I say, Bry, d'you know Miss Pimpernel Schley?"
+
+"Naturally."
+
+"Come with me, there's a good chap, and--what's she like?"
+
+As they went on into the drawing-rooms Mr. Bry dropped out:
+
+"Some people say she's like Lady Holme."
+
+"Like Vi! Is she? Laycock's been simply ravin'--simply ravin'--and
+Laycock's not a feller to--where is she?
+
+"We shall come to her. So there was no gee-gee to look at in the country
+to-night?"
+
+Lord Holme burst into a roar of laughter.
+
+"There's the vestal tending her lamp," said Mr. Bry a moment later.
+
+"The what up to what?"
+
+"Miss Pimpernel Schley keeping the fire of adoration carefully alight."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"There."
+
+"Oh, I see! Jove, what a skin, though! Eh! Isn't it? She is deuced like
+Vi at a distance. Vi looks up just like that when she's singin'. Doesn't
+she, though? Eh?"
+
+He went on towards her.
+
+Mr. Bry followed him, murmuring.
+
+"The giant refreshed with wine. No gee-gee to-night. No gee-gee."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+"THE brougham is at the door, my lady."
+
+"Tell his lordship."
+
+The butler went out, and Lady Holme's maid put a long black cloak
+carefully over her mistress's shoulders. While she did this Lady Holme
+stood quite still gazing into vacancy. They were in the now deserted
+yellow drawing-room, which was still brilliantly lit, and full of the
+already weary-looking flowers which had been arranged for the reception.
+The last guest had gone and the carriage was waiting to take the Holmes
+to Arkell House.
+
+The maid did something to the diamonds in Lady Holme's hair with deft
+fingers, and the light touch seemed to wake Lady Holme from a reverie.
+She went to a mirror and looked into it steadily. The maid stood behind.
+After a moment Lady Holme lifted her hand suddenly to her head, as
+if she were going to take off her tiara. The maid could not repress
+a slight movement of startled astonishment. Lady Holme saw it in the
+glass, dropped her hand, and said:
+
+"C'est tout, Josephine. Vous pouvez vous en aller."
+
+"Merci, miladi."
+
+She went out quietly.
+
+Two or three minutes passed. Then Lord Holme's deep bass voice was
+audible, humming vigorously:
+
+
+  "Ina, Ina, oh, you should have seen her!
+     Seen her with her eyes cast down.
+       She looked upon the floor,
+         And all the Johnnies swore
+   That Ina, Ina--oh, you should have seen her!--
+     That Ina was the _chic_-est girl in town."
+
+
+Lady Holme frowned.
+
+"Fritz!" she called rather sharply.
+
+Lord Holme appeared with a coat thrown over his arm and a hat in his
+hand. His brown face was beaming with self-satisfaction.
+
+"Well, old girl, ready? What's up now?"
+
+"I wish you wouldn't sing those horrible music-hall songs. You know I
+hate them."
+
+"Music-hall! I like that. Why, it's the best thing in _The Chick from
+the Army and Navy_ at the Blue Theatre."
+
+"It's disgustingly vulgar."
+
+"What next? Why, I saw the Lord Chan--"
+
+"I daresay you did. Vulgarity will appeal to the Saints of Heaven next
+season if things go on as they're going now. Come along."
+
+She went out of the room, walking more quickly than she usually walked,
+and holding herself very upright. Lord Holme followed, forming the words
+of his favourite song with his lips, and screwing up his eyes as if he
+were looking at an improper peepshow. When they were in the electric
+brougham, which spun along with scarcely any noise, he began:
+
+"I say, Vi, how long've you known Miss Schley?"
+
+"I don't know. Some weeks."
+
+"Why didn't you tell me?"
+
+"I did. I said I had met her at Mrs. Wolfstein's lunch."
+
+"No, but why didn't you tell me how like you she was?"
+
+There was complete silence in the brougham for a minute. Then Lady Holme
+said:
+
+"I had no idea she was like me."
+
+"Then you're blind, old girl. She's like you if you'd been a chorus-girl
+and known a lot of things you don't know."
+
+"Really. Perhaps she has been a chorus-girl."
+
+"I'll bet she has, whether she says so or not."
+
+He gave a deep chuckle. Lady Holme's gown rustled as she leaned back in
+her corner.
+
+"And she's goin' to Arkell House. Americans are the very devil for
+gettin' on. Laycock was tellin' me to-night that--"
+
+"I don't wish to hear Mr. Laycock's stories, Fritz. They don't amuse
+me."
+
+"Well, p'r'aps they're hardly the thing for you, Vi. But they're deuced
+amusin' for all that."
+
+He chuckled again. Lady Holme felt an intense desire to commit some
+act of physical violence. She shut her eyes. In a minute she heard her
+husband once more beginning to hum the refrain about Ina. How utterly
+careless he was of her desires and requests. There was something animal
+in his forgetfulness and indifference. She had loved the animal in him.
+She did love it. Something deep down in her nature answered eagerly to
+its call. But at moments she hated it almost with fury. She hated it now
+and longed to use the whip, as the tamer in a menagerie uses it when one
+of his beasts shows its teeth, or sulkily refuses to perform one of its
+tricks.
+
+Lord Holme went on calmly humming till the brougham stopped in the long
+line of carriages that stretched away into the night from the great
+portico of Arkell House.
+
+People were already going in to supper when the Holmes arrived. The
+Duke, upon whom a painful malady was beginning to creep, was bravely
+welcoming his innumerable guests. He found it already impossible to go
+unaided up and down stairs, and sat in a large armchair close to the
+ball-room, with one of his pretty daughters near him, talking brightly,
+and occasionally stealing wistful glances at the dancers, who were
+visible through a high archway to his left. He was a thin, middle-aged
+man, with a curious, transparent look in his face--something crystalline
+that was nearly beautiful.
+
+The Duchess was swarthy and masterful, very intelligent and _grande
+dame_. Vivacity was easy to her. People said she had been a good hostess
+in her cradle, and that she had presided over the ceremony of her own
+baptism in a most autocratic and successful manner. It was quite likely.
+
+After a word with the Duke, Lady Holme went slowly towards the ballroom
+with her husband. She did not mean to dance, and began to refuse the
+requests of would-be partners with charming protestations of fatigue.
+Lord Holme was scanning the ballroom with his big brown eyes.
+
+"Are you going to dance, Fritz?" asked Lady Holme, nodding to Robin
+Pierce, whom she had just seen standing at a little distance with Rupert
+Carey.
+
+The latter had not seen her yet, but as Robin returned her nod he looked
+hastily round.
+
+"Yes, I promised Miss Schley to struggle through a waltz with her.
+Wonder if she's dancin'?"
+
+Lady Holme bowed, a little ostentatiously, to Rupert Carey. Her husband
+saw it and began at once to look pugilistic. He could not say anything,
+for at this moment two or three men strolled up to speak to Lady Holme.
+While she was talking to them, Pimpernel Schley came in sight waltzing
+with Mr. Laycock, one of those abnormally thin, narrow-featured, smart
+men, with bold, inexpressive ayes, in whom London abounds.
+
+Lord Holme's under-jaw resumed its natural position, and he walked away
+and was lost in the crowd, following the two dancers.
+
+"Take me in to supper, Robin. I'm tired."
+
+"This way. I thought you were never coming."
+
+"People stayed so late. I can't think why. I'm sure it was dreadfully
+dull and foolish. How odd Mr. Carey's looking! When I bowed to him just
+now he didn't return it, but only stared at me as if I were a stranger."
+
+Robin Pierce made no rejoinder. They descended the great staircase and
+went towards the picture-gallery.
+
+"Find a corner where we can really talk."
+
+"Yes, yes."
+
+He spoke eagerly.
+
+"Here--this is perfect."
+
+They sat down at a table for two that was placed in an angle of the
+great room. Upon the walls above them looked down a Murillo and a
+Velasquez. Lady Holme was under the Murillo, which represented three
+Spanish street boys playing a game in the dust with pieces of money.
+
+"A table for two," said Robin Pierce. "I have always said that the
+Duchess understands the art of entertaining better than anyone in
+London, except you--when you choose."
+
+"To-night I really couldn't choose. Later on, I'm going to give two or
+three concerts. Is anything the matter with Mr. Carey?"
+
+"Do you think so?"
+
+"Well, I hope it isn't true what people are saying."
+
+"What are they saying?"
+
+"That's he's not very judicious in one way."
+
+A footman poured champagne into her glass. Robin Pierce touched the
+glass.
+
+"That way?"
+
+"Yes. It would be too sad."
+
+"Let us hope it isn't true, then."
+
+"You know him well. Is it true?"
+
+"Would you care if it was?"
+
+He looked at her earnestly.
+
+"Yes. I like Mr. Carey."
+
+There was a rather unusual sound of sincerity in her voice.
+
+"And what is it that you like in him?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. He talks shocking nonsense, of course, and is down on
+people and things. And he's absurdly unsophisticated at moments, though
+he knows the world so well. He's not like you--not a diplomat. But I
+believe if he had a chance he might do something great."
+
+Robin felt as if the hidden woman had suddenly begun to speak. Why did
+she speak about Rupert Carey?
+
+"Do you like a man to do something great?" he said.
+
+"Oh, yes. All women do."
+
+"But I perpetually hear you laughing at the big people--the Premiers,
+the Chancellors, the Archbishops, the Generals of the world."
+
+"Because I've always known them. And really they are so often quite
+absurd and tiresome."
+
+"And--Rupert Carey?"
+
+"Oh, he's nothing at all, poor fellow! Still there's something in his
+face that makes me think he could do an extraordinary thing if he had
+the chance. I saw it there to-night when he didn't bow to me. There's
+Sir Donald's son. And what a dreadful-looking woman just behind him."
+
+Leo Ulford was coming down the gallery with a gaunt, aristocratic,
+harsh-featured girl. Behind him walked Mr. Bry, conducting a very young
+old woman, immensely smart, immensely vivacious, and immensely pink, who
+moved with an unnecessary alertness that was birdlike, and turned her
+head about sharply on a long, thin neck decorated with a large diamond
+dog-collar. Slung at her side there was a tiny jewelled tube.
+
+"That's Mrs. Leo."
+
+"She must be over sixty."
+
+"She is."
+
+The quartet sat down at the next table. Leo Ulford did not see Lady
+Holme at once. When he caught sight of her, he got up, came to her,
+stood over her and pressed her hand.
+
+"Been away," he explained. "Only back to-night."
+
+"I've been complaining to your father about you."
+
+A slow smile overspread his chubby face.
+
+"May I see you again after supper?"
+
+"If you can find me."
+
+"I can always manage to find what I want," he returned, still smiling.
+
+When he had gone back to his table Robin Pierce said:
+
+"How insolent Englishmen are allowed to be in Society! It always strikes
+me after I've been a long time abroad. Doesn't anybody mind it?"
+
+"Do you mean that you consider Mr. Ulford insolent?"
+
+"In manner. Yes, I do."
+
+"Well, I think there's something like Fritz about him."
+
+Robin Pierce could not tell from the way this was said what would be a
+safe remark to make. He therefore changed the subject.
+
+"Do you know what Sir Donald's been doing?" he said.
+
+"No. What?"
+
+"Buying a Campo Santo."
+
+"A Campo Santo! Is he going to bury himself, then? What do you mean,
+Robin?"
+
+"He called it a Campo Santo to Carey. It's really a wonderful house in
+Italy, on Como. Casa Felice is the name of it. I know it well."
+
+"Casa Felice. How delicious! But is it the place for Sir Donald?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"For an old, tired man. Casa Felice. Won't the name seem an irony to him
+when he's there?"
+
+"You think an old man can't be happy anywhere?"
+
+"I can't imagine being happy old."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Oh!"--she lowered her voice--"if you want to know, look at Mrs.
+Ulford."
+
+"Your husk theory again. A question of looks. But you will grow old
+gracefully--some day in the far future."
+
+"I don't think I shall grow old at all."
+
+"Then--?"
+
+"I think I shall die before that comes--say at forty-five. I couldn't
+live with wrinkles all over my face. No, Robin, I couldn't. And--look at
+Mrs. Ulford!--perhaps an ear-trumpet set with opals."
+
+"What do the wrinkles matter? But some day you'll find I'm right. You'll
+tell me so. You'll acknowledge that your charm comes from within, and
+has survived the mutilation of the husk."
+
+"Mutilation! What a hideous sound that word has. Why don't all mutilated
+people commit suicide at once? I should. Is Sir Donald going to live in
+his happy house?"
+
+"Naturally. He'll be there this August. He's invited Rupert Carey to
+stay there with him."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"Not yet."
+
+"I suppose he will. Everybody always asks you everywhere. Diplomacy is
+so universally--"
+
+She broke off. Far away, at the end of the gallery, she had caught sight
+of Miss Schley coming in with her husband. They sat down at a table near
+the door. Robin Pierce followed her eyes and understood her silence.
+
+"Are you going on the first?" he asked.
+
+"What to?"
+
+"Miss Schley's first night."
+
+"Is it on the first? I didn't know. We can't. We're dining at Brayley
+House that evening."
+
+"What a pity!" he said, with a light touch of half playful malice. "You
+would have seen her as she really is--from all accounts."
+
+"And what is Miss Schley really?"
+
+"The secret enemy of censors."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"You dislike her. Why?"
+
+"I don't dislike her at all."
+
+"Do you like her?"
+
+"No. I like very few women. I don't understand them."
+
+"At any rate you understand--say Miss Schley--better than a man would."
+
+"Oh--a man!"
+
+"I believe all women think all men fools."
+
+Lady Holme laughed, not very gaily.
+
+"Don't they?" he insisted.
+
+"In certain ways, in certain relations of life, I suppose most men
+are--rather short-sighted."
+
+"Like Mr. Bry."
+
+"Mr. Bry is the least short-sighted man I know. That's why he always
+wears an eyeglass."
+
+"To create an illusion?"
+
+"Who knows?"
+
+She looked down the long room. Between the heads of innumerable men and
+women she could see Miss Schley. Her husband was hidden. She would have
+preferred to see him. Miss Schley's head was by no means expressive of
+the naked truth. It merely looked cool, self-possessed, and--so Lady
+Holme said to herself--extremely American. What she meant by that she
+could, perhaps, hardly have explained.
+
+"Do you admire Miss Schley's appearance?"
+
+Robin Pierce spoke again with a touch of humorous malice. He knew Lady
+Holme so well that he had no objection to seem wanting in tact to her
+when he had a secret end to gain. She looked at him sharply; leaning
+forward over the table and opening her eyes very wide.
+
+"Why are you forgetting your manners to-night and bombarding me with
+questions?"
+
+"The usual reason--devouring curiosity."
+
+She hesitated, looking at him. Then suddenly her face changed.
+Something, some imp of adorable frankness, peeped out of it at him, and
+her whole body seemed confiding.
+
+"Miss Schley is going about London imitating me. Now, isn't that true?
+Isn't she?"
+
+"I believe she is. Damned impertinence!"
+
+He muttered the last words under his breath.
+
+"How can I admire her?"
+
+There was something in the way she said that which touched him. He
+leaned forward to her.
+
+"Why not punish her for it?"
+
+"How?"
+
+"Reveal what she can't imitate."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"All you hide and I divine."
+
+"Go on."
+
+"She mimics the husk. She couldn't mimic the kernel."
+
+"Ice, my lady?"
+
+Lady Holme started. Till the footman spoke she had not quite realised
+how deeply interested she was in the conversation. She helped herself to
+some ice.
+
+"You can go on, Mr. Pierce," she said when the man had gone.
+
+"But you understand."
+
+She shook her head, smiling. Her body still looked soft and attractive,
+and deliciously feminine.
+
+"Miss Schley happens to have some vague resemblance to you in height and
+colouring. She is a clever mimic. She used to be a professional mimic."
+
+"Really!"
+
+"That was how she first became known."
+
+"In America?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Why should she imitate me?"
+
+"Have you been nice to her?"
+
+"I don't know. Yes. Nice enough."
+
+Robin shook his head.
+
+"You think she dislikes me then?"
+
+"Do women want definite reasons for half the things they do? Miss Schley
+may not say to herself that she dislikes you, any more than you say to
+yourself that you dislike her. Nevertheless--"
+
+"We should never get on. No."
+
+"Consider yourselves enemies--for no reasons, or secret woman's reasons.
+It's safer."
+
+Lady Holme looked down the gallery again. Miss Schley's fair head was
+bending forward to some invisible person.
+
+"And the mimicry?" she asked, turning again to Robin.
+
+"Can only be applied to mannerisms, to the ninety-ninth part, the
+inconsiderable fraction of your charm. Miss Schley could never imitate
+the hidden woman, the woman who sings, the woman who laughs at, denies
+herself when she is not singing."
+
+"But no one cares for her--if she exists."
+
+There was a hint of secret bitterness in her voice when she said that.
+
+"Give her a chance--and find out. But you know already that numbers do."
+
+He tried to look into her eyes, but she avoided his gaze and got up.
+
+"Take me back to the ballroom."
+
+"You are going to dance?"
+
+"I want to see who's here."
+
+As they passed the next table Lady Holme nodded to Leo Ulford. He bowed
+in return and indicated that he was following almost immediately. Mrs.
+Ulford put down her ear-trumpet, turned her head sharply, and looked at
+Lady Holme sideways, fluttering her pink eyelids.
+
+"How exactly like a bird she is," murmured Lady Holme.
+
+"Exactly--moulting."
+
+Lady Holme meant as she walked down the gallery; to stop and speak a
+few gay words to Miss Schley and her husband, but when she drew near to
+their table Lord Holme was holding forth with such unusual volubility,
+and Miss Schley was listening with such profound attention, that it did
+not seem worth while, and she went quietly on, thinking they did not see
+her. Lord Holme did not. But the American smiled faintly as Lady Holme
+and Robin disappeared into the hall. Then she said, in reply to her
+animated companion:
+
+"I'm sure if I am like Lady Holme I ought to say _Te Deum_ and think
+myself a lucky girl. I ought, indeed."
+
+Lady Holme had not been in the ballroom five minutes before Leo Ulford
+came up smiling.
+
+"Here I am," he remarked, as if the statement were certain to give
+universal satisfaction.
+
+Robin looked black and moved a step closer to Lady Holme.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Pierce," she said.
+
+She took Leo Ulford's arm, nodded to Robin, and walked away.
+
+Robin stood looking after her. He started when he heard Carey's voice
+saying:
+
+"Why d'you let her dance with that blackguard?"
+
+"Hulloa, Carey?"
+
+"Come to the supper-room. I want to have a yarn with you. And
+all this"--he made a wavering, yet violent, gesture towards the
+dancers--"might be a Holbein."
+
+"A dance of death? What nonsense you talk!"
+
+"Come to the supper-room."
+
+Robin looked at his friend narrowly.
+
+"You're bored. Let's go and take a stroll down Park Lane."
+
+"No. Well, then, if you won't--"
+
+"I'll come."
+
+He put his arm through Carey's, and they went out together.
+
+Lady Holme was generally agreeable to men. She was particularly charming
+to Leo Ulford that night. He was not an interesting man, but he seemed
+to interest her very much. They sat out together for a long time in the
+corner of a small drawing-room, far away from the music. She had said to
+Robin Pierce that she thought there was something about Leo Ulford
+that was like her husband, and when she talked to him she found the
+resemblance even greater than she had supposed.
+
+Lord Holme and Leo Ulford were of a similar type. Both were strong,
+healthy, sensual, slangy, audacious in a dull kind of fashion--Lady
+Holme did not call it dull--serenely and perpetually intent upon having
+everything their own way in life. Both lived for the body and ignored
+the soul, as they would have ignored a man with a fine brain, a
+passionate heart, a narrow chest and undeveloped muscles. Such a man
+they would have summed up as "a rotter." If they ever thought of the
+soul at all, it was probably under some such comprehensive name. Both
+had the same simple and blatant aim in life, an aim which governed all
+their actions and was the generator of most of their thoughts. This
+aim, expressed in their own terse language, was "to do themselves
+jolly well." Both had, so far, succeeded in their ambition. Both were,
+consequently, profoundly convinced of their own cleverness. Intellectual
+conceit--the conceit of the brain--is as nothing to physical
+conceit--the conceit of the body. Acute intelligence is always
+capable of uneasiness, can always make room for a doubt. But the
+self-satisfaction of the little-brained and big-muscled man who has
+never had a rebuff or a day's illness is cased in triple brass. Lady
+Holme knew this self-satisfaction well. She had seen it staring out of
+her husband's big brown eyes. She saw it now in the boyish eyes of Leo
+Ulford. She was at home with it and rather liked it. In truth, it had
+at least one merit--from the woman's point of view--it was decisively
+masculine.
+
+Whether Leo Ulford was, or was not, a blackguard; as Mrs. Trent had
+declared, did not matter to her. Three-quarters of the men she knew were
+blackguards according to the pinched ideas of Little Peddlington; and
+Mrs. Trent might originally have issued from there.
+
+She got on easily with Leo Ulford because she was experienced in the
+treatment of his type. She knew exactly what to do with it; how to lead
+it on, how to fend it off, how to throw cold water on its enterprise
+without dashing it too greatly, how to banish any little, sulky
+cloud that might appear on the brassy horizon without seeming to be
+solicitous.
+
+The type is amazingly familiar to the woman of the London world. She can
+recognize it at a glance, and can send it in its armchair canter round
+the circus with scarce a crack of the ring-mistress's whip.
+
+To-night Lady Holme enjoyed governing it more than usual, and for a
+subtle reason.
+
+In testing her power upon Leo Ulford she was secretly practising her
+siren's art, with a view that would have surprised and disgusted him,
+still more amazed him, had he known it. She was firing at the dummy
+in order that later she might make sure of hitting the living man. Leo
+Ulford was the dummy. The living man would be Fritz.
+
+Both dummy and living man were profoundly ignorant of her moving
+principle. The one was radiant with self-satisfaction under her
+fusillade. The other, ignorant of it so far, would have been furious in
+the knowledge of it.
+
+She knew-and laughed at the men.
+
+Presently she turned the conversation, which was getting a little too
+personal--on Leo Ulford's side--to a subject very present in her mind
+that night.
+
+"Did you have a talk with Miss Schley the other day after I left?"
+she asked. "I ran away on purpose to give you a chance. Wasn't it
+good-natured of me, when I was really longing to stay?"
+
+Leo Ulford stretched out his long legs slowly, his type's way of
+purring.
+
+"I'd rather have gone on yarning with you."
+
+"Then you did have a talk! She was at my house to-night, looking quite
+delicious. You know she's conquered London?"
+
+"That sort's up to every move on the board."
+
+"What do you mean? What board?"
+
+She looked at him with innocent inquiry.
+
+"I wish men didn't know so much," she added; with a sort of soft
+vexation. "You have so many opportunities of acquiring knowledge and we
+so few--if we respect the _convenances_."
+
+"Miss Schley wouldn't respect 'em."
+
+He chuckled, and again drew up and then stretched out his legs, slowly
+and luxuriously.
+
+"How can you know?"
+
+"She's not the sort that does. She's the sort that's always kicking over
+the traces and keeping it dark. I know 'em."
+
+"I think you're rather unkind. Miss Schley's mother arrives to-morrow."
+
+Leo Ulford put up his hands to his baby moustache and shook with
+laughter.
+
+"That's the only thing she wanted to set her up in business," he
+ejaculated. "A marmar. I do love those Americans!"
+
+"But you speak as if Mrs. Schley were a stage property!"
+
+"I'll bet she is. Wait till you see her. Why, it's a regular profession
+in the States, being a marmar. I tell you what--"
+
+He leaned forward and fixed his blue eyes on Lady Holme, with an air of
+profound acuteness.
+
+"Are you going to see her?"
+
+"Mrs. Schley? I daresay."
+
+"Well, you remember what I tell you. She'll be as dry as a dog-biscuit,
+wear a cap and spectacles with gold rims, and say nothing but 'Oh,
+my, yes indeed!' to everything that's said to her. Does she come from
+Susanville?"
+
+"How extraordinary! I believe she does."
+
+Leo Ulford's laugh was triumphant and prolonged.
+
+"That's where they breed marmars!" he exclaimed, when he was able to
+speak. "Women are stunning."
+
+"I'm afraid I don't quite understand," said Lady Holme, preserving a
+quiet air of pupilage. "But perhaps it's better I shouldn't. Anyhow, I
+am quite sure Miss Schley's mother will be worthy of her daughter."
+
+"You may bet your bottom dollar on that. She'll be what they call 'a
+sootable marmar.' I must get my wife to shoot a card on her."
+
+"I hope you'll introduce me to Mrs. Ulford. I should like to know her."
+
+"Yours isn't the voice to talk down a trumpet," said Leo Ulford, with a
+sudden air of surliness.
+
+"I should like to know her now I know you and your father."
+
+At the mention of his father Leo Ulford's discontented expression
+increased.
+
+"My father's a rotter," he said. "Never cared for anything. No shot to
+speak of. He can sit on a horse all right. Had to, in South America
+and Morocco and all those places. But he never really cared about it,
+I don't believe. Why, he'd rather look at a picture than a thoroughbred
+any day!"
+
+At this moment Sir Donald wandered into the room, with his hands behind
+his thin back, and his eyes searching the walls. The Duke possessed a
+splendid collection of pictures.
+
+"There he is!" said Leo, gruffly.
+
+"He doesn't see us. Go and tell him I'm here."
+
+"Why? he might go out again if we keep mum."
+
+"But I want to speak to him. Sir Donald! Sir Donald!"
+
+Sir Donald turned round at the second summons and came towards them,
+looking rather embarrassed.
+
+"Hulloa, pater!" said Leo.
+
+Sir Donald nodded to his son with a conscientious effort to seem
+familiar and genial.
+
+"Hulloa!" he rejoined in a hollow voice.
+
+"Your boy has been instructing me in American mysteries," said Lady
+Holme. "Do take me to the ballroom, Sir Donald."
+
+Leo Ulford's good humour returned as abruptly as it had departed.
+Her glance at him, as she spoke, had seemed to hint at a secret
+understanding between them in which no one--certainly not his
+father--was included.
+
+"Pater can tell you all about the pictures," he said, with a comfortable
+assurance, which he did not strive to disguise, that she would be
+supremely bored.
+
+He stared at her hard, gave a short laugh, and lounged away.
+
+When he had gone, Sir Donald still seemed embarrassed. He looked at Lady
+Holme apologetically, and in his faded eyes she saw an expression
+that reminded her of Lady Cardington. It was surely old age asking
+forgiveness for its existence.
+
+She did not feel much pity for it, but with the woman of the world's
+natural instinct to smooth rough places--especially for a man--she began
+to devote herself to cheering Sir Donald up, as they slowly made their
+way through room after room towards the distant sound of the music.
+
+"I hear you've been plunging!" she began gaily.
+
+Sir Donald looked vague.
+
+"I'm afraid I scarcely--"
+
+"Forgive me. I catch slang from my husband. He's ruining my English. I
+mean that I hear you've been investing--shall I say your romance?--in
+a wonderful place abroad, with a fascinating name. I hope you'll get
+enormous interest."
+
+A faint colour, it was like the ghost of a blush, rose in Sir Donald's
+withered cheeks.
+
+"Ah, Mr. Carey--"
+
+He checked himself abruptly, remembering whet he had heard from Robin
+Pierce.
+
+"No, Mr. Pierce was my informant. He knows your place and says it's too
+wonderful. I adore the name."
+
+"Casa Felice. You would not advise me to change it, then?"
+
+"Change it! Why?"
+
+"Well, I--one should not, perhaps, insist beforehand that one is going
+to have happiness, which must always lie on the knees of the gods."
+
+"Oh, I believe in defiance."
+
+There was an audacious sound in her voice. Her long talk with Leo Ulford
+had given her back her belief in herself, her confidence in her beauty,
+her reliance on her youth.
+
+"You have a right to believe in it. But Casa Felice is mine."
+
+"Even to buy it was a defiance--in a way."
+
+"Perhaps so. But then--"
+
+"But then you have set out and you must not turn back, Sir Donald.
+Baptise your wonderful house yourself by filling it with happiness.
+Another gave it its name. Give it yourself the reason for the name."
+
+Happiness seemed to shine suddenly in the sound of her speaking voice,
+as it shone in her singing voice when the theme of her song was joy. Sir
+Donald's manner lost its self-consciousness, its furtive diffidence.
+
+"You--you come and give my house its real baptism," he said, with a
+flash of ardour that, issuing from him, was like fire bursting out of a
+dreary marsh land. "Will you? This August?"
+
+"But," she hesitated. "Isn't Mr. Carey coming?"
+
+At this moment they came into a big drawing-room that immediately
+preceded the ballroom, with which it communicated by an immense doorway
+hung with curtains of white velvet. They could see in the distance the
+dancers moving rather indifferently in a lancers. Lord Holme and Miss
+Schley were dancing in the set nearest to the doorway, and on the side
+that faced the drawing-room. Directly Lady Holme saw the ballroom she
+saw them. A sudden sense of revolt, the defiance of joy carried on into
+the defiance of anger, rose up in her.
+
+"If Mr. Carey is coming I'll come too, and baptise your house," she
+said.
+
+Sir Donald looked surprised, but he answered, with a swiftness that did
+not seem to belong to old age:
+
+"That is a bargain, Lady Holme. I regard that as a bargain."
+
+"I'll not go back on it."
+
+There was a hard sound in her voice.
+
+They entered the ballroom just as the band played the closing bars
+of the lancers, and the many sets began to break up and melt into a
+formless crowd which dispersed in various directions. The largest
+number of people moved towards the archway near which the Duke was still
+sitting, bravely exerting himself to be cheerful. Lady Holme and Sir
+Donald became involved in this section of the crowd, and naturally
+followed in its direction. Lord Holme and Miss Schley were at a short
+distance behind them, and Lady Holme was aware of this. The double
+defiance was still alive in her, and was strengthened by a clear sound
+which reached her ears for a moment, then was swallowed up by the hum of
+conversation from many intervening voices--the sound of the American's
+drawling tones raised to say something she could not catch. As she
+came out into the hall, close to the Duke's chair, she saw Rupert Carey
+trying to make his way into the ballroom against the stream of dancers.
+His face was flushed. There were drops of perspiration on his forehead,
+and the violent expression that was perpetually visible in his red-brown
+eyes, lighting them up as with a flame, seemed partially obscured as if
+by a haze. The violence of them was no longer vivid but glassy.
+
+Lady Holme did not notice all this. The crowd was round her, and she was
+secretly preoccupied. She merely saw that Rupert Carey was close to her,
+and she knew who was following behind her. A strong impulse came upon
+her and she yielded to it without hesitation. As she reached Rupert
+Carey she stopped and held out her hand.
+
+"Mr. Carey," she said, "I've been wanting to speak to you all the
+evening. Why didn't you ask me to dance?"
+
+She spoke very distinctly. Carey stood still and stared at her, and now
+she noticed the flush on his face and the unnatural expression in his
+eyes. She understood at once what was the matter and repented of her
+action. But it was too late to draw back. Carey stared dully for an
+instant, as if he scarcely knew who she was. Then, with a lurch, he came
+closer to her, and, with a wavering movement, tried to find her hand,
+which she had withdrawn.
+
+"Where is it?" he muttered in a thick voice. "Where is it?"
+
+He groped frantically.
+
+"Sir Donald!" Lady Holme whispered sharply, while the people nearest to
+them began to exchange glances of surprise or of amusement.
+
+She pressed his arm and he tried to draw her on. But Carey was exactly
+in front of her. It was impossible for her to escape. He found her hand
+at last, took it limply in his, bent down and began to kiss it, mumbling
+some loud but incoherent words.
+
+The Duke, who from his chair, was a witness of the scene, tried to raise
+himself up, and a vivid spot of scarlet burned in his almost transparent
+cheeks. His daughter hastened forward to stop his effort. Lady Holme
+dragged her hand away violently, and Carey suddenly burst into tears.
+Sir Donald hurried Lady Holme on, and Carey tried to follow, but was
+forcibly prevented by two men.
+
+When at length Lady Holme found herself at the other end of the great
+hall, she turned and saw her husband coming towards her with a look of
+fury on his face.
+
+"I wish to go home," she said to him in a low voice.
+
+She withdrew her hand from Sir Donald's arm and quietly bade him
+good-bye. Lord Holme did not say a word.
+
+"Where is the Duchess?" Lady Holme added. "Ah, there she is!"
+
+She saw the Duchess hurriedly going towards the place where the Duke was
+sitting, intercepted her swiftly, and bade her good-night.
+
+"Now, Fritz!" she said.
+
+She was conscious that a number of people were watching her, and her
+voice and manner were absolutely unembarrassed. A footman took the
+number of her cloak from Lord Holme and fetched the cloak. A voice cried
+in the distance, "Lord Holme's carriage!" Another, and nearer voice,
+echoed the call. She passed slowly between two lines of men over a broad
+strip of carpet to the portico, and stepped into the brougham.
+
+As it glided away into the night she heard her husband's loud breathing.
+
+He did not speak for two or three minutes, but breathed like a man who
+had been running, and moved violently in the carriage as if to keep
+still were intolerable to him. The window next to him was up. He let it
+down. Then he turned right round to his wife, who was leaning back in
+her corner wrapped up in her black cloak.
+
+"With the Duke sittin' there!" he said in a loud voice. "With the Duke
+sittin' there!"
+
+There was a sound of outrage in the voice.
+
+"Didn't I kick that sweep out of the house?" he added. "Didn't I?"
+
+"I believe you asked Mr. Carey not to call anymore."
+
+Lady Holme's voice had no excitement in it.
+
+"Asked him! I--"
+
+"Don't make such a noise, Fritz. The men will hear you."
+
+"I told him if he ever came again I'd have him put out."
+
+"Well, he never has come again."
+
+"What d'you mean by speakin' to him? What d'you mean by it?"
+
+Lady Holme knew that her husband was a thoroughly conventional man, and,
+like all conventional men, had a horror of a public scene in which any
+woman belonging to him was mixed up. Such a scene alone was quite enough
+to rouse his wrath. But there was in his present anger something deeper,
+more brutal, than any rage caused by a breach of the conventions. His
+jealousy was stirred.
+
+"He didn't speak to you. You spoke to him."
+
+Lady Holme did not deny it.
+
+"I heard every word you said," continued Lord Holme, beginning to
+breathe hard again. "I--I--"
+
+Lady Holme felt that he was longing to strike her, that if he had been
+the same man, but a collier or a labourer, born in another class of
+life, he would not have hesitated to beat her. The tradition in which he
+had been brought up controlled him. But she knew that if he could have
+beaten her he would have hated her less, that his sense of bitter wrong
+would have at once diminished. In self-control it grew. The spark rose
+to a flame.
+
+"You're a damned shameful woman!" he said.
+
+The brougham drew up softly before their house. Lord Holme, who was
+seated on the side next the house, got out first. He did not wait on the
+pavement to assist his wife, but walked up the steps, opened the door,
+and went into the hall. Lady Holme followed. She saw her husband, with
+the light behind him, standing with his hand on the handle of the hall
+door. For an instant she thought that he was going to shut her out. He
+actually pushed the door till the light was almost hidden. Then he flung
+it open with a bang, threw down his hat and strode upstairs.
+
+If he had shut her out! She found herself wondering what would have
+become of her, where she would have gone. She would have had to go to
+the Coburg, or to Claridge's, without a maid, without luggage. As she
+slowly came upstairs she heard her husband go into the drawing-room. Was
+he waiting for her there? or did he wish to avoid her? When she
+reached the broad landing she hesitated. She was half inclined to go in
+audaciously, to laugh in his face; turn his fury into ridicule, tell him
+she was the sort of woman who is born to do as she likes, to live as she
+chooses, to think of nothing but her own will, consult nothing but her
+whims of the moment. But she went on and into her bedroom.
+
+Josephine was there and began to take the diamonds out of her hair. Lady
+Holme did not say a word. She was listening intently for the sound of
+any movement below. She heard nothing. When she was undressed, and there
+was nothing more for the maid to do, she began to feel uneasy, as if
+she would rather not dismiss the girl. But it was very late. Josephine
+strangled her yawns with difficulty. There was no excuse for keeping her
+up any longer.
+
+"You can go."
+
+The maid went out, leaving Lady Holme standing in the middle of the big
+bedroom. Next to it on one side was Lord Holme's dressing-room. On the
+other side there was a door leading into Lady Holme's boudoir. Almost
+directly after Josephine had gone Lady Holme heard the outer door of
+this room opened, and the heavy step of her husband. It moved about
+the room, stopped, moved about again. What could he be doing? She stood
+where she was, listening. Suddenly the door between the rooms was thrown
+open and Lord Holme appeared.
+
+"Where's the red book?" he said.
+
+"The red book!"
+
+"Where is it? D'you hear?"
+
+"What do you want it for?"
+
+"That sweep's address."
+
+"What are you going to do? Write to him?"
+
+"Write to him!" said Lord Holme, with bitter contempt. "I'm goin' to
+thrash him. Where is it?"
+
+"You are going now?"
+
+"I've not come up to answer questions. I've come for the red book. Where
+is it?"
+
+"The little drawer at the top on the right hand of the writing-table."
+
+Lord Holme turned back into the boudoir, went to the writing-table,
+found the book, opened it, found the address and wrote it down on a bit
+of paper. He folded the paper up anyhow and thrust it into his waistcoat
+pocket. Then, without saying another word to his wife, or looking at
+her, he went out and down the staircase.
+
+She followed him on to the landing, and stood there till she heard the
+hall door shut with a bang.
+
+A clock below struck four. She went back into the bedroom and sank into
+an armchair.
+
+A slight sense of confusion floated over her mind for a moment, like a
+cloud. She was not accustomed to scenes. There had been one certainly
+when Rupert Carey was forbidden to come to the house any more, but it
+had been brief, and she had not been present at it. She had only heard
+of it afterwards. Lord Holme had been angry then, and she had rather
+liked his anger. She took it as, in some degree, a measure of his
+attachment to her. And then she had had no feeling of being in the wrong
+or of humiliation. She had been charming to Carey, as she was charming
+to all men. He had lost his head. He had mistaken the relations existing
+between her and her husband, and imagined that such a woman as she was
+must be unhappily mated with such a man as Lord Holme. The passionate
+desire to console a perfectly-contented woman had caused him to go too
+far, and bring down upon himself a fiat of exile, which he could not
+defy since Lady Holme permitted it to go forth, and evidently was not
+rendered miserable by it. So the acquaintance with Rupert Carey had
+ceased, and life had slipped along once more on wheels covered with
+india-rubber tyres.
+
+And now she had renewed the acquaintance publicly and with disastrous
+results.
+
+As she sat there she began to wonder at herself, at the strength of her
+temper, the secret violence of her nature. She had yielded like a
+child to a sudden impulse. She had not thought of consequences. She had
+ignored her worldly knowledge. She had considered nothing, but had acted
+abruptly, as any ignorant, uneducated woman might have acted. She had
+been the slave of a mood. Or had she been the slave of another woman--of
+a woman whom she despised?
+
+Miss Schley had certainly been the cause of the whole affair. Lady Holme
+had spoken to Rupert Carey merely because she knew that her husband was
+immediately behind her with the American. There had been within her at
+that moment something of a broad, comprehensive feeling, mingled with
+the more limited personal feeling of anger against another woman's
+successful impertinence, a sentiment of revolt in which womanhood seemed
+to rise up against the selfish tyrannies of men. As she had walked
+in the crowd, and heard for an instant Miss Schley's drawlling voice
+speaking to her husband, she had felt as if the forbidding of the
+acquaintance between herself and Rupert Carey had been an act of
+tyranny, as if the acquaintance between Miss Schley and her husband were
+a worse act of tyranny. The feeling was wholly unreasonable, of course.
+How could Lord Holme know that she wished to impose a veto, even as
+he had? And what reason was there for such a veto? That lay deep down
+within her as woman's instinct. No man could have understood it.
+
+And now Lord Holme had gone out in the dead of the night to thrash
+Carey.
+
+She began to think about Carey.
+
+How disgusting he had been. A drunken man must be one of two
+things--either terrible or absurd. Carey had been absurd--disgusting
+and absurd. It had been better for him if he had been terrible. But
+mumblings and tears! She remembered what she had said of Carey to Robin
+Pierce--that something in his eyes, one of those expressions which are
+the children of the eyes, or of the lines about the eyes, told her that
+he was capable of doing something great. What an irony that her remark
+to Robin had been succeeded by such a scene! And she heard again the
+ugly sound of Carey's incoherent exclamations, and felt again the limp
+clasp of his hot, weak hand, and saw again the tears running over his
+flushed, damp face. It was all very nauseous. And yet--had she been
+wrong in what she had said of him? Did she even think that she had been
+wrong now, after what had passed?
+
+What kind of great action had she thought he would be capable of if a
+chance to do something great were thrown in his way? She said to herself
+that she had spoken at random, as one perpetually speaks in Society. And
+then she remembered Carey's eyes. They were ugly eyes. She had always
+thought them ugly. Yet, now and then, there was something in them,
+something to hold a woman--no, perhaps not that--but something to
+startle a woman, to make her think, wonder, even to make her trust. And
+the scene which had just occurred, with all its weakness, its fatuity,
+its maundering display of degradation and the inability of any
+self-government, had not somehow destroyed the impression made upon
+Lady Holme by that something in Carey's eyes. What she had said to Robin
+Pierce she might not choose ever to say again. She would not choose
+ever to say it again--of that she was certain--but she had not ceased to
+think it.
+
+A conviction based upon no evidence that could be brought forward to
+convince anyone is the last thing that can be destroyed in a woman's
+heart.
+
+It was nearly six o'clock when Lady Holme heard a step coming up the
+stairs. She was still sitting in the deep chair, and had scarcely moved.
+The step startled her. She put her hands on the arms of the chair and
+leaned forward. The step passed her bedroom. She heard the door of the
+dressing-room opened and then someone moving about.
+
+"Fritz!" she called. "Fritz!"
+
+There was no answer. She got up and went quickly to the dressing-room.
+Her husband was there in his shirt sleeves. His evening coat and
+waistcoat were lying half on a chair, half on the floor, and he was in
+the act of unfastening his collar. She looked into his face, trying to
+read it.
+
+"Well?" she said. "Well?"
+
+"Go to bed!" he said brutally.
+
+"What have you done?"
+
+"That's my business. Go to bed. D'you hear?"
+
+She hesitated. Then she said:
+
+"How dare you speak to me like that? Have you seen Mr. Carey?"
+
+Lord Holme suddenly took his wife by the shoulders; pushed her out of
+the room, shut the door, and locked it.
+
+They always slept in the same bedroom. Was he not going to bed at all?
+What had happened? Lady Holme could not tell from his face or manner
+anything of what had occurred. She looked at her clock and saw her
+husband had been out of the house for two hours. Indignation and
+curiosity fought within her; and she became conscious of an excitement
+such as she had never felt before. Sleep was impossible, but she got
+into bed and lay there listening to the noises made by her husband in
+his dressing-room. She could just hear them faintly through the door.
+Presently they ceased. A profound silence reigned. There was a sofa
+in the dressing-room. Could he be trying to sleep on it? Such a thing
+seemed incredible to her. For Lord Holme, although he could rough it
+when he was shooting or hunting, at home or abroad, and cared little for
+inconvenience when there was anything to kill, was devoted to comfort in
+ordinary life, and extremely exigent in his own houses. For nothing, for
+nobody, had Lady Holme ever known him to allow himself to be put out.
+
+She strained her ears as she lay in bed. For a long time the silence
+lasted. She began to think her husband must have left the dressing-room,
+when she heard a noise as if something--some piece of furniture--had
+been kicked, and then a stentorian "Damn!"
+
+Suddenly she burst out laughing. She shook against the pillows. She
+laughed and laughed weakly; helplessly, till the tears ran down her
+cheeks. And with those tears ran away her anger, the hot, strained
+sensation that had been within her even since the scene at Arkell House.
+If she had womanly pride it melted ignominiously. If she had feminine
+dignity--that pure and sacred panoply which man ignores at his own
+proper peril--it disappeared. The "poor old Fritz" feeling, which was
+the most human, simple, happy thing in her heart, started into vivacity
+as she realised the long legs flowing into air over the edge of the
+short sofa, the pent-up fury--fury of the too large body on the
+too small resting-place--which found a partial vent in the hallowed
+objurgation of the British Philistine.
+
+With every moment that she lay in the big bed she was punishing
+Fritz. She nestled down among the pillows. She stretched out her limbs
+luxuriously. How easy it was to punish a man! Lying there she recalled
+her husband's words, each detail of his treatment of her since she had
+spoken to Carey. He had called her "a damned shameful woman." That was
+of all the worst offence. She told herself that she ought to, that
+she must, for that expression alone, hate Fritz for ever. And then,
+immediately, she knew that she had forgiven it already, without effort,
+without thought.
+
+She understood the type with which she had to deal, the absurd
+boyishness that was linked with the brutality of it, the lack of mind
+to give words their true, their inmost meaning. Words are instruments of
+torture, or the pattering confetti of a carnival, not by themselves but
+by the mind that sends them forth. Fritz's exclamation might have roused
+eternal enmity in her if it had been uttered by another man. Coming from
+Fritz it won its pardon easily by having a brother, "Damn."
+
+She wondered how long her husband would be ruled by his sense of
+outrage.
+
+Towards seven she heard another movement; another indignant exclamation,
+then the creak of furniture, a step, a rattling at the door. She turned
+on her side towards the wall, shut her eyes and breathed lightly and
+regularly. The key revolved, the door opened and closed, and she heard
+feet shuffling cautiously over the carpet. A moment and Fritz was in
+bed. Another moment, a long sigh, and he was asleep.
+
+Lady Holme still lay awake. Now that her attention was no longer fixed
+upon her husband's immediate proceedings she began to wonder again what
+had happened between him and Rupert Carey. She would find out in the
+morning.
+
+And presently she too slept.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+IN the morning Lord Holme woke very late and in a different humour. Lady
+Holme was already up, sitting by a little table and pouring out tea,
+when he stretched himself, yawned, turned over, uttered two or three
+booming, incohorent exclamations, and finally raised himself on one arm,
+exhibiting a touzled head and a pair of blinking eyes, stared solemnly
+at his wife's white figure and at the tea-table, and ejaculated:
+
+"Eh?"
+
+"Tea?" she returned, lifting up the silver teapot and holding it towards
+him with an encouraging, half-playful gesture.
+
+Lord Holme yawned again, put up his hands to his hair, and then looked
+steadily at the teapot, which his wife was moving about in the sunbeams
+that were shining in at the window. The morning was fine.
+
+"Tea, Fritz?"
+
+He smiled and began to roll out of bed. But the action woke up his
+memory, and when he was on his feet he looked at his wife again more
+doubtfully. She saw that he was beginning, sleepily but definitely,
+to consider whether he should go on being absolutely furious about the
+events of the preceding night, and acted with promptitude.
+
+"Don't be frightened," she said quickly. "I've made up my mind to
+forgive you. You're only a great schoolboy after all. Come along."
+
+She began to pour out the tea. It made a pleasant little noise falling
+into the cup. The sun was wonderfully bright in the pretty room, almost
+Italian in its golden warmth. Lady Holme's black Pomeranian, Pixie,
+stood on its hind legs to greet him. He came up to the sofa, still
+looking undecided, but with a wavering light of dawning satisfaction in
+his eyes.
+
+"You behaved damned badly last night," he growled.
+
+He sat down beside his wife with a bump. She put up her hand to his
+rough, brown cheek.
+
+"We both behaved atrociously," she answered. "There's your tea."
+
+She poured in the cream and buttered a thin piece of toast. Lord Holme
+sipped. As he put the cup down she held the piece of toast up to his
+mouth. He took a bite.
+
+"And we both do the Christian act and forgive each other," she added.
+
+He leaned back. Sleep was flowing away from him, full consciousness of
+life and events returning to him.
+
+"What made you speak to that feller?" he said.
+
+"Drink your tea. I don't know. He looked miserable at being avoided,
+and--"
+
+"Miserable! He was drunk. He's done for himself in London, and pretty
+near done for you too."
+
+As he thought about it all a cloud began to settle over his face. Lady
+Holme saw it and said:
+
+"That depends on you, Fritz."
+
+She nestled against him, put her hand over his, and kept on lifting his
+hand softly and then letting it fall on his knee, as she went on:
+
+"That all depends on you."
+
+"How?"
+
+He began to look at her hand and his, following their movements almost
+like a child.
+
+"If we are all right together, obviously all right, very, very
+par-ti-cu-lar-ly all right--voyez vous, mon petit chou?--they will think
+nothing of it. 'Poor Mr. Carey! What a pity the Duke's champagne is so
+good!' That's what they'll say. But if we--you and I--are not on
+perfect terms, if you behave like a bear that's been sitting on a wasps'
+nest--why then they'll say--they'll say--"
+
+"What'll they say?"
+
+"They'll say, 'That was really a most painful scene at the Duke's. She's
+evidently been behaving quite abominably. Those yellow women always
+bring about all the tragedies--'"
+
+"Yellow women!" Lord Holme ejaculated.
+
+He looked hard at his wife. It was evident that his mind was tacking.
+
+"Miss Schley heard what you said to the feller," he added.
+
+"People who never speak hear everything--naturally."
+
+"How d'you mean--never speak? Why, she's full of talk."
+
+"How well she listened to him!" was Lady Holme's mental comment.
+
+"If half the world heard it doesn't matter if you and I choose it
+shouldn't. Unless--"
+
+"Unless what?"
+
+"Unless you did anything last night--afterwards--that will make a
+scandal?"
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"Did you?"
+
+"That's all right."
+
+He applied himself with energy to the toast. Lady Holme recognised, with
+a chagrin which she concealed, that Lord Holme was not going to allow
+himself to be "managed" into any revelation. She recognised it so
+thoroughly that she left the subject at once.
+
+"We'd better forgive and forget," she said. "After all, we are married
+and I suppose we must stick together."
+
+There was a clever note of regret in her voice.
+
+"Are you sorry?" Lord Holme said, with a manner that suggested a
+readiness to be surly.
+
+"For what?"
+
+"That we're married?"
+
+She sat calmly considering.
+
+"Am I? Well, I must think. It's so difficult to be sure. I must compare
+you with other men--"
+
+"If it comes to that, I might do a bit of comparin' too."
+
+"I should be the last to prevent you, old boy. But I'm sure you've often
+done it already and always made up your mind afterwards that she wasn't
+quite up to the marrying mark."
+
+"Who wasn't?"
+
+"The other--horrid creature."
+
+He could not repress a chuckle.
+
+"You're deuced conceited," he said.
+
+"You've made me so."
+
+"I--how?"
+
+"By marrying me first and adoring me afterwards."
+
+They had finished tea and were no longer preoccupied with cups and
+saucers. It was very bright in the room, very silent. Lord Holme looked
+at his wife and remembered how much she was admired by other men, how
+many men would give--whatever men are ready to give--to see her as she
+was just then. It occurred to him that he would have been rather a fool
+if he had yielded to his violent impulse and shut her out of the house
+the previous night.
+
+"You're never to speak to that cad again," he said. "D'you hear?"
+
+"Whisper it close in my ear and I'll try to hear. Your voice is
+so--what's your expression--so infernally soft."
+
+He put his great arm round her.
+
+"D'you hear?"
+
+"I'm trying."
+
+"I'll make you."
+
+Whether Lord Holme succeeded or not, Lady Holme had no opportunity--even
+if she desired it--of speaking to Rupert Carey for some time. He left
+London and went up to the North to stay with his mother. The only person
+he saw before he went was Robin Pierce. He came round to Half Moon
+Street early on the afternoon of the day after the Arkell House Ball.
+Robin was at home and Carey walked in with his usual decision. He was
+very pale, and his face looked very hard. Robin received him coldly
+and did not ask him to sit down. That was not necessary, of course. But
+Robin was standing by the door and did not move back into the room.
+
+"I'm going North to-night," said Carey.
+
+"Are you?"
+
+"Yes. If you don't mind I'll sit down."
+
+Robin said nothing. Carey threw himself into an armchair.
+
+"Going to see the mater. A funny thing--but she's always glad to see
+me."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Mothers have a knack that way. Lucky for sons like me."
+
+There was intense bitterness in his voice, but there was a sound of
+tenderness too. Robin shut the door but did not sit down.
+
+"Are you going to be in the country long?"
+
+"Don't know. What time did you leave Arkell House last night?"
+
+"Not till after Lady Holme left."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+He was silent for a moment, biting his red moustache.
+
+"Were you in the hall after the last lancers?"
+
+"No."
+
+"You weren't?"
+
+He spoke quickly, with a sort of relief, hesitated then added
+sardonically:
+
+"But of course you know--and much worse than the worst. The art of
+conversation isn't dead yet, whatever the--perhaps you saw me being got
+out?"
+
+"No, I didn't."
+
+"But you do know?"
+
+"Naturally."
+
+"I say, I wish you'd let me have--"
+
+He checked himself abruptly, and muttered:
+
+"Good God! What a brute I am."
+
+He sprang up and walked about the room. Presently he stopped in front of
+the statuette of the "_Danseuse de Tunisie_."
+
+"Is it the woman that does it all, or the fan?" he said. "I don't know.
+Sometimes I think it's one, and sometimes the other. Without the fan
+there's purity, what's meant from the beginning--"
+
+"By whom?" said Robin. "I thought you were an atheist?"
+
+"Oh, God! I don't know what I am."
+
+He turned away from the statuette.
+
+"With the fan there's so much more than purity, than what was meant to
+complete us--as devils--men. But--mothers don't carry the fan. And I'm
+going North to-night."
+
+"Do you mean to say that Lady Holme--?"
+
+Robin's voice was stern.
+
+"Why did she say that to me?"
+
+"What did she say?"
+
+"That she wished to speak to me, to dance with me."
+
+"She said that? How can you know?"
+
+"Oh, I wasn't so drunk that I couldn't hear the voice from Eden. Pierce,
+you know her. She likes you. Tell her to forgive as much as she can.
+Will you? And tell her not to carry the fan again when fools like me are
+about."
+
+And then, without more words, he went out of the room and left Robin
+standing alone.
+
+Robin looked at the statuette, and remembered what Sir Donald Ulford
+had said directly he saw it--"Forgive me, that fan makes that statuette
+wicked."
+
+"Poor old Carey!" he murmured.
+
+His indignation at Carey's conduct, which had been hot, had nearly died
+away.
+
+"If I had told him what she said about him at supper!" he thought.
+
+And then he began to wonder whether Lady Holme had changed her mind on
+that subject. Surely she must have changed it. But one never knew--with
+women. He took up his hat and gloves and went out. If Lady Holme was in
+he meant to give her Carey's message. It was impossible to be jealous of
+Carey now.
+
+Lady Holme was not in.
+
+As Robin walked away from Cadogan Square he was not sure whether he was
+glad or sorry that he had not been able to see her.
+
+After his cup of early morning tea Lord Holme had seemed to be "dear
+old Fritz" again, and Lady Holme felt satisfied with herself despite the
+wagging tongues of London. She knew she had done an incautious thing.
+She knew, too, that Carey had failed her. Her impulse had been to use
+him as a weapon. He had proved a broken reed. And this failure on his
+part was likely to correct for ever her incautious tendencies. That
+was what she told herself, with some contempt for men. She did not
+tell herself that the use to which she had intended to put Carey was an
+unworthy one. Women as beautiful, and as successful in their beauty, as
+she was seldom tell themselves these medicinal truths.
+
+She went about as usual, and on several occasions took Lord Holme with
+her. And though she saw a light of curiosity in many eyes, and saw lips
+almost forced open by the silent questions lurking within many minds,
+it was as she had said it would be. The immediate future had been in
+Fritz's hands, and he had made it safe enough.
+
+He had made it safe. Even the Duchess of Arkell was quite charming, and
+laid the whole burden of blame--where it always ought to be laid,
+of course--upon the man's shoulders. Rupert Carey was quite done
+for socially. Everyone said so. Even Upper Bohemia thought blatant
+intemperance--in a Duke's house--an unnecessary defiance flung at the
+Blue Ribbon Army. Only Amalia Wolfstein, who had never succeeded in
+getting an invitation to Arkell House, remarked that "It was probably
+the champagne's fault. She had always noticed that where the host and
+hostess were dry the champagne was apt to be sweet."
+
+Yes, Fritz had made it safe, but:
+
+Circumstances presently woke in Lady Holme's mind a rather disagreeable
+suspicion that though Fritz had "come round" with such an admirable
+promptitude he had reserved to himself a right to retaliate, that he
+perhaps presumed to fancy that her defiant action, and its very public
+and unpleasant result, gave to him a greater license than he had
+possessed before.
+
+Some days after the early morning tea Lord Holme said to his wife:
+
+"I say, Vi, we've got nothing on the first, have we?"
+
+There was a perceptible pause before she replied.
+
+"Yes, we have. We've accepted a dinner at Brayley House."
+
+Lord Holme looked exceedingly put out.
+
+"Brayley House. What rot!" he exclaimed. "I hate those hind-leg affairs.
+Why on earth did you accept it?"
+
+"Dear boy, you told me to. But why?"
+
+"Why what?"
+
+"Why are you so anxious to be free for the first?"
+
+"Well, it's Miss Schley's _debut_ at the British. Everyone's goin' and
+Laycock says--"
+
+"I'm not very interested in Mr. Laycock's aphorisms, Fritz. I prefer
+yours, I truly do."
+
+"Oh, well, I'm as good as Laycock, I know. Still--"
+
+"You're a thousand times better. And so everybody's going, on Miss
+Schley's first night? I only wish we could, but we can't. Let's put up
+with number two. We're free on the second."
+
+Lord Holme did not look at all appeased.
+
+"That's not the same thing," he said.
+
+"What's the difference? She doesn't change the play, I suppose?"
+
+"No. But naturally on the first night she wants all her friends to come
+up to the scratch, muster round--don't you know?--and give her a hand."
+
+"And she thinks your hand, being enormous, would be valuable? But we
+can't throw over Brayley House."
+
+Lord Holme's square jaw began to work, a sure sign of acute irritation.
+
+"If there's a dull, dreary house in London, it's Brayley House," he
+grumbled. "The cookin's awful--poison--and the wine's worse. Why, last
+time Laycock was there they actually gave him--"
+
+"Poor dear Mr. Laycock! Did they really? But what can we do? I'm sure I
+don't want to be poisoned either. I love life."
+
+She was looking brilliant. Lord Holme began to straddle his legs.
+
+"And there's the box!" he said. "A box next the stage that holds six in
+a row can't stand empty on a first night, eh? It'd throw a damper on the
+whole house."
+
+"I'm afraid I don't quite understand. What box?"
+
+"Hang it all!--ours."
+
+"I didn't know we had a box for this important social function."
+
+Lady Holme really made a great effort to keep the ice out of her voice,
+but one or two fragments floated in nevertheless.
+
+"Well, I tell you I've taken a box and asked Laycock--"
+
+The reiterated mention of this hallowed name was a little too much for
+Lady Holme's equanimity.
+
+"If Mr. Laycock's going the box won't be empty. So that's all right,"
+she rejoined. "Mr. Laycock will make enough noise to give the critics a
+lead. And I suppose that's all Miss Schley wants."
+
+"But it isn't!" said Lord Holme, violently letting himself down at the
+knees and shooting himself up again.
+
+"What does she want?"
+
+"She wants you to be there."
+
+"Me! Why?"
+
+"Because she's taken a deuce of a fancy to you."
+
+"Really!"
+
+An iceberg had entered the voice now.
+
+"Yes, thinks you the smartest woman in London, and all that. So you
+are."
+
+"I'm very sorry, but even the smartest woman in London can't throw over
+the Brayley's. Take another box for the second."
+
+Lord Holme looked fearfully sulky and lounged out of the room.
+
+On the following morning he strode into Lady Holme's boudoir about
+twelve with a radiant face.
+
+"It's all right!" he exclaimed. "Talk of diplomatists! I ought to be an
+ambassador."
+
+He flung himself into a chair, grinning with satisfaction like a
+schoolboy.
+
+"What is it?" asked Lady Holme, looking up from her writing-table.
+
+"I've been to Lady Brayley, explained the whole thing, and got us both
+off. After all, she was a friend of my mother's, and knew me in kilts
+and all that, so she ought to be ready to do me a favour. She looked
+a bit grim, but she's done it. You've--only got to tip her a note of
+thanks."
+
+"You're mad then, Fritz!"
+
+Lady Holme stood up suddenly.
+
+"Never saner."
+
+He put one hand into the breast pocket of his coat and pulled out an
+envelope.
+
+"Here's what she says to you."
+
+Lady Holme tore the note open.
+
+
+            "BRAYLEY HOUSE, W.
+
+  "DEAR VIOLA,--Holme tells me you made a mistake when you accepted
+  my invitation for the first, and that you have long been pledged
+  to be present on that date at some theatrical performance or other.
+  I am sorry I did not know sooner, but of course I release you with
+  pleasure from your engagement with me, and I have already filled up
+  your places.--Believe me, yours always sincerely,
+
+            "MARTHA BRAYLEY."
+
+
+Lady Holme read this note carefully, folded it up, laid it quietly on
+the writing-table and repeated:
+
+"You're mad, Fritz."
+
+"What d'you mean--mad?"
+
+"You've made Martha Brayley my enemy for life."
+
+"Rubbish!"
+
+"I beg your pardon. And for--for--"
+
+She stopped. It was wiser not to go on. Perhaps her face spoke for her,
+even to so dull an observer as Lord Holme, for he suddenly said, with a
+complete change of tone:
+
+"I forgave you about Carey."
+
+"Oh, I see! You want a _quid pro quo_. Thank you, Fritz."
+
+"Don't forget to tip Lady Brayley a note of thanks," he said rather
+loudly, getting up from his chair.
+
+"Oh, thanks! You certainly ought to be an ambassador--at the court of
+some savage monarch."
+
+He said nothing, but walked out of the room whistling the refrain about
+Ina.
+
+When he had gone Lady Holme sat down and wrote two notes. One was to
+Lady Brayley and was charmingly apologetic, saying that the confusion
+was entirely owing to Fritz's muddle-headedness, and that she was in
+despair at her misfortune--which was almost literally true. The other
+was to Sir Donald Ulford, begging him to join them in their box on the
+first, and asking whether it was possible to persuade Mr. and Mrs. Leo
+Ulford to come with him. If he thought so she would go at once and leave
+cards on Mrs. Ulford, whom she was longing to know.
+
+Both notes went off by hand before lunch.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE Ulfords accepted for the first. Lady Holme left cards on Mrs.
+Leo and told her husband that the box was filled up. He received the
+information with indifference. So long as his wife was there to please
+Miss Schley, and Mr. Laycock to "give her a hand and show 'em all
+whether she was popular," he was satisfied. Having gained his point,
+he was once again in excellent humour. Possibly Lady Holme would have
+appreciated his large gaieties more if she had not divined their cause.
+But she expressed no dissatisfaction with them, and indeed increased
+them by her own brilliant serenity during the days that intervened
+between the Martha Brayley incident and the first night.
+
+Lord Holme had no suspicion that during these days she was inwardly
+debating whether she would go to the theatre or not.
+
+It would be very easy to be unwell. She was going out incessantly and
+could be over-fatigued. She could have woman's great stand-by in moments
+of crisis--a bad attack of neuralgia. It was the simplest matter in the
+world. The only question was--all things considered, was it worth while?
+By "all things considered" she meant Leo Ulford. The touch of Fritz in
+him made him a valuable ally at this moment. Fritz and Miss Schley were
+not going to have things quite all their own way. And then Mrs. Leo! She
+would put Fritz next the ear-trumpet. She had enough sense of humour to
+smile to herself at the thought of him there. On the whole, she fancied
+the neuralgia would not attack her at the critical instant.
+
+Only when she thought of what her husband had said about the American's
+desire for her presence did she hesitate again. Her suspicions were
+aroused. Miss Schley was not anxious that she should be conspicuously
+in the theatre merely because she was the smartest woman in London. That
+was certain. Besides, she was not the smartest woman in London. She was
+far too well-born to be that in these great days of the _demi-mondaine_.
+She remembered Robin Pierce's warning at the Arkell House
+ball--"Consider yourselves enemies for no reasons or secret woman's
+reasons. It's safer."
+
+When do women want the bulky, solid reasons obtusely demanded by men
+before they can be enemies? Where man insists on an insult, a blow, they
+will be satisfied with a look--perhaps not even at them but only at the
+skirt of their gown--with a turn of the head, with nothing at all. For
+what a man calls nothing can be the world and all that there is in it
+to a woman. Lady Holme knew that she and the American had been enemies
+since the moment when the latter had moved with the tiny steps that
+so oddly caricatured her own individual walk down the stairs at the
+Carlton. She wanted no tiresome reasons; nor did Miss Schley. Robin was
+right, of course. He understood women. But then--?
+
+Should she go to the theatre?
+
+The night came and she went. Whether an extraordinary white lace gown,
+which arrived from Paris in the morning, and fitted too perfectly for
+words, had anything to do with the eventual decision was not known to
+anybody but herself.
+
+Boxes are no longer popular in London except at the Opera. The British
+Theatre was new, and the management, recognising that people prefer
+stalls, had given up all the available space to them, and only left room
+for two large boxes, which faced each other on a level with the dress
+circle and next the stage. Lord Holme had one. Mrs. Wolfstein had taken
+the other.
+
+Miss Schley's personal success in London brought together a rather
+special audience. There were some of the usual people who go to first
+nights--critics, ladies who describe dresses, fashionable lawyers and
+doctors. But there were also numbers of people who are scarcely ever
+seen on these occasions, people who may be found in the ground and grand
+tier boxes at Covent Garden during the summer season. These thronged the
+stalls, and every one of them was a dear friend of Lady Holme's.
+Among them were Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Sally Perceval with her
+magnificently handsome and semi-idiotic husband, old Lady Blower, in a
+green cap that suggested the bathing season, Robin Pierce and Mr. Bry.
+Smart Americans were scattered all over the house. Most of them had
+already seen the play in New York during the preceding winter, and
+nearly everyone in the stalls had seen the French original in Paris. The
+French piece had been quite shocking and quite delicious. Every Royalty
+_de passage_ in Paris had been to see it, and one wandering monarch
+had gone three nights running, and had laughed until his
+gentleman-in-waiting thought the heir to his throne was likely to
+succeed much sooner than was generally expected.
+
+The Holmes came in early. Lady Holme hated arriving anywhere early, but
+Lord Holme was in such a prodigious fuss about being in plenty of time
+to give Miss Schley a "rousin' welcome," that she yielded to his bass
+protestations, and had the satisfaction of entering their box at least
+seven minutes before the curtain went up. The stalls, of course, were
+empty, and as they gradually filled she saw the faces of her friends
+looking up at her with an amazement that under other circumstances might
+have been amusing, but under these was rather irritating. Mr. Laycock
+arrived two minutes after they did, and was immediately engaged in a
+roaring conversation by Fritz. He was a man who talked a great deal
+without having anything to say, who had always had much success with
+women, perhaps because he had always treated them very badly, who
+dressed, danced and shot well, and who had never, even for a moment,
+really cared for anyone but himself. A common enough type.
+
+Sir Donald appeared next, looking even more ghostly than usual. He sat
+down by Lady Holme, a little behind her. He seemed depressed, but the
+expression in his pale blue eyes when they first rested upon her made
+her thoroughly realise one thing--that it was one of her conquering
+nights. His eyes travelled quickly from her face to her throat, to
+her gown. She wore no jewels. Sir Donald had a fastidious taste in
+beauty--the taste that instinctively rejects excess of any kind. Her
+appeal to it had never been so great as to-night. She knew it, and felt
+that she had never found Sir Donald so attractive as to-night.
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Ulford came in just as the curtain was going up, and the
+introductions had to be gone through with a certain mysterious caution,
+and the sitting arrangements made with as little noise as possible. Lady
+Holme managed them deftly. Mr. Laycock sat nearest the stage, then Leo
+Ulford next to her, on her right. Sir Donald was on her other side,
+Mrs. Leo sat in the place of honour, with Lord Holme between her and Sir
+Donald. She was intensely pink. Even her gown was of that colour, and
+she wore a pink aigrette in her hair, fastened with a diamond ornament.
+Her thin, betraying throat was clasped by the large dog-collar she had
+worn at Arkell House. She cast swift, bird-like glances, full of a
+sort of haggard inquiry, towards Lady Holme as she settled down in
+her arm-chair in the corner. Lord Holme looked at her and at her
+ear-trumpet, and Lady Holme was glad she had decided not to have
+neuralgia. There are little compensations about all women even in the
+tiresome moments of their lives. Whether this moment was going to be
+tiresome or not she could not yet decide.
+
+The Wolfstein party had come in at the same time as the Leo Ulfords,
+and the box opposite presented an interesting study of Jewish types.
+For Mrs. Wolfstein and "Henry" were accompanied by four immensely
+rich compatriots, three of whom were members of the syndicate that was
+"backing" Miss Schley. The fourth was the wife of one of them, and a
+cousin of Henry's, whom she resembled, but on a greatly enlarged
+scale. Both she and Amalia blazed with jewels, and both were slightly
+overdressed and looked too animated. Lady Holme saw Sir Donald glance at
+them, and then again at her, and began to think more definitely that the
+evening would not be tiresome.
+
+Leo Ulford seemed at present forced into a certain constraint by the
+family element in the box. He looked at his father sideways, then at
+Lady Holme, drummed one hand on his knee, and was evidently uncertain of
+himself. During the opening scene of the play he found an opportunity to
+whisper to Lady Holme:
+
+"I never can talk when pater's there!"
+
+She whispered back:
+
+"We mustn't talk now."
+
+Then she looked towards the stage with apparent interest. Mrs. Leo sat
+sideways with her trumpet lifted up towards her ear, Lord Holme had
+his eyes fixed on the stage, and held his hands ready for the "rousin'
+welcome." Mr. Laycock, at the end of the row, was also all attention.
+Lady Holme glanced from one to the other, and murmured to Sir Donald
+with a smile:
+
+"I think we shall find to-night that the claque is not abolished in
+England."
+
+He raised his eyebrows and looked distressed.
+
+"I have very little hope of her acting," he murmured back.
+
+Lady Holme put her fan to her lips.
+
+"'Sh! No sacrilege!" she said in an under voice.
+
+She saw Leo Ulford shoot an angry glance at his father. Mrs. Wolfstein
+nodded and smiled at her from the opposite box, and it struck Lady Holme
+that her smile was more definitely malicious than usual, and that her
+large black eyes were full of a sort of venomous anticipation. Mrs.
+Wolfstein had at all times an almost frightfully expressive face.
+To-night it had surely discarded every shred of reticence, and
+proclaimed an eager expectation of something which Lady Holme could not
+divine, but which must surely be very disagreeable to her. What could it
+possibly be? And was it in any way connected with Miss Schley's anxiety
+that she should be there that night? She began to wish that the American
+would appear, but Miss Schley had nothing to do in the first act till
+near the end, and then had only one short scene to bring down the
+curtain. Lady Holme knew this because she had seen the play in Paris.
+She thought the American version very dull. The impropriety had been
+removed and with it all the fun. People began to yawn and to assume
+the peculiar blank expression--the bankrupt face--that is indicative of
+thwarted anticipation. Only the Americans who had seen the piece in New
+York preserved their lively looks and an appearance of being on the _qui
+vive_.
+
+Lord Holme's blunt brown features gradually drooped, seemed to become
+definitely elongated. As time went on he really began to look almost
+lantern-jawed. He bent forward and tried to catch Mr. Laycock's eye and
+to telegraph an urgent question, but only succeeded in meeting the surly
+blue eyes of Leo Ulford, whom he met to-night for the first time. In
+his despair he turned towards Mrs. Leo, and at once encountered the
+ear-trumpet. He glanced at it with apprehension, and, after a moment of
+vital hesitation, was about to pour into it the provender, "Have you
+any notion when she's comin' on?" when there was a sudden rather languid
+slapping of applause, and he jerked round hastily to find Miss Schley
+already on the stage and welcomed without any of the assistance which he
+was specially there to give. He lifted belated hands, but met a glance
+from his wife which made him drop them silently. There was a satire in
+her eyes, a sort of humorous, half-urging patronage that pierced the
+hide of his self-satisfied and lethargic mind. She seemed sitting there
+ready to beat time to his applause, nod her head to it as to a childish
+strain of jigging music. And this apparent preparation for a semi-comic,
+semi-pitiful benediction sent his hands suddenly to his knees.
+
+He stared at the stage. Miss Schley was looking wonderfully like Viola,
+he thought, on the instant, more like than she did in real life; like
+Viola gone to the bad, though become a very reticent, yet very definite,
+_cocotte_. There was not much in the scene, but Miss Schley, without
+apparent effort and with a profound demureness, turned the dulness of
+it into something that was--not French, certainly not that--but that was
+quite as outrageous as the French had been, though in a different way;
+something without definite nationality, but instinct with the slyness
+of acute and unscrupulous womankind. The extraordinary thing was the
+marvellous resemblance this acute and unscrupulous womanhood bore to
+Lady Holme's, even through all its obvious difference from hers. All her
+little mannerisms of voice, look, manner and movement, were there but
+turned towards commonness, even towards a naive but very self-conscious
+impropriety. Had she been a public performer instead of merely a woman
+of the world, the whole audience must have at once recognised the
+imitation. As it was, her many friends in the house noticed it, and
+during the short progress of the scene various heads were turned in her
+direction, various faces glanced up at the big box in which she sat,
+leaning one arm on the ledge, and looking towards Miss Schley with an
+expression of quiet observation--a little indifferent--on her white
+face. Even Sir Donald, who was next to her, and who once--in the most
+definite moment of Miss Schley's ingenious travesty--looked at her for
+an instant, could not discern that she was aware of what was amusing or
+enraging all her acquaintances.
+
+Naturally she had grasped the situation at once, had discovered at once
+why Miss Schley was anxious for her to be there. As she sat in the
+box looking on at this gross impertinence, she seemed to herself to be
+watching herself after a long _degringolade_, which had brought her, not
+to the gutter, but to the smart restaurant, the smart music-hall,
+the smart night club; the smart everything else that is beyond the
+borderland of even a lax society. This was Miss Schley's comment upon
+her. The sting of it lay in this fact, that it followed immediately
+upon the heels of the unpleasant scene at Arkell House. Otherwise, she
+thought it would not have troubled her. Now it did trouble her. She felt
+not only indignant with Miss Schley. She felt also secretly distressed
+in a more subtle way. Miss Schley's performance was calculated, coming
+at this moment, to make her world doubtful just when it had been turned
+from doubt. A good caricature fixes the attention upon the oddities, or
+the absurdities, latent in the original. But this caricature did more.
+It suggested hidden possibilities which she, by her own indiscreet
+action at the ball, had made perhaps to seem probabilities to many
+people.
+
+Here, before her friends, was set a woman strangely like her, but
+evidently a bad woman. Lady Holme was certain that the result of Miss
+Schley's performance would be that were she to do things now which, done
+before the Arkell House ball and this first night, would not have been
+noticed, or would have been merely smiled at, they would be commented
+upon with acrimony, exaggerated, even condemned.
+
+Miss Schley was turning upon her one of those mirrors which distorts by
+enlarging. Society would be likely to see her permanently distorted, and
+not only in mannerisms but in character.
+
+It happened that this fact was specially offensive to her on this
+particular evening, and at this particular moment of her life.
+
+While she sat there and watched the scene run its course, and saw,
+without seeming to see, the effect it had upon those whom she knew well
+in the house--saw Mrs. Wolfstein's eager delight in it, Lady Manby's
+broad amusement, Robin Pierce's carefully-controlled indignation,
+Mr. Bry's sardonic and always cold gratification, Lady Cardington's
+surprised, half-tragic wonder--she was oscillating between two courses,
+one a course of reserve, of stern self-control and abnegation, the other
+a course of defiance, of reckless indulgence of the strong temper that
+dwelt within her, and that occasionally showed itself for a moment, as
+it had on the evening of Miss Filberte's fiasco. That temper was flaming
+now unseen. Was she going to throw cold water over the flame, or to fan
+it? She did not know.
+
+When the curtain fell, the critics, who sometimes seem to enjoy
+personally what they call very sad and disgraceful in print, were
+smiling at one another. The blank faces of the men about town in the
+stalls were shining almost unctuously. The smart Americans were busily
+saying to everyone, "Didn't we say so?" The whole house was awake. Miss
+Schley might not be much of an actress. Numbers of people were already
+bustling about to say that she could not act at all. But she had
+banished dulness. She had shut the yawning lips, and stopped that uneasy
+cough which is the expression of the relaxed mind rather than of the
+relaxed throat.
+
+Lady Holme sat back a little in the box.
+
+"What d'you think of her?" she said to Sir Donald. "I think she's rather
+piquant, not anywhere near Granier, of course, but still--"
+
+"I think her performance entirely odious," he said, with an unusual
+emphasis that was almost violent. "Entirely odious."
+
+He got up from his seat, striking his thin fingers against the palms of
+his hands.
+
+"Vulgar and offensive," he said, almost as if to himself, and with a
+sort of passion. "Vulgar and offensive!"
+
+Suddenly he turned away and went out of the box.
+
+"I say--"
+
+Lady Holme, who had been watching Sir Donald's disordered exit, looked
+round to Leo.
+
+"I say--" he repeated. "What's up with pater?"
+
+"He doesn't seem to be enjoying the play."
+
+Leo Ulford looked unusually grave, even thoughtful, as if he were
+pondering over some serious question. He kept his blue eyes fixed upon
+Lady Holme. At last he said, in a voice much lower than usual:
+
+"Poor chap!"
+
+"Who's a poor chap?"
+
+Leo jerked his head towards the door.
+
+"Your father? Why?"
+
+"Why--at his age!"
+
+The last words were full of boyish contempt.
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+"Yes, you do. To be like that at his age. What's the good? As if--" He
+smiled slowly at her. "I'm glad I'm young," he said.
+
+"I'm glad you're young too," she answered. "But you're quite wrong about
+Sir Donald."
+
+She let her eyes rest on his. He shook his head.
+
+"No, I'm not. I guessed it that day at the Carlton. All through lunch he
+looked at you."
+
+"But what has all this to do with Miss Schley's performance?"
+
+"Because she's something like you, but low down, where you'd never go."
+
+He drew his chair a little closer to hers.
+
+"Would you?" he added, almost in a whisper.
+
+Mr. Laycock, who was in raptures over Miss Schley's performance, had got
+up to speak to Fritz, but found the latter being steadily hypnotised by
+Mrs. Leo's trumpet, which went up towards his mouth whenever he opened
+it. He bellowed distracted nothings but could not make her hear,
+obtaining no more fortunate result than a persistent flutter of pink
+eyelids, and a shrill, reiterated "The what? The what?"
+
+A sharp tap came presently on the box door, and Mrs. Wolfstein's painted
+face appeared. Lord Holme sprang up with undisguised relief.
+
+"What d'you think of Pimpernel? Ah, Mr. Laycock--I heard your faithful
+hands."
+
+"Stunnin'!" roared Lord Holme, "simply stunnin'!"
+
+"Stunnin'! stunnin'!" exclaimed Mr. Laycock; "Rippin'! There's no other
+word. Simply rippin'!"
+
+"The what? The what?" cried Mrs. Ulford.
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein bent down, with expansive affection, over Lady Holme's
+chair, and clasped the left hand which Lady Holme carelessly raised to a
+level with her shoulder.
+
+"You dear person! Nice of you to come, and in such a gown too! The
+angels wear white lace thrown together by Victorine--it is Victorine? I
+was certain!--I'm sure. D'you like Pimpernel?"
+
+Her too lustrous eyes--even Mrs. Wolfstein's eyes looked
+over-dressed--devoured Lady Holme, and her large, curving features were
+almost riotously interrogative.
+
+"Yes," Lady Holme said. "Quite."
+
+"She's startled everybody."
+
+"Startled!--why?"
+
+"Oh, well--she has! There's money in it, don't you think?"
+
+"Henry," who had accompanied his wife, and who was standing sideways
+at the back of the box looking like a thief in the night, came a step
+forward at the mention of money.
+
+"I'm afraid I'm no judge of that. Your husband would know better."
+
+"Plenty of money," said "Henry," in a low voice that seemed to issue
+from the bridge of his nose; "it ought to bring a good six thousand
+into the house for the four weeks. That's--for Miss Schley--for the
+Syndicate--ten per cent. on the gross, and twenty-five per cent.--"
+
+He found himself in mental arithmetic.
+
+"The--swan with the golden eggs!" said Lady Holme, lightly, turning once
+more to Leo Ulford. "You mustn't kill Miss Schley."
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein looked at Mr. Laycock and murmured to him:
+
+"Pimpernel does any killing that's going about--for herself. What d'you
+say, Franky?"
+
+They went out of the box together, followed by "Henry," who was still
+buzzing calculations, like a Jewish bee.
+
+Lord Holme resolutely tore himself from the ear-trumpet, and was
+preparing to follow, with the bellowed excuse that he was "sufferin'
+from toothache" and had been ordered to "do as much smokin' as
+possible," when the curtain rose on the second act.
+
+Miss Schley was engaged to a supper-party that evening and did not wish
+to be late. Lord Holme sat down again looking scarcely pleasant.
+
+"Do as much--the what?" cried Mrs. Ulford, holding the trumpet at right
+angles to her pink face.
+
+Leo Ulford leant backwards and hissed "Hush!" at her. She looked at him
+and then at Lady Holme, and a sudden expression of old age came into her
+bird-like face and seemed to overspread her whole body. She dropped the
+trumpet and touched the diamonds that glittered in the front of her low
+gown with trembling hands.
+
+Mr. Laycock slipped into the box when the curtain had been up two or
+three minutes, but Sir Donald did not return.
+
+"I b'lieve he's bolted," Leo whispered to Lady Holme. "Just like him."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Oh!--I'm here, for one thing."
+
+He looked at her victoriously.
+
+"You'll have a letter from him to-morrow. Poor old chap!"
+
+He spoke contemptuously.
+
+For the first time Lord Holme seemed consciously and unfavourably
+observant of his wife and Leo. His under-jaw began to move. But Miss
+Schley came on to the stage again, and he thrust his head eagerly
+forward.
+
+During the rest of the evening Miss Schley did not relax her ingenious
+efforts of mimicry, but she took care not to make them too prominent.
+She had struck her most resonant note in the first act, and during the
+two remaining acts she merely kept her impersonation to its original
+lines. Lady Holme watched the whole performance imperturbably, but
+before the final curtain fell she knew that she was not going to
+throw cold water on that flame which was burning within her. Fritz's
+behaviour, perhaps, decided which of the two actions should be carried
+out--the douching or the fanning. Possibly Leo Ulford had something to
+say in the matter too. Or did the faces of friends below in the stalls
+play their part in the silent drama which moved step by step with the
+spoken drama on the stage? Lady Holme did not ask questions of herself.
+When Mr. Laycock and Fritz were furiously performing the duties of a
+claque at the end of the play, she got up smiling, and nodded to Mrs.
+Wolfstein in token of her pleasure in Miss Schley's success, her opinion
+that it had been worthily earned. As she nodded she touched one hand
+with the other, making a silent applause that Mrs. Wolfstein and all her
+friends might see. Then she let Leo Ulford put on her cloak and called
+pretty words down Mrs. Leo's trumpet, all the while nearly deafened by
+Fritz's demonstrations, which even outran Mr. Laycock's.
+
+When at last they died away she said to Leo:
+
+"We are going on to the Elwyns. Shall you be there?"
+
+He stood over her, while Mrs. Ulford watched him, drooping her head
+sideways.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"We can talk it all over quietly. Fritz!"
+
+"What's that about the Elwyns?" said Lord Holme.
+
+"I was telling Mr. Ulford that we are going on there."
+
+"I'm not. Never heard of it."
+
+Lady Holme was on the point of retorting that it was he who had told her
+to accept the invitation on the ground that "the Elwyns always do you
+better than anyone in London, whether they're second-raters or not," but
+a look in Leo Ulford's eyes checked her.
+
+"Very well," she said. "Go to the club if you like; but I must peep
+in for five minutes. Mrs. Ulford, didn't you think Miss Schley rather
+delicious--?"
+
+She went out of the box with one hand on a pink arm, talking gently into
+the trumpet.
+
+"You goin' to the Elwyns?" said Lord Holme, gruffly, to Leo Ulford as
+they got their coats and prepared to follow.
+
+"Depends on my wife. If she's done up--"
+
+"Ah!" said Lord Holme, striking a match, and holding out his cigarette
+case, regardless of regulations.
+
+A momentary desire to look in at the Elwyns' possessed him. Then he
+thought of a supper-party and forgot it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+MRS. WOLFSTEIN was right. There was money in Miss Schley's performance.
+Her sly impropriety appealed with extraordinary force to the peculiar
+respectability characteristic of the British temperament, and her
+celebrity, hitherto mainly social, was suddenly and enormously
+increased. Already a popular person, she became a popular actress, and
+was soon as well-known to the world in the streets and the suburbs as
+to the world in the drawing-rooms of Mayfair. And this public celebrity
+greatly increased the value that was put upon her in private--especially
+the value put upon her by men.
+
+The average man adores being connected openly with the woman who is the
+rage of the moment. It flatters his vanity and makes him feel good
+all over. It even frequently turns his head and makes him almost as
+intoxicated as a young girl with adulation received at her first ball.
+
+The combination of Miss Schley herself and Miss Schley's celebrity--or
+notoriety--had undoubtedly turned Lord Holme's head. Perhaps he had not
+the desire to conceal the fact. Certainly he had not the finesse. He
+presented his turned head to the world with an audacious simplicity that
+was almost laughable, and that had in it an element of boyishness not
+wholly unattractive to those who looked on--the casual ones to whom
+even the tragedies of a highly-civilised society bring but a quiet and
+cynical amusement.
+
+Lady Holme was not one of these. Her strong temper was token of a vivid
+temperament. Till now this vivid temperament had been rocked in the
+cradle of an easy, a contented, a very successful life. Such storms as
+had come to her had quickly passed away. The sun had never been far off.
+Her egoism had been constantly flattered. Her will had been perpetually
+paramount. Even the tyranny of Lord Holme had been but as the tyranny
+of a selfish, thoughtless, pleasure-seeking boy who, after all, was
+faithful to her and was fond of her. His temperamental indifference to
+any feelings but his own had been often concealed and overlaid by his
+strong physical passion for his wife's beauty, his profound satisfaction
+in having carried off and in possessing a woman admired and sought by
+many others.
+
+Suddenly life presented to Lady Holme its seamy side; Fate attacking
+her in her woman's vanity, her egoism, even in her love. The vision
+startled. The blow stung. She was conscious of confusion, of cloud, then
+of a terrible orderliness, of a clear light. In the confusion she seemed
+to hear voices never heard before, voices that dared to jeer at her; in
+the cloud to see phantoms of gigantic size menacing her, impending over
+her. The orderliness, the clear light were more frightful to her. They
+left less to her imagination; had, as it were, no ragged edges. In
+them she faced a definite catastrophe, saw it whole, as one sees a near
+object in the magical atmosphere of the East, outlined with burning
+blue, quivering with relentless gold. She saw herself in the dust,
+pelted, mocked at.
+
+That seemed at first to be incredible. But she saw it so plainly that
+she could not even pretend to herself that she was deceived by some
+unusual play of light or combination of shadows. What she saw--was:
+
+Her husband had thrown off his allegiance to her and transferred his
+admiration, perhaps his affection, to the woman who had most deftly and
+delicately insulted her in the face of all her world. And he had done
+this with the most abominable publicity. That was what she saw in a
+clear light like the light of the East. That was what sent a lash across
+her temperament, scarring it perhaps, but waking it into all it could
+ever have of life. In each woman there is hidden a second woman, more
+fierce and tender, more evil and good, more strong and fervent than the
+woman who hides her in the ordinary hours of life; a woman who weeps
+blood where the other woman weeps tears, who strikes with a flaming
+sword where the other woman strikes with a willow wand.
+
+This woman now rose up in Lady Holme, rose up to do battle.
+
+The laughing, frivolous world was all unconscious of her. Lord Holme was
+unconscious of her. But she was at last fully conscious of herself.
+
+This woman remembered Robin Pierce's odd belief and the light words
+with which she had chastised it. He had persistently kept faith in, and
+sought for, a far-away being. But she was a being of light and glory.
+His kernel of the husk was still a siren, but a siren with a heart, with
+an exquisite imagination, with a fragrance of dreams about her, a lilt
+of eternal music in her voice, the beaming, wonder of things unearthly
+in her eyes. Poor Robin! Lady Holme found it in her heart to pity him
+as she realised herself. But then she turned her pity aside and
+concentrated it elsewhere. The egoism of her was not dead though the
+hidden woman had sprung up in vivid life. Her intellect was spurred
+into energy by the suffering of her pride and of her heart. Memory was
+restless and full of the passion of recall.
+
+She remembered the night when she softly drew up the hood of her
+dressing-gown above her head and, rocking herself to and fro, murmured
+the "Allah-Akbar" of a philosophic fatalist--"I will live for the day. I
+will live for the night." What an absurd patter that was on the lips
+of a woman. And she remembered the conversation with Fritz that had
+preceded her monologue. She had asked him then whether he could love
+her if her beauty were taken from her. It had never occurred to her that
+while her beauty still remained her spell upon him might be weakened,
+might be broken. That it was broken now she did not say to herself.
+All she did say to herself was that she must strike an effective blow
+against this impertinent woman. She had some pride but not enough to
+keep her passive. She was not one of those women who would rather lose
+all they have than struggle to keep it. She meant to struggle, but she
+had no wish that the world should know what she was doing. Pride rose
+in her when she thought of cold eyes watching the battle, cold voices
+commenting on it--Amalia Wolfstein's eyes, Mr. Bry's voice, a hundred
+other eyes and voices. Her quickened intellect, her woman's heart would
+teach her to be subtle. The danger lay in her temper. But since the
+scene at Arkell House she had thoroughly realised its impetuosity and
+watched it warily as one watches an enemy. She did not intend to be
+ruined by anything within her. The outside chances of life were many
+enough and deadly enough to deal with. Strength and daring were needed
+to ward them off. The chances that had their origin within the soul,
+the character--not really chances at all--must be controlled, foreseen,
+forestalled.
+
+And yet she had not douched the flame of defiance which she had felt
+burning within her on the night of Pimpernel Schley's first appearance
+on the London stage. She had fanned it. At the Elwyns' ball she had
+fanned it. Temper had led her that night. Deliberately, and knowing
+perfectly well who was her guide, she had let it lead her. She had been
+like a human being who says, "To do this will be a sin. Very well,
+I choose to sin. But I will sin carefully." At the Elwyns she had
+discovered why her husband had not come with her. She had stayed late to
+please Leo Ulford. Mr. Laycock had come in about two in the morning and
+had described to Leo the festivity devised by Lord Holme in honour
+of Miss Schley, at which he had just been present. And Leo Ulford had
+repeated the description to her. She had deceived him into thinking that
+she had known of the supper-party and approved of it. But, after this
+deception, she had given a looser rein to her temper. She had let
+herself go, careless whether she set the poor pink eyelids of Mrs. Leo
+fluttering or not.
+
+The hint of Fritz which she recognised in Leo Ulford had vaguely
+attracted her to him from the first. How her world would have laughed at
+such a domestic sentiment! She found herself wondering whether it were
+Miss Schley's physical resemblance to her which had first attracted
+Fritz, the touch of his wife in a woman who was not his wife and who was
+what men call "a rascal." Perhaps Fritz loved Miss Schley's imitation
+of her. She thought a great deal about that--turning it over and over in
+her mind, bringing to bear on it the white light of her knowledge of her
+husband's character. Did he see in the American his wife transformed,
+made common, sly, perhaps wicked, set on the outside edge of decent
+life, or further--over the border? And did he delight in that? If
+so, ought she not to--? Then her mind was busy. Should she change? If
+herself changed were his ideal, why not give him what he wanted? Why let
+another woman give it to him? But at this point she recognised a fact
+recognised by thousands of women with exasperation, sometimes with
+despair--that men would often hate in their wives the thing that draws
+them to women not their wives. The Pimpernel Schleys of the world
+know this masculine propensity of seeking different things--opposites,
+even--in the wife and the woman beyond the edge of the hearthstone, a
+propensity perhaps more tragic to wives than any other that exists in
+husbands. And having recognised this fact, Lady Holme knew that it would
+be worse than useless for her to imitate Miss Schley's imitation of her.
+Then, travelling along the road of thought swiftly as women in such a
+case always travel, she reached another point. She began to consider
+the advice of Robin Pierce, given before she had begun to feel with such
+intensity, to consider it as a soldier might consider a plan of campaign
+drawn up by another.
+
+Should she, instead of descending, of following the demure steps of the
+American to the lower places, strive to ascend?
+
+Could she ascend? Was Robin Pierce right? She thought for a long time
+about his conception of her. The singing woman; would she be the most
+powerful enemy that could confront Miss Schley? And, if she would be,
+could the singing woman be made continuous in the speech and the actions
+of the life without music? She remembered a man she had known who
+stammered when he spoke, but never stammered when he sang. And she
+thought she resembled this man. Robin Pierce had always believed that
+she could speak without the stammer even as she sang without it. She had
+never cared to. She had trusted absolutely in her beauty. Now her trust
+was shaken. She thought of the crutch.
+
+Realising herself she had said within herself, "Poor Robin!" seeing
+perhaps the tigress where he saw the angel. Now she asked herself
+whether the angel could conquer where the tigress might fail. People had
+come round her like beggars who have heard the chink of gold and she had
+showed them an empty purse. Could she show them something else? And if
+she could, would her husband join the beggars? Would he care to have
+even one piece of gold?
+
+Whether Lord Holme's obvious infatuation had carried him very far she
+did not know. She did not stop to ask. A woman capable, as she was, of
+retrospective jealousy, an egoist accustomed to rule, buffeted in
+heart and pride, is swift not sluggish. And then how can one know these
+things? Jealousy rushes because it is ignorant.
+
+Lord Holme and she were apparently on good terms. She was subtle, he was
+careless. As she did not interfere with him his humour was excellent.
+She had carried self-control so far as never to allude to the fact
+that she knew about the supper-party. Yet it had actually got into the
+papers. Paragraphs had been written about a wonderful ornament of ice,
+representing the American eagle perched on the wrist of a glittering
+maiden, which had stood in the middle of the table. Of course she had
+seen them, and of course Lord Holme thought she had not seen them as she
+had never spoken of them. He went his way rejoicing, and there seemed
+to be sunshine in the Cadogan Square house. And meanwhile the world was
+smiling at the apparent triumph of impertinence, and wondering how long
+it would last, how far it would go. The few who were angry--Sir Donald
+was one of them--were in a mean minority.
+
+Robin Pierce was angry too, but not with so much single-heartedness as
+was Sir Donald. It could not quite displease him if the Holmes drifted
+apart. Yet he was fond enough of Lady Holme, and he was subtle enough,
+to be sorry for any sorrow of hers, and to understand it--at any rate,
+partially--without much explanation. Perhaps he would have been more
+sorry if Leo Ulford had not come into Lady Holme's life, and if the
+defiance within her had not driven her into an intimacy that distressed
+Mrs. Leo and puzzled Sir Donald.
+
+Robin's time in London was very nearly at an end. The season was at its
+height. Every day was crowded with engagements. It was almost impossible
+to find a quiet moment even to give to a loved one. But Robin was
+determined to have at least one hour with Lady Holme before he started
+for Italy. He told her so, and begged her to arrange it. She put him off
+again and again, then at last made an engagement, then broke it. In her
+present condition of mind to break faith with a man was a pleasure with
+a bitter savour. But Robin was not to be permanently avoided. He had
+obstinacy. He meant to have his hour, and perhaps Lady Holme always
+secretly meant that he should have it. At any rate she made another
+appointment and kept it.
+
+She came one afternoon to his house in Half Moon Street. She had never
+been there before. She had never meant to go there. To do so was an
+imprudence. That fact was another of the pleasures with a bitter savour.
+
+Robin met her at the head of the stairs, with an air of still excitement
+not common in his look and bearing. He followed her into the blue room
+where Sir Donald had talked with Carey. The "_Danseuse de Tunisie_"
+still presided over it, holding her little marble fan. The open
+fireplace was filled with roses. The tea-table was already set by the
+great square couch. Robin shut the door and took out a matchbox.
+
+"I am going to make tea," he said.
+
+"Bachelor fashion?"
+
+She sat down on the couch and looked round quickly, taking in all the
+details of the room. He saw her eyes rest on the woman with the fan, but
+she said nothing about it. He lit a silver spirit lamp and then sat down
+beside her.
+
+"At last!" he said.
+
+Lady Holme leaned back in her corner. She was dressed in black, with a
+small, rather impertinent black toque, in which one pale blue wing of a
+bird stood up. Her face looked gay and soft, and Robin, who had cunning,
+recognised that quality of his in her.
+
+"I oughtn't to be here."
+
+"Absurd. Why not?"
+
+"Fritz has a jealous temperament."
+
+She spoke with a simple naturalness that moved the diplomat within him
+to a strong admiration.
+
+"You can act far better than Miss Schley," he said, with intentional
+bluntness.
+
+"I love her acting."
+
+"I'm going away. I shan't see you for an age. Don't give me a theatrical
+performance to-day."
+
+"Can a woman do anything else?"
+
+"Yes. She can be a woman."
+
+"That's stupid--or terrible. What a dear little lamp that is! I like
+your room."
+
+Robin looked at the blue-grey linen on the walls, at the pale blue wing
+in her hat, then at her white face.
+
+"Viola," he said, leaning forward, "it's bad to waste anything in this
+life, but the worst thing of all is to waste unhappiness. If I could
+teach you to be niggardly of your tears!"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+She spoke with sudden sharpness.
+
+"I never cry. Nothing's worth a tear," she added.
+
+"Yes, some things are. But not what you are going to weep for."
+
+Her face had changed. The gaiety had gone out of it, and it looked
+hesitating.
+
+"You think I am going to shed tears?" she said. "Why?"
+
+"I am glad you let me tell you. For the loss of nothing--a coin that
+never came out of the mint, that won't pass current anywhere."
+
+"I've lost nothing," she exclaimed, "nothing. You're talking nonsense."
+
+He made no reply, but looked at the small, steady flame of the lamp. She
+followed his eyes, and, when he saw that she was looking at it too, he
+said:
+
+"Isn't a little, steady flame like that beautiful?"
+
+She laughed.
+
+"When it means tea--yes. Does it mean tea?"
+
+"If you can wait a few minutes."
+
+"I suppose I must. Have you heard anything of Mr. Carey?"
+
+Robin looked at her narrowly.
+
+"What made you think of him just then?"
+
+"I don't know. Being here, I suppose. He often comes here, doesn't he?"
+
+"Then this room holds more of his personality than of mine?"
+
+There was an under sound of vexation in his voice.
+
+"Have you heard anything?"
+
+"No. But no doubt he's still in the North with his mother."
+
+"How domestic. I hope there is a stool of repentance in the family
+house."
+
+"I wonder if you could ever repent of anything."
+
+"Do you think there is anything I ought to repent of?"
+
+"Oh, yes."
+
+"What?"
+
+"You might have married a man who knew the truth of you, and you married
+a man incapable of ever knowing it."
+
+He half expected an outburst of anger to follow his daring speech, but
+she sat quite still, looking at him steadily. She had taken off her
+gloves, and her hands lay lightly, one resting on the other.
+
+"You mean, I might have married you."
+
+"I'm not worth much, but at least I could never have betrayed the white
+angel in you."
+
+She leaned towards him and spoke earnestly, almost like a child to an
+older person in whom it has faith.
+
+"Do you think such an angel could do anything in--in this sort of
+world?"
+
+"Modern London?"
+
+She nodded, keeping her eyes still on him. He guessed at once of what
+she was thinking.
+
+"Do anything--is rather vague," he replied evasively. "What sort of
+thing?"
+
+Suddenly she threw off all reserve and let her temper go.
+
+"If an angel were striving with a common American, do you mean to tell
+me you don't know which would go to the wall in our world?" she cried.
+"Robin, you may be a thousand things, but you aren't a fool. Nor am
+I--not _au fond_. And yet I have thought--I have wondered--"
+
+She stopped.
+
+"What?" he asked.
+
+"Whether, if there is an angel in me, it mightn't be as well to trot it
+out."
+
+The self-consciousness of the slang prevented him from hating it.
+
+"Ah!" he said. "When have you wondered?"
+
+"Lately. It's your fault. You have insisted so much upon the existence
+of the celestial being that at last I've become almost credulous. It's
+very absurd and I'm still hanging back."
+
+"Call credulity belief and you needn't be ashamed of it."
+
+"And if I believe, what then?"
+
+"Then a thousand things. Belief sheds strength through all the tissues
+of the mind, the heart, the temperament. Disbelief sheds weakness. The
+one knits together, the other dissolves."
+
+"There are people who think angels frightfully boring company."
+
+"I know."
+
+"Well then?"
+
+Suddenly Robin got up and spoke almost brutally.
+
+"Do you think I don't see that you are trying to find out from me what I
+think would be the best means of--"
+
+The look in her face stopped him.
+
+"I think the water is boiling," he said, going over to the lamp.
+
+"It ought to bubble," she answered quietly.
+
+He lifted up the lid of the silver bowl and peeped in.
+
+"It is bubbling."
+
+For a moment he was busy pouring the water into the teapot. While he did
+this there was a silence between them. Lady Holme got up from the sofa
+and walked about the room. When she came to the "_Danseuse de Tunisie_"
+she stopped in front of it.
+
+"How strange that fan is," she said.
+
+Robin shut the lid of the teapot and came over to her.
+
+"Do you like it?"
+
+"The fan?"
+
+"The whole thing?"
+
+"It's lovely, but I fancy it would have been lovelier without the fan."
+
+"Why?"
+
+She considered, holding her head slightly on one side and half closing
+her eyes.
+
+"The woman's of eternity, but the fan's of a day," she said presently.
+"It belittles her, I think. It makes her _chic_ when she might have
+been--"
+
+She stopped.
+
+"Throw away your fan!" he said in a low, eager voice.
+
+"I?"
+
+"Yes. Be the woman, the eternal woman. You've never been her yet, but
+you could be. Now is the moment. You're unhappy."
+
+"No," she said sharply.
+
+"Yes, you are. Viola, don't imagine I can't understand. You care for him
+and he's hurting you--hurting you by being just himself, all he can ever
+be. It's the fan he cares for."
+
+"And you tell me to throw it away!"
+
+She spoke with sudden passion. They stood still for a moment in front of
+the statuette, looking at each other silently. Then Robin said, with a
+sort of bitter surprise:
+
+"But you can't love him like that!"
+
+"I do."
+
+It gave her an odd, sharp pleasure to speak the truth to him.
+
+"What are you going to do, then?" he asked, after a pause.
+
+He spoke without emotion, accepting the situation.
+
+"To do? What do you mean?"
+
+"Come and sit down. I'll tell you."
+
+He took her hand and led her back to the sofa. When she had sat down, he
+poured out tea, put in cream and gave it to her.
+
+"Nothing to eat," she said.
+
+He poured out his tea and sat down in a chair opposite to her, and close
+to her.
+
+"May I dare to speak frankly?" he asked. "I've known you so long, and
+I've--I've loved you very much, and I still do."
+
+"Go on!" she answered.
+
+"You thought your beauty was everything, that so long as it lasted you
+were safe from unhappiness. Well, to-day you are beautiful, and yet--"
+
+"But what does he care for?" she said. "What do men care for? You
+pretend that it's something romantic, something good even. Really, it's
+impudent--just that--cold and impudent. You're a fool, Robin, you're a
+fool!"
+
+"Am I? Thank God there are men--and men. You can't be what Carey said."
+
+For once he had spoken incautiously. He had blurted out something he
+never meant to say.
+
+"Mr. Carey!" she exclaimed quickly, curiously. "What did Mr. Carey say I
+was?"
+
+"Oh--"
+
+"No, Robin, you are to tell me. No diplomatic lies."
+
+A sudden, almost brutal desire came into him to tell her the truth, to
+revel in plain speaking for once, and to see how she would bear it.
+
+"He said you were an egoist, that you were fine enough in your brilliant
+selfishness to stand quite alone--"
+
+A faint smile moved the narrow corners of her lips at the last words. He
+went on.
+
+"--That your ideal of a real man, the sort of man a woman loses her head
+for, was--"
+
+He stopped. Carey's description of the Lord Holme and Leo Ulford type
+had not been very delicate.
+
+"Was--?" she said, with insistence. "Was--?"
+
+Robin thought how she had hurt him, and said:
+
+"Carey said, a huge mass of bones, muscles, thews, sinews, that cares
+nothing for beauty."
+
+"Beauty! That doesn't care for beauty! But then--?"
+
+"Carey meant--yes, I'm sure Carey meant real beauty."
+
+"What do you mean by 'real beauty'?"
+
+"An inner light that radiates outward, but whose abiding-place is
+hidden--perhaps. But one can't say. One can only understand and love."
+
+"Oh. And Mr. Carey said that. Was he--was he at all that evening as he
+was at Arkell House? Was he talking nonsense or was he serious?"
+
+"Difficult to say! But he was not as he was at Arkell House. Which knows
+you best--Carey or I?"
+
+"Neither of you. I don't know myself."
+
+"What are you going to do?"
+
+"I don't know. The only thing I know is that you can't tell me what to
+do."
+
+"No, I can't."
+
+"But perhaps I can tell you."
+
+She put down her cup and looked at him with a sort of grave kindness
+that he had never seen in her face before.
+
+"What to do?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Give up loving the white angel. Perhaps it isn't there. Perhaps it
+doesn't exist. And if it does--perhaps it's a poor, feeble thing that's
+no good to me, no good to me."
+
+Suddenly she put her arms on the back of the couch, leaned her face on
+them and began to cry gently.
+
+Robin was terribly startled. He got up, stretched out his hands to her
+in an impulsive gesture, then drew them back, turned and went to the
+window.
+
+She was crying for Fritz.
+
+That was absurd and horrible. Yet he knew that those tears came from
+the heart of the hidden woman he had so long believed in, proved her
+existence, showed that she could love.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+AS Lady Holme had foreseen, the impertinent mimicry of Miss Schley
+concentrated a great deal of attention upon the woman mimicked. Many
+people, accepting the American's cleverness as a fashionable fact, also
+accepted her imitation as the imitation of a fact more surreptitious,
+and credited Lady Holme with a secret leading towards the improper never
+before suspected by them. They remembered the break between the Holmes
+and Carey, the strange scene at the Arkell House ball, and began to
+whisper many things of Lady Holme, and to turn a tide of pity and of
+sympathy upon her husband. On this tide Lord Holme and the American
+might be said to float merrily like corks, unabashed in the eye of the
+sun. Their intimacy was condoned on all sides as a natural result of
+Lady Holme's conduct. Most of that which had been accomplished by
+Lord and Lady Holme together after their reconciliation over the first
+breakfast was undone. The silent tongue began to wag, and to murmur the
+usual platitudes about the poor fellow who could not find sympathy at
+home and so was obliged, against his will, to seek for it outside.
+
+All this Lady Holme had foreseen as she sat in her box at the British
+Theatre.
+
+The wrong impression of her was enthroned. She had to reckon with it.
+This fact, fully recognised by her, made her wish to walk warily where
+otherwise her temper might have led her to walk heedlessly. She wanted
+to do an unusual thing, to draw her husband's attention to an intimacy
+which was concealed from the world--the intimacy between herself and Leo
+Ulford.
+
+After her visit to the house in Half Moon Street she began to see a
+great deal of Leo Ulford. Carey had been right when he said that they
+would get on together. She understood him easily and thoroughly, and
+for that very reason he was attracted by her. Men delight to feel that a
+woman is understanding them; women that no man can ever understand them.
+Under the subtle influence of Lady Holme's complete comprehension of
+him, Leo Ulford's nature expanded, stretched itself as his long legs
+stretched themselves when his mind was purring. There was not much in
+him to reveal, but what there was he revealed, and Lady Holme seemed to
+be profoundly interested in the contents of his soul.
+
+But she was not interested in the contents of his soul in public places
+on which the world's eye is fixed. She refused to allow Leo to do what
+he desired, and assumed an air of almost possessive friendship before
+Society. His natural inclination for the blatant was firmly checked
+by her. She cared nothing for him really, but her woman's instinct had
+divined that he was the type of man most likely to rouse the slumbering
+passion of Fritz, if Fritz were led to suspect that she was attracted
+to him. Men like Lord Holme are most easily jealous of the men who most
+closely resemble them. Their conceit leads them to put an exaggerated
+value upon their own qualities in others, upon the resemblance to their
+own physique exhibited by others.
+
+Leo Ulford was rather like a younger and coarser Lord Holme. In him Lady
+Holme recognised an effective weapon for the chastisement, if not for
+the eventual reclamation, of her husband. It was characteristic of her
+that this was the weapon she chose, the weapon she still continued to
+rely on even after her conversation with Robin Pierce. Her faith in
+white angels was very small. Perpetual contact with the world of to-day,
+with life as lived by women of her order, had created within her far
+other faiths, faiths in false gods, a natural inclination to bow the
+knee in the house of Rimmon rather than before the altars guarded by the
+Eternities.
+
+And then--she knew Lord Holme; knew what attracted him, what stirred
+him, what moved him to excitement, what was likely to hold him. She felt
+sure that he and such men as he yield the homage they would refuse to
+the angel to the siren. Instead of seeking the angel within herself,
+therefore, she sought the siren. Instead of striving to develope that
+part of her which was spiritual, she fixed all her attention upon that
+part of her which was fleshly, which was physical. She neglected the
+flame and began to make pretty patterns with the ashes.
+
+Robin came to bid her good-bye before leaving London for Rome. The
+weeping woman was gone. He looked into the hard, white face of a woman
+who smiled. They talked rather constrainedly for a few minutes. Then
+suddenly he said:
+
+"Once it was a painted window, now it's an iron shutter."
+
+He got up from his chair and clasped his hands together behind his back.
+
+"What on earth do you mean?" she asked, still smiling.
+
+"Your face," he answered. "One could see you obscurely before. One can
+see nothing now."
+
+"You talk great nonsense, Robin. It's a good thing you're going back to
+Rome."
+
+"At least I shall find the spirit of beauty there," he said, almost with
+bitterness. "Over here it is treated as if it were Jezebel. It's trodden
+down. It's thrown to the dogs."
+
+"Poor spirit!"
+
+She laughed lightly.
+
+"Do you understand what they're saying of you?" he went on.
+
+"Where?"
+
+"All over London."
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+"But--do you?"
+
+"Perhaps I don't care to."
+
+"They're saying--'Poor thing! But it's her own fault.'"
+
+There was a silence. In it he looked at her hard, mercilessly. She
+returned his gaze, still smiling.
+
+"And it is your own fault," he went on after a moment. "If you had
+been yourself she couldn't have insulted you first and humiliated you
+afterwards. Oh, how I hate it! And yet--yet there are moments when I am
+like the others, when I feel--'She has deserved it.'"
+
+"When will you be in Rome?" she said.
+
+"And even now," he continued, ignoring her remark, "even now, what are
+you doing? Oh, Viola, you're a prey to the modern madness for crawling
+in the dirt instead of walking upright in the sun. You might be a
+goddess and you prefer to be an insect. Isn't it mad of you? Isn't it?"
+
+He was really excited, really passionate. His face showed that. There
+was fire in his eyes. His lips worked convulsively when he was not
+speaking. And yet there was just a faint ring of the accomplished
+orator's music in his voice, a music which suggests a listening ear--and
+that ear the orator's own.
+
+Perhaps she heard it. At any rate his passionate attack did not seem to
+move her.
+
+"I prefer to be what I am," was all she said.
+
+"What you are! But you don't know what you are."
+
+"And how can you pretend to know?" she asked. "Is a man more subtle
+about a woman than she is about herself?"
+
+He did not answer for a moment. Then he said bluntly:
+
+"Promise me one thing before I go away."
+
+"I don't know. What is it?"
+
+"Promise me not to--not to--"
+
+He hesitated. The calm of her face seemed almost to confuse him.
+
+"Well?" she said. "Go on."
+
+"Promise me not to justify anything people are saying, not to justify it
+with--with that fellow Ulford."
+
+"Good-bye," she answered, holding out her hand.
+
+He recognised that the time for his advice had gone by, if it had ever
+been.
+
+"What a way--what a way for us to--" he almost stammered.
+
+He recovered his self-possession with an effort and took her hand.
+
+"At least," he said in a low, quiet voice, "believe it is less jealousy
+that speaks within me than love--love for you, for the woman you are
+trampling in the dust."
+
+He looked into her eyes and went out. She did not see him again before
+he left England. And she was glad. She did not want to see him. Perhaps
+it was the first time in her life that the affection of a man whom she
+really liked was distasteful to her. It made her uneasy, doubtful of
+herself just then, to be loved as Robin loved her.
+
+Carey had come back to town, but he went nowhere. He was in bad odour.
+Sir Donald Ulford was almost the only person he saw anything of at this
+time. It seemed that Sir Donald had taken a fancy to Carey. At any rate,
+such friendly feeling as he had did not seem lessened after Carey's
+exhibition at Arkell House. When Carey returned to Stratton Street, Sir
+Donald paid him a visit and stayed some time. No allusion was made to
+the painful circumstances under which they had last seen each other
+until Sir Donald was on the point of going away. Then he said:
+
+"You have not forgotten that I expect you at Casa Felice towards the end
+of August?"
+
+Carey looked violently astonished.
+
+"Still?" he said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+Suddenly Carey shot out his hand and grasped Sir Donald's.
+
+"You aren't afraid to have a drunken beast like me in Casa Felice! It's
+a damned dangerous experiment."
+
+"I don't think so."
+
+"It's your own lookout, you know. I absolve you from the invitation."
+
+"I repeat it, then."
+
+"I accept it, then--again."
+
+Sir Donald went away thoughtfully. When he reached the Albany he found
+Mrs. Leo Ulford waiting for him in tears. They had a long interview.
+
+Many people fancied that Sir Donald looked more ghostly, more faded even
+than usual as the season wore on. They said he was getting too old to
+go about so much as he did, and that it was a pity Society "got such a
+hold" on men who ought to have had enough of it long ago. One night he
+met Lady Holme at the Opera. She was in her box and he in the stalls.
+After the second act she called him to her with a gay little nod of
+invitation. Lady Cardington had been with her during the act, but left
+the box when the curtain fell to see some friends close by. When
+Sir Donald tapped at the door Lady Holme was quite alone. He came in
+quietly--even his walk was rather ghostly--and sat down beside her.
+
+"You don't look well," she said after they had greeted each other.
+
+"I am quite well," he answered, with evident constraint.
+
+"I haven't seen you to speak to since that little note of yours."
+
+A very faint colour rose in his faded cheeks.
+
+"After Miss Schley's first night?" he murmured.
+
+His yellow fingers moved restlessly.
+
+"Do you know that your son told me you would write?" she continued.
+
+She was leaning back in her chair, half hidden by the curtain of the
+box.
+
+"Leo!"
+
+Sir Donald's voice was almost sharp and startling.
+
+"How should he--you spoke about me then?"
+
+There was a flash of light in his pale, almost colourless eyes.
+
+"I wondered where you had gone, and he said you would write next day."
+
+"That was all?"
+
+"Why, how suspicious you are!"
+
+She spoke banteringly.
+
+"Suspicious! No--but Leo does not understand me very well. I was rather
+old when he was born, and I have never been able to be much with him. He
+was educated in England, and my duties of course lay abroad."
+
+He paused, looking at her and moving his thin white moustache. Then, in
+an uneasy voice, he added:
+
+"You must not take my character altogether from Leo."
+
+"Nor you mine altogether from Miss Schley," said Lady Holme.
+
+She scarcely knew why she said it. She thought herself stupid,
+ridiculous almost, for saying it. Yet she could not help speaking.
+Perhaps she relied on Sir Donald's age. Or perhaps--but who knows why
+a woman is cautious or incautious in moments the least expected? God
+guides her, perhaps, or the devil--or merely a bottle imp. Men never
+know, and that is why they find her adorable.
+
+Sir Donald said nothing for a moment, only made the familiar movement
+with his hands that was a sign in him of concealed excitement or
+emotion. His eyes were fixed upon the ledge of the box. Lady Holme was
+puzzled by his silence and, at last, was on the point of making a remark
+on some other subject--Plancon's singing--when he spoke, like a man
+who had made up his mind firmly to take an unusual, perhaps a difficult
+course.
+
+"I wish to take it from you," he said. "Give me the right one, not an
+imitation of an imitation."
+
+She knew at once what he meant and was surprised. Had Leo Ulford been
+talking?
+
+"Lady Holme," he went on, "I am taking a liberty. I know that. It's a
+thing I have never done before, knowingly. Don't think me unconscious
+of what I am doing. But I am an old man, and old men can sometimes
+venture--allowance is sometimes made for them. I want to claim that
+allowance now for what I am going to say."
+
+"Well?" she said, neither hardly nor gently.
+
+In truth she scarcely knew whether she wished him to speak or not.
+
+"My son is--Leo is not a safe friend for you at this moment."
+
+Again the dull, brick-red flush rose in his cheeks. There was an odd,
+flattened look just above his cheekbones near his eyes, and the eyes
+themselves had a strange expression as of determination and guilt
+mingled.
+
+"Your son?" Lady Holme said. "But--"
+
+"I do not wish to assume anything, but I--well, my daughter-in-law
+sometimes comes to me."
+
+"Sometimes!" said Lady Holme.
+
+"Leo is not a good husband," Sir Donald said. "But that is not the
+point. He is also a bad--friend."
+
+"Why don't you say lover?" she almost whispered.
+
+He grasped his knee with one hand and moved the hand rapidly to and fro.
+
+"I must say of him to you that where his pleasure or his vanity is
+concerned he is unscrupulous."
+
+"Why say all this to a woman?"
+
+"You mean that you know as much as I?"
+
+"Don't you think it likely?"
+
+"Henrietta--"
+
+"Who is that?"
+
+"My daughter-in-law has done everything for Leo--too much. She gets
+nothing--not even gratitude. I am sorry to say he has no sense of
+chivalry towards women. You know him, I daresay. But do you know him
+thwarted?"
+
+"Ah, you don't think so badly of me after all?" she said quickly.
+
+"I--I think of you that--that--"
+
+He stopped.
+
+"I think that I could not bear to see the whiteness of your wings
+smirched by a child of mine." he added.
+
+"You too!" she said.
+
+Suddenly tears started into her eyes.
+
+"Another believer in the angel!" she thought.
+
+"May I come in?"
+
+It was Mr. Bry's cold voice. His discontented, sleek face was peeping
+round the door.
+
+Sir Donald got up to go.
+
+As Lady Holme drove away from Covent Garden that night she was haunted
+by a feverish, embittering thought:
+
+"Will everyone notice it but Fritz?"
+
+Lord Holme indeed seemed scarcely the same man who had forbidden Carey
+to come any more to his house, who had been jealous of Robin Pierce, who
+had even once said that he almost wished his wife were an ugly woman.
+The Grand Turk nature within him, if not actually dead, was certainly
+in abeyance. He was so intent on his own affairs that he paid no heed
+at all to his wife's, even when they might be said to be also his. Leo
+Ulford was becoming difficult to manage, and Lord Holme still gaily
+went his way. As Lady Holme thought over Sir Donald's words she felt a
+crushing weight of depression sink down upon her. The brougham rolled
+smoothly on through the lighted streets. She did not glance out of the
+windows, or notice the passing crowds. In the silence and darkness of
+her own soul she was trying not to feel, trying to think.
+
+A longing to be incautious, to do something startling, desperate, came
+to her.
+
+It was evident that Mrs. Ulford had been complaining to Sir Donald about
+his son's conduct. With whom? Lady Holme could not doubt that it was
+with herself. She had read, with one glance at the fluttering pink
+eyelids, the story of the Leo Ulford's _menage_. Now, she was not
+preoccupied with any regret for her own cruelty or for another woman's
+misery. The egoism spoken of by Carey was not dead in her yet, but very
+much alive. As she sat in the corner of the brougham, pressing herself
+against the padded wall, she was angry for herself, pitiful for herself.
+And she was jealous--horribly jealous. That woke up her imagination,
+all the intensity of her. Where was Fritz to-night? She did not know.
+Suddenly the dense ignorance in which every human being lives, and must
+live to the end of time, towered above her like a figure in a nightmare.
+What do we know, what can we ever know of each other? In each human
+being dwells the most terrible, the most ruthless power that exists--the
+power of silence.
+
+Fritz had that power; stupid, blundering, self-contented Fritz.
+
+She pulled the check-string and gave the order, "Home!"
+
+In her present condition she felt unable to go into Society.
+
+When she got to Cadogan Square she said to the footman who opened the
+door:
+
+"His lordship isn't in yet?"
+
+"No, my lady."
+
+"Did he say what time he would be in to-night?"
+
+"No, my lady."
+
+The man paused, then added:
+
+"His lordship told Mr. Lucas not to wait up."
+
+"Mr. Lucas" was Lord Holme's valet.
+
+It seemed to Lady Holme as if there were a significant, even a slightly
+mocking, sound in the footman's voice. She stared at him. He was a thin,
+swarthy young man, with lantern jaws and a very long, pale chin. When
+she looked at him he dropped his eyes.
+
+"Bring me some lemonade to the drawing-room in ten minutes," she said.
+
+"Yes, my lady."
+
+"In ten minutes, not before. Turn on all the lights in the
+drawing-room."
+
+"Yes, my lady."
+
+The man went before her up the staircase, turned on the lights, stood
+aside to let her pass and then went softly down. Lady Holme rang for
+Josephine.
+
+"Take my cloak and then go to bed," she said.
+
+Josephine took the cloak and went out, shutting the door.
+
+"Ten minutes!" Lady Holme said to herself.
+
+She sat down on the sofa on which she had sat for a moment alone after
+her song at the dinner-party, the song murdered by Miss Filberte. The
+empty, brilliantly-lit rooms seemed unusually large. She glanced round
+them with inward-looking eyes. Here she was at midnight sitting quite
+alone in her own house. And she wished to do something decisive,
+startling as the cannon shot sometimes fired from a ship to disperse a
+fog wreath. That was the reason why she had told the footman to come in
+ten minutes. She thought that in ten minutes she might make up her mind.
+If she decided upon doing something that required an emissary the man
+would be there.
+
+She looked at the little silver box she had taken up that night when she
+was angry, then at the grand piano in the further room. The two things
+suggested to her two women--the woman of hot temper and the woman of
+sweetness and romance. What was she to-night, and what was she going to
+do? Nothing, probably. What could she do? Again she glanced round the
+rooms. It seemed to her that she was like an actress in an intense,
+passionate _role_, who is paralysed by what is called in the theatre "a
+stage wait." She ought to play a tremendous scene, now, at once, but the
+person with whom she was to play it did not come on to the stage. She
+had worked herself up for the scene. The emotion, the passion, the
+force, the fury were alive, were red hot within her, and she could not
+set them free. She remained alone upon the stage in a sort of horror of
+dumbness, a horror of inaction.
+
+The footman came in quietly with the lemonade on a tray. He put it down
+on a table by Lady Holme.
+
+"Is there anything else, my lady?"
+
+She supposed that the question was meant as a very discreet hint to her
+that the man would be glad to go to bed. For a moment she did not reply,
+but kept him waiting. She was thinking rapidly, considering whether she
+would do the desperate thing or not, whether she would summon one of
+the actors for the violent scene her nature demanded persistently that
+night.
+
+After the opera she had been due at a ball to which Leo Ulford was
+going. She had promised to go in to supper with him and to arrive by a
+certain hour. He was wondering, waiting, now, at this moment. She knew
+that. The house was in Eaton Square, not far off. Should she send the
+footman with a note to Leo, saying that she was too tired to come to the
+ball but that she was sitting up at home? That was what she was rapidly
+considering while the footman stood waiting. Leo would come, and
+then--presently--Lord Holme would come. And then? Then doubtless would
+happen the scene she longed for, longed for with a sort of almost crazy
+desire such as she had never felt before.
+
+She glanced up and saw an astonished expression upon the footman's pale
+face. How long had she kept him there waiting? She had no idea.
+
+"There is nothing else," she said slowly.
+
+She paused, then added, reluctantly:
+
+"You can go to bed."
+
+The man went softly out of the room. As he shut the door she breathed
+a deep sigh, that was almost a sob. So difficult had she found it to
+govern herself, not to do the crazy thing.
+
+She poured out the lemonade and put ice into it.
+
+As she did so she made grimaces, absurd grimaces of pain and misery,
+like those on the faces of the two women in Mantegna's picture of Christ
+and the Marys in the Brera at Milan. They are grotesque, yet wonderfully
+moving in their pitiless realism. But tears fall from the eyes of
+Mantegna's women and no tears fell from Lady Holme's eyes. Still making
+grimaces, she sipped the lemonade. Then she put down the glass, leaned
+back on the sofa and shut her eyes. Her face ceased to move, and became
+beautiful again in its stillness. She remained motionless for a long
+time, trying to obtain the mastery over herself. In act she had obtained
+it already, but not in emotion. Indeed, the relinquishing of violence,
+the sending of the footman to bed, seemed to have increased the passion
+within her. And now she felt it rising till she was afraid of being
+herself, afraid of being this solitary woman, feeling intensely and able
+to do nothing. It seemed to her as if such a passion of jealousy, and
+desire for immediate expression of it in action, as flamed within her,
+must wreak disaster upon her like some fell disease, as if she were in
+immediate danger, even in immediate physical danger. She lay still like
+one determined to meet it bravely, without flinching, without a sign of
+cowardice.
+
+But suddenly she felt that she had made a mistake in dismissing the
+footman, that the pain of inaction was too great for her to bear. She
+could not just--do nothing. She could not, and she got up swiftly and
+rang the bell. The man did not return. She pressed the bell again. After
+three or four minutes he came in, looking rather flushed and put out.
+
+"I want you to take a note to Eaton Square," she said. "It will be ready
+in five minutes."
+
+"Yes, my lady."
+
+She went to her writing table and wrote this note to Leo Ulford:
+
+
+  "DEAR MR. ULFORD,--I am grieved to play you false, but I am too
+  tired to-night to come on. Probably you are amusing yourself. I
+  am sitting here alone over such a dull book. One can't go to bed
+  at twelve, somehow, even if one is tired. The habit of the season's
+  against early hours and one couldn't sleep. Be nice and come in for
+  five minutes on your way home, and tell me all about it. I know you
+  pass the end of the square, so it won't be out of your way.--Yours
+  very sincerely,   V. H."
+
+
+After writing this note Lady Holme hesitated for a moment, then she went
+to a writing table, opened a drawer and took out a tiny, flat key. She
+enclosed it in two sheets of thick note paper, folded the note also
+round it, and put it into an envelope which she carefully closed.
+After writing Leo Ulford's name on the envelope she rang again for the
+footman.
+
+"Take this to Eaton Square," she said, naming the number of the house.
+"And give it to Mr. Ulford yourself. Go in a hansom. When you have given
+Mr. Ulford the note come straight back in the hansom and let me know.
+After that you can go to bed. Do you understand?"
+
+"Yes, my lady."
+
+The man went out.
+
+Lady Holme stood up to give him the note. She remained standing after he
+had gone. An extraordinary sensation of relief had come to her. Action
+had lessened her pain, had removed much of the pressure of emotion upon
+her heart. For a moment she felt almost happy.
+
+She sat down again and took up a book. It was a book of poems written by
+a very young girl whom she knew. There was a great deal about sorrow in
+the poems, and sorrow was always alluded to as a person; now flitting
+through a forest in the autumn among the dying leaves, now bending over
+a bed, now walking by the sea at sunset watching departing ships, now
+standing near the altar at a wedding. The poems were not good. On the
+other hand, they were not very bad.
+
+They had some grace, some delicacy here and there, now and then a touch
+of real, if by no means exquisite, sentiment. At this moment Lady Holme
+found them soothing. There was a certain music in them and very little
+reality. They seemed to represent life as a pensive phantasmagoria
+of bird songs, fading flowers, dying lights, soft winds and rains and
+sighing echoes.
+
+She read on and on. Sometimes a hard thought intruded itself upon her
+mind--the thought of Leo Ulford with the latch-key of her husband's
+house in his hand. That thought made the poems seem to her remarkably
+unlike life.
+
+She looked at the clock. The footman had been away long enough to do his
+errand. Just as she was thinking this he came into the room.
+
+"Well?" she said.
+
+"I gave Mr. Ulford the note, my lady."
+
+"Then you can go to bed. Good-night. I'll put out the lights here."
+
+"Thank you, my lady."
+
+As he went away she turned again to the poems; but now she could not
+read them. Her eyes rested upon them, but her mind took in nothing of
+their meaning. Presently--very soon--she laid the book down and sat
+listening. The footman had shut the drawing-room door. She got up and
+opened it. She wanted to hear the sound of the latch-key being put into
+the front door by Leo Ulford. It seemed to her as if that sound would
+be like the _leit motif_ of her determination to govern, to take her own
+way, to strike a blow against the selfish egoism of men. After opening
+the door she sat down close to it and waited, listening.
+
+Some minutes passed. Then she heard--not the key put into the hall
+door; it had not occurred to her that she was much too far away to hear
+that--but the bang of the door being shut.
+
+Quickly she closed the drawing-room door, went back to the distant sofa,
+sat down upon it and began to turn over the poems once more. She even
+read one quite carefully. As she finished it the door was opened.
+
+She looked up gaily to greet Leo and saw her husband coming into the
+room.
+
+She was greatly startled. It had never occurred to her that Fritz was
+quite as likely to arrive before Leo Ulford as Leo Ulford to arrive
+before Fritz. Why had she never thought of so obvious a possibility? She
+could not imagine. The difference between the actuality and her intense
+and angry conception of what it would be, benumbed her mind for an
+instant. She was completely confused. She sat still with the book of
+poems on her lap, and gazed at Lord Holme as he came towards her, taking
+long steps and straddling his legs as if he imagined he had a horse
+under him. The gay expression had abruptly died away from her face and
+she looked almost stupid.
+
+"Hulloa!" said Lord Holme, as he saw her.
+
+She said nothing.
+
+"Thought you were goin' to the Blaxtons to-night," he added.
+
+She made a strong effort and smiled.
+
+"I meant to, but I felt tired after the opera."
+
+"Why don't you toddle off to bed then?"
+
+"I feel tired, I don't feel sleepy."
+
+Lord Holme stared at her, put his hand into his trousers pocket and
+pulled out his cigarette-case. Lady Holme knew that he had been in a
+good humour when he came home, and that the sight of her sitting up in
+the drawing-room had displeased him. She had seen a change come into his
+face. He had been looking gay. He began to look glum and turned his eyes
+away from her.
+
+"What have you been up to?" she asked, with a sudden light gaiety and
+air of comradeship.
+
+"Club--playin' bridge," he answered, lighting a cigarette.
+
+He shot a glance at her sideways as he spoke, a glance that was meant
+to be crafty. If she had not been excited and horribly jealous, such
+a glance would probably have amused her, even made her laugh. Fritz's
+craft was very transparent. But she could not laugh now. She knew he was
+telling her the first lie that had occurred to him.
+
+"Lucky?" she asked, still preserving her light and casual manner.
+
+"Middlin'," he jerked out.
+
+He sat down in an armchair and slowly stretched his legs, staring up at
+the ceiling. Lady Holme began to think rapidly, feverishly.
+
+Had he locked the front door when he came in? Very much depended upon
+whether he had or had not. The servants had all gone to bed. Not one of
+them would see that the house was closed for the night. Fritz was a
+very casual person. He often forgot to do things he had promised to do,
+things that ought to be done. On the other hand, there were moments
+when his memory was excellent. If she only knew which mood had been his
+to-night she thought she would feel calmer. The uncertainty in which she
+was made mind and body tingle. If Fritz had remembered to lock the door,
+Leo Ulford would try to get in, fail, and go away. But if he had
+not remembered, at any moment Leo Ulford might walk into the room
+triumphantly with the latch-key in his hand. And it was nearly half-past
+twelve.
+
+She wished intensely that she knew what Fritz had done.
+
+"What's up?" he said abruptly.
+
+"Up?" she said with an uncontrollable start.
+
+"Yes, with you?"
+
+"Nothing. What d'you mean?"
+
+"Why, you looked as if--don't you b'lieve I've been playin' bridge?"
+
+"Of course I do. Really, Fritz, how absurd you are!"
+
+It was evident that he, too, was not quite easy to-night. If he had a
+conscience, surely it was pricking him. Fierce anger flamed up again
+suddenly in Lady Holme, and the longing to lash her husband. Yet even
+this anger did not take away the anxiety that beset her, the wish that
+she had not done the crazy thing. The fact of her husband's return
+before Leo's arrival seemed to have altered her action, made it far more
+damning. To have been found with Leo would have been compromising, would
+have roused Fritz's anger. She wanted to rouse his anger. She had meant
+to rouse it. But when she looked at Fritz she did not like the thought
+of Leo walking in at this hour holding the latch-key in his hand. What
+had Fritz done that night to Rupert Carey? What would he do to-night
+if--?
+
+"What the deuce is up with you?"
+
+Lord Holme drew in his legs, sat up and stared with a sort of uneasy
+inquiry which he tried to make hard. She laughed quickly, nervously.
+
+"I'm tired, I tell you. It was awfully hot at the opera."
+
+She put some more ice into the lemonade, and added:
+
+"By the way, Fritz, I suppose you locked up all right?"
+
+"Locked up what?"
+
+"The front door. All the servants have gone to bed, you know."
+
+No sooner had she spoken the last words than she regretted them. If Leo
+did get in they took away all excuse. She might have pretended he had
+been let in. He would have had to back her up. It would have been mean
+of her, of course. Still, seeing her husband there, Leo would have
+understood, would have forgiven her. Women are always forgiven such
+subterfuges in unfortunate moments. What a fool she was to-night!
+
+"That don't matter," said her husband, shortly.
+
+"But--but it does. You know how many burglaries there are. Why, only
+the other night Mrs. Arthur came home from a ball and met two men on the
+stairs."
+
+"I pity any men I found on my stairs," he returned composedly, touching
+the muscle of his left arm with his right hand.
+
+He chuckled.
+
+"They'd be sorry for themselves, I'll bet," he added.
+
+He put down his cigarette and took out another slowly, leisurely. Lady
+Holme longed to strike him. His conceited composure added fuel to the
+flame of her anxiety.
+
+"Well, anyhow, I don't care to run these risks in a place like London,
+Fritz," she said almost angrily. "Have you locked up or not?"
+
+"Damned if I remember," he drawled.
+
+She did not know whether he was deliberately trying to irritate her or
+whether he really had forgotten, but she felt it impossible to remain
+any longer in uncertainty.
+
+"Very well, then, I shall go down and see," she said.
+
+And she laid the book of poems on a table and prepared to get up from
+the sofa.
+
+"Rot!" said Lord Holme; "if you're nervous, I'll go."
+
+She leaned back.
+
+"Very well."
+
+"In a minute."
+
+He struck a match and let it out.
+
+"Do go now, there's a good dog," she said coaxingly.
+
+He struck another match and held it head downwards.
+
+"You needn't hurry a feller."
+
+He tapped his cigarette gently on his knee, and applied the flame to it.
+
+"That's better."
+
+Lady Holme moved violently on the sofa. She had a pricking sensation all
+over her body, and her face felt suddenly very hot, as if she had fever.
+A ridiculous, but painful idea started up suddenly in her mind. Could
+Fritz suspect anything? Was he playing with her? She dismissed it at
+once as the distorted child of a guilty conscience. Fritz was not that
+sort of man. He might be a brute sometimes, but he was never a subtle
+brute. He blew two thin lines of smoke out through his nostrils, now
+with a sort of sensuous, almost languid, deliberation, and watched them
+fade away in the brilliantly-lit room. Lady Holme resolved to adopt
+another manner, more in accord with her condition of tense nervousness.
+
+"When I ask you to do a thing, Fritz, you might have the decency to
+do it," she said sharply. "You're forgetting what's due to me--to any
+woman."
+
+"Don't fuss at this time of night."
+
+"I want to go to bed, but I'm not going till I know the house is
+properly shut up. Please go at once and see."
+
+"I never knew you were such a coward," he rejoined without stirring.
+"Who was at the opera?"
+
+"I won't talk to you till you do what I ask."
+
+"That's a staggerin' blow."
+
+She sprang up with an exclamation of anger. Her nerves were on edge and
+she felt inclined to scream out.
+
+"I never thought you could be so--such a cad to a woman, Fritz," she
+said.
+
+She moved towards the door. As she did so she heard a cab in the square
+outside, a rattle of wheels, then silence. It had stopped. Her heart
+seemed to stand still too. She knew now that she was a coward, though
+not in the way Fritz meant. She was a coward with regard to him.
+Her jealousy had prompted her to do a mad thing. In doing it she had
+actually meant to produce a violent scene. It had seemed to her that
+such a scene would relieve the tension of her nerves, of her heart,
+would clear the air. But now that the scene seemed imminent--if Fritz
+had forgotten, and she was certain he had forgotten, to lock the
+door--she felt heart and nerves were failing her. She felt that she
+had risked too much, far too much. With almost incredible swiftness she
+remembered her imprudence in speaking to Carey at Arkell House and how
+it had only served to put a weapon into her husband's hand, a weapon he
+had not scrupled to use in his selfish way to further his own pleasure
+and her distress. That stupid failure had not sufficiently warned her,
+and now she was on the edge of some greater disaster. She was positive
+that Leo Ulford was in the cab which had just stopped, and it was too
+late now to prevent him from entering the house. Lord Holme had got
+up from his chair and stood facing her. He looked quite pleasant. She
+thought of the change that would come into his face in a moment and
+turned cold.
+
+"Don't cut up so deuced rough," he said; "I'll go and lock up."
+
+So he had forgotten. He took a step towards the drawing-room door.
+But now she felt that at all costs she must prevent him from going
+downstairs, must gain a moment somehow. Suddenly she swayed slightly.
+
+"I feel--awfully faint," she said.
+
+She went feebly, but quickly, to the window which looked on to the
+Square, drew away the curtain, opened the window and leaned out. The cab
+had stopped before their door, and she saw Leo Ulford standing on the
+pavement with his back to the house. He was feeling in his pocket,
+evidently for some money to give to the cabman. If she could only
+attract his attention somehow and send him away! She glanced back. Fritz
+was coming towards her with a look of surprise on his face.
+
+"Leave me alone," she said unevenly. "I only want some air."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Leave me--oh, do leave me alone!"
+
+He stopped, but stood staring at her in blank amazement. She dared not
+do anything. Leo Ulford stretched out his arm towards the cabman, who
+bent down from his perch. He took the money, looked at it, then bent
+down again, showing it to Leo and muttering something. Doubtless he was
+saying that it was not enough. She turned round again sharply to Fritz.
+
+"Fritz," she said, "be a good dog. Go upstairs to my room and fetch me
+some eau de Cologne, will you?"
+
+"But--"
+
+"It's on my dressing-table--the gold bottle on the right. You know. I
+feel so bad. I'll stay here. The air will bring me round perhaps."
+
+She caught hold of the curtain, like a person on the point of swooning.
+
+"All right," he said, and he went out of the room.
+
+She watched till he was gone, then darted to the window and leaned out.
+
+She was too late. The cab was driving off and Leo was gone. He must have
+entered the house.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+BEFORE she had time to leave the window she heard a step in the room.
+She turned and saw Leo Ulford, smiling broadly--like a great boy--and
+holding up the latch-key she had sent him. At the sight of her face his
+smile died away.
+
+"Go--go!" she whispered, putting out her hand. "Go at once!"
+
+"Go! But you told me--"
+
+"Go! My husband's come back. He's in the house. Go quickly. Don't make a
+sound. I'll explain to-morrow."
+
+She made a rapid, repeated gesture of her hands towards the door,
+frowning. Leo Ulford stood for an instant looking heavy and sulky, then,
+pushing out his rosy lips in a sort of indignant pout, he swung round
+on his heels. As he did so, Lord Holme came into the room holding the
+bottle of eau de Cologne. When he saw Leo he stopped. Leo stopped too,
+and they stood for a moment staring at each other. Lady Holme, who was
+still by the open window, did not move. There was complete silence in
+the room. Then Leo dropped the latch-key. It fell on the thick carpet
+without a noise. He made a hasty, lumbering movement to pick it up, but
+Lord Holme was too quick for him. When Lady Holme saw the key in her
+husband's hand she moved at last and came forward into the middle of the
+room.
+
+"Mr. Ulford's come to tell me about the Blaxtons' dance," she said.
+
+She spoke in her usual light voice, without tremor or uncertainty. Her
+face was perfectly calm and smiling. Leo Ulford cleared his throat.
+
+"Yes," he said loudly, "about the Blaxtons' dance."
+
+Lord Holme stood looking at the latch-key. Suddenly his face swelled up
+and became bloated, and large veins stood out in his brown forehead.
+
+"What's this key?" he said.
+
+He held it out towards his wife. Neither she nor Leo Ulford replied to
+his question.
+
+"What's this key?" he repeated.
+
+"The key of Mr. Ulford's house, I suppose," said Lady Holme. "How should
+I know?"
+
+"I'm not askin' you," said her husband.
+
+He came a step nearer to Leo.
+
+"Why the devil don't you answer?" he said to him.
+
+"It's my latch-key," said Leo, with an attempt at a laugh.
+
+Lord Holme flung it in his face.
+
+"You damned liar!" he said. "It's mine."
+
+And he struck him full in the face where the key had just struck him.
+
+Leo returned the blow. When she saw that, Lady Holme passed the two men
+and went quickly out of the room, shutting the door behind her. Holding
+her hands over her ears, she hurried upstairs to her bedroom. It was in
+darkness. She felt about on the wall for the button that turned on
+the electric light, but could not find it. Her hands, usually deft and
+certain in their movements, seemed to have lost the sense of touch. It
+was as if they had abruptly been deprived of their minds. She felt
+and felt. She knew the button was there. Suddenly the room was full of
+light. Without being aware of it she had found the button and turned
+it. In the light she looked down at her hands and saw that they were
+trembling violently. She went to the door and shut it. Then she sat down
+on the sofa at the foot of the bed. She clasped her hands together in
+her lap, but they went on trembling. Pulses were beating in her eyelids.
+She felt utterly degraded, like a scrupulously clean person who has been
+rolled in the dirt. And she fancied she heard a faint and mysterious
+sound, pathetic and terrible, but very far away--the white angel in her
+weeping.
+
+And the believers in the angel--were they weeping too?
+
+She found herself wondering as a sleeper wonders in a dream.
+
+Presently she got up. She could not sit there and see her hands
+trembling. She did not walk about the room, but went over to the
+dressing-table and stood by it, resting her hands upon it and leaning
+forward. The attitude seemed to relieve her. She remained there for a
+long time, scarcely thinking at all, only feeling degraded, unclean. The
+sight of physical violence in her own drawing-room, caused by her, had
+worked havoc in her. She had always thought she understood the brute in
+man. She had often consciously administered to it. She had coaxed
+it, flattered it, played upon it even--surely--loved it. Now she had
+suddenly seen it rush out into the full light, and it had turned her
+sick.
+
+The gold things on the dressing-table--bottles, brushes, boxes,
+trays--looked offensive. They were like lies against life, frauds.
+Everything in the pretty room was like a lie and a fraud. There ought to
+be dirt, ugliness about her. She ought to stand with her feet in mud and
+look on blackness. The angel in her shuddered at the siren in her now,
+as at a witch with power to evoke Satanic things, and she forgot the
+trembling of her hands in the sensation of the trembling of her soul.
+The blow of Fritz, the blow of Leo Ulford, had both struck her. She felt
+a beaten creature.
+
+The door opened. She did not turn round, but she saw in the glass her
+husband come in. His coat was torn. His waistcoat and shirt were almost
+in rags. There was blood on his face and on his right hand. In his
+eyes there was an extraordinary light, utterly unlike the light of
+intelligence, but brilliant, startling; flame from the fire by which the
+animal in human nature warms itself. In the glass she saw him look at
+her. The light seemed to stream over her, to scorch her. He went into
+his dressing-room without a word, and she heard the noise of water being
+poured out and used for washing. He must be bathing his wounds, getting
+rid of the red stains.
+
+She sat down on the sofa at the foot of the bed and listened to the
+noise of the water. At last it stopped and she heard drawers being
+violently opened and shut, then a tearing sound. After a silence her
+husband came into the room again with his forehead bound up in a silk
+handkerchief, which was awkwardly knotted behind his head. Part of
+another silk handkerchief was loosely tied round his right hand. He came
+forward, stood in front of her and looked at her, and she saw now that
+there was an expression almost of exultation on his face. She felt
+something fall into her lap. It was the latch-key she had sent to Leo
+Ulford.
+
+"I can tell you he's sorry he ever saw that--damned sorry," said Lord
+Holme.
+
+And he laughed.
+
+Lady Holme took the key up carefully and put it down on the sofa. She
+was realising something, realising that her husband was feeling happy.
+When she had laid down the key she looked up at him and there was an
+intense scrutiny in her eyes. Suddenly it seemed to her as if she were
+standing up and looking down on him, as if she were the judge, he the
+culprit in this matter. The numbness left her mind. She was able to
+think swiftly again and her hands stopped trembling. That look of
+exultation in her husband's eyes had changed everything.
+
+"Sit down, I want to speak to you," she said.
+
+She was surprised by the calm sound of her own voice.
+
+Lord Holme looked astonished. He shifted the bandage on his hand and
+stood where he was.
+
+"Sit down," she repeated.
+
+"Well!" he said.
+
+And he sat down.
+
+"I suppose you came up here to turn me out of the house?" she said.
+
+"You deserve it," he muttered.
+
+But even now he did not look angry. There was a sort of savage glow on
+his face. It was evident that the violent physical effort he had just
+made, and the success of it, had irresistibly swept away his fury for
+the moment. It might return. Probably it would return. But for the
+moment it was gone. Lady Holme knew Fritz, and she knew that he
+was feeling good all over. The fact that he could feel thus in such
+circumstances set the brute in him before her as it had never been set
+before--in a glare of light.
+
+"And what do you deserve?" she asked.
+
+All her terror had gone utterly. She felt mistress of herself.
+
+"When I went to thrash Carey he was so drunk I couldn't touch him. This
+feller showed fight but he was a baby in my hands. I could do anything I
+liked with him," said Lord Holme. "Gad! Talk of boxin'--"
+
+He looked at his bandaged hand and laughed again triumphantly. Then,
+suddenly, a sense of other things than his physical strength seemed to
+return upon him. His face changed, grew lowering, and he thrust forward
+his under jaw, opening his mouth to speak. Lady Holme did not give him
+time.
+
+"Yes, I sent Leo Ulford the latch-key," she said. "You needn't ask. I
+sent it, and told him to come to-night. D'you know why?"
+
+Lord Holme's face grew scarlet.
+
+"Because you're a--"
+
+She stopped him before he could say the irrevocable word.
+
+"Because I mean to have the same liberty as the man I've married,"
+she said. "I asked Leo Ulford here, and I intended you should find him
+here."
+
+"You didn't. You thought I wasn't comin' home."
+
+"Why should I have thought such a thing?" she said, swiftly, sharply.
+
+Her voice had an edge to it.
+
+"You meant not to come home, then?"
+
+She read his stupidity at a glance, the guilty mind that had blundered,
+thinking its intention known when it was not known. He began to deny it,
+but she stopped him. At this moment, and exactly when she ought surely
+to have been crushed by the weight of Fritz's fury, she dominated him.
+Afterwards she wondered at herself, but not now.
+
+"You meant not to come home?"
+
+For once Lord Holme showed a certain adroitness. Instead of replying to
+his wife he retorted:
+
+"You meant me to find Ulford here! That's a good 'un! Why, you tried all
+you knew to keep him out."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, then?"
+
+"I wanted--but you'd never understand."
+
+"He does," said Lord Holme.
+
+He laughed again, got up and walked about the room, fingering his
+bandages. Then suddenly, he turned on Lady Holme and said savagely:
+
+"And you do."
+
+"I?"
+
+"Yes, you. There's lots of fellers that would--"
+
+"Stop!" said Lady Holme, in a voice of sharp decision.
+
+She got up too. She felt that she could not say what she meant to say
+sitting down.
+
+"Fritz," she added, "you're a fool. You may be worse. I believe you
+are. But one thing's certain--you're a fool. Even in wickedness you're a
+blunderer."
+
+"And what are you?" he said.
+
+"I!" she answered, coming a step nearer. "I'm not wicked."
+
+A sudden, strange desire came to her, a desire--as she had slangily
+expressed it to Robin Pierce--to "trot out" the white angel whom she had
+for so long ignored or even brow-beaten. Was the white angel there? Some
+there were who believed so. Robin Pierce, Sir Donald, perhaps others.
+And these few believers gave Lady Holme courage. She remembered them,
+she relied on them at this moment.
+
+"I'm not wicked," she repeated.
+
+She looked into her husband's face.
+
+"Don't you know that?"
+
+He was silent.
+
+"Perhaps you'd rather I was," she continued. "Don't men prefer it?"
+
+He stared first at her, then at the carpet. A puzzled look came into his
+face.
+
+"But I don't care," she said, gathering resolution, and secretly
+calling, calling on the hidden woman, yet always with a doubt as to
+whether she was there in her place of concealment. "I don't care. I
+can't change my nature because of that. And surely--surely there must be
+some men who prefer refinement to vulgarity, purity to--"
+
+"Ulford, eh?" he interrupted.
+
+The retort struck like a whip on Lady Holme's temper. She forgot the
+believers in the angel and the angel too.
+
+"How dare you?" she exclaimed. "As if I--"
+
+He took up the latch-key and thrust it into her face. His sense of
+physical triumph was obviously dying away, his sense of personal outrage
+returning.
+
+"Good women don't do things like that," he said. "If it was known in
+London you'd be done for."
+
+"And you--may you do what you like openly, brazenly?"
+
+"Men's different," he said.
+
+The words and the satisfied way in which they were said made Lady Holme
+feel suddenly almost mad with rage. The truth of the statement, and the
+disgrace that it was truth, stirred her to the depths. At that moment
+she hated her husband, she hated all men. She remembered what Lady
+Cardington had said in the carriage as they were driving away from the
+Carlton after Mrs. Wolfstein's lunch, and her sense of impotent fury
+was made more bitter by the consciousness that women had chosen that
+men should be "different," or at least--if not that--had smilingly given
+them a license to be so. She wanted to say, to call out, so much that
+she said nothing. Lord Holme thought that for once he had been clever,
+almost intellectual. This was indeed a night of many triumphs for him.
+An intoxication of power surged up to his brain.
+
+"Men's made different and treated differently," he said. "And they'd
+never stand anything else."
+
+Lady Holme sat down again on the sofa. She put her right hand on her
+left hand and held it tightly in her lap.
+
+"You mean," she said, in a hard, quiet voice, "that you may humiliate
+your wife in the eyes of London and that she must just pretend that she
+enjoys it and go on being devoted to you? Well, I will not do either the
+one or the other. I will not endure humiliation quietly, and as to my
+devotion to you--I daresay it wouldn't take much to kill it. Perhaps
+it's dead already."
+
+No lie, perhaps, ever sounded more like truth than hers. At that moment
+she thought that probably it was truth.
+
+"Eh?" said Lord Holme.
+
+He looked suddenly less triumphant. His blunt features seemed altered
+in shape by the expression of blatant, boyish surprise, even amazement,
+that overspread them. His wife saw that, despite the incident of Leo
+Ulford's midnight visit, Fritz had not really suspected her of the
+uttermost faithlessness, that it had not occurred to him that perhaps
+her love for him was dead, that love was alive in her for another man.
+Had his conceit then no limits?
+
+And then suddenly another thought flashed into her mind. Was he, too,
+a firm, even a fanatical, believer in the angel? She had never numbered
+Fritz among that little company of believers. Him she had always set
+among the men who worship the sirens of the world. But now--? Can there
+be two men in one man as there can be two women in one woman? Suddenly
+Fritz was new to her, newer to her than on the day when she first met
+him. And he was complex. Fritz complex! She changed the word conceit.
+She called it trust. And tears rushed into her eyes. There were tears in
+her heart too. She looked up at her husband. The silk bandage over
+his forehead had been white. Now it was faintly red. As she looked she
+thought that the colour of the red deepened.
+
+"Come here, Fritz," she said softly.
+
+He moved nearer.
+
+"Bend down!"
+
+"Eh?"
+
+"Bend down your head."
+
+He bent down his huge form with a movement that had in it some
+resemblance to the movement of a child. She put up her hand and touched
+the bandage where it was red. She took her hand away. It was damp.
+
+A moment later Fritz was sitting in a low chair by the wash-hand stand
+in an obedient attitude, and a woman--was she siren or angel?--was
+bathing an ugly wound.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+AFTER that night Lady Holme began to do something she had never done
+before--to idealise her husband. Hitherto she had loved him without
+weaving pretty fancies round him, loved him crudely for his strength,
+his animalism, his powerful egoism and imperturbable self-satisfaction.
+She had loved him almost as a savage woman might love, though without
+her sense of slavery. Now a change came over her. She thought of Fritz
+in a different way, the new Fritz, the Fritz who was a believer in the
+angel. It seemed to her that he could be kept faithful most easily,
+most surely, by such an appeal as Robin Pierce would have loved. She had
+sought to rouse, to play upon the instincts of the primitive man. She
+had not gone very far, it is true, but her methods had been common,
+ordinary. She had undervalued Fritz's nature. That was what she felt
+now. He had behaved badly to her, had wronged her, but he had believed
+in her very much. She resolved to make his belief more intense. An
+expression on his face--only that--had wrought a vital change in her
+feeling towards him, her conception of him. She ranged him henceforth
+with Sir Donald, with Robin Pierce. He stood among the believers in the
+angel.
+
+She called upon the angel passionately, feverishly.
+
+There was strength in Lady Holme's character, and not merely strength
+of temper. When she was roused, confident, she could be resolute,
+persistent; could shut her eyes to side issues and go onward looking
+straight before her. Now she went onward and she felt a new force within
+her, a force that would not condescend to pettiness, to any groping in
+the mud.
+
+Lord Holme was puzzled. He felt the change in his wife, but did not
+understand it. Since the fracas with Leo Ulford their relations had
+slightly altered. Vaguely, confusedly, he was conscious of being pitied,
+yes, surely pitied by his wife. She shed a faint compassion, like a
+light cloud, over the glory of his wrongdoing. And the glory was abated.
+He felt a little doubtful of himself, almost as a son feels sometimes
+in the presence of his mother. For the first time he began to think of
+himself, now and then, as the inferior of his wife, began even, now and
+then, to think of man as the inferior of woman--in certain ways. Such a
+state of mind was very novel in him. He stared at it as a baby stares
+at its toes, with round amazement, inwardly saying, "Is this phenomenon
+part of me?"
+
+There was a new gentleness in Viola, a new tenderness. Both put him--as
+one lifted and dropped--a step below her. He pulled his bronze moustache
+over it with vigour.
+
+His wife showed no desire to control his proceedings, to know what
+he was about. When she spoke of Miss Schley she spoke kindly,
+sympathetically, but with a dainty, delicate pity, as one who secretly
+murmurs, "If she had only had a chance!" Lord Holme began to think it
+a sad thing that she had not had a chance. The mere thought sent the
+American a step down from her throne. She stood below him now, as he
+stood below Viola. It seemed to him that there was less resemblance
+between his wife and Miss Schley than he had fancied. He even said so to
+Lady Holme. The angel smiled. Somebody else in her smiled too. Once he
+remarked to the angel, _a propos de bottes_, "We men are awful brutes
+sometimes." Then he paused. As she said nothing, only looked very kind,
+he added, "I'll bet you think so, Vi?"
+
+It sounded like a question, but she preferred to give no answer, and he
+walked away shaking his head over the brutishness of men.
+
+The believers in the angel naturally welcomed the development in Lady
+Holme and the unbelievers laughed at it, especially those who had been
+at Arkell House and those who had been influenced by Pimpernel Schley's
+clever imitation. One night at the opera, when _Tannhauser_ was being
+given, Mr. Bry said of it, "I seem to hear the voice of Venus raised in
+the prayer of Elizabeth." Mrs. Wolfstein lifted large eyebrows over it,
+and remarked to Henry, in exceptionally guttural German:
+
+"If this goes on Pimpernel's imitation will soon be completely out of
+date."
+
+To be out of date--in Mrs. Wolfstein's opinion--was to be irremediably
+damned. Lady Cardington, Sir Donald Ulford, and one or two others began
+to feel as if their dream took form and stepped out of the mystic realm
+towards the light of day. Sir Donald seemed specially moved by the
+change. It was almost as if something within him blossomed, warmed by
+the breath of spring.
+
+Lady Holme wondered whether he knew of the fight between her husband and
+his son. She dared not ask him and he only mentioned Leo once. Then
+he said that Leo had gone down to his wife's country place in
+Hertfordshire. Lady Holme could not tell by his intonation whether he
+had guessed that there was a special reason for this departure. She was
+glad Leo had gone. The developing angel did not want to meet the man who
+had suffered from the siren's common conduct. Leo was not worth much.
+She knew that. But she realised now the meanness of having used him
+merely as a weapon against Fritz, and not only the meanness, but the
+vulgarity of the action. There were moments in which she was fully
+conscious that, despite her rank, she had not endured unsmirched close
+contact with the rampant commonness of London.
+
+One of the last great events of the season was to be a charity concert,
+got up by a Royal Princess in connection with a committee of well-known
+women to start a club for soldiers and sailors. Various amateurs and
+professionals were asked to take part in it, among them Lady Holme and
+Miss Schley. The latter had already accepted the invitation when Lady
+Holme received the Royal request, which was made _viva voce_ and was
+followed by a statement about the composition of the programme, in which
+"that clever Miss Schley" was named.
+
+Lady Holme hesitated. She had not met the American for some time and
+did not wish to meet her. Since she had bathed her husband's wound she
+knew--she could not have told how--that Miss Schley's power over him had
+lessened. She did not know what had happened between them. She did not
+know that anything had happened. And, as part of this new effort of
+hers, she had had the strength to beat down the vehement, the terrible
+curiosity--cold steel and fire combined--that is a part of jealousy.
+That curiosity, she told herself, belonged to the siren, not to the
+angel. But at this Royal request her temper waked, and with it many
+other children of her temperament. It was as if she had driven them into
+a dark cave and had rolled a great stone to the cave's mouth. Now the
+stone was pushed back, and in the darkness she heard them stirring,
+whispering, preparing to come forth.
+
+The Royal lady looked slightly surprised. She coughed and glanced at a
+watch she wore at her side.
+
+"I shall be delighted to do anything, ma'am," Lady Holme said quickly.
+
+When she received the programme she found that her two songs came
+immediately after "Some Imitations" by Miss Pimpernel Schley.
+
+She stood for a moment with the programme in her hand.
+
+"Some Imitations"; there was a certain crudeness about the statement, a
+crudeness and an indefiniteness combined. Who were to be the victims? At
+this moment, perhaps, they were being studied. Was she to be pilloried
+again as she had been pilloried that night at the British Theatre? The
+calm malice of the American was capable of any impudent act. It seemed
+to Lady Holme that she had perhaps been very foolish in promising to
+appear in the same programme with Miss Schley. Was it by accident that
+their names were put together? Lady Holme did not know who had arranged
+the order of the performances, but it occurred to her that there was
+attraction to the public in the contiguity, and that probably it was a
+matter of design. No other two women had been discussed and compared,
+smiled over and whispered about that season by Society as she and Miss
+Schley had been.
+
+For a moment, while she looked at the programme, she thought of the
+strange complications of feeling that are surely the fruit of an extreme
+civilisation. She saw herself caught in a spider's web of apparently
+frail, yet really powerful, threads spun by an invisible spider. Her
+world was full of gossamer playing the part of iron, of gossamer that
+was compelling, that made and kept prisoners. What freedom was there
+for her and women like her, what reality of freedom? Even beauty, birth,
+money were gossamer to hold the fly. For they concentrated the gaze of
+those terrible watchful eyes which govern lives, dominating actions,
+even dominating thoughts.
+
+She moved, had always moved, in a maze of complications. She saw them
+tiny yet intense, like ants in their hill. They stirred minds, hearts,
+as the ants stirred twigs, leaves, blossoms, and carried them to the
+hill for their own purposes. In this maze free will was surely lost. The
+beautiful woman of the world seems to the world to be a dominant being,
+to be imposing the yoke of her will on those around her. But is she
+anything but a slave?
+
+Why were she and Miss Schley enemies? Why had they been enemies from the
+moment they met? There was perhaps a reason for their hostility now,
+a reason in Fritz. But at the beginning what reason had there been?
+Civilisation manufactures reasons as the spider manufactures threads,
+because it is the deadly enemy of peace--manufactures reasons for all
+those thoughts and actions which are destructive of inward and exterior
+peace.
+
+For a moment it seemed to Lady Holme as if she and the American
+were merely victims of the morbid conditions amid which they lived;
+conditions which caused the natural vanity of women to become a
+destroying fever, the natural striving of women to please a venomous
+battle, the natural desire of women to be loved a fracas, in which
+clothes were the armour, modes of hair-dressing, manicure, perfumes,
+dyes, powder-puffs the weapons.
+
+What a tremendous, noisy nothingness it was, this state of being! How
+could an angel be natural in it,--be an angel at all?
+
+She laid down the programme and sighed. She felt a vague yet violent
+desire for release, for a fierce change, for something that would brush
+away the spider's web and set free her wings. Yet where would she fly?
+She did not know; probably against a window-pane. And the change would
+never come. She and Fritz--what could they ever be but a successful
+couple known in a certain world and never moving beyond its orbit?
+
+Perhaps for the first time the longing that she had often expressed
+in her singing, obedient to poet and composer, invaded her own soul.
+Without music she was what with music she had often seemed to be--a
+creature of wayward and romantic desires, a yearning spirit, a soaring
+flame.
+
+At that moment she could have sung better than she had ever sung.
+
+On the programme the names of her songs did not appear. They were
+represented by the letters A and B. She had not decided yet what she
+would sing. But now, moved by feeling to the longing for some action in
+which she might express it, she resolved to sing something in which she
+could at least flutter the wings she longed to free, something in
+which the angel could lift its voice, something that would delight
+the believers in the angel and be as far removed from Miss Schley's
+imitations as possible.
+
+After a time she chose two songs. One was English, by a young composer,
+and was called "Away." It breathed something of the spirit of the East.
+The man who had written it had travelled much in the East, had drawn
+into his lungs the air, into his nostrils the perfume, into his soul
+the meaning of desert places. There was distance in his music. There
+was mystery. There was the call of the God of Gold who lives in the sun.
+There was the sound of feet that travel. The second song she chose was
+French. The poem was derived from a writing of Jalalu'd dinu'r Rumi, and
+told this story.
+
+One day a man came to knock upon the door of the being he loved. A voice
+cried from within the house, "_Qui est la_?" "_C'est moi_!" replied
+the man. There was a pause. Then the voice answered, "This house cannot
+shelter us both together." Sadly the lover went away, went into the
+great solitude, fasted and prayed. When a long year had passed he came
+once more to the house of the one he loved, and struck again upon
+the door. The voice from within cried, "_Qui est la_?" "_C'est toi_!"
+whispered the lover. Then the door was opened swiftly and he passed in
+with outstretched arms.
+
+Having decided that she would sing these two songs, Lady Holme sat down
+to go through them at the piano. Just as she struck the first chord of
+the desert song a footman came in to know whether she was at home to
+Lady Cardington. She answered "Yes." In her present mood she longed
+to give out her feeling to an audience, and Lady Cardington was very
+sympathetic.
+
+In a minute she came in, looking as usual blanched and tired, dressed in
+black with some pale yellow roses in the front of her gown. Seeing Lady
+Holme at the piano she said, in her low voice with a thrill in it:
+
+"You are singing? Let me listen, let me listen."
+
+She did not come up to shake hands, but at once sat down at a short
+distance from the piano, leaned back, and gazed at Lady Holme with a
+strange expression of weary, yet almost passionate, expectation.
+
+Lady Holme looked at her and at the desert song. Suddenly she thought
+she would not sing it to Lady Cardington. There was too wild a spell
+in it for this auditor. She played a little prelude and sang an Italian
+song, full, as a warm flower of sweetness, of the sweetness of love. The
+refrain was soft as golden honey, soft and languorous, strangely sweet
+and sad. There was an exquisite music in the words of the refrain, and
+the music they were set to made their appeal more clinging, like the
+appeal of white arms, of red, parting lips.
+
+
+  "Torna in fior di giovinezza
+       Isaotta Blanzesmano,
+       Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano:
+   Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."
+
+
+Tears came into Lady Cardington's eyes as she listened, brimmed over and
+fell down upon her blanched cheeks. Each time the refrain recurred she
+moved her lips: "Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano: Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."
+
+Lady Holme's voice was like honey as she sang, and tears were in her
+eyes too. Each time the refrain fell from her heart she seemed to see
+another world, empty of gossamer threads, a world of spread wings,
+a world of--but such poetry and music do not tell you! Nor can you
+imagine. You can only dream and wonder, as when you look at the horizon
+line and pray for the things beyond.
+
+
+  "Tutto--tutto al mondo a vano:
+   Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."
+
+
+"Why do you sing like that to-day?" said Lady Cardington, wiping her
+eyes gently.
+
+"I feel like that to-day," Lady Holme said, keeping her hands on the
+keys in the last chord. There was a vagueness in her eyes, a sort of
+faint cloud of fear. While she was singing she had thought, "Have I
+known the love that shows the vanity of the world? Have I known the
+love in which alone all sweetness lives?" The thought had come in like a
+firefly through an open window. "Have I? Have I?"
+
+And something within her felt a stab of pain, something within her soul
+and yet surely a thousand miles away.
+
+"Tutto--tutto al mondo e vano," murmured Lady Cardington. "We feel that
+and we feel it, and--do you?"
+
+"To-day I seem to," answered Lady Holme.
+
+"When you sing that song you look like the love that gives all sweetness
+to men. Sing like that, look like that, and you--If Sir Donald had heard
+you!"
+
+Lady Holme got up from the piano.
+
+"Sir Donald!" she said.
+
+She came to sit down near Lady Cardington.
+
+"Sir Donald! Why do you say that?"
+
+And she searched Lady Cardington's eyes with eyes full of inquiry.
+
+Lady Cardington looked away. The wistful power that generally seemed a
+part of her personality had surely died out in her. There was something
+nervous in her expression, deprecating in her attitude.
+
+"Why do you speak about Sir Donald?" Lady Holme said.
+
+"Don't you know?"
+
+Lady Cardington looked up. There was an extraordinary sadness in her
+eyes, mingled with a faint defiance.
+
+"Know what?"
+
+"That Sir Donald is madly in love with you?"
+
+"Sir Donald! Sir Donald--madly anything!"
+
+She laughed, not as if she were amused, but as if she wished to do
+something else and chose to laugh instead. Lady Cardington sat straight
+up.
+
+"You don't understand anything but youth," she said.
+
+There was a sound of keen bitterness in her low voice.
+
+"And yet," she added, after a pause, "you can sing till you break the
+heart of age--break its heart."
+
+Suddenly she burst into a flood of tears. Lady Holme was so surprised
+that she did absolutely nothing, did not attempt to console, to inquire.
+She sat and looked at Lady Cardington's tall figure swayed by grief,
+listened to the sound of her hoarse, gasping sobs. And then, abruptly,
+as if someone came into the room and told her, she understood.
+
+"You love Sir Donald," she said.
+
+Lady Cardington looked up. Her tear-stained, distorted face seemed very
+old.
+
+"We both regret the same thing in the same way," she said. "We were both
+wretched in--in the time when we ought to have been happy. I thought--I
+had a ridiculous idea we might console each other. You shattered my
+hope."
+
+"I'm sorry," Lady Holme said.
+
+And she said it with more tenderness than she had ever before used to a
+woman.
+
+Lady Cardington pressed a pocket-handkerchief against her eyes.
+
+"Sing me that song again," she whispered. "Don't say anything more. Just
+sing it again and I'll go."
+
+Lady Holme went to the piano.
+
+
+  "Torna in fior di giovinezza
+       Isaotta Blanzesmano,
+       Dice: Tutto al mondo a vano:
+   Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."
+
+
+When the last note died away she looked towards the sofa. Lady
+Cardington was gone. Lady Holme leaned her arm on the piano and put her
+chin in her hand.
+
+"How awful to be old!" she thought.
+
+Half aloud she repeated the last words of the refrain: "Nell'amore ogni
+dolcezza." And then she murmured:
+
+"Poor Sir Donald!"
+
+And then she repeated, "Poor--" and stopped. Again the faint cloud of
+fear was in her eyes.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE Charity Concert was to be given in Manchester House, one of the
+private palaces of London, and as Royalty had promised to be present,
+all the tickets were quickly sold. Among those who bought them were most
+of the guests who had been present at the Holmes' dinner-party when Lady
+Holme lost her temper and was consoled by Robin Pierce. Robin of course
+was in Rome, but Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mrs. Wolfstein, Sir
+Donald, Mr. Bry took seats. Rupert Carey also bought a ticket. He was
+not invited to great houses any more, but on this public occasion no one
+with a guinea to spend was unwelcome. To Lady Holme's surprise the day
+before the concert Fritz informed her that he was going too.
+
+"You, Fritz!" she exclaimed. "But it's in the afternoon."
+
+"What o' that?"
+
+"You'll be bored to death. You'll go to sleep. Probably you'll snore."
+
+"Not I."
+
+He straddled his legs and looked attentively at the toes of his boots.
+Lady Holme wondered why he was going. Had Miss Schley made a point of
+it? She longed to know. The cruel curiosity which the angel was ever
+trying to beat down rose up in her powerfully.
+
+"I say--"
+
+Her husband was speaking with some hesitation.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Let's have a squint at the programme, will you?"
+
+"Here it is."
+
+She gave it to him and watched him narrowly as he looked quickly over
+it.
+
+"Hulloa!" he said.
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"Some Imitations," he said. "What's that mean?"
+
+"Didn't you know Miss Schley was a mimic?"
+
+"A mimic--not I! She's an actress."
+
+"Yes--now."
+
+"Now? When was she anythin' else?"
+
+"When she began in America. She was a mimic in the music-halls."
+
+"The deuce she was!"
+
+He stood looking very grave and puzzled for a minute, then he stared
+hard at his wife.
+
+"What did she mimic?"
+
+"I don't know--people."
+
+Again there was a silence. Then he said--
+
+"I say, I don't know that I want you to sing at that affair to-morrow."
+
+"But I must. Why not?"
+
+He hesitated, shifting from one foot to the other almost like a great
+boy.
+
+"I don't know what she's up to," he answered at last.
+
+"Miss Schley?"
+
+"Ah!"
+
+Lady Holme felt her heart beat faster. Was her husband going to open up
+a discussion of the thing that had been turning her life to gall during
+these last weeks--his flirtation, his _liaison_--if it were a _liaison_;
+she did not know--with the American? The woman who had begun to idealise
+Fritz and the woman who was desperately jealous of him both seemed to be
+quivering within her.
+
+"Do you mean--?" she began.
+
+She stopped, then spoke again in a quiet voice.
+
+"Do you mean that you think Miss Schley is going to do something unusual
+at the concert tomorrow?"
+
+"I dunno. She's the devil."
+
+There was a reluctant admiration in his voice, as there always is in
+the voice of a man when he describes a woman as gifted with infernal
+attributes, and this sound stung Lady Holme. It seemed to set that angel
+upon whom she was calling in the dust, to make of that angel a puppet,
+an impotent, even a contemptible thing.
+
+"My dear Fritz," she said in a rather loud, clear voice, like the voice
+of one speaking to a child, "my dear Fritz, you're surely aware that I
+have been the subject of Miss Schley's talent ever since she arrived in
+London?"
+
+"You! What d'you mean?"
+
+"You surely can't be so blind as not to have seen what all London has
+seen?"
+
+"What's all London seen?'
+
+"Why, that Miss Schley's been mimicking me!"
+
+"Mimickin' you!"
+
+The brown of his large cheeks was invaded by red.
+
+"But you have noticed it. I remember your speaking about it."
+
+"Not I!" he exclaimed with energy.
+
+"Yes. You spoke of the likeness between us, in expression, in ways of
+looking and moving."
+
+"That--I thought it was natural."
+
+"You thought it was natural?"
+
+There was a profound, if very bitter, compassion in her voice.
+
+"Poor old boy!" she added.
+
+Lord Holme looked desperately uncomfortable. His legs were in a most
+violent, even a most pathetic commotion, and he tugged his moustache
+with the fingers of both hands.
+
+"Damned cheek!" he muttered. "Damned cheek!"
+
+He turned suddenly as if he were going to stride about the room.
+
+"Don't get angry," said his wife. "I never did."
+
+He swung round and faced her.
+
+"D'you mean you've always known she was mimickin' you?"
+
+"Of course. From the very start."
+
+His face got redder.
+
+"I'll teach her to let my wife alone," he muttered. "To dare--my wife!"
+
+"I'm afraid it's a little late in the day to begin now," Lady Holme
+said. "Society's been laughing over it, and your apparent appreciation
+of it, the best part of the season."
+
+"My what?"
+
+"Your apparent enjoyment of the performance."
+
+And then she went quietly out of the room and shut the door gently
+behind her. But directly the door was shut she became another woman. Her
+mouth was distorted, her eyes shone, she rushed upstairs to her bedroom,
+locked herself in, threw herself down on the bed and pressed her face
+furiously against the coverlet.
+
+The fact that she had spoken at last to her husband of the insult she
+had been silently enduring, the insult he had made so far more bitter
+than it need have been by his conduct, had broken down something within
+her, some wall of pride behind which had long been gathering a flood
+of feeling. She cried now frantically, with a sort of despairing rage,
+cried and crushed herself against the bed, beating the pillows with her
+hands, grinding her teeth.
+
+What was the use of it all? What was the use of being beautiful, of
+being young, rich? What was the use of having married a man she had
+loved? What was the use? What was the use?
+
+"What's the use?" she sobbed the words out again and again.
+
+For the man was a fool, Fritz was a fool. She thought of him at that
+moment as half-witted. For he saw nothing, nothing. He was a blind man
+led by his animal passions, and when at last he was forced to see, when
+she came and, as it were, lifted his eyelids with her fingers, and said
+to him, "Look! Look at what has been done to me!" he could only be angry
+for himself, because the insult had attained him, because she happened
+to be his wife. It seemed to her, while she was crying there, that
+stupidity combined with egoism must have the power to kill even that
+vital, enduring thing, a woman's love. She had begun to idealise Fritz,
+but how could she go on idealising him? And she began for the first time
+really to understand--or to begin to understand--that there actually was
+something within her which was hungry, unsatisfied, something which was
+not animal but mental, or was it spiritual?--something not sensual, not
+cerebral, which cried aloud for sustenance. And this something did not,
+could never, cry to Fritz. It knew he could not give it what it wanted.
+Then to whom did it cry? She did not know.
+
+Presently she grew calmer and sat upon the bed, looking straight before
+her. Her mind returned upon itself. She seemed to go back to that point
+of time, just before Lady Cardington called, when she had the programme
+in her hand and thought of the gossamer threads that were as iron in her
+life, and in such lives as hers; then to move on to that other point of
+time when she laid down the programme, sighed, and was conscious of a
+violent desire for release, for something to come and lift a powerful
+hand and brush away the spider's web.
+
+But now, returning to this further moment in her life, she asked herself
+what would be left to her if the spider's web were gone? The believers
+in the angel? Perhaps she no longer included Fritz among them. The
+impotence of his mind seemed to her an impotence of heart just then. He
+was to her like a numbed creature, incapable of movement, incapable of
+thought, incapable of belief. Credulity--yes, but not belief. And
+so, when she looked at the believers, she saw but a few people: Robin
+Pierce, Sir Donald--whom else?
+
+And then she heard, as if far off, the song she would sing on the morrow
+at Manchester House.
+
+
+  "Torna in fior di giovinezza
+       Isaotta Blanzesmano,
+       Dice: Tutto al mondo a vano:
+   Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."
+
+
+And then she cried again, but no longer frantically; quietly, with a
+sort of childish despair and confusion. In her heart there had opened
+a dark space, a gulf. She peered into it and heard, deep down in it,
+hollow echoes resounding, and she recoiled from a vision of emptiness.
+
+  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
+
+On the following day Fritz drove her himself to Manchester House in a
+new motor he had recently bought. All the morning he had stayed at home
+and fidgeted about the house. It was obvious to his wife that he was in
+an unusually distracted frame of mind. He wanted to tell her something,
+yet could not do so. She saw that plainly, and she felt almost certain
+that since their interview of the previous day he had seen Miss Schley.
+She fancied that there had been a scene of some kind between them, and
+she guessed that Fritz had been hopelessly worsted in it and was very
+sorry for himself. There was a beaten look in his face, a very different
+look from that which had startled her when he came into her room after
+thrashing Leo Ulford. This time, however, her curiosity was not awake,
+and the fact that it was not awake marked a change in her. She felt
+to-day as if she did not care what Fritz had been doing or was going
+to do. She had suffered, she had concealed her suffering, she had tried
+vulgarly to pay Fritz out, she had failed. At the critical moment she
+had played the woman after he had played the man. He had thrashed the
+intruder whom she was using as a weapon, and she had bathed his wounds,
+made much of him, idealised him. She had done what any uneducated street
+woman would have done for "her man." And now she had suddenly come to
+feel as if there had always been an emptiness in her life, as if Fritz
+never had, never could fill it. The abruptness of the onset of this new
+feeling confused her. She did not know that a woman could be subject
+to a change of this kind. She did not understand it, realise what it
+portended, what would result from it. But she felt that, for the moment,
+at any rate, she could not get up any excitement about Fritz, his
+feelings, his doings. Whenever she thought of him she thought of his
+blundering stupidity, his blindness, sensuality and egoism. No doubt she
+loved him. Only, to-day, she did not feel as if she loved him or anyone.
+Yet she did not feel dull. On the contrary, she was highly strung,
+unusually sensitive. What she was most acutely conscious of was a
+sensation of lonely excitement, of solitary expectation. Fritz fidgeted
+about the house, and the fact that he did so gave her no more concern
+than if a little dog had been running to and fro. She did not want him
+to tell her what was the matter. On the other hand, she did want him not
+to tell her. Simply she did not care.
+
+He said nothing. Perhaps something in her look, her manner, kept him
+dumb.
+
+When they were in the motor on the way to Manchester House, he said:
+
+"I bet you'll cut out everybody."
+
+"Oh, there are all sorts of stars."
+
+"Well, mind you put 'em all out."
+
+It was evident to her that for some reason or other he was particularly
+anxious she should shine that afternoon. She meant to. She knew she was
+going to. But she had no desire to shine in order to gratify Fritz's
+egoism. Probably he had just had a quarrel with Miss Schley and
+wanted to punish her through his wife. The idea was not a pretty one.
+Unfortunately that circumstance did not ensure its not being a true one.
+
+"Mind you do, eh?" reiterated her husband, giving the steering wheel a
+twist and turning the car up Hamilton Place.
+
+"I shall try to sing well, naturally," she replied coldly. "I always
+do."
+
+"Of course--I know."
+
+There was something almost servile in his manner, an anxiety which was
+quite foreign to it as a rule.
+
+"That's a stunnin' dress," he added. "Keep your cloak well over it."
+
+She said nothing.
+
+"What's the row?" he asked. "Anythin' up?"
+
+"I'm thinking over my songs."
+
+"Oh, I see."
+
+She had silenced him for the moment.
+
+Very soon they were in a long line of carriages and motors moving slowly
+towards Manchester House.
+
+"Goin' to be a deuce of a crowd," said Fritz.
+
+"Naturally."
+
+"Wonder who'll be there?"
+
+"Everybody who's still in town."
+
+She bowed to a man in a hansom.
+
+"Who's that?"
+
+"Plancon. He's singing."
+
+"How long'll it be before you come on?"
+
+"Quite an hour, I think."
+
+"Better than bein' first, isn't it?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"What are you goin' to sing?"
+
+"Oh--"
+
+She was about to say something impatient about his not knowing one tune
+from another, but she checked herself, and answered quietly:
+
+"An Italian song and a French song."
+
+"What about?"
+
+"Take care of that carriage in front--love."
+
+He looked at her sideways.
+
+"You're the one to sing about that," he said.
+
+She felt that he was admiring her beauty as if it were new to him. She
+did not care.
+
+At last they reached Manchester House. Fritz's place was taken by
+his chauffeur, and they got out. The crowd was enormous. Many people
+recognised Lady Holme and greeted her. Others, who did not know her
+personally, looked at her with open curiosity. A powdered footman came
+to show her to the improvised artists' room. Fritz prepared to follow.
+
+"Aren't you going into the concert-room?" she said.
+
+"Presently."
+
+"But--"
+
+"I'll take you up first."
+
+"Very well," she said. "But it isn't the least necessary."
+
+He only stuck out his under jaw. She realised that Miss Schley would
+be in the artists' room and said nothing more. They made their way very
+slowly to the great landing on the first floor of the house, from which
+a maze of reception rooms opened. Mr. and Mrs. Ongrin, the immensely
+rich Australians who were the owners of the house, were standing there
+ready to receive the two Royal Princesses who were expected, and Mr.
+Ongrin took from a basket on a table beside him a great bouquet of
+honey-coloured roses, and offered it to Lady Holme with a hearty word of
+thanks to her for singing.
+
+She took the roses with a look of pleasure.
+
+"How sweet of you! They suit my song," she said.
+
+She was thinking of the Italian song.
+
+Mr. Ongrin, who was a large, loose-limbed man, with straw-coloured hair
+turning grey, and a broken nose, looked genial and confused, and she
+went on, still closely followed by Fritz.
+
+"This is the room for the performers, my lady," said the footman,
+showing them into a large, green drawing-room, with folding doors at one
+end shut off by an immense screen.
+
+"Is the platform behind the screen?" Lady Holme asked.
+
+"Yes, my lady. The ladies' cloak-room is on the left--that door, my
+lady."
+
+There were already several people in the room, standing about and
+looking tentative. Lady Holme knew most of them. One was a French
+actor who was going to give a monologue; very short, very stout, very
+intelligent-looking, with a face that seemed almost too flexible to be
+human. Two or three were singers from the Opera House. Another was an
+aristocratic amateur, an intimate friend of Lady Holme's, who had a
+beautiful contralto voice. Several of the committee were there too,
+making themselves agreeable to the artists. Lady Holme began to speak
+to the French actor. Fritz stood by. He scarcely understood a word of
+French, and always looked rather contemptuous when it was talked in
+his presence. The French actor appealed to him on some point in the
+conversation. He straddled his legs, uttered a loud, "Oh, wee! Oh, wee!
+wee!" and laughed.
+
+"Lord Holme est tout a fait de mon avis!" cried the comedian.
+
+"Evidemment," she answered, wishing Fritz would go. Miss Schley had not
+come yet. She was certain to be effectively late, as she had been at
+Mrs. Wolfstein's lunch-party. Lady Holme did not feel as if she cared
+whether she came early or late, whether she were there or not. She was
+still companioned by her curious sensation of the morning, a sensation
+of odd loneliness and detachment, combined with excitement--but an
+excitement which had nothing to do with the present. It seemed to her as
+if she were a person leaning out of a window and looking eagerly along
+a road. People were in the room behind her, voices were speaking, things
+were happening there, but they had nothing to do with her. That which
+had to do with her was coming down the road. She could not see yet what
+it was, but she could hear the faint sound of its approach.
+
+The comedian spoke to someone else. She went into the cloak-room and
+took off her motor cloak. As she glanced into a mirror to see if all the
+details of her gown were perfect, she was struck by the expression on
+her face, as if she had seen it on the face of a stranger. For a moment
+she looked at herself as at a stranger, seeing her beauty with a curious
+detachment, and admiring it without personal vanity or egoism, or any
+small, triumphant feeling. Yet it was not her beauty which fascinated
+her eyes, but an imaginative look in them and in the whole face. For
+the first time she fully realised why she had a curious, an evocative,
+influence on certain people, why she called the hidden children of the
+secret places of their souls, why those children heard, and stretched
+out their hands, and lifted their eyes and opened their lips.
+
+There was a summoning, and yet a distant expression in her eyes. She
+saw it herself. They were like eyes that had looked on magic, that would
+look on magic again.
+
+A maid came to help her. In a moment she had picked up her bouquet of
+roses and her music-case, and was back in the green drawing-room.
+
+There were more people in it now. Fritz was still hovering about looking
+remarkably out of place and strangely ill at ease. To-day his usual
+imperturbable self-confidence had certainly deserted him. He spoke
+to people but his eyes were on the door. Lady Holme knew that he
+was waiting for Miss Schley. She felt a sort of vague pity for his
+uneasiness. It was time for the concert to begin, but the Princesses
+had not yet arrived. A murmur of many voices came from the hidden room
+beyond the screen where the audience was assembled. Several of the
+performers began to look rather strung up. They smiled and talked with
+slightly more vivacity than was quite natural in them. One or two of the
+singers glanced over their songs, and pointed out certain effects they
+meant to make to the principal accompanist, an abnormally thin boy
+with thick dark hair and flushed cheeks. He expressed comprehension,
+emphasising it by finger-taps on the music and a continual, "I see!
+I see!" Two or three of the members of the committee looked at their
+watches, and the murmur of conversation in the hidden concert-room rose
+into a dull roar.
+
+Lady Holme sat down on a sofa. Sometimes when she was going to sing she
+felt nervous. There are very few really accomplished artists who do
+not. But to-day she was not at all nervous. She knew she was going to do
+well--as well as when she sang to Lady Cardington, even better. She felt
+almost as if she were made of music, as if music were part of her, ran
+in her veins like blood, shone in her eyes like light, beat in her heart
+like the pulse of life. But she felt also as if she were still at a
+window, looking down a road, and listening to the sound of an approach.
+
+"Did you see him?"
+
+A lady near her was speaking to a friend.
+
+"Yes. Doesn't he look shocking? Such an alteration!"
+
+"Poor fellow! I wonder he cares to go about."
+
+"And he's so clever. He helped me in a concert once--the Gordon boys,
+you know--and I assure you--"
+
+She did not catch anything more, but she felt a conviction that they
+were speaking of Rupert Carey, and that he must be in the concert-room.
+Poor Carey! She thought of the Arkell House ball, but only for a moment.
+Then someone spoke to her. A moment later Miss Schley came slowly
+into the room, accompanied by a very small, wiry-looking old woman,
+dreadfully dressed, and by Leo Ulford, who was carrying a bouquet of red
+carnations. The kind care of Mr. Ongrin had provided a bouquet for each
+lady who was performing.
+
+As Leo came in he looked round swiftly, furtively. He saw Fritz, and
+a flush went over his face. Then Lady Holme saw him look at her with a
+scowl, exactly like the scowl of an evil-tempered schoolboy. She bowed
+to him slightly. He ignored the recognition, and spoke to Miss Schley
+with a heavy assumption of ignominious devotion and intimacy. Lady Holme
+could scarcely help smiling. She read the little story very plainly--the
+little common story of Leo's desire to take a revenge for his thrashing
+fitting in with some similar desire of Miss Schley's; on her part
+probably a wish to punish Fritz for having ventured to say something
+about her impudent mimicry of his wife. Easy to read it was,
+common-minded, common-hearted humanity in full sail to petty triumph,
+petty revenge. But all this was taking place in the room behind Lady
+Holme, and she was leaning from the window watching the white road. But
+Fritz? She glanced round the drawing-room and saw that he was moved by
+the story as they had meant him to be moved. The angry jealousy of the
+primitive, sensual man was aflame, His possessive sense, one of the
+strongest, if not the strongest, of such a man's senses, was outraged.
+And he showed it.
+
+He was standing with a middle-aged lady, one of the committee, but he
+had ceased from talking to her, and was staring at Miss Schley and Leo
+with the peculiar inflated look on his face that was characteristic of
+him when his passions were fully roused. Every feature seemed to swell
+and become bloated, as if under the influence of a disease or physical
+seizure. The middle-aged lady looked at him with obvious astonishment,
+then turned away and spoke to the French actor.
+
+Miss Schley moved slowly into the middle of the room. She did not seem
+to see Fritz. Two or three people came to speak to her. She smiled but
+did not say much. The little wiry-looking old lady, her mother from
+Susanville, stood by her in an effaced manner, and Leo, holding the
+bouquet, remained close beside her, standing over her in his impudent
+fashion like a privileged guardian and lover.
+
+Lady Holme was watching Fritz. The necessary suppression of his anger
+at such a moment, and in such surroundings, suppression of any
+demonstration of it at least, was evidently torturing him. Someone--a
+man--spoke to him. His wife saw that he seemed to choke something down
+before he could get out a word in reply. Directly he had answered he
+moved away from the man towards Miss Schley, but he did not go up to
+her. He did not trust himself to do that. He stood still again, staring.
+Leo bent protectively over the American. She smiled at him demurely
+beneath lowered eyelids. The little old lady shook out her rusty black
+dress and assumed an absurd air of social sprightliness, making a mouth
+bunched up like an old-fashioned purse sharply drawn together by a
+string.
+
+There was a sudden lull in the roar of conversation from the
+concert-room, succeeded by a wide rustling noise. The Princesses had
+at length arrived, and the audience was standing up as they came in and
+took their seats. After a brief silence the rustling noise was renewed
+as the audience sat down again. Then the pianist hurried up to a
+grave-looking girl who was tenderly holding a violin, took her hand and
+led her away behind the screen. A moment later the opening bars of a
+duet were audible.
+
+The people in the artists' room began to sit down with a slight air of
+resignation. The French actor looked at the very pointed toes of his
+varnished boots and composed his india-rubber features into a solemn,
+almost priestly, expression. Lady Holme went over to a sofa near the
+screen and listened attentively to the duet, but from time to time
+she glanced towards the middle of the room where Miss Schley was
+still calmly standing up with Leo holding the bouquet. The mother from
+Susanville had subsided on a small chair with gilt legs, spread out
+her meagre gown, and assumed the aspect of a roosting bird at twilight.
+Fritz stood up with his back against the wall, staring at Miss Schley.
+His face still looked bloated. Presently Miss Schley glanced at him,
+as if by accident, looked surprised at seeing him there, and nodded
+demurely. He made a movement forward from the wall, but she immediately
+began to whisper to Leo Ulford, and after remaining for a moment in an
+attitude of angry hesitation he moved backward again. His face flushed
+scarlet.
+
+Lady Holme realised that he was making a fool of himself. She saw
+several pairs of eyes turned towards him, slight smiles appearing
+on several faces. The French actor had begun to watch him with an
+expression of close criticism, as a stage manager watches an actor at
+rehearsal. But she did not feel as if she cared what Fritz was doing.
+The sound of the violin had emphasised her odd sensation of having
+nothing to do with what was going on in the room. Just for one hour
+Fritz's conduct could not affect her.
+
+Very soon people began to whisper round her. Artists find it very
+difficult to listen to other artists on these occasions. In a minute or
+two almost everybody was speaking with an air of mystery. Miss Schley
+put her lips to Leo Ulford's ear. Evidently she had a great deal to say
+to him. He began to pout his lips in smiles. They both looked across at
+Lord Holme. Then Miss Schley went on murmuring words into Leo's ear and
+Leo began to shake with silent laughter. Lord Holme clenched his hands
+at his sides. The French actor, still watching him closely, put up a
+fat forefinger and meditatively traced the outline of his own profile,
+pushing out his large flexible lips when the finger was drawing near to
+them. The whole room was full of the tickling noise of half-whispered
+conversation.
+
+Presently the music stopped. Instantly the tickling noise stopped too.
+There was languid applause--the applause of smart people on a summer
+afternoon--from beyond the screen. Then the grave girl reappeared,
+looking graver and hot. Those who had been busily talking while she
+was playing gathered round her to express their delight in her kind
+accompaniment. The pianist hurried up to a stout man with a low,
+turned-down collar and a white satin tie, whose double chin, and general
+air of rather fatuous prosperity, proclaimed him the possessor of a
+tenor voice, and Miss Schley walked quietly, but with determination, up
+to where Lady Holme was sitting and took a seat beside her.
+
+"Glad to meet you again," she drawled.
+
+She called Leo Ulford with a sharp nod. He hesitated, and began to look
+supremely uncomfortable, twisting the bouquet of carnations round and
+round in nervous hands.
+
+"I've been simply expiring all season to hear you sing," Miss Schley
+continued.
+
+"How sweet of you!"
+
+"That is so. Mr. Ulford, please bring my flowers."
+
+Leo had no alternative but to obey. He came slowly towards the sofa,
+while the tenor and the pianist vanished behind the screen. That he
+was sufficiently sensitive to be conscious of the awkwardness of the
+situation Miss Schley had pleasantly contrived was very apparent.
+He glowered upon Lady Holme, forcing his boyish face to assume a
+coarsely-determined and indifferent expression. But somehow the body,
+which she knew her husband had thrashed, looked all the time as if it
+were being thrashed again.
+
+The voice of the hidden tenor rose in "_Celeste Aida!_" and Lady Holme
+listened with an air of definite attention, taking no notice of Leo. The
+music gave her a perfect excuse for ignoring him. But Miss Schley did
+not intend to be interfered with by anything so easily trampled upon as
+an art. Speaking in her most clear and choir-boyish tones, she said to
+Leo Ulford:
+
+"Sit down, Mr. Ulford. You fidget me standing."
+
+Then turning again to Lady Holme she continued:
+
+"Mr. Ulford's been so lovely and kind. He came up all the way from
+Hertfordshire just to take care of marmar and me to-day. Marmar's fair
+and crazy about him. She says he's the most lovely feller in Europe."
+
+Leo twisted the bouquet. He was sitting now on the edge of a chair, and
+shooting furtive glances in the direction of Lord Holme, who had begun
+to look extremely stupid, overwhelmed by the cool impudence of the
+American.
+
+"Your husband looks as if he were perched around on a keg of
+rattlesnakes," continued Miss Schley, her clear voice mingling with the
+passionate tenor cry, "_Celeste Aida!_" "Ain't he feeling well to-day?"
+
+"I believe he is perfectly well," said Lady Holme, in a very low voice.
+
+It was odd, perhaps, but she did not feel at all angry, embarrassed,
+or even slightly annoyed, by Miss Schley's very deliberate attempt to
+distress her. Of course she understood perfectly what had happened and
+was happening. Fritz had spoken to the actress about her mimicry of
+his wife, had probably spoken blunderingly, angrily. Miss Schley was
+secretly furious at his having found out what she had been doing, still
+more furious at his having dared to criticise any proceeding of hers. To
+revenge herself at one stroke on both Lord and Lady Holme she had turned
+to Leo Ulford, whose destiny it evidently was to be used as a weapon
+against others. Long ago Lady Holme had distracted Leo's wandering
+glances from the American and fixed them on herself. With the instinct
+to be common of an utterly common nature Miss Schley had resolved to
+awake a double jealousy--of husband and wife--by exhibiting Leo Ulford
+as her _ami intime_, perhaps as the latest victim to her fascination. It
+was the vulgar action of a vulgar woman, but it failed of its effect
+in one direction. Lord Holme was stirred, but Lady Holme was utterly
+indifferent. Miss Schley's quick instinct told her so and she was
+puzzled. She did not understand Lady Holme. That was scarcely strange,
+for to-day Lady Holme did not understand herself. The curious mental
+detachment of which she had been conscious for some time had increased
+until it began surely to link itself with something physical, something
+sympathetic in the body that replied to it. She asked herself whether
+the angel were spreading her wings at last. All the small, sordid
+details of which lives lived in society, lives such as hers, are full,
+details which assume often an extraordinary importance, a significance
+like that of molecules seen through a magnifying glass, had suddenly
+become to her as nothing. A profound indifference had softly invaded her
+towards the petty side of life. Miss Schley, Leo Ulford, even Fritz in
+his suppressed rage and jealousy of a male animal openly trampled upon,
+had nothing to do with her, could have no effect on her at this moment.
+She remembered that she had once sighed for release. Well, it seemed to
+her as if release were at hand.
+
+The tenor finished his romance. Again the muffled applause sounded. As
+the singer came from behind the screen, wiping beads of perspiration
+from his self-satisfied face, Lady Holme got up and congratulated him.
+Then she crossed over to her husband.
+
+"Why don't you go into the concert-room, Fritz? You're missing
+everything, and you're only in the way here."
+
+She did not speak unkindly. He said nothing, only cleared his throat.
+
+"Go in," she said. "I should like to have you there while I am singing."
+
+He cleared his throat again.
+
+"Right you are."
+
+He stared into her eyes with a sort of savage admiration.
+
+"Cut her out," he said. "Cut her out! You can, and--damn her!--she
+deserves it."
+
+Then he turned and went out.
+
+Lady Holme felt rather sick for a moment. She knew she was going to sing
+well, she wished to sing well--but not in order to punish Miss Schley
+for having punished Fritz. Was everything she did to accomplish some
+sordid result? Was even her singing--the one thing in which Robin Pierce
+and some other divined a hidden truth that was beautiful--was even that
+to play its contemptible part in the social drama in which she was so
+inextricably entangled? Those gossamer threads were iron strands indeed.
+
+Someone else was singing--her friend with the contralto voice.
+
+She sat down alone in a corner. Presently the French actor began to
+give one of his famous monologues. She heard his wonderfully varied
+elocution, his voice--intelligence made audible and dashed with flying
+lights of humour rising and falling subtly, yet always with a curious
+sound of inevitable simplicity. She heard gentle titterings from the
+concealed audience, then a definite laugh, then a peal of laughter quite
+gloriously indiscreet. The people were waking up. And she felt as if
+they were being prepared for her. But why had Fritz looked like that,
+spoken like that? It seemed to spoil everything. To-day she felt too far
+away from--too far beyond, that was the truth--Miss Schley to want to
+enter into any rivalry with her. She wished very much that she had been
+placed first on the programme. Then there could have been no question of
+her cutting out the American.
+
+As she was thinking this Miss Schley slowly crossed the room and came up
+to her.
+
+"Lady Holme," she said, "I come next."
+
+"Do you?"
+
+"I do. And then you follow after."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Say, would you mind changing it? It don't do to have two recitations
+one after the other. There ought to be something different in between."
+
+Lady Holme looked at her quite eagerly, almost with gratitude.
+
+"I'll sing next," she said quickly.
+
+"Much obliged to you, I'm sure. You're perfectly sweet."
+
+Lady Holme saw again a faint look of surprise on the American's white
+face, succeeded instantly by an expression of satisfaction. She realised
+that Miss Schley had some hidden disagreeable reason for her request.
+She even guessed what it was. But she only felt glad that, whatever
+happened, no one could accuse her of trying to efface any effect made by
+Miss Schley upon the audience. As she sang before the "imitations,"
+if any effect were to be effaced it must be her own. The voice of the
+French actor ceased, almost drowned in a ripple of laughter, a burst
+of quite warm applause. He reappeared looking calm and magisterial. The
+applause continued, and he had to go back and bow his thanks. The tenor,
+who had not been recalled, looked cross and made a movement of his
+double chin that suggested bridling.
+
+"Now, Miss Schley!" said the pianist. "You come now!"
+
+"Lady Holme has very kindly consented to go first," she replied.
+
+Then she turned to the French actor and, in atrocious but very
+self-possessed French, began to congratulate him on his performance.
+
+"Oh, well--" the pianist hurried up to Lady Holme. "You have
+really--very well then--these are the songs! Which do you sing first?
+Very hot, isn't it?"
+
+He wiped his long fingers with a silk pocket-handkerchief and took the
+music she offered to him.
+
+"The Princesses seem very pleased," he added. "Marteau--charming
+composer, yes--very pleased indeed. Which one? '_C'est toi_'? Certainly,
+certainly."
+
+He wiped his hands again and held out one to lead Lady Holme to the
+platform. But she ignored it gently and went on alone. He followed,
+carrying the music and perspiring. As they disappeared Miss Schley got
+up and moved to a chair close by the screen that hid the platform. She
+beckoned to Leo Ulford and he followed her.
+
+As Lady Holme stepped on to the low platform, edged with a bank of
+flowers, it seemed to her as if with one glance she saw everyone in the
+crowded room, and felt at least something swiftly of each one's feeling.
+
+The two Princesses sat together looking kind and serious. As she
+curtseyed to them they bowed to her and smiled. Behind them she saw a
+compact mass of acquaintances: Lady Cardington sitting with Sir Donald
+and looking terribly sad, even self-conscious, yet eager; Mrs. Wolfstein
+with Mr. Laycock; Mr. Bry, his eyeglass fixed, a white carnation in his
+coat; Lady Manby laughing with a fat old man who wore a fez, and many
+others. At the back she saw Fritz, standing up and staring at her with
+eyes that seemed almost to cry, "Cut her out!" And in the fourth row she
+saw a dreary, even a horrible, sight--Rupert Carey's face, disfigured
+by the vice which was surely destroying him, red, bloated, dreadfully
+coarsened, spotted. From the midst of the wreckage of the flesh his
+strange eyes looked out with a vivid expression of hopelessness. Yet in
+them burned fires, and in fire there is an essence of fierce purity. The
+soul in those eyes seemed longing to burn up the corruption of his body,
+longing to destroy the ruined temple, longing to speak and say, "I am in
+prison, but do not judge of the prisoner by examining the filthiness of
+his cell."
+
+As Lady Holme took in the audience with a glance there was a rustle
+of paper. Almost everyone was looking to see if the programme had been
+altered. Lady Holme saw that suddenly Fritz had realised the change that
+had been made, and what it meant. An expression of anger came into his
+face.
+
+She felt that she saw more swiftly, and saw into more profoundly to-day
+than ever before in her life; that she had a strangely clear vision of
+minds as well as of faces, that she was vivid, penetrating. And she
+had time, before she began to sing, for an odd thought of the person
+drowning who flashes back over the ways of his past, who is, as it were,
+allowed one instant of exceptional life before he is handed over to
+death. This thought was clear, clean cut in her mind for a moment, and
+she put herself in the sounding arms of the sea.
+
+Then the pianist began his prelude, and she moved a step forward to the
+flowers and opened her lips to sing.
+
+She sang by heart the little story drawn from the writing of Jalalu'd
+dinu'r Rumi. The poet who had taken it had made a charming poem of it,
+delicate, fragile, and yet dramatic and touched with fervour, porcelain
+with firelight gleaming on it here and there. Lady Holme had usually a
+power of identifying herself thoroughly with what she was singing, of
+concentrating herself with ease upon it, and so compelling her hearers
+to be concentrated upon her subject and upon her. To-day she was deeper
+down in words and music, in the little drama of them, than ever before.
+She was the man who knocked at the door, the loved one who cried from
+within the house. She gave the reply, "_C'est moi_!" with the eagerness
+of that most eager of all things--Hope. Then, as she sang gravely, with
+tender rebuke, "This house cannot shelter us both together," she was
+in the heart of love, that place of understanding. Afterwards, as one
+carried by Fate through the sky, she was the man set down in a desert
+place, fasting, praying, educating himself to be more worthy of love.
+Then came the return, the question, "_Qui est la_?" the reply;--reply
+of the solitary place, the denied desire, the longing to mount, the
+educated heart--"_C'est toi_!" the swiftly-opening door, the rush of
+feet that were welcome, of outstretched arms for which waited a great
+possession.
+
+Something within her lived the song very fully and completely. For once
+she did not think at all of what effect she was making. She was not
+unconscious of the audience. She was acutely conscious of the presence
+of people, and of individuals whom she knew; of Fritz, of Lady
+Cardington, Sir Donald, even of poor, horrible Rupert Carey. But with
+the unusual consciousness was linked a strange indifference, a sense
+of complete detachment. And this enabled her to live simultaneously two
+lives--Lady Holme's and another's. Who was the other? She did not ask,
+but she felt as if in that moment a prisoner within her was released.
+And yet, directly the song was over and the eager applause broke out, a
+bitterness came into her heart. Her sense, banished for the moment,
+of her own personality and circumstances returned upon her, and that
+"_C'est toi_!" of the educated heart seemed suddenly an irony as she
+looked at Fritz's face. Had any lover gone into the desert for her,
+fasted and prayed for her, learned for her sake the right answer to the
+ceaseless question that echoes in every woman's heart?
+
+The pianist modulated, struck the chord of a new key, paused, then broke
+into a languid, honey-sweet prelude. Lady Holme sang the Italian song
+which had made Lady Cardington cry.
+
+Afterwards, she often thought of her singing of that particular song on
+that particular occasion as people think of the frail bridges that span
+the gulfs between one fate and another. And it seemed to her that
+while she was crossing this bridge, that was a song, she had a faint
+premonition of the land that lay before her on the far side of the gulf.
+She did not see clearly any features of the landscape, but surely she
+saw that it was different from all that she had known. Perhaps she
+deceived herself. Perhaps she fancied that she had divined something
+that was in reality hidden from her. One thing, however, is
+certain--that she made a very exceptional effect upon her audience. Many
+of them, when later they heard of an incident that occurred within a
+very short time, felt almost awestricken for a moment. It seemed to them
+that they had been visited by one of the messengers--the forerunners of
+destiny--that they had heard a whispering voice say, "Listen well! This
+is the voice of the Future singing."
+
+Many people in London on the following day said, "We felt in her singing
+that something extraordinary must be going to happen to her." And some
+of them at any rate, probably spoke the exact truth.
+
+Lady Holme herself, while she sang her second song, really felt this
+sensation--that it was her swan song. If once we touch perfection we
+feel the black everlasting curtain being drawn round us. We have
+done what we were meant to do and can do no more. Let the race of men
+continue. Our course is run out. To strive beyond the goal is to offer
+oneself up to the derision of the gods. In her song, Lady Holme felt
+that suddenly, and with great ease, she touched the perfection that it
+was possible for her to reach. She felt that, and she saw what she had
+done--in the eyes of Lady Cardington that wept, in Sir Donald's eyes,
+which had become young as the eyes of Spring, and in the eyes of that
+poor prisoner who was the real Rupert Carey. When she sang the first
+refrain she knew.
+
+
+  "Torna in fior di giovinezza
+       Isaotta Blanzesmano,
+       Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano:
+   Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."
+
+
+She understood while she sang--she had never understood before, nor
+could conceive why she understood now--what love had been to the world,
+was being, would be so long as there was a world. The sweetness of love
+did not merely present itself to her imagination, but penetrated her
+soul. And that penetration, while it carried with it and infused through
+her whole being a delicate radiance, that was as the radiance of
+light in the midst of surrounding blackness--beams of the moon in
+a forest--carried with it also into her heart a frightful sense of
+individual isolation, of having missed the figure of Truth in the
+jostling crowd of shams.
+
+Fritz stood there against the wall. Yes--Fritz. And he was savagely
+rejoicing in the effect she was making upon the audience, because he
+thought, hoped, that it would lessen the triumph of the woman who was
+punishing him.
+
+She had missed the figure of Truth. That was very certain. And as she
+sang the refrain for the last time she seemed to herself to be searching
+for the form that must surely be very wonderful, searching for it in the
+many eyes that were fixed upon her. She looked at Sir Donald:
+
+
+  "Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano:"
+
+
+She looked at Rupert Carey:
+
+
+  "Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."
+
+
+She still looked at Carey, and the hideous wreckage of the flesh was no
+longer visible to her. She saw only his burning eyes.
+
+Directly she had finished singing she asked for her motor cloak. While
+they were fetching it she had to go back twice to the platform to bow to
+the applause.
+
+Miss Schley, who was looking angry, said to her:
+
+"You're not going away before my show?"
+
+"I want to go to the concert room, where I can hear better, and see,"
+she replied.
+
+Miss Schley looked at her doubtfully, but had to go to the platform. As
+she slowly disappeared behind the screen Lady Holme drew the cloak round
+her, pulled down her veil and went quickly away.
+
+She wanted--more, she required--to be alone.
+
+At the hall door she sent a footman to find the motor car. When it came
+up she said to the chauffeur:
+
+"Take me home quickly and then come back for his lordship."
+
+She got in.
+
+As the car went off swiftly she noticed that the streets were shining
+with wet.
+
+"Has it been raining?" she asked.
+
+"Raining hard, my lady."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+ON the following morning the newspapers contained an account of the
+concert at Manchester House. They contained also an account of a motor
+accident which had occurred the same afternoon between Hyde Park Corner
+and Knightsbridge.
+
+On the wet pavement Lord Holme's new car, which was taking Lady Holme
+to Cadogan Square at a rapid pace, skidded and overturned, pinning Lady
+Holme beneath it. While she was on the ground a hansom cab ran into the
+car.
+
+At their breakfasts her friends, her acquaintances, her enemies and the
+general public read of her beautiful singing at the concert, and read
+also the following paragraph, which closed the description of the
+accident:
+
+
+  "We deeply regret to learn that Lady Holme was severely injured in
+  the face by the accident. Full particulars have not reached us, but
+  we understand that an immediate operation is necessary and will be
+  performed to-day by Mr. Bernard Crispin the famous surgeon. Her
+  ladyship is suffering great pain, and it is feared that she will be
+  permanently disfigured."
+
+
+The fierce change which Lady Holme had longed for was a reality. One
+life, the life of the siren, had come to an end. But the eyes of the
+woman must still see light. The heart of the woman must still beat on.
+
+Death stretched out a hand in the darkness and found the hand of Birth.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+ON a warm but overcast day, at the end of the following September, a
+woman, whose face was completely hidden by a thick black veil, drove
+up to the boat landing of the town of Como in a hired victoria. She was
+alone, but behind her followed a second carriage containing an Italian
+maid and a large quantity of luggage. When the victoria stopped at
+the water's edge the woman got out slowly, and stood for a moment,
+apparently looking for something. There were many boats ranged along the
+quay, their white awnings thrown back, their oars resting on the painted
+seats. Beside one, which was larger than the others, soberly decorated
+in brown with touches of gold, and furnished with broad seats not unlike
+small armchairs, stood two bold-looking Italian lads dressed in white
+sailors' suits. One of them, after staring for a brief instant at the
+veiled woman, went up to her and said in Italian:
+
+"Is the signora for Casa Felice?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+The boy took off his round hat with a gallant gesture.
+
+"The boat is here, signora."
+
+He led the way to the brown-and-gold craft, and helped the lady to get
+into it. She sat down on one of the big seats.
+
+"That is the luggage," she said, speaking Italian in a low voice, and
+pointing to the second carriage from which the maid was stepping. The
+two boatmen hastened towards it. In a few minutes maid and luggage were
+installed in a big black gondola, oared by two men standing up, and the
+brown boat, with the two lads in white and the veiled woman, glided out
+on the calm water.
+
+The day was a grey dream, mystical in its colourless silence. Blue Italy
+was shrouded as the woman's face was shrouded. The speechlessness of
+Nature environed her speechlessness. She was an enigma set in an enigma,
+and the two rowers looked at her and at the sunless sky, and bent to
+their oars gravely. A melancholy stole into their sensitive dark
+faces. This new _padrona_ had already cast a shadow upon their buoyant
+temperaments.
+
+She noticed it and clasped her hands together in her lap. She was not
+accustomed yet to her new _role_ in life.
+
+The boat stole on. Como was left behind. The thickly-wooded shores of
+the lake, dotted with many villas, the tall green mountains covered with
+chestnut trees, framed the long, winding riband of water which was the
+way to Casa Felice. There were not many other boats out. The steamer
+had already started for Bellagio, and was far away near the point
+where Torno nestles around its sheltered harbour. The black gondola was
+quickly left behind. Its load of luggage weighed it down. The brown boat
+was alone in the grey dream of the sunless autumn day.
+
+Behind her veil Lady Holme was watching the two Italian boys, whose
+lithe bodies bent to their oars, whose dark eyes were often turned
+upon her with a staring scrutiny, with the morose and almost violent
+expression that is the child of frustrated curiosity.
+
+Was it true? Was she in real life, or sitting there, watching, thinking,
+striving to endure, in a dream? Since the accident which had for ever
+changed her life she had felt many sensations, a torrent of sensations,
+but never one exactly like this, never one so full of emptiness, chaos,
+grey vacancy, eternal stillness, unreal oppression and almost magical
+solitude as this. She had thought she had suffered all things that she
+could suffer. She had not yet suffered this. Someone, the Governing
+Power, had held this in reserve. Now it was being sent forth by decree.
+Now it was coming upon her. Now it was enveloping her. Now it was
+rolling round her and billowing away on every side to unimaginably
+remote horizons.
+
+Another and a new emotion of horror was to be hers. Would the attack of
+the hidden one upon her never end? Was that quiver of poisoned arrows
+inexhaustible?
+
+She leaned back against the cushions without feeling them. She wanted to
+sink back as the mortally wounded sink, to sink down, far down, into the
+gulf where surely the dying go to find, with their freezing lips, the
+frozen lips of Death. She shut her eyes.
+
+Presently, with the faint splash of the oars in the water, there mingled
+a low sound of music. The rower nearest to her was singing in an
+under voice to keep his boy's heart from succumbing to the spell of
+melancholy. She listened, still wrapped in this dreadful chaos that
+was dreamlike. At first the music was a murmur. But presently it
+grew louder. She could distinguish words now and then. Once she heard
+_carissima_, a moment afterwards _amore_. Then the poison in which the
+tip of this last arrow had been curiously steeped began its work in
+her. The quivering creature hidden within her cowered, shrank, put up
+trembling hands, cried out, "I cannot endure this thing. I do not know
+how to. I have never learnt the way. This is impossible for me. This is
+a demand I have not the capacity to fulfil!" And, even while it cowered
+and cried out, knew, "This I must endure. This demand I shall be made
+to fulfil. Nothing will serve me; no outstretched hands, no wailings of
+despair, no prayers, no curses even will save me. For I am the soul in
+the hands of the vivisector."
+
+Along the lake, past the old home of La Taglioni, past the Villa Pasta
+with its long garden, past little Torno with its great round oleanders
+and its houses crowding to the shore, the boatman sang. Gathering
+courage as his own voice dispersed his melancholy, and the warm hopes of
+his youth spread their wings once more, roused by the words of love his
+lips were uttering, he fearlessly sent out his song. Love in the South
+was in it, love in the sun, embraces in warm scented nights, longings
+in moonlight, attainment in darkness. The boy had forgotten the veiled
+lady, whose shrouded face and whose silence had for a moment saddened
+him. His hot, bold nature reasserted itself, the fire of his youth
+blazed up again. He sang as if only the other boatman had been there and
+they had seen the girls they loved among the trees upon the shore.
+
+And the soul writhed, like an animal stretched and strapped upon the
+board, to whom no anaesthetic, had been given.
+
+Never before would it have been possible to Lady Holme to believe that
+the mere sound of a word could inflict such torment upon a heart as the
+sound of the word _amore_, coming from the boatman's lips, now inflicted
+upon hers. Each time it came, with its soft beauty, its languor of
+sweetness--like a word reclining--it flayed her soul alive, and showed
+her red, raw bareness.
+
+Yet she did not ask the man to stop singing. Few people in the hands
+of Fate ask Fate for favours. Instinct speaks in the soul and says, "Be
+silent."
+
+The boat rounded the point of Torno and came at once into a lonelier
+region of the lake. Autumn was more definite here. Its sadness spoke
+more plainly. Habitations on the shores were fewer. The mountains were
+more grim, though grander. And their greyness surely closed in a little
+upon the boat, the rowers, the veiled woman who was being taken to Casa
+Felice.
+
+Perhaps to combat the gathering gloom of Nature the boatman sang more
+loudly, with the full force of his voice. But suddenly he seemed to be
+struck by the singular contrast opposed to his expansive energy by the
+silent figure opposite to him. A conscious look came into his face. His
+voice died away abruptly. After a pause he said,
+
+"Perhaps the signora is not fond of music?"
+
+Lady Holme wanted to speak, but she could not. She and this bright-eyed
+boy were not in the same world. That was what she felt. He did not know
+it, but she knew it. And one world cannot speak through infinite space
+with another.
+
+She said nothing. The boy looked over his shoulder at his companion.
+Then, in silence, they both rowed on.
+
+And now that the song had ceased she was again in the grey chaos of the
+dream, in the irrevocable emptiness, the intense, the enormous solitude
+that was like the solitude of an unpeopled eternity in which man had no
+lot.
+
+Presently, with a stroke of his right oar, the boy who had sung turned
+the boat's prow toward the shore, and Lady Holme saw a large, lonely
+house confronting them on the nearer bank of the lake. It stood apart.
+For a long distance on either side of it there was no other habitation.
+The flat, yellow facade rose out of the water. Behind was a dim tangle
+of densely-growing trees rising up on the steep mountain side towards
+the grey sky. Lady Holme could not yet see details. The boat was still
+too far out upon the lake. Nor would she have been able to note details
+if she had seen them. Only a sort of heavy impression that this house
+had a pale, haunted aspect forced itself dully upon her.
+
+"Ecco Casa Felice, signora!" said the foremost rower, half timidly,
+pointing with his brown hand.
+
+She made an intense effort and uttered some reply. The boy was
+encouraged and began to tell her about the beauties of the house, the
+gardens, the chasm behind the piazza down which the waterfall rushed, to
+dive beneath the house and lose itself in the lake. She tried to listen,
+but she could not. The strangeness of her being alone, hidden behind
+a dense veil, of her coming to such a retired house in the autumn to
+remain there in utter solitude, with no object except that of being
+safe from the intrusion of anyone who knew her, of being hidden from
+all watching eyes that had ever looked upon her--the strangeness of it
+obsessed her, was both powerful and unreal. That she should be one of
+those lonely women of whom the world speaks with a lightly-contemptuous
+pity seemed incredible to her. Yet what woman was lonelier than she?
+
+The boat drew in toward the shore and she began to see the house more
+plainly. It was large, and the flat facade was broken in the middle
+by an open piazza with round arches and slender columns. This piazza
+divided the house in two. The villa was in fact composed of two square
+buildings connected together by it. From the boat, looking up, Lady
+Holme saw a fierce mountain gorge rising abruptly behind the house.
+Huge cypresses grew on its sides, towering above the slate roof, and she
+heard the loud noise of falling water. It seemed to add to the weight of
+her desolation.
+
+The boat stopped at a flight of worn stone steps. One of the boys sprang
+out and rang a bell, and presently an Italian man-servant opened a tall
+iron gate set in a crumbling stone arch, and showed more stone steps
+leading upward between walls covered with dripping lichen. The boat boy
+came to help Lady Holme out.
+
+For a moment she did not move. The dreamlike feeling had come upon her
+with such force that her limbs refused to obey her will. The sound of
+the falling water in the mountain gorge had sent her farther adrift into
+the grey, unpeopled eternity, into the vague chaos. But the boy held
+out his hand, took hers. The strong clasp recalled her. She got up. The
+Italian man-servant preceded her up the steps into a long garden built
+up high above the lake on a creeper-covered wall. To the left was the
+house door. She stood still for an instant looking out over the wide
+expanse of unruffled grey water. Then, putting her hand up to her veil
+as if to keep it more closely over her face, she slowly went into the
+house.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+DESPAIR had driven Lady Holme to Casa Felice. When she had found that
+the accident had disfigured her frightfully, and that the disfigurement
+would be permanent, she had at first thought of killing herself. But
+then she had been afraid. Life had abruptly become a horror to her. She
+felt that it must be a horror to her always. Yet she dared not leave
+it then, in her home in London, in the midst of the sights and sounds
+connected with her former happiness. After the operation, and the
+verdict of the doctors, that no more could be done than had been done,
+she had had an access of almost crazy misery, in which all the secret
+violence of her nature had rushed to the surface from the depths. Shut
+up alone in her room, she had passed a day and a night without food. She
+had lain upon the floor. She had torn her clothes into fragments. The
+animal that surely dwells at the door of the soul of each human being
+had had its way in her, had ravaged her, humiliated her, turned her to
+savagery. Then at last she had slept, still lying upon the floor. And
+she had waked feeling worn out but calm, desperately calm. She defied
+the doctors. What did they know of women, of what women can do to
+regain a vanished beauty? She would call in specialists, beauty doctors,
+quacks, the people who fill the papers with their advertisements.
+
+Then began a strange defile of rag-tag humanity to the Cadogan Square
+door--women, men, of all nationalities and pretensions. But the evil was
+beyond their power. At last an American specialist, who had won renown
+by turning a famous woman of sixty into the semblance of a woman of
+six-and-thirty--for a short time--was called in. Lady Holme knew
+that his verdict must be final. If he could do nothing to restore her
+vanished loveliness nothing could be done. After being closeted with her
+for a long time he came out of her room. There were tears in his eyes.
+To the footman who opened the hall door, and who stared in surprise, he
+explained his emotion thus.
+
+"Poor lady," he said. "It's a hopeless case."
+
+"Ah!" said the man, who was the pale footman Lady Holme had sent with
+the latch-key to Leo Ulford.
+
+"Hopeless. It's a hard thing to have to tell a lady she'll always
+be--be--"
+
+"What, sir?" said the footman.
+
+"Well--what people won't enjoy looking at."
+
+He winked his eyes. He was a little bald man, with a hatchet face that
+did not suggest emotion.
+
+"And judging by part of the left side of the face, I guess she must have
+been almost a beauty once," he added, stepping into the square.
+
+That was Lady Holme now. She had to realise herself as a woman whom
+people would rather not look at.
+
+All this time she had not seen Fritz. He had asked to see her. He had
+even tried to insist on seeing her, but so long as there was any hope in
+her of recovering her lost beauty she had refused to let him come near
+her. The thought of his eyes staring upon the tragic change in her face
+sent cold creeping through her veins. But when the American had gone she
+realised that there was nothing to wait for, that if she were ever to
+let Fritz see her again it had better be now. The bandages in which
+her face had been swathed had been removed. She went to a mirror and,
+setting her teeth and clenching her hands, looked into it steadily.
+
+She did not recognise herself. As she stood there she felt as if a
+dreadful stranger had come into the room and was confronting her.
+
+The accident, and the surgical treatment that had followed upon it,
+had greatly altered the face. The nose, once fine and delicate, was
+now coarse and misshapen. A wound had permanently distorted the mouth,
+producing a strange, sneering expression. The whole of the right side of
+the face was puffy and heavy-looking, and drawn down towards the chin.
+It was also at present discoloured. For as Lady Holme lay under the car
+she had been badly burnt. The raw, red tinge would no doubt fade away
+with time, but the face must always remain unsightly, even a little
+grotesque, must always show to the casual passer-by a woman who had been
+the victim of a dreadful accident.
+
+Lady Holme stared at this woman for a long time. There were no tears in
+her eyes. Then she went to the dressing-table and began to make up her
+face. Slowly, deliberately, with a despairing carefulness, she covered
+it with pigments till she looked like a woman in Regent Street. Her face
+became a frightful mask, and even then the fact that she was disfigured
+was not concealed. The application of the pigments began to cause her
+pain. The right side of her face throbbed. She looked dreadfully old,
+too, with this mass of paint and powder upon her--like a hag, she
+thought. And it was obvious that she was trying to hide something.
+Anyone, man or woman, looking upon her, would divine that so much art
+could only be used for the concealment of a dreadful disability. People,
+seeing this mask, would suppose--what might they not suppose? The pain
+in her face became horrible. Suddenly, with a cry, she began to undo
+what she had done. When she had finished she rang the bell. Her maid
+knocked at the door. Without opening it she called out:
+
+"Is his lordship in the house?"
+
+"Yes, my lady. His lordship has just come in."
+
+"Go and ask him to come up and see me."
+
+"Yes, my lady."
+
+Lady Holme sat down on the sofa at the foot of the bed. She was
+trembling violently. She sat looking on the ground and trying to control
+her limbs. A sort of dreadful humbleness surged through her, as if she
+were a guilty creature about to cringe before a judge. She trembled till
+the sofa on which she was sitting shook. She caught hold of the cushions
+and made a strong effort to sit still. The handle of the door turned.
+
+"Don't come in!" she cried out sharply.
+
+But the door opened and her husband appeared on the threshold. As he did
+so she turned swiftly so that only part of the left side of her face was
+towards him.
+
+"Vi!" he said. "Poor old girl, I--"
+
+He was coming forward when she called out again "Stay there, Fritz!"
+
+He stopped.
+
+"Why?" he asked.
+
+"I--I--wait a minute. Shut the door."
+
+He shut the door. She was still looking away from him.
+
+"Do you understand?" she said, still in a sharp voice.
+
+"Understand what?"
+
+"That I'm altered, that the accident's altered me--very much?"
+
+"I know. The doctor said something. But you look all right."
+
+"From there."
+
+The trembling seized her again.
+
+"Well, but--it can't be so bad--"
+
+"It is. Don't move! Fritz--"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"You--do you care for me?"
+
+"Of course I do, old girl. Why, you know--"
+
+Suddenly she turned round, stood up and faced him desperately.
+
+"Do you care for me, Fritz?" she said.
+
+There was a dead silence. It seemed to last for a long while. At length
+it was broken by a woman's voice crying:
+
+"Fritz,--Fritz--it isn't my fault! It isn't my fault!"
+
+"Good God!" Lord Holme said slowly.
+
+"It isn't my fault, Fritz! It isn't my fault!"
+
+"Good God! but--the doctor didn't--Oh--wait a minute--"
+
+A door opened and shut. He was gone. Lady Holme fell down on the sofa.
+She was alone, but she kept on sobbing:
+
+"It isn't my fault, Fritz! It isn't my fault, Fritz!"
+
+And while she sobbed the words she knew that her life with Fritz Holme
+had come to an end. The chapter was closed.
+
+From that day she had only one desire--to hide herself. The season was
+over. London was empty. She could travel. She resolved to disappear.
+Fritz had stayed on in the house, but she would not see him again, and
+he did not press her to. She knew why. He dreaded to look at her. She
+would see no one. At first there had been streams of callers, but now
+almost everybody had left town. Only Sir Donald came to the door each
+day and inquired after her health. One afternoon a note was brought to
+her. It was from Fritz, saying that he had been "feeling a bit chippy,"
+and the doctor advised him to run over to Homburg. But he wished to know
+what she meant to do. Would she go down to her father?--her mother, Lady
+St. Loo, was dead, and her father was an old man--or what? Would she
+come to Homburg too?
+
+When she read those words she laughed out loud. Then she sent for the
+_New York Herald_ and looked for the Homburg notes. She found Miss
+Pimpernel Schley's name among the list of the newest arrivals. That
+evening she wrote to her husband:
+
+
+  "Do not bother about me. Go to Homburg. I need rest and I want to
+  be alone. Perhaps I may go to some quiet place in Switzerland with
+  my maid. I'll let you know if I leave town. Good-bye.
+
+                                              "VIOLA HOLME."
+
+
+At first she had put only Viola. Then she added the second word. Viola
+alone suggested an intimacy which no longer existed between her and the
+man she had married.
+
+The next day Lord Holme crossed the Channel. She was left with the
+servants.
+
+Till then she had not been out of the house, but two days afterwards,
+swathed in a thick veil, she went for a drive in the Park, and on
+returning from it found Sir Donald on the door-step. He looked frailer
+than ever and very old. Lady Holme would have preferred to avoid him.
+Since that interview with her husband the idea of meeting anyone she
+knew terrified her. But he came at once to help her out of the carriage.
+Her face was invisible, but he knew her, and he greeted her in a rather
+shaky voice. She could see that he was deeply moved, and thanked him for
+his many inquiries.
+
+"But why are you still in London?" she said.
+
+"You are still in London," he replied.
+
+She was about to say good-bye on the door-step; but he kept her hand in
+his and said:
+
+"Let me come in and speak to you for a moment."
+
+"Very well," she said.
+
+When they were in the drawing-room she still kept the veil over her
+face, and remained standing.
+
+"Sir Donald," she said, "you cared for me, I know; you were fond of me."
+
+"Were?" he answered.
+
+"Yes--were. I am no longer the woman you--other people--cared for."
+
+"If there is any change--" he began.
+
+"I know. You are going to say it is not in the woman, the real woman.
+But I say it is. The change is in what, to men, is the real woman. This
+change has destroyed any feeling my husband may have had for me."
+
+"It could never destroy mine," Sir Donald said quietly.
+
+"Yes, it could--yours especially, because you are a worshipper of
+beauty, and Fritz never worshipped anything except himself. I am going
+to let you say good-bye to me without seeing me. Remember me as I was."
+
+"But--what do you mean? You speak as if you would no longer go into the
+world."
+
+"I go into the world! You haven't seen me, Sir Donald."
+
+She saw an expression of nervous apprehension come into his face as he
+glanced at her veil.
+
+"What are you going to do, then?" he said.
+
+"I don't know. I--I want a hiding-place."
+
+She saw tears come into his old, faded eyes.
+
+"Hush!" he said. "Don't-"
+
+"A hiding-place. I want to travel a long way off and be quite alone, and
+think, and see how I can go on, if I can go on."
+
+Her voice was quite steady.
+
+"If I could do something--anything for you!" he murmured.
+
+"You fancy you are still speaking to the woman who sang, Sir Donald."
+
+"Would you--" Suddenly he spoke with some eagerness. "You want to go
+away, to be alone?"
+
+"Yes, I must."
+
+"Let me lend you Casa Felice!"
+
+"Casa Felice!"
+
+She laughed.
+
+"To be sure; I was to baptise it, wasn't I?"
+
+"Ah, that--will you have it for a while?"
+
+"But you are going there!"
+
+"I will not go. It is all ready. The servants are engaged. You will
+be perfectly looked after, perfectly comfortable. Let me feel I can do
+something for you. Try it. You will find beauty there--peace. And I--I
+shall be on the lake, not far off."
+
+"I must be alone," she said wearily.
+
+"You shall be. I will never come unless you send for me."
+
+"I should never send for you or for anyone."
+
+She did not say then what she would do, but three days later she
+accepted Sir Donald's offer.
+
+And now she was alone in Casa Felice. She had not even brought her
+French maid, but had engaged an Italian. She was resolved to isolate
+herself with people who had never seen her as a beautiful woman.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+LADY HOLME never forgot that first evening at Casa Felice. The
+strangeness of it was greater than the strangeness of any nightmare.
+When she was shut up in her bedroom in London she had thought she
+realised all the meaning of the word loneliness. Now she knew that then
+she had not begun to realise it. For she had been in her own house, in
+the city which contained a troop of her friends, in the city where she
+had reigned. And although she knew that she would reign no more, she had
+not grasped the exact meaning of that knowledge in London. She had known
+a fact but not fully felt it. She had known what she now was but not
+fully felt what she now was. Even when Fritz, muttering almost terrified
+exclamations, had stumbled out of the bedroom, she had not heard the
+dull clamour of finality as she heard it now.
+
+She was an exile. She was an outcast among women. She was no longer
+a beautiful woman, she was not even a plain woman--she was a
+dreadful-looking human being.
+
+The Italian servants by whom she was surrounded suddenly educated her in
+the lore of exact knowledge of herself and her present situation.
+
+Italians are the most charming of the nations, but Italians of the lower
+classes are often very unreserved in the display of their most fugitive
+sensations, their most passing moods. The men, especially when they are
+young, are highly susceptible to beauty in women. They are also--and
+the second emotion springs naturally enough from the first--almost
+childishly averse from female ugliness. It is a common thing in Italy
+to hear of men of the lower classes speak of a woman's plainness with
+brutality, with a manner almost of personal offence. They often shrink
+from personal ugliness as Englishmen seldom do, like children shrinking
+from something abnormal--a frightening dwarf, a spectre.
+
+Now that Lady Holme had reached the "hiding-place" for which she had
+longed, she resolved to be brutal with herself. Till now she had almost
+perpetually concealed her disfigured face. Even her servants had not
+seen it. But in this lonely house, among these strangers, she knew that
+the inevitable moment was come when she must begin the new life, the
+terrible life that was henceforth to be hers. In her bedroom she took
+off her hat and veil, and without glancing into the glass she came
+downstairs. In the hall she met the butler. She saw him start.
+
+"Can I have tea?" she said, looking at him steadily.
+
+"Yes, signora," he answered, looking down.
+
+"In the piazza, please."
+
+She went out through the open door into the piazza. The boy who had sung
+in the boat was there, watering some geraniums in pots. As she came out
+he glanced up curiously, at the same time pulling off his hat. When he
+saw her his mouth gaped, and an expression of pitiless repulsion came
+into his eyes. It died out almost instantaneously, and he smiled and
+began to speak about the flowers. But Lady Holme had received her
+education. She knew what she was to youth that instinctively loves
+beauty.
+
+She sat down in a cane chair. It seemed to her as if people were
+scourging her with thongs of steel, as if she were bleeding from the
+strokes.
+
+She looked out across the lake.
+
+The butler brought tea and put it beside her. She did not hear him
+come or go. Behind her the waterfall roared down between the cypresses.
+Before her the lake spread out its grey, unruffled surface. And this was
+the baptism of Casa Felice, her baptism into a new life. Her agony was
+the more intense because she had never been an intellectual woman, had
+never lived the inner life. Always she had depended on outward things.
+Always she had been accustomed to bustle, movement, excitement,
+perpetual intercourse with people who paid her homage. Always she had
+lived for the world, and worshipped, because she had seen those around
+her worshipping, the body.
+
+And now all was taken from her. Without warning, without a moment
+for preparation, she was cast down into Hell. Even her youth was made
+useless to her.
+
+When she thought of that she began to cry, sitting there by the stone
+balustrade of the piazza, to cry convulsively. She remembered her pity
+for old age, for the monstrous loss it cannot cease from advertising.
+And now she, in her youth, had passed it on the road to the pit. Lady
+Cardington was a beautiful woman. She pitied herself bitterly because
+she was morbid, as many beautiful women are when they approach old age.
+But she was beautiful. She would always be beautiful. She might not
+think it, but she was still a power, could still inspire love. In
+her blanched face framed in white hair there was in truth a wonderful
+attraction.
+
+Whiteness--Lady Holme shuddered when she thought of whiteness,
+remembering what the glass had shown her.
+
+Fritz--his animal passion for her--his horror of her now--Miss
+Schley--their petty, concealed strife--Rupert Carey's love--Leo Ulford's
+desire of conquest--his father's strange, pathetic devotion--Winter
+falling at the feet of Spring--figures and events from the panorama of
+her life now ended flickered through her almost numbed mind, while the
+tears still ran down her face.
+
+And Robin Pierce?
+
+As she thought of him more life quickened in her mind.
+
+Since her accident he had written to her several times, ardent,
+tender letters, recalling all he had said to her, recounting again his
+adoration of her for her nature, her soul, the essence of her, the woman
+in her, telling her that this terror which had come upon her only made
+her dearer to him, that--as she knew--he had impiously dared almost to
+long for it, as for an order of release that would take effect in the
+liberation of her true self.
+
+These letters she had read, but they had not stirred her. She had told
+herself that Robin did not know, that he was a self-deceiver, that he
+did not understand his own nature, which was allied to the nature of
+every living man. But now, seeking some, even the smallest solace in
+the intense agony of desolation that was upon her, she caught--in her
+bleeding woman's heart--at this hand stretched out from Rome. She got
+up, went to her bedroom, unlocked her despatch-box, took out these
+letters of Robin's. They had not stirred her, yet she had kept them.
+Now she came down once more to the piazza, sat by the tea-table, opened
+them, read them, re-read them, whispered them over again and again.
+Something she must have; some hand she must catch at. She could not die
+in this freezing cold which she had never known, this cold that came out
+of the Inferno, at whose cavern mouth she stood. And Robin said he was
+there--Robin said he was there.
+
+She did not love Robin. It seemed to her now that it would be grotesque
+for her to love any man. Her face was not meant for love. But as she
+read these ardent, romantic letters, written since the tragedy that had
+overtaken her, she began to ask herself, with a fierce anxiety, whether
+what Robin affirmed could be the truth? Was he unlike other men? Was his
+nature capable of a devotion of the soul to another soul, of a devotion
+to which any physical ugliness, even any physical horror, would count as
+nothing?
+
+After that last scene with Fritz she felt as if he were no longer her
+husband, as if he were only a man who had fled from her in fear. She
+did not think any more of his rights, her duties. He had abandoned his
+rights. What duties could she have towards a man who was frightened when
+he looked at her? And indeed all the social and moral questions to which
+the average woman of the world pays--because she must pay--attention had
+suddenly ceased to exist for Lady Holme. She was no longer a woman of
+the world. All worldly matters had sunk down beneath her feet with her
+lost beauty. She had wanted to be free. Well, now she was surely free.
+Who would care what she did in the future?
+
+Robin said he was there.
+
+She thought that, unless she could feel that in world there was one man
+who wanted to take care of her, she must destroy herself. The thought
+grew in her as she sat there, till she said to herself, "If it is true
+what he says, perhaps I shall be able to live. If it is not true--"
+She looked over the stone balustrade at the grey waters of the lake.
+Twilight was darkening over them.
+
+Late that evening, when she was sitting in the big drawing-room staring
+at the floor, the butler came in with a telegram. She opened it and
+read:
+
+
+  "Sir Donald has told me you are at Casa Felice; arrive to-morrow
+  from Rome--ROBIN."
+
+
+"No answer," she said.
+
+So he was coming--to-morrow. The awful sense of desolation lifted
+slightly from her. A human being was travelling to her, was wanting to
+see her. To see her! She shuddered. Then fiercely she asked herself why
+she was afraid. She would not be afraid. She would trust in Robin. He
+was unlike other men. There had always been in him something that
+set him apart, a strangeness, a romance, a love of hidden things, a
+subtlety. If only he would still care for her, still feel towards her
+as he had felt, she could face the future, she thought. They might be
+apart. That did not matter. She had no thought of a close connection, of
+frequent intercourse even. She only wanted desperately, frantically,
+to know that someone who had loved her could love her still in spite of
+what had happened. If she could retain one deep affection she felt that
+she could live.
+
+The morrow would convince her.
+
+That night she did not sleep. She lay in bed and heard the water falling
+in the gorge, and when the dawn began to break she did a thing she had
+not done for a long time.
+
+She got out of bed, knelt down and prayed--prayed to Him who had dealt
+terribly with her that He would be merciful when Robin came.
+
+When it was daylight and the Italian maid knocked at her door she told
+her to get out a plain, dark dress. She did her hair herself with the
+utmost simplicity. That at least was still beautiful. Then she went down
+and walked in the high garden above the lake. The greyness had lifted
+and the sky was blue. The mellowness rather than the sadness of autumn
+was apparent, throned on the tall mountains whose woods were bathed in
+sunshine. All along the great old wall, that soared forty feet from
+the water, roses were climbing. Scarlet and white geraniums bloomed in
+discoloured ancient vases. Clumps of oleanders showed pink showers
+of blossoms. Tall bamboos reared their thin heads towards the tufted
+summits of palms that suggested Africa. Monstrous cypresses aspired,
+with a sort of haughty resignation, above their brother trees. The bees
+went to and fro. Flies circled and settled. Lizards glided across the
+warm stones and rustled into hiding among the ruddy fallen leaves. And
+always the white water sang in the gorge as it rushed towards the piazza
+of Casa Felice.
+
+And Lady Holme tried to hope.
+
+Yet, as she walked slowly to and fro amid the almost rank luxuriance
+of the garden, she was gnawed by a terrible anxiety. The dreadful
+humbleness, the shrinking cowardice of the unsightly human being invaded
+her. She strove to put them from her. She strove to call Robin's own
+arguments and assertions to her aid. What she had been she still was
+in all essentials. Her self was unharmed, existed, could love, hate, be
+tender, be passionate as before. Viola was there still within her,
+the living spirit to which a name had been given when she was a little
+child. The talent was there which had spoken, which could still speak,
+through her voice. The beating heart was there which could still speak
+through her actions. The mysteries of the soul still pursued their
+secret courses within her, like far-off subterranean streams. The
+essential part of her remained as it had been. Only a little outside bit
+of a framework had been twisted awry. Could that matter very much? Had
+she not perhaps been morbid in her despair?
+
+She determined to take courage. She told herself that if she allowed
+this dreadful, invading humbleness way in her she would lose all power
+to dominate another by showing that she had ceased to dominate herself.
+If she met Robin in fear and trembling she would actually teach him to
+despise her. If she showed that she thought herself changed,
+horrible, he would inevitably catch her thought and turn it to her own
+destruction. Men despise those who despise themselves. She knew that,
+and she argued with herself, fought with herself. If Robin loved the
+angel; surely he could still love. For if there were an angel within
+her it had not been harmed. And she leaned on the stone wall and prayed
+again while the roses touched her altered face.
+
+It seemed to her then that courage was sent to her. She felt less
+terrified of what was before her, as if something had risen up within
+her upon which she could lean, as if her soul began to support the
+trembling, craven thing that would betray her, began to teach it how to
+be still.
+
+She did not feel happy, but she felt less desperately miserable than she
+had felt since the accident.
+
+After _dejeuner_ she walked again in the garden. As the time drew near
+for Robin to arrive, the dreadful feverish anxiety of the early morning
+awoke again within her. She had not conquered herself. Again the thought
+of suicide came upon her, and she felt that her life or death were in
+the hands of this man whom yet she did not love. They were in his hands
+because he was a human being and she was one. There are straits in
+which the child of life, whom the invisible hand that is extended in
+a religion has not yet found, must find in the darkness a human hand
+stretched out to it or sink down in utter terror and perhaps perish.
+Lady Holme was in such a strait. She knew it. She said to herself quite
+plainly that if Robin failed to stretch out his hand to her she could
+not go on living. It was clear to her that her life or death depended
+upon whether he remained true to what he had said was his ideal, or
+whether he proved false to it and showed himself such a man as Fritz, as
+a thousand others.
+
+She sickened with anxiety as the moments passed.
+
+Now, leaning upon the wall, she began to scan the lake. Presently she
+saw the steamer approaching the landing-stage of Carate on the opposite
+bank. The train from Rome had arrived. But Robin would doubtless come
+by boat. There was at least another hour to wait. She left the wall
+and walked quickly up and down, moving her hands and her lips. Now she
+almost wished he were not coming. She recalled the whole story of her
+acquaintance with Robin--his adoration of her when she was a girl, his
+wish to marry her, his melancholy when she refused him, his persistent
+affection for her after she had married Fritz, his persistent belief
+that there was that within her which Fritz did not understand and could
+never satisfy, his persistent obstinacy in asserting that he had the
+capacity to understand and content this hidden want. Was that true?
+
+Fritz had cared for nothing but the body, yet she had loved Fritz. She
+did not love Robin. Yet there was a feeling in her that if he proved
+true to his ideal now she might love him in the end. If only he would
+love her--after he knew.
+
+She heard a sound of oars. The blood rushed to her face. She drew back
+from the wall and hurried into her house. All the morning she had been
+making up her mind to go to meet Robin at once in the sunlight, to let
+him know all at once. But now, in terror, she went to her room. With
+trembling hands she pinned on a hat; she took out of a drawer the thick
+veil she wore when travelling and tied it tightly over her face. Panic
+seized her.
+
+There was a knock at the door, the announcement that a signore was
+waiting in the drawing-room for the signora.
+
+Lady Holme felt an almost ungovernable sensation of physical nausea. She
+went to her dressing-case and drank one or two burning drops of eau de
+Cologne. Then she pulled down the veil under her chin and stood in the
+middle of the room for several minutes without moving. Then she went
+downstairs quickly and went quickly into the drawing-room.
+
+Robin was there, standing by the window. He looked excited, with an
+excitement of happiness, and this gave to him an aspect of almost boyish
+youth. His long black eyes shone with eagerness when she came into the
+room. But when he saw the veil his face changed.
+
+"You don't trust me!" he said, without any greeting.
+
+She went up to him and put out her hand.
+
+"Robin!" she said.
+
+"You don't trust me," he repeated.
+
+He took her hand. His was hot.
+
+"Robin--I'm a coward," she said.
+
+Her voice quivered.
+
+"Oh, my dearest!" he exclaimed, melted in a moment.
+
+He took her other hand, and she felt his hands throbbing. His clasp
+was so ardent that it startled her into forgetting everything for one
+instant, everything that except these clasping hands loved her hands,
+loved her. That instant was exquisitely sweet to her. There was a
+stinging sweetness in it, a mystery of sweetness, as if their four hands
+were four souls longing to be lost in one another.
+
+"Now you'll trust me," he said.
+
+She released her hands and immediately her terror of doubt returned.
+
+"Let us go into the garden," she answered.
+
+He followed her to the path beside the wall.
+
+"I looked for you from here," she said.
+
+"I did not see you."
+
+"No. When I heard the boat I--Robin, I'm afraid--I'm afraid."
+
+"Of me, Viola?"
+
+He laughed joyously.
+
+"Take off your veil," he said.
+
+"No, no--not yet. I want to tell you first--"
+
+"To tell me what?"
+
+"That my--that my--Robin, I'm not beautiful now."
+
+Her voice quivered again.
+
+"You tell me so," he answered.
+
+"It's true."
+
+"I don't believe it."
+
+"But," she began, almost desperately, "it's true, Robin, oh, it's true!
+When Fritz--"
+
+She stopped. She was choking.
+
+"Oh--Fritz!" he said with scathing contempt.
+
+"No, no, listen! You've got to listen." She put her hand on his arm.
+"When Fritz saw me--afterwards he--he was afraid of me. He couldn't
+speak to me. He just looked and said--and said--"
+
+Tears were running down behind the veil. He put up his hand to hers,
+which still touched his arm.
+
+"Don't tell me what he said. What do I care? Viola, you know I've almost
+longed for this--no, not that, but--can't you understand that when one
+loves a woman one loves something hidden, something mystical? It's so
+much more than a face that one loves. One doesn't want to live in a
+house merely because it's got a nice front door."
+
+He laughed again as if he were half ashamed of his own feeling.
+
+"Is that true, Robin?"
+
+The sound of her voice told him that he need not be afraid to be
+passionate.
+
+"Sit down here," he said.
+
+They had reached an old stone bench at the end of the garden where the
+woods began. Two cypresses towered behind it, sad-looking sentinels.
+There was a gap in the wall here through which the lake could be seen as
+one sat upon the bench.
+
+"I want to make you understand, to make you trust me."
+
+She sat down without speaking, and he sat beside her.
+
+"Viola," he said, "there are many men who love only what they can see,
+and never think of the spirit behind it. They care only for a woman's
+body. For them the woman's body is the woman. I put it rather brutally.
+What they can touch, what they can kiss, what they can hold in their
+arms is all to them. They are unconscious of the distant, untameable
+woman, the lawless woman who may be free in the body that is captive,
+who may be unknown in the body that is familiar, who may even be pure in
+the body that is defiled as she is immortal though her body is mortal.
+These men love the flesh only. But there are at least some men who love
+the spirit. They love the flesh, too, because it manifests the spirit,
+but to them the spirit is the real thing. They are always stretching out
+their arms to that. The hearth can't satisfy them. They demand the fire.
+The fire, the fire!" he repeated, as if the word warmed him. "I've so
+often thought of this, imagined this. It's as if I'd actually foreseen
+it."
+
+He spoke with gathering excitement.
+
+"What?" she murmured.
+
+"That some day the woman men--those men I've spoken of--loved would
+be struck down, and the real woman, the woman of the true beauty, the
+mystic, the spirit woman, would be set free. If this had not happened
+you could perhaps never have known who was the man that really loved
+you--that loved the real you, the you that lies so far beyond the flesh,
+the you that has sung and suffered--"
+
+"Ah, suffered!" she said.
+
+But there was a note of something that was not sorrow in her voice.
+
+"If you want to know the man I mean," Robin said, "lift up your veil,
+Viola."
+
+She sat quite still for a moment, a moment that seemed very long. Then
+she put up both hands to her head, untied the veil and let it fall into
+her lap. He looked at her, and there was silence. They heard the bees
+humming. There were many among the roses on the wall. She had turned her
+face fully towards him, but she kept her eyes on the veil that lay in
+her lap. It was covered with little raised black spots. She began to
+count them. As the number mounted she felt her body turning gradually
+cold.
+
+"Fifteen--sixteen-seventeen"--she formed the words with her
+lips, striving to concentrate her whole soul upon this useless
+triviality--"eighteen--nineteen--twenty."
+
+Little drops of moisture came out upon her temples. Still the silence
+continued. She knew that all this time Robin was looking into her face.
+She felt his eyes like two knives piercing her face.
+
+"Twenty-one--twenty-two--"
+
+"Viola!"
+
+He spoke at last and his voice was extraordinary. It was husky, and
+sounded desperate and guilty.
+
+"Well?" she said, still looking at the spots.
+
+"Now you know the man I spoke of."
+
+Yes, it was a desperate voice and hard in its desperation.
+
+"You mean that you are the man?"
+
+Still she did not look up. After a pause she heard him say:
+
+"Yes, that I am the man."
+
+Then she looked up. His face was scarlet, like a face flushed with
+guilt. His eyes met hers with a staring glance, yet they were furtive.
+His hands were clenched on his knees. When she looked at him he began to
+smile.
+
+"Viola," he said, "Viola."
+
+He unclenched his hands and put them out towards her, as if to take her
+hands. She did not move.
+
+"Poor Robin!" she said.
+
+"Poor--but--what do you mean?" he stammered.
+
+He never turned his eyes from her face.
+
+"Poor Robin!--but it isn't your fault."
+
+Then she put out her hand and touched his gently.
+
+"My fault?
+
+"That it was all a fancy, all a weaving of words. You want to be what
+you thought you were, but you can't be."
+
+"You're wrong, Viola, you're utterly wrong--"
+
+"Hush, Robin! That woman you spoke of--that woman knows."
+
+He cleared his throat, got up, went over to the wall, leaned his arms
+upon it and hid his face on them. There were tears in his eyes. At
+that moment he was suffering more than she was. His soul was rent by an
+abject sense of loss, an abject sense of guilty impotence and shame.
+It was frightful that he could not be what he wished to be, what he had
+thought he was. He longed to comfort her and could not do anything
+but plunge a sword into her heart. He longed to surround her with
+tenderness--yes, he was sure he longed--but he could only hold up to
+her in the sun her loneliness. And he had lost--what had he not lost? A
+dream of years, an imagination that had been his inseparable and dearest
+companion. His loneliness was intense in that moment as was hers. The
+tears seemed to scald his eyes. In his heart he cursed God for not
+permitting him to be what he longed to be, to feel what he longed to
+feel. It seemed to him monstrous, intolerable, that even our emotions
+are arranged for us as are arranged the events of our lives. He felt
+like a doll, a horrible puppet.
+
+"Poor old Robin!"
+
+She was standing beside him, and in her voice there was, just for a
+moment, the sound that sometimes comes into a mother's voice when she
+speaks to her little child in the dark.
+
+At the moment when he knew he did not love the white angel she stood
+beside him.
+
+And she thought that she was only a wretched woman.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+ROBIN had gone. He had gone, still protesting that Lady Holme was
+deceiving herself, protesting desperately, with the mistaken chivalry of
+one who was not only a gentleman to his finger-tips but who was also
+an almost fanatical lover of his own romance. After recovering from
+the first shock of his disillusion, and her strange reception of it,
+so different from anything he could have imagined possible in her, or
+indeed in any woman who had lived as she had, he had said everything
+that was passionate, everything that fitted in with his old
+protestations when she was beautiful. He had spoken, perhaps, even more
+to recall himself than to convince her, but he had not succeeded in
+either effort, and a strange, mingled sense of tragic sadness and
+immense relief invaded him as the width of waterway grew steadily larger
+between his boat and Casa Felice. He could have wept for her and for
+himself. He could even have wept for humanity. Yet he felt the comfort
+of one from whom an almost intolerable strain has just been removed. To
+a man of his calibre, sensitive, almost feminine in his subtlety, the
+situation had been exquisitely painful. He had felt what Viola was
+feeling as well as what he was feeling. He had struggled like a creature
+taken in a net. And how useless it had all been! He found himself
+horribly inferior to her. Her behaviour at this critical moment had
+proved to him that in his almost fantastic conception of her he had
+shown real insight. Then why had his heart betrayed his intellect? Why
+had his imagination proved true metal, his affection false? He asked
+himself these questions. He searched his own nature, as many a man has
+done in moments when he has found himself unworthy. And he was met by
+mystery, by the "It was impossible for me!" which stings the soul that
+would be strong. He remembered Carey's words that night in Half Moon
+Street when Sir Donald had accompanied him home after the dinner in
+Cadogan Square. Sir Donald had gone. He and Carey were alone, and he had
+said that if one loves, one loves the kernel not the shell. And Carey
+had said, "I think if the shell is a beautiful shell, and becomes
+suddenly broken, it makes a devil of a lot of difference in what most
+people think of the kernel." And when he--Robin--had replied, "It
+wouldn't to me," Carey had abruptly exclaimed, "I think it would." After
+Carey had gone Robin remembered very well saying to himself that it was
+strange no man will believe you if you hint at the truth of your true
+self. That night he had not known his true self and Carey had known it.
+But then, had he loved the shell only? He could not believe it. He
+felt bewildered. Even now, as the boat crept onward through the
+falling darkness, he felt that he loved Viola, but as someone who had
+disappeared or who was dead. This woman whom he had just left was not
+Viola. And yet she was. When he was not looking at her and she spoke to
+him, the past seemed to take the form of the present. When she had worn
+the veil and had touched him all his pulses had leaped. But when she had
+touched him with those same hands after the veil had fallen, there
+had been frost in his veins. Nothing in his body had responded. The
+independence of the flesh appalled him. It had a mind of its own then.
+It chose and acted quite apart from the spirit which dwelt in it. It
+even defied that spirit. And the eyes? They had become almost a terror
+to him. He thought of them as a slave thinks of a cruel master.
+Were they to coerce his soul? Were they to force his heart from its
+allegiance? He had always been accustomed to think that the spirit was
+essentially the governing thing in man, that indestructible, fierce,
+beautiful flame which surely outlives death and time. But now he found
+himself thinking of the flesh, the corruptible part of man that mingles
+its dust with the earth, as dominant over the spirit. For the first
+time, and because of his impotence to force his body to feel as his
+spirit wished it to feel, he doubted if there were a future for the
+soul, if there were such a condition as immortality. He reached Villa
+d'Este in a condition of profound depression, almost bordering on
+despair.
+
+Meanwhile Viola, standing by the garden wall, had watched the boat
+that carried Robin disappear on the water. Till it was only a speck she
+watched. It vanished. Evening came on. Still she stood there. She did
+not feel very sad. The strange, dreamlike sensation of the preceding day
+had returned to her, but with a larger vagueness that robbed it of some
+of its former poignancy. It seemed to her that she felt as a spirit
+might feel--detached. She remembered once seeing a man, who called
+himself an "illusionist," displaying a woman's figure suspended
+apparently in mid-air. He took a wand and passed it over, under, around
+the woman to show that she was unattached to anything, that she did not
+rest upon anything. Viola thought that she was like that woman. She was
+not embittered. She was not even crushed. Her impulse of pity, when she
+understood what Robin was feeling, had been absolutely genuine. It had
+rushed upon her. It remained with her. But now it was far less definite,
+and embraced not only Robin but surely other men whom she had never
+known or even seen. They could not help themselves. It was not their
+fault. They were made in a certain way. They were governed. It seemed to
+her that she looked out vaguely over a world of slaves, the serfs of God
+who have never been emancipated. She had no hope. But just then she had
+no fear. The past did not ebb from her, nor did the future steal towards
+her. The tides were stilled. The pulses of life were stopped. Everything
+was wrapped in a cold, grey calm. She had never been a very thoughtful
+woman. She had not had much time for thought. That is what she herself
+would probably have said. Seldom had she puzzled her head over the
+mysteries of existence. Even now, when she confronted the great mystery
+of her own, she did not think very definitely. Before Robin came her
+mind had been in a fever. Now that he was gone the fever had gone with
+him. Would it ever return? She did not ask or wonder.
+
+The night fell and the servant came to summon her to dinner. She shook
+her head.
+
+"The signora will not eat anything?"
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+She took her arms from the wall and looked at the man.
+
+"Could I have the boat?"
+
+"The signora wishes to go on the lake?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I will tell Paolo."
+
+Two or three minutes later the boy who had sung came to say that the
+boat was ready.
+
+Lady Holme fetched a cloak, and went down the dark stone staircase
+between the lichen-covered walls to the tall iron gate. The boat was
+lying by the outer steps. She got in and Paolo took the oars.
+
+"Where does the signora wish to go?"
+
+"Anywhere out on the lake."
+
+He pushed off. Soon the noise of the waterfall behind Casa Felice died
+away, the spectral facade faded and only the plash of the oars and the
+tinkle of fishermen's bells above the nets, floating here and there in
+the lake, were audible. The distant lights of mountain villages gleamed
+along the shores, and the lights of the stars gleamed in the clear sky.
+
+Now that she was away from the land Lady Holme became more conscious of
+herself and of life. The gentle movement of the boat promoted an echoing
+mental movement in her. Thoughts glided through the shadows of her soul
+as the boat glided through the shadows of the night. Her mind was like a
+pilgrim, wandering in the darkness cast by the soul.
+
+She felt, first, immensely ignorant. She had scarcely ever, perhaps
+never, consciously felt immensely ignorant before. She felt also very
+poor, very small and very dingy, like a woman very badly dressed. She
+felt, finally, that she was the most insignificant of all the living
+things under the stars to the stars and all they watched, but that, to
+herself, she was of a burning, a flaming significance.
+
+There seemed to be bells everywhere in the lake. The water was full of
+their small, persistent voices.
+
+So had her former life been full of small, persistent voices, but
+now, abruptly, they were all struck into silence, and she was left
+listening--for what? For some far-off but larger voice beyond?
+
+"What am I to do? What am I to do?"
+
+Now she began to say this within herself. The grey calm was floating
+away from her spirit, and she began to realise what had happened that
+afternoon. She remembered that just before Robin came she had made up
+her mind that, though she did not love him, he held the matter of her
+life or death in his power. Well, if that were so, he had decided. The
+dice had been thrown and death had come up. No hand had been stretched
+out in the darkness to the child.
+
+She looked round her. On every side she saw smooth water, a still
+surface which hid depths. At the prow of the boat shone a small lantern,
+which cast before the boat an arrow of light. And as the boat moved
+this arrow perpetually attacked the darkness in front. It was like the
+curiosity of man attacking the impenetrable mysteries of God. It seemed
+to penetrate, but always new darkness disclosed itself beyond, new
+darkness flowed silently around.
+
+Was the darkness the larger voice?
+
+She did not say this to herself. Her mind was not of the definite
+species that frames such silent questions often. But, like all human
+beings plunged in the strangeness of a terror that is absolutely new,
+and left to struggle in it quite alone, she thought a thousand things
+that she did not even know she thought, her mind touched many verges of
+which she was not aware. There were within her tremendous activities
+of which she was scarcely conscious. She was like a woman who wakes at
+night without knowing why, and hears afterwards that there was a tumult
+in the city where she dwelt.
+
+Gradually, along devious ways, she came to the thought that life had
+done with her. It seemed to her that life said to her, "Woman, what
+have I to do with thee?" The man who had sworn to protect her could
+not endure to look at her. The man who had vowed that he loved her soul
+shrank before her face. She had never been a friend to women. Why should
+they wish to be her friends now? They would not wish it. And if they did
+she felt their friendship would be useless to her, more--horrible. She
+would rather have shown her shattered face to a thousand men than to ten
+women. She had never "bothered" much about religion. No God seemed near
+her now. She had no sense of being chastened because she was loved. On
+the other hand, she did feel as if she had been caught by a torturer who
+did not mean to let her go.
+
+It became obvious to her that there was no place for her in life, and
+presently she returned to the conclusion that, totally unloved, she
+could not continue to exist.
+
+She began definitely to contemplate self-destruction.
+
+She looked at the little arrow of light beyond the boat's prow. Like
+that little arrow she must go out into the darkness. When? Could she go
+to-night? If not, probably she could never go at all by her own will and
+act. It should be done to-night then, abruptly, without much thought.
+For thought is dangerous and often paralysing.
+
+She spoke to the boat boy. He answered. They fell into conversation.
+She asked him about his family, his life, whether he would have to be
+a soldier; whether he had a sweetheart. She forced herself to listen
+attentively to his replies. He was a responsive boy and soon began to
+talk volubly, letting the oars trail idly in the water. With energy he
+paraded his joyous youth before her. Even in his touches of melancholy
+there was hope. His happiness confirmed her in her resolution. She put
+herself in contrast with this boy, and her heart sank below the sources
+of tears into a dry place, like the valley of bones.
+
+"Will you turn towards Casa Feli--towards the house now," she said
+presently.
+
+The boat swung round, and instantly the boy began to sing.
+
+"Yes, I can do it to-night," she thought.
+
+His happy singing entered like iron into her soul.
+
+When the pale facade of Casa Felice was visible once more, detaching
+itself from the surrounding darkness, she said to the boy carelessly:
+
+"Where do you put the boat at night?"
+
+"The signora has not seen?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Under the house. There is deep water there. One can swim for five
+minutes without coming out into the open."
+
+"I should like to see that place. Can I get out of the boat there?"
+
+"Si, signora. There is a staircase leading into the piazza by the
+waterfall."
+
+"Then row in."
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+He was beginning to sing again, but suddenly he stopped, looked over his
+shoulder and listened.
+
+"What is it?" she asked quickly.
+
+"There is a boat, signora."
+
+"Where."
+
+She looked into the darkness but saw nothing.
+
+"Close to the house, signora."
+
+"But how do you know?"
+
+"I heard the oars. The man in the boat was not rowing, but just as
+I began to sing he began to row. When I stopped singing he stopped
+rowing."
+
+"You didn't see the boat?"
+
+"No, signora. It carries no light."
+
+He looked at her mysteriously.
+
+"_It may be the contrabbandieri_."
+
+"Smugglers?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He turned his head over his shoulder and whistled, in a peculiar way.
+There was no reply. Then he bent down over the gunwale of the boat till
+his ear nearly touched the water, and listened.
+
+"The boat has stopped. It must be near us."
+
+His whole body seemed quivering with attentive life, like a terrier's
+when it stands to be unchained.
+
+"Might it not be a fisherman?" asked Lady Holme.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"This is not the hour."
+
+"Some tourists, perhaps, making an excursion?"
+
+"It is too far. They never come here at night."
+
+His eyes stared, his attitude was so intensely alert and his manner so
+mysterious that, despite her desperate preoccupation, Lady Holme found
+herself distracted for a moment. Her mind was detached from herself, and
+fixed upon this hidden boat and its occupant or occupants.
+
+"You think it is _contrabbandieri_?" she whispered. He nodded.
+
+"I have been one, signora."
+
+"You!"
+
+"Yes, when I was a boy, in the winter. Once, when we were running for
+the shore, on a December night, the _carabinieri_ fired on us and killed
+Gaetano Cremona."
+
+"Your companion?"
+
+"Yes. He was sixteen and he died. The boat was full of his blood."
+
+She shuddered.
+
+"Row in," she said. "That boat must have gone."
+
+"Non, signora. It has not. It is close by and the oars are out of the
+water."
+
+He spoke with certainty, as if he saw the boat. Then, reluctantly, he
+dipped his oars in the lake, and rowed towards the house, keeping his
+head half turned and staring into the darkness with eyes that were still
+full of mystery and profound attention.
+
+Lady Holme looked over the water too, but she saw nothing upon its calm
+surface.
+
+"Go into the boat-house," she said.
+
+Paolo nodded without speaking. His lips were parted.
+
+"Chi e la?" she heard him whisper to himself.
+
+They were close to the house now. Its high, pale front, full of
+shuttered windows, loomed over them, and the roar of the waterfall was
+loud in their ears. Paolo turned the boat towards his right, and, almost
+directly, Lady Holme saw a dark opening in the solid stone blocks on
+which the house was built. The boat glided through it into cover, and
+the arrow of light at the prow pierced ebon blackness, while the
+plash of the oars made a curious sound, full of sudden desolation and
+weariness. A bat flitted over the arrow of light and vanished, and the
+head of a swimming rat was visible for a moment, pursued by a wrinkle on
+the water.
+
+"How dark it is here," Lady Holme said in a low voice. "And what strange
+noises there are."
+
+There was terror in the sound of the waterfall heard under this
+curving roof of stone. It sounded like a quantity of disputing voices,
+quarrelling in the blackness of the night. The arrow of light lay on a
+step, and the boat's prow grated gently against a large ring of rusty
+iron.
+
+"And you tie up the boat here at night?" she asked as she got up.
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+While she stood on the step, close to the black water, he passed the
+rope through the ring, and tied it deftly in a loose knot that any
+backward movement of the boat would tighten. She watched with profound
+attention his hands moving quickly in the faint light cast by the
+lantern.
+
+"How well you tie it," she said.
+
+He smiled.
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"Is it easy to untie?"
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"Show me, will you? It--it holds so well that I should have thought it
+would be difficult."
+
+He looked up at her with a flash of surprise. Something in her voice had
+caught his young attention sharply. She smiled at him when she saw the
+keen inquiry in his large eyes.
+
+"I'm interested in all these little things you do so well," she said.
+
+He flushed with pride, and immediately untied the knot, carefully,
+showing her exactly how he did it.
+
+"Thank you. I see. It's very ingenious."
+
+"Si, signora. I can do many things like that."
+
+"You are a clever boy, Paolo."
+
+He tied the knot again, unhooked the lantern; jumped out of the boat,
+and lighted her up the staircase to a heavy wooden door. In another
+moment she stood on the piazza close to the waterfall. The cold spray
+from it fell on her face. He pushed the door to, but did not lock it.
+
+"You leave it like that at night?" she asked.
+
+"Non, signora. Before I go to bed I lock it."
+
+"I see."
+
+She saw a key sticking out from the door.
+
+"_A rivederci_, Paolo."
+
+"_A rivederci_, signora."
+
+He took off his hat and went swiftly away. The light of the lantern
+danced on the pavement of the piazza, and, for one instant, on the white
+foam of the water falling between the cypresses.
+
+When Viola was alone on the piazza she went to the stone balustrade and
+looked over it at the lake. Was there a boat close by? She could not see
+it. The chiming bells of the fishermen came up to her, mingling with the
+noise of the cascade. She took out her watch and held it up close to
+her eyes. The hour was half-past nine. She wondered what time Italian
+servants went to bed.
+
+The butler came out and begged to know if she would not eat something.
+He seemed so distressed at her having missed dinner, that she went into
+the house, sat down at the dining table and made a pretence of eating. A
+clock struck ten as she finished.
+
+"It is so warm that I am going to sit out in the piazza," she said.
+
+"Will the signora take coffee?"
+
+"No--yes, bring me some there. And tell my maid--tell the servants they
+needn't sit up. I may stay out quite late. If I do, I'll lock the door
+on to the piazza when I go in."
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+When she reached the piazza she saw a shining red spark just above
+the balustrade. Paolo was there smoking a black cigar and leaning over
+sideways.
+
+"What are you looking for?" she asked.
+
+"That boat, signora. It has not gone."
+
+"How do you know? It may have gone when we were in the boat-house."
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"You could not have heard the oars through the noise of the waterfall."
+
+"Si, signora. It has not gone. Shall I take the boat and--"
+
+"No, no," she interrupted quickly. "What does it matter? Go and have
+supper."
+
+"I have had it, signora."
+
+"Then, when you have finished smoking, you'd better go to bed."
+
+She forced herself to smile lightly.
+
+"Boys like you need plenty of sleep."
+
+"Four hours is enough, signora."
+
+"No, no. You should go to bed early."
+
+She saw an odd expression come into his face. He looked over at the
+water, then at her, with a curious dawning significance, that would
+almost have been impudent if it had not been immensely young and full of
+a kind of gnomish sympathy.
+
+"I'll go to bed, signora!" he said.
+
+Then he looked at her again and there were doubt and wonder in his eyes.
+
+She turned away, with a sickness at her heart. She knew exactly what he
+had thought, was thinking. The suspicion had crossed his mind that
+she knew why the hidden boat was there, that she wished no one else to
+suspect why it was there. And then had followed the thought, "Ma--per
+questa signora--non e possibile."
+
+At certain crises of feeling, a tiny incident will often determine some
+vital act. So it was now. The fleeting glance in a carelessly expressive
+boy's eyes at this moment gave to Lady Holme's mind the last touch it
+needed to acquire the impetus which would carry it over the edge of the
+precipice into the abyss. The look in Paolo's eyes said to her, "Life
+has done with you. Throw it away." And she knew that though she had
+thought she had already decided to throw it away that night, she had
+really not decided. Secretly she had been hesitating. Now there was no
+more hesitation in her. She drank her coffee and had the cup taken away,
+and ordered the lights in the drawing-room to be put out.
+
+"When I come in I shall go straight up to bed," she said. "Leave me a
+candle in the hall."
+
+The lights went out behind the windows. Blank darkness replaced the
+yellow gleam that had shone upon them. The two houses on either side of
+the piazza were wrapped in silence. Presently there was a soft noise of
+feet crossing the pavement. It was Paolo going to lock the door leading
+to the boathouse. Lady Holme moved round sharply in her chair to watch
+him. He bent down. With a swift turn of his brown wrists he secured the
+door and pulled the key out of the lock. She opened her lips to call out
+something to him, but when she saw him look at the key doubtfully, then
+towards her, she said nothing. And he put it back into the keyhole. When
+he did that she sighed. Perhaps a doubt had again come into his young
+mind. But, if so, it had come too late. He slipped away smiling, half
+ironically, to himself.
+
+Lady Holme sat still. She had wrapped a white cloth cloak round her.
+She put up her hand to the disfigured side of her face, and touched it,
+trying to see its disfigurement as the blind see, by feeling. She kept
+her hand there, and her hand recognized ugliness vividly. After two or
+three minutes she took her hand away, got up and walked to and fro in
+the piazza, very near to the balustrade.
+
+Now she was thinking fiercely.
+
+She thought of Fritz. What would he feel when he knew? Shocked for a
+moment, no doubt. After all, they had been very close to each other, in
+body at least, if not in soul. And the memory of the body would surely
+cause him to suffer a little, to think, "I held it often, and now it is
+sodden and cold." At least he must think something like that, and his
+body must shudder in sympathy with the catastrophe that had overtaken
+its old companion. She felt a painful yearning to see Fritz again. Yet
+she did not say to herself that she loved him any more. Even before the
+accident she had begun to realise that she had not found in Fritz the
+face of truth among the crowd of shams which all women seek, ignorantly
+or not. And since the accident--there are things that kill even a
+woman's love abruptly. And for a dead love there is no resurrection.
+
+Yet to-night she felt infinitely tender over Fritz, as if she stood by
+him again and saw the bandage darkened by the red stain.
+
+Then she thought of the song she had sung to Lady Cardington, the song
+which had surely opened the eyes of her own drowsy, if not actually
+sleeping, heart:
+
+
+  "Tutto al mondo e vano:
+   Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."
+
+
+It was horribly true to her to-night. She could imagine now, in her
+utter desolation, that for love a woman could easily sacrifice the
+world. But she had had the world--all she called the world--ruthlessly
+taken from her, and nothing had been given to her to fill its place.
+Possibly before the accident she might have recoiled from the idea of
+giving up the world for love. But now, as she walked to and fro, it
+seemed to her as if a woman isolated from everything with love possessed
+the world and all that is therein. Vaguely she remembered the story she
+had heard about this very house, Casa Felice. There had been a romance
+connected with it. Two lovers had fled here, had lived here for a long
+time. She imagined them now, sitting together at night in this piazza,
+hearing the waterfall together, looking at the calm lake together,
+watching the stars together. The sound of the water was terrible to her.
+To them how beautiful it must have been, how beautiful the light of the
+stars, and the lonely gardens stretching along the lake, and the dim
+paths between the cypresses, and the great silence that floated over the
+lake to listen to the waterfall. And all these things were terrible to
+her--all. Not one was beautiful. Each one seemed to threaten her, to
+say to her, "Leave us, we are not for such as you." Well, she would obey
+these voices. She would go. She wrapped the cloak more closely round
+her, went to the balustrade and leaned over it looking at the water.
+
+It seemed to her as if her life had been very trivial. She thought now
+that she had never really enjoyed anything. She looked upon her life as
+if it were down there in the water just beneath her, and she saw it as
+a broken thing, a thing in many fragments. And the fragments, however
+carefully and deftly arranged, could surely never have been fitted
+together and become a complete whole. Everything in her life had been
+awry as her face was now awry, and she had not realised it. Her love for
+Fritz, and his--what he had called his, at least--for her, had seemed to
+her once to be a round and beautiful thing, a circle of passion without
+a flaw. How distorted, misshapen, absurd it had really been. Nothing
+in her life had been carried through to a definite end. Even her petty
+struggle with Miss Schley had been left unfinished. Those who had loved
+her had been like spectres, and now, like spectres, had faded away. And
+all through their spectral love she had clung to Fritz. She had clasped
+the sand like a mad-woman, and never felt the treacherous grains
+shifting between her arms at the touch of every wind.
+
+A sudden passionate fury of longing woke in her to have one week, one
+day, one hour of life, one hour of life now that her eyes were open, one
+moment only--even one moment. She felt that she had had nothing, that
+every other human being must have known the _dolcezza_, the ineffable,
+the mysterious ecstasy, the one and only thing worth the having,
+that she alone had been excluded, when she was beautiful, from the
+participation in joy that was her right, and that now, in her ugliness,
+she was irrevocably cast out from it.
+
+It was unjust. Suddenly she faced a God without justice in His heart,
+all-powerful and not just. She faced such a God and she knew Hell.
+
+Swiftly she turned from the balustrade, went to the door by the
+waterfall, unlocked it and descended the stone staircase. It was very
+dark. She had to feel her way. When she reached the last step she could
+just see the boat lying against it in the black water. She put out her
+hand and felt for the ring through which the rope was slipped. The rope
+was wet. It took her some minutes to undo it. Then she got into the
+boat. Her eyes were more accustomed to the darkness now, and she could
+see the arched opening which gave access to the lake. She found the
+oars, pushed them into the rowlocks, and pulled gently to the opening.
+The boat struck against the wall and grated along it. She stood up and
+thrust one hand against the stone, leaning over to the side. The boat
+went away swiftly, and she nearly fell into the water, but managed
+to save herself by a rapid movement. She sank down, feeling horribly
+afraid. Yet, a moment after, she asked herself why she had not let
+herself go. It was too dark there under the house. Out in the open air
+it would be different, it would be easier. She wanted the stars above
+her. She did not know why she wanted them, why she wanted anything now.
+
+The boat slipped out from the low archway into the open water.
+
+It was a pale and delicate night, one of those autumn nights that are
+full of a white mystery. A thin mist lay about the water, floated among
+the lower woods. Higher up, the mountains rose out of it. Their green
+sides looked black and soft in the starlight, their summits strangely
+remote and inaccessible. Through the mist, here and there, shone faintly
+the lights of the scattered villages. The bells in the water were still
+ringing languidly, and their voices emphasised the pervading silence, a
+silence full of the pensive melancholy of Nature in decline.
+
+Viola rowed slowly out towards the middle of the lake. Awe had come upon
+her. There seemed a mystical presence in the night, something far away
+but attentive, a mind concentrated upon the night, upon Nature, upon
+herself. She was very conscious of it, and it seemed to her not as if
+eyes, but as if a soul were watching her and everything about her; the
+stars and the mountains, the white mist, even the movement of the boat.
+This concentrated, mystical attention oppressed her. It was like a soft,
+impalpable weight laid upon her. She rowed faster.
+
+But now it seemed to her as if she were being followed. Casa Felice had
+already disappeared. The shore was hidden in the darkness. She could
+only see vaguely the mountain-tops. She paused, then dipped the oars
+again, but again--after two or three strokes--she had the sensation
+that she was being followed. She recalled Paolo's action when they were
+returning to Casa Felice in the evening, leaned over the boat's side and
+put her ear close to the water.
+
+When she did so she heard the plash of oars--rhythmical, steady, and
+surely very near. For a moment she listened. Then a sort of panic
+seized her. She remembered the incident of the evening, the hidden boat,
+Paolo's assertion that it was waiting near the house, that it had not
+gone. He had said, too, that the unseen rower had begun to row when he
+began to sing, had stopped rowing when he stopped singing. A conviction
+came to her that this same rower as now following her. But why? Who was
+it? She knew nobody on the lake, except Robin. And he--no, it could not
+be Robin.
+
+The ash of the oars became more distinct. Her unreasoning fear
+increased. With the mystical attention of the great and hidden mind was
+now blent a crude human attention. She began to feel really terrified,
+and, seizing her oars, she pulled frantically towards the middle of the
+lake.
+
+"Viola!"
+
+Out of the darkness it came.
+
+"Viola!"
+
+She stopped and began to tremble. Who--what--could be calling her by
+name, here, in the night? She heard the sound of oars plainly now. Then
+she saw a thing like a black shadow. It was the prow of an advancing
+boat. She sat quite still, with her hands on the oars. The boat came on
+till she could see the figure of one man in it, standing up, and rowing,
+as the Italian boatmen do when they are alone, with his face set towards
+the prow. A few strong strokes and it was beside her, and she was
+looking into Rupert Carey's eyes.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+SHE sat still without saying anything. It seemed to her as if she were
+on the platform at Manchester House singing the Italian song. Then
+the disfigured face of Carey--disfigured by vice as hers now by the
+accident--had become as nothing to her. She had seen only his eyes. She
+saw only his eyes now. He remained standing up in the faint light with
+the oars in his hands looking at her. Round about them tinkled the bells
+above the nets.
+
+"You heard me call?" he said at last, almost roughly.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"How did you--?" she began, and stopped.
+
+"I was there this evening when you came in. I heard your boy singing. I
+was under the shadow of the woods."
+
+"Why?"
+
+All this time she was gazing into Carey's eyes, and had not seen in them
+that he was looking, for the first time, at her altered face. She did
+not realise this. She did not remember that her face was altered. The
+expression in his eyes made her forget it.
+
+"I wanted something of you."
+
+"What?"
+
+He let the oars go, and sat down on the little seat. They were close to
+each other now. The sides of the boats touched. He did not answer her
+question.
+
+"I know I've no business to speak to you," he said. "No business to come
+after you. I know that. But I was always a selfish, violent, headlong
+brute, and it seems I can't change."
+
+"But what do you want with me?"
+
+Suddenly she remembered--put her hands up to her face with a swift
+gesture, then dropped them again. What did it matter now? He was the
+last man who would look upon her in life. And now that she remembered
+her own condition she saw his. She saw the terror of his life in his
+marred features, aged, brutalised by excess. She saw, and was glad for a
+moment, as if she met someone unexpectedly on her side of the stream of
+fate. Let him look upon her. She was looking upon him.
+
+"What do you want?" she repeated.
+
+"I want a saviour," he said, staring always straight at her, and
+speaking without tenderness.
+
+"A saviour!"
+
+For a moment she thought of the Bible, of religion; then of her
+sensation that she had been caught by a torturer who would not let her
+go.
+
+"Have you come to me because you think I can tell you of saviour?" she
+said.
+
+And she began to laugh.
+
+"But don't you see me?" she exclaimed. "Don't you see what I am now?"
+
+Suddenly she felt angry with him because his eyes did not seem to see
+the dreadful change in her appearance.
+
+"Don't you think I want a saviour too?" she exclaimed.
+
+"I don't think about you," he said with a sort of deliberate brutality.
+"I think about myself. Men generally do when they come to women."
+
+"Or go away from them," she said.
+
+She was thinking of Robin then, and Fritz.
+
+"Did you know Robin Pierce was here to-day?" she asked.
+
+"Yes. I saw him leave you."
+
+"You saw--but how long have you been watching?"
+
+"A long time."
+
+"Where do you come from?"
+
+He pointed towards the distant lights behind her and before him.
+
+"Opposite. I was to have stayed with Ulford in Casa Felice. I'm staying
+with him over there."
+
+"With Sir Donald?"
+
+"Yes. He's ill. He wants somebody."
+
+"Sir Donald's afraid of me now," she said, watching him closely. "I told
+him to live with his memory of me. Will he do that?"
+
+"I think he will. Poor old chap! he's had hard knocks. They've made him
+afraid of life."
+
+"Why didn't you keep your memory of me?" she said, with sudden nervous
+anger. "You too? If you hadn't come to-night it would never have been
+destroyed."
+
+Her extreme tension of the nerves impelled her to an exhibition of
+fierce bitterness which she could not control. She remembered how he
+had loved her, with what violence and almost crazy frankness. Why had he
+come? He might have remembered her as she was.
+
+"I hate you for coming," she said, almost under her breath.
+
+"I don't care. I had to come."
+
+"Why? Why?"
+
+"I told you. I want a saviour. I'm down in the pit. I can't get out. You
+can see that for yourself."
+
+"Yes," she answered, "I can see that."
+
+"Give me a hand, Viola, and--you'll make me do something I've never
+done, never been able to do."
+
+"What?" she half whispered.
+
+"Believe there's a God--who cares."
+
+She drew in her breath sharply. Something warm surged through her. It
+was not like fire. It was more like the warmth that comes from a warm
+hand laid on a cold one. It surged through her and went away like a
+travelling flood.
+
+"What are you saying?" she said in a low voice. "You are mad to come
+here to-night, to say this to me to-night."
+
+"No. It's just to-night it had to be said."
+
+Suddenly she resolved to tell him. He was in the pit. So was she. Well,
+the condemned can be frank with one another though all the free have to
+practise subterfuge.
+
+"You don't know," she said, and her voice was quiet now. "You don't know
+why it was mad of you to come to-night. I'll tell you. I've come out
+here and I'm not going back again."
+
+He kept his eyes on hers, but did not speak.
+
+"I'm going to stay out here," she said.
+
+And she let her hand fall over the side of the boat till her fingers
+touched the water.
+
+"No," he said. "You can't do that."
+
+"Yes. I shall do it. I want to hide my face in the water."
+
+"Give me a hand first, Viola."
+
+Again the warmth went through her.
+
+"Nobody else can."
+
+"And you've looked at me!" she said.
+
+There was a profound amazement in her voice.
+
+"It's only when I look at you," he said, "that I know there are stars
+somewhere beyond the pit's mouth."
+
+"When you look at me--now?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But you are blind then?" she said.
+
+"Or are the others blind?" he asked.
+
+Instinctively, really without knowing what she did, she put up her hand
+to her face, touched it, and no longer felt that it was ugly. For a
+moment it seemed to her that her beauty was restored.
+
+"What do you see?" she asked. "But--but it's so dark here."
+
+"Not too dark to see a helping hand--if there is one," he answered.
+
+And he stretched out his arm into her boat and took her right hand from
+the oar it was holding.
+
+"And there is one," he added.
+
+She felt a hand that loved her hand, and there was no veil over her
+face. How strange that was. How utterly impossible it seemed. Yet it
+was so. No woman can be deceived in the touch of a hand on hers. If it
+loves--she knows.
+
+"What are you going to do, Viola?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+There was a sound almost of shame, a humble sound, in her voice.
+
+"I can't do anything," she murmured. "You would know that to-morrow, in
+sunlight."
+
+"To-morrow I'll come in sunlight."
+
+"No, no. I shall not be there."
+
+"I shall come."
+
+"Oh!--good-night," she said.
+
+She began to feel extraordinarily, terribly excited. She could not tell
+whether it was an excitement of horror, of joy--what it was. But it
+mounted to her brain and rushed into her heart. It was in her veins like
+an intoxicant, and in her eyes like fire, and thrilled in her nerves
+and beat in her arteries. And it seemed to be an excitement full of
+passionate contradictions. She was at the same time like a woman on a
+throne and a woman in the dust--radiant as one worshipped, bowed as one
+beaten.
+
+"Good-night, good-night," she repeated, scarcely knowing what she said.
+
+Her hand struggled in his hand.
+
+"Viola, if you destroy yourself you destroy two people."
+
+She scarcely heard him speaking.
+
+"D'you understand?"
+
+"No, no. Not to-night. I can't understand anything to-night."
+
+"Then to-morrow."
+
+"Yes, to-morrow-to-morrow."
+
+He would not let go her hand, and now his was arbitrary, the hand of a
+master rather than of a lover.
+
+"You won't dare to murder me," he said.
+
+"Murder--what do you mean?"
+
+He had used the word to arrest her attention, which was wandering almost
+as the attention of a madwoman wanders.
+
+"If you hide your face in the water I shall never see those stars above
+the pit's mouth."
+
+"I can't help it--I can't help anything. It's not my fault, it's not my
+fault."
+
+"It will be your fault. It will be your crime."
+
+"Your hand is driving me mad," she gasped.
+
+She meant it, felt that it was so. He let her go instantly. She began to
+row back towards Casa Felice. And now that mystical attention of which
+she had been conscious, that soul watching the night, her in the night,
+was surely profounder, watched with more intensity as a spectator
+bending down to see a struggle. Never before had she felt as if beyond
+human life there was life compared with which human life was as death.
+And now she told herself that she was mad, that this shock of human
+passion coming suddenly upon her loneliness had harmed her brain, that
+this cry for salvation addressed to one who looked upon herself as
+destroyed had deafened reason within her.
+
+His boat kept up with hers. She did not look at him. Casa Felice came in
+sight. She pulled harder, like a mad creature. Her boat shot under the
+archway into the darkness. Somehow--how, she did not know--she guided it
+to the steps, left it, rushed up the staircase in the dark and came out
+on to the piazza. There she stopped where the waterfall could cast its
+spray upon her face. She stayed till her hair and cheeks and hands were
+wet. Then she went to the balustrade. His boat was below and he was
+looking up. She saw the tragic mask of his face down in the thin mist
+that floated about the water, and now she imagined him in the pit,
+gazing up and seeking those stars in which he still believed though he
+could not see them.
+
+"Go away," she said, not knowing why she said it or if she wished him to
+go, only knowing that she had lost the faculty of self-control and might
+say, do, be anything in that moment.
+
+"I can't bear it."
+
+She did not know what she meant she could not bear.
+
+He made a strange answer. He said:
+
+"If you will go into the house, open the windows and sing to me--the
+last song I heard you sing--I'll go. But to-morrow I'll come and touch
+my helping hand, and after to-morrow, and every day."
+
+"Sing--?" she said vacantly. "To-night!"
+
+"Go into the house. Open the window. I shall hear you."
+
+He spoke almost sternly.
+
+She crossed the piazza slowly. A candle was burning in the hall. She
+took it up and went into the drawing-room, which was in black darkness.
+There was a piano in it, close to a tall window which looked on to the
+lake. She set the candle down on the piano, went to the window, unbarred
+the shutters and threw the window open. Instantly she heard the sound
+of oars as Carey sent his boat towards the water beneath the window. She
+drew back, went again to the piano, sat down, opened it, put her hands
+on the keys. How could she sing? But she must make him go away. While
+he was there she could not think, could not grip herself, could not--She
+struck a chord. The sound of music, the doing of a familiar action,
+had a strange effect upon her. She felt as if she recovered clear
+consciousness after an anaesthetic. She struck another chord. What did
+he want? The concert--that song. Her fingers found the prelude, her lips
+the poetry, her voice the music. And then suddenly her heart found
+the meaning, more than the meaning, the eternal meanings of the things
+unutterable, the things that lie beyond the world in the deep souls of
+the women who are the saviours of men.
+
+When she had finished she went to the window. He was still standing in
+the boat and looking up, with the whiteness of the mist about him.
+
+"When you sing I can see those stars," he said. "Do you understand?"
+
+She bent down.
+
+"I don't know--I don't think I understand anything," she whispered.
+"But--I'll try--I'll try to live."
+
+Her voice was so faint, such an inward voice, that it seemed impossible
+he could have heard it. But he struck the oars at once into the water
+and sent the boat out into the shadows of the night.
+
+And she stood there looking into the white silence, which was broken
+only by the faint voices of the fishermen's bells, and said to herself
+again and again, like a wondering child:
+
+"There must be a God, there must be; a God who cares!"
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+IN London during the ensuing winter people warmly discussed, and many of
+them warmly condemned, a certain Italian episode, in which a woman and
+a man, once well-known and, in their very different ways, widely popular
+in Society, were the actors.
+
+In the deep autumn Sir Donald Ulford had died rather suddenly, and it
+was found in his will that he had left his newly-acquired property, Casa
+Felice, to Lady Holme, who--as everybody had long ago discovered--was
+already living there in strict retirement, while her husband was amusing
+himself in various Continental towns. This legacy was considered by a
+great number of persons to be "a very strange one;" but it was not this
+which caused the gossip now flitting from boudoir to boudoir and from
+club to club.
+
+It had become known that Rupert Carey, whose unfortunate vice had been
+common talk ever since the Arkell House ball, was a perpetual visitor to
+Casa Felice, and presently it was whispered that he was actually living
+there with Lady Holme, and that Lord Holme was going to apply to the
+Courts for a divorce. Thereupon many successful ladies began to wag
+bitter tongues. It seemed to be generally agreed that the affair was
+rendered peculiarly disgraceful by the fact that Lady Holme was no
+longer a beautiful woman. If she had still been lovely they could have
+understood it! The wildest rumours as to the terrible result of the
+accident upon her had been afloat, and already she had become almost
+a legend. It was stated that when poor Lord Holme had first seen her,
+after the operation, the shock had nearly turned his brain. And now it
+was argued that the only decent thing for a woman in such a plight to
+do was to preserve at least her dignity, and to retire modestly from
+the fray in which she could no longer hope to hold her own. That she had
+indeed retired, but apparently with a man, roused much pious scorn and
+pinched regret in those whose lives were passed amid the crash of broken
+commandments.
+
+One day, at a tea, a certain lady, animadverted strongly upon Lady
+Holme's conduct, and finally remarked:
+
+"It's grotesque! A woman who is disfigured, and a man who is, or at any
+rate was, a drunkard! Really it's the most disgusting thing I ever heard
+of!"
+
+Lady Cardington happened to be in the room and she suddenly flushed.
+
+"I don't think we know very much about it," she said, and her voice was
+rather louder than usual.
+
+"But Lord Holme is going to--" began the lady who had been speaking.
+
+"He may be, and he may succeed. But my sympathies are not with him. He
+left his wife when she needed him."
+
+"But what could he have done for her?"
+
+"He could have loved her," said Lady Cardington.
+
+The flush glowed hotter in the face that was generally as white as
+ivory.
+
+There was a moment of silence in the room. Then Lady Cardington, getting
+up to go, added:
+
+"Whatever happens, I shall admire Mr. Carey as long as I live, and I
+wish there were many more men like him in the world."
+
+She went out, leaving a tense astonishment behind her.
+
+Her romantic heart, still young and ardent, though often aching with
+sorrow, and always yearning for the ideal love that it had never found,
+had divined the truth these chattering women had not imagination enough
+to conceive of, soul enough to appreciate if they had conceived of it.
+
+In that Italian winter, far away from London, a very beautiful drama
+of human life was being enacted, not the less but the more beautiful
+because the man and woman who took part in it had been scourged by fate,
+had suffered cruel losses, were in the eyes of many who had known them
+well pariahs--Rupert Carey through his fault, Lady Holme through her
+misfortune.
+
+Long ago, at the Arkell House ball, Lady Holme had said to Robin
+Pierce that if Rupert Carey had the chance she could imagine him doing
+something great. The chance was given him now of doing one of the
+greatest things a human being can do--of winning a soul that is in
+despair back to hope, of winning a heart that is sceptical of love back
+to belief in love. It was a great thing to do, and Carey set about doing
+it in a strange way. He cast himself down in his degradation at the feet
+of this woman whom he was resolved to help, and he said, "Help me!" He
+came to this woman who was on the brink of self-destruction and he said,
+"Teach me to live!"
+
+It was a strange way he took, but perhaps he was right--perhaps it
+was the only way. The words he spoke at midnight on the lake were as
+nothing. His eyes, his acts in sunlight the next day, and day after day,
+were everything. He forced Viola to realise that she was indeed the only
+woman who could save him from the vice he had become the slave of, lift
+him up out of that pit in which he could not see the stars. At first she
+could not believe it, or could believe it only in moments of exaltation.
+Lord Holme and Robin Pierce had rendered her terrified of life and of
+herself in life. She was inclined to cringe before all humanity like a
+beaten dog. There were moments, many moments at first, when she cringed
+before Rupert Carey. But his eyes always told her the same story. They
+never saw the marred face, but always the white angel. The soul in them
+clung to that, asked to be protected by that. And so, at last, the white
+angel--one hides somewhere surely in every woman--was released.
+
+There were sad, horrible moments in this drama of the Italian winter.
+The lonely house in the woods was a witness to painful, even tragic,
+scenes. Viola's love for Rupert Carey was reluctant in its dawning
+and he could not rise at once, or easily, out of the pit into the full
+starlight to which he aspired. After the death of Sir Donald, when the
+winter set in, he asked her to let him live in the house on the opposite
+side of the piazza from the house in which she dwelt. They were people
+of the world, and knew what the world might say, but they were also
+human beings in distress, and they felt as if they had passed into a
+region in which the meaning of the world's voices was lost, as the cry
+of an angry child is lost in the vastness of the desert. She agreed to
+his request, and they lived thus, innocently, till the winter was over
+and the spring came to bring to Italy its radiance once more.
+
+Even the spring was not an idyll. Rupert Carey had struggled upward,
+but Viola, too, had much to forget and very much to learn. The egoist,
+spoken of by Carey himself one night in Half Moon Street, was slow to
+fade in the growing radiance that played about the angel's feet. But
+it knew, and Carey knew also, that it was no longer fine enough in
+its brilliant selfishness to stand quite alone. With the death of the
+physical beauty there came a modesty of heart. With the understanding,
+bitter and terrible as it was, that the great, conquering outward thing
+was destroyed, came the desire, the imperious need, to find and to
+develop if possible the inner things which, perhaps, conquer less
+easily, but which retain their conquests to the end. There was growth in
+Casa Felice, slow but stubborn, growth in the secret places of the soul,
+till there came a time when not merely the white angel, but the whole
+woman, angel and that which had perhaps been devil too, was able to
+accept the yoke laid upon her with patience, was able to say, "I can
+endure it bravely."
+
+Lord Holme presently took his case to the Courts. It was undefended and
+he won it. Not long ago Viola Holme became Viola Carey.
+
+When Robin Pierce heard of it in Rome he sat for a long time in deep
+thought. Even now, even after all that had passed, he felt a thrill of
+pain that was like the pain of jealousy. He wished for the impossible,
+he wished that he had been born with his friend's nature; that, instead
+of the man who could only talk of being, he were the man who could be.
+And yet, in the past, he had sometimes surely defended Viola against
+Carey's seeming condemnation! He had defended and not loved--but Carey
+had judged and loved.
+
+Carey had judged and loved, yet Carey had said he did not believe in a
+God. Robin wondered if he believed now.
+
+Robin was in Rome, and could not hear the words of a man and a woman who
+were sitting one night, after the marriage, upon a piazza above the Lake
+of Como.
+
+The man said:
+
+"Do you remember Robin's '_Danseuse de Tunisie_'?"
+
+"The woman with the fan?"
+
+"Yes. I see her now without the fan. With it she was a siren, perhaps,
+but without it she is--"
+
+"What is she without it?"
+
+"Eternal woman. Ah, how much better than the siren!"
+
+There was a silence filled only by the voice of the waterfall between
+the cypresses. Then the woman spoke, rather softly.
+
+"You taught her what she could be without the fan. You have done the
+great thing."
+
+"And do you know what you have done?"
+
+"I?"
+
+"Yes. You have taught me to see the stars and to feel the soul beyond
+the stars."
+
+"No, it was not I."
+
+Again there was a silence. Then the man said:
+
+"No, thank God--it was not you."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Woman With The Fan, by Robert Hichens
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+
+Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8549]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on July 22, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMAN WITH THE FAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny, dagnypg@yahoo.com
+and David Widger, widger@cecomet.net
+
+
+
+
+This Book was first published in March, 1904.
+
+
+
+                       THE WOMAN WITH THE FAN
+
+                                 BY
+
+                           ROBERT HICHENS
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+IN a large and cool drawing-room of London a few people were scattered
+about, listening to a soprano voice that was singing to the accompaniment
+of a piano. The sound of the voice came from an inner room, towards which
+most of these people were looking earnestly. Only one or two seemed
+indifferent to the fascination of the singer.
+
+A little woman, with oily black hair and enormous dark eyes, leaned back
+on a sofa, playing with a scarlet fan and glancing sideways at a thin,
+elderly man, who gazed into the distance from which the voice came. His
+mouth worked slightly under his stiff white moustache, and his eyes, in
+colour a faded blue, were fixed and stern. Upon his knees his thin and
+lemon-coloured hands twitched nervously, as if they longed to grasp
+something and hold it fast. The little dark woman glanced down at these
+hands, and then sharply up at the elderly man's face. A faint and
+malicious smile curved her full lips, which were artificially reddened,
+and she turned her shoulder to him with deliberation and looked about the
+room.
+
+On all the faces in it, except one, she perceived intent expressions. A
+sleek and plump man, with hanging cheeks, a hooked nose, and hair
+slightly tinged with grey and parted in the middle, was the exception. He
+sat in a low chair, pouting his lips, playing with his single eyeglass,
+and looking as sulky as an ill-conditioned school-boy. Once or twice he
+crossed and uncrossed his short legs with a sort of abrupt violence, laid
+his fat, white hands on the arms of the chair, lifted them, glanced at
+his rosy and shining nails, and frowned. Then he shut his little eyes so
+tightly that the skin round them became wrinkled, and, stretching out his
+feet, seemed almost angrily endeavouring to fall asleep.
+
+A tall young man, who was sitting alone not far off, cast a glance of
+contempt at him, and then, as if vexed at having bestowed upon him even
+this slight attention, leaned forward, listening with eagerness to the
+soprano voice. The little dark woman observed him carefully above the
+scarlet feathers of her fan, which she now held quite still. His face was
+lean and brown. His eyes were long and black, heavy-lidded, and shaded by
+big lashes which curled upward. His features were good. The nose and chin
+were short and decided, but the mouth was melancholy, almost weak. On his
+upper lip grew a short moustache, turned up at the ends. His body was
+slim and muscular.
+
+After watching him for a little while the dark woman looked again at the
+elderly man beside her, and then quickly back to the young fellow. She
+seemed to be comparing the two attentions, of age and of youth. Perhaps
+she found something horrible in the process for she suddenly lost her
+expression of sparkling and birdlike sarcasm, and bending her arm, as if
+overcome with lassitude, she let her fan drop on her knees, and stared
+moodily at the carpet.
+
+A very tall woman, with snow-white hair and a face in which nobility and
+weariness were mated, let fall two tears, and a huge man, with short,
+bronze-coloured hair and a protruding lower jaw, who was sitting opposite
+to her, noticed them and suddenly looked proud.
+
+The light soprano voice went on singing an Italian song about a summer
+night in Venice, about stars, dark waters and dark palaces, heat, and the
+sound of music, and of gondoliers calling over the lagoons to their
+comrades. It was an exquisite voice; not large, but flexible and very
+warm. The pianoforte accompaniment was rather uneasy and faltering. Now
+and then, when it became blurred and wavering, the voice was abruptly
+hard and decisive, once even piercing and almost shrewish. Then the
+pianist, as if attacked by fear, played louder and hurried the tempo, the
+little dark woman smiled mischievously, the white-haired woman put her
+handkerchief to her eyes, and the young man looked as if he wished to
+commit murder. But the huge man with the bronze hair went on looking
+equably proud.
+
+When the voice died away there was distinct, though slight, applause,
+which partially drowned the accompanist's muddled conclusion. Then a
+woman walked in from the second drawing-room with an angry expression on
+her face.
+
+She was tall and slight. Her hair and eyes were light yellow-brown, and
+the former had a natural wave in it. Her shoulders and bust were superb,
+and her small head was beautifully set on a lovely, rather long, neck.
+She had an oval face, with straight, delicate features, now slightly
+distorted by temper. But the most remarkable thing about her was her
+complexion. Her skin was exquisite, delicately smooth and white, warmly
+white like a white rose. She did nothing to add to its natural beauty,
+though nearly every woman in London declared that she had a special
+preparation and always slept in a mask coated thickly with it. The Bond
+Street oracles never received a visit from her. She had been born with an
+enchanting complexion, a marvellous skin. She was young, just
+twenty-four. She let herself alone because she knew improvement--in that
+direction--was not possible. The mask coated with Juliet paste, or
+Aphrodite ivorine, existed only in the radiant imaginations of her
+carefully-arranged acquaintances.
+
+In appearance she was a siren. By nature she was a siren too. But she had
+a temper and sometimes showed it. She showed it now.
+
+As she walked in slowly all the scattered people leaned forward,
+murmuring their thanks, and the men stood up and gathered round her.
+
+"Beautiful! Beautiful!" muttered the thin, elderly man in a hoarse voice,
+striking his fingers repeatedly against the palms of his withered hands.
+
+The young man looked at the singer and said nothing; but the anger in her
+face was reflected in his, and mingled with a flaming of sympathy that
+made his appearance almost startling. The white-haired woman clasped the
+singer's hands and said, "Thank you, dearest!" in a thrilling voice, and
+the little dark woman with the red fan cried out, "Viola, you simply pack
+up Venice, carry it over the Continent and set it down here in London!"
+
+Lady Holme frowned slightly.
+
+"Thank you, thank you, you good-natured dears," she said with an attempt
+at lightness. Then, hearing the thin rustle of a dress, she turned
+sharply and cast an unfriendly glance at a mild young woman with a very
+pointed nose, on which a pair of eyeglasses sat astride, who came meekly
+forward, looking self-conscious, and smiling with one side of her mouth.
+The man with the protruding jaw, who was Lord Holme, said to her, in a
+loud bass voice:
+
+"Thanks, Miss Filberte, thanks."
+
+"Oh, not at all, Lord Holme," replied the accompanist with a sudden air
+of rather foolish delight. "I consider it an honour to accompany an
+amateur who sings like Lady Holme."
+
+She laid a slight emphasis on the word "amateur."
+
+Lady Holme suddenly walked forward to an empty part of the drawing-room.
+The elderly man, whose name was Sir Donald Ulford, made a movement as if
+to follow her, then cleared his throat and stood still looking after her.
+Lord Holme stuck out his under jaw. But Lady Cardington, the white-haired
+woman spoke to him softly, and he leaned over to her and replied. The
+sleek man, whose name was Mr. Bry, began to talk about Tschaikowsky to
+Mrs. Henry Wolfstein, the woman with the red fan. He uttered his remarks
+authoritatively in a slow and languid voice, looking at the pointed toes
+of his shoes. Conversation became general.
+
+Robin Pierce, the tall young man, stood alone for a few minutes. Two or
+three times he glanced towards Lady Holme, who had sat down on a sofa,
+and was opening and shutting a small silver box which she had picked up
+from a table near her. Then he walked quietly up the room and sat down
+beside her.
+
+"Why on earth didn't you accompany yourself?" he asked in a low voice.
+"You knew what a muddler that girl was, I suppose."
+
+"Yes. She plays like a distracted black beetle--horrid creature!"
+
+"Then--why?"
+
+"I look ridiculous sitting at the piano."
+
+"Ridiculous--you--"
+
+"Well, I hold them far more when I stand up. They can't get away from me
+then."
+
+"And you'd rather have your singing ruined than part for a moment with a
+scrap of your physical influence, of the influence that comes from your
+beauty, not your talent--your face, not your soul. Viola, you're just the
+same."
+
+"Lady Holme," she said.
+
+"P'sh! Why?"
+
+"My little husband's fussy."
+
+"And much you care if he is."
+
+"Oh, yes, I do. He sprawls when he fusses and knocks things over, and
+then, when I've soothed him, he always goes and does Sandow exercises and
+gets bigger. And he's big enough as it is. I must keep him quiet."
+
+"But you can't keep the other men quiet. With your face and your voice--"
+
+"Oh, it isn't the voice," she said with contempt.
+
+He looked at her rather sadly.
+
+"Why will you put such an exaggerated value on your appearance? Why will
+you never allow that three-quarters at least of your attraction comes
+from something else?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Your personality--your self."
+
+"My soul!" she said, suddenly putting on a farcically rapt and yearning
+expression and speaking in a hollow, hungry voice. "Are we in the
+prehistoric Eighties?"
+
+"We are in the unchanging world."
+
+"Unchanging! My dear boy!"
+
+"Yes, unchanging," he repeated obstinately.
+
+He pressed his lips together and looked away. Miss Filberte was cackling
+and smiling on a settee, with a man whose figure presented a succession
+of curves, and who kept on softly patting his hands together and swaying
+gently backwards and forwards.
+
+"Well, Mr. Pierce, what's the matter?"
+
+"Mr. Pierce!" he said, almost savagely.
+
+"Yes, of the English Embassy in Rome, rising young diplomat and full of
+early Eighty yearns--"
+
+"How the deuce can you be as you are and yet sing as you do?" he
+exclaimed, turning on her. "You say you care for nothing but the outside
+of things--the husk, the shell, the surface. You think men care for
+nothing else. Yet when you sing you--you--"
+
+"What do I do?"
+
+"It's as if another woman than you were singing in you--a woman totally
+unlike you, a woman who believes in, and loves, the real beauty which you
+care nothing about."
+
+"The real beauty that rules the world is lodged in the epidermis," she
+said, opening her fan and smiling slowly. "If this"--she touched her
+face--"were to be changed into--shall we say a Filberte countenance?"
+
+"Oh!" he exclaimed.
+
+"There! You see, directly I put the matter before you, you have to agree
+with me!"
+
+"No one could sing like you and have a face like a silly sheep."
+
+"Poor Miss Filberte! Well, then, suppose me disfigured and singing better
+than ever--what man would listen to me?"
+
+"I should."
+
+"For half a minute. Then you'd say, 'Poor wretch, she's lost her voice!'
+No, no, it's my face that sings to the world, my face the world loves to
+listen to, my face that makes me friends and--enemies."
+
+She looked into his eyes with impertinent directness.
+
+"It's my face that's made Mr. Robin Pierce deceive himself into the
+belief that he only worships women for their souls, their lovely natures,
+their--"
+
+"Do you know that in a way you are a singularly modest woman?" he
+suddenly interrupted.
+
+"Am I? How?"
+
+"In thinking that you hold people only by your appearance, that your
+personality has nothing to say in the matter."
+
+"I am modest, but not so modest as that."
+
+"Well, then?"
+
+"Personality is a crutch, a pretty good crutch; but so long as men are
+men they will put crutches second and--something else first. Yes, I know
+I'm a little bit vulgar, but everybody in London is."
+
+"I wish you lived in Rome."
+
+"I've seen people being vulgar there too. Besides, there may be reasons
+why it would not be good for me to live in Rome."
+
+She glanced at him again less impertinently, and suddenly her whole body
+looked softer and kinder.
+
+"You must put up with my face, Robin," she added. "It's no good wishing
+me to be ugly. It's no use. I can't be."
+
+She laughed. Her ill-humour had entirely vanished.
+
+"If you were--" he said. "If you were--!"
+
+"What then?"
+
+"Do you think no one would stick to you--stick to you for yourself?"
+
+"Oh, yes."
+
+"Who, then?"
+
+"Quite several old ladies. It's very strange, but old ladies of a certain
+class--the almost obsolete class that wears caps and connects piety with
+black brocade--like me. They think me 'a bright young thing.' And so I
+am."
+
+"I don't know what you are. Sometimes I seem to divine what you are, and
+then--then your face is like a cloud which obscures you--except when you
+are singing."
+
+She laughed frankly.
+
+"Poor Robin! It was always your great fault--trying to plumb shallows and
+to take high dives into water half a foot deep."
+
+He was silent for a minute. At last he said:
+
+"And your husband?"
+
+"Fritz!"
+
+His forehead contracted.
+
+"Fritz--yes. What does he do? Try to walk in ocean depths?"
+
+"You needn't sneer at Fritz," she said sharply.
+
+"I beg your pardon."
+
+"Fritz doesn't bother about shallows and depths. He loves me absurdly,
+and that's quite enough for him."
+
+"And for you."
+
+She nodded gravely.
+
+"And what would Fritz do if you were to lose your beauty? Would he be
+like all the other men? Would he cease to care?"
+
+For the first time Lady Holme looked really thoughtful--almost painfully
+thoughtful.
+
+"One's husband," she said slowly. "Perhaps he's different. He--he ought
+to be different."
+
+A faint suggestion of terror came into her large brown eyes.
+
+"There's a strong tie, you know, whatever people may say, a very strong
+tie in marriage," she murmured, as if she were thinking out something for
+herself. "Fritz ought to love me, even if--if--"
+
+She broke off and looked about the room. Robin Pierce glanced round too
+over the chattering guests sitting or standing in easy or lazy postures,
+smiling vaguely, or looking grave and indifferent. Mrs. Wolfstein was
+laughing, and yawned suddenly in the midst of her mirth. Lady Cardington
+said something apparently tragic, to Mr. Bry, who was polishing his
+eyeglass and pouting out his dewy lips. Sir Donald Ulford, wandering
+round the walls, was examining the pictures upon them. Lady Manby, a
+woman with a pyramid of brown hair and an aggressively flat back, was
+telling a story. Evidently it was a comic history of disaster. Her
+gestures were full of deliberate exaggeration, and she appeared to be
+impersonating by turns two or three different people, each of whom had a
+perfectly ridiculous personality. Lord Holme burst into a roar of
+laughter. His big bass voice vibrated through the room. Suddenly Lady
+Holme laughed too.
+
+"Why are you laughing?" Robin Pierce asked rather harshly. "You didn't
+hear what Lady Manby said."
+
+"No, but Fritz is so infectious. I believe there are laughter microbes.
+What a noise he makes! It's really a scandal."
+
+And she laughed again joyously.
+
+"You don't know much about women if you think any story of Lady Manby's
+is necessary, to prompt my mirth. Poor dear old Fritz is quite enough.
+There he goes again!"
+
+Robin Pierce began to look stiff with constraint, and just then Sir
+Donald Ulford, in his progress round the walls, reached the sofa where
+they were sitting.
+
+"You are very fortunate to possess this Cuyp, Lady Holme," he said in a
+voice from which all resonance had long ago departed.
+
+"Alas, Sir Donald, cows distress me! They call up sad memories. I was
+chased by one in the park at Grantoun when I was a child. A fly had stung
+it, so it tried to kill me. This struck me as unreason run riot, and ever
+since then I have wished the Spaniards would go a step farther and make
+cow-fights the national pastime. I hate cows frankly."
+
+Sir Donald sat down in an armchair and looked, with his faded blue eyes,
+into the eyes of his hostess. His drawn yellow face was melancholy, like
+the face of one who had long been an invalid. People who knew him well,
+however, said there was nothing the matter with him, and that his
+appearance had not altered during the last twenty years.
+
+"You can hate nothing beautiful," he said with a sort of hollow
+assurance.
+
+"I think cows hideous."
+
+"Cuyp's?"
+
+"All cows. You've never had one running after you."
+
+She took up her gloves, which she had laid down on the table beside her,
+and began to pull them gently through her fingers. Both Sir Donald and
+Robin looked at her hands, which were not only beautiful in shape but
+extraordinarily intelligent in their movements. Whatever they did they
+did well, without hesitation or bungling. Nobody had ever seen them
+tremble.
+
+"Do you consider that anything that can be dangerous for a moment must be
+hideous for ever?" asked Sir Donald, after a slight pause.
+
+"I'm sure I don't know. But I truly think cows hideous--I truly do."
+
+"Don't put on your gloves," exclaimed Robin at this moment.
+
+Sir Donald glanced at him and said:
+
+"Thank you."
+
+"Why not?" said Lady Holme.
+
+It was obvious to both men that there was no need to answer her question.
+She laid the gloves in her lap, smoothed them with her small fingers, and
+kept silence. Silence was characteristic of her. When she was in society
+she sometimes sat quite calmly and composedly without uttering a word.
+After watching her for a minute or two, Sir Donald said:
+
+"You must know Venice very well and understand it completely."
+
+"Oh, I've been there, of course."
+
+"Recently?"
+
+"Not so very long ago. After my marriage Fritz took me all over Europe."
+
+"And you loved Venice."
+
+Sir Donald did not ask a question, he made a statement.
+
+"No. It didn't agree with me. It depressed me. We were there in the
+mosquito season."
+
+"What has that to do with it?"
+
+"My dear Sir Donald, if you'd ever had a hole in your net you'd know. I
+made Fritz take me away after two days, and I've never been back. I don't
+want to have my one beauty ruined."
+
+Sir Donald did not pay the reasonable compliment. He only stretched out
+his lean hands over his knees, and said:
+
+"Venice is the only ideal city in Europe."
+
+"You forget Paris."
+
+"Paris!" said Sir Donald. "Paris is a suburb of London and New York.
+Paris is no longer the city of light, but the city of pornography and
+dressmakers."
+
+"Well, I don't know exactly what pornography is--unless it's some new
+process for taking snapshots. But I do know what gowns are, and I love
+Paris. The Venice shops are failures and the Venice mosquitoes are
+successes, and I hate Venice."
+
+An expression of lemon-coloured amazement appeared upon Sir Donald's
+face, and he glanced at Robin Pierce as if requesting the answer to a
+riddle. Robin looked rather as if he were enjoying himself, but the
+puzzled melancholy grew deeper on Sir Donald's face. With the air of a
+man determined to reassure his mind upon some matter, however, he spoke
+again.
+
+"You visited the European capitals?" he said.
+
+"Yes, all of them."
+
+"Constantinople?"
+
+"Terrible place! Dogs, dogs, nothing but dogs."
+
+"Did you like Petersburg?"
+
+"No, I couldn't bear it. I caught cold there."
+
+"And that was why you hated it?"
+
+"Yes. I went out one night with Fritz on the Neva to hear a woman in a
+boat singing--a peasant girl with high cheek-bones--and I caught a
+frightful chill."
+
+"Ah!" said Sir Donald. "What was the song? I know a good many of the
+Northern peasant songs."
+
+Suddenly Lady Holme got up, letting her gloves fall to the ground.
+
+"I'll sing it to you," she said.
+
+Robin Pierce touched her arm.
+
+"For Heaven's sake not to Miss Filberte's accompaniment!"
+
+"Very well. But come and sit where you can see me."
+
+"I won't," he said with brusque obstinacy.
+
+"Madman!" she answered. "Anyhow, you come, Sir Donald."
+
+And she walked lightly away towards the piano, followed by Sir Donald,
+who walked lightly too, but uncertainly, on his thin, stick-like legs.
+
+"What are you up to, Vi?" said Lord Holme, as she came near to him.
+
+"I'm going to sing something for Sir Donald."
+
+"Capital! Where's Miss Filberte?"
+
+"Here I am!" piped a thin alto voice.
+
+There was a rustle of skirts as the accompanist rose hastily from her
+chair.
+
+"Sit down, please, Miss Filberte," said Lady Holme in a voice of ice.
+
+Miss Filberte sat down like one who has been knocked on the head with a
+hammer, and Lady Holme went alone to the piano, turned the button that
+raised the music-stool, sat down too, holding herself very upright, and
+played some notes. For a moment, while she played, her face was so
+determined and pitiless that Mr. Bry, unaware that she was still thinking
+about Miss Filberte, murmured to Lady Cardington:
+
+"Evidently we are in for a song about Jael with the butter in the lordly
+dish omitted."
+
+Then an expression of sorrowful youth stole into Lady Holme's eyes,
+changed her mouth to softness and her cheeks to curving innocence. She
+leaned a little way from the piano towards her audience and sang, looking
+up into vacancy as if her world were hidden there. The song had the clear
+melancholy and the passion of a Northern night. It brought the stars out
+within that room and set purple distances before the eyes. Water swayed
+in it, but languidly, as water sways at night in calm weather, when the
+black spars of ships at anchor in sheltered harbours are motionless as
+fingers of skeletons pointing towards the moon. Mysterious lights lay
+round a silent shore. And in the wide air, on the wide waters, one woman
+was singing to herself of a sorrow that was deep as the grave, and that
+no one upon the earth knew of save she who sang. The song was very short.
+It had only two little verses. When it was over, Sir Donald, who had been
+watching the singer, returned to the sofa, where Robin Pierce was sitting
+with his eyes shut and, again striking his fingers against the palms of
+his hands, said: "I have heard that song at night on the Neva, and yet I
+never heard it before."
+
+People began getting up to go away. It was past eleven o'clock. Sir
+Donald and Robin Pierce stood together, saying good-bye to Lady Holme. As
+she held out her hand to the former, she said:
+
+"Oh, Sir Donald, you know Russia, don't you?"
+
+"I do."
+
+"Then I want you to tell me the name of that stuff they carry down the
+Neva in boats--the stuff that has such a horrible smell. That song always
+reminds me of it, and Fritz can't remember the name."
+
+"Nor can I," said Sir Donald, rather abruptly. "Good-night, Lady Holme."
+
+He walked out of the room, followed by Robin.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+LORD HOLME'S house was in Cadogan Square. When Sir Donald had put on his
+coat in the hall he turned to Robin Pierce and said:
+
+"Which way do you go?"
+
+"To Half Moon Street," said Robin.
+
+"We might walk, if you like. I am going the same way.
+
+"Certainly."
+
+They set out slowly. It was early in the year. Showers of rain had fallen
+during the day. The night was warm, and the damp earth in the Square
+garden steamed as if it were oppressed and were breathing wearily. The
+sky was dark and cloudy, and the air was impregnated with a scent to
+which many things had contributed, each yielding a fragment of the odour
+peculiar to it. Rain, smoke, various trees and plants, the wet paint on a
+railing, the damp straw laid before the house of an invalid, the hothouse
+flowers carried by a woman in a passing carriage--these and other things
+were represented in the heavy atmosphere which was full of the sensation
+of life. Sir Donald expanded his nostrils.
+
+"London, London!" he said. "I should know it if I were blind."
+
+"Yes. The London smell is not to be confused with the smell of any other
+place. You have been back a good while, I believe?"
+
+"Three years. I am laid on the London shelf now."
+
+"You have had a long life of work--interesting work."
+
+"Yes. Diplomacy has interesting moments. I have seen many countries. I
+have been transferred from Copenhagen to Teheran, visited the Sultan of
+Morocco at Fez, and--" he stopped. After a pause he added: "And now I sit
+in London clubs and look out of bay windows."
+
+They walked on slowly.
+
+"Have you known our hostess of to-night long?" Sir Donald asked
+presently.
+
+"A good while--quite a good while. But I'm very much away at Rome now.
+Since I have been there she has married."
+
+"I have only met her to speak to once before to-night, though I have seen
+her about very often and heard her sing."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"To me she is an enigma," Sir Donald continued with some hesitation. "I
+cannot make her out at all."
+
+Robin Pierce smiled in the dark and thrust his hands deep down in the
+pockets of his overcoat.
+
+"I don't know," Sir Donald resumed, after a slight pause, "I don't know
+what is your--whether you care much for beauty in its innumerable forms.
+Many young men don't, I believe."
+
+"I do," said Robin. "My mother is an Italian, you know, and not an
+Italian Philistine."
+
+"Then you can help me, perhaps. Does Lady Holme care for beauty? But she
+must. It is impossible that she does not."
+
+"Do you think so? Why?"
+
+"I really cannot reconcile myself to the idea that such performances as
+hers are matters of chance."
+
+"They are not. Lady Holme is not a woman who chances things before the
+cruel world in which she, you and I live, Sir Donald."
+
+"Exactly. I felt sure of that. Then we come to calculation of effects, to
+consideration of that very interesting question--self-consciousness in
+art."
+
+"Do you feel that Lady Holme is self-conscious when she is singing?"
+
+"No. And that is just the point. She must, I suppose, have studied till
+she has reached that last stage of accomplishment in which the
+self-consciousness present is so perfectly concealed that it seems to be
+eliminated."
+
+"Exactly. She has an absolute command over her means."
+
+"One cannot deny it. No musician could contest it. But the question that
+interests me lies behind all this. There is more than accomplishment in
+her performance. There is temperament, there is mind, there is emotion
+and complete understanding. I am scarcely speaking strongly enough in
+saying complete--perhaps infinitely subtle would be nearer the mark. What
+do you say?"
+
+"I don't think if you said that there appears to be an infinitely subtle
+understanding at work in Lady Holme's singing you would be going at all
+too far."
+
+"Appears to be?"
+
+Sir Donald stopped for a moment on the pavement under a gas-lamp. As the
+light fell on him he looked like a weary old ghost longing to fade away
+into the dark shadows of the London night.
+
+"You say 'appears to be,'" he repeated.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"May I ask why?"
+
+"Well, would you undertake to vouch for Lady Holme's understanding--I
+mean for the infinite subtlety of it?"
+
+Sir Donald began to walk on once more.
+
+"I cannot find it in her conversation," he said.
+
+"Nor can I, nor can anyone."
+
+"She is full of personal fascination, of course."
+
+"You mean because of her personal beauty?"
+
+"No, it's more than that, I think. It's the woman herself. She is
+suggestive somehow. She makes one's imagination work. Of course she is
+beautiful."
+
+"And she thinks that is everything. She would part with her voice, her
+intelligence--she is very intelligent in the quick, frivolous fashion
+that is necessary for London--that personal fascination you speak of,
+everything rather than her white-rose complexion and the wave in her
+hair."
+
+"Really, really?"
+
+"Yes. She thinks the outside everything. She believes the world is
+governed, love is won and held, happiness is gained and kept by the husk
+of things. She told me only to-night that it is her face which sings to
+us all, not her voice; that were she to sing as well and be an ugly woman
+we should not care to listen to her."
+
+"H'm! H'm!"
+
+"Absurd, isn't it?"
+
+"What will be the approach of old age to her?"
+
+There was a suspicion of bitterness in his voice.
+
+"The coming of the King of Terrors," said Pierce. "But she cannot hear
+his footsteps yet."
+
+"They are loud enough in some ears. Ah, we, are at your door already?"
+
+"Will you be good-natured and come in for a little while?"
+
+"I'm afraid--isn't it rather late?"
+
+"Only half-past eleven."
+
+"Well, thank you."
+
+They stepped into the little hall. As they did so a valet appeared at the
+head of the stairs leading to the servants' quarters.
+
+"If you please, sir," he said to Pierce, "this note has just come. I was
+to ask if you would read it directly you returned."
+
+"Will you excuse me?" said Pierce to Sir Donald, tearing open the
+envelope.
+
+He glanced at the note.
+
+"Is it to ask you to go somewhere to-night?" Sir Donald said.
+
+"Yes, but--"
+
+"I will go."
+
+"Please don't. It is only from a friend who is just round the corner in
+Stratton Street. If you will not mind his joining us here I will send him
+a message."
+
+He said a few words to his man.
+
+"That will be all right. Do come upstairs."
+
+"You are sure I am not in the way?"
+
+"I hope you will not find my friend in the way; that's all. He's an odd
+fellow at the best of times, and to-night he's got an attack of what he
+calls the blacks--his form of blues. But he's very talented. Carey is his
+name--Rupert Carey. You don't happen to know him?"
+
+"No. If I may say so, your room is charming."
+
+They were on the first floor now, in a chamber rather barely furnished
+and hung with blue-grey linen, against which were fastened several old
+Italian pictures in black frames. On the floor were some Eastern rugs in
+which faded and originally pale colours mingled. A log fire was burning
+on an open hearth, at right angles to which stood an immense sofa with a
+square back. This sofa was covered with dull blue stuff. Opposite to it
+was a large and low armchair, also covered in blue. A Steinway grand
+piano stood out in the middle of the room. It was open and there were no
+ornaments or photographs upon it. Its shining dark case reflected the
+flames which sprang up from the logs. Several dwarf bookcases of black
+wood were filled with volumes, some in exquisite bindings, some paper
+covered. On the top of the bookcases stood four dragon china vases filled
+with carnations of various colours. Electric lights burned just under the
+ceiling, but they were hidden from sight. In an angle of the wall, on a
+black ebony pedestal, stood an extremely beautiful marble statuette of a
+nude girl holding a fan. Under this, on a plaque, was written, "/Une
+Danseuse de Tunisie/."
+
+Sir Donald went up to it, and stood before it for two or three minutes in
+silence.
+
+"I see indeed you do care for beauty," he said at length. "But--forgive
+me--that fan makes that statuette wicked."
+
+"Yes, but a thousand times more charming. Carey said just the same thing
+when he saw it. I wonder I wonder what Lady Holme would say."
+
+They sat down on the sofa by the wood fire.
+
+"Carey could probably tell us!" Pierce added.
+
+"Oh, then your friend knows Lady Holme?"
+
+"He did once. I believe he isn't allowed to now. Ah, here is Carey!"
+
+A quick step was audible on the stairs, the door was opened, and a broad,
+middle-sized young man, with red hair, a huge red moustache and fierce
+red-brown eyes, entered swiftly with an air of ruthless determination.
+
+"I came, but I shall be devilish bad company to-night," he said at once,
+looking at Sir Donald.
+
+"We'll cheer you up. Let me introduce you to Sir Donald Ulford--Mr.
+Rupert Carey."
+
+Carey shook Sir Donald by the hand.
+
+"Glad to meet you," he said abruptly. "I've carried your Persian poems
+round the world with me. They lay in my trunk cheek by jowl with
+God-forsaken, glorious old Omar."
+
+A dusky red flush appeared in Sir Donald's hollow cheeks.
+
+"Really," he said, with obvious embarrassment, "I--they were a great
+failure. 'Obviously the poems of a man likely to be successful in dealing
+with finance,' as /The Times/ said in reviewing them."
+
+"Well, in the course of your career you've done some good things for
+England financially, haven't you?--not very publicly, perhaps, but as a
+minister abroad."
+
+"Yes. To come forward as a poet was certainly a mistake."
+
+"Any fool could see the faults in your book. True Persia all the same
+though. I saw all the faults and read 'em twenty times."
+
+He flung himself down in the big armchair. Sir Donald could see now that
+there was a shining of misery in his big, rather ugly, eyes.
+
+"Where have you two been?" he continued, with a directness that was
+almost rude.
+
+"Dining with the Holmes," answered Pierce.
+
+"That ruffian! Did she sing?"
+
+"Yes, twice."
+
+"Wish I'd heard her. Here am I playing Saul without a David. Many people
+there?"
+
+"Several. Lady Cardington--"
+
+"That white-haired enchantress! There's a Niobe--weeping not for her
+children, she never had any, but for her youth. She is the religion of
+half Mayfair, though I don't know whether she's got a religion. Men who
+wouldn't look at her when she was sixteen, twenty-six, thirty-six,
+worship her now she's sixty. And she weeps for her youth! Who else?"
+
+"Mrs. Wolfstein."
+
+"A daughter of Israel; coarse, intelligent, brutal to her reddened
+finger-tips. I'd trust her to judge a singer, actor, painter, writer. But
+I wouldn't trust her with my heart or half a crown."
+
+"Lady Manby."
+
+"Humour in petticoats. She's so infernally full of humour that there's no
+room in her for anything else. I doubt if she's got lungs. I'm sure she
+hasn't got a heart or a brain."
+
+"But if she is so full of humour," said Sir Donald mildly, "how does
+she--?"
+
+"How does a great writer fail over an addition sum? How does a man who
+speaks eight languages talk imbecility in them all? How is it that a bird
+isn't an angel? I wish to Heaven we knew. Well, Robin?"
+
+"Of course, Mr. Bry."
+
+Carey's violent face expressed disgust in every line.
+
+"One of the most finished of London types," he exclaimed. "No other city
+supplies quite the same sort of man to take the colour out of things.
+He's enormously clever, enormously abominable, and should have been
+strangled at birth merely because of his feet. Why he's not Chinese I
+can't conceive; why he dines out every night I can. He's a human
+cruet-stand without the oil. He's so monstrously intelligent that he
+knows what a beast he is, and doesn't mind. Not a bad set of people to
+talk with, unless Lady Holme was in a temper and you were next to her, or
+you were left stranded with Holme when the women went out of the
+dining-room."
+
+"You think Holme a poor talker?" asked Sir Donald.
+
+"Precious poor. His brain is muscle-bound, I believe. Robin, you know I'm
+miserable to-night you offer me nothing to drink."
+
+"I beg your pardon. Help yourself. And, Sir Donald, what will you--?"
+
+"Nothing, thank you."
+
+"Try one of those cigars."
+
+Sir Donald took one and lit it quietly, looking at Carey, who seemed to
+interest him a good deal.
+
+"Why are you miserable, Carey?" said Pierce, as the former buried his
+moustache in a tall whisky-and-soda.
+
+"Because I'm alive and don't want to be dead. Reason enough."
+
+"Because you're an unmitigated egoist," rejoined Pierce.
+
+"Yes, I am an egoist. Introduce me to a man who is not, will you?"
+
+"And what about women?"
+
+"Many women are not egoists. But you have been dining with one of the
+most finished egoists in London to-night."
+
+"Lady Holme?" said Sir Donald, shifting into the left-hand corner of the
+sofa.
+
+"Yes, Viola Holme, once Lady Viola Grantoun; whom I mustn't know any
+more."
+
+"I'm not sure that you are right, Carey," said Pierce, rather coldly.
+
+"What!"
+
+"Can a true and perfect egoist be in love?"
+
+"Certainly. Is not even an egoist an animal?"
+
+Pierce's lips tightened for a second, and his right hand strained itself
+round his knee, on which it was lying.
+
+"And how much can she be in love?"
+
+"Very much."
+
+"Do you mean with her body?"
+
+"Yes, I do; and with the spirit that lives in it. I don't believe there's
+any life but this. A church is more fantastic to me than the room in
+which Punch belabours Judy. But I say that there is spirit in lust, in
+hunger, in everything. When I want a drink my spirit wants it. Viola
+Holme's spirit--a flame that will be blown out at death--takes part in
+her love for that great brute Holme. And yet she's one of the most
+pronounced egoists in London."
+
+"Do you care to tell us any reason you may have for saying so?" said Sir
+Donald.
+
+As he spoke, his voice, brought into sharp contrast with the changeful
+and animated voice of Carey, sounded almost preposterously thin and worn
+out.
+
+"She is always conscious of herself in every situation, in every relation
+of life. While she loves even she thinks to herself, 'How beautifully I
+am loving!' And she never forgets for a single moment that she is a
+fascinating woman. If she were being murdered she would be saying
+silently, while the knife went in, 'What an attractive creature, what an
+unreplaceable personage they are putting an end to!'"
+
+"Rupert, you are really too absurd!" exclaimed Pierce, laughing
+reluctantly.
+
+"I'm not absurd. I see straight. Lady Holme is an egoist--a magnificent,
+an adorable egoist, fine enough in her brilliant selfishness to stand
+quite alone."
+
+"And you mean to tell us that any woman can do that?" exclaimed Pierce.
+
+"Who am I that I should pronounce a verdict upon the great mystery? What
+do I know of women?"
+
+"Far too much, I'm afraid," said Pierce.
+
+"Nothing, I have never been married, and only the married man knows
+anything of women. The Frenchmen are wrong. It is not the mistress who
+informs, it is the loving wife. For me the sex remains mysterious, like
+the heroine of my realm of dreams."
+
+"You are talking great nonsense, Rupert."
+
+"I always do when I am depressed, and I am very specially depressed
+to-night."
+
+"But why? There must be some very special reason."
+
+"There is. I, too, dined out and met at dinner a young man whose one
+desire in life appears to be to deprive living creatures of life."
+
+Sir Donald moved slightly.
+
+"You're not a sportsman, then, Mr. Carey?" he said.
+
+"Indeed, I am. I've shot big game, the Lord forgive me, and found big
+pleasure in doing it. Yet this young man depressed me. He was so robust,
+so perfectly happy, so supremely self-satisfied, and, according to his
+own account, so enormously destructive, that he made me feel very sick.
+He is married. He married a widow who has an ear-trumpet and a big
+shooting in Scotland. If she could be induced to crawl in underwood, or
+stand on a cairn against a skyline, I'm sure he'd pot at her for the fun
+of the thing."
+
+"What is his name?" asked Sir Donald.
+
+"I didn't catch it. My host called him Leo. He has--"
+
+"Ah! He is my only son."
+
+Pierce looked very uncomfortable, but Carey replied calmly:
+
+"Really. I wonder he hasn't shot you long ago."
+
+Sir Donald smiled.
+
+"Doesn't he depress you?" added Carey.
+
+"He does, I'm sorry to say, but scarcely so much as I depress him."
+
+"I think Lady Holme would like him."
+
+For once Sir Donald looked really expressive, of surprise and disgust.
+
+"Oh, I can't think so!" he said.
+
+"Yes, yes, she would. She doesn't care honestly for art-loving men. Her
+idea of a real man, the sort of man a woman marries, or bolts with, or
+goes off her head for, is a huge mass of bones and muscles and thews and
+sinews that knows not beauty. And your son would adore her, Sir Donald.
+Better not let him, though. Holme's a jealous devil."
+
+"Totally without reason," said Pierce, with a touch of bitterness.
+
+"No doubt. It's part of his Grand Turk nature. He ought to possess a
+Yildiz. He's out of place in London where marital jealousy is more
+unfashionable than pegtop trousers."
+
+He buried himself in his glass. Sir Donald rose to go.
+
+"I hope I may see you again," he said rather tentatively at parting. "I
+am to be found in the Albany."
+
+They both said they would call, and he slipped away gently.
+
+"There's a sensitive man," said Carey when he had gone. "A sort of male
+Lady Cardington. Both of them are morbidly conscious of their age and
+carry it about with them as if it were a crime. Yet they're both worth
+knowing. People with that temperament who don't use hair-dye must have
+grit. His son's awful."
+
+"And his poems?"
+
+"Very crude, very faulty, very shy, but the real thing. But he'll never
+publish anything again. It must have been torture to him to reveal as
+much as he did in that book. He must find others to express him, and such
+as him, to the world."
+
+"Lady Holmes?"
+
+"/Par exemple/. Deuced odd that while the dumb understand the whole show
+the person who's describing it quite accurately to them often knows
+nothing about it. Paradox, irony, blasted eternal cussedness of life! Did
+you ever know Lady Ulford?"
+
+"No."
+
+"She was a horse-dealer's daughter."
+
+Rupert!"
+
+"On my honour! One of those women who are all shirt and collar and
+nattiness, with a gold fox for a tie-pin and a hunting-crop under the
+arm. She was killed schooling a horse in Mexico after making Ulford shy
+and uncomfortable for fifteen years. Lady Cardington and a Texas cowboy
+would have been as well suited to one another. Ulford's been like a
+wistful ghost, they tell me, ever since her death. I should like to see
+him and his son together."
+
+A hard and almost vicious gleam shone for as instant in his eyes.
+
+"You're as cruel as a Spaniard at a bull-fight."
+
+"My boy, I've been gored by the bull."
+
+Pierce was silent for a minute. He thought of Lady Holme's white-rose
+complexion and of the cessation of Carey's acquaintance with the Holmes.
+No one seemed to know exactly why Carey went to the house in Cadogan
+Square no more.
+
+"For God's sake give me another drink, Robin, and make it a stiff one."
+
+Pierce poured out the whisky and thought:
+
+"Could it have been that?"
+
+Carey emptied the tumbler and heaved a long sigh.
+
+"When d'you go back to Rome?"
+
+"Beginning of July."
+
+"You'll be there in the dead season."
+
+"I like Rome then. The heat doesn't hurt me and I love the peace.
+Antiquity seems to descend upon the city in August, returning to its own
+when America is far away."
+
+Carey stared at him hard.
+
+"A rising diplomatist oughtn't to live in the past," he said bluntly.
+
+"I like ruins."
+
+"Unless they're women."
+
+"If I loved a woman I could love her when she became what is called a
+ruin."
+
+"If you were an old man who had crumbled gradually with her."
+
+"As a young man, too. I was discussing--or rather flitting about,
+dinner-party fashion--that very subject to-night."
+
+"With whom?"
+
+"Viola."
+
+"The deuce! What line did you take?"
+
+"That one loves--if one loves--the kernel, not the shell."
+
+"And she?"
+
+"You know her--the opposite."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"And you, Carey?"
+
+"I! I think if the shell is a beautiful shell and becomes suddenly broken
+it makes a devil of a lot of difference in what most people think of the
+kernel."
+
+"It wouldn't to me."
+
+"I think it would."
+
+"You take Viola's side then?"
+
+"And when did I ever do anything else? I'm off."
+
+He got up, nodded good-night, and was gone in a moment. Pierce heard him
+singing in a deep voice as he went down the stairs, and smiled with a
+faint contempt.
+
+"How odd it is that nobody will believe a man if he's fool enough to hint
+at the truth of his true self," he thought. "And Carey--who's so clever
+about people!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+WHEN the last guest had grimaced at her and left the drawing-room, Lady
+Holme stood with her hand on the mantelpiece, facing a tall mirror. She
+was alone for the moment. Her husband had accompanied Mrs. Wolfstein
+downstairs, and Lady Holme could hear his big, booming voice below,
+interrupted now and then by her impudent soprano. She spoke English with
+a slight foreign accent which men generally liked and women loathed. Lady
+Holme loathed it. But she was not fond of her own sex. She believed that
+all women were untrustworthy. She often said that she had never met a
+woman who was not a liar, and when she said it she had no doubt that, for
+once, a woman was speaking the truth. Now, as she heard Mrs. Wolfstein's
+curiously improper laugh, she frowned. The face in the mirror changed and
+looked almost old.
+
+This struck her unpleasantly. She kept the frown in its place and stared
+from under it, examining her features closely, fancying herself really an
+old woman, her whimsical fascination dead in its decaying home, her
+powers faded if not fled for ever. She might do what she liked then. It
+would all be of no use. Even the voice would be cracked and thin,
+unresponsive, unwieldy. The will would be phlegmatic. If it were not, the
+limbs and features would not easily obey its messages. The figure, now
+beautiful, would perhaps be marred by the ungracious thickness, the
+piteous fleshiness that Time often adds assiduously to ageing bodies, as
+if with an ironic pretence of generously giving in one direction while
+taking away in another. Decay would be setting in, life becoming
+perpetual loss. The precious years would be gone irrevocably.
+
+She let the frown go and looked again on her beauty and smiled. The
+momentary bitterness passed. For there were many precious years to come
+for her, many years of power. She was young. Her health was superb. Her
+looks were of the kind that lasts. She thought of a famous actress whom
+she resembled closely. This actress was already forty-three, and was
+still a lovely woman, still toured about the world winning the hearts of
+men, was still renowned for her personal charm, worshipped not only for
+her talent but for her delicious skin, her great romantic eyes, her
+thick, waving hair.
+
+Lady Holme laughed. In twenty years what Robin Pierce called her "husk"
+would still be an exquisite thing, and she would be going about without
+hearing the horrible tap, tap of the crutch in whose sustaining power she
+really believed so little. She knew men, and she said to herself, as she
+had said to Robin, that for them beauty lies in the epidermis.
+
+"Hullo, Vi, lookin' in the glass! 'Pon my soul, your vanity's disgustin'.
+A plain woman like you ought to keep away from such things--leave 'em to
+the Mrs. Wolfsteins--what?"
+
+Lady Holme turned round in time to see her husband's blunt, brown
+features twisted in the grimace which invariably preceded his portentous
+laugh.
+
+"I admire Mrs. Wolfstein," she said.
+
+The laugh burst like a bomb.
+
+You admire another woman! Why, you're incapable of it. The Lord defend me
+from hypocrisy, and there's no greater hypocrisy than one woman takin'
+Heaven to witness that she thinks another a stunnin' beauty."
+
+"You know nothing about it, Fritz. Mrs. Wolfstein's eyes would be lovely
+if they hadn't that pawnbroking expression."
+
+"Good, good! Now we're goin' to hear the voice of truth. Think it went
+well, eh?"
+
+He threw himself down on a sofa and began to light a cigarette.
+
+"The evening? No, I don't."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+He crossed his long legs and leaned back, resting his head on a cushion,
+and puffing the smoke towards the ceiling.
+
+"They all seemed cheery--what? Even Lady Cardington only cried when you
+were squallin'."
+
+It was Lord Holme's habit to speak irreverently of anything he happened
+to admire.
+
+"She had reason to cry. Miss Filberte's accompaniment was a tragedy. She
+never comes here again."
+
+"What's the row with her? I thought her fingers got about over the piano
+awful quick."
+
+"They did--on the wrong notes."
+
+She came and sat down beside him.
+
+"You don't understand music, Fritz, thank goodness."
+
+"I know I don't. But why thank what's-his-name?"
+
+"Because the men that do are usually such anaemic, dolly things, such
+shaved poodles with their Sunday bows on."
+
+"What about that chap Pierce? He's up to all the scales and thingumies,
+isn't he?"
+
+"Robin--"
+
+"Pierce I said."
+
+"And I said Robin."
+
+Lord Holme frowned and stuck out his under jaw. When he was irritated he
+always made haste to look like a prize-fighter. His prominent
+cheek-bones, and the abnormal development of bone in the lower part of
+his face, helped the illusion whose creation was begun by his expression.
+
+"Look here, Vi," he said gruffly. "If you get up to any nonsense there'll
+be another Carey business. I give you the tip, and you can just take it
+in time. Don't you make any mistake. I'm not a Brenford, or a
+Godley-Halstoun, or a Pennisford, to sit by and--"
+
+"What a pity it is that your body's so big and your intelligence so
+small!" she interrupted gently. "Why aren't there Sandow exercises for
+increasing the brain?"
+
+"I've quite enough brain to rub along with very well. If I'd chosen to
+take it I could have been undersecretary---"
+
+"You've told me that so many times, old darling, and I really can't
+believe it. The Premier's very silly. Everybody knows that. But he's
+still got just a faint idea of the few things the country won't stand.
+And you are one of them, you truly are. You don't go down even with the
+Primrose League, and they simply worship at the shrine of the great
+Ar-rar."
+
+"Fool or not, I'd kick out Pierce as I kicked out Carey if I thought--"
+
+"And suppose I wouldn't let you?"
+
+Her voice had suddenly changed. There was in it the sharp sound which had
+so overwhelmed Miss Filberte.
+
+Lord Holme sat straight up and looked at his wife.
+
+"Suppose--what?"
+
+"Suppose I declined to let you behave ridiculously a second time."
+
+"Ridiculously! I like that! Do you stick out that Carey didn't love you?"
+
+"Half London loves me. I'm one of the most attractive women in it. That's
+why you married me, blessed boy."
+
+"Carey's a violent ass. Red-headed men always are. There's a chap at
+White's--"
+
+"I know, I know. You told me about him when you forbade poor Mr. Carey
+the house. But Robin's hair is black and he's the gentlest creature in
+diplomacy."
+
+"I wouldn't trust him a yard."
+
+"Believe me, he doesn't wish you to. He's far too clever to desire the
+impossible."
+
+"Then he can stop desirin' you."
+
+"Don't be insulting, Fritz. Remember that by birth you are a gentleman."
+
+Lord Holme bit through his cigarette.
+
+"Sometimes I wish you were an ugly woman," he muttered.
+
+"And if I were?"
+
+She leaned forward quite eagerly on the sofa and her whimsical,
+spoilt-child manner dropped away from her.
+
+"You ain't."
+
+"Don't be silly. I know I'm not, of course. But if I were to become one?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Really, Fritz, there's no sort of continuity in your mental processes.
+If I were to become an ugly woman, what would you feel about me then?"
+
+"How the deuce could you become ugly?"
+
+"Oh, in a hundred ways. I might have smallpox and be pitted for life, or
+be scalded in the face as poor people's babies often are, or have vitriol
+thrown over me as lots of women do in Paris, or any number of things."
+
+"What rot! Who'd throw vitriol over you, I should like to know?"
+
+He lit a fresh cigarette with tender solicitude. Lady Holme began to look
+irritated.
+
+"Do use your imagination!" she cried.
+
+"Haven't got one, thank God!" he returned philosophically.
+
+"I insist upon your imagining me ugly. Do you hear, I insist upon it."
+
+She laid one soft hand on his knee and squeezed his leg with all her
+might.
+
+"Now you're to imagine me ugly and just the same as I am now."
+
+"You wouldn't be the same."
+
+"Yes, I should. I should be the same woman, with the same heart and
+feelings and desires and things as I have now. Only the face would be
+altered."
+
+"Well, go ahead, but don't pinch so, old girl."
+
+"I pinch you to make you exert your mind. Now tell me truly--truly; would
+you love me as you do now, would you be jealous of me, would you--"
+
+"I say, wait a bit! Don't drive on at such a rate. How ugly are you?"
+
+"Very ugly; worse than Miss Filberte."
+
+"Miss Filberte's not so bad."
+
+"Yes, she is, Fritz, you know she is. But I mean ever so much worse; with
+a purple complexion, perhaps, like Mrs. Armington, whose husband insisted
+on a judicial separation; or a broken nose, or something wrong with my
+mouth--"
+
+"What wrong?"
+
+"Oh, dear, anything! What /l'homme qui vir/ had--or a frightful scar
+across my cheek. Could you love me as you do now? I should be the same
+woman, remember."
+
+"Then it'd be all the same to me, I s'pose. Let's turn in."
+
+He got up, went over to the hearth, on which a small wood fire was
+burning, straddled his legs, bent his knees and straightened them several
+times, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his trousers, which were
+rather tight and horsey and defined his immense limbs. An expression of
+profound self-satisfaction illumined his face as he looked at his wife,
+giving it a slightly leery expression, as of a shrewd rustic. His large
+blunt features seemed to broaden, his big brown eyes twinkled, and his
+lips, which were thick and very red and had a cleft down their middle,
+parted under his short bronze moustache, exposing two level rows of
+square white teeth.
+
+"It's jolly difficult to imagine you an ugly woman," he said, with a deep
+chuckle.
+
+"I do wish you'd keep your legs still," said Lady Holme. "What earthly
+pleasure can it give you to go on like that? Would you love me as you do
+now?"
+
+"You'd be jolly sick if I didn't, wouldn't you, Vi, eh?"
+
+"I wonder if it ever occurs to you that you're hideously conceited,
+Fritz?"
+
+She spoke with a touch of real anger, real exasperation.
+
+"No more than any other Englishman that's worth his salt and ever does
+any good in the world. I ain't a timid molly-coddle, if that's what you
+mean."
+
+He took one large hand out of his pocket, scratched his cheek and yawned.
+As he did so he looked as unconcerned, as free from self-consciousness,
+as much a slave to every impulse born of passing physical sensation as a
+wild animal in a wood or out on a prairie.
+
+"Otherwise life ain't worth tuppence," he added through his yawn.
+
+Lady Holme sat looking at him for a moment in silence. She was really
+irritated by his total lack of interest in what she wanted to interest in
+him, irritated, too, because her curiosity remained unsatisfied. But that
+abrupt look and action of absolutely unconscious animalism, chasing the
+leeriness of the contented man's conceit, turned her to softness if not
+to cheerfulness. She adored Fritz like that. His open-mouthed, gaping
+yawn moved something in her to tenderness. She would have liked to kiss
+him while he was yawning and to pass her hands over his short hair, which
+was like a mat and grew as strongly as the hair which he shaved every
+morning from his brown cheeks.
+
+"Well, what about bed, old girl?" he said, stretching himself.
+
+Lady Holme did not reply. Some part of him, some joint, creaked as he
+forced his clasped hands downward and backward. She was listening eagerly
+for a repetition of the little sound.
+
+"What! Is mum the word?" he said, bending forward to stare into her face.
+
+At this moment the door opened, and a footman came in to extinguish the
+lights and close the piano. By mistake he let the lid of the latter drop
+with a bang. Lady Holme, who had just got up to go to bed, started
+violently. She said nothing but stared at him for an instant with an
+expression of cold rebuke on her face. The man reddened. Lord Holme was
+already on the stairs. He yawned again noisily, and turned the sound
+eventually into a sort of roaring chant up and down the scale as he
+mounted towards the next floor. Lady Holme came slowly after him. She had
+a very individual walk, moving from the hips and nearly always taking
+small, slow steps. Her sapphire-blue gown trailed behind her with a
+pretty noise over the carpet.
+
+When her French maid had locked up her jewels and helped her to undress,
+she dismissed her, and called out to Lord Holme, who was in the next
+room, the door of which was slightly open.
+
+"Fritz!"
+
+"Girlie?"
+
+His mighty form, attired in pale blue pyjamas, stood in the doorway. In
+his hand he grasped a toothbrush, and there were dabs of white
+tooth-powder on his cheeks and chin.
+
+"Finish your toilet and make haste."
+
+He disappeared. There was a prolonged noise of brushing and the gurgling
+and splashing of water. Lady Holme sat down on the white couch at the
+foot of the great bed. She was wrapped in a soft white gown made like a
+burnous, a veritable Arab garment, with a white silk hood at the back,
+and now she put up her hands and, with great precision, drew the hood up
+over her head. The burnous, thus adjusted, made her look very young. She
+had thrust her bare feet into white slippers without heels, and now she
+drew up her legs lightly and easily and crossed them under her, assuming
+an Eastern attitude and the expression of supreme impassivity which suits
+it. A long mirror was just opposite to her. She swayed to and fro,
+looking into it.
+
+"Allah-Akbar!" she murmured. "Allah-Akbar! I am a fatalist. Everything is
+ordained, so why should I bother? I will live for the day. I will live
+for the night. Allah-Akbar, Allah-Akbar!"
+
+The sound of water gushing from a reversed tumbler into a full basin was
+followed by the reappearance of Lord Holme, looking very clean and very
+sleepy.
+
+Lady Holme stopped swaying.
+
+"You look like a kid of twelve years old in that thing, Vi," he observed,
+surveying her with his hands on his hips.
+
+"I am a woman with a philosophy," she returned with dignity.
+
+"A philosophy! What the deuce is that?"
+
+"You didn't learn much at Eton and Christchurch."
+
+"I learnt to use my fists and to make love to the women."
+
+"You're a brute!" she exclaimed with most unphilosophic vehemence.
+
+"And that's why you worship the ground I tread on," he rejoined equably.
+"And that's why I've always had a good time with the women ever since I
+stood six foot in my stockin's when I was sixteen."
+
+Lady Holme looked really indignant. Her face was contorted by a spasm.
+She was one of those unfortunate women who are capable of retrospective
+jealousy.
+
+"I won't--how dare you speak to me of those women?" she said bitterly.
+"You insult me."
+
+"Hang it, there's no one since you, Vi. You know that. And what would you
+have thought of a great, hulkin' chap like me who'd never--well, all
+right. I'll dry up. But you know well enough you wouldn't have looked at
+me."
+
+"I wonder why I ever did."
+
+"No, you don't. I'm just the chap to suit you. You're full of whimsies
+and need a sledge-hammer fellow to keep you quiet. It you'd married that
+ass, Carey, or that--"
+
+"Fritz, once for all, I won't have my friends abused. I allowed you to
+have your own way about Rupert Carey, but I will not have Robin Pierce or
+anyone else insulted. Please understand that. I married to be more free,
+not more--"
+
+"You married because you'd fallen jolly well in love with me, that's why
+you married, and that's why you're a damned lucky woman. Come to bed. You
+won't, eh?"
+
+He made a stride, snatched Lady Holme up as if she were a bundle, and
+carried her off to bed.
+
+She was on the point of bursting into angry tears, but when she found
+herself snatched up, her slippers tumbling off, the hood of the burnous
+falling over her eyes, her face crushed anyhow against her husband's
+sinewy chest, she suddenly felt oddly contented, disinclined to protest
+or to struggle.
+
+Lord Holme did not trouble himself to ask what she was feeling or why she
+was feeling it.
+
+He thought of himself--the surest way to fasten upon a man the thoughts
+of others.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+ROBIN PIERCE and Carey were old acquaintances, if not exactly old
+friends. They had been for a time at Harrow together. Pierce had six
+thousand a year and worked hard for a few hundreds. Carey had a thousand
+and did nothing. He had never done anything definite, anything to earn a
+living. Yet his talents were notorious. He played the piano well for an
+amateur, was an extraordinarily clever mimic, acted better than most
+people who were not on the stage, and could write very entertaining verse
+with a pungent, sub-acid flavour. But he had no creative power and no
+perseverance. As a critic of the performances of others he was cruel but
+discerning, giving no quarter, but giving credit where it was due. He
+loathed a bad workman more than a criminal, and would rather have crushed
+an incompetent human being than a worm. Secretly he despised himself. His
+own laziness was as disgusting to him as a disease, and was as incurable
+as are certain diseases. He was now thirty-four and realised that he was
+never going to do anything with his life. Already he had travelled over
+the world, seen a hundred, done a hundred things. He had an enormous
+acquaintance in Society and among artists; writers, actors, painters--all
+the people who did things and did them well. As a rule they liked him,
+despite his bizarre bluntness of speech and manner, and they invariably
+spoke of him as a man of great talent; he said because he was so seldom
+fool enough to do anything that could reveal incompetence. His mother,
+who was a widow, lived in the north, in an old family mansion, half
+house, half castle, near the sea coast of Cumberland. He had one sister,
+who was married to an American.
+
+Carey always declared that he was that /rara avis/ an atheist, and that
+he had been born an atheist. He affirmed that even when a child he had
+never, for a moment, felt that there could be any other life than this
+earth-life. Few people believed him. There are few people who can believe
+in a child atheist.
+
+Pierce had a totally different character. He seemed to be more dreamy and
+was more energetic, talked much less and accomplished much more. It had
+always been his ambition to be a successful diplomat, and in many
+respects he was well fitted for a diplomatic career. He had a talent for
+languages, great ease of manner, self-possession, patience and cunning.
+He loved foreign life. Directly he set foot in a country which was not
+his own he felt stimulated. He felt that he woke up, that his mind became
+more alert, his imagination more lively. He delighted in change, in being
+brought into contact with a society which required study to be
+understood. His present fate contented him well enough. He liked Rome and
+was liked there. As his mother was a Roman he had many Italian
+connections, and he was far more at ease with Romans than with the
+average London man. His father and mother lived almost perpetually in
+large hotels. The former, who was enormously rich, was a /malade
+imaginaire/. He invariably spoke of his quite normal health as if it were
+some deadly disease, and always treated himself, and insisted on being
+treated, as if he were an exceptionally distinguished invalid. In the
+course of years his friends had learned to take his view of the matter,
+and he was at this time almost universally spoken of as "that poor Sir
+Henry Pierce whose life has been one long martyrdom." Poor Sir Henry was
+fortunate in the possession of a wife who really was a martyr--to him.
+Nobody had ever discovered whether Lady Pierce knew, or did not know,
+that her husband was quite as well as most people. There are many women
+with such secrets. Robin's parents were at present taking baths and
+drinking waters in Germany. They were later going for an "after cure" to
+Switzerland, and then to Italy to "keep warm" during the autumn. As they
+never lived in London, Robin had no home there except his little house in
+Half Moon Street. He had one brother, renowned as a polo player, and one
+sister, who was married to a rising politician, Lord Evelyn Clowes, a
+young man with a voluble talent, a peculiar power of irritating
+Chancellors of the Exchequer, and hair so thick that he was adored by the
+caricaturists.
+
+Robin Pierce and Carey saw little of each other now, being generally
+separated by a good many leagues of land and sea, but when they met they
+were still fairly intimate. They had some real regard for each other.
+Carey felt at ease in giving his violence to the quiet and self-possessed
+young secretary, who was three years his junior, but who sometimes seemed
+to him the elder of the two, perhaps because calm is essentially the
+senior of storm. He had even allowed Robin to guess at the truth of his
+feeling for Lady Holme, though he had never been explicit, on the subject
+to him or to anyone. There were moments when Robin wished he had not been
+permitted to guess, for Lady Holme attracted him far more than any other
+woman he had seen, and he had proposed to her before she had been carried
+off by her husband. He admired her beauty, but he did not believe that it
+was her beauty which had led him into love. He was sure that he loved the
+woman in her, the hidden woman whom Lord Holme and the world at
+large--including Carey--knew nothing about. He thought that Lady Holme
+herself did not understand this hidden woman, did not realise, as he did,
+that she existed. She spoke to him sometimes in Lady Holme's singing,
+sometimes in an expression in her eyes when she was serious, sometimes
+even in a bodily attitude. For Robin, half fantastically, put faith in
+the eloquence of line as a revealer of character, of soul. But she did
+not speak to him in Lady Holme's conversation. He really thought this
+hidden woman was obscured by the lovely window--he conceived it as a
+window of exquisite stained glass, jewelled but concealing--through which
+she was condemned to look for ever, through which, too, all men must look
+at her. He really wished sometimes, as he had said, that Lady Holme were
+ugly, for he had a fancy that perhaps then, and only then, would the
+hidden woman arise and be seen as a person may be seen through unstained,
+clear glass. He really felt that what he loved would be there to love if
+the face that ruled was ruined; would not only still be there to love,
+but would become more powerful, more true to itself, more understanding
+of itself, more reliant, purer, braver. And he had learnt to cherish this
+fancy till it had become a little monomania. Robin thought that the world
+misunderstood him, but he knew the world too well to say so. He never
+risked being laughed at. He felt sure that he was passionate, that he was
+capable of romantic deeds, of Quixotic self-sacrifice, of a devotion that
+might well be sung by poets, and that would certainly be worshipped by
+ardent women. And he said to himself that Lady Holme was the one woman
+who could set free, if the occasion came, this passionate, unusual and
+surely admirable captive at present chained within him, doomed to
+inactivity and the creeping weakness that comes from enforced repose.
+
+Carey's passion for Lady Holme had come into being shortly before her
+marriage. No one knew much about it, or about the rupture of all
+relations between him and the Holmes which had eventually taken place.
+But the fact that Carey had lost his head about Lady Holme was known to
+half London. For Carey, when carried away, was singularly reckless;
+singularly careless of consequences and of what people thought. It was
+difficult to influence him, but when influenced he was almost painfully
+open in his acknowledgment of the power that had reached him. As a rule,
+however, despite his apparent definiteness, his decisive violence, there
+seemed to be something fluid in his character, something that divided and
+flowed away from anything which sought to grasp and hold it. He had
+impetus but not balance; swiftness, but a swiftness that was
+uncontrolled. He resembled a machine without a brake.
+
+It was soon after his rupture with the Holmes that his intimates began to
+notice that he was becoming inclined to drink too much. When Pierce
+returned to London from Rome he was immediately conscious of the slight
+alteration in his friend. Once he remonstrated with Carey about it. Carey
+was silent for a moment. Then he said abruptly:
+
+"My heart wants to be drowned."
+
+Lord Holme hated Carey. Yet Lady Holme had not loved him; though she had
+not objected to him more than to other men because he loved her. She had
+been brought up in a society which is singularly free from prejudices,
+which has no time to study carefully questions of so-called honour, which
+has little real religious feeling, and a desire for gaiety which perhaps
+takes the place of a desire for morals. Intrigues are one of the chief
+amusements of this society, which oscillates from London to Paris as the
+pendulum of a clock oscillates from right to left. Lady Holme, however,
+happened to be protected doubly against the dangers--or joys by the
+way--to which so many of her companions fell cheerful, and even
+chattering, victims. She had a husband who though extremely stupid was
+extremely masterful, and, for the time at any rate, she sincerely loved
+him. She was a faithful wife and had no desire to be anything else,
+though she liked to be, and usually was, in the fashion. But though
+faithful to Lord Holme she had, as has been said, both the appearance and
+the temperament of a siren. She enjoyed governing men, and those who were
+governed by her, who submitted obviously to the power of her beauty and
+the charm of manner that seemed to emanate from it, and to be one with
+it, were more attractive to her than those who were not. She was inclined
+to admire a man for loving her, as a serious and solemn-thinking woman,
+with bandeaux and convictions, admires a clergyman for doing his duty.
+Carey had done his duty with such fiery ardour that, though she did not
+prevent her husband from kicking him out of the house, she could not
+refrain from thinking well of him.
+
+Her thoughts of Robin Pierce were perhaps a little more confused.
+
+She had not accepted him. Carey would have said that he was not "her
+type." Although strong and active he was not the huge mass of bones and
+muscles and thews and sinews, ignorant of beauty and devoid of the love
+of art, which Carey had described as her ideal. There was melancholy and
+there was subtlety in him. When Lady Holme was a girl this melancholy and
+subtlety had not appealed to her sufficiently to induce her to become
+Lady Viola Pierce. Nevertheless, Robin's affection for her, and the
+peculiar form it took--of idealising her secret nature and wishing her
+obvious beauty away--had won upon the egoism of her. Although she laughed
+at his absurdity, as she called it, and honestly held to her Pagan belief
+that physical beauty was all in all to the world she wished to influence,
+it pleased her sometimes to fancy that perhaps he was right, that perhaps
+her greatest loveliness was hidden and dwelt apart. The thought was
+flattering, and though her knowledge of men rejected the idea that such a
+loveliness alone could ever command an empire worth the ruling, she could
+have no real objection to being credited with a double share of
+charm--the charm of face and manner which everyone, including herself,
+was aware that she possessed, and that other stranger, more dim and
+mysterious charm at whose altar Robin burnt an agreeably perfumed
+incense.
+
+She had a peculiar power of awakening in others that which she usually
+seemed not to possess herself--imagination, passion, not only physical
+but ethereal and of the mind; a tenderness for old sorrows, desire for
+distant, fleeting, misty glories not surely of this earth. She was a
+brilliant suggestionist, but not in conversation. Her face and her voice,
+when she sang, were luring to the lovers of beauty. When she sang she
+often expressed for them the under-thoughts and under-feelings of
+secretly romantic, secretly wistful men and women, and drew them to her
+as if by a spell. But her talk and manner in conversation were so unlike
+her singing, so little accorded with the look that often came into her
+eyes while she sang, that she was a perpetual puzzle to such elderly men
+as Sir Donald Ulford, to such young men as Robin Pierce, and even to some
+women. They came about her like beggars who have heard a chink of gold,
+and she showed them a purse that seemed to be empty.
+
+Was it the /milieu/ in which she lived, the influence of a vulgar and
+greedy age, which prevented her from showing her true self except in her
+art? Or was she that stupefying enigma sometimes met with, an
+unintelligent genius?
+
+There were some who wondered.
+
+In her singing she seemed to understand, to love, to pity, to enthrone.
+In her life she often seemed not to understand, not to love, not to pity,
+not to place high.
+
+She sang of Venice, and those who cannot even think of the city in the
+sea without a flutter of the heart, a feeling not far from soft pain in
+its tenderness and gratitude, listened to the magic bells at sunset, and
+glided in the fairy barques across the liquid plains of gold. She spoke
+of Venice, and they heard only the famished voice of the mosquito
+uttering its midnight grace before meat.
+
+Which was the real Venice?
+
+Which was the real woman?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+ON the following day, which was warm and damp; Lady Holme drove to Bond
+Street, bought two new hats, had her hand read by a palmist who called
+himself "Cupido," looked in at a ladies' club and then went to Mrs.
+Wolfstein, with whom she was engaged to lunch. She did not wish to lunch
+with her. She disliked Mrs. Wolfstein as she disliked most women, but she
+had not been able to get out of it. Mrs. Wolfstein had overheard her
+saying to Lady Cardington that she had nothing particular to do till four
+that day, and had immediately "pinned her." Besides disliking Mrs.
+Wolfstein, Lady Holme was a little afraid of her. Like many clever
+Jewesses, Mrs. Wolfstein was a ruthless conversationalist, and enjoyed
+showing off at the expense of others, even when they were her guests. She
+had sometimes made Lady Holme feel stupid, even feel as if a good talker
+might occasionally gain, and keep, an advantage over a lovely woman who
+did not talk so well. The sensation passed, but the fact that it had ever
+been did not draw Lady Holme any closer to the woman with the
+"pawnbroking expression" in her eyes.
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein was not in the most exclusive set in London, but she was
+in the smart set, which is no longer exclusive although it sometimes
+hopes it is. She knew the racing people, nearly all the most fashionable
+Jews, and those very numerous English patricians who like to go where
+money is. She also knew the whole of Upper Bohemia, and was a /persona
+gratissima/ in that happy land of talent and jealousy. She entertained a
+great deal, generally at modish restaurants. Many French and Germans were
+to be met with at her parties; and it was impossible to be with either
+them or her for many minutes without hearing the most hearty and
+whole-souled abuse of English aspirations, art, letters and cooking. The
+respectability, the pictures, the books and the boiled cabbage of Britain
+all came impartially under the lash.
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein's origin was obscure. That she was a Jewess was known to
+everybody, but few could say with certainty whether she was a German, a
+Spanish, a Polish or an Eastern Jewess. She had much of the covert
+coarseness and open impudence of a Levantine, and occasionally said
+things which made people wonder whether, before she became Amalia
+Wolfstein, she had not perhaps been--well really--something very strange
+somewhere a long way off.
+
+Her husband was shocking to look at: small, mean, bald, Semitic and
+nervous, with large ears which curved outwards from his head like leaves,
+and cheeks blue from much shaving. He was said to hide behind his anxious
+manner an acuteness that was diabolic, and to have earned his ill-health
+by sly dissipations for which he had paid enormous sums. There were two
+Wolfstein children, a boy and a girl of eleven and twelve; small,
+swarthy, frog-like, self-possessed. They already spoke three languages,
+and their protruding eyes looked almost diseased with intelligence.
+
+The Wolfstein house, which was in Curzon Street, was not pretty,
+Apparently neither Mrs. Wolfstein nor her husband, who was a financier
+and company promoter on a very large scale, had good taste in furniture
+and decoration. The mansion was spacious but dingy. There was a great
+deal of chocolate and fiery yellow paint. There were many stuffy brown
+carpets, and tables which were unnecessarily solid. In the hall were
+pillars which looked as if they were made of brawn, and arches with
+lozenges of azure paint in which golden stars appeared rather
+meretriciously. A plaster statue of Hebe, with crinkly hair and staring
+eyeballs, stood in a corner without improving matters. That part of the
+staircase which was not concealed by the brown carpet was dirty white. An
+immense oil painting of a heap of dead pheasants, rabbits and wild duck,
+lying beside a gun and a pair of leather gaiters, immediately faced the
+hall door, which was opened by two enormous men with yellow complexions
+and dissipated eyes. Mrs. Wolfstein was at home, and one of the enormous
+men lethargically showed Lady Holme upstairs into a drawing-room which
+suggested a Gordon Hotel. She waited for about five minutes on a brown
+and yellow sofa near a table on which lay some books and several
+paper-knives, and then Mrs. Wolfstein appeared. She was dressed very
+smartly in blue and red, and looked either Oriental or Portuguese, as she
+came in. Lady Holme was not quite certain which.
+
+"Dear person!" she said, taking Lady Holme's hands in hers, which were
+covered with unusually large rings. "Now, I've got a confession to make.
+What a delicious hat!"
+
+Lady Holme felt certain the confession was of something unpleasant, but
+she only said, in the rather languid manner she generally affected
+towards women:
+
+"Well? My ear is at the grating."
+
+"My lunch is at the Carlton."
+
+Lady Holme was pleased. At the Carlton one can always look about.
+
+"And--it's a woman's lunch."
+
+Lady Holme's countenance fell quite frankly.
+
+"I knew you'd be horrified. You think us such bores, and so we are. But I
+couldn't resist being malicious to win such a triumph. You at a hen
+lunch! It'll be the talk of London. Can you forgive me?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"And can you stand it?"
+
+Lady Holme looked definitely dubious.
+
+"I'll tell you who'll be there--Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mrs.
+Trent--do you know her? Spanish looking, and's divorced two husbands,
+and's called the scarlet woman because she always dresses in red--Sally
+Perceval, Miss Burns and Pimpernel Schley."
+
+"Pimpernel Schley! Who is she?"
+
+"The American actress who plays all the improper modern parts. Directly a
+piece is produced in Paris that we run over to see--you know the sort!
+the Grand Duke and foreign Royalty species--she has it adapted for her.
+Of course it's Bowdlerised as to words, but she manages to get back all
+that's been taken out in her acting. Young America's crazy about her.
+She's going to play over here."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+Lady Holme's voice was not encouraging, but Mrs. Wolfstein was not
+sensitive. She chattered gaily all the way to the Haymarket. When they
+came into the Palm Court they found Lady Cardington already there, seated
+tragically in an armchair, and looking like a weary empress. The band was
+playing on the balcony just outside the glass wall which divides the
+great dining-room from the court, and several people were dotted about
+waiting for friends, or simply killing time by indulging curiosity. Among
+them was a large, broad-shouldered young man, with a round face,
+contemptuous blue eyes and a mouth with chubby, pouting lips. He was well
+dressed, but there was a touch of horseyness in the cut of his trousers,
+the arrangement of his tie. He sat close to the band, tipping his green
+chair backwards and smoking a cigarette.
+
+As Mrs. Wolfstein and Lady Holme went up to greet Lady Cardington, Sally
+Perceval and Mrs. Trent came in together, followed almost immediately by
+Lady Manby.
+
+Sally Perceval was a very pretty young married woman, who spent most of
+her time racing, gambling and going to house parties. She looked
+excessively fragile and consumptive, but had lived hard and never had a
+day's illness in her life. She was accomplished, not at all intellectual,
+clever at games, a fine horsewoman and an excellent swimmer. She had been
+all over the world with her husband, who was very handsome and almost
+idiotic, and who could not have told you what the Taj was, whether Thebes
+was in Egypt or India, or what was the difference, if any, between the
+Golden Gate and the Golden Horn. Mrs. Trent was large, sultry,
+well-informed and supercilious; had the lustrous eyes of a Spaniard, and
+spoke in a warm contralto voice. Her figure was magnificent, and she
+prided herself on having a masculine intellect. Her enemies said that she
+had a more than masculine temper.
+
+Lady Manby had been presented by Providence with a face like a teapot,
+her nose being the spout and her cheeks the bulging sides. She saw
+everything in caricature. If war were spoken of, her imagination
+immediately conjured up visions of unwashed majors conspicuously absurd
+in toeless boots, of fat colonels forced to make merry on dead rats, of
+field-marshals surprised by the enemy in their nightshirts, and of common
+soldiers driven to repair their own clothes and preposterously at work on
+women's tasks. She adored the clergy for their pious humours, the bench
+for its delicious attempts at dignity, the bar for its grotesque
+travesties of passionate conviction--lies with their wigs on--the world
+political for its intrigues dressed up in patriotism. A Lord Chancellor
+in full state seemed to her the most delightfully ridiculous phenomenon
+in a delightfully ridiculous universe. And she had once been obliged to
+make a convulsive exit from an English cathedral, in which one hundred
+colonial bishops were singing a solemn hymn, entirely devastated by the
+laughter waked in her by this most sacred spectacle.
+
+Miss Burns, who hurried in breathlessly ten minutes late, was very thin,
+badly dressed and insignificant-looking, wore her hair short, and could
+not see you if you were more than four feet away from her. She had been
+on various lonely and distant travelling excursions, about which she had
+written books, had consorted merrily with naked savages, sat in the oily
+huts of Esquimaux, and penetrated into the interior of China dressed as a
+man. Her lack of affectation hit you in the face on a first meeting, and
+her sincerity was perpetually embroiling her with the persistent liars
+who, massed together, formed what is called decent society.
+
+"I know I'm late," she said, pushing her round black hat askew on her
+shaggy little head. "I know I've kept you all waiting. Pardon!"
+
+"Indeed you haven't," replied Mrs. Wolfstein. "Pimpernel Schley isn't
+here yet. She lives in the hotel, so of course she'll turn up last."
+
+Mrs. Trent put one hand on her hip and stared insolently at the various
+groups of people in the court, Lady Cardington sighed, and Lady Holme
+assumed a vacant look, which suited her mental attitude at the moment.
+She generally began to feel rather vacant if she were long alone with
+women.
+
+Another ten minutes passed.
+
+"I'm famishing," said Sally Perceval. "I've been at the Bath Club diving,
+and I do so want my grub. Let's skip in."
+
+"It really is too bad--oh, here she comes!" said Mrs. Wolfstein.
+
+Many heads in the Palm Court were turned towards the stairs, down which a
+demure figure was walking with extreme slowness. The big young man with
+the round face got up from his chair and looked greedy, and the waiters
+standing by the desk just inside the door glanced round, whispered, and
+smiled quickly before gliding off to their different little tables.
+
+Pimpernel Schley was alone, but she moved as if she were leading a quiet
+procession of vestal virgins. She was dressed in white, with a black
+velvet band round her tiny waist and a large black hat. Her shining,
+straw-coloured hair was fluffed out with a sort of ostentatious innocence
+on either side of a broad parting, and she kept her round chin tucked
+well in as she made what was certainly an effective entrance. Her arms
+hung down at her sides, and in one hand she carried a black fan. She wore
+no gloves, and many diamond rings glittered on her small fingers, the
+rosy nails of which were trimmed into points. As she drew near to Mrs.
+Wolfstein's party she walked slower and slower, as if she felt that she
+was arriving at a destination much too soon.
+
+Lady Holme watched her as she approached, examined her with that piercing
+scrutiny in which the soul of one woman is thrust out, like a spear,
+towards the soul of another. She noticed at once that Miss Schley
+resembled her, had something of her charm of fairness. It was a fainter,
+more virginal charm than hers. The colouring of hair and eyes was
+lighter. The complexion was a more dead, less warm, white. But there was
+certainly a resemblance. Miss Schley was almost exactly her height, too,
+and--
+
+Lady Holme glanced swiftly round the Palm Court. Of all the women
+gathered there Pimpernel Schley and herself were nearest akin in
+appearance.
+
+As she recognised this fact Lady Holme felt hostile to Miss Schley.
+
+Not until the latter was almost touching her hostess did she lift her
+eyes from the ground. Then she stood still, looked up calmly, and said,
+in a drawling and infantine voice:
+
+"I had to see my trunks unpacked, but I was bound to be on time. I
+wouldn't have come down to-day for any soul in the world but you. I would
+not."
+
+It was a pretty speaking voice, clear and youthful, with a choir-boyish
+sound in it, and remarkably free from nasal twang, but it was not a
+lady's voice. It sounded like the frontispiece of a summer number become
+articulate.
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein began to introduce Miss Schley to her guests, none of
+whom, it seemed, knew her. She bowed to each of them, still with the
+vestal virgin air, and said, "Glad to know you!" to each in turn without
+looking at anyone. Then Mrs. Wolfstein led the way into the restaurant.
+
+Everyone looked at the party of women as they came in and ranged
+themselves round a table in the middle of the big room. Lady Cardington
+sat on one side of Mrs. Wolfstein and Lady Holme on the other, between
+her and Mrs. Trent. Miss Schley was exactly opposite. She kept her eyes
+eternally cast down like a nun at Benediction. All the quite young men
+who could see her were looking at her with keen interest, and two or
+three of them--probably up from Sandhurst--had already assumed
+expressions calculated to alarm modesty. Others looked mournfully
+fatuous, as if suddenly a prey to lasting and romantic grief. The older
+men were more impartial in their observation of Mrs. Wolfstein's guests.
+And all the women, without exception, fixed their eyes upon Lady Holme's
+hat.
+
+Lady Cardington, who seemed oppressed by grief, said to Mrs. Wolfstein:
+
+"Did you see that article in the /Daily Mail/ this morning?"
+
+"Which one?"
+
+"On the suggestion to found a school in which the only thing to be taught
+would be happiness."
+
+"Who's going to be the teacher?"
+
+"Some man. I forget the name."
+
+"A man!" said Mrs. Trent, in a slow, veiled contralto voice. "Why, men
+are always furious if they think we have any pleasure which they can't
+deprive us of at a minute's notice. A man is the last two-legged thing to
+be a happiness teacher."
+
+"Whom would you have then?" said Lady Cardington.
+
+"Nobody, or a child."
+
+"Of which sex?" said Mrs. Wolfstein.
+
+"The sex of a child," replied Mrs. Trent.
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein laughed rather loudly.
+
+"I think children are the most greedy, unsatisfied individuals in--" she
+began.
+
+"I was not alluding to Curzon Street children," observed Mrs. Trent,
+interrupting. "When I speak in general terms of anything I always except
+London."
+
+"Why?" said Sally Perceval.
+
+"Because it's no more natural, no more central, no more in line with the
+truth of things than you are, Sally."
+
+"But, my dear, you surely aren't a belated follower of Tolstoi!" cried
+Mrs. Wolfstein. "You don't want us all to live like day labourers."
+
+"I don't want anybody to do anything, but if happiness is to be taught it
+must not be by a man or by a Londoner."
+
+"I had no idea you had been caught by the cult of simplicity," said Mrs.
+Wolfstein. "But you are so clever. You reveal your dislikes but conceal
+your preferences. Most women think that if they only conceal their
+dislikes they are quite perfectly subtle."
+
+"Subtle people are delicious," said Lady Manby, putting her mouth on one
+side. "They remind me of a kleptomaniac I once knew who had a little
+pocket closed by a flap let into the front of her gown. When she dined
+out she filled it with scraps. Once she dined with us and I saw her, when
+she thought no one was watching, peppering her pocket with cayenne, and
+looking so delightfully sly and thieving. Subtle people are always
+peppering their little pockets and thinking nobody sees them."
+
+"And lots of people don't," said Mrs. Wolfstein.
+
+"The vices are divinely comic," continued Lady Manby, looking every
+moment more like a teapot. "I think it's such a mercy. Fancy what a lot
+of fun we should lose if there were no drunkards, for instance!"
+
+Lady Cardington looked shocked.
+
+"The virtues are often more comic than the vices," said Mrs. Trent, with
+calm authority. "Dramatists know that. Think of the dozens of good farces
+whose foundation is supreme respectability in contact with the wicked
+world."
+
+"I didn't know anyone called respectability a virtue," cried Sally
+Perceval.
+
+"Oh, all the English do in their hearts," said Mrs. Wolfstein.
+"Pimpernel, are you Yankees as bad?"
+
+Miss Schley was eating /sole a la Colbert/ with her eyes on her plate.
+She ate very slowly and took tiny morsels. Now she looked up.
+
+"We're pretty respectable over in America, I suppose," she drawled. "Why
+not? What harm does it do anyway?"
+
+"Well, it limits the inventive faculties for one thing. If one is
+strictly respectable life is plain sailing."
+
+"Oh, life is never that," said Mrs. Trent, "for women."
+
+Lady Cardington seemed touched by this remark.
+
+"Never, never," she said in her curious voice--a voice in which tears
+seemed for ever to be lingering. "We women are always near the rocks."
+
+"Or on them," said Mrs. Trent, thinking doubtless of the two husbands she
+had divorced.
+
+"I like a good shipwreck," exclaimed Miss Burns in a loud tenor voice. "I
+was in two before I was thirty, one off Hayti and one off Java, and I
+enjoyed them both thoroughly. They wake folks up and make them show their
+mettle."
+
+"It's always dangerous to speak figuratively if she's anywhere about,"
+murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Holme. "She'll talk about lowering boats
+and life-preservers now till the end of lunch."
+
+Lady Holme started. She had not been listening to the conversation but
+had been looking at Miss Schley. She had noticed instantly the effect
+created in the room by the actress's presence in it. The magic of a name
+flits, like a migratory bird, across the Atlantic. Numbers of the
+youthful loungers of London had been waiting impatiently during the last
+weeks for the arrival of this pale and demure star. Now that she had come
+their interest in her was keen. Her peculiar reputation for ingeniously
+tricking Mrs. Bowdler, secretary to Mrs. Grundy, rendered her very
+piquant, and this piquancy was increased by her ostentatiously vestal
+appearance.
+
+Lady Holme was sometimes clairvoyante. At this moment every nerve in her
+body seemed telling her that the silent girl, who sat there nibbling her
+lunch composedly, was going to be the rage in London. It did not matter
+at all whether she had talent or not. Lady Holme saw that directly, as
+she glanced from one little table to another at the observant, whispering
+men.
+
+She felt angry with Miss Schley for resembling her in colouring, for
+resembling her in another respect--capacity for remaining calmly silent
+in the midst of fashionable chatterboxes.
+
+"Will she?" she said to Mrs. Wolfstein.
+
+"Yes. If she'd never been shipwrecked she'd have been almost
+entertaining, but--there's Sir Donald Ulford trying to attract your
+attention."
+
+"Where?"
+
+She looked and saw Sir Donald sitting opposite to the large young man
+with the contemptuous blue eyes and the chubby mouth. They both seemed
+very bored. Sir Donald bowed.
+
+"Who is that with him?" asked Lady Holme.
+
+"I don't know," said Mrs. Wolfstein. "He looks like a Cupid who's been
+through Sandow's school. He oughtn't to wear anything but wings."
+
+"It's Sir Donald's son, Leo," said Lady Cardington.
+
+Pimpernel Schley lifted her eyes for an instant from her plate, glanced
+at Leo Ulford, and cast them down again.
+
+"Leo Ulford's a blackguard," observed Mrs. Trent. "And when a fair man's
+a blackguard he's much more dangerous than a dark man."
+
+All the women stared at Leo Ulford with a certain eagerness.
+
+"He's good-looking," said Sally Perceval. "But I always distrust cherubic
+people. They're bound to do you if they get the chance. Isn't he
+married?"
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Trent. "He married a deaf heiress."
+
+"Intelligent of him!" remarked Mrs. Wolfstein. "I always wish I'd married
+a blind millionaire instead of Henry. Being a Jew, Henry sees not only
+all there is to see, but all there isn't. Sir Donald and his Cupid son
+don't seem to have much to say to one another."
+
+"Oh, don't you know that family affection's the dumbest thing on earth?"
+said Mrs. Trent.
+
+"Too deep for speech," said Lady Manby. "I love to see fathers and sons
+together, the fathers trying to look younger than they are and the sons
+older. It's the most comic relationship, and breeds shyness as the West
+African climate breeds fever."
+
+"I know the whole of the West African coast by heart," declared Miss
+Burns, wagging her head, and moving her brown hands nervously among her
+knives and forks. "And I never caught anything there."
+
+"Not even a husband," murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Manby.
+
+"In fact, I never felt better in my life than I did at Old Calabar,"
+continued Miss Burns. "But there my mind was occupied. I was studying the
+habits of alligators."
+
+"They're very bad, aren't they?" asked Lady Manby, in a tone of earnest
+inquiry.
+
+"I prefer to study the habits of men," said Sally Perceval, who was
+always surrounded by a troup of young racing men and athletes, who
+admired her swimming feats.
+
+"Men are very disappointing, I think," observed Mrs. Trent. "They are
+like a lot of beads all threaded on one string."
+
+"And what's the string?" asked Sally Perceval.
+
+"Vanity. Men are far vainer than we are. Their indifference to the little
+arts we practise shows it. A woman whose head is bald covers it with a
+wig. Without a wig she would feel that she was an outcast totally
+powerless to attract. But a bald-headed man has no idea of diffidence. He
+does not bother about a wig because he expects to be adored without one."
+
+"And the worst of it is that he is adored," said Mrs. Wolfstein. "Look at
+my passion for Henry."
+
+They began to talk about their husbands. Lady Holme did not join in. She
+and Pimpernel Schley were very silent members of the party. Even Miss
+Burns, who was--so she said--a spinster by conviction not by necessity,
+plunged into the husband question, and gave some very daring
+illustrations of the marriage customs of certain heathen tribes.
+
+Pimpernel Schley hardly spoke at all. When someone, turning to her, asked
+her what she thought about the subject under discussion, she lifted her
+pale eyes and said, with the choir-boy drawl:
+
+"I've got no husband and never had one, so I guess I'm no kind of a
+judge."
+
+"I guess she's a judge of other women's husbands, though," said Mrs.
+Wolfstein to Lady Cardington. "That child is going to devastate London."
+
+Now and then Lady Holme glanced towards Sir Donald and his son. They
+seemed as untalkative as she was. Sir Donald kept on looking towards Mrs.
+Wolfstein's table. So did Leo. But whereas Leo Ulford's eyes were fixed
+on Pimpernel Schley, Sir Donald's met the eyes of Lady Holme. She felt
+annoyed; not because Sir Donald was looking at her, but because his son
+was not.
+
+How these women talked about their husbands! Lady Cardington, who was a
+widow, spoke of husbands as if they were a race which was gradually dying
+out. She thought the modern woman was beginning to get a little tired of
+the institution of matrimony, and to care much less for men than was
+formerly the case. Being contradicted by Mrs. Trent, she gave her reasons
+for this belief. One was that whereas American matinee girls used to go
+mad over the "leading men" of the stage they now went mad over the
+leading women. She also instanced the many beautiful London women,
+universally admired, who were over thirty and still remained spinsters.
+Mrs. Trent declared that they were abnormal, and that, till the end of
+time, women would always wish to be wives. Mrs. Wolfstein agreed with her
+on various grounds. One was that it was the instinct of woman to buy and
+to rule, and that if she were rich she could now acquire a husband as, in
+former days, people acquired slaves--by purchase. This remark led to the
+old question of American heiresses and the English nobility, and to a
+prolonged discussion as to whether or not most women ruled their
+husbands.
+
+Women nearly always argue from personal experience, and consequently Lady
+Cardington--whose husband had treated her badly--differed on this point
+from Mrs. Wolfstein, who always did precisely what she pleased,
+regardless of Mr. Wolfstein's wishes. Mrs. Trent affirmed that for her
+part she thought women should treat their husbands as they treated their
+servants, and dismiss them if they didn't behave themselves, without
+giving them a character. She had done so twice, and would do it a third
+time if the occasion arose. Sally Perceval attacked her for this,
+pleading slangily that men would be men, and that their failings ought to
+be winked at; and Miss Burns, as usual, brought the marital proceedings
+of African savages upon the carpet. Lady Manby turned the whole thing
+into a joke by a farcical description of the Private Enquiry proceedings
+of a jealous woman of her acquaintance, who had donned a canary-coloured
+wig as a disguise, and dogged her husband's footsteps in the streets of
+London, only to find that he went out at odd times to visit a grandmother
+from whom he had expectations, and who happened to live in St. John's
+Wood.
+
+The foreign waiters, who moved round the table handing the dishes,
+occasionally exchanged furtive glances which seemed indicative of
+suppressed amusement, and the men who were lunching near, many of whom
+were now smoking cigarettes, became more and more intent upon Mrs.
+Wolfstein and her guests. As they were getting up to go into the Palm
+Court for coffee and liqueurs, Lady Cardington again referred to the
+article on the proposed school for happiness, which had apparently made a
+deep impression upon her.
+
+"I wonder if happiness can be taught," she said. "If it can--"
+
+"It can't," said Mrs. Trent, with more than her usual sledge-hammer
+bluntness. "We aren't meant to be happy here."
+
+"Who doesn't mean us to be happy?" asked poor Lady Cardington in a
+deplorable voice.
+
+"First--our husbands."
+
+"It's cowardly not to be happy," cried Miss Burns, pushing her hat over
+her left eye as a tribute to the close of lunch. "In a savage state
+you'll always find--"
+
+The remainder of her remark was lost in the /frou-frou/ of skirts as the
+eight women began slowly to thread their way between the tables to the
+door.
+
+Lady Holme found herself immediately behind Miss Schley, who moved with
+impressive deliberation and the extreme composure of a well-brought-up
+child thoroughly accustomed to being shown off to visitors. Her
+straw-coloured hair was done low in the nape of her snowy neck, and, as
+she took her little steps, her white skirt trailed over the carpet behind
+her with a sort of virginal slyness. As she passed Leo Ulford it brushed
+gently against him, and he drummed the large fingers of his left hand
+with sudden violence on the tablecloth, at the same time pursing his
+chubby lips and then opening his mouth as if he were going to say
+something.
+
+Sir Donald rose and bowed. Mrs. Wolfstein murmured a word to him in
+passing, and they had not been sipping their coffee for more than two or
+three minutes before he joined them with his son.
+
+Sir Donald came up at once to Lady Holme.
+
+"May I present my son to you, Lady Holme?" he said.
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"Leo, I wish to introduce you to Lady Holme."
+
+Leo Ulford bowed rather ungracefully. Standing up he looked more than
+ever like a huge boy, and he had much of the expression that is often
+characteristic of huge boys--an expression in which impudence seems to
+float forward from a background of surliness.
+
+Lady Holme said nothing. Leo Ulford sat down beside her in an armchair.
+
+"Better weather," he remarked.
+
+Then he called a waiter, and said to him, in a hectoring voice:
+
+"Bring me a Kummel and make haste about it."
+
+He lit a cigarette that was almost as big as a cigar, and turned again to
+Lady Holme.
+
+"I've been in the Sahara gazelle shooting," he continued.
+
+He spoke in a rather thick, lumbering voice and very loud, probably
+because he was married to a deaf woman.
+
+"Just come back," he added.
+
+"Oh!" said Lady Holme.
+
+She was sitting perfectly upright on her chair, and noticed that her
+companion's eyes travelled calmly and critically over her figure with an
+unveiled deliberation that was exceptionally brazen even in a modern
+London man. Lady Holme did not mind it. Indeed, she rather liked it. She
+knew at once, by that look, the type of man with whom she had to deal. In
+Leo Ulford there was something of Lord Holme, as in Pimpernel Schley
+there was perhaps a touch of herself. Having finished his stare, Leo
+Ulford continued:
+
+"Jolly out there. No rot. Do as you like and no one to bother you.
+Gazelle are awfully shy beasts though."
+
+"They must have suited you," said Lady Holme, very gravely.
+
+"Why?" he asked, taking the glass of Kummel which the waiter had brought
+and setting it down on a table by him.
+
+"Aren't you a shy--er--beast?"
+
+He stared at her calmly for a moment, and then said:
+
+"I say, you're too sharp, Lady Holme."
+
+He turned his head towards Pimpernel Schley, who was sitting a little way
+off with her soft, white chin tucked well in, looking steadily down into
+a cup half full of Turkish coffee and speaking to nobody.
+
+"Who's that girl?" he asked.
+
+"That's Miss Pimpernel Schley. A pretty name, isn't it?"
+
+"Is it? An American of course."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"What cheek they have? What's she do?"
+
+"I believe she acts in--well, a certain sort of plays."
+
+A slow smile overspread Leo Ulford's face and made him look more like a
+huge boy than ever.
+
+"What certain sort?" he asked. "The sort I'd like?"
+
+"Very probably. But I know nothing of your tastes."
+
+She did--everything almost. There are a good many Leo Ulfords lounging
+about London.
+
+"I like anything that's a bit lively, with no puritanic humbug about it."
+
+"Well, you surely can't suppose that there can be any puritanic humbug
+about Miss Schley or anything she has to do with!"
+
+He glanced again at Pimpernel Schley and then at Lady Holme. The smile on
+his face became a grin. Then his huge shoulders began to shake gently.
+
+"I do love talking to women," he said, on the tide of a prolonged
+chuckle. "When they aren't deaf."
+
+Lady Holme still remained perfectly grave.
+
+"Do you? Why?" she inquired.
+
+"Can't you guess why?"
+
+"Our charity to our sister women?"
+
+She was smiling now.
+
+"You teach me such a lot," he said.
+
+He drank his Kummel.
+
+"I always learn something when I talk to a woman. I've learnt something
+from you."
+
+Lady Holme did not ask him what it was. She saw that he was now more
+intent on her than he had been on Miss Schley, and she got up to go,
+feeling more cheerful than she had since she left the /atelier/ of
+"Cupido."
+
+"Don't go."
+
+"I must."
+
+"Already! May I come and call?"
+
+"Your father knows my address."
+
+"Oh, I say--but--"
+
+"You're not going already!" cried Mrs. Wolfstein, who was having a second
+glass of Benedictine and beginning to talk rather outrageously and with a
+more than usually pronounced foreign accent.
+
+"I must, really."
+
+"I'm afraid my son has bored you," murmured Sir Donald, in his worn-out
+voice.
+
+"No, I like him," she replied, loud enough for Leo to hear.
+
+Sir Donald did not look particularly gratified at this praise of his
+achievement. Lady Holme took an airy leave of everybody. When she came to
+Pimpernel Schley she said:
+
+"I wish you a great success, Miss Schley."
+
+"Many thanks," drawled the vestal virgin, who was still looking into her
+coffee cup.
+
+"I must come to your first night. Have you ever acted in London?"
+
+"Never."
+
+"You won't be nervous?"
+
+"Nervous! Don't know the word."
+
+She bent to sip her coffee.
+
+When Lady Holme reached the door of the Carlton, and was just entering
+one of the revolving cells to gain the pavement, she heard Lady
+Cardington's low voice behind her.
+
+"Let me drive you home, dear."
+
+At the moment she felt inclined to be alone. She had even just refused
+Sir Donald's earnest request to accompany her to her carriage. Had any
+other woman made her this offer she would certainly have refused it. But
+few people refused any request of Lady Cardington's. Lady Holme, like the
+rest of the world, felt the powerful influence that lay in her gentleness
+as a nerve lies in a body. And then had she not wept when Lady Holme sang
+a tender song to her? In a moment they were driving up the Haymarket
+together in Lady Cardington's barouche.
+
+The weather had grown brighter. Wavering gleams of light broke through
+the clouds and lay across the city, giving a peculiarly unctuous look to
+the slimy streets, in which there were a good many pedestrians more or
+less splashed with mud. There was a certain hopefulness in the
+atmosphere, and yet a pathos such as there always is in Spring, when it
+walks through London ways, bearing itself half nervously, like a country
+cousin.
+
+"I don't like this time of year," said Lady Cardington.
+
+She was leaning back and glancing anxiously about her.
+
+"But why not?" asked Lady Holme. "What's the matter with it?"
+
+"Youth."
+
+"But surely--"
+
+"The year's too young. And at my age one feels very often as if the
+advantage of youth were an unfair advantage."
+
+"Dare I ask--?"
+
+She checked herself, looking at her companion's snow-white hair, which
+was arranged in such a way that it looked immensely thick under the big
+black hat she wore--a hat half grandmotherly and half coquettish, that
+certainly suited her to perfection.
+
+"Spring--" she was beginning rather quickly; but Lady Cardington
+interrupted her.
+
+"Fifty-eight," she said.
+
+She laughed anxiously and looked at Lady Holme.
+
+"Didn't you think I was older?"
+
+"I don't know that I ever thought about it," replied Lady Holme, with the
+rather careless frankness she often used towards women.
+
+"Of course not. Why should you, or anyone? When a woman's once over fifty
+it really doesn't matter much whether she's fifty-one or seventy-one.
+Does it?"
+
+Lady Holme thought for a moment. Then she said:
+
+"I really don't know. You see, I'm not a man."
+
+Lady Cardington's forehead puckered and her mouth drooped piteously.
+
+"A woman's real life is very short," she said. "But her desire for real
+life can last very long--her silly, useless desire."
+
+"But if her looks remain?"
+
+"They don't."
+
+"You think it is a question of looks?"
+
+"Do you think it is?" asked Lady Cardington. "But how can you know
+anything about it, at your age, and with your appearance?"
+
+"I suppose we all have our different opinions as to what men are and what
+men want," Lady Holme said, more thoughtfully than usual.
+
+"Men! Men!" Lady Cardington exclaimed, with a touch of irritation unusual
+in her. "Why should we women do, and be, everything for men?"
+
+"I don't know, but we do and we are. There are some men, though, who
+think it isn't a question of looks, or think they think so."
+
+"Who?" said Lady Cardington, quickly.
+
+"Oh, there are some," answered Lady Holme, evasively, "who believe in
+mental charm more than in physical charm, or say they do. And mental
+charm doesn't age so obviously as physical--as the body does, I suppose.
+Perhaps we ought to pin our faith to it. What do you think of Miss
+Schley?"
+
+Lady Cardington glanced at her with a kind of depressed curiosity.
+
+"She pins her faith to the other thing," she said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"She's pretty. Do you know she reminds me faintly of you."
+
+Lady Holme felt acute irritation at this remark, but she only said:
+
+"Does she?"
+
+"Something in her colouring. I'm sure she's a man's woman, but I can't
+say I found her interesting."
+
+"Men's women seldom are interesting to us. They don't care to be," said
+Lady Holme.
+
+Suddenly she thought that possibly between Pimpernel Schley and herself
+there were resemblances unconnected with colouring.
+
+"I suppose not. But still--ah, here's Cadogan Square!"
+
+She kissed Lady Holme lightly on the cheek.
+
+"Fifty-eight!" Lady Holme said to herself as she went into the house.
+"Just think of being fifty-eight if one has been a man's woman! Perhaps
+it's better after all to be an everybody's woman. Well, but how's it
+done?"
+
+She looked quite puzzled as she came into the drawing-room, where Robin
+Pierce had been waiting impatiently for twenty minutes.
+
+"Robin," she said seriously, "I'm very unhappy."
+
+"Not so unhappy as I have been for the last half hour," he said, taking
+her hand and holding it. "What is it?"
+
+"I'm dreadfully afraid I'm a man's woman. Do you think I am?"
+
+He could not help smiling as he looked into her solemn eyes.
+
+"I do indeed. Why should you be upset about it?"
+
+"I don't know. Lady Cardington's been saying things--and I met a rather
+abominable little person at lunch, a little person like a baby that's
+been about a great deal in a former state, and altogether--Let's have
+tea."
+
+"By all means."
+
+"And now soothe me, Robin. I'm dreadfully strung up. Soothe me. Tell me,
+I'm an everybody's woman and that I shall never be /de trop/ in the
+world--not even when I'm fifty-eight."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE success of Pimpernel Schley in London was great and immediate, and
+preceded her appearance upon the stage. To some people, who thought they
+knew their London, it was inexplicable. Miss Schley was pretty and knew
+how to dress. These facts, though of course denied by some, as all facts
+in London are, were undeniable. But Miss Schley had nothing to say. She
+was not a brilliant talker, as so many of her countrywomen are. She was
+not vivacious in manner, except on rare occasions. She was not interested
+in all the questions of the day. She was not--a great many things. But
+she was one thing.
+
+She was exquisitely sly.
+
+Her slyness was definite and pervasive. In her it took the place of wit.
+It took the place of culture. It even took the place of vivacity. It was
+a sort of maid-of-all-work in her personality and never seemed to tire.
+The odd thing was that it did not seem to tire others. They found it
+permanently piquant. Men said of Miss Schley, "She's a devilish clever
+little thing. She don't say much, but she's up to every move on the
+board." Women were impressed by her. There was something in her supreme
+and snowy composure that suggested inflexible will. Nothing ever put her
+out or made her look as if she were in a false position.
+
+London was captivated by the abnormal combination of snow and slyness
+which she presented to it, and began at once to make much of her.
+
+At one time the English were supposed to be cold; and rather gloried in
+the supposition. But recently a change has taken place in the national
+character--at any rate as exhibited in London. Rigidity has gone out of
+fashion. It is condemned as insular, and unless you are cosmopolitan
+nowadays you are nothing, or worse than nothing. The smart Englishwoman
+is beginning to be almost as restless as a Neapolitan. She is in a
+continual flutter of movement, as if her body were threaded with
+trembling wires. She uses a great deal of gesture. She is noisy about
+nothing. She is vivacious at all costs, and would rather suggest hysteria
+than British phlegm.
+
+Miss Schley's calm was therefore in no danger of being drowned in any
+pervasive calm about her. On the contrary, it stood out. It became very
+individual. Her composed speechlessness in the midst of uneasy
+chatter--the Englishwoman is seldom really self-possessed--carried with
+it a certain dignity which took the place of breeding. She was always at
+her ease, and to be always at your ease makes a deep impression upon
+London, which is full of self-consciousness.
+
+She began to be the fashion at once. A great lady, who had a passion for
+supplying smart men with what they wanted, saw that they were going to
+want Miss Schley and promptly took her up. Other women followed suit.
+Miss Schley had a double triumph. She was run after by women as well as
+by men. She got her little foot in everywhere, and in no time. Her
+personal character was not notoriously bad. The slyness had taken care of
+that. But even if it had been, if only the papers had not been too busy
+in the matter, she might have had success. Some people do whose names
+have figured upon the evening bills exposed at the street corners. Hers
+had not and was not likely to. It was her art to look deliberately pure
+and good, and to suggest, in a way almost indefinable and very perpetual,
+that she could be anything and everything, and perhaps had been, under
+the perfumed shadow of the rose. The fact that the suggestion seemed to
+be conveyed with intention was the thing that took corrupt old London's
+fancy and made Miss Schley a pet.
+
+Her name of Pimpernel was not against her.
+
+Men liked it for its innocence, and laughed as they mentioned it in the
+clubs, as who should say:
+
+"We know the sort of Pimpernel we mean."
+
+Miss Schley's social success brought her into Lady Holme's set, and
+people noticed, what Lady Holme had been the first to notice, the faint
+likeness between them. Lady Holme was not exquisitely sly. Her voice was
+not like a choir-boy's; her manner was not like the manner of an image;
+her eyes were not for ever cast down. Even her characteristic silence was
+far less perpetual than the equally characteristic silence of Miss
+Schley. But men said they were the same colour. What men said women began
+to think, and it was not an assertion wholly without foundation. At a
+little distance there was an odd resemblance in the one white face and
+fair hair to the other. Miss Schley's way of moving, too, had a sort of
+reference to Lady Holme's individual walk. There were several things
+characteristic of Lady Holme which Miss Schley seemed to reproduce, as it
+were, with a sly exaggeration. Her hair was similar, but paler, her
+whiteness more dead, her silence more perpetual, her composure more
+enigmatically serene, her gait slower, with diminished steps.
+
+It was all a little like an imitation, with just a touch of caricature
+added.
+
+One or two friends remarked upon it to Lady Holme, who heard them very
+airily.
+
+"Are we alike?" she said. "I daresay, but you mustn't expect me to see
+it. One never knows the sort of impression one produces on the world. I
+think Miss Schley a very attractive little creature, and as to her social
+gifts, I bow to them."
+
+"But she has none," cried Mrs. Wolfstein, who was one of those who had
+drawn Lady Holme's attention to the likeness.
+
+"How can you say so? Everyone is at her feet."
+
+"Her feet, perhaps. They are lovely. But she has no gifts. That's why she
+gets on. Gifted people are a drug in the market. London's sick of them.
+They worry. Pimpernel's found that out and gone in for the savage state.
+I mean mentally of course."
+
+"Her mind dwells in a wigwam," said Lady Manby. "And wears glass beads
+and little bits of coloured cloth."
+
+"But her acting?" asked Lady Holme, with careless indifference.
+
+"Oh, that's improper but not brilliant," said Mrs. Wolfstein. "The
+American critics says it's beneath contempt."
+
+"But not beneath popularity, I suppose?" said Lady Holme.
+
+"No, she's enormously popular. Newspaper notices don't matter to
+Pimpernel. Are you going to ask her to your house? You might. She's
+longing to come. Everybody else has, and she knew you first."
+
+Lady Holme began to realise why she could never like Mrs. Wolfstein. The
+latter would try to manage other people's affairs.
+
+"I had no idea she would care about it," she answered, rather coldly.
+
+"My dear--an American! And your house! You're absurdly modest. She's
+simply pining to come. May I tell her to?"
+
+"I should prefer to invite her myself," said Lady Holme, with a distinct
+touch of hauteur which made Mrs. Wolfstein smile maliciously.
+
+When Lady Holme was alone she realised that she had, half unconsciously,
+meant that Miss Schley should find that there was at any rate one house
+in London whose door did not at once fly open to welcome her demure
+presence. But now? She certainly did not intend to be a marked exception
+to a rule that was apparently very general. If people were going to talk
+about her exclusion of Miss Schley, she would certainly not exclude her.
+She asked herself why she wished to, and said to herself that Miss
+Schley's slyness bored her. But she knew that the real reason of the
+secret hostility she felt towards the American was the fact of their
+resemblance to each other. Until Miss Schley appeared in London
+she--Viola Holme--had been original both in her beauty and in her manner
+of presenting it to the world. Miss Schley was turning her into a type.
+
+It was too bad. Any woman would have disliked it.
+
+She wondered whether Miss Schley recognised the likeness. But of course
+people had spoken to her about it. Mrs. Wolfstein was her bosom friend.
+The Jewess had met her first at Carlsbad and, with that terrible social
+flair which often dwells in Israel, had at once realised her fitness for
+a London success and resolved to "get her over." Women of the Wolfstein
+species are seldom jealously timorous of the triumphs of other women. A
+certain coarse cleverness, a certain ingrained assurance and
+unconquerable self-confidence keeps them hardy. And they generally have a
+noble reliance on the power of the tongue. Being incapable of any fear of
+Miss Schley, Mrs. Wolfstein, ever on the look-out for means of improving
+her already satisfactory position in the London world, saw one in the
+vestal virgin and resolved to launch her in England. She was delighted
+with the result. Miss Schley had already added several very desirable
+people to the Wolfstein visiting-list. In return "Henry" had "put her on
+to" one or two very good things in the City. Everything would be most
+satisfactory if only Lady Holme were not tiresome about the Cadogan
+Square door.
+
+"She hates you, Pimpernel," said Mrs. Wolfstein to her friend.
+
+"Why?" drawled Miss Schley.
+
+"You know why perfectly well. You reproduce her looks. I'm perfectly
+certain she's dreading your first night. She's afraid people will begin
+to think that extraordinary colourless charm she and you possess stagey.
+Besides, you have certain mannerisms--you don't imitate her, Pimpernel?"
+
+The pawnbroking expression was remarkably apparent for a moment in Mrs.
+Wolfstein's eyes.
+
+"I haven't started to yet."
+
+"Yet?"
+
+"Well, if she don't ask me to number thirty-eight--'tis thirty-eight?"
+
+"Forty-two."
+
+"Forty-two Cadogan Square, I might be tempted. I came out as a mimic, you
+know, at Corsher and Byall's in Philadelphia."
+
+Miss Schley gazed reflectively upon the brown carpet of Mrs. Wolfstein's
+boudoir.
+
+"Folks said I wasn't bad," she added meditatively.
+
+"I think I ought to warn Viola," said Mrs. Wolfstein.
+
+She was peculiarly intimate with people of distinction when they weren't
+there. Miss Schley looked as if she had not heard. She often did when
+anything of importance to her was said. It was important to her to be
+admitted to Lady Holme's house. Everybody went there. It was one of the
+very smartest houses in London, and since everybody knew that she had
+been introduced to Lady Holme, since half the world was comparing their
+faces and would soon begin to compare their mannerisms--well, it would be
+better that she should not be forced into any revival of her Philadelphia
+talents.
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein did not warn Lady Holme. She was far too fond of being
+amused to do anything so short-sighted. Indeed, from that moment she was
+inclined to conspire to keep the Cadogan Square door shut against her
+friend. She did not go so far as that; for she had a firm faith in
+Pimpernel's cuteness and was aware that she would be found out. But she
+remained passive and kept her eyes wide open.
+
+Miss Schley was only going to act for a month in London. Her managers had
+taken a theatre for her from the first of June till the first of July. As
+she was to appear in a play she had already acted in all over the States,
+and as her American company was coming over to support her, she had
+nothing to do in the way of preparation. Having arrived early in the
+year, she had nearly three months of idleness to enjoy. Her conversation
+with Mrs. Wolfstein took place in the latter days of March. And it was
+just at this period that Lady Holme began seriously to debate whether she
+should, or should not, open her door to the American. She knew Miss
+Schley was determined to come to her house. She knew her house was one of
+those to which any woman setting out on the conquest of London would wish
+to come. She did not want Miss Schley there, but she resolved to invite
+her if peopled talked too much about her not being invited. And she
+wished to be informed if they did. One day she spoke to Robin Pierce
+about it. Lord Holme's treatment of Carey had not yet been applied to
+him. They met at a private view in Bond Street, given by a painter who
+was adored by the smart world, and, as yet, totally unknown in every
+other circle. The exhibition was of portraits of beautiful women, and all
+the beautiful women and their admirers crowded the rooms. Both Lady Holme
+and Miss Schley had been included among the sitters of the painter,
+and--was it by chance or design?--their portraits hung side by side upon
+the brown-paper-covered walls. Lady Holme was not aware of this when she
+caught Robin's eye through a crevice in the picture hats and called him
+to her with a little nod.
+
+"Is there tea?"
+
+"Yes. In the last room."
+
+"Take me there. Oh, there's Ashley Greaves. Avoid him, like a dear, till
+I've looked at something."
+
+Ashley Greaves was the painter. There was nothing of the Bohemian about
+him. He looked like a heavy cavalry officer as he stood in the centre of
+the room talking to a small, sharp-featured old lady in a poke bonnet.
+
+"He's safe. Lady Blower's got hold of him."
+
+"Poor wretch! She ought to have a keeper. Strong tea, Robin."
+
+They found a settee in a corner walled in by the backs of tea-drinking
+beauties.
+
+"I want to ask you something," said Lady Holme, confidentially. "You go
+about and hear what they're saying."
+
+"And greater nonsense it seems each new season."
+
+"Nonsense keeps us alive."
+
+"Is it the oxygen self-administered by an almost moribund society?"
+
+"It's the perfume that prevents us from noticing the stuffiness of the
+room. But, Robin, tell me--what is the nonsense of now?"
+
+"Religious, political, theatrical, divorce court or what, Lady Holme?"
+
+He looked at her with a touch of mischief in his dark face, which told
+her, and was meant to tell her, that he was on the alert, and had divined
+that she had a purpose in thus pleasantly taking possession of him.
+
+"Oh, the people--nonsense. You know perfectly what I mean."
+
+"Whom are they chattering about most at the moment? You'll be
+contemptuous if I tell you."
+
+"It's a woman, then?"
+
+"When isn't it?"
+
+"Do I know her?"
+
+"Slightly."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Miss Schley."
+
+"Really?"
+
+Lady Holme's voice sounded perfectly indifferent and just faintly
+surprised. There was no hint of irritation in it.
+
+"And what are they saying about Miss Schley?" she added, sipping her tea
+and glancing about the crowded room.
+
+"Oh, many things, and among the many one that's more untrue than all the
+rest put together."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"It's too absurd. I don't think I'll tell you."
+
+"But why not? If it's too absurd it's sure to be amusing."
+
+"I don't think so."
+
+His voice sounded almost angry.
+
+"Tell me, Robin."
+
+He looked at her quickly with a warm light in his dark eyes.
+
+"If you only knew how I--"
+
+"Hush! Go on about Miss Schley."
+
+"They're saying that she's wonderfully like you, and that--have some more
+tea?"
+
+"That--?"
+
+"That you hate it."
+
+Lady Holme smiled, as if she were very much entertained.
+
+"But why should I hate it?"
+
+"I don't know. But women invent reasons for everything."
+
+"What have they invented for this?"
+
+"Oh--well--that you like to--I can't tell you it all, really. But in
+substance it comes to this! They are saying, or implying--"
+
+"Implication is the most subtle of the social arts."
+
+"It's the meanest--implying that all that's natural to you, that sets you
+apart from others, is an assumption to make you stand out from the rest
+of the crowd, and that you hate Miss Schley because she happens to have
+assumed some of the same characteristics, and so makes you seem less
+unique than you did before."
+
+Lady Holme said nothing for a moment. Then she remarked:
+
+"I'm sure no woman said 'less unique.'"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Now did anyone? Confess!"
+
+"What d'you suppose they did say?"
+
+"More commonplace."
+
+He could not help laughing.
+
+"As if you were ever commonplace!" he exclaimed, rather relieved by her
+manner.
+
+"That's not the question. But then Miss Schley's said to be like me not
+only in appearance but in other ways? Are we really so Siamese?"
+
+"I can't see the faintest beginning of a resemblance."
+
+"Ah, now you're falling into exaggeration in the other direction."
+
+"Well, not in realities. Perhaps in one or two trifling mannerisms--I
+believe she imitates you deliberately."
+
+"I think I must ask her to the house."
+
+"Why should you?"
+
+"Well, perhaps you might tell me."
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+"Aren't people saying that the reason I don't ask her is because I am
+piqued at the supposed resemblance between us?"
+
+"Oh, people will say anything. If we are to model our lives according to
+their ridiculous ideas--"
+
+"Well, but we do."
+
+"Unless we follow the dictates of our own natures, our own souls."
+
+He lowered his voice almost to a whisper.
+
+"Be yourself, be the woman who sings, and no one--not even a fool--will
+ever say again that you resemble a nonentity like Miss Schley. You
+see--you see now that even socially it is a mistake not to be your real
+self. You can be imitated by a cute little Yankee who has neither
+imagination nor brains, only the sort of slyness that is born out of the
+gutter."
+
+"My dear Robin, remember where we are. You--a diplomatist!"
+
+She put her finger to her lips and got up.
+
+"We must look at something or Ashley Greaves will be furious."
+
+They made their way into the galleries, which were almost impassable. In
+the distance Lady Holme caught sight of Miss Schley with Mrs. Wolfstein.
+They were surrounded by young men. She looked hard at the American's pale
+face, saying to herself, "Is that like me? Is that like me?" Her
+conversation with Robin Pierce had made her feel excited. She had not
+shown it. She had seemed, indeed, almost oddly indifferent. But something
+combative was awake within her. She wondered whether the American was
+consciously imitating her. What an impertinence! But Miss Schley was
+impertinence personified. Her impertinence was her /raison d'etre/.
+Without it she would almost cease to be. She would at any rate be as
+nothing.
+
+Followed by Robin, Lady Holme made her way slowly towards the Jewess and
+the American.
+
+They were now standing together before the pictures, and had been joined
+by Ashley Greaves, who was beginning to look very warm and expressive,
+despite his cavalry moustache. Their backs were towards the room, and
+Lady Holme and Robin drew near to them without being perceived. Mrs.
+Wolfstein had a loud voice and did not control it in a crowd. On the
+contrary, she generally raised it, as if she wished to be heard by those
+whom she was not addressing.
+
+"Sargent invariably brings out the secret of his sitters," she was saying
+to Ashley Greaves as Lady Holme and Robin came near and stood for an
+instant wedged in by people, unable to move forward or backward. "You've
+brought out the similarities between Pimpernel and Lady Holme. I never
+saw anything so clever. You show us not only what we all saw but what we
+all passed over though it was there to see. There is an absurd likeness,
+and you've blazoned it."
+
+Robin stole a glance at his companion. Ashley Greaves said, in a thin
+voice that did not accord with his physique:
+
+"My idea was to indicate the strong link there is between the English
+woman and the American woman. If I may say so, these two portraits, as it
+were, personify the two countries, and--er--and--er--"
+
+His mind appeared to give way. He strove to continue, to say something
+memorable, conscious of his conspicuous and central position. But his
+intellect, possibly over-heated and suffering from lack of air, declined
+to back him up, and left him murmuring rather hopelessly:
+
+"The one nation--er--and the other--yes--the give and take--the give and
+take. You see my meaning? Yes, yes."
+
+Miss Schley said nothing. She looked at Lady Holme's portrait and at hers
+with serenity, and seemed quite unconscious of the many eyes fastened
+upon her.
+
+"You feel the strong link, I hope, Pimpernel?" said Mrs. Wolfstein, with
+her most violent foreign accent. "Hands across the Herring Pond!"
+
+"Mr. Greaves has been too cute for words," she replied. "I wish Lady
+Holme could cast her eye on them."
+
+She looked up at nothing, with a sudden air of seeing something
+interesting that was happening along way off.
+
+"Philadelphia!" murmured Mrs. Wolfstein, with an undercurrent of
+laughter.
+
+It was very like Lady Holme's look when she was singing. Robin Pierce saw
+it and pressed his lips together. At this moment the crowd shifted and
+left a gap through which Lady Holme immediately glided towards Ashley
+Greaves. He saw her and came forward to meet her with eagerness, holding
+out his hand, and smiling mechanically with even more than his usual
+intention.
+
+"What a success!" she said.
+
+"If it is, your portrait makes it so."
+
+"And where is my portrait?"
+
+Robin Pierce nipped in the bud a rather cynical smile. The painter wiped
+his forehead with a white silk handkerchief.
+
+"Can't you guess? Look where the crowd is thickest."
+
+The people had again closed densely round the two pictures.
+
+"You are an artist in more ways than one, I'm afraid," said Lady Holme.
+"Don't turn my head more than the heat has."
+
+The searching expression, that indicated the strong desire to say
+something memorable, once more contorted the painter's face.
+
+"He who would essay to fix beauty on canvas," he began, in a rather
+piercing voice, "should combine two gifts."
+
+He paused and lifted his upper lip two or three times, employing his
+under-jaw as a lever.
+
+"Yes?" said Lady Holme, encouragingly.
+
+"The gift of the brush which perpetuates and the gift of--er--gift of
+the--"
+
+His intellect once more retreated from him into some distant place and
+left him murmuring:
+
+"Beauty demands all, beauty demands all. Yes, yes! Sacrifice! Sacrifice!
+Isn't it so?"
+
+He tugged at his large moustache, with an abrupt assumption of the
+cavalry officer's manner, which he doubtless deemed to be in accordance
+with his momentary muddle-headedness.
+
+"And you give it what it wants most--the touch of the ideal. It blesses
+you. Can we get through?"
+
+She had glanced at Robin while she spoke the first words. Ashley Greaves,
+with an expression of sudden relief, began very politely to hustle the
+crowd, which yielded to his persuasive shoulders, and Lady Holme found
+herself within looking distance of the two portraits, and speaking
+distance of Mrs. Wolfstein and Miss Schley. She greeted them with a nod
+that was more gay and friendly than her usual salutations to women, which
+often lacked /bonhomie/. Mrs. Wolfstein's too expressive face lit up.
+
+"The sensation is complete!" she exclaimed loudly.
+
+"Hope you're well," murmured Miss Schley, letting her pale eyes rest on
+Lady Holme for about a quarter of a second, and then becoming acutely
+attentive to vacancy.
+
+Lady Holme was now in front of the pictures. She looked at Miss Schley's
+portrait with apparent interest, while Mrs. Wolfstein looked at her with
+an interest that was maliciously real.
+
+"Well?" said Mrs. Wolfstein. "Well?"
+
+"There's an extraordinary resemblance!" said Lady Holme. "It's
+wonderfully like."
+
+"Even you see it! Ashley, you ought to be triumphant--"
+
+"Wonderfully like--Miss Schley," added Lady Holme, cutting gently through
+Mrs. Wolfstein's rather noisy outburst.
+
+She turned to the American.
+
+"I have been wondering whether you won't come in one day and see my
+little home. Everyone wants you, I know, but if you have a minute some
+Wednesday--"
+
+"I'll be delighted."
+
+"Next Wednesday, then?"
+
+"Thanks. Next Wednesday."
+
+"Cadogan Square--the red book will tell you. But I'll send cards. I must
+be running away now."
+
+When she had gone, followed by Robin, Mrs. Wolfstein said to Miss Schley:
+
+"She's been conquered by fear of Philadelphia."
+
+"Wait till I give her Noo York," returned the American, placidly.
+
+It seemed that Lady Holme's secret hostility to Miss Schley was returned
+by the vestal virgin.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+LORD HOLME seldom went to parties and never to private views. He thought
+such things "all damned rot." Few functions connected with the arts
+appealed to his frankly Philistine spirit, which rejoiced in celebrations
+linked with the glories of the body; boxing and wrestling matches,
+acrobatic performances, weight-lifting exhibitions, and so forth. He
+regretted that bear-baiting and cock-fighting were no longer legal in
+England, and had, on two occasions, travelled from London to South
+America solely in order to witness prize fights.
+
+As he so seldom put in an appearance at smart gatherings he had not yet
+encountered Miss Schley, nor had he heard a whisper of her much-talked-of
+resemblance to his wife. Her name was known to him as that of a woman
+whom one or two of his "pals" began to call a "deuced pretty girl" but
+his interest in her was not greatly awakened. The number of deuced pretty
+girls that had been in his life, and in the lives of his pals, was
+legion. They came and went like feathers dancing on the wind. The mere
+report of them, therefore, casual and drifting, could not excite his
+permanent attention, or fix their names and the record of their charms in
+his somewhat treacherous memory. Lady Holme had not once mentioned the
+American to him. She was a woman who knew how to be silent, and sometimes
+she was silent by instinct without saying to herself why.
+
+Lord Holme never appeared on her Wednesdays; and, indeed, those days were
+a rather uncertain factor among the London joys. If Lady Holme was to be
+found in her house at all, she was usually to be found on a Wednesday
+afternoon. She herself considered that she was at home on Wednesdays, but
+this idea of hers was often a mere delusion, especially when the season
+had fully set in. There were a thousand things to be done. She frequently
+forgot what the day of the week was. Unluckily she forgot it on the
+Wednesday succeeding her invitation to Miss Schley. The American duly
+turned up in Cadogan Square and was informed that Lady Holme was not to
+be seen. She left her card and drove away in her coupe with a decidedly
+stony expression upon her white face.
+
+That day it chanced that Lord Holme came in just before his wife and
+carelessly glanced over the cards which had been left during the
+afternoon. He was struck by the name of Pimpernel. It tickled his fancy
+somehow. As he looked at it he grinned. He looked at it again and vaguely
+recalled some shreds of the club gossip about Miss Schley's attractions.
+When Lady Holme walked quietly into her drawing-room two or three minutes
+later he met her with Miss Schley's card in his hand.
+
+"What have you got there, Fritz?" she said.
+
+He gave her the card.
+
+"You never told me you'd run up against her," he remarked.
+
+Lady Holme looked at the card and then, quickly, at her husband.
+
+"Why--do you know Miss Schley?" she asked.
+
+"Not I."
+
+"Well then?"
+
+"Fellows say she's deuced takin'. That's all. And she's got a fetchin'
+name--eh? Pimpernel."
+
+He repeated it twice and began to grin once more, and to bend and
+straighten his legs in the way which sometimes irritated his wife. Lady
+Holme was again looking at the card.
+
+"Surely it isn't Wednesday?" she said.
+
+"Yes, it is. What did you think it was?"
+
+"Tuesday--Monday--I don't know."
+
+"Where'd you meet her?"
+
+"Whom? Miss Schley? At the Carlton. A lunch of Amalia Wolfstein's."
+
+"Is she pretty?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+There was no hesitation before the reply.
+
+"What colour?
+
+"Oh!--not Albino."
+
+Lord Holme stared.
+
+"What d'you mean by that, girlie?"
+
+"That Miss Schley is remarkably fair--fairer than I am."
+
+"Is she as pretty as you?
+
+"You can find out for yourself. I'm going to ask her to
+something--presently."
+
+In the last word, in the pause that preceded it, there was the creeping
+sound of the reluctance Lady Holme felt in allowing Miss Schley to draw
+any closer to her life. Lord Holme did not notice it. He only said:
+
+"Right you are. Pimpernel--I should like to have a squint at her."
+
+"Very well. You shall."
+
+"Pimpernel," repeated Lord Holme, in a loud bass voice, as he lounged out
+of the room, grinning. The name tickled his fancy immensely. That was
+evident.
+
+Lady Holme fully intended to ask Miss Schley to the "something" already
+mentioned immediately. But somehow several days slipped by and it was
+difficult to find an unoccupied hour. The Holme cards had, of course,
+duly gone to the Carlton, but there the matter had ended, so far as Lady
+Holme was concerned. Miss Schley, however, was not so heedless as the
+woman she resembled. She began to return with some assiduity to the
+practice of the talent of the old Philadelphia days. In those days she
+used to do a "turn" in the course of which she imitated some of the
+popular public favourites of the States, and for each of her imitations
+she made up to resemble the person mimicked. She now concentrated this
+talent upon Lady Holme, but naturally the methods she employed in Society
+were far more subtle than those she had formerly used upon the stage.
+They were scarcely less effective. She slightly changed her fashion of
+doing her hair, puffing it out less at the sides, wearing it a little
+higher at the back. The change accentuated her physical resemblance to
+Lady Holme. She happened to get the name of the dressmaker who made most
+of the latter's gowns, and happened to give her an order that was
+executed with remarkable rapidity. But all this was only the foundation
+upon which she based, as it were, the structure of her delicate revenge.
+
+That consisted in a really admirable hint--it could not be called
+more--of Lady Holme's characteristic mannerisms.
+
+Lady Holme was not an affected woman, but, like all women of the world
+who are greatly admired and much talked about, she had certain little
+ways of looking, moving, speaking, being quiet, certain little habits of
+laughter, of gravity, that were her own property. Perhaps originally
+natural to her, they had become slightly accentuated as time went on, and
+many tongues and eyes admired them. That which had been unconscious had
+become conscious. The faraway look came a little more abruptly, went a
+little more reluctantly; than it had in the young girl's days. The
+wistful smile lingered more often on the lips of the twenties than on the
+lips of the teens. Few noticed any change, perhaps, but there had been a
+slight change, and it made things easier for Miss Schley.
+
+Her eye was observant although it was generally cast down. Society began
+to smile secretly at her talented exercises. Only a select few, like Mrs.
+Wolfstein, knew exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it, but
+the many were entertained, as children are, without analysing the cause
+of their amusement.
+
+Two people, however, were indignant--Robin Pierce and Rupert Carey.
+
+Robin Pierce, who had an instinct that was almost feminine in its
+subtlety, raged internally, and Rupert Carey, who, naturally acute, was
+always specially shrewd when his heart was in the game, openly showed his
+distaste for Miss Schley, and went about predicting her complete failure
+to capture the London public as an actress.
+
+"She's done it as a woman," someone replied to him.
+
+"Not the public, only the smart fools," returned Carey.
+
+"The smart fools have more influence on the public every day."
+
+Carey only snorted. He was in one of his evil moods that afternoon. He
+left the club in which the conversation had taken place, and, casting
+about for something to do, some momentary solace for his irritation and
+/ennui/, he bethought him of Sir Donald Ulford's invitation and resolved
+to make a call at the Albany. Sir Donald would be out, of course, but
+anyhow he would chance it and shoot a card.
+
+Sir Donald's servant said he was in. Carey was glad. Here was an hour
+filled up.
+
+With his usual hasty, decisive step he followed the man through a dark
+and Oriental-looking vestibule into a library, where Sir Donald was
+sitting at a bureau of teakwood, slowly writing upon a large, oblong
+sheet of foolscap with a very pointed pen.
+
+He got up, looking rather startled, and held out his hand.
+
+"I am glad to see you. I hoped you would come."
+
+"I'm disturbing a new poem," said Carey.
+
+Sir Donald's faded face acknowledged it.
+
+"Sorry. I'll go."
+
+"No, no. I have infinite leisure, and I write now merely for myself. I
+shall never publish anything more. The maunderings of the old are really
+most thoroughly at home in the waste-paper basket. Do sit down."
+
+Carey threw himself into a deep chair and looked round. It was a room of
+books and Oriental china. The floor was covered with an exquisite Persian
+carpet, rich and delicate in colour, with one of those vague and
+elaborate designs that stir the imagination as it is stirred by a strange
+perfume in a dark bazaar where shrouded merchants sit.
+
+"I light it with wax candles," said Sir Donald, handing Carey a cigar.
+
+"It's a good room to think in, or to be sad in."
+
+He struck a match on his boot.
+
+"You like to shut out London," he continued.
+
+"Yes. Yet I live in it."
+
+"And hate it. So do I. London's like a black-browed brute that gets an
+unholy influence over you. It would turn Mark Tapley into an Ibsen man.
+Yet one can't get away from it."
+
+"It holds interesting minds and interesting faces."
+
+"Didn't Persia?"
+
+"Lethargy dwells there and in all Eastern lands."
+
+"You have made up your mind to spend the rest of your days in the fog?"
+
+"No. Indeed, only to-day I acquired a Campo Santo with cypress trees, in
+which I intend to make a home for any dying romance that still lingers
+within me."
+
+He spoke with a sort of wistful whimsicality. Carey stared hard at him.
+
+"A Campo Santo's a place for the dead."
+
+"Why not for the dying? Don't they need holy ground as much?"
+
+"And where's this holy ground of yours?"
+
+Sir Donald got up from his chair, went over to the bureau, opened a
+drawer, and took out of it a large photograph rolled round a piece of
+wood, which he handed to Carey, who swiftly spread it out on his knees.
+
+"That is it."
+
+"I say, Sir Donald, d'you mind my asking for a whisky-and-soda?"
+
+"I beg your pardon."
+
+He hastily touched a bell and ordered it. Meanwhile Carey examined the
+photograph.
+
+"What do you think of it?" Sir Donald asked.
+
+"Well--Italy obviously."
+
+"Yes, and a conventional part of Italy."
+
+"Maggiore?"
+
+"No, Como."
+
+"The playground of the honeymoon couple."
+
+"Not where my Campo Santo is. They go to Cadenabbia, Bellagio, Villa
+D'Este sometimes."
+
+"I see the fascination. But it looks haunted. You've bought it?"
+
+"Yes. The matter was arranged to-day."
+
+The photograph showed a large, long house, or rather two houses divided
+by a piazza with slender columns. In the foreground was water. Through
+the arches of the piazza water was also visible, a cascade falling in the
+black cleft of a mountain gorge dark with the night of cypresses. To the
+right of the house, rising from the lake, was a tall old wall overgrown
+with masses of creeping plants and climbing roses. Over it more cypresses
+looked, and at the base of it, near the house, were a flight of worn
+steps disappearing into the lake, and an arched doorway with an
+elaborately-wrought iron grille. Beneath the photograph was written,
+"/Casa Felice/."
+
+"Casa Felice, h'm!" said Carey, with his eyes on the photograph.
+
+"You think the name inappropriate?"
+
+"Who knows? One can be wretched among sunbeams. One might be gay among
+cypresses. And Casa Felice belongs to you?"
+
+"From to-day."
+
+"Old--of course?"
+
+"Yes. There is a romance connected with the house."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Long ago two guilty lovers deserted their respective mates and the
+brilliant world they had figured in, and fled there together."
+
+"And quarrelled and were generally wretched there for how many months?"
+
+"For eight years."
+
+"The devil! Fidelity gone mad!"
+
+"It is said that during those years the mistress never left the garden,
+except to plunge into the lake on moonlight nights and swim through the
+silver with her lover."
+
+Carey was silent. He did not take his eyes from the photograph, which
+seemed to fascinate him. When the servant came in with the
+whisky-and-soda he started.
+
+"Not a place to be alone in," he said.
+
+He drank, and stared again at the photograph.
+
+"There's something about the place that holds one even in a photograph,"
+he added.
+
+"One can feel the strange intrigue that made the house a hermitage. It
+has been a hermitage ever since."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"An old Italian lady, very rich, owned it, but never lived there. She
+recently died, and her heir consented to sell it to me."
+
+"Well, I should like to see it in the flesh--or the bricks and mortar.
+But it's not a place to be alone in," repeated Carey. "It wants a woman
+if ever a house did."
+
+"What sort of woman?"
+
+Sir Donald had sat down again on the chair opposite, and was looking with
+his exhausted eyes through the smoke of the cigars at Carey.
+
+"A fair woman, a woman with a white face, a slim woman with eyes that are
+cords to draw men to her and bind them to her, and a voice that can sing
+them into the islands of the sirens."
+
+"Are there such women in a world that has forgotten Ulysses?"
+
+"Don't you know it?"
+
+He rolled the photograph round the piece of wood and laid it on a table.
+
+"I can only think of one who at all answers to your description."
+
+"The one of whom I was thinking."
+
+"Lady Holme?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"Don't you think she would be dreadfully bored in Casa Felice?"
+
+"Horribly, horribly. Unless--"
+
+"Unless?"
+
+"Who knows what? But there's very often an unless hanging about, like a
+man at a street corner, that--" He broke off, then added abruptly,
+"Invite me to Casa Felice some day."
+
+"I do."
+
+"When will you be going there?"
+
+"As soon as the London season is over. Some time in August. Will you come
+then?"
+
+"The house is ready for you?"
+
+"It will be. The necessary repairs will be begun now. I have bought it
+furnished."
+
+"The lovers' furniture?"
+
+"Yes. I shall add a number of my own things, picked up on my wanderings."
+
+"I'll come in August if you'll have me. But I'll give you the season to
+think whether you'll have me or whether you won't. I'm a horrible bore in
+a house--the lazy man who does nothing and knows a lot. Casa Felice--Casa
+Felice. You won't alter the name?"
+
+"Would you advise me to?"
+
+"I don't know. To keep it is to tempt the wrath of the gods, but I should
+keep it."
+
+He poured out another whisky-and-soda and suddenly began to curse Miss
+Schley.
+
+Sir Donald had spoken to her after Mrs. Wolfstein's lunch.
+
+"She's imitating Lady Holme," said Carey.
+
+"I cannot see the likeness," Sir Donald said. "Miss Schley seems to me
+uninteresting and common."
+
+"She is."
+
+"And Lady Holme's personality is, on the contrary; interesting and
+uncommon."
+
+"Of course. Pimpernel Schley would be an outrage in that Campo Santo of
+yours. And yet there is a likeness, and she's accentuating it every day
+she lives."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Ask the women why they do the cursed things they do do."
+
+"You are a woman-hater?"
+
+"Not I. Didn't I say just now that Casa Felice wanted a woman? But the
+devil generally dwells where the angel dwells--cloud and moon together.
+Now you want to get on with that poem."
+
+Half London was smiling gently at the resemblance between Lady Holme and
+Miss Schley before the former made up her mind to ask the latter to
+"something." And when, moved to action by certain evidences of the
+Philadelphia talent which could not be misunderstood, she did make up her
+mind, she resolved that the "something" should be very large and by no
+means very intimate. Safety wanders in crowds.
+
+She sent out cards for a reception, one of those affairs that begin about
+eleven, are tremendous at half past, look thin at twelve, and have faded
+away long before the clock strikes one.
+
+Lord Holme hated them. On several occasions he had been known to throw
+etiquette to the winds and not to turn up when his wife was giving them.
+He always made what he considered to be a good excuse. Generally he had
+"gone into the country to look at a horse." As Lady Holme sent out her
+cards, and saw her secretary writing the words, "Miss Pimpernel Schley,"
+on an envelope which contained one, she asked herself whether her husband
+would be likely to play her false this time.
+
+"Shall you be here on the twelfth?" she asked him casually.
+
+"Why? What's up on the twelfth?"
+
+"I'm going to have one of those things you hate--before the Arkell House
+ball. I chose that night so that everyone should run away early! You
+won't be obliged to look at a horse in the country that particular day?"
+
+She spoke laughingly, as if she wanted him to say no, but would not be
+very angry if he didn't. Lord Holme tugged his moustache and looked very
+serious indeed.
+
+"Another!" he ejaculated. "We're always havin' 'em. Any music?"
+
+"No, no, nothing. There are endless dinners that night, and Mrs.
+Crutchby's concert with Calve, and the ball. People will only run in and
+say something silly and run out again."
+
+"Who's comin'?"
+
+"Everybody. All the tiresome dears that have had their cards left."
+
+Lord Holme stared at his varnished boots and looked rather like a puzzled
+boy at a /viva voce/ examination.
+
+"The worst of it is, I can't be in the country lookin' at a horse that
+night," he said with depression.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+She hastily added:
+
+"But why should you? You ought to be here."
+
+"I'd rather be lookin' at a horse. But I'm booked for the dinner to
+Rowley at the Nation Club that night. I might say the speeches were too
+long and I couldn't get away. Eh?"
+
+He looked at her for support.
+
+"You really ought to be here, Fritz," she answered.
+
+It ended there. Lady Holme knew her husband pretty well. She fancied that
+the speeches at the dinner given to Sir Jacob Rowley, ex-Governor of some
+place she knew nothing about, would turn out to be very lengthy
+indeed--speeches to keep a man far from his home till after midnight.
+
+On the evening of the twelfth Lord Holme had not arrived when the first
+of his wife's guests came slowly up the stairs, and Lady Holme began
+gently to make his excuses to all the tiresome dears who had had their
+cards left at forty-two Cadogan Square. There were a great many tiresome
+dears. The stream flowed steadily, and towards half-past eleven resembled
+a flood-tide.
+
+Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mr. Bry, Sally Perceval had one by one
+appeared, and Robin Pierce's dark head was visible mounting slowly amid a
+throng of other heads of all shapes, sizes and tints.
+
+Lady Holme was looking particularly well. She was dressed in black. Of
+course black suits everybody. It suited her even better than most people,
+and her gown was a triumph. She was going on to the Arkell House ball,
+and wore the Holme diamonds, which were superb, and which she had
+recently had reset. She was in perfect health, and felt unusually young
+and unusually defiant. As she stood at the top of the staircase, smiling,
+shaking hands with people, and watching Robin Pierce coming slowly
+nearer, she wondered a little at certain secret uneasinesses--they could
+scarcely be called tremors--which had recently oppressed her. How absurd
+of her to have been troubled, even lightly, by the impertinent
+proceedings of an American actress, a nobody from the States, without
+position, without distinction, without even a husband. How could it
+matter to her what such a little person--she always called Pimpernel
+Schley a little person in her thoughts--did or did not do? As Robin came
+towards her she almost--but not quite--wished that the speeches at the
+dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley had not been so long as they evidently had
+been, and that her husband were standing beside her, looking enormous and
+enormously bored.
+
+"What a crowd!"
+
+"Yes. We can't talk now. Are you going to Arkell House?"
+
+Robin nodded.
+
+"Take me in to supper there."
+
+"May I? Thank you. I'm going with Rupert Carey."
+
+"Really!"
+
+At this moment Lady Holme's eyes and manner wandered. She had just caught
+a glimpse of Mrs. Wolfstein, a mass of jewels, and of Pimpernel Schley at
+the foot of the staircase, had just noticed that the latter happened to
+be dressed in black.
+
+"Bye-bye!" she added.
+
+Robin Pierce walked on into the drawing-rooms looking rather preoccupied.
+
+Everybody came slowly up the stairs. It was impossible to do anything
+else. But it seemed to Lady Holme that Miss Schley walked far more slowly
+than the rest of the tiresome dears, with a deliberation that had a touch
+of insolence in it. Her straw-coloured hair was done exactly like Lady
+Holme's, but she wore no diamonds in it. Indeed, she had on no jewels.
+And this absence of jewels, and her black gown, made her skin look almost
+startlingly white, if possible whiter than Lady Holme's. She smiled
+quietly as she mounted the stairs, as if she were wrapt in a pleasant,
+innocent dream which no one knew anything about.
+
+Amalia Wolfstein was certainly a splendid--a too splendid--foil to her.
+The Jewess was dressed in the most vivid orange colour, and was very much
+made up. Her large eyebrows were heavily darkened. Her lips were scarlet.
+Her eyes, which moved incessantly, had a lustre which suggested oil with
+a strong light shining on it. "Henry" followed in her wake, looking
+intensely nervous, and unnaturally alive and observant, as if he were
+searching in the crowd for a bit of gold that someone had accidentally
+dropped. When anyone spoke to him he replied with extreme vivacity but in
+the fewest possible words. He held his spare figure slightly sideways as
+he walked, and his bald head glistened under the electric lamps. Behind
+them, in the distance, was visible the yellow and sunken face of Sir
+Donald Ulford.
+
+When Miss Schley gained the top of the staircase Lady Holme saw that
+their gowns were almost exactly alike. Hers was sewn with diamonds, but
+otherwise there was scarcely any difference. And she suddenly felt as if
+the difference made by the jewels was not altogether in her favour, as if
+she were one of those women who look their best when they are not wearing
+any ornaments. Possibly Mrs. Wolfstein made all jewellery seem vulgar for
+the moment. She looked like an exceedingly smart jeweller's shop rather
+too brilliantly illuminated; "as if she were for sale," as an old and
+valued friend of hers aptly murmured into the ear of someone who had
+known her ever since she began to give good dinners.
+
+"Here we are! I'm chaperoning Pimpernel. But her mother arrives
+to-morrow," began Mrs. Wolfstein, with her strongest accent, while Miss
+Schley put out a limp hand to meet Lady Holme's and very slightly
+accentuated her smile.
+
+"Your mother? I shall be delighted to meet her. I hope you'll bring her
+one day," said Lady Holme; thinking more emphatically than ever that for
+a woman with a complexion as perfect as hers it was a mistake to wear
+many jewels.
+
+"I'll be most pleased, but mother don't go around much," replied Miss
+Schley.
+
+"Does she know London?"
+
+"She does not. She spends most of her time sitting around in Susanville,
+but she's bound to look after me in this great city."
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein was by this time in violent conversation with a pale young
+man, who always looked as if he were on the point of fainting, but who
+went literally everywhere. Miss Schley glanced up into Lady Holme's eyes.
+
+"I hoped to make the acquaintance of Lord Holme to-night," she murmured.
+"Folks tell me he's a most beautiful man. Isn't he anywhere around?"
+
+She looked away into vacancy, ardently. Lady Holme felt a slight tingling
+sensation in her cool skin. For a moment it seemed to her as if she
+watched herself in caricature, distorted perhaps by a mirror with a
+slight flaw in it.
+
+"My husband was obliged to dine out to-night; unfortunately. I hope he'll
+be here in a moment, but he may be kept, as there are to be some dreadful
+speeches afterwards. I can't think why elderly men always want to get up
+and talk nonsense about the Royal family after a heavy dinner. It's so
+bad for the digestion and the--ah, Sir Donald! Sweet of you to turn up.
+Your boy's been so unkind. I asked him to call, or he asked to call, and
+he's never been near me."
+
+Miss Schley drifted away and was swallowed by the crowd. Sir Donald had
+arrived at the top of the stairs.
+
+"Leo's been away in Scotland ever since he had the pleasure of meeting
+you. He only came back to-night."
+
+"Then I'm not quite so hurt. He's always running about, I suppose, to
+kill things, like my husband."
+
+"He does manage a good deal in that way. If you are going to the Arkell
+House ball you'll meet him there. He and his wife are both--"
+
+"How did do! Oh, Charley, I never expected to see you. I thought it
+wasn't the thing for the 2nd to turn up at little hay parties like this.
+Kitty Barringlave is in the far room, dreadfully bored. Go and cheer her
+up. Tell her what'll win the Cup. She's pale and peaky with ignorance
+about Ascot this year. Both going to Arkell House, Sir Donald, did you
+say? Bring your son to me, won't you? But of course you're a wise man
+trotting off to bed."
+
+"No. The Duke is a very old friend of mine, and so--"
+
+"Perfect. We'll meet then. They say it's really locomotor ataxia, poor
+fellow I but--ah, there's Fritz!"
+
+Sir Donald looked at her with a sudden inquiring shrewdness, that lit up
+his faded eyes and made them for a moment almost young. He had caught a
+sound of vexation in her voice, which reminded him oddly of the sound in
+her singing voice when Miss Filberte was making a fiasco of the
+accompaniment. Lord Holme was visible and audible in the hall. His
+immense form towered above his guests, and his tremendous bass voice
+dominated the hum of conversation round him. Lady Holme could see from
+where she stood that he was in a jovial and audacious mood. The dinner to
+Sir Jacob Rowley had evidently been well cooked and gay. Fritz had the
+satisfied and rather larky air of a man who has been having one good time
+and intends to have another. She glanced into the drawing-rooms. They
+were crammed. She saw in the distance Lady Cardington talking to Sir
+Donald Ulford. Both of them looked rather pathetic. Mrs. Wolfstein was
+not far off, standing in the midst of a group and holding forth with
+almost passionate vivacity and self-possession. Her husband was gliding
+sideways through the crowd with his peculiarly furtive and watchful air,
+which always suggested the old nursery game, "Here I am on Tom Tiddler's
+ground, picking up gold and silver." Lady Manby was laughing in a corner
+with an archdeacon who looked like a guardsman got up in fancy dress. Mr.
+Bry, his eyeglass fixed in his left eye, came towards the staircase,
+moving delicately like Agag, and occasionally dropping a cold or
+sarcastic word to an acquaintance. He reached Lady Holme when Lord Holme
+was half-way up the stairs, and at once saw him.
+
+"A giant refreshed with wine," he observed, dropping his eyeglass.
+
+It was such a perfect description of Lord Holme in his present condition
+that two or three people who were standing with Lady Holme smiled,
+looking down the staircase. Lady Holme did not smile. She continued
+chattering, but her face wore a discontented expression. Mr. Bry noticed
+it. There were very few things he did not notice, although he claimed to
+be the most short-sighted man in London.
+
+"Why is your husband so dutiful to-night?" he murmured to his hostess. "I
+thought he always had to go into the country to look at a gee-gee on
+these occasions."
+
+"He had to be in town for the dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley. I begged him to
+come back in--How did do! How did do! Yes, very. Mr. Raleigh, do tell the
+opera people not to put on Romeo too often this season. Of course Melba's
+splendid in it, and all that, but still--"
+
+Mr. Bry fixed his eyeglass again, and began to smile gently like an
+evil-minded baby. Lord Holme's brown face was full in view, grinning. His
+eyes were looking about with unusual vivacity.
+
+"How early you are, Fritz! Good boy. I want you to look after--"
+
+"I say, Vi, why didn't you tell me?"
+
+Mr. Bry, letting his eyeglass fall, looked abstracted and lent an
+attentive ear. If he were not playing prompter to social comedies he
+generally stood in the wings, watching and listening to them with a cold
+amusement that was seldom devoid of a spice of venom.
+
+"Tell you what, Fritz?"
+
+"That Miss Schley was comin' to-night. Everyone's talking about her. I
+sat next Laycock at dinner and he was ravin'. Told me she was to be here
+and I didn't know it. Rather ridiculous, you know. Where is she?"
+
+"Somewhere in the rooms."
+
+"What's she like?"
+
+"Oh!--I don't know. She's in black. Go and look for her."
+
+Lord Holme strode on. As he passed Mr. Bry he said:
+
+"I say, Bry, d'you know Miss Pimpernel Schley?"
+
+"Naturally."
+
+"Come with me, there's a good chap, and--what's she like?"
+
+As they went on into the drawing-rooms Mr. Bry dropped out:
+
+"Some people say she's like Lady Holme."
+
+"Like Vi! Is she? Laycock's been simply ravin'--simply ravin'--and
+Laycock's not a feller to--where is she?
+
+"We shall come to her. So there was no gee-gee to look at in the country
+to-night?"
+
+Lord Holme burst into a roar of laughter.
+
+"There's the vestal tending her lamp," said Mr. Bry a moment later.
+
+"The what up to what?"
+
+"Miss Pimpernel Schley keeping the fire of adoration carefully alight."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"There."
+
+"Oh, I see! Jove, what a skin, though! Eh! Isn't it? She is deuced like
+Vi at a distance. Vi looks up just like that when she's singin'. Doesn't
+she, though? Eh?"
+
+He went on towards her.
+
+Mr. Bry followed him, murmuring.
+
+"The giant refreshed with wine. No gee-gee to-night. No gee-gee."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+"THE brougham is at the door, my lady."
+
+"Tell his lordship."
+
+The butler went out, and Lady Holme's maid put a long black cloak
+carefully over her mistress's shoulders. While she did this Lady Holme
+stood quite still gazing into vacancy. They were in the now deserted
+yellow drawing-room, which was still brilliantly lit, and full of the
+already weary-looking flowers which had been arranged for the reception.
+The last guest had gone and the carriage was waiting to take the Holmes
+to Arkell House.
+
+The maid did something to the diamonds in Lady Holme's hair with deft
+fingers, and the light touch seemed to wake Lady Holme from a reverie.
+She went to a mirror and looked into it steadily. The maid stood behind.
+After a moment Lady Holme lifted her hand suddenly to her head, as if she
+were going to take off her tiara. The maid could not repress a slight
+movement of startled astonishment. Lady Holme saw it in the glass,
+dropped her hand, and said:
+
+"C'est tout, Josephine. Vous pouvez vous en aller."
+
+"Merci, miladi."
+
+She went out quietly.
+
+Two or three minutes passed. Then Lord Holme's deep bass voice was
+audible, humming vigorously:
+
+
+  "Ina, Ina, oh, you should have seen her!
+     Seen her with her eyes cast down.
+       She looked upon the floor,
+         And all the Johnnies swore
+   That Ina, Ina--oh, you should have seen her!--
+     That Ina was the /chic/-est girl in town."
+
+
+Lady Holme frowned.
+
+"Fritz!" she called rather sharply.
+
+Lord Holme appeared with a coat thrown over his arm and a hat in his
+hand. His brown face was beaming with self-satisfaction.
+
+"Well, old girl, ready? What's up now?"
+
+"I wish you wouldn't sing those horrible music-hall songs. You know I
+hate them."
+
+"Music-hall! I like that. Why, it's the best thing in /The Chick from the
+Army and Navy/ at the Blue Theatre."
+
+"It's disgustingly vulgar."
+
+"What next? Why, I saw the Lord Chan--"
+
+"I daresay you did. Vulgarity will appeal to the Saints of Heaven next
+season if things go on as they're going now. Come along."
+
+She went out of the room, walking more quickly than she usually walked,
+and holding herself very upright. Lord Holme followed, forming the words
+of his favourite song with his lips, and screwing up his eyes as if he
+were looking at an improper peepshow. When they were in the electric
+brougham, which spun along with scarcely any noise, he began:
+
+"I say, Vi, how long've you known Miss Schley?"
+
+"I don't know. Some weeks."
+
+"Why didn't you tell me?"
+
+"I did. I said I had met her at Mrs. Wolfstein's lunch."
+
+"No, but why didn't you tell me how like you she was?"
+
+There was complete silence in the brougham for a minute. Then Lady Holme
+said:
+
+"I had no idea she was like me."
+
+"Then you're blind, old girl. She's like you if you'd been a chorus-girl
+and known a lot of things you don't know."
+
+"Really. Perhaps she has been a chorus-girl."
+
+"I'll bet she has, whether she says so or not."
+
+He gave a deep chuckle. Lady Holme's gown rustled as she leaned back in
+her corner.
+
+"And she's goin' to Arkell House. Americans are the very devil for
+gettin' on. Laycock was tellin' me to-night that--"
+
+"I don't wish to hear Mr. Laycock's stories, Fritz. They don't amuse me."
+
+"Well, p'r'aps they're hardly the thing for you, Vi. But they're deuced
+amusin' for all that."
+
+He chuckled again. Lady Holme felt an intense desire to commit some act
+of physical violence. She shut her eyes. In a minute she heard her
+husband once more beginning to hum the refrain about Ina. How utterly
+careless he was of her desires and requests. There was something animal
+in his forgetfulness and indifference. She had loved the animal in him.
+She did love it. Something deep down in her nature answered eagerly to
+its call. But at moments she hated it almost with fury. She hated it now
+and longed to use the whip, as the tamer in a menagerie uses it when one
+of his beasts shows its teeth, or sulkily refuses to perform one of its
+tricks.
+
+Lord Holme went on calmly humming till the brougham stopped in the long
+line of carriages that stretched away into the night from the great
+portico of Arkell House.
+
+People were already going in to supper when the Holmes arrived. The Duke,
+upon whom a painful malady was beginning to creep, was bravely welcoming
+his innumerable guests. He found it already impossible to go unaided up
+and down stairs, and sat in a large armchair close to the ball-room, with
+one of his pretty daughters near him, talking brightly, and occasionally
+stealing wistful glances at the dancers, who were visible through a high
+archway to his left. He was a thin, middle-aged man, with a curious,
+transparent look in his face--something crystalline that was nearly
+beautiful.
+
+The Duchess was swarthy and masterful, very intelligent and /grande
+dame/. Vivacity was easy to her. People said she had been a good hostess
+in her cradle, and that she had presided over the ceremony of her own
+baptism in a most autocratic and successful manner. It was quite likely.
+
+After a word with the Duke, Lady Holme went slowly towards the ballroom
+with her husband. She did not mean to dance, and began to refuse the
+requests of would-be partners with charming protestations of fatigue.
+Lord Holme was scanning the ballroom with his big brown eyes.
+
+"Are you going to dance, Fritz?" asked Lady Holme, nodding to Robin
+Pierce, whom she had just seen standing at a little distance with Rupert
+Carey.
+
+The latter had not seen her yet, but as Robin returned her nod he looked
+hastily round.
+
+"Yes, I promised Miss Schley to struggle through a waltz with her. Wonder
+if she's dancin'?"
+
+Lady Holme bowed, a little ostentatiously, to Rupert Carey. Her husband
+saw it and began at once to look pugilistic. He could not say anything,
+for at this moment two or three men strolled up to speak to Lady Holme.
+While she was talking to them, Pimpernel Schley came in sight waltzing
+with Mr. Laycock, one of those abnormally thin, narrow-featured, smart
+men, with bold, inexpressive ayes, in whom London abounds.
+
+Lord Holme's under-jaw resumed its natural position, and he walked away
+and was lost in the crowd, following the two dancers.
+
+"Take me in to supper, Robin. I'm tired."
+
+"This way. I thought you were never coming."
+
+"People stayed so late. I can't think why. I'm sure it was dreadfully
+dull and foolish. How odd Mr. Carey's looking! When I bowed to him just
+now he didn't return it, but only stared at me as if I were a stranger."
+
+Robin Pierce made no rejoinder. They descended the great staircase and
+went towards the picture-gallery.
+
+"Find a corner where we can really talk."
+
+"Yes, yes."
+
+He spoke eagerly.
+
+"Here--this is perfect."
+
+They sat down at a table for two that was placed in an angle of the great
+room. Upon the walls above them looked down a Murillo and a Velasquez.
+Lady Holme was under the Murillo, which represented three Spanish street
+boys playing a game in the dust with pieces of money.
+
+"A table for two," said Robin Pierce. "I have always said that the
+Duchess understands the art of entertaining better than anyone in London,
+except you--when you choose."
+
+"To-night I really couldn't choose. Later on, I'm going to give two or
+three concerts. Is anything the matter with Mr. Carey?"
+
+"Do you think so?"
+
+"Well, I hope it isn't true what people are saying."
+
+"What are they saying?"
+
+"That's he's not very judicious in one way."
+
+A footman poured champagne into her glass. Robin Pierce touched the
+glass.
+
+"That way?"
+
+"Yes. It would be too sad."
+
+"Let us hope it isn't true, then."
+
+"You know him well. Is it true?"
+
+"Would you care if it was?"
+
+He looked at her earnestly.
+
+"Yes. I like Mr. Carey."
+
+There was a rather unusual sound of sincerity in her voice.
+
+"And what is it that you like in him?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. He talks shocking nonsense, of course, and is down on
+people and things. And he's absurdly unsophisticated at moments, though
+he knows the world so well. He's not like you--not a diplomat. But I
+believe if he had a chance he might do something great."
+
+Robin felt as if the hidden woman had suddenly begun to speak. Why did
+she speak about Rupert Carey?
+
+"Do you like a man to do something great?" he said.
+
+"Oh, yes. All women do."
+
+"But I perpetually hear you laughing at the big people--the Premiers, the
+Chancellors, the Archbishops, the Generals of the world."
+
+"Because I've always known them. And really they are so often quite
+absurd and tiresome."
+
+"And--Rupert Carey?"
+
+"Oh, he's nothing at all, poor fellow! Still there's something in his
+face that makes me think he could do an extraordinary thing if he had the
+chance. I saw it there to-night when he didn't bow to me. There's Sir
+Donald's son. And what a dreadful-looking woman just behind him."
+
+Leo Ulford was coming down the gallery with a gaunt, aristocratic,
+harsh-featured girl. Behind him walked Mr. Bry, conducting a very young
+old woman, immensely smart, immensely vivacious, and immensely pink, who
+moved with an unnecessary alertness that was birdlike, and turned her
+head about sharply on a long, thin neck decorated with a large diamond
+dog-collar. Slung at her side there was a tiny jewelled tube.
+
+"That's Mrs. Leo."
+
+"She must be over sixty."
+
+"She is."
+
+The quartet sat down at the next table. Leo Ulford did not see Lady Holme
+at once. When he caught sight of her, he got up, came to her, stood over
+her and pressed her hand.
+
+"Been away," he explained. "Only back to-night."
+
+"I've been complaining to your father about you."
+
+A slow smile overspread his chubby face.
+
+"May I see you again after supper?"
+
+"If you can find me."
+
+"I can always manage to find what I want," he returned, still smiling.
+
+When he had gone back to his table Robin Pierce said:
+
+"How insolent Englishmen are allowed to be in Society! It always strikes
+me after I've been a long time abroad. Doesn't anybody mind it?"
+
+"Do you mean that you consider Mr. Ulford insolent?"
+
+"In manner. Yes, I do."
+
+"Well, I think there's something like Fritz about him."
+
+Robin Pierce could not tell from the way this was said what would be a
+safe remark to make. He therefore changed the subject.
+
+"Do you know what Sir Donald's been doing?" he said.
+
+"No. What?"
+
+"Buying a Campo Santo."
+
+"A Campo Santo! Is he going to bury himself, then? What do you mean,
+Robin?"
+
+"He called it a Campo Santo to Carey. It's really a wonderful house in
+Italy, on Como. Casa Felice is the name of it. I know it well."
+
+"Casa Felice. How delicious! But is it the place for Sir Donald?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"For an old, tired man. Casa Felice. Won't the name seem an irony to him
+when he's there?"
+
+"You think an old man can't be happy anywhere?"
+
+"I can't imagine being happy old."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Oh!"--she lowered her voice--"if you want to know, look at Mrs. Ulford."
+
+"Your husk theory again. A question of looks. But you will grow old
+gracefully--some day in the far future."
+
+"I don't think I shall grow old at all."
+
+"Then--?"
+
+"I think I shall die before that comes--say at forty-five. I couldn't
+live with wrinkles all over my face. No, Robin, I couldn't. And--look at
+Mrs. Ulford!--perhaps an ear-trumpet set with opals."
+
+"What do the wrinkles matter? But some day you'll find I'm right. You'll
+tell me so. You'll acknowledge that your charm comes from within, and has
+survived the mutilation of the husk."
+
+"Mutilation! What a hideous sound that word has. Why don't all mutilated
+people commit suicide at once? I should. Is Sir Donald going to live in
+his happy house?"
+
+"Naturally. He'll be there this August. He's invited Rupert Carey to stay
+there with him."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"Not yet."
+
+"I suppose he will. Everybody always asks you everywhere. Diplomacy is so
+universally--"
+
+She broke off. Far away, at the end of the gallery, she had caught sight
+of Miss Schley coming in with her husband. They sat down at a table near
+the door. Robin Pierce followed her eyes and understood her silence.
+
+"Are you going on the first?" he asked.
+
+"What to?"
+
+"Miss Schley's first night."
+
+"Is it on the first? I didn't know. We can't. We're dining at Brayley
+House that evening."
+
+"What a pity!" he said, with a light touch of half playful malice. "You
+would have seen her as she really is--from all accounts."
+
+"And what is Miss Schley really?"
+
+"The secret enemy of censors."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"You dislike her. Why?"
+
+"I don't dislike her at all."
+
+"Do you like her?"
+
+"No. I like very few women. I don't understand them."
+
+"At any rate you understand--say Miss Schley--better than a man would."
+
+"Oh--a man!"
+
+"I believe all women think all men fools."
+
+Lady Holme laughed, not very gaily.
+
+"Don't they?" he insisted.
+
+"In certain ways, in certain relations of life, I suppose most men
+are--rather short-sighted."
+
+"Like Mr. Bry."
+
+Mr. Bry is the least short-sighted man I know. That's why he always wears
+an eyeglass."
+
+"To create an illusion?"
+
+"Who knows?"
+
+She looked down the long room. Between the heads of innumerable men and
+women she could see Miss Schley. Her husband was hidden. She would have
+preferred to see him. Miss Schley's head was by no means expressive of
+the naked truth. It merely looked cool, self-possessed, and--so Lady
+Holme said to herself--extremely American. What she meant by that she
+could, perhaps, hardly have explained.
+
+"Do you admire Miss Schley's appearance?"
+
+Robin Pierce spoke again with a touch of humorous malice. He knew Lady
+Holme so well that he had no objection to seem wanting in tact to her
+when he had a secret end to gain. She looked at him sharply; leaning
+forward over the table and opening her eyes very wide.
+
+"Why are you forgetting your manners to-night and bombarding me with
+questions?"
+
+"The usual reason--devouring curiosity."
+
+She hesitated, looking at him. Then suddenly her face changed. Something,
+some imp of adorable frankness, peeped out of it at him, and her whole
+body seemed confiding.
+
+"Miss Schley is going about London imitating me. Now, isn't that true?
+Isn't she?"
+
+"I believe she is. Damned impertinence!"
+
+He muttered the last words under his breath.
+
+"How can I admire her?"
+
+There was something in the way she said that which touched him. He leaned
+forward to her.
+
+"Why not punish her for it?"
+
+"How?"
+
+"Reveal what she can't imitate."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"All you hide and I divine."
+
+"Go on."
+
+"She mimics the husk. She couldn't mimic the kernel."
+
+"Ice, my lady?"
+
+Lady Holme started. Till the footman spoke she had not quite realised how
+deeply interested she was in the conversation. She helped herself to some
+ice.
+
+"You can go on, Mr. Pierce," she said when the man had gone.
+
+"But you understand."
+
+She shook her head, smiling. Her body still looked soft and attractive,
+and deliciously feminine.
+
+"Miss Schley happens to have some vague resemblance to you in height and
+colouring. She is a clever mimic. She used to be a professional mimic."
+
+"Really!"
+
+"That was how she first became known."
+
+"In America?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Why should she imitate me?"
+
+"Have you been nice to her?"
+
+"I don't know. Yes. Nice enough."
+
+Robin shook his head.
+
+"You think she dislikes me then?"
+
+"Do women want definite reasons for half the things they do? Miss Schley
+may not say to herself that she dislikes you, any more than you say to
+yourself that you dislike her. Nevertheless--"
+
+"We should never get on. No."
+
+"Consider yourselves enemies--for no reasons, or secret woman's reasons.
+It's safer."
+
+Lady Holme looked down the gallery again. Miss Schley's fair head was
+bending forward to some invisible person.
+
+"And the mimicry?" she asked, turning again to Robin.
+
+"Can only be applied to mannerisms, to the ninety-ninth part, the
+inconsiderable fraction of your charm. Miss Schley could never imitate
+the hidden woman, the woman who sings, the woman who laughs at, denies
+herself when she is not singing."
+
+"But no one cares for her--if she exists."
+
+There was a hint of secret bitterness in her voice when she said that.
+
+"Give her a chance--and find out. But you know already that numbers do."
+
+He tried to look into her eyes, but she avoided his gaze and got up.
+
+"Take me back to the ballroom."
+
+"You are going to dance?"
+
+"I want to see who's here."
+
+As they passed the next table Lady Holme nodded to Leo Ulford. He bowed
+in return and indicated that he was following almost immediately. Mrs.
+Ulford put down her ear-trumpet, turned her head sharply, and looked at
+Lady Holme sideways, fluttering her pink eyelids.
+
+"How exactly like a bird she is," murmured Lady Holme.
+
+"Exactly--moulting."
+
+Lady Holme meant as she walked down the gallery; to stop and speak a few
+gay words to Miss Schley and her husband, but when she drew near to their
+table Lord Holme was holding forth with such unusual volubility, and Miss
+Schley was listening with such profound attention, that it did not seem
+worth while, and she went quietly on, thinking they did not see her. Lord
+Holme did not. But the American smiled faintly as Lady Holme and Robin
+disappeared into the hall. Then she said, in reply to her animated
+companion:
+
+"I'm sure if I am like Lady Holme I ought to say /Te Deum/ and think
+myself a lucky girl. I ought, indeed."
+
+Lady Holme had not been in the ballroom five minutes before Leo Ulford
+came up smiling.
+
+"Here I am," he remarked, as if the statement were certain to give
+universal satisfaction.
+
+Robin looked black and moved a step closer to Lady Holme.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Pierce," she said.
+
+She took Leo Ulford's arm, nodded to Robin, and walked away.
+
+Robin stood looking after her. He started when he heard Carey's voice
+saying:
+
+"Why d'you let her dance with that blackguard?"
+
+"Hulloa, Carey?"
+
+"Come to the supper-room. I want to have a yarn with you. And all
+this"--he made a wavering, yet violent, gesture towards the
+dancers--"might be a Holbein."
+
+"A dance of death? What nonsense you talk!"
+
+"Come to the supper-room."
+
+Robin looked at his friend narrowly.
+
+"You're bored. Let's go and take a stroll down Park Lane."
+
+"No. Well, then, if you won't--"
+
+"I'll come."
+
+He put his arm through Carey's, and they went out together.
+
+Lady Holme was generally agreeable to men. She was particularly charming
+to Leo Ulford that night. He was not an interesting man, but he seemed to
+interest her very much. They sat out together for a long time in the
+corner of a small drawing-room, far away from the music. She had said to
+Robin Pierce that she thought there was something about Leo Ulford that
+was like her husband, and when she talked to him she found the
+resemblance even greater than she had supposed.
+
+Lord Holme and Leo Ulford were of a similar type. Both were strong,
+healthy, sensual, slangy, audacious in a dull kind of fashion--Lady Holme
+did not call it dull--serenely and perpetually intent upon having
+everything their own way in life. Both lived for the body and ignored the
+soul, as they would have ignored a man with a fine brain, a passionate
+heart, a narrow chest and undeveloped muscles. Such a man they would have
+summed up as "a rotter." If they ever thought of the soul at all, it was
+probably under some such comprehensive name. Both had the same simple and
+blatant aim in life, an aim which governed all their actions and was the
+generator of most of their thoughts. This aim, expressed in their own
+terse language, was "to do themselves jolly well." Both had, so far,
+succeeded in their ambition. Both were, consequently, profoundly
+convinced of their own cleverness. Intellectual conceit--the conceit of
+the brain--is as nothing to physical conceit--the conceit of the body.
+Acute intelligence is always capable of uneasiness, can always make room
+for a doubt. But the self-satisfaction of the little-brained and
+big-muscled man who has never had a rebuff or a day's illness is cased in
+triple brass. Lady Holme knew this self-satisfaction well. She had seen
+it staring out of her husband's big brown eyes. She saw it now in the
+boyish eyes of Leo Ulford. She was at home with it and rather liked it.
+In truth, it had at least one merit--from the woman's point of view--it
+was decisively masculine.
+
+Whether Leo Ulford was, or was not, a blackguard; as Mrs. Trent had
+declared, did not matter to her. Three-quarters of the men she knew were
+blackguards according to the pinched ideas of Little Peddlington; and
+Mrs. Trent might originally have issued from there.
+
+She got on easily with Leo Ulford because she was experienced in the
+treatment of his type. She knew exactly what to do with it; how to lead
+it on, how to fend it off, how to throw cold water on its enterprise
+without dashing it too greatly, how to banish any little, sulky cloud
+that might appear on the brassy horizon without seeming to be solicitous.
+
+The type is amazingly familiar to the woman of the London world. She can
+recognize it at a glance, and can send it in its armchair canter round
+the circus with scarce a crack of the ring-mistress's whip.
+
+To-night Lady Holme enjoyed governing it more than usual, and for a
+subtle reason.
+
+In testing her power upon Leo Ulford she was secretly practising her
+siren's art, with a view that would have surprised and disgusted him,
+still more amazed him, had he known it. She was firing at the dummy in
+order that later she might make sure of hitting the living man. Leo
+Ulford was the dummy. The living man would be Fritz.
+
+Both dummy and living man were profoundly ignorant of her moving
+principle. The one was radiant with self-satisfaction under her
+fusillade. The other, ignorant of it so far, would have been furious in
+the knowledge of it.
+
+She knew-and laughed at the men.
+
+Presently she turned the conversation, which was getting a little too
+personal--on Leo Ulford's side--to a subject very present in her mind
+that night.
+
+"Did you have a talk with Miss Schley the other day after I left?" she
+asked. "I ran away on purpose to give you a chance. Wasn't it
+good-natured of me, when I was really longing to stay?"
+
+Leo Ulford stretched out his long legs slowly, his type's way of purring.
+
+"I'd rather have gone on yarning with you."
+
+"Then you did have a talk! She was at my house to-night, looking quite
+delicious. You know she's conquered London?"
+
+"That sort's up to every move on the board."
+
+"What do you mean? What board?"
+
+She looked at him with innocent inquiry.
+
+"I wish men didn't know so much," she added; with a sort of soft
+vexation. "You have so many opportunities of acquiring knowledge and we
+so few--if we respect the /convenances/."
+
+"Miss Schley wouldn't respect 'em."
+
+He chuckled, and again drew up and then stretched out his legs, slowly
+and luxuriously.
+
+"How can you know?"
+
+"She's not the sort that does. She's the sort that's always kicking over
+the traces and keeping it dark. I know 'em."
+
+"I think you're rather unkind. Miss Schley's mother arrives to-morrow."
+
+Leo Ulford put up his hands to his baby moustache and shook with
+laughter.
+
+"That's the only thing she wanted to set her up in business," he
+ejaculated. "A marmar. I do love those Americans!"
+
+"But you speak as if Mrs. Schley were a stage property!"
+
+"I'll bet she is. Wait till you see her. Why, it's a regular profession
+in the States, being a marmar. I tell you what--"
+
+He leaned forward and fixed his blue eyes on Lady Holme, with an air of
+profound acuteness.
+
+"Are you going to see her?"
+
+"Mrs. Schley? I daresay."
+
+"Well, you remember what I tell you. She'll be as dry as a dog-biscuit,
+wear a cap and spectacles with gold rims, and say nothing but 'Oh, my,
+yes indeed!' to everything that's said to her. Does she come from
+Susanville?"
+
+"How extraordinary! I believe she does."
+
+Leo Ulford's laugh was triumphant and prolonged.
+
+"That's where they breed marmars!" he exclaimed, when he was able to
+speak. "Women are stunning."
+
+"I'm afraid I don't quite understand," said Lady Holme, preserving a
+quiet air of pupilage. "But perhaps it's better I shouldn't. Anyhow, I am
+quite sure Miss Schley's mother will be worthy of her daughter."
+
+"You may bet your bottom dollar on that. She'll be what they call 'a
+sootable marmar.' I must get my wife to shoot a card on her."
+
+"I hope you'll introduce me to Mrs. Ulford. I should like to know her."
+
+"Yours isn't the voice to talk down a trumpet," said Leo Ulford, with a
+sudden air of surliness.
+
+"I should like to know her now I know you and your father."
+
+At the mention of his father Leo Ulford's discontented expression
+increased.
+
+"My father's a rotter," he said. "Never cared for anything. No shot to
+speak of. He can sit on a horse all right. Had to, in South America and
+Morocco and all those places. But he never really cared about it, I don't
+believe. Why, he'd rather look at a picture than a thoroughbred any day!"
+
+At this moment Sir Donald wandered into the room, with his hands behind
+his thin back, and his eyes searching the walls. The Duke possessed a
+splendid collection of pictures.
+
+"There he is!" said Leo, gruffly.
+
+"He doesn't see us. Go and tell him I'm here."
+
+"Why? he might go out again if we keep mum."
+
+"But I want to speak to him. Sir Donald! Sir Donald!"
+
+Sir Donald turned round at the second summons and came towards them,
+looking rather embarrassed.
+
+"Hulloa, pater!" said Leo.
+
+Sir Donald nodded to his son with a conscientious effort to seem familiar
+and genial.
+
+"Hulloa!" he rejoined in a hollow voice.
+
+"Your boy has been instructing me in American mysteries," said Lady
+Holme. "Do take me to the ballroom, Sir Donald."
+
+Leo Ulford's good humour returned as abruptly as it had departed. Her
+glance at him, as she spoke, had seemed to hint at a secret understanding
+between them in which no one--certainly not his father--was included.
+
+"Pater can tell you all about the pictures," he said, with a comfortable
+assurance, which he did not strive to disguise, that she would be
+supremely bored.
+
+He stared at her hard, gave a short laugh, and lounged away.
+
+When he had gone, Sir Donald still seemed embarrassed. He looked at Lady
+Holme apologetically, and in his faded eyes she saw an expression that
+reminded her of Lady Cardington. It was surely old age asking forgiveness
+for its existence.
+
+She did not feel much pity for it, but with the woman of the world's
+natural instinct to smooth rough places--especially for a man--she began
+to devote herself to cheering Sir Donald up, as they slowly made their
+way through room after room towards the distant sound of the music.
+
+"I hear you've been plunging!" she began gaily.
+
+Sir Donald looked vague.
+
+I'm afraid I scarcely--"
+
+"Forgive me. I catch slang from my husband. He's ruining my English. I
+mean that I hear you've been investing--shall I say your romance?--in a
+wonderful place abroad, with a fascinating name. I hope you'll get
+enormous interest."
+
+A faint colour, it was like the ghost of a blush, rose in Sir Donald's
+withered cheeks.
+
+"Ah, Mr. Carey--"
+
+He checked himself abruptly, remembering whet he had heard from Robin
+Pierce.
+
+"No, Mr. Pierce was my informant. He knows your place and says it's too
+wonderful. I adore the name."
+
+"Casa Felice. You would not advise me to change it, then?"
+
+"Change it! Why?"
+
+"Well, I--one should not, perhaps, insist beforehand that one is going to
+have happiness, which must always lie on the knees of the gods."
+
+"Oh, I believe in defiance."
+
+There was an audacious sound in her voice. Her long talk with Leo Ulford
+had given her back her belief in herself, her confidence in her beauty,
+her reliance on her youth.
+
+"You have a right to believe in it. But Casa Felice is mine."
+
+"Even to buy it was a defiance--in a way."
+
+"Perhaps so. But then--"
+
+"But then you have set out and you must not turn back, Sir Donald.
+Baptise your wonderful house yourself by filling it with happiness.
+Another gave it its name. Give it yourself the reason for the name."
+
+Happiness seemed to shine suddenly in the sound of her speaking voice, as
+it shone in her singing voice when the theme of her song was joy. Sir
+Donald's manner lost its self-consciousness, its furtive diffidence.
+
+"You--you come and give my house its real baptism," he said, with a flash
+of ardour that, issuing from him, was like fire bursting out of a dreary
+marsh land. "Will you? This August?"
+
+"But," she hesitated. "Isn't Mr. Carey coming?"
+
+At this moment they came into a big drawing-room that immediately
+preceded the ballroom, with which it communicated by an immense doorway
+hung with curtains of white velvet. They could see in the distance the
+dancers moving rather indifferently in a lancers. Lord Holme and Miss
+Schley were dancing in the set nearest to the doorway, and on the side
+that faced the drawing-room. Directly Lady Holme saw the ballroom she saw
+them. A sudden sense of revolt, the defiance of joy carried on into the
+defiance of anger, rose up in her.
+
+"If Mr. Carey is coming I'll come too, and baptise your house," she said.
+
+Sir Donald looked surprised, but he answered, with a swiftness that did
+not seem to belong to old age:
+
+"That is a bargain, Lady Holme. I regard that as a bargain."
+
+"I'll not go back on it."
+
+There was a hard sound in her voice.
+
+They entered the ballroom just as the band played the closing bars of the
+lancers, and the many sets began to break up and melt into a formless
+crowd which dispersed in various directions. The largest number of people
+moved towards the archway near which the Duke was still sitting, bravely
+exerting himself to be cheerful. Lady Holme and Sir Donald became
+involved in this section of the crowd, and naturally followed in its
+direction. Lord Holme and Miss Schley were at a short distance behind
+them, and Lady Holme was aware of this. The double defiance was still
+alive in her, and was strengthened by a clear sound which reached her
+ears for a moment, then was swallowed up by the hum of conversation from
+many intervening voices--the sound of the American's drawling tones
+raised to say something she could not catch. As she came out into the
+hall, close to the Duke's chair, she saw Rupert Carey trying to make his
+way into the ballroom against the stream of dancers. His face was
+flushed. There were drops of perspiration on his forehead, and the
+violent expression that was perpetually visible in his red-brown eyes,
+lighting them up as with a flame, seemed partially obscured as if by a
+haze. The violence of them was no longer vivid but glassy.
+
+Lady Holme did not notice all this. The crowd was round her, and she was
+secretly preoccupied. She merely saw that Rupert Carey was close to her,
+and she knew who was following behind her. A strong impulse came upon her
+and she yielded to it without hesitation. As she reached Rupert Carey she
+stopped and held out her hand.
+
+"Mr. Carey," she said, "I've been wanting to speak to you all the
+evening. Why didn't you ask me to dance?"
+
+She spoke very distinctly. Carey stood still and stared at her, and now
+she noticed the flush on his face and the unnatural expression in his
+eyes. She understood at once what was the matter and repented of her
+action. But it was too late to draw back. Carey stared dully for an
+instant, as if he scarcely knew who she was. Then, with a lurch, he came
+closer to her, and, with a wavering movement, tried to find her hand,
+which she had withdrawn.
+
+"Where is it?" he muttered in a thick voice. "Where is it?"
+
+He groped frantically.
+
+"Sir Donald!" Lady Holme whispered sharply, while the people nearest to
+them began to exchange glances of surprise or of amusement.
+
+She pressed his arm and he tried to draw her on. But Carey was exactly in
+front of her. It was impossible for her to escape. He found her hand at
+last, took it limply in his, bent down and began to kiss it, mumbling
+some loud but incoherent words.
+
+The Duke, who from his chair, was a witness of the scene, tried to raise
+himself up, and a vivid spot of scarlet burned in his almost transparent
+cheeks. His daughter hastened forward to stop his effort. Lady Holme
+dragged her hand away violently, and Carey suddenly burst into tears. Sir
+Donald hurried Lady Holme on, and Carey tried to follow, but was forcibly
+prevented by two men.
+
+When at length Lady Holme found herself at the other end of the great
+hall, she turned and saw her husband coming towards her with a look of
+fury on his face.
+
+"I wish to go home," she said to him in a low voice.
+
+She withdrew her hand from Sir Donald's arm and quietly bade him
+good-bye. Lord Holme did not say a word.
+
+"Where is the Duchess?" Lady Holme added. "Ah, there she is!"
+
+She saw the Duchess hurriedly going towards the place where the Duke was
+sitting, intercepted her swiftly, and bade her good-night.
+
+"Now, Fritz!" she said.
+
+She was conscious that a number of people were watching her, and her
+voice and manner were absolutely unembarrassed. A footman took the number
+of her cloak from Lord Holme and fetched the cloak. A voice cried in the
+distance, "Lord Holme's carriage!" Another, and nearer voice, echoed the
+call. She passed slowly between two lines of men over a broad strip of
+carpet to the portico, and stepped into the brougham.
+
+As it glided away into the night she heard her husband's loud breathing.
+
+He did not speak for two or three minutes, but breathed like a man who
+had been running, and moved violently in the carriage as if to keep still
+were intolerable to him. The window next to him was up. He let it down.
+Then he turned right round to his wife, who was leaning back in her
+corner wrapped up in her black cloak.
+
+"With the Duke sittin' there!" he said in a loud voice. "With the Duke
+sittin' there!"
+
+There was a sound of outrage in the voice.
+
+"Didn't I kick that sweep out of the house?" he added. "Didn't I?"
+
+"I believe you asked Mr. Carey not to call anymore."
+
+Lady Holme's voice had no excitement in it.
+
+"Asked him! I--"
+
+"Don't make such a noise, Fritz. The men will hear you."
+
+"I told him if he ever came again I'd have him put out."
+
+"Well, he never has come again."
+
+"What d'you mean by speakin' to him? What d'you mean by it?"
+
+Lady Holme knew that her husband was a thoroughly conventional man, and,
+like all conventional men, had a horror of a public scene in which any
+woman belonging to him was mixed up. Such a scene alone was quite enough
+to rouse his wrath. But there was in his present anger something deeper,
+more brutal, than any rage caused by a breach of the conventions. His
+jealousy was stirred.
+
+"He didn't speak to you. You spoke to him."
+
+Lady Holme did not deny it.
+
+"I heard every word you said," continued Lord Holme, beginning to breathe
+hard again. "I--I--"
+
+Lady Holme felt that he was longing to strike her, that if he had been
+the same man, but a collier or a labourer, born in another class of life,
+he would not have hesitated to beat her. The tradition in which he had
+been brought up controlled him. But she knew that if he could have beaten
+her he would have hated her less, that his sense of bitter wrong would
+have at once diminished. In self-control it grew. The spark rose to a
+flame.
+
+"You're a damned shameful woman!" he said.
+
+The brougham drew up softly before their house. Lord Holme, who was
+seated on the side next the house, got out first. He did not wait on the
+pavement to assist his wife, but walked up the steps, opened the door,
+and went into the hall. Lady Holme followed. She saw her husband, with
+the light behind him, standing with his hand on the handle of the hall
+door. For an instant she thought that he was going to shut her out. He
+actually pushed the door till the light was almost hidden. Then he flung
+it open with a bang, threw down his hat and strode upstairs.
+
+If he had shut her out! She found herself wondering what would have
+become of her, where she would have gone. She would have had to go to the
+Coburg, or to Claridge's, without a maid, without luggage. As she slowly
+came upstairs she heard her husband go into the drawing-room. Was he
+waiting for her there? or did he wish to avoid her? When she reached the
+broad landing she hesitated. She was half inclined to go in audaciously,
+to laugh in his face; turn his fury into ridicule, tell him she was the
+sort of woman who is born to do as she likes, to live as she chooses, to
+think of nothing but her own will, consult nothing but her whims of the
+moment. But she went on and into her bedroom.
+
+Josephine was there and began to take the diamonds out of her hair. Lady
+Holme did not say a word. She was listening intently for the sound of any
+movement below. She heard nothing. When she was undressed, and there was
+nothing more for the maid to do, she began to feel uneasy, as if she
+would rather not dismiss the girl. But it was very late. Josephine
+strangled her yawns with difficulty. There was no excuse for keeping her
+up any longer.
+
+"You can go."
+
+The maid went out, leaving Lady Holme standing in the middle of the big
+bedroom. Next to it on one side was Lord Holme's dressing-room. On the
+other side there was a door leading into Lady Holme's boudoir. Almost
+directly after Josephine had gone Lady Holme heard the outer door of this
+room opened, and the heavy step of her husband. It moved about the room,
+stopped, moved about again. What could he be doing? She stood where she
+was, listening. Suddenly the door between the rooms was thrown open and
+Lord Holme appeared.
+
+"Where's the red book?" he said.
+
+"The red book!"
+
+"Where is it? D'you hear?"
+
+"What do you want it for?"
+
+"That sweep's address."
+
+"What are you going to do? Write to him?"
+
+"Write to him!" said Lord Holme, with bitter contempt. "I'm goin' to
+thrash him. Where is it?"
+
+"You are going now?"
+
+"I've not come up to answer questions. I've come for the red book. Where
+is it?"
+
+"The little drawer at the top on the right hand of the writing-table."
+
+Lord Holme turned back into the boudoir, went to the writing-table, found
+the book, opened it, found the address and wrote it down on a bit of
+paper. He folded the paper up anyhow and thrust it into his waistcoat
+pocket. Then, without saying another word to his wife, or looking at her,
+he went out and down the staircase.
+
+She followed him on to the landing, and stood there till she heard the
+hall door shut with a bang.
+
+A clock below struck four. She went back into the bedroom and sank into
+an armchair.
+
+A slight sense of confusion floated over her mind for a moment, like a
+cloud. She was not accustomed to scenes. There had been one certainly
+when Rupert Carey was forbidden to come to the house any more, but it had
+been brief, and she had not been present at it. She had only heard of it
+afterwards. Lord Holme had been angry then, and she had rather liked his
+anger. She took it as, in some degree, a measure of his attachment to
+her. And then she had had no feeling of being in the wrong or of
+humiliation. She had been charming to Carey, as she was charming to all
+men. He had lost his head. He had mistaken the relations existing between
+her and her husband, and imagined that such a woman as she was must be
+unhappily mated with such a man as Lord Holme. The passionate desire to
+console a perfectly-contented woman had caused him to go too far, and
+bring down upon himself a fiat of exile, which he could not defy since
+Lady Holme permitted it to go forth, and evidently was not rendered
+miserable by it. So the acquaintance with Rupert Carey had ceased, and
+life had slipped along once more on wheels covered with india-rubber
+tyres.
+
+And now she had renewed the acquaintance publicly and with disastrous
+results.
+
+As she sat there she began to wonder at herself, at the strength of her
+temper, the secret violence of her nature. She had yielded like a child
+to a sudden impulse. She had not thought of consequences. She had ignored
+her worldly knowledge. She had considered nothing, but had acted
+abruptly, as any ignorant, uneducated woman might have acted. She had
+been the slave of a mood. Or had she been the slave of another woman--of
+a woman whom she despised?
+
+Miss Schley had certainly been the cause of the whole affair. Lady Holme
+had spoken to Rupert Carey merely because she knew that her husband was
+immediately behind her with the American. There had been within her at
+that moment something of a broad, comprehensive feeling, mingled with the
+more limited personal feeling of anger against another woman's successful
+impertinence, a sentiment of revolt in which womanhood seemed to rise up
+against the selfish tyrannies of men. As she had walked in the crowd, and
+heard for an instant Miss Schley's drawlling voice speaking to her
+husband, she had felt as if the forbidding of the acquaintance between
+herself and Rupert Carey had been an act of tyranny, as if the
+acquaintance between Miss Schley and her husband were a worse act of
+tyranny. The feeling was wholly unreasonable, of course. How could Lord
+Holme know that she wished to impose a veto, even as he had? And what
+reason was there for such a veto? That lay deep down within her as
+woman's instinct. No man could have understood it.
+
+And now Lord Holme had gone out in the dead of the night to thrash Carey.
+
+She began to think about Carey.
+
+How disgusting he had been. A drunken man must be one of two
+things--either terrible or absurd. Carey had been absurd--disgusting and
+absurd. It had been better for him if he had been terrible. But mumblings
+and tears! She remembered what she had said of Carey to Robin
+Pierce--that something in his eyes, one of those expressions which are
+the children of the eyes, or of the lines about the eyes, told her that
+he was capable of doing something great. What an irony that her remark to
+Robin had been succeeded by such a scene! And she heard again the ugly
+sound of Carey's incoherent exclamations, and felt again the limp clasp
+of his hot, weak hand, and saw again the tears running over his flushed,
+damp face. It was all very nauseous. And yet--had she been wrong in what
+she had said of him? Did she even think that she had been wrong now,
+after what had passed?
+
+What kind of great action had she thought he would be capable of if a
+chance to do something great were thrown in his way? She said to herself
+that she had spoken at random, as one perpetually speaks in Society. And
+then she remembered Carey's eyes. They were ugly eyes. She had always
+thought them ugly. Yet, now and then, there was something in them,
+something to hold a woman--no, perhaps not that--but something to startle
+a woman, to make her think, wonder, even to make her trust. And the scene
+which had just occurred, with all its weakness, its fatuity, its
+maundering display of degradation and the inability of any
+self-government, had not somehow destroyed the impression made upon Lady
+Holme by that something in Carey's eyes. What she had said to Robin
+Pierce she might not choose ever to say again. She would not choose ever
+to say it again--of that she was certain--but she had not ceased to think
+it.
+
+A conviction based upon no evidence that could be brought forward to
+convince anyone is the last thing that can be destroyed in a woman's
+heart.
+
+It was nearly six o'clock when Lady Holme heard a step coming up the
+stairs. She was still sitting in the deep chair, and had scarcely moved.
+The step startled her. She put her hands on the arms of the chair and
+leaned forward. The step passed her bedroom. She heard the door of the
+dressing-room opened and then someone moving about.
+
+"Fritz!" she called. "Fritz!"
+
+There was no answer. She got up and went quickly to the dressing-room.
+Her husband was there in his shirt sleeves. His evening coat and
+waistcoat were lying half on a chair, half on the floor, and he was in
+the act of unfastening his collar. She looked into his face, trying to
+read it.
+
+"Well?" she said. "Well?"
+
+"Go to bed!" he said brutally.
+
+"What have you done?"
+
+"That's my business. Go to bed. D'you hear?"
+
+She hesitated. Then she said:
+
+"How dare you speak to me like that? Have you seen Mr. Carey?"
+
+Lord Holme suddenly took his wife by the shoulders; pushed her out of the
+room, shut the door, and locked it.
+
+They always slept in the same bedroom. Was he not going to bed at all?
+What had happened? Lady Holme could not tell from his face or manner
+anything of what had occurred. She looked at her clock and saw her
+husband had been out of the house for two hours. Indignation and
+curiosity fought within her; and she became conscious of an excitement
+such as she had never felt before. Sleep was impossible, but she got into
+bed and lay there listening to the noises made by her husband in his
+dressing-room. She could just hear them faintly through the door.
+Presently they ceased. A profound silence reigned. There was a sofa in
+the dressing-room. Could he be trying to sleep on it? Such a thing seemed
+incredible to her. For Lord Holme, although he could rough it when he was
+shooting or hunting, at home or abroad, and cared little for
+inconvenience when there was anything to kill, was devoted to comfort in
+ordinary life, and extremely exigent in his own houses. For nothing, for
+nobody, had Lady Holme ever known him to allow himself to be put out.
+
+She strained her ears as she lay in bed. For a long time the silence
+lasted. She began to think her husband must have left the dressing-room,
+when she heard a noise as if something--some piece of furniture--had been
+kicked, and then a stentorian "Damn!"
+
+Suddenly she burst out laughing. She shook against the pillows. She
+laughed and laughed weakly; helplessly, till the tears ran down her
+cheeks. And with those tears ran away her anger, the hot, strained
+sensation that had been within her even since the scene at Arkell House.
+If she had womanly pride it melted ignominiously. If she had feminine
+dignity--that pure and sacred panoply which man ignores at his own proper
+peril--it disappeared. The "poor old Fritz" feeling, which was the most
+human, simple, happy thing in her heart, started into vivacity as she
+realised the long legs flowing into air over the edge of the short sofa,
+the pent-up fury--fury of the too large body on the too small
+resting-place--which found a partial vent in the hallowed objurgation of
+the British Philistine.
+
+With every moment that she lay in the big bed she was punishing Fritz.
+She nestled down among the pillows. She stretched out her limbs
+luxuriously. How easy it was to punish a man! Lying there she recalled
+her husband's words, each detail of his treatment of her since she had
+spoken to Carey. He had called her "a damned shameful woman." That was of
+all the worst offence. She told herself that she ought to, that she must,
+for that expression alone, hate Fritz for ever. And then, immediately,
+she knew that she had forgiven it already, without effort, without
+thought.
+
+She understood the type with which she had to deal, the absurd boyishness
+that was linked with the brutality of it, the lack of mind to give words
+their true, their inmost meaning. Words are instruments of torture, or
+the pattering confetti of a carnival, not by themselves but by the mind
+that sends them forth. Fritz's exclamation might have roused eternal
+enmity in her if it had been uttered by another man. Coming from Fritz it
+won its pardon easily by having a brother, "Damn."
+
+She wondered how long her husband would be ruled by his sense of outrage.
+
+Towards seven she heard another movement; another indignant exclamation,
+then the creak of furniture, a step, a rattling at the door. She turned
+on her side towards the wall, shut her eyes and breathed lightly and
+regularly. The key revolved, the door opened and closed, and she heard
+feet shuffling cautiously over the carpet. A moment and Fritz was in bed.
+Another moment, a long sigh, and he was asleep.
+
+Lady Holme still lay awake. Now that her attention was no longer fixed
+upon her husband's immediate proceedings she began to wonder again what
+had happened between him and Rupert Carey. She would find out in the
+morning.
+
+And presently she too slept.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+IN the morning Lord Holme woke very late and in a different humour. Lady
+Holme was already up, sitting by a little table and pouring out tea, when
+he stretched himself, yawned, turned over, uttered two or three booming,
+incohorent exclamations, and finally raised himself on one arm,
+exhibiting a touzled head and a pair of blinking eyes, stared solemnly at
+his wife's white figure and at the tea-table, and ejaculated:
+
+"Eh?"
+
+"Tea?" she returned, lifting up the silver teapot and holding it towards
+him with an encouraging, half-playful gesture.
+
+Lord Holme yawned again, put up his hands to his hair, and then looked
+steadily at the teapot, which his wife was moving about in the sunbeams
+that were shining in at the window. The morning was fine.
+
+"Tea, Fritz?"
+
+He smiled and began to roll out of bed. But the action woke up his
+memory, and when he was on his feet he looked at his wife again more
+doubtfully. She saw that he was beginning, sleepily but definitely, to
+consider whether he should go on being absolutely furious about the
+events of the preceding night, and acted with promptitude.
+
+"Don't be frightened," she said quickly. "I've made up my mind to forgive
+you. You're only a great schoolboy after all. Come along."
+
+She began to pour out the tea. It made a pleasant little noise falling
+into the cup. The sun was wonderfully bright in the pretty room, almost
+Italian in its golden warmth. Lady Holme's black Pomeranian, Pixie, stood
+on its hind legs to greet him. He came up to the sofa, still looking
+undecided, but with a wavering light of dawning satisfaction in his eyes.
+
+"You behaved damned badly last night," he growled.
+
+He sat down beside his wife with a bump. She put up her hand to his
+rough, brown cheek.
+
+"We both behaved atrociously," she answered. "There's your tea."
+
+She poured in the cream and buttered a thin piece of toast. Lord Holme
+sipped. As he put the cup down she held the piece of toast up to his
+mouth. He took a bite.
+
+"And we both do the Christian act and forgive each other," she added.
+
+He leaned back. Sleep was flowing away from him, full consciousness of
+life and events returning to him.
+
+"What made you speak to that feller?" he said.
+
+"Drink your tea. I don't know. He looked miserable at being avoided,
+and--"
+
+"Miserable! He was drunk. He's done for himself in London, and pretty
+near done for you too."
+
+As he thought about it all a cloud began to settle over his face. Lady
+Holme saw it and said:
+
+"That depends on you, Fritz."
+
+She nestled against him, put her hand over his, and kept on lifting his
+hand softly and then letting it fall on his knee, as she went on:
+
+"That all depends on you."
+
+"How?"
+
+He began to look at her hand and his, following their movements almost
+like a child.
+
+"If we are all right together, obviously all right, very, very
+par-ti-cu-lar-ly all right--voyez vous, mon petit chou?--they will think
+nothing of it. 'Poor Mr. Carey! What a pity the Duke's champagne is so
+good!' That's what they'll say. But if we--you and I--are not on perfect
+terms, if you behave like a bear that's been sitting on a wasps'
+nest--why then they'll say--they'll say--"
+
+"What'll they say?"
+
+"They'll say, 'That was really a most painful scene at the Duke's. She's
+evidently been behaving quite abominably. Those yellow women always bring
+about all the tragedies--'"
+
+"Yellow women!" Lord Holme ejaculated.
+
+He looked hard at his wife. It was evident that his mind was tacking.
+
+"Miss Schley heard what you said to the feller," he added.
+
+"People who never speak hear everything--naturally."
+
+"How d'you mean--never speak? Why, she's full of talk."
+
+"How well she listened to him!" was Lady Holme's mental comment.
+
+"If half the world heard it doesn't matter if you and I choose it
+shouldn't. Unless--"
+
+"Unless what?"
+
+"Unless you did anything last night--afterwards--that will make a
+scandal?"
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"Did you?"
+
+"That's all right."
+
+He applied himself with energy to the toast. Lady Holme recognised, with
+a chagrin which she concealed, that Lord Holme was not going to allow
+himself to be "managed" into any revelation. She recognised it so
+thoroughly that she left the subject at once.
+
+"We'd better forgive and forget," she said. "After all, we are married
+and I suppose we must stick together."
+
+There was a clever note of regret in her voice.
+
+"Are you sorry?" Lord Holme said, with a manner that suggested a
+readiness to be surly.
+
+"For what?"
+
+"That we're married?"
+
+She sat calmly considering.
+
+"Am I? Well, I must think. It's so difficult to be sure. I must compare
+you with other men--"
+
+"If it comes to that, I might do a bit of comparin' too."
+
+"I should be the last to prevent you, old boy. But I'm sure you've often
+done it already and always made up your mind afterwards that she wasn't
+quite up to the marrying mark."
+
+"Who wasn't?"
+
+"The other--horrid creature."
+
+He could not repress a chuckle.
+
+"You're deuced conceited," he said.
+
+"You've made me so."
+
+"I--how?"
+
+"By marrying me first and adoring me afterwards."
+
+They had finished tea and were no longer preoccupied with cups and
+saucers. It was very bright in the room, very silent. Lord Holme looked
+at his wife and remembered how much she was admired by other men, how
+many men would give--whatever men are ready to give--to see her as she
+was just then. It occurred to him that he would have been rather a fool
+if he had yielded to his violent impulse and shut her out of the house
+the previous night.
+
+"You're never to speak to that cad again," he said. "D'you hear?"
+
+"Whisper it close in my ear and I'll try to hear. Your voice is
+so--what's your expression--so infernally soft."
+
+He put his great arm round her.
+
+"D'you hear?"
+
+"I'm trying."
+
+"I'll make you."
+
+Whether Lord Holme succeeded or not, Lady Holme had no opportunity--even
+if she desired it--of speaking to Rupert Carey for some time. He left
+London and went up to the North to stay with his mother. The only person
+he saw before he went was Robin Pierce. He came round to Half Moon Street
+early on the afternoon of the day after the Arkell House Ball. Robin was
+at home and Carey walked in with his usual decision. He was very pale,
+and his face looked very hard. Robin received him coldly and did not ask
+him to sit down. That was not necessary, of course. But Robin was
+standing by the door and did not move back into the room.
+
+"I'm going North to-night," said Carey.
+
+"Are you?"
+
+"Yes. If you don't mind I'll sit down."
+
+Robin said nothing. Carey threw himself into an armchair.
+
+"Going to see the mater. A funny thing--but she's always glad to see me."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Mothers have a knack that way. Lucky for sons like me."
+
+There was intense bitterness in his voice, but there was a sound of
+tenderness too. Robin shut the door but did not sit down.
+
+"Are you going to be in the country long?"
+
+"Don't know. What time did you leave Arkell House last night?"
+
+"Not till after Lady Holme left."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+He was silent for a moment, biting his red moustache.
+
+"Were you in the hall after the last lancers?"
+
+"No."
+
+"You weren't?"
+
+He spoke quickly, with a sort of relief, hesitated then added
+sardonically:
+
+"But of course you know--and much worse than the worst. The art of
+conversation isn't dead yet, whatever the--perhaps you saw me being got
+out?"
+
+"No, I didn't."
+
+"But you do know?"
+
+"Naturally."
+
+"I say, I wish you'd let me have--"
+
+He checked himself abruptly, and muttered:
+
+"Good God! What a brute I am."
+
+He sprang up and walked about the room. Presently he stopped in front of
+the statuette of the "/Danseuse de Tunisie/."
+
+"Is it the woman that does it all, or the fan?" he said. "I don't know.
+Sometimes I think it's one, and sometimes the other. Without the fan
+there's purity, what's meant from the beginning--"
+
+"By whom?" said Robin. "I thought you were an atheist?"
+
+"Oh, God! I don't know what I am."
+
+He turned away from the statuette.
+
+"With the fan there's so much more than purity, than what was meant to
+complete us--as devils--men. But--mothers don't carry the fan. And I'm
+going North to-night."
+
+"Do you mean to say that Lady Holme--?"
+
+Robin's voice was stern.
+
+"Why did she say that to me?"
+
+"What did she say?"
+
+"That she wished to speak to me, to dance with me."
+
+"She said that? How can you know?"
+
+"Oh, I wasn't so drunk that I couldn't hear the voice from Eden. Pierce,
+you know her. She likes you. Tell her to forgive as much as she can. Will
+you? And tell her not to carry the fan again when fools like me are
+about."
+
+And then, without more words, he went out of the room and left Robin
+standing alone.
+
+Robin looked at the statuette, and remembered what Sir Donald Ulford had
+said directly he saw it--"Forgive me, that fan makes that statuette
+wicked."
+
+"Poor old Carey!" he murmured.
+
+His indignation at Carey's conduct, which had been hot, had nearly died
+away.
+
+"If I had told him what she said about him at supper!" he thought.
+
+And then he began to wonder whether Lady Holme had changed her mind on
+that subject. Surely she must have changed it. But one never knew--with
+women. He took up his hat and gloves and went out. If Lady Holme was in
+he meant to give her Carey's message. It was impossible to be jealous of
+Carey now.
+
+Lady Holme was not in.
+
+As Robin walked away from Cadogan Square he was not sure whether he was
+glad or sorry that he had not been able to see her.
+
+After his cup of early morning tea Lord Holme had seemed to be "dear old
+Fritz" again, and Lady Holme felt satisfied with herself despite the
+wagging tongues of London. She knew she had done an incautious thing. She
+knew, too, that Carey had failed her. Her impulse had been to use him as
+a weapon. He had proved a broken reed. And this failure on his part was
+likely to correct for ever her incautious tendencies. That was what she
+told herself, with some contempt for men. She did not tell herself that
+the use to which she had intended to put Carey was an unworthy one. Women
+as beautiful, and as successful in their beauty, as she was seldom tell
+themselves these medicinal truths.
+
+She went about as usual, and on several occasions took Lord Holme with
+her. And though she saw a light of curiosity in many eyes, and saw lips
+almost forced open by the silent questions lurking within many minds, it
+was as she had said it would be. The immediate future had been in Fritz's
+hands, and he had made it safe enough.
+
+He had made it safe. Even the Duchess of Arkell was quite charming, and
+laid the whole burden of blame--where it always ought to be laid, of
+course--upon the man's shoulders. Rupert Carey was quite done for
+socially. Everyone said so. Even Upper Bohemia thought blatant
+intemperance--in a Duke's house--an unnecessary defiance flung at the
+Blue Ribbon Army. Only Amalia Wolfstein, who had never succeeded in
+getting an invitation to Arkell House, remarked that "It was probably the
+champagne's fault. She had always noticed that where the host and hostess
+were dry the champagne was apt to be sweet."
+
+Yes, Fritz had made it safe, but:
+
+Circumstances presently woke in Lady Holme's mind a rather disagreeable
+suspicion that though Fritz had "come round" with such an admirable
+promptitude he had reserved to himself a right to retaliate, that he
+perhaps presumed to fancy that her defiant action, and its very public
+and unpleasant result, gave to him a greater license than he had
+possessed before.
+
+Some days after the early morning tea Lord Holme said to his wife:
+
+"I say, Vi, we've got nothing on the first, have we?"
+
+There was a perceptible pause before she replied.
+
+"Yes, we have. We've accepted a dinner at Brayley House."
+
+Lord Holme looked exceedingly put out.
+
+"Brayley House. What rot!" he exclaimed. "I hate those hind-leg affairs.
+Why on earth did you accept it?"
+
+"Dear boy, you told me to. But why?"
+
+"Why what?"
+
+"Why are you so anxious to be free for the first?"
+
+"Well, it's Miss Schley's /debut/ at the British. Everyone's goin' and
+Laycock says--"
+
+"I'm not very interested in Mr. Laycock's aphorisms, Fritz. I prefer
+yours, I truly do."
+
+"Oh, well, I'm as good as Laycock, I know. Still--"
+
+"You're a thousand times better. And so everybody's going, on Miss
+Schley's first night? I only wish we could, but we can't. Let's put up
+with number two. We're free on the second."
+
+Lord Holme did not look at all appeased.
+
+"That's not the same thing," he said.
+
+"What's the difference? She doesn't change the play, I suppose?"
+
+"No. But naturally on the first night she wants all her friends to come
+up to the scratch, muster round--don't you know?--and give her a hand."
+
+"And she thinks your hand, being enormous, would be valuable? But we
+can't throw over Brayley House."
+
+Lord Holme's square jaw began to work, a sure sign of acute irritation.
+
+"If there's a dull, dreary house in London, it's Brayley House," he
+grumbled. "The cookin's awful--poison--and the wine's worse. Why, last
+time Laycock was there they actually gave him--"
+
+"Poor dear Mr. Laycock! Did they really? But what can we do? I'm sure I
+don't want to be poisoned either. I love life."
+
+She was looking brilliant. Lord Holme began to straddle his legs.
+
+"And there's the box!" he said. "A box next the stage that holds six in a
+row can't stand empty on a first night, eh? It'd throw a damper on the
+whole house."
+
+"I'm afraid I don't quite understand. What box?"
+
+"Hang it all!--ours."
+
+"I didn't know we had a box for this important social function."
+
+Lady Holme really made a great effort to keep the ice out of her voice,
+but one or two fragments floated in nevertheless.
+
+"Well, I tell you I've taken a box and asked Laycock--"
+
+The reiterated mention of this hallowed name was a little too much for
+Lady Holme's equanimity.
+
+"If Mr. Laycock's going the box won't be empty. So that's all right," she
+rejoined. "Mr. Laycock will make enough noise to give the critics a lead.
+And I suppose that's all Miss Schley wants."
+
+"But it isn't!" said Lord Holme, violently letting himself down at the
+knees and shooting himself up again.
+
+"What does she want?"
+
+"She wants you to be there."
+
+"Me! Why?"
+
+"Because she's taken a deuce of a fancy to you."
+
+"Really!"
+
+An iceberg had entered the voice now.
+
+"Yes, thinks you the smartest woman in London, and all that. So you are."
+
+"I'm very sorry, but even the smartest woman in London can't throw over
+the Brayley's. Take another box for the second."
+
+Lord Holme looked fearfully sulky and lounged out of the room.
+
+On the following morning he strode into Lady Holme's boudoir about twelve
+with a radiant face.
+
+"It's all right!" he exclaimed. "Talk of diplomatists! I ought to be an
+ambassador."
+
+He flung himself into a chair, grinning with satisfaction like a
+schoolboy.
+
+"What is it?" asked Lady Holme, looking up from her writing-table.
+
+"I've been to Lady Brayley, explained the whole thing, and got us both
+off. After all, she was a friend of my mother's, and knew me in kilts and
+all that, so she ought to be ready to do me a favour. She looked a bit
+grim, but she's done it. You've--only got to tip her a note of thanks."
+
+"You're mad then, Fritz!"
+
+Lady Holme stood up suddenly.
+
+"Never saner."
+
+He put one hand into the breast pocket of his coat and pulled out an
+envelope.
+
+"Here's what she says to you."
+
+Lady Holme tore the note open.
+
+
+            "BRAYLEY HOUSE, W.
+
+  "DEAR VIOLA,--Holme tells me you made a mistake when you accepted
+  my invitation for the first, and that you have long been pledged
+  to be present on that date at some theatrical performance or other.
+  I am sorry I did not know sooner, but of course I release you with
+  pleasure from your engagement with me, and I have already filled up
+  your places.--Believe me, yours always sincerely,
+
+            "MARTHA BRAYLEY."
+
+
+Lady Holme read this note carefully, folded it up, laid it quietly on the
+writing-table and repeated:
+
+"You're mad, Fritz."
+
+"What d'you mean--mad?"
+
+"You've made Martha Brayley my enemy for life."
+
+"Rubbish!"
+
+"I beg your pardon. And for--for--"
+
+She stopped. It was wiser not to go on. Perhaps her face spoke for her,
+even to so dull an observer as Lord Holme, for he suddenly said, with a
+complete change of tone:
+
+"I forgave you about Carey."
+
+"Oh, I see! You want a /quid pro quo/. Thank you, Fritz."
+
+"Don't forget to tip Lady Brayley a note of thanks," he said rather
+loudly, getting up from his chair.
+
+"Oh, thanks! You certainly ought to be an ambassador--at the court of
+some savage monarch."
+
+He said nothing, but walked out of the room whistling the refrain about
+Ina.
+
+When he had gone Lady Holme sat down and wrote two notes. One was to Lady
+Brayley and was charmingly apologetic, saying that the confusion was
+entirely owing to Fritz's muddle-headedness, and that she was in despair
+at her misfortune--which was almost literally true. The other was to Sir
+Donald Ulford, begging him to join them in their box on the first, and
+asking whether it was possible to persuade Mr. and Mrs. Leo Ulford to
+come with him. If he thought so she would go at once and leave cards on
+Mrs. Ulford, whom she was longing to know.
+
+Both notes went off by hand before lunch.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE Ulfords accepted for the first. Lady Holme left cards on Mrs. Leo and
+told her husband that the box was filled up. He received the information
+with indifference. So long as his wife was there to please Miss Schley,
+and Mr. Laycock to "give her a hand and show 'em all whether she was
+popular," he was satisfied. Having gained his point, he was once again in
+excellent humour. Possibly Lady Holme would have appreciated his large
+gaieties more if she had not divined their cause. But she expressed no
+dissatisfaction with them, and indeed increased them by her own brilliant
+serenity during the days that intervened between the Martha Brayley
+incident and the first night.
+
+Lord Holme had no suspicion that during these days she was inwardly
+debating whether she would go to the theatre or not.
+
+It would be very easy to be unwell. She was going out incessantly and
+could be over-fatigued. She could have woman's great stand-by in moments
+of crisis--a bad attack of neuralgia. It was the simplest matter in the
+world. The only question was--all things considered, was it worth while?
+By "all things considered" she meant Leo Ulford. The touch of Fritz in
+him made him a valuable ally at this moment. Fritz and Miss Schley were
+not going to have things quite all their own way. And then Mrs. Leo! She
+would put Fritz next the ear-trumpet. She had enough sense of humour to
+smile to herself at the thought of him there. On the whole, she fancied
+the neuralgia would not attack her at the critical instant.
+
+Only when she thought of what her husband had said about the American's
+desire for her presence did she hesitate again. Her suspicions were
+aroused. Miss Schley was not anxious that she should be conspicuously in
+the theatre merely because she was the smartest woman in London. That was
+certain. Besides, she was not the smartest woman in London. She was far
+too well-born to be that in these great days of the /demi-mondaine/. She
+remembered Robin Pierce's warning at the Arkell House ball--"Consider
+yourselves enemies for no reasons or secret woman's reasons. It's safer."
+
+When do women want the bulky, solid reasons obtusely demanded by men
+before they can be enemies? Where man insists on an insult, a blow, they
+will be satisfied with a look--perhaps not even at them but only at the
+skirt of their gown--with a turn of the head, with nothing at all. For
+what a man calls nothing can be the world and all that there is in it to
+a woman. Lady Holme knew that she and the American had been enemies since
+the moment when the latter had moved with the tiny steps that so oddly
+caricatured her own individual walk down the stairs at the Carlton. She
+wanted no tiresome reasons; nor did Miss Schley. Robin was right, of
+course. He understood women. But then--?
+
+Should she go to the theatre?
+
+The night came and she went. Whether an extraordinary white lace gown,
+which arrived from Paris in the morning, and fitted too perfectly for
+words, had anything to do with the eventual decision was not known to
+anybody but herself.
+
+Boxes are no longer popular in London except at the Opera. The British
+Theatre was new, and the management, recognising that people prefer
+stalls, had given up all the available space to them, and only left room
+for two large boxes, which faced each other on a level with the dress
+circle and next the stage. Lord Holme had one. Mrs. Wolfstein had taken
+the other.
+
+Miss Schley's personal success in London brought together a rather
+special audience. There were some of the usual people who go to first
+nights--critics, ladies who describe dresses, fashionable lawyers and
+doctors. But there were also numbers of people who are scarcely ever seen
+on these occasions, people who may be found in the ground and grand tier
+boxes at Covent Garden during the summer season. These thronged the
+stalls, and every one of them was a dear friend of Lady Holme's. Among
+them were Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Sally Perceval with her
+magnificently handsome and semi-idiotic husband, old Lady Blower, in a
+green cap that suggested the bathing season, Robin Pierce and Mr. Bry.
+Smart Americans were scattered all over the house. Most of them had
+already seen the play in New York during the preceding winter, and nearly
+everyone in the stalls had seen the French original in Paris. The French
+piece had been quite shocking and quite delicious. Every Royalty /de
+passage/ in Paris had been to see it, and one wandering monarch had gone
+three nights running, and had laughed until his gentleman-in-waiting
+thought the heir to his throne was likely to succeed much sooner than was
+generally expected.
+
+The Holmes came in early. Lady Holme hated arriving anywhere early, but
+Lord Holme was in such a prodigious fuss about being in plenty of time to
+give Miss Schley a "rousin' welcome," that she yielded to his bass
+protestations, and had the satisfaction of entering their box at least
+seven minutes before the curtain went up. The stalls, of course, were
+empty, and as they gradually filled she saw the faces of her friends
+looking up at her with an amazement that under other circumstances might
+have been amusing, but under these was rather irritating. Mr. Laycock
+arrived two minutes after they did, and was immediately engaged in a
+roaring conversation by Fritz. He was a man who talked a great deal
+without having anything to say, who had always had much success with
+women, perhaps because he had always treated them very badly, who
+dressed, danced and shot well, and who had never, even for a moment,
+really cared for anyone but himself. A common enough type.
+
+Sir Donald appeared next, looking even more ghostly than usual. He sat
+down by Lady Holme, a little behind her. He seemed depressed, but the
+expression in his pale blue eyes when they first rested upon her made her
+thoroughly realise one thing--that it was one of her conquering nights.
+His eyes travelled quickly from her face to her throat, to her gown. She
+wore no jewels. Sir Donald had a fastidious taste in beauty--the taste
+that instinctively rejects excess of any kind. Her appeal to it had never
+been so great as to-night. She knew it, and felt that she had never found
+Sir Donald so attractive as to-night.
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Ulford came in just as the curtain was going up, and the
+introductions had to be gone through with a certain mysterious caution,
+and the sitting arrangements made with as little noise as possible. Lady
+Holme managed them deftly. Mr. Laycock sat nearest the stage, then Leo
+Ulford next to her, on her right. Sir Donald was on her other side, Mrs.
+Leo sat in the place of honour, with Lord Holme between her and Sir
+Donald. She was intensely pink. Even her gown was of that colour, and she
+wore a pink aigrette in her hair, fastened with a diamond ornament. Her
+thin, betraying throat was clasped by the large dog-collar she had worn
+at Arkell House. She cast swift, bird-like glances, full of a sort of
+haggard inquiry, towards Lady Holme as she settled down in her arm-chair
+in the corner. Lord Holme looked at her and at her ear-trumpet, and Lady
+Holme was glad she had decided not to have neuralgia. There are little
+compensations about all women even in the tiresome moments of their
+lives. Whether this moment was going to be tiresome or not she could not
+yet decide.
+
+The Wolfstein party had come in at the same time as the Leo Ulfords, and
+the box opposite presented an interesting study of Jewish types. For Mrs.
+Wolfstein and "Henry" were accompanied by four immensely rich
+compatriots, three of whom were members of the syndicate that was
+"backing" Miss Schley. The fourth was the wife of one of them, and a
+cousin of Henry's, whom she resembled, but on a greatly enlarged scale.
+Both she and Amalia blazed with jewels, and both were slightly
+overdressed and looked too animated. Lady Holme saw Sir Donald glance at
+them, and then again at her, and began to think more definitely that the
+evening would not be tiresome.
+
+Leo Ulford seemed at present forced into a certain constraint by the
+family element in the box. He looked at his father sideways, then at Lady
+Holme, drummed one hand on his knee, and was evidently uncertain of
+himself. During the opening scene of the play he found an opportunity to
+whisper to Lady Holme:
+
+"I never can talk when pater's there!"
+
+She whispered back:
+
+"We mustn't talk now."
+
+Then she looked towards the stage with apparent interest. Mrs. Leo sat
+sideways with her trumpet lifted up towards her ear, Lord Holme had his
+eyes fixed on the stage, and held his hands ready for the "rousin'
+welcome." Mr. Laycock, at the end of the row, was also all attention.
+Lady Holme glanced from one to the other, and murmured to Sir Donald with
+a smile:
+
+"I think we shall find to-night that the claque is not abolished in
+England."
+
+He raised his eyebrows and looked distressed.
+
+"I have very little hope of her acting," he murmured back.
+
+Lady Holme put her fan to her lips.
+
+"'Sh! No sacrilege!" she said in an under voice.
+
+She saw Leo Ulford shoot an angry glance at his father. Mrs. Wolfstein
+nodded and smiled at her from the opposite box, and it struck Lady Holme
+that her smile was more definitely malicious than usual, and that her
+large black eyes were full of a sort of venomous anticipation. Mrs.
+Wolfstein had at all times an almost frightfully expressive face.
+To-night it had surely discarded every shred of reticence, and proclaimed
+an eager expectation of something which Lady Holme could not divine, but
+which must surely be very disagreeable to her. What could it possibly be?
+And was it in any way connected with Miss Schley's anxiety that she
+should be there that night? She began to wish that the American would
+appear, but Miss Schley had nothing to do in the first act till near the
+end, and then had only one short scene to bring down the curtain. Lady
+Holme knew this because she had seen the play in Paris. She thought the
+American version very dull. The impropriety had been removed and with it
+all the fun. People began to yawn and to assume the peculiar blank
+expression--the bankrupt face--that is indicative of thwarted
+anticipation. Only the Americans who had seen the piece in New York
+preserved their lively looks and an appearance of being on the /qui
+vive/.
+
+Lord Holme's blunt brown features gradually drooped, seemed to become
+definitely elongated. As time went on he really began to look almost
+lantern-jawed. He bent forward and tried to catch Mr. Laycock's eye and
+to telegraph an urgent question, but only succeeded in meeting the surly
+blue eyes of Leo Ulford, whom he met to-night for the first time. In his
+despair he turned towards Mrs. Leo, and at once encountered the
+ear-trumpet. He glanced at it with apprehension, and, after a moment of
+vital hesitation, was about to pour into it the provender, "Have you any
+notion when she's comin' on?" when there was a sudden rather languid
+slapping of applause, and he jerked round hastily to find Miss Schley
+already on the stage and welcomed without any of the assistance which he
+was specially there to give. He lifted belated hands, but met a glance
+from his wife which made him drop them silently. There was a satire in
+her eyes, a sort of humorous, half-urging patronage that pierced the hide
+of his self-satisfied and lethargic mind. She seemed sitting there ready
+to beat time to his applause, nod her head to it as to a childish strain
+of jigging music. And this apparent preparation for a semi-comic,
+semi-pitiful benediction sent his hands suddenly to his knees.
+
+He stared at the stage. Miss Schley was looking wonderfully like Viola,
+he thought, on the instant, more like than she did in real life; like
+Viola gone to the bad, though become a very reticent, yet very definite,
+/cocotte/. There was not much in the scene, but Miss Schley, without
+apparent effort and with a profound demureness, turned the dulness of it
+into something that was--not French, certainly not that--but that was
+quite as outrageous as the French had been, though in a different way;
+something without definite nationality, but instinct with the slyness of
+acute and unscrupulous womankind. The extraordinary thing was the
+marvellous resemblance this acute and unscrupulous womanhood bore to Lady
+Holme's, even through all its obvious difference from hers. All her
+little mannerisms of voice, look, manner and movement, were there but
+turned towards commonness, even towards a naive but very self-conscious
+impropriety. Had she been a public performer instead of merely a woman of
+the world, the whole audience must have at once recognised the imitation.
+As it was, her many friends in the house noticed it, and during the short
+progress of the scene various heads were turned in her direction, various
+faces glanced up at the big box in which she sat, leaning one arm on the
+ledge, and looking towards Miss Schley with an expression of quiet
+observation--a little indifferent--on her white face. Even Sir Donald,
+who was next to her, and who once--in the most definite moment of Miss
+Schley's ingenious travesty--looked at her for an instant, could not
+discern that she was aware of what was amusing or enraging all her
+acquaintances.
+
+Naturally she had grasped the situation at once, had discovered at once
+why Miss Schley was anxious for her to be there. As she sat in the box
+looking on at this gross impertinence, she seemed to herself to be
+watching herself after a long /degringolade/, which had brought her, not
+to the gutter, but to the smart restaurant, the smart music-hall, the
+smart night club; the smart everything else that is beyond the borderland
+of even a lax society. This was Miss Schley's comment upon her. The sting
+of it lay in this fact, that it followed immediately upon the heels of
+the unpleasant scene at Arkell House. Otherwise, she thought it would not
+have troubled her. Now it did trouble her. She felt not only indignant
+with Miss Schley. She felt also secretly distressed in a more subtle way.
+Miss Schley's performance was calculated, coming at this moment, to make
+her world doubtful just when it had been turned from doubt. A good
+caricature fixes the attention upon the oddities, or the absurdities,
+latent in the original. But this caricature did more. It suggested hidden
+possibilities which she, by her own indiscreet action at the ball, had
+made perhaps to seem probabilities to many people.
+
+Here, before her friends, was set a woman strangely like her, but
+evidently a bad woman. Lady Holme was certain that the result of Miss
+Schley's performance would be that were she to do things now which, done
+before the Arkell House ball and this first night, would not have been
+noticed, or would have been merely smiled at, they would be commented
+upon with acrimony, exaggerated, even condemned.
+
+Miss Schley was turning upon her one of those mirrors which distorts by
+enlarging. Society would be likely to see her permanently distorted, and
+not only in mannerisms but in character.
+
+It happened that this fact was specially offensive to her on this
+particular evening, and at this particular moment of her life.
+
+While she sat there and watched the scene run its course, and saw,
+without seeming to see, the effect it had upon those whom she knew well
+in the house--saw Mrs. Wolfstein's eager delight in it, Lady Manby's
+broad amusement, Robin Pierce's carefully-controlled indignation, Mr.
+Bry's sardonic and always cold gratification, Lady Cardington's
+surprised, half-tragic wonder--she was oscillating between two courses,
+one a course of reserve, of stern self-control and abnegation, the other
+a course of defiance, of reckless indulgence of the strong temper that
+dwelt within her, and that occasionally showed itself for a moment, as it
+had on the evening of Miss Filberte's fiasco. That temper was flaming now
+unseen. Was she going to throw cold water over the flame, or to fan it?
+She did not know.
+
+When the curtain fell, the critics, who sometimes seem to enjoy
+personally what they call very sad and disgraceful in print, were smiling
+at one another. The blank faces of the men about town in the stalls were
+shining almost unctuously. The smart Americans were busily saying to
+everyone, "Didn't we say so?" The whole house was awake. Miss Schley
+might not be much of an actress. Numbers of people were already bustling
+about to say that she could not act at all. But she had banished dulness.
+She had shut the yawning lips, and stopped that uneasy cough which is the
+expression of the relaxed mind rather than of the relaxed throat.
+
+Lady Holme sat back a little in the box.
+
+"What d'you think of her?" she said to Sir Donald. "I think she's rather
+piquant, not anywhere near Granier, of course, but still--"
+
+"I think her performance entirely odious," he said, with an unusual
+emphasis that was almost violent. "Entirely odious."
+
+He got up from his seat, striking his thin fingers against the palms of
+his hands.
+
+"Vulgar and offensive," he said, almost as if to himself, and with a sort
+of passion. "Vulgar and offensive!"
+
+Suddenly he turned away and went out of the box.
+
+"I say--"
+
+Lady Holme, who had been watching Sir Donald's disordered exit, looked
+round to Leo.
+
+"I say--" he repeated. "What's up with pater?"
+
+"He doesn't seem to be enjoying the play."
+
+Leo Ulford looked unusually grave, even thoughtful, as if he were
+pondering over some serious question. He kept his blue eyes fixed upon
+Lady Holme. At last he said, in a voice much lower than usual:
+
+"Poor chap!"
+
+"Who's a poor chap?"
+
+Leo jerked his head towards the door.
+
+"Your father? Why?"
+
+"Why--at his age!"
+
+The last words were full of boyish contempt.
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+"Yes, you do. To be like that at his age. What's the good? As if--" He
+smiled slowly at her. "I'm glad I'm young," he said.
+
+"I'm glad you're young too," she answered. "But you're quite wrong about
+Sir Donald."
+
+She let her eyes rest on his. He shook his head.
+
+"No, I'm not. I guessed it that day at the Carlton. All through lunch he
+looked at you."
+
+"But what has all this to do with Miss Schley's performance?"
+
+"Because she's something like you, but low down, where you'd never go."
+
+He drew his chair a little closer to hers.
+
+"Would you?" he added, almost in a whisper.
+
+Mr. Laycock, who was in raptures over Miss Schley's performance, had got
+up to speak to Fritz, but found the latter being steadily hypnotised by
+Mrs. Leo's trumpet, which went up towards his mouth whenever he opened
+it. He bellowed distracted nothings but could not make her hear,
+obtaining no more fortunate result than a persistent flutter of pink
+eyelids, and a shrill, reiterated "The what? The what?"
+
+A sharp tap came presently on the box door, and Mrs. Wolfstein's painted
+face appeared. Lord Holme sprang up with undisguised relief.
+
+"What d'you think of Pimpernel? Ah, Mr. Laycock--I heard your faithful
+hands."
+
+"Stunnin'!" roared Lord Holme, "simply stunnin'!"
+
+"Stunnin'! stunnin'!" exclaimed Mr. Laycock; "Rippin'! There's no other
+word. Simply rippin'!"
+
+"The what? The what?" cried Mrs. Ulford.
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein bent down, with expansive affection, over Lady Holme's
+chair, and clasped the left hand which Lady Holme carelessly raised to a
+level with her shoulder.
+
+"You dear person! Nice of you to come, and in such a gown too! The angels
+wear white lace thrown together by Victorine--it is Victorine? I was
+certain!--I'm sure. D'you like Pimpernel?"
+
+Her too lustrous eyes--even Mrs. Wolfstein's eyes looked
+over-dressed--devoured Lady Holme, and her large, curving features were
+almost riotously interrogative.
+
+"Yes," Lady Holme said. "Quite."
+
+"She's startled everybody."
+
+"Startled!--why?"
+
+"Oh, well--she has! There's money in it, don't you think?"
+
+"Henry," who had accompanied his wife, and who was standing sideways at
+the back of the box looking like a thief in the night, came a step
+forward at the mention of money.
+
+"I'm afraid I'm no judge of that. Your husband would know better."
+
+"Plenty of money," said "Henry," in a low voice that seemed to issue from
+the bridge of his nose; "it ought to bring a good six thousand into the
+house for the four weeks. That's--for Miss Schley--for the Syndicate--ten
+per cent. on the gross, and twenty-five per cent.--"
+
+He found himself in mental arithmetic.
+
+"The--swan with the golden eggs!" said Lady Holme, lightly, turning once
+more to Leo Ulford. "You mustn't kill Miss Schley."
+
+Mrs. Wolfstein looked at Mr. Laycock and murmured to him:
+
+"Pimpernel does any killing that's going about--for herself. What d'you
+say, Franky?"
+
+They went out of the box together, followed by "Henry," who was still
+buzzing calculations, like a Jewish bee.
+
+Lord Holme resolutely tore himself from the ear-trumpet, and was
+preparing to follow, with the bellowed excuse that he was "sufferin' from
+toothache" and had been ordered to "do as much smokin' as possible," when
+the curtain rose on the second act.
+
+Miss Schley was engaged to a supper-party that evening and did not wish
+to be late. Lord Holme sat down again looking scarcely pleasant.
+
+"Do as much--the what?" cried Mrs. Ulford, holding the trumpet at right
+angles to her pink face.
+
+Leo Ulford leant backwards and hissed "Hush!" at her. She looked at him
+and then at Lady Holme, and a sudden expression of old age came into her
+bird-like face and seemed to overspread her whole body. She dropped the
+trumpet and touched the diamonds that glittered in the front of her low
+gown with trembling hands.
+
+Mr. Laycock slipped into the box when the curtain had been up two or
+three minutes, but Sir Donald did not return.
+
+"I b'lieve he's bolted," Leo whispered to Lady Holme. "Just like him."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Oh!--I'm here, for one thing."
+
+He looked at her victoriously.
+
+"You'll have a letter from him to-morrow. Poor old chap!"
+
+He spoke contemptuously.
+
+For the first time Lord Holme seemed consciously and unfavourably
+observant of his wife and Leo. His under-jaw began to move. But Miss
+Schley came on to the stage again, and he thrust his head eagerly
+forward.
+
+During the rest of the evening Miss Schley did not relax her ingenious
+efforts of mimicry, but she took care not to make them too prominent. She
+had struck her most resonant note in the first act, and during the two
+remaining acts she merely kept her impersonation to its original lines.
+Lady Holme watched the whole performance imperturbably, but before the
+final curtain fell she knew that she was not going to throw cold water on
+that flame which was burning within her. Fritz's behaviour, perhaps,
+decided which of the two actions should be carried out--the douching or
+the fanning. Possibly Leo Ulford had something to say in the matter too.
+Or did the faces of friends below in the stalls play their part in the
+silent drama which moved step by step with the spoken drama on the stage?
+Lady Holme did not ask questions of herself. When Mr. Laycock and Fritz
+were furiously performing the duties of a claque at the end of the play,
+she got up smiling, and nodded to Mrs. Wolfstein in token of her pleasure
+in Miss Schley's success, her opinion that it had been worthily earned.
+As she nodded she touched one hand with the other, making a silent
+applause that Mrs. Wolfstein and all her friends might see. Then she let
+Leo Ulford put on her cloak and called pretty words down Mrs. Leo's
+trumpet, all the while nearly deafened by Fritz's demonstrations, which
+even outran Mr. Laycock's.
+
+When at last they died away she said to Leo:
+
+"We are going on to the Elwyns. Shall you be there?"
+
+He stood over her, while Mrs. Ulford watched him, drooping her head
+sideways.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"We can talk it all over quietly. Fritz!"
+
+"What's that about the Elwyns?" said Lord Holme.
+
+"I was telling Mr. Ulford that we are going on there."
+
+"I'm not. Never heard of it."
+
+Lady Holme was on the point of retorting that it was he who had told her
+to accept the invitation on the ground that "the Elwyns always do you
+better than anyone in London, whether they're second-raters or not," but
+a look in Leo Ulford's eyes checked her.
+
+"Very well," she said. "Go to the club if you like; but I must peep in
+for five minutes. Mrs. Ulford, didn't you think Miss Schley rather
+delicious--?"
+
+She went out of the box with one hand on a pink arm, talking gently into
+the trumpet.
+
+"You goin' to the Elwyns?" said Lord Holme, gruffly, to Leo Ulford as
+they got their coats and prepared to follow.
+
+"Depends on my wife. If she's done up--"
+
+"Ah!" said Lord Holme, striking a match, and holding out his cigarette
+case, regardless of regulations.
+
+A momentary desire to look in at the Elwyns' possessed him. Then he
+thought of a supper-party and forgot it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+MRS. WOLFSTEIN was right. There was money in Miss Schley's performance.
+Her sly impropriety appealed with extraordinary force to the peculiar
+respectability characteristic of the British temperament, and her
+celebrity, hitherto mainly social, was suddenly and enormously increased.
+Already a popular person, she became a popular actress, and was soon as
+well-known to the world in the streets and the suburbs as to the world in
+the drawing-rooms of Mayfair. And this public celebrity greatly increased
+the value that was put upon her in private--especially the value put upon
+her by men.
+
+The average man adores being connected openly with the woman who is the
+rage of the moment. It flatters his vanity and makes him feel good all
+over. It even frequently turns his head and makes him almost as
+intoxicated as a young girl with adulation received at her first ball.
+
+The combination of Miss Schley herself and Miss Schley's celebrity--or
+notoriety--had undoubtedly turned Lord Holme's head. Perhaps he had not
+the desire to conceal the fact. Certainly he had not the finesse. He
+presented his turned head to the world with an audacious simplicity that
+was almost laughable, and that had in it an element of boyishness not
+wholly unattractive to those who looked on--the casual ones to whom even
+the tragedies of a highly-civilised society bring but a quiet and cynical
+amusement.
+
+Lady Holme was not one of these. Her strong temper was token of a vivid
+temperament. Till now this vivid temperament had been rocked in the
+cradle of an easy, a contented, a very successful life. Such storms as
+had come to her had quickly passed away. The sun had never been far off.
+Her egoism had been constantly flattered. Her will had been perpetually
+paramount. Even the tyranny of Lord Holme had been but as the tyranny of
+a selfish, thoughtless, pleasure-seeking boy who, after all, was faithful
+to her and was fond of her. His temperamental indifference to any
+feelings but his own had been often concealed and overlaid by his strong
+physical passion for his wife's beauty, his profound satisfaction in
+having carried off and in possessing a woman admired and sought by many
+others.
+
+Suddenly life presented to Lady Holme its seamy side; Fate attacking her
+in her woman's vanity, her egoism, even in her love. The vision startled.
+The blow stung. She was conscious of confusion, of cloud, then of a
+terrible orderliness, of a clear light. In the confusion she seemed to
+hear voices never heard before, voices that dared to jeer at her; in the
+cloud to see phantoms of gigantic size menacing her, impending over her.
+The orderliness, the clear light were more frightful to her. They left
+less to her imagination; had, as it were, no ragged edges. In them she
+faced a definite catastrophe, saw it whole, as one sees a near object in
+the magical atmosphere of the East, outlined with burning blue, quivering
+with relentless gold. She saw herself in the dust, pelted, mocked at.
+
+That seemed at first to be incredible. But she saw it so plainly that she
+could not even pretend to herself that she was deceived by some unusual
+play of light or combination of shadows. What she saw--was:
+
+Her husband had thrown off his allegiance to her and transferred his
+admiration, perhaps his affection, to the woman who had most deftly and
+delicately insulted her in the face of all her world. And he had done
+this with the most abominable publicity. That was what she saw in a clear
+light like the light of the East. That was what sent a lash across her
+temperament, scarring it perhaps, but waking it into all it could ever
+have of life. In each woman there is hidden a second woman, more fierce
+and tender, more evil and good, more strong and fervent than the woman
+who hides her in the ordinary hours of life; a woman who weeps blood
+where the other woman weeps tears, who strikes with a flaming sword where
+the other woman strikes with a willow wand.
+
+This woman now rose up in Lady Holme, rose up to do battle.
+
+The laughing, frivolous world was all unconscious of her. Lord Holme was
+unconscious of her. But she was at last fully conscious of herself.
+
+This woman remembered Robin Pierce's odd belief and the light words with
+which she had chastised it. He had persistently kept faith in, and sought
+for, a far-away being. But she was a being of light and glory. His kernel
+of the husk was still a siren, but a siren with a heart, with an
+exquisite imagination, with a fragrance of dreams about her, a lilt of
+eternal music in her voice, the beaming, wonder of things unearthly in
+her eyes. Poor Robin! Lady Holme found it in her heart to pity him as she
+realised herself. But then she turned her pity aside and concentrated it
+elsewhere. The egoism of her was not dead though the hidden woman had
+sprung up in vivid life. Her intellect was spurred into energy by the
+suffering of her pride and of her heart. Memory was restless and full of
+the passion of recall.
+
+She remembered the night when she softly drew up the hood of her
+dressing-gown above her head and, rocking herself to and fro, murmured
+the "Allah-Akbar" of a philosophic fatalist--"I will live for the day. I
+will live for the night." What an absurd patter that was on the lips of a
+woman. And she remembered the conversation with Fritz that had preceded
+her monologue. She had asked him then whether he could love her if her
+beauty were taken from her. It had never occurred to her that while her
+beauty still remained her spell upon him might be weakened, might be
+broken. That it was broken now she did not say to herself. All she did
+say to herself was that she must strike an effective blow against this
+impertinent woman. She had some pride but not enough to keep her passive.
+She was not one of those women who would rather lose all they have than
+struggle to keep it. She meant to struggle, but she had no wish that the
+world should know what she was doing. Pride rose in her when she thought
+of cold eyes watching the battle, cold voices commenting on it--Amalia
+Wolfstein's eyes, Mr. Bry's voice, a hundred other eyes and voices. Her
+quickened intellect, her woman's heart would teach her to be subtle. The
+danger lay in her temper. But since the scene at Arkell House she had
+thoroughly realised its impetuosity and watched it warily as one watches
+an enemy. She did not intend to be ruined by anything within her. The
+outside chances of life were many enough and deadly enough to deal with.
+Strength and daring were needed to ward them off. The chances that had
+their origin within the soul, the character--not really chances at
+all--must be controlled, foreseen, forestalled.
+
+And yet she had not douched the flame of defiance which she had felt
+burning within her on the night of Pimpernel Schley's first appearance on
+the London stage. She had fanned it. At the Elwyns' ball she had fanned
+it. Temper had led her that night. Deliberately, and knowing perfectly
+well who was her guide, she had let it lead her. She had been like a
+human being who says, "To do this will be a sin. Very well, I choose to
+sin. But I will sin carefully." At the Elwyns she had discovered why her
+husband had not come with her. She had stayed late to please Leo Ulford.
+Mr. Laycock had come in about two in the morning and had described to Leo
+the festivity devised by Lord Holme in honour of Miss Schley, at which he
+had just been present. And Leo Ulford had repeated the description to
+her. She had deceived him into thinking that she had known of the
+supper-party and approved of it. But, after this deception, she had given
+a looser rein to her temper. She had let herself go, careless whether she
+set the poor pink eyelids of Mrs. Leo fluttering or not.
+
+The hint of Fritz which she recognised in Leo Ulford had vaguely
+attracted her to him from the first. How her world would have laughed at
+such a domestic sentiment! She found herself wondering whether it were
+Miss Schley's physical resemblance to her which had first attracted
+Fritz, the touch of his wife in a woman who was not his wife and who was
+what men call "a rascal." Perhaps Fritz loved Miss Schley's imitation of
+her. She thought a great deal about that--turning it over and over in her
+mind, bringing to bear on it the white light of her knowledge of her
+husband's character. Did he see in the American his wife transformed,
+made common, sly, perhaps wicked, set on the outside edge of decent life,
+or further--over the border? And did he delight in that? If so, ought she
+not to--? Then her mind was busy. Should she change? If herself changed
+were his ideal, why not give him what he wanted? Why let another woman
+give it to him? But at this point she recognised a fact recognised by
+thousands of women with exasperation, sometimes with despair--that men
+would often hate in their wives the thing that draws them to women not
+their wives. The Pimpernel Schleys of the world know this masculine
+propensity of seeking different things--opposites, even--in the wife and
+the woman beyond the edge of the hearthstone, a propensity perhaps more
+tragic to wives than any other that exists in husbands. And having
+recognised this fact, Lady Holme knew that it would be worse than useless
+for her to imitate Miss Schley's imitation of her. Then, travelling along
+the road of thought swiftly as women in such a case always travel, she
+reached another point. She began to consider the advice of Robin Pierce,
+given before she had begun to feel with such intensity, to consider it as
+a soldier might consider a plan of campaign drawn up by another.
+
+Should she, instead of descending, of following the demure steps of the
+American to the lower places, strive to ascend?
+
+Could she ascend? Was Robin Pierce right? She thought for a long time
+about his conception of her. The singing woman; would she be the most
+powerful enemy that could confront Miss Schley? And, if she would be,
+could the singing woman be made continuous in the speech and the actions
+of the life without music? She remembered a man she had known who
+stammered when he spoke, but never stammered when he sang. And she
+thought she resembled this man. Robin Pierce had always believed that she
+could speak without the stammer even as she sang without it. She had
+never cared to. She had trusted absolutely in her beauty. Now her trust
+was shaken. She thought of the crutch.
+
+Realising herself she had said within herself, "Poor Robin!" seeing
+perhaps the tigress where he saw the angel. Now she asked herself whether
+the angel could conquer where the tigress might fail. People had come
+round her like beggars who have heard the chink of gold and she had
+showed them an empty purse. Could she show them something else? And if
+she could, would her husband join the beggars? Would he care to have even
+one piece of gold?
+
+Whether Lord Holme's obvious infatuation had carried him very far she did
+not know. She did not stop to ask. A woman capable, as she was, of
+retrospective jealousy, an egoist accustomed to rule, buffeted in heart
+and pride, is swift not sluggish. And then how can one know these things?
+Jealousy rushes because it is ignorant.
+
+Lord Holme and she were apparently on good terms. She was subtle, he was
+careless. As she did not interfere with him his humour was excellent. She
+had carried self-control so far as never to allude to the fact that she
+knew about the supper-party. Yet it had actually got into the papers.
+Paragraphs had been written about a wonderful ornament of ice,
+representing the American eagle perched on the wrist of a glittering
+maiden, which had stood in the middle of the table. Of course she had
+seen them, and of course Lord Holme thought she had not seen them as she
+had never spoken of them. He went his way rejoicing, and there seemed to
+be sunshine in the Cadogan Square house. And meanwhile the world was
+smiling at the apparent triumph of impertinence, and wondering how long
+it would last, how far it would go. The few who were angry--Sir Donald
+was one of them--were in a mean minority.
+
+Robin Pierce was angry too, but not with so much single-heartedness as
+was Sir Donald. It could not quite displease him if the Holmes drifted
+apart. Yet he was fond enough of Lady Holme, and he was subtle enough, to
+be sorry for any sorrow of hers, and to understand it--at any rate,
+partially--without much explanation. Perhaps he would have been more
+sorry if Leo Ulford had not come into Lady Holme's life, and if the
+defiance within her had not driven her into an intimacy that distressed
+Mrs. Leo and puzzled Sir Donald.
+
+Robin's time in London was very nearly at an end. The season was at its
+height. Every day was crowded with engagements. It was almost impossible
+to find a quiet moment even to give to a loved one. But Robin was
+determined to have at least one hour with Lady Holme before he started
+for Italy. He told her so, and begged her to arrange it. She put him off
+again and again, then at last made an engagement, then broke it. In her
+present condition of mind to break faith with a man was a pleasure with a
+bitter savour. But Robin was not to be permanently avoided. He had
+obstinacy. He meant to have his hour, and perhaps Lady Holme always
+secretly meant that he should have it. At any rate she made another
+appointment and kept it.
+
+She came one afternoon to his house in Half Moon Street. She had never
+been there before. She had never meant to go there. To do so was an
+imprudence. That fact was another of the pleasures with a bitter savour.
+
+Robin met her at the head of the stairs, with an air of still excitement
+not common in his look and bearing. He followed her into the blue room
+where Sir Donald had talked with Carey. The "/Danseuse de Tunisie/" still
+presided over it, holding her little marble fan. The open fireplace was
+filled with roses. The tea-table was already set by the great square
+couch. Robin shut the door and took out a matchbox.
+
+"I am going to make tea," he said.
+
+"Bachelor fashion?"
+
+She sat down on the couch and looked round quickly, taking in all the
+details of the room. He saw her eyes rest on the woman with the fan, but
+she said nothing about it. He lit a silver spirit lamp and then sat down
+beside her.
+
+"At last!" he said.
+
+Lady Holme leaned back in her corner. She was dressed in black, with a
+small, rather impertinent black toque, in which one pale blue wing of a
+bird stood up. Her face looked gay and soft, and Robin, who had cunning,
+recognised that quality of his in her.
+
+"I oughtn't to be here."
+
+"Absurd. Why not?"
+
+"Fritz has a jealous temperament."
+
+She spoke with a simple naturalness that moved the diplomat within him to
+a strong admiration.
+
+"You can act far better than Miss Schley," he said, with intentional
+bluntness.
+
+"I love her acting."
+
+"I'm going away. I shan't see you for an age. Don't give me a theatrical
+performance to-day."
+
+"Can a woman do anything else?"
+
+"Yes. She can be a woman."
+
+"That's stupid--or terrible. What a dear little lamp that is! I like your
+room."
+
+Robin looked at the blue-grey linen on the walls, at the pale blue wing
+in her hat, then at her white face.
+
+"Viola," he said, leaning forward, "it's bad to waste anything in this
+life, but the worst thing of all is to waste unhappiness. If I could
+teach you to be niggardly of your tears!"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+She spoke with sudden sharpness.
+
+"I never cry. Nothing's worth a tear," she added.
+
+"Yes, some things are. But not what you are going to weep for."
+
+Her face had changed. The gaiety had gone out of it, and it looked
+hesitating.
+
+"You think I am going to shed tears?" she said. "Why?"
+
+"I am glad you let me tell you. For the loss of nothing--a coin that
+never came out of the mint, that won't pass current anywhere."
+
+"I've lost nothing," she exclaimed, "nothing. You're talking nonsense."
+
+He made no reply, but looked at the small, steady flame of the lamp. She
+followed his eyes, and, when he saw that she was looking at it too, he
+said:
+
+"Isn't a little, steady flame like that beautiful?"
+
+She laughed.
+
+"When it means tea--yes. Does it mean tea?"
+
+"If you can wait a few minutes."
+
+"I suppose I must. Have you heard anything of Mr. Carey?"
+
+Robin looked at her narrowly.
+
+"What made you think of him just then?"
+
+"I don't know. Being here, I suppose. He often comes here, doesn't he?"
+
+"Then this room holds more of his personality than of mine?"
+
+There was an under sound of vexation in his voice.
+
+"Have you heard anything?"
+
+"No. But no doubt he's still in the North with his mother."
+
+"How domestic. I hope there is a stool of repentance in the family
+house."
+
+"I wonder if you could ever repent of anything."
+
+"Do you think there is anything I ought to repent of?"
+
+"Oh, yes."
+
+"What?"
+
+"You might have married a man who knew the truth of you, and you married
+a man incapable of ever knowing it."
+
+He half expected an outburst of anger to follow his daring speech, but
+she sat quite still, looking at him steadily. She had taken off her
+gloves, and her hands lay lightly, one resting on the other.
+
+"You mean, I might have married you."
+
+"I'm not worth much, but at least I could never have betrayed the white
+angel in you."
+
+She leaned towards him and spoke earnestly, almost like a child to an
+older person in whom it has faith.
+
+"Do you think such an angel could do anything in--in this sort of world?"
+
+"Modern London?"
+
+She nodded, keeping her eyes still on him. He guessed at once of what she
+was thinking.
+
+"Do anything--is rather vague," he replied evasively. "What sort of
+thing?"
+
+Suddenly she threw off all reserve and let her temper go.
+
+"If an angel were striving with a common American, do you mean to tell me
+you don't know which would go to the wall in our world?" she cried.
+"Robin, you may be a thousand things, but you aren't a fool. Nor am
+I--not /au fond/. And yet I have thought--I have wondered--"
+
+She stopped.
+
+"What?" he asked.
+
+"Whether, if there is an angel in me, it mightn't be as well to trot it
+out."
+
+The self-consciousness of the slang prevented him from hating it.
+
+"Ah!" he said. "When have you wondered?"
+
+"Lately. It's your fault. You have insisted so much upon the existence of
+the celestial being that at last I've become almost credulous. It's very
+absurd and I'm still hanging back."
+
+"Call credulity belief and you needn't be ashamed of it."
+
+"And if I believe, what then?"
+
+"Then a thousand things. Belief sheds strength through all the tissues of
+the mind, the heart, the temperament. Disbelief sheds weakness. The one
+knits together, the other dissolves."
+
+"There are people who think angels frightfully boring company."
+
+"I know."
+
+"Well then?"
+
+Suddenly Robin got up and spoke almost brutally.
+
+"Do you think I don't see that you are trying to find out from me what I
+think would be the best means of--"
+
+The look in her face stopped him.
+
+"I think the water is boiling," he said, going over to the lamp.
+
+"It ought to bubble," she answered quietly.
+
+He lifted up the lid of the silver bowl and peeped in.
+
+"It is bubbling."
+
+For a moment he was busy pouring the water into the teapot. While he did
+this there was a silence between them. Lady Holme got up from the sofa
+and walked about the room. When she came to the "/Danseuse de Tunisie/"
+she stopped in front of it.
+
+"How strange that fan is," she said.
+
+Robin shut the lid of the teapot and came over to her.
+
+"Do you like it?"
+
+"The fan?"
+
+"The whole thing?"
+
+"It's lovely, but I fancy it would have been lovelier without the fan."
+
+"Why?"
+
+She considered, holding her head slightly on one side and half closing
+her eyes.
+
+"The woman's of eternity, but the fan's of a day," she said presently.
+"It belittles her, I think. It makes her /chic/ when she might have
+been--"
+
+She stopped.
+
+"Throw away your fan!" he said in a low, eager voice.
+
+"I?"
+
+"Yes. Be the woman, the eternal woman. You've never been her yet, but you
+could be. Now is the moment. You're unhappy."
+
+"No," she said sharply.
+
+"Yes, you are. Viola, don't imagine I can't understand. You care for him
+and he's hurting you--hurting you by being just himself, all he can ever
+be. It's the fan he cares for."
+
+"And you tell me to throw it away!"
+
+She spoke with sudden passion. They stood still for a moment in front of
+the statuette, looking at each other silently. Then Robin said, with a
+sort of bitter surprise:
+
+"But you can't love him like that!"
+
+"I do."
+
+It gave her an odd, sharp pleasure to speak the truth to him.
+
+"What are you going to do, then?" he asked, after a pause.
+
+He spoke without emotion, accepting the situation.
+
+"To do? What do you mean?"
+
+"Come and sit down. I'll tell you."
+
+He took her hand and led her back to the sofa. When she had sat down, he
+poured out tea, put in cream and gave it to her.
+
+"Nothing to eat," she said.
+
+He poured out his tea and sat down in a chair opposite to her, and close
+to her.
+
+"May I dare to speak frankly?" he asked. "I've known you so long, and
+I've--I've loved you very much, and I still do."
+
+"Go on!" she answered.
+
+"You thought your beauty was everything, that so long as it lasted you
+were safe from unhappiness. Well, to-day you are beautiful, and yet--"
+
+"But what does he care for?" she said. "What do men care for? You pretend
+that it's something romantic, something good even. Really, it's
+impudent--just that--cold and impudent. You're a fool, Robin, you're a
+fool!"
+
+"Am I? Thank God there are men--and men. You can't be what Carey said."
+
+For once he had spoken incautiously. He had blurted out something he
+never meant to say.
+
+"Mr. Carey!" she exclaimed quickly, curiously. "What did Mr. Carey say I
+was?"
+
+"Oh--"
+
+"No, Robin, you are to tell me. No diplomatic lies."
+
+A sudden, almost brutal desire came into him to tell her the truth, to
+revel in plain speaking for once, and to see how she would bear it.
+
+"He said you were an egoist, that you were fine enough in your brilliant
+selfishness to stand quite alone--"
+
+A faint smile moved the narrow corners of her lips at the last words. He
+went on.
+
+"--That your ideal of a real man, the sort of man a woman loses her head
+for, was--"
+
+He stopped. Carey's description of the Lord Holme and Leo Ulford type had
+not been very delicate.
+
+"Was--?" she said, with insistence. "Was--?"
+
+Robin thought how she had hurt him, and said:
+
+"Carey said, a huge mass of bones, muscles, thews, sinews, that cares
+nothing for beauty."
+
+"Beauty! That doesn't care for beauty! But then--?"
+
+"Carey meant--yes, I'm sure Carey meant real beauty."
+
+"What do you mean by 'real beauty'?"
+
+"An inner light that radiates outward, but whose abiding-place is
+hidden--perhaps. But one can't say. One can only understand and love."
+
+"Oh. And Mr. Carey said that. Was he--was he at all that evening as he
+was at Arkell House? Was he talking nonsense or was he serious?"
+
+"Difficult to say! But he was not as he was at Arkell House. Which knows
+you best--Carey or I?"
+
+"Neither of you. I don't know myself."
+
+"What are you going to do?"
+
+"I don't know. The only thing I know is that you can't tell me what to
+do."
+
+"No, I can't."
+
+"But perhaps I can tell you."
+
+She put down her cup and looked at him with a sort of grave kindness that
+he had never seen in her face before.
+
+"What to do?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Give up loving the white angel. Perhaps it isn't there. Perhaps it
+doesn't exist. And if it does--perhaps it's a poor, feeble thing that's
+no good to me, no good to me."
+
+Suddenly she put her arms on the back of the couch, leaned her face on
+them and began to cry gently.
+
+Robin was terribly startled. He got up, stretched out his hands to her in
+an impulsive gesture, then drew them back, turned and went to the window.
+
+She was crying for Fritz.
+
+That was absurd and horrible. Yet he knew that those tears came from the
+heart of the hidden woman he had so long believed in, proved her
+existence, showed that she could love.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+AS Lady Holme had foreseen, the impertinent mimicry of Miss Schley
+concentrated a great deal of attention upon the woman mimicked. Many
+people, accepting the American's cleverness as a fashionable fact, also
+accepted her imitation as the imitation of a fact more surreptitious, and
+credited Lady Holme with a secret leading towards the improper never
+before suspected by them. They remembered the break between the Holmes
+and Carey, the strange scene at the Arkell House ball, and began to
+whisper many things of Lady Holme, and to turn a tide of pity and of
+sympathy upon her husband. On this tide Lord Holme and the American might
+be said to float merrily like corks, unabashed in the eye of the sun.
+Their intimacy was condoned on all sides as a natural result of Lady
+Holme's conduct. Most of that which had been accomplished by Lord and
+Lady Holme together after their reconciliation over the first breakfast
+was undone. The silent tongue began to wag, and to murmur the usual
+platitudes about the poor fellow who could not find sympathy at home and
+so was obliged, against his will, to seek for it outside.
+
+All this Lady Holme had foreseen as she sat in her box at the British
+Theatre.
+
+The wrong impression of her was enthroned. She had to reckon with it.
+This fact, fully recognised by her, made her wish to walk warily where
+otherwise her temper might have led her to walk heedlessly. She wanted to
+do an unusual thing, to draw her husband's attention to an intimacy which
+was concealed from the world--the intimacy between herself and Leo
+Ulford.
+
+After her visit to the house in Half Moon Street she began to see a great
+deal of Leo Ulford. Carey had been right when he said that they would get
+on together. She understood him easily and thoroughly, and for that very
+reason he was attracted by her. Men delight to feel that a woman is
+understanding them; women that no man can ever understand them. Under the
+subtle influence of Lady Holme's complete comprehension of him, Leo
+Ulford's nature expanded, stretched itself as his long legs stretched
+themselves when his mind was purring. There was not much in him to
+reveal, but what there was he revealed, and Lady Holme seemed to be
+profoundly interested in the contents of his soul.
+
+But she was not interested in the contents of his soul in public places
+on which the world's eye is fixed. She refused to allow Leo to do what he
+desired, and assumed an air of almost possessive friendship before
+Society. His natural inclination for the blatant was firmly checked by
+her. She cared nothing for him really, but her woman's instinct had
+divined that he was the type of man most likely to rouse the slumbering
+passion of Fritz, if Fritz were led to suspect that she was attracted to
+him. Men like Lord Holme are most easily jealous of the men who most
+closely resemble them. Their conceit leads them to put an exaggerated
+value upon their own qualities in others, upon the resemblance to their
+own physique exhibited by others.
+
+Leo Ulford was rather like a younger and coarser Lord Holme. In him Lady
+Holme recognised an effective weapon for the chastisement, if not for the
+eventual reclamation, of her husband. It was characteristic of her that
+this was the weapon she chose, the weapon she still continued to rely on
+even after her conversation with Robin Pierce. Her faith in white angels
+was very small. Perpetual contact with the world of to-day, with life as
+lived by women of her order, had created within her far other faiths,
+faiths in false gods, a natural inclination to bow the knee in the house
+of Rimmon rather than before the altars guarded by the Eternities.
+
+And then--she knew Lord Holme; knew what attracted him, what stirred him,
+what moved him to excitement, what was likely to hold him. She felt sure
+that he and such men as he yield the homage they would refuse to the
+angel to the siren. Instead of seeking the angel within herself,
+therefore, she sought the siren. Instead of striving to develope that
+part of her which was spiritual, she fixed all her attention upon that
+part of her which was fleshly, which was physical. She neglected the
+flame and began to make pretty patterns with the ashes.
+
+Robin came to bid her good-bye before leaving London for Rome. The
+weeping woman was gone. He looked into the hard, white face of a woman
+who smiled. They talked rather constrainedly for a few minutes. Then
+suddenly he said:
+
+"Once it was a painted window, now it's an iron shutter."
+
+He got up from his chair and clasped his hands together behind his back.
+
+"What on earth do you mean?" she asked, still smiling.
+
+"Your face," he answered. "One could see you obscurely before. One can
+see nothing now."
+
+"You talk great nonsense, Robin. It's a good thing you're going back to
+Rome."
+
+"At least I shall find the spirit of beauty there," he said, almost with
+bitterness. "Over here it is treated as if it were Jezebel. It's trodden
+down. It's thrown to the dogs."
+
+"Poor spirit!"
+
+She laughed lightly.
+
+"Do you understand what they're saying of you?" he went on.
+
+"Where?"
+
+"All over London."
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+"But--do you?"
+
+"Perhaps I don't care to."
+
+"They're saying--'Poor thing! But it's her own fault.'"
+
+There was a silence. In it he looked at her hard, mercilessly. She
+returned his gaze, still smiling.
+
+"And it is your own fault," he went on after a moment. "If you had been
+yourself she couldn't have insulted you first and humiliated you
+afterwards. Oh, how I hate it! And yet--yet there are moments when I am
+like the others, when I feel--'She has deserved it.'"
+
+"When will you be in Rome?" she said.
+
+"And even now," he continued, ignoring her remark, "even now, what are
+you doing? Oh, Viola, you're a prey to the modern madness for crawling in
+the dirt instead of walking upright in the sun. You might be a goddess
+and you prefer to be an insect. Isn't it mad of you? Isn't it?"
+
+He was really excited, really passionate. His face showed that. There was
+fire in his eyes. His lips worked convulsively when he was not speaking.
+And yet there was just a faint ring of the accomplished orator's music in
+his voice, a music which suggests a listening ear--and that ear the
+orator's own.
+
+Perhaps she heard it. At any rate his passionate attack did not seem to
+move her.
+
+"I prefer to be what I am," was all she said.
+
+"What you are! But you don't know what you are."
+
+"And how can you pretend to know?" she asked. "Is a man more subtle about
+a woman than she is about herself?"
+
+He did not answer for a moment. Then he said bluntly:
+
+"Promise me one thing before I go away."
+
+"I don't know. What is it?"
+
+"Promise me not to--not to--"
+
+He hesitated. The calm of her face seemed almost to confuse him.
+
+"Well?" she said. "Go on."
+
+"Promise me not to justify anything people are saying, not to justify it
+with--with that fellow Ulford."
+
+"Good-bye," she answered, holding out her hand.
+
+He recognised that the time for his advice had gone by, if it had ever
+been.
+
+"What a way--what a way for us to--" he almost stammered.
+
+He recovered his self-possession with an effort and took her hand.
+
+"At least," he said in a low, quiet voice, "believe it is less jealousy
+that speaks within me than love--love for you, for the woman you are
+trampling in the dust."
+
+He looked into her eyes and went out. She did not see him again before he
+left England. And she was glad. She did not want to see him. Perhaps it
+was the first time in her life that the affection of a man whom she
+really liked was distasteful to her. It made her uneasy, doubtful of
+herself just then, to be loved as Robin loved her.
+
+Carey had come back to town, but he went nowhere. He was in bad odour.
+Sir Donald Ulford was almost the only person he saw anything of at this
+time. It seemed that Sir Donald had taken a fancy to Carey. At any rate,
+such friendly feeling as he had did not seem lessened after Carey's
+exhibition at Arkell House. When Carey returned to Stratton Street, Sir
+Donald paid him a visit and stayed some time. No allusion was made to the
+painful circumstances under which they had last seen each other until Sir
+Donald was on the point of going away. Then he said:
+
+"You have not forgotten that I expect you at Casa Felice towards the end
+of August?"
+
+Carey looked violently astonished.
+
+"Still?" he said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+Suddenly Carey shot out his hand and grasped Sir Donald's.
+
+"You aren't afraid to have a drunken beast like me in Casa Felice! It's a
+damned dangerous experiment."
+
+"I don't think so."
+
+"It's your own lookout, you know. I absolve you from the invitation."
+
+"I repeat it, then."
+
+"I accept it, then--again."
+
+Sir Donald went away thoughtfully. When he reached the Albany he found
+Mrs. Leo Ulford waiting for him in tears. They had a long interview.
+
+Many people fancied that Sir Donald looked more ghostly, more faded even
+than usual as the season wore on. They said he was getting too old to go
+about so much as he did, and that it was a pity Society "got such a hold"
+on men who ought to have had enough of it long ago. One night he met Lady
+Holme at the Opera. She was in her box and he in the stalls. After the
+second act she called him to her with a gay little nod of invitation.
+Lady Cardington had been with her during the act, but left the box when
+the curtain fell to see some friends close by. When Sir Donald tapped at
+the door Lady Holme was quite alone. He came in quietly--even his walk
+was rather ghostly--and sat down beside her.
+
+"You don't look well," she said after they had greeted each other.
+
+"I am quite well," he answered, with evident constraint.
+
+"I haven't seen you to speak to since that little note of yours."
+
+A very faint colour rose in his faded cheeks.
+
+"After Miss Schley's first night?" he murmured.
+
+His yellow fingers moved restlessly.
+
+"Do you know that your son told me you would write?" she continued.
+
+She was leaning back in her chair, half hidden by the curtain of the box.
+
+"Leo!"
+
+Sir Donald's voice was almost sharp and startling.
+
+"How should he--you spoke about me then?"
+
+There was a flash of light in his pale, almost colourless eyes.
+
+"I wondered where you had gone, and he said you would write next day."
+
+"That was all?"
+
+"Why, how suspicious you are!"
+
+She spoke banteringly.
+
+"Suspicious! No--but Leo does not understand me very well. I was rather
+old when he was born, and I have never been able to be much with him. He
+was educated in England, and my duties of course lay abroad."
+
+He paused, looking at her and moving his thin white moustache. Then, in
+an uneasy voice, he added:
+
+"You must not take my character altogether from Leo."
+
+"Nor you mine altogether from Miss Schley," said Lady Holme.
+
+She scarcely knew why she said it. She thought herself stupid, ridiculous
+almost, for saying it. Yet she could not help speaking. Perhaps she
+relied on Sir Donald's age. Or perhaps--but who knows why a woman is
+cautious or incautious in moments the least expected? God guides her,
+perhaps, or the devil--or merely a bottle imp. Men never know, and that
+is why they find her adorable.
+
+Sir Donald said nothing for a moment, only made the familiar movement
+with his hands that was a sign in him of concealed excitement or emotion.
+His eyes were fixed upon the ledge of the box. Lady Holme was puzzled by
+his silence and, at last, was on the point of making a remark on some
+other subject--Plancon's singing--when he spoke, like a man who had made
+up his mind firmly to take an unusual, perhaps a difficult course.
+
+"I wish to take it from you," he said. "Give me the right one, not an
+imitation of an imitation."
+
+She knew at once what he meant and was surprised. Had Leo Ulford been
+talking?
+
+"Lady Holme," he went on, "I am taking a liberty. I know that. It's a
+thing I have never done before, knowingly. Don't think me unconscious of
+what I am doing. But I am an old man, and old men can sometimes
+venture--allowance is sometimes made for them. I want to claim that
+allowance now for what I am going to say."
+
+"Well?" she said, neither hardly nor gently.
+
+In truth she scarcely knew whether she wished him to speak or not.
+
+"My son is--Leo is not a safe friend for you at this moment."
+
+Again the dull, brick-red flush rose in his cheeks. There was an odd,
+flattened look just above his cheekbones near his eyes, and the eyes
+themselves had a strange expression as of determination and guilt
+mingled.
+
+"Your son?" Lady Holme said. "But--"
+
+"I do not wish to assume anything, but I--well, my daughter-in-law
+sometimes comes to me."
+
+"Sometimes!" said Lady Holme.
+
+"Leo is not a good husband," Sir Donald said. "But that is not the point.
+He is also a bad--friend."
+
+"Why don't you say lover?" she almost whispered.
+
+He grasped his knee with one hand and moved the hand rapidly to and fro.
+
+"I must say of him to you that where his pleasure or his vanity is
+concerned he is unscrupulous."
+
+"Why say all this to a woman?"
+
+"You mean that you know as much as I?"
+
+"Don't you think it likely?"
+
+"Henrietta--"
+
+"Who is that?"
+
+"My daughter-in-law has done everything for Leo--too much. She gets
+nothing--not even gratitude. I am sorry to say he has no sense of
+chivalry towards women. You know him, I daresay. But do you know him
+thwarted?"
+
+"Ah, you don't think so badly of me after all?" she said quickly.
+
+"I--I think of you that--that--"
+
+He stopped.
+
+"I think that I could not bear to see the whiteness of your wings
+smirched by a child of mine." he added.
+
+"You too!" she said.
+
+Suddenly tears started into her eyes.
+
+"Another believer in the angel!" she thought.
+
+"May I come in?"
+
+It was Mr. Bry's cold voice. His discontented, sleek face was peeping
+round the door.
+
+Sir Donald got up to go.
+
+As Lady Holme drove away from Covent Garden that night she was haunted by
+a feverish, embittering thought:
+
+"Will everyone notice it but Fritz?"
+
+Lord Holme indeed seemed scarcely the same man who had forbidden Carey to
+come any more to his house, who had been jealous of Robin Pierce, who had
+even once said that he almost wished his wife were an ugly woman. The
+Grand Turk nature within him, if not actually dead, was certainly in
+abeyance. He was so intent on his own affairs that he paid no heed at all
+to his wife's, even when they might be said to be also his. Leo Ulford
+was becoming difficult to manage, and Lord Holme still gaily went his
+way. As Lady Holme thought over Sir Donald's words she felt a crushing
+weight of depression sink down upon her. The brougham rolled smoothly on
+through the lighted streets. She did not glance out of the windows, or
+notice the passing crowds. In the silence and darkness of her own soul
+she was trying not to feel, trying to think.
+
+A longing to be incautious, to do something startling, desperate, came to
+her.
+
+It was evident that Mrs. Ulford had been complaining to Sir Donald about
+his son's conduct. With whom? Lady Holme could not doubt that it was with
+herself. She had read, with one glance at the fluttering pink eyelids,
+the story of the Leo Ulford's /menage/. Now, she was not preoccupied with
+any regret for her own cruelty or for another woman's misery. The egoism
+spoken of by Carey was not dead in her yet, but very much alive. As she
+sat in the corner of the brougham, pressing herself against the padded
+wall, she was angry for herself, pitiful for herself. And she was
+jealous--horribly jealous. That woke up her imagination, all the
+intensity of her. Where was Fritz to-night? She did not know. Suddenly
+the dense ignorance in which every human being lives, and must live to
+the end of time, towered above her like a figure in a nightmare. What do
+we know, what can we ever know of each other? In each human being dwells
+the most terrible, the most ruthless power that exists--the power of
+silence.
+
+Fritz had that power; stupid, blundering, self-contented Fritz.
+
+She pulled the check-string and gave the order, "Home!"
+
+In her present condition she felt unable to go into Society.
+
+When she got to Cadogan Square she said to the footman who opened the
+door:
+
+"His lordship isn't in yet?"
+
+"No, my lady."
+
+"Did he say what time he would be in to-night?"
+
+"No, my lady."
+
+The man paused, then added:
+
+"His lordship told Mr. Lucas not to wait up."
+
+"Mr. Lucas" was Lord Holme's valet.
+
+It seemed to Lady Holme as if there were a significant, even a slightly
+mocking, sound in the footman's voice. She stared at him. He was a thin,
+swarthy young man, with lantern jaws and a very long, pale chin. When she
+looked at him he dropped his eyes.
+
+"Bring me some lemonade to the drawing-room in ten minutes," she said.
+
+"Yes, my lady."
+
+"In ten minutes, not before. Turn on all the lights in the drawing-room."
+
+"Yes, my lady."
+
+The man went before her up the staircase, turned on the lights, stood
+aside to let her pass and then went softly down. Lady Holme rang for
+Josephine.
+
+"Take my cloak and then go to bed," she said.
+
+Josephine took the cloak and went out, shutting the door.
+
+"Ten minutes!" Lady Holme said to herself.
+
+She sat down on the sofa on which she had sat for a moment alone after
+her song at the dinner-party, the song murdered by Miss Filberte. The
+empty, brilliantly-lit rooms seemed unusually large. She glanced round
+them with inward-looking eyes. Here she was at midnight sitting quite
+alone in her own house. And she wished to do something decisive,
+startling as the cannon shot sometimes fired from a ship to disperse a
+fog wreath. That was the reason why she had told the footman to come in
+ten minutes. She thought that in ten minutes she might make up her mind.
+If she decided upon doing something that required an emissary the man
+would be there.
+
+She looked at the little silver box she had taken up that night when she
+was angry, then at the grand piano in the further room. The two things
+suggested to her two women--the woman of hot temper and the woman of
+sweetness and romance. What was she to-night, and what was she going to
+do? Nothing, probably. What could she do? Again she glanced round the
+rooms. It seemed to her that she was like an actress in an intense,
+passionate /role/, who is paralysed by what is called in the theatre "a
+stage wait." She ought to play a tremendous scene, now, at once, but the
+person with whom she was to play it did not come on to the stage. She had
+worked herself up for the scene. The emotion, the passion, the force, the
+fury were alive, were red hot within her, and she could not set them
+free. She remained alone upon the stage in a sort of horror of dumbness,
+a horror of inaction.
+
+The footman came in quietly with the lemonade on a tray. He put it down
+on a table by Lady Holme.
+
+"Is there anything else, my lady?"
+
+She supposed that the question was meant as a very discreet hint to her
+that the man would be glad to go to bed. For a moment she did not reply,
+but kept him waiting. She was thinking rapidly, considering whether she
+would do the desperate thing or not, whether she would summon one of the
+actors for the violent scene her nature demanded persistently that night.
+
+After the opera she had been due at a ball to which Leo Ulford was
+going. She had promised to go in to supper with him and to arrive by a
+certain hour. He was wondering, waiting, now, at this moment. She knew
+that. The house was in Eaton Square, not far off. Should she send the
+footman with a note to Leo, saying that she was too tired to come to the
+ball but that she was sitting up at home? That was what she was rapidly
+considering while the footman stood waiting. Leo would come, and then--
+presently--Lord Holme would come. And then? Then doubtless would happen
+the scene she longed for, longed for with a sort of almost crazy desire
+such as she had never felt before.
+
+She glanced up and saw an astonished expression upon the footman's pale
+face. How long had she kept him there waiting? She had no idea.
+
+"There is nothing else," she said slowly.
+
+She paused, then added, reluctantly:
+
+"You can go to bed."
+
+The man went softly out of the room. As he shut the door she breathed a
+deep sigh, that was almost a sob. So difficult had she found it to govern
+herself, not to do the crazy thing.
+
+She poured out the lemonade and put ice into it.
+
+As she did so she made grimaces, absurd grimaces of pain and misery, like
+those on the faces of the two women in Mantegna's picture of Christ and
+the Marys in the Brera at Milan. They are grotesque, yet wonderfully
+moving in their pitiless realism. But tears fall from the eyes of
+Mantegna's women and no tears fell from Lady Holme's eyes. Still making
+grimaces, she sipped the lemonade. Then she put down the glass, leaned
+back on the sofa and shut her eyes. Her face ceased to move, and became
+beautiful again in its stillness. She remained motionless for a long
+time, trying to obtain the mastery over herself. In act she had obtained
+it already, but not in emotion. Indeed, the relinquishing of violence,
+the sending of the footman to bed, seemed to have increased the passion
+within her. And now she felt it rising till she was afraid of being
+herself, afraid of being this solitary woman, feeling intensely and able
+to do nothing. It seemed to her as if such a passion of jealousy, and
+desire for immediate expression of it in action, as flamed within her,
+must wreak disaster upon her like some fell disease, as if she were in
+immediate danger, even in immediate physical danger. She lay still like
+one determined to meet it bravely, without flinching, without a sign of
+cowardice.
+
+But suddenly she felt that she had made a mistake in dismissing the
+footman, that the pain of inaction was too great for her to bear. She
+could not just--do nothing. She could not, and she got up swiftly and
+rang the bell. The man did not return. She pressed the bell again. After
+three or four minutes he came in, looking rather flushed and put out.
+
+"I want you to take a note to Eaton Square," she said. "It will be ready
+in five minutes."
+
+"Yes, my lady."
+
+She went to her writing table and wrote this note to Leo Ulford:
+
+
+  "DEAR MR. ULFORD,--I am grieved to play you false, but I am too
+  tired to-night to come on. Probably you are amusing yourself. I
+  am sitting here alone over such a dull book. One can't go to bed
+  at twelve, somehow, even if one is tired. The habit of the season's
+  against early hours and one couldn't sleep. Be nice and come in for
+  five minutes on your way home, and tell me all about it. I know you
+  pass the end of the square, so it won't be out of your way.--Yours
+  very sincerely,   V. H."
+
+
+After writing this note Lady Holme hesitated for a moment, then she went
+to a writing table, opened a drawer and took out a tiny, flat key. She
+enclosed it in two sheets of thick note paper, folded the note also round
+it, and put it into an envelope which she carefully closed. After writing
+Leo Ulford's name on the envelope she rang again for the footman.
+
+"Take this to Eaton Square," she said, naming the number of the house.
+"And give it to Mr. Ulford yourself. Go in a hansom. When you have given
+Mr. Ulford the note come straight back in the hansom and let me know.
+After that you can go to bed. Do you understand?"
+
+"Yes, my lady."
+
+The man went out.
+
+Lady Holme stood up to give him the note. She remained standing after he
+had gone. An extraordinary sensation of relief had come to her. Action
+had lessened her pain, had removed much of the pressure of emotion upon
+her heart. For a moment she felt almost happy.
+
+She sat down again and took up a book. It was a book of poems written by
+a very young girl whom she knew. There was a great deal about sorrow in
+the poems, and sorrow was always alluded to as a person; now flitting
+through a forest in the autumn among the dying leaves, now bending over a
+bed, now walking by the sea at sunset watching departing ships, now
+standing near the altar at a wedding. The poems were not good. On the
+other hand, they were not very bad.
+
+They had some grace, some delicacy here and there, now and then a touch
+of real, if by no means exquisite, sentiment. At this moment Lady Holme
+found them soothing. There was a certain music in them and very little
+reality. They seemed to represent life as a pensive phantasmagoria of
+bird songs, fading flowers, dying lights, soft winds and rains and
+sighing echoes.
+
+She read on and on. Sometimes a hard thought intruded itself upon her
+mind--the thought of Leo Ulford with the latch-key of her husband's house
+in his hand. That thought made the poems seem to her remarkably unlike
+life.
+
+She looked at the clock. The footman had been away long enough to do his
+errand. Just as she was thinking this he came into the room.
+
+"Well?" she said.
+
+"I gave Mr. Ulford the note, my lady."
+
+"Then you can go to bed. Good-night. I'll put out the lights here."
+
+"Thank you, my lady."
+
+As he went away she turned again to the poems; but now she could not read
+them. Her eyes rested upon them, but her mind took in nothing of their
+meaning. Presently--very soon--she laid the book down and sat listening.
+The footman had shut the drawing-room door. She got up and opened it. She
+wanted to hear the sound of the latch-key being put into the front door
+by Leo Ulford. It seemed to her as if that sound would be like the /leit
+motif/ of her determination to govern, to take her own way, to strike a
+blow against the selfish egoism of men. After opening the door she sat
+down close to it and waited, listening.
+
+Some minutes passed. Then she heard--not the key put into the hall door;
+it had not occurred to her that she was much too far away to hear
+that--but the bang of the door being shut.
+
+Quickly she closed the drawing-room door, went back to the distant sofa,
+sat down upon it and began to turn over the poems once more. She even
+read one quite carefully. As she finished it the door was opened.
+
+She looked up gaily to greet Leo and saw her husband coming into the
+room.
+
+She was greatly startled. It had never occurred to her that Fritz was
+quite as likely to arrive before Leo Ulford as Leo Ulford to arrive
+before Fritz. Why had she never thought of so obvious a possibility? She
+could not imagine. The difference between the actuality and her intense
+and angry conception of what it would be, benumbed her mind for an
+instant. She was completely confused. She sat still with the book of
+poems on her lap, and gazed at Lord Holme as he came towards her, taking
+long steps and straddling his legs as if he imagined he had a horse under
+him. The gay expression had abruptly died away from her face and she
+looked almost stupid.
+
+"Hulloa!" said Lord Holme, as he saw her.
+
+She said nothing.
+
+"Thought you were goin' to the Blaxtons to-night," he added.
+
+She made a strong effort and smiled.
+
+"I meant to, but I felt tired after the opera."
+
+"Why don't you toddle off to bed then?"
+
+"I feel tired, I don't feel sleepy."
+
+Lord Holme stared at her, put his hand into his trousers pocket and
+pulled out his cigarette-case. Lady Holme knew that he had been in a good
+humour when he came home, and that the sight of her sitting up in the
+drawing-room had displeased him. She had seen a change come into his
+face. He had been looking gay. He began to look glum and turned his eyes
+away from her.
+
+"What have you been up to?" she asked, with a sudden light gaiety and air
+of comradeship.
+
+"Club--playin' bridge," he answered, lighting a cigarette.
+
+He shot a glance at her sideways as he spoke, a glance that was meant to
+be crafty. If she had not been excited and horribly jealous, such a
+glance would probably have amused her, even made her laugh. Fritz's craft
+was very transparent. But she could not laugh now. She knew he was
+telling her the first lie that had occurred to him.
+
+"Lucky?" she asked, still preserving her light and casual manner.
+
+"Middlin'," he jerked out.
+
+He sat down in an armchair and slowly stretched his legs, staring up at
+the ceiling. Lady Holme began to think rapidly, feverishly.
+
+Had he locked the front door when he came in? Very much depended upon
+whether he had or had not. The servants had all gone to bed. Not one of
+them would see that the house was closed for the night. Fritz was a very
+casual person. He often forgot to do things he had promised to do, things
+that ought to be done. On the other hand, there were moments when his
+memory was excellent. If she only knew which mood had been his to-night
+she thought she would feel calmer. The uncertainty in which she was made
+mind and body tingle. If Fritz had remembered to lock the door, Leo
+Ulford would try to get in, fail, and go away. But if he had not
+remembered, at any moment Leo Ulford might walk into the room
+triumphantly with the latch-key in his hand. And it was nearly half-past
+twelve.
+
+She wished intensely that she knew what Fritz had done.
+
+"What's up?" he said abruptly.
+
+"Up?" she said with an uncontrollable start.
+
+"Yes, with you?"
+
+"Nothing. What d'you mean?"
+
+"Why, you looked as if--don't you b'lieve I've been playin' bridge?"
+
+"Of course I do. Really, Fritz, how absurd you are!"
+
+It was evident that he, too, was not quite easy to-night. If he had a
+conscience, surely it was pricking him. Fierce anger flamed up again
+suddenly in Lady Holme, and the longing to lash her husband. Yet even
+this anger did not take away the anxiety that beset her, the wish that
+she had not done the crazy thing. The fact of her husband's return before
+Leo's arrival seemed to have altered her action, made it far more
+damning. To have been found with Leo would have been compromising, would
+have roused Fritz's anger. She wanted to rouse his anger. She had meant
+to rouse it. But when she looked at Fritz she did not like the thought of
+Leo walking in at this hour holding the latch-key in his hand. What had
+Fritz done that night to Rupert Carey? What would he do to-night if--?
+
+"What the deuce is up with you?"
+
+Lord Holme drew in his legs, sat up and stared with a sort of uneasy
+inquiry which he tried to make hard. She laughed quickly, nervously.
+
+"I'm tired, I tell you. It was awfully hot at the opera."
+
+She put some more ice into the lemonade, and added:
+
+"By the way, Fritz, I suppose you locked up all right?"
+
+"Locked up what?"
+
+"The front door. All the servants have gone to bed, you know."
+
+No sooner had she spoken the last words than she regretted them. If Leo
+did get in they took away all excuse. She might have pretended he had
+been let in. He would have had to back her up. It would have been mean of
+her, of course. Still, seeing her husband there, Leo would have
+understood, would have forgiven her. Women are always forgiven such
+subterfuges in unfortunate moments. What a fool she was to-night!
+
+"That don't matter," said her husband, shortly.
+
+"But--but it does. You know how many burglaries there are. Why, only the
+other night Mrs. Arthur came home from a ball and met two men on the
+stairs."
+
+"I pity any men I found on my stairs," he returned composedly, touching
+the muscle of his left arm with his right hand.
+
+He chuckled.
+
+"They'd be sorry for themselves, I'll bet," he added.
+
+He put down his cigarette and took out another slowly, leisurely. Lady
+Holme longed to strike him. His conceited composure added fuel to the
+flame of her anxiety.
+
+"Well, anyhow, I don't care to run these risks in a place like London,
+Fritz," she said almost angrily. "Have you locked up or not?"
+
+"Damned if I remember," he drawled.
+
+She did not know whether he was deliberately trying to irritate her or
+whether he really had forgotten, but she felt it impossible to remain any
+longer in uncertainty.
+
+"Very well, then, I shall go down and see," she said.
+
+And she laid the book of poems on a table and prepared to get up from the
+sofa.
+
+"Rot!" said Lord Holme; "if you're nervous, I'll go."
+
+She leaned back.
+
+"Very well."
+
+"In a minute."
+
+He struck a match and let it out.
+
+"Do go now, there's a good dog," she said coaxingly.
+
+He struck another match and held it head downwards.
+
+"You needn't hurry a feller."
+
+He tapped his cigarette gently on his knee, and applied the flame to it.
+
+"That's better."
+
+Lady Holme moved violently on the sofa. She had a pricking sensation all
+over her body, and her face felt suddenly very hot, as if she had fever.
+A ridiculous, but painful idea started up suddenly in her mind. Could
+Fritz suspect anything? Was he playing with her? She dismissed it at once
+as the distorted child of a guilty conscience. Fritz was not that sort of
+man. He might be a brute sometimes, but he was never a subtle brute. He
+blew two thin lines of smoke out through his nostrils, now with a sort of
+sensuous, almost languid, deliberation, and watched them fade away in the
+brilliantly-lit room. Lady Holme resolved to adopt another manner, more
+in accord with her condition of tense nervousness.
+
+"When I ask you to do a thing, Fritz, you might have the decency to do
+it," she said sharply. "You're forgetting what's due to me--to any
+woman."
+
+"Don't fuss at this time of night."
+
+"I want to go to bed, but I'm not going till I know the house is properly
+shut up. Please go at once and see."
+
+"I never knew you were such a coward," he rejoined without stirring. "Who
+was at the opera?"
+
+"I won't talk to you till you do what I ask."
+
+"That's a staggerin' blow."
+
+She sprang up with an exclamation of anger. Her nerves were on edge and
+she felt inclined to scream out.
+
+"I never thought you could be so--such a cad to a woman, Fritz," she
+said.
+
+She moved towards the door. As she did so she heard a cab in the square
+outside, a rattle of wheels, then silence. It had stopped. Her heart
+seemed to stand still too. She knew now that she was a coward, though not
+in the way Fritz meant. She was a coward with regard to him. Her jealousy
+had prompted her to do a mad thing. In doing it she had actually meant to
+produce a violent scene. It had seemed to her that such a scene would
+relieve the tension of her nerves, of her heart, would clear the air. But
+now that the scene seemed imminent--if Fritz had forgotten, and she was
+certain he had forgotten, to lock the door--she felt heart and nerves
+were failing her. She felt that she had risked too much, far too much.
+With almost incredible swiftness she remembered her imprudence in
+speaking to Carey at Arkell House and how it had only served to put a
+weapon into her husband's hand, a weapon he had not scrupled to use in
+his selfish way to further his own pleasure and her distress. That stupid
+failure had not sufficiently warned her, and now she was on the edge of
+some greater disaster. She was positive that Leo Ulford was in the cab
+which had just stopped, and it was too late now to prevent him from
+entering the house. Lord Holme had got up from his chair and stood facing
+her. He looked quite pleasant. She thought of the change that would come
+into his face in a moment and turned cold.
+
+"Don't cut up so deuced rough," he said; "I'll go and lock up."
+
+So he had forgotten. He took a step towards the drawing-room door. But
+now she felt that at all costs she must prevent him from going
+downstairs, must gain a moment somehow. Suddenly she swayed slightly.
+
+"I feel--awfully faint," she said.
+
+She went feebly, but quickly, to the window which looked on to the
+Square, drew away the curtain, opened the window and leaned out. The cab
+had stopped before their door, and she saw Leo Ulford standing on the
+pavement with his back to the house. He was feeling in his pocket,
+evidently for some money to give to the cabman. If she could only attract
+his attention somehow and send him away! She glanced back. Fritz was
+coming towards her with a look of surprise on his face.
+
+"Leave me alone," she said unevenly. "I only want some air."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Leave me--oh, do leave me alone!"
+
+He stopped, but stood staring at her in blank amazement. She dared not do
+anything. Leo Ulford stretched out his arm towards the cabman, who bent
+down from his perch. He took the money, looked at it, then bent down
+again, showing it to Leo and muttering something. Doubtless he was saying
+that it was not enough. She turned round again sharply to Fritz.
+
+"Fritz," she said, "be a good dog. Go upstairs to my room and fetch me
+some eau de Cologne, will you?"
+
+"But--"
+
+"It's on my dressing-table--the gold bottle on the right. You know. I
+feel so bad. I'll stay here. The air will bring me round perhaps."
+
+She caught hold of the curtain, like a person on the point of swooning.
+
+"All right," he said, and he went out of the room.
+
+She watched till he was gone, then darted to the window and leaned out.
+
+She was too late. The cab was driving off and Leo was gone. He must have
+entered the house.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+BEFORE she had time to leave the window she heard a step in the room. She
+turned and saw Leo Ulford, smiling broadly--like a great boy--and holding
+up the latch-key she had sent him. At the sight of her face his smile
+died away.
+
+"Go--go!" she whispered, putting out her hand. "Go at once!"
+
+"Go! But you told me--"
+
+"Go! My husband's come back. He's in the house. Go quickly. Don't make a
+sound. I'll explain to-morrow."
+
+She made a rapid, repeated gesture of her hands towards the door,
+frowning. Leo Ulford stood for an instant looking heavy and sulky, then,
+pushing out his rosy lips in a sort of indignant pout, he swung round on
+his heels. As he did so, Lord Holme came into the room holding the bottle
+of eau de Cologne. When he saw Leo he stopped. Leo stopped too, and they
+stood for a moment staring at each other. Lady Holme, who was still by
+the open window, did not move. There was complete silence in the room.
+Then Leo dropped the latch-key. It fell on the thick carpet without a
+noise. He made a hasty, lumbering movement to pick it up, but Lord Holme
+was too quick for him. When Lady Holme saw the key in her husband's hand
+she moved at last and came forward into the middle of the room.
+
+"Mr. Ulford's come to tell me about the Blaxtons' dance," she said.
+
+She spoke in her usual light voice, without tremor or uncertainty. Her
+face was perfectly calm and smiling. Leo Ulford cleared his throat.
+
+"Yes," he said loudly, "about the Blaxtons' dance."
+
+Lord Holme stood looking at the latch-key. Suddenly his face swelled up
+and became bloated, and large veins stood out in his brown forehead.
+
+"What's this key?" he said.
+
+He held it out towards his wife. Neither she nor Leo Ulford replied to
+his question.
+
+"What's this key?" he repeated.
+
+"The key of Mr. Ulford's house, I suppose," said Lady Holme. "How should
+I know?"
+
+"I'm not askin' you," said her husband.
+
+He came a step nearer to Leo.
+
+"Why the devil don't you answer?" he said to him.
+
+"It's my latch-key," said Leo, with an attempt at a laugh.
+
+Lord Holme flung it in his face.
+
+"You damned liar!" he said. "It's mine."
+
+And he struck him full in the face where the key had just struck him.
+
+Leo returned the blow. When she saw that, Lady Holme passed the two men
+and went quickly out of the room, shutting the door behind her. Holding
+her hands over her ears, she hurried upstairs to her bedroom. It was in
+darkness. She felt about on the wall for the button that turned on the
+electric light, but could not find it. Her hands, usually deft and
+certain in their movements, seemed to have lost the sense of touch. It
+was as if they had abruptly been deprived of their minds. She felt and
+felt. She knew the button was there. Suddenly the room was full of light.
+Without being aware of it she had found the button and turned it. In the
+light she looked down at her hands and saw that they were trembling
+violently. She went to the door and shut it. Then she sat down on the
+sofa at the foot of the bed. She clasped her hands together in her lap,
+but they went on trembling. Pulses were beating in her eyelids. She felt
+utterly degraded, like a scrupulously clean person who has been rolled in
+the dirt. And she fancied she heard a faint and mysterious sound,
+pathetic and terrible, but very far away--the white angel in her weeping.
+
+And the believers in the angel--were they weeping too?
+
+She found herself wondering as a sleeper wonders in a dream.
+
+Presently she got up. She could not sit there and see her hands
+trembling. She did not walk about the room, but went over to the
+dressing-table and stood by it, resting her hands upon it and leaning
+forward. The attitude seemed to relieve her. She remained there for a
+long time, scarcely thinking at all, only feeling degraded, unclean. The
+sight of physical violence in her own drawing-room, caused by her, had
+worked havoc in her. She had always thought she understood the brute in
+man. She had often consciously administered to it. She had coaxed it,
+flattered it, played upon it even--surely--loved it. Now she had suddenly
+seen it rush out into the full light, and it had turned her sick.
+
+The gold things on the dressing-table--bottles, brushes, boxes,
+trays--looked offensive. They were like lies against life, frauds.
+Everything in the pretty room was like a lie and a fraud. There ought to
+be dirt, ugliness about her. She ought to stand with her feet in mud and
+look on blackness. The angel in her shuddered at the siren in her now, as
+at a witch with power to evoke Satanic things, and she forgot the
+trembling of her hands in the sensation of the trembling of her soul. The
+blow of Fritz, the blow of Leo Ulford, had both struck her. She felt a
+beaten creature.
+
+The door opened. She did not turn round, but she saw in the glass her
+husband come in. His coat was torn. His waistcoat and shirt were almost
+in rags. There was blood on his face and on his right hand. In his eyes
+there was an extraordinary light, utterly unlike the light of
+intelligence, but brilliant, startling; flame from the fire by which the
+animal in human nature warms itself. In the glass she saw him look at
+her. The light seemed to stream over her, to scorch her. He went into his
+dressing-room without a word, and she heard the noise of water being
+poured out and used for washing. He must be bathing his wounds, getting
+rid of the red stains.
+
+She sat down on the sofa at the foot of the bed and listened to the noise
+of the water. At last it stopped and she heard drawers being violently
+opened and shut, then a tearing sound. After a silence her husband came
+into the room again with his forehead bound up in a silk handkerchief,
+which was awkwardly knotted behind his head. Part of another silk
+handkerchief was loosely tied round his right hand. He came forward,
+stood in front of her and looked at her, and she saw now that there was
+an expression almost of exultation on his face. She felt something fall
+into her lap. It was the latch-key she had sent to Leo Ulford.
+
+"I can tell you he's sorry he ever saw that--damned sorry," said Lord
+Holme.
+
+And he laughed.
+
+Lady Holme took the key up carefully and put it down on the sofa. She was
+realising something, realising that her husband was feeling happy. When
+she had laid down the key she looked up at him and there was an intense
+scrutiny in her eyes. Suddenly it seemed to her as if she were standing
+up and looking down on him, as if she were the judge, he the culprit in
+this matter. The numbness left her mind. She was able to think swiftly
+again and her hands stopped trembling. That look of exultation in her
+husband's eyes had changed everything.
+
+"Sit down, I want to speak to you," she said.
+
+She was surprised by the calm sound of her own voice.
+
+Lord Holme looked astonished. He shifted the bandage on his hand and
+stood where he was.
+
+"Sit down," she repeated.
+
+"Well!" he said.
+
+And he sat down.
+
+"I suppose you came up here to turn me out of the house?" she said.
+
+"You deserve it," he muttered.
+
+But even now he did not look angry. There was a sort of savage glow on
+his face. It was evident that the violent physical effort he had just
+made, and the success of it, had irresistibly swept away his fury for the
+moment. It might return. Probably it would return. But for the moment it
+was gone. Lady Holme knew Fritz, and she knew that he was feeling good
+all over. The fact that he could feel thus in such circumstances set the
+brute in him before her as it had never been set before--in a glare of
+light.
+
+"And what do you deserve?" she asked.
+
+All her terror had gone utterly. She felt mistress of herself.
+
+"When I went to thrash Carey he was so drunk I couldn't touch him. This
+feller showed fight but he was a baby in my hands. I could do anything I
+liked with him," said Lord Holme. "Gad! Talk of boxin'--"
+
+He looked at his bandaged hand and laughed again triumphantly. Then,
+suddenly, a sense of other things than his physical strength seemed to
+return upon him. His face changed, grew lowering, and he thrust forward
+his under jaw, opening his mouth to speak. Lady Holme did not give him
+time.
+
+"Yes, I sent Leo Ulford the latch-key," she said. "You needn't ask. I
+sent it, and told him to come to-night. D'you know why?"
+
+Lord Holme's face grew scarlet.
+
+"Because you're a--"
+
+She stopped him before he could say the irrevocable word.
+
+"Because I mean to have the same liberty as the man I've married," she
+said. "I asked Leo Ulford here, and I intended you should find him here."
+
+"You didn't. You thought I wasn't comin' home."
+
+"Why should I have thought such a thing?" she said, swiftly, sharply.
+
+Her voice had an edge to it.
+
+"You meant not to come home, then?"
+
+She read his stupidity at a glance, the guilty mind that had blundered,
+thinking its intention known when it was not known. He began to deny it,
+but she stopped him. At this moment, and exactly when she ought surely to
+have been crushed by the weight of Fritz's fury, she dominated him.
+Afterwards she wondered at herself, but not now.
+
+"You meant not to come home?"
+
+For once Lord Holme showed a certain adroitness. Instead of replying to
+his wife he retorted:
+
+"You meant me to find Ulford here! That's a good 'un! Why, you tried all
+you knew to keep him out."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, then?"
+
+"I wanted--but you'd never understand."
+
+"He does," said Lord Holme.
+
+He laughed again, got up and walked about the room, fingering his
+bandages. Then suddenly, he turned on Lady Holme and said savagely:
+
+"And you do."
+
+"I?"
+
+"Yes, you. There's lots of fellers that would--"
+
+"Stop!" said Lady Holme, in a voice of sharp decision.
+
+She got up too. She felt that she could not say what she meant to say
+sitting down.
+
+"Fritz," she added, "you're a fool. You may be worse. I believe you are.
+But one thing's certain--you're a fool. Even in wickedness you're a
+blunderer."
+
+"And what are you?" he said.
+
+"I!" she answered, coming a step nearer. "I'm not wicked."
+
+A sudden, strange desire came to her, a desire--as she had slangily
+expressed it to Robin Pierce--to "trot out" the white angel whom she had
+for so long ignored or even brow-beaten. Was the white angel there? Some
+there were who believed so. Robin Pierce, Sir Donald, perhaps others. And
+these few believers gave Lady Holme courage. She remembered them, she
+relied on them at this moment.
+
+"I'm not wicked," she repeated.
+
+She looked into her husband's face.
+
+"Don't you know that?"
+
+He was silent.
+
+"Perhaps you'd rather I was," she continued. "Don't men prefer it?"
+
+He stared first at her, then at the carpet. A puzzled look came into his
+face.
+
+"But I don't care," she said, gathering resolution, and secretly calling,
+calling on the hidden woman, yet always with a doubt as to whether she
+was there in her place of concealment. "I don't care. I can't change my
+nature because of that. And surely--surely there must be some men who
+prefer refinement to vulgarity, purity to--"
+
+"Ulford, eh?" he interrupted.
+
+The retort struck like a whip on Lady Holme's temper. She forgot the
+believers in the angel and the angel too.
+
+"How dare you?" she exclaimed. "As if I--"
+
+He took up the latch-key and thrust it into her face. His sense of
+physical triumph was obviously dying away, his sense of personal outrage
+returning.
+
+"Good women don't do things like that," he said. "If it was known in
+London you'd be done for."
+
+"And you--may you do what you like openly, brazenly?"
+
+"Men's different," he said.
+
+The words and the satisfied way in which they were said made Lady Holme
+feel suddenly almost mad with rage. The truth of the statement, and the
+disgrace that it was truth, stirred her to the depths. At that moment she
+hated her husband, she hated all men. She remembered what Lady Cardington
+had said in the carriage as they were driving away from the Carlton after
+Mrs. Wolfstein's lunch, and her sense of impotent fury was made more
+bitter by the consciousness that women had chosen that men should be
+"different," or at least--if not that--had smilingly given them a license
+to be so. She wanted to say, to call out, so much that she said nothing.
+Lord Holme thought that for once he had been clever, almost intellectual.
+This was indeed a night of many triumphs for him. An intoxication of
+power surged up to his brain.
+
+"Men's made different and treated differently," he said. "And they'd
+never stand anything else."
+
+Lady Holme sat down again on the sofa. She put her right hand on her left
+hand and held it tightly in her lap.
+
+"You mean," she said, in a hard, quiet voice, "that you may humiliate
+your wife in the eyes of London and that she must just pretend that she
+enjoys it and go on being devoted to you? Well, I will not do either the
+one or the other. I will not endure humiliation quietly, and as to my
+devotion to you--I daresay it wouldn't take much to kill it. Perhaps it's
+dead already."
+
+No lie, perhaps, ever sounded more like truth than hers. At that moment
+she thought that probably it was truth.
+
+"Eh?" said Lord Holme.
+
+He looked suddenly less triumphant. His blunt features seemed altered in
+shape by the expression of blatant, boyish surprise, even amazement, that
+overspread them. His wife saw that, despite the incident of Leo Ulford's
+midnight visit, Fritz had not really suspected her of the uttermost
+faithlessness, that it had not occurred to him that perhaps her love for
+him was dead, that love was alive in her for another man. Had his conceit
+then no limits?
+
+And then suddenly another thought flashed into her mind. Was he, too, a
+firm, even a fanatical, believer in the angel? She had never numbered
+Fritz among that little company of believers. Him she had always set
+among the men who worship the sirens of the world. But now--? Can there
+be two men in one man as there can be two women in one woman? Suddenly
+Fritz was new to her, newer to her than on the day when she first met
+him. And he was complex. Fritz complex! She changed the word conceit. She
+called it trust. And tears rushed into her eyes. There were tears in her
+heart too. She looked up at her husband. The silk bandage over his
+forehead had been white. Now it was faintly red. As she looked she
+thought that the colour of the red deepened.
+
+"Come here, Fritz," she said softly.
+
+He moved nearer.
+
+"Bend down!"
+
+"Eh?"
+
+"Bend down your head."
+
+He bent down his huge form with a movement that had in it some
+resemblance to the movement of a child. She put up her hand and touched
+the bandage where it was red. She took her hand away. It was damp.
+
+A moment later Fritz was sitting in a low chair by the wash-hand stand in
+an obedient attitude, and a woman--was she siren or angel?--was bathing
+an ugly wound.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+AFTER that night Lady Holme began to do something she had never done
+before--to idealise her husband. Hitherto she had loved him without
+weaving pretty fancies round him, loved him crudely for his strength, his
+animalism, his powerful egoism and imperturbable self-satisfaction. She
+had loved him almost as a savage woman might love, though without her
+sense of slavery. Now a change came over her. She thought of Fritz in a
+different way, the new Fritz, the Fritz who was a believer in the angel.
+It seemed to her that he could be kept faithful most easily, most surely,
+by such an appeal as Robin Pierce would have loved. She had sought to
+rouse, to play upon the instincts of the primitive man. She had not gone
+very far, it is true, but her methods had been common, ordinary. She had
+undervalued Fritz's nature. That was what she felt now. He had behaved
+badly to her, had wronged her, but he had believed in her very much. She
+resolved to make his belief more intense. An expression on his face--only
+that--had wrought a vital change in her feeling towards him, her
+conception of him. She ranged him henceforth with Sir Donald, with Robin
+Pierce. He stood among the believers in the angel.
+
+She called upon the angel passionately, feverishly.
+
+There was strength in Lady Holme's character, and not merely strength of
+temper. When she was roused, confident, she could be resolute,
+persistent; could shut her eyes to side issues and go onward looking
+straight before her. Now she went onward and she felt a new force within
+her, a force that would not condescend to pettiness, to any groping in
+the mud.
+
+Lord Holme was puzzled. He felt the change in his wife, but did not
+understand it. Since the fracas with Leo Ulford their relations had
+slightly altered. Vaguely, confusedly, he was conscious of being pitied,
+yes, surely pitied by his wife. She shed a faint compassion, like a light
+cloud, over the glory of his wrongdoing. And the glory was abated. He
+felt a little doubtful of himself, almost as a son feels sometimes in the
+presence of his mother. For the first time he began to think of himself,
+now and then, as the inferior of his wife, began even, now and then, to
+think of man as the inferior of woman--in certain ways. Such a state of
+mind was very novel in him. He stared at it as a baby stares at its toes,
+with round amazement, inwardly saying, "Is this phenomenon part of me?"
+
+There was a new gentleness in Viola, a new tenderness. Both put him--as
+one lifted and dropped--a step below her. He pulled his bronze moustache
+over it with vigour.
+
+His wife showed no desire to control his proceedings, to know what he was
+about. When she spoke of Miss Schley she spoke kindly, sympathetically,
+but with a dainty, delicate pity, as one who secretly murmurs, "If she
+had only had a chance!" Lord Holme began to think it a sad thing that she
+had not had a chance. The mere thought sent the American a step down from
+her throne. She stood below him now, as he stood below Viola. It seemed
+to him that there was less resemblance between his wife and Miss Schley
+than he had fancied. He even said so to Lady Holme. The angel smiled.
+Somebody else in her smiled too. Once he remarked to the angel, /a propos
+de bottes/, "We men are awful brutes sometimes." Then he paused. As she
+said nothing, only looked very kind, he added, "I'll bet you think so,
+Vi?"
+
+It sounded like a question, but she preferred to give no answer, and he
+walked away shaking his head over the brutishness of men.
+
+The believers in the angel naturally welcomed the development in Lady
+Holme and the unbelievers laughed at it, especially those who had been at
+Arkell House and those who had been influenced by Pimpernel Schley's
+clever imitation. One night at the opera, when /Tannhauser/ was being
+given, Mr. Bry said of it, "I seem to hear the voice of Venus raised in
+the prayer of Elizabeth." Mrs. Wolfstein lifted large eyebrows over it,
+and remarked to Henry, in exceptionally guttural German:
+
+"If this goes on Pimpernel's imitation will soon be completely out of
+date."
+
+To be out of date--in Mrs. Wolfstein's opinion--was to be irremediably
+damned. Lady Cardington, Sir Donald Ulford, and one or two others began
+to feel as if their dream took form and stepped out of the mystic realm
+towards the light of day. Sir Donald seemed specially moved by the
+change. It was almost as if something within him blossomed, warmed by the
+breath of spring.
+
+Lady Holme wondered whether he knew of the fight between her husband and
+his son. She dared not ask him and he only mentioned Leo once. Then he
+said that Leo had gone down to his wife's country place in Hertfordshire.
+Lady Holme could not tell by his intonation whether he had guessed that
+there was a special reason for this departure. She was glad Leo had gone.
+The developing angel did not want to meet the man who had suffered from
+the siren's common conduct. Leo was not worth much. She knew that. But
+she realised now the meanness of having used him merely as a weapon
+against Fritz, and not only the meanness, but the vulgarity of the
+action. There were moments in which she was fully conscious that, despite
+her rank, she had not endured unsmirched close contact with the rampant
+commonness of London.
+
+One of the last great events of the season was to be a charity concert,
+got up by a Royal Princess in connection with a committee of well-known
+women to start a club for soldiers and sailors. Various amateurs and
+professionals were asked to take part in it, among them Lady Holme and
+Miss Schley. The latter had already accepted the invitation when Lady
+Holme received the Royal request, which was made /viva voce/ and was
+followed by a statement about the composition of the programme, in which
+"that clever Miss Schley" was named.
+
+Lady Holme hesitated. She had not met the American for some time and did
+not wish to meet her. Since she had bathed her husband's wound she
+knew--she could not have told how--that Miss Schley's power over him had
+lessened. She did not know what had happened between them. She did not
+know that anything had happened. And, as part of this new effort of hers,
+she had had the strength to beat down the vehement, the terrible
+curiosity--cold steel and fire combined--that is a part of jealousy. That
+curiosity, she told herself, belonged to the siren, not to the angel. But
+at this Royal request her temper waked, and with it many other children
+of her temperament. It was as if she had driven them into a dark cave and
+had rolled a great stone to the cave's mouth. Now the stone was pushed
+back, and in the darkness she heard them stirring, whispering, preparing
+to come forth.
+
+The Royal lady looked slightly surprised. She coughed and glanced at a
+watch she wore at her side.
+
+"I shall be delighted to do anything, ma'am," Lady Holme said quickly.
+
+When she received the programme she found that her two songs came
+immediately after "Some Imitations" by Miss Pimpernel Schley.
+
+She stood for a moment with the programme in her hand.
+
+"Some Imitations"; there was a certain crudeness about the statement, a
+crudeness and an indefiniteness combined. Who were to be the victims? At
+this moment, perhaps, they were being studied. Was she to be pilloried
+again as she had been pilloried that night at the British Theatre? The
+calm malice of the American was capable of any impudent act. It seemed to
+Lady Holme that she had perhaps been very foolish in promising to appear
+in the same programme with Miss Schley. Was it by accident that their
+names were put together? Lady Holme did not know who had arranged the
+order of the performances, but it occurred to her that there was
+attraction to the public in the contiguity, and that probably it was a
+matter of design. No other two women had been discussed and compared,
+smiled over and whispered about that season by Society as she and Miss
+Schley had been.
+
+For a moment, while she looked at the programme, she thought of the
+strange complications of feeling that are surely the fruit of an extreme
+civilisation. She saw herself caught in a spider's web of apparently
+frail, yet really powerful, threads spun by an invisible spider. Her
+world was full of gossamer playing the part of iron, of gossamer that was
+compelling, that made and kept prisoners. What freedom was there for her
+and women like her, what reality of freedom? Even beauty, birth, money
+were gossamer to hold the fly. For they concentrated the gaze of those
+terrible watchful eyes which govern lives, dominating actions, even
+dominating thoughts.
+
+She moved, had always moved, in a maze of complications. She saw them
+tiny yet intense, like ants in their hill. They stirred minds, hearts, as
+the ants stirred twigs, leaves, blossoms, and carried them to the hill
+for their own purposes. In this maze free will was surely lost. The
+beautiful woman of the world seems to the world to be a dominant being,
+to be imposing the yoke of her will on those around her. But is she
+anything but a slave?
+
+Why were she and Miss Schley enemies? Why had they been enemies from the
+moment they met? There was perhaps a reason for their hostility now, a
+reason in Fritz. But at the beginning what reason had there been?
+Civilisation manufactures reasons as the spider manufactures threads,
+because it is the deadly enemy of peace--manufactures reasons for all
+those thoughts and actions which are destructive of inward and exterior
+peace.
+
+For a moment it seemed to Lady Holme as if she and the American were
+merely victims of the morbid conditions amid which they lived; conditions
+which caused the natural vanity of women to become a destroying fever,
+the natural striving of women to please a venomous battle, the natural
+desire of women to be loved a fracas, in which clothes were the armour,
+modes of hair-dressing, manicure, perfumes, dyes, powder-puffs the
+weapons.
+
+What a tremendous, noisy nothingness it was, this state of being! How
+could an angel be natural in it,--be an angel at all?
+
+She laid down the programme and sighed. She felt a vague yet violent
+desire for release, for a fierce change, for something that would brush
+away the spider's web and set free her wings. Yet where would she fly?
+She did not know; probably against a window-pane. And the change would
+never come. She and Fritz--what could they ever be but a successful
+couple known in a certain world and never moving beyond its orbit?
+
+Perhaps for the first time the longing that she had often expressed in
+her singing, obedient to poet and composer, invaded her own soul. Without
+music she was what with music she had often seemed to be--a creature of
+wayward and romantic desires, a yearning spirit, a soaring flame.
+
+At that moment she could have sung better than she had ever sung.
+
+On the programme the names of her songs did not appear. They were
+represented by the letters A and B. She had not decided yet what she
+would sing. But now, moved by feeling to the longing for some action in
+which she might express it, she resolved to sing something in which she
+could at least flutter the wings she longed to free, something in which
+the angel could lift its voice, something that would delight the
+believers in the angel and be as far removed from Miss Schley's
+imitations as possible.
+
+After a time she chose two songs. One was English, by a young composer,
+and was called "Away." It breathed something of the spirit of the East.
+The man who had written it had travelled much in the East, had drawn into
+his lungs the air, into his nostrils the perfume, into his soul the
+meaning of desert places. There was distance in his music. There was
+mystery. There was the call of the God of Gold who lives in the sun.
+There was the sound of feet that travel. The second song she chose was
+French. The poem was derived from a writing of Jalalu'd dinu'r Rumi, and
+told this story.
+
+One day a man came to knock upon the door of the being he loved. A voice
+cried from within the house, "/Qui est la/?" "/C'est moi/!" replied the
+man. There was a pause. Then the voice answered, "This house cannot
+shelter us both together." Sadly the lover went away, went into the great
+solitude, fasted and prayed. When a long year had passed he came once
+more to the house of the one he loved, and struck again upon the door.
+The voice from within cried, "/Qui est la/?" "/C'est toi/!" whispered the
+lover. Then the door was opened swiftly and he passed in with
+outstretched arms.
+
+Having decided that she would sing these two songs, Lady Holme sat down
+to go through them at the piano. Just as she struck the first chord of
+the desert song a footman came in to know whether she was at home to Lady
+Cardington. She answered "Yes." In her present mood she longed to give
+out her feeling to an audience, and Lady Cardington was very sympathetic.
+
+In a minute she came in, looking as usual blanched and tired, dressed in
+black with some pale yellow roses in the front of her gown. Seeing Lady
+Holme at the piano she said, in her low voice with a thrill in it:
+
+"You are singing? Let me listen, let me listen."
+
+She did not come up to shake hands, but at once sat down at a short
+distance from the piano, leaned back, and gazed at Lady Holme with a
+strange expression of weary, yet almost passionate, expectation.
+
+Lady Holme looked at her and at the desert song. Suddenly she thought she
+would not sing it to Lady Cardington. There was too wild a spell in it
+for this auditor. She played a little prelude and sang an Italian song,
+full, as a warm flower of sweetness, of the sweetness of love. The
+refrain was soft as golden honey, soft and languorous, strangely sweet
+and sad. There was an exquisite music in the words of the refrain, and
+the music they were set to made their appeal more clinging, like the
+appeal of white arms, of red, parting lips.
+
+
+  "Torna in fior di giovinezza
+       Isaotta Blanzesmano,
+       Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano:
+   Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."
+
+
+Tears came into Lady Cardington's eyes as she listened, brimmed over and
+fell down upon her blanched cheeks. Each time the refrain recurred she
+moved her lips: "Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano: Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."
+
+Lady Holme's voice was like honey as she sang, and tears were in her eyes
+too. Each time the refrain fell from her heart she seemed to see another
+world, empty of gossamer threads, a world of spread wings, a world
+of--but such poetry and music do not tell you! Nor can you imagine. You
+can only dream and wonder, as when you look at the horizon line and pray
+for the things beyond.
+
+
+  "Tutto--tutto al mondo a vano:
+   Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."
+
+
+"Why do you sing like that to-day?" said Lady Cardington, wiping her eyes
+gently.
+
+"I feel like that to-day," Lady Holme said, keeping her hands on the keys
+in the last chord. There was a vagueness in her eyes, a sort of faint
+cloud of fear. While she was singing she had thought, "Have I known the
+love that shows the vanity of the world? Have I known the love in which
+alone all sweetness lives?" The thought had come in like a firefly
+through an open window. "Have I? Have I?"
+
+And something within her felt a stab of pain, something within her soul
+and yet surely a thousand miles away.
+
+"Tutto--tutto al mondo e vano," murmured Lady Cardington. "We feel that
+and we feel it, and--do you?"
+
+"To-day I seem to," answered Lady Holme.
+
+"When you sing that song you look like the love that gives all sweetness
+to men. Sing like that, look like that, and you--If Sir Donald had heard
+you!"
+
+Lady Holme got up from the piano.
+
+"Sir Donald!" she said.
+
+She came to sit down near Lady Cardington.
+
+"Sir Donald! Why do you say that?"
+
+And she searched Lady Cardington's eyes with eyes full of inquiry.
+
+Lady Cardington looked away. The wistful power that generally seemed a
+part of her personality had surely died out in her. There was something
+nervous in her expression, deprecating in her attitude.
+
+"Why do you speak about Sir Donald?" Lady Holme said.
+
+"Don't you know?"
+
+Lady Cardington looked up. There was an extraordinary sadness in her
+eyes, mingled with a faint defiance.
+
+"Know what?"
+
+"That Sir Donald is madly in love with you?"
+
+"Sir Donald! Sir Donald--madly anything!"
+
+She laughed, not as if she were amused, but as if she wished to do
+something else and chose to laugh instead. Lady Cardington sat straight
+up.
+
+"You don't understand anything but youth," she said.
+
+There was a sound of keen bitterness in her low voice.
+
+"And yet," she added, after a pause, "you can sing till you break the
+heart of age--break its heart."
+
+Suddenly she burst into a flood of tears. Lady Holme was so surprised
+that she did absolutely nothing, did not attempt to console, to inquire.
+She sat and looked at Lady Cardington's tall figure swayed by grief,
+listened to the sound of her hoarse, gasping sobs. And then, abruptly, as
+if someone came into the room and told her, she understood.
+
+"You love Sir Donald," she said.
+
+Lady Cardington looked up. Her tear-stained, distorted face seemed very
+old.
+
+"We both regret the same thing in the same way," she said. "We were both
+wretched in--in the time when we ought to have been happy. I thought--I
+had a ridiculous idea we might console each other. You shattered my
+hope."
+
+"I'm sorry," Lady Holme said.
+
+And she said it with more tenderness than she had ever before used to a
+woman.
+
+Lady Cardington pressed a pocket-handkerchief against her eyes.
+
+"Sing me that song again," she whispered. "Don't say anything more. Just
+sing it again and I'll go."
+
+Lady Holme went to the piano.
+
+
+  "Torna in fior di giovinezza
+       Isaotta Blanzesmano,
+       Dice: Tutto al mondo a vano:
+   Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."
+
+
+When the last note died away she looked towards the sofa. Lady Cardington
+was gone. Lady Holme leaned her arm on the piano and put her chin in her
+hand.
+
+"How awful to be old!" she thought.
+
+Half aloud she repeated the last words of the refrain: "Nell'amore ogni
+dolcezza." And then she murmured:
+
+"Poor Sir Donald!"
+
+And then she repeated, "Poor--" and stopped. Again the faint cloud of
+fear was in her eyes.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE Charity Concert was to be given in Manchester House, one of the
+private palaces of London, and as Royalty had promised to be present, all
+the tickets were quickly sold. Among those who bought them were most of
+the guests who had been present at the Holmes' dinner-party when Lady
+Holme lost her temper and was consoled by Robin Pierce. Robin of course
+was in Rome, but Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mrs. Wolfstein, Sir Donald,
+Mr. Bry took seats. Rupert Carey also bought a ticket. He was not invited
+to great houses any more, but on this public occasion no one with a
+guinea to spend was unwelcome. To Lady Holme's surprise the day before
+the concert Fritz informed her that he was going too.
+
+"You, Fritz!" she exclaimed. "But it's in the afternoon."
+
+"What o' that?"
+
+"You'll be bored to death. You'll go to sleep. Probably you'll snore."
+
+"Not I."
+
+He straddled his legs and looked attentively at the toes of his boots.
+Lady Holme wondered why he was going. Had Miss Schley made a point of it?
+She longed to know. The cruel curiosity which the angel was ever trying
+to beat down rose up in her powerfully.
+
+"I say--"
+
+Her husband was speaking with some hesitation.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Let's have a squint at the programme, will you?"
+
+"Here it is."
+
+She gave it to him and watched him narrowly as he looked quickly over it.
+
+"Hulloa!" he said.
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"Some Imitations," he said. "What's that mean?"
+
+"Didn't you know Miss Schley was a mimic?"
+
+"A mimic--not I! She's an actress."
+
+"Yes--now."
+
+"Now? When was she anythin' else?"
+
+"When she began in America. She was a mimic in the music-halls."
+
+"The deuce she was!"
+
+He stood looking very grave and puzzled for a minute, then he stared hard
+at his wife.
+
+"What did she mimic?"
+
+"I don't know--people."
+
+Again there was a silence. Then he said--
+
+"I say, I don't know that I want you to sing at that affair to-morrow."
+
+"But I must. Why not?"
+
+He hesitated, shifting from one foot to the other almost like a great
+boy.
+
+"I don't know what she's up to," he answered at last.
+
+"Miss Schley?"
+
+"Ah!"
+
+Lady Holme felt her heart beat faster. Was her husband going to open up a
+discussion of the thing that had been turning her life to gall during
+these last weeks--his flirtation, his /liaison/--if it were a /liaison/;
+she did not know--with the American? The woman who had begun to idealise
+Fritz and the woman who was desperately jealous of him both seemed to be
+quivering within her.
+
+"Do you mean--?" she began.
+
+She stopped, then spoke again in a quiet voice.
+
+"Do you mean that you think Miss Schley is going to do something unusual
+at the concert tomorrow?"
+
+"I dunno. She's the devil."
+
+There was a reluctant admiration in his voice, as there always is in the
+voice of a man when he describes a woman as gifted with infernal
+attributes, and this sound stung Lady Holme. It seemed to set that angel
+upon whom she was calling in the dust, to make of that angel a puppet, an
+impotent, even a contemptible thing.
+
+"My dear Fritz," she said in a rather loud, clear voice, like the voice
+of one speaking to a child, "my dear Fritz, you're surely aware that I
+have been the subject of Miss Schley's talent ever since she arrived in
+London?"
+
+"You! What d'you mean?"
+
+"You surely can't be so blind as not to have seen what all London has
+seen?"
+
+"What's all London seen?'
+
+"Why, that Miss Schley's been mimicking me!"
+
+"Mimickin' you!"
+
+The brown of his large cheeks was invaded by red.
+
+"But you have noticed it. I remember your speaking about it."
+
+"Not I!" he exclaimed with energy.
+
+"Yes. You spoke of the likeness between us, in expression, in ways of
+looking and moving."
+
+"That--I thought it was natural."
+
+"You thought it was natural?"
+
+There was a profound, if very bitter, compassion in her voice.
+
+"Poor old boy!" she added.
+
+Lord Holme looked desperately uncomfortable. His legs were in a most
+violent, even a most pathetic commotion, and he tugged his moustache with
+the fingers of both hands.
+
+"Damned cheek!" he muttered. "Damned cheek!"
+
+He turned suddenly as if he were going to stride about the room.
+
+"Don't get angry," said his wife. "I never did."
+
+He swung round and faced her.
+
+"D'you mean you've always known she was mimickin' you?"
+
+"Of course. From the very start."
+
+His face got redder.
+
+"I'll teach her to let my wife alone," he muttered. "To dare--my wife!"
+
+"I'm afraid it's a little late in the day to begin now," Lady Holme said.
+"Society's been laughing over it, and your apparent appreciation of it,
+the best part of the season."
+
+"My what?"
+
+"Your apparent enjoyment of the performance."
+
+And then she went quietly out of the room and shut the door gently behind
+her. But directly the door was shut she became another woman. Her mouth
+was distorted, her eyes shone, she rushed upstairs to her bedroom, locked
+herself in, threw herself down on the bed and pressed her face furiously
+against the coverlet.
+
+The fact that she had spoken at last to her husband of the insult she had
+been silently enduring, the insult he had made so far more bitter than it
+need have been by his conduct, had broken down something within her, some
+wall of pride behind which had long been gathering a flood of feeling.
+She cried now frantically, with a sort of despairing rage, cried and
+crushed herself against the bed, beating the pillows with her hands,
+grinding her teeth.
+
+What was the use of it all? What was the use of being beautiful, of being
+young, rich? What was the use of having married a man she had loved? What
+was the use? What was the use?
+
+"What's the use?" she sobbed the words out again and again.
+
+For the man was a fool, Fritz was a fool. She thought of him at that
+moment as half-witted. For he saw nothing, nothing. He was a blind man
+led by his animal passions, and when at last he was forced to see, when
+she came and, as it were, lifted his eyelids with her fingers, and said
+to him, "Look! Look at what has been done to me!" he could only be angry
+for himself, because the insult had attained him, because she happened to
+be his wife. It seemed to her, while she was crying there, that stupidity
+combined with egoism must have the power to kill even that vital,
+enduring thing, a woman's love. She had begun to idealise Fritz, but how
+could she go on idealising him? And she began for the first time really
+to understand--or to begin to understand--that there actually was
+something within her which was hungry, unsatisfied, something which was
+not animal but mental, or was it spiritual?--something not sensual, not
+cerebral, which cried aloud for sustenance. And this something did not,
+could never, cry to Fritz. It knew he could not give it what it wanted.
+Then to whom did it cry? She did not know.
+
+Presently she grew calmer and sat upon the bed, looking straight before
+her. Her mind returned upon itself. She seemed to go back to that point
+of time, just before Lady Cardington called, when she had the programme
+in her hand and thought of the gossamer threads that were as iron in her
+life, and in such lives as hers; then to move on to that other point of
+time when she laid down the programme, sighed, and was conscious of a
+violent desire for release, for something to come and lift a powerful
+hand and brush away the spider's web.
+
+But now, returning to this further moment in her life, she asked herself
+what would be left to her if the spider's web were gone? The believers in
+the angel? Perhaps she no longer included Fritz among them. The impotence
+of his mind seemed to her an impotence of heart just then. He was to her
+like a numbed creature, incapable of movement, incapable of thought,
+incapable of belief. Credulity--yes, but not belief. And so, when she
+looked at the believers, she saw but a few people: Robin Pierce, Sir
+Donald--whom else?
+
+And then she heard, as if far off, the song she would sing on the morrow
+at Manchester House.
+
+
+  "Torna in fior di giovinezza
+       Isaotta Blanzesmano,
+       Dice: Tutto al mondo a vano:
+   Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."
+
+
+And then she cried again, but no longer frantically; quietly, with a sort
+of childish despair and confusion. In her heart there had opened a dark
+space, a gulf. She peered into it and heard, deep down in it, hollow
+echoes resounding, and she recoiled from a vision of emptiness.
+
+  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
+
+On the following day Fritz drove her himself to Manchester House in a new
+motor he had recently bought. All the morning he had stayed at home and
+fidgeted about the house. It was obvious to his wife that he was in an
+unusually distracted frame of mind. He wanted to tell her something, yet
+could not do so. She saw that plainly, and she felt almost certain that
+since their interview of the previous day he had seen Miss Schley. She
+fancied that there had been a scene of some kind between them, and she
+guessed that Fritz had been hopelessly worsted in it and was very sorry
+for himself. There was a beaten look in his face, a very different look
+from that which had startled her when he came into her room after
+thrashing Leo Ulford. This time, however, her curiosity was not awake,
+and the fact that it was not awake marked a change in her. She felt
+to-day as if she did not care what Fritz had been doing or was going to
+do. She had suffered, she had concealed her suffering, she had tried
+vulgarly to pay Fritz out, she had failed. At the critical moment she had
+played the woman after he had played the man. He had thrashed the
+intruder whom she was using as a weapon, and she had bathed his wounds,
+made much of him, idealised him. She had done what any uneducated street
+woman would have done for "her man." And now she had suddenly come to
+feel as if there had always been an emptiness in her life, as if Fritz
+never had, never could fill it. The abruptness of the onset of this new
+feeling confused her. She did not know that a woman could be subject to a
+change of this kind. She did not understand it, realise what it
+portended, what would result from it. But she felt that, for the moment,
+at any rate, she could not get up any excitement about Fritz, his
+feelings, his doings. Whenever she thought of him she thought of his
+blundering stupidity, his blindness, sensuality and egoism. No doubt she
+loved him. Only, to-day, she did not feel as if she loved him or anyone.
+Yet she did not feel dull. On the contrary, she was highly strung,
+unusually sensitive. What she was most acutely conscious of was a
+sensation of lonely excitement, of solitary expectation. Fritz fidgeted
+about the house, and the fact that he did so gave her no more concern
+than if a little dog had been running to and fro. She did not want him to
+tell her what was the matter. On the other hand, she did want him not to
+tell her. Simply she did not care.
+
+He said nothing. Perhaps something in her look, her manner, kept him
+dumb.
+
+When they were in the motor on the way to Manchester House, he said:
+
+"I bet you'll cut out everbody."
+
+"Oh, there are all sorts of stars."
+
+"Well, mind you put 'em all out."
+
+It was evident to her that for some reason or other he was particularly
+anxious she should shine that afternoon. She meant to. She knew she was
+going to. But she had no desire to shine in order to gratify Fritz's
+egoism. Probably he had just had a quarrel with Miss Schley and wanted to
+punish her through his wife. The idea was not a pretty one. Unfortunately
+that circumstance did not ensure its not being a true one.
+
+"Mind you do, eh?" reiterated her husband, giving the steering wheel a
+twist and turning the car up Hamilton Place.
+
+"I shall try to sing well, naturally," she replied coldly. "I always do."
+
+"Of course--I know."
+
+There was something almost servile in his manner, an anxiety which was
+quite foreign to it as a rule.
+
+"That's a stunnin' dress," he added. "Keep your cloak well over it."
+
+She said nothing.
+
+"What's the row?" he asked. "Anythin' up?"
+
+"I'm thinking over my songs."
+
+"Oh, I see."
+
+She had silenced him for the moment.
+
+Very soon they were in a long line of carriages and motors moving slowly
+towards Manchester House.
+
+"Goin' to be a deuce of a crowd," said Fritz.
+
+"Naturally."
+
+"Wonder who'll be there?"
+
+"Everybody who's still in town."
+
+She bowed to a man in a hansom.
+
+"Who's that?"
+
+"Plancon. He's singing."
+
+"How long'll it be before you come on?"
+
+"Quite an hour, I think."
+
+"Better than bein' first, isn't it?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"What are you goin' to sing?"
+
+"Oh--"
+
+She was about to say something impatient about his not knowing one tune
+from another, but she checked herself, and answered quietly:
+
+"An Italian song and a French song."
+
+"What about?"
+
+"Take care of that carriage in front--love."
+
+He looked at her sideways.
+
+"You're the one to sing about that," he said.
+
+She felt that he was admiring her beauty as if it were new to him. She
+did not care.
+
+At last they reached Manchester House. Fritz's place was taken by his
+chauffeur, and they got out. The crowd was enormous. Many people
+recognised Lady Holme and greeted her. Others, who did not know her
+personally, looked at her with open curiosity. A powdered footman came to
+show her to the improvised artists' room. Fritz prepared to follow.
+
+"Aren't you going into the concert-room?" she said.
+
+"Presently."
+
+"But--"
+
+"I'll take you up first."
+
+"Very well," she said. "But it isn't the least necessary."
+
+He only stuck out his under jaw. She realised that Miss Schley would be
+in the artists' room and said nothing more. They made their way very
+slowly to the great landing on the first floor of the house, from which a
+maze of reception rooms opened. Mr. and Mrs. Ongrin, the immensely rich
+Australians who were the owners of the house, were standing there ready
+to receive the two Royal Princesses who were expected, and Mr. Ongrin
+took from a basket on a table beside him a great bouquet of
+honey-coloured roses, and offered it to Lady Holme with a hearty word of
+thanks to her for singing.
+
+She took the roses with a look of pleasure.
+
+"How sweet of you! They suit my song," she said.
+
+She was thinking of the Italian song.
+
+Mr. Ongrin, who was a large, loose-limbed man, with straw-coloured hair
+turning grey, and a broken nose, looked genial and confused, and she went
+on, still closely followed by Fritz.
+
+"This is the room for the performers, my lady," said the footman, showing
+them into a large, green drawing-room, with folding doors at one end shut
+off by an immense screen.
+
+"Is the platform behind the screen?" Lady Holme asked.
+
+"Yes, my lady. The ladies' cloak-room is on the left--that door, my
+lady."
+
+There were already several people in the room, standing about and looking
+tentative. Lady Holme knew most of them. One was a French actor who was
+going to give a monologue; very short, very stout, very
+intelligent-looking, with a face that seemed almost too flexible to be
+human. Two or three were singers from the Opera House. Another was an
+aristocratic amateur, an intimate friend of Lady Holme's, who had a
+beautiful contralto voice. Several of the committee were there too,
+making themselves agreeable to the artists. Lady Holme began to speak to
+the French actor. Fritz stood by. He scarcely understood a word of
+French, and always looked rather contemptuous when it was talked in his
+presence. The French actor appealed to him on some point in the
+conversation. He straddled his legs, uttered a loud, "Oh, wee! Oh, wee!
+wee!" and laughed.
+
+"Lord Holme est tout a fait de mon avis!" cried the comedian.
+
+"Evidemment," she answered, wishing Fritz would go. Miss Schley had not
+come yet. She was certain to be effectively late, as she had been at Mrs.
+Wolfstein's lunch-party. Lady Holme did not feel as if she cared whether
+she came early or late, whether she were there or not. She was still
+companioned by her curious sensation of the morning, a sensation of odd
+loneliness and detachment, combined with excitement--but an excitement
+which had nothing to do with the present. It seemed to her as if she were
+a person leaning out of a window and looking eagerly along a road. People
+were in the room behind her, voices were speaking, things were happening
+there, but they had nothing to do with her. That which had to do with her
+was coming down the road. She could not see yet what it was, but she
+could hear the faint sound of its approach.
+
+The comedian spoke to someone else. She went into the cloak-room and took
+off her motor cloak. As she glanced into a mirror to see if all the
+details of her gown were perfect, she was struck by the expression on her
+face, as if she had seen it on the face of a stranger. For a moment she
+looked at herself as at a stranger, seeing her beauty with a curious
+detachment, and admiring it without personal vanity or egoism, or any
+small, triumphant feeling. Yet it was not her beauty which fascinated her
+eyes, but an imaginative look in them and in the whole face. For the
+first time she fully realised why she had a curious, an evocative,
+influence on certain people, why she called the hidden children of the
+secret places of their souls, why those children heard, and stretched out
+their hands, and lifted their eyes and opened their lips.
+
+There was a summoning, and yet a distant expression in her eyes. She saw
+it herself. They were like eyes that had looked on magic, that would look
+on magic again.
+
+A maid came to help her. In a moment she had picked up her bouquet of
+roses and her music-case, and was back in the green drawing-room.
+
+There were more people in it now. Fritz was still hovering about looking
+remarkably out of place and strangely ill at ease. To-day his usual
+imperturbable self-confidence had certainly deserted him. He spoke to
+people but his eyes were on the door. Lady Holme knew that he was waiting
+for Miss Schley. She felt a sort of vague pity for his uneasiness. It was
+time for the concert to begin, but the Princesses had not yet arrived. A
+murmur of many voices came from the hidden room beyond the screen where
+the audience was assembled. Several of the performers began to look
+rather strung up. They smiled and talked with slightly more vivacity than
+was quite natural in them. One or two of the singers glanced over their
+songs, and pointed out certain effects they meant to make to the
+principal accompanist, an abnormally thin boy with thick dark hair and
+flushed cheeks. He expressed comprehension, emphasising it by finger-taps
+on the music and a continual, "I see! I see!" Two or three of the members
+of the committee looked at their watches, and the murmur of conversation
+in the hidden concert-room rose into a dull roar.
+
+Lady Holme sat down on a sofa. Sometimes when she was going to sing she
+felt nervous. There are very few really accomplished artists who do not.
+But to-day she was not at all nervous. She knew she was going to do
+well--as well as when she sang to Lady Cardington, even better. She felt
+almost as if she were made of music, as if music were part of her, ran in
+her veins like blood, shone in her eyes like light, beat in her heart
+like the pulse of life. But she felt also as if she were still at a
+window, looking down a road, and listening to the sound of an approach.
+
+"Did you see him?"
+
+A lady near her was speaking to a friend.
+
+"Yes. Doesn't he look shocking? Such an alteration!"
+
+"Poor fellow! I wonder he cares to go about."
+
+"And he's so clever. He helped me in a concert once--the Gordon boys, you
+know--and I assure you--"
+
+She did not catch anything more, but she felt a conviction that they were
+speaking of Rupert Carey, and that he must be in the concert-room. Poor
+Carey! She thought of the Arkell House ball, but only for a moment. Then
+someone spoke to her. A moment later Miss Schley came slowly into the
+room, accompanied by a very small, wiry-looking old woman, dreadfully
+dressed, and by Leo Ulford, who was carrying a bouquet of red carnations.
+The kind care of Mr. Ongrin had provided a bouquet for each lady who was
+performing.
+
+As Leo came in he looked round swiftly, furtively. He saw Fritz, and a
+flush went over his face. Then Lady Holme saw him look at her with a
+scowl, exactly like the scowl of an evil-tempered schoolboy. She bowed to
+him slightly. He ignored the recognition, and spoke to Miss Schley with a
+heavy assumption of ignominious devotion and intimacy. Lady Holme could
+scarcely help smiling. She read the little story very plainly--the little
+common story of Leo's desire to take a revenge for his thrashing fitting
+in with some similar desire of Miss Schley's; on her part probably a wish
+to punish Fritz for having ventured to say something about her impudent
+mimicry of his wife. Easy to read it was, common-minded, common-hearted
+humanity in full sail to petty triumph, petty revenge. But all this was
+taking place in the room behind Lady Holme, and she was leaning from the
+window watching the white road. But Fritz? She glanced round the
+drawing-room and saw that he was moved by the story as they had meant him
+to be moved. The angry jealousy of the primitive, sensual man was aflame,
+His possessive sense, one of the strongest, if not the strongest, of such
+a man's senses, was outraged. And he showed it.
+
+He was standing with a middle-aged lady, one of the committee, but he had
+ceased from talking to her, and was staring at Miss Schley and Leo with
+the peculiar inflated look on his face that was characteristic of him
+when his passions were fully roused. Every feature seemed to swell and
+become bloated, as if under the influence of a disease or physical
+seizure. The middle-aged lady looked at him with obvious astonishment,
+then turned away and spoke to the French actor.
+
+Miss Schley moved slowly into the middle of the room. She did not seem to
+see Fritz. Two or three people came to speak to her. She smiled but did
+not say much. The little wiry-looking old lady, her mother from
+Susanville, stood by her in an effaced manner, and Leo, holding the
+bouquet, remained close beside her, standing over her in his impudent
+fashion like a privileged guardian and lover.
+
+Lady Holme was watching Fritz. The necessary suppression of his anger at
+such a moment, and in such surroundings, suppression of any demonstration
+of it at least, was evidently torturing him. Someone--a man--spoke to
+him. His wife saw that he seemed to choke something down before he could
+get out a word in reply. Directly he had answered he moved away from the
+man towards Miss Schley, but he did not go up to her. He did not trust
+himself to do that. He stood still again, staring. Leo bent protectively
+over the American. She smiled at him demurely beneath lowered eyelids.
+The little old lady shook out her rusty black dress and assumed an absurd
+air of social sprightliness, making a mouth bunched up like an
+old-fashioned purse sharply drawn together by a string.
+
+There was a sudden lull in the roar of conversation from the
+concert-room, succeeded by a wide rustling noise. The Princesses had at
+length arrived, and the audience was standing up as they came in and took
+their seats. After a brief silence the rustling noise was renewed as the
+audience sat down again. Then the pianist hurried up to a grave-looking
+girl who was tenderly holding a violin, took her hand and led her away
+behind the screen. A moment later the opening bars of a duet were
+audible.
+
+The people in the artists' room began to sit down with a slight air of
+resignation. The French actor looked at the very pointed toes of his
+varnished boots and composed his india-rubber features into a solemn,
+almost priestly, expression. Lady Holme went over to a sofa near the
+screen and listened attentively to the duet, but from time to time she
+glanced towards the middle of the room where Miss Schley was still calmly
+standing up with Leo holding the bouquet. The mother from Susanville had
+subsided on a small chair with gilt legs, spread out her meagre gown, and
+assumed the aspect of a roosting bird at twilight. Fritz stood up with
+his back against the wall, staring at Miss Schley. His face still looked
+bloated. Presently Miss Schley glanced at him, as if by accident, looked
+surprised at seeing him there, and nodded demurely. He made a movement
+forward from the wall, but she immediately began to whisper to Leo
+Ulford, and after remaining for a moment in an attitude of angry
+hesitation he moved backward again. His face flushed scarlet.
+
+Lady Holme realised that he was making a fool of himself. She saw several
+pairs of eyes turned towards him, slight smiles appearing on several
+faces. The French actor had begun to watch him with an expression of
+close criticism, as a stage manager watches an actor at rehearsal. But
+she did not feel as if she cared what Fritz was doing. The sound of the
+violin had emphasised her odd sensation of having nothing to do with what
+was going on in the room. Just for one hour Fritz's conduct could not
+affect her.
+
+Very soon people began to whisper round her. Artists find it very
+difficult to listen to other artists on these occasions. In a minute or
+two almost everybody was speaking with an air of mystery. Miss Schley put
+her lips to Leo Ulford's ear. Evidently she had a great deal to say to
+him. He began to pout his lips in smiles. They both looked across at Lord
+Holme. Then Miss Schley went on murmuring words into Leo's ear and Leo
+began to shake with silent laughter. Lord Holme clenched his hands at his
+sides. The French actor, still watching him closely, put up a fat
+forefinger and meditatively traced the outline of his own profile,
+pushing out his large flexible lips when the finger was drawing near to
+them. The whole room was full of the tickling noise of half-whispered
+conversation.
+
+Presently the music stopped. Instantly the tickling noise stopped too.
+There was languid applause--the applause of smart people on a summer
+afternoon--from beyond the screen. Then the grave girl reappeared,
+looking graver and hot. Those who had been busily talking while she was
+playing gathered round her to express their delight in her kind
+accompaniment. The pianist hurried up to a stout man with a low,
+turned-down collar and a white satin tie, whose double chin, and general
+air of rather fatuous prosperity, proclaimed him the possessor of a tenor
+voice, and Miss Schley walked quietly, but with determination, up to
+where Lady Holme was sitting and took a seat beside her.
+
+"Glad to meet you again," she drawled.
+
+She called Leo Ulford with a sharp nod. He hesitated, and began to look
+supremely uncomfortable, twisting the bouquet of carnations round and
+round in nervous hands.
+
+"I've been simply expiring all season to hear you sing," Miss Schley
+continued.
+
+"How sweet of you!"
+
+"That is so. Mr. Ulford, please bring my flowers."
+
+Leo had no alternative but to obey. He came slowly towards the sofa,
+while the tenor and the pianist vanished behind the screen. That he was
+sufficiently sensitive to be conscious of the awkwardness of the
+situation Miss Schley had pleasantly contrived was very apparent. He
+glowered upon Lady Holme, forcing his boyish face to assume a
+coarsely-determined and indifferent expression. But somehow the body,
+which she knew her husband had thrashed, looked all the time as if it
+were being thrashed again.
+
+The voice of the hidden tenor rose in "/Celeste Aida!/" and Lady Holme
+listened with an air of definite attention, taking no notice of Leo. The
+music gave her a perfect excuse for ignoring him. But Miss Schley did not
+intend to be interfered with by anything so easily trampled upon as an
+art. Speaking in her most clear and choir-boyish tones, she said to Leo
+Ulford:
+
+"Sit down, Mr. Ulford. You fidget me standing."
+
+Then turning again to Lady Holme she continued:
+
+"Mr. Ulford's been so lovely and kind. He came up all the way from
+Hertfordshire just to take care of marmar and me to-day. Marmar's fair
+and crazy about him. She says he's the most lovely feller in Europe."
+
+Leo twisted the bouquet. He was sitting now on the edge of a chair, and
+shooting furtive glances in the direction of Lord Holme, who had begun to
+look extremely stupid, overwhelmed by the cool impudence of the American.
+
+"Your husband looks as if he were perched around on a keg of
+rattlesnakes," continued Miss Schley, her clear voice mingling with the
+passionate tenor cry, "/Celeste Aida!/" "Ain't he feeling well to-day?"
+
+"I believe he is perfectly well," said Lady Holme, in a very low voice.
+
+It was odd, perhaps, but she did not feel at all angry, embarrassed, or
+even slightly annoyed, by Miss Schley's very deliberate attempt to
+distress her. Of course she understood perfectly what had happened and
+was happening. Fritz had spoken to the actress about her mimicry of his
+wife, had probably spoken blunderingly, angrily. Miss Schley was secretly
+furious at his having found out what she had been doing, still more
+furious at his having dared to criticise any proceeding of hers. To
+revenge herself at one stroke on both Lord and Lady Holme she had turned
+to Leo Ulford, whose destiny it evidently was to be used as a weapon
+against others. Long ago Lady Holme had distracted Leo's wandering
+glances from the American and fixed them on herself. With the instinct to
+be common of an utterly common nature Miss Schley had resolved to awake a
+double jealousy--of husband and wife--by exhibiting Leo Ulford as her
+/ami intime/, perhaps as the latest victim to her fascination. It was the
+vulgar action of a vulgar woman, but it failed of its effect in one
+direction. Lord Holme was stirred, but Lady Holme was utterly
+indifferent. Miss Schley's quick instinct told her so and she was
+puzzled. She did not understand Lady Holme. That was scarcely strange,
+for to-day Lady Holme did not understand herself. The curious mental
+detachment of which she had been conscious for some time had increased
+until it began surely to link itself with something physical, something
+sympathetic in the body that replied to it. She asked herself whether the
+angel were spreading her wings at last. All the small, sordid details of
+which lives lived in society, lives such as hers, are full, details which
+assume often an extraordinary importance, a significance like that of
+molecules seen through a magnifying glass, had suddenly become to her as
+nothing. A profound indifference had softly invaded her towards the petty
+side of life. Miss Schley, Leo Ulford, even Fritz in his suppressed rage
+and jealousy of a male animal openly trampled upon, had nothing to do
+with her, could have no effect on her at this moment. She remembered that
+she had once sighed for release. Well, it seemed to her as if release
+were at hand.
+
+The tenor finished his romance. Again the muffled applause sounded. As
+the singer came from behind the screen, wiping beads of perspiration from
+his self-satisfied face, Lady Holme got up and congratulated him. Then
+she crossed over to her husband.
+
+"Why don't you go into the concert-room, Fritz? You're missing
+everything, and you're only in the way here."
+
+She did not speak unkindly. He said nothing, only cleared his throat.
+
+"Go in," she said. "I should like to have you there while I am singing."
+
+He cleared his throat again.
+
+"Right you are."
+
+He stared into her eyes with a sort of savage admiration.
+
+"Cut her out," he said. "Cut her out! You can, and--damn her!--she
+deserves it."
+
+Then he turned and went out.
+
+Lady Holme felt rather sick for a moment. She knew she was going to sing
+well, she wished to sing well--but not in order to punish Miss Schley for
+having punished Fritz. Was everything she did to accomplish some sordid
+result? Was even her singing--the one thing in which Robin Pierce and
+some other divined a hidden truth that was beautiful--was even that to
+play its contemptible part in the social drama in which she was so
+inextricably entangled? Those gossamer threads were iron strands indeed.
+
+Someone else was singing--her friend with the contralto voice.
+
+She sat down alone in a corner. Presently the French actor began to give
+one of his famous monologues. She heard his wonderfully varied elocution,
+his voice--intelligence made audible and dashed with flying lights of
+humour rising and falling subtly, yet always with a curious sound of
+inevitable simplicity. She heard gentle titterings from the concealed
+audience, then a definite laugh, then a peal of laughter quite gloriously
+indiscreet. The people were waking up. And she felt as if they were being
+prepared for her. But why had Fritz looked like that, spoken like that?
+It seemed to spoil everything. To-day she felt too far away from--too far
+beyond, that was the truth--Miss Schley to want to enter into any rivalry
+with her. She wished very much that she had been placed first on the
+programme. Then there could have been no question of her cutting out the
+American.
+
+As she was thinking this Miss Schley slowly crossed the room and came up
+to her.
+
+"Lady Holme," she said, "I come next."
+
+"Do you?"
+
+"I do. And then you follow after."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Say, would you mind changing it? It don't do to have two recitations one
+after the other. There ought to be something different in between."
+
+Lady Holme looked at her quite eagerly, almost with gratitude.
+
+"I'll sing next," she said quickly.
+
+"Much obliged to you, I'm sure. You're perfectly sweet."
+
+Lady Holme saw again a faint look of surprise on the American's white
+face, succeeded instantly by an expression of satisfaction. She realised
+that Miss Schley had some hidden disagreeable reason for her request. She
+even guessed what it was. But she only felt glad that, whatever happened,
+no one could accuse her of trying to efface any effect made by Miss
+Schley upon the audience. As she sang before the "imitations," if any
+effect were to be effaced it must be her own. The voice of the French
+actor ceased, almost drowned in a ripple of laughter, a burst of quite
+warm applause. He reappeared looking calm and magisterial. The applause
+continued, and he had to go back and bow his thanks. The tenor, who had
+not been recalled, looked cross and made a movement of his double chin
+that suggested bridling.
+
+"Now, Miss Schley!" said the pianist. "You come now!"
+
+"Lady Holme has very kindly consented to go first," she replied.
+
+Then she turned to the French actor and, in atrocious but very
+self-possessed French, began to congratulate him on his performance.
+
+"Oh, well--" the pianist hurried up to Lady Holme. "You have really--very
+well then--these are the songs! Which do you sing first? Very hot, isn't
+it?"
+
+He wiped his long fingers with a silk pocket-handkerchief and took the
+music she offered to him.
+
+"The Princesses seem very pleased," he added. "Marteau--charming
+composer, yes--very pleased indeed. Which one? '/C'est toi/'? Certainly,
+certainly."
+
+He wiped his hands again and held out one to lead Lady Holme to the
+platform. But she ignored it gently and went on alone. He followed,
+carrying the music and perspiring. As they disappeared Miss Schley got up
+and moved to a chair close by the screen that hid the platform. She
+beckoned to Leo Ulford and he followed her.
+
+As Lady Holme stepped on to the low platform, edged with a bank of
+flowers, it seemed to her as if with one glance she saw everyone in the
+crowded room, and felt at least something swiftly of each one's feeling.
+
+The two Princesses sat together looking kind and serious. As she
+curtseyed to them they bowed to her and smiled. Behind them she saw a
+compact mass of acquaintances: Lady Cardington sitting with Sir Donald
+and looking terribly sad, even self-conscious, yet eager; Mrs. Wolfstein
+with Mr. Laycock; Mr. Bry, his eyeglass fixed, a white carnation in his
+coat; Lady Manby laughing with a fat old man who wore a fez, and many
+others. At the back she saw Fritz, standing up and staring at her with
+eyes that seemed almost to cry, "Cut her out!" And in the fourth row she
+saw a dreary, even a horrible, sight--Rupert Carey's face, disfigured by
+the vice which was surely destroying him, red, bloated, dreadfully
+coarsened, spotted. From the midst of the wreckage of the flesh his
+strange eyes looked out with a vivid expression of hopelessness. Yet in
+them burned fires, and in fire there is an essence of fierce purity. The
+soul in those eyes seemed longing to burn up the corruption of his body,
+longing to destroy the ruined temple, longing to speak and say, "I am in
+prison, but do not judge of the prisoner by examining the filthiness of
+his cell."
+
+As Lady Holme took in the audience with a glance there was a rustle of
+paper. Almost everyone was looking to see if the programme had been
+altered. Lady Holme saw that suddenly Fritz had realised the change that
+had been made, and what it meant. An expression of anger came into his
+face.
+
+She felt that she saw more swiftly, and saw into more profoundly to-day
+than ever before in her life; that she had a strangely clear vision of
+minds as well as of faces, that she was vivid, penetrating. And she had
+time, before she began to sing, for an odd thought of the person drowning
+who flashes back over the ways of his past, who is, as it were, allowed
+one instant of exceptional life before he is handed over to death. This
+thought was clear, clean cut in her mind for a moment, and she put
+herself in the sounding arms of the sea.
+
+Then the pianist began his prelude, and she moved a step forward to the
+flowers and opened her lips to sing.
+
+She sang by heart the little story drawn from the writing of Jalalu'd
+dinu'r Rumi. The poet who had taken it had made a charming poem of it,
+delicate, fragile, and yet dramatic and touched with fervour, porcelain
+with firelight gleaming on it here and there. Lady Holme had usually a
+power of identifying herself thoroughly with what she was singing, of
+concentrating herself with ease upon it, and so compelling her hearers to
+be concentrated upon her subject and upon her. To-day she was deeper down
+in words and music, in the little drama of them, than ever before. She
+was the man who knocked at the door, the loved one who cried from within
+the house. She gave the reply, "/C'est moi/!" with the eagerness of that
+most eager of all things--Hope. Then, as she sang gravely, with tender
+rebuke, "This house cannot shelter us both together," she was in the
+heart of love, that place of understanding. Afterwards, as one carried by
+Fate through the sky, she was the man set down in a desert place,
+fasting, praying, educating himself to be more worthy of love. Then came
+the return, the question, "/Qui est la/?" the reply;--reply of the
+solitary place, the denied desire, the longing to mount, the educated
+heart--"/C'est toi/!" the swiftly-opening door, the rush of feet that
+were welcome, of outstretched arms for which waited a great possession.
+
+Something within her lived the song very fully and completely. For once
+she did not think at all of what effect she was making. She was not
+unconscious of the audience. She was acutely conscious of the presence of
+people, and of individuals whom she knew; of Fritz, of Lady Cardington,
+Sir Donald, even of poor, horrible Rupert Carey. But with the unusual
+consciousness was linked a strange indifference, a sense of complete
+detachment. And this enabled her to live simultaneously two lives--Lady
+Holme's and another's. Who was the other? She did not ask, but she felt
+as if in that moment a prisoner within her was released. And yet, directly
+the song was over and the eager applause broke out, a bitterness came
+into her heart. Her sense, banished for the moment, of her own
+personality and circumstances returned upon her, and that "/C'est toi/!"
+of the educated heart seemed suddenly an irony as she looked at Fritz's
+face. Had any lover gone into the desert for her, fasted and prayed for
+her, learned for her sake the right answer to the ceaseless question that
+echoes in every woman's heart?
+
+The pianist modulated, struck the chord of a new key, paused, then broke
+into a languid, honey-sweet prelude. Lady Holme sang the Italian song
+which had made Lady Cardington cry.
+
+Afterwards, she often thought of her singing of that particular song on
+that particular occasion as people think of the frail bridges that span
+the gulfs between one fate and another. And it seemed to her that while
+she was crossing this bridge, that was a song, she had a faint
+premonition of the land that lay before her on the far side of the gulf.
+She did not see clearly any features of the landscape, but surely she saw
+that it was different from all that she had known. Perhaps she deceived
+herself. Perhaps she fancied that she had divined something that was in
+reality hidden from her. One thing, however, is certain--that she made a
+very exceptional effect upon her audience. Many of them, when later they
+heard of an incident that occurred within a very short time, felt almost
+awestricken for a moment. It seemed to them that they had been visited by
+one of the messengers--the forerunners of destiny--that they had heard a
+whispering voice say, "Listen well! This is the voice of the Future
+singing."
+
+Many people in London on the following day said, "We felt in her singing
+that something extraordinary must be going to happen to her." And some of
+them at any rate, probably spoke the exact truth.
+
+Lady Holme herself, while she sang her second song, really felt this
+sensation--that it was her swan song. If once we touch perfection we feel
+the black everlasting curtain being drawn round us. We have done what we
+were meant to do and can do no more. Let the race of men continue. Our
+course is run out. To strive beyond the goal is to offer oneself up to
+the derision of the gods. In her song, Lady Holme felt that suddenly, and
+with great ease, she touched the perfection that it was possible for her
+to reach. She felt that, and she saw what she had done--in the eyes of
+Lady Cardington that wept, in Sir Donald's eyes, which had become young
+as the eyes of Spring, and in the eyes of that poor prisoner who was the
+real Rupert Carey. When she sang the first refrain she knew.
+
+
+  "Torna in fior di giovinezza
+       Isaotta Blanzesmano,
+       Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano:
+   Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."
+
+
+She understood while she sang--she had never understood before, nor could
+conceive why she understood now--what love had been to the world, was
+being, would be so long as there was a world. The sweetness of love did
+not merely present itself to her imagination, but penetrated her soul.
+And that penetration, while it carried with it and infused through her
+whole being a delicate radiance, that was as the radiance of light in the
+midst of surrounding blackness--beams of the moon in a forest--carried
+with it also into her heart a frightful sense of individual isolation, of
+having missed the figure of Truth in the jostling crowd of shams.
+
+Fritz stood there against the wall. Yes--Fritz. And he was savagely
+rejoicing in the effect she was making upon the audience, because he
+thought, hoped, that it would lessen the triumph of the woman who was
+punishing him.
+
+She had missed the figure of Truth. That was very certain. And as she
+sang the refrain for the last time she seemed to herself to be searching
+for the form that must surely be very wonderful, searching for it in the
+many eyes that were fixed upon her. She looked at Sir Donald:
+
+
+  "Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano:"
+
+
+She looked at Rupert Carey:
+
+
+  "Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."
+
+
+She still looked at Carey, and the hideous wreckage of the flesh was no
+longer visible to her. She saw only his burning eyes.
+
+Directly she had finished singing she asked for her motor cloak. While
+they were fetching it she had to go back twice to the platform to bow to
+the applause.
+
+Miss Schley, who was looking angry, said to her:
+
+"You're not going away before my show?"
+
+"I want to go to the concert room, where I can hear better, and see," she
+replied.
+
+Miss Schley looked at her doubtfully, but had to go to the platform. As
+she slowly disappeared behind the screen Lady Holme drew the cloak round
+her, pulled down her veil and went quickly away.
+
+She wanted--more, she required--to be alone.
+
+At the hall door she sent a footman to find the motor car. When it came
+up she said to the chauffeur:
+
+"Take me home quickly and then come back for his lordship."
+
+She got in.
+
+As the car went off swiftly she noticed that the streets were shining
+with wet.
+
+"Has it been raining?" she asked.
+
+"Raining hard, my lady."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+ON the following morning the newspapers contained an account of the
+concert at Manchester House. They contained also an account of a motor
+accident which had occurred the same afternoon between Hyde Park Corner
+and Knightsbridge.
+
+On the wet pavement Lord Holme's new car, which was taking Lady Holme to
+Cadogan Square at a rapid pace, skidded and overturned, pinning Lady
+Holme beneath it. While she was on the ground a hansom cab ran into the
+car.
+
+At their breakfasts her friends, her acquaintances, her enemies and the
+general public read of her beautiful singing at the concert, and read
+also the following paragraph, which closed the description of the
+accident:
+
+
+  "We deeply regret to learn that Lady Holme was severely injured in
+  the face by the accident. Full particulars have not reached us, but
+  we understand that an immediate operation is necessary and will be
+  performed to-day by Mr. Bernard Crispin the famous surgeon. Her
+  ladyship is suffering great pain, and it is feared that she will be
+  permanently disfigured."
+
+
+The fierce change which Lady Holme had longed for was a reality. One
+life, the life of the siren, had come to an end. But the eyes of the
+woman must still see light. The heart of the woman must still beat on.
+
+Death stretched out a hand in the darkness and found the hand of Birth.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+ON a warm but overcast day, at the end of the following September, a
+woman, whose face was completely hidden by a thick black veil, drove up
+to the boat landing of the town of Como in a hired victoria. She was
+alone, but behind her followed a second carriage containing an Italian
+maid and a large quantity of luggage. When the victoria stopped at the
+water's edge the woman got out slowly, and stood for a moment, apparently
+looking for something. There were many boats ranged along the quay, their
+white awnings thrown back, their oars resting on the painted seats.
+Beside one, which was larger than the others, soberly decorated in brown
+with touches of gold, and furnished with broad seats not unlike small
+armchairs, stood two bold-looking Italian lads dressed in white sailors'
+suits. One of them, after staring for a brief instant at the veiled
+woman, went up to her and said in Italian:
+
+"Is the signora for Casa Felice?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+The boy took off his round hat with a gallant gesture.
+
+"The boat is here, signora."
+
+He led the way to the brown-and-gold craft, and helped the lady to get
+into it. She sat down on one of the big seats.
+
+"That is the luggage," she said, speaking Italian in a low voice, and
+pointing to the second carriage from which the maid was stepping. The two
+boatmen hastened towards it. In a few minutes maid and luggage were
+installed in a big black gondola, oared by two men standing up, and the
+brown boat, with the two lads in white and the veiled woman, glided out
+on the calm water.
+
+The day was a grey dream, mystical in its colourless silence. Blue Italy
+was shrouded as the woman's face was shrouded. The speechlessness of
+Nature environed her speechlessness. She was an enigma set in an enigma,
+and the two rowers looked at her and at the sunless sky, and bent to
+their oars gravely. A melancholy stole into their sensitive dark faces.
+This new /padrona/ had already cast a shadow upon their buoyant
+temperaments.
+
+She noticed it and clasped her hands together in her lap. She was not
+accustomed yet to her new /role/ in life.
+
+The boat stole on. Como was left behind. The thickly-wooded shores of the
+lake, dotted with many villas, the tall green mountains covered with
+chestnut trees, framed the long, winding riband of water which was the
+way to Casa Felice. There were not many other boats out. The steamer had
+already started for Bellagio, and was far away near the point where Torno
+nestles around its sheltered harbour. The black gondola was quickly left
+behind. Its load of luggage weighed it down. The brown boat was alone in
+the grey dream of the sunless autumn day.
+
+Behind her veil Lady Holme was watching the two Italian boys, whose lithe
+bodies bent to their oars, whose dark eyes were often turned upon her
+with a staring scrutiny, with the morose and almost violent expression
+that is the child of frustrated curiosity.
+
+Was it true? Was she in real life, or sitting there, watching, thinking,
+striving to endure, in a dream? Since the accident which had for ever
+changed her life she had felt many sensations, a torrent of sensations,
+but never one exactly like this, never one so full of emptiness, chaos,
+grey vacancy, eternal stillness, unreal oppression and almost magical
+solitude as this. She had thought she had suffered all things that she
+could suffer. She had not yet suffered this. Someone, the Governing
+Power, had held this in reserve. Now it was being sent forth by decree.
+Now it was coming upon her. Now it was enveloping her. Now it was rolling
+round her and billowing away on every side to unimaginably remote
+horizons.
+
+Another and a new emotion of horror was to be hers. Would the attack of
+the hidden one upon her never end? Was that quiver of poisoned arrows
+inexhaustible?
+
+She leaned back against the cushions without feeling them. She wanted to
+sink back as the mortally wounded sink, to sink down, far down, into the
+gulf where surely the dying go to find, with their freezing lips, the
+frozen lips of Death. She shut her eyes.
+
+Presently, with the faint splash of the oars in the water, there mingled
+a low sound of music. The rower nearest to her was singing in an under
+voice to keep his boy's heart from succumbing to the spell of melancholy.
+She listened, still wrapped in this dreadful chaos that was dreamlike. At
+first the music was a murmur. But presently it grew louder. She could
+distinguish words now and then. Once she heard /carissima/, a moment
+afterwards /amore/. Then the poison in which the tip of this last arrow
+had been curiously steeped began its work in her. The quivering creature
+hidden within her cowered, shrank, put up trembling hands, cried out, "I
+cannot endure this thing. I do not know how to. I have never learnt the
+way. This is impossible for me. This is a demand I have not the capacity
+to fulfil!" And, even while it cowered and cried out, knew, "This I must
+endure. This demand I shall be made to fulfil. Nothing will serve me; no
+outstretched hands, no wailings of despair, no prayers, no curses even
+will save me. For I am the soul in the hands of the vivisector."
+
+Along the lake, past the old home of La Taglioni, past the Villa Pasta
+with its long garden, past little Torno with its great round oleanders
+and its houses crowding to the shore, the boatman sang. Gathering courage
+as his own voice dispersed his melancholy, and the warm hopes of his
+youth spread their wings once more, roused by the words of love his lips
+were uttering, he fearlessly sent out his song. Love in the South was in
+it, love in the sun, embraces in warm scented nights, longings in
+moonlight, attainment in darkness. The boy had forgotten the veiled lady,
+whose shrouded face and whose silence had for a moment saddened him. His
+hot, bold nature reasserted itself, the fire of his youth blazed up
+again. He sang as if only the other boatman had been there and they had
+seen the girls they loved among the trees upon the shore.
+
+And the soul writhed, like an animal stretched and strapped upon the
+board, to whom no anaesthetic, had been given.
+
+Never before would it have been possible to Lady Holme to believe that
+the mere sound of a word could inflict such torment upon a heart as the
+sound of the word /amore/, coming from the boatman's lips, now inflicted
+upon hers. Each time it came, with its soft beauty, its languor of
+sweetness--like a word reclining--it flayed her soul alive, and showed
+her red, raw bareness.
+
+Yet she did not ask the man to stop singing. Few people in the hands of
+Fate ask Fate for favours. Instinct speaks in the soul and says, "Be
+silent."
+
+The boat rounded the point of Torno and came at once into a lonelier
+region of the lake. Autumn was more definite here. Its sadness spoke more
+plainly. Habitations on the shores were fewer. The mountains were more
+grim, though grander. And their greyness surely closed in a little upon
+the boat, the rowers, the veiled woman who was being taken to Casa
+Felice.
+
+Perhaps to combat the gathering gloom of Nature the boatman sang more
+loudly, with the full force of his voice. But suddenly he seemed to be
+struck by the singular contrast opposed to his expansive energy by the
+silent figure opposite to him. A conscious look came into his face. His
+voice died away abruptly. After a pause he said"
+
+"Perhaps the signora is not fond of music?"
+
+Lady Holme wanted to speak, but she could not. She and this bright-eyed
+boy were not in the same world. That was what she felt. He did not know
+it, but she knew it. And one world cannot speak through infinite space
+with another.
+
+She said nothing. The boy looked over his shoulder at his companion.
+Then, in silence, they both rowed on.
+
+And now that the song had ceased she was again in the grey chaos of the
+dream, in the irrevocable emptiness, the intense, the enormous solitude
+that was like the solitude of an unpeopled eternity in which man had no
+lot.
+
+Presently, with a stroke of his right oar, the boy who had sung turned
+the boat's prow toward the shore, and Lady Holme saw a large, lonely
+house confronting them on the nearer bank of the lake. It stood apart.
+For a long distance on either side of it there was no other habitation.
+The flat, yellow facade rose out of the water. Behind was a dim tangle of
+densely-growing trees rising up on the steep mountain side towards the
+grey sky. Lady Holme could not yet see details. The boat was still too
+far out upon the lake. Nor would she have been able to note details if
+she had seen them. Only a sort of heavy impression that this house had a
+pale, haunted aspect forced itself dully upon her.
+
+"Ecco Casa Felice, signora!" said the foremost rower, half timidly,
+pointing with his brown hand.
+
+She made an intense effort and uttered some reply. The boy was encouraged
+and began to tell her about the beauties of the house, the gardens, the
+chasm behind the piazza down which the waterfall rushed, to dive beneath
+the house and lose itself in the lake. She tried to listen, but she could
+not. The strangeness of her being alone, hidden behind a dense veil, of
+her coming to such a retired house in the autumn to remain there in utter
+solitude, with no object except that of being safe from the intrusion of
+anyone who knew her, of being hidden from all watching eyes that had ever
+looked upon her--the strangeness of it obsessed her, was both powerful
+and unreal. That she should be one of those lonely women of whom the
+world speaks with a lightly-contemptuous pity seemed incredible to her.
+Yet what woman was lonelier than she?
+
+The boat drew in toward the shore and she began to see the house more
+plainly. It was large, and the flat facade was broken in the middle by an
+open piazza with round arches and slender columns. This piazza divided
+the house in two. The villa was in fact composed of two square buildings
+connected together by it. From the boat, looking up, Lady Holme saw a
+fierce mountain gorge rising abruptly behind the house. Huge cypresses
+grew on its sides, towering above the slate roof, and she heard the loud
+noise of falling water. It seemed to add to the weight of her desolation.
+
+The boat stopped at a flight of worn stone steps. One of the boys sprang
+out and rang a bell, and presently an Italian man-servant opened a tall
+iron gate set in a crumbling stone arch, and showed more stone steps
+leading upward between walls covered with dripping lichen. The boat boy
+came to help Lady Holme out.
+
+For a moment she did not move. The dreamlike feeling had come upon her
+with such force that her limbs refused to obey her will. The sound of the
+falling water in the mountain gorge had sent her farther adrift into the
+grey, unpeopled eternity, into the vague chaos. But the boy held out his
+hand, took hers. The strong clasp recalled her. She got up. The Italian
+man-servant preceded her up the steps into a long garden built up high
+above the lake on a creeper-covered wall. To the left was the house door.
+She stood still for an instant looking out over the wide expanse of
+unruffled grey water. Then, putting her hand up to her veil as if to keep
+it more closely over her face, she slowly went into the house.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+DESPAIR had driven Lady Holme to Casa Felice. When she had found that the
+accident had disfigured her frightfully, and that the disfigurement would
+be permanent, she had at first thought of killing herself. But then she
+had been afraid. Life had abruptly become a horror to her. She felt that
+it must be a horror to her always. Yet she dared not leave it then, in
+her home in London, in the midst of the sights and sounds connected with
+her former happiness. After the operation, and the verdict of the
+doctors, that no more could be done than had been done, she had had an
+access of almost crazy misery, in which all the secret violence of her
+nature had rushed to the surface from the depths. Shut up alone in her
+room, she had passed a day and a night without food. She had lain upon
+the floor. She had torn her clothes into fragments. The animal that
+surely dwells at the door of the soul of each human being had had its way
+in her, had ravaged her, humiliated her, turned her to savagery. Then at
+last she had slept, still lying upon the floor. And she had waked feeling
+worn out but calm, desperately calm. She defied the doctors. What did
+they know of women, of what women can do to regain a vanished beauty? She
+would call in specialists, beauty doctors, quacks, the people who fill
+the papers with their advertisements.
+
+Then began a strange defile of rag-tag humanity to the Cadogan Square
+door--women, men, of all nationalities and pretensions. But the evil was
+beyond their power. At last an American specialist, who had won renown by
+turning a famous woman of sixty into the semblance of a woman of
+six-and-thirty--for a short time--was called in. Lady Holme knew that his
+verdict must be final. If he could do nothing to restore her vanished
+loveliness nothing could be done. After being closeted with her for a
+long time he came out of her room. There were tears in his eyes. To the
+footman who opened the hall door, and who stared in surprise, he
+explained his emotion thus.
+
+"Poor lady," he said. "It's a hopeless case."
+
+"Ah!" said the man, who was the pale footman Lady Holme had sent with the
+latch-key to Leo Ulford.
+
+"Hopeless. It's a hard thing to have to tell a lady she'll always
+be--be--"
+
+"What, sir?" said the footman.
+
+"Well--what people won't enjoy looking at."
+
+He winked his eyes. He was a little bald man, with a hatchet face that
+did not suggest emotion.
+
+"And judging by part of the left side of the face, I guess she must have
+been almost a beauty once," he added, stepping into the square.
+
+That was Lady Holme now. She had to realise herself as a woman whom
+people would rather not look at.
+
+All this time she had not seen Fritz. He had asked to see her. He had
+even tried to insist on seeing her, but so long as there was any hope in
+her of recovering her lost beauty she had refused to let him come near
+her. The thought of his eyes staring upon the tragic change in her face
+sent cold creeping through her veins. But when the American had gone she
+realised that there was nothing to wait for, that if she were ever to let
+Fritz see her again it had better be now. The bandages in which her face
+had been swathed had been removed. She went to a mirror and, setting her
+teeth and clenching her hands, looked into it steadily.
+
+She did not recognise herself. As she stood there she felt as if a
+dreadful stranger had come into the room and was confronting her.
+
+The accident, and the surgical treatment that had followed upon it, had
+greatly altered the face. The nose, once fine and delicate, was now
+coarse and misshapen. A wound had permanently distorted the mouth,
+producing a strange, sneering expression. The whole of the right side of
+the face was puffy and heavy-looking, and drawn down towards the chin. It
+was also at present discoloured. For as Lady Holme lay under the car she
+had been badly burnt. The raw, red tinge would no doubt fade away with
+time, but the face must always remain unsightly, even a little grotesque,
+must always show to the casual passer-by a woman who had been the victim
+of a dreadful accident.
+
+Lady Holme stared at this woman for a long time. There were no tears in
+her eyes. Then she went to the dressing-table and began to make up her
+face. Slowly, deliberately, with a despairing carefulness, she covered it
+with pigments till she looked like a woman in Regent Street. Her face
+became a frightful mask, and even then the fact that she was disfigured
+was not concealed. The application of the pigments began to cause her
+pain. The right side of her face throbbed. She looked dreadfully old,
+too, with this mass of paint and powder upon her--like a hag, she
+thought. And it was obvious that she was trying to hide something.
+Anyone, man or woman, looking upon her, would divine that so much art
+could only be used for the concealment of a dreadful disability. People,
+seeing this mask, would suppose--what might they not suppose? The pain in
+her face became horrible. Suddenly, with a cry, she began to undo what
+she had done. When she had finished she rang the bell. Her maid knocked
+at the door. Without opening it she called out:
+
+"Is his lordship in the house?"
+
+"Yes, my lady. His lordship has just come in."
+
+"Go and ask him to come up and see me."
+
+"Yes, my lady."
+
+Lady Holme sat down on the sofa at the foot of the bed. She was trembling
+violently. She sat looking on the ground and trying to control her limbs.
+A sort of dreadful humbleness surged through her, as if she were a guilty
+creature about to cringe before a judge. She trembled till the sofa on
+which she was sitting shook. She caught hold of the cushions and made a
+strong effort to sit still. The handle of the door turned.
+
+"Don't come in!" she cried out sharply.
+
+But the door opened and her husband appeared on the threshold. As he did
+so she turned swiftly so that only part of the left side of her face was
+towards him.
+
+"Vi!" he said. "Poor old girl, I--"
+
+He was coming forward when she called out again "Stay there, Fritz!"
+
+He stopped.
+
+"Why?" he asked.
+
+"I--I--wait a minute. Shut the door."
+
+He shut the door. She was still looking away from him.
+
+"Do you understand?" she said, still in a sharp voice.
+
+"Understand what?"
+
+"That I'm altered, that the accident's altered me--very much?"
+
+"I know. The doctor said something. But you look all right."
+
+"From there."
+
+The trembling seized her again.
+
+"Well, but--it can't be so bad--"
+
+"It is. Don't move! Fritz--"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"You--do you care for me?"
+
+"Of course I do, old girl. Why, you know--"
+
+Suddenly she turned round, stood up and faced him desperately.
+
+"Do you care for me, Fritz?" she said.
+
+There was a dead silence. It seemed to last for a long while. At length
+it was broken by a woman's voice crying:
+
+"Fritz,--Fritz--it isn't my fault! It isn't my fault!"
+
+"Good God!" Lord Holme said slowly.
+
+"It isn't my fault, Fritz! It isn't my fault!"
+
+"Good God! but--the doctor didn't--Oh--wait a minute--"
+
+A door opened and shut. He was gone. Lady Holme fell down on the sofa.
+She was alone, but she kept on sobbing:
+
+"It isn't my fault, Fritz! It isn't my fault, Fritz!"
+
+And while she sobbed the words she knew that her life with Fritz Holme
+had come to an end. The chapter was closed.
+
+From that day she had only one desire--to hide herself. The season was
+over. London was empty. She could travel. She resolved to disappear.
+Fritz had stayed on in the house, but she would not see him again, and he
+did not press her to. She knew why. He dreaded to look at her. She would
+see no one. At first there had been streams of callers, but now almost
+everybody had left town. Only Sir Donald came to the door each day and
+inquired after her health. One afternoon a note was brought to her. It
+was from Fritz, saying that he had been "feeling a bit chippy," and the
+doctor advised him to run over to Homburg. But he wished to know what she
+meant to do. Would she go down to her father?--her mother, Lady St. Loo,
+was dead, and her father was an old man--or what? Would she come to
+Homburg too?
+
+When she read those words she laughed out loud. Then she sent for the
+/New York Herald/ and looked for the Homburg notes. She found Miss
+Pimpernel Schley's name among the list of the newest arrivals. That
+evening she wrote to her husband:
+
+
+  "Do not bother about me. Go to Homburg. I need rest and I want to
+  be alone. Perhaps I may go to some quiet place in Switzerland with
+  my maid. I'll let you know if I leave town. Good-bye.
+
+                                              "VIOLA HOLME."
+
+
+At first she had put only Viola. Then she added the second word. Viola
+alone suggested an intimacy which no longer existed between her and the
+man she had married.
+
+The next day Lord Holme crossed the Channel. She was left with the
+servants.
+
+Till then she had not been out of the house, but two days afterwards,
+swathed in a thick veil, she went for a drive in the Park, and on
+returning from it found Sir Donald on the door-step. He looked frailer
+than ever and very old. Lady Holme would have preferred to avoid him.
+Since that interview with her husband the idea of meeting anyone she knew
+terrified her. But he came at once to help her out of the carriage. Her
+face was invisible, but he knew her, and he greeted her in a rather shaky
+voice. She could see that he was deeply moved, and thanked him for his
+many inquiries.
+
+"But why are you still in London?" she said.
+
+"You are still in London," he replied.
+
+She was about to say good-bye on the door-step; but he kept her hand in
+his and said:
+
+"Let me come in and speak to you for a moment."
+
+"Very well," she said.
+
+When they were in the drawing-room she still kept the veil over her face,
+and remained standing.
+
+"Sir Donald," she said, "you cared for me, I know; you were fond of me."
+
+"Were?" he answered.
+
+"Yes--were. I am no longer the woman you--other people--cared for."
+
+"If there is any change--" he began.
+
+"I know. You are going to say it is not in the woman, the real woman. But
+I say it is. The change is in what, to men, is the real woman. This
+change has destroyed any feeling my husband may have had for me."
+
+"It could never destroy mine," Sir Donald said quietly.
+
+"Yes, it could--yours especially, because you are a worshipper of beauty,
+and Fritz never worshipped anything except himself. I am going to let you
+say good-bye to me without seeing me. Remember me as I was."
+
+"But--what do you mean? You speak as if you would no longer go into the
+world."
+
+"I go into the world! You haven't seen me, Sir Donald."
+
+She saw an expression of nervous apprehension come into his face as he
+glanced at her veil.
+
+"What are you going to do, then?" he said.
+
+"I don't know. I--I want a hiding-place."
+
+She saw tears come into his old, faded eyes.
+
+"Hush!" he said. "Don't-"
+
+"A hiding-place. I want to travel a long way off and be quite alone, and
+think, and see how I can go on, if I can go on."
+
+Her voice was quite steady.
+
+"If I could do something--anything for you!" he murmured.
+
+"You fancy you are still speaking to the woman who sang, Sir Donald."
+
+"Would you--" Suddenly he spoke with some eagerness. "You want to go
+away, to be alone?"
+
+"Yes, I must."
+
+"Let me lend you Casa Felice!"
+
+"Casa Felice!"
+
+She laughed.
+
+"To be sure; I was to baptise it, wasn't I?"
+
+"Ah, that--will you have it for a while?"
+
+"But you are going there!"
+
+"I will not go. It is all ready. The servants are engaged. You will be
+perfectly looked after, perfectly comfortable. Let me feel I can do
+something for you. Try it. You will find beauty there--peace. And I--I
+shall be on the lake, not far off."
+
+"I must be alone," she said wearily.
+
+"You shall be. I will never come unless you send for me."
+
+"I should never send for you or for anyone."
+
+She did not say then what she would do, but three days later she accepted
+Sir Donald's offer.
+
+And now she was alone in Casa Felice. She had not even brought her French
+maid, but had engaged an Italian. She was resolved to isolate herself
+with people who had never seen her as a beautiful woman.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+LADY HOLME never forgot that first evening at Casa Felice. The
+strangeness of it was greater than the strangeness of any nightmare. When
+she was shut up in her bedroom in London she had thought she realised all
+the meaning of the word loneliness. Now she knew that then she had not
+begun to realise it. For she had been in her own house, in the city which
+contained a troop of her friends, in the city where she had reigned. And
+although she knew that she would reign no more, she had not grasped the
+exact meaning of that knowledge in London. She had known a fact but not
+fully felt it. She had known what she now was but not fully felt what she
+now was. Even when Fritz, muttering almost terrified exclamations, had
+stumbled out of the bedroom, she had not heard the dull clamour of
+finality as she heard it now.
+
+She was an exile. She was an outcast among women. She was no longer a
+beautiful woman, she was not even a plain woman--she was a
+dreadful-looking human being.
+
+The Italian servants by whom she was surrounded suddenly educated her in
+the lore of exact knowledge of herself and her present situation.
+
+Italians are the most charming of the nations, but Italians of the lower
+classes are often very unreserved in the display of their most fugitive
+sensations, their most passing moods. The men, especially when they are
+young, are highly susceptible to beauty in women. They are also--and the
+second emotion springs naturally enough from the first--almost childishly
+averse from female ugliness. It is a common thing in Italy to hear of men
+of the lower classes speak of a woman's plainness with brutality, with a
+manner almost of personal offence. They often shrink from personal
+ugliness as Englishmen seldom do, like children shrinking from something
+abnormal--a frightening dwarf, a spectre.
+
+Now that Lady Holme had reached the "hiding-place" for which she had
+longed, she resolved to be brutal with herself. Till now she had almost
+perpetually concealed her disfigured face. Even her servants had not seen
+it. But in this lonely house, among these strangers, she knew that the
+inevitable moment was come when she must begin the new life, the terrible
+life that was henceforth to be hers. In her bedroom she took off her hat
+and veil, and without glancing into the glass she came downstairs. In the
+hall she met the butler. She saw him start.
+
+"Can I have tea?" she said, looking at him steadily.
+
+"Yes, signora," he answered, looking down.
+
+"In the piazza, please."
+
+She went out through the open door into the piazza. The boy who had sung
+in the boat was there, watering some geraniums in pots. As she came out
+he glanced up curiously, at the same time pulling off his hat. When he
+saw her his mouth gaped, and an expression of pitiless repulsion came
+into his eyes. It died out almost instantaneously, and he smiled and
+began to speak about the flowers. But Lady Holme had received her
+education. She knew what she was to youth that instinctively loves
+beauty.
+
+She sat down in a cane chair. It seemed to her as if people were
+scourging her with thongs of steel, as if she were bleeding from the
+strokes.
+
+She looked out across the lake.
+
+The butler brought tea and put it beside her. She did not hear him come
+or go. Behind her the waterfall roared down between the cypresses. Before
+her the lake spread out its grey, unruffled surface. And this was the
+baptism of Casa Felice, her baptism into a new life. Her agony was the
+more intense because she had never been an intellectual woman, had never
+lived the inner life. Always she had depended on outward things. Always
+she had been accustomed to bustle, movement, excitement, perpetual
+intercourse with people who paid her homage. Always she had lived for the
+world, and worshipped, because she had seen those around her worshipping,
+the body.
+
+And now all was taken from her. Without warning, without a moment for
+preparation, she was cast down into Hell. Even her youth was made useless
+to her.
+
+When she thought of that she began to cry, sitting there by the stone
+balustrade of the piazza, to cry convulsively. She remembered her pity
+for old age, for the monstrous loss it cannot cease from advertising. And
+now she, in her youth, had passed it on the road to the pit. Lady
+Cardington was a beautiful woman. She pitied herself bitterly because she
+was morbid, as many beautiful women are when they approach old age. But
+she was beautiful. She would always be beautiful. She might not think it,
+but she was still a power, could still inspire love. In her blanched face
+framed in white hair there was in truth a wonderful attraction.
+
+Whiteness--Lady Holme shuddered when she thought of whiteness,
+remembering what the glass had shown her.
+
+Fritz--his animal passion for her--his horror of her now--Miss
+Schley--their petty, concealed strife--Rupert Carey's love--Leo Ulford's
+desire of conquest--his father's strange, pathetic devotion--Winter
+falling at the feet of Spring--figures and events from the panorama of
+her life now ended flickered through her almost numbed mind, while the
+tears still ran down her face.
+
+And Robin Pierce?
+
+As she thought of him more life quickened in her mind.
+
+Since her accident he had written to her several times, ardent, tender
+letters, recalling all he had said to her, recounting again his adoration
+of her for her nature, her soul, the essence of her, the woman in her,
+telling her that this terror which had come upon her only made her dearer
+to him, that--as she knew--he had impiously dared almost to long for it,
+as for an order of release that would take effect in the liberation of
+her true self.
+
+These letters she had read, but they had not stirred her. She had told
+herself that Robin did not know, that he was a self-deceiver, that he did
+not understand his own nature, which was allied to the nature of every
+living man. But now, seeking some, even the smallest solace in the
+intense agony of desolation that was upon her, she caught--in her
+bleeding woman's heart--at this hand stretched out from Rome. She got up,
+went to her bedroom, unlocked her despatch-box, took out these letters of
+Robin's. They had not stirred her, yet she had kept them. Now she came
+down once more to the piazza, sat by the tea-table, opened them, read
+them, re-read them, whispered them over again and again. Something she
+must have; some hand she must catch at. She could not die in this
+freezing cold which she had never known, this cold that came out of the
+Inferno, at whose cavern mouth she stood. And Robin said he was
+there--Robin said he was there.
+
+She did not love Robin. It seemed to her now that it would be grotesque
+for her to love any man. Her face was not meant for love. But as she read
+these ardent, romantic letters, written since the tragedy that had
+overtaken her, she began to ask herself, with a fierce anxiety, whether
+what Robin affirmed could be the truth? Was he unlike other men? Was his
+nature capable of a devotion of the soul to another soul, of a devotion
+to which any physical ugliness, even any physical horror, would count as
+nothing?
+
+After that last scene with Fritz she felt as if he were no longer her
+husband, as if he were only a man who had fled from her in fear. She did
+not think any more of his rights, her duties. He had abandoned his
+rights. What duties could she have towards a man who was frightened when
+he looked at her? And indeed all the social and moral questions to which
+the average woman of the world pays--because she must pay--attention had
+suddenly ceased to exist for Lady Holme. She was no longer a woman of the
+world. All worldly matters had sunk down beneath her feet with her lost
+beauty. She had wanted to be free. Well, now she was surely free. Who
+would care what she did in the future?
+
+Robin said he was there.
+
+She thought that, unless she could feel that in world there was one man
+who wanted to take care of her, she must destroy herself. The thought
+grew in her as she sat there, till she said to herself, "If it is true
+what he says, perhaps I shall be able to live. If it is not true--" She
+looked over the stone balustrade at the grey waters of the lake. Twilight
+was darkening over them.
+
+Late that evening, when she was sitting in the big drawing-room staring
+at the floor, the butler came in with a telegram. She opened it and read:
+
+
+  "Sir Donald has told me you are at Casa Felice; arrive to-morrow
+  from Rome--ROBIN."
+
+
+"No answer," she said.
+
+So he was coming--to-morrow. The awful sense of desolation lifted
+slightly from her. A human being was travelling to her, was wanting to
+see her. To see her! She shuddered. Then fiercely she asked herself why
+she was afraid. She would not be afraid. She would trust in Robin. He was
+unlike other men. There had always been in him something that set him
+apart, a strangeness, a romance, a love of hidden things, a subtlety. If
+only he would still care for her, still feel towards her as he had felt,
+she could face the future, she thought. They might be apart. That did not
+matter. She had no thought of a close connection, of frequent intercourse
+even. She only wanted desperately, frantically, to know that someone who
+had loved her could love her still in spite of what had happened. If she
+could retain one deep affection she felt that she could live.
+
+The morrow would convince her.
+
+That night she did not sleep. She lay in bed and heard the water falling
+in the gorge, and when the dawn began to break she did a thing she had
+not done for a long time.
+
+She got out of bed, knelt down and prayed--prayed to Him who had dealt
+terribly with her that He would be merciful when Robin came.
+
+When it was daylight and the Italian maid knocked at her door she told
+her to get out a plain, dark dress. She did her hair herself with the
+utmost simplicity. That at least was still beautiful. Then she went down
+and walked in the high garden above the lake. The greyness had lifted and
+the sky was blue. The mellowness rather than the sadness of autumn was
+apparent, throned on the tall mountains whose woods were bathed in
+sunshine. All along the great old wall, that soared forty feet from the
+water, roses were climbing. Scarlet and white geraniums bloomed in
+discoloured ancient vases. Clumps of oleanders showed pink showers of
+blossoms. Tall bamboos reared their thin heads towards the tufted summits
+of palms that suggested Africa. Monstrous cypresses aspired, with a sort
+of haughty resignation, above their brother trees. The bees went to and
+fro. Flies circled and settled. Lizards glided across the warm stones and
+rustled into hiding among the ruddy fallen leaves. And always the white
+water sang in the gorge as it rushed towards the piazza of Casa Felice.
+
+And Lady Holme tried to hope.
+
+Yet, as she walked slowly to and fro amid the almost rank luxuriance of
+the garden, she was gnawed by a terrible anxiety. The dreadful
+humbleness, the shrinking cowardice of the unsightly human being invaded
+her. She strove to put them from her. She strove to call Robin's own
+arguments and assertions to her aid. What she had been she still was in
+all essentials. Her self was unharmed, existed, could love, hate, be
+tender, be passionate as before. Viola was there still within her, the
+living spirit to which a name had been given when she was a little child.
+The talent was there which had spoken, which could still speak, through
+her voice. The beating heart was there which could still speak through
+her actions. The mysteries of the soul still pursued their secret courses
+within her, like far-off subterranean streams. The essential part of her
+remained as it had been. Only a little outside bit of a framework had
+been twisted awry. Could that matter very much? Had she not perhaps been
+morbid in her despair?
+
+She determined to take courage. She told herself that if she allowed this
+dreadful, invading humbleness way in her she would lose all power to
+dominate another by showing that she had ceased to dominate herself. If
+she met Robin in fear and trembling she would actually teach him to
+despise her. If she showed that she thought herself changed, horrible, he
+would inevitably catch her thought and turn it to her own destruction.
+Men despise those who despise themselves. She knew that, and she argued
+with herself, fought with herself. If Robin loved the angel; surely he
+could still love. For if there were an angel within her it had not been
+harmed. And she leaned on the stone wall and prayed again while the roses
+touched her altered face.
+
+It seemed to her then that courage was sent to her. She felt less
+terrified of what was before her, as if something had risen up within her
+upon which she could lean, as if her soul began to support the trembling,
+craven thing that would betray her, began to teach it how to be still.
+
+She did not feel happy, but she felt less desperately miserable than she
+had felt since the accident.
+
+After /dejeuner/ she walked again in the garden. As the time drew near
+for Robin to arrive, the dreadful feverish anxiety of the early morning
+awoke again within her. She had not conquered herself. Again the thought
+of suicide came upon her, and she felt that her life or death were in the
+hands of this man whom yet she did not love. They were in his hands
+because he was a human being and she was one. There are straits in which
+the child of life, whom the invisible hand that is extended in a religion
+has not yet found, must find in the darkness a human hand stretched out
+to it or sink down in utter terror and perhaps perish. Lady Holme was in
+such a strait. She knew it. She said to herself quite plainly that if
+Robin failed to stretch out his hand to her she could not go on living.
+It was clear to her that her life or death depended upon whether he
+remained true to what he had said was his ideal, or whether he proved
+false to it and showed himself such a man as Fritz, as a thousand others.
+
+She sickened with anxiety as the moments passed.
+
+Now, leaning upon the wall, she began to scan the lake. Presently she saw
+the steamer approaching the landing-stage of Carate on the opposite bank.
+The train from Rome had arrived. But Robin would doubtless come by boat.
+There was at least another hour to wait. She left the wall and walked
+quickly up and down, moving her hands and her lips. Now she almost wished
+he were not coming. She recalled the whole story of her acquaintance with
+Robin--his adoration of her when she was a girl, his wish to marry her,
+his melancholy when she refused him, his persistent affection for her
+after she had married Fritz, his persistent belief that there was that
+within her which Fritz did not understand and could never satisfy, his
+persistent obstinacy in asserting that he had the capacity to understand
+and content this hidden want. Was that true?
+
+Fritz had cared for nothing but the body, yet she had loved Fritz. She
+did not love Robin. Yet there was a feeling in her that if he proved true
+to his ideal now she might love him in the end. If only he would love
+her--after he knew.
+
+She heard a sound of oars. The blood rushed to her face. She drew back
+from the wall and hurried into her house. All the morning she had been
+making up her mind to go to meet Robin at once in the sunlight, to let
+him know all at once. But now, in terror, she went to her room. With
+trembling hands she pinned on a hat; she took out of a drawer the thick
+veil she wore when travelling and tied it tightly over her face. Panic
+seized her.
+
+There was a knock at the door, the announcement that a signore was
+waiting in the drawing-room for the signora.
+
+Lady Holme felt an almost ungovernable sensation of physical nausea. She
+went to her dressing-case and drank one or two burning drops of eau de
+Cologne. Then she pulled down the veil under her chin and stood in the
+middle of the room for several minutes without moving. Then she went
+downstairs quickly and went quickly into the drawing-room.
+
+Robin was there, standing by the window. He looked excited, with an
+excitement of happiness, and this gave to him an aspect of almost boyish
+youth. His long black eyes shone with eagerness when she came into the
+room. But when he saw the veil his face changed.
+
+"You don't trust me!" he said, without any greeting.
+
+She went up to him and put out her hand.
+
+"Robin!" she said.
+
+"You don't trust me," he repeated.
+
+He took her hand. His was hot.
+
+"Robin--I'm a coward," she said.
+
+Her voice quivered.
+
+"Oh, my dearest!" he exclaimed, melted in a moment.
+
+He took her other hand, and she felt his hands throbbing. His clasp was
+so ardent that it startled her into forgetting everything for one
+instant, everything that except these clasping hands loved her hands,
+loved her. That instant was exquisitely sweet to her. There was a
+stinging sweetness in it, a mystery of sweetness, as if their four hands
+were four souls longing to be lost in one another.
+
+"Now you'll trust me," he said.
+
+She released her hands and immediately her terror of doubt returned.
+
+"Let us go into the garden," she answered.
+
+He followed her to the path beside the wall.
+
+"I looked for you from here," she said.
+
+"I did not see you."
+
+"No. When I heard the boat I--Robin, I'm afraid--I'm afraid."
+
+"Of me, Viola?"
+
+He laughed joyously.
+
+"Take off your veil," he said.
+
+"No, no--not yet. I want to tell you first--"
+
+"To tell me what?"
+
+"That my--that my--Robin, I'm not beautiful now."
+
+Her voice quivered again.
+
+"You tell me so," he answered.
+
+"It's true."
+
+"I don't believe it."
+
+"But," she began, almost desperately, "it's true, Robin, oh, it's true!
+When Fritz--"
+
+She stopped. She was choking.
+
+"Oh--Fritz!" he said with scathing contempt.
+
+"No, no, listen! You've got to listen." She put her hand on his arm.
+"When Fritz saw me--afterwards he--he was afraid of me. He couldn't speak
+to me. He just looked and said--and said--"
+
+Tears were running down behind the veil. He put up his hand to hers,
+which still touched his arm.
+
+"Don't tell me what he said. What do I care? Viola, you know I've almost
+longed for this--no, not that, but--can't you understand that when one
+loves a woman one loves something hidden, something mystical? It's so
+much more than a face that one loves. One doesn't want to live in a house
+merely because it's got a nice front door."
+
+He laughed again as if he were half ashamed of his own feeling.
+
+"Is that true, Robin?"
+
+The sound of her voice told him that he need not be afraid to be
+passionate.
+
+"Sit down here," he said.
+
+They had reached an old stone bench at the end of the garden where the
+woods began. Two cypresses towered behind it, sad-looking sentinels.
+There was a gap in the wall here through which the lake could be seen as
+one sat upon the bench.
+
+"I want to make you understand, to make you trust me."
+
+She sat down without speaking, and he sat beside her.
+
+"Viola," he said, "there are many men who love only what they can see,
+and never think of the spirit behind it. They care only for a woman's
+body. For them the woman's body is the woman. I put it rather brutally.
+What they can touch, what they can kiss, what they can hold in their arms
+is all to them. They are unconscious of the distant, untameable woman,
+the lawless woman who may be free in the body that is captive, who may be
+unknown in the body that is familiar, who may even be pure in the body
+that is defiled as she is immortal though her body is mortal. These men
+love the flesh only. But there are at least some men who love the spirit.
+They love the flesh, too, because it manifests the spirit, but to them
+the spirit is the real thing. They are always stretching out their arms
+to that. The hearth can't satisfy them. They demand the fire. The fire,
+the fire!" he repeated, as if the word warmed him. "I've so often thought
+of this, imagined this. It's as if I'd actually foreseen it."
+
+He spoke with gathering excitement.
+
+"What?" she murmured.
+
+"That some day the woman men--those men I've spoken of--loved would be
+struck down, and the real woman, the woman of the true beauty, the
+mystic, the spirit woman, would be set free. If this had not happened you
+could perhaps never have known who was the man that really loved
+you--that loved the real you, the you that lies so far beyond the flesh,
+the you that has sung and suffered--"
+
+"Ah, suffered!" she said.
+
+But there was a note of something that was not sorrow in her voice.
+
+"If you want to know the man I mean," Robin said, "lift up your veil,
+Viola."
+
+She sat quite still for a moment, a moment that seemed very long. Then
+she put up both hands to her head, untied the veil and let it fall into
+her lap. He looked at her, and there was silence. They heard the bees
+humming. There were many among the roses on the wall. She had turned her
+face fully towards him, but she kept her eyes on the veil that lay in her
+lap. It was covered with little raised black spots. She began to count
+them. As the number mounted she felt her body turning gradually cold.
+
+"Fifteen--sixteen-seventeen"--she formed the words with her lips,
+striving to concentrate her whole soul upon this useless
+triviality--"eighteen--nineteen--twenty."
+
+Little drops of moisture came out upon her temples. Still the silence
+continued. She knew that all this time Robin was looking into her face.
+She felt his eyes like two knives piercing her face.
+
+"Twenty-one--twenty-two--"
+
+"Viola!"
+
+He spoke at last and his voice was extraordinary. It was husky, and
+sounded desperate and guilty.
+
+"Well?" she said, still looking at the spots.
+
+"Now you know the man I spoke of."
+
+Yes, it was a desperate voice and hard in its desperation.
+
+"You mean that you are the man?"
+
+Still she did not look up. After a pause she heard him say:
+
+"Yes, that I am the man."
+
+Then she looked up. His face was scarlet, like a face flushed with guilt.
+His eyes met hers with a staring glance, yet they were furtive. His hands
+were clenched on his knees. When she looked at him he began to smile.
+
+"Viola," he said, "Viola."
+
+He unclenched his hands and put them out towards her, as if to take her
+hands. She did not move.
+
+"Poor Robin!" she said.
+
+"Poor--but--what do you mean?" he stammered.
+
+He never turned his eyes from her face.
+
+"Poor Robin!--but it isn't your fault."
+
+Then she put out her hand and touched his gently.
+
+"My fault?
+
+"That it was all a fancy, all a weaving of words. You want to be what you
+thought you were, but you can't be."
+
+"You're wrong, Viola, you're utterly wrong--"
+
+"Hush, Robin! That woman you spoke of--that woman knows."
+
+He cleared his throat, got up, went over to the wall, leaned his arms
+upon it and hid his face on them. There were tears in his eyes. At that
+moment he was suffering more than she was. His soul was rent by an abject
+sense of loss, an abject sense of guilty impotence and shame. It was
+frightful that he could not be what he wished to be, what he had thought
+he was. He longed to comfort her and could not do anything but plunge a
+sword into her heart. He longed to surround her with tenderness--yes, he
+was sure he longed--but he could only hold up to her in the sun her
+loneliness. And he had lost--what had he not lost? A dream of years, an
+imagination that had been his inseparable and dearest companion. His
+loneliness was intense in that moment as was hers. The tears seemed to
+scald his eyes. In his heart he cursed God for not permitting him to be
+what he longed to be, to feel what he longed to feel. It seemed to him
+monstrous, intolerable, that even our emotions are arranged for us as are
+arranged the events of our lives. He felt like a doll, a horrible puppet.
+
+"Poor old Robin!"
+
+She was standing beside him, and in her voice there was, just for a
+moment, the sound that sometimes comes into a mother's voice when she
+speaks to her little child in the dark.
+
+At the moment when he knew he did not love the white angel she stood
+beside him.
+
+And she thought that she was only a wretched woman.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+ROBIN had gone. He had gone, still protesting that Lady Holme was
+deceiving herself, protesting desperately, with the mistaken chivalry of
+one who was not only a gentleman to his finger-tips but who was also an
+almost fanatical lover of his own romance. After recovering from the
+first shock of his disillusion, and her strange reception of it, so
+different from anything he could have imagined possible in her, or indeed
+in any woman who had lived as she had, he had said everything that was
+passionate, everything that fitted in with his old protestations when she
+was beautiful. He had spoken, perhaps, even more to recall himself than
+to convince her, but he had not succeeded in either effort, and a
+strange, mingled sense of tragic sadness and immense relief invaded him
+as the width of waterway grew steadily larger between his boat and Casa
+Felice. He could have wept for her and for himself. He could even have
+wept for humanity. Yet he felt the comfort of one from whom an almost
+intolerable strain has just been removed. To a man of his calibre,
+sensitive, almost feminine in his subtlety, the situation had been
+exquisitely painful. He had felt what Viola was feeling as well as what
+he was feeling. He had struggled like a creature taken in a net. And how
+useless it had all been! He found himself horribly inferior to her. Her
+behaviour at this critical moment had proved to him that in his almost
+fantastic conception of her he had shown real insight. Then why had his
+heart betrayed his intellect? Why had his imagination proved true metal,
+his affection false? He asked himself these questions. He searched his
+own nature, as many a man has done in moments when he has found himself
+unworthy. And he was met by mystery, by the "It was impossible for me!"
+which stings the soul that would be strong. He remembered Carey's words
+that night in Half Moon Street when Sir Donald had accompanied him home
+after the dinner in Cadogan Square. Sir Donald had gone. He and Carey
+were alone, and he had said that if one loves, one loves the kernel not
+the shell. And Carey had said, "I think if the shell is a beautiful
+shell, and becomes suddenly broken, it makes a devil of a lot of
+difference in what most people think of the kernel." And when
+he--Robin--had replied, "It wouldn't to me," Carey had abruptly
+exclaimed, "I think it would." After Carey had gone Robin remembered very
+well saying to himself that it was strange no man will believe you if you
+hint at the truth of your true self. That night he had not known his true
+self and Carey had known it. But then, had he loved the shell only? He
+could not believe it. He felt bewildered. Even now, as the boat crept
+onward through the falling darkness, he felt that he loved Viola, but as
+someone who had disappeared or who was dead. This woman whom he had just
+left was not Viola. And yet she was. When he was not looking at her and
+she spoke to him, the past seemed to take the form of the present. When
+she had worn the veil and had touched him all his pulses had leaped. But
+when she had touched him with those same hands after the veil had fallen,
+there had been frost in his veins. Nothing in his body had responded. The
+independence of the flesh appalled him. It had a mind of its own then. It
+chose and acted quite apart from the spirit which dwelt in it. It even
+defied that spirit. And the eyes? They had become almost a terror to him.
+He thought of them as a slave thinks of a cruel master. Were they to
+coerce his soul? Were they to force his heart from its allegiance? He had
+always been accustomed to think that the spirit was essentially the
+governing thing in man, that indestructible, fierce, beautiful flame
+which surely outlives death and time. But now he found himself thinking
+of the flesh, the corruptible part of man that mingles its dust with the
+earth, as dominant over the spirit. For the first time, and because of
+his impotence to force his body to feel as his spirit wished it to feel,
+he doubted if there were a future for the soul, if there were such a
+condition as immortality. He reached Villa d'Este in a condition of
+profound depression, almost bordering on despair.
+
+Meanwhile Viola, standing by the garden wall, had watched the boat that
+carried Robin disappear on the water. Till it was only a speck she
+watched. It vanished. Evening came on. Still she stood there. She did not
+feel very sad. The strange, dreamlike sensation of the preceding day had
+returned to her, but with a larger vagueness that robbed it of some of
+its former poignancy. It seemed to her that she felt as a spirit might
+feel--detached. She remembered once seeing a man, who called himself an
+"illusionist," displaying a woman's figure suspended apparently in
+mid-air. He took a wand and passed it over, under, around the woman to
+show that she was unattached to anything, that she did not rest upon
+anything. Viola thought that she was like that woman. She was not
+embittered. She was not even crushed. Her impulse of pity, when she
+understood what Robin was feeling, had been absolutely genuine. It had
+rushed upon her. It remained with her. But now it was far less definite,
+and embraced not only Robin but surely other men whom she had never known
+or even seen. They could not help themselves. It was not their fault.
+They were made in a certain way. They were governed. It seemed to her
+that she looked out vaguely over a world of slaves, the serfs of God who
+have never been emancipated. She had no hope. But just then she had no
+fear. The past did not ebb from her, nor did the future steal towards
+her. The tides were stilled. The pulses of life were stopped. Everything
+was wrapped in a cold, grey calm. She had never been a very thoughtful
+woman. She had not had much time for thought. That is what she herself
+would probably have said. Seldom had she puzzled her head over the
+mysteries of existence. Even now, when she confronted the great mystery
+of her own, she did not think very definitely. Before Robin came her mind
+had been in a fever. Now that he was gone the fever had gone with him.
+Would it ever return? She did not ask or wonder.
+
+The night fell and the servant came to summon her to dinner. She shook
+her head.
+
+"The signora will not eat anything?"
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+She took her arms from the wall and looked at the man.
+
+"Could I have the boat?"
+
+"The signora wishes to go on the lake?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I will tell Paolo."
+
+Two or three minutes later the boy who had sung came to say that the boat
+was ready.
+
+Lady Holme fetched a cloak, and went down the dark stone staircase
+between the lichen-covered walls to the tall iron gate. The boat was
+lying by the outer steps. She got in and Paolo took the oars.
+
+"Where does the signora wish to go?"
+
+"Anywhere out on the lake."
+
+He pushed off. Soon the noise of the waterfall behind Casa Felice died
+away, the spectral facade faded and only the plash of the oars and the
+tinkle of fishermen's bells above the nets, floating here and there in
+the lake, were audible. The distant lights of mountain villages gleamed
+along the shores, and the lights of the stars gleamed in the clear sky.
+
+Now that she was away from the land Lady Holme became more conscious of
+herself and of life. The gentle movement of the boat promoted an echoing
+mental movement in her. Thoughts glided through the shadows of her soul
+as the boat glided through the shadows of the night. Her mind was like a
+pilgrim, wandering in the darkness cast by the soul.
+
+She felt, first, immensely ignorant. She had scarcely ever, perhaps
+never, consciously felt immensely ignorant before. She felt also very
+poor, very small and very dingy, like a woman very badly dressed. She
+felt, finally, that she was the most insignificant of all the living
+things under the stars to the stars and all they watched, but that, to
+herself, she was of a burning, a flaming significance.
+
+There seemed to be bells everywhere in the lake. The water was full of
+their small, persistent voices.
+
+So had her former life been full of small, persistent voices, but now,
+abruptly, they were all struck into silence, and she was left
+listening--for what? For some far-off but larger voice beyond?
+
+"What am I to do? What am I to do?"
+
+Now she began to say this within herself. The grey calm was floating away
+from her spirit, and she began to realise what had happened that
+afternoon. She remembered that just before Robin came she had made up her
+mind that, though she did not love him, he held the matter of her life or
+death in his power. Well, if that were so, he had decided. The dice had
+been thrown and death had come up. No hand had been stretched out in the
+darkness to the child.
+
+She looked round her. On every side she saw smooth water, a still surface
+which hid depths. At the prow of the boat shone a small lantern, which
+cast before the boat an arrow of light. And as the boat moved this arrow
+perpetually attacked the darkness in front. It was like the curiosity of
+man attacking the impenetrable mysteries of God. It seemed to penetrate,
+but always new darkness disclosed itself beyond, new darkness flowed
+silently around.
+
+Was the darkness the larger voice?
+
+She did not say this to herself. Her mind was not of the definite species
+that frames such silent questions often. But, like all human beings
+plunged in the strangeness of a terror that is absolutely new, and left
+to struggle in it quite alone, she thought a thousand things that she did
+not even know she thought, her mind touched many verges of which she was
+not aware. There were within her tremendous activities of which she was
+scarcely conscious. She was like a woman who wakes at night without
+knowing why, and hears afterwards that there was a tumult in the city
+where she dwelt.
+
+Gradually, along devious ways, she came to the thought that life had done
+with her. It seemed to her that life said to her, "Woman, what have I to
+do with thee?" The man who had sworn to protect her could not endure to
+look at her. The man who had vowed that he loved her soul shrank before
+her face. She had never been a friend to women. Why should they wish to
+be her friends now? They would not wish it. And if they did she felt
+their friendship would be useless to her, more--horrible. She would
+rather have shown her shattered face to a thousand men than to ten women.
+She had never "bothered" much about religion. No God seemed near her now.
+She had no sense of being chastened because she was loved. On the other
+hand, she did feel as if she had been caught by a torturer who did not
+mean to let her go.
+
+It became obvious to her that there was no place for her in life, and
+presently she returned to the conclusion that, totally unloved, she could
+not continue to exist.
+
+She began definitely to contemplate self-destruction.
+
+She looked at the little arrow of light beyond the boat's prow. Like that
+little arrow she must go out into the darkness. When? Could she go
+to-night? If not, probably she could never go at all by her own will and
+act. It should be done to-night then, abruptly, without much thought. For
+thought is dangerous and often paralysing.
+
+She spoke to the boat boy. He answered. They fell into conversation. She
+asked him about his family, his life, whether he would have to be a
+soldier; whether he had a sweetheart. She forced herself to listen
+attentively to his replies. He was a responsive boy and soon began to
+talk volubly, letting the oars trail idly in the water. With energy he
+paraded his joyous youth before her. Even in his touches of melancholy
+there was hope. His happiness confirmed her in her resolution. She put
+herself in contrast with this boy, and her heart sank below the sources
+of tears into a dry place, like the valley of bones.
+
+"Will you turn towards Casa Feli--towards the house now," she said
+presently.
+
+The boat swung round, and instantly the boy began to sing.
+
+"Yes, I can do it to-night," she thought.
+
+His happy singing entered like iron into her soul.
+
+When the pale facade of Casa Felice was visible once more, detaching
+itself from the surrounding darkness, she said to the boy carelessly:
+
+"Where do you put the boat at night?"
+
+"The signora has not seen?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Under the house. There is deep water there. One can swim for five
+minutes without coming out into the open."
+
+"I should like to see that place. Can I get out of the boat there?"
+
+"Si, signora. There is a staircase leading into the piazza by the
+waterfall."
+
+"Then row in."
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+He was beginning to sing again, but suddenly he stopped, looked over his
+shoulder and listened.
+
+"What is it?" she asked quickly.
+
+"There is a boat, signora."
+
+"Where."
+
+She looked into the darkness but saw nothing.
+
+"Close to the house, signora."
+
+"But how do you know?"
+
+"I heard the oars. The man in the boat was not rowing, but just as I
+began to sing he began to row. When I stopped singing he stopped rowing."
+
+"You didn't see the boat?"
+
+"No, signora. It carries no light."
+
+He looked at her mysteriously.
+
+"/It may be the contrabbandieri/."
+
+"Smugglers?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He turned his head over his shoulder and whistled, in a peculiar way.
+There was no reply. Then he bent down over the gunwale of the boat till
+his ear nearly touched the water, and listened.
+
+"The boat has stopped. It must be near us."
+
+His whole body seemed quivering with attentive life, like a terrier's
+when it stands to be unchained.
+
+"Might it not be a fisherman?" asked Lady Holme.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"This is not the hour."
+
+"Some tourists, perhaps, making an excursion?"
+
+"It is too far. They never come here at night."
+
+His eyes stared, his attitude was so intensely alert and his manner so
+mysterious that, despite her desperate preoccupation, Lady Holme found
+herself distracted for a moment. Her mind was detached from herself, and
+fixed upon this hidden boat and its occupant or occupants.
+
+"You think it is /contrabbandieri/?" she whispered. He nodded.
+
+"I have been one, signora."
+
+"You!"
+
+"Yes, when I was a boy, in the winter. Once, when we were running for the
+shore, on a December night, the /carabinieri/ fired on us and killed
+Gaetano Cremona."
+
+"Your companion?"
+
+"Yes. He was sixteen and he died. The boat was full of his blood."
+
+She shuddered.
+
+"Row in," she said. "That boat must have gone."
+
+"Non, signora. It has not. It is close by and the oars are out of the
+water."
+
+He spoke with certainty, as if he saw the boat. Then, reluctantly, he
+dipped his oars in the lake, and rowed towards the house, keeping his
+head half turned and staring into the darkness with eyes that were still
+full of mystery and profound attention.
+
+Lady Holme looked over the water too, but she saw nothing upon its calm
+surface.
+
+"Go into the boat-house," she said.
+
+Paolo nodded without speaking. His lips were parted.
+
+"Chi e la?" she heard him whisper to himself.
+
+They were close to the house now. Its high, pale front, full of shuttered
+windows, loomed over them, and the roar of the waterfall was loud in
+their ears. Paolo turned the boat towards his right, and, almost
+directly, Lady Holme saw a dark opening in the solid stone blocks on
+which the house was built. The boat glided through it into cover, and the
+arrow of light at the prow pierced ebon blackness, while the plash of the
+oars made a curious sound, full of sudden desolation and weariness. A bat
+flitted over the arrow of light and vanished, and the head of a swimming
+rat was visible for a moment, pursued by a wrinkle on the water.
+
+"How dark it is here," Lady Holme said in a low voice. "And what strange
+noises there are."
+
+There was terror in the sound of the waterfall heard under this curving
+roof of stone. It sounded like a quantity of disputing voices,
+quarrelling in the blackness of the night. The arrow of light lay on a
+step, and the boat's prow grated gently against a large ring of rusty
+iron.
+
+"And you tie up the boat here at night?" she asked as she got up.
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+While she stood on the step, close to the black water, he passed the rope
+through the ring, and tied it deftly in a loose knot that any backward
+movement of the boat would tighten. She watched with profound attention
+his hands moving quickly in the faint light cast by the lantern.
+
+"How well you tie it," she said.
+
+He smiled.
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"Is it easy to untie?"
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"Show me, will you? It--it holds so well that I should have thought it
+would be difficult."
+
+He looked up at her with a flash of surprise. Something in her voice had
+caught his young attention sharply. She smiled at him when she saw the
+keen inquiry in his large eyes.
+
+"I'm interested in all these little things you do so well," she said.
+
+He flushed with pride, and immediately untied the knot, carefully,
+showing her exactly how he did it.
+
+"Thank you. I see. It's very ingenious."
+
+"Si, signora. I can do many things like that."
+
+"You are a clever boy, Paolo."
+
+He tied the knot again, unhooked the lantern; jumped out of the boat, and
+lighted her up the staircase to a heavy wooden door. In another moment
+she stood on the piazza close to the waterfall. The cold spray from it
+fell on her face. He pushed the door to, but did not lock it.
+
+"You leave it like that at night?" she asked.
+
+"Non, signora. Before I go to bed I lock it."
+
+"I see."
+
+She saw a key sticking out from the door.
+
+"/A rivederci/, Paolo."
+
+"/A rivederci/, signora."
+
+He took off his hat and went swiftly away. The light of the lantern
+danced on the pavement of the piazza, and, for one instant, on the white
+foam of the water falling between the cypresses.
+
+When Viola was alone on the piazza she went to the stone balustrade and
+looked over it at the lake. Was there a boat close by? She could not see
+it. The chiming bells of the fishermen came up to her, mingling with the
+noise of the cascade. She took out her watch and held it up close to her
+eyes. The hour was half-past nine. She wondered what time Italian
+servants went to bed.
+
+The butler came out and begged to know if she would not eat something. He
+seemed so distressed at her having missed dinner, that she went into the
+house, sat down at the dining table and made a pretence of eating. A
+clock struck ten as she finished.
+
+"It is so warm that I am going to sit out in the piazza," she said.
+
+"Will the signora take coffee?"
+
+"No--yes, bring me some there. And tell my maid--tell the servants they
+needn't sit up. I may stay out quite late. If I do, I'll lock the door on
+to the piazza when I go in."
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+When she reached the piazza she saw a shining red spark just above the
+balustrade. Paolo was there smoking a black cigar and leaning over
+sideways.
+
+"What are you looking for?" she asked.
+
+"That boat, signora. It has not gone."
+
+"How do you know? It may have gone when we were in the boat-house."
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"You could not have heard the oars through the noise of the waterfall."
+
+"Si, signora. It has not gone. Shall I take the boat and--"
+
+"No, no," she interrupted quickly. "What does it matter? Go and have
+supper."
+
+"I have had it, signora."
+
+"Then, when you have finished smoking, you'd better go to bed."
+
+She forced herself to smile lightly.
+
+"Boys like you need plenty of sleep."
+
+"Four hours is enough, signora."
+
+"No, no. You should go to bed early."
+
+She saw an odd expression come into his face. He looked over at the
+water, then at her, with a curious dawning significance, that would
+almost have been impudent if it had not been immensely young and full of
+a kind of gnomish sympathy.
+
+"I'll go to bed, signora!" he said.
+
+Then he looked at her again and there were doubt and wonder in his eyes.
+
+She turned away, with a sickness at her heart. She knew exactly what he
+had thought, was thinking. The suspicion had crossed his mind that she
+knew why the hidden boat was there, that she wished no one else to
+suspect why it was there. And then had followed the thought, "Ma--per
+questa signora--non e possibile."
+
+At certain crises of feeling, a tiny incident will often determine some
+vital act. So it was now. The fleeting glance in a carelessly expressive
+boy's eyes at this moment gave to Lady Holme's mind the last touch it
+needed to acquire the impetus which would carry it over the edge of the
+precipice into the abyss. The look in Paolo's eyes said to her, "Life has
+done with you. Throw it away." And she knew that though she had thought
+she had already decided to throw it away that night, she had really not
+decided. Secretly she had been hesitating. Now there was no more
+hesitation in her. She drank her coffee and had the cup taken away, and
+ordered the lights in the drawing-room to be put out.
+
+"When I come in I shall go straight up to bed," she said. "Leave me a
+candle in the hall."
+
+The lights went out behind the windows. Blank darkness replaced the
+yellow gleam that had shone upon them. The two houses on either side of
+the piazza were wrapped in silence. Presently there was a soft noise of
+feet crossing the pavement. It was Paolo going to lock the door leading
+to the boathouse. Lady Holme moved round sharply in her chair to watch
+him. He bent down. With a swift turn of his brown wrists he secured the
+door and pulled the key out of the lock. She opened her lips to call out
+something to him, but when she saw him look at the key doubtfully, then
+towards her, she said nothing. And he put it back into the keyhole. When
+he did that she sighed. Perhaps a doubt had again come into his young
+mind. But, if so, it had come too late. He slipped away smiling, half
+ironically, to himself.
+
+Lady Holme sat still. She had wrapped a white cloth cloak round her. She
+put up her hand to the disfigured side of her face, and touched it,
+trying to see its disfigurement as the blind see, by feeling. She kept
+her hand there, and her hand recognized ugliness vividly. After two or
+three minutes she took her hand away, got up and walked to and fro in the
+piazza, very near to the balustrade.
+
+Now she was thinking fiercely.
+
+She thought of Fritz. What would he feel when he knew? Shocked for a
+moment, no doubt. After all, they had been very close to each other, in
+body at least, if not in soul. And the memory of the body would surely
+cause him to suffer a little, to think, "I held it often, and now it is
+sodden and cold." At least he must think something like that, and his
+body must shudder in sympathy with the catastrophe that had overtaken its
+old companion. She felt a painful yearning to see Fritz again. Yet she
+did not say to herself that she loved him any more. Even before the
+accident she had begun to realise that she had not found in Fritz the
+face of truth among the crowd of shams which all women seek, ignorantly
+or not. And since the accident--there are things that kill even a woman's
+love abruptly. And for a dead love there is no resurrection.
+
+Yet to-night she felt infinitely tender over Fritz, as if she stood by
+him again and saw the bandage darkened by the red stain.
+
+Then she thought of the song she had sung to Lady Cardington, the song
+which had surely opened the eyes of her own drowsy, if not actually
+sleeping, heart:
+
+
+  "Tutto al mondo e vano:
+   Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."
+
+
+It was horribly true to her to-night. She could imagine now, in her utter
+desolation, that for love a woman could easily sacrifice the world. But
+she had had the world--all she called the world--ruthlessly taken from
+her, and nothing had been given to her to fill its place. Possibly before
+the accident she might have recoiled from the idea of giving up the world
+for love. But now, as she walked to and fro, it seemed to her as if a
+woman isolated from everything with love possessed the world and all that
+is therein. Vaguely she remembered the story she had heard about this
+very house, Casa Felice. There had been a romance connected with it. Two
+lovers had fled here, had lived here for a long time. She imagined them
+now, sitting together at night in this piazza, hearing the waterfall
+together, looking at the calm lake together, watching the stars together.
+The sound of the water was terrible to her. To them how beautiful it must
+have been, how beautiful the light of the stars, and the lonely gardens
+stretching along the lake, and the dim paths between the cypresses, and
+the great silence that floated over the lake to listen to the waterfall.
+And all these things were terrible to her--all. Not one was beautiful.
+Each one seemed to threaten her, to say to her, "Leave us, we are not for
+such as you." Well, she would obey these voices. She would go. She
+wrapped the cloak more closely round her, went to the balustrade and
+leaned over it looking at the water.
+
+It seemed to her as if her life had been very trivial. She thought now
+that she had never really enjoyed anything. She looked upon her life as
+if it were down there in the water just beneath her, and she saw it as a
+broken thing, a thing in many fragments. And the fragments, however
+carefully and deftly arranged, could surely never have been fitted
+together and become a complete whole. Everything in her life had been
+awry as her face was now awry, and she had not realised it. Her love for
+Fritz, and his--what he had called his, at least--for her, had seemed to
+her once to be a round and beautiful thing, a circle of passion without a
+flaw. How distorted, misshapen, absurd it had really been. Nothing in her
+life had been carried through to a definite end. Even her petty struggle
+with Miss Schley had been left unfinished. Those who had loved her had
+been like spectres, and now, like spectres, had faded away. And all
+through their spectral love she had clung to Fritz. She had clasped the
+sand like a mad-woman, and never felt the treacherous grains shifting
+between her arms at the touch of every wind.
+
+A sudden passionate fury of longing woke in her to have one week, one
+day, one hour of life, one hour of life now that her eyes were open, one
+moment only--even one moment. She felt that she had had nothing, that
+every other human being must have known the /dolcezza/, the ineffable,
+the mysterious ecstasy, the one and only thing worth the having, that she
+alone had been excluded, when she was beautiful, from the participation
+in joy that was her right, and that now, in her ugliness, she was
+irrevocably cast out from it.
+
+It was unjust. Suddenly she faced a God without justice in His heart,
+all-powerful and not just. She faced such a God and she knew Hell.
+
+Swiftly she turned from the balustrade, went to the door by the
+waterfall, unlocked it and descended the stone staircase. It was very
+dark. She had to feel her way. When she reached the last step she could
+just see the boat lying against it in the black water. She put out her
+hand and felt for the ring through which the rope was slipped. The rope
+was wet. It took her some minutes to undo it. Then she got into the boat.
+Her eyes were more accustomed to the darkness now, and she could see the
+arched opening which gave access to the lake. She found the oars, pushed
+them into the rowlocks, and pulled gently to the opening. The boat struck
+against the wall and grated along it. She stood up and thrust one hand
+against the stone, leaning over to the side. The boat went away swiftly,
+and she nearly fell into the water, but managed to save herself by a
+rapid movement. She sank down, feeling horribly afraid. Yet, a moment
+after, she asked herself why she had not let herself go. It was too dark
+there under the house. Out in the open air it would be different, it
+would be easier. She wanted the stars above her. She did not know why she
+wanted them, why she wanted anything now.
+
+The boat slipped out from the low archway into the open water.
+
+It was a pale and delicate night, one of those autumn nights that are
+full of a white mystery. A thin mist lay about the water, floated among
+the lower woods. Higher up, the mountains rose out of it. Their green
+sides looked black and soft in the starlight, their summits strangely
+remote and inaccessible. Through the mist, here and there, shone faintly
+the lights of the scattered villages. The bells in the water were still
+ringing languidly, and their voices emphasised the pervading silence, a
+silence full of the pensive melancholy of Nature in decline.
+
+Viola rowed slowly out towards the middle of the lake. Awe had come upon
+her. There seemed a mystical presence in the night, something far away
+but attentive, a mind concentrated upon the night, upon Nature, upon
+herself. She was very conscious of it, and it seemed to her not as if
+eyes, but as if a soul were watching her and everything about her; the
+stars and the mountains, the white mist, even the movement of the boat.
+This concentrated, mystical attention oppressed her. It was like a soft,
+impalpable weight laid upon her. She rowed faster.
+
+But now it seemed to her as if she were being followed. Casa Felice had
+already disappeared. The shore was hidden in the darkness. She could only
+see vaguely the mountain-tops. She paused, then dipped the oars again,
+but again--after two or three strokes--she had the sensation that she was
+being followed. She recalled Paolo's action when they were returning to
+Casa Felice in the evening, leaned over the boat's side and put her ear
+close to the water.
+
+When she did so she heard the plash of oars--rhythmical, steady, and
+surely very near. For a moment she listened. Then a sort of panic seized
+her. She remembered the incident of the evening, the hidden boat, Paolo's
+assertion that it was waiting near the house, that it had not gone. He
+had said, too, that the unseen rower had begun to row when he began to
+sing, had stopped rowing when he stopped singing. A conviction came to
+her that this same rower as now following her. But why? Who was it? She
+knew nobody on the lake, except Robin. And he--no, it could not be Robin.
+
+The ash of the oars became more distinct. Her unreasoning fear increased.
+With the mystical attention of the great and hidden mind was now blent a
+crude human attention. She began to feel really terrified, and, seizing
+her oars, she pulled frantically towards the middle of the lake.
+
+"Viola!"
+
+Out of the darkness it came.
+
+"Viola!"
+
+She stopped and began to tremble. Who--what--could be calling her by
+name, here, in the night? She heard the sound of oars plainly now. Then
+she saw a thing like a black shadow. It was the prow of an advancing
+boat. She sat quite still, with her hands on the oars. The boat came on
+till she could see the figure of one man in it, standing up, and rowing,
+as the Italian boatmen do when they are alone, with his face set towards
+the prow. A few strong strokes and it was beside her, and she was looking
+into Rupert Carey's eyes.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+SHE sat still without saying anything. It seemed to her as if she were on
+the platform at Manchester House singing the Italian song. Then the
+disfigured face of Carey--disfigured by vice as hers now by the
+accident--had become as nothing to her. She had seen only his eyes. She
+saw only his eyes now. He remained standing up in the faint light with
+the oars in his hands looking at her. Round about them tinkled the bells
+above the nets.
+
+"You heard me call?" he said at last, almost roughly.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"How did you--?" she began, and stopped.
+
+"I was there this evening when you came in. I heard your boy singing. I
+was under the shadow of the woods."
+
+"Why?"
+
+All this time she was gazing into Carey's eyes, and had not seen in them
+that he was looking, for the first time, at her altered face. She did not
+realise this. She did not remember that her face was altered. The
+expression in his eyes made her forget it.
+
+"I wanted something of you."
+
+"What?"
+
+He let the oars go, and sat down on the little seat. They were close to
+each other now. The sides of the boats touched. He did not answer her
+question.
+
+"I know I've no business to speak to you," he said. "No business to come
+after you. I know that. But I was always a selfish, violent, headlong
+brute, and it seems I can't change."
+
+"But what do you want with me?"
+
+Suddenly she remembered--put her hands up to her face with a swift
+gesture, then dropped them again. What did it matter now? He was the last
+man who would look upon her in life. And now that she remembered her own
+condition she saw his. She saw the terror of his life in his marred
+features, aged, brutalised by excess. She saw, and was glad for a moment,
+as if she met someone unexpectedly on her side of the stream of fate. Let
+him look upon her. She was looking upon him.
+
+"What do you want?" she repeated.
+
+"I want a saviour," he said, staring always straight at her, and speaking
+without tenderness.
+
+"A saviour!"
+
+For a moment she thought of the Bible, of religion; then of her sensation
+that she had been caught by a torturer who would not let her go.
+
+"Have you come to me because you think I can tell you of saviour?" she
+said.
+
+And she began to laugh.
+
+"But don't you see me?" she exclaimed. "Don't you see what I am now?"
+
+Suddenly she felt angry with him because his eyes did not seem to see the
+dreadful change in her appearance.
+
+"Don't you think I want a saviour too?" she exclaimed.
+
+"I don't think about you," he said with a sort of deliberate brutality.
+"I think about myself. Men generally do when they come to women."
+
+"Or go away from them," she said.
+
+She was thinking of Robin then, and Fritz.
+
+"Did you know Robin Pierce was here to-day?" she asked.
+
+"Yes. I saw him leave you."
+
+"You saw--but how long have you been watching?"
+
+"A long time."
+
+"Where do you come from?"
+
+He pointed towards the distant lights behind her and before him.
+
+"Opposite. I was to have stayed with Ulford in Casa Felice. I'm staying
+with him over there."
+
+"With Sir Donald?"
+
+"Yes. He's ill. He wants somebody."
+
+"Sir Donald's afraid of me now," she said, watching him closely. "I told
+him to live with his memory of me. Will he do that?"
+
+"I think he will. Poor old chap! he's had hard knocks. They've made him
+afraid of life."
+
+"Why didn't you keep your memory of me?" she said, with sudden nervous
+anger. "You too? If you hadn't come to-night it would never have been
+destroyed."
+
+Her extreme tension of the nerves impelled her to an exhibition of fierce
+bitterness which she could not control. She remembered how he had loved
+her, with what violence and almost crazy frankness. Why had he come? He
+might have remembered her as she was.
+
+"I hate you for coming," she said, almost under her breath.
+
+"I don't care. I had to come."
+
+"Why? Why?"
+
+"I told you. I want a saviour. I'm down in the pit. I can't get out. You
+can see that for yourself."
+
+"Yes," she answered, "I can see that."
+
+"Give me a hand, Viola, and--you'll make me do something I've never done,
+never been able to do."
+
+"What?" she half whispered.
+
+"Believe there's a God--who cares."
+
+She drew in her breath sharply. Something warm surged through her. It was
+not like fire. It was more like the warmth that comes from a warm hand
+laid on a cold one. It surged through her and went away like a travelling
+flood.
+
+"What are you saying?" she said in a low voice. "You are mad to come here
+to-night, to say this to me to-night."
+
+"No. It's just to-night it had to be said."
+
+Suddenly she resolved to tell him. He was in the pit. So was she. Well,
+the condemned can be frank with one another though all the free have to
+practise subterfuge.
+
+"You don't know," she said, and her voice was quiet now. "You don't know
+why it was mad of you to come to-night. I'll tell you. I've come out here
+and I'm not going back again."
+
+He kept his eyes on hers, but did not speak.
+
+"I'm going to stay out here," she said.
+
+And she let her hand fall over the side of the boat till her fingers
+touched the water.
+
+"No," he said. "You can't do that."
+
+"Yes. I shall do it. I want to hide my face in the water."
+
+"Give me a hand first, Viola."
+
+Again the warmth went through her.
+
+"Nobody else can."
+
+"And you've looked at me!" she said.
+
+There was a profound amazement in her voice.
+
+"It's only when I look at you," he said, "that I know there are stars
+somewhere beyond the pit's mouth."
+
+"When you look at me--now?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But you are blind then?" she said.
+
+"Or are the others blind?" he asked.
+
+Instinctively, really without knowing what she did, she put up her hand
+to her face, touched it, and no longer felt that it was ugly. For a
+moment it seemed to her that her beauty was restored.
+
+"What do you see?" she asked. "But--but it's so dark here."
+
+"Not too dark to see a helping hand--if there is one," he answered.
+
+And he stretched out his arm into her boat and took her right hand from
+the oar it was holding.
+
+"And there is one," he added.
+
+She felt a hand that loved her hand, and there was no veil over her face.
+How strange that was. How utterly impossible it seemed. Yet it was so. No
+woman can be deceived in the touch of a hand on hers. If it loves--she
+knows.
+
+"What are you going to do, Viola?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+There was a sound almost of shame, a humble sound, in her voice.
+
+"I can't do anything," she murmured. "You would know that to-morrow, in
+sunlight."
+
+"To-morrow I'll come in sunlight."
+
+"No, no. I shall not be there."
+
+"I shall come."
+
+"Oh!--good-night," she said.
+
+She began to feel extraordinarily, terribly excited. She could not tell
+whether it was an excitement of horror, of joy--what it was. But it
+mounted to her brain and rushed into her heart. It was in her veins like
+an intoxicant, and in her eyes like fire, and thrilled in her nerves and
+beat in her arteries. And it seemed to be an excitement full of
+passionate contradictions. She was at the same time like a woman on a
+throne and a woman in the dust--radiant as one worshipped, bowed as one
+beaten.
+
+"Good-night, good-night," she repeated, scarcely knowing what she said.
+
+Her hand struggled in his hand.
+
+"Viola, if you destroy yourself you destroy two people."
+
+She scarcely heard him speaking.
+
+"D'you understand?"
+
+"No, no. Not to-night. I can't understand anything to-night."
+
+"Then to-morrow."
+
+"Yes, to-morrow-to-morrow."
+
+He would not let go her hand, and now his was arbitrary, the hand of a
+master rather than of a lover.
+
+"You won't dare to murder me," he said.
+
+"Murder--what do you mean?"
+
+He had used the word to arrest her attention, which was wandering almost
+as the attention of a madwoman wanders.
+
+"If you hide your face in the water I shall never see those stars above
+the pit's mouth."
+
+"I can't help it--I can't help anything. It's not my fault, it's not my
+fault."
+
+"It will be your fault. It will be your crime."
+
+"Your hand is driving me mad," she gasped.
+
+She meant it, felt that it was so. He let her go instantly. She began to
+row back towards Casa Felice. And now that mystical attention of which
+she had been conscious, that soul watching the night, her in the night,
+was surely profounder, watched with more intensity as a spectator bending
+down to see a struggle. Never before had she felt as if beyond human life
+there was life compared with which human life was as death. And now she
+told herself that she was mad, that this shock of human passion coming
+suddenly upon her loneliness had harmed her brain, that this cry for
+salvation addressed to one who looked upon herself as destroyed had
+deafened reason within her.
+
+His boat kept up with hers. She did not look at him. Casa Felice came in
+sight. She pulled harder, like a mad creature. Her boat shot under the
+archway into the darkness. Somehow--how, she did not know--she guided it
+to the steps, left it, rushed up the staircase in the dark and came out
+on to the piazza. There she stopped where the waterfall could cast its
+spray upon her face. She stayed till her hair and cheeks and hands were
+wet. Then she went to the balustrade. His boat was below and he was
+looking up. She saw the tragic mask of his face down in the thin mist
+that floated about the water, and now she imagined him in the pit, gazing
+up and seeking those stars in which he still believed though he could not
+see them.
+
+"Go away," she said, not knowing why she said it or if she wished him to
+go, only knowing that she had lost the faculty of self-control and might
+say, do, be anything in that moment.
+
+"I can't bear it."
+
+She did not know what she meant she could not bear.
+
+He made a strange answer. He said:
+
+"If you will go into the house, open the windows and sing to me--the last
+song I heard you sing--I'll go. But to-morrow I'll come and touch my
+helping hand, and after to-morrow, and every day."
+
+"Sing--?" she said vacantly. "To-night!"
+
+"Go into the house. Open the window. I shall hear you."
+
+He spoke almost sternly.
+
+She crossed the piazza slowly. A candle was burning in the hall. She took
+it up and went into the drawing-room, which was in black darkness. There
+was a piano in it, close to a tall window which looked on to the lake.
+She set the candle down on the piano, went to the window, unbarred the
+shutters and threw the window open. Instantly she heard the sound of oars
+as Carey sent his boat towards the water beneath the window. She drew
+back, went again to the piano, sat down, opened it, put her hands on the
+keys. How could she sing? But she must make him go away. While he was
+there she could not think, could not grip herself, could not--She struck
+a chord. The sound of music, the doing of a familiar action, had a
+strange effect upon her. She felt as if she recovered clear consciousness
+after an anaesthetic. She struck another chord. What did he want? The
+concert--that song. Her fingers found the prelude, her lips the poetry,
+her voice the music. And then suddenly her heart found the meaning, more
+than the meaning, the eternal meanings of the things unutterable, the
+things that lie beyond the world in the deep souls of the women who are
+the saviours of men.
+
+When she had finished she went to the window. He was still standing in
+the boat and looking up, with the whiteness of the mist about him.
+
+"When you sing I can see those stars," he said. "Do you understand?"
+
+She bent down.
+
+"I don't know--I don't think I understand anything," she whispered.
+"But--I'll try--I'll try to live."
+
+Her voice was so faint, such an inward voice, that it seemed impossible
+he could have heard it. But he struck the oars at once into the water and
+sent the boat out into the shadows of the night.
+
+And she stood there looking into the white silence, which was broken only
+by the faint voices of the fishermen's bells, and said to herself again
+and again, like a wondering child:
+
+"There must be a God, there must be; a God who cares!"
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+IN London during the ensuing winter people warmly discussed, and many of
+them warmly condemned, a certain Italian episode, in which a woman and a
+man, once well-known and, in their very different ways, widely popular in
+Society, were the actors.
+
+In the deep autumn Sir Donald Ulford had died rather suddenly, and it was
+found in his will that he had left his newly-acquired property, Casa
+Felice, to Lady Holme, who--as everybody had long ago discovered--was
+already living there in strict retirement, while her husband was amusing
+himself in various Continental towns. This legacy was considered by a
+great number of persons to be "a very strange one;" but it was not this
+which caused the gossip now flitting from boudoir to boudoir and from
+club to club.
+
+It had become known that Rupert Carey, whose unfortunate vice had been
+common talk ever since the Arkell House ball, was a perpetual visitor to
+Casa Felice, and presently it was whispered that he was actually living
+there with Lady Holme, and that Lord Holme was going to apply to the
+Courts for a divorce. Thereupon many successful ladies began to wag
+bitter tongues. It seemed to be generally agreed that the affair was
+rendered peculiarly disgraceful by the fact that Lady Holme was no longer
+a beautiful woman. If she had still been lovely they could have
+understood it! The wildest rumours as to the terrible result of the
+accident upon her had been afloat, and already she had become almost a
+legend. It was stated that when poor Lord Holme had first seen her, after
+the operation, the shock had nearly turned his brain. And now it was
+argued that the only decent thing for a woman in such a plight to do was
+to preserve at least her dignity, and to retire modestly from the fray in
+which she could no longer hope to hold her own. That she had indeed
+retired, but apparently with a man, roused much pious scorn and pinched
+regret in those whose lives were passed amid the crash of broken
+commandments.
+
+One day, at a tea, a certain lady, animadverted strongly upon Lady
+Holme's conduct, and finally remarked:
+
+"It's grotesque! A woman who is disfigured, and a man who is, or at any
+rate was, a drunkard! Really it's the most disgusting thing I ever heard
+of!"
+
+Lady Cardington happened to be in the room and she suddenly flushed.
+
+"I don't think we know very much about it," she said, and her voice was
+rather louder than usual.
+
+"But Lord Holme is going to--" began the lady who had been speaking.
+
+"He may be, and he may succeed. But my sympathies are not with him. He
+left his wife when she needed him."
+
+"But what could he have done for her?"
+
+"He could have loved her," said Lady Cardington.
+
+The flush glowed hotter in the face that was generally as white as ivory.
+
+There was a moment of silence in the room. Then Lady Cardington, getting
+up to go, added:
+
+"Whatever happens, I shall admire Mr. Carey as long as I live, and I wish
+there were many more men like him in the world."
+
+She went out, leaving a tense astonishment behind her.
+
+Her romantic heart, still young and ardent, though often aching with
+sorrow, and always yearning for the ideal love that it had never found,
+had divined the truth these chattering women had not imagination enough
+to conceive of, soul enough to appreciate if they had conceived of it.
+
+In that Italian winter, far away from London, a very beautiful drama of
+human life was being enacted, not the less but the more beautiful because
+the man and woman who took part in it had been scourged by fate, had
+suffered cruel losses, were in the eyes of many who had known them well
+pariahs--Rupert Carey through his fault, Lady Holme through her
+misfortune.
+
+Long ago, at the Arkell House ball, Lady Holme had said to Robin Pierce
+that if Rupert Carey had the chance she could imagine him doing something
+great. The chance was given him now of doing one of the greatest things a
+human being can do--of winning a soul that is in despair back to hope, of
+winning a heart that is sceptical of love back to belief in love. It was
+a great thing to do, and Carey set about doing it in a strange way. He
+cast himself down in his degradation at the feet of this woman whom he
+was resolved to help, and he said, "Help me!" He came to this woman who
+was on the brink of self-destruction and he said, "Teach me to live!"
+
+It was a strange way he took, but perhaps he was right--perhaps it was
+the only way. The words he spoke at midnight on the lake were as nothing.
+His eyes, his acts in sunlight the next day, and day after day, were
+everything. He forced Viola to realise that she was indeed the only woman
+who could save him from the vice he had become the slave of, lift him up
+out of that pit in which he could not see the stars. At first she could
+not believe it, or could believe it only in moments of exaltation. Lord
+Holme and Robin Pierce had rendered her terrified of life and of herself
+in life. She was inclined to cringe before all humanity like a beaten
+dog. There were moments, many moments at first, when she cringed before
+Rupert Carey. But his eyes always told her the same story. They never saw
+the marred face, but always the white angel. The soul in them clung to
+that, asked to be protected by that. And so, at last, the white
+angel--one hides somewhere surely in every woman--was released.
+
+There were sad, horrible moments in this drama of the Italian winter. The
+lonely house in the woods was a witness to painful, even tragic, scenes.
+Viola's love for Rupert Carey was reluctant in its dawning and he could
+not rise at once, or easily, out of the pit into the full starlight to
+which he aspired. After the death of Sir Donald, when the winter set in,
+he asked her to let him live in the house on the opposite side of the
+piazza from the house in which she dwelt. They were people of the world,
+and knew what the world might say, but they were also human beings in
+distress, and they felt as if they had passed into a region in which the
+meaning of the world's voices was lost, as the cry of an angry child is
+lost in the vastness of the desert. She agreed to his request, and they
+lived thus, innocently, till the winter was over and the spring came to
+bring to Italy its radiance once more.
+
+Even the spring was not an idyll. Rupert Carey had struggled upward, but
+Viola, too, had much to forget and very much to learn. The egoist, spoken
+of by Carey himself one night in Half Moon Street, was slow to fade in
+the growing radiance that played about the angel's feet. But it knew, and
+Carey knew also, that it was no longer fine enough in its brilliant
+selfishness to stand quite alone. With the death of the physical beauty
+there came a modesty of heart. With the understanding, bitter and
+terrible as it was, that the great, conquering outward thing was
+destroyed, came the desire, the imperious need, to find and to develop if
+possible the inner things which, perhaps, conquer less easily, but which
+retain their conquests to the end. There was growth in Casa Felice, slow
+but stubborn, growth in the secret places of the soul, till there came a
+time when not merely the white angel, but the whole woman, angel and that
+which had perhaps been devil too, was able to accept the yoke laid upon
+her with patience, was able to say, "I can endure it bravely."
+
+Lord Holme presently took his case to the Courts. It was undefended and
+he won it. Not long ago Viola Holme became Viola Carey.
+
+When Robin Pierce heard of it in Rome he sat for a long time in deep
+thought. Even now, even after all that had passed, he felt a thrill of
+pain that was like the pain of jealousy. He wished for the impossible, he
+wished that he had been born with his friend's nature; that, instead of
+the man who could only talk of being, he were the man who could be. And
+yet, in the past, he had sometimes surely defended Viola against Carey's
+seeming condemnation! He had defended and not loved--but Carey had judged
+and loved.
+
+Carey had judged and loved, yet Carey had said he did not believe in a
+God. Robin wondered if he believed now.
+
+Robin was in Rome, and could not hear the words of a man and a woman who
+were sitting one night, after the marriage, upon a piazza above the Lake
+of Como.
+
+The man said:
+
+"Do you remember Robin's '/Danseuse de Tunisie/'?"
+
+"The woman with the fan?"
+
+"Yes. I see her now without the fan. With it she was a siren, perhaps,
+but without it she is--"
+
+"What is she without it?"
+
+"Eternal woman. Ah, how much better than the siren!"
+
+There was a silence filled only by the voice of the waterfall between the
+cypresses. Then the woman spoke, rather softly.
+
+"You taught her what she could be without the fan. You have done the
+great thing."
+
+"And do you know what you have done?"
+
+"I?"
+
+"Yes. You have taught me to see the stars and to feel the soul beyond the
+stars."
+
+"No, it was not I."
+
+Again there was a silence. Then the man said:
+
+"No, thank God--it was not you."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Woman With The Fan, by Robert Hichens
+
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