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By Root 3076 0

surpassing-the-Lily-and-Solomontoo, surprisingly svelte, tall, clean-run creature who for ever on the shiny paper of illustrated journals advanced towards you with improbable strides along the railings of the Row, laughing, in company with the Honourable Somebody, second son of Lord Someone-or-other...Edith Ethel was more refined. She had a title, whereas the other hadn't, but she was pensive. She showed you that she had read Walter Savage Landor, and had only very lately given up wearing opaque amber beads, as affected by the later pre-Raphaelites. She was practically never in the illustrated papers, but she held more refined views. She held that there were some men who were not like that--and those, all of them, were the men to whom Edith Ethel accorded the entrée to her Afternoons. She was their Egeria! A refining influence!

The Husband of the Wife then? Once he had been allowed in Edith Ethel's drawing room: now he wasn't!...Must have deteriorated!

She said to herself sharply, in her 'No nonsense, there' mood:

'Chuck it. You're in love with a married man who's a Society wife and you're upset because the Titled Lady has put into your head the idea that you might "come together again". After ten years!'

But immediately she protested:

'No. NO. No! It isn't that. It's all right the habit of putting things incisively, but it's misleading to put things too crudely.'

What was the coming together that was offered her? Nothing, on the face of it, but being dragged again into that man's intolerable worries as unfortunate machinists are dragged into wheels by belts--and all the flesh torn off their bones! Upon her word that had been her first thought. She was afraid, afraid, afraid! She suddenly appreciated the advantages of nunlike seclusion. Besides she wanted to be bashing policemen with bladders in celebration of Eleven Eleven!

That fellow--he had no furniture; he did not appear to recognize the hall porter...Dotty. Dotty and too morally deteriorated to be admitted to drawing-room of titled lady, the frequenters of which could be trusted not to make love to you on insufficient provocation, if left alone with you...

Her generous mind reacted painfully.

'Oh, that's not fair!' she said.

There were all sorts of sides to the unfairness. Before this War, and, of course, before he had lent all his money to Vincent Macmaster that--that grey grizzly had been perfectly fit for the country-parsonage drawing-room of Edith Ethel Duchemin: he had been welcomed there with effusion!...After the War and when his money was--presumably exhausted, and his mind exhausted, for he had no furniture and did not know the porter...After the War, then, and when his money was exhausted he was not fit for the Salon of Lady Macmaster--the only Lady to have a Salon in London.

It was what you called kicking down your ladder!

Obviously it had to be done. There were such a lot of these bothering War heroes that if you let them all into your Salon it would cease to be a Salon, particularly if you were under an obligation to them!...That was already a pressing national problem: it was going to become an overwhelming one now--in twenty minutes' time; after those maroons. The impoverished War Heroes would all be coming back. Innumerable. You would have to tell your parlourmaid that you weren't at home to...about seven million!

But wait a minute...Where did they just stand?

He...But she could not go on calling him just He like a school-girl of eighteen, thinking of her favourite actor ...in the purity of her young thoughts. What was she to call him? She had never--even when they had known each other--called him anything other than Mr So and So...She could not bring herself to let her mental lips frame his name...She had never used anything but his surname to this grey thing, familiar object of her mother's study, seen frequently at tea-parties...Once she had been out with it for a whole night in a dog-cart! Think of that!...And they had spouted Tibullus one to another in moonlit mist. And she had certainly wanted it to kiss her--in the moonlit mists,