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By Root 3079 0

of his entanglements, their very essence. He got into appalling messes, unending and unravellable--no, she meant ununravellable!--messes and other people suffered for him whilst he mooned on--into more messes! The General charging the dog-cart was symbolical of him. He was perfectly on his right side and all, but it was like him to be in a dog-cart when flagitious automobiles carrying Generals were running amuck! Then...the Woman Paid!...She really did, in this case. It had been her mother's horse they had been driving and, although they had got damages out of the General, the costs were twice that...And her, Valentine's, reputation had suffered from being in a dog-cart at dawn, alone with a man...It made no odds that he had--or was it hadn't?--'insulted' her in any way all through that--oh, that delicious delirious night...She had to be said to have a baby by him, and then she had to be dreadfully worried about his poor old reputation...Of course it would have been pretty rotten of him--she so young and innocent, daughter of so preposterously eminent, if so impoverished a man, his father's best friend and all. 'He hadn't oughter'er done it!' He hadn't really oughter...She heard them all saying it, still!

Well, he hadn't!...But she?

That magic night. It was just before dawn, the mists nearly up to their necks as they drove; the sky going pale in a sort of twilight. And one immense star! She remembered only one immense star, though, historically, there had been also a dilapidated sort of moon. But the star was her best boy--what her wagon was hitched on to...And they had been quoting--quarrelling over, she remembered:

Flebis et arsuro me, Delia, lecto

Tristibus et...

She exclaimed suddenly:

Sunset and evening star

And one clear call for me

And may there be no moaning at the bar

When I...'

She said:

'Oh, but you oughtn't to, my dear! That's Tennyson!' Tennyson, with a difference!

She said:

'All the same, that would have been an inexperienced school-girl's prank...-But if I let him kiss me now I should be....' She would be a what was it...a fornicatress?...trix! Fornicatrix is preferable! Very preferable. Then why not adultrix? You couldn't: you had to be a 'cold-blooded adultress!' or morality was not avenged.

Oh; but surely not cold-blooded!...Deliberate, then!...That wasn't, either, the word for the process. Of osculation!...Comic things, words, as applied to states of feelings!

But if she went now to Lincoln's Inn and the Problem held out its arms...That would be 'Deliberate'. It would be asking for it in the fullest sense of the term.

She said to herself quickly:

'This way madness lies!' And then:

'What an imbecile thing to say!'

She had had an Affair with a man, she made her mind say to her, two years ago. That was all right. There could not be a, say, a schoolmistress rising twenty-four or twenty-five, in the world who hadn't had some affair, even if it were no more than a gentleman in a tea-shop who every afternoon for a week had gazed at her disrespectfully over a slice of plum-cake...And then disappeared...But you had to have had at least a might-have-been or you couldn't go on being a schoolmistress or a girl in a ministry or a dactylographer of respectability. You packed that away in the bottom of your mind and on Sunday mornings before the perfectly insufficient Sunday dinner, you took it out and built castles in Spain in which you were a castanetted heroine turning on wonderful hips, but casting behind you inflaming glances...Something like that!

Well, she had had an affair with this honest, simple creature! So good! So unspeakably GOOD...Like the late Albert, prince consort! The very, helpless, immobile sort of creature that she ought not to have tempted. It had been like shooting tame pigeons! Because he had had a Society wife always in the illustrated papers whilst he sat at home and evolved Statistics or came to tea with her dear, tremendous, distracted mother, whom he helped to get her articles accurate. So a woman tempted him and he did...No; he didn't quite eat!

But why?...Because he