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By Root 5677 0

the clearing convulsion on—are, exceedingly often if not always, idle, morbid, trivial or adolescent people, or people who feel a vacuum they are eager to fill. Not to these would one show, in happier moments, some secret spring of one's nature, the pride of love, the ambition, the sustaining hope; one could share with them no delicate pleasure in living: they are people who make discussion impossible. Their brutalities, their intrusions and ineptitudes are, at the same time, possible when one could not endure the tender touch. The finer the nature, and the higher the level at which it seeks to live, the lower, in grief, it not only sinks but dives: it goes to weep with beggars and mountebanks, for these make the shame of being unhappy less.

So that, that unendurable Monday afternoon (two days after Portia had seen Eddie with Anna, nearly a week after St. Quentin's revelation—long enough for the sense of two allied betrayals to push up to full growth, like a double tree) nobody could have come in better than Lilian. The telephone crisis, before lunch at Miss Paullie's, had been the moment for Lilian to weigh in. To be discovered by Lilian weeping in the cloakroom had at once brought Portia inside that sub-tropical zone of feeling: nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms. To be consoled, to be understood by Lilian was like extending to weep in a ferny grot, whose muggy air and clammy frond-touches relax, demoralise and pervade you. The size of everything alters: when you look up with wet eyes trees look no more threatening than the ferns. Factitious feeling and true feeling come to about the same thing, when it comes to pain. Lilian's arabesques of the heart, the unkindness of the actor, made her eye Portia with doomful benevolence—and though she at this moment withdrew the cake plate, she started to count her money and reckon up the cost of the taxi fare.

"Well, as you feel," she said. "If you're crazy to go alone. But don't let the taxi stop where you're really going. You know, you might be blackmailed, you never know."

"I am only going to Covent Garden."

"My dear—why ever not tell me that before?"

IV

EDDIE did not think Covent Garden a good place to meet, but he had had no time to think of anywhere else—his telephone talk with Portia had been cut off at her end while he was still saying they might surely do better. He had to be thankful that there had, at least, been time to put the lid on her first idea: she had proposed to meet him in the entrance foyer of Quayne and Merrett's. And this—for she was such a good, discreet little girl, trained to awe of Thomas's office—had been enough to show her desperate sense of emergency. She would arrive distraught. No, this would never have done.

Particularly, it would not have done this week. For Eddie's relations with the firm of Quayne and Merrett were (apart from the telephone trouble, of which, still unconscious, he was to hear from Anna) at the present moment, uncertain enough. He had annoyed many people by flitting about the office as though he were some denizen of a brighter clime. There had been those long week-ends. More, the absence of Thomas, the apparent susceptibility of Merrett to one's personal charm had beguiled Eddie into excesses of savage skittishness: he had bounced his weight about; he had been more nonchalant in the production of copy, at once more coy and insolent in his manners than (as it had been borne in on him lately) was acceptable here. He had lately got three chits of a damping nature, with Merrett's initials, and the threat of an interview that did not promise to take the usual course. There had been an unseemly scene in a near-by bar, with a more than low young man recruited by Mr. Merrett, when Eddie had been warned, with a certain amount of gusto, that one could not go to all lengths as Mrs. Quayne's fancy boy. This had been a time when a young man in the tradition should have knocked the speaker's teeth down his throat: Eddie's attempt to look at once disarming, touchy, tickled and not taken