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By Root 5701 0

him (he had been a friend of a cousin of hers, at Oxford) she had been told about his cosmic black moods, which were the things he was principally noted for. Her cousin knew no one else who went on like that, and did not believe that anyone else did, either. Denis, her cousin, and Eddie belonged about that time to a circle in which it was important to be unique. Everyone seemed to get a kick out of his relations with Eddie; he was like a bright little cracker that, pulled hard enough, goes off with a loud bang. He had been the brilliant child of an obscure home, and came up to Oxford ready to have his head turned. There he was taken up, played up, played about with, taken down, let down, finally sent down for one idiotic act. His appearance was charming: he had a proletarian, animal, quick grace. His manner, after a year of trying to get the pitch, had become bold, vivid and intimate. He became a quite frank arriviste—at the same time, the one thing no one, so far, knew about Eddie was quite how he felt about selling himself. His apparent rushes of Russian frankness proved, when you came to look back at them later, to have been more carefully edited than you had known at the time. All Anna's cousin's friends, who found Eddie as clever as a monkey, regarded his furies, his denunciations (sometimes) of the whole pack of them as Eddie's most striking turn—at the same time, something abstract and lasting about the residue of his anger had been known, once or twice, to command respect.

When he left Oxford, he had a good many buddies, few responsible friends: he had grown apart from his family, who, obscure and living in an obscure province, were not, anyhow, in a position to do anything for him. He came to London and got a job on a paper; in his spare time he worked off his sense of insult in a satirical novel which, when published, did him no good at all. Its readers, who were not many, were divided into those who saw no point in the book whatever, and those who did see the point, were profoundly offended and made up their minds to take it out of Eddie. What security he had rested so much on favour that he could not really afford to annoy anyone: he had shown himself, not for the first time, as one of those natures in which underground passion is, at a crisis, stronger than policy. Some weeks after the appearance of the novel, Eddie found himself unstuck from his position on the paper, whose editor, though an apparently dim man, was related to someone Eddie had put in his book. Eddie's disillusionment, his indignation knew almost no bounds: he disappeared, saying something about enlisting. Just when people were beginning to notice, partly with relief, partly with disappointment, that he was not there, he reappeared, very cheerful, every sign of resentment polished away, staying indefinitely with a couple called the Monkshoods, in Bayswater.

Where he had got the Monkshoods nobody knew: they were said to have all been up Cader Idris together. They were a very nice couple, middle-aged, serious, childless, idealistic and full of belief in youth. They were well off, and seemed disposed to make Eddie their son—with Mrs. Monkshood, possibly, there was just a touch of something more than this. During the Monkshood period, Eddie helped his patrons with some research, went to useful parties, did a little reviewing and wrote some pamphlets, which were printed by a girl who had a press in a loft. Arts and crafts had succeeded Sturm und Drang. It was at this time, when he looked like being less of a trouble, that Eddie was first brought to Anna's house by Denis: he found his way there again with kittenlike trustfulness. All seemed to be going almost too well when a friend whose girl Eddie had taken—or had, rather, picked up and put down again—got the Monkshoods' ear and began to make bad blood. Eddie—unconscious, though perhaps a little affected by some threat of dissolution in the air—galloped towards his doom: he brought the girl back to his room in the Monkshoods' flat: the flat was too small for this, and the Monkshoods, already uneasy,