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!”