Mrs. Rutherford was the fashion in that first year of her second marriage, just as she had been in her London dÉbut as Madame Provana. It seemed as if one of the fairies at her christening had given her that inexpressible charm which captivates the crowd, that elusive, indescribable attractiveness which for want of a better name people have agreed to call magnetism. Vera Rutherford was a magnetic woman. Mr. Symeon went about telling people that she had psychic attributes which removed her worlds away from the normal woman, and Miranda, the only, the inimitable dressmaker, told her patronesses that it was a delight to work for Mrs. Rutherford, not because she was rich enough to pay for the wildest flights in millinery, but because her pale, ethereal beauty lent itself to all that was daring and original in the dress-designer's art. "People preach to me about Mrs. Montressor's lovely colouring, and what a joy it must be to invent frocks for her; but those pink and white beauties are difficult," said the dressmaker. "They require much study. A nuance, just the faintest nuance on the wrong side, and your pink and white woman looks vulgar. A wrong shade of blue and the peach complexion becomes purple, but with Mrs. Rutherford's alabaster skin every scheme of colour is possible."

Mrs. Rutherford was a social success, just as Madame Provana had been. Her entertainments were as frequent and as sumptuous as in the old days, when Mario Provana stalked like a stranger through crowded rooms where hardly one face in twenty afforded him a moment's interest. The entertainments were as sumptuous, but they were more original. The tone was lighter, and gilded youth from the Embassies found the house more amusing.

"Vera is ten years younger since her second marriage," Lady Susie told people; "Claude aids and abets her in everything frivolous. She used to be just a little too dreamy—Oh, you may call it 'side,' but that it never was. But she is certainly more sociable now; more eagerly interested in the things that interest other people. Claude has made her forget that she is a poet's daughter. She is as keen as mustard about their house and racing stables at Newmarket. She goes to all the big cricket matches with him, things she never thought of in Provana's time. They are not like commonplace husband and wife, but like boy and girl lovers, pleased with everything. I don't wonder Mr. Symeon thinks she has degenerated. He says she is losing her other-world look, and is fast becoming a mere mortal."

"And as a mere mortal I hope she won't allow Rutherford to spend all her money," said Susie's confidant, an iron-grey bachelor of fifty, who spent the greater part of his life sitting in pretty women's pockets. "A racing stud is a pretty deep pit for gold at the best; but a man who has married a triple millionaire's widow may safely allow himself one hobby. Rutherford goes in for too many things: his dirigible balloons and his aeroplane, his racing cars and his motor launches: his Ostend holiday, where people say he is hardly ever out of the gambling rooms. Your friend had better keep an eye on her pass-book."

"Vera!" cried Susie, with uplifted eyebrows. "Vera look at a pass-book!"

"As a banker's widow she might be supposed to know that there are such financial thermometers. She must have learnt something of business from Provana."

"She never took the slightest interest in his business, and he was far too noble to degrade her by talking of money."

"A pity," said the bachelor; "when a woman's husband is a great financier he may want to talk about money; and his wife ought to be interested in things that are of vital concern for him."

"That's a counsel of perfection," said Susie, "and very few women rise to it. All I have ever known about my husband is that he is interested in railways and insurance companies and things, and that when any of them are going wrong I'd better not talk of my dressmaker's bills, or let him see my pass-book."

"Then you know what a pass-book is."

"I have to," sighed Susie, "for my normal state is an overdrawn account. I think the letters n.e. and n.s. are quite the horridest in the alphabet."

"Yet you never ask a friend to help you out of a fix?"

"Not much; when it comes to that I shall make a mistake in measuring my dose of chloral, and it will be 'poor Susan Amphlett, death by misadventure'!"

Susan, who had never had adventures or "affairs" of her own, was a kind of modern representative of the chorus in a Greek play, and was always explaining people, more especially her bosom friends, of whom Vera was the dearest. She was really fond of Vera, and there was no arriÈre pensÉe of envy and malice in her explanations. Her intense interest in other people may perhaps be attributed to the fact that she hardly ever opened a book—not even the novel of the season—and that her knowledge of public events was derived solely from the talk at luncheon tables.

Certainly it might be admitted, even by the malicious, that Claude and Vera were an ideal couple. They outraged all modern custom in spending the greater part of their lives in close companionship; he originating all their amusements, and she keenly interested in everything he originated.

They were happy, and they were continually telling each other how happy. They always went back to the childish days at Disbrowe.

"I feel as if all that ever happened after that was blotted out," Vera whispered, one sunlit afternoon, as they sat side by side among silken cushions on the motor launch, while all the glory of the upper Thames moved past them; "all between those summer days and these seems vague and dim: even the long years with poor Grannie. The wailing about want of money, the moaning over the things we had to do without, the people she hated because they were rich; all those years and the years that came after have gone down into the gulf of forgotten things. A dark curtain, like a pall, has fallen upon the past; and we are living in the present. We love each other, and we are together. That is enough, Claude, is it not? That is enough."

"That is enough," he echoed, smiling up at her from his lower level among the pillows. That heap of down pillows and his lounging attitude among them seemed to epitomise the man and his life. "All the same, I want Sinbad the Second to win the Leger."

"Ah, you always laugh at me," she cried, with a vexed air. "You can never be serious."

"No, I can't," he answered, with a darkening brow, and a voice that was as heavy as lead.

They were living upon the rapture of a consummated love: which is something like a rich man living upon his capital. There comes a time when he begins to ask himself how long it will last.

They had loved each other for years; first unconsciously, with a divine innocence, at least on the woman's part, then consciously, and with a vague sense of sin; and then, all obstacles being removed, triumphantly; assured of the long future, in which nothing could part them.

She repeated this often—in impassioned moments. "Nothing can part us. Whatever Fate may bring we shall be together. There can be no more parting."

He was not given to serious thoughts. He never had been. His one irresistible charm had been his careless enjoyment of the present hour, and indifference to all that might come after. He had never considered the ultimate result of any action in his life. He left the Army with no more thought than he left off a soiled glove! He threw up a painter's art, and all its chances of delight and fame, the moment he found discouragement and difficulty. He hated difficult things; he hated hard work; he hated giving up anything he liked. His haunting idea of evil was the dread of being bored.

Once Vera found herself making an involuntary comparison between the dead man and the living.

If Claude had had a dying daughter whom he loved, could he have watched her sink into her grave, and kept the secret of his sorrow, and smiled at her while his heart was breaking? She knew he could not. He was a creature of light and variable moods, of sunshine and fine weather. She had loved him for his lightness. He had brought her relief from ennui whenever he crossed her threshold; he had brought her gladness and gay thoughts, as a man brings a bunch of June roses to his sweetheart. And now that the past was done with, and that she was his for ever, they were to be always glad and gay. There was to be no gloom in their atmosphere, no long, dull pause in life to give time for dark thoughts.

"Everybody has something to be sorry for," Vera told Susan Amphlett; "that's why people's existence is a perpetual rush. Niagara can have no time to think—but imagine, if nature were alive, what long aching thoughts there might be under the bosom of a great, smooth lake."

"You know, my darling Vera, I generally think everything you do is perfect," Susan answered, more sensibly than her wont, "but, I sometimes fear that you and Claude are burning the candle at both ends. You are too much alive. You seem to be running a race with time. Neither your health nor your beauty can last at the pace you are going."

"I'll take my chance of that. There is one thing that I dread more than being ill and growing ugly."

"What is that?"

"Living to be old."

"What, you've caught my fear?"

"I dread the long, slow years—the long, slow days and sleepless nights—old people sleep very little—in which there is nothing but thought, an endless-web of miserable thoughts, going slowly round and round, never stopping, never changing. That's what I am afraid of, Susie."

"Strange for you to be afraid of anything," her friend said thoughtfully. "I think you are the most courageous woman I ever heard of—as brave as Joan of Arc, or Charlotte Corday."

"Why?"

"Because you are not afraid to live in this house."

"Why not? What does the house matter?"

"It must make you think sometimes," faltered Susan.

"I won't think! But if I were to think of the past, the house would make no difference. My thoughts would be the same in Mexico—or at the North Pole. I have heard of people who go to the end of the earth to forget things, but I should never do that. I should know that memory would go with me."

For three seasons in London, for three winters in Rome, the pace went on, and was accelerated rather than slackened with the passing of the years. Claude Rutherford won the Blue Ribbon of the turf, with Sinbad the Second, and was equally fortunate with his boat at Cowes. If he did not cross the Channel or fly from London to Liverpool, he did at least make sundry costly excursions in the air, which kept his name in the daily papers, and made his wife miserable, till, aviation having resulted in boredom, he promised to content himself with the substantial earth. After those three years this boy and girl couple began to discover that they had done everything brilliant and exciting that there was to be done; and the fever called living began to pall.

And now Susan Amphlett told people that Vera was killing herself, and that her husband, though as passionately in love with her as ever he had been, was selfish and thoughtless, and was spending her money, and ruining her health, with the extravagances and agitations of a racing stable that was on a scale he ought never to have allowed himself.

"After all, it is her money," said Susan, "and it's bad form on his part to be so reckless."

"But as she has only a life interest in Provana's millions, and as her trustees are some of the sharpest business men in London, Rutherford can't do her much harm," said masculine common-sense, while feminine malice was lifting its shoulders and eyebrows with doleful prognostics.

"Well, I suppose the money is all right," said Chorus, still inclined to be tragic; "it's her health I'm afraid of. She's losing her high spirits, her joy in everything, and she is getting out of touch with her husband. She could hardly give him a smile when Blue Rose won the Oaks. She sat in a corner of her box, looking the other way, while that lovely animal was coming down the hill neck and neck with the favourite, at a moment when any other woman would have been simply frantic."

"She is not of the stuff that racing men's wives are made of," said Eustace Lyon, the poet. "No doubt she was worlds away—in dreamland—and did not even know whose mare the bookies and the mob were cheering."

"She was not like that two years ago," said Chorus. "She and Claude were in such perfect sympathy that it was impossible for either of them to have a joy that the other did not share. It was a case of two souls with but a single thought."

"I can quite believe that, for I never gave C. R. credit for thinking," replied the poet.

Satiety had come. It came in a day. The fatal day that comes to all the favoured and the fortunate, and which never comes to the poor and the unlucky. That evil at least is spared to Nature's stepchildren. They never have too much of anything, except debt and difficulty. They never yawn in each other's faces, and ask themselves where they can go for the summer. They never turn over the leaves of a Continental Bradshaw and complain that they are tired of everywhere.

It is the people who can go everywhere and have everything who find the wide earth a garden run to seed, and feel the dust of the desert in their mouths as they talk of the pleasure places that the herd long for. This time had come for Vera, at the end of her third season as Claude Rutherford's wife. He, the gay and the insouciant, was careless still, but it was a new kind of carelessness: the carelessness that comes from hating everything that an exhausted life can give.

They had fallen into the fashion of their friends of late, and were more like the normal semi-detached couple than the boy and girl lovers upon whose bliss Lady Susan had loved to expatiate.

When the Goodwood week came round in this third year with the inexorable regularity that one finds in the events of the season, Vera declared that she had had enough of Goodwood and would never go there again.

"Of course, that won't prevent your being there," she said.

"Well, not exactly, when I have Iseult of Ireland in two races."

"Yes, of course, you must be there. I forgot."

"You seem always to forget my horses nowadays. Yet you were once so keen about them."

"They were very interesting at first, poor, sweet things, but the fonder I was of them, the more cruel it seemed to race them."

"You'd like them kept to look at, eh?"

"I should like to sit with them in their boxes, and feed them with sugar, and make them lie down with their heads in my lap."

"A Lady Rarey!"

"I sometimes long for a paradise of animals, some lovely pastoral valley with a silver stream winding through the deep grass, where I might live among beautiful innocent creatures—sheep, and deer, and Jersey cows, and great calm, cream-coloured oxen from the Campagna. Creatures that can lie in the sun and bask, knowing nothing of the past, feeling nothing but the warmth and beauty of the world; and where I myself should have lost the faculty of thought."

"That's a queer fancy."

"I have many queer fancies. They come to me in my dreams."

"You'd much better come to Goodwood. All the world will be there, and you'd like to see Iseult win. Haven't you enough frocks? Is that the reason for not coming?"

"I have too many frocks, some that I have never worn."

"Hansel them at Lady Waterbury's. You'll be the prettiest woman there."

"It's dear of you to say that"—her eyes clouded as she spoke—"but I can't go. I'm so tired of it all, Claude, so tired!"

"Do you suppose I am never tired of things? Sick, sick to death! but I know that to be happy one must keep moving. That's a law of human life. You'd better come, Vera. You'll be moped to extinction alone."

"I don't mind loneliness, and I shall have Susan part of the time, and there will be a meeting in the Albany."

"De gustibus? Well, if you prefer Symeon and his spooks to a racecourse in an old English park, there's nothing more to be said." He stooped to kiss the pale forehead before he sauntered out of the room, yawning as he went. He had always a tired air; but it had verily become a law of his being to keep moving.

"Nemesis is like the policeman on night duty," he used to say. "She won't let us lie in the dust and sleep. We must trudge on."

Trudging from one costly pleasure to another might not suggest hardship to the loafer on the Embankment, but to a self-indulgent worldling who has drained the cup of life to the dregs, that necessity of going on drinking when there are only dregs to drink may seem hard to bear.