Priscilla Craven

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CHAPTER I
EN ROUTE

Yes, Mrs. Currey was “at home,” the butler admitted, opening the doors hospitably.

By the hats and overcoats lying about the spacious hall of their flat in Albert Hall Mansions, Carey Image knew he was not the only man who had hastened to congratulate Claudia on her husband’s latest honour. He had seen the announcement in the papers that morning. Gilbert Currey had been made a K.C. Image immediately sent a wire to his chambers, and now in person was giving himself the pleasure of calling on his “god-daughter by marriage,” as he called her.

The honour was no surprise to anyone; for the last year or more rumour had marked him out for this distinction. There had even been vague whispers of coming glory in the church at his wedding, eighteen months before. But now Gilbert had stepped into the vacancy left by the death of Howard Barnes, that blunt and sarcastic personality who, under a forbidding exterior, had hidden the heart of a child.

Image had seen very little of the pair since their marriage, for he who has once roamed in the Orient never settles down for long in the dull, tidy lands of the West, and though Cary Image had fully intended to stop in England, he had broken his resolve a few weeks after the ceremony. Japan with her slender golden fingers had beckoned him and he had gone back to the land of almond blossom and universal courtesy.

The room overlooking the Park which he entered, unusually large and lofty for a London flat, seemed crowded to his near-sighted eyes. There was an animated chatter of voices, for Claudia had already gathered around her an amusing and socially attractive set, who talked well and easily, and required but little “managing.” Image’s bright eyes peered out through his eyeglasses in search of his hostess.

She soon came towards him with her most hospitable and welcoming smile. She was always pleased to see him or receive one of his long, descriptive letters. She liked him and she liked his life-story. Gilbert generally spoke of him a little slightingly.

“Welcome, godfather; I’m delighted to see you. You’ve neglected me shamefully of late. From what part of the world have you come?”

“Last of all from Paris, chÈre madame, and this morning I saw the announcement in the paper. Gilbert is forging ahead. My heartiest congratulations to his charming partner. What could one not hope to do with such a one!”

She listened with a conventional smile, but her eyes did not warm to any enthusiasm as she said lightly, “Thank you, but I have had nothing to do with it. Such a partner as I”—there was a slight emphasis on the word—“is not entitled to claim any share in the congratulations.”

“That is not true,” said Image warmly; “a wife is the closest and best partner a man can have; and I am sure, if the truth were known, that most of our famous men owed much of their success to their wives’ co-operation. The partner in the house is often far more important than the partner in the office.”

“Mr. Image, you really are the most refreshing person,” said a studiously lazy voice from under an enormous mass of lancer plumes at his left. “Isn’t he, Claudia? You are the one faithful appreciative soul in a multitude of scoffers howling in the wilderness. You almost induce a woman to believe in herself.”

Image laughed and peered under the feathery erection to discover that it was Rhoda Carnegie, a cousin of Claudia’s and a woman he had known in Society for many years. She was married to an unsuccessful playwright, a “one play” man, who on the strength of a singleton had induced her to marry him, to their mutual regret. Some people raved about her beauty in superlatives, while others merely dubbed her “queer-looking.” No one refrained from expressing an opinion about her. Her looks and manners were of the arrogant “I-must-be-obeyed” order, and she had a reputation for being irresistible where she chose to charm.

“Ah! Mrs. Carnegie, I could not see who it was. How do you do? I am so glad you agree with me.”

“I don’t in the least,” she responded languidly, through half-shut eyes. “It’s only bad women who play a big part in men’s lives; that’s why I gave up being good. The nice, virtuous, sympathetic wife is—just a super most of the time, unnoticed in the wings. And who wants to be super?”

With a careless laugh Claudia moved away to greet a new arrival. Rhoda Carnegie watched her with a sort of detached, cold-blooded speculation.

“Claudia was never cut out to be a super. I see signs that she will shortly get beyond that stage, for Gilbert gives no one a chance to distinguish himself. He always plays lead. But Claudia is not her mother’s daughter for nothing,” she drawled, playing with a set of golden baubles in her lap. She had but a small income of her own and her husband had less, but Rhoda Carnegie was noted for her extravagance. How she got her very handsome toilettes was a mystery. At least, perhaps it was not an insolvable one to those who knew her well; but a mystery is always more decent than a scandal.

Image listened, rather startled. Then he remembered the type of woman to whom he was speaking. It was said that she made an art of demolishing reputations in as few words as possible.

“I find her looking exceedingly well,” he said, trying to change the subject; “and you, also,” he added courteously.

She looked up at him through her narrow slits of eyes, a trick which some men found fascinating.

“Claudia is the type that goes on getting better-looking until she arrives at the age of fifty, then she remains handsome and distinguished, especially when her hair gets white. It’s a good job our styles don’t clash, or I should have to avoid her. But we are quite different. She is the charming, sympathetic, give-all type which has its admirers, and I—I hold men with a whip, which I don’t hesitate to use. You know the play Doormats? Well, I am the boot.” She laughed insolently. “Now you like the Claudia type. So does Frank Hamilton.”

“Frank Hamilton? Is that the new artist that——”

“Yes, Claudia has made a success of him. She first introduced him socially, and they say he is deluged with commissions for portraits. He isn’t as strong as Sargent or Lavery, and I shouldn’t wonder if he fizzles out, but he has a trick of pleasing his sitters and doing very graceful work. I believe he is doing a portrait of Claudia. That is he over there.”

She pointed quite openly with her fingers to a young man who stood at Claudia’s elbow, holding some cigarettes. There was something in his very attitude that suggested his admiration for his hostess.

Image saw a tall, broad-shouldered, but loose-jointed figure, that spoke more of the studio than the cricket-field. His features were good, graceful rather than strong, and the whole face, he could see, would be one that would please women. His hazel eyes had an appealing, rather wistful look in them, and his mouth, if rather weak, spoke of a taste for and appreciation of beauty and luxury.

“Claudia should prove a good subject for his brush,” said Image, exchanging a nod with a foreign diplomatist whom he knew. “I have heard people speak of him and predict great things for his future.”

“Mostly women, I suppose? Women like him and men—are not keen about him. But then he’s not keen on them. Women fill the bill. A good many of them are taking him up, and I don’t think his head can stand it. He hates me like poison. He loves to talk about himself, and I love and intend to talk about myself. He told a dear friend of mine, who never loses an opportunity of repeating the nasty things that are said about me, that I had the eyes of a Lucretia Borgia.”

“I have always wondered what colour they really are,” said Image, playing up to her obvious lead.

She smiled. “Continue—to wonder! That is the way to make men think about you. An ounce of conjecture is worth a hundredweight of knowledge where women are concerned.... Good gracious, Patricia, is there any more of you to unwind? I thought it was a boa-constrictor standing on his hind legs. Haven’t you stopped growing?”

“In stature—yes.” She was more of an Amazon than ever as she rose from somewhere behind the piano. She gripped Image by the hand, and it was a real grip.

“How about goodness?” queried Rhoda.

“A non-starter—the handicap frightens me. We are not a good family, you know.... What a lot of people and congratulations! I should have thought Gilbert might have got home early to have relieved his wife’s blushes, and given himself a sort of holiday treat.”

“Working as hard as ever?”

“Harder. I annoyed him the other day by predicting a nerve-breakdown—he was playing golf so badly—in a couple of years. And that same night at dinner he was so dead tired or cross that he hardly said a word, and I was left to talk to a boy I’d refused the night before. He was sulky and devoted himself to his food. I had a beastly time. I told Gilbert that he fancied he was an indestructible machine, and that he would find he wasn’t. Anyway, he hates dinner-parties, and he begins to show it in his manners.”

“If I were Claudia I should leave him at home,” said Rhoda coolly. “I always leave mine at home. I tell people not to invite him. A husband is always the skeleton at the feast.”

“Why have a husband at all?” said Pat lightly, who knew her Rhoda.

“It’s a bad habit we shall outgrow in time, like needle-work and charity. A husband is like your appendix. When you don’t know it’s there, it’s no use, and when you do, it’s a nuisance.”

“Had any tea?” inquired Patricia of Image.

“No, will you take me and give me some?” They walked together to the next room. “Dear me, would you mind hobbling on your knees, or providing me with stilts? After the miniature women of Japan you take my breath away. The modern Englishwoman is really a glorious creature.”

Pat laughed amiably. “I’m a sort of yard-measure, aren’t I? It’s a nuisance really, except when you get in a crowd. Mother winces every time she sees me, and father says my feet are larger than his.”

But Image looked admiringly at her over the edge of his tea-cup. To him this fine young girl, so amazingly fresh and healthy, Saxon in colouring, with the limbs of an athlete, was most attractive, though he knew she made his own lack of inches more conspicuous.

“I suppose we shall have you getting married soon?” he said, beaming on her through his glasses.

Patricia shrugged her broad shoulders and nibbled at a sandwich. “Didn’t you hear Rhoda say that we women are getting out of the habit?”

“She talks a lot of nonsense. Don’t listen to it. You are much too fresh and sweet to repeat such horrible cynicism.”

“We are all cynical nowadays. How is it you have escaped? How have you managed to keep on believing in people and things?”

Image answered quite simply and directly. “By loving a woman, my dear. To love a woman well keeps the core of a man’s heart from withering and getting old. My blessings on all your sex, even a Rhoda Carnegie, because of her.”

It was said so naturally that Patricia, who, like all young things, recoiled from any display of sentiment, could not find any fault with the frankness with which he had replied to her question. She became a little graver, and whether by accident or the prompting of some hidden association of ideas, she glanced up at the opposite wall, where hung a portrait of Gilbert, a wedding-present from the tenants on his father’s estate.

“Ah!” she said impulsively, “but why, then, do so many marriages go wrong? They seem so right beforehand, and then——” She checked herself suddenly and shot a sideways look at the little man beside her, like a child who fears she has betrayed a cherished secret. But though Image’s mind was full of alarm at what he felt lay between the lines, he gave no sign that Pat could have had any personal implication in her mind. To Pat’s relief, Frank Hamilton came in for some tea, and she seized upon him and made him known to Carey Image.

“I am delighted to make your acquaintance,” said Image, with his old-world formality. “I have heard your praises sung, but never found myself in your company before. I saw one of your portraits photographed for an illustrated paper I found in Japan. I understand you are engaged on a portrait of our hostess?”

Hamilton’s face, which had been full of pleased attention—Rhoda said he swallowed praise as a baby swallows milk—clouded a little. Then he replied with an engaging air of frankness.

“To tell you the truth, I have not been successful so far. She is a most difficult subject, though a delightful one. I have already destroyed one portrait and several studies. I think she is tired of my efforts, for I cannot persuade her to come to the studio for sittings. And I want so much to get a good portrait of her.”

Image nodded understandingly. “Yes, I should say Mrs. Currey would be a difficult subject. Her greatest charm is in her animation and spirit, and those qualities are always difficult to transfer to canvas. And such people always appear different to each of their friends, so that a popular success is, I should say, almost impossible. It is before the cow-like, plaster-of-paris woman that people throw up their hands and say ‘How like!’”

“I see you know something about the art of portrait-painting,” said Hamilton, looking pleased.

“He knows something about everything,” exclaimed Pat. “He’s a walking index and encyclopÆdia, a Who’s Who and a Dictionary of National Biography all combined.”

Claudia came up and caught the last words.

“He’s nothing so dull and uninteresting. It’s a deadly insult, godfather. Up, sir, and at Patricia.”

“How can I?” said Image humorously. “Just look at us! I shall have to get some of the mushroom that Alice nibbled before I fight your sister.”

“Oh! but the pen is mightier than the sword! Annihilate her with an epigram; that’s much more deadly, because your enemies go round repeating it,” said Claudia gaily. Image noticed that Hamilton was feasting his eyes on her face and that Claudia seemed rather to avoid looking at him. Image received the impression that she was used to his homage and did not either actively encourage or resent it.

“Such bad form,” jeered Pat. “Everyone epigrammates nowadays, and you never have the least idea what anyone is talking about. You answer in the same strain, and you wonder what on earth you yourself are talking about. Anyone can get a reputation for being clever, if he’s only vague and wild enough in his conversation.”

In the general laugh at Patricia the group shifted, and Image found himself alone with Claudia. She smiled upon him frankly and said with obvious sincerity:

“It’s so nice to see you again. Don’t run away for a while. By and by, I expect another friend back from ‘furrin parts abroad.’ You remember Colin Paton?”

“Indeed, yes, and shall be glad to see him again.”

“So shall I. He’s such an excellent and satisfying companion. A ‘collectable’ person, you know. At least,” she added, with a slight change of tone, “I used to find him so.”

“That sounds a little like granny, with her ‘When I was young, my dear, I used to——’”

Claudia laughed. “Oh well! friends change, even in eighteen months, or else it is that one changes one’s self, and friends seem different, judged by different standards. Eighteen months may be a day—or an eternity. He went away just before our wedding, you know. He has written me some most delightful letters at intervals since. He is one of the few men who can write something more than a telegram.”

Although he did not appear to be doing so, the keen eyes of her companion were scrutinizing her face as she talked. In middle-age or its borderland lines tell their tale for all to read, massage she ever so assiduously, but the changes in a young face are much more subtle and difficult to classify. But to a student of physiognomy like Carey Image there is sometimes a hint conveyed in the softest curve, a suggestion in an apparently sunny smile, a warning in the glance of brilliantly youthful eyes, such as were now confronting him.

She was not satisfied, she was not happy. The eyes had lost a little of the eager, questioning softness he had noticed in the photograph in Gilbert’s room two years ago, and the mouth had acquired a little more decisiveness and an inclination toward sarcasm rather than smiles. Her whole bearing was much more assured, much more the woman of the world, the woman who has eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. But Image knew that she had not found that fruit altogether sweet. And he was profoundly sorry. He would have been sorry to have read that information on any young man or woman’s face for he always wanted the world to be a more joyful place, but he particularly liked his young hostess. He saw in Claudia the bud that has blossomed but has never been warmed by the good red sun, so that the petals at the heart are still cold and unopened. And with the kindly wisdom of his fifty-four years, Image knew that this spelt danger ahead.

They chatted on, Claudia questioning him about his wanderings abroad, until they were interrupted by one of the servants.

“The master has just rung up, madam, to say that he cannot get back this evening in time to accompany you out to Hampstead to-night, and will you please make his apologies to Mrs. Rivington.”

Claudia listened with a curious compression of her lips, like someone who listens with irritation to a too frequently told tale. Then she made a quick movement towards the door.

“I must speak to him myself. It’s too bad. Mrs. Rivington——”

Then she stopped short, as though second thoughts had put a check on her impulse. She came back to Image with a resigned shrug of her shoulders.

“It really is too bad of Gilbert. I spend half my time making apologies for him and meekly bearing the ill-temper of my hostess whose table has been disarranged.” Yet she looked anything but meek as she said it. “I am sure people will soon cease to ask us, because it is annoying to have your table upset at the last minute. It would try the patience of a hostess in heaven. Mrs. Rivington will be furious. She has asked us several times and we’ve refused.... Oh, well! I must go and telephone at once. That’s the only peace-offering and oblation I can make.”

“Let me go, Claud,” said Patricia; “you can’t leave your guests, and as she is a stranger to me, her wrath will pass harmlessly over my head.”

Claudia accepted the offer with relief. “You’ll find the number under Major-General Rivington, Newcombe Avenue. I say, Pat, suggest that, as Gilbert can’t come, I shall absent myself also.” Hopefully. “Perhaps she’ll let me off, as they are Gilbert’s friends rather than mine. Get me a reprieve if you can. It’s in the wilds of West Hampstead, and it’s such a long drive for a bad dinner.”

“Right-o! I’ll be a perfect Machiavelli on the telephone,” sang out Pat as she departed.

Dr. Fritz Neeburg, who was sitting near by, looked up as Pat went. “Is Gilbert in the habit of working in the evening, Mrs Currey?” he asked quietly.

“Yes, pretty often, Dr. Neeburg. Do you approve of it? You are his doctor, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but he hasn’t been to see me for ages, so I suppose he keeps pretty fit. All the same, I don’t approve of it.”

“He’s looking very tired,” said Claudia lightly. “Last night he did go out with me to a party at the ‘Ritz,’ but he was too tired to talk. I am sure the woman who sat next to him must be going about saying that the new K.C. is the dullest man in London.”

“I must talk to him,” said Neeburg decidedly. “He’s just the sort of a man who has a splendid constitution and takes that as an excuse for overwork. When a man gets into the habit of thinking of himself as a machine Nature has a little way of avenging such slights.”

“Mrs. Currey, give him a curtain lecture,” said Image.

Claudia’s lip curled a little and she raised her eyebrows. “You can’t curtain-lecture a man who listens in silence and then says, like putting in the cork, ‘You don’t understand. Women never do. A man who wants to make his way nowadays must devote himself whole-heartedly to his work. The world is strewn with the wreckage of men who have relaxed too soon or “taken holidays.”’”

Patricia has returned.

“Claudia, I did my best, and even spoke quite plainly; but I couldn’t get you off. She was very cross indeed. Her voice through the telephone was like that of an angry mosquito. She says you, at least, must come, and she wants you to bring a substitute. She suggested that Mr. Hamilton should come out with you, as she wants to make his acquaintance.”

Claudia spoke coldly. “I can’t ask Mr. Hamilton, or anyone, to take Gilbert’s place at a couple of hours’ notice.”

“No, I told her that, but she seemed to think you ought to get her out of the difficulty with the table.”

She did not tell her sister that Lorna Rivington’s rather sharp reply had been, “Your sister and he are such great friends that I am sure he would do it if she asked him.” Instead she whispered in her sister’s ear, “Why don’t you ask Mr. Image? He is such a nice, obliging dear.”

Because her feelings were divided between an unreasonable anger that Mrs. Rivington should make such a suggestion and a pleasurable relief that her long drive might not be so boresome after all, she seized on the alternative suggestion.

“Mr. Image, you have heard of my dilemma. Would you earn the martyr’s crown and take me out to Hampstead? It’s too bad to ask you at such short notice, but——”

“I should have been only too pleased,” returned Image, with a note of sincere regret, “but it is the anniversary of my mother’s death, and I always spend the evening quite quietly. At any other time, if such a situation occurs and I can fill the bill, ring me up and just give me time to dress. But you must give me an hour—I can’t do it in less.” It was well known that Carey Image took an age to attire himself. His neat, precise personal habits and leisurely methods of dressing were a constant amusement to his friends and a handle to his—very few—enemies.

Several people came up to make their adieux, among them Frank Hamilton.

“Why are you going so soon?” asked Claudia of him, for he had lately slipped into the habit of outstaying other visitors and waiting for a talk with her.

“I promised to go to Ealing to-night,” he said with a self-pitying sigh.

“Ealing,” said Claudia vaguely. “Where is that? Then it’s no good asking you to come out with me this evening? My husband is detained at his chambers and I want a substitute.” She was conscious of a slight sense of disappointment, though she had fully made up her mind a minute previously not to ask Hamilton.

“Yes, it is,” he said eagerly. “I can send a wire.”

“But your engagement?”

“Of no importance. I can easily go some other night. Old friends.... If you will have me I am entirely at your service.”

He looked into her eyes with his, over which he had not troubled to draw the blinds of conventionality. They underlined and emphasized the spoken words so that no woman could fail to understand. And she felt a pleasing sensation of power as she parried his devotion. She did not acknowledge it to herself, but she was subtly aware that they were both on the brink of deep waters. His eyes had spoken words of love for many weeks. His very naÏvetÉ and boyishness had its attraction for her. He was just as easy to move as Gilbert was difficult. She could colour his thoughts, deflect his mind, bring him instantly inside the circle of her mood. He took his colour from her like a chameleon, and she did not stop to consider whether she alone had this power, or if Frank Hamilton were always so influenced by attractive women.

“Very well, then,” she said, holding out her hand, “You are bidden to take dinner at the house of one Major-General Rivington, who served Her Majesty Queen Victoria with great distinction, and is now resting on his laurels in the wilds of West Hampstead. Come for me at half-past seven.”

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CHAPTER II
“LIVE! LIVE! LIVE!”

Claudia did not belong to the tribe of unpunctual women who stretch the minutes at their will and snap derisive fingers at Greenwich. The person who was unpunctual in their house was its master. That, however, was not due to carelessness, but to his uncertain calls. Often it was Claudia who, when the motor was at the door, sat down in her cloak and waited for her spouse.

So this evening she was ready in good time. It wanted still a few minutes to the half-hour when she cast a last critical look at herself in the mirror.

She was one of those women whom a dÉcolletÉ dress shows at their best, and Claudia knew, as she surveyed herself, that the result was good. She was as little conceited as any of her sex—she had too much brain and good looks for that; but she could not fail to see that the gown she was wearing for the first time made her look strikingly handsome in the best and most individual way. It was as though the creator of the gown had loved his task, for the deep orange of the rich yet light-weight fabric, softened with some exquisite pearl-embroidered lace and bordered on the skirt with dark-hued skunk, threw up into relief the darkly-bronze lights in her hair and made the big brown eyes seem softer and deeper than ever. A strange Oriental-looking headpiece studded with topazes and pearls accentuated the foreign note in her appearance, which so impressed strangers that they refused to believe that she was entirely English as she averred and believed. They said the way she moved and wore her dresses was not English, that she could not belong to the nation of women who know how to choose a frock but not how to wear it. As she stood in front of the mirror she was a flat contradiction to the American who said that English men were dressed, but the women only wore frocks.

Her looks had improved since her marriage. For some unknown reason she scrutinized herself dispassionately that night, and she realized that she was infinitely more attractive to men than when Gilbert had married her. Her figure now was almost as good as her mother’s had been at her age. Indeed, the tops of her arms and her wrists were even prettier. She remembered what an old friend of her mother’s had once said to her just before her marriage. “You will be much admired, my dear, and you will remain naturally good-looking longer than your mother has done. But you will never enslave all sorts and conditions of men as she did—not that you come so far below her in looks, but because hers is the beautÉ du diable, that irresistible magnet to unregenerate man. You look too intelligent, too independent, too critical. That will pique some here and there, but the woman who shows obviously that she likes men and that they are necessary to her always finds a return for that compliment. Besides, she holds out hopes of reward which your type does not. The majority of men are childish and lazy: they pick the fruit on the lowest branches. You would be too exigeante, you would demand more than they could give. Your nature is not that of a Circe, and men will know it instinctively.” Then she had kissed her affectionately and added, “I am glad you have no beautÉ du diable. The world is better without it. Take your place in the heart of one man, not in the passions of many.”

Claudia thought over these words as she thoughtfully pulled on her gloves. And simultaneously she recalled a scene soon after Gilbert’s proposal when she had, as to-night, stood in front of the mirror and slowly divesting herself of her garments, half shyly, half exultingly, because of her love of beauty, had watched the charms of her body emerge. She had rejoiced in her own comeliness because it was a gift she was bringing to her husband, a wedding gift such as few women could present.

She shrugged her shoulders at the recollection, and her face hardened a little. She had learned how evanescent a thing is passion with a man of Gilbert’s self-centred, violent nature. And the knowledge rankled, so that as she looked at herself something which was not the individual, Claudia Currey, the wife of the new K.C., but Women Unsatisfied and Disappointed, crept into her eyes and mouth, and which, for the first time, gave her some fleeting resemblance to her mother. Was her mother’s old friend quite right? Was there no touch of the devil’s beauty in her looks now? Perhaps she would have changed her mind if she could have seen the woman looking broodingly at her own reflection, a smouldering defiance in her eyes, an unformed challenge on her lips. That it was not the real Claudia that looked so, the passionate-hearted, idealistic woman who walked away with her head held high, the elder woman would have known; but she would have had to acknowledge regretfully that Claudia was evolving.

Then had she been present she would have seen the little hardness disappear as morning mist before the sun, as a familiar padding sound became evident along the carpet.

Only Billie, only a dog, but so unchangeably devoted, so unceasingly responsive. In a sudden burst of thwarted affection she caught him up, heedless of her costly embroideries, and hugged his fat bundle of soft brown fur. At least this creature loved her, she was his whole world and——

“Mr. Hamilton, madam.”

Billie found himself gently deposited on the floor, where he stood wagging his tail with pleasure at the caress, yet eyeing her beseechingly, as he always did when she was going out, as if to say, “Are you really going to leave me again?”

“Tell Mr. Hamilton that I am quite ready. Is the fur rug in the motor? It will be cold coming home to-night.”

She refastened a corsage spray that had been loosened, and picked up an Eastern-looking garment of dull golds and browns, with a chiffon and skunk muff that matched. Outside it was freezing, and the trees in the Park were lightly powdered with snow. Billie stood on his short stumpy hind legs—a great effort by reason of his plumpness—and besought her to stay with him. Claudia laughed gently, and stooping down, took the little useless, dangling paws in her hand.

“Billie, you fool, don’t you know how ridiculous it is; to love anyone so much? Better far to cut your heart up into lots of little pieces and distribute them than give it away in a lump. Don’t you know that?”

No, Billie didn’t know that at all.

“Well, it is. Listen to my words of wisdom and ponder them in your doggy understanding. It hurts, Billie boy, to love very much, it hurts dreadfully, though you pretend, except to a little dog who keeps your counsel, that it doesn’t. Well, I shall never do it again, and it’s all over, Billie; it’s all over, both the dream and the awakening.... Go to your basket and sleep the sleep of the faithful.”

They drove some way in silence. Inside the motor it was cosy and warm, in pleasant contrast to the streets, for the snow that lingered still on the trees had turned into slush on the pavements. The pedestrians looked uncomfortable and nipped by the east wind which was blowing, and the mud on the roads gleamed evilly in the light of the street lamps. Here and there they passed dirty heaps of snow in sheltered corners. Like the lace petticoats of a fine lady once pure and spotless, it was revolting now in its soiled, bedraggled state. People waiting in the wind at street corners for buses looked enviously at the motor as they passed. The padded luxury in which the two were enveloped, the dim frosted light, the narcissi in the silver holder diffusing a faint perfume, were very intime and aloof from the discomfort abroad.

They had left Baker Street behind them before Claudia came out of her reverie and realized that she was not being sociable. She looked sideways at her companion, to find him steadily regarding her.

“Are you wondering when I would be polite and talk?” she said, with a smile.

“No.... I was making a mental picture of you. I think—I think I can paint you now. I want to paint you in that velvet cloak—what colour do you call it?—it is like copper in the firelight—with the sable just touching your throat at one side just as it is now and falling off the other shoulder. Will you let me? Oh! I want my brushes in my hand now.” His eyes suddenly blazed with the inspiration of the moment as they devoured her. Quickly she drew the folds of the cloak closer around her neck. She felt as though a scorching wind had swept over her, a sirocco of passion came from him to her. She shrank back a little, yet even as she instinctively did so she wondered why. Her husband flagrantly neglected her, most of her friends had consoled themselves for their husbands’ shortcomings, and had not she almost determined to seek the love which she craved outside her home? She met his eyes, and she was half attracted, half repelled by their light. She liked him, she felt his magnetism drawing her, and yet something which she could not quite understand bobbed quickly up to the surface of her mind and surveyed them both with a certain contempt. So she was a little cruel in her reply to his enthusiasm.

“You were not very successful last time. I hope you destroyed that picture.”

“Yes, I slashed it to pieces in the middle of the night,” he said sombrely.

Claudia laughed lightly.

“Why in the middle of the night? Why were you moved to be so melodramatic?” She often teased him and made him angry by saying that he ought to have been an actor. For Frank Hamilton had a torch of the woman in him which clothed in drama many things that he did and said. Whether he was conscious of these effects or whether they came naturally to his character Claudia could never determine.

“I had been dreaming of you,” he said simply. “I had seen you standing at the foot of my bed, looking down on me, and I knew exactly how I should have painted you. So I sprang out of bed and hacked the beastly canvas to pieces. Afterwards I made a rough charcoal sketch of you from memory. To-night you look as you did when you stood at the foot of my bed.” The eyes of the man were audacious, but the words were spoken very quietly.

“I beg to remark that my frock is brand new,” rejoined Claudia flippantly. “I have never worn it even in dream-land. It is hard to be deprived of a positively first appearance when frocks are so ruinously expensive.”

“You looked wonderful that night,” he went on dreamily. “I have always seen you since—as you might look.”

“As I might look,” she repeated, her curiosity getting the better of her discretion. “What do you mean by that?”

He was looking out at the glistening streets, at the flakes of snow beginning to fall again, and he made no reply. This piqued her the more, and she repeated her question.

“I suppose you will be angry with me,” he said slowly. “Women always resent these things. I don’t know why.... As you might look if you were not so proud and if your brain did not rule your heart, if you would let yourself be the woman—you were meant to be.”

Claudia wanted to say “How ridiculous!” but she couldn’t. The motor was passing a large burial ground, the tombstones showing by the railings like dreary grey ghosts in the darkness, shut in with the wet, dripping trees, and looking hungrily at life passing a few yards away. Underneath those tombstones were hearts and brains in silent decay that had once been men and women. Claudia watched them flit by and she was silent now. She wondered if those tombstones had a message for her. Were not the dead saying “Live! live! live! Death started out to meet as soon as you were born.”

The man beside her commenced to quote softly, almost in a whisper:

The motor came to a standstill, and Claudia shook herself free from the spell of his words. There are few men who can quote poetry without divesting it of all lyrical charm and naturalness, but Frank Hamilton knew or had acquired the art. Then, as though the quotation were some nursery jingle, his voice altered, and he said, “Heigh ho! is this the house? What is my hostess like? Hints, please. I meant to have asked you before.”

“Much younger than her husband, but not as young as she would like to be,” whispered Claudia hurriedly. “If you flatter her judiciously you may get a portrait out of her. She is dying to have it painted.”

The boy was opening the door, but he caught her arm with every appearance of sudden anger, and made her stop and look at him.

“Do you think I only like to come out with you because I may get commissions for portraits from your friends?” he said heatedly. “Answer me, please.”

Claudia looked at the boy and motioned him to silence. “Don’t be foolish, I was only jesting. You mustn’t be so sensitive....” Then, as they walked up the steps together she said smilingly, “If you say silly things like that, you shan’t come out with me again. But, seriously, Mrs. Rivington has been wanting to meet you for a long time. I think she fancies that if she gets to know you the portrait will come cheaper. But she is well able to pay, so don’t take any notice when she hints at her poverty of purse. She is a woman who would try and get a discount off her seat in heaven.”

“You will make time to come to the studio one day quite soon, won’t you?” he pleaded.

“I’ll see,” she said, as the door opened before them.

The maid came forward and slipped off her cloak. As she waited and pulled up her gloves, Claudia propounded a question to herself.

“He seems to care so much—I wonder if he is really sincere.”

When a woman stands and asks that question, the man has scored his first point. But Claudia thought the tricks were still all in her hand.

---

CHAPTER III
“ICH LIEBE DICH”

To her surprise Claudia found that the assembled company included her father and mother-in-law. Mrs. Rivington’s set was absolutely antipodal to Lady Currey’s, but as the General was an old friend of Sir John’s Lady Currey occasionally and stiffly countenanced the wife. Since her marriage, the intercourse between Claudia and Gilbert’s family had been of the most formal description, for Lady Currey found nothing to like in Claudia, and her daughter-in-law realized that she was taken on sufferance.

“So I shall not see my dear son to-night,” said the elder woman, as she presented a frosty cheek for Claudia to kiss. “It is a disappointment.” She looked with sideways disapproval at Claudia’s toilette. “As showy as her mother,” was her mental comment.

“You knew he was expected? He telephoned me at the last minute that he was detained at his chambers.”

Lady Currey’s eyebrows were of the fixture kind that cannot really be raised, only crumpled. She crumpled them now.

“Ah! I remember when I was young no woman thought of going out without her husband. If John did not care to go to a function I stayed away. When he had that fall from his horse I never took a meal outside the house for five months.”

Claudia would have explained to anyone else that her hostess had insisted on her presence, and thus have soothed down old-fashioned prejudices, but Lady Currey’s tone annoyed her.

“Oh!” she said carelessly, “women are neither treated as children nor inmates of a harem nowadays. We have progressed, you know. Women are freeing themselves. Did you never revolt in your heart of hearts?”

“My pleasure was always to do as my husband wished.”

“What is that about me?” said Sir John, coming up to them. “How do you do, Claudia. I am sorry Gilbert is not able to come. But it shows the right spirit. I inculcated that into him when he was a boy.”

He looked at Claudia fixedly under his heavy, bushy eyebrows. They always annoyed Claudia, who longed to tell him to brush them. She knew the meaning of that look. It was to remind her that she had so far failed to provide him with a grandson.

“Then the responsibility rests with you,” said Claudia quietly.

“What do you mean? What responsibility? We are proud of him.”

“‘All work and no play——’” Claudia began to quote, when he interrupted her.

“Pooh! that was invented by some lazy rogue, I bet. Work never yet hurt any man. It’s play—late hours, too rich food and too much drink—that plays old Harry with the constitution. I impressed that on him early in life. Marian, don’t fidget with your fan”—she carried an old-fashioned fan of black ostrich feathers—“it worries me. The husband to work and the wife to look after the house and the children, that is the proper division. You leave Gilbert alone, and don’t worry him to come to silly dinner-parties. I’m getting on in years, and it doesn’t matter about me. He’s carrying the name to the country. The youngest K.C.—it’ s a thing to be proud of in a husband, Claudia.” He fixed his rather prominent cold grey eyes on her as she lightly shrugged her shoulders.

But her hostess fluttered up to her rescue. Mrs. Rivington never walked like other people, she always floated or fluttered.

“Mrs. Currey, may I present to you Mr. Littleton, who will take you in to dinner. It was too bad of your husband to desert us. But he is impervious to the charms of women, isn’t he?”

“Obviously not,” said the tall, almost gaunt, fair-haired man who bowed before her. Claudia knew by the accent that he was an American. “Your husband is the new K.C., is he not? King’s Counsel—it has a dignified but archaic sound to our ears.”

“Don’t,” cried Mrs. Rivington shrilly, gauging in ten seconds the probable cost of Claudia’s dress. “I’m an Imperialist, and I wave flags and put up bunting and do all sorts of loyal things, and the red on a Union Jack doesn’t agree with my complexion, so I really am quite genuine and what-you-may-call-it. Don’t run down the King to me.” She fluttered off, her eyes roving restlessly over the couples she was pairing.

Left together, Claudia and the American smiled. He was the type of American that suggests the mettlesome racehorse, lean-flanked, long-limbed, not a spare ounce of flesh on his bones, relying on training and determination to carry him through the race. He was unusually fair, with a suggestion that he might have had a Viking ancestor, yet there was nothing colourless about him. Claudia wondered what he might be, millionaire, financier, hoping to become one, railroad magnate, what? She was sure he was a worker, it was written in every line of him.

“I am certain women like our hostess are really and truly the props of your empire,” he said gravely. “The sacrifice of a complexion, what can compare with it? Sons, lands, money—what can touch it?”

They both laughed as they moved in to dinner. As Claudia had predicted, Mrs. Rivington was spreading herself over Frank Hamilton. Littleton caught the exchange of glances between him and his partner, and made a mental note. He was by way of studying Englishwomen.

“Are you here for long?” asked Claudia, unfolding her serviette.

“Maybe I’ll be here for six months or so. I know you are wondering what is my particular branch of money-making. I’m a publisher—Littleton, Robins and Co., and we’re starting a branch over here as an experiment. I want to stay for a bit and direct it.”

Her interest was aroused. Everything to do with books had a fascination for her ever since Colin Paton had taught her to love them. And to her a publisher was not a merchant, a mere purveyor of books to the public, but something dedicated to the service of art. The glamour of the books was around the man who produced them. She knew of his firm as one that specialized in art books and good belles lettres. She had several books with his imprint on her shelves. So the talk flowed on smoothly after this happy opening, neither having to consider what they should say next to while away the dinner-hour. Claudia found herself more interested than she had been for a long time at a dinner-table. He had not the delicate illuminating touch of Colin Paton, he lacked the subtleties of his imagination and sound classical scholarship, but he knew all the books of the day and was appreciative of the good in them.

Towards the end of dinner he looked at her with a whimsical twinkle in his blue eyes and said, “I wonder if you will be amused or annoyed if I tell you something. I am not sure how an Englishwoman takes such things. Personally I think the photograph of a beautiful woman should be public property, but I realize she may not.”

Claudia turned a wondering face upon him.

“Your photograph, in the shape of a coloured book-cover, has gone into every part of the United States, although”—with an appraisingly admiring glance—“the artist did not get your colouring correctly. He made your hair dead black and your skin and colouring too pink and commonplace.”

“But how——”

“It was like this. We were publishing a new book of Henry Roxton Vanderling’s—you know him—and we wanted an attractive paper cover with a portrait of the heroine. I remember it was a very hot day when we were discussing the matter, and I told the artist I wanted something specially taking. I generally have the English illustrated papers sent out to me, and he was listlessly turning over the pages, when he struck your photograph. With a cry of ‘Here it is—bully!’ he nabbed it. A few days later he brought me a coloured sketch suggested by your portrait. I have the original sketch framed in my office. Are you offended?”

Claudia laughed. It struck her as being humorous and something unusual in the way of introductions. And she was pleasantly aware, as any woman would be, of the compliment conveyed.

“I knew you the minute you came into the room, although I had forgotten your name. When you came in I said to myself, ‘Vanderling’s “Woman of the East!”’ I felt somehow we were already acquainted.”

“Well, I think I ought to have a copy of the book.” said Claudia promptly.

“Sure. I’ll send you one to-morrow. I’m delighted you are amused, not angry. I took a big chance in telling you, but I had to.”

“You thought I’d find out and you’d better put the thing nicely, with the varnished side uppermost?”

He gave a hearty laugh. “Well, you’ve guessed most of the truth. Mrs. Rivington spotted the resemblance, and as I come from the same country as George Washington, I didn’t tell a lie.”

“No, it’s no good telling a lie when it is sure to be found out. Only a good lie justifies the liar.”

Mrs. Rivington was collecting eyes by this time, and Claudia rose. In the drawing-room, an apartment so crowded with furniture and bric-À-brac of various periods that it suggested a well-dusted shop in Wardour Street, her hostess seized on her.

“I was glad to see you getting on so well with Mr. Littleton. He wanted to meet you. He told you about the ‘Woman of the East’? Quite romantic, I think. He ought to fall in love with you.”

“To serve as an advertisement is hardly romantic, surely? I rank with the monkey advertising soap and a starved cat extolling a certain milk.”

“Oh! how funny you are—and so cold and critical! Now I should be thrilled. But you’re not a bit romantic, anyone can see that. Oh! Claudia, is it true about your brother?”

“My brother? What is it?” She wished Mrs. Rivington’s eyes would not wander so restlessly over her person.

“Why don’t you know? They say he has married ‘The Girlie Girl!’”

“Who on earth is ‘The Girlie Girl’?” laughed Claudia, sipping her liqueur. “It sounds like a cross between a barrel organ and a seaside pier.”

“Yes, doesn’t it? But don’t you know her—haven’t you seen her picture on the hoardings? She was playing at the Pavilion last week. I don’t like her style myself, but I suppose most men would think her pretty. Not, of course, that you can tell. Paint goes such a long way, doesn’t it?”

“A music-hall artiste? What an absurd rumour!”

“Are you sure it’s a rumour?” said her hostess, with a gleam of malice. “These girls are always entrapping rich young men, and I heard as a positive fact that the wedding took place at the registrar’s three weeks ago.”

“Nonsense. Jack amuses himself, but he wouldn’t do a thing like that. He’s an awful fool, but not such a fool as that.”

“Well,” replied Mrs. Rivington, dabbing at her nose with a powder-puff; “I hope it’s not true, for your sake. Fancy having a sister who calls herself ‘The Girlie Girl’! Too awful to contemplate, isn’t it? Thank goodness, I haven’t any children. I shouldn’t survive such a thing. I don’t believe in marrying out of your own class.” As the General had obviously married beneath him—it was rumoured that she had been employed as reception-clerk at an hotel—her scruples were understandable. “She figures on the hoardings in a sort of vivandiÈre costume, and the men seem to admire her no end. But men always do admire such creatures. But really, Claudia, I am afraid it is true. My sewing-maid knows one of her maids, and this girl told Bertha in confidence that she went to the registrar’s with them, only nobody is to know at present. She heard all about the wedding-breakfast and the gallons of champagne and the flowers. These people live on champagne, I believe.”

Claudia, though a little startled, hardly credited the story. At one time she had been afraid that Jack would make some horrible mÉsalliance, but as the years had gone on and he had left the impressionable, callow stage behind him, she had ceased to feel any alarm. Jack was an ass, but he was a conventional ass. Once she hinted her fears to him, but he had taken the suggestion as such a deadly insult that she believed he realized the foolishness of such things. She remembered that he had proudly informed her that in the circle of “little ladies” he was nicknamed “The Knowing Kard,” and he gave her to understand that the nickname was not undeserved. Every now and then the family asked him when he was going to settle down and espouse some well-born, inexperienced girl, but Jack invariably said airily that there was lots of time, and that a really nice wife would hamper a fellow horribly, and a third party was always such a nuisance. It was exceedingly unlikely that there was any foundation for Mrs. Rivington’s piece of gossip. Claudia dismissed the idea with a laugh.

“Jack has a large heart, if somewhat shallow,” she said lightly. “I don’t think I’ll worry about his wedding-present.”

“Strange fascination these creatures have for men,” commented her hostess, glancing round to see that the other women were occupied. “Never can understand it myself. How a man can fall in love with powder—several inches thick—and grease paint beats me. But men are so easily taken in, aren’t they? and of course we should be too proud to use their arts.”

Claudia’s attention was wandering and her eyes were caught by a woman of about thirty-five, rather badly dressed, who did not seem to belong to the same galÈre as the other women. She was sitting apart, looking shy and a little uncomfortable. No one seemed to be paying any attention to her. Claudia wondered who she could be. She had fine, expressive eyes and a sensitive mouth, and she could have been much better-looking had she been more fashionably dressed. Mrs. Rivington noticed the direction of her eyes.

“I do wish Mrs. Milton would look smarter,” she said rather irritably. “I hate rÉchauffÉd dresses, don’t you? But she’s got a beautiful voice, and I thought she would amuse us after dinner. She and her husband are as poor as church mice. She can’t get any engagements. Partly her dowdy dresses, I should think.”

“Do you mean you have engaged her for the evening?” asked Claudia.

“Heavens, no! I give her a dinner in return for some music. She wants to get known. It’s really doing her a kindness. I must go and talk to your mother-in-law now. She hates me, but I can see everyone else is tired of her. Where are you going?”

“I am going to talk to Mrs. Milton.” Claudia could not stand the sight of the solitary figure any longer, and she longed to tell her hostess what she thought of the practice of getting artistes to give their services for nothing. Colin Paton had opened her eyes to the injustice. She was filled with shame for the set which she represented, and she gave Mrs. Milton her most cordial smile—it could be very charming—as she sat down beside her.

“Mrs. Rivington tells me that you sing beautifully,” she said. “I am looking forward to hearing you. One so seldom hears music nowadays after dinner. It is usually that tiresome bridge.”

The woman flushed with pleasure; she had a fine skin that coloured easily. They were the first friendly words that had been addressed to her that evening, for she had been taken in to dinner by a deaf old major.

“How nice of you,” she said involuntarily. She had been admiring Claudia all the evening. “I do hope I am in good voice, but my little boy has an attack of bronchitis and I was up with him most of the night. And when you are a little tired——”

Claudia nodded sympathetically. “I know. It takes all the fullness and timbre out of the voice, doesn’t it? Must you nurse your little boy yourself?” She noticed that the singer’s voice was infinitely more refined than that of her hostess, which had an unmistakable Cockney twang.

“Yes, we can’t afford a nurse,” said Mrs. Milton simply. “You see, my husband lost all his money two years ago. That’s why I come out to sing. When we were married I gave it up to please him, but now I want to help keep the house going.” The kind and real interest in Claudia’s eyes warmed her to unwonted loquacity.

“And you have a little boy?”

“I have three children, two boys and a girl. They are such darlings.” Her eyes lit up and the whole face was transformed to something almost beautiful in its brooding motherliness. “The boys are just like my husband, so plucky and good-tempered. Oh! they are worth fighting for. We say that every night when we tip-toe into their room and see they are all right for the night. Children make all the difference, don’t they?”

“I—I suppose they do.” Claudia could visualize the picture of the man and woman, tired and anxious, looking with love and hope at their sleeping children and feeling that they made all the difference. She looked across at the chattering groups scattered about the room, most of the women, like her hostess, childless or having only one child. Scraps of their conversation punctuated Mrs. Milton’s words. “I assure you, Kitty, she lost eighty pounds in two rubbers, and everyone knows she can’t afford it. Who pays her debts? I should like to know, and....” “Her bill, my dear, was outrageous. She charged me twenty-two guineas for that little muslin frock, and then....” “—entirely new method of treating the complexion. No creams, only massage with....”

“You have none yet?” said Mrs. Milton gently.

“No ... but a husband counts also, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, yes! Rob is the best husband in the world. Perhaps I love the boys so much because they are like him. He hates my having to sing again. You know how a man feels when his wife has to work, and he hoped to give me an easy time. But he’s working in the City all day, and I’d like to do something too. Oh, yes! Rob is splendid. I should think he did count.” A woman’s voice broke in shrilly: “I simply adore my dogs. Wouldn’t be parted from them. Don’t enjoy my meals unless they are with me and....”

Claudia and Mrs. Milton looked at one another, and the mother-woman smiled. “Isn’t it a pity?” she said.

“Tell me where you live,” responded Claudia. “I shall want someone to sing at a little dinner I am giving soon. I will not encourage these dull bridge evenings. Will you sing for me?... Ah! here come the men.”

Frank Hamilton came straight across to her and commenced to talk, apparently not noticing her companion, who drew a little away, as though feeling she was not wanted any longer. But Claudia interrupted Hamilton’s rather ardent words and said, “Mrs. Milton, was Mr. Hamilton introduced to you?” He was forced to turn a little, and Claudia noticed that Mrs. Milton bowed with a little embarrassment.

“I think Mr. Hamilton has forgotten me,” she replied quietly. “We were acquainted in our youth.”

“Were you?” Claudia looked at him in surprise, for she had been watching him all the evening out of the corner of her eyes, while apparently oblivious of his existence—a womanish trick—and she had not seen him speak to her. When Hamilton spoke it was rather stiffly.

“I did not see you before, Mrs. Milton.” It was a stupid fib, and Claudia noted it. “How do you do? Yes, in our salad days we used to warble duets together, didn’t we?” The geniality of the last words was rather forced. Claudia divined that he did not want those days recalled. The obvious reason momentarily occurred to her, but a glance at Mrs. Milton dissipated it. Also, she was several years older than Hamilton. Hamilton had once confessed that he could never fall in love with a plain woman, and Margaret Milton would never be beautiful except to the man who loved her.

“I had hoped I should sit next to you,” he said in an undertone. Mrs. Milton had moved away to the piano. “It was too bad, and I couldn’t even see you properly because of that beastly erection in the middle.”

“Oh! you were quite happy. You seemed to get on quite well with your hostess. Who was that dark-complexioned lady next to you, with some truly wonderful diamonds?”

“Mrs. Jacobs, the wife of a South African millionaire. She told me that herself and that she was a widow!”

“Ha! ha! Do we want to sit for a dusky portrait?”

“Don’t....” He tried to look very hurt, but it was not so successful as earlier in the evening. The dinner had been quite good and the champagne better. Hamilton’s eyes were a little too bright to look very grieved.

“Did she not give you a commission?”

“Well, what if she did? Why do you always sneer at me. And it’s your portrait I want to paint. What do I care for her commission, even if it is a lucrative one. Parchment and diamonds—ugh! Tell me, when will you come again to the studio?”

“Hush, Mrs. Milton is going to sing. You must remain absolutely quiet.”

The first notes of Brahms’ “Sapphische Ode” throbbed through the inharmonious room. Margaret Milton had the deep, pure contralto that makes the listener think of all things tender and true and intimate, the things that no man or woman says, even to his twin soul, but sometimes in the watches of the night whispers to the shadows. And the shadows enfold them and carry them away into the Hinterland beyond the setting of the sun, with the poignant tears and the imperishable kisses, the pain and the joy and the passion of mortals.

The timbre of the voice was singularly sympathetic and emotional, and Claudia instantly fell under its enchantment. Somehow she felt that the woman was singing to her, guiding her, pleading with her. She sang several times, and then, after “Still wie die Nacht” by Claudia’s request, she began to sing a song that always made Claudia’s heart throb and ache intolerably. Her throat swelled and burned on this night, and the tears waited on her eyelids. She forgot the indifferent, politely bored company, as she listened to the exquisite strains of that wonderful love-song, “Ich liebe dich.”

And this plain, dowdy woman knew the real meaning of that song. Only a woman who knew the joy and the pain of love could have sung it as she sang it. The cry of love rang through the room like a clear clarion call. Even the people who had wanted to play bridge felt it and looked vaguely uncomfortable. For a moment they were lured from their money-bags. The call was so clear that it penetrated the cotton-wool of everyday life.

Claudia found herself looking at the shabby woman at the piano with fierce envy. Once, she, Claudia, had thought she knew, once her heart had triumphantly chanted “Ich liebe dich, ich liebe dich,” like an eternal refrain. Once? Was it all quite over? Something stirred within her, something touched her cold heart like the rosy finger of hope. Once! Perhaps she and Gilbert had only drifted apart, perhaps she had not made due allowances for the inarticulate, more prosaic, unemotional nature of man. She had loved him very much—she did love him still, if only——

There was a bowl of red roses at her elbow. She did not notice them, but perhaps it was their perfume that mounted to her brain and brought back the remembrance just then of the garden at Wargrave, when she had questioned Gilbert and asked him if he had really loved her.... He had promised she should always come first ... she was right to demand that ... he had said that he was not good at pretty speeches and that she must take some things for granted ... that men were different from women.... Her blood tingled in her veins as she felt in imagination again the fierce pressure of his arms around her, his kisses on her lips. Surely he had really loved her then, she reiterated to herself. She knew more now than she did then. She had been initiated into the mysteries of life and death. She had begun to realize how large a part mere animal passion plays in a man’s life, how men take love (so called) where they find it, how “the worldly hopes men set their hearts upon” cheat women of their just dues, and leave them bankrupt. But with the passionate echo of “Ich liebe dich” in her ears, she felt she could not write that horrible word “finis” to this page of her life. Perhaps she had been too exigeante, impatient; perhaps she could be more tactful now. Eighteen months! Why, it must be that she had not had time to master the game of love. Their tastes were so different, perhaps that was partly the trouble. She remembered how he had talked her out of going to the enchanted Palace at Como and substituted a golfing honeymoon in Scotland. But he had been very charming to her—humoring all her fancies, his own having been satisfied—he had made her feel that she had only to command and he would always obey love’s call. It had been an intoxication. Was it all behind her? Was love behind her for the rest of her life? No, she could not do without love. She had always wanted it, she had tasted its sweets, no, no, no! Gilbert must love her again as he used to. He could not have entirely changed in eighteen months. He was at home probably. Perhaps he was thinking of her, wanting her to come in——

She rose abruptly to her feet, filled with an uncontrollable blind desire for action, to pursue this elusive thing which seemed to have escaped from her hands.

But Hamilton’s eyes fixed on her in surprise at her abrupt rising, drew her back to earth and the faded Aubusson carpet on which she stood. He, too, had been moved by the music. His artistic pulses, so easily set beating, had responded to the call also. But his thoughts had been of the rather capricious woman by his side, the woman who so far had never listened to his words of love.

After his first surprise at her action, he came to the flattering conclusion that the music had warmed her heart towards him. An easy favourite with women, he did not doubt that she cared for him. He had always gained what he wanted, though he had never before aimed at such big game as Claudia Currey. But he was rapidly becoming famous, he was sought after and flattered. Women begged him to paint them on his own terms. He was not what he had been. Mrs. Milton knew what he had been. Perhaps the game was not so difficult as he had begun to fear. He looked at her meaningly, with a rising sense of power, but she did not return his glance. That might be shyness.

He heard her make her adieux to their hostess, who protested at her going so early.

“It is only eleven o’clock.... I suppose you are going on somewhere else, you and”—markedly—“Mr. Hamilton.”

But her mother-in-law came to her rescue. “Claudia is quite right. I daresay Gilbert wants her. I know John is always fidgety when I am away from him.”

Claudia did not laugh as she would have done half an hour previously. Perhaps Gilbert was wanting her. She wanted him to want her.

“Mr. Hamilton, you need not see me home. I can——”

“Of course I am coming. Good-bye, Mrs. Rivington, it has been a delightful evening. Yes, I won’t forget about the portrait, Mrs. Jacobs.”

He followed Claudia out into the hall, followed by Mrs. Milton with her roll of music.

“Don’t you know I should come?” he whispered, not noticing her.

The maid helped Claudia on with her cloak. Mrs. Milton was tucking herself—the maid, with the strange knowledge of the servants’ hall, did not trouble to help her—into a businesslike garment, long and warm. Claudia heard her make some inquiry of one of the maids, and caught the words “last ’bus.”

Frank came up to her at that moment, the dawning light of possession in his eyes, a subtle change in his manner.

“Are you ready, madam?” He smiled to himself as he foresaw the long drive in the darkness, side by side in the pleasant intimate warmth of the motor ... her hand would fall naturally into his and then....

“Mrs. Milton, can I not give you a lift in the motor?” Her clear voice cut short his dreams. “Where do you live? Maida Vale. Oh! we can go that way quite easily. Yes, I should like to take you home quickly to the bronchitisy child.”

Only one of the maids, who giggled over it and mimicked him directly the hall-door was shut, saw the sudden scowl on Hamilton’s brow, for Claudia was bent on saving the tired woman an uncomfortable cold journey in the ’bus and Mrs. Milton was full of gratitude at the unexpected thoughtfulness.

“My! wasn’t that a sell for him,” said the pert parlour-maid. “Thought he’d have a nice, cosy time with her all alone. But she wasn’t taking any. Always does a man good to take him down a peg or two!”

---

CHAPTER IV
“NOT SATISFIED”

As Claudia was waiting for the lift in their block of flats half an hour later Fritz Neeburg came running down the stairs.

“Ah! Mrs. Currey, you’re back early from your dinner-party.” Claudia was a little impatient of Fritz Neeburg because of a certain German stolidity and lack of imagination, but he was what she called “a learned beast,” and a very loyal and kindly friend to both of them. He had lately given up practising as a medical man and devoted himself to research work in connection with nervous troubles affecting the brain.

“Dinner-parties have such a family resemblance, haven’t they? I was bored.”

He nodded, noting the brilliancy of her eyes and wondering what had caused the excitement in their depths. She looked more highly strung than usual to-night, but it seemed a happy excitement. It might have been the anticipative joy of a woman going to her lover.

“Gilbert and I had some dinner—rather late—and we’ve been yarning ever since.”

Claudia raised her eyebrows. “I thought Gilbert was detained at his chambers.”

Neeburg caught a glint in her eyes that made him apprehensive that he had said the wrong thing. “Oh!” he added hastily, “it was nearly nine before he rang me up. As it happened I was also late and hadn’t fed.”

Claudia’s lips curved into a smile, a smile that puzzled him. It was a smile, the lips had even parted, showing her rather small white teeth, but he felt that it was the wrong kind of smile. It seemed to have an edge to it somehow. He wondered if he had put his foot in it as he watched her ascend in the lift. Gilbert had told him that he had “got out of a stupid dinner-party ... a woman likes those sort of things ... her province, you know....” Fritz Neeburg was a bachelor and knew little of women, either by experience or temperament, but he realized that it was not a real smile of genuine amusement. He felt vaguely that it was like the early bloom of a peach which masks the hidden acidity. Then he recalled that Claudia lately had not been half so gay and spontaneously happy as in the early months of her marriage.

Gilbert came out of the study at the sound of her entrance. She saw at once that he was in a good temper and unusually genial. He was in the humour to stay up a little longer and chat, for he had just worsted Fritz in an argument over the Home Rule Bill, and Gilbert always liked to hold his own, even on his own hearthrug.

“Hallo, Claudia! you’re back then. There’s a nice fire in here. Pretty cold outside, isn’t it?”

She followed him into the library without any reply, but he did not notice her silence, nor did he look at her, except casually. He was a man who would buy a beautiful picture, look admiringly at it once, hang it on his walls and then never notice it again.

A big leather chair invited her to sit down, but she stood by the oaken mantelpiece. Gilbert had commenced to put away several reference books that he had got out to convince Neeburg, for Gilbert was always great on figures and statistics.

“Tough fighter, old Fritz, but of course you can’t expect a German, even if he has lived over here all his life, to understand English politics. Of course, he knows his own subjects and——”

“Gilbert, you and Neeburg dined together to-night?”

“Yes,” he said, faintly surprised. “Did you see him?” For the moment he had forgotten his broken engagement with the Rivingtons. He had a wonderful habit, which had helped to make him what he was, of settling a point and then automatically forgetting all about it. Then his wife’s toilette caught his eye and he remembered. Where had Claudia been? Oh, yes! “It would have been an awful rush to have got back in time to dress and go out to Hampstead, and I didn’t feel a bit like it. How is the old General?”

His back was towards her, busy with the bookcase. She looked at it coldly, critically.

“Couldn’t you have made a little effort in order that I shouldn’t have had to go all that way alone?” She herself made a great one to speak calmly and pleasantly. The echoes of Ich liebe dich were still faintly in her ears, and if he would only turn and take her in his arms, and say, “Look, old girl, I’m sorry. I know I’m a social shirker, but I forgot you would have to go alone,” she was ready to return the pressure of his arms. Women can exist on very little love, very few caresses from the man they care for, and Claudia was in the mood to make every allowance for him.

He answered her rather mechanically, trying to find the correct place for the volume.

“Oh, well! you like dinner-parties, and it’s not so far in the motor. It’s not the day of the horse-brougham.... You are my social shop-window, and”—with blunt humour—“it’s very nicely dressed. I wonder where that book of Burke’s has got to? Besides I wanted to get hold of Fritz, I wanted his opinion on a case.”

“You particularly asked me to accept this invitation as the General is an old friend of your family.”

“Well, it does just as well if you go,” he said imperturbably, mixing himself a whiskey and soda. “They understand how busy I am.”

“Suppose—I don’t understand.” Her lips were compressed until the soft curves had disappeared, and the determination and independence of the chin were emphasized. He looked up from the syphon in surprise at her tone.

“Were they awfully annoyed at my not turning up? I suppose Mrs. Rivington scratched a little.”

“I am not concerned with the Rivingtons. I am talking of myself, of my feelings on the subject.” She was beginning to speak a little more quickly now. The cold, abstracted look in his eyes stung her. He could not even realize that she was hurt and angry. “I am not here merely as your social shop-window, as you call it. I am not here merely as your hausfrau, to order your food and entertain and visit your friends. That is the way in which you have lately been regarding me.... Do you realize how often I have to go out in the evening alone?”

“I’m sorry, but my work——”

“You could have got away quite easily to-night. I’m not a fool, Gilbert, don’t underrate my intelligence. If you had said to me in the first place, ‘Tell the Rivingtons we are engaged for that day,’ and then spent the evening quietly at home with me, I should have been perfectly content. But I will not be used.”

“My dear girl——”

Perhaps there is nothing an angry woman dislikes more at certain stages of an argument than that preface.

“Couldn’t you even have come out to fetch me?” she went on. “You see hardly anything of me, and we might have had a good talk on the way home. Don’t you want to see anything of me?”

“Why of course. Come, Claudia, do be reasonable. We are having a talk now, and it might be a pleasant one, if you are not so fiery. You are always getting so excited over things.”

“I came home early because——” She remembered the impulse that had made her leave the company, and she laughed. Love? Was love this cold, indifferent, methodical thing? Was she to be content with this tantalizing imitation? Her eyes flashed defiantly and she flung back her head. Picking up a cigarette out of the box, she sat down and lighted it. Her excitement had suddenly evaporated in that laugh like an exhaust-valve relieving steam pressure. It was the rather critical repressed woman of the world who next spoke to him.

“We don’t see much of one another nowadays, do we?” she said, looking at him through the smoke.

“Later on I shall have more time, I hope,” he replied, placidly accepting her cessation of unreasonableness. He never worried over women’s moods. If you left them alone, he argued, they evaporated.

“Later on, we shall both be middle-aged,” said Claudia calmly. “Later on the gods will jeer at us and ask us what we have done with our youth. They always ask that question sooner or later of everyone. They always bring you to account, and sometimes the balance is on one side and sometimes on the other. I wonder how you and I will be able to answer that question?”

“Oh! I’m not going to get old yet,” he smiled. “Anyone would think we were on the verge of decrepitude.”

“I am not sure you have ever been young.” She leaned her chin on her hand and looked at him. Somehow the face of Frank Hamilton ranged itself beside it to-night. A weaker face, yes, but it seemed to her that there was real youth in the passionate eyes, real sentiment in his deep voice, a joie de vivre in his whole being which called to her like the gleam of snow to the Arctic explorer. Was it the strong men of the world who made women happy? Was not the strong man always self-centered, egoistic, taking all and giving nothing? Should a woman ask for too much strength in the man she loved?

Gilbert listened to her indulgently. It was just one of Claudia’s odd moods. His marriage had been quite successful, and therefore so had hers. He knew that she was very popular and that invitations to their house were eagerly coveted. After what his mother said, he would have hated that the marriage should have been a failure, and he had accepted as fuel to his pride his mother’s remark after a dinner-party which they had given and at which Claudia had entertained the Prime Minister, the Lord Chief Justice and other well-known people. “Claudia makes an excellent hostess. After all, there is something to be said for your marriage. The Iversons have always had plenty of savoir faire.” It was said a little grudgingly, for Lady Currey still did not like Claudia. There was nothing to disapprove of so far, but she was always waiting for something.

“I am not sure that you ever were young,” repeated Claudia. “I don’t believe you ever had a freakish, irresponsible mood. I remember Pat saying once, on a beautiful spring morning, that it made her feel as if she’d like to turn somersaults on the grass and yell like a wild Indian every time she came right side up! You never felt like that, did you?”

“But I’m neither a wild Indian nor a dog,” said Gilbert, trying to stifle a yawn. He had felt stimulated while arguing with Neeburg, and had forgotten he was tired. Now the yawns were threatening to descend upon him and he began to feel drowsy. But a glance at Claudia showed him that she was wide awake. She had what her brother called “her brainy look.”

He had resolutely tried to ignore Claudia’s changing and complex moods from the very beginning of their married life. On their honeymoon he had stopped her speculations and questions with kisses. His treatment was clearly right. Claudia had been far less imaginative and introspective in her talk lately. This idea of trying to understand women was all nonsense. He had unconsciously shaped his treatment of women on some words of his father’s À propos of some news he once brought him about a neighbour’s wife who had eloped with another man on the plea that her husband did not “understand her.” “He’s well rid of her,” said his father contemptuously. “There’s nothing to understand in women. Don’t be misled by any of this modern novelist’s jargon, my boy. Women always have suffered from the megrims, and they always will. In one century they are called the ‘vapours,’ in another ‘moods,’ but they are megrims all the same, caused by physical weakness and disabilities and lack of self-control. More harm has been done by humouring women and taking their megrims seriously than will ever be known. It’s responsible for this ‘Votes for Women’ movement, and, mark my words, if women are not kept in their proper place, megrims may ruin the nation!”

“After all,” said Gilbert, “it depends on what you mean by youth. I suppose the dictionary would define it as the state of being young, but it is conceivable that one might improve on that. I was once in the state of being young, you know, because my mother has some of my first teeth!”

Claudia pondered a minute, twisting an old French marquise ring round and round her little finger. “I should think,” she said slowly, “it’s the ability to notice and enjoy all the pleasures of the wayside. Yes, that’s somewhere near it. The man who enjoys life is the one who saunters along, admiring the flowers in the hedgerows, sniffing the different perfumes, watching the insects and the birds, filling his lungs with the good fresh air. The man who doesn’t know how to enjoy life is the one who rushes across country in the fastest touring car he can buy.”

Gilbert rose and looked at the clock. “Lots of weeds and undesirable tramps by the wayside,” he responded dryly.

“Weeds and tramps are part of life. To enjoy every minute of life you must waste a few.”

“Well, I wish I had a chance to waste some.... Bed, Claudia. I am sure no one would ever think you missed your beauty-sleep, but I fear you often do.” He turned towards the door, but she recalled him.

“Gilbert!”

“Yes?”

“Are we always going to live like this? This is the first opportunity we have had for a talk for—oh! weeks! When we have people here, you always fall into bed the moment the last guest goes; when we do go out together we just have a few minutes in the car on the way home. Gilbert, I——” Having got so far she hesitated and cast a quick, appealing look at him. He came a little nearer.

“Is there anything you particularly want to say to me?” he said, uncomprehending, but noticing the convulsive rise and fall of her white bosom under its laces and pearls. What had upset her?

“Gilbert, other men find me attractive ... other men like my company ... you realize that, don’t you?” she said, with unexpected directness.

He raised his eyebrows, and then they met in a frown. He found her words in bad taste, which was not usual with Claudia.

“I quite appreciate that my wife is admired by other——”

“Yes, but I am your wife. Somehow—to-night—I feel I must speak plainly and tell you—that I am not satisfied with the crumbs that fall from the legislative table. Once, before we were married, I warned you that such scraps would not satisfy me. I want more. Any woman, unless she were as cold as a stone and had only married you for her own ends, would want more. Why, we are hardly friends even! Oh, I don’t want to know the details of your work, but you never discuss anything with me. I am as lonely as I was before I married you.... I thought I was entering a land of plenty. You made me think so. I knew I should never be content with a conventional marriage.” She caught her breath for a moment. “Yes, I remember my very words to you—‘Love is the only convention that I own.’ Have you forgotten?... If you value me and my love, think over what I have said and look where we have drifted, Gilbert. I daresay you haven’t noticed—that is the worst part of it all—that we have drifted at all. Perhaps you think that we stand where we did eighteen months ago.... We none of us ever stand still even for a single day and there’s a pretty strong current that catches restless, unsatisfied women nowadays. And—I am not satisfied, I am not satisfied.”

With a sudden abrupt movement, so foreign to her that it showed how much she had been keeping herself in leash, she went out and closed the door behind her.

He stood where she had left him, a look of annoyed surprise upon his face. It was a real shock to him, and a disagreeable one. He preferred to think that Claudia was quite satisfied with their marriage. She had never before complained of any specific thing. She did not now. He told himself irritably that he wished she would, it would make it so much easier to give her what she wanted. The worst of women was that they were so vague in their demands and their complaints. Men can usually put down in black and white what they want; women never. He loved her, she was his wife, she shared his honor and the brilliant prospects for the future. What more did she want? Why did women talk in such an exaggerated way nowadays? Surely it was her fault if she were not satisfied? He had never pretended to any Paolo or Romeo-like passion; he had given her instead a much more useful commodity in the twentieth century—the good, honest heart of a real man, instead of the mawkish sentiment of an unbusiness-like poet. He had never run after other women as did so many of the men he knew. Of course, Claudia might say he had not had the time to do so, which was true. But probably he could have made some time if he had wanted to amuse himself. It was true that he had not wanted to make love to any woman. After he had indulged his natural passions in marrying Claudia, women had dropped into the background again. Even the desultory emotions which used to stir within him had not agitated him. He could have lived a virtuous bachelor life with the greatest of ease.

Claudia had dropped her gloves on the hearthrug and left a soft, cloudy chiffon scarf on the leathern armchair. With the sense of tidiness and order that characterized him, he picked them up.

Did women know what they wanted nowadays? Was it not the signs of the mental inflammation of the times?

Perhaps it was the scent from the scarf—Claudia used some delicate, haunting perfume—that caused an idea to strike him, a very mundane masculine idea, but still it had the grace of at least a faint touch of imagination. The perfume revived memories.... There was that night at Fyvie Castle on their honeymoon, when they had watched the moon shining on the loch from her window, he remembered the sweetness of her body nestling against him on the old window-seat ... once he had awakened with that perfume in his nostrils and found her arms around his neck.... It had been playtime then, but women were only children masquerading as grown-ups. Had he found the key to her queer speech? Was that what she had meant? Yes, in that way he had been very neglectful the last few months and married women had a right.... He recalled that she had sometimes looked rather wistfully at him when he kissed her good-night outside her door.... Oh, yes! that was the trouble. How stupid of him!

He stopped to put away a few papers and then, ten minutes later, he knocked at the door which divided their rooms.

He waited, but there was no answer. He gently tried the handle. The door was locked.

He listened intently and he thought he heard a sound like a sob strangled in a pillow.

“Claudia, Claudia, may I come in?”

Now there was no sound at all.

“Claudia, I want to talk to you. Open the door.”

But still no movement in the room or any sign that she had heard him, though he felt sure she must have done so.

Then, with a shrug of his shoulders and a compression of his lips that made him very like his father, he turned away.

Two minutes later he was fast asleep. His father was right, was his last reflection. There was no good trying to understand women.

---

CHAPTER V
THE GIRLIE GIRL

The next morning, when Claudia opened her eyes after a bad and restless night, she knew by Johnson’s voice that some agitation was in the air.

“Madam, I am sorry to wake you so early, but your mother has been ringing you up on the telephone. She insisted on my waking you.”

For a moment Claudia’s dark eyes, still heavy with sleep, stared at her vaguely. Then she sat up in bed with a look of alarm. “What time is it? Half-past eight, and mother wants to speak to me. Why, she is never wakened until ten! What can have happened?”

Something in Johnson’s expression caught Claudia’s eye and made her certain that she knew something.

“Johnson, is anything amiss? Is Pat ill or had an accident?” Pat was the sort of wild, careless person one always associates with possible accidents.

“No, madam, I—I should think it must be about Mr. Jack. It’s all in the papers this morning. I thought you couldn’t know anything about it.”

“Jack’s had an accident, then?” said Claudia, paling, for in her way she was fond of him. “Is it very bad—tell me quick, Johnson.”

“Madam,” gasped the woman, “it’s not exactly an accident—I mean—oh! madam, let your mother tell you.”

Suddenly Claudia remembered Mrs. Rivington’s words of the previous evening. It was true, then. That could be the only thing which would give Jack prominence in the papers.

“All right, Johnson, don’t look so frightened. I think I know. He’s got married, hasn’t he? All right, ring up my mother and put me through. And fetch me a newspaper, quick. Do that first, before you ring up. Do you understand?”

“It’s here, madam; I thought perhaps——”

Claudia tore it open with shaking fingers, and Billie rubbed his head against her arm in vain. A few minutes ago she would have said, “What did it matter what a young fool like Jack did?” Now she realized that she was furiously angry, ridiculously angry. If he had married this awful woman—Ah!

PEER’S GRANDSON MARRIES A MUSIC-HALL ARTISTE.

The words stared hideously at her as they would stare at several thousand people who opened that page—friends, enemies, acquaintances. The blood sang in her ears as she tried to read the paragraph. She could hear their friends shouting with laughter, she could see the look of contempt on the faces of the people who mattered, she could hear the course chuckles, the resurrected stories.... Ugh! disgusting.

The newspaper, a popular halfpenny, recounted in well-worn journalistic phrases how The Girlie Girl of music-hall fame last night confessed that she had been married for several weeks to Captain Jack Iverson of the Blues, a grandson of Lord Creagh and the son of the famous society beauty whose picture, “Circe,” was known all over Europe. “The bridegroom,” said the paper, “has for some years been considered one of the richest and best-looking young bachelors in Mayfair, and its dovecots will be fluttered by the news of his marriage. It appears that they were married before a registrar and the utmost secrecy was observed, but truth will out, and last night Miss Fay Morris, better known as The Girlie Girl, was the recipient of much congratulation. Our reporter visited her between the first and second houses and found her dressing-room crowded with flowers. She is very popular in the profession, and has made her successes in America, South Africa and at home. She is very pretty, with a petite, perfect figure, and she possesses a considerable store of vitality and go, so much that she is billed as ‘The whirlwind dancer and mimic.’ Captain Iverson’s sister is the wife of the new K.C., Gilbert Currey, and is considered one of the most fascinating hostesses in Society.”

Johnson hardly recognized her as she looked up from the paper. It was just as bad as bad could be. The Girlie Girl! The Girlie Girl! Could anything be more vulgar and inane!

“You are through now,” said the maid, pushing the table that held the telephone nearer to the bedside. Claudia motioned her to leave the room.

Mrs. Iverson’s voice was almost lost in a kind of weird moan with which she punctuated her sentences.

“I knew something awful was going to happen,” she said. “I was warned by the spirits three times in succession ... they told me that disaster was coming closer and closer. It’s too awful, isn’t it? Of course, we can’t know her. Jack must be mad. I’ve sent for him to come to me at once, not, of course, that we can do anything now. I couldn’t sleep and I heard two of the servants talking about it while they did the stairs. He must divorce her or something. Fancy marrying a woman like that. Do you realize it, Claudia, I’m the mother-in-law of The Girlie Girl—I—I! My God, it’s incredible. Why, musical comedy would have been better. Why didn’t you stop it? Your father says he washes his hands of him, but that doesn’t prevent her being my daughter-in-law. If only the spirits had been more explicit in their warnings ... but spirits are always so vague.... I was afraid it meant that my masseur was going to die or my maid was going to leave me.... I’m prostrate.... What’s the good of Jules massaging me when I’ve got troubles like this? Do get dressed and come round—it’s as bad as having a funeral in the house, only, thank goodness, one doesn’t have to go into black.”

Claudia put back the receiver with a click, and Billie gave a bark to remind her that she had not greeted him kindly. She gave him an absent caress, her dark eyes, full of thought, looking out over his soft little head. How furious Gilbert would be! The Girlie Girl a sister-in-law of the rising young barrister! She had long ago divined his father’s and mother’s feeling against her own family, partly shared by Gilbert. Lady Currey would be delighted! A sarcastic smile curved her lips as Johnson came in again.

Johnson’s eyes were glittering with excitement, for servants love a good, rousing scandal.

In her excitement she called her mistress by her old name. “Miss Claudia, Mr. Jack is downstairs and wants to see you at once. I told him you were in bed and hadn’t had your breakfast——”

There was a knock on the door, followed by her brother’s voice.

“Claudia, let me come in. I must speak to you.”

Johnson looked at her, and for a moment Claudia’s hands clenched themselves in helpless rage at the folly of her brother. “Let him come in,” she said shortly, “and send me up my breakfast!”

Johnson opened the door and Jack came in, his face rather pitiable in its weakness and worry. He looked like a puppy that has lost its way. He was as smartly dressed and as well-groomed in person as usual—nothing short of an earthquake would have made him regardless of his attire, and then one felt he would have been resurrected trying to put his tie straight—but his usual placid expression of serene content with himself and that state of life into which Providence had pleased to call him was gone.

He looked at Claudia rather helplessly and yet appealingly, and some of the hardness of her glance melted. After all, it was the same silly old good-natured Jack.

“Johnson, wait a minute. Have you had some breakfast?”

“Yes—no—you never can get anything to eat at the flat.... I should like some coffee, Claudia. I think it might pull me together if it was strong and very hot.”

He came to the bedside and sat down rather heavily in a pink-cushioned chair. Mechanically he found his cigarette-case and opened it.

“Oh! I beg your pardon, old girl. I forgot it was your bedroom. It’s something to do.... You know all about it!”

She pointed without speaking to the paper flung in disgrace to the foot of the bed.

“Oh, well! you know, then. Everybody knows. She let it out last night. Women never can keep secrets.”

“Was she going to be your wife—secretly—for the rest of your life?” said Claudia sarcastically.

“Eh? Oh, well! I didn’t want people to know yet. She’s a clinking good sort, and don’t think”—with an expression like the puppy on the scent again—“that I regret marrying her. No, by Jove, I don’t. But she might have let me break the thing to—to everyone.”

“You can’t break things like that,” said Claudia sharply, “they break themselves. It’s like dropping an egg—it’s smash. Jack, I do believe this dog has got more sense than you have. I heard a rumour about this marriage last night, and I laughed at it. I had a certain amount of respect for your—social intelligence. Brains you never did have, but you always had good manners. I’m utterly disgusted with you, and I never want to see you—or your wife—again.”

“You haven’t seen her yet,” said Jack quickly. “So you can’t judge things.”

“I have no intention of seeing her,” said Claudia, her lips tightly compressed, her eyes flashing with anger. “Do you expect me to take The Girlie Girl to my bosom and swear I love her as a sister?”

“Look here, Claudia, say what you like about me—oh, yes! I know it was a fool thing to do, although I don’t regret it——” He passed his hand over his brow wearily, for his small brain, so little used, was unequalled to the strain. “I say again”—obstinately—“I don’t regret, and I’m awful fond of her—she’s a nut, I can’t tell you—but of course I can see how you and mother and everyone look at it. I never would have believed I could have done it—I’ve always jeered at other fellows who married beneath them—but I was just crazy about her. You’ll like her, Claudia,” he bent forward with pathetic eagerness, his hand again seeking his cigarette-case, “she’s not a bit like anyone else. All the men are in love with her, and she could have married most anyone she wanted.”

Claudia’s expression was so indicative of her feelings that he stopped. At that moment Johnson brought in the breakfast-tray. Jack looked at it with relief. It was something to do if only to eat and drink, and the cup of tea Polly had given him that morning had been “wash.”

He noticed that Claudia’s hand shook as she started to pour out the coffee, and at imminent danger to the tray and his own clothes, he caught hold of her hand.

“Give us your paw, Claud. I say, old girl, don’t you go against me. I came to you at once; you’ve always been such a good chap, though you do scold me.” With rough affection he put his arm round her and kissed her. “I said to myself, ‘Old Claudia will stand by me. She isn’t a conventional duffer like the others. She’ll see Fay’s fascination, and, after all, a fellow’s only got one life to live, and why can’t I do as I like?’ I’ve heard you say things like that time and time again, and Gilbert’s contradicted you. I daresay I’ve done a silly thing, but if I don’t regret it, what is it to anyone else? Only don’t you round on me. It makes me feel as if I’d gone to my bath and there wasn’t any water.”

Claudia had to laugh, at first a little uncertainly, and then with wild abandon. Jack’s similes, when he employed any, were always so absurd.

“Jack, get away, the point of your collar is puncturing my cheek.... Oh! you silly ass, how could you do it? Now you’re upsetting the tray, and I love those pink cushions.”

“Fay likes everything pale blue, but then, she’s got blue eyes. Such blue eyes! They’re ripping, Claud. I must give Billy some sugar—we’ll pretend it’s off the wedding-cake. Claudie, next to you—at least, no, because you’re so different, there isn’t any next-to—but you and she are the most ripping women I’ve ever meet. I say, I am glad of this coffee. I’m going to see that Fay has some decent servants. Polly’s a sketch, a fair sketch.”

He was so frankly and boyishly relieved that she had “made it up.” After all, he didn’t mind very much about his father and mother—luckily his income was his own—but Claudia did matter. And he was honestly sure that Claudia would be fond of Fay when she knew her.

After a while Claudia put the question: “She is going to give up her profession, of course?”

His brow clouded. “Well, I want her to, and I’ve talked till my throat has got dry, but she says she’s got ‘contracts,’ whatever that means, for the next six years. And she’s so proud of them, too. Funny set of people, you know. What there is to be proud of in having to work for six years more I can’t for the life of me see. But she tells everyone.”

“I suppose it means that she’s a success and has been secured by certain theatres,” said Claudia.

“Eh? Oh, yes! I suppose it does mean that. Oh, yes! I see. That’s why she’s proud. What a nut you are, Claudia, you are the brainy one of the family, right enough. How’s Gilbert?”

She gave a slight shrug of her shoulders under the silken matinÉe.

“Have you had a row over me?” he said quickly. “Of course, you couldn’t explain a thing like this to Gilbert.”

“You include him among the conventional duffers?” said his sister, with an enigmatic smile, patting Billie with one hand.

“Er—well—of course, he’s——”

“You’re quite right, my dear brother. He’s a conventional old duffer.” Then, with an abrupt change of key: “But, after all, as you say, we’ve only got one life and we must each decide for ourselves how we will live it. Live, love and be merry, for to-morrow we grow old!”

“By Jove, old girl, that’s the right spirit, and I really am awfully fond of Fay. And she’s gone on me, too.”

“You’ve been awfully in love with other girls before,” said Claudia running her fingers through her soft, loosened hair, “but you haven’t married them. How did it happen?”

He evidently concentrated on the subject for a moment before he answered:

“Blest if I quite know myself. I didn’t mean anything of the kind at first, because I knew that she ... I don’t know whether she put it in my head or I put it in hers.”

“You’re a very rich man,” said his sister softly.

“Yes, I know; and I daresay she wouldn’t have married me if I hadn’t had a good deal of oof.” Catching his sister’s look of surprise, he said quickly, “Oh! I don’t kid myself it was love, pure love. I don’t believe there is any such thing. And she’s as cute as they make them, only—she can be just the other way sometimes, too. She’ll interest you, Claudia, she really will. I bet you haven’t met anything like her before. You’ll find her a bit of a puzzle all right. But she’s got plenty of money of her own; she earns quite a big salary, she tells me, and though she lives in a sloppy sort of Bohemian way, there’s always plenty to it and no end of fluff and frills. Got plenty of jewellery, too, that—that admirers have given her. I want to replace it all one day.”

“She has had plenty of admirers, then?”

He coloured a little and looked away. “Oh, well! hang it all, who am I that I should hang out a blue ribbon?—no, that’s teetotal, isn’t it?—well, you know what I mean. But we’re both going to stick to one another in future.”

“But you haven’t told me yet why you wanted to marry her?”

He ruminatively twisted his small, fair moustache. “Well, I don’t know. She didn’t feel for me the way she felt for the other fellows, she said. Of course, they’re an awful set, though I haven’t told her so yet. And”—he got up and fidgeted with a photograph-frame, it contained a portrait of Colin Paton—“she’s a queer little person, Fay. She’s twenty-two and she says—she says it’s time she became a mother, and she wants—the father—to be a gentleman. I daresay she’d—she’d have had it the other way—things like that don’t matter so much to them—only, of course, I couldn’t. You see that, don’t you, old girl?”

Claudia’s voice was very tender and affectionate as she answered:

“Run away now, old boy, and let me get up. Yes, you couldn’t, of course, and I’ll do my best to smooth things over. Scribble down her address on that memorandum-tablet, will you?”

He came over to her and gave her a bear-like hug.

“You’re a brick, Claudia. I always knew it.... I say, you haven’t been looking the thing lately. Are you quite happy yourself?”

She unloosened a strand of hair from his coat-button with a little wince.

“Well, at any rate I married for love. And is anybody quite happy? I guess life is rather like those bottles of mixed sweets we used to have in the nursery. They were all called ‘sweets,’ but some of them were very sharp and acid, do you remember? We used to first dig out the sugary ones, but nurse afterwards insisted that we should eat the acid ones. Life is a thing of spots and streaks, Jack; that’s all there is to it.”

CHAPTER VI
UNE CHAMBRE À LOUER

There is some uncatalogued sense in man which seems immediately aware when a woman is at a loose end, when there is une chambre À louer in her heart. There is a story told of Don Juan which relates how the famous gallant was unsuccessful with three women in his life; one was a middle-class woman who adored her husband, the second was a nun who kept true to her vows, and the third was a cocotte who, having lived the “gay life” for many years and “ ... grown old in the service of pleasure, love no longer made any appeal.” The woman who is estranged from her husband, who no longer cares for him, has no need to proclaim the tidings upon the house-tops. Men are subtly and quickly aware that her heart is free, and consider not only that she is fair game for any arrows they may care to shoot, but that they are offering her something she cannot live without and that she is sure to accept from someone sooner or later. One often hears a man speak of an unhappy wife as that “poor little woman,” but he never doubts that he can make her happy where her spouse has failed.

The face of life seemed now to change for Claudia. Her admirers were bolder with their compliments, more pressing in their invitations; and although some of them were secretly rather intimidated by her direct-glancing, critical eyes and occasionally cynical tongue, they gave her plainly to understand that she need not waste her sweetness upon the desert air. She had lost that happy, absorbed look a woman wears when she is in love, but her personality had gained from the social point of view, for she was more arresting, more vivid, and she had always been accounted a good companion and conversationalist. But Claudia had not studied le monde oÙ l’on s’ennuie for some years for nothing, and though she had hitherto kept a little aloof from certain phases, she was not ignorant, nor likely to let her vanity lead her into foolishness. The obvious love-hunter only amused her, and she used such men just as much as it suited her convenience.

Besides Frank Hamilton she found only one man that really interested her and whose companionship she enjoyed—Charles Littleton, the American publisher. She had met him since their first dinner-party at one or two houses she frequented, and a sort of cheery understanding had grown up between them. Her brain was much more subtle than his, but he always responded when she led the way. He had a sense of humour and all sorts of stories to tell her of authors whom she only knew between bookcovers. His talk was always racy, and he occasionally used quaint idioms and expressions that gave his conversation a different flavour from that which was usually poured into her ears at dinners and at homes.

The breach between Claudia and Gilbert had not been lessened by Jack’s mÉsalliance. Gilbert writhed under the publicity, and though he knew it was a nine-days’ wonder and would soon evaporate, he was infuriated with the house of Iverson and the offspring of Circe. A letter from his mother, quite illogical and trying to make him appear responsible for the marriage, made him more irritable. His reply to it was dignified, pointing out her untenable position—the attitude of a strong man towards women must be maintained, even with a mother—but he felt the sting of it all the same. His father, whom he met the next day, was not illogical, but there was an atmosphere of chilliness and silence on the subject which was probably more unpleasant to him than his mother’s letter. A comic paper came out with a cartoon showing him giving advice on her contracts to The Girlie Girl. In view of it all, Claudia’s attitude was the worst of all. She took up Jack’s own attitude, that he was at liberty to do as he pleased with his life. She was logical and perfectly calm during their discussions, and Gilbert, to his great disgust, found himself forced into becoming illogical, which is enough to exasperate any lawyer, even a briefless one.

“It’s a disgrace to us all,” he said stormily, his sombre grey eyes dark under the lowered lids, “a beastly scandal.”

“Why are we disgraced?” said Claudia calmly, also forced to assume a position she had never meant to take. “She’s not your wife, she’s Jack’s.” A satirical smile curved her lips as she tried to imagine Gilbert married to The Girlie Girl.

“A family stands or falls together,” said Gilbert heavily, noting the smile with inward resentment. Lately he had often seen that smile on his wife’s lips.

“Oh! surely not, nowadays. It is hard enough to have your own sins come home to roost, but to have your sister’s and your brother’s and your cousin’s and your aunt’s—Oh! life would be too hard!”

“Don’t be flippant; we are discussing a serious matter.”

“All the more reason not to lose our sense of humour. Undiluted seriousness is—the devil. After all, aren’t we making a great fuss over nothing in particular? I confess I was furious at first, but—Jack isn’t a German Crown Prince or the heir of great possessions, you know. I daresay it’s a lucky escape for some nice girl.”

“A pretty way to speak of your own brother!” he flung at her.

“Oh, Gilbert! how old-fashioned you are! Don’t you know a brother may be a friend or a stranger nowadays? I’m fond of Jack, but I don’t think he is cut out to take a firm and virtuous position on the family hearthrug. He’s always been much too good-looking and too rich to acquire goodness or have it thrust upon him. He seems genuinely fond of her. I am quite curious to see her.”

She settled herself more comfortably in the corner of the couch and took up a book, as if to indicate that the subject was exhausted. Gilbert stood looking down upon her in his golfing kit. He made spasmodic efforts to take exercise—he had put on a couple of stone since their marriage—and being Saturday, he was free from his chambers. They both belonged to the club at Sunningdale, but lately he never suggested that she should accompany him. Secretly, he was ashamed that she should see how badly out of form he was, for Claudia played fairly regularly, and had a good, clean stroke of her own.

“See her?” he ejaculated. “I must ask you not to try and see her or identify yourself with this disastrous marriage in any way.” He made use of the word ask, but the tone made it equivalent to forbid. He did not want to go and play golf, although he felt he ought to, and the picture that Claudia made in her soft silken draperies, snugly ensconced in the well-warmed room, gave an additional edge to his tone.

Claudia raised her expressive eyebrows and turned a page of the book.

“Really, Gilbert, I will not ask her here to meet you——”

“I should think not, indeed!”

“—but I have promised Jack that I will go and see her. What I do in future depends on—her and myself. After all, she is Jack’s wife and he is fond of her.”

“Do you know this woman is—is notorious, that she is what men call ‘hot stuff’? Can’t you see that she has only married your brother to fleece him and degrade his family?”

His eyes were black with anger and his lower lip protruded pugnaciously, just as his father’s did. Claudia watched him, fascinated, for this was the first real quarrel they had had. In the midst of a pregnant silence the door opened, and the manservant announced “Mr. Paton.”

They were both so angry that they had not time enough to pull down the blinds before Paton was in the room, and he saw two people as he had never seen them before. Then they both recovered themselves—Claudia more easily than her husband—and went forward to greet him.

“Colin, what a delightful surprise!” cried Claudia, taking his hand in hers. “I am glad to see you again.” Perhaps there was also a little relief at the interruption of an unpleasant scene, but she was unfeignedly glad to feel his firm hand-clasp once more. She was almost surprised herself to find how glad she was.

“Hallo, old chap, back again, then?” said Gilbert. “It’s good to see you. Safe and sound, eh? You look fit enough,” he added, ruefully casting a look down at himself. “Why do some men put on fat and others don’t?”

Paton laughed. “I suppose I belong to the lean kine. Yes, I think you have put on flesh, Gilbert.”

In truth he was a little shocked at the deterioration in his old friend’s appearance. He had always been rather heavy for his age, but now a heaviness of the spirit as well as of the body seemed to have settled upon him. Surely the lids drooped more over the rather lifeless eyes, and his chin and jowl were coarser? He himself was much the same as when he had left England before the wedding, spare, erect, in obvious good form.

“It’s abominable,” said Gilbert. “It isn’t what I eat, either.”

The manservant opened the door again. “The car is at the door, sir.”

“Going golfing?” smiled Paton. “Ah! I haven’t done that for a great while. Sounds sort of homely and English. I’m sure you could beat me into a cocked hat, Claudia, and I used to give you—how many strokes a hole?”

“Ah! but I’ve been practising religiously with the deadly purpose of defeating you when you returned,” laughed Claudia gaily, the colour back again in her smooth, creamy cheeks. It was jolly to see Colin again. One could always talk nonsense or sense to Paton, and she suddenly realized that nobody had ever taken his place in that respect. “I’ll take you on to-morrow at Stoke Poges. I am thirsting for vengeance for old affronts.”

“I say! I shall expect at least to get a ball in my eye or a gentle tap with the brassie. Still, let me like a golfer fall! I’ll take you on. And, Gilbert, what’s your form?”

“Oh! he’s going down to see his parents to-morrow,” replied Claudia carelessly, ringing for the tea. “When did you land?”

“Yesterday.”

Claudia was pleased. He had lost no time in coming to see them.

Although Paton had been his friend long before he had known Claudia, Gilbert had a curious feeling that he was not wanted. He felt they were eager to talk over many things. Paton would probably tell her all about his travels—well, travellers’ tales were apt to be boring.

“I shall see you again soon, Colin. I’d arranged to go this afternoon.”

“Let’s have lunch together early next week.”

“I will if I can, but I’m infernally busy just now. Get a vacation soon though, thank goodness.”

The door closed behind him, and as if the impulse were mutual, they found themselves shaking hands again.

“Colin, what a long time you’ve been away. Don’t dare to tell me you’ve any plans for going away again, because I shall really hit you on the head with the brassie and incapacitate you.”

It was a woman who teased him now, not the fresh, eager-eyed girl he had left. But from most men’s point of view she had gained more, much more than she had lost. She had acquired a nice, physical balance, that had been wanting before. She had the charm of early maturity. She was a woman who knew her power over men, and knew just what that power meant. She was on the surface even more frankly gay and charming, but it hid certain reserves. She would pretend to be more confidential and open, but would be less so. She would never shut a door with a bang in anybody’s face, but it would be shut quietly all the same. In the few minutes that he had been with her, Colin realized all this and, mingled with his admiration for her development—for he found her far handsomer than she had been—there was a touch of regret for the girl who had talked about anything and everything, and as frankly answered questions as she asked them. She was Gilbert’s wife, a woman of the world, and—a great deal more.

“Taking stock of me?” she laughed, meeting his eyes. “But I don’t think Topsy had growed much this time.”

“On the contrary, I think she has grown a good deal,” he said quietly. “You haven’t grown into a giraffe or a fat Boy Joey, but all the same you have grown.”

She rested her head on her hand, her elbow propped on the arm of the couch, and looked speculatively at him. He reminded her of those days before her marriage, when she had spelt marriage with a capital letter. And—yes—she did look back at herself from one side of a huge gulf. Was that gulf growth? She realized more what life meant, and might mean. She had touched hard facts, unalterable laws of nature, great moments, petty awakenings ... was all that growth?

“Perhaps you are right,” she said slowly.

“I am sure I am right. You have shot up at an alarming rate. You think before you speak now, a most potent symptom! In the old days you would have blurted out ‘I haven’t grown,’ with great suddenness and force, and I should have been laid low by your vehemence.”

Claudia smiled. “You mean I begin to know that I don’t know. I think I do realize that my landmarks are shifting.”

“An awfully good sign,” he said cheerfully. “I’m always pulling up mine and planting them again. A constantly uprooted landmark gathers no moss.... Do I smell the smell of muffins? Claudia, this is heaven, indeed, and you are the ministering angel.”

“There isn’t much of an angel about me,” said Claudia, rather jerkily, when the servant had withdrawn. “If I’m growing—I’m growing much nastier. I’m growing so short-tempered and prickly, and——”

She stopped. She had heard a faint, a very faint sound at the door. Paton, whose hearing was as quick as her own, had heard it too.

“Is that my old friend, Billie the Blessed Dachshund?” he asked. “Bless his stumpy legs! May I let him in?”

She nodded, surprised to find that her eyes had suddenly filled with tears. Why, she did not know. What had she been about to confess to him? It was just as well Billie had interrupted.

Billie gave Paton a royal welcome, a most unusual welcome for him. For of all the hands that caressed him, he liked Paton’s next to his adored mistress. Billie would have told you that there are hands and hands. Some are heavy as lead on small dogs’ heads, some are blunt and stupid, some are cold and clammy, and send a shiver down a dog’s spine, and there are hands that are delicate and sensitive, and convey a sense of liking that is most comforting to the canine tribe.

“Verdict—not grown!”

They both laughed heartily, and Billie stood with a smile—it certainly was a smile—and with his tail wagging surveying them both.

“You have preserved your figure admirably, Billie. I’ll proceed to put it in jeopardy with this lump of sugar.... How nice of you, Claudia, to remember no milk in my tea.”

“I suppose you saw that Gilbert and I were having—what shall I call it?—a row when you came in?” said Claudia calmly, her hands busy among the silver. “Oh! we were in a most exciting part when the door opened.”

“All couples quarrel occasionally, don’t they?” he said lightly. “That’s part of the joys of married life, isn’t it? Marriage is a sort of licence to quarrel and afterwards make it up.”

“Oh! we don’t quarrel as a rule. Perhaps it would be better if we did. No, this was a special and particular quarrel, with a particular verse and chapter. You’ve heard of Jack’s asinine marriage, of course?”

“Yes it was in the papers when I landed.”

“What do you think about it?”

“Now, what is the good of asking me that? Do you want me to tell you what I wouldn’t have done, or what I think he should have done? What’s the use? He’s done what he wanted to do.”

“Ah! you take that attitude too.”

“What can one say about a man’s marriage, except perhaps to regret or be glad? I don’t pretend that if I were a boy’s father, I shouldn’t be horribly annoyed with him for doing a thing that will probably be a failure. It was a surprise to you?”

“Absolutely. You know the sort of man Jack is. There have always been Girlie Girls of sorts. Only marriage is a different proposition, isn’t it? ‘Blest be the tie that binds,’ et cetera.”

He nodded. “A great pity, of course. Have you seen her? What is she like?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her yet. That was the finishing touch to our quarrel. I’ve promised Jack to go and see her. After all, Jack is my brother, and he put it in such a way that—well, I felt I wanted to see her. I suppose she will be too awful for words?”

He hesitated for a moment. He wondered why it jarred on him, the idea of her going to see Fay Morris. He had heard a good many stories about her, and he had several times come in contact with music-hall artistes—there had been some on the boat he went out on. But he was catholic in his tastes and mind, and personally he would never have drawn aside from contact with another human being. But Claudia with Fay Morris, Claudia in the Bohemian, over-heated atmosphere of the music-hall!

“Yes, I see, you think it will be all that. I suppose Jack is quite mad.”

He forced himself to be just. “I don’t think we can say that. You know, all sorts of stories go round about such people, and she may be quite—quite maligned. She is young, only twenty-two, and there’s every chance with youth, you know. She can’t be viciously fair, fat and forty. And you were always interested in humans, Claudia.”

“Oh, yes! I still am, more so than ever. If someone were just taking me to see her as a curiosity, it would be different. But, Colin, she’s my sister-in-law! Suppose she talks Cockney, and drops her aitches, and calls me ‘dearie’ or something!”

“Perhaps it won’t be as bad as that,” suggested Colin, not liking the picture at all, and wishing he could go with her. “What does Jack say about her?”

“Oh! nothing that tells you anything. And I can’t ask such questions of him, can I? Of course, Gilbert is furious at the idea of my going to see her. I think—I think he was going to forbid me to go and visit her, when you came in. What do you think?”

He hesitated, for he knew it was a ticklish matter to arbitrate, or attempt to do so, between husband and wife.

“I don’t need to think at all,” he said, after a pause. “You’re his sister, and you’ve got to do the thinking. And what you think should go, as the Americans say.”

“Ah!” She drew a deep breath and put her hand impulsively on his arm, a little trick she had with people she liked. “You are a real comfort, Colin. In future I shall throw all my problems on you.”

Frank Hamilton came in, as he was patting her hand, the two standing close together, and instant jealousy and suspicion filled him at the sight. It was the first time he had ever seen Claudia show any particular favour to a man, she was rather difficult to approach, and though it encouraged him not to be too diffident, he was also very angry with her. A couple of years ago he would have shown by his manner that he had noticed the little incident, but he had learned some of the usages of Mayfair, and he controlled himself. It showed itself, however, in a little stiffness.

“Oh! Mr. Hamilton, let me introduce you to my old friend, Mr. Colin Paton. He has just come back from the Argentine, where I suppose there are no pictures?”

“Only Nature’s, and those of the most wonderful. I read an account of one of your exhibitions in a paper that was sent out to me, Mr. Hamilton. I should have liked to see that show.”

“Mr. Paton educated my taste in pictures,” said Claudia, with a friendly glance at him. “He insisted on my liking the good things, and then I really did.”

“Don’t believe her, Mr. Hamilton, she was always an excellent natural judge of pictures.”

“But I did like them rather painty, at first, Colin, you must admit that. Do you remember that Leighton I adored and the Dicksee I found so poetical? And I made you stand and gaze at them, too. You must have stored up many a grudge against me for that.”

Hamilton had heard Claudia speak of “a friend now abroad,” who had been her constant companion at picture-galleries and who had lent her several art books. But he had somehow got the idea that the friend was middle-aged, if not old. He wondered how he had got the idea, but something in Claudia’s tone had conveyed it to his mind. The man that he saw was neither quite young, middle-aged, nor old, and yet Hamilton felt there was a steady fund of youth in him. He instinctively understood that this man’s judgment would be worth having, that those quiet, keen eyes would make short work of his careless and meretricious paintings. For, though usually he was amply content with his own ability, he was aware at intervals that some of it left much to be desired, both in form and execution. He had a heaven-born gift for catching a likeness, and a great feeling for colour, but his technique was faulty, and lately he had done too much and too little.

“I shall be giving another exhibition next month. I hope you will come to it,” he replied.

“I shall make a point of doing so.”

“We’ll go together,” said Claudia promptly, so promptly and so simply that some of the sting went out of his jealousy. After all, this man was exceedingly good form, and all that, but he was not good-looking, and though he knew about art, apparently he did nothing in that line. And Claudia had told him that she liked people who did things.

He determined to make a possible enemy into a friend. “Mr. Paton, if you are interested in the service of art, do persuade your friend here to give me some more sittings for her portrait. I made a ghastly failure of my first attempt, but I think I can do much better now. I’ve got the thing in my mind and I’m aching to begin.”

“Having your portrait painted, Claudia? That’s good news. To increase the joy of nations you must give him some sittings.”

“It’s so tiresome sitting still,” said Claudia, looking at him plaintively out of the corners of her eyes. “I never was great at sitting still.” Woman-like, she did not give the real reason. She had begun to be afraid of those sittings, and as she met Frank’s eyes she felt that feeling re-awaken. He was too good-looking, too attractive to sit to.

“There!” exclaimed Frank. “That’s what an artist has to contend with. Laziness, pure laziness! And she calls herself interested in art!”

“Paint Mrs. Jacobs instead,” teased Claudia, with a gleam of mischief in her eyes, which set his blood afire.

“I’ve said it—inwardly.... Mr. Paton, help me.”

“I would like to see a good portrait of you,” said Colin earnestly. “You ought to make such a good subject. I quite understand Mr. Hamilton’s anxiety to paint you. Do it—for the sake of your friends.”

She looked at Hamilton, but she really answered Paton. After all, she had not too many real friends, and he was the best of them all, the most faithful, the most reliable and unchanging.

“Very well. I’ll make a martyr of myself in the cause of friendship. I’ll come one day next week. Will that do?”

CHAPTER VII
“MISS FAY MORRIS THAT WAS”

It was still only a little past five when the two men departed, and Claudia found herself alone with a very restless mood. Had it been earlier she would have gone out and walked in the Park, for she often tramped away a mood of restlessness. But it was grey and dismal outside. She glanced at the piano, but that was not the right thing. She picked up her book—one of Anatole France’s—but that also she put down again in a very few minutes. Then the idea came to her. Her eyes opened widely and she caught her under-lip with her small teeth. Would she?

Billie looked at her, and he knew she was going out.

“No, Billie, can’t take you this time. Oh! well, yes, you can stop in the car.”

“What hat will madame wear?” said Johnson, her hand on the cupboard that contained her hats.

Claudia considered carefully, and decided on her most becoming one. It was a delightful possession, mostly composed of pearl-grey feather shading to the softest pink, and round her neck she wore a little necklet to match. Johnson wondered why she was so excited that she pulled a button off her gloves and demanded a fresh pair. It seemed as though her mistress was not going to make an ordinary call.

“Now, Billiken, we must be off. I wonder! I wonder!”

She went over first to her writing-table and abstracted a little bit of paper. Jack’s writing was atrocious, but she could decipher it with some difficulty. 25A, Gilchrist Mansions, Bloomsbury.

The car threaded its way through the crowded streets, and after what seemed a long time to Claudia, it stopped before a large block of flats, very red and very white, and obviously trying to show how gloomy was the rest of the square. Evidently it was a new block, and for this Claudia was thankful. Ugly youth is better than ugly age.

There was a lift, which she entered, with a rather obsequious and yet familiar liftman, who, when she asked—after some natural hesitation—for Mrs. Iverson, said, “Miss Fay Morris that was, you mean, madam? Oh, yes! it’s the third floor.” Claudia fancied that he eyed her curiously as he manipulated the wires. She tried to brace herself for the ordeal, for now she was ascending in the lift she felt like hurriedly descending and running away. There was no doubt it was an ordeal. It is quite bad enough in the ordinary way to have to make the first call on a new sister-in-law, but when she is “Miss Fay Morris that was,” whose portraits adorned the entrances of several music-halls, it is a colossal undertaking. She wished most heartily she had asked Jack to take her. Why had she not thought of that? How foolish of her. But now she was here she must face the music. Perhaps Jack would be there. If so, it would be all right. And yet, in a way she would rather not have him there, for though he was as stupid as an owl, there was a sort of understanding between them, and he would know what impression his wife was making on her.

She rang the bell and waited. There was no answer. Ah! a reprieve. She was turning away, but the liftman said reassuringly, “Ring again, ma’am. She’s in, I know. But the parrot makes such a noise they can’t hear the bell.”

So that was the meaning of the curious screeching she had heard while waiting, like someone at the mercy of a clumsy dentist. How could anyone stand such awful sounds!

The door opened and a servant, still in a print dress, nodded when she asked if Mrs. Iverson were at home. The screeching had grown worse, and Claudia quite understood why the servant nodded. She noticed that she wore no cap and that her hair was outrageously frizzed and curled. Was this the servant Jack had called “a sketch, a fair sketch”?

The good-sized hall was cheery enough with plenty of red paper and red carpet, perhaps a thought too cheerful, as though the decorator had said, “Now let’s have a cheerful hall, a very cheerful hall.” There was a large imitation oak stand, crowded with oddments in the way of coats. Claudia caught glimpses of a white knitted coat, a long squirrel one, a dark fur stole and two or three overcoats. There were any amount of umbrellas, walking-sticks, etc., and over all was a strong smell of cooking.

“Chuck it! Chuck it! Chuck it!” shrieked the parrot from somewhere near at hand. Claudia gave a start.

“Only that blessed bird,” said the servant. “She’s in there, miss.”

She jerked her head in the direction of a door that was a little ajar and suddenly departed. Claudia opened her lips to speak, but the maid had gone.

“Chuck it! Chuck it!” came more faintly from evidently the kitchen regions.

Claudia felt a strong desire to laugh. Then she heard a voice singing in a room on her right. It seemed to be the door the servant had indicated. The voice was untrained, but of a good quality, sweet and rather high-pitched.

The rest seemed somehow smothered and she could not catch the words.

Claudia tapped at the door in considerable embarrassment. Would she have to announce herself, and what would she say?

She pushed open the door gently and she saw a most remarkable sight, nothing less than a pair of exquisitely shaped little legs and feet in white silk tights that seemed to belong to a frilly pink lampshade. That was Claudia’s first impression, and then she saw that someone had her back to her, delving down into a huge trunk. Her second impression was that she had never seen a room that was so blue! There were pale blue curtains, wall-paper and bed-spread, blue flowers on the carpet and satin bows everywhere.

“Is that you, Madam Rose?” said a voice from the depths, which was rough and unrefined, but was not Cockney. “Half a jiff. I can’t find my pink shoes and——”

“I beg your pardon,” said Claudia, standing in the doorway, “but I am not Madame Rose. The maid did not——”

Claudia had just time to catch a glimpse of a piquant little face with great surprised blue eyes, when there was a cry of pain. The lid of the trunk, a heavy, clamped one, had descended on the small hand.

“Oh, gracious!” said the ballet-like person, hopping about holding her hand; “oh! that damned trunk! Ouch! My goodness! it’s nearly broken my knuckles.”

Her little face was screwed up with pain, so that she hardly looked at her visitor. Claudia’s eyes caught sight of a jug of water steaming away on the untidy washstand, and she quickly went over to it.

“Here,” she said, “put your hand in this jug. That will stop the pain and prevent it discolouring. Yes, I know how those things hurt.”

The hand was so small that it easily slid down into the jug. Claudia marvelled at its size, and then she noticed that the girl was hardly up to her shoulders. Why, it looked like a small child. This could not be The Girlie Girl, surely?

Then she became aware that the wrinkles had come undone and that the big blue eyes were looking at her.

“My word!” The blue eyes stared at her with the directness and naÏvetÉ of a child. The small mouth dropped open a little as companion in the process. “Who are you? I thought at first you were Madame Rose with my new set of curls, and then cocking half an eye at you, I thought you must be Maudie de Vere. But—who on earth are you?”

“Is your hand better?” said Claudia, half smiling, half embarrassed. “Please tell me first, are you—Fay?”

The girl looked at her with a sudden seriousness. “Yes, and I guess who you are. You’re Jack’s sister, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” returned Claudia. “I’m Jack’s sister. I am sorry to come in this unceremonious way into your bedroom——”

“Oh! that doesn’t matter,” said Fay, never taking her eyes off Claudia’s face, “everybody comes in here when they want me, because I’m hardly ever out of it.... My!”—her feelings overcoming her—“you are handsome! Jack told me you were good-looking, but he didn’t tell me you were such a stunner. I never saw anyone so pretty.”

It was impossible to resent the frank criticism or the speaker as she stood there in her most extraordinary attire. For the fluffy, chiffony petticoats ended just below the knees, and over her shoulders she had thrown a lacy matinÉe jacket, adorned with pale blue ribbons and showing a neck and throat perfect in a miniature way. Her hair—jet black and in remarkable contrast to her eyes, which seemed as though they should belong to a head of flaxen hair—was rather short, but fell about her shoulders in curly masses.

Claudia was completely at a loss how to answer this very naive tribute to her charms. But Fay was used to making the entire conversation, and she went on without noticing any lack of conversational powers on the part of her visitor.

“I might have known it wasn’t Maudie, though, because she uses so much scent it’s like a chemist’s shop coming into your room. I like a little sprayed on myself, but she puts it on with a garden hose. I’ve told her about it heaps of times. I think it’s such bad taste, don’t you?”

It was not quite the conversation Claudia had vaguely imagined. And yet, though Fay gabbled on, her words coming at a tremendous speed, she felt that her hostess was taking good stock of her. At the back of those childish eyes there was a shrewd little brain. She showed this by her next words:

“You’re hopping mad with Jack and me, aren’t you? I never saw Jack in such a state as the morning when the thing came out in the newspaper.” She gave a little chuckle. “I must say I enjoyed it. I like to keep my name before the public, for one thing. You’ve got to keep on working some sensation, or you’re passed over.” She pulled her hand out of the jug and dried it on a towel, which she flung on the very ornate bed. It had a lace coverlet over pale blue satin, and enormous bows of pale blue satin ribbon ornamented the corners. A huge nightdress-case of the same satin painted with pink roses was lying on the frilled pillows, which were also threaded with pale blue.

She came over to where Claudia was standing. “I say, don’t be mad with me. I like you. I didn’t think I would. I thought you’d be starchy and turn up your nose at me. It was nice of you to think of that hot water for my hand. Sit down and make friends with me, will you?”

Claudia appreciated her charm as she stood in front of her, playing with her sable muff. It was the charm of the gamine-child.

“I—I came to have a little talk with you,” returned Claudia, smiling. You simply could not help smiling at it.

“That’s right. Sit down. Bless me, there never is a chair that isn’t littered up.” She took a handful of clothes and threw them carelessly on the floor. “Now just sit down there and tell me what the people you know say about me. I suppose I shouldn’t have married Jack, and I told him at first he’d better run away and play with Lady Somebody or other. But he wouldn’t go. He’ll tell you that if you ask him.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” returned Claudia as Fay energetically seized a brush and commenced to brush her hair.

“Oh! bother!” she said, stopping short, “and I want those curls. Madame Rose is a blighter all right. She promised them for to-day. Well, Polly will have to rake those other curls over and make them presentable.” She went to the door and shouted, “Polly! Polly! come here quick.”

A red-haired girl came running in, her hands all wet and soapsuddy. “Miss Fay, I’m just washing your stockings.”

“Leave ’em and come and dish up these curls. That old beast hasn’t sent my new set. Look, Polly, this is Mr. Jack’s sister. Isn’t she lovely?”

The red-haired girl stared at Claudia with her greeny-brown eyes. Claudia had never been inspected by a servant in such a manner before. Her lips twitched, but she assisted Polly by looking straight at her.

“She ain’t much like the Capting, is she?” Polly said in strong Cockney. “But then, I ain’t a bit like my brother. He’s in the army too. I always say as brothers and sisters——”

“Don’t chatter so much. Take those curls and vanish.” Fay waved her small hand imperiously, and Polly, grabbing a bunch of curls, went out. “We don’t want her in here listening to us, do we?” said Fay confidentially. “Not but that Polly knows most everything. She was on the halls once herself—doing small stunts with an acrobat—and she got rheumatic fever. My mother saved her life and kept her going for goodness knows how long. When mar died, she came to me as a sort of dresser. And she runs everything here.” She waved her hand round the apartment. “The tradesmen don’t do her. As far me, I’m no good at housekeeping. Don’t know a chicken from a turkey. Of course, Jack says she isn’t smart enough. He says he wants me to have some proper servants. But, what’s the trouble? I’m comfortable, and that’s everything, isn’t it?”

“The best of servants can only make you comfortable,” conceded Claudia, looking at the littered apartment. There was a cup and saucer on the dressing-table, and the spoon was on the floor. Some biscuits and an orange were side by side with a powder-puff and a scent-spray. One satin slipper rested on the pin-cushion, and a pair of silk stockings were thrown over the mirror, which had enormous wings and occupied a large amount of the available space. Fay was busily putting up her hair as she talked.

“You know, I’m awfully gone on your brother. I never met anyone like him before.” Now she was energetically rubbing cold cream all over her neck and arms. “I like to make up at home. It’s much more comfortable. Those dressing-rooms are so draughty. Have you ever seen me? But of course you have. I suppose everybody has. I top the bill at most of the halls now. And I make a row when I don’t. Do you like my turn?”

“I’m sorry to say I seldom go to variety houses,” said Claudia, feeling somehow that she ought to have seen her.

“What!”—she turned, with her face smothered with grease. “You haven’t seen me do my turn? Jack must take you this very night. He’ll be along soon.”

“Oh! I—er—am afraid I’m engaged to-night.”

Polly returned and planked the curls down on the dressing-table.

“Here you are, miss, and Mr. Robins is out in the hall. He wants to see you.” She grinned. “He’s got a bucket for yer.”

“What!” Fay screamed gleefully, “old Joey Robins! Why, this is worth a week’s screw.” She rushed to the door just as she was and called out: “Come in, Joey, my boy. I’m awful glad to see you.”

She flung her arms round the neck of a man whose face was typically that of a low comedian of the old school. He was funny even off the stage, and Claudia vaguely remembered the name. He was somewhere about fifty, and had a habit of blinking as he talked, like a parrot. Claudia found out afterwards that he had acquired it for stage purposes—the audiences shrieked at him when he just blinked and did nothing else—and he could not rid himself of it in private life.

“Come in, do. Joey, this is my sister-in-law. You know Joey? You may not know me, but you know Joey all right. Joey Robins on the Razzle-Dazzle! My! that was a good number, wasn’t it?”

She put her head on one side and her hands on her hips, and began to skip about, humming a catchy tune.

Claudia found the comedian was extending a large and very rough hand. “Glad to make your acquaintance, miss. I say, Fay, there’s a turnip for you outside. Shall I fetch it in?”

“Rather! You don’t mean it’s—— Oh! Joey, you darling!” It was an immense bouquet of the old-fashioned kind, and it was tied with long, streaming ribbons of white satin. “I told ’em not to stint the ribbing. I said my little gal don’t get married hevery day. Well, my dear, how does it agree with you?”

“Oh, fine!” she laughed, using a little brush to darken her eyelashes. “Wasn’t you surprised when you saw it in the papers?”

“No,” said the man, still blinking, “not exsakerly surprised. I always said you was fit to be a princess. I see you’re at the Royal this week? Best advertisement you hever ’ad, my girl.”

“And I don’t forget I owe it all to you,” she said earnestly, leaving off with one eyelash blacked. “Yes,” turning to Claudia, who did not feel left out in the cold, because Fay took it for granted that she was interested in this queer, common man who had come in, “he got me my first engagement, and I don’t forget it.”

“Oh, go on! it was nothing.”

“Well, I shall never make light of it,” she said, with a vigorous nod of her small head, now entirely over-weighted with the curls she had pinned on. They spoilt the shape of her head and stuck out in masses about her ears. Fay went on quickly with the making-up process. “You gave me a shove here and a shove there, and now I’ve got into high society, I don’t forget those who helped me. I’m going to give a dinner to celebrate the wedding—you must come”—nodding friendly-wise to Claudia—“and so must you and your missus, Joey.”

“It’s kind of you, Fay, but I’ll be up north for the next month.” He looked at a large gold watch, the chain of which meandered over a waistcoat of startling pattern. “Can’t stay many minutes. Got to get down to Reading to-night. Came up a purpose to bring you the turnip.”

“You’re a duck, Joey. Polly! Polly! Bring in a bottle of fizz. Sharp’s the word! Yes, Joey, it’s a special occasion and I’d like her to have some too. You know”—speaking to both of them—“I never take nothing until after I’ve done my work, unless it’s a glass of stout, but Joey’s got to drink me a proper health. Come on, Polly, bring a glass for yourself.”

“Hallo, Polly!” said Joey, “still ginger, eh? My, we’re getting on in the world, ain’t we? You fancy yourself, waiting on the wife of a capting, don’t yer? I’ll do that for yer. You hold the glass.”

“It’s the best fizz,” said Fay, who was now putting the rouge thickly on her cheeks. “It costs ten shillings a bottle and that’s wholesale price too. I know a man—do you know Sam Levy? He’s got an interest in a champagne business, or something. Anyway, I told him to get me some of the best. Jack says it’s too sweet, but I like it that way. The other stuff tastes like ginger-ale. When I have fizz I like to know it’s fizz. But there”—she turned to Claudia, who at half-past six in the evening somehow found herself holding a glass of champagne—“I suppose you drink champagne every night of your life, don’t you?”

At that instant Jack came in at the door, which was wide open.

“Just in time old boy,” called out Fay. “This is my old friend Joey Robins—my husband.”

“Please to meet you sir—I mean capting,” murmured Joey Robbins, blinking at him. “You’ve got the smartest little woman in the world as your wife, sir. There’s no one to touch her in her perfession. Lord! she did for old Joey long ago. She fairly beat his heart to a pulp.”

Jack had just caught sight of Claudia, and his face was a curiosity to behold.

“But,” said Joey, with a rough note of kindly earnestness in his voice, “no larking any more, Fay, my dear. Be a good child, be a good child.”

Fay slipped her arm round Jack’s neck, standing on a footstool to do so.

“We’re both going to be good children, aren’t we, Jack? We’ve both been a bit flighty, but we’re going to be good now. I’m going”—her blue eyes opened widely, and she gave Jack a hearty hug—“to be a responsible person in future. Drink, all of you. Drink to the health of a pair of naughty children who are going to be good!”

It was not a bit as Claudia had planned it, but she found herself obediently drinking the health of her brother and sister-in-law in very bad and very sweet champagne.

CHAPTER VIII
“TWO IN A STUDIO”

Two days later Claudia was wrinkling her brows over her visiting-list, and sadly contemplating the people she had been shunting, and who must be asked to dinner, when she was surprised to hear Gilbert’s voice outside the door. He had been confined to bed for the last few days with a sharp attack of influenza, and Neeburg had forbidden him to go out.

She rose and opened the door. Outside was her husband, with his hat and coat on.

“Gilbert!”

“I’m going down to my chambers for an hour or two. I’m sick of this coddling, and the only thing to do is to work it off. It was a mistake to take to bed at all. I’m convinced you bring on illnesses that way.”

“Come in a minute. Did Dr. Neeburg say you might go?”

“No. Doctors always try and keep you in bed, and Fritz is no better than the rest of them.”

His face was flushed and unhealthy in colour. His eyes seemed more sombre than ever, and he was obviously quite unfit to go out of the house.

“Gilbert, this is madness. Have you looked at yourself in the glass? At least wait to see the doctor this morning. Surely your work can wait for awhile, or one of your clerks can come down as he did yesterday?”

“I’ve got to be in court on a big case four days hence, and all my books and things are down there. Lots of people have influenza and don’t stop indoors. I’m strong; I’ll soon throw the thing off if my mind is occupied.”

She did not know what to say. She knew it was very unwise for him to go out, but, after all, she could not force him to stay indoors. Neeburg had told her privately that he was very much run down and needed a good rest. Was it a good thing to tell a man he was not as strong as he thought he was? Gilbert was always so proud of his robust health, and so contemptuous of weaker men. An old friend of his, a barrister, who often secured his services, had recently had to go for a sea-voyage owing to nerve-strain, and Gilbert had commented on it with a complete lack of sympathy and understanding. People who got ill easily he dubbed “weaklings.”

“Well, Gilbert,” she said gravely, “of course I can’t make you keep to the doctor’s orders, but I do ask you to give yourself a fair chance. You know”—tentatively—“you have really been overworking for a long time, and your constitution may be strong, but you can’t tax it when you have an attack of influenza.”

“I’m all right,” he said rather truculently. “And I’m going down in the car to a well-warmed room. It won’t harm me, and I shall feel easier in my mind. I loathe having nothing to do.”

She looked at him, and wondered what he would do if he had a real long illness. The whole man was his work, and his work was the man. He had practically no hobbies, no pursuits, no amusements. When she had married him he had been keen on golf, but even that he had dropped.

Suddenly she said to him, “Do you ever wonder how I spend my days, Gilbert?”

He looked at her in dull surprise. “Oh! women always find something to do, don’t they? Dressmakers, shopping, et cetera. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. You know Frank Hamilton is painting my portrait, don’t you?”

“Yes, I think you did tell me. Is it going to be good?” He was obviously not very interested, and anxious to be gone.

“Yes, I think so, this time. But he needs a good many sittings.... Do you like Frank Hamilton?”

“I never thought about it. Yes, I suppose he’s all right for an artist. Well, I must go now. I daresay I shan’t be away many hours.”

“Gilbert,” she said pleadingly, “don’t go. You are not fit, really. If you don’t want to stop in bed, stay here with me and read some books, or if your eyes hurt, I’ll read to you. There’s such an amusing biography here.”

He shook her hand off his coat-sleeve and went towards the door. “I’m too restless, Claudia. Tell Neeburg I had to go.”

He was gone, and Claudia walked back to her desk. Though various thoughts were buzzing through her head, inflammatory, rebellious thoughts, she completed the list of undesirables and requested the honour of their company at dinner. Most of the stodgy ones were friends of Gilbert’s family and good and worthy men at the Bar, with their good and worthy wives.

At last Claudia laid down her pen and took up the telephone. Frank’s voice answered her at the other end.

“I say, I told you I couldn’t come this afternoon for the sitting. But I find I can, after all. Is it still convenient?”

“Yes, and I’m delighted to hear it. I haven’t seen you for three whole days—an eternity!”

“What a pretty speech!” mocked Claudia; “but I’ve got the grain of salt here.”

“You can laugh at me if you like, but it only makes things worse. I sometimes wonder if you are quite heartless. Don’t you believe in any man?”

“Not—not if I can help it. Well, I’ll be with you about three. I can’t talk now; I’m busy.”

But she sat for half an hour quite unoccupied, at least she had no tangible occupation. She wrote no letters and she sent no more invitations. The only thing she did was to light a cigarette and stare out of the window at the bare branches of the trees, just faintly beginning to bud. And yet she was not thinking of the view, for she looked for quite five minutes at the Albert Memorial, and it was an edifice she loathed. Her face was set and expressionless, only her eyes burned like live, glowing coals in her head.

Rhoda Carnegie was lunching with her. She had rung up earlier in the day and requested the meal, saying quite frankly that a man had failed her and that she wanted some decent food.

Claudia neither liked nor disliked her, she had got used to her, for every now and then she had drifted into the Iverson household.

Rhoda was late, but as Claudia knew her habits she had ordered lunch a quarter of an hour later than usual.

“I’m late, dear. So sorry. But I put on six hats and hated them all, so I’ve come out in the ugliest.” It was a queer-shaped one, that showed the tip of her nose and part of an ear.

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll get run over when you wear a hat like that?” laughed Claudia.

“It does make the day seem gloomy, I admit. But a hat like this intrigues a man. He doesn’t know what else there is to it. There’s nothing like mystery about a hat. Well, and how goes l’affaire Hamilton?”

Claudia started to frown and then changed her mind. Rhoda was not actively malicious, except when she hated a rival, and a frown would be wasted on her.

“Oh! quite nicely,” she said coolly, inwardly a little startled that it should have come to that. “I think the picture will be a success this time.”

“Ah! if I were interested in a portrait-painter I should certainly have my portrait painted, but that type doesn’t appeal to me, and I hate having to talk art and look at daubs that are not half as nice as the things they represent. We hate one another most cordially. Two poseurs together, you know. It takes a poseur to catch a poseur.”

Claudia stopped in the act of raising a glass of hock to her lips. “You consider him a poseur?”

“Haven’t you spotted that?” drawled Rhoda. “I wish I could afford a decent cook. No, you wouldn’t. You think he has an artistic soul. I am certain he hasn’t. But if you don’t rub the veneer too hard I daresay it won’t come off while you are playing with it.”

“I don’t see why you call him a poseur,” returned Claudia. “Unless you think we are all poseurs and—well, one has to wear clothing!”

“I’ll call it acting if you like it better. Wasn’t it Meissonier who said, ‘Painters always have in them something of the actor, they have the instinct for attitude and gesture’? But he’s clever, he acts rather well. So do I. And a pose is justified by its cleverness.”

She leaned forward on the table and smiled in her hostess’s face.

“My dear, don’t think I am trying to say that his love for you is a pose. But—well, naturally. You are very handsome and an excellent companion. Shall I tell you what he is not?”

“If you like,” said Claudia, with an affectation of indifference.

“He is not working for art’s sake. He is not generous, except to himself. He is not quite a gentleman—yes, let me finish—either by birth or natural feeling. And he is not—good enough for you, ma chÈre.”

“There is hardly any question——” began Claudia hotly.

“Claudia, don’t pretend. It’s not necessary with me. I daresay he is more amusing than Gilbert, but still, he’s not the right man. One’s husband is an accident; a lover is sometimes—a mistake. After all, in spite of the sweetest poodles and coon-can, love is the one thing that interests women. But be careful with Frank Hamilton. He is the sort of a man who gives a woman away, and discretion is the first requisite for a lover.”

Claudia ignored the bigger issues. It was impossible to snub Rhoda.

“You don’t like him, and therefore you are prejudiced,” she replied, playing with a fat little quail on her plate. “What do you know about him?”

“I know he is the son of a small country solicitor who used to live at Salisbury. Now he lives in Kensal Green Cemetery. His grandfather was the butcher of that town, and I believe his grandfather wanted to put Frank into his business, but——”

“Oh, Rhoda! don’t be ridiculous. Besides, what does it matter what his grandfather was? You’re talking like Lady Currey now. And it’s so old-fashioned!”

“Pooh! I don’t care about people’s ancestors, although I think a butcher peculiarly unpleasing, let us say. Loinchops and rumpsteaks are so prosaic. No, that isn’t the point. He hasn’t got the innate feelings of a gentleman, and with his upbringing he would let any woman down. There are some things that men of the world with decent breeding don’t do. And now tell me what the scandal is about Lucy Morgan and the card that dropped on the floor?”

At three, Claudia left Rhoda with the box of cigarettes—she had already smoked five—and the latest thing in novels, and went to Frank’s studio. She felt rather self-conscious as she ascended the stairs, for now someone had labelled it l’affaire Hamilton it seemed to have taken a different complexion. Well, other women were all having flirtations, why not she? She had never meant to; she recalled how she had looked on such affairs during her engagement—not with disgust, her upbringing was against that, but she had been sorry for the women who had to fill up their lives in underhand ways. Life had looked so easy then, now she was beginning to realize that life is most subtle, most complex, most alluring and—most disappointing.

She involuntarily stopped and gave a delicate sniff as she entered the studio. It was full of some over-sweet perfume.

“Have you upset a bottle of perfume?” she asked. “This is sweetness twice distilled.”

He went to the window hastily. “Don’t accuse me of using perfume. One of my sitters.”

“Heavens! who uses such a perfume?”

He busied himself with the chair she was to sit in. “Oh, you’ve met her. Mrs. Jacobs.”

“Mrs. J—— Oh, yes! the yellow lady with much wealth. Well, you might make something odd and bizarre out of her. But perhaps she wants to be depicted as a blush-rose?”

“Don’t let’s talk about her. I don’t want to remember any other woman when you are here.... No, that arm isn’t quite right.” His hand was subtly caressing as he bent it into the position required, and it sent a little physical thrill through her. But when she met his eyes, he saw only a mocking light in them. All the same, he was quick to detect a slight difference in her attitude towards him. After the episode of the drive home from Hampstead he had been at first furiously angry, but after a while her very elusiveness had intrigued him to fresh efforts. His experience with women had been that they were always rather shy when it came to the last moves in the game; and Claudia was certainly a prize in the feminine market.

“You don’t know the happiness it gives me to work on your portrait.... Just look a little more to the left—a trifle more—yes, that’s right.... You must give me the chance of finishing it. I shall be restless and unhappy until it is done.... Don’t make me more unhappy than I am already,” he concluded softly.

The studio was very warm—too warm, and the scent still lingered in the air. It was an unpretentious apartment, but it had not that bare, unclothed look which distinguished some artists’ studios. Frank declared that he worked better in a coloursome atmosphere, and he had picked up some beautiful Oriental hangings, subdued but rich, which draped the walls with dull gold and reds. The few pieces of furniture were good. Frank had bought them very cheaply from a former tenant.

“I don’t see why you should be unhappy,” answered Claudia languidly, watching him mix some colours on his palette. “Young and successful, that ought to be enough to make a man happy.”

“Unsuccessful in the one thing that he really wants,” replied the man at the easel, with a quick glance at her.

Claudia knew it was injudicious to continue in this strain, but something within her, reckless and craving for excitement, urged her on.

“We never get the things we really want. That would be Paradise.... And what do you want so particularly?”

“What I am afraid there is no chance of gaining,” he replied softly; “the heart of the dearest, most beautiful woman in the world.”

“You want—a good deal.”

“Nothing less would content me.”

The studio was on the roof of a building in Victoria Street and was reached by a long flight of stairs from his living apartments below. Somewhere down there a middle-aged, flat-footed woman acted as his servant, but she never came into the studio unless Frank rang for her. The sounds of the traffic made a dull, heavy grumbling below, but no other noise intruded upon them.

He looked at his sitter and he found her very desirable and very beautiful, especially to-day, with that touch of languor, that air of laisser faire, as of one who lays down the oars and deliberately lets the boat drift with the current. Was it only a momentary mood? Did he dare to say more?

She looked at the man, and she found him young and very much alive, fully aware and appreciative of her femininity.

Unconsciously she sighed.

In an instant he had thrown down the brushes and was at her side, a light in his eyes, a look on his face that made her shrink back a little and catch at the arms of the chair.

“Claudia!”

She raised her eyebrows interrogatively.

He had dropped on his knees beside her chair—he could do such things gracefully—and his lips were pressed on the back of her hand, on her wrist, on her soft forearm.

“Don’t, Frank, I——”

“Claudia, I worship you” he said recklessly. “You must know it. Don’t keep me at arm’s length any longer. You are driving me mad by your coldness. I can’t paint, I can’t sleep.... I can only think of you as you might be if you would let yourself love me.”

They had both risen to their feet, and he slipped his arm persuasively round her shoulders. His nearness seemed to deprive her of any will or any desire to repulse him. Love is sweet, and his evident sincerity and passion seemed to soothe some aching wound within her. Was not this what she needed to make her life tolerable? Every woman is entitled to love, and her marriage had been a mistake. Perhaps, if she had known all she knew now and she had met Frank earlier....

“Claudia, my dearest, say something to me.”

He drew her unresistingly to him, and the lids drooped over her eyes as she felt the warmth of his breath on her face and then the pressure of his lips.

There was none of the fierce masculinity and violence of Gilbert’s early love-making. Frank Hamilton was too much of an artist for that, and it was not the first time he had made love to a fastidious, sensitive woman. He gave her just the right impression, just the assurance she needed at that moment of tender affection and almost reverent passion. Had he been more virile in his love-making, memory would have awakened, and with her later knowledge she would have repulsed him. She would have said to herself, “This is passion, only passion, and I know what a little it means.” Suspicion would have plucked at her sleeve. But Frank struck the right note, partly by instinct, partly by design.

When at last she made a faint resistance to the pressure of his arms, he slowly let her go, only to catch her hands and cover them again with kisses. She looked down at the waves of his dark hair, worn a little longer than is usual, but not noticeably “artistic,” and she felt sure that she cared for him. He had given a grateful warmth to her heart. A glow of tenderness rose in her for him.

“I think you are foolish to care so much for me,” she said softly.

He drew her hands up till they rested on his shoulders, and he smiled with happy contradiction into her face. He was very good-looking in his triumph, and she could not help rejoicing in his comeliness. The Greeks worshipped beauty, and were they so wrong? Youth and good looks ought to be part of love. Surely it is the ideal.

“Now you look as I knew you could look,” he said half dreamily; “your eyes are soft and velvety like the petals of the pansy. I must kiss them once again ... dear eyes ... beautiful eyes ... and I’ve looked into them such a long time, hoping to see them soften and glow as they do now. Claudia, if you knew how much I love you.”

“I wonder why,” she laughed, with the harmless coquetry of the woman who knows herself loved, “when there are such a number of women in the world.”

“There isn’t any woman comparable to you. I don’t realize now that another woman exists on the face of the earth. I feel as if you and I were standing on a desert island. There are many people on the other islands, of course, but not on ours.” He really meant it at the moment.

She pretended to laugh at his extravagance, but all the time she felt that this was the way a man should love a woman. Had she not felt like that when she had been in love with Gilbert? The world had consisted of Gilbert—and people. Of course, Frank loved her more than she did him, but that somehow evened up things a little. She had loved Gilbert more than he had loved her.

he murmured.

“Then I saw the tombstones in the dark and their message,” she interrupted, the scene in the motor recurring to her.

“You saw——?”

“Nothing ... only don’t quote poetry; it makes everything seem so unreal.”

“Unreal?” He caught her to him passionately. “Is this unreal? Don’t you believe in my love?”

She let her head droop on his shoulder. “Men have such large hearts—or such small ones. Don’t look so hurt, dear.... It’s true. Men love and unlove so much more easily than women.” But her lips smiled and took the sting out of her words. The lips said, “I want to believe,” while the worldly, cynical words flowed over them. “What is fire to-day, Frank, is ashes to-morrow.”

“You don’t believe that love can last?”

His eyes shone, and he made a most convincing lover. His voice had the right ring. She could feel the pulsating warmth of his hand through the thin ninon of her sleeve. “Claudia, you mean everything to me—everything. I hardly dared to hope, and yet I had to, just as a ship-wrecked sailor has to dream of land or he would die. I have worked hard because I wanted to be worthy of your praise, of your confidence. You have inspired everything I have done. All the time I have been striving to please you.”

It was balm to her, it was food for her heart’s hunger. He had worked hard at his profession but to please her, to lay his success as an offering at her feet—art, not for art’s sake, but for love’s. That was the right romantic spirit, a little exaltÉ, a little extravagant; but then, he was an artist, and had not innumerable artists owed their lives’ inspiration to women? She was glad she had been able to help him, to introduce him into a circle that had started the ball of success a-rolling for him. She had been able to give and he had appreciated the giving, for love always seeks self-immolation, and Claudia had nothing of the vampire in her composition. Love! Did she love him? Was it not inevitable after her first experience that she should be a little uncertain of her own feelings?

“I hoped, I prayed you would turn to me one day.... He doesn’t appreciate you. He takes your beauty and your sweetness as his right. Everyone sees it.”

She was a little startled. So she and Gilbert’s marital relations were being discussed just like other couples’ in their set. Gilbert’s coldness and neglect were being talked about over the teacups of Mayfair. Her pride revolted against it, and her half-formed determination to console herself like the other women she knew hardened. Something that had been pricking her a little ceased to do so. She would take the sweets offered her. After all, life soon ended—in a tombstone. An epigram she had heard a few days previously recurred to her mind: “Let every woman see to it that she has a present, so that the future may not find her unprovided with a past.” Who cared about either her morals or her ethics? She had only herself to reckon with. Herself! Well, she would consider that another time.

“We won’t discuss him.... Never. You understand, Frank?”

He had read the sudden tumult of her thoughts.

“You are still in love with him?” he said jealously. “Of course, I know a woman like you must have married for love. Tell me—you must answer me this one question, then I will respect your wishes.... Are you?”

She did not hesitate, but she made a deliberate pause, as though she were finally settling the question with her own heart.

“No, I no longer love him, because the man I loved does not exist.... Now go on with the picture. The light will soon go, and I want to see it finished. Please.”

Reluctantly he went back to the easel and took up his palette. She stood on the platform, watching him. He caught her look and squared his shoulders.

“This is going to be my best picture,” he said enthusiastically. “Love and beauty! Why, the very worst artist would be inspired. I know I can do big things if you encourage me.” He stopped, and then came back to where she stood. “Claudia, you never acknowledged you loved me. Say you do, dearest?”

His eyes were very beseeching and like a child’s, a little distressed at the doubt that had flung its shadows across his happiness.

“Claudia, you do love me?”

“I—I think I do, Frank. No, you must be content with that at present.” She waved him back.

“But some day you will love me as I love you.” His eyes were steady now, and the accent of the voice was that of the conquering male.

She laughed a little uncertainly and a faint flush rose to her cheeks.

“Shall I? Oh, what conceited creatures men are! And—I don’t know how much you love me. A woman never knows. Now go on with the portrait.”

As she went down in the lift some time later it stopped at the second floor, and to her surprise the gate admitted Colin Paton.

“You!” he exclaimed pleasantly. “And what are you doing in Victoria Street?”

For a moment she had an unpleasant feeling of having been caught doing something clandestine, and her reply was a little embarrassed. She never remembered to have felt quite so before.

“Didn’t you know that Mr. Hamilton’s studio is up at the top? The portrait, you know.”

She was very annoyed with herself for the feeling, and went on quickly:

“It was you who begged me to continue the sittings. So I have been trying to please you. But it’s very tiresome.”

She wondered what made her tack on the last sentence even as she uttered it. Was it because she feared that his keen eyes would note her embarrassment? Why did she have to be a hypocrite? She was glad when the lift stopped and the bright electric light ceased to shine on her face. The street was grey and more kindly.

“Beauty must be penalized some way or another,” he rejoined smilingly. “Some women would be only too glad to put up with the boredom should a well-known portrait-painter beg them to sit.”

She arranged her veil and looked round for her motor.

“You don’t know his work, do you?”

The fresh air of the street was refreshing after the enervating atmosphere of the studio.

“I saw some of his pictures the other day at a show. It’s clever work.”

“Not more than that?” Her tone implied that his praise was too tepid.

“Does it quite satisfy you?”

She was feeling vaguely irritated at the encounter. Why did he make her feel uncomfortable, and why did he belittle Frank’s work? He was usually generous in his praise. Had he any suspicion with regard to their friendship? She answered untruthfully, with a touch of defiance:

“Yes, I think it quite satisfies me.”

“Well, you’re a good judge. Perhaps I’ve lost my taste for pictures in the Argentine. Big spaces are apt to make you rather intolerant of some so-called ‘artistic’ achievements. Genius always stands out, but talent somehow gets awfully dwarfed. Don’t you know what I mean?”

“Well, we’re not in the Argentine. We’re in Victoria Street.” No, she would not admit that Frank had only talent.

He laughed and dropped the subject. “I know it well by the roar of the buses. I met a fellow out there who was desperately homesick, and he confided to me that he’d give anything to see the scavengers washing down the street as he drove home from the club, and see the wet pavement shining under the street lamps. How’s Gilbert to-day?”

“He has gone to his chambers.”

“What? Why, he was in bed yesterday.”

“I know.” She shrugged her shoulders under their luxurious furs. “But the only thing that counts with Gilbert is his work, you know. He refuses to stop in bed any longer.” She looked him straight in the face and her eyes were bright and hard. “Tell me something. Did you always know that work is the only real thing in Gilbert’s life? But, of course, you knew. You see most things in your quiet, undemonstrative way.”

They were standing beside the car. The door was open for her to step into it.

For a moment he was nonplussed. What answer could he make to such a question? But while he was groping for some words, she held out her hand with a little amused, cynical laugh.

“Yes. I see you did know. You need not tell a lie. I think you might have warned me. Good-bye.”

She left him standing on the pavement, his grey eyes troubled and anxious.

She leaned back and tried to think of Frank and the difference his love was going to make in her life. She tried to give herself up again to the pleasant feeling of being cared for, of being appreciated. She tried to recapture the thrill his caresses had given her; but she could not. She could only see the troubled grey eyes of Colin Paton.

“He’s spoilt my afternoon,” she said angrily to herself as the car sped homewards. “He’s spoilt my afternoon. And he is only a dreamer. He has no right to judge me.”

But Colin Paton was not the judge.

CHAPTER IX
“MELTON GREEN”

“She’s so keen on your coming,” urged Jack. “She’s taken a tremendous fancy to you. And, you know, she’s such a kid. She’s no end proud of her turn. You must come and see her.”

“You are aware that my august husband will be very displeased should he hear of it,” returned Claudia dryly.

“Oh! blow Gilbert and his airs! I can’t think how you came to marry such a sack of sawdust. I met him yesterday and he was as frigid as a frozen leg of mutton.... What’s it got to do with him whom I marry?”

A good constitution will stand a great deal, and, contrary to expectations, Gilbert had not had to return ignominiously to bed after his rash defiance of the doctor’s orders. But he had never recovered, and Claudia saw that he was not half the man he had been. But he would not admit that he felt ill, and his secret feelings only showed themselves in great irritability and an almost total ignoring of her presence.

“If people minded their own business,” said Claudia lightly, “this world would be a dull place! It’s family friction that keeps us all alive!”

“Rot! But Gilbert is too priggish for words. I always did hate the Curreys, anyway, and Gilbert was ever a cold-blooded fish.” He cast a curious glance at his sister, which she ignored. Sometimes in a dull, unimaginative way he wondered how far emotion now played its part in her marriage. But he never asked questions, for he was a little afraid of Claudia. “I say, come along to-night. It’s Saturday, and that’s a good night. You’ve never seen anything like the Empire at Melton Green on a Saturday, I bet.”

“I half promised to make a four at the club,” said Claudia indifferently, stroking Billie’s ears. “But Melton Green sounds amusing.”

Gilbert had gone down for the week-end to his parents, always a tiresome function to her, and this time he had not urged her to accompany him.

“That’s nothing. I insist on your coming. We’ll dash back to the West End between the shows and get something to eat. Do, Claud, old girl; I want you to see how popular she is. Why, the gallery boys fairly eat her.”

“How much is the gallery?”

“Oh! threepence admission.” Jack grinned. “They are a crew, too. They’ll amuse you. You look a bit down in the mouth. Fay’ll cheer you up. You can’t be blue with her.”

“I’m not down in the mouth,” contradicted his sister untruthfully. “One can’t always be howling with laughter. Life isn’t as funny as all that.”

“Oh! I don’t know. That’s the worst of you brainy people. You take life too seriously. What on earth is the good of rootling about and trying to find a deep meaning in everything? There isn’t any meaning in life. You’re just put here to enjoy yourself. A cabbage doesn’t think. Why should we?”

“Yes, I know your theory of life, or rather, your lack of one.” Frank had been insinuating the same philosophy at their various meetings. She was aware that the insinuating process had an ulterior motive, for she was unable to deceive herself or walk blindly into the arms he held out to her. But so far she had kept him off very delicate ground. She knew she could not do so much longer, and she wondered at herself that she did not capitulate. For more and more her thoughts dwelt on those pleasures of which she had been deprived. The spring air tantalized her and made the blood run hotter in her veins. Nature craved its proper food; youth seconded its demands.

“Chuck this analytical business and take life lightly,” urged her brother. “I take life lightly and so does Fay. She’s a perfect skylark. Doesn’t look a day ahead or a day backwards.”

“And you counsel me to do likewise—to emulate her mode of living?”

He was lounging in the library of her flat, content with himself and all the world. He had borne a lot of “chipping” on his marriage, which was now dying down. But in spite of his lethargic egotism, he caught a look now in Claudia’s eyes that made his dull brain work a little. What had some woman been saying about Claudia and some painter chap? He tried to recall the gossip, but it had been late at night and his recollection was vague.

“In moderation, old girl,” he counselled warily. “Of course there are some things you can’t do. But flutter a bit if you like.”

“What sort of things can’t I do?” asked Claudia, with abrupt directness.

“Oh, don’t peg me down! Well, things I can do, you can’t. A girl’s different from a man—at least, you are.”

“The old shibboleth!” she jeered. “We’re not different, my dear brother. We’re exactly the same, only—only I suppose we’re more fastidious.”

He was a little alarmed. In the old days Claudia had always taken what he called “a high moral tone” in discussing his little peccadilloes. Vaguely he felt that this change in her was not right.

“Is Fay conservative in her opinions on this subject?” went on Claudia, with a touch of cruelty. “Does she think there are things she can do and you can’t?”

He winced and uncrossed his legs. “She’s different from you,” he said decidedly. “You’re sort of—well, superior. I’d hate to think——” He stopped and tweaked Billie’s ear.

“Well, go on. What would you hate?”

Billie looked at him sadly as he twisted his lips about. “Well, er—oh! you know the things I wouldn’t like you to do. For some women it’s all right, not for you.... You see, well, with some women it doesn’t seem to matter, it’s natural for them to do a bit of straying, but it’s not natural for you, and”—with unexpected acuteness—“it would make you miserable. You’d hate the game, because you’d see through the whole bally business, and you’d criticize yourself and him.”

“You’re talking of a mere flirtation,” returned Claudia quickly. “A liaison between a man and a woman may be something more than that. What, after all, is a gold band on the finger and a mumbling clergyman?”

“Course, if you put it that way, I can’t answer you. But I don’t say it’s different, only—well, they nearly all are flirtations of varying degrees of warmth. You don’t mean much to her, and she doesn’t mean much to you, but you pretend all the time. Of course”—vaguely—“there are grandes passions, like Shakespeare’s people, but they don’t grow on every gooseberry-bush. And I ought to know, you know.” He made the last remark quite simply, just as he might have complimented himself on his taste in ties.

“You haven’t looked for love,” she said sharply. “Love may come at any moment in your life, and I think you deny it—at your own risk.”

“Besides, Gilbert would make a hell of a row,” observed her brother. “A hell of a row.”

“I wasn’t talking of myself. We were merely arguing in—in a general way.”

He looked at her in silence, and she turned away, biting her lip. Then she rose with a little dry laugh. The one man of all those she knew whose tolerance she would have taken for granted had failed to back her up. Why should she be different from other neglected wives? Why should she go through life hungry and miserable? Suddenly she turned in surprise at Jack’s next remark.

“Why doesn’t Colin Paton get married? He’s a nice chap. Everyone speaks well of him.”

“Colin? Oh! I don’t think he cares for women that way.”

Jack gave a lazy chuckle. “All men care for women that way—when they can get ’em. Why didn’t you marry him Claud? Why did you give him the go-by?”

“The go-by?” she said incredulously. “Why, he never wanted to marry me. We were only—friends, the best of friends.”

“I read somewhere in something that friendship is a good foundation for marriage. What was the beastly quotation? ‘Love is friendship set on fire.’ It impressed me, because Fay and I were awful good chums for a long time and we never—never till we were married.”

He said it in a shamefaced way, like a schoolboy convicted of saying his prayers. His face had gone a curious pink, and he avoided meeting Claudia’s eyes.

But she was not thinking of his confession, she was thinking of Colin Paton. Why had he not married? Was her easy explanation the right one? Why, no, he had never wanted to marry her.

“You don’t imagine Colin Paton wanted to marry me, do you?” she asked.

“Well, I shouldn’t have been surprised if you and he had fixed it up. You used to go about a lot together, and you’re not a woman a man would feel platonically about. I thought he went away so hurriedly because of your engagement. But, of course, you know him much better than I.”

She found the thought curiously interesting and a little exciting, even while she tried to dismiss it. He had never said a word that could be construed into love-making. Surely there would have been some word or look that would have betrayed him if it were as Jack suggested.

Jack looked at his watch. “By Jove, we must go if we’re going. Come along, old girl, she’s on in the first house at eight, and it’s a long drive down there. It’s the wilds of beyond, over the river. Go and put on something quiet and oldish. There’s a good deal of dust knocking about behind the scenes.”

The drive was, as he had said, a long one, through narrow streets and past huge lumbering tramcars that were new to Claudia. The streets during the latter part of the journey were lined with roadside stalls illuminated by flaring naptha lamps that cast weird shadows over faces that reminded her of those in Dickens’ novels. There were barrows with all kinds of china, stalls brilliantly red with joints of meat, others piled high with greenstuff and with trays of toffee and sweets. It seemed to Claudia that she had never heard so many hoarse, raucous voices before, punctuated every now and then by the pipe of some child trying to make itself heard among the tumult. Between the activities of the stalls they passed rows of grey, grimy little houses, timber-yards and factories, brightly-lit public houses, and always the trams, still more brilliant, gliding along full of passengers, like great ships in full sail.

She and Jack did not talk intimately any more. She listened to his account of a big golfing competition. Only once did he revert to their previous conversation. It came up apropos of Jack saying that Colin Paton had been in up to the last round.

“He plays such a good, steady game. Upon my word, I like to watch him. I say, Claudia, if it were he, instead of this painter chap, I wouldn’t mind. But, then, he’s Gilbert’s friend, isn’t he?”

Claudia was spared any reply by the stoppage of their car outside a brightly-lit theatre with placards galore. She noticed at once several of The Girlie Girl in various costumes and various smiles. It was not one of the new suburban halls, but there was plenty of light on the frontage.

“Got to find the stage-door,” said Jack. “Here, perhaps this is it, up this alley.”

The alley was dark and very dirty and Claudia held up her skirts fastidiously. A boy, with a jug in his hand, came running down while they were half-way, and a man with a clay pipe came out of a grimy, narrow door at the end.

It was the stage-door. Claudia almost shrank back when she saw the narrow passage way with its blackened walls and filthy staircase, which she found she was expected to descend. The atmosphere was indescribable, frowsy, hot and stale. The strains of the orchestra reached them intermittently as the doors below were opened and shut.

“You’ll find her down there,” called out the door-keeper encouragingly. “She ain’t on yet.”

The boy had returned with the beer-jug, and the beer was being slopped on the stairs as he shoved his way past them. A curious roaring sound was in progress now, and it took Claudia a little time to realize that it was applause from the front of the house.

She followed Jack down the stairs, and she saw that the dirtiness of his surroundings did not embarrass him. Evidently he was used to them. The steps were of stone and the railings were iron, and it seemed to Claudia like some curious sort of dirty prison, rather than a hall of gaiety.

They arrived at the bottom of the stairs, and looking up from the stone steps on which she was afraid her feet might slip, she got rather a shock. Standing talking excitedly were three acrobats with the minimum of clothing, the perspiration pouring down over their make-up. It was certainly Nature in the raw, and hardly a pleasant sight at close quarters. The muscles were standing out on their arms and chests, and for the first time Claudia realized the work involved in such performances, which she usually sat through indifferently. One of them hailed Jack enthusiastically.

“Hallo! old man! Fay was asking if we’d seen you.” They cast a curious but not very interested glance at Claudia. “Come into our room and have a drink later on.”

Jack nodded, and Claudia followed him along another few yards of the passage. It struck her that most of the dirt had been made by human fingers and bodies, for above the height of five feet or so the walls were comparatively clean. They passed an open door where a stout woman in chemise and petticoat was making-up in a public manner before a looking-glass, and then she found herself in Fay’s dressing-room.

It was a small slip of a room, with flaring gas-jets protected by wire shades and two washing-basins inset in the table-shelf which went across one side of it. The heat in the room took Claudia’s breath away; it was even worse than the passages. The light was almost cruelly bright. There were three huge dress-baskets, which almost filled the apartment, and a lumpy, perspiring and heavily-breathing dresser was sitting on one of them, sewing on something spangled.

A man was just finishing speaking in a heavy, oily voice as Fay’s husband pushed open the door, and Claudia was in time to hear Fay say, in accents of excitement and pleasure: “Jim, you’re a perfect duck. I love diamonds and rubies. Come here and let me give you another kiss for it.”

So it happened that Claudia’s second view of Fay was one with her arms flung round something masculine, standing on the tips of her toes to do so. Two brawny arms were returning her hug. She felt Jack stiffen a little as Fay broke loose with a laugh.

“It’s almost like old times. Oh! but I mustn’t remember them now. I promised.... Here he is. Jack, come in. I want to introduce you to Jim Clerry—my husband.”

There was not the faintest touch of confusion in Fay’s manner or face, any more than with a child who has been caught bestowing embraces. She was evidently very pleased over something. She was radiant with good humour.

The man, who thrust out his hand and said, “Glad to know you sir,” was, in spite of his name, an obvious Jew, with heavy, coarse features and almost negroid lips. The face was only redeemed by the brightness of the dark eyes. To Claudia’s artistic sense it was almost revolting that any pretty woman should kiss him, especially anything so dainty as Fay. She wondered, indeed, that any woman could wish to do so.

In an artificial way, for she was heavily made-up, Fay was looking her prettiest. Her great blue eyes sparkled under the bunch of pale blue ostrich feathers on her head which, with some kind of a gold-lace cap, constituted her head-dress.

“Now, boys, I want you to be friends,” called out Fay, picking up a hare’s foot and giving another rub to her red cheeks. “I say, what’s the time? Have the performing dogs finished? Oh! Jack, why didn’t you tell me?” She rushed over impetuously to the doorway and pulled Claudia in. “My dear, this is nice of you. I am glad to see you. Sit on this basket. But I wish you hadn’t come to this hall. I generally do much more classy halls than this, but I have to do this on an old contract. I’m working ’em all off now. I wish I were doing ‘The Monkey and the Moth’ to-night. Have you heard it? No? Oh! it’s a ripping song. Perhaps I’ll do it at the second house. Oh! I’m forgetting my manners—never shall be a real lady—Mr. Clerry, Mrs. Currey, my sister-in-law. Isn’t she lovely?”

A knotted, hairy and none too clean hand came towards her and shook hers like a pump-handle.

“Good looks run in the family, I should say,” with what, to Claudia, was an offensive chuckle. “Well, I’ll ’op it, Fay. No room for an old mash now. Congrats on your marriage. I daresay you were wise to chuck me. Anyway, I bear no grudge. So long. Ta-ta, everyone.”

“Jim, don’t be a fool!” cried Fay, standing on one foot like a stork while the dresser laced some ribbons round her leg. “You must wait and see my turn.”

“Got to see a man at the Kilburn Empire. Only came along to give you that toy. Ta-ta. Be good, and you’ll be happy.”

With a comprehensive nod he went out, with a curious swaggering, swaying movement of the shoulders and hips.

“Come and see us at the flat,” shouted Fay, standing on the other leg. Then to Claudia: “He’s the best clog dancer on the Moss and Stoll tour. He’s out this week because of the fire last week.”

A jeweller’s morocco case lay at her elbow, and Jack looked at it suspiciously.

“What’s that, Fay?”

She opened it with great glee. “The duckiest pendant you ever saw.” It was a showy but rather expensive affair. “It’s jolly nice of Jim under the circs. I’ll wear it to-night for luck.”

Jack took the case away from her. “Fay, you can’t accept this. You’re my wife now. Don’t you see it isn’t—isn’t the thing. I’ll give you all the pendants you want.”

The blue eyes opened at first in surprise and then grew dark and stormy. Her mouth took a curve that spoilt its prettiness.

“Give it back to me at once or you and me’ll have a row. Why, they’re real diamonds and rubies. He told me he paid twenty-five quid for it wholesale. Think you’re going to chuck it in the dust-bin?” Her voice had grown a little shrill. Claudia wished she were anywhere rather than in the same room, but the dresser looked on with frank interest, “a bit of a row” evidently enlivening her profession for her.

“I shan’t chuck it in the dust-bin,” said Jack a little sulkily. “You’ve got to send it back to him. She must, mustn’t she, Claudia?”

“Not much, my dear. And have him give it to some other girl? After all, I’ve a right to it. We were great pals. I hear he’s taken up with Molly Billington, and I won’t see it hung round her fat neck. She’s a beast! Why shouldn’t he give me a wedding-present?”

She made a sudden snatch that reminded Claudia of a velvet-pawed cat, and regained possession of it. With a laugh of triumph she put it round her neck.

“I’ll wear it to-night for luck.” Her good temper had come back. She danced up to her husband, who was standing moodily regarding the mess of make-up materials spread on a towel, and held up her lips to him.

“Don’t be a loony, Jackie boy. It’s all over and done with if you’re feeling jealous. I’m good now. I won’t take anything more from him. Kiss me.” Yelps and howls suddenly assailed their ears. “There! the dogs have finished. Kiss me like a good boy and I’ll forgive you.” She looked up into his face with a delicious moue and wink. “I never said any of your girls were not to give you presents, though I’d fire them out of the flat quick enough. I say ‘Live and let live.’ Come on.”

The tempting mouth and laughing eyes were too much for Jack, and he did as she requested, though with a rueful look at Claudia that she thought it better to pretend not to see.

“Hope my voice is all right to-night. I ate a lot of bloater-paste for tea, and that dries up the voice. Don’t you find that? Only it’s a weakness of mine. Mar used to say I was weaned on bloater-paste.” She looked in the glass anxiously. “Perkins, a wee drop of stout. La—la—la—la!” She took the scale with terrific force in the small space. “Come in.” This in answer to a knock at the door. The fat woman whom they had seen next door came hurtling in. Her toilette was a little more advanced, but not much.

“I say, dearie, have you heard about Gertie Lockhart? She’s got the rheumatic fever, and they say she won’t be able to work for months. We’re getting up a little sub. for her. Give me a few bob, my dear.”

“I should think so,” said Fay emphatically. “Perkins, find my purse. I heard she was pretty bad. Rotten luck! Here’s half a quid with my love. Oh! Miss Belle de Laney—Mrs. Currey. You’ve met my husband, haven’t you?”

“Charmed to meet you, I’m sure. Fay, where did you get them feathers? I’ve been looking out for some like that for weeks. I’ve got such a cold I can hardly speak. Old Moser’s a bit screwed to-night, ain’t he? Thanks muchly, old girl. My! I wish I could keep my fat down like you. Once upon a time—yes, it sounds like a fairy-tale, don’t it?—I had legs like hers. Couldn’t fill my stockings out properly. Now it’s out-sizes, and the holes I wear in ’em!” She nodded confidentially to Claudia. “Do you know, I used to play Columbine once; then I got to principal boy, and now—well, look at me!”

“Don’t you worry,” said Fay kindly. “You’ve got a fine figure, and no one’ll overlook you. And your song’s a treat, a fair treat. Got three curtains last night, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Glad you like it. There’s a rattling good ’ouse to-night. See you later, Fay.”

“Used to be one of the prettiest girls on the halls,” explained Fay, as Miss Belle de Laney vanished; “used to know my mother. She’s a good sort, too. Husband’s a swine, and won’t do no work, and she keeps him and four kids, and makes no growl about it either. Now, Jack, I’m on in a few minutes. Take your sister round to the front. Old Moser’ll put you in a box ... la, la, la, la.... H’m!... How do I look? Knock ’em in the Old Kent Roadish? Emerald green and orange, my own idea. Got it from seeing some oranges lying with the spinach in the kitchen. Bit of shick, ain’t it? See the saucy garters?” She suddenly bestowed a hug upon Claudia. “I like you no end. I watched you just now, and you didn’t turn up your nose at Belle. Of course, she’s as common as dirt, I know that. Still, I believe in good hearts. We’re going to be real sisters, aren’t we? You can teach me the ways of high society, because I don’t want the boy to be ashamed of me. I’ll catch on quick enough if you’ll only give me a few tips, and I can keep my mouth shut if I want to.” She turned with a characteristically quick gesture—she reminded Claudia of an active robin—and caught Jack by the lapels of his coat.

“You’re not angry with me, Jumbo, are you? What does it matter?”

“I’m not exactly angry,” said Jack, looking into her face, “only, don’t you see, things are different now, and a—a man—can’t give jewellery—to a lady who is—is the wife of another man.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Moses in the bulrushes! why not? Most women would like to get the chance of having pendants. It’s a souvenny, Jack, for luck. And it’s so pretty. I’m straight now all right, so it don’t mean nothing. Crikey! that’s his second song. I must go down. Perkins, give me my coat. Here”—she rushed back again to the table and thrust a bunch of carnations into Claudia’s hand—“throw these down to me. It looks well. See you afterwards.”

CHAPTER X
“THE STAR TURN.”

Claudia had never been behind the scenes of a theatre, and she found the va et vient, the bustle and hurry of a music-hall almost bewildering, so that she received the vaguest impressions of her journey through to the front. She felt, rather than saw, the gloomy floor space behind the set littered with properties, all looking very ludicrous and childish. A man was evidently doing a song and patter turn to judge from the guffaws from the front of the house. She could see above her head men up in the flies controlling the limelight and the curtain, all of whom were in their shirt-sleeves. In fact, Jack was the only conventionally dressed person she had seen since she entered the theatre.

She was hurried along to a small door, which she found gave access to the house—Jack was evidently known to the man in charge, who nodded familiarly and called him “Capting”—and having descended some dusty, red-covered steps, she found herself suddenly in a little box in full view of the audience. Her first impression was that she had never seen so many people so tightly squeezed together before, and so intent on the comedian with the red nose and battered silk hat who was holding forth from the middle of the stage. All the theatres she had ever seen had been more or less roomy, but these people reminded her of an old-fashioned solid bouquet, except that there was practically no colour in the house. In a West-End theatre various bits of colour strike the eye, especially in the stalls and dress-circle; but as the curtain descended to great applause she saw that the house was a study in black and white—the clothing black, the faces white. There must have been some bits of colour, but they did not show. Her second impression was that she had never before realized how toiling humanity in a mass can smell. It was the odour of toil and scanty bathing, mingled with the inevitable orange and the reek of gas.

A number went up in the slot at the side—twelve—the star turn of the evening, The Girlie Girl.

The orchestra struck up one of her popular songs, and the audience, and especially the gallery boys—they looked to Claudia as though they were hanging on the ceiling by their eyelashes like flies—began to cheer and beat time to the music. She happened to glance at Jack, and she was amused to see a complacent smile taking the place of the dumbly-worried look he had been wearing since the episode of the pendant.

“They adore her,” he whispered. “She believes in making friends with the gallery boys. She says it’s the secret of her success.... I say, Claud, what could I do about that beastly pendant? She doesn’t see things as we do. She’s like a blessed babe, or a savage, in some things.”

A huge burst of cheering stopped any further conversation, and Claudia found herself looking down at her sister-in-law laughing and kissing her hands to the gallery. In the limelight she looked extraordinarily pretty and alive, and there was no man present that could have failed to see the gamine charm of her, though he might not have wanted to espouse her. Her blue eyes laughed in a friendly fashion at the house and her pretty feet began to dance to the measure while she waved aloft a sort of d’Orsay walking-stick tied up with green and orange ribbons.

Her voice, though sweet—unusually sweet for the music-halls—was nothing wonderful, and Claudia detected already signs of hard wear. She had a few particularly good notes in her top register, but it was not for her voice that she was so applauded. There was an air of infectious gaiety, a “I-like-you-and-you-like-me” camaraderie that made the vapid song and words—how incredibly bad the words were!—seem amusing.

The song was all about a ladybird and a rose in an old-fashioned garden. The rose was sweet and innocent, and the ladybird “knew a bit.” It was neither funny nor frankly improper; but the audience roared with laughter, especially when she completed each verse with a huge wink. At the end of the song she threw a kiss deliberately up to their box, which made the entire audience turn and look at them, and reduced Claudia to a state of helpless and fiery embarrassment.

“All right, boys, it’s my husband,” called out the Girlie Girl, with a chuckle, as she departed into the wings. There followed a burst of yelling, cat-calling and clapping, with cries of “Good luck!” “Send us a bit of cake, Girlie,” “Keep him in order,” “Wish you joy!”

Claudia was sorry she had not put on a veil or a more shady hat. She knew that her face was scarlet. She had never been in such a scene in her life, and she took no pleasure in being conspicuous at any time. Jack was looking sheepish, but evidently he was more used to such things.

The audience went on singing the chorus of her last song while Fay was changing in the wings. Then the orchestra struck up another tune as she appeared in a smart little vivandiÈre costume of blue, with red facings, and a cap that was stuck coquettishly sideways on her huge bunch of curls. This time she led the singing of the chorus from the stage, every now and then ceasing to sing herself, and beating time with encouraging gestures to the rather hoarse, flat voices of the crowd. It was a wonderful sight to Claudia, who was so fascinated that she forgot her embarrassment and leaned forward. As she looked round the house all the lips seemed moving—men and women, boys and children.

The audience would not part with her, and after taking eight curtains she came back to sing the last verse once more.

“Now boys, I want you to sing loudly this time. Let’s raise the roof and take the slates off. Shan’t be coming to Milton Green for a long time. Don’t whisper—sing. All of you sing, Tom and Bill, and Kate and Mary. Sing out as you would if you got your wages doubled to-morrow. Now....”

The packed audience positively yelled, and Fay laughing, kept on encouraging them with remarks:

“Go it, boys!... It’s a cure for sore throats.... Get it off your chests.... Bill, you’re not opening your mouth wide enough; no flies to-night.... Mary, a bit louder....”

Then how the tragedy happened no one ever quite understood. Fay was laughing and kissing her little hands up to the gallery, as alive as a piece of quicksilver, when the heavy curtain came down suddenly, and before anyone could shout, struck her. Claudia, who had risen in horror, caught a look of almost childish surprise in the blue eyes before Fay lay flattened out on the ground the two pretty arms thrown out helplessly in front of her, the curtain, as it were, cutting her in two.

For a moment there was a horrible awed hush; then a woman in the audience gave vent to a piercing shriek, and immediately a tumult of cries and shouts filled the auditorium. Claudia, who had been almost stunned by the suddenness of the thing, had just time to see the men fighting their way to the front, apparently with some vague idea of raising the curtain off the little body, when she saw the curtain move up a few inches and half a dozen hands gently drag the body behind it. She turned to Jack. He was staring down at the stage, his face ashen grey, his eyes starting out of his head. But he made no movement to go to his wife.

“Jack,” she panted, “we must go round. Quick! Don’t you want to get to her?”

Still he did not move, nor did he seem to hear her. He was still staring down at the stage.

“Jack!” she shook his arm. “Rouse yourself! Come quick!”

He seemed to awaken with a shudder, and she drew him into the shadow of the box.

“I can’t,” he said, with dry lips and shaking from head to foot. “I can’t.... Is she dead?”

Claudia was unaware of the great weight of the curtain, and tried to speak encouragingly.

“No, no, of course not.... Jack, you must go to her.”

“I can’t stand things like that,” he whispered, passing his hand over his clammy forehead. “You know I never could.... Oh, my God! she’s dead! Fay’s dead, and I saw her killed!”

Claudia remembered that he never could stand ugly sights or any kind of illness or decay. His ordinary good-nature entirely deserted him at such times. He had refused to go and see an old schoolfellow in his last illness, and had always tried to escape visiting his grandmother, who had died slowly of cancer.

“Jack, you must!” cried Claudia hotly, propelling him to the door. “Don’t be a coward. Perhaps she’s only stunned and wants you. You’ve got to play the man, or I’ll never speak to you again.”

Even the biting contempt in her voice did not rouse him; but he allowed himself to be dragged like one in a dream through the door and up the red stairs.

“For the sake of your manhood and the honour of the Iversons, if not for poor Fay, pull yourself together,” said Claudia sharply, as they stepped upon the stage.

A group of men were bending down over something that had been laid on a pile of coats. Others were crowding together, talking in excited, frightened whispers. The stout lady came rushing on the stage, sobbing hysterically and wringing her red hands. The orchestra commenced to play again.

A man came pushing his way after them through the door from the auditorium. Accustomed as she was to the conventional garb of West End physicians, Claudia was surprised to hear this man in a pepper-and-salt suit say: “I’m a doctor. Let me go to her.”

Jack was still dazed. With a last glance of contempt at him, Claudia went forward and took command of the situation. “Please, doctor, do all you can. I am her sister-in-law. Tell me what we should do.”

She followed him towards the little group, inwardly shrinking and desperately frightened, but outwardly calm and collected. She stood with the stage hands, as one of them. She could see by their faces that they feared a bad verdict.

Various hoarse whispers reached her while she waited, feeling as though the world had suddenly turned topsy-turvy.

“ ... The next turn ... can’t go on.... Let the orchestra play.... Tell the audience she isn’t badly hurt ... turned my blood cold.... Hadn’t time to shout.... Who dropped the damned thing?... Must have broken her spine.... Rather anyone than The Girlie Girl.”

The doctor had risen from his examination and was coming towards her. She nerved herself for a shock; but she could hear her own heart thumping against her ribs.

“Not—not——” She could not get the words out of her dry lips.

The doctor gravely shook his head. “No, she’s alive. Bad injury to the spine, I should say. Get her to a hospital”—then taking in the quality of the woman who had said she was the sister-in-law—“or to her home at once and call in a specialist.”

Claudia read the look in his eyes, which was compounded of pity and deep emotion. She had seen that look once in the eyes of a man who had been entrusted with the task of breaking the news of her husband’s death to a poor woman on their country estate.

“Is she—very bad?” she whispered. “Will she die?”

“I’m afraid not—yet.”

Claudia reeled up against a piece of scenery. She never forgot that moment. The orchestra playing a rag-time melody, the stout woman sobbing, the regret in the eyes of the doctor.

“You mean——”

“It’s not likely she will ever move off her bed again. She’s paralysed.”

CHAPTER XI
“OUT AT SEA”

Such confusion as existed in Fay’s flat that night Claudia had never conceived possibly. Life in Circe’s household had been somewhat erratic occasionally, but there had been a sort of order in the disorder, and a certain peaceful current had always flowed over internal convulsions. But in Fay’s home everything in the way of discipline and order—if there ever were any—fell to pieces when she was carried home unconscious. The two domestics wailed and sobbed—Polly at first went into hysterics, and had to have cold water thrown over her—the telephone bell went incessantly, and almost before Fay had been put to bed by Claudia, newspaper reporters filled the hall with insistent inquiries.

Claudia, though she kept her head pretty well and controlled the panic in her heart, had always been accustomed to have competent underlings to do things for her, and she did not know what ought to be done in such a crisis, what specialist should be fetched, and where to obtain a nurse at a minute’s notice.

It was Colin Paton who came to the rescue in answer to her telephone inquiries, and reduced order out of chaos.

Directly she saw him walk into the hall Claudia felt a sense of instant relief. In a few minutes the reporters had all gone, the telephone-bell rang no more, and the specialist and nurse were on their way. No one seemed surprised that he should take command, the servants obeyed him without a query. He seemed to have an almost mesmeric calming effect on everyone.

“Where’s your brother?” he asked, as soon as he had a moment to spare for essentials.

“He’s shut himself in the dining-room.” She told him of his attitude.

“It’s partly physical, just as some men—the bravest—cannot stand the sight of blood. But I must talk to him.... Claudia, you are dead tired. There’s nothing more to be done at the moment. She’s still unconscious.” The clock in the room struck eleven, and she dropped wearily into a chair. His keen eyes suddenly took on a tenderness that she did not see as they searched her drawn face. “Have you had a meal this evening?”

She shook her head without raising her eyes, for she suddenly felt a weak sort of feeling, so that she was afraid if she looked up and met his gaze the tears would come running down her cheeks. He would despise her for such an exhibition, but everything—everything seemed so wrong and miserable.

“Then you’ll have one at once.... Yes, I know you feel as if you can’t eat, but you must.” He put his hand on her shoulder, and there was something so sympathetic and yet so invigorating in his touch that she felt new courage flow into her veins. She did not know that the sight of two tears that would escape down her cheeks ere she could overcome her weakness nearly unnerved him, and made the cheap tawdry little room suddenly blur before his eyes.

What he said to Jack, Claudia never knew, but ten minutes later Jack came out of the dining-room looking like a whipped cur, but holding his head with a certain forced rigidity, and his lips were steady as he said to her:

“Claudia, is there anything I can do? I’ve been a beast, I know. Shall I”—he could not control a wince of repugnance—“shall I go to her?”

She told him that she was still unconscious. “But when she recovers, if she asks for you, you must go to her.”

“Yes, I will, I will. Only, Claud, for God’s sake don’t go away and leave us to-night. I couldn’t stand that.”

Claudia looked at Paton inquiringly. Everyone seemed to be doing that to-night. There was a slight pinkness of her eyes, and somehow, to Paton, it gave her a new and rather pathetic character. The dark eyes were very heavy but curiously beautiful in the white face, and the hard brilliancy that had characterized them recently had temporarily vanished.

“I’ll stay, too, if you wish,” said Paton simply, “but in case she recovers consciousness she might like to see a woman she knows as well as her nurse. A woman is always such a comfort to another in time of illness, don’t you think?”

“I hardly know,” admitted Claudia, trying to force some soup down her throat, “you see, I’ve never been in contact with such things as—grave illnesses. Of course I’ll stay.”

The specialist had arrived by this time, and Paton left the brother and sister together. Claudia tried to comfort him as she would have a child.

“I don’t mean to be heartless,” blubbered Jack, his face working pitiably, “only you don’t know how I feel.... I do love her.... I’m sorry I was so cross about the pendant. She put it on for luck.... Oh, God!”

It struck Claudia what a ridiculously immature couple Fay and Jack were. They were small ships that should have kept near shore, and now Destiny had blown them suddenly out to sea. And she herself was tacking about in the wind, blown this way and that, and finding no place where she might safely anchor. Somewhere at the back of her mind she knew Frank Hamilton was no permanent anchorage for any woman. Surely, the children of Circe were not the luckiest of mortals!

It seemed ages before Paton came back to them. Jack was drinking himself into a fuddled state, and Claudia was too anxious herself to keep watch over him. Afterwards she realized that she could have written an inventory of that commonplace room.

His face told them that he had no good news before he spoke.

“Tell us the worst,” said Jack thickly, “always better to know everything.”

“The medical verdict is paraphlegia. Fatal injury to the nerves at the base of the spine.... She’s coming round now. She can’t feel any pain, that’s one blessing, poor child.”

“That means—she is paralysed?” whispered Claudia.

“From the waist downwards ... she may live for some time. I think, Claudia, it would be kind of you to go to her. The strange nurse might frighten her. I don’t think we ought—to tell her there’s no hope. The doctor says it is always better in such cases to let the patient think she will recover. Keeps the mind from dwelling on the inevitable. You understand, Jack?”

Jack nodded, and then dropping his head on his hands, commenced to cry.

“My little Fay.... Never to dance again. I can’t believe it.... Never still from morning till night.... I’m sorry I was cross about the pendant....”

Claudia stole softly into the garish, pretentious bedroom that seemed to mock them all with its air of coquetry. The nurse had reduced it to something like order, but the thousand and one knickknacks were still lying about, and Claudia found the pale blue satin bows odious. Two tiny white satin slippers were on a chair. Claudia averted her eyes from them. They would never dance gleefully any more.

She found Fay lying with her blue eyes fixed wonderingly on the nurse, who was trying to induce her to take a restorative.

“Why are you here?” she was saying wonderingly. “You’re a real nurse, aren’t you? I don’t understand. Why am I—Oh!” She gave a cry of relief at the sight of Claudia that accomplished the conquest of her sister-in-law’s heart. “You’ll tell me. I like you. What’s the matter? Oh! I do feel that tired, too tired to move!”

“Don’t you remember, dear, the curtain came down and hit you. You—you fainted, you know. We thought we’d get a nurse, because you—you’ll have to stop in bed and rest for a while, and nurses know how to make one so comfortable, don’t they?”

Her eyes jumped and snapped. “Ill? Me ill? Good gracious! then I can’t play next week at Shepherd’s Bush? I say, I must let them know at once. I’m topping the bill, and——”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Claudia soothingly, “we’ll arrange that for you.”

Fay was silent for quite a minute, and Claudia wondered of what she was thinking, but she did not dare to inquire. What was going on in that unformed, unreflective brain? Had she any suspicion?

“I heard of a man being struck by a curtain once,” she said suddenly. “I must claim damages immediately. You instruct Samuels.... The pendant didn’t bring me luck, after all.... I ought to get heavy damages. I’ll talk to Samuels about it to-morrow.”

CHAPTER XII
“ASHES”

The following Monday morning brought an ugly scene with Gilbert, who learned not only the tragic and sensational news from the daily paper, but his wife’s part in it. For somehow the reporters had found out that she was present at the performance, and “the beautiful Mrs. Currey” was credited in one sensational rag with having “dashed forward heroically to try and save her sister-in-law, The Girlie Girl, from the impact of the curtain.” Claudia had not reckoned for this notoriety, and if Gilbert had shown any human sympathy with poor Fay she would have forgiven his ebullition of temper as excusable under the circumstances.

“You deliberately took advantage of my being in the country to frequent low music-halls with this woman,” he flung at her, his eyes bloodshot with anger.

Claudia controlled her rising anger. “I went on the spur of the moment, Gilbert. Jack came in to fetch me on Saturday afternoon.”

“I suppose you’ve been planning it for some time,” he sneered. “It was a nice thing to have to explain to my father and mother. My mother! who has never been in a music-hall in her life.”

“Perhaps it would do her good if she had.... You talk as if I knew what was going to happen.”

“Scandal on scandal!”

“Scandal! Is that all you can call it?” cried Claudia, a picture of Fay, so pitifully flattened out under the curtain, rising before her eyes. “Do you realize that she is paralysed for life—that everything is finished for her?”

“It’s a pity she wasn’t killed outright,” returned Gilbert callously, “instead of remaining a disgrace to the family. But my mother warned me long ago,” he added injudiciously, almost beside himself with rage, for now these paroxysms grew on him and contorted any sense of fairness or kindness that had ever been in his composition.

“Of what did your mother warn you?” said Claudia, her nostrils dilating, her eyes flashing. “Of marrying me? I insist on an answer.”

“This isn’t the first scandal in your family, is it? I’m not throwing your mother’s sins up against you, you are not responsible for her; but why on earth have you got the same flair for the sensational? You’ve deliberately courted this by going to see this—this woman.”

“Don’t call her ‘this woman,’ as though she were a leper,” said Claudia passionately. “She’s earned her living by hard work ever since she was fourteen years old. How many women can boast of that? What if she hasn’t led a conventional life? A good many women whom you shake by the hand are a good deal less virtuous, and certainly far less honest. Because she hasn’t dodged behind a wedding-ring or covered up her tracks you look upon her with contempt. And even if she were the most unscrupulous, mercenary creature alive, you might be sorry now. Twenty-two, and life over for her!” To Claudia, with her Grecian appreciation of youth and life, this seemed a tragedy of tragedies. Once, as a child, when a gambolling puppy from the stables had got under the wheels of the brougham and been killed she had wept for days, and as she had looked down at the little fat white body that would never frisk any more, she had learned a lesson never to be forgotten. The puppy had taught her early to see the inestimable boon of youth and life. To be alive, to have all one’s faculties and powers of enjoyment, that is the great gift of the gods, she had told herself then. There had always been something of the pagan in her, and she had ever refused to believe that death is the gate of Life.

“So you are sprouting the modern jargon, are you?” said Gilbert angrily. “Listen, Claudia. You married me, and you must respect my name. I thought you were different from the women in your set, or I should not have married you. Apparently you are not different, but I am different from the husbands of those women. You’d better remember that. I allow you to go your own way, I give you perfect liberty, but on condition that you do not drag my name into club smoking-rooms and smart restaurants. There has never been a breath of talk about my mother, and there shall not be about my wife. If you want that kind of notoriety—you will not remain my wife.”

Claudia stood motionless, listening to this outburst, very erect, her head thrown up, her neck making a beautiful but disdainful line with her chin. A sarcastic, enigmatic smile played round her sensitive mouth, and her eyes were cold and keenly critical. She had suddenly seen the coarseness of his lips, the deadly, soul-destroying coldness of his self-satisfied, sombre eyes. He was merely a male, a high-handed, aggressive male, with the highly specialized brain of a lawyer. Heart? When had he ever shown any heart? She had never once touched his heart, only his senses. His feeling for his mother and father was only a sort of clannish family pride. Why, even Jack’s love for Fay, lacking as it was in all the big qualities that make love worth while, was a much finer thing than Gilbert’s feeling for her. For a moment a revulsion of shame, a feeling of humiliation swept over her at the thought of what she had given him.

“If you were not afraid of being laughed at, of being made to look small, you wouldn’t care a jot what I did, would you?” she said with deadly precision. “You have a profound contempt for women, haven’t you? You married me for my looks, because I aroused your passion, because it is the general habit of man to instal a woman in his home. I am installed here and I have the privilege of calling myself Mrs. Currey; otherwise, had I been a woman of lower station and more easy virtue, you would have fired me out long ago, wouldn’t you? I am to live on the ashes of your passion—I, a woman with no children! You are asking too much, my husband. As for that poor, maimed child, I shall go to her as often as she wants me.”

She was surprised, when he had gone, at the calmness with which she could turn to her ordinary occupations. She felt anger, contempt, the sting of her own humiliation, but he had no longer the power to wound her heart. She remembered the time—was it ages ago or only a year or so?—when, after an altercation or lack of response on his part, she had fled to her room and sobbed or brooded until she had made herself ill. Then her being had been shaken to its foundations, and she had felt the results on her nervous system for days.

But this morning, once the fierce blaze of her anger had burned out, she shrugged her shoulders and sat down to her escritoire. She must make her life without Gilbert. To allow a man she neither loved nor respected to destroy her balance would be a sign of weakness.

She was organizing, with Colin Paton, a concert in aid of a home for Penniless Gentlewomen, a charity which had always aroused her sympathy, and there was a good deal to be done. She was herself feeing Mrs. Milton to sing, and she had promised to come in that morning and give her some advice on the other artistes to be engaged.

It was not long before the maid showed her into her boudoir, but a much smarter-looking woman than she had been at Mrs. Rivington’s party. Claudia had contrived to make her accept one or two modish dresses without hurting her feelings or her dignity, and she had also secured her several lucrative engagements. It is needless to say that Margaret Milton’s generous heart held almost an adoration for Claudia.

“I hope I’m not late,” she said, as she came into the room, “but I had to do a little grave-digging before I could get away. Ugh! I thought the whole neighbourhood would be poisoned, the monkeys!”

Claudia laughingly inquired whose grave she had been digging.

“You must know that a favourite cat died about a month ago, and was gathered to—the other cats in limbo. I allowed the children to bury it in the back garden—quite deep—and erect a tombstone. This morning, just as I was coming out, I became aware of an awful effluvia in the house. I wondered if the drains had suddenly gone wrong, and rushed round distraught. I found it was worse at the back of the house. Then I looked out of the window and saw——”

“No!”

“Yes. They had disinterred the cat to see how ‘she was getting on.’”

After they had both laughed over the children’s enterprise, they got to work. Claudia asked her opinion about an accompanist.

“Lucy Hamilton used to accompany most sympathetically, but—no—I don’t suppose she would have decent clothes to come up in, and I daresay she may not have kept up her music.”

“Lucy Hamilton,” repeated Claudia, “not a sister of——?”

“Yes, Frank’s old-maid sister. Poor Lucy! She had such talent, and she was sacrificed to him right along.”

Claudia pondered a minute. “Does she still live somewhere in the country?”

“Salisbury. Yes, she gives music-lessons at a shilling an hour! It must be torture to her. Her old mother and she live in a tiny home together.”

“But, Mrs. Milton,” said Claudia, bewildered, “are they as poor as all that? How can they be when——?” She stopped, and then she decided to put the question that had been on her lips. “Will she not accept help from her son Frank?”

“Oh, yes! he does help her—a little.” Then she continued thoughtfully: “It does seem wrong, doesn’t it, that people won’t pay for pictures nowadays. I suppose we shall soon have no artists.”

Claudia stared. “But he gets big prices now for his pictures. A couple of years ago, I know, he was nearly starving, but he gets his own prices now.”

It was Mrs. Milton’s turn to look startled. For the moment she had forgotten that Claudia and he were friends. She tried to gloss over what might have been an indiscretion.

“I’m glad to hear it; perhaps—no doubt he will be able to help them more soon.... I think Miss Ronald would accompany splendidly, and I’ve got her address at home.”

“Mrs. Milton,” went on Claudia, a curious expression in her eyes, “have you heard from this Lucy Hamilton recently? And has—Mrs. Hamilton been a good mother to him—them both?”

“I heard from Lucy only yesterday. I wanted her to come up for a change—you can’t think how she revels in a few concerts, it’s a joy to take her, and I can always get tickets—but her own words were: ‘I’m much too shabby to come to town; such a lot of pupils owe me money, and mother’s illness in the winter was expensive.’” She did not add that the writer had gone on to say that her brother did not like her to come to town unless she was decently dressed, and that though he was getting on and acquiring reputation, he could not at the moment help them more than he was doing.

“As for Mrs. Hamilton being a good mother,” went on Mrs. Milton, “she’s been one of the best. Her husband was a small solicitor and left them very badly off. It was she who screwed the money out of the housekeeping that Frank should go to Paris and study painting. Lucy, who was just as clever at music, had to teach herself. I do hope, now he is getting on, that Frank will make their lives easier.”

“You don’t like him?” said Claudia abruptly. There was a subtle something in Mrs. Milton’s tone that convinced her.

Mrs. Milton hesitated.

“You can speak quite honestly. Why not? You knew him for some years, did you not?”

“Yes, we lived next door to them in the High Street for years.... I think artists are always rather egotistical and selfish, don’t you? His mother adored him, and perhaps that doesn’t do a man any good. I want my boys to have happy memories of their youth and me, but I do try not to spoil them. I try and remember that they will be husbands to some nice girls later on. He always let her do all the giving ... one shouldn’t give too much, however much one loves. One should insist on some exchange, if only for the sake of the loved one.”

“And yet,” said Claudia, scrawling weird figures on the blotting-pad, “they say that the ideal love means self-sacrifice, that true happiness is to be found in giving.”

“But it isn’t an ideal world in which we live, is it?” said Mrs. Milton gently. “Isn’t that sometimes a form of selfishness? I know by experience with the children that it’s often the tempting path, ‘the easiest way,’ but if one really loves the little minds and hearts, one must sometimes bear the tears and the sulks that follow when you are firm. You’ll know that one day, when you have children of your own.”

“And with men and women?”

“Many women, I think, have made themselves and their men unhappy by giving too much and too freely. It’s become a habit with women. We can’t stand their frowns and their tempers. But I’m sure it’s a mistake. My husband is the dearest of men, but at the beginning of our life together I nearly became a doormat—just of my own accord.... Shall we fix on Miss Ronald?”

They worked steadily for half an hour, when there was a loud commotion on the stairs. It startled Margaret Milton, but Claudia knew the cause. Pat had lately acquired a huge puppy sheepdog, with the result that her arrival was always somewhat like that of a circus in full swing.

Pat and the dog, who had been christened Socrates because he was such a fool, came tumbling in together.

“He’s chewed up half a mat downstairs while I was using your telephone, Claudia. How do you do, Mrs. Milton. Allow me, Mrs. Milton—Socrates. Socky, go and lie down and take a short snooze. He’s the terror of Mayfair. He upset two children and a mail-cart this morning, and he’s been in the Round Pond and splashed me from head to foot. How’s poor little Fay getting on?”

“No change,” said Claudia, with a sigh. “I’m going down there after lunch.”

Pat drew in her breath. “Heavens! if anything like that should happen to me, I’d go mad! I should yell the house down. She must know something. It’s a fortnight now. She must suspect something.”

“Sometimes I wonder,” said Claudia. “Sometimes I think I see panic in her eyes, then the next moment she’s asking me a conundrum she’s found in some penny journal and roaring with laughter at my wild guesses. She talks about getting up soon—she’s had the piano taken in, and yesterday she was singing ‘to keep her voice from getting mildewy,’ but—I don’t know. If she knows—if she’s got any suspicion, she’s the pluckiest little soul I’ve ever known.”

After that first awful night, it had become a practice for her to go down to the flat almost daily, each time devising some fresh forms of amusement—Fay was like a child—and directing the domestic machinery, which was now much smoother. The clinging helpless hands of Fay gave her a strange feeling, and a curious bond had sprung up between them. To Fay, Claudia, with her education and culture, was something wonderfully clever, something she had never known, something that made her long, in her generous, undisciplined heart, to emulate, to grow into. She considered Claudia’s knowledge of books and pictures amazing. She told all her fellow-professionals who flocked to see her—and they were a strange, bizarre crowd—that her sister-in-law was the most wonderful and splendid lady in the world, and when Jack occasionally talked carelessly of his sister, she was roused to such volleys of wrathful words that the nurse had to ask him not to excite her. In all her moods—sometimes babyish, when she would play with dolls and mechanical toys; sometimes fretful, when nothing pleased her and she wailed to get well; sometimes optimistic and full of ideas for new turns and songs—Claudia was always wanted and loudly welcomed. Fay did not always want Jack—perhaps she divined something of his repugnance to sickness—she did not always want her “pals,” but she always listened eagerly for Claudia’s step in the hall, and if she did not come, sent the nurse to the telephone.

Soon after, Mrs. Milton took her departure.

Pat sat in a low chair, her long legs sprawling half across the room. For a long time neither of them spoke. Claudia stood gazing out of the window across the Park. The trees were gloriously green now, and like fluttering heralds of summer, brilliant in the sunlight. The sun touched the gilt of the Albert Memorial so that it mingled with the tender greens and almost reconciled her to it. She was thinking of Mrs. Milton’s story of Hamilton’s mother and sister. She knew her statement was correct. She knew several large cheques had been despatched to him by people with whom she had brought him in touch. Was he—she shrank from the word like a loathsome disease—was he mean? He had evidently not wished to renew his acquaintance with Mrs. Milton that night at the Rivingtons. Why? Did he desire to forget his small beginnings—the obligations of which she must have reminded him? It was a corroding idea, and Claudia was glad when Pat commenced to speak in a—for her—thoughtful tone.

“I must be a throw-back. That’s the explanation always trotted out nowadays, isn’t it?”

“A throw-back, Pat? What on earth are you talking about?” She turned and looked at the fresh, boyish face, the slim, long limbs, the sophisticated and yet innocent eyes of her sister.

“We’re a funny family, aren’t we? We’ve just dragged ourselves up anyhow. I went to a lecture on heredity the other day. What do we inherit, I asked myself? Father’s an invertebrate jellyfish, and mother—well, mother’s Circe! Grandfather, on mother’s side, is a gay old dog still, and father’s father was a leader of lost causes and died young. Bit of a jumble, isn’t it? I’ve been puzzling over it for days. I heard someone say of you the other day—of course, they were discussing you in connection with The Girlie Girl—‘she’s Circe’s daughter.’ We’re both Circe’s daughters, and I’m not a bit like her. I say, I’m a throw-back somewhere. Mother always cared for men, never for women. I don’t care a scrap for men in any sexual way—oh, yes! don’t look so wise, I’ve experimented in a few flirtations—and I simply hate them—that way. I like hunting with them and playing golf and wading in the water, fishing, but directly they get sentimental and want to kiss me I curl up inside. Most girls, I’ve found out, like being kissed, even if they are not in love. I nearly murdered Dicky Trevor the other day because he kissed me unexpectedly on the nape of the neck. No, Circe hasn’t given me any heritage, and I don’t think I’m so backboneless as father. I’ve got a scheme growing in my head—I shan’t tell you about it till I’m sure of my own mind—but it doesn’t include a husband.”

Claudia looked attentively at her sister. For the first time it flashed across her that the baffling thing about Pat was that so far she was quite sexless. She had been eager to come out for the fun of the dancing and the parties, but she had never had that shy anticipation of love that makes so many girls of eighteen eager to be presented. The books she read as a child were always stirring adventure stories, travels and records of real achievements. Fairy-tales with the all-conquering prince had bored her, all except the passages that dealt with sanguinary fights and treasure-trove. Later on she had read one or two famous French romances out of curiosity, but they had failed to make any appeal whatever. Her enthusiasms, her outbursts of passion, her thrills, were reserved for golf and hockey, and she had once said that the greatest and most satisfying moments of life to her were when she was on the back of her favourite horse, following the hounds. She liked men. Indeed, on the whole, she preferred them to women, but only because they were better and more vigorous sportsmen and less liable to be petty and jealous. As Claudia surveyed her she realized that she neither could give nor did she wish to proffer advice. Pat must face her own problem. Before her marriage she would have rushed in where experience fears to tread, and talked to Pat of the joys of love, of the folly of the woman who disdained or belittled what man could offer. Now all her landmarks were gone. She had messed up her own life. All she could do was to listen and reflect what an awful muddle and enigma life was for women, and wonder why Providence had given them no chart to steer by.

“You see,” continued Pat, “I’ve thought the thing out, and it wouldn’t be playing cricket to marry a man if you didn’t want him—that way. I tried to tell a man the other day how I felt, and he said he’d be a chum and wouldn’t worry me; but I saw the look in his eyes even then, and I knew it would be hell for both of us. Men always want women that way.”

Who had said something like that recently? Ah, yes! it had been said by Jack, apropos of Colin Paton.

“You are very wise this morning,” said Claudia, with a forced laugh. “If you feel this way there may be men who also are celibates at heart.”

“Haven’t met any,” said Pat laconically, giving Socky a kick to stop his stentorian dreams. “He’s chasing bunnies in the Park.”

“Oh! there are men. A good many women complain of—lack of attention on the part of their husbands.”

“Then the attentions go to some other woman, or he’s an uninteresting money-grabber.”

“Don’t generalize so much.... What about a man like Colin Paton?”

Pat laughed derisively, so that Socky got up and barked. “Shut up, you fool; I’m laughing at my sister, who has the foolishness of a babe! Have you known Paton all these years and not seen beneath the surface? Gracious! even if he likes me—which he doesn’t expect to crack jokes with—that would be the last man I’d experiment with. He’s full of emotion underneath that quiet exterior. If I could return it, I’d rather like to be loved by Colin Paton. Why, he’d make the most tender and ardent of lovers if he gained the heart of the right woman. Have you seen him with his widowed mother? Oh! he’s perfectly sweet to her, and she adores him. She’s such a nice, cosy thing, too; you feel you want to sit on a footstool at her feet and have her stroke your hair.”

“If you’re right, it’s curious he hasn’t married.”

She was looking out of the window again, and she didn’t see the curious look her sister cast at her. Pat finished up the conversation with:

“Come on, Socks, we’re going to our happy home. Men like Colin Paton often get left because most women are fools where love is concerned. It’s been the study of their lives for centuries, and even now they can’t tell a piece of glass from a diamond. Because a man doesn’t come along like a raging whirlwind they think he’s cold, and because he loudly swears fidelity like a tinkling cymbal they think they can put their money on him. The metaphors are a bit mixed, but what I’m driving at is this. Women seldom have any judgment where men are concerned, and the nicer the woman the less sound is her judgment. Only bad women have good judgment regarding men. I—Patricia Iverson—have spoken. Selah! Socks!”

CHAPTER XIII
A DANGER SIGNAL

Fritz Neeburg was busily writing in his study when his man came to tell him that Carey Image had called to see him. He was just starting a chapter of his new book, entitled “Neurasthenia and its Causes,” but he at once put his pen down.

“This is good of you to receive me,” said Image warmly; “I can see you are busy.”

“Not too busy to stop and have a chat with you. I hope you don’t want to consult me professionally? You haven’t got the disease of the age, have you?”

Image shook his bird-like head and then sighed.

“No, but I came on behalf of someone else—someone in whom you are interested, or I shouldn’t waste your valuable time. Have you seen Gilbert Currey lately?”

“Not since the attack of influenza, when he”—dryly—“asked my advice and didn’t take it.”

“Ah! you must see him, Neeburg.”

Neeburg never looked surprised or startled, he had the Teutonic phlegmatic temperament. He waited for Image to go on.

“My dear fellow, I won’t usurp your province, but I don’t like the look of him at all. I’ve seen men before on the verge of a nervous breakdown. We got a good many out in India, and I’ve come to know that curious inward, burning look of the eyes.... I was very upset yesterday. I met him suddenly in King’s Bench Walk and he—didn’t know me.”

Neeburg opened his eyes a little.

“He passed it off by saying he was immersed in some difficult case; but I could see he was intensely annoyed with himself, and that led me to deduce it is not the first time his memory has played a trick on him. I needn’t say any more to you, as a physician, except that Robson, the Attorney-General, told me in confidence the other day that he is taking far too much work, and that he is not—doing it well. He’s noticed a great change in him, and he told me, as an old friend, to use my influence to make him take a holiday.”

The eyes of the two men met—Image’s brilliantly bright through his eyeglasses, those of the physician calmly reflective. Then Neeburg got up from his seat and paced the room without speaking.

“I’ve warned him repeatedly,” he said at length, “and I’ve watched it coming. But Gilbert is not an easy man to prescribe for. He is eaten up with ambition, he is so keen on ‘the game’ that he takes no heed of warnings, mine or Nature’s. That man has worked like a horse for the last five years; in fact, he has worked incessantly ever since his boyhood, when his father urged him to win scholarships for the glory of the Currey family.... The father has only been half a success; he had driving power but no judgment, and he was unpopular at the Bar. He took up politics, but he was too vehement and dogmatic for his party. He concentrated his ambition on Gilbert, and Gilbert is very like him—very. With Gilbert, what I call ‘the game’ is the very marrow of his bones. You might as well ask him to change his body as change his manner of life. He had a very good constitution, and I hoped it would stand the strain.... But it’s gone to pieces very badly of late. Outside people will say suddenly, but he’s been undermined for some time. If his memory is going ... God help him and Claudia!”

“Extraordinary he can be so blind to her charm and qualities ... extraordinary!... I am sometimes ashamed he is my godson.”

“The men in the Currey family have—to put it bluntly—used women. They have never rated them highly. Claudia is a very emotional, highly-strung woman, with all sorts of splendid qualities which he does not appreciate; she was never meant to marry a Currey.”

“In my young days we didn’t hear so much talk of ‘the game,’ this feverish desire to work one’s self into an early grave. Is it a modern failing, doctor?”

“No, men have always sacrificed themselves and devoted their best energies to it, but to-day we are suffering from it in an aggravated form, because most of the things men set their hopes upon are not worth while. It gets worse every year. This craze for luxury, for display—and that comes a good deal from our women-folk—first of all eggs a man on to accumulate money or make a position, then the spirit of the game gets into him, even if he isn’t born with it, and before he has time to turn round and reflect he is in the midst of the scrimmage and he doesn’t want to get out of it. It’s a poison that eats into the very flesh, that corrodes his blood, that makes him blind to the waste of his life. Oh! I’ve been watching it for years.”

Image’s bright eyes watched Neeburg.

“It’s worse in America than it is here, but every day the pace gets hotter, the gambling more feverish. The wrecks of men that have passed through my hands, men that at forty and earlier are practically used up, and no amount of drugs or rest will do them much good! They ‘get through’ the rest of their lives instead of living! While you were in India I practised in New York for a couple of years with Finlay McKay. One man came to me at the beginning of my stay, and begged me to pull him together. I preached a holiday, relaxation. He said ‘No,’ but as soon as he had made a couple of million dollars he’d stop. He’d set himself that task. A year later he came to me in such a frazzled state that I was ashamed of my sex. He’d made his pile, he’d gained his ambition. ‘Now rest,’ said I, ‘you have still a slender chance if you’re careful.’ ‘I can’t, doctor,’ he said. ‘I can’t do anything except work. I’ve done what I set out to do, but I can’t stop now. Life without my work wouldn’t be worth while. I thought it was a bank balance I wanted, but it’s “the game!”’ I told that man I would give him six months if he didn’t clear out of it and go for a long sea voyage. There, in my presence, he deliberately chose the six months. He died in four.... Most men nowadays are crazy to get ahead of other men. To a man, ‘the game’: to a woman, love; for whatever women may do or have done, love for them will always remain the great adventure.”

“Love was for me ‘the great adventure,’ as well as for her,” said Image quietly. “But there, I have something of the woman in me. I realize that.”

“And you have a thousand happy memories, and you still enjoy every minute of your life, don’t you? Everything in the world interests you. You have provided yourself with a future. You’re a wise man, Image.”

The little man shook his head with a smile. “A sweet and a brave woman was wise for me, Neeburg.... You will use your influence with Gilbert?”

“Yes, I will try and frighten him. I did that once very successfully, but my patient was not so stubborn as Gilbert. He had a wife and four children, and she begged me to stop him while there was yet time. He was already in such a state of nerves that the home was all misery and apprehension. Generally we tell patients that they are better than they really are, but this man I frightened stiff. He went for a long sea-voyage, and the fright and the cleansing breath of Nature—oh! so kindly, if we would only heed her!—cured him. He’s doing exceedingly well now—he’s rapidly becoming famous—but he’s going slow, and they are bringing up their boys to ignore this modern competitive spirit.... I’ll do my best, Image, you may be sure of that. But his vigorous early manhood is against him. He won’t believe, I fear, in the danger that threatens.... Have you heard about Colin Paton? I was told yesterday by Sir Andrew Morgan that he’s going to create a sensation shortly by one of the finest books on Sociology that has so far been written. Sir Andrew read it for a publishing firm, and he confessed it staggered him—the knowledge and judgment of the thing. I’m glad; I always knew there was real stuff in Paton!”

CHAPTER XIV
AN UNEMOTIONAL FISH

Claudia had been giving a little luncheon-party, and she had kept Mr. Littleton, the American publisher, in order to have a talk with him on a new volume of poetry she had been reading. The other guests had all gone, and she always enjoyed talking to him. It was left to him to give her the news of Paton’s book.

“By and by,” he said casually, “Mr. Colin Paton is a friend of yours, is he not? I think I have heard you mention his name?”

“Oh, yes!” returned Claudia easily, “I have known him for years. He has always been a guide, philosopher and friend, and especially in your department.”

“Don’t! It sounds as if I sold ribbons at the stores.... Then, of course, you know about this book of his on Sociology that is bound to make a stir this autumn?”

Claudia sat up abruptly in her chair.

“What book? Has Colin Paton written a book on Sociology?”

“One of the finest, if not the finest, that has yet been written. Such a lot of twaddle and froth is usually poured forth on that subject, but this book is the real thing, and exceedingly well written too. I’ve secured it for America, where we’ve got a good many books on that subject. But I reckon this will put all the others out of court. Where has he got all his knowledge, Mrs. Currey?”

Claudia was some little time before she replied to his question. Colin had not told her! He had been writing this book for a long time, and he had never confided in her! She had thought they were such intimate friends, she had always taken it for granted that he told her—well, most things that were not other people’s secrets, and she was left to learn of his book from a new friend. Why, surely she might have expected that he would have told her long ago of his intention to write it. She had always thought their friendship meant that.

She was very hurt and also a little astounded. It was as though a favourite and well-known view had suddenly taken on an entirely new aspect. Another landmark that she thought was firmly planted in almost eternal solidity seemed to have shifted. She wondered wildly if the whole world were not built on a quicksand, if there were any stability or permanence in any of the human emotions or relations. Their vaunted friendship, what was it worth, if it did not mean that she had his confidence and he had hers?

Littleton wondered at the blank look on her face as she replied rather mechanically:

“Oh, I think he has been studying such questions for years, ever since he was up at Oxford. He’s not a man to talk much or make any show.... Yes, I can quite imagine the book is good.”

She could not turn and accuse herself of living in a fool’s paradise, for she was too unhappy to dwell in such a favoured, sunny clime; but did she know the world she lived in, the people by whom she was surrounded? Why, her younger sister Pat had been accusing her only the other day of bad judgment where men were concerned. Pat had laughed at her on this very subject, and said she did not really know Colin Paton. Was it true? Can one see a man constantly for years and not really know the inner man? But she had always credited herself with unusual powers of divination. She despised other people for taking the world and its creatures at face-value.

“The amount of reading he must have done for this book is enormous,” went on Littleton. “Because, unlike most wildly enthusiastic reformers, who fling adjectives about and scream at the top of their voices, he has marshalled an amazing array of facts and figures. That, and his own discrimination and judgment, make the book so fine. And there are one or two passages, where he lets himself go, that are absolutely stirring. As you know”—with a laugh—“I’m in the trade, and I don’t often enthuse over a book, but I was greatly struck with this.”

“I am glad,” said Claudia dully, “very glad.”

This book had been in his mind for years, perhaps ever since he left Oxford, and he had never talked of it to her. She would never forgive him! He had not thought her worthy of his confidence. He was not her friend. Then a vision of him at Fay’s flat that awful night, quietly directing everyone and watching over her, came across her mental vision, but this only confused her the more. Did he, like most men, look upon her as a graceful, pretty plaything—just a woman? Was his idea of a woman just like her husband’s, only different in kind? Apparently she was of no real use to anyone, except—yes, except to the little music-hall artiste whom the family had rejected.

Then she looked at the man in the chair beside hers, and as her preoccupation had made him drop his guard, she read clearly the very personal admiration in his eyes. For a moment they remained looking at one another, love in the man’s eyes, a hopeless bewilderment and weariness in Claudia’s.

“Your life does not satisfy you,” said the man abruptly. “I have known that for some time.”

“Is anyone satisfied with his life?”

She was a little startled, but a beautiful, much-sought-after woman is seldom nonplussed by such a situation. She had seen that look in too many men’s eyes. It was only startling with Littleton because she had not noticed that he was falling in love with her. Was that because she had been thinking of Frank to the exclusion of other men? For though love itself may not be blind, it makes a woman insensible to the feelings of other men and her very preoccupation often piques them into desiring her.

Littleton got up and leaned against the mantelpiece, looking down upon her. His straight, spare figure, in his unmistakable American clothing, bespoke energy and endurance. The shape of his head, on the forehead of which the fair hair was thinning a little, told of great mental activity and powers of organization. Some woman might be proud of such a man. In some ways he was not unlike Colin Paton, save that he had the American restlessness and nerviness, and that he lacked the fine polish and self-possession which a man may possibly acquire, but is usually associated with families that can count back many centuries, and that have always tried to uphold the best traditions of English manhood. Paton’s ancestors had mainly been divided into two classes, fighters and scholars. Admiral Worral Paton had fought many a fight with Francis Drake on the high seas, and another Paton in the reign of Elizabeth had been accounted a great and learned savant at court. Before that time, in the reign of Henry the Seventh, there had been a namesake of Colin’s who had fought bravely for the crown, and helped to subdue Lord Lovel’s rising in Yorkshire. Claudia knew of these and of several more worthy and later ancestors, for she had once visited his Elizabethan country home, where his mother still lived, and he had, with laughing comments, conducted her through the gallery of family portraits, which showed, he said, that there had never been any fatal beauty in the family. But she had been struck even then, as a girl—she had only been seventeen at the time—with the indefinable air of breeding and intellectual distinction which they all bore. There was an unmistakable stamp on the faces of all the Patons, which said as plainly as words, “Death before dishonour.” Colin had told her the story of one youth, a gay Royalist with laughing eyes, who had fallen from honour by parting, under pressure from the woman he loved, with one of the King’s secrets. “But, like Judas,” said Colin, “he went out and hanged, or rather shot, himself almost directly afterwards. You, who feel so intensely the joy of life—look at his laughing eyes!—will believe that he expiated his sin.”

At Gilbert’s home, too, there was a small picture-gallery—not very large, for the Curreys had never had any artistic leanings, and had only had their portraits painted to feed their own vanity and pomp—but the Curreys were a different race. Worthy—yes, probably—but heavy and coarse-featured, with none of the fineness and delicacy that distinguished the Patons, and some of them obviously too full-blooded, with the limited vision which embraces only the material things of life.

The man who stood looking down upon her now was of different type from either. He belonged to the virile new world; he had its good qualities and its defects. Like Colin, he was a good companion to be with, but he was so virile and so mettlesome that he occasionally left her rather exhausted.

“Well?” he queried smilingly, not attempting to answer her question.

“I was thinking.”

“I know you were. One can always see the thoughts flitting through your eyes. I have often longed to know what you were thinking about. I believe your thoughts are worth hearing. Won’t you tell me this time?”

She found herself liking his voice, which had a slight American inflection without being nasal.

“I was thinking how different the American man is from the average Englishman, both in mind, temperament and physique.”

“We’re certainly beaten under the last head,” he replied, with a frank laugh. “I am always admiring your Englishmen from the point of view of good looks, though you know our men can be pretty fit, as we’ve shown in your sports’ contests. But we’re not such good lookers, sure. As for temperament”—he looked at her with a little challenge in his grey-blue eyes—“that isn’t racial, you know; it’s individual. I guess one of my countrymen may possess it as well as an Englishman. And what do you mean by a temperament, anyway?”

Claudia shook her head. She refused to be drawn. “Impossible to define. Those who have it do not need a definition, and those who have it not—will never find one. Didn’t someone once say: ‘Art is life seen through a temperament’?”

“But I’m not an artist,” he replied quickly, “only a merchant, who purveys works of art through the medium of a printing-press. Do you think that only professed artists may possess a temperament?”

“Of course not. That would be too ridiculous. I daresay some of the greatest artists are inarticulate.”

“I am glad to hear you say that, because I should have hated to have you put me right out of court. Because,” he spoke slowly, “lately I have begun to realize that a certain resurrection is going on within me; that what I tried deliberately to kill is still alive, painfully alive.”

She was aware that he was on the verge of a confidence, and she only looked her interest. She liked him, and she felt she wanted to know more about him; for never had they discussed their private lives with one another. He was introducing a new element into their friendship.

“I married before I was twenty-two, and last fall I became a widower. I married early after deliberation and sober reflection. Isn’t it curious that one can so often reflect more soberly when one is twenty than when one is approaching forty, as I am now? I married, my friends said, most suitably. I was not what you would call in love with her. I had known her for years, and I was fond of her in a quiet, unemotional way, which you people of temperament despise. I married young to have my mind and energies free for my work of restoring an old firm to its original activity and greatness. I realized that if youth wants to toe the straight line, it must keep clear of emotional complications. I saw other men taken off their work, their senses flaying them into madness and folly, by the women they met. I determined that I would marry and keep clear of attractive women. I would settle down early into a family man, and if there were joys that I knew not—well, the man who has been born blind doesn’t know the glory of the sunshine. My wife was placid and quite content with the small amount of leisure and attention I could give her. All my best energies I gave to my work. Every American is born ambitious; it’s in the very air he breathes, and with his first little squalling breath he draws it in. I had rather a tough fight, but I won out all right.... Now I am nearly forty I begin to wonder if I have done the best with my life; I begin to see that perhaps those other fellows who never got on are not to be pitied after all. I begin to feel a hiatus in my life; I begin to see what life might be.”

As he looked at the beautiful vivid woman among the cushions of the armchair, he recalled the quiet, orderly life he had led with the one who had borne his name, the lack of anything approaching exaltation or beauty in their relationship, the prosaic monotony of their days, and he wondered if he had not been the greatest of God’s fools. What would life be with such a woman as the one Who now sat plaiting her fingers in her lap, her very finger-tips pulsating with life? The magnetism of her womanhood reached him as he stood, and made his breath come more quickly. They had so much in common already, was it too wild and venturesome to hope that they might have more?

“In short,” she said slowly, “you have sacrificed the best years of your life to what you men call ‘the game.’ But you have succeeded. Many men sacrifice everything and—fail. You may feel at odd moments that you have missed something, but I expect you are really quite satisfied. You know the proverb about the cake?”

“Yes, but did I choose the best kind of cake?”

She broke the spell by laughing. It sounded so odd. It reminded her of the days when, as a child, she used to hover over the plate of cakes anxiously seeking to make a good choice.

“That’s life,” she laughed. “If you take the chocolate one, you always wish you had taken the jam-puff. And, after all,” a little wearily, “what does it matter—chocolate or jam? Equally sweet, perhaps, and equally unwholesome.”

He joined in her laugh and held out his hand. “I must go now. Let me come again soon, will you? I enjoyed your charming luncheon-party, but much more have I enjoyed this talk with you. Somehow I always want to talk to you, and I have the reputation for being rather a silent man. I wonder why you inspire me?”

Her hand was in his and she smiled mischievously and mockingly as she said: “I suppose it’s because I talk so much. It makes you feel that you must uphold the superior ability of your sex in all things, even conversation.”

But he did not smile. His eyes were searching her face, noting the soft, velvety texture of the skin—how he longed to press his lips on her full, creamy throat even more than on her lips—the satiny gloss of her luxurious hair, the long eyelashes which, as he stood above her, swept her cheeks, the small, straight nose and delicate ears.

“You are a very sweet and fascinating woman,” he said suddenly, “and I am sorry that we ever did anything so vulgar as to use your portrait for a book cover.... Good-bye.”

For a few minutes after he had taken his departure Claudia sat thinking about him. Unlike Frank Hamilton, he did not set her pulses singing, and leave her inwardly shaken when he released her hand; but, on the other hand, she found herself considering him more seriously. She conjectured more about him; she found herself wanting his opinion, just as she did Colin Paton’s. Colin! That reminded her of the beginning of their conversation. Colin had clearly shown that their friendship was to him but a small thing. She found herself clenching her fingers into the palm of her hand as she reflected on the secret he had kept from her. This man Littleton was not in any way the equal of Colin Paton, either in brain or in character; but he was evidently trying to tell her how much he appreciated their acquaintanceship, trying to let her know that he realized now what a big part a woman might play in his life. Pat was quite, quite wrong. Colin was an unemotional fish; he even took their friendship coldly.

“And I want love, life, warmth!” she cried to her empty drawing-room. “I am tired of leading this deadly existence. I want someone to love me, to tell me so, to make me feel that he loves me.”

She looked at the room through a blinding mist, so that the delicate walls and the Louis Quinze furniture all swum in a haze, and nothing stood out save the fact that the room, like her heart, was empty, and there was no one to hold out two arms ready to enfold her.

Then she strangled a sob in her throat, and the room became once more the charming, orderly room it always was, filled with sweet scented flowers and majestic palms.

“You’re a fool, Claudia, a fool! a fool! a fool!” she said through her half-closed teeth. “You want things that you will never get, that probably don’t exist except in your stupid imagination.”

Then she went quickly out of the room to her bedroom, where her outdoor clothes were lying on the bed. She rang the bell for her maid.

“Order the car for me, please. I am going to see Mrs. Iverson. Give me that box of picture-puzzles I got for her.”

Fay always wanted her. She would go where she was wanted.

CHAPTER XV
WHY NOT?

Claudia asked the usual question of the nurse who met her in the hall of the flat. It was now three weeks since Fay’s accident.

“Sir Richard said definitely to-day that everything has now been tried,” said the nurse sadly, for both the day and the night nurse had grown fond of their odd little patient. “I think they always knew it was hopeless.... I fear she is growing suspicious. She cried a good deal of last night, and only slept for a couple of hours. Nurse Calderon said she thought she heard her whisper to herself in the night: ‘Oh, God! I can’t! I can’t! Let me get better!’ Poor little thing! It’s too horrible, and, of course, everything will—will get worse.”

Claudia, who had read up the progress of such cases in a medical book she had found in Gilbert’s library, gave assent. She knew that the end of such cases is the abject humiliation of human flesh where so many of the functions of the body are paralysed. The account had made her feel sick in the reading, and she shrank from the thought of all that lay before the girl—she was little more—who lay in the bedroom beyond.

Claudia opened the bedroom door full of misgivings, her heart very heavy as the thought of Fay’s night vigil, so that she was unprepared for the sight that met her gaze. The room always was a bower of flowers, generally coloured ones, for Fay said bluntly that white ones reminded her of a funeral; but this afternoon it presented an unusually gay aspect. The apartment was almost gaudy, and at first Claudia did not take in why it was so bright. Fay was propped up among a nest of pillows, her tiny face, very little changed, hidden under an enormous black hat with three great blue feathers floating over it. The bed was strewn with hats, the chairs were littered with them. Pink cardboard boxes of various sizes stood everywhere.

“Darling, you’ve come in the nick of time,” called out Fay excitedly. “Isn’t this a duck of a hat? You see, I must have some new hats. I shall be better soon now, and it’s no good getting up and finding you’ve got nothing to put on your cocoanut. And Madame Rose has got all her new models for the summer. This is French. You can see that with half an eye, can’t you? I call it shick, don’t you? Something like a hat.”

A dark-eyed Jewess, who had evidently brought the hats, was standing at the foot of the bed, and broke in with:

“Straight from Parry, Miss Morris,” she said glibly, though it was evident that it had been concocted in some cheap London warehouse. “Very latest thing. Real style there. I thought of you as soon as I saw it. It’s too good for anyone else, I said.”

“Ah! did you? Give me the hand-glass. I want to see how my dial looks under it. Ugh! like an under-done muffin left out in the rain. Give us over the rouge and the powder-puff. And the bunch of curls out of the drawer. Where’s that eyebrow pencil I had this morning? I rub the blessed stuff off on the pillow. There! that’s better, cocky. Now I’ve got a bit of bloom. We’re not forty and in the cupboard yet, thank the Lord! It saves a lot of trouble if you’ve got dark eyebrows. Yours don’t rub off and get smeary, do they?”

“It’s curious,” smiled Claudia, removing one of the hats in order to sit down, “that your eyebrows are so light when your hair is so dark.”

Fay gave a whoop that showed her lungs were not affected.

“You dear holy innocent! Did you think my hair was really this colour? Not much. The hair-dresser does it, and jolly expensive it is. My hair, as a child, was a silly soppy sort of light shade, so I improved on it. I’m much more effective with black hair. Makes a bit of a contrast. Got the idea out of a story where a man was raving over blue eyes and black hair. First of all, I tried red. But it’s so difficult with hats and all the boys call you Ginger.”

She might have been discussing the colour of a parasol, so impersonal and frank was her tone. Evidently it never occurred to her that these were what is called in ladies’ papers, “secrets of the toilet-table.”

Fay turned to the girl, who was adjusting the trimming on another hat, equally large and covered with roses of a nightmare shade of pink.

“You remember my hair when it was red, don’t you, Vera?” She chuckled. “I remember you didn’t know me when I came into the shop, and you was so polite”—she gave Claudia a wink—“that I knew you hadn’t spotted me. I’d run up the devil of a bill, and Madame Rose was giving me the frozen eye just then. I think I shall keep to black now. It does suit me, doesn’t it?”

“Admirably,” returned her sister-in-law, controlling a desire to laugh.

“I like your hair,” commented Fay; “there are sort of coloury bits in it. I thought at first you must dye it, only Jack told me you didn’t, and that it was like that when you were a kid. It’s real pretty. Darling, try on this hat. I want to see it on someone else. There’s no doubt it’s stylish. I hate the sort of hats nobody notices. When I pay big money I like to get the goods.”

Claudia good-naturedly removed her own smart little toque of white brocade and skunk, and placed the top-heavy confection upon her head.

Fay’s face was a study in astonishment and dismay as she looked at the other woman.

“Well, I’m blowed! It looks—oh! sort of funny—and”—she shook her head—“Vera, are you sure it’s good style? All right, keep your hair on, I didn’t say it wasn’t, only—— Crickey Bill, does it look like that on me?”

The girl from the shop eyed Claudia with no great favour. Her small, beady eyes looked sourly and enviously at the perfectly-cut, black velvet gown and elegant skunk and ermine furs. She was cute enough to realize that Claudia’s clothes were the “real thing” and spelt not only money—her own wares were absurdly overpriced—but taste. She was accustomed to serving “ladies” in the profession, who familiarly called her “Vera, my dear,” and asked, and generally took her advice, as well as swallowed her fulsome flattery.

“Take it off,” said Fay almost sharply. “I hate it now. It’s too large, it’s too——” Then, with a sudden change to wistfulness, she added, “but it’s you that makes it wrong. You’re good style, and I’m not. I’m common, dead common. I don’t wonder you didn’t want me in the family.”

“Fay, dear, don’t.” Claudia glanced at the sulky Vera, who was packing up the hats. Apparently Fay had never heard of the undesirability of washing dirty linen in public.

“You’re a lady. A blind man could see that. If you hadn’t been so sweet I’d have hated you directly I saw you. I knew what you were at once. Of course, Jack is a perfect gentleman, but that’s different somehow, except”—vaguely—“I liked him a bit extra for it. He looks different in his clothes to the other men, and yet those men spend a lot of money too. I knew a man once, he owned a couple of halls in the Midlands, and he told me he had fifty-two waistcoats, one for every week of the year. I don’t suppose Jack’s got as many as that?”

She was adjusting a saucy matinÉe cap, a dainty affair of pink ribbon and lace.

“I am sure he hasn’t.”

“Won’t you take no hat at all?” said the annoyed shop-girl, breaking in rudely. “You might take this one with the pink roses. I’m sure that’s quite enough.”

“No, no, I’ll wait till I can come to the shop. Here, my dear, here’s a half a crown for your trouble. I’ll come in—soon.” She looked quickly from the shop-girl to Claudia, a desperate question in her blue eyes.

“That’s a much better arrangement,” returned Claudia cheerfully. “We’ll go together, shall we?”

“Yes, yes,” cried Fay eagerly, clapping her hands. “But, I say,” as the door closed behind the girl and her hat-boxes, “will you take me to your hat shop where that came from?”

“With pleasure.”

“What; come here.” Fay beckoned her imperiously to her side. “Do you mean you are not ashamed of me? I could keep my mouth dead shut, you know. Do you mean that you’d let me wear the same sort of hats as you, that you’ll try and make a lady of me?”

Claudia could not speak, she gently nodded.

“Well,” said Fay huskily, her eyes suspiciously moist, “you’re it all right, that’s all I can say. I—you can touch me for anything you want. You’ve only got to ask me. I say, hand me over that leather case from the chest of drawers—yes, that’s the one.”

Wonderingly, Claudia obeyed, and handed her the case which was a cheap leather imitation.

Fay opened the case with a key from under her pillow and rummaged inside. Presently she produced a small box.

“There! I want to show you this. It’s for you. It’s quite straight; you needn’t think I got it in any—any way you wouldn’t like. I bought it off someone who was hard up.” “It” was a diamond and ruby brooch, and quite a tasteful affair in the form of two hearts, transfixed by an arrow.

“Oh! but Fay, I couldn’t——”

“Take it, I say, or I shall think you don’t mean what you said just now. Two hearts, d’yer see—you and me! Quite romantic, isn’t it? Put it on that lacy thing at your throat. Yes, it looks nice. No, you’re not going to thank me. Just give me a kiss, that’s all.”

For a few moments the lips of the two met, so different in their upbringing and views of life, but strangely brought together by the hand of Fate.

“Now look at my joolery. Never seen it, have you? Well, it aint so dusty, if I says it. I’ve always got them to shell out all right. After all,” with a quaint little touch of vanity, “when you top the bill you’re worth it, and I don’t believe in making yourself cheap or making men meaner than they are. Not that I exactly like them for what they give you, but it shows they do like you, because a man doesn’t stump up easily.... There, that’s a stunning pendant, isn’t it? It cost two hundred and fifty, because I went and chose it.”

Claudia was astounded at the value of the jewellery that reposed in the shabby, unremarkable leather case. She saw that Fay loved the things by the way she touched them. Some of them were beautiful. But presently Fay gave a sigh and, selecting a large diamond pendant which she put round her neck, over her nightdress, she shut up the case. “Put the things back,” she said queerly. “I—I——” Then, to Claudia’s dismay, she began to sob rather pitifully like a frightened child. Claudia drew the little head to her breast.

“Hush, dear, you mustn’t excite yourself. It’s bad for you. Nurse will say it’s my fault, you know.”

“I’m not very old,” sobbed Fay, “I’m only twenty-two. Some people live to be very old.”

Claudia tried to think of a laughing reply, but no words would come. She could only rearrange the matinÉe cap and put her own cool cheek against the one wet with tears.

“Fay, dear, to please me—you said you’d do anything for me—don’t cry so. Are you—are you in pain?”

She wiped the tears away gently with her handkerchief, the rouge from the cheeks coming off too.

Presently Fay grew a little calmer.

“Claudia, I want to ask you something because you are honest.” Oh! how Claudia’s heart sank! She dreaded what the next words would be, but as usual the unexpected came from Fay.

“Do you think this is a punishment for—for not being good? Nurse has got a Bible, and I—just for fun—asked her to read me a bit. It frightened me. I’m not what you call bad, am I?”

“No, Fay,” said Claudia steadily, determined that not all the religion or moral teaching in the world should make her distress the doomed woman. “No, Fay, don’t distress yourself. I don’t believe for an instant this is a punishment.” She tried to speak simply, but the task was difficult. Her own religion was a very vague one. She believed that if there were a God, as so many Christians averred, a God who was all-loving, understanding beyond finite conception, there could never be any question of punishment such as Fay suggested. Fay’s mind and morals were stunted, undeveloped. Since she had come in contact with the queer people who were her fellow “pros,” Claudia had come very clearly to recognize that the lives of such artistes, especially those like Fay, who had been born practically on the boards of a music-hall, were not subject to the ordinary judgments of society. Theirs was a little world of its own, with its obligations, its own ideas of right and wrong. To do another artiste out of a job, to queer her turn, to refuse to put your hand in your pocket for a deserving case, to crib another person’s business or her “fancy boy,” those were unpardonable sins in Fay’s world. To have flitted from lover to lover—in her case without any breaking of hearts or ugly recriminations—was only a venial one.

Fay gave a huge relieved sigh. “If you say so, I won’t worry about that any more. Of course, mind you, I ought to have kept straight. Mother told me that when I was a kid. But I don’t know. Men always liked me, you see, and I’m fond of them. Of course, I know you wouldn’t do the things I’ve done.”

Claudia inwardly winced. That very morning she had had an impassioned lover-like letter from Frank complaining that she never came for the sittings now. “I know you have been a great deal with your sister-in-law, but sometimes I fear you cannot care for me when you can live without seeing me. To me, you are the whole world.”

“I expect Jack and I are pretty poor tripe,” continued Fay calmly. Then a new thought struck her. “I say, that night I fainted, I thought I heard a nice voice in the hall, a man’s voice. It wasn’t the doctor, because he’s got a down-in-your-boots voice, and it wasn’t none of my pals. Was it someone, or did I fancy it?”

“I think it was probably a friend of mine, Colin Paton. He got the specialist and nurse for you, and often inquires after you.”

“That’s jolly decent of him, because he doesn’t know me from Adam.” She looked round her at the many vases crowded with flowers. “But people have been nice to me, haven’t they? It shows I’m liked, doesn’t it?” It was such harmless vanity that Claudia smiled. “Is your friend a great swell, Sir Somebody or other?”

“Oh, dear, no.” Claudia found herself laughing at the idea of anyone calling Colin Paton “a great swell.” She must remember to tell him, he would enjoy the joke too. Then she stiffened a little. No, she would not tell him anything. He left her out of his life. “He’s the simplest and kindest of men, a friend one can always rely on.” Her sense of fairness prompted her to say so much.

“He’s old, then?”

“No, about thirty-eight. Did my description sound like a greybeard?”

“Yes, ‘kind’ sounds so old somehow. Of course, he’s gone on you. He must be. Would he come and see me, do you think? Why,” with a sudden flash of inspiration, “it must be the man Polly said was here that night and treated her as if she was a duchess, and thanked her for everything. Polly flopped immediate. She’s had a balmy look ever since. Oh, yes, I don’t think! Is he handsome?”

“No, only nice looking.”

“Well, I should like him to have black, flashing eyes—don’t you love black, flashing eyes—and dark curly hair, and long, white hands like the man in the novel, ‘Did He Love Her.’ I’ll just have to listen to his voice.... Must you go now? Oh, well, I suppose I mustn’t be selfish. Jack will be in soon. It’s rough on Jack me being like this, isn’t it? Only a log for a wife.... He’s better than I expected, because”—with a canny wag of her head—“Jack didn’t marry me to have me lying here, like this. Men like their women to be pretty lively and ‘on the go,’ especially when they marry someone of my sort. Poor old boy! I’m really fond of Jack, you know. He’s always treated me decently. I hope I’ll get well or else—— All right, yes, of course, I won’t worry. Come again to-morrow. Where are you going?”

“To my mother’s. She’s got a musical afternoon, and I must look in. Several grand opera stars and a great pianist. It will be very fireworky, I’m sure. Good-bye, dear.”

Fay kissed her hand gaily as Claudia smilingly withdrew.

In the hall she met Jack coming in.

“Hallo! Claud.” He heaved a deep sigh. “I say, this is breaking my heart.”

“Don’t think about your heart, think about hers,” said Claudia, putting her hand on his shoulder. He looked very dejected and some of the youth had gone out of his face. The contented, well-fed expression was flecked with something closely resembling unhappiness. “She is not likely to live for many years, and let’s try and make the best of it for her, Jacky boy.”

“It’s hell hearing her talk about her new songs and going to Paris with me.... I shall blurt out the truth one day, sure as Fate. It’s lucky I’ve got a stolid sort of look, but it breaks me up inside. I remember talking to you once about thinking too much and rootling about for meanings in life. Why should Fay have to die like this? She hasn’t harmed anyone!”

Claudia shook her head and was silent. Many greater minds than poor Jack’s had wrestled with that problem, and there had never been, and never would be, any answer. With Jack, his belated questioning was rather pathetic. He had never wanted to ask questions, he had been content just to live, and now his happy-go-lucky love for Fay had turned into tragedy.

As they stood there they could faintly hear the parrot in the distance still calling, “Chuck it! Chuck it!” accompanied by a hoarse chuckle that seemed to mock them with some uncanny knowledge. The little hall was tidy now, but it meant that its volatile mistress would never dash through it any more.

“I say, Claud,” said Jack, taking off his coat, “what’s come over Gilbert? I went into court to-day—a fellow I know was interested in an arbitration case, had money invested—and when we got there I found Gilbert had been briefed. He started splendidly in that ‘listen to me’ sort of manner, and then he got muddled. He couldn’t remember the name of the firm he was speaking about, and he had to ask his junior. Everybody was noticing it. Why, he used to have such a ripping memory! What’s wrong with the works?”

Claudia was not so alarmed as she well might have been had she known the symptoms of nerve breakdown.

“Perhaps he took the case up in a hurry, sometimes he has to do that, you know.”

“No, he didn’t, because the fellow with me told me that he knew he had been secured for the case a long time ago. I heard someone say he was going to pieces.”

“He wants a holiday.... Mother will think I am never coming. Go in and talk to Fay.”

He saw her into her car, and a few minutes later Claudia found herself alighting on the red carpet outside her old home. The sounds of a violin played by a master hand reached her as she entered. The Rivingtons were just going, Mrs. Rivington very shrill and chatty, and the General rather tottery and deaf.

“I say,” said Mrs. Rivington, with a glint of malice in her eye, “is it true your friend Frank Hamilton is going to marry Mrs. Jacobs? Good thing for him, I should say. She’s just rolling in money, almost indecent, and anyone can see she’s madly in love with him. It’s all very well to talk art,” sneeringly, “but it usually spells money, doesn’t it? Artists are just like the rest of us, only they pretend a bit more. He’s always with her, so I suppose the engagement will be announced soon.”

Claudia attributed the remarks to ill-nature on Mrs. Rivington’s part, for her chief occupation in life was planting arrows as often as she could in the weak spots in her friends’ armour. Claudia could afford to smile serenely in reply. Did she not know whom Frank loved? A woman rather enjoys a clandestine love-affair, and Claudia hugged to herself her closer knowledge of Frank’s inner life. She knew she was the core of it.

“Mr. Hamilton’s in there now, talking to the Duchess of Roxford,” continued Mrs. Rivington. “Ridiculous how artists are run after, isn’t it? I don’t suppose he was anyone in particular. Artists never are. Some people find that interesting, but I must say, personally, I prefer good breeding. So unmistakable. Good-bye. It’s too dreadful about The Girlie Girl, but I was right, after all, wasn’t I?”

Claudia stood quietly in the doorway until the violinist, the great Ysaye, had finished playing. There were many well-known people present, great names in the social and artistic firmaments, for Circe had always held a little court all her life, and she had cleverly managed to pursue her uneven way without offending any of the powerful social leaders, who, though they always remembered her trespasses against her, generously spoke with more or less indulgence of them. She was hated by a few, like Lady Currey, but they did not count for very much. Circe had never been actively malicious, and she had always been too immersed in her own affairs to find time to be inquisitive about other people’s, hence she had acquired a certain reputation for fair dealing and generosity of character not altogether deserved. Now she very seldom entertained, but when she did so, she did it superlatively well, and many artists she had encouraged in their young and aspiring days were glad to do her honour.

The music stopped and she found Frank at her side.

“At last! I have been waiting for you all the afternoon. I was afraid you were not coming. Claudia, this cannot go on. You are driving me mad. It is deliberate? Have you all the time just been playing with me?”

“Hush! don’t be so indiscreet.” She smiled, for Mrs. Rivington’s words returned to her mind. Frank Hamilton attracted by Mrs. Jacob’s money-bags! “I’ll talk to you later. You shall get me some tea. I must go over and speak to mother.”

She threaded her way, with handshakes and smiles, to where Circe, in a most exquisite frock, sat in a shaded corner, among a lot of scented cushions. She was talking with more animation than usual to a man whose back was towards Claudia. With her quick eye for beauty, she noticed that he had a particularly well-shaped head, which was finely set on his shoulders. Circe was talking in French to him.

“Eh bien, mon cher, Claudia est trÈs belle, et elle est—”

Circe caught sight of her, and stopped short. Had it not been almost impossible, Claudia would have thought that her mother looked distinctly embarrassed and taken aback. Then the well-known sweet smile drifted over her still beautiful mouth, and the momentary impression vanished.

“Claudia, we were just talking of you. You are late, child. Let me introduce to you an old friend, Mr. Mavrocopoulos.”

The man rose and bowed with unusual grace, and Claudia saw a very well-preserved man of about fifty-five, with black hair flecked with grey, and remarkably fine dark eyes. She returned his evident look of interest, and again she received a peculiar impression as of something that was vaguely familiar and yet somewhat dreamlike. She was aware that Circe was watching them.

“Have I not met you before?” inquired Claudia. “Your face seems familiar to me, somehow.”

Something flashed into his eyes, and his lips smiled as he turned to Circe.

“No, Claudia, I don’t think you can remember Mr. Mavrocopoulos. He has not been in England for many years.”

“But I saw you when you were a child of three,” said the man. “I remember you well, very well. I do not pretend that I should have known you as that child, but I remember you well.”

Claudia knew his name as that of a famous and very wealthy Greek family, and she recalled a rumour that had once linked it with her mother’s. Had they found happiness together? Were there golden memories between them? She wondered curiously how a man and woman felt in such a case, who, after the lapse of many years, met again. Did yesterday seem as to-day? Was memory sharp or dulled by time, did they remember the high-water-mark of their passion, or the moment when they had said good-bye? Were they glad to meet again? If she and Frank met after many years, would they——? Then suddenly she heard Fay’s voice saying confidently: “I know you wouldn’t do the things I’ve done.” But Circe had done them, too, and she had not had the excuse poor Fay could bring forward.

There were no signs of regret on her mother’s face. She never spoke as one who finds any bitterness in the dregs of such a past. Indeed, she always spoke as one who felt that she had fulfilled her destiny, who has eaten stolen fruit joyously, without a scruple, without a fear. Her mother’s contempt was for women who looked longingly over the hedge and were afraid to jump.

With a few more words Claudia left the two together.

Circe’s slanting eyes, carefully made up, but in the shaded light still siren-like and magnetic, looked for some seconds into the eyes of the man beside her.

“She is like you, Demetrius, and she has always been my favourite,” she murmured.

His only answer was to take her hand in his, and raise it to his lips.

“I return to Rome next week, but I take back with me a living picture, the incarnation of a dream.”

Claudia was sipping the cup of tea that Frank had procured for her, when she bethought herself that she had not yet seen Patricia.

“Have you seen Pat? It is not humanly possible that she has tucked herself in a corner!”

His eyes were hungrily devouring her face, and lingering on her lips, so that she had the pleasant sensation of a secret caress. Mrs. Jacobs! How ridiculous!

“I saw her disappear half an hour ago in a conspirator-like manner with Mr. Colin Paton, into that room over there.”

He pointed to a closed door, which was the door of the library.

“Nonsense. What have they got to conspire about?”

There was a little frown between her brows. Colin was her friend.

“Why do men and women usually conspire to be alone together?”

Without answering, Claudia crossed the hall, and abruptly turned the handle of the library-door.

Seated close together, talking very earnestly, Pat more excited than she had ever seen her, were the two whom Frank had seen disappear half an hour before. As a matter of fact, it had only been ten minutes, but Frank had always had his doubts of Colin’s friendship.

“ ... bushels of apples and immense quantities of ...” Pat was saying, when her sister came in. “Oh! Claudia, you have come. We’d almost given you up.”

In an utterly different style from her own, Patricia was looking most attractive that afternoon. She had on a soft white charmeuse gown, which showed the long lines of her figure, and clung around her in a manner calculated to send her admirers crazy. The cool nonchalant look which she usually wore had given place to something more intense, more human. Something seemed to have aroused her from her virginal slumber, and is not that brightness in the eyes, that flush on the cheek, generally aroused by a male? Claudia took all this in at a glance, and it was not till afterwards that she had time to reflect on the odd subject-matter of their earnest conversation.

“I wondered where you were,” said Claudia, rather frigidly. “How do you do, Colin? I think mother wants you, Pat.” It was a fib, but she had to explain her entrance.

Then she turned with a sweet but cold smile to Colin Paton, who had quietly risen.

“I hear you have written a great book and are going to become famous. Congratulations! I must buy a copy as soon as it comes out.... Frank, I want some more tea. I’m so thirsty.”

Pachmann was playing as they made their way back to the tea-room, his fairy-like fingers lightly caressing the keys into exquisite joyousness.

“I want you to come to the studio to dinner next Monday,” said Frank eagerly. “You always said you’d like to meet Henry Bridgeman and his wife if I could arrange it?” Claudia was a great admirer of Bridgeman’s etchings. “Well, they are coming to dinner at the studio on Monday. Will you come too?”

“Of course, I shall be delighted,” returned Claudia, not even troubling to think of her engagements. “I shall love it. And”—with a hard laugh—“I’ll come for a sitting to-morrow if you like, before I go to Fay.... Dear, you mustn’t say such things here. It’s compromising.” A loud chord on the piano, immediately followed by the sound of a man’s voice, made her raise a warning finger. “Hush!”

The words came clearly enough to both of them as they stood together.

It was Liza Lehmann’s setting, and the accompaniment thundered and rumbled, and then softened down to a plaintive, appealing melody. It might have been the voice of Circe herself, beckoning, alluring, promising....

After all, why had she so many scruples? How did she come to be possessed of them? Why did she hesitate to grasp her happiness?

She looked up and found Colin Paton’s eyes fixed upon her, and they wore an expression she did not know.

Then she heard Frank’s voice murmuring in her ear. “Claudia, if you only knew how much I love you. If you would only trust yourself to me. Why are you afraid?”

“I don’t know,” she said truthfully, “I don’t know.”

She gave him a particularly tender smile, out of sheer feminine perverseness, impelled by something that rankled and festered within her. Colin Paton should be made to understand that there was at least one man who was a real friend to her, yes, and might be more.

Why not?

CHAPTER XVI
NATURE’S FAULT

Claudia was leisurely dressing for the dinner À quatre at Frank’s studio, leisurely, because there was something in the warm May air, stealing in through the windows, that made her dawdle and dream. She and Pat had motored out into the country that morning, and lunched at a quaint old inn covered with wistaria, just outside Penshurst, and the spell of the country, with its riot of scent and song, still possessed her. She thought of the hedges, with their tender greens; the young grass studded with gold and silver, for the buttercups and daisies were gaily blooming; the lilac in the cottage-gardens, just bursting into exquisite flower; the primroses with their pale beauty, nestling at the roots of the trees; the fruit blossom making a poem in delicate pinks and whites. She looked at the bowl of wild hyacinths she and Pat had gathered as excitedly as a couple of Cockney children, and she wished that she could have stayed in fairyland a little longer. She had been so happy for a few hours, for she loved the country. She had put away all the problems that beset her, and she had let the sweet perfection of Nature soothe her into something closely resembling peace. She had given herself up to its healing, and she was still between it and noisy nerve-racking London as she donned her clothes. In accordance with her mood, she had chosen to wear a simple, almost girlish dress of faint pinks, that reminded her of the orchards they had passed through, and, as a finishing touch to remind her of their excursion, she pinned some primroses on her corsage. Their delicate perfume was like fresh honey.

Her maid noticed that she looked very young that night, with the dreams in her eyes and on her lips, even younger than her twenty-three years. Usually she looked much older, for her self-possessed manner, inherited from her mother, her dignified carriage and air of savoir faire might have belonged to a woman of twenty-eight. To-night she almost had the illusion that she was still an unmarried girl, with The Great Choice before her. The soft, warm air seemed to breathe love, to say, “Take your fill of its sweetness, your life is still to make.” The impassioned song of the birds, the riot and colour, the bursting life in bud and blossom, what did it all say, but:

Even Rhoda Carnegie’s cynical words the previous evening at the Prime Minister’s dinner-party seemed part of the day. “Is love to be confined within the small circlet of a wedding-ring? Why, it would be like trying to pour the sea into a thimble.” After all, most intelligent people nowadays scoffed at the wedding-service, with its “forevers” and “till death.” Those ideas had all been swept away.

As she rearranged the wild hyacinths for the mere pleasure of touching them, she asked herself if there still lingered any belief in those “forevers.” Honestly, no. She did realize that love is too big a thing to be confined within a wedding-ring. It was not that kind of scruple that held her back. Love, as she had once said before her marriage, was the only convention she owned. She recalled the words of James Hinton. “Love, and do as you please.” Many people had taken this as their text for lax morality, but they had not understood him rightly. It was not an easy saying, but a hard one. Love! How often did one love in a lifetime? She had thought she loved Gilbert, and she really had at the time. But his neglect and coldness had killed her love. Could a great love be killed? “Many waters cannot quench love——” was that not merely the high standard which we should all try and uphold, but can never attain to? An impossible standard, surely, except for rare, ethereal beings without sexual instincts, strong human needs.

“And I don’t want an ethereal love,” she said aloud.

The dachshund, who had been slumbering peacefully on the couch, awoke, and looked at her interrogatively. His faithful soul was afraid she had called him.

“Only talking to myself, Billiken,” she said, smiling at him. “Why, even you, Billie—I am your little world, your sun and your moon and your stars, but you like me to stroke and pat you. Oh, Billie! I must be first with someone. I don’t belong to anyone really, not of my own free will, and I want to so much, so much. I’m not strong enough to stand alone. I don’t want to stand alone.”

She was first with Frank, the only thing that mattered in his life. He had told her so often and often. Perhaps, yes, perhaps she would give herself to him, and make him happy, make herself happy. Stupid Jack had said that illicit relations with a man would never make her happy. But he was an ass, anyway. Why should not Frank make her happy? Why should Circe’s daughter not be happy as, apparently, her mother had been? Perhaps Circe had gone through a similar period of happiness and hesitation before she—— No, she could not honestly follow that line of argument. Her mother had only made a marriage of convenience, her father had never counted at all, and she knew instinctively, without any harsh judgment, that Circe had an entirely different nature from her own. There were no subtle shades of feeling in her mother, no understanding of intellectual and emotional heights. Claudia had discovered that as a child. Her mother never shared her enthusiasm for books or pictures, she would have looked with but languid interest that morning at the blue mist of the hyacinths stretching far away under the trees. Claudia had felt like shouting as she and Pat turned the corner and saw the beautiful carpet at their feet, but her mother would only have feared that she might be getting her feet damp on the grass. No, the example of Circe taught her nothing. They were mother and daughter, but they were different.

She went to the window and leaned out, looking up at the darkly blue sky and the steady stars, which watched in remote peacefulness over the traffic of Knightsbridge.

Her only justification now or at any time would be the strength of her love. She had her heritage of passion, but something that had not restrained her mother would always restrain her. Did she love Frank? He loved her, she never doubted that, but did she love him? She asked herself if the secrecy of such relationship would not harass her? Would the stolen meetings be the sweeter for the necessary secrecy, or would there not be a certain degradation in the whispered rendezvous? She could hear herself as a girl calling it, with fine youthful dogmatism, a “hole-and-corner” business. Did love save it from that reproach?

At the back of her Billie barked sharply, and withdrawing her head from the window, Claudia heard two voices raised in unusual excitement outside her door. She went across to it and threw it open.

She just caught the end of a sentence spoken by her husband in his most dictatorial, angry tones. “ ... you can take a month’s notice. I refuse to overlook the matter. I have enough affairs on my hands without keeping a man I cannot rely on. You can go.”

The man, who was an excellent valet, answered with considerable conviction. “You did not tell me, sir. I know you did not. You may have thought you did, but you did not say anything about the suit-case.”

The man went towards the servants’ quarters, and Gilbert, turning, saw her in the doorway. His face was very unbeautiful in its anger. He looked almost apoplectic, his skin was so red and mottled. He had grown lately to look many years older than his age.

“Gilbert, did I hear you giving Marsh notice to go? He is such an excellent servant. What has he done?”

He came inside and sat down on the couch, breathing rather heavily. For a moment he seemed unable to answer.

“Forgot some instructions I gave him this morning, and then had the impertinence to say I never gave them. How”—irritably—“could I forget such an important thing?”

He was pulling himself together by an effort, but his mouth twitched.

“Was it very important?”

“Yes. I told him to send my dress-suit to my chambers. I was going down to a political dinner at Wynnstay”—Wynnstay was his father’s home—“I thought the bag was there, and when I went to catch the train—Imbecile! Most important. I haven’t told you. I expect to stand for Parliament shortly. Father finds the responsibility too much, and, of course, the seat is safe.”

“But, Gilbert,” expostulated Claudia, contrary to her latter custom of listening, if not in agreement, in non-disagreement, “you have too much to do already. Don’t you think——”

“Oh, don’t rub it in, for heaven’s sake.... Besides, I’ve promised Neeburg to take a holiday.... I’m certain I told Marsh about packing my clothes.”

“He is usually very reliable.”

“Oh, well! have it as you like. But any man with as many things to remember as I have, would be liable to forget—trifles. Doctors are so ridiculously bigoted.” His face was slowly becoming an unhealthy white, the redness was fading away. He looked at her obviously asking her to agree with him. Neeburg had scared him a little ... but Neeburg didn’t understand the strain of a barrister’s work. Claudia was only a woman and, of course, she wouldn’t understand either.... No good trying to explain. A long sea voyage ... six months’ rest ... ridiculous! A fortnight at Le Touquet would set him up ... a man knew his own constitution best. But perhaps it was just as well he had been prevented from going to Wynnstay that evening.... He was a little tired. He would have an early dinner and go to bed by ten.

He became aware that she was regarding him in a critical, impersonal way, which, though he was relieved she had ceased to expect wildly enthusiastic responses to her exaltÉ moods, somehow annoyed him. No woman, especially a wife, had any right to look so at a man.

“Why are you staring at me?” he asked, with a frown.

“I was wondering why Nature took the trouble to bring us together. I have been in the country all day, and there she seemed so gentle, so beneficent, so sympathetic. You felt like throwing yourself down among the daisies on the grass and saying, ‘Take me, everything you do must be good and wise.’ And in reality Nature is so cruel, so horribly cruel. Passion is Nature’s greatest force after self-preservation, and I wonder how many thousands of lives it ruins. I never realized until recently that ‘Love is cruel as the grave’ meant that.”

“Are you blaming me for our marriage? I never persuaded you into it against your will.”

“No. Nature persuaded me into it, and Nature made these soft, delicate primroses.” She touched the flowers at her breast. “Surely it seems strange that so much gentle beauty and sordid cruelty should go hand-in-hand?”

He raised his thick, heavy eyebrows. He was feeling better now. Perhaps, after all, he would go down to the club on the chance of seeing Mathews about that case on Tuesday.

“Nature has only one object in bringing men and women together,” he said slowly. Her words had reminded him of his father’s and mother’s grievance and hints. His father had mentioned it when he suggested giving up his seat in Parliament to him, and made it the text for a diatribe against the modern woman and her absent sense of duty. After all, his father was right. A man ought to have a son. “You know, Claudia, while we are speaking on this matter, my father and mother are very disappointed that——”

“Don’t!” she said sharply, the girlish, wistful look gone from her face. “How can you talk about that—now. Have you no sense of delicacy—of—of decency——?” She drew in her breath with a jerk. “Don’t ever speak again, please, of your parents’ disappointment. I know you have always considered them before me, but this is the limit.... You don’t love me—you never did love me. I will not bear children to a man who does not love me.”

He shrugged his shoulders and rose from the sofa. She had turned away from him, only her back was visible. The dress was cut in a low, V-shaped opening, and there were two pretty dimples that invited a man’s kisses. But her husband did not notice them, he had never noticed them, and he saw only the back of a neurotic, unreasonable woman. He was going towards the door when she stopped him.

“Gilbert, do you remember that afternoon at Wargrave, when I asked you if I came first.... I asked if you loved me a great deal.... Why did you lie to me? Your work, your ambition, have always come first, and after the first few months of our marriage, I have meant nothing to you.” She spoke quite calmly, with none of the heat and excitement she had shown on the night she had come back from the Rivingtons. “Gilbert, please answer a straight question. Why did you tell me that lie?”

“It wasn’t a lie. I meant it. Only you women are so exacting and——”

She slowly inclined her head.

“I see. Perhaps you weren’t aware at the time it was a lie. You never have analysed your emotions. You meant it—at the moment. Passion had got both of us by the throat. I loved you, but although I didn’t realize it, passion blinded my eyes to your real character and how unsuitable we were to one another. And passion urged you on to marry me, when you ought to have married a nice, tame woman who would have been content with occasional crumbs. Oh! why does Nature bring the wrong people together! Why! Why! Gilbert, I wish we had been lovers instead of husband and wife, then—then the mistake would not have been irrevocable.”

He was genuinely shocked. “Claudia, I would rather not listen to such things. Really, the licence women allow themselves nowadays—— I can’t think how such ideas enter your head.”

She smiled, with a touch of amusement as well as a tinge of sadness, as she answered him:

“All sorts of unorthodox ideas get into women’s heads nowadays. I know you can’t understand, and that’s the trouble. You were made one way and I another, and then there came a whirlwind and threw us together.” She held out her hand. “Don’t let’s quarrel any more. I begin to see things more clearly.... I was cheated by Nature, not by you. But ... certain things you were—going to speak about, are quite impossible. Those days are gone for ever. We must each in our own way make the best of the remainder of our life.... Have you decided to go to Le Touquet at once?”

He was puzzled by her new attitude and the calmness of the frank brown eyes that confronted him.

“Yes, I promised Fritz to get away as soon as possible. I’ve asked Colin to go over with me. I knew you wouldn’t want to leave town just now, at the beginning of the season.” He had not considered the possibility of her going with him, but something in her new, almost friendly, attitude, made him add the last sentence.

“I will come if you wish it, Gilbert.”

He hesitated. She played golf much better than he. So did Colin, but that was different. The primitive man was strong in Gilbert.

“I think it’s hardly worth while disarranging your plans. You’ve got heaps of engagements, haven’t you?”

“Yes, but——”

“If Colin can come, we’ll just take it quietly; golf all day and go to bed early. A fortnight of that will soon pick me up. Later on in the summer we’ll go for a holiday together.”

“Very well.”

He went towards the door again, and Claudia picked up a light wrap for her shoulders. She would be rather late for Frank’s dinner-party.

At the door he fidgeted with the handle and finally turned to her. “Perhaps I did forget to tell Marsh, Claudia. Smooth him over, will you? You’re good at that kind of thing. Tell him that—er—I’ve come to the conclusion that—he didn’t hear me.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him why he did not tell Marsh himself. Then she remembered her newborn resolution, and let him go his own road.

“I’ll see what I can do in the morning. Good-night, Gilbert.”

CHAPTER XVII
THE GREAT THRESHOLD

The small dining-room of Frank’s studio-flat had that cosy, friendly air that only a small room can achieve. That there was little more space than was occupied by the table laid for four only seemed to increase the pleasantness of the apartment, which was lit by four red candles in old pewter candlesticks on the table. Their red shades confined the circle of light to the white tablecloth, and allowed the rest of the room to appear pleasantly soft and vague. An enormous bowl of red roses filled the centre of the table, and some of their broken petals were scattered over the cloth, while an Eastern scarf of some filmy material shading from orange to blood-red was loosely disposed with an air of artistic negligence around the centre bowl.

Frank Hamilton looked down at his handiwork and found it good. But still he fidgeted with the back of a chair as he surveyed it, and his eyes were bright with some mental or physical excitement. He was not often restless, but to-night his nerves were evidently on edge. His teeth gnawed his lower lip and his eyes constantly sought the clock.

Then, after giving a last touch to the table, he pulled out a bunch of keys from his pocket and unlocked a corner cupboard where he kept liqueurs and wines. He never forgot to lock that cupboard, no matter how late his company left or how high his visions had soared, for he had a great mistrust of servants. His usual manner was half dreamy, rather abstracted, as though the sordid details of everyday life passed him by, but the impression that he gave was misleading. Often his mind was most practical when his eyes seemed only to hold vague dreams and beautiful, unworldly ideals, and if anyone thought to drive an easy bargain at such a time he found himself mistaken. As a child at school Frank had always managed to elude just punishment by that same manner of aloofness from desks and copybooks, and from quite early manhood women had taught him to realize how that air, combined with obvious good looks and the reputation for “temperament,” could be made valuable. The way in which his eyes would light up with sudden enthusiasm, the frank expressions of admiration which came easily to his lips, the appeal which he made by a seemingly exclusive devotion to the woman of the moment, had always made him a favourite with the fair sex, who contrasted him with the more phlegmatic males of their acquaintance to his great advantage, for “it’s the high-falutin stuff the women bite on.”

Men did not like Frank Hamilton, and he was seldom seen in their company. A few artists dropped in on him occasionally to talk “shop,” but they were never heard to speak of him with any enthusiasm. Indeed, among them he had the reputation for being “close,” and that happy-go-lucky, jovial crowd that lends and borrows with equal ease found this unforgivable. He was not willing to “part,” nor did he try to put commissions in their way, and lately, as de Bleriot had been heard to say at the Chelsea Arts Club, “Hamilton’s getting altogether too big for his boots.”

After Frank had put the liqueurs on the sideboard, he noticed that the card which had been attached to the bunch of roses he had just arranged had fallen to the ground. He picked it up and re-read it with a little smile of amusement.

“To the greatest of artists and my dear friend. M.J.”