Julia Cavendish tried to explain these post-war matrimonial issues to Dot Fancourt, when he called at Bruton Street to remonstrate with her about "the very serious blunder" she had committed. But Dot, willing enough to open his columns in "The Contemplatory" for an intellectual threshing out of such issues, could not face them in real life. A social cowardliness, essentially editorial, obsessed his failing mentality.

"My dear," he argued, "it isn't as if you were a nobody. Nobodies can afford experiments. You can't. You're a Cavendish. You have a position, an eminent position in the scholastic world, in the world of society, and in the world of letters. Therefore you, of all people, have least right, especially in times like the present, to countenance matrimonial bolshevism."

Julia Cavendish put down her embroidery-frame, and faced her quondam friend squarely. Ever since their meeting in the foyer of the Capitol Theater, she had been seeing him with new eyes, seeing only his weakness, the insufficiency and the inefficiency of him. That he meant his advice kindly and for the best, she knew. Nevertheless, he had wrecked their friendship; failed her when she most needed him. The disloyalty stung her to bitterness.

"The fact that I married a Cavendish," she said, "is neither here nor there. My position, such as it is, is one which I attained for myself. If, by siding with my own son, I jeopardize it----"

"But, my dear, why jeopardize it at all? You're being so unwise. You won't do your son any good by quarreling with your friends."

"Apparently I have no friends." The Biblical phrase about the broken reed crossed Julia's mind. "If I had friends, they would stand by me and mine; not try to avoid us in public."

"You're very unfair." Dot rose irritably, and began shambling up and down the room. "Terribly unfair. Can't you understand how I hated seeing you--messed up in this sort of thing?"

She fired up at that. "One defends one's own, Dot."

And for an hour after Dot had gone, the words rang in Julia's mind. "One defends one's own--at all costs--however hard the battle."

For her, battle grew harder as the days went by. One by one she argued out the issue with her protesting friends, convincing few, antagonizing many. Her family, however--always a little jealous of "the immaculate Ronald"--Julia met not with argument but with shock tactics.

Clementina, calling, breasted and bustled for fray, accompanied by Sir John, in his best Bank of England blacks, who admitted that "they had heard things" and pressed to know if there was any truth in "the things they had heard," received a direct "My dear Clementina, if your husband means that you've been informed of my son's running away with Hector Brunton's wife, and that Hector Brunton is going to divorce her, you've been informed correctly"; while Alice, writing a dutiful letter from Cheltenham, received a typescript reply--to the same effect--which cut her Anglo-Indian sense of etiquette to the quick.

As for May who, relinquishing the expensive good works and still more expensive garden of her house in Abbey Road, called unattended and found Julia alone; she returned to St. John's Wood with the firm conviction that her "poor dear sister" must have been "got at by some of those dreadful writing people," and bombarded her, for nearly a week, with pamphlets on "The Sin of Divorce."

Meanwhile, regular callers at Bruton Street grew rarer and rarer; until Paul Flower, busy rewriting some of his earlier books for American admirers and utterly unable to discuss anything else, almost monopolized the once-crowded drawing-room. Paul, engrossed with pre-war literature, became in those days Julia's best refuge from post-war life. He succeeded--sometimes for hours together--in stimulating her creative imagination.

And since, to a literary craftswoman, the creative imagination is only as the first nip to a confirmed toper, Paul Flower soon succeeded in more than this--in arousing the actual creative instinct: so that the creative instinct awoke and demanded work.

Gradually Julia grew hungry for the pen, for the long and lonely hours when the creative mind is as God, fashioning puppets for His pleasure. But always, when Paul Flower had left her, her imagination switched back from literature to life.

"The man Brunton," said imagination, "is not beaten. He'll bring no action. He is working, working secretly, to ruin your boy's career."