You are going to spend a dismal evening, my dear,” said Mrs. Farquharson, with a sigh.

They were sitting on either side of the drawing-room fire, awaiting dinner guests.

“Why?” asked Clytie.

“Oh, the crowd that's coming—fossilised London, with figures like amphoras and faces like old coins. It's the principle of assimilation, I suppose. And they'll talk as if there were nothing new under the sun.”

“There isn't much.”

“Isn't there? Wait till you have lived a little longer. At any rate there are murders and divorces and new pictures and the latter end of the nineteenth century. Why people choose to live a couple of thousand years before their time I can't make out. You'll see. They'll all look as if they had been excavated—except George, and he looks as if they had never taken the trouble to bury him. Thank goodness, they have all got weak digestions and don't dine out much, or else we should have them here every week.”

“But the wives are coming too,” said Clytie by way of consolation.

“Poor things! They all look weary with many proof-sheets crammed with circumflexes over impossible letters, and wrong-headed pictures of birds and beasts. All archaeologists are not like George, you know.”

“But then no one is like George.”

“That's a mercy,” said Mrs. Farquharson settling herself with much comfort among the cushions of her chair. “Don't you get married, my dear; stay independent. Do you know, one of the beings is going to read a paper. Pity me.”

“It seems as if I am to be pitied too,” remarked Clytie.

“Ah! but you are young and can make fun out of them. I can't.”

The occasion was a meeting of Mr. Farquharson's archaeological set. The inner circle dined at each other's houses in turn once a month, and the outer circle came in later, for the “conversazione,” as Mrs. Farquharson called it, with a little shudder. A paper was usually read, followed by a discussion, from which the more flippant seceded and gossipped casually in odd corners. Clytie had never been to one of these strangely homogeneous reunions. The people she generally met at her friends' house were miscellaneous, and the talk danced about upon all subjects under heaven, wreathed in blue curls of cigarette smoke. Mrs. Farquharson had begged her to come and support her—“to strike a note of colour among the gray ruins.” Clytie looked forward to the incongruous formalism of the evening with an anticipation of amusement.

She hinted as much to Mr. Farquharson when he came into the drawing-room. He laughed, bowed his long, ungainly figure, hoped that Miss Davenant had come to be instructed. Professor Petherick was to read a paper on an aureus of Geta of the type Cohen No. 11,—Clytie and her hostess communed with each other dumbly,—and many rare coins were to be exhibited. He trusted that Miss Davenant would be appreciative and on her best behaviour. Numismatics was not a subject that lent itself to flippancy.

“My wife can turn the house into a bear-garden every Sunday evening, more shame to her, though she does sit and smile in her superior way. But twice a year I assert my individuality and this house becomes sober and respectable. So no cigarettes to-night, Miss Davenant. When I put on these dress-clothes I am rigid.”

“You look very nice,” said Clytie.

He looked down at himself complacently, accepting the flattery; such is man. He always insisted upon wearing very square-toed kid boots, a high buttoned waistcoat with a chain made of old coins banded across it, a deep velvet collar to his dress-coat, and a shirt-collar, with two long ends that served as a tie, beneath his beard.

“I like him better in his velvet jacket,” said Mrs. Farquharson. “Go and put it on, George.”

But George shook his head sadly. He must be properly attired to discuss an aureus of Geta.

The guests arrived, seven in number, and they went down to the dining-room. Clytie sat between Professor Petherick, a little rosy man with a bald head and gastronomic appreciation, and a young clergyman who had taken her in to dinner. She had been for so long a time outside Church influences that a strange little Durdleham qualm come over her. He looked stern, overworked, dreadfully in earnest, she thought, not likely to sympathise with the Thelemite joyousness of life of the house whose motto was, “Fays ce que vouldras.” He was the only bachelor among the guests. The six others, including the professor, consisted of three married couples, middle-aged, respectable. Mr. Vansittart was a great Egyptologist. It was of his wife, a faded, weary-looking woman, that Mrs. Farquharson had so pathetically spoken with reference to the correction of proof-sheets. Mrs. Petherick was literary, fond of lions. Her talk was a catalogue raisonnÉ of her menagerie. Mr. Farquharson listened politely and went on with his dinner. The remaining couple were the Chowders, retired Anglo-Indians, who found only late in life an opportunity of gratifying their ruling passions—on her part an undisturbed warm bath of domesticity; on his, archaeological dilettanteism. She was florid and buxom; he bronzed and shrivelled. Both talked on their pet subjects. The Rev. Victor Treherne was a keen numismatist. “A recognised authority,” Farquharson had whispered to Clytie. “Will give Petherick beans if he goes wrong.” Clytie knew nothing of numismatics. She did not know the difference between a moidur and a bezant, nor did she seek enlightenment from her neighbour. She questioned him as to his environment—North London, a large parish, chiefly poor. The conversation languished, then it brightened up through common effort. Each had a King Charles the First's head to keep in the background, feeling it to be distasteful to the other. Treherne had left his parish behind, and had brought no other interests with him save those circling round the famous aureus, a matter of supreme indifference to Clytie, who, for her part, had been cautioned to act as the superior Ki-Pi-Yu, friend of Confucius, did on certain occasions—roll her principles up and keep them in her breast. Each, too, divined dimly the other's personality, and they talked eagerly, seeking to like and interest one another through a current of mutual antipathy.

The professor and Mrs. Farquharson were talking less unreservedly on the question of female disabilities. He had theories on the sacredness of woman's mission. Mrs. Farquharson's views were more materialistic. Her early training had disabused her of the oak and ivy illusion, which the professor still entertained.

“No, it's no use, professor,” she said. “A man has got to go his way and a woman hers. If their ways lie together, so much the better—they can help each other; if they lie apart, so much the worse. Besides, I cannot conceive anything more irritating to a man than to be followed all about by his wife—like a dog. No wonder some men beat their wives.”

Treherne had caught the speech. He turned to Clytie. “Do you believe that?”

“Of course. Mrs. Farquharson and I are sworn sisters. We hold advanced views concerning ourselves. I hope you don't think we have a mission! Have you ever thought how distressing it is to try to live up to a false ideal, and somebody else's into the bargain?”

“We all have to live up to an ideal. This one may be false; I don't know. At any rate it is a high one, and worth aiming at.”

“That is Jesuitical. What is to become of a woman's self-respect when she knows all the time she is a humbug, although a sublime one?”

“By seeking to inspire others with faith in her she will at length acquire faith in herself.”

“Don't you think that's rather vicious?”

“I don't know. The same principle obtains in my own calling. Many a man enters the Church who is not really fit for it. But the professional effort he has to make to raise others in most cases raises himself.”

“That may be quite true,” said Clytie, “but it does not prove the principle to be right. Besides, the cases are different. You undertake, when you enter the Church, to do certain things. Now when a woman enters the world she does not undertake to do anything, any more than a man does. They both clamour to assert themselves as human beings. They may go about it in different ways,—it is merely the difference of sex,—but their ultimate end is the same.”

“And what is this?”

“To get as much out of life as possible.”

“That's scarcely orthodox.”

The accompanying smile was a touch of the curb on Clytie. She paused. There was an interval of dining. Then she turned to reply to a remark of the professor. Mrs. Farquharson, who hitherto had steered skilfully through the shoals of antiquity, was run aground by Colonel Chowder. Clytie was astonished to hear her friend talking learnedly of coins and Latin inscriptions. She ran discursively over the points of George's collection, toning her speech with a light counterpoint of mockery, so that its echo should reach Clytie's ears. Mrs. Chowder bubbled domesticity over the Egyptologist; spoke of her sons, the difficulty of army examinations. She was bent upon their getting into the service, also upon their marrying young. The reconciliation of these incongruities was the problem offered for Mr. Vansittart's solution.

Clytie again turned to Mr. Treherne.

“Do you often come here? I am almost of the house and I have never met you.”

“Once before, on a similar occasion—almost the same circle. A common hobby brings the most divergent people together.”

“It is a pity you and I have not got one,” said Clytie, flashing a malicious glance at him.

“Perhaps we have. What do you mostly do?”

“Paint—for my living.”

“An artist! What is your line?”

“Anything human—they call it genre—street life—the very poor.”

“The poor? Then we have a common hobby after all!”

“Perhaps,” replied Clytie. “But I am afraid we ride it in opposite directions.”

“Do you know much of their lives—go among them?”

“Not much; I see them only externally, from an artist's point of view. I should like to see deeper.”

A light burned for a moment in the young clergyman's gray eyes.

“Would you care for work among them?”

“As a student, perhaps; as a reformer, no!”

“One generally leads to the other.”

“In that case I'll not run the risk,” she replied laughing.

An hour later the drawing-room was filled with the evening guests, mostly men. Women archaeologists are scarce. The sentiment with which they inwrap relics of the past harms the pure scientific spirit of inquiry. Thus Mr. Farquharson to Clytie, briefly explanative. She laughed, reminded him how lately in a sentimental mood he had accused women of lack of imagination; she reproached him for inconsistency.

“Inconsistency is a principle of the art of living,” he replied epigrammatically, moving away.

The men stood in groups about the room chatting on personalities, examining the display of coin-cases arranged here and there upon the tables, each under the soothing light of a shaded lamp. The professor stood by himself on the hearthrug, hemming irritably, anxious to read his paper. The talk was subdued, attitudes formal, a contrast to the ordinary easy abandonment of that drawing-room. The men were of a different type, mostly elderly, sedate. Mrs. Farquharson rested for a moment from her exertions as hostess by Clytie's side.

“Now for a minute's peace. I wish the men would smoke, they all look so woebegone; but George says they mustn't. Now, then, my dear, I haven't seen you for ages, except for those five minutes before dinner; what have you been doing lately?”

“Nothing much—working. Oh! yes, I have, though. I have found a new chum.”

“What is she like?”

“It isn't a she, it's a he.”

“Where does he come from?” asked Mrs. Farquharson, arching her eyebrows.

“From the skies, apparently: in the first case to put out a fire in my room—he lives over me in the attics——”

“Clytie! You must be careful. Who is he? What's his name?”

“Caroline,” said her husband's deep voice behind her chair, “I don't think you know Mr. Kent.”

Clytie started round violently at the shock of the coincidence. Kent was standing by her side, looking odd, changed, a bit Philistine in his evening dress. He wore a glove over his burned hand.

They talked, explained their meeting. He had had a numismatic acquaintance with Mr. Farquharson for a long time past. Had received his invitation at the Museum, his private address not being known to his host. Clytie described her own privileged position in the household, speaking frankly, vivaciously. She felt a little thrill of pleasure at seeing him there. He seemed, more than the other guests, in harmony with the traditions of the house. They had not time for much conversation, social exigencies separating them. Besides, a general buzz and a subsiding into chairs or restful attitudes sounded the warning that Professor Petherick was about to read his paper.

He described the coin that had come into his possession,—previously it had been passed round for the inspection of the guests,—claiming it to be a finer specimen than the one in the Caylus collection. The figure of Castor beside his horse, without the pileus, on the reverse, he argued was a portrait of the unfortunate young co-emperor. The legend on the obverse proclaimed that it was a coin of Geta. He took this as the text for a learned disquisition upon the aureus, tracing its origin, the variations in its weight, to the time of Justinian, who fixed it as a limit stake for a throw of the dice. He quoted Pitiscus, Eckhel, many learned authorities. He read in a bland, easy tone, confident of his facts and his deductions.

Clytie felt relieved when he had finished. Across the room she had now and then caught Kent's eye, which had a humourous twinkle in it. She, who an hour before had been scoffing at the dry-as-dust nature of numismatics as a pursuit, now felt a consciousness of inferiority, of being relegated to the tribe feminine, who are not expected to care for intellectual matters. She nourished a seed of resentment against Kent and all archaeologists. But when the usual discussion on the paper began she set an example of interest in it to Mr. Vansittart, who had come over and sat down by her side. Really, she was curious to see what part Kent would take in the discussion. He seemed to find many acquaintances in the room, and an appreciative welcome from each. She experienced a strange sense of satisfaction at the dispelling of an unformulated apprehension lest he might be unknown, insignificant. She had seen him several times since his visit to the studio; once they had met at Sloane Square station and had walked home together. The acquaintance was ripening into friendliness. Now she was interested at seeing him in a new environment. Our conception of people changes very much according to the conditions with which we associate them. But Kent in the drawing-room, despite his unfamiliar attire, seemed much the same as Kent in the studio, his manner towards the men she saw him talking with much the same as his manner towards her. Presently he rose, broke into the discussion. The principal participators listened with apparent respect to his remarks, few in number, but apt.

“Well, Mr. Kent is an authority,” said the professor, surrendering a particular point with a certain grace.

The little tribute fell gratefully on Clytie's ears. Suddenly she became conscious that her pleasure was greater than the occasion warranted. She turned round quickly to Mr. Vansittart, who was taking but mild interest in the affair, and somewhat abruptly opened a conversation. The Rev. Mr. Treherne joined them soon afterwards, asking permission to introduce a friend. Thus it came about that Clytie had a small group around her, and her interest in Kent's proceedings was checked for a time.

Meanwhile Mrs. Farquharson had threaded her way through the crowd of black coats, and taken Kent off with her to an undisturbed corner. She was curious to examine Clytie's new “chum.”

“So you live in the same house as Clytie Davenant. You rescued her from the flames, didn't you? She told me something about it. What happened, exactly?”

Kent sketched briefly the little scene with the blazing curtains, and mentioned his visit next day and his subsequent meetings with Clytie. He politely expressed his agreeable surprise at meeting her to-night.

“And what do you think of her?” asked Mrs. Farquharson confidentially. “I dare say it's an odd question, but if you will come and see us again, you will find we are given to saying odd things.”

“Like Miss Davenant?”

“You have found that out already? Well, come, what do you think of her?”

“Honestly, or conventionally?”

“If I meant conventionally, I should not ask you the question.”

Kent waited for a moment, stroking his beard. He was scarcely prepared with an answer even to satisfy himself.

“I don't know. She is a bit too complicated to be defined in a phrase like a term in Euclid. She is nearer to a man than any woman I know.”

Mrs. Farquharson smiled inwardly, noting the phrase, yet liking him for it. It was so deliciously wrong, so absurdly off the track. She contemplated him from the empyrean of feminine wisdom, and from that moment took him under her protection. To blunder honestly in things feminine is one of the ways to a woman's pity, thence often to her heart. She encouraged him, however, instead of correcting him.

“Why do you say that?”

“For one reason, because I can talk to her as I would to a man. She has ideas and is not afraid of expressing them. In fact, she is different from the ordinary women one meets.”

“Oh, yes! she is that,” Mrs. Farquharson granted. “She is all for le nouveau jeu. When I want to tease her I tell her she will find it le vieux jeu all the time, but she won't believe it.” Then suddenly, “Don't you think she is very pretty?”

“Pretty?” echoed Kent in some confusion. “Really, yes, I suppose she is. I hardly thought about it,” and leaning his body aside, so as to catch a distant glimpse of Clytie between the forms of the little circle of men round her, he added, “she is very pretty.”

And truly it was a fair picture that his eye fell upon. She was wearing a simple dress of ivory-coloured silk, falling in soft, straight folds to her feet. Her low-cut bodice was relieved only by a ruffle of old lace along the top, and the sole ornament she wore, a necklet of antique silver, brought out the delicate modelling of her shapely neck, as she sat talking animatedly, her chin pointing upwards. Her rich, vivid colouring compensated for any lack of relief in her costume. The intense blue of her eyes, the many glints in her auburn hair, twisted in a careless knot at the back of her small, shapely head, and kept in place by a broad silver arrow, would of themselves have supplied the place of any ornament.

“She is very pretty indeed—striking!” repeated Kent.

Mrs. Farquharson looked at him amusedly.

“You must be an original, Mr. Kent. Fancy knowing Clytie Davenant without thinking of her looks!”

“I am a great bear,” replied Kent. “My sister says so, and brothers and sisters generally speak the truth to each other. Of course I have thought of Miss Davenant's looks, in a way—admired her artistically; but I have never realised in her society that I have been talking to a pretty girl—one consciously so. She does not seem to expect you to be impressed with her looks. That's one thing that I like about her.”

Mrs. Farquharson carried on the conversation a little further and then directed it into other channels. She was pleased with Kent, and made a mental note to see more of him. A man who could like Clytie and yet not reflect upon her personal attractiveness was, as she had said, an oddity, and Mrs. Farquharson made oddities rather a speciality.

It was growing late and there was a perceptible thinning in the numbers of the guests. A few enthusiasts lingered fondly over the showcases, comparing their contents with specimens in their own or other collections. Among these was Treherne, by himself, deeply cogitative. He arrested Kent, who was passing by to speak to Clytie, whom he had scarcely seen during the evening, as he had felt bound to take an honest and practical interest in the proceedings. The question that Treherne desired Kent's help in solving was a knotty one, and the two men bent over the table absorbed in deciphering an obliterated obverse. When the matter was settled Kent looked around for Clytie, but she had already disappeared. There was nothing left for him to do but to take his leave.

“If you care for a Bohemian Sunday evening scramble, when everyone talks inconsequent nonsense—quite a different thing from to-night,” said Mrs. Farquharson, shaking hands—“we shall be very glad to see you.”

In the hall he was pleased to see Clytie, fur cloaked, waiting for a cab. She gave him a frank smile of recognition. With his white slouch hat and waterproof—a new one—his figure seemed to her very familiar. He talked to her for a moment or two, until the cab was announced.

“How are you going home?” she said when they were on the pavement.

“Walk,” he replied briefly.

“But it's raining hard—would you accept a lift?”

He opened the swing doors for her, shielding her dress from the muddy wheels as she entered, and then hesitated a moment. He had in fact been intending to pay one of his midnight visits to his South Kensington friends, but Clytie thought his hesitation was due to considerations of propriety. She laughed with a little thrill of defiance as she settled herself comfortably in a corner. The touch of rebelliousness let loose an unwonted shaft of coquetry.

“Of course if you think it would do you more good to walk in the rain than drive dry with me——”

The interval between her two remarks had been very short, taken up entirely with the process of Clytie's seating herself in the cab, but still Kent felt he had been somewhat unchivalrous.

“If you really don't mind, I shall be very grateful,” he said by way of making amends as he took his seat by her side.

After all, driving with Clytie was not unpleasant, he reflected, and he could see Wither and Fairfax any day. That Clytie should have made her offer did not seem unnatural. He frankly informed her of the cause of his hesitation.

“I paid you the compliment of being mistaken,” said Clytie.

“What do you mean?” he asked, catching a glimpse of her face in the swift gleam of a gas-lamp. She was smiling, in good humour.

“Oh! if you are mystified, so much the better,” she exclaimed, “It will be my little revenge.”

And that was all the explanation she vouchsafed him.

However, that drive spun a thread of intimacy between them. There are few conditions of companionship so favourable as those in a hansom cab. The driver is practically non-existent; the three sides and roof of the vehicle form a temporary home, a chez soi. The outside world lies in front of one, very near, and yet one is out of it. Even the desolate squares, with their occasional lamps blinking through the mist, and their wet, sooty trees rustling reluctantly as the wind passes through them, and their gaunt houses, each grimly and jealously guarding its household, giving the sense of the awful isolation of souls, fail to depress as they invariably depress the sensitive pedestrian. There is again the cheerful rattle which precludes sustained conversation, but encourages disjointed, intimate talk. The rush of the air, the whirling past of figures and objects, is exhilarating even in the vilest of weather and in the dreariest of neighbourhoods. The rapid night glimpses, too, of coffee-stalls, their lamps glaring upon the surrounding idlers; public houses, with the sudden babel of voices issuing from an opened door; walkers of the pavement forlornly standing with white, indistinguishable faces, 'buses steaming and labouring with their somnolent fares; every 'bus-load the counterpart of the last; swifter still, the glimpses of the occupants of other cabs that pass, stimulating the imagination; a phantasmagoria of life, almost unreal, yet bringing into play some of the lighter elemental forces of nature.

Clytie was almost sorry when the cab stopped at the familiar side-door next to the shop where the legend of “Gurkins, green-grocer,” was dimly visible through the gloom. Much of the mere woman in her had risen to the surface, obscuring the artist, the hater of formulas, the restless seeker after the mysteries of life. She had felt childish, frivolous, thus appearing in a new light to Kent, not without a certain charm, although he wondered to himself whether she, after all, was not like the rest of womankind—“fundamentally silly.” This was a famous dictum of his.

But when the door closed behind them, and the narrow, ill-lighted, close-smelling passage leading to the gloomy staircase struck upon her senses, the realities of life came sharply before her, and her usual independence of thought and action reasserted itself. Otherwise, when she had said good-night to Kent on the landing and had found her room in darkness, she would not have called him back to light her lamp for her, and, that done, have asked him to remain for a short chat. He was struck by the change to her usual frank tones, and seeking half unconsciously for a reason, attributed his late impression to an illusion on his part caused by the darkness and dispelled by the light, by which he could see her face.

“You smoke, I know,” she said, throwing her wraps on to the sofa. “You must be dying for some tobacco. What do you smoke?”

“Oh! a pipe,” he replied with much fervour, instantly seeking for it in his pocket.

Clytie turned to poke the fire. It was black and sulky, and her efforts were of not much avail.

“Let me try,” said Kent, bending down with her on the hearthrug; “this is a thing not generally known.”

He threw a lighted match on to the fire, the escaping gases burst into flame, and cheerfulness was established in the grate.

A trivial incident, but it was recognised by them both in after years as having served to cement their comradeship.