“Can you spare a moment to see me some time? You may remember Mrs. O’Rane’s party and a young man whom we agreed not to like. I want to find out all I can about him....”

Amy Loring lay in bed, frowning over Eric’s note and weaving interpretations of its discreet brevity. After telephoning to invite him to tea, she read the letter again with mingled curiosity and misgiving. Obviously the man in question was John Gaymer; no less obviously John Gaymer had been up to mischief. It was not easy, however, to establish a connection between him and Eric, unless he had been up to mischief with the little Maitland girl; Amy had overheard enough of a conversation between them at the Carstairs’ dinner to realize that a certain intimacy existed; and she had not failed to detect in Eric at least a paternal attitude towards a girl whose eyes just perceptibly brightened when he spoke to her.

In the course of the morning she contrived a meeting with Gaymer’s aunt Lady Poynter; encountering Lady Maitland at luncheon, she mentioned Ivy’s name and returned home in time for tea with a collection of opinions which crystallized in the vigorous statement that Mr. Justice Maitland was a fool, Gaymer a cad and Ivy a child whom one had not seen since she was a baby.

“What is it, exactly, that you want to find out?,” asked Amy when Eric arrived.

“I hardly know... I’ve met this girl half a dozen times; she’s a nice child, but rather impulsive and very easily led. She’s not happy at home, and I fancy she’s allowing Gaymer to lead her... Let me put it this way: if she were your sister, would you entrust her to him with an easy mind?”

Amy shook her head emphatically:

“No! I daresay I’m old-fashioned... Mr. Lane, I’m waiting for a hideous scandal—not with her, poor child, but with all these girls who’ve broken away from home during the war, all the men too, who’ve been allowed so much liberty with girls that they’ve lost the old reverence that men like you or my brother Jim had. The parents are to blame—”

“But the children suffer,” Eric interrupted. “That’s an epitome of the world’s history. And it’s equally true if you put it the other way round... But what are we to do with this girl?”

A fleeting glance at Eric’s worried eyes told her that he was less concerned for the world’s history of suffering than for Ivy’s immediate welfare; his use of the plural shewed that they were to be joined in a common rescue; and her mind, seizing the possibility that Eric might be in love, bounded forward to consider whether he should be helped to fall deeper in love with a girl who possessed superficially little more than the daintiness and intoxicating lure of adolescence.

“Tell me about her,” she suggested. “I should like to help if I could.”

Eric described their fragmentary conversation in New York, on the Lithuania, at Lady John Carstairs’ and in Ivy’s attic behind the Adelphi, adding guesswork sketches of the establishment in the Cromwell Road with an unsympathetic father and a helpless mother. Neither the range of his information nor his manner of giving it betrayed any great intimacy.

“Has she any other relations?,” asked Amy.

“Two brothers—demobilized and back at Cambridge—we can rely on them, I suppose, to intervene with the usual horse-whip, if things go too far—; and two sisters who’ve married and shed all responsibility... Perhaps you wonder what I’m doing—”

“It’s very natural. She’s an attractive child.”

“I’m not in love with her or anything of that kind. I don’t think she’s in... danger, but I’d do anything to keep her from being vulgarized.”

Amy busied herself with the tea for a few moments.

“I think she’s a little bit in love with you...” she ventured, when she had given his momentary warmth time to pass away. “Oh, tiny things that only a woman sees. She admires you enormously; and she’s flattered that you take an interest in her. That strengthens your position.”

“But I don’t want to mix myself up in it,” cried Eric impatiently. “One can’t altogether stand aside... Everybody’s business is nobody’s business, and that girl needs some one to take an interest in her. As she doesn’t get on well with her parents, I was wondering if her aunt could be persuaded to take charge of her. All this revolt of the young girl is rooted in boredom; it’s the descent of Nemesis on the Cromwell Road. If Connie Maitland gave her a good time and introduced her and let her see that people would simply cut her if she went off on her own, she’d soon drop this aspect of provincialism. Can’t you play on her vanity? A girl like that would much sooner be a success in society than a rebel against society; she’d sooner marry the second cousin of a baronet than live with the greatest poet or painter of all the age... That’s the object of my call. Forgive me for boring you like this!”

“You haven’t bored me. I took quite a fancy to her. I’ll see what I can do.”

Eric left the house with relief that he had transferred to other shoulders the responsibility for Ivy’s welfare. From the library window Amy watched his thin figure striding away, with what she chose to construe as rapid purposelessness, until it disappeared round the corner of Clarges Street; for Ivy’s sake it was worth her while to take a little trouble, and, if Eric were truly in love with her, she would take very great trouble indeed; but that, she decided, she would not know until she saw how impatiently he came to enquire what was being done. For all she knew, he was befriending Ivy from vague good nature—as she was befriending him—; Eric was one of the men for whom most women felt a mild and transitory tenderness because he was nearly always too much preoccupied to be aware of it.

When she had put herself in communication with Lady Maitland, Amy waited for another visit from Eric, but for several weeks he was too busy with his play to think about Ivy; and, as she did not avail herself of his general invitation to lunch with him, he could only assume that her position was no more “desperate” than before. A month after his call at Loring House, Amy took the initiative and wrote to say that the judge had gone away on circuit and that his sister-in-law was to take charge of Ivy until her father’s return, when the position could be reconsidered.

“I think she’ll behave sensibly and go back home,” Amy added when they met one night at Lady Poynter’s. “Ivy and I have become great friends; and I’m sure that John Gaymer was at the bottom of the trouble. First of all he flattered her and dared her to break loose; then he neglected her, then he made a fuss of her, then he roused her jealousy. After that he could do what he liked with her. But I’m thankful to say that he’s sheered off now, and you can rely on Connie to give her other things to think about.”

Eric looked thoughtfully across the room to the corner where Mrs. O’Rane and Gaymer were talking in whispers. Throughout dinner Lady Poynter, whose latest intellectual relaxation was in the works of Freud and Jung, had been interpreting all human relationships in terms of psycho-analysis; adopting her language, Eric found that all this remote, whispered discussion of Gaymer had created a fantastic image of a man sinister and dissolute, bearing on his face the stamp of evil passions and the ravages of debauchery. False images, Lady Poynter explained with annihilating sweeps of a massive arm, could only be corrected or dispelled by contact with reality. It was a relief and a disappointment to Eric that he could detect no change in form and features which always seemed to have been cut by a machine; Gaymer was powerfully built with sturdy limbs, broad shoulders and back, a muscular neck and big-boned wrists and hands, the whole so well proportioned and knit together that his true height and breadth were unsuspected. In face, manner and dress he had set himself to be conventional to the verge of commonplace. His hair, black and straight, was cut, oiled and brushed back from the forehead, as though straight black hair could be treated in no other way; his blue Air Force uniform, vividly new and well-fitting, was built and worn unremarkably but with a suggestion that it could not be worn otherwise. He moved, smiled and spoke as if he were trying to suppress all personal characteristics; and everything about him was ready-made except his clothes.

Eric pretended to be judicial when he knew that he was on the look-out for faults; but there was no fault to find, unless a man was to be hanged for impatiently lighting a cigarette while waiting for dinner—and Mrs. O’Rane began to smoke before the fish-plates had been taken away—; these were war-manners. Eric watched and listened; but, like the others of his set, Gaymer talked like a gramophone and thought not at all. Failing to condemn, Eric tried to appreciate; but Gaymer’s exasperating suppression of personality left nothing to admire. The set had agreed to put on humorous Cockney records; Mrs. O’Rane and Gaymer were improvising a duologue to represent one shop-girl bidding another good-bye at a station, and fragments of their speech floated across the room to mingle incongruously with Lady Poynter’s undefeated exposition of psycho-analysis: “I should ’a thought A Certain Person would ’a come and seen you off, dearie...” “Ow, ’e knows, when I want ’im, I’ll send for ’im; and not before. You will write, dearie? I love letters. And you’ll send my washing on; I’m in me old lodgings”... “You won’t be ’ungry, missing tea and all?”... “Thenks, I ’ad a nice bit of cold fish before I started....”

“I don’t see the fascination,” Eric murmured, turning away after a last look at Gaymer. Any other healthy animal in good condition, well washed and groomed, enjoying his food and drink, would be as attractive.

“Perhaps it’s—impersonal,” Amy suggested. “I’ve been trying to make out why so many girls marry in such a hurry. Partly it’s instinct, of course, and partly it’s just recklessness; when your husband might be killed any moment, it didn’t much matter who you married. But far more often, I’m sure, girls marry something symbolical in a man rather than the man himself. They see a man in a top hat, and he’s nothing in particular; they hear of him doing something wonderfully brave, and he’s a very different person to them; he’s a hero, he’s been fighting, while they—with perhaps just as much bravery—can’t use it.”

“They marry the sex and not the individual,” Eric suggested.

Amy nodded and looked across the room as though to contrast Ivy’s youth with her own grave maturity.

“Yes, and in twelve or fifteen years’ time, when she’s my age, she’ll know that it doesn’t matter what a man represents symbolically or what he is. But what he will be, how he’ll wear....”

“I believe Gaymer was incredibly brave until his smash,” said Eric.

“And never really sober from one week’s end to another. He must have a wonderful physique... That’s another thing: I wonder how much of the immorality and unhappiness of the present-day is caused by a sort of shell-shock. It’s a great excuse; it may also be a reason... Have you seen Ivy since our talk?”

“No, but I believe we’re to meet on the opening night of the opera.”

When Eric entered Lady Maitland’s box the following week, he found Ivy recovered from her melancholy and pleasurably excited by the amusement and occupation which her aunt was contriving as a means of shewing her that, whatever changes the war had effected and whatever “those freakish people in Chelsea and St. John’s Wood” might do, it was social outlawry, self-imposed, for a girl of her age and position to live alone; and it was a pity to be outlawed before she knew anything of the life to which she was saying good-bye.

Eric participated in the conspiracy to the extent of conducting Ivy round the house in the second entr’acte. Though most of the singers were new to London, Covent Garden had regained very much of its old appearance. War, indeed, and the passage of five years had expunged some well-known names from the box doors; Bertrand Oakleigh’s place was taken by a war contractor, the double box in which Sir Deryk Lancing used to sit restless and alone, half-hidden by the curtains, had passed to Lady Poynter. But, though new names were occasionally seen and certain old names had taken on a British ring, the changes were inconsiderable.

“Is there any one you’d like to call on?,” he asked Ivy.

“I haven’t seen any one I know.”

“You’re to be envied.” Eric bowed vaguely and found himself caught up by three different women in as many minutes. “Let’s go back,” he suggested, as he took off the last of them. “I’m tired of telling people that I’m too busy to lunch out; and, though I hate work, I think it’s preferable to the average luncheon-party.”

He picked up his opera-glasses and began identifying and describing to her the occupants of the other boxes.

“If I had genius—,” Ivy began diffidently.

“But I haven’t, Miss Maitland,” he interrupted. Adulation was at any time a weariness, and he had not undermined her alliance with Gaymer in order to attract her to himself. “You mistake fashion for fame. I’ve written half a dozen successful plays... I’m glad to see you here to-night. This is a better frame for you than a garret behind the Adelphi.”

Ivy left the challenge where it lay.

“I’ve never been to the opera before,” she said. “I shall come as often as Aunt Connie has room for me.”

“So shall I,” answered Eric, “whenever she or you invite me. That’s one of the few things I’m not tired of.”

It was only when he had found Lady Maitland’s car for her and sent Ivy home in it that he recalled his own words and wondered whether she was reading an unintended enthusiasm into them. Her big grey eyes seemed startled when the lights were turned on at the end of the third act; and, though she said nothing, he felt their light upon him. They were still startled at the opera’s end and looked over her shoulder at him, as he helped her into her cloak. When they said good-night, she drew away her hand as though his touch sent a shock through her body, but she was turning to see the last of him as the car glided away from the door.

During the next fortnight Eric received three invitations by telephone and two by letter; but he recalled Amy Loring’s hint and determined to avoid that one box until Ivy had lived down any suspicion that she was in love with him; he excused himself until he felt that Lady Maitland’s friendship hung by a thread and then chose a night when Louise was being played and he could come late and leave early. As he walked upstairs, the shrill laughter of the atelier scene warned him that the second act was not yet over, and he crept down again to finish his cigar in the hall. He was reading the list of box-holders for the night, when a voice behind him said:

“Hul-lo! When did you get back from America?”

George Oakleigh was standing at his elbow, unembarrassed and cordial, waiting to shake hands with him. Eric was conscious only of an immense, sudden appeal to his own strength of heart and nerves; his eyes had taken in George and his expression at a glance; Barbara was almost certainly with him; and with another glance, not hurried enough to seem apprehensive, he saw her three yards away, speaking to Mrs. Shelley. He had taken in all that he needed, before George was ready for an answer. Unchanged; tall and slender; in a silver sheath of a dress; with a black head-band and a bouquet of the white carnations that she always brought him when he was ill; a white Indian shawl, embroidered with green and red parrakeets, which he had seen her wear a dozen times. All the blood in his body seemed to rush to his eyes, and he felt himself rocking.

“I got back a fortnight after the armistice.”

His voice was detached from him, but, though it came from an unguessed distance, he could hear that it was steady.

And then it was time for his own question:

“You’ve been on the Riviera, haven’t you?” It was a triumph to meet and overcome “Riviera” without a stammer. “Lucky man! We had the wettest winter on record here... George, I hope it’s not too late to offer you all good wishes. I was in Japan, when I heard about it; I meant to write, but I was suddenly called home to my father and I thought I should arrive before the letter... I crossed with Raney, by the way... Like me, I see you only come for the third act of Louise.”

“Yes, I’m rather tired of the rest. I suppose this means that the second act’s just over.”

Two sluggish streams were trickling out of the stalls and down the stairs, converging by the open doors. Dr. Gaisford, heading the first, looked round, nodded to George and walked over to a sofa, where he perched like a fat, blond idol; it was a perfect opportunity for Eric to break away and join him, but he knew that this first meeting with Barbara must be faced and endured.

She brought her conversation to an end at last and looked round for her husband.

“Oh, how do you do?” she said to Eric.

Even through a glove the touch of her hand was unmistakable. If he did not meet her for twenty years, he could never forget it; if he were blind, he would still know it from any other woman’s. He had kissed it a thousand times, kissed every finger of it; when he was ill and she came to sit with him, it had lain coolly over his eyes, charming him to sleep; at the first night of the “Bomb-Shell”, when the success of the play hung in the balance, he had gripped it until a ring cut into her finger. He wondered how much she remembered, could not help remembering....

“How do you do?”

She smiled as she had smiled in saying good-bye to Mrs. Shelley, with a regrouping of lips and cheeks. It was a smile in which her eyes played no part; they told him nothing. She was as much collected as he knew she would be, equal to every social demand and blankly without emotion. She was neither tender nor hard, neither ashamed nor defiant; and, though she too must have rehearsed this meeting, her eyes looked at him without even curiosity.

He was already trembling in reaction before she passed out of sight. He could not trust himself to light a cigarette; and he was thankful for the press of people who gave him time for recovery as he threaded his way to Gaisford’s sofa.

“What d’you think of it?,” he asked, carelessly enough. “I’ve only just come.”

“Oh, it’s good. Ansseau’s marvellous, and Edvina’s singing very well, though I’d always sooner hear her in Tosca than in anything. She’s worked that up wonderfully since the first time it was put on. I haven’t seen you here before.”

“I came to BohÈme the first night. Not since... But I intend to be here as often as I can spare the time.”

Dr. Gaisford offered him a cigarette, wondering idly why a man whose trade was in words allowed himself to say “intend” when he could have used “hope” or “expect” without betraying himself.

“Well, you’re wise... if you feel equal to it,” he said bluntly. “Was that the first time you’d seen her since her marriage?”

“The first time to speak to,” said Eric, trying to control his voice.

“It will get easier by degrees,” said the doctor.

“We’ll hope so.”

“Bad as that, old man?”

“It was hell!” Eric whispered. “Either she never had a soul, or she’s lost it.”

“Well, my dear boy—”

Eric interrupted him with a mirthless laugh.

“Oh, I’m sure you’re right!,” he cried. “But I wonder if you ever appreciate how little good it sometimes does to be right... I must go, or Lady Maitland will be fuming.”

He jumped up and hurried through the hall and up the stairs. The first name to meet his eyes was “George Oakleigh, Esq.” but the door was mercifully shut and he strode past it and worked his way through an argumentative circle into Lady Maitland’s box. She was sitting with her husband and Ivy, and he was almost glad to be distracted by her reproaches for arriving so late.

“I’ll make up by leaving early,” he suggested. “Age cannot wither the infinite tedium of the fourth act.”

“Oh, you must stay till the end. Maurice and I have to go on to the Poynter’s musical-party; I was depending on you to take Ivy home or at least to find her a taxi.”

“Oh, I’ll stay for that with pleasure,” Eric answered.

The drowsy mutter of slip-shod conversation accelerated and became excitedly clear as the conductor climbed to his place. Eric drew his glasses lazily from their case and swept the boxes on either side of him. George and Barbara must be almost at right-angles; she could see him, if he sat forward; she might be looking at him then, but he dared not focus the glasses on her. Some one in the stalls underneath him drawled: “Hullo! D’you see Babs and George? I wonder when they got back?” Then the lights were lowered, one after another.

Eric tried to lose himself in the music. When that failed, he analyzed the orchestration and concentrated his attention on the conducting. Barbara’s presence made itself felt, and he knew that, for all preoccupation, he was waiting until the stage was dark enough for him to lean forward and steal a glance at her between Lady Maitland’s square grey head and Ivy’s dancing black curls. When he turned slowly and looked at her with all the artificial calm that he could put forth, she was sitting with one arm on the sill of the box, fingering a big fan and watching the stage with rapt enjoyment. He leaned back and closed his eyes.

At the end of the act Sir Maurice and Lady Maitland hurried away, and he moved into the empty chair at the front of the box. Barbara was evidently holding a court; her back was turned to the house, and he could see a phalanx of men breaking rank, shaking hands, exchanging a word and squeezing their way out again. George was supporting her adequately, easily, as though it were natural and as though he were her husband as of right, never seeing that he was a grotesque usurper....

“Are you going to smoke?,” Ivy asked him, as he laid the glasses down.

“I don’t think so,—unless you’d like to.”

“I prefer just to watch the people. I love the opera! I love the music and the acting, I love the house and the people and the dresses and the jewellery. I’ve been here every night since the beginning.”

Eric forced himself to take an interest in her though her enthusiasm jarred on him.

“You’re living with Lady Maitland, aren’t you?,” he asked.

“Yes. She wanted a sort of secretary to arrange her parties and answer her letters and deal with the telephone... I’m quite enjoying it.”

“I knew you would.”

“Did you suggest it to her?”

“Well, I had a hand in it. I was so shocked—I don’t mean morally, but you seemed so utterly forlorn and miserable that night when I came to see you... Are you happy now?”

She looked away without answering for some moments:

“If I thought about it, I should be very unhappy. So I try not to think about it. I try to enjoy myself and keep so busy... I miss the freedom. It’s great fun being with Aunt Connie; she’s giving me an awfully good time, and I’ve all the money and clothes I need; and I’m meeting the most wonderfully interesting people—You know what her parties are like.”

“Then what earthly excuse have you for being unhappy?”

“It isn’t everything,” she sighed.

There was no taxi to be found in the neighbourhood of Covent Garden, and after a fruitless walk down the Strand they struck across the Park. At the corner of Buckingham Palace an officer in an open car, with a girl beside him, leaning on his shoulder, passed them and turned with a jerk of the head to look a second time and to wave his hand.

“Was that intended for me, do you suppose?” Eric asked. “My eyes aren’t good enough—”

“It was Johnnie Gaymer,” she answered.

Though her voice was dispassionate enough, Eric fancied that he had felt her hand dragging against his arm.

“I haven’t seen him for a long time,” he murmured.

“Nor have I... He lives in Buckingham Gate... Rather a nice flat,” she explained jerkily.

Eric was vaguely disquieted at seeing Gaymer, as though not to see him were to bring his existence to an end. The moment’s glimpse had disturbed Ivy as much as his own meeting with Barbara. She spoke hurriedly, with unconcern too elaborate to be convincing; unconsciously she quickened her pace. And Eric would have wagered a year’s income that Ivy’s unhappiness was linked with Gaymer’s treatment of her.

“I wonder whether we shall get a taxi at Victoria,” she murmured as though she knew and wanted to interrupt his thoughts.

“I certainly don’t want to walk home from Eaton Place.”

It was distasteful to suspect a man, when there was no basis for suspicion, but Eric felt that Gaymer was not to be trusted. That conceded, it was plausible to imagine that Ivy had fallen in love with him and that he had tried to exploit her devotion for his own amusement. Either he had misjudged the character of his quarry or else he was waiting for her to come to her senses. Eric remembered his glimpse of the girl in the car, lolling back with her head on Gaymer’s shoulder: it was a reasonable guess that Ivy had drifted without seeing where he was leading her and had pulled herself up in time to administer an unexpected rebuff....

Eric was startled out of his reverie when she drew her arm out of his and waved to a taxi.

“Don’t come any farther with me!,” she begged. “It was simply sweet of you to toil right out of your way like this.”

“But I’ll drop you in Eaton Place and take the taxi on.” It was the most obvious and comfortable arrangement for both. As she hesitated to accept it, Eric became suddenly suspicious that she wanted to get rid of him and to be alone. The sight of Gaymer with another woman had hurt her until she had to cry—and to cry where no one would see her. As she stood with set face and eyes averted, against the immense gloomy background of the palace, with the wind blowing through her hair and snatching at her cloak, she seemed even more fragile and forlorn than on the night when she had begged him to come home with her from the theatre.

“Won’t you let me stay with you for another two minutes?,” he begged her gently. “I promised Lady Maitland to see you home.”

“She only asked you to find me a taxi.”

“But you’re condemning me to walk the whole way from here to Ryder Street!” he protested.

“Won’t you find a taxi at Victoria? Or you can have this one, and I’ll walk; I’m nearly home now.”

To press his company on her any further would have been persecution.

“You have your latch-key?,” he asked. “And d’you want any money?”

“I’ve plenty, thanks. Good-night.”

He slammed the door to and turned back towards the Park. As he paused to light a cigarette, the noise of the taxi grew fainter and died almost away; then it seemed to become unaccountably clearer, and he looked up with surprise. The taxi was returning, and, though he could not see any one inside, the flag was down, and he recognized the driver. In another moment it had passed him and swept away to the right down Buckingham Gate. Eric started in pursuit. If his suspicions were anything but the fruit of a disordered imagination, Ivy Maitland was preparing to fight the unknown woman for possession of Gaymer.

His pace slackened, as he tried to think how he should explain or justify himself to Gaymer. He came to a standstill, as he remembered that he did not know Gaymer’s address.