“One marries a girl and lives with a woman. I think I know something about girls, but I am sure I know nothing about women.”

Though the sun shone with warm encouragement as Eric swerved and rattled through the forbidding Sunday calm of Eaton Place, he was chilled by anxiety, a broken night and a sense of his own amazing rashness. Though he was still uncommitted in act, his mind had made itself up so firmly that he could not change it without a breach of faith. And now he expected to meet with one disappointment after another: Ivy had proved herself frail and not wholly truthful; he would find her to be heartless or insipid or commonplace; perhaps she would reveal a disconcerting streak of vulgarity, he might well have been mistaken in thinking her even pretty....

“I hope you hadn’t arranged to do anything else to-day,” he said, as they drove to Paddington.

“I was only going to dine with father and mother,” Ivy answered listlessly. “The usual Sunday supper.”

“Well, we can get back in time for that.”

“I don’t mind missing it for once. He’s just come back from assizes; and they always make him so pompous that mother and I can do nothing with him for weeks afterwards.”

“But he’ll be disappointed,” Eric suggested. Already a blemish! Ivy always seemed so selfish in her attitude towards her parents that she might become equally inconsiderate towards her husband. “We’ll telephone from Maidenhead to say you’re coming, and you can ask if you may bring me. I don’t mind cadging an invitation, because you remember I was invited once before and couldn’t go.”

“Oh, they’ll be delighted to see you,” Ivy answered without enthusiasm.

Was it a blemish that she acquiesced so easily? Would it have been a blemish if she had resisted? Eric told himself that he must cut short this microscopic search for faults, but he was not disposed to let her off a meeting with her parents. He would really know very little of Ivy until he had seen her framed in her own house and flanked by the formidable judge and his passive consort; a chance encounter in New York and their few stilted meetings in London revealed only her insincere social mannerisms, while in their two emotional passages she had shewn him only the tragic mask.

In the cab and in the train neither was at ease, for Eric did not know how or when to begin speaking, and Ivy stared blankly out of the window with watery eyes, accepting his arrangement and disposal of her with dull thanks from a drooping mouth. Would she always be like this? Must her vitality always be drawn from him? For months, perhaps for years, she would mourn her lost lover; Eric would have to bear with irresponsive apathy... He gave her two papers, which she allowed to rest on her knees, and tried to forget his discouragement in looking about him.

The station was crowded with men in flannels and girls in gauzy frocks, all oppressively high-spirited and resolved to enjoy themselves. Every seat was taken before the train had been five minutes in the station, and, when it started, Eric found himself squeezed between Ivy and another girl in a carriage with six aside and four men standing. He looked from one to another, contrasting the girls’ faces and bearing. There was an absurd similarity in hats and dresses, in their very shape and feature and age. All were wearing grey or white buckskin shoes, grey or white silk stockings thin as gossamer; all were wearing spider’s-web hats and low-cut dresses with transparent sleeves. Their average age was twenty; they were perfectly happy, perfectly well-pleased with themselves and in perfect health. Like that stage-army overnight at the opera, life—as a thing of ecstasy or racking pain—passed them by. Ivy watched him, as he watched them, and he could feel her arm trembling against his.

“I telephoned for a cab,” said Eric, as the train slowed into Maidenhead. “And a table. And a punt.” There was no answer; and he leaned towards her, lowering his voice to a whisper: “Ivy, I’ve been looking forward to this ever since last night.”

“I hope you won’t be disappointed in me,” she sighed.

“I shall only be disappointed if you don’t enjoy yourself.”

Ivy shivered and hid her face from him; but, as the arrangements for the day unfolded themselves, she could not help responding to his solicitude. Nothing had been forgotten, nothing could have been improved. They drove in comfort through the crowded, narrow streets of Maidenhead, while others struggled for cabs or resigned themselves to walking; a table was waiting for them by an open window, and intuition had warned him that she would want to lunch off lobster and strawberries. By luck or contrivance they were served by the most attentive waiter; the most comfortable chairs were ready for them at the water’s edge, when they came out to the lawn for coffee; and the sun blazed down on them from a cloudless sky. In the hotel several people had spoken or nodded to Eric; Grace Pentyre and Lady John Carstairs detached themselves from their parties to cross the lawn and compliment Ivy on her dress; she felt her self-respect reviving and surrendered to the enveloping atmosphere of well-being.

“You are good to me!,” she exclaimed suddenly, when Eric returned to her after ordering the punt to be made ready.

“Are you happy?,” he asked.

“I’m—enjoying myself.”

“Ah! that’s not enough... I don’t believe I’ve been to Maidenhead since I was an undergraduate.”

“Too much work? I’ve never had enough in one year to keep me busy for one day!,” she exclaimed impatiently.

“And I’ve always had more in one day than I could do in a year, ever since I was a small boy.”

He helped her into the punt and began paddling up stream in search of a quiet place for mooring. Half-an-hour passed before he noticed that he was talking only about himself and his boyhood, his family and his work; then he stopped self-consciously, and Ivy looked up eagerly, waiting for him to go on.

“I envy you! I’d give anything to be you!,” she exclaimed. “When I think of my life... and yours....”

Eric smiled and headed for the bank, where he made fast to an obtruding willow-root. Then he stepped into the middle of the punt, rearranged the cushions at Ivy’s back and sat beside her.

“Comfortable?,” he asked her. “Ivy... I want you to think over what I’m going to say, take your time and tell me what you make of it when you’ve thought it over from every point of view for, say, a month.” He lighted a cigarette and looked straight ahead of him. “I want to know whether you’ll marry me.” She sat up, rigid with amazement, looking at him with round eyes. He laid a hand on her shoulder and pressed her gently back. “I’ve saved a fair amount of money and I’m making a good income; one hopes it will go on. I would do all I could to make you happy... Before you decide, you must try to imagine whether I’m the sort of person that you think you could live with. I’m not a professional invalid, but I have to lead rather a careful life and I suppose I’ve as many angles as most bachelors....”

When she tried to speak, he had stopped her; but he found it impossible to go on cataloguing himself while she sat silent with bitten, bloodless lips.

“But... I thought you understood!,” Ivy broke in, as he paused. “I’m not fit... You... or anybody.”

Eric could not trust himself to look at her, but he felt for her hand.

“I’m not asking you to—yet awhile,” he said. “But, when you’ve had time to think it over... Anything that you’ve told me, I—I’ve forgotten. In your turn, you’ll have to take me as you find me... I’m a solitary man... I should like some one to take care of... Will you think this over, Ivy, very slowly and very carefully? It’s a big risk... If you say ‘no’—” he hesitated and shrugged his shoulders. The doubts of the morning had melted like snow beneath a tropic sun; he had recovered the mood of overnight in which pity fiercer than desire set before his eyes the picture of Ivy, praying in wild despair, and filled his ears with the fancied mutter of her prayers. If she said “no,” he would be tempted to plead and argue against her decision and his own better judgement; he hoped that he might not be tempted—“if you say ‘no’”—he hesitated again and moistened his lips—“I can make certain arrangements that will spare you the worst; if you say ‘yes’, I propose that we get married very quietly and go abroad for a time. What matters now is that you should feel comfortable in mind; there’s nothing in the world for you to worry about.”

He withdrew his hand and shaded his eyes to look at the leisurely procession of boats converging at the gate of Boulter’s Lock. Now that he had laid his proposal before her, he seemed cold and repellent where he had meant to make a single, irresistible gesture of magnanimity; it was only by giving her everything and by spending himself to give her more that he could heal the wounds in his own spirit. Ivy’s world must be the fairy palace of a dream....

As the silence lengthened, he wondered whether he wanted her to say anything yet... The announcement would create a sensation. Many would be disappointed, a few pleased by the surface of romance; his mother would look at the slim, dark, undeveloped child and wonder whether he had been captivated by her youthful prettiness and whether such inexperience could possibly make him happy; he wondered in his turn whether a mother’s uncanny intuition would discover that he was not marrying for love. Ivy, for that matter, would not be marrying for love; she would be marrying, at nineteen, for safety. Even if she had loved him now, in ten years’ time she would be a different woman, capable of a different love; if she were assailed later by a passion to which she could not now pretend, he wondered how far gratitude would restrain her....

“I don’t understand...” Ivy’s voice was quavering. “I’ve been praying to die, ever since I knew... Why should you...?”

Her voice rose tremulously, broke and died away. Still without looking at her, Eric gripped her wrist.

“But why not?,” he asked.

“I’m nothing to you, and you’re—It isn’t fair on you.”

“I’m the best judge of that,” he answered with exultant, fierce excitement that made his voice harsh. “But you’re not to decide anything for the moment,” he went on more gently. “Just tell me—are you happy?”

He felt his hand brushed by her lips. Then she dragged her wrist from his fingers and bent forward, burying her head in her lap.

They both felt exhausted; and neither knew what to do next. The pitiless publicity of Boulter’s Lock held them in artificial restraint; there were numberless prosaic arrangements to be contrived, but Eric shirked the emotional violence of abruptly broaching them. As she regained composure, Ivy took off her hat and drew herself upright with her hands clasped round her knees, looking away from him to the line of punts under the opposite bank. She had pretty feet and ankles, pretty arms and shoulders, a straight thin back and slender neck; since their first meeting she had lost something of her looks by suddenly becoming so thin, but the sharpness of outline added to her charm of youth and delicacy. Eric suddenly remembered his chill of misgiving as he drove to Eaton Place, expecting to be disappointed in her; a warm wave of compassion blinded him, and he asked himself how a man of Gaymer’s upbringing and traditions could bring himself to commit the social sin for which there was no pardon; if he had waited till Ivy was married, an intrigue would have been venial; if he had chosen a girl from a humbler walk of life, no one would have asked more than that he should behave liberally to her... That was conventional morality in England....

Perhaps the one impossible thing had been made possible by the war. For five years there had been whispered rumours of desolating scandals scotched at the last moment. England was sex-intoxicated; women married light-heartedly on a few weeks’ acquaintance and married again a few months later when their husbands had been killed, without prejudicing their right to acquire three or four lovers in the interval. And those who remained technically virtuous talked sex by day and dreamed it at night; there was nothing they did not know, nothing they would not discuss, and in this welter of short-lived artificial excitement, when all were overworked and overstimulated, when vague cosmic hungers made themselves felt and an opportunity became a duty, it was not surprising that some had lost their heads.

But Ivy looked too fastidious. Her deferential timidity, under the skin-deep manner of bustle and efficiency which had irritated him in New York, was no challenge to a man; her youth imposed an obligation on any one with the wit to see her as an emancipated school-girl; a libertine, when he had pierced the veneer of assurance, would find her insipid; and, even if Gaymer was insensible to discrimination and honourable restraint, Eric could not understand her allowing herself to fall into his hands. Men and women drifted dizzily without seeing where they were going or how far they had gone, but Ivy seemed yet enough of a child to stop herself by sheer ignorant instinct before she began to drift.

“Eric!”

He turned quickly, for Ivy had never before used his Christian name.

“Yes?”

“Eric...” She hesitated, and he saw that her cheeks were crimson. “Eric, I want to tell you about Johnnie.”

“My dear, I’ve forgotten that there is such a person.”

After screwing herself up to do her duty, Ivy did not feel entitled to be relieved of it.

“Perhaps you won’t think as badly of me afterwards,” she faltered.

“But I don’t think badly of you! I want a new life to start from to-day. If we get married—you mustn’t dream of deciding yet—, I want to obliterate everything that happened before to-day. So far as our joint life is concerned, we meet now for the first time. Let’s see all we can of each other. If we become engaged, we’ll announce it, get married as soon as possible and go straight out to America. I’ve always an excuse to go there for as long as I like; we can come back when it suits us and we can settle down to domestic life in England. It’s very probable that you’ll meet Gaymer—I’ve found that you can’t avoid meeting people in London, however much you may want to—, but you’ll meet him as a mere acquaintance. And, Ivy, the only thing I know of him is that I’ve run across him for three years in other people’s houses and have never invited him to my own, because we don’t seem to have anything in common. Isn’t that enough?”

She made a vague movement with head and shoulders, but he could see that she was hardly listening to him.

“I—can’t understand,” she faltered. “You must despise me so, and I’ve nothing to give... It’s like a dream.”

“I’m asking you to give me the whole of yourself for all my life...,” Eric answered. “Now I’m going to paddle you back.”

Though there had been no rain for several weeks, a strong stream was flowing, and he punted swiftly to Skindle’s lawn before he found that it was still too early for tea. Shooting under Maidenhead Bridge, he crossed to the Berkshire side and drifted until he found another stretch of shady bank under which they could moor the boat and smoke. Ivy beckoned him to her side and struck a match for his cigarette.

“Eric, I shall never be able to do anything for you,” she whispered. “All you say is that you want to make me happy! Long before I met you, I’d wanted to meet you, because you wrote such wonderful plays. In New York... If anybody’d told me I was going to marry you, I should have burst out laughing. You were so big and famous. Coming over on the boat I hardly dared speak to you. I can’t believe it yet... If I came to you as I was in New York—I had something to give then—, I couldn’t believe it. But I never knew you then, I never thought that any man... out of a book, I mean... Oh, I can never do enough, I can never begin to repay you!”

Her urgency sent a glow through blood which Eric once thought would never again be warm. He wanted to see his mother and Gaisford, to say to them: “You told me to make one more effort, and I’ve made it. You told me to forget myself. Well, I have; and I’ve won. The biggest effort... and the biggest victory....”

“Love must be dead long before a man renders a bill, Ivy,” he said.

“I want to pay without waiting for it!”

“But love hasn’t been born yet.”

“Oh, it has, Eric!”

“When?”

“When you promised... You know.”

Eric laughed and took her hand:

“When you thought you were dreaming? You’re dreaming still, Ivy. That’s why I won’t let you decide till you’ve had time to wake up and think. Cold, grey, early-morning thinking... Perhaps I’m dreaming too. It seems so long... And you’re so absurdly young, Ivy; I’m half a generation older. When I saw you outside Covent Garden last night, I felt I’d do anything to make you less miserable. Anything in the world. If we hadn’t been in a public street, I’d have taken you in my arms and kissed you... I thought and argued all the evening; I wished I had more to give you. And I was glad for my own selfish sake that you were unhappy. I wasn’t particularly happy myself; and I suddenly saw that, if I could give you everything I had, if I could make a new life, a happy life for you, Ivy, I should be happy myself. You see, I’ve not been thinking of you very much,” he laughed.

She turned quickly and put her face up to him.

“Kiss me now, Eric,” she begged.

“I will, when you’re sure you’re in love with me,—if you ever are.”

“I am! You know I am! I’d do anything for you. Isn’t that love?”

“You don’t yet feel that I’m essential to you. That’s why you need time. And, if you knew what love was, you wouldn’t need me to tell you.”

Ivy knitted her brows and looked away.

“I thought I did,” she murmured. “I thought I couldn’t get on without Johnnie. That was why; he threatened to go away....”

Eric watched her out of the corner of one eye:

“And you find you can get on without him?”

“I had to.” The answer came without hesitation, but she paused at once to consider it. Eric wondered whether he had heard regret in her voice.

“If he came to see you to-night,” Eric propounded, “if he explained away whatever happened two nights ago and said that he’d always meant to marry you and wanted to marry you, if he told you that it was simply a question of money—”

She interrupted with a vigorous shake of the head:

“You don’t understand! He’s a different man.”

“He was the man you fell in love with, Ivy.”

“No! I’d been mistaken in him.”

“I only want to be sure that you’re not mistaken now.”

“I’m certain now.”

There was no profit in reminding her that she must have felt at least as certain before she surrendered to Gaymer. Eric concentrated his attention on the punt, which was making slow progress against the wind and stream. As they came alongside the lawn of the Guards Club, he saw Ivy stiffen and look away; there was no apparent reason for her abrupt movement, as he could only see two wounded officers, playing with a dog, and the back of a third, who was making his way slowly towards the club-house. Evidently she did not want to be seen, and Eric felt a twinge of misgiving when he reflected how little he knew of her. Whenever a man married, he had to some extent to inherit the relations and friends, the family bores and family feuds of his wife, with a greater or less legacy of complications and indiscretions; all that he knew of Ivy and her world could be written on a single sheet of paper.

Tea was a silent and reflective meal for both of them. It was only when they had driven to the station and were walking up and down the platform that he found a reason for her embarrassment. On a bench by the head of the stairs two officers were playing with a dog; between them sat Gaymer. Now as before, Ivy saw him first, but this time he saw her and bowed. Eric would have walked on, but one of the wounded officers waved a crutch and hailed him by name.

“Hullo, Pentyre! I haven’t seen you to speak to since you were smashed up,” said Eric.

“No, I came to look you up when I was home about a year and a half ago, but they told me you were in America. I caught sight of you in the distance at one of Sonia’s parties... This is a memento of the final Hun push. You know my brother, don’t you? And Gaymer?”

“Oh, yes!” Eric felt his heart quickening its beat. There was an adequate nod, Gaymer rose with adequate alacrity and bowed a second time to Ivy; but there was no glint of resentment over their late candid meeting in Buckingham Gate, no flicker of curiosity at finding Ivy in such company and no embarrassment in meeting her at all. “You know Lord Pentyre, don’t you? Miss Maitland, Mr. Frank Pentyre.”

“Oh, please don’t get up,” Ivy begged, as Pentyre and his brother reached for their crutches.

Eric was pleased to see that she was composed—as much composed as he had been when he found himself confronted with George and Barbara at Covent Garden; he also remembered his own emotions that night and led her away as soon as he could make an opportunity.

“Well done!” whispered Eric, pressing Ivy’s arm.

“Let’s go further in front,” she answered. “I don’t want to travel up with them... Eric! I could have killed him! So cool and collected... He knows how he’s treated me, he knows he’s been a brute and a liar—”

“Steady on, Ivy,” Eric urged, as her voice became tremulous.

“He always frightened me, because nothing seemed to make any impression on him. When he was flying, he was inconceivably brave; people have told me. He’d have been given the V. C. again and again, if any one had known. When he crashed, it would have killed any other man, but, though he’s not allowed to fly any more, it’s made no other difference. He frightens me, because I can’t do anything with him. That night—he let me do all the talking... He’s a brute.”

Eric was disquieted that Gaymer should have seen them together. Most men would be glad to be relieved so promptly of their responsibilities, but under his mask of indifference Gaymer was capable of being piqued at finding himself so quickly supplanted; it was almost an invitation to see whether he could reestablish his ascendancy, a challenge to his idleness and vanity, his taste for mischief and his love of power.

“Don’t have anything to do with him,” Eric urged.

“I want to punish him.”

“You may only punish yourself—and me.”

A taxi had been ordered to wait for them at Paddington, and they escaped with relief from the crowded train and drove to the Cromwell Road. It was the first moment of privacy since the morning, and Ivy caught his hand and pressed it eagerly.

“Eric, I want to cry!,” she gasped, throwing her arms around him and hiding her face on his shoulder. “I’ve wanted to all day, you’ve been so wonderful! What can you see in me? I will try to repay you, though I never can. Eric, tell me it’s all true and that you’re not playing with me!”

“I’m no good at jokes of that kind.” She had slipped half to the floor, and he lifted her on to his knees; with a gentle pressure she drew his head to her bosom and laid a cold, tear-stained cheek against his. “Ivy, this is not my idea of taking a month to think calmly—”

“I don’t want a month!,” she cried, tightening the grip of her arms as though he were trying to escape.

“Dear child, you must steady yourself! We shall be at your father’s house in a minute, and you can’t go in like this. Dry your eyes, Ivy darling. You said you couldn’t see why I was doing this; don’t you see it’s because I want you? But, however much I want you, I can’t take you till I’m sure that I can make you happy. Wait a month—”

“I can’t wait a month!”

It was on his lips to say “a week,” but he stopped himself in time. There was always a temptation to do what a woman asked, when she was unhappy; but the one way to make a happy woman unhappy, an unhappy woman unhappier, was to yield to her. And in his overnight sanity, before she fired his blood, he had promised Gaisford to take time before risking a double tragedy.

“A month, Ivy,” he repeated. “You must find out the sort of creature you’re marrying.”

“I shall never see you,” she pouted.

“You shall see me all day and every day, if you like. My secretary went for a holiday on Saturday. Do you remember once offering yourself for the position? I don’t mind now. You can tell your aunt and say you’re coming as a great favour to me. Then we shall see how quickly you get tired of me... Sit still, you little eel!”

Ivy had slipped on to the floor again and laid her head on his knees:

“Tired of you... Tired of you! I love you. And I can never thank you or be worthy of you—” She stopped abruptly and sprang up. “Eric! My darling!”

The taxi came to a standstill, and he helped her out. As they stood decorously on the steps of her father’s house, he looked at his watch and said:

“Eight hours ago you were respectfully calling me ‘Mr. Lane.’”

He saw her shivering; and her eyes filled with fear:

“Eight hours ago—seven and a half—I prayed that our train might have a collision... Is her ladyship expecting us, Henry?”

Though Ivy had only once described her home—and then in a single sentence—, one glance at the outside and another at the hall enabled Eric to deduce the character of the occupants and the moral atmosphere of the house. A young footman with two wound-stripes on his livery coat took his hat and asked whether he would like to wash before dinner. Ivy had already run upstairs to her room, and, as he followed the footman, Eric saw massive orderliness on every hand. In the dim hall stood a heavy oak table, flanked by two black oak chairs and surmounted by a presentation salver and a rack with leather-cased Bradshaw, Whittaker and Law List. It was painfully irregular, he felt, that doors, intended by the genius of orderliness to be shut, should have been left open; but he was fortunate in gaining a glimpse, through one, of mahogany side-board and massive dining-table set with eight heavy mahogany chairs and, through another, of glass-fronted fumed-oak book-cases, a double writing-table and red leather couches. The furniture seemed to have been bought in sets and ordered by post; the books—each surely an accepted classic, though Eric could see nothing of them but their calf backs—might well have been supplied by measure. The house was lighted by gas, and each room had its accredited box of matches. The all-pervading solemnity filled Eric with unseemly thoughts of irresponsible humour; he longed to transpose the match-boxes marked “HALL” and “COAT ROOM” and to see what would happen; over the basin, as he washed, was a mirror and shelf with two hair-brushes, one branded “J. F. M.” and the other “VISITORS.” Perhaps Gaymer had been detected changing the match-boxes; perhaps that was why he had been forbidden the house....

Eric checked the impulse to laugh, as soon as Gaymer came into his thoughts. It was easy to understand why a girl had been so desperately anxious to escape from such a house, easy to imagine how she would welcome any one who stretched out a hand to help her... But he had felt no resentment towards Gaymer for two hours; a cad, yes, but a cad who had made his contribution to Eric’s own destiny... What mattered now was the remembrance of Ivy’s ecstatic plunge into his arms, her quavering whisper and trembling mouth, her eyes bright with unshed tears, a kiss that sent her soul on wings to his lips. He frowned at his reflection in the mirror and wondered whether the judge would suspect anything....

Ivy was not yet down when he was shewn into the grim, shadow-filled drawing-room, but her mother welcomed him with nervous warmth. As she turned to the light, Eric saw a thin, small woman with the incongruous remains of a loveable, baby prettiness under her lined skin and her air of being never at ease. While Mr. Justice Maitland was still an unproved junior, her friends murmured that she was throwing away both herself and the snug dowry which came to her from the family business of wholesale chemists, but the initial advantage was first equalized and then turned against her; the rearing of five children tied her to the house, and her speech and outlook hinted that she had not kept pace with her husband’s social advancement.

“It’s very good of you to let me invite myself like this,” said Eric, as he shook hands with her. “As I reminded Ivy, you were kind enough to ask me once before, when I couldn’t come.”

“It’s a great honour, I’m sure. And I expect you’re ever so much run after.”

The judge laid aside the book that he had been reading and raised himself with slow solemnity from his chair.

“It’s not our first meeting, Mr. Lane; you’re not likely to remember that,” he said with austere geniality. “I knew your father in old days and I did in fact meet you not so many months after your arrival in this troubled world of ours. I should like to think that your kindness to our daughter means that you are not going to drop your early friends now that you are famous.”

The hollow click which his eye-glasses, after glissading down his nose, struck out of his shirt-front was for a moment disconcerting; but the bleak, formidable smile which accompanied the words apprised Eric that his host was venturing on badinage. He hastened to smile sympathetically, as he took in the details of appearance and manner. Sir James Maitland was tall and spare, with a long, blue-grained jaw, plentiful grey hair and light, steady eyes set deep under bushy brows. His clothes, like himself, were deliberately old-fashioned; the loose-cut trousers accentuated his thin, bent legs, and a low double collar gave him the hungry, long neck of a vulture. Eric was prepared to find him pompous and despotic in his grave moments and tedious in all; he felt like a reveller who had strayed inadvertently into a grave-yard where the distant fragrance and music that he had left were swallowed in chilling mustiness and silence. If any one for a moment ceased talking in that house, the brooding spirit of melancholy would claim them all in forfeit.

“I didn’t meet Ivy till just before I left America,” he said. “I wish I’d seen more of her.”

“I gather you gave her, if I may say so, very sound advice, very sound,” said the judge. “She had heard the same sort of thing from her parents more than once, but it is the modern fashion to disregard what parents say. I’ve watched the growth of liberty among the girls of the present day,” he went on, as though he were delivering a considered judgement and defying other courts to reverse it on appeal, “and I can’t find a single good thing to be said for it; not a single good thing.”

“Oh, I can!,” Eric answered. “A generation ago I’m sure I shouldn’t have been allowed to take Ivy on the river alone, and we should both have missed a very delightful day. At least, I enjoyed it; I mustn’t speak for her.”

“I’m sure she, too...” Lady Maitland turned, as the door opened. “Well, my dear, how did you get on?”

Ivy looked past her to Eric and then turned to her mother with shining eyes:

“It was wonderful! Mr. Lane, you’re the perfect host, you know.”

Eric bowed, noting from her form of address that she did not yet propose to take her parents into her confidence. Lady Maitland was looking closely at her, and he wondered what inference was being drawn from the tell-tale, starry brightness of the eyes. Magic and poetry were not dead so long as a man could charm that soft diamond sheen from a girl’s eyes... He discovered that the judge was asking him a question—and wondered what inference would be drawn from his own tell-tale absence of mind....

“It was such a glorious day, it couldn’t help being successful,” he said hastily. “We caught the eleven o’clock at Paddington and went to Maidenhead....”

He was still describing their day, when Ivy’s two sisters entered with their husbands. Eric did not hear much of Lady Maitland’s mumbled introduction, but one woman appeared to be Rose and the other Myrtle. Their mother evidently inclined towards horticultural prettiness; and the judge had probably been very scornful when the names were chosen. Scorn, indeed, seemed his fixed attitude of mind towards his family; the sons-in-law forgot that they were promising young chancery barristers and were only careful to avoid being committed for contempt of court. One had travelled from Wimbledon, the other from Beaconsfield; they came every week like fascinated rabbits... If it had not been the middle of the Cambridge term, Ivy’s two brothers would have completed the ceremonial, unchanging circle... The elder sisters had Ivy’s good looks without her rebelliousness of spirit; in any massed attack against their parents they would first hesitate and then surrender; marriage was to them primarily an escape from the necessity of making massed attacks on any one; they were their mother’s daughters....

Supper was announced; and Eric found himself between the elder sister, who never spoke, and Lady Maitland, who only stopped speaking when the judge drowned her voice. As wine followed wine and course followed course, Eric felt that rules could be framed for the legal profession, binding its private life as straitly as the inhibitions of caste-law. At one remove he had watched it in the days when he shared chambers in Pump Court with Jack Waring and observed the grub of the pupil-room, who lunched with fellow-grubs in Hall, developing through the chrysalis stage of the newly-called junior into the practising barrister who first marshalled a judge and was later bidden by younger marshals to dine with the judge in his lodgings. From his friend’s description Eric gathered that most barristers and all judges lived in the same kind of house, married the same kind of wife and ate the same food. At the end of dinner they told the same legal anecdotes before suggesting bridge. (Mr. Justice Maitland probably disapproved of bridge on Sundays, but he had been playing golf at Walton Heath—with other judges....)

Eric sipped a matchless sherry and sympathized with Lady Maitland over her difficulties in obtaining butter during the war. (A small farmer who lived near her old home in Hampshire had been willing to supply an unlimited quantity, but the judge felt that it was bad citizenship to exceed their ration by an ounce.) Ivy was watching them silently, asking him with her eyes whether he now wondered why she had run away from home; no vice could be imputed to her parents, but they were solidly uncongenial, and in his turn Eric privately debated the possibility of being able to break away altogether from the Cromwell Road after marriage. To rescue her from the judge was no less important than to rescue her from Gaymer. It would be intolerable, if he were expected to dine there regularly; fortunately, he was at present being treated with extravagant deference, which shewed that a reputation still had its value; and, for a man, economic freedom consisted in being able to patronize his father-in-law....

Strong mock-turtle soup and sherry; cold salmon and champagne that was drinkable—and no more—(the judge had brought it out in Eric’s honour, and it had been kept long enough to lose its quality); cold roast beef, gooseberry tart and cheese, followed by a bottle of ’84 Dow; it was a plain, substantial meal, spoiled by Lady Maitland’s unceasing efforts to make her guest overeat himself and by his own need to talk in three keys at once. The judge asked what the next play was to be and gave himself a cue for recalling and describing the London stage as he had known it in his youth (from the age of thirty he had been too busy to spare time for the theatre, and nowadays—with certain illustrious exceptions which he did not need to specify—there were no plays worth seeing). Lady Maitland was still troubled by the butter shortage and the difficulties of providing for a big house; it was a pain of spirit, which wrung from her a moan whenever she could make it heard; and, though the judge dominated the conversation with his cues and speeches, she remained resolutely undefeated with an inexhaustible store of food-news which she poked through the interstices of her husband’s periods.

“I was asked to be chairman of a committee on dramatic censorship,” he explained. “That’s how I come to be interested in the subject.”

“You must have some more gooseberries,” insisted Lady Maitland swiftly, as he paused. “They’re from our own garden in Norfolk. Fruit always seems so much nicer when you’ve grown it yourself, don’t you think?... I was telling you about that salmon. The price—but prices don’t mean anything to a bachelor, I’m sure; you just order what you fancy, and, if it’s not in season, so much the worse for you.” She laughed at her own audacity. “Well, the reason why salmon is so disgracefully dear is that ever so much has been deliberately allowed to go bad so as to force up the price of the rest. I always think it’s so wicked to waste food, don’t you? With so much want about. The people with small fixed incomes—I’m always so sorry for them. I had a case the other day, the woman who used to teach my girls music—”

“I’m sure Mr. Lane doesn’t want to hear about her,” interposed Ivy with more solicitude for Eric than civility to her mother. “Father, Mr. Lane’s secretary has gone away for a holiday, and I’m going in her place.”

The two sisters looked up with dawning interest; Lady Maitland glanced covertly at Eric; the judge nodded slowly to give himself time to think. Ivy had thrown out the announcement without inviting his approval or opinion. If she wanted either, it was not fair to speak in front of Eric, but he had not adjusted himself to the new conditions of her emancipation....

“How does that work in with Connie’s arrangements?,” asked Lady Maitland, when her husband’s silence began to look like discourtesy to Eric.

“Oh, she can get on without me for a month,” Ivy answered easily. “Don’t you think it will be fun?”

“What does Mr. Lane say?”

Eric wished that the subject had not been introduced, if it brought so much latent antagonism to the surface.

“She will be of very great assistance to me, if you’ll let her come,” he answered.

The judge reached out eagerly to take up the challenge:

“My dear Lane, we don’t control Ivy’s movements.”

“But I shouldn’t dream of asking her to come against your wishes. We discussed this in America, before I engaged my present secretary.”

Lady Maitland was still visibly fluttered by finding Eric at her table and discovering him to be Ivy’s intimate friend. The wives of barristers and judges lived to as rigid a pattern as that of their husbands; and it was part of their guild-law to dislike the idea of any girl’s wandering off in the morning and returning at night without giving any account of herself or having any one to look after her. Mr. Lane, indeed, had a big enough position of his own to make him careful of his reputation; he seemed steady and sensible, agreeing with almost everything that she had said....

The judge felt that he had been trapped. It was no longer possible to launch side-long reproaches at Ivy, when the responsibility of the decision was put into his hands. As he waited for their decision, Eric was able to break free for a moment from their fog of timid conventionality and ask himself what they would think if they ever guessed why he was there at that moment.

“Well, that’s a very proper sentiment,” said the judge at length, “very proper. I’m glad to find one person in the house who thinks that the wishes of parents should be consulted; I’m glad that Ivy should see that this is not merely senile perversity or malice... I’m sure we can trust her to you, Lane. If you could discover what we’ve done to make life insupportable to her at home,” he added caustically, “we shall be glad of enlightenment.”

Eric laughed, because it saved an answer; but Rose and Myrtle were sitting upright and tense in scared anticipation of a scene, while their husbands ransacked void brains for an attractive subject of conversation. Lady Maitland was gamely casting back to the gross tonnage of bully-beef wantonly wasted by the expeditionary force in the first six months of the war; but their prompt and practised contrivance only strengthened his feeling that he had never seen a house in which the older generation succeeded less in understanding and sympathizing with the aspirations, the enthusiasms, even the follies of the young. He was sorry for Ivy and her brothers and sisters, sorry for the common, faded, pretty mother; but he was also sorry for the blue-jawed judge, who was a more interesting dramatic type, ruling like a patriarch until dumb obedience changed without warning, so far as he could see, to flaming revolt. A bigger man would not feel humiliated that his daughter had transferred herself to a house two miles away in the same city, because life at home rawed her nerves; the judge only knew that this thing had been done, and he suspected that the whole legal world of South Kensington was discussing it with malicious interest.

At the end of dinner, the two sisters whispered to their husbands about trains and slipped away with a murmured good-night. Left with an untried audience, the judge returned freshly to the charge. While he was at the bar, Maitland had won grudging tributes to the range and depth of his knowledge; in his facts, if not in his law, he improvized the little that he did not know, and the habit had become permanent in his conversation. Before they had finished discussing the rival degrees of hard work demanded of literature and the bar, Eric had detached himself from the plans of personal interest and fatigue and was surveying his host as a study to be committed to a certain closely guarded note-book in his safe at home. The judge conversed methodically: he would introduce his subject with a flourish like a self-conscious proprietor flinging open the door of a room and asking his visitors what they thought of that; after listening to half the answer, he would raise one hand, beg leave to interrupt and develop his theme unsparingly, only stopping when the chance of asking another question promised him the opportunity of delivering another discourse.

“I’m afraid I shall have to be going in a moment,” said Eric, as the judge offered him a second cigar. “I have work to do before I go to bed.”

“Well, I’m very glad to have had this talk. You’ll come upstairs?” He led the way to the door and paused with his fingers on the handle. “Do you know a friend of Ivy’s called Gaymer?”

“I’ve met him a certain number of times,” Eric answered easily enough.

“What d’you think of him?”

“Oh, I hardly like to give an opinion of a man I know so little.”

The judge laughed sombrely:

“A good answer! You’re by no means as young and simple as you look, Lane. Well, the reason I asked is this: I’m making you personally responsible for Ivy and, if young Gaymer comes round after her, I shall be obliged if you’ll send him about his business. Half the nonsense in Ivy’s head comes from him. They struck up a very warm intimacy—quite unknown to her mother and me, of course! that’s the modern method; I only heard of it from people who were seeing them about together. So I got my gentleman to honour me with his company at dinner; and I put it to him—what was it all about? He pretended he didn’t understand, but I wouldn’t have any of that. ‘I’ll thank you,’ I told him, ‘not to behave in such a way as to cause people to gossip about my daughter. I daresay you think I’m old-fashioned,’ I said. ‘You may think I’m wrong,’ I said. ‘You may tell me that you’re only doing what thousands of other men do; all I say is, I was brought up in a different school.’ And I may tell you, Lane, that it was a school in which young men had manners flogged into them. My gentleman stared at me very saucily and said: ‘Are you asking me my “intentions”? Nineteen-nineteen! Is that still done? I’ve been away at the war so long that I’ve lost touch with that sort of thing.’ Well, then I rang for his coat and hat. I’ve not seen him since; but that was quite enough to make Ivy take his side, and I’ve never had any doubt that he put into her head the idea of going off and living her own life. ‘Living her own life’! How tired I am of that phrase!...”

“I don’t encourage people to interrupt me when I’m working, judge,” Eric reassured him.

The double doors of the drawing-room were open, and, as his head came on a level with the landing, Eric saw Ivy sitting on a cushion at her mother’s feet and talking with listless unconcern. She had put on her hat, and her gloves were lying across her knees. Perhaps she was only tired after her long day in the open air, perhaps she was goaded beyond bearing by her father’s pin-pricks; or perhaps she had been pleading fatigue so that he might take her away and be alone with her... As they came into the room, her unconcern dropped from her, and she turned with the same sheen of adoration in her eyes. He prayed that the judge might have missed it; he ought not to have been expecting it, for they had been talking gravely and responsibly as fathers of families, and Eric had been commissioned to protect Ivy from undesirable acquaintances... Lady Maitland had turned at the same moment, so she could not have seen the glance; but, unless she were blind, she must notice that Ivy was still transfigured....

“I was just coming down to say good-bye! Mr. Lane, what time do I come to you to-morrow? If it’s early, I must go to bed now.”

“I suppose nine o’clock’s out of the question?,” Eric hazarded.

“I can manage that.”

“Then won’t you let me see you home? I was telling your father that I’d work to finish. Lady Maitland, will you think me very rude if I run away? It’s so kind of you to let me come.”

“We were honoured to have you, I’m sure,” Lady Maitland answered. “And now that you have found your way here—”

“That’s too charming,” he interrupted before she could finish the dreaded sentence.

The judge said good-night warmly to his guest and less warmly to his daughter, adding, before the doors were securely closed, that Lane seemed a sensible, steady, decent young fellow.

Ivy offered smiling congratulations.

“Eric, I thought you were never coming!,” she whispered. “My dear, you were wonderful! Mother’s in love with you! And you could hear what a success you’d been with father. Was it a very terrible evening? I didn’t notice anything except that you were there; I couldn’t see any one else. I suppose father was disapproving of me, as usual....”

She stopped speaking, as the front door was opened for them.

“We must get things right with your people somehow,” said Eric reflectively. “I think it’s awful when children don’t get on well with their parents.”

“But, my dear, is it my fault? I don’t believe father ever cared for me much, but he really hates me now.”

“If he does, it’s because he was very fond of you before... Nature’s substitute....”

Ivy slipped her arm through his and walked for some moments in silence. A taxi was on the rank by Gloucester Road Station, and they got into it.

“There’s only one substitute for love,” she whispered. “A greater love... Isn’t that true?”

“I hope so.”

“We’ll make it so.”

“If, Ivy. Remember that for a month—”

“A month! But it’ll be just the same. I shall be with you every day. ‘I suppose nine o’clock’s out of the question,’” she mimicked. “I’ll come at eight or seven or six. And stay till mid-night.”

“And a nice character I should get from your father. He’s made me responsible for you, Ivy... Eaton Place. And you have been happy?”

“Oh, Eric, I wish it wasn’t over! Happy!”

Eric laughed and helped her out of the taxi. Her happiness was so radiant that he felt it could not last. As he drove away he wondered whether she had been as radiant with Gaymer. Such intensity of passion was frightening; love that grew from seed to flower and fruit in a single day might die in a single night....

Ivy stood on the doorstep until he was out of sight. Eric stared long at an unlighted cigarette and then searched his pockets for a match. He was bewildered and a little nervous and utterly exhausted....