“Eastward was the wise man’s course.... Mr. Polly saw himself going along it with all the self-applause a wise man feels. But somehow it wouldn’t come like that... the figure went slinking... and would not go otherwise than slinking. He turned his eyes westward as if for an explanation, and if the figure was no longer ignoble, the prospect was appalling.

“‘One kick in the stummick would settle a chap like me,’ said Mr. Polly.

“‘Oh, God!’ cried Mr. Polly, and lifted his eyes to heaven, and said for the last time in that struggle, ‘It isn’t my affair!’

“And so saying, he turned his face towards the Potwell Inn.

“He went back, neither halting nor hastening in his pace after this last decision, but with a mind feverishly busy.

“‘If I get killed I get killed, and if he gets killed, I get hung. Don’t seem just somehow...’”

“We should be so pleased if you could dine with us on Friday,” said Lady John Carstairs on the threshold of the O’Ranes’ house. “I never had an opportunity of thanking you for your kindness in getting us off the boat so early. It will be only a small party, but you’ll meet one or two friends from America. I wanted to ask you before, but we’re only now beginning to get our house straight.”

Eric thought over the invitation in the moment allowed him for consulting his engagement-book. He had intended to begin work on a new play, but his friends and the strange monster of an adoring public that he had conjured into existence refused to leave him in peace. For a week after his return to England the illustrated papers were publishing photographs of him; four reporters called in two days to learn his plans for the future and his impressions of America; by letter and telegram he was begged to write and speak on the fruits of his tour; and, when he had deflected the applicants to the office of his agent, there remained private appeals less easy to shelve or refuse. The dramatic circle of the Thespian Club organized a dinner in his honour; Dr. Gaisford bade him to “a strictly bachelor party” of his friends and admirers; he was asked to take the chair for the Actors’ Pension Fund; and the Penmen’s Club invited him to be the guest of honour at their weekly luncheon.

Mingled with the official invitations, the unofficial rained down upon him. It was a repetition of the personal triumph which he had enjoyed when his first play was produced. Lady Maitland, Mrs. Shelley, Lady Poynter, Mrs. Manisty and a dozen more urged him to lunch or dine with them; war and peace made no difference to them, a man might travel to the end of the world and back to find them still chewing the cud of their sparse culture. If his position in London three years before had been incredible even to him, he was forced to believe now that his absence abroad had mysteriously consolidated it: then the critics had bracketed him with Pinero and Barrie for the excellence of his stagecraft and with Shaw for the wit and virility of his dialogue, in him they saw and blessed the promise of the future; now, though he had written nothing in the interval, they chose to regard the promise as fulfilled. “Among the younger playwrights,” wrote the grudging editor of “Green-room and Studio,” “it is unsafe to predict who will step into the shoes of the men we have named. Always excepting Mr. Eric Lane, whose niche is assured to him...” The public seemed to take its time from the press; the enthusiasm of those who knew him reacted on those who had yet to meet him; and for a month he was whirled from house to house in a sandstorm of adulation.

When he could see and breathe again, Eric discovered gaps in the well-remembered catalogue of names: Lady Crawleigh and Lady Knightrider at least knew too much or suspected too much or had enough consideration not to ask him to their houses; but Lady John Carstairs’ invitation was a test-case. If he accepted, Eric was sure to meet other of Lady Barbara’s relations there; but, even as he wavered, he knew that he dared not surrender to shyness.

“I should love to come,” he answered, as they went forward to shake hands with their hostess.

Mrs. O’Rane was signalizing her return from America by assembling all of her many friends who had resisted the lure of the peace conference or the south of France. During the war Eric had attended sufficient of her parties to recoil from their noise and studied hilarity, but he was by now so much sated with the pompous entertaining of such intellectuals as Lady Poynter that he welcomed the informality of a Bohemian frolic. Here at least he would be screened by the shadow of some later and more modish celebrity. As he came into the long, crowded library, a space was being cleared in the middle; while their leader explored the quality of the floor, a group of dancers with only their heads and ballet slippers protruding from a swathing mass of cloaks and shawls stood whispering in one corner. A tentative chord was struck, the wrappings slid to the ground, and the dancers pattered forward on tip-toe with their arms arched above their heads.

Eric was trying to see who was present when Amy Loring came up with a radiant smile of welcome.

“I’m very glad to see you again!,” she whispered. “Sonia told me you’d crossed by the same boat, and I came here on purpose to meet you. I do hope you’re quite strong again now.”

“I’ve as clean a bill of health as our friend Gaisford is ever likely to give me,” Eric laughed. For a moment he had felt his muscles tightening in embarrassment and could only think of a dinner at Lady Crawleigh’s house when Amy had given him the same glowing smile of encouragement; she had bathed in his happiness at being in love with her cousin and had exhorted him to go on and prosper in disregard of any obstacles that Barbara’s father might impose. Eric wondered whether she remembered that night as vividly as he did. Gaisford’s name touched another note in his brain, and he remembered the doctor’s telling him that George Oakleigh had once been in love with her; it was an old, familiar tale, and, until a few months before, the gossips had predicted that neither of them would ever marry. In the act of wondering whether she felt any resentment towards George or Barbara, Eric realized that she was too big of heart to grudge happiness to any one. “I’m most awfully glad to see you again!,” he added, unconsciously pressing her hand.

As they turned to watch the dancing, Eric recalled that he had never before met Amy in the O’Ranes’ house. After her brother’s jilting at Sonia’s hands, the two families had found it more comfortable not to meet; they were apparently now reconciled, and any one could choose between thinking that they had drifted together in the irresistible crosscurrents of London and imagining that the more generous had made overtures of friendship. Behind the warmth of her greeting Eric had fancied the diffidence of a suppliant, as though Amy were offering him amends on behalf of all her kin; he realized that he could, if he liked, live in retirement, but that, if he came back to the old life, he must try to shew as much graciousness and as little rancour as Amy displayed towards those who fell below her own exalted standard of chivalry.

“You don’t see a chair anywhere..?,” he heard her murmuring.

“Why shouldn’t we stake out a claim at the supper-table?,” he asked. “I was wondering if you were dining with the Carstairs next week... Oh, well, don’t you think you might get Lady John to invite you? It’s so very long since I’ve seen you; and it’s impossible to talk here... London hasn’t changed much in the last two years.”

“Or the last five. I wonder if we’re going straight back to 1914... I’ve not been to a party of this kind since the war. It’s not very amusing....”

The scenes from the ballet were followed by a pianoforte solo; Harry Manders poured forth a stream of stories; Deganway gave imitations; and Pentyre accompanied himself on a banjo, until a restless group headed by Gaymer suggested clearing away the furniture for a dance. Eric, too, was finding but little amusement in Mrs. O’Rane’s strenuous programme and would have preferred to talk in peace to Amy Loring or go home to bed. This, he decided, would be the last party of its kind which he could spare time to attend; for a moment he had wandered aimlessly in the wilderness of London, waiting to light upon anything that would occupy his thoughts. Nothing had come to him, and he recognized that he must find his refuge in work.

“I’m too old for this sort of thing,” he murmured to Amy.

“I can’t remember ever being young enough,” she answered with a smile.

The heat and noise were by now almost unbearable; high spirits were rising by imperceptible shrill stages to rowdiness; and, as Gaymer’s deputation pressed insistently for its dance, the older members of the party began to look at their watches.

“Anything you like, if you’ll only wait until every one’s had something to eat—,” cried Mrs. O’Rane, leaving the supper-table to pacify Gaymer.

“Oh, they’ll go on all night, Sonia! We—want—a—dance. Come on, Gerry, all together! Pentyre! One, two, three! We—want—a—dance—We—want—a—dance.”

The three men ranged themselves against a wall and shouted through their open fists like trumpeting heralds.

At the second repetition, those nearest to them joined in the measured, relentless chorus, drowning the efforts of a girl at the piano and reducing Mrs. O’Rane to helpless gesticulation.

“Wait till the end of this!,” she begged in an interval of silence.

“We—want—a—dance!”

“But it’s so rude!”

Gaymer laughed and whispered to his companions.

“Do—not—shoot—the—pi-an-ist.—She—is—do-ing—her—best,” rose the new chorus; then, with swelling menace, “WE—WANT—A—DANCE.”

It was impossible to sing, play or argue against the concerted uproar, and after a moment’s indecision Mrs. O’Rane gave orders for the rugs and furniture to be moved. Her husband apologized to the interrupted musician, and Eric was leading Amy Loring away when Gaymer petitioned for the first dance.

“Lady Amy’s promised it to me,” Eric improvised.

“The feller’s cut me out,” commented Gaymer with humorous solemnity. “The next one, then?”

“Didn’t you ask me to find your car after that?,” Eric enquired.

“’Better go somewhere where I am wanted,” muttered Gaymer. “No objection to my asking, was there? ’Hate to give offence, you know. Nod as good as a wink, you know. Pardon granted as soon as asked?”

As they drove back to Loring House, Amy thanked Eric for his intervention.

“I’m afraid Johnny’s rather deteriorated since the war,” she mused. “He was always rather wild, but he never used to be rowdy. There was quite an unpleasantness at Kathleen Knightrider’s last week; I believe she had to ask him to go... If he’d only drink less....”

When Eric arrived at Queen Anne’s Gate the following week, he found that Lady John had conscientiously assembled a novelist and war-poet to keep him in countenance; the “friends from America” were represented by Sir Matthew and Lady Woodstock, an attachÉ from the embassy, David O’Rane, his wife and Sir Matthew’s former secretary. After that she seemed to have surrendered to her new family by inviting the Duchess of Ross, Amy Loring and Phyllis Knightrider; and, when Eric entered the drawing-room, she cut short her welcome to tell the butler that Captain Gaymer had asked whether he might dine and to order another cover to be laid. The dinner promised to be peaceful and proved so dull that Eric had to invent an excuse for leaving early: he had now sketched the ground-plan of a new play and, though he could as yet feel no enthusiasm for it, he conscientiously tried to recover his old habit of regular work.

“If you’ll wait till half-past ten, we’ll drop you,” volunteered Gaymer. “Ivy and I are going to a dance of sorts, and I’ve chartered a taxi for the night.”

Eric remembered that it was raining, when he arrived, and decided that his vague distaste for Gaymer’s society was weaker than his dislike of wet pavements.

“It’s very good of you,” he answered. “A taxi for the night sounds luxurious.”

“Necessary,” answered Gaymer. “Can’t be bothered to fight for the beastly things or walk home at three in the morning. I can do without everything except personal comforts. This fellow’s been ticking up tuppences ever since Armistice Day; I suppose he’ll have to be paid some time... ’Wonder if Amy’d like a lift.”

As he crossed the room, Eric sat down in the empty chair by Ivy Maitland’s side. It was ungracious to accept a favour from a man and then, in the next breath, to disparage him; but, after Gaymer’s unmannerly conduct at Mrs. O’Rane’s party, any one might feel a little sorry to see Ivy becoming his friend. Before the war he had been a leader in the disorderly little group of roystering practical jokers headed by Jack Summertown and Pentyre; and, though the Air Force had kept him employed for three or four years, he seemed now to be casting about for fresh forms of dissipation and rather aimless mischief. While Ivy was too young and, at heart, too timid to amuse him for long, her behaviour on the boat had been feather-brained; it was, of course, their business, but Eric would have preferred to see her with some one who checked her youthful craving for independence instead of exciting it.

“Where are you dancing?” he asked her.

“Ssh! Please!,” she whispered. “I wish Johnnie hadn’t shouted it out like that! Mother’d have a fit, if she knew I was going to a dance alone.”

Eric wondered for a moment whether she was yielding to the youthful temptation of trying to shock him.

“Your parents seem still to be a great trial to you,” he observed.

“I’ve made some impression on them. Johnnie’s got me a job at the Air Ministry, and they’ve allowed me to take it. The real fight’s coming when I tell them I’ve taken rooms of my own.”

“Are you going to live alone?”

“I think so. The girl who was coming with me has cried off... Now, it’s no use finding fault with me, because I’ve absolutely made up my mind. I must lead my own life!”

“I think it’s an awful mistake,” said Eric with a shrug. “You’re much too young, much too good-looking...” After saying good-bye at Liverpool, he had forgotten her very existence; but in a short and flimsy blue dance-frock, with blue stockings, shoes and head-band she was younger and more provocative than he remembered either at their first meeting in New York or on board the Lithuania. “Girls of nineteen do not leave home and set up housekeeping on their own,” he added.

“But why shouldn’t they? I know several who do.”

It was waste of breath to tell any one so superficially self-confident that a girl of nineteen might need protection from risks older and more insidious than she would deign to admit. His eyes wandered for a moment to the corner where John Gaymer was talking to Amy Loring; it was hard for one man to say what attraction any other man exerted over women, but Gaymer was undeniably popular; without being handsome, he was more than presentable in appearance, with an immaculate shell; the war had proved his strength and reckless courage, and he comported himself towards women with a devil-may-care assurance that occasionally degenerated into a brutality which they did not seem to resent. It was his business if he embarrassed himself with Ivy Maitland’s adoration and hers if she chose to fall in love with him... Eric tried to recall what he had seen of their manner to each other: Gaymer had apparently forced himself upon the party when he heard that Ivy was dining, but this was perhaps no more than a convenient means of meeting his partner before the dance; he had shewn her only the boisterous attention that he held in readiness for all women who would accept it; and, if they were in love, neither would welcome a third person in the taxi....

Eric’s attention was recalled to Ivy when he heard her proclaiming rather petulantly:

“Somebody must make a start.”

“You’ve not yet convinced me that you’ve any great hardships to put up with at home,” he answered, with difficulty suppressing a yawn.

“They aren’t great. They’re small, absurdly small. But they’re innumerable and everlasting. Now, take to-night. When I met Johnnie last week at Mrs. O’Rane’s, we found that we danced rather well together. He’s frightfully good at games and everything—”

“Do you know anything about him?” Eric interrupted.

“Not much. Do you?”

“Nothing at all. I’ve met him on and off for some years, but in all the time I’ve never seen as much of him as I saw of you that night in New York. On general principles, don’t you think it’s—imprudent; aren’t your parents justified in thinking it’s imprudent for you to tumble into an intimacy—not with Gaymer, but with any man of whom you know absolutely nothing?”

“But women have instincts about men! I should be no better off if I dragged him away and introduced him to mother and made her invite him to dinner. I daresay that’s more conventional, but it doesn’t do any good.”

Eric hesitated long enough to ask himself why he inflicted so much advice on a very raw child, but not long enough to answer his own question.

“It puts your relationship on a different footing,” he suggested. “When a man’s been to your house and eaten your salt, he feels a responsibility to the house. Look at it this way: during the last week, how have you differed in essence from—let me say—a chorus-girl who dines with a man and goes to a dance with him and lets him help her to get taken on at a new theatre? I don’t suggest that there are no differences, but what differences are there for a man like Gaymer to see?”

Ivy looked at him in perplexity which was too strong to allow resentment to creep in.

“I don’t understand,” she said, and both were glad when the taxi was reported to be at the door.

As he read his letters and looked with distaste at the work awaiting him on the morrow, Eric reviewed with morose dissatisfaction the five weeks that had passed since his return to England. He had sighed with boredom at the cultured table of Lady Poynter; and in the conscientiously Bohemian setting of Mrs. O’Rane the boredom had only been complicated by amazement. (He scrawled a blue-pencil “Refuse” across four invitations and tossed them into his secretary’s letter-basket.) He had interested himself for a moment in Ivy Maitland, at least to the extent of giving her some good advice; but her pert assurance was a little tiresome, and he was now only interested to wonder how soon John Gaymer would weary of it. At the Mill-House he had tried to win his way back to a place in his own family, but they had mysteriously stood still and he had wandered into a spiritual wilderness of his own. Even his work no longer promised him a way out of the wilderness, but it might keep him from brooding over the astounding emptiness of life.

He had achieved a dull quiescence of spirit when he read in Christmas week that Mr. and Lady Barbara Oakleigh had returned to London from Ireland and were leaving England for the Riviera after a few days in Hampshire. That night, on his way to Winchester, Eric chose a compartment at the back of the train to avoid all chance of meeting her in the Crawleigh or Southampton coaches. His window commanded two-thirds of the platform, and, five minutes before the train was due to start, he caught sight of Oakleigh and a footman hurrying by, with Barbara half a pace behind him. Valentine Arden had christened her “the haggard Venus”; her big sunken eyes and white cheeks had a morbid fascination of their own, compelling as ever; physical delicacy and nervous vitality still contended for possession of her tall, wasted body; tragedy and defiance alternated in the swift changes of her expression, as she flashed by the window of his compartment. For all his resolution and training, Eric felt his heart stop as it had stopped in Tokio, when he read the news of her marriage; when the red mist lifted from his eyes, he looked at her again from behind the screen of his paper, surprised to see no change: the green morocco travelling-cushion still bore the old “B.N.” in one corner; he recognized her fur-coat, and George was carrying the red leather jewel-case which he had carried for her fifty times. At their first meeting she had criticized his first play, offering to re-write it, telling him that he knew nothing of ‘Life’ and proposing herself as instructor.

“Oh, well... This is Life, I suppose,” Eric whispered to himself.

To have seen her would break the shock of meeting her on her return to England, but he was glad that she was going abroad; the shock would have to be broken by instalments, widely separated, if he was to acquit himself without disgrace. He wondered how much she had ever told her husband. He wondered how much she dared admit to herself... At Winchester he jumped on to the platform, before the train stopped, and ran out of the station, before any curious head could reconnoitre from the windows of the Crawleigh and Southampton coaches.

Finality... Eric turned up his collar and sank lower in the seat of the car. He did not want Sybil to see his face. Christmas Eve... Three years ago to a day he had reached finality; Barbara was falling in love with him, when she had sworn by the Cross to offer herself in reparation to Jack Waring: and in those easy, sane, clear-cut days Eric had decided to end their intimacy before either clouded it with tragedy. And then she had appealed to his compassion and sent for him... perhaps to see if he could continue to resist her. And he had gone back; and his resistance had broken down. A man only paid for his own weakness....

But it was finality to see her running along the platform arm-in-arm with her husband....

“Basil’s home,” said Sybil, as they left the town. “He got back yesterday and demobilized himself this morning.”

“Oh, good work! I’ve not seen him for three years.”

“It’s the first Christmas since the war that all three of you have been home.”

His two brothers had walked out to meet the car, and at the sparse edge of Lashmar Woods they sprang out like highwaymen and secured themselves on the running-boards. Lady Lane and her husband were waiting for them in the hall, and, when they sat down to dinner, no one could believe that they had been scattered for nearly five years. The obliteration of time was all that Eric needed to complete his sense of finality. For three days they talked and chaffed one another, exhuming time-honoured jests and bandying stories and experiences from four continents.

Half-consciously Eric realized that he was reviving an atmosphere of the past to avoid thinking of the future; but, when each had told the tale of his wanderings, all looked beyond the smoke and fire of the war to a world which might be peaceful but would certainly be drab.

“What are you going to do now, Basil?,” asked Eric at breakfast on his last morning.

“Well, if a grateful Government has kept open my job in the India Office, I suppose I shall have to start in there—just as if there’d been no jolly little war.”

“And I’m going back to the dear old China Station, just as if there’d been no jolly little war,” added Geoffrey. “Everything’s going to be rather flat... Hullo! Perfectly good postman with Yuletide greetings for all of us!” He bounded out of the room and helped in the sorting. “You’ve got more than your fair share, Ricky.”

“You can have them all, if you’ll pay the bills,” answered Eric. “Or I’ll pay the bills, if you’ll accept the invitations and go in my place. Would you like to lunch with Lady Poynter? Her husband had some marvellous port a couple of years ago. Or dine with Mrs. Shelley? I can give you a list of her clichÉs: a book always “creates an illusion” with her, and modern poetry is “the pendant to a mood”. I can’t honestly recommend her. Misguided women who think I still dance... Or you may dine with Mr. Justice and Lady Maitland; I don’t know them, but you’re sure to get a good dinner, because their daughter says—here it is, if you don’t believe me—‘My father is so anxious to meet you.’”

“Sounds as if you’d been trifling with her young affections,” said Geoffrey. “Take my advice and don’t go.”

“I’ve no intention of going,” Eric answered. “I’ve work to do.”

In the New Year he shut himself up with the first draft of a play and for three months only left his flat for an hour’s walk each day in the Green Park. Sometimes, as he sat bent before his miniature theatre, marshalling, drilling and dismissing his little card-board figures, he could fancy Barbara’s eager, low voice at his side, her breath warm on his cheek, and the keen, sweet scent of carnations once more, at each lithe movement of her body, filling the room where in other years she had argued out his plays line by line; sometimes, as he read his speeches aloud, he caught himself pausing for her judgement of their rhythm; and, when the first rehearsal was called, he knew that he would find her ghost sitting with clasped hands on a stool by his feet; on the first night it would await him in his box, defying him to bring any one else to a seat already taken.

“But this is Life,” he whispered to himself. “I... I told Gaisford I was going to forget about all this.”

As soon as the new play was mentioned in the theatrical gossip of the press, he received the usual appeals from unknown men and women to be given a trial. As usual he sent them bodily to Manders and, as usual, instructed his secretary and servants to admit no one who called without a satisfactory explanation. Manders hoped to begin rehearsing in the late summer and to produce the play in the autumn; Eric had too much other work on hand to waste his scanty leisure on stage-struck amateurs; he had not seen a play since his return to England and was beginning to forget the highly-charged, conventionally unreal atmosphere of the theatre.

A week’s conscientious study of contemporary drama satisfied him that, whatever else the critics might say of “The Gate of Horn”, they would not degrade it by comparison with any of the plays that he had felt constrained to see. On the last night of his penance he was escaping into the Strand from the unknown people who persisted in bowing to him, when a girl, standing by herself a few paces ahead, turned carelessly and bade him good-evening in a diffident and rather surprised voice.

“I’m afraid I can’t see who it is,” Eric had to confess. “I’m as blind as a bat, when I come out of a theatre.”

“It’s Ivy Maitland. You wouldn’t remember me.”

“Indeed I do. Are you all by yourself?”

“Yes. I came with a man, but he—he had to go before the end.”

“Then you must let me see you home,” said Eric after a moment’s hesitation which he hoped she would not notice. “It’s the Cromwell Road, didn’t you tell me?”

“Not now. I—in spite of your advice... I really couldn’t stand it any longer at home. But you mustn’t come out of your way; I’m only a step from here—at the back of the Adelphi.”

“Let me see you as far as the door... Well, I hope it’s a success.”

They crossed the Strand and dived through a hidden courtyard and down a flight of steps before she answered:

“I can’t say it is—so far.”

“Come! that’s honest!,” said Eric. “If you’ve the moral courage to admit it’s a failure, why don’t you have the greater moral courage to chuck the whole thing up?”

“Ah! I can’t do that.” She stopped in front of a door and felt for her latch-key. “I suppose you wouldn’t come in, if I asked you?”

Eric pretended to look at his watch and even walked away to the nearest lamp-post, where he looked at it again. He had still two hours’ work to do, but the girl’s dejection of voice and her candid admission of failure touched him.

“Are you all alone?” he asked.

“Yes. You won’t compromise me; and I shouldn’t mind if you did,” she added with a touch of her old impatience. “I was thinking of you. You’re so well-known—”

“If you’re all by yourself... I’m thinking of you—”

“Ah, I was afraid you wouldn’t come!”

She sighed gently and held out her hand. Loneliness and the sense of failure seemed to have taken away all her vitality: her hand was cold and limp, and her head drooped as though she lacked the strength to keep it erect.

“Let me come to tea some day,” Eric suggested.

“Oh, you’re too busy. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“I’m not too busy for that.”

“Aren’t you?” She made a pitiful attempt to collect the fragments of her pride; but the drooping head and unsteady lips belied the valiance of her voice, and haughtiness passed quickly into petulance. “You were too busy to dine with us, when I invited you; you were too busy to see me when I called on you, too busy even to answer my letter.”

Eric stared at her in amazement:

“Miss Maitland, I simply don’t understand! I couldn’t dine with you, because I never dine out when I’ve a play on hand. But the call and the letter—”

“Your maid said you couldn’t see me, as I hadn’t an appointment.”

“I must apologize for her. She probably thought you’d come to ask for an engagement.”

“I had. And that’s what I wrote about. You said in New York that I might come to you for help; I couldn’t go to your club, because father’s a member. Didn’t you get my letter?”

“If it had anything to do with the theatre, I don’t suppose I finished it; all those things are sent on to Manders. I’m sorry, Miss Maitland; I wouldn’t have disappointed you for the world.”

“I began to feel desperate,” she answered dully. “It seemed needlessly unkind. Of course, I ought to have known that you were very famous—”

“Please! I’ve apologized. I hoped I’d cleared myself. Won’t you choose your own time for coming,—if you think I can do any good?”

She swung her latch-key reflectively and then touched his arm with her fingers.

“Won’t you come in—just for a moment?” she pleaded.

“I’m thinking of you,” he repeated.

“You’ll do me more good by coming in for five minutes than by thinking of my reputation... I’m desperate.”

“That’s the second time you’ve used that word; you oughtn’t to know the meaning of it.”

“Ah, if you come in, don’t treat me like a child.”

Eric followed her into a narrow, ill-ventilated hall, lighted by a pin-point of gas. The house was old and full of half-heard noises and dry, distant scents; the first floor was let to a solicitor, the second to a dramatic agent; above that was a double flat and at the top, crushed squat under the roof and pared by sloping ceilings, Ivy Maitland’s own roomy attic. As she turned up the gas, he saw a round table and wicker chairs, a piano and book-case and, in an alcove, a cupboard, bed and chest of drawers. While she slipped off her cloak and pulled the curtains over the alcove, he read the titles of the books and glanced at the photographs on the piano. The place of honour was given to an officer in the uniform of the Air Force, and Eric guessed its identity almost without looking at the face or at the “Yours always, John Gaymer,” scrawled across one corner.

“Won’t you sit down? It’s a miserable fire, I’m afraid,” she apologized, dropping on to her knees and battering unscientifically with a bent poker on the top of three sadly smouldering lumps of coal, each too big for the tiny grate.

“I’m not cold, thanks... How long have you been in these quarters?”

“Two months.”

“And who looks after you?”

“A woman comes in and cooks my breakfast and cleans the place. I usually have my other meals out.” Eric was not conscious that his expression had changed, but the girl looked up piteously and turned away to the fire. “Don’t look so disapproving! I’m not defending myself!”

“My dear child, I’m not attacking you. Haven’t I come here solely to find out if I can be of any assistance to you?”

She jabbed at the fire in reflective silence, and Eric, watching her through half-closed eyes, seemed to see rippling waves of unhappiness, disappointment, loneliness and discomfort rising until they submerged her and she ceased to struggle. She was white and tired; her arms were thin and her shoulder-blades sharply outlined under the green gauze of her dress, as she stolidly poked the fire and refused to look at him. The air of assured efficiency which she had worn in New York never seemed more than the assertive protest of extreme youth against patronage; her abandonment of it now suggested that she habitually attacked and then ran away, first disregarding advice, then admitting her mistake where a stronger woman would have converted it into success and where a prouder woman would have preserved silence. Perhaps it was too much to expect great strength or pride in a girl of nineteen whose head was still fermenting with unassimilated catch-words.

“It was very good of you to come. And it was awful cheek of me to ask you.”

“Imagine—for one night—that I’m quite human,” Eric suggested.

She jumped up and ran to the door.

“You’d like a drink!,” she exclaimed.

“Is that the differentia of the human man?” he laughed.

There was a clink of glasses outside, and she returned with a bottle of brandy and a box of cigars. While he was mixing himself a drink, she slipped with apparent aimlessness behind him, and he heard something drop. When he looked round, the signed photograph of John Gaymer had disappeared, and she was holding out a tumbler for him to fill.

“I’m not going to give you brandy,” he said, picking up the syphon of soda-water.

“Just a little! I’m so tired.”

“Not a drop! If you start drinking brandy at nineteen—because you’re tired—, where d’you think you’ll be at thirty?”

“I don’t much care!” she answered. “I believe those cigars are quite good. Won’t you try one?”

“Not if you’re going to sleep in this room, thanks,” he answered.

“I don’t mind it—honestly,” she said.

“As a matter of fact I’ve been smoking all day.”

Eric composed himself as comfortably as possible in a room where everything jarred upon him. She ought not to have been living there by herself, she was lonely, uncomfortable and probably ill-fed; she ought not to allow a man to come and see her, she ought not to dream of drinking a brandy and soda, she ought not to have brandy or cigars in the house, she ought not to know that she did not mind inhaling cigar-smoke in her sleep. The incident of the photograph recurred to his mind, and he wondered whether he was being offered refreshment which she had provided for Gaymer... and whether she had dropped the photograph behind the piano because she was ashamed of him... or whether they had quarrelled, whether it was Gaymer who had taken her to the theatre and abandoned her....

“I haven’t seen you since that night at the Carstairs’,” she began. “You remember?”

“When I gave you good advice. Yes.”

“Well, I tried to follow it. I’m not altogether a fool and, thinking it over, I thought I saw what you meant. After the dance Johnnie asked me to go to another... It was very hard to do, but I tried to let him see that, though it was all right, of course... I invited him to come and dine with us. That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

“I thought it was better, certainly. Though, why you think my advice—”

“Because you know about things, you’re clever, you’ve met everybody, you can understand people and write about them. Father’s in such a rut... Well, Johnnie came. That was when I wanted you to meet him. He wasn’t much of a success, I’m afraid.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, I don’t know! He argued... and father always expects an enormous lot of deference from boys. Father said afterwards that Johnnie had drunk much too much for a young man and had become very impertinent. After that, of course, he wasn’t invited again, and mother kept nagging and trying to make me give up my job in his office. We had an awful row one day, just because I dined with Johnnie and came back rather late after the theatre. Father said I wasn’t to go out with him and that, as long as I lived at home, he expected me to obey him. I decided that I couldn’t live at home any longer. Johnnie found me these rooms....”

She coughed and took a sip of her soda-water.

“You consulted him?”

“Yes. He made me see that the only thing to do was to leave home....”

Eric sat suddenly upright and then relaxed to his former attitude, noting with quick thankfulness that his movement had been unobserved.

“What made you write to me?” he asked.

“Well, you see, everybody in my department is being demobilized, so I wanted a job. I saw you had a new play—”

“Already cast,” Eric interrupted. “And we could cast the third footman five times over with people who’ve played respectable parts for years. There’s nothing there, Miss Maitland, I’m afraid. Even if there were, I’d sooner see you living with your parents again—”

“I can’t go back.”

“I see. Well, what are you living on?”

“I saved a little money when I was with Sir Matthew. When that’s gone—”

“Oh, Gaymer would see you didn’t starve or get turned into the street,” said Eric with soft irony.

“Yes. At least he said he would—”

“Before you quarrelled,” he suggested.

She looked at him wonderingly.

“Who told you we’d quarrelled?” she asked.

“You did. Miss Maitland, however unconventional you want to be, you can’t take money from a man. I’d most gladly lend or give you fifty pounds to-night, but you couldn’t possibly accept it. You see that?”

“Of course! I hardly know you.”

Eric shook his head in bewilderment, as he tried to determine whether she was naturally stupid or wholly unsophisticated.

“Are you in love with Gaymer?”

Ivy hesitated before answering, and Eric felt that he was not going to hear the truth.

“I like him when he’s nice to me,” she answered indifferently.

“Is he in love with you?”

“He likes me. He likes so many people,” she said, as carelessly as before.

Eric nodded slowly and held out his hand.

“Well, good-night. I’ll do what I can.”

Though he could promise her little, she was better for the companionship and talk. In opening the door, he turned and saw her watching him; but now she was spiritless again, her hands were clasped in front of her, her shoulders were bowed, and she looked crestfallen, limp and fragile. Remembering how irritation at her pertness had warmed to impatient dislike on board the Lithuania, Eric blamed himself for intolerance towards a child whose worst crime was her childishness.

“Have you a telephone here?” he asked.

“There’s one downstairs that I use. Shall I shew you?”

“Oh, no, thanks.” Impulse sent him back into the room; and he shook hands with her again, as though to postpone for an instant the silent chill of loneliness which he could feel already settling upon her. Gaymer had contrived to make the girl uncommonly miserable; and, though unhappiness was a universal distemper of the soul, though Eric had told himself that Ivy’s relations to Gaymer were their own business, he knew that he could comfort her spirit by putting an arm round her thin shoulders, by kissing her forehead and allowing her to sob out her simple perplexity and pain of heart. A hundred anguished memories warned him of the price that he had already paid for compassion; common sense cried out that this was not his affair. And yet, unless he made it his affair, no one would; and he had now learned wisdom and knew where to stop. “What I meant was: if you ever feel lonely, ring me up and have a talk. I’m nearly always at home, night and day. I’m not too busy for that. Suggest a day for lunch. I lead a fairly solitary life myself.”