1

Arnold Lane and Guy Cust had been great friends at Cambridge, in spite of having been at different colleges, and having cultivated different poses.

Guy, who was an Etonian, had gone in for intellectual and sartorial foppishness, for despising feminine society, for quoting “Mr. Pope” and “Mr. Gibbon,” and for frequenting unmarried dons.

Arnold had been less exclusive—had painted the town a “greenery-yellow” with discalceated Fabians, read papers on Masefield to the “Society of Pagans,” and frequently played tennis at the women’s colleges; he had also, rather shamefacedly, played a good deal of cricket and football.

Then, at the end of their last year, came the War, and they had both gone to the front.

The trenches had turned Arnold into an ordinary and rather Philistine young man.

As to Guy—he had undergone what he called a conversion to the “amazing beauty of modern life,” and, abandoning his idea of becoming a King’s don and leading that peculiar existence which, like Balzac’s novel, is a recherche de l’Absolu in a Dutch interior, when the War was over he had settled in London, where he tried to express in poetry what he called “the modern mysticism”—that sense, made possible by wireless and cables, of all the different doings of the world happening simultaneously: London, music-halls, Broad Street, Proust writing, people picking oranges in California, mysterious processes of growth or decay taking place in the million trees of the myriad forests of the world, a Javanese wife creeping in and stabbing her Dutch rival. One gets the sense a little when at the end of The Garden of Cyrus Sir Thomas Browne says: “The huntsmen are up in America and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.” Its finest expression, he said, was to be found in the Daily Mirror.

But early training and tastes are tenacious. We used to be taught that, while we ought not to wish for the palm without the dust, we should, nevertheless, keep Apollo’s bays immaculate; and, in spite of their slang, anacoluthons, and lack of metre, Guy’s poems struck some people (Teresa, for instance) as being not the bays but the aspidistras of Apollo—dusted by the housemaid every morning.

Towards five o’clock, the next day, their arrival was announced by ’Snice excitably barking at the front door, and by Concha—well, the inarticulate and loud noises of welcome with which Concha always greeted the return of her father, brother, or friends, is also best described by the word “barking.”

“It’s a friendly gift; I’m sure no ‘true woman’ is without it,” thought Teresa.

Arnold had his father’s short, sturdy body and his mother’s handsome head; Guy was small and slight, with large, widely-opened, china-blue eyes and yellow hair; he was always exquisitely dressed; he talked in a shrill voice, always at a tremendous rate. They were both twenty-seven years old.

As usual, they had tea out on the lawn; the DoÑa plying Arnold with wistful questions, in the hopes of getting fresh material for that exact picture of his life in London that she longed to possess, that, by its help, she might, in imagination, dog his every step, hear each word he uttered.

Up in the morning, say at eight (she hoped his landlady saw that his coffee was hot), then at his father’s office by nine, then ... but she never would be able to grasp the sort of things men did in offices, then luncheon—she hoped it was a good one (no one else had ever had any fears of Arnold’s not always doing himself well), then ... hazy outlines and details which she knew were all wrong, and, in spite of the many years she had spent in England, ridiculously like the life of a young Spaniard in her youth ... no, no, he would never begin his letters to young ladies ojos de mi corazon (eyes of my heart)—they would be more like this: Dear ——? Fed up. Have you read? Cheerio! Amazing performance! Quite. Allow me to remind you.... And then, perhaps, a Latin quotation to end up. No, it was no use, she would never be able to understand it all.

“A Scotch protÉgÉ of Dad’s is coming to-night,” said Concha; “he’ll probably travel down with Rory Dundas—I wonder if they’ll get on ... oh, Guy, I hadn’t noticed them before; what divine spats!”

“Oh, Lord!” groaned Arnold, “it’s that chap Munroe, I suppose. Look here, I don’t come down here so often, I think I might be left alone when I do, Mother,” and he turned angrily to the DoÑa. It was only in moments of irritation that he called her “mother.”

“And I think so, too. I told your father that you would not be pleased.”

“Well, of course, it’s come to this, that I’ll give up coming home at all,” and he savagely hacked himself a large slice of cake.

A look of terror crept into the DoÑa’s eyes—her children vanishing slowly, steadily, over the brow of a hill, while she stood rooted to the ground, was one of her nightmares.

Trying to keep the anger out of her voice, Teresa said, “The last time you were here there were no visitors at all, and the time before it was all your own friends.”

“Quite. But that is no reason....”

“Poor angel!” cried Concha, plumping down on his knee, “you’re like Harry, who used to say that he’d call his house Yarrow that it might be ‘unvisited.’”

Arnold grinned—the Boswellian possessive grin, automatically produced in every Trinity man when a sally of Dr. Sinclair’s was quoted.

“How I love family quarrels! By the way, where’s Mr. Lane?” said Guy.

“Playing golf,” answered the DoÑa curtly.

“The glorious life he leads! ‘The apples fall about his head!’ He does lead an amazingly beautiful life.”

“‘Beautiful,’ Guy?” and the DoÑa turned on him the look of pitying wonder his remarks were apt to arouse in her.

“Yes, successful, middle-aged business men,” cried Guy excitedly, beginning to wave his hands up and down, “they’re the only happy people ... they’re like Keats’ Nightingale, ‘no hungry generations tread them down, singing of....’”

“I’m not so sure of that,” laughed Arnold. “We’re certainly hungry, and we often trample on him—if that’s what it means,” and, getting up, he yawned, stretched himself, and, seizing the DoÑa’s hand, said, “Come and show me the garden.”

The DoÑa flushed with pleasure, and they strolled off towards the border, whither they were shortly followed by Concha.

Teresa and Guy sat on by the tea-table.

“I quite agree with you,” she said presently. “Dad’s life is pleasant to contemplate. Somehow, he belongs to this planet—he manages to be happy.”

“Yes, you see he doesn’t try to pretend that he belongs to a different scheme of evolution from beasts and trees and things, and he doesn’t dream. Do you think he ever thinks of his latter end?” and he gave a little squeak of laughter.

Teresa smiled absently, and for some seconds gazed in silence at the view. Then she said, “Think of all the things happening everywhere ... but there are such gaps that we can’t feel the process—even in ourselves; we can only register results and that isn’t living, and it’s frightfully unÆsthetic.”

“But, my dear Teresa, that’s what I’m always preaching!” cried Guy indignantly. “It’s exactly this registering of results instead of living through processes that is so frightful. In a poem you shouldn’t say, ‘Hullo! There’s a lesser celandine!’ all ready-made, you know; and then start moralising about it: ‘In its unostentatious performance of its duty it reminds me of a Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman that I once knew’—you know the sort of thing. In your poem the lesser celandine should go through the whole process of growth—and then it should wither and die.”

“No, Guy; it can’t be done ... in music, perhaps, but that’s so vague.”

Guy felt a sudden sinking in his stomach: had he not himself invented a technique to do this very thing? He must find out at all costs what Teresa thought of his poetry.

“Don’t you think ...” he began nervously, “that modern poetry is getting much nearer to—to—er—processes?”

Teresa gave a little smile. So that was what it was all leading up to? Was there no one with whom she could discuss things simply and honestly for their own sake?

“Did you—er—ever by any chance read my poem on King’s Cross?”

“Yes. It was very good.”

She felt tempted to add, “It reminded me a little bit of Frith,” but she refrained. It would be very unkind and really not true.

Her praise, faint though it was, made Guy tingle all over with pleasure, and he tumbled out, in one breath, “Well, you see, it’s really a sort of trick (everything is). Grammar and logic must be thrown overboard, and it’s not that it’s easier to write without them, it’s much more difficult; Monsieur Jourdain was quite wrong in calling logic rÉbarbative; as a matter of fact, it’s damnably easy and seductive—so’s grammar; the Song of the Sirens was probably sung in faultless grammar ... and anyhow, it spoils everything. Now, just think of the most ridiculous line in the Prelude:

Don’t you see it’s entirely the fault of the conjunction ‘and’? Try it this way. Oranges, churches, cabriolets, negro ladies in white muslin gowns.... It immediately becomes as significant and decorative as Manet’s negro lady is a white muslin gown in the Louvre—the one offering a bouquet to Olympia.”

He paused, and looked at her a little sheepishly, a smile lurking in the corner of his eyes.

“You’re too ridiculous,” laughed Teresa, “and theories about literature, you know, are rather dangerous, and allow me to point out that all the things that ... well, that one perhaps regrets in poor Wordsworth, whom you despise so much, that all these things are the result of his main theory, namely, that everything is equally interesting and equally poetic. While the other things—the incomparable things—happened in spite of his theories.”

“Oh, yes ... trudging over the moors through the rain, and he’s sniffing because he’s lost his handkerchief, and he’s thinking of tea—sent him by that chap in India or China, what was his name? You know ... the friend of Lamb’s—and of hot tea cakes.”

Teresa gave her cool, superior smile. “Poor Guy! You’ve got a complex about Wordsworth.”

After a little pause, she went on, “Literature, I think, ought to transpose life ... turn it into a new thing. It has to come pushing up through all the endless labyrinths of one’s mind—like catechumens in the ancient Mysteries wandering through cave after cave of strange visions, and coming out at the other end new men. I mean ... oh, it’s so difficult to say what I mean ... but one looks at—say, that view, and the result is that one writes—well, the love story of King Alfred, or ... a sonnet on a sun-dial. I remember I once read a description by a psychologist of the process that went on in the mind of a certain Italian dramatist: he would be teased for months by some abstract philosophical idea and gradually it would turn itself into, and be completely lost in an action—living men and women doing things. It seems to me an extraordinarily beautiful process—really creative.... Transubstantiation, that’s what it is really; but the bad writers are like priests who haven’t proper Orders—they can scream hoc est corpus till they are hoarse, but nothing happens.”

Guy had wriggled impatiently during this monologue; and now he said, in a very small voice, “You ... you do like my poetry, don’t you, Teresa?”

She looked at him; of course, he deserved to be slapped for his egotism and vanity, but his eager, babyish face was so ridiculous—like Jasper’s—and when Jasper climbed on to the chest of drawers and shouted, “Look at me, Teresa! Teresa! Look at me!” as if he had achieved the ascent of Mount Everest, she always feigned surprise and admiration.

So, getting up, she said with a smile, “I think you’re an amazingly brilliant creature, Guy—I do really. Now I must go.”

He felt literally intoxicated with gratification. “I think you’re an amazingly brilliant creature; I think you’re an amazingly brilliant creature; an amazingly brilliant creature”—he sucked each word as if it were a lollipop.

Then, the way she affectionately humoured him—that was the way women always treated geniuses: geniuses were apt to seem a trifle ridiculous; probably the impression he made on people was somewhat similar to Swinburne’s.

He got up and tripped across the lawn to a clump of fuchsias.

Yes; he had certainly been very brilliant with Teresa: the song of the sirens was, I am sure, in faultless grammar; the song of the sirens was, I am sure, in faultless grammar; the song of the ... and how witty he had been about the negro ladies!

He really must read a paper on his own views on poetry—to an audience mainly composed of women: The cultivated have, without knowing it, become the Philistines, and, scorning the rude yet lovely Saturnalia of modern life, have refused an angel the hospitality of their fig-tree; Tartuffe, his long, red nose pecksniffing—the day of the Puritans is over; but for the sake of the Lady of Christ’s, let them enjoy undisturbed their domestic paradise regained; then all these subjects locked up so long and now let loose by modern poetry ... yes, it would go like this: The harems have been thrown open, and, though as good reactionaries we may deplore the fact, yet common humanity demands that we should lend a helping hand to the pretty lost creatures in their embroidered shoes; then, about anacoluthons and so on; surely one’s sentences need not hold water if they hold the milk of Paradise; oh, yes ... of course ... and he would end up by reading them a translation of Pindar’s first Olympian Ode, ... ???st?? ?? ?d?? ..., and now, ladies and gentlemen, which of you will dare to subscribe to Malherbe’s ‘ce galimatias de Pindare’?

Loud applause; rows of indulgent, admiring, cultured smiles—like the Cambridge ladies when the giver of the Clark lectures makes a joke.

“Guy! I have told you before, I will not have you cracking the fuchsia buds.”

It was the DoÑa, calling out from the border where, deserted by Arnold but joined by Dick, she was examining and commenting upon each blossom separately, in the manner of La BruyÈre’s amateur of tulips.

“All right,” he called back in a small, weak voice, and went up to say, “How d’ye do” to Dick.

“Hullo, Guy! Been writing any more poetry?”

This was Dick’s invariable greeting of him.

Then he wandered off towards the house—a trifle crestfallen. “I think you’re an amazingly brilliant creature.” Yes; but wasn’t that begging the question, the direct question he had asked whether she liked his poetry? And one could be “an amazingly brilliant creature,” and, at the same time, but an indifferent writer. Marie Bashkirsteff, for instance, whose journal he had come upon in an attic at home, mouldering away between a yellow-backed John Strange Winter and a Who’s Who of the nineties; no one could deny that socially she must have been extremely brilliant, but, to him, it had seemed incredible that the world should have failed to perceive that her “self-revelations” were to a large extent faked, and her imagination a tenth-rate one. And now, both as painter and writer, Time had shown her up, together with the other pompiers whose work had made such a brave show in the Salons of the eighties, or had received such panegyrics in the Mercure de France.

He felt sick as he thought of time, in fifteen years ... ten years ... having corroded the brilliant flakes of contemporary paint, faded the arabesque of strange words and unexpected thoughts, and revealed underneath the grains of pounce.

Brilliant ... there was Oscar Wilde, of course ... but then, Oscar Wilde!

He must find out what value exactly she attached to brilliancy.

2

It was past seven o’clock when Captain Roderick Dundas and Mr. David Munroe drove up side by side to Plasencia.

If they did not find much to say to each other, the fault was not Rory’s; for he was a friendly creature, ready, as he put it, “to babble to any one at his grandmother’s funeral.”

In appearance he was rather like Guy, only much taller. They had both inherited considerable prettiness from their respective mothers—“the beautiful Miss Brabazons,” whose beauty and high spirits had made a great stir at their dÉbut in the eighties.

As to David Munroe; he was a huge man of swarthy complexion, slow of speech and of movement, and with large, rather melancholy brown eyes.

“Hullo! We must be arriving. Isn’t it terrifying arriving at a new house? It’s like going to parties when one was a child—‘are you sure there’s a clean pocket handkerchief in your sporran, master Rory?’”

David, turning a puzzled, rather suspicious, look upon him, said slowly, “Are you Scotch?”

“Lord, yes! I never get my ‘wills and shalls’ right, and I talk about ‘table-maids’ and all sorts of things. Here we are.”

As they got into the hall, Guy and Arnold came out from the billiard-room.

“Hullo, Rory!” said Guy, “you can’t have a bath before dinner because I’m going to have one.”

“You’ll have to have it with Concha then, Guy,” said Arnold, “she’s there regularly from seven till eight. I wish to God this house had more bathrooms. Hullo! You’ve got a paper, Dundas—I want to see the latest news about the Strike.”

In the meanwhile, David Munroe stood in the background, looking embarrassed and rather sulky, and Rendall, the butler, who secretly deplored “Mr. Arnold’s” manners, said soothingly, “I’ll have your bag taken up to your room, sir.” Whereupon Arnold looked up from the paper, greeted him with sullen excuses, took him up to his room, and hurriedly left him.

Half an hour later David walked into the drawing-room, forlorn and shy, in full evening dress. All the party, except Rory, were already assembled, and he felt still more uncomfortable when in a flash he realised that the other men were in dinner-jackets and black ties.

“Ah! How are you, Munroe?” cried Dick heartily, “very pleased to see you. So sorry I wasn’t there when you arrived—didn’t hear the car. Let me introduce you to my wife.”

“How do you do, Mr. Munroe. How clever of you to be dressed in time!” said the DoÑa. There was always a note of irony in her voice, and it was confirmed by the myopic contraction of her eyes; so David imagined, quite erroneously, that she was “having a dig” at his tails and white waistcoat. Nor did Dick improve matters by saying, “I say, Munroe, you put us all to shame.”

Then Rory came in, so easily, chattering and laughing as if he had known them all his life—also in a dinner-jacket and a black tie; because, if poor David had only known, Arnold had told him it was “just a family party and he needn’t bother about tails.”

The moment Rory had entered the room, Teresa had felt a sudden little contraction of her throat, and had almost exclaimed aloud, “At last!”

In their childhood, she and Pepa had dreamed of, and craved for, a man doll, made of some supple material which would allow of its limbs being bent according to their will, its face modelled and painted with a realism unknown to the toy shops, a little fair moustache of real hair that could be twisted, and real clothes that, of course, came off and on: waistcoat, tie, collar, braces, and in a pocket a little gold watch.

Their longing for this object had, at one time, become an obsession, and had reached the point of their regarding living men entirely from the point of view of whether, shrunk to twelve inches high, they would make a good doll.

So Teresa, who had so often deplored the childishness of her friends and family, actually found herself gazing with gloating eyes at Rory Dundas—the perfect man doll, found at last.

Then they went into dinner. Guy took in Teresa; he was nervous, and more talkative than usual, and she was unusually distraite.

The room grew hot; every one seemed to be talking at once—screaming about the Fifth Form at St. Dominics, or Black Beauty, or both. It seemed that Arnold, when he was at Rugby, had exchanged one or both with Concha for a Shakespeare, illustrated by photographs of leading actors and actresses, and that he wanted them back.

“Ah! he is thinking of his own children. Does it mean ... can he be going to ...?” thought the DoÑa, delighted at the thought of the children, frightened at the thought of the wife.

“You must certainly give them back to Arnold, Concha; they’re his,” she said firmly.

“I like that! When he got such an extremely good bargain, too! He always did in his deals with me.”

“Anna has a Black Beauty, you might wangle it out of her by offering to teach her carpentry or something ... something she could get a new badge for in the Girl Guides.”

“But it’s my own copy that I want.”

And so on, what time Dick at the foot of the table shook like a jelly with delighted laughter.

Nothing makes parents—even detached ones like Dick—so happy as to see their grown-up offspring behaving like children.

“English hospitality is to make you at home—a pistol at your head; look at the poor Scot!” said Guy to Teresa.

She had been trying to hear what Rory was saying to Concha about the latest Revue, and, looking absently across at the silent, aloof David, said vaguely, “Oh, yes of course; he’s Scotch, isn’t he?”

“Inverness-shire, I should think. They’ve got a special accent there—not Scotch, but a sort of genteel English. It’s rather frightening, like suddenly coming upon a pure white tribe in the heart of Darkest Africa, it....”

Teresa heard no more, but yielded to the curious intoxication produced by half a glass of claret, the din of voices, and the hot and brightly lighted room.

By some mysterious anomaly, its action was definitely Apolline, as opposed to Dionysiac—suddenly lifting her from the Bacchic rout on the stage to the marble throne of spectator.

David Munroe, too, sitting silent by the DoÑa, happened to be feeling it also.

It seemed to him as if the oval mahogany table, on which the lights glinted and the glasses rattled, and all the people sitting round it, except himself, suddenly became an entity, which tore itself away from surrounding phenomena like the launching of a ship, perhaps....

And at that very moment, “the dark Miss Lane” was saying to herself, “It’s like the beginning of the Symposium, which seems at first clumsy and long-winded, but by which the real thing—the Feast—is shifted further and further, first to the near past, and then to years and years ago, when they were all children, in the days when Agathon was still in Athens and was making his sacrifice for his victory at the dramatic contest; pushing the rÔle of eyewitness through a descending scale of remoteness—from Apollodorus to Phoenix, the son of Philip, from Phoenix to ‘one Aristodemus, a CydathenÆan,’ till finally It—the Feast, small, compact, and far-away—disentangles itself from Space and Time and floats off to the stars, like a fire-balloon, while Apollodorus and his friend, standing down there in the streets of Athens, stare up at it with dazzled eyes.”

“I say, Teresa, I was wondering ... I was thinking of writing an article on ‘the men of the nineties’—do you think I should be justified in calling Oscar Wilde ‘brilliant’?”

Teresa, still bemused, gazed at Guy with puzzled eyes. Why on earth was he looking so odd and self-conscious?

“Brilliant? Yes; I suppose so. Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I was just wondering....”

But the DoÑa was getting up, and the men were left to their port.

3

Dick moved his chair beside David’s, and talked to him a little about the prospects of sugar, and whether the Cuban planters were going to “down” all the others; but, finding him unresponsive, he turned eagerly to Arnold, saying, “I say! I lunched with Paget-Clark the other day, and he told me this year’s Rugby fifteen will be one of the strongest we’ve ever had. There’s a chap called Girdlestone who, they say, is a perfect genius as half-back, and they’ve got a new beak who’s an international and a marvellous coach. He says....”

“Anyhow, their eleven was jolly good this year. They did extraordinary well at Lord’s.” There was a slightly reproving note in Arnold’s voice, as if it were sacrilege to talk about football when one might talk about cricket. As a matter of fact, he was much more interested in football, but he resented that his father should be able to give him any information about Rugby.

David smiled to himself as he thought of his own school—the Inverness Academy.

They had thought themselves very “genteel” with their school colours and their Latin song beginning:

And indeed this gentility had been rubbed into them every morning on their way to school by bare-footed laddies, who shouted after them:

“I doubt it wouldn’t seem very genteel to them,” he thought, without, however, a trace of bitterness.

They began to talk about the prospects of the Cambridge Boat, and Guy, who prided himself on being able to talk knowledgeably on such matters, eagerly joined in with aphorisms on “form.”

“I say, Munroe, we’re nowhere in this show, are we?” said Rory, with a friendly grin; then suddenly remembering that he had no legitimate cause for assuming that David was not a University man (Rory prided himself on his tact), he added hastily, “mere sodgers like you and me.”

“I—I understand that the late Dr. Arnold sent his son to Oxford instead of Cambridge, because—because at the latter University they didn’t study Aristotle,” said David.

He genuinely wanted to know about this, because recently his own thoughts—by way of St. Thomas Aquinas—had been very much occupied with Aristotle; but, being shy, his voice sounded aggressive.

“Arnold would,” said the other Arnold coldly.

“But—but Dr. Arnold was surely a great man, wasn’t he?”

This time David’s voice was unmistakably timid.

The others exchanged smiles.

“Was he? That’s the question,” said Arnold.

A few years ago Dick would have had no hesitation in exclaiming indignantly, “A great man? I should just think he was!” Why, he had called his only son after him, in spite of the DoÑa’s marked preference for Maria-JosÉ. But recently his children had insisted on his reading a small biography of Dr. Arnold that has since become a classic; very unwillingly had he complied, as he had expected it to be like Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-Worship, which his sister, Joanna, had made him read in his youth, and which he had secretly loathed; but he had been pleasantly surprised, and had found himself at the end in complete agreement with the writer.

One of Dick’s virtues was an open mind.

“Well, I think old Arnold was quite right,” laughed Rory. “I’m sure it’s most awfully important to read ... who did you say, Munroe? Aristotle? Fancy not reading Aristotle! Rotten hole, Cambridge!”

David grinned with such perfect good-nature at this chaff, that the atmosphere perceptibly warmed in his favour.

“Oh, well; I dare say there’s a good deal to be said for Oxford,” said Dick magnanimously.

“Oh, of course! Oxford shoes; Morris-Cowley cars, summing up the whole of the Oxford movement ... namely, Cowley Fathers and the Preraphaelites!” shrieked Guy.

“Boar’s Hill!” screamed back Arnold.

“Or the ‘Oxford’—the music-hall, you know,” suggested Rory.

Then port wine began to come into its own.

There is a certain type of story with but little plot and the crudest psychology, to appreciate which—as in the case of the highest poetry—one must have a love of words—for their own sake.

“... and she thought the toast was ‘Church and Birmingham’!” ended Guy in a shrill scream.

Rory and Arnold chuckled; Dick shook convulsively, and a little sheepishly. After all, he was much older than the others; besides, he was afraid that his plate might slip down. He was very fond of his plate, and much enjoyed clicking it into place, like the right piece in a jig-saw puzzle; nevertheless, he would die of humiliation if it slipped down before Arnold.

Story followed story; with each one, the laughter growing louder and more satyr-like (even David was smiling gravely); and it was on the best of terms that the five entered the billiard-room, where, if there were men, it was the custom at Plasencia to assemble after dinner.

Arnold immediately organised a game of Snooker between Dick, Concha, Rory, Guy, and himself; and the DoÑa, who was not completely free from a social conscience, invited David to come and sit beside her on the sofa.

What on earth was she going to talk to him about? It had been difficult enough at dinner. Ah, of course! There was always the War; though there were few subjects that bored her more.

Though she was as ignorant as the Australian aborigines of the world’s organisation and configuration, and of the natural and economic laws by which it is governed, yet, like an exceptionally gifted parrot, she was able to manipulate the current clichÉs, with considerable tact and dexterity.

For instance, on her annual visit to Wales, she would say, quite correctly, “Snowdon is very clear to-day, isn’t it?” And that, though she had not the slightest idea which of the many peaks on the horizon happened to be called Snowdon.

Nor did she ever talk about a barrage in connection with motor-cars, or a carboretto in connection with guns; though, if asked to define these two words, she would have been hard put.

So David talked about the War, and she purred or sighed or smiled, as the occasion required, and did not listen to a word.

She noticed that Guy’s eyes kept wandering towards the chair where Teresa sat motionless. Well, he, at any rate, had always preferred Teresa to Concha. Why was she jealous of Concha? It must be Concha’s beauty that was the trouble.... Teresa, of course, was more distinguished looking, but Concha was like a Seville Purissima—infinitely more beautiful.

On and on went David’s voice; Concha, looking across from the billiard-table, whispered to Arnold, “No one talks so much really as a ‘strong, silent man.’”

“Yes; it was a queer time—the War. Things happened then that people had come to look upon as impossible—as old wives’ tales. But you’ll hardly meet a fellow who has been through the War who hasn’t either himself had some queer sort of experience, or else had a chum who has. It was a queer time ... there—there ... were things....”

“Be a sportsman—double the black!” shouted Rory from the billiard-table.

Teresa, sitting silent in her corner, found herself muttering:

Jollypot looked up eagerly from her crochet and said:

“Oh, do tell us more about it, Mr. Munroe.”

“Oh, well, it’s only that at times like these ... things are more ... more naked, maybe,” and he laughed apologetically. Then he added, as if to himself, “One sees the star.”

Jollypot murmured something inaudible, and her eyes filled with sympathetic tears; she was not certain of what he meant, but was sure it was something beautiful and mystical.

The DoÑa wondered if he had had shell-shock.

But Teresa turned in her chair and scrutinised him. What exactly did he mean? Not, she felt sure, what she herself would have meant, if she had used these words, namely, that, during the five years of the War, one had been continually, or so it seemed in retrospect, in that Apolline state of intoxication into which she had fallen that very night at dinner; no, not quite the same; for that had been purely Apolline, while during the War it had been at once Apolline and Dionysiac, in that it was oneself that one was looking at from these cool heights—oneself, a blind, deaf, dusty maniac, whirling in a dance.

And, if one liked, one might call such times “heliacal periods”—a time when the star is visible ... whatever the star may be.

But David, she felt sure, meant something concrete.

“Now, then, Concha, cut that red and come back on the blue ... ve-e-ry pree ... oh, hard luck!”

“Now, then ... all eyes on Captain Dundas!... Captain Dundas pots the black. Well, a very good game.”

Whereupon the Snooker party broke up; the men wriggling into their dinner-jackets, and Concha standing by the gramophone and swaying up and down as she hummed the latest jazz tune.

Guy came up to Teresa. “About Oscar Wilde—I do want to have a talk to you about him. Do you think—well, brilliancy—it has a certain literary value, don’t you think?”

“Yes; I suppose so,” she answered absently; she was watching Concha and Rory giggling by the gramophone.

“Well, I am going to bed,” said the DoÑa, and, kissing her hand to Arnold, who was still knocking about the balls, she left the room, followed by Jollypot.

“Well, that was a very successful game,” said Dick.

“What about another one? You’ve got to play this time, Munroe.”

“Yes, another game. I’ve never seen a game of Snooker over so quickly ... owing to the amazing brilliance of our Captain Dundas,” cried Arnold.

So they started another game, this time including David; and as it had been decided that Rory was too good for parlour-billiards, he sat down on the sofa beside Teresa.

They began to talk—about the War, of course: all the old platitudes—the “team-spirit,” for instance. “It’s football, you know, that makes us good fighters. It’s about the only thing we learn at school—the team-spirit. It teaches us to sacrifice stunts and showy play and that sort of thing to the whole.”

Then there was the Horse. “It’s extraordinary how chivalry and ... and ... decent behaviour ... and everything should be taught us by that old creature with his funny, long face—but it’s true all the same. It’s only because we use horses so little in fighting now that ‘frightfulness’ has begun.”

Teresa felt disappointed; but, after all, what had she expected?

“But it was a funny time—the old War. All these tunes—rag-times and Violet Lorraine’s songs—hearing them first at the Coliseum or Murray’s, and then on one’s gramophone in the trenches ... it gave one a feeling ... I don’t know!” and he broke off with a laugh.

“I know! Tunes ... it is very queer,” murmured Teresa.

It struck her with a stab of amusement that her tone of reverent sympathy was rather like Jollypot’s—always agog to encourage any expression of the pure and poetical spirit that she was sure was burning in every young male bosom.

“Yes, it was ... an extraordinary time—for all of us; but for you in the trenches! And all that death—I’ve often wondered about that; how did it strike you?”

“Oh, well, that was nothing new to me—I mean some people hadn’t realised till the War that there was such a thing; but my old Nanny died when I was nine—and then, there was my mother.”

He paused; and then in quite a different tone he said:

“Did it used to scare you stiff when you were a child if you heard the clock strike midnight?”

“Oh, yes—did it you?”

“Rather. And could you scare yourself stiff by staring at your own reflection in a mirror?”

“Oh, yes.”

They laughed.

But Teresa felt the presence of the angel Intimacy—a presence which, when it comes between a man and a woman, shuffles the dreams and, so it seems, causes the future to stir in its sleep.

“I say! Isn’t this extraordinary? We are getting on well, aren’t we? One doesn’t often talk to a person about these sort of things the first time one meets them,” and Rory gave a light, mocking laugh.

Teresa felt absurdly, exaggeratedly disappointed; and why did he use such a strongly scented hair-wash?

The second game of Snooker came to an end, David, this time, potting the black.

“Well, Munroe, what about a ‘wee doch-an-doris’?” said Dick, opening the tantalus.

Concha stretched her soft, supple mouth in an enormous yawn, rubbed her head on Dick’s shoulder, and said, “Dad always talks to the Irish in a brogue and to the Scotch like Harry Lauder—it’s his joke.”

“And theirs, I suppose, is to answer in English,” said Rory, getting up from the sofa and merging at once into the atmosphere of the Snookerites.

Teresa wondered if it were consciously that Concha was always more affectionate to their father when she had strange men for an audience. Then, seeing in Guy’s eye that he wanted to continue his idiotic talk about Oscar Wilde and brilliance, she slipped away to bed.