SOME DO NOT. . . (continued 3)

Mrs. Duchemin stroked the girl's fair hair and tucked a loose strand behind her ear.

"I wish you'd let me show you how to do your hair," she said. "The right man might come along at any moment."

"Oh, the right man!" Miss Wannop said. "Thanks for tactfully changing the subject. The right man for me, when he comes along, will be a married man. That's the Wannop luck!"

Mrs. Duchemin said, with deep concern:

"Don't talk like that. . . . Why should you regard yourself as being less lucky than other people? Surely your mother's done well. She has a position; she makes money. . . ."

"Ah, but mother isn't a Wannop," the girl said, "only by marriage. The real Wannops . . . they've been executed, and attaindered, and falsely accused and killed in carriage accidents and married adventurers or died penniless like father. Ever since the dawn of history. And then, mother's got her mascot . . ."

"Oh, what's that?" Mrs. Duchemin asked, almost with animation, "a relic . . ."

"Don't you know mother's mascot?" the girl asked. "She tells everybody. . . . Don't you know the story of the man with the champagne? How mother was sitting contemplating suicide in her bed-sitting room and there came in a man with a name like Tea-tray; she always calls him the mascot and asks us to remember him as such in our prayers. . . . He was a man who'd been at a German university with father years before and loved him very dearly, but not kept touch with him. And he'd been out of England for nine months when father died and round about it. And he said: 'Now Mrs. Wannop, what's this?' And she told him. And he said, 'What you want is champagne!' And he sent the slavey out with a sovereign for a bottle of Veuve Cliquot. And he broke the neck of the bottle off against the mantelpiece because they were slow in bringing an opener. And he stood over her while she drank half the bottle out of her tooth-glass. And he took her out to lunch . . . o . . . o . . . oh, it's cold! . . . And lectured her . . . And got her a job to write leaders on a paper he had shares in . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin said:

"You're shivering!"

"I know I am," the girl said. She went on very fast. "And of course, mother always wrote father's articles for him. He found the ideas, but couldn't write, and she's a splendid style. . . . And, since then, he—the mascot—Tea-tray—has always turned up when she's been in tight places. When the paper blew her up and threatened to dismiss her for inaccuracies! She's frightfully inaccurate. And he wrote her out a table of things every leader writer must know, such as that 'A. Ebor' is the Archbishop of York, and that the Government is Liberal. And one day he turned up and said: 'Why don't you write a novel on that story you told me?' And he lent her the money to buy the cottage we're in now to be quiet and write in . . . Oh, I can't go on!"

Miss Wannop burst into tears.

"It's thinking of those beastly days," she said. "And that beastly, beastly yesterday!" She ran the knuckles of both her hands fiercely into her eyes, and determinedly eluded Mrs. Duchemin's handkerchief and embraces. She said almost contemptuously:

"A nice, considerate person I am. And you with this ordeal hanging over you! Do you suppose I don't appreciate all your silent heroism of the home, while we're marching about with flags and shouting? But it's just to stop women like you being tortured, body and soul, week in, week out, that we . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin had sat down on a chair near one of the windows; she had her handkerchief hiding her face.

"Why women in your position don't take lovers . . ." the girl said, hotly. "Or that women in your position do take lovers . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin looked up; in spite of its tears her white face had an air of serious dignity:

"Oh, no, Valentine," she said, using her deeper tones. "There's something beautiful, there's something thrilling about chastity. I'm not narrow-minded. Censorious! I don't condemn! But to preserve in word, thought and action a lifelong fidelity. . . . It's no mean achievement. . . ."

"You mean like an egg and spoon race," Miss Wannop said.

"It isn't," Mrs. Duchemin replied gently, "the way I should have put it. Isn't the real symbol Atalanta, running fast and not turning aside for the golden apple? That always seemed to me the real truth hidden in the beautiful old legend. . . ."

"I don't know," Miss Wannop said, "when I read what Ruskin says about it in the Crown of Wild Olive. Or no! It's the Queen of the Air. That's his Greek rubbish, isn't it? I always think it seems like an egg-race in which the young woman didn't keep her eyes in the boat. But I suppose it comes to the same thing."

Mrs. Duchemin said:

"My dear! Not a word against John Ruskin in this house."

Miss Wannop screamed.

An immense voice had shouted:

"This way! This way! . . . The ladies will be here!"

Of Mr. Duchemin's curates—he had three of them, for he had three marshland parishes almost without stipend, so that no one but a very rich clergyman could have held them—it was observed that they were all very large men with the physiques rather of prize-fighters than of clergy. So that when by any chance at dusk, Mr. Duchemin, who himself was of exceptional stature, and his three assistants went together along a road the hearts of any malefactors whom in the mist they chanced to encounter went pit-a-pat.

Mr. Horsley—the number two—had in addition an enormous voice. He shouted four or five words, interjected tee-hee, shouted four or five words more and again interjected "tee-hee." He had enormous wrist-bones that protruded from his clerical cuffs, an enormous Adam's apple, a large, thin, close-cropped, colourless face like a skull, with very sunken eyes, and when he was once started speaking it was impossible to stop him, because his own voice in his ears drowned every possible form of interruption.

This morning, as an inmate of the house, introducing to the breakfast-room Messrs. Tietjens and Macmaster, who had driven up to the steps just as he was mounting them, he had a story to tell. The introduction was, therefore, not, as such, a success. . . .

"A STATE OF SIEGE, LADIES! Tee-hee!" he alternately roared and giggled. "We're living in a regular state of siege. . . . What with . . ." It appeared that the night before, after dinner, Mr. Sandbach and rather more than half-a-dozen of the young bloods who had dined at Mountby, had gone scouring the country lanes, mounted on motor bicycles and armed with loaded canes . . . for Suffragettes! Every woman they had come across in the darkness they had stopped, abused, threatened with their loaded canes and subjected to cross-examination. The countryside was up in arms.

As a story this took, with the appropriate reflections and repetitions, a long time in telling, and afforded Tietjens and Miss Wannop the opportunity of gazing at each other. Miss Wannop was frankly afraid that this large, clumsy, unusual-looking man, now that he had found her again, might hand her over to the police whom she imagined to be searching for herself and her friend Gertie, Miss Wilson, at that moment in bed, under the care, as she also imagined, of Mrs. Wannop. On the links he had seemed to her natural and in place; here, with his loosely hung clothes and immense hands, the white patch on the side of his rather cropped head and his masked, rather shapeless features, he affected her queerly as being both in and out of place. He seemed to go with the ham, the meat-pie, the galantine and even at a pinch with the roses; but the Turner pictures, the æsthetic curtain and Mrs. Duchemin's flowing robes, amber and rose in the hair did not go with him at all. Even the Chippendale chairs hardly did. And she felt herself thinking oddly, beneath her perturbations, of a criminal and the voice of the Rev. Horsley that his Harris tweeds went all right with her skirt, and she was glad that she had on a clean, cream-coloured silk blouse, not a striped pink cotton.

She was right as to that.

In every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one checking the other; thus emotion stands against reason, intellect corrects passion and first impressions act a little, but very little, before quick reflection. Yet first impressions have always a bias in their favour, and even quiet reflection has often a job to efface them.

The night before, Tietjens shad given several thoughts to this young woman. General Campion had assigned her to him as maîtresse en tître. He was said to have ruined himself, broken up his home and spent his wife's money on her. Those were lies. On the other hand they were not inherent impossibilities. Upon occasion and given the right woman, quite sound men have done such things. He might, heaven knows, himself be so caught. But that he should have ruined himself over an unnoticeable young female who had announced herself as having been a domestic servant, and wore a pink cotton blouse . . . that had seemed to go beyond the bounds of even the unreason of club gossip!

That was the strong, first impression! It was all very well for his surface mind to say that the girl was not by birth a tweeny maid; she was the daughter of Professor Wannop and she could jump! For Tietjens held very strongly the theory that what finally separated the classes was that the upper could lift its feet from the ground whilst common people couldn't. . . . But the strong impression remained. Miss Wannop was a tweeny maid. Say a lady's help, by nature. She was of good family, for the Wannops were first heard of at Birdlip in Gloucestershire in the year 1417—no doubt enriched after Agincourt. But even brilliant men of good family will now and then throw daughters who are lady helps by nature. That was one of the queernesses of heredity. . . . And, though Tietjens had even got as far as to realise that Miss Wannop must be a heroine who had sacrificed her young years to her mother's gifts, and no doubt to a brother at school—for he had guessed as far as that—even then Tietjens couldn't make her out as more than a lady help. Heroines are all very well; admirable, they may even be saints; but if they let themselves get careworn in face and go shabby. . . . Well, they must wait for the gold that shall be amply stored for them in heaven. On this earth you could hardly accept them as wives for men of your own set. Certainly you wouldn't spend your own wife's money on them. That was what it really came to.

But, brightened up as he now suddenly saw her, with silk for the pink cotton, shining coiled hair for the white canvas hat, a charming young neck, good shoes beneath neat ankles, a healthy flush taking the place of yesterday's pallor of fear for her comrade; an obvious equal in the surroundings of quite good people; small, but well-shaped and healthy; immense blue eyes fixed without embarrassment on his own. . . .

"By Jove . . ." he said to himself: "It's true! What a jolly little mistress she'd make!"

He blamed Campion, Sandbach and the club gossips for the form the thought had taken. For the cruel, bitter and stupid pressure of the world has yet about it something selective; if it couples male and female in its inexorable rings of talk it will be because there is something harmonious in the union. And there exists then the pressure of suggestion!

He took a look at Mrs. Duchemin and considered her infinitely commonplace and probably a bore. He disliked her large-shouldered, many-yarded style of blue dress and considered that no woman should wear clouded amber, for which the proper function was the provision of cigarette holders for bounders. He looked back at Miss Wannop, and considered that she would make a good wife for Macmaster; Macmaster liked bouncing girls and this girl was quite lady enough.

He heard Miss Wannop shout against the gale to Mrs. Duchemin:

"Do I sit beside the head of the table and pour out?"

Mrs. Duchemin answered:

"No! I've asked Miss Fox to pour out. She's nearly stone deaf." Miss Fox was the penniless sister of a curate deceased. "You're to amuse Mr. Tietjens."

Tietjens noticed that Mrs. Duchemin had an agreeable throat-voice; it penetrated the noises of Mr. Horsley as the missel-thrush's note penetrates a gale. It was rather agreeable. He noticed that Miss Wannop made a little grimace.

Mr. Horsley, like a megaphone addressing a crowd, was turning from side to side, addressing his hearers by rotation. At the moment he was bawling at Macmaster; it would be Tietjens' turn again in a moment to hear a description of the heart attacks of old Mrs. Haglen at Nobeys. But Tietjens' turn did not come. . . .

A high-complexioned, round-cheeked, forty-fivish lady, with agreeable eyes, dressed rather well in the black of the not-very-lately widowed, entered the room with precipitation. She patted Mr. Horsley on his declamatory right arm and, since he went on talking, she caught him by the hand and shook it. She exclaimed in high, commanding tones:

"Which is Mr. Macmaster, the critic?" and then, in the dead lull to Tietjens: "Are you Mr. Macmaster, the critic? No! . . . Then you must be."

Her turning to Macmaster and the extinction of her interest in himself had been one of the rudest things Tietjens had ever experienced, but it was an affair so strictly business-like that he took it without any offence. She was remarking to Macmaster:

"Oh, Mr. Macmaster, my new book will be out on Thursday week," and she had begun to lead him towards a window at the other end of the room.

Miss Wannop said:

"What have you done with Gertie?"

"Gertie!" Mrs. Wannop exclaimed with the surprise of one coming out of a dream. "Oh yes! She's fast asleep. She'll sleep till four. I told Hannah to give a look at her now and then."

Miss Wannop's hands fell open at her side.

"Oh, mother!" forced itself from her.

"Oh, yes," Mrs. Wannop said, "we'd agreed to tell old Hannah we didn't want her to-day. So we had!" She said to Macmaster: "Old Hannah is our charwoman," wavered a little and then went on brightly: "Of course it will be of use to you to hear about my new book. To you journalists a little bit of previous explanation . . ." and she dragged off Macmaster. . . .

That had come about because just as she had got into the dog-cart to be driven to the rectory—for she herself could not drive a horse—Miss Wannop had told her mother that there would be two men at breakfast, one whose name she didn't know; the other, a Mr. Macmaster, a celebrated critic. Mrs. Wannop had called up to her:

"A critic? Of what?" her whole sleepy being electrified.

"I don't know," her daughter had answered. "Books, I daresay. . . ."

A second or so after, when the horse, a large black animal that wouldn't stand, had made twenty yards at several bounds, the handy man who drove had said:

"Yer mother's 'owlin' after yer." But Miss Wannop had answered that it didn't matter. She was confident that she had arranged for everything. She was to be back to get lunch; her mother was to give an occasional look at Gertie Wilson in the garret; Hannah, the daily help, was to be told she could go for the day. It was of the highest importance that Hannah should not know that a completely strange young woman was asleep in the garret at eleven in the morning. If she did, the news would be all over the neighbourhood at once, and the police instantly down on them.

But Mrs. Wannop was a woman of business. If she heard of a reviewer within driving distance she called on him with eggs as a present. The moment the daily help had arrived, she had set out and walked to the rectory. No consideration of danger from the police would have stopped her; besides, she had forgotten all about the police.

Her arrival worried Mrs. Duchemin a good deal, because she wished all her guests to be seated and the breakfast well begun before the entrance of her husband. And this was not easy. Mrs. Wannop, who was uninvited, refused to be separated from Mr. Macmaster. Mr. Macmaster had told her that he never wrote reviews in the daily papers, only articles for the heavy quarterlies, and it had occurred to Mrs. Wannop that an article on her new book in one of the quarterlies was just what was needed. She was, therefore, engaged in telling Mr. Macmaster how to write about herself, and twice after Mrs. Duchemin had succeeded in shepherding Mr. Macmaster nearly to his seat, Mrs. Wannop had conducted him back to the embrasure of the window. It was only by sitting herself firmly in her chair next to Macmaster that Mrs. Duchemin was able to retain for herself this all-essential, strategic position. And it was only by calling out:

"Mr. Horsley, do take Mrs. Wannop to the seat beside you and feed her," that Mrs. Duchemin got Mrs. Wannop out of Mr. Duchemin's own seat at the head of the table, for Mrs. Wannop, having perceived this seat to be vacant and next to Mr. Macmaster, had pulled out the Chippendale arm-chair and had prepared to sit down in it. This could only have spelt disaster, for it would have meant turning Mrs. Duchemin's husband loose amongst the other guests.

Mr. Horsley, however, accomplished his duty of leading away this lady with such firmness that Mrs. Wannop conceived of him as a very disagreeable and awkward person. Mr. Horsley's seat was next to Miss Fox, a grey spinster, who sat, as it were, within the fortification of silver urns and deftly occupied herself with the ivory taps of these machines. This seat, too, Mrs. Wannop tried to occupy, imagining that, by moving the silver vases that upheld the tall delphiniums, she would be able to get a diagonal view of Macmaster and so to shout to him. She found, however, that she couldn't, and so resigned herself to taking the chair that had been reserved for Miss Gertie Wilson, who was to have been the eighth guest. Once there she sat in distracted gloom, occasionally saying to her daughter:

"I think it's very bad management. I think this party's very badly arranged." Mr. Horsley she hardly thanked for the sole that he placed before her; Tietjens she did not even look at.

Sitting beside Macmaster, her eyes fixed on a small door in the corner of a panelled wall, Mrs. Duchemin became a prey to a sudden and overwhelming fit of apprehension. It forced her to say to her guest, though she had resolved to chance it and say nothing:

"It wasn't perhaps fair to ask you to come all this way. You may get nothing out of my husband. He's apt . . . especially on Saturdays. . . ."

She trailed off into indecision. It was possible that nothing might occur. On two Saturdays out of seven nothing did occur. Then an admission would be wasted; this sympathetic being would go out of her life with a knowledge that he needn't have had—to be a slur on her memory in his mind. . . . But then, overwhelmingly, there came over her the feeling that, if he knew of her sufferings, he might feel impelled to remain and comfort her. She cast about for words with which to finish her sentence. But Macmaster said:

"Oh, dear lady!" (And it seemed to her to be charming to be addressed thus!) "One understands . . . One is surely trained and adapted to understand . . . that these great scholars, these abstracted cognoscenti . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin breathed a great "Ah!" of relief. Macmaster had used the exactly right words.

"And," Macmaster was going on, "merely to spend a short hour; a swallow flight . . . 'As when the swallow gliding from lofty portal to lofty portal' . . . You know the lines . . . in these, your perfect surroundings . . ."

Blissful waves seemed to pass from him to her. It was in this way that men should speak; in that way—steel-blue tie, true-looking gold ring, steel-blue eyes beneath black brows!—that men should look. She was half-conscious of warmth; this suggested the bliss of falling asleep, truly, in perfect surroundings. The roses on the table were lovely; their scent came to her.

A voice came to her:

"You do do the thing in style, I must say."

The large, clumsy but otherwise unnoticeable being that this fascinating man had brought in his train was setting up pretensions to her notice. He had just placed before her a small blue china plate that contained a little black caviare and a round of lemon; a small Sèvres, pinkish, delicate plate that held the pinkest peach in the room. She had said to him: "Oh . . . a little caviare! A peach!" a long time before, with the vague underfeeling that the names of such comestibles must convey to her person a charm in the eyes of Caliban.

She buckled about her her armour of charm; Tietjens was gazing with large, fishish eyes at the caviare before her.

"How do you get that, for instance?" he asked.

"Oh!" she answered: "If it wasn't my husband's doing it would look like ostentation. I'd find it ostentatious for myself." She found a smile, radiant, yet muted. "He's trained Simpkins of New Bond Street. For a telephone message overnight special messengers go to Billingsgate at dawn for salmon, and red mullet, this, in ice, and great blocks of ice too. It's such pretty stuff . . . and then by seven the car goes to Ashford Junction. . . . All the same, it's difficult to give a breakfast before ten."

She didn't want to waste her careful sentences on this grey fellow; she couldn't, however, turn back, as she yearned to do, to the kindredly running phrases—as if out of books she had read!—of the smaller man.

"Ah, but it isn't," Tietjens said, "ostentation. It's the great Tradition. You mustn't ever forget that your husband's Breakfast Duchemin of Magdalen."

He seemed to be gazing, inscrutably, deep into her eyes. But no doubt he meant to be agreeable.

"Sometimes I wish I could," she said. "He doesn't get anything out of it himself. He's ascetic to unreasonableness. On Fridays he eats nothing at all. It makes me quite anxious . . . for Saturdays."

Tietjens said:

"I know."

She exclaimed—and almost with sharpness:

"You know!"

He continued to gaze straight into her eyes:

"Oh, of course one knows all about Breakfast Duchemin!" he said. "He was one of Ruskin's road-builders. He was said to be the most Ruskin-like of them all!"

Mrs. Duchemin cried out: "Oh!" Fragments of the worst stories that in his worst moods her husband had told her of his old preceptor went through her mind. She imagined that the shameful parts of her intimate life must be known to this nebulous monster. For Tietjens, turned sideways and facing her, had seemed to grow monstrous, with undefined outlines. He was the male, threatening, clumsily odious and external! She felt herself say to herself: "I will do you an injury, if ever——" For already she had felt herself swaying the preferences, the thoughts and the future of the man on her other side. He was the male, tender, in-fitting; the complement of the harmony, the meat for consumption, like the sweet pulp of figs. . . . It was inevitable; it was essential to the nature of her relationship with her husband that Mrs. Duchemin should have these feelings. . . .

She heard, almost without emotion, so great was her disturbance, from behind her back the dreaded, high, rasping tones:

"Post coitum tristis! Ha! Ha! That's what it is?" The voice repeated the words and added sardonically: "You know what that means?" But the problem of her husband had become secondary; the real problem was: "What was this monstrous and hateful man going to say of her to his friend, when, for long hours, they were away?"

He was still gazing into her eyes. He said nonchalantly, rather low:

"I wouldn't look round if I were you. Vincent Macmaster is quite up to dealing with the situation."

His voice had the familiarity of an elder brother's. And at once Mrs. Duchemin knew—that he knew that already close ties were developing between herself and Macmaster. He was speaking as a man speaks in emergencies to the mistress of his dearest friend. He was then one of those formidable and to be feared males who possess the gift of right intuitions. . . .

Tietjens said: "You heard!"

To the gloating, cruel tones that had asked:

"You know what that means?" Macmaster had answered clearly, but with the snappy intonation of a reproving Don:

"Of course I know what it means. It's no discovery!" That was exactly the right note. Tietjens—and Mrs. Duchemin too—could hear Mr. Duchemin, invisible behind his rampart of blue spikes and silver, give the answering snuffle of a reproved schoolboy. A hard-faced, small man, in grey tweed that buttoned, collar-like, tight round his throat, standing behind the invisible chair, gazed straight forward into infinity.

Tietjens said to himself:

"By God! Parry! the Bermondsey light middle-weight! He's there to carry Duchemin off if he becomes violent!"

During the quick look that Tietjens took round the table Mrs. Duchemin gave, sinking lower in her chair, a short gasp of utter relief. Whatever Macmaster was going to think of her, he thought now. He knew the worst! It was settled, for good or ill. In a minute she would look round at him.

Tietjens said:

"It's all right, Macmaster will be splendid. We had a friend up at Cambridge with your husband's tendencies, and Macmaster could get him through any social occasion. . . . Besides, we're all gentlefolk here!"

He had seen the Rev. Horsley and Mrs. Wannop both interested in their plates. Of Miss Wannop he was not so certain. He had caught, bent obviously on himself, from large, blue eyes, an appealing glance. He said to himself: "She must be in the secret. She's appealing to me not to show emotion and upset the apple-cart! It is a shame that she should be here: a girl!" and into his answering glance he threw the message: "It's all right as far as this end of the table is concerned."

But Mrs. Duchemin had felt come into herself a little stiffening of morale. Macmaster by now knew the worst; Duchemin was quoting snuffingly to him the hot licentiousness of the Trimalchion of Petronius; snuffing into Macmaster's ear. She caught the phrase: Festinans, puer calide. . . . Duchemin, holding her wrist with the painful force of the maniac, had translated it to her over and over again. . . . No doubt, that too, this hateful man beside her would have guessed!

She said: "Of course we should be all gentlefolk here. One naturally arranges that. . . ."

Tietjens began to say:

"Ah! But it isn't so easy to arrange nowadays. All sorts of bounders get into all sorts of holies of holies!"

Mrs. Duchemin turned her back on him right in the middle of his sentence. She devoured Macmaster's face with her eyes, in an infinite sense of calm.

Macmaster four minutes before had been the only one to see the entrance, from a small panelled door that had behind it another of green baize, of the Rev. Mr. Duchemin, and following him a man whom Macmaster, too, recognised at once as Parry, the ex-prize-fighter. It flashed through his mind at once that this was an extraordinary conjunction. It flashed through his mind, too, that it was extraordinary that anyone so ecstatically handsome as Mrs. Duchemin's husband should not have earned high preferment in a church always hungry for male beauty. Mr. Duchemin was extremely tall, with a slight stoop of the proper clerical type. His face was of alabaster; his grey hair, parted in the middle, fell brilliantly on his high brows; his glance was quick, penetrating, austere; his nose very hooked and chiselled. He was the exact man to adorn a lofty and gorgeous fane, as Mrs. Duchemin was the exact woman to consecrate an episcopal drawing-room. With his great wealth, scholarship and tradition. . . . "Why then?" went through Macmaster's mind in a swift pinprick of suspicion, "isn't he at least a dean?"

Mr. Duchemin had walked swiftly to his chair which Parry, as swiftly walking behind him, drew out. His master slipped into it with a graceful, sideways motion. He shook his head at grey Miss Fox who had moved a hand towards an ivory urn-tap. There was a glass of water beside his plate, and round it his long, very white fingers closed. He stole a quick glance at Macmaster, and then looked at him steadily with glittering eyes. He said: "Good-morning, doctor," and then, drowning Macmaster's quiet protest: "Yes! Yes! The stethoscope meticulously packed into the top-hat and the shining hat left in the hall."

The prize-fighter, in tight box-cloth leggings, tight whipcord breeches, and a short tight jacket that buttoned up at the collar to his chin—the exact stud-groom of a man of property, gave a quick glance of recognition to Macmaster and then to Mr. Duchemin's back another quick look, raising his eyebrows. Macmaster, who knew him very well because he had given Tietjens boxing lessons at Cambridge, could almost hear him say: "A queer change this, sir! Keep your eyes on him a second!" and, with the quick, light, tip-toe of the pugilist he slipped away to the sideboard. Macmaster stole a quick glance on his own account at Mrs. Duchemin. She had her back to him, being deep in conversation with Tietjens. His heart jumped a little when, looking back again, he saw Mr. Duchemin half raised to his feet, peering round the fortifications of silver. But he sank down again in his chair, and surveying Macmaster with an expression of cunning singular on his ascetic features, exclaimed:

"And your friend? Another medical man! All with stethoscope complete. It takes, of course, two medical men to certify . . ."

He stopped and with an expression of sudden, distorted rage, pushed aside the arm of Parry, who was sliding a plate of sole-fillets on to the table beneath his nose.

"Take away," he was beginning to exclaim thunderously, "these conducements to the filthy lusts of . . ." But with another cunning and apprehensive look at Macmaster, he said: "Yes! yes! Parry! That's right. Yes! Sole! A touch of kidney to follow. Another! Yes! Grape-fruit! With sherry!" He had adopted an old Oxford voice, spread his napkin over his knees and hastily placed in his mouth a morsel of fish.

Macmaster with a patient and distinct intonation said that he must be permitted to introduce himself. He was Macmaster, Mr. Duchemin's correspondent on the subject of his little monograph. Mr. Duchemin looked at him, hard, with an awakened attention that gradually lost suspicion and became gloatingly joyful:

"Ah, yes, Macmaster!" he said. "Macmaster. A budding critic. A little of a hedonist perhaps? And yes . . . you wired that you were coming. Two friends! Not medical men! Friends!" He moved his face closer to Macmaster and said:

"How tired you look! Worn! Worn!"

Macmaster was about to say that he was rather hard-worked when, in a harsh, high cackle close to his face there came the Latin words. Mrs. Duchemin—and Tietjens!—had heard. Macmaster knew then what he was up against. He took another look at the prize-fighter; moved his head to one side to catch a momentary view of the gigantic Mr. Horsley, whose size took on a new meaning. Then he settled down in his chair and ate a kidney. The physical force present was no doubt enough to suppress Mr. Duchemin should he become violent. And trained! It was one of the curious, minor coincidences of life that, at Cambridge, he had once thought of hiring this very Parry to follow round his dear friend Sim. Sim, the most brilliant of sardonic ironists, sane, decent and ordinarily a little prudish on the surface, had been subject to just such temporary lapses as Mr. Duchemin. On society occasions he would stand up and shout or sit down and whisper the most unthinkable indecencies. Macmaster, who had loved him very much, had run round with Sim as often as he could, and had thus gained skill in dealing with these manifestations. . . . He felt suddenly a certain pleasure! He thought he might gain prestige in the eyes of Mrs. Duchemin if he dealt quietly and efficiently with this situation. It might even lead to an intimacy. He asked nothing better!

He knew that Mrs. Duchemin had turned towards him: he could feel her listening and observing him; it was as if her glance was warm on his cheek. But he did not look round; he had to keep his eyes on the gloating face of her husband. Mr. Duchemin was quoting Petronius, leaning towards his guest. Macmaster consumed kidneys stiffly.

He said:

"That isn't the amended version of the iambics. Willamovitz Möllendorf that we used . . ."

To interrupt him Mr. Duchemin put his thin hand courteously on Macmaster's arm. It had a great cornelian seal set in red gold on the third finger. He went on, reciting in ecstasy; his head a little on one side as if he were listening to invisible choristers. Macmaster really disliked the Oxford intonation of Latin. He looked for a short moment at Mrs. Duchemin; her eyes were upon him; large, shadowy, full of gratitude. He saw, too, that they were welling over with wetness.

He looked quickly back at Duchemin. And suddenly it came to him; she was suffering! She was probably suffering intensely. It had not occurred to him that she would suffer—partly because he was without nerves himself, partly because he had conceived of Mrs. Duchemin as firstly feeling admiration for himself. Now it seemed to him abominable that she should suffer.

Mrs. Duchemin was in an agony. Macmaster had looked at her intently and looked away! She read into his glance contempt for her situation, and anger that he should have been placed in such a position. In her pain she stretched out her hand and touched his arm.

Macmaster was aware of her touch; his mind seemed filled with sweetness. But he kept his head obstinately averted. For her sake he did not dare to look away from the maniacal face. A crisis was coming. Mr. Duchemin had arrived at the English translation. He placed his hands on the tablecloth in preparation for rising; he was going to stand on his feet and shout obscenities wildly to the other guests. It was the exact moment.

Macmaster made his voice dry and penetrating to say:

"'Youth of tepid loves' is a lamentable rendering of puer calide! It's lamentably antiquated . . ."

Duchemin choked and said:

"What? What? What's that?"

"It's just like Oxford to use an eighteenth century crib. I suppose that's Whiston and Ditton? Something like that . . ." He observed Duchemin, brought out of his impulse, to be wavering—as if he were coming awake in a strange place! He added:

"Anyhow it's wretched schoolboy smut. Fifth form. Or not even that. Have some galantine. I'm going to. Your sole's cold."

Mr. Duchemin looked down at his plate.

"Yes! Yes!" he muttered. "Yes! With sugar and vinegar sauce!" The prize-fighter slipped away to the sideboard, an admirable quiet fellow; as unobtrusive as a burying beetle. Macmaster said:

"You were about to tell me something for my little monograph. What became of Maggie . . . Maggie Simpson. The Scots girl who was Rossetti's model for Alla Finestra del Cielo?"

Mr. Duchemin looked at Macmaster with sane, muddled, rather exhausted eyes:

"Alla Finestra!" he exclaimed: "Oh yes! I've got the water-colour. I saw her sitting for it and bought it on the spot. . . ." He looked again at his plate, started at sight of the galantine and began to eat ravenously: "A beautiful girl!" he said: "Very long necked . . . She wasn't of course . . . eh . . . respectable! She's living yet, I think. Very old. I saw her two years ago. She had a lot of pictures. Relics of course! . . . In the Whitechapel Road she lived. She was naturally of that class. . . ." He went muttering on, his head above his plate. Macmaster considered that the fit was over. He was irresistibly impelled to turn to Mrs. Duchemin; her face was rigid, stiff. He said swiftly:

"If he'll eat a little: get his stomach filled . . . It calls the blood down from the head. . . ."

She said:

"Oh, forgive! It's dreadful for you! Myself I will never forgive!"

He said:

"No! No! . . . Why; it's what I'm for!"

A deep emotion brought her whole white face to life:

"Oh, you good man!" she said in her profound tones, and they remained gazing at each other.

Suddenly, from behind Macmaster's back Mr. Duchemin shouted:

"I say he made a settlement on her, dum casta et sola, of course. Whilst she remained chaste and alone!"

Mr. Duchemin, suddenly feeling the absence of the powerful will that had seemed to overweigh his own like a great force in the darkness, was on his feet, panting and delighted:

"Chaste!" He shouted. "Chaste, you observe! What a world of suggestion in the word . . .'" He surveyed the opulent broadness of his tablecloth; it spread out before his eyes as if it had been a great expanse of meadow in which he could gallop, relaxing his limbs after long captivity. He shouted three obscene words and went on in his Oxford Movement voice: "But chastity . . ."

Mrs. Wannop suddenly said:

"Oh!" and looked at her daughter, whose face grew slowly crimson as she continued to peel a peach. Mrs. Wannop turned to Mr. Horsley beside her and said:

"You write, too, I believe, Mr. Horsley. No doubt something more learned than my poor readers would care for . . ." Mr. Horsley had been preparing, according to his instructions from Mrs. Duchemin, to shout a description of an article he had been writing about the Mosella of Ausonius, but as he was slow in starting the lady got in first. She talked on serenely about the tastes of the large public. Tietjens leaned across to Miss Wannop and, holding in his right hand a half-peeled fig, said to her as loudly as he could:

"I've got a message for you from Mr. Waterhouse. He says if you'll . . ."

The completely deaf Miss Fox—who had had her training by writing—remarked diagonally to Mrs. Duchemin:

"I think we shall have thunder to-day. Have you remarked the number of minute insects. . . ."

"When my revered preceptor," Mr. Duchemin thundered on "drove away in the carriage on his wedding day he said to his bride: 'We will live like the blessed angels!' How sublime! I, too, after my nuptials . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin suddenly screamed:

"Oh . . . no!"

As if checked for a moment in their stride all the others paused—for a breath. Then they continued talking with polite animation and listening with minute attention. To Tietjens that seemed the highest achievement and justification of English manners!

Parry, the prize-fighter, had twice caught his master by the arm and shouted that breakfast was getting cold. He said now to Macmaster that he and the Rev. Horsley could get Mr. Duchemin away, but there'd be a hell of a fight. Macmaster whispered: "Wait!" and, turning to Mrs. Duchemin he said: "I can stop him. Shall I?" She said:

"Yes! Yes! Anything!" He observed tears; isolated upon her cheeks, a thing he had never seen. With caution and with hot rage he whispered into the prize-fighter's hairy ear that was held down to him:

"Punch him in the kidney. With your thumb. As hard as you can without breaking your thumb . . ."

Mr. Duchemin had just declaimed:

"I, too, after my nuptials . . ." He began to wave his arms, pausing and looking from unlistening face to unlistening face. Mrs. Duchemin had just screamed.

Mr. Duchemin thought that the arrow of God struck him. He imagined himself an unworthy messenger. In such pain as he had never conceived of he fell into his chair and sat huddled up, a darkness covering his eyes.

"He won't get up again." Macmaster whispered to the appreciative pugilist. "He'll want to. But he'll be afraid."

He said to Mrs. Duchemin:

"Dearest lady! It's all over. I assure you of that. It's a scientific nerve counter-irritant."

Mrs. Duchemin said:

"Forgive!" with one deep sob: "You can never respect . . ." She felt her eyes explore his face as the wretch in a cell explores the face of his executioner for a sign of pardon. Her heart stayed still: her breath suspended itself. . . .

Then complete heaven began. Upon her left palm she felt cool fingers beneath the cloth. This man knew always the exact right action! Upon the fingers, cool, like spikenard and ambrosia, her fingers closed themselves.

In complete bliss, in a quiet room, his voice went on talking. At first with great neatness of phrase, but with what refinement! He explained that certain excesses being merely nervous cravings, can be combated if not, indeed, cured altogether, by the fear of, by the determination not to ensue, sharp physical pain—which of course is a nervous matter, too! . . .

Parry, at a given moment, had said into his master's ear:

"It's time you prepared your sermon for to-morrow, sir," and Mr. Duchemin had gone as quietly as he had arrived, gliding over the thick carpet to the small door.

Then Macmaster said to her:

"You come from Edinburgh? You'll know the Fifeshire coast then."

"Do I not?" she said. His hand remained in hers. He began to talk of the whins on the links and the sanderlings along the flats, with such a Scots voice and in phrases so vivid that she saw her childhood again, and had in her eyes a wetness of a happier order. She released his cool hand after a long gentle pressure. But when it was gone it was as if much of her life went. She said: "You'll be knowing Kingussie House, just outside your town. It was there I spent my holidays as a child."

He answered:

"Maybe I played round it a barefoot lad and you in your grandeur within."

She said:

"Oh, no! Hardly! There would be the difference of our ages! And . . . And indeed there are other things I will tell you."

She addressed herself to Tietjens, with all her heroic armour of charm buckled on again:

"Only think! I find Mr. Macmaster and I almost played together in our youths."

He looked at her, she knew, with a commiseration that she hated:

"Then you're an older friend than I," he asked, "though I've known him since I was fourteen, and I don't believe you could be a better. He's a good fellow. . ."

She hated him for his condescension towards a better man and for his warning—she knew it was a warning—to her to spare his friend.

Mrs. Wannop gave a distinct, but not an alarming scream. Mr. Horsley had been talking to her about an unusual fish that used to inhabit the Moselle in Roman times. The Mosella of Ausonius; the subject of the essay he was writing is mostly about fish. . . .

"No," he shouted, "it's been said to be the roach. But there are no roach in the river now." "Vannulis viridis, oculisque. No. It's the other way round: Red fins . . ."

Mrs. Wannop's scream and her wide gesture: her hand, indeed, was nearly over his mouth and her trailing sleeve across his plate!—were enough to interrupt him.

"Tietjens!" she again screamed. "Is it possible? . . ."

She pushed her daughter out of her seat and, moving round beside the young man, she overwhelmed him with vociferous love. As Tietjens had turned to speak to Mrs. Duchemin she had recognised his aquiline half-profile as exactly that of his father at her own wedding-breakfast. To the table that knew it by heart—though Tietjens himself didn't!—she recited the story of how his father had saved her life, and was her mascot. And she offered the son—for to the father she had never been allowed to make any return—her house, her purse, her heart, her time, her all. She was so completely sincere that, as the party broke up, she just nodded to Macmaster and, catching Tietjens forcibly by the arm, said perfunctorily to the critic:

"Sorry I can't help you any more with the article. But my dear Chrissie must have the books he wants. At once! This very minute!"

She moved off, Tietjens grappled to her, her daughter following as a young swan follows its parents. In her gracious manner Mrs. Duchemin had received the thanks of her guests for her wonderful breakfast and had hoped that now that they had found their ways there. . . .

The echoes of the dispersed festival seemed to whisper in the room. Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin faced each other, their eyes wary—and longing.

He said:

"It's dreadful to have to go now. But I have an engagement."

She said:

"Yes! I know! With your great friends."

He answered:

"Oh, only with Mr. Waterhouse and General Campion . . . and Mr. Sandbach, of course . . ."

She had a moment of fierce pleasure at the thought that Tietjens was not to be of the company: her man would be out-soaring the vulgarian of his youth, of his past that she didn't know. . . . Almost harshly she exclaimed:

"I don't want you to be mistaken about Kingussie House. It was just a holiday school. Not a grand place."

"It was very costly," he said, and she seemed to waver on her feet.

"Yes! yes!" she said, nearly in a whisper "But you're so grand now! I was only the child of very poor bodies. Johnstons of Midlothian. But very poor bodies. . . . I . . . He bought me, you might say. You know. . . . Put me to very rich schools: when I was fourteen . . . my people were glad. . . . But I think if my mother had known when I married . . ." She writhed her whole body. "Oh, dreadful! dreadful!" she exclaimed. "I want you to know . . ."

His hands were shaking as if he had been in a jolting cart. . . .

Their lips met in a passion of pity and tears. He removed his mouth to say: "I must see you this evening. . . . I shall be mad with anxiety about you." She whispered: "Yes! yes! . . . In the yew walk." Her eyes were closed, she pressed her body fiercely into his. "You are the . . . first . . . man . . ." she breathed.

"I will be the only one for ever," he said.

He began to see himself: in the tall room, with the long curtains: a round, eagle mirror reflected them gleaming: like a bejewelled picture with great depths: the entwined figures.

They drew apart to gaze at each other: holding hands. . . . The voice of Tietjens said:

"Macmaster! You're to dine at Mrs. Wannop's to-night. Don't dress; I shan't." He was looking at them without any expression, as if he had interrupted a game of cards; large, grey, fresh-featured, the white patch glistening on the side of his grizzling hair.

Macmaster said:

"All right. It's near here, isn't it? . . . I've got an engagement just after . . ." Tietjens said that that would be all right: he would be working himself. All night probably. For Waterhouse . . .

Mrs. Duchemin said with swift jealousy:

"You let him order you about . . ." Tietjens was gone.

Macmaster said absently:

"Who? Chrissie? . . . Yes! Sometimes I him, sometimes he me. . . . We make engagements. My best friend. The most brilliant man in England, of the best stock too. Tietjens of Groby. . . ." Feeling that she didn't appreciate his friend he was abstractly piling on commendations: "He's making calculations now. For the Government that no other man in England could make. But he's going . . ."

An extreme languor had settled on him, he felt weakened but yet triumphant with the cessation of her grasp. It occurred to him numbly that he would be seeing less of Tietjens. A grief. He heard himself quote:

"'Since when we stand side by side!'" His voice trembled.

"Ah yes!" came in her deep tones: "The beautiful lines . . . They're true. We must part. In this world . . ." They seemed to her lovely and mournful words to say; heavenly to have them to say, vibratingly, arousing all sorts of images. Macmaster, mournfully too, said:

"We must wait." He added fiercely: "But to-night, at dusk!" He imagined the dusk, under the yew hedge. A shining motor drew up in the sunlight under the window.

"Yes! yes!" she said. "There's a little white gate from the lane." She imagined their interview of passion and mournfulness amongst dim objects half seen. So much of glamour she could allow herself.

Afterwards he must come to the house to ask after her health and they would walk side by side on the lawn, publicly, in the warm light, talking of indifferent but beautiful poetries, a little wearily, but with what currents electrifying and passing between their flesh. . . . And then: long, circumspect years. . . .

Macmaster went down the tall steps to the car that gleamed in the summer sun. The roses shone over the supremely levelled turf. His heel met the stones with the hard tread of a conqueror. He could have shouted aloud!

VI

Tietjens lit a pipe beside the stile, having first meticulously cleaned out the bowl and the stem with a surgical needle, in his experience the best of all pipe-cleaners, since, made of German silver, it is flexible, won't corrode and is indestructible. He wiped off methodically, with a great dock-leaf, the glutinous brown products of burnt tobacco, the young woman, as he was aware, watching him from behind his back. As soon as he had restored the surgical needle to the notebook in which it lived, and had put the notebook into its bulky pocket. Miss Wannop moved off down the path: it was only suited for Indian file, and had on the left hand a ten foot, untrimmed quicken hedge, the hawthorn blossoms just beginning to blacken at the edges and small green haws to show. On the right the grass was above knee high and bowed to those that passed. The sun was exactly vertical; the chaffinchs said: "Pink! pink!": the young woman had an agreeable back.

This, Tietjens thought, is England! A man and a maid walk through Kentish grass fields: the grass ripe for the scythe. The man honourable, clean, upright; the maid virtuous, clean, vigorous: he of good birth; she of birth quite as good; each filled with a too good breakfast that each could yet capably digest. Each come just from an admirably appointed establishment: a table surrounded by the best people: their promenade sanctioned, as it were, by the Church—two clergy—the State: two Government officials; by mothers, friends, old maids. . . . Each knew the names of birds that piped and grasses that bowed: chaffinch, greenfinch, yellow-ammer (not, my dear, hammer! ammer from the Middle High German for "finch"), garden warbler, Dartford warbler, pied-wagtail, known as "dishwasher." (These charming local dialect names.) Marguerites over the grass, stretching in an infinite white blaze: grasses purple in a haze to the far distant hedgerow: coltsfoot, wild white clover, sainfoin, Italian rye grass (all technical names that the best people must know: the best grass mixture for permanent pasture on the Wealden loam). In the hedge: Our Lady's bedstraw: dead-nettle: bachelor's button (but in Sussex they call it ragged robin, my dear): So interesting! cowslip (paigle, you know, from old French pasque, meaning Easter): burr, burdock (farmer that thy wife may thrive, but not burr and burdock wive!); violet leaves, the flowers of course over; black briony; wild clematis: later it's old man's beard; purple loose-strife. (That our young maids long purples call and literal shepherds give a grosser name. So racy of the soil!) . . . Walk, then, through the field, gallant youth and fair maid, minds cluttered up with all these useless anodynes for thought, quotation, imbecile epithets! Dead silent: unable to talk: from too good breakfast to probably extremely bad lunch. The young woman, so the young man is duly warned, to prepare it: pink india-rubber half-cooked cold beef, no doubt: tepid potatoes, water in the bottom of willow-pattern dish. (No! Not genuine willow-pattern, of course, Mr. Tietjens.) Overgrown lettuce with wood-vinegar to make the mouth scream with pain; pickles, also preserved in wood-vinegar; two bottles of public-house beer that, on opening, squirts to the wall. A glass of invalid port . . . for the gentleman! . . . and the jaws hardly able to open after the too enormous breakfast at 10.15. Mid-day now!

"God's England!" Tietjens exclaimed to himself in high good humour. "'Land of Hope and Glory!'—F natural descending to tonic, C major: chord of 6-4, suspension over dominant seventh to common chord of C major. . . . All absolutely correct! Double basses, 'cellos, all violins: all wood wind: all brass. Full grand organ: all stops: special vox humana and key-bugle effect. . . . Across the counties came the sound of bugles that his father knew. . . . Pipe exactly right. It must be: pipe of Englishman of good birth: ditto tobacco. Attractive young woman's back. English mid-day midsummer. Best climate in the world! No day on which man may not go abroad!" Tietjens paused and aimed with his hazel stick an immense blow at a tall spike of yellow mullein with its undecided, furry, glaucous leaves and its undecided, buttony, unripe lemon-coloured flower. The structure collapsed, gracefully, like a woman killed among crinolines!

"Now I'm a bloody murderer!" Tietjens said. "Not gory! Green-stained with vital fluid of innocent plant . . . And by God! Not a woman in the country who won't let you rape her after an hour's acquaintance!" He slew two more mulleins and a sow-thistle! A shadow, but not from the sun, a gloom, lay across the sixty acres of purple grass bloom and marguerites, white: like petticoats of lace over the grass!

"By God," he said, "Church! State! Army! H.M. Ministry: H.M. Opposition; H.M. City Man. . . . All the governing class! All rotten! Thank God we've got a navy! . . . But perhaps that's rotten too! Who knows! Britannia needs no bulwarks . . . Then thank God for the upright young man and the virtuous maiden in the summer fields: he Tory of the Tories as he should be: she suffragette of the militants: militant here in earth . . . as she should be! As she should be! In the early decades of the twentieth century however else can a woman keep clean and wholesome! Ranting from platforms, splendid for the lungs: bashing in policemen's helmets. . . . No! It's I do that: my part, I think, miss! . . . Carrying heavy banners in twenty mile processions through streets of Sodom. All splendid! I bet she's virtuous. But you don't have to bet. It isn't done on certainties. You can tell it in the eye. Nice eyes! Attractive back. Virginal cockiness. . . . Yes, better occupation for mothers of empire than attending on lewd husbands year in year out till you're as hysterical as a female cat on heat. . . . You could see it in her: that woman: you can see it in most of 'em! Thank God then for the Tory, upright young married man and the Suffragette kid . . . Backbone of England! . . ."

He killed another flower.

"But by God! we're both under a cloud! Both! . . . That kid and I! And General Lord Edward Campion, Lady Claudine Sandbach, and the Hon. Paul, M.P. (suspended) to spread the tale. . . . And forty toothless fogies in the club to spread it: and no end visiting books yawning to have your names cut out of them, my boy! . . . My dear boy: I so regret: your father's oldest friend. . . . By Jove, the pistachio nut of that galantine! Repeating! Breakfast gone wrong: gloomy reflections! Thought I could stand anything: digestion of an ostrich. . . . But no! Gloomy reflections: I'm hysterical: like that large-eyed whore! For same reason! Wrong diet and wrong life: diet meant for partridge shooters over the turnips consumed by the sedentary. England the land of pills . . . Das Pillen-Land, the Germans call us. Very properly . . . And, damn it: outdoor diet: boiled mutton, turnips: sedentary life . . . and forced up against the filthiness of the world: your nose in it all day long! . . . Why, hang it, I'm as badly off as she. Sylvia's as bad as Duchemin! . . . I'd never have thought that . . . No wonder meat's turned to uric acid . . . prime cause of neurasthenia. . . . What a beastly muddle! Poor Macmaster! He's finished. Poor devil: he'd better have ogled this kid. He could have sung: 'Highland Mary' a better tune than 'This is the end of every man's desire' . . . You can cut it on his tombstone, you can write it on his card that a young man tacked on to a paulo-post pre-Raphaelite prostitute. . . ."

He stopped suddenly in his walk. It had occurred to him that he ought not to be walking with this girl!

"But damn it all," he said to himself, "she makes a good screen for Sylvia . . . who cares! She must chance it. She's probably struck off all their beastly visiting lists already . . . as a suffragette!"

Miss Wannop, a cricket pitch or so ahead of him, hopped over a stile: left foot on the step, right on the top bar, a touch of the left on the other steps, and down on the white, drifted dust of a road they no doubt had to cross. She stood waiting, her back still to him. . . . Her nimble foot-work, her attractive back, seemed to him, now, infinitely pathetic. To let scandal attach to her was like cutting the wings of a goldfinch: the bright creature, yellow, white, golden and delicate that in the sunlight makes a haze with its wings beside this thistle-tops. No; damn it! it was worse; it was worse than putting out, as the bird-fancier does, the eyes of a chaffinch. . . . Infinitely pathetic!

Above the stile, in an elm, a chaffinch said: "Pink! pink!"

The imbecile sound filled him with rage; he said to the bird:

"Damn your eyes! Have them put out, then!" The beastly bird that made the odious noise, when it had its eyes put out, at least squealed like any other skylark or tom-tit. Damn all birds, field naturalists, botanists! In the same way he addressed the back of Miss Wannop: "Damn your eyes! Have your chastity impugned them? What do you speak to strange men in public for! You know you can't do it in this country. If it were a decent, straight land like Ireland where people cut each other's throats for clean issues: Papist versus Prot. . . . well, you could! You could walk through Ireland from east to west and speak to every man you met. . . . 'Rich and rare were the gems she wore . . .' To every man you met as long as he wasn't an Englishman of good birth: that would deflower you!" He was scrambling clumsily over the stile. "Well! be deflowered then: lose your infantile reputation. You've spoken to strange pitch: you're defiled . . . with the benefit of Clergy, Army, Cabinet, Administration, Opposition, mothers and old maids of England. . . . They'd all tell you you can't talk to a strange man, in the sunlight, on the links without becoming a screen for some Sylvia or other. . . . Then be a screen for Sylvia: get struck off the visiting books! The deeper you're implicated, the more bloody villain I am! I'd like the whole lot to see us here: that would settle it. . . ."

Nevertheless, when at the road-side he stood level with Miss Wannop who did not look at him, and saw the white road running to right and left with no stile opposite, he said gruffly to her:

"Where's the next stile? I hate walking on roads!" She pointed with her chin along the opposite hedgerow. "Fifty yards!" she said.

"Come along!" he exclaimed, and set off at a trot almost. It had come into his head that it would be just the beastly sort of thing that would happen if a car with General Campion and Lady Claudine and Paul Sandbach all aboard should come along that blinding stretch of road: or one alone: perhaps the General driving the dog-cart he affected. He said to himself:

"By God! If they cut this girl I'd break their backs over my knee!" and he hastened. "Just the beastly thing that would happen." The road probably led straight in at the front door of Mountby!

Miss Wannop trotted along a little in his rear. She thought him the most extraordinary man: as mad as he was odious. Sane people, if they're going to hurry—but why hurry!—do it in the shade of field hedgerows, not in the white blaze of county council roads. Well, he could go ahead. In the next field she was going to have it out with him: she didn't intend to be hot with running: let him be, his hateful, but certainly noticeable eyes, protruding at her like a lobster's; but she cool and denunciatory in her pretty blouse. . . .

There was a dog-cart coming behind them!

Suddenly it came into her head: that fool had been lying when he had said that the police meant to let them alone: lying over the breakfast-table. . . . The dog-cart contained the police: after them! She didn't waste time looking round: she wasn't a fool like Atalanta in the egg race. She picked up her heels and sprinted. She beat him by a yard and a half to the kissing-gate, white in the hedge: panicked: breathing hard. He panted into it, after her: the fool hadn't the sense to let her through first. They were jammed in together: face to face, panting! An occasion on which sweethearts kiss in Kent: the gate being made in three, the inner flange of the V moving on hinges. It stops cattle getting through: but this great lout of a Yorkshireman didn't know: trying to push through like a mad bullock! Now they were caught. Three weeks in Wandsworth gaol. . . . Oh hang. . . .

The voice of Mrs. Wannop—of course it was only mother! Twenty feet on high or so behind the kicking mare, with a good, round face like a peony—said:

"Ah, you can jam my Val in a gate and hold her . . . but she gave you seven yards in twenty and beat you to the gate. That was her father's ambition!" She thought of them as children running races. She beamed down, round-faced and simple, on Tietjens from beside the driver, who had a black, slouch hat and the grey beard of St. Peter.

"My dear boy!" she said, "my dear boy; it's such a satisfaction to have you under my roof!"

The black horse reared on end, the patriarch sawing at its mouth. Mrs. Wannop said unconcernedly: "Stephen Joel! I haven't done talking."

Tietjens was gazing enragedly at the lower part of the horse's sweat-smeared stomach.

"You soon will have," he said, "with the girth in that state. Your neck will be broken."

"Oh, I don't think so," Mrs. Wannop said. "Joel only bought the turn-out yesterday."

Tietjens addressed the driver with some ferocity:

"Here; get down, you," he said. He held, himself, the head of the horse whose nostrils were wide with emotion: it rubbed its forehead almost immediately against his chest. He said: "Yes! yes! There! there!" Its limbs lost their tautness. The aged driver scrambled down from the high seat, trying to come down at first forward and then backwards. Tietjens fired indignant orders at him:

"Lead the horse into the shade of that tree. Don't touch his bit: his mouth's sore. Where did you get this job lot? Ashford market: thirty pounds: it's worth more. . . . But, blast you, don't you see you've got a thirteen hands pony's harness for a sixteen and a half hands horse. Let the bit out: three holes: it's cutting the animal's tongue in half. . . . This animal's a rig. Do you know what a rig is? If you give it corn for a fortnight it will kick you and the cart and the stable to pieces in five minutes one day." He led the conveyance, Mrs. Wannop triumphantly complacent and all, into a patch of shade beneath elms.

"Loosen that bit, confound you," he said to the driver. "Ah! you're afraid."

He loosened the bit himself, covering his fingers with greasy harness polish which he hated. Then he said:

"Can you hold his head or are you afraid of that too? You deserve to have him bite your hands off." He addressed Miss Wannop: "Can you?" She said: "No! I'm afraid of horses. I can drive any sort of car: but I'm afraid of horses." He said: "Very proper!" He stood back and looked at the horse: it had dropped its head and lifted its near hind foot, resting the toe on the ground: an attitude of relaxation.

"He'll stand now!" he said. He undid the girth, bending down uncomfortably, perspiring and greasy: the girth-strap parted in his hand.

"It's true," Mrs. Wannop said. "I'd have been dead in three minutes if you hadn't seen that. The cart would have gone over backwards . . ."

Tietjens took out a large, complicated, horn-handled knife like a schoolboy's. He selected a punch and pulled it open. He said to the driver:

"Have you got any cobbler's thread? Any string? Any copper wire? A rabbit wire, now? Come, you've got a rabbit wire or you're not a handy man."

The driver moved his slouch hat circularly in negation. This seemed to be Quality who summons you for poaching if you own to possessing rabbit wires.

Tietjens laid the girth along the shaft and punched into it with his punch.

"Woman's work!" he said to Mrs. Wannop, "but it'll take you home and last you six months as well . . . But I'll sell this whole lot for you to-morrow."

Mrs. Wannop sighed:

"I suppose it'll fetch a ten pound note . . ." She said: "I ought to have gone to market myself."

"No!" Tietjens answered: "I'll get you fifty for it or I'm no Yorkshireman. This fellow hasn't been swindling you. He's got you deuced good value for money, but he doesn't know what's suited for ladies; a white pony and a basket-work chaise is what you want."

"Oh, I like a bit of spirit," Mrs. Wannop said.

"Of course you do," Tietjens answered: "but this turn-out's too much."

He sighed a little and took out his surgical needle.

"I'm going to hold this band together with this," he said. "It's so pliant it will make two stitches and hold for ever. . . ."

But the handy man was beside him, holding out the contents of his pockets: a greasy leather pouch, a ball of beeswax, a knife, a pipe, a bit of cheese and a pale rabbit wire. He had made up his mind that this Quality was benevolent and he made offering of all his possessions.

Tietjens said: "Ah," and then, while he unknotted the wire:

"Well! Listen . . . you bought this turn-out of a higgler at the back door of the Leg of Mutton Inn."

"Saracen's 'Ed!" the driver muttered.

"You got it for thirty pounds because the higgler wanted money bad. I know. And dirt cheap. . . . But a rig isn't everybody's driving. All right for a vet or a horse-coper. Like the cart that's too tall! . . . But you did damn well. Only you're not what you were, are you, at thirty? And the horse looked to be a devil and the cart so high you couldn't get out once you were in. And you kept it in the sun for two hours waiting for your mistress."

"There wer' a bit o' lewth 'longside stable wall," the driver muttered.

"Well! He didn't like waiting," Tietjens said placably. "You can be thankful your old neck's not broken. Do this band up, one hole less for the bit I've taken in."

He prepared to climb into the driver's seat, but Mrs. Wannop was there before him, at an improbable altitude on the sloping watch-box with strapped cushions.

"Oh, no, you don't," she said, "no one drives me and my horse but me or my coachman when I'm about. Not even you, dear boy."

"I'll come with you then," Tietjens said.

"Oh, no, you don't," she answered. "No one's neck's to be broken in this conveyance but mine and Joel's," she added: "perhaps to-night if I'm satisfied the horse is fit to drive."

Miss Wannop suddenly exclaimed:

"Oh, no, mother." But the handy man having climbed in, Mrs. Wannop flirted her whip and started the horse. She pulled up at once and leaned over to Tietjens:

"What a life for that poor woman," she said. "We must all do all we can for her. She could have her husband put in a lunatic asylum to-morrow. It's sheer self-sacrifice that she doesn't."

The horse went off at a gentle, regular trot.

Tietjens addressed Miss Wannop:

"What hands your mother's got," he said, "it isn't often one sees a woman with hands like that on a horse's mouth. . . . Did you see how she pulled up? . . ."

He was aware that, all this while, from the road-side, the girl had been watching him with shining eyes: intently even: with fascination.

"I suppose you think that a mighty fine performance," she said.

"I didn't make a very good job of the girth," he said. "Let's get off this road."

"Setting poor, weak women in their places," Miss Wannop continued. "Soothing the horse like a man with a charm. I suppose you soothe women like that too. I pity your wife. . . . The English country male! And making a devoted vassal at sight of the handy man. The feudal system all complete. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Well, you know, it'll make him all the better servant to you if he thinks you've friends in the know. The lower classes are like that. Let's get off this road."

She said:

"You're in a mighty hurry to get behind the hedge. Are the police after us or aren't they? Perhaps you were lying at breakfast: to calm the hysterical nerves of a weak woman."

"I wasn't lying," he said, "but I hate roads when there are field-paths . . ."

"That's a phobia, like any woman's," she exclaimed.

She almost ran through the kissing-gate and stood awaiting him:

"I suppose," she said, "if you've stopped off the police with your high and mighty male ways you think you've destroyed my romantic young dream. You haven't. I don't want the police after me. I believe I'd die if they put me in Wandsworth . . . I'm a coward."

"Oh, no, you aren't," he said, but he was following his own train of thought, just as she wasn't in the least listening to him. "I daresay you're a heroine all right. Not because you persevere in actions the consequences of which you fear. But I daresay you can touch pitch and not be defiled."

Being too well brought up to interrupt she waited till he had said all he wanted to say, then she exclaimed:

"Let's settle the preliminaries. It's obvious mother means us to see a great deal of you. You're going to be a mascot too, like your father. I suppose you think you are: you saved me from the police yesterday, you appear to have saved mother's neck to-day. You appear, too, to be going to make twenty pounds profit on a horse deal. You say you will and you seem to be that sort of a person . . . Twenty pounds is no end in a family like ours . . . Well, then, you appear to be going to be the regular bel ami of the Wannop family . . ."

Tietjens said:

"I hope not."

"Oh, I don't mean," she said, "that you're going to rise to fame by making love to all the women of the Wannop family. Besides, there's only me. But mother will press you into all sorts of odd jobs: and there will always be a plate for you at the table. Don't shudder! I'm a regular good cook—cuisine bourgeoise of course. I learned under a real professed cook, though a drunkard. That meant I used to do half the cooking and the family was particular. Eating people are: county councillors, half of them, and the like. So I know what men are . . ." She stopped and said good-naturedly: "But do, for goodness' sake, get it over. I'm sorry I was rude to you. But it is irritating to have to stand like a stuffed rabbit while a man is acting like a regular Admirable Crichton, and cool and collected, with the English country gentleman air and all."

Tietjens winced. The young woman had come a little too near the knuckle of his wife's frequent denunciations of himself. And she exclaimed:

"No! That's not fair! I'm an ungrateful pig! You didn't show a bit more side really than a capable workman must who's doing his job in the midst of a crowd of incapable duffers. But just get it out, will you? Say once and for all that—you know the proper, pompous manner: you are not without sympathy with our aims: but you disapprove—oh, immensely, strongly—of our methods."

It struck Tietjens that the young woman was a good deal more interested in the cause—of votes for women—than he had given her credit for. He wasn't much in the mood for talking to young women, but it was with considerably more than the surface of his mind that he answered:

"I don't. I approve entirely of your methods: but your aims are idiotic."

She said:

"You don't know, I suppose, that Gertie Wilson, who's in bed at our house, is wanted by the police: not only for yesterday, but for putting explosives in a whole series of letter-boxes?"

He said:

"I didn't . . . but it was a perfectly proper thing to do. She hasn't burned any of my letters or I might be annoyed: but it wouldn't interfere with my approval."

"You don't think," she asked earnestly, "that we . . . mother and I . . . are likely to get heavy sentences for shielding her. It would be beastly bad luck on mother. Because she's an anti. . ."

"I don't know about the sentence," Tietjens said, "but we'd better get the girl off your premises as soon as we can. . . ."

She said:

"Oh, you'll help?"

He answered:

"Of course, your mother can't be incommoded. She's written the only novel that's been fit to read since the eighteenth century."

She stopped and said earnestly:

"Look here. Don't be one of those ignoble triflers who say the vote won't do women any good. Women have a rotten time. They do, really. If you'd seen what I've seen, I'm not talking through my hat." Her voice became quite deep: she had tears in her eyes: "Poor women do!" she said, "little insignificant creatures. We've got to change the divorce laws. We've got to get better conditions. You couldn't stand it if you knew what I know."

Her emotion vexed him, for it seemed to establish a sort of fraternal intimacy that he didn't at the moment want. Women do not show emotion except before their familiars.

He said drily:

"I daresay I shouldn't. But I don't know, so I can!"

She said with deep disappointment:

"Oh, you are a beast! And I shall never beg your pardon for saying that. I don't believe you mean what you say, but merely to say it is heartless."

This was another of the counts of Sylvia's indictment and Tietjens winced again. She explained:

"You don't know the case of the Pimlico army clothing factory workers or you wouldn't say the vote would be no use to women."

"I know the case perfectly well," Tietjens said: "It came under my official notice, and I remember thinking that there never was a more signal instance of the uselessness of the vote to anyone."

"We can't be thinking of the same case," she said.

"We are," he answered. "The Pimlico army clothing factory is in the constituency of Westminster; the Under-Secretary for War is member for Westminster; his majority at the last election was six hundred. The clothing factory employed seven hundred men at 1s. 6d. an hour, all these men having votes in Westminster. The seven hundred men wrote to the Under-Secretary to say that if their screw wasn't raised to two bob they'd vote solid against him at the next election. . . ."

Miss Wannop said: "Well then!"

"So," Tietjens said: "The Under-Secretary had the seven hundred men at eighteenpence fired and took on seven hundred women at tenpence. What good did the vote do the seven hundred men? What good did a vote ever do anyone?"

Miss Wannop checked at that and Tietjens prevented her exposure of his fallacy by saying quickly:

"Now, if the seven hundred women, backed by all the other ill-used, sweated women of the country, had threatened the Under-Secretary, burned the pillar-boxes, and cut up all the golf greens round his country-house, they'd have had their wages raised to half-a-crown next week. That's the only straight method. It's the feudal system at work."

"Oh, but we couldn't cut up golf greens," Miss Wannop said. "At least the W.S.P.U. debated it the other day, and decided that anything so unsporting would make us too unpopular. I was for it personally."

Tietjens groaned:

"It's maddening," he said, "to find women, as soon as they get in Council, as muddle-headed and as afraid to face straight issues as men! . . ."

"You won't, by-the-by," the girl interrupted, "be able to sell our horse to-morrow. You've forgotten that it will be Sunday."

"I shall have to on Monday, then," Tietjens said. "The point about the feudal system . . ."

Just after lunch—and it was an admirable lunch of the cold lamb, new potatoes and mint-sauce variety, the mint-sauce made with white wine vinegar and as soft as kisses, the claret perfectly drinkable and the port much more than that, Mrs. Wannop having gone back to the late professor's wine merchants—Miss Wannop herself went to answer the telephone. . . .

The cottage had no doubt been a cheap one, for it was old, roomy and comfortable; but effort had no doubt, too, been lavished on its low rooms. The dining-room had windows on each side and a beam across; the dining silver had been picked up at sales, the tumblers were old cut-glass; on each side of the ingle was a grandfather's chair. The garden had red brick paths, sunflowers, hollyhocks and scarlet gladioli. There was nothing to it all, but the garden-gate was well hung.

To Tietjens all this meant effort. Here was a woman who, a few years ago, was penniless, in the most miserable of circumstances, supporting life with the most exiguous of all implements. What effort hadn't it meant! and what effort didn't it mean? There was a boy at Eton . . . a senseless, but a gallant effort.

Mrs. Wannop sat opposite him in the other grandfather's chair; an admirable hostess, an admirable lady. Full of spirit in dashes; but tired. As an old horse is tired that, taking three men to harness it in the stable yard, starts out like a stallion, but soon drops to a jog-trot. The face tired, really; scarlet-cheeked with the good air, but seamed downward. She could sit there at ease, the plump hands covered with a black lace shawl, and descending on each side of her lap, as much at ease as any other Victorian great lady. But at lunch she had let drop that she had written for eight hours every day for the last four years—till that day—without missing a day. To-day being Saturday, she had no leader to write:

"And, my darling boy," she had said to him. "I'm giving it to you. I'd give it to no other soul but your father's son. Not even to . . ." And she had named the name that she most respected. "And that's the truth," she had added. Nevertheless, even over lunch, she had fallen into abstractions, heavily and deeply, and made fantastic mis-statements, mostly about public affairs. . . . It all meant a tremendous record. . . .

And there he sat, his coffee and port on a little table beside him; the house belonging to him. . . .

She said:

"My dearest boy . . . you've so much to do. Do you think you ought really to drive the girls to Plimsoll to-night? They're young and inconsiderate; work comes first."

Tietjens said:

"It isn't the distance . . ."

"You'll find that it is," she answered humorously. "It's twenty miles beyond Tenterden. If you don't start till ten when the moon sets, you won't be back till five, even if you've no accidents. . . . The horse is all right, though . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Mrs. Wannop, I ought to tell you that your daughter and I are being talked about. Uglily!"

She turned her head to him; rather stiffly. But she was only coming out of an abstraction.

"Eh?" she said, and then: "Oh! About the golf-links episode. . . . It must have looked suspicious. I daresay you made a fuss, too, with the police, to head them off her." She remained pondering for a moment, heavily, like an old pope:

"Oh, you'll live it down," she said.

"I ought to tell you," he persisted, "that it's more serious than you think. I fancy I ought not to be here."

"Not here!" she exclaimed. "Why, where else in the world should you be? You don't get on with your wife; I know. She's a regular wrong 'un. Who else could look after you as well as Valentine and I?"

In the acuteness of that pang, for, after all, Tietjens cared more for his wife's reputation than for any other factor in a complicated world, Tietjens asked rather sharply why Mrs. Wannop had called Sylvia a wrong 'un. She said in rather a protesting, sleepy way:

"My dear boy, nothing! I've guessed that there are differences between you; give me credit for some perception. Then, as you're perfectly obviously a right 'un, she must be a wrong 'un. That's all, I assure you."

In his relief Tietjens' obstinacy revived. He liked this house; he liked this atmosphere; he liked the frugality, the choice of furniture, the way the light fell from window to window; the weariness after hard work; the affection of mother and daughter; the affection, indeed, that they both had for himself, and he was determined, if he could help it, not to damage the reputation of the daughter of the house.

Decent men, he held, don't do such things, and he recounted with some care the heads of the conversation he had had with General Campion in the dressing-room. He seemed to see the cracked wash-bowls in their scrubbed oak settings. Mrs. Wannop's face seemed to grow greyer, more aquiline; a little resentful! She nodded from time to time; either to denote attention or else in sheer drowsiness:

"My dear boy," she said at last, "it's pretty damnable to have such things said about you. I can see that. But I seem to have lived in a bath of scandal all my life. Every woman who has reached my age has that feeling. . . Now it doesn't seem to matter . . ." She really nodded nearly off: then she started. "I don't see . . . I really don't see how I can help you as to your reputation. I'd do it if I could: believe me. . . . But I've other things to think of. . . . I've this house to keep going and the children to keep fed and at school. I can't give all the thought I ought to to other people's troubles. . . ."

She started into wakefulness and right out of her chair.

"But what a beast I am!" she said, with a sudden intonation that was exactly that of her daughter; and, drifting with a Victorian majesty of shawl and long skirt behind Tietjens' high-backed chair, she leaned over it and stroked the hair on his right temple:

"My dear boy," she said. "Life's a bitter thing. I'm an old novelist and know it. There you are working yourself to death to save the nation with a wilderness of cats and monkeys howling and squalling your personal reputation away. . . . It was Dizzy himself said these words to me at one of our receptions. 'Here I am, Mrs. Wannop,' he said. . . And . . ." She drifted for a moment. But she made another effort: "My dear boy," she whispered, bending down her head to get it near his ear: "My dear boy; it doesn't matter; it doesn't really matter. You'll live it down. The only thing that matters is to do good work. Believe an old woman that has lived very hard; 'Hard lying money' as they call it in the navy. It sounds like cant, but it's the only real truth. . . . You'll find consolation in that. And you'll live it all down. Or perhaps you won't; that's for God in His mercy to settle. But it won't matter; believe me, as thy day so shall thy strength be." She drifted into other thoughts; she was much perturbed over the plot of a new novel and much wanted to get back to the consideration of it. She stood gazing at the photograph, very faded, of her husband in side-whiskers and an immense shirt-front, but she continued to stroke Tietjens' temple with a subliminal tenderness.

This kept Tietjens sitting there. He was quite aware that he had tears in his eyes; this was almost too much tenderness to bear, and, at bottom his was a perfectly direct, simple and sentimental soul. He always had bedewed eyes at the theatre, after tender love scenes and so avoided the theatre. He asked himself twice whether he should or shouldn't make another effort, though it was almost beyond him. He wanted to sit still.

The stroking stopped; he scrambled on to his feet:

"Mrs. Wannop," he said, facing her, "it's perfectly true. I oughtn't to care what these swine say about me, but I do. I'll reflect about what you say till I get it into my system . . ."

She said:

"Yes, yes! My dear," and continued to gaze at the photograph:

"But," Tietjens said; he took her mittened hand and led her back to her chair: "What I'm concerned for at the moment is not my reputation, but your daughter Valentine's."

She sank down into the high chair, balloon-like and came to rest.

"Val's reputation!" she said, "Oh! you mean they'll be striking her off their visiting lists. It hadn't struck me. So they will!" She remained lost in reflection for a long time.

Valentine was in the room, laughing a little. She had been giving the handy man his dinner, and was still amused at his commendations of Tietjens.

"You've got one admirer," she said to Tietjens. "'Punched that rotten strap,' he goes on saying, 'like a gret ol' yaffle punchin' a 'ollow log!'" He's had a pint of beer and said it between each gasp. She continued to narrate the quaintnesses of Joel which appealed to her; informed Tietjens that "yaffle" was Kentish for great green woodpecker; and then said:

"You haven't got any friends in Germany, have you?" She was beginning to clear the table.

Tietjens said:

"Yes; my wife's in Germany; at a place called Lobscheid."

She placed a pile of plates on a black japanned tray.

"I'm so sorry," she said, without an expression of any deep regret. "It's the ingenious clever stupidities of the telephone. I've got a telegraph message for you then. I thought it was the subject for mother's leader. It always comes through with the initials of the paper which are not unlike Tietjens, and the girl who always sends it is called Hopside. It seemed rather inscrutable, but I took it to have to do with German politics and I thought mother would understand it. . . . You're not both asleep, are you?"

Tietjens opened his eyes; the girl was standing over him, having approached from the table. She was holding out a slip of paper on which she had transcribed the message. She appeared all out of drawing and the letters of the message ran together. The message was:

"Righto. But arrange for certain Hullo Central travels with you. Sylvia Hopside Germany."

Tietjens leaned back for a long time looking at the words; they seemed meaningless. The girl placed the paper on his knee, and went back to the table. He imagined the girl wrestling with these incomprehensibilities on the telephone.

"Of course if I'd had any sense," the girl said, "I should have known it couldn't have been mother's leader note; she never gets one on a Saturday."

Tietjens heard himself announce clearly, loudly and with between each word a pause:

"It means I go to my wife on Tuesday and take her maid with me."

"Lucky you!" the girl said, "I wish I was you. I've never been in the Fatherland of Goethe and Rosa Luxemburg." She went off with her great tray load, the table cloth over her forearm. He was dimly aware that she had before then removed the crumbs with a crumb-brush. It was extraordinary with what swiftness she worked, talking all the time. That was what domestic service had done for her; an ordinary young lady would have taken twice the time, and would certainly have dropped half her words if she had tried to talk. Efficiency! He had only just realised that he was going back to Sylvia, and of course to Hell! Certainly it was Hell. If a malignant and skilful devil . . . though the devil of course is stupid and uses toys like fireworks and sulphur; it is probably only God who can, very properly, devise the long ailings of mental oppressions . . . if God then desired (and one couldn't object but one hoped He would not!) to devise for him, Christopher Tietjens, a cavernous eternity of weary hopelessness. . . . But He had done it; no doubt as retribution. What for? Who knows what sins of his own are heavily punishable in the eyes of God, for God is just? . . . Perhaps God then, after all, visits thus heavily sexual offences.

There came back into his mind, burnt in, the image of their breakfast-room, with all the brass, electrical fixings, poachers, toasters, grillers, kettle-heaters, that he detested for their imbecile inefficiency; with gross piles of hot-house flowers—that he detested for their exotic waxennesses!—with white enamelled panels that he disliked and framed, weak prints—quite genuine of course, my dear, guaranteed so by Sotheby—pinkish women in sham Gainsborough hats, selling mackerel or brooms. A wedding present that he despised. And Mrs. Satterthwaite, in négligé, but with an immense hat; reading the Times with an eternal rustle of leaves because she never could settle down to any one page; and Sylvia walking up and down because she could not sit still, with a piece of toast in her fingers or her hands behind her back. Very tall; fair; as graceful, as full of blood and as cruel as the usual degenerate Derby winner. In-bred for generations for one purpose: to madden men of one type. . . . Pacing backwards and forwards, exclaiming: "I'm bored! Bored!"; sometimes even breaking the breakfast plates . . . And talking! For ever talking; usually, cleverly, with imbecility; with maddening inaccuracy; with wicked penetration, and clamouring to be contradicted; a gentleman has to answer his wife's questions. . . . And in his forehead the continual pressure; the determination to sit put; the décor of the room seeming to burn into his mind. It was there, shadowy before him now. And the pressure upon his forehead. . . .

Mrs. Wannop was talking to him now; he did not know what she said; he never knew afterwards what he had answered.

"God!" he said within himself, "if it's sexual sins God punishes, He indeed is just and inscrutable!" . . . Because he had had physical contact with this woman before he married her; in a railway carriage; coming down from the Dukeries. An extravagantly beautiful girl!