THE big loggia at Grote was set into the house; the dining-room lay along one side of it, the Italian drawing-room along the other, and a door in the inner wall of it communicated with the entrance hall. The open front was supported by six Corinthian columns, two set against the side walls, while the other four divided into equal spaces its frieze of metopes and triglyphs. It was raised a couple of steps above the broad gravel walk which ran along the southern fa?ade of the house, and bordered the lawn. On the other side of that was the stone-balustraded terrace which fringed the edge of the beech-clad hill that plunged steeply down into the Thames valley. A broad opening had been cut through these woods opposite the centre of the terrace, and from the iron gates there you could look down on the mirror of the stream below which reflected the roofs and orchards of the village opposite. They were still milky-green with the verdure of the spring, and ran on past the house and formed the broad, mile-long avenue that led to the high-road beyond the park-gates.

The loggia gave the impression of great space and coolness on this broiling June afternoon. It was floored with squares of black and white marble, over{51} which were laid some half dozen big Persian rugs, but the walls were bare save for panels framed in stone wreaths of fruit and flowers. In the centre of it stood a long dining-table, from a corner of which lunch had only recently been cleared away, and Lady Grote and a couple of friends who had arrived with her that morning, were lounging in a group of easy chairs that stood just inside the strip of sunlight lying along the edge of the steps.

Lady Grote had just rejoined the other two after seeing off Mr. Stoughton, the inexorable Socialist who had also lunched with her, and had now returned to London.

“He practically told me that Grote and I were thieves,” she remarked rather plaintively. “He said that all this”—and she indicated the surroundings—“really belonged to the human race in general and not to us. We had stolen it.”

“If you are thieves,” said Lord Thorley in his calm, philosophical voice, “then he is the receiver of stolen goods. He ate and drank in your pilferings with immense appetite.”

“I know. I thought it was not quite consistent of him. And he has gone to the station in the Rolls-Royce of which I have robbed him and others. But after all, why be consistent? Gracie is consistent, but I can’t think of anybody else who is.”

Lady Massingberd stirred gently in her chair.

“Is that a testimonial or an accusation?” she asked.

“I think it’s an accusation. It’s inconsistent to be consistent, if you see what I mean.”

“I think I should perhaps see better if you explained.”

Helen Grote considered a moment, half closing her eyes as if to focus her ideas.

“What I mean is this,” she said. “That we are{52} each of us such a bundle of opposite and contradictory tendencies and desires, the results of heredity, if you will, or of environment, that unless we continually did a large quantity of contradictory things, we shouldn’t be consistent with ourselves, or express ourselves. Mr. Stoughton, for instance, expresses himself beautifully: he is a Socialist and says that we have no right to possess anything nice, or to money which we didn’t earn: we are thieves and receivers of stolen goods. I am sure he is sincere in his outrageous belief. But on the other hand, he is clearly very fond of large quantities of food and wine, and likes going to the station in an expensive and stolen motor-car. That again is quite sincere, and he is right to eat and drink the stuff I have stolen. He wouldn’t be consistent with himself if he was not inconsistent. I really believe that means something.”

“Let us go on talking about me,” said Lady Massingberd. “We seem to have strayed from the subject.”

“Not far. I was coming back to you. You are consistent. You are completely convinced that nothing in the world matters two straws, and that the sole object of life is to extract from it all the enjoyment you can.”

“And there you are!” remarked Lord Thorley, shielding his eyes against the glare.

“I don’t think I’m there at all. You make me out not only completely selfish, but also utterly shallow.”

“No, not shallow,” said Lady Grote. “No one with convictions is shallow. You don’t drift in the least, you go steaming away in a well-defined line, with a wake of foam and waves behind you. And occasional corpses which you have thrown overboard,” she added, to complete the picture.

{53}

“Thank you, darling. And do explain also why I’m not selfish. It would make me feel more comfortable.”

“Certainly I can explain that: it is quite easy. You do quantities of kind and unselfish things. It gives you enjoyment to do them.”

“It would be very kind of you, for instance, to pass me those matches,” remarked Henry Thorley. “I’m sure you would enjoy it. Thanks.”

Lady Massingberd sat stiffly up in her chair. She looked rather like a smart young guardsman who had chosen to dress in a tailor-made gown.

“That is just like you, Helen,” she said. “You always impute low motives to people. You are good enough—I don’t know about your sincerity—to say I do kind things, but only because it amuses me.”

“No, I never said that. I said you enjoyed it,” said Helen. “I don’t think that anything amuses you.”

“Worse and worse. I have no sense of humour, then.”

“In that sense you haven’t. Things don’t tickle you, as Americans say, as they tickle me. You didn’t see the humour of Mr. Stoughton, for instance. You took him quite seriously: I had to point out to you the humour of his inconsistencies. I don’t say for a moment that you can’t see a funny joke, but you don’t see a serious joke like Mr. Stoughton.”

“No, it is true I didn’t see the joke in Mr. Stoughton, if there was one. I thought him merely very rude and ill-mannered and altogether without breeding.”

“I don’t know where he would have got his breeding from,” said Lord Thorley. “That would have been stolen, if he had any.”

“He hadn’t: he had appropriated nothing in that line. I can’t understand you, Helen. You like seeing{54} the weirdest sorts of people. Do you remember when you found you had asked a black bishop, a lion-tamer and a suffragette to dine with you?”

Lady Grote leaned laughing back in her chair.

“Do I remember?” she said. “And do I not remember that Grote came up to town unexpectedly that night? He arrived in the middle of dinner, gave one glance at us and fled to his club. I didn’t see him again for six months. Poor Grote!”

“Poor Grote indeed! But we are going to see him to-day, aren’t we?”

“Yes: he comes this evening. You see, Robin is coming too, and he adores Robin.”

“But tell me why you like suffragettes and lion-tamers and black bishops?” asked Lady Massingberd. “You are—it’s a terrible word—but you’re aristocratic to your finger-tips, and yet I really think you like riff-raff of that sort more than anybody. Anyhow it amuses you most. But then, of course you’ve got a sense of humour,” she added bitingly.

“Darling, I never said you hadn’t: I explained that away beautifully. But the real difference between us is that I like people: I like the human race, and you don’t like the human race. You like what they call ‘a few friends,’ which is far more genteel.”

“Oh, I’m genteel, too, am I?” asked Lady Massingberd in a voice that would have frozen molten pitch.

“Yes, you are genteel: it is very, very nice to be genteel. You like a few friends, as I said, and they are all of the class which you allowed yourself to call aristocratic. My dear, I believe that you think that when Moses came down from Sinai he brought with him not the tables of the law but the original edition of Burke’s Peerage. The Dukes of Edom: that’s what you like.{55}”

Lady Massingberd began counting on her brown, strong fingers.

“One selfish: two shallow: three without sense of humour: four genteel: five snob,” she said. “There’s a nice handful of qualities.”

Lady Grote laughed again: she had the laugh of a child, open mouthed and abandoned.

“You won’t listen to my explanation,” she said. “I’ve explained away everything but genteel, which I can’t do, and now I’ll explain away snob. You aren’t in the least a snob in the ordinary sense: you don’t like princes better than dukes and dukes than marquises, like Mr. Boyton who is coming down here this evening, but you like a certain quality which you call breeding. If a prince hasn’t got it you don’t like him. Lots of them haven’t. But you like a certain quality which usually goes with generations of living comfortably in castles. Now I don’t, at least I don’t like that to the exclusion of those who haven’t got it. I can make friends with those who haven’t got a trace of it. Indeed, I think I must have had some great-great-grandmother who came from the music-halls, if they had them in those days, and heredity makes me want to go back there.”

“I can’t think why people are down on snobs,” remarked Lord Thorley, in his slow, suave voice. “Snobs are so pleasant if one happens to be an earl or something. But the earl-variety of snob is unfortunately becoming rather scarce. They ought to create snobs instead of peers. With a pension.”

“Henry so often appears to be talking nonsense when he is really talking sense,” remarked Lady Grote. “He hasn’t had the opportunity to talk much at present owing to Gracie and me. Shall we let him talk for a little?{56}”

“If he’s got anything to say,” remarked Lady Massingberd austerely.

“He has. I always know when Henry has something to say, because when he has something to say he is rather silent; when he has nothing to say, he talks.”

“You’re the biggest snob I know, Helen,” said Henry gently.

“That sounds like having something to say. Do say it.”

“Well, the good old crusted snob who likes earls as such is about extinct, except for your friend Mr. Boyton. But another sort of snob has sprung up, of which you are a perfect specimen. You are snobbish about success. You don’t like the rank and file of the Socialists, you like their leader, Mr. Stoughton. You don’t like singers, but you like the finest singer in the world. You like the finest artist, the richest man——”

“Oh, that’s not being a snob,” said Helen.

“Yes, it is: it is being the up-to-date snob. In old days there was the snobbism with regard to birth, because prince and duke and so on were representative of the most successful class. They had seats in the House of Lords, and controlled the seats in the House of Commons. They were richer than anybody else, they mattered most. Nowadays other people are much richer, Germans and Jews and such-like. Nowadays other people matter more, because the opera and the Russian ballet and such-like interest us more than marquises. We care less about territorial possessions and more about being amused. I don’t say you are the worse for being a snob: I only remark that you are one.”

“Go on: I love being talked about,” said Lady Grote.

“You have led a very happy life then, darling,” said{57} Lady Massingberd, looking at her fingers, each of which connoted some odious quality.

“Oh, shut up, Gracie!” said Lady Grote. “Go on, Henry.”

“Well, you’re a snob, and what’s the harm of that? I think it’s very sensible of you. The efficient people of the world are naturally more interesting than others. They have won success, and to have won success implies gifts: it implies character. They have got their hall-mark: the world has recognized them: they have shown strength and determination. So far, so good.”

“Then tell me about the bad part. Whenever anyone says ‘So far, so good,’ it means there’s something awful coming.”

“You don’t think it awful, so you won’t mind. But it is a fact that a quantity of your successful people are bounders. That’s one of the penalties of success: it so often makes you a bounder. To be successful in the rough and tumble of a profession blunts your gentler qualities. Competition has been your business, and the habit of competition makes a very disagreeable by-product. It makes you inconsiderate of other people: it makes you square your shoulders and elbow people in the face.”

“That’s right,” said Lady Massingberd, almost smacking her lips. “Give it her hot: she told me I was genteel and selfish and—and what was my third finger?”

“Marriage-ring finger, dear,” said Helen wildly, completely forgetting for the moment that Gracie had divorced her husband only six months ago. Then suddenly she remembered, and gave a shriek of laughter.

“Oh, I wish I could say that sort of thing when I wanted to,” she exclaimed. “I only make awful gaffes by accident. It must be lovely to make them{58} on purpose. But there’s more to follow, Henry. You got to where I liked people who elbowed others in the face.”

“Yes, I stick to that. You don’t like them because they elbow other people in the face, mind: you only like them though they do these elbowings. And there’s much more to follow.”

“Out with it,” said Lady Massingberd. “My third finger is for my marriage ring. Never shall I forget that.”

“Go on, Henry,” said Helen.

“I am going on. You make a profound mistake. You think you are being democratic: I have known you even think you were socialistic. But you are only being snobbish. The opera bores you very much——”

“She doesn’t know one note from another,” interjected Lady Massingberd.

“But you go in order to pay homage to that immense Kuhlmann, about whom everyone is talking.”

“He is coming down here this afternoon,” murmured Lady Grote.

“I felt sure of it. So probably is that man who wrote the play which the Lord Chamberlain refused to license. You don’t care for plays.”

“Mr. Hedgekick is perfectly charming,” said Helen, sticking up for her friends.

“Hedgekick?” asked Lady Massingberd in an awestruck voice.

“Yes, darling: Hedgekick. Why not? Talbot is just as funny, so is anything beginning with Fitz. I wish you wouldn’t interrupt when Henry is talking about me.”

“And the worst of all the miserable business,” said Lord Thorley, “is that you think you are being demo{59}cratic and open-minded, and are among those who say, ‘One man is as good as another,’ and ‘God made us all.’ You don’t really think anything of the sort. A few men are much better than the others, and the others can go hang. You worship success. Could there be anything narrower or less democratic?”

“Anyhow, I had a suffragette to dinner,” remarked Lady Grote. “She was a criminal, too: she had scragged some picture in the Royal Academy and was sent to prison.”

“That was precisely why you asked her to dinner. She was in the world’s eye.”

“Like a cinder from the engine,” said Lady Massingberd.

“Exactly. And if a notorious murderer was allowed to go out to dinner, you would certainly ask him the night before he was hanged.”

Lady Grote did not attempt to defend herself.

“Yes, that’s all quite true as far as it goes,” she said. “But it doesn’t go far enough.”

“It goes a great deal too far,” said Lady Massingberd. “I never knew how dreadful you were.”

“May the prisoner at the bar speak?” said Helen. “She’s going to, anyhow. It’s just this. I’m human.”

She pointed her finger suddenly at Lady Massingberd. “Gracie, don’t say I’m much too human,” she said, “because that’s cheap. And you get into humanity most surely and quickly by going blind for the people who have succeeded in their own lines. I adore them. I don’t particularly care what they do, so long as they do it better than anybody else. If that is being a snob—well, I am one. I like people about whom the world is talking. They are concentrated people. They may be colossally rich, and that’s interesting, because they smoulder with power. They may sing, they may{60} tell me, like Mr. Stoughton, that I’m a thief: they may dance. I like the grit that makes success. It’s what they are that interests me, not what they do.”

“In the case of the dancer, it’s what his legs do,” said Gracie succinctly.

“My dear, your great fault is that you can’t forgive,” said Helen. “You are pricking me with pins because I said you were genteel. That’s small of you. Now whatever I am, I’m not small. I’m not bound like you by any restriction of class: I’m much more a woman than a lady, if that makes it clearer to you. I don’t care whether the person who interests me comes from a slum, or South Kensington, or a palace: it doesn’t seem to me to matter. Therein I’m much bigger also than people like Mr. Stoughton, and those novelists, for whom, as someone said, the sun always rises in the East End. They think that if you dress for dinner you can’t be interesting. That’s a shallow view, if you like.”

Lord Thorley, with a wrinkling movement of his nose, displaced the pince-nez which he habitually wore. This gave him a lost sort of look.

“I don’t know where we’ve got to,” he remarked.

“We’ve got to the fact that I am more human than either of you, and therefore bigger. I know perfectly well how to be grande dame and how to be gamin. I know it from the inside too: I am both. Grote used to say that he never knew which of me was coming down in the morning. But whichever it was, it always adored people.”

Lord Thorley gave a long, abstracted sigh.

“That is so amazing of you,” he said. “I can’t understand your being so completely taken up with people, as individuals, as you are. Collectively I agree{61} with you: when people form masses and parties, you can deal with the principles that are evolved.”

“In fact, you prefer the abstract to the concrete,” said Lady Massingberd.

He gave them a charming smile.

“Apart from the people I am privileged to call my friends, I certainly do,” said he. “It is delightful to sit here and discuss Helen’s snobbishness, because she’s a friend. But I have not the slightest desire to discuss Mr. Stoughton’s inconsistency. It doesn’t seem to me to matter whether he is inconsistent or not. All Socialists, I am aware, are very muddle-headed, and, indeed, have no constructive scheme to propose. Mr. Stoughton seems to me a very ordinary representative of the class without any clear ideas to lay before us, beyond the notion that we are thieves. I think that possibly we are, but he could tell us no more than that our goods ought to belong to the State. He hadn’t the slightest notion of how the State would dispose of them. He didn’t see that if A., for instance, is industrious and frugal, he will, though all property is equally distributed to-day, be richer at the end of the year than B., who is idle and spendthrift. Eventually he admitted that, but when I asked him if he proposed to have further distributions of property annually, he had nothing better to say than that this was a detail which could be worked out. It isn’t a detail: it lies at the root of the whole affair. The clever, the frugal and the industrious will always amass property, and periodical distributions of wealth would only put a premium on idleness and extravagance. How far the fact that our great-grandfathers were hard-working justifies our being rich to-day is, of course, a totally different question.”

He sat there gently tapping the knuckles of one hand{62} with the pince-nez he held in the other, looking dreamily out over the sunny lawn. Then suddenly he seemed to recollect himself, and glanced from one to the other of his companions.

“Dear me, I have been bringing principles into this very charming discussion on personalities,” he said. “Naturally, I grant you that to arrive at principles, you must study persons. They must be analysed and dissected: all principles are the spirit distilled from persons. But I am more concerned really with the result of that distillation than with the individual grapes that have gone to it.”

“But, then, why did you adopt politics as your profession?” asked Lady Massingberd. “I always wanted to know that. Surely in a political career you are entirely concerned with persons as individuals.”

“Not in my view of it. Indeed, I should say precisely the opposite. Anyone who attempts to be a constructive politician deals entirely with forces and tendencies, with the evolution of the nation’s collective mind. Of course, there are tub-thumpers and rhetoricians of the new order who attack individuals, and tell us what they have seen in one particular Staffordshire potter’s house, and contrast it with the deer-park and the Vandycks of somebody else. Mr. Stoughton—was that his name?—was of that class. But the man whose ideas deal with big movements does not concern himself with isolated and probably misleading phenomena. He does not have to see a thing for himself and tell everybody what he has seen. You need not go to Australia, in fact, in order to learn to think imperially. Who coined that phrase, by the way?”

He turned to Lady Grote, as he spoke. She knew as much about politics as she knew about the lunar{63} theory, and very wisely hazarded no conjectures on the subject.

“You are very suggestive,” she said. “But I think what you say is completely wrong from beginning to end. All the heads of different professions just now, like you Ministers of State, and the heads of the Church, like bishops, know nothing at all of what is really going on. Public opinion isn’t made in Whitehall, any more than Christianity is made in cathedrals. And anyone who professes to control the course of either must have first-hand knowledge of the subject. Why is the Church out of touch with the people? Simply because bishops live in palaces. And why is the State out of touch with the people? Simply because Ministers sit in their offices, in an academic manner, and are unacquainted with what public opinion is. You and they have not the smallest idea what individuals want: you have no first-hand information. Was there ever a more ridiculous assembly than the House of Commons, unless it is the House of Lords? A man is elected to the House of Commons, let us say, by the majority of one vote. He represents half of the constituents who elect him, plus one man. It is no answer to say that somebody else is elected with a majority of three thousand. He only represents the majority of the electorate. It doesn’t come out square; there is no use in saying it does. And, good Lord, the House of Lords!”

Lord Thorley had adjusted his pince-nez again, and looked at her as through a microscope.

“And about the House of Lords?” he asked.

“My dear, you are not a professor, and I am not an undergraduate. You ask that as if you were trying to examine me, and determine my place by the intelligence of my answers. That is the fault of your party, which{64} is the same as mine. The Government are like school-masters: they don’t seem to recollect that they were elected by the school itself. You are—to adopt Gracie’s horrid phrase—aristocratic, and you can’t understand that nowadays there is no aristocracy. I suppose I belong to it, but I am quite certain that it doesn’t exist. We are like things in the Red King’s dream. When he wakes we shall all find that there aren’t any of us. Why should there be? As you said yourself, that which the House of Lords used to represent has gone elsewhere. Germans and Jews and Hittites—whatever they are—have got it. The House of Lords is an Aunt Sally, and everybody throws darts at its silly face. And they stick there every time.”

He wrinkled his pince-nez off his nose again.

“My dear Helen,” he said, “I had no idea you were such a Radical.”

She gave a little despairing sigh.

“I am nothing of the kind!” she said. “I am no more a Radical than I am a Tory. But I do know this, that in some weird way the whole world is going into a melting-pot. We’re all going to be chucked in. What sort of soup shall we make, I wonder?”

Lord Thorley, who had sunk back into his chair, sat a little more upright, and grasped the lapels of his coat in his hands.

“Without calling attention to the fact that soup is not usually made in a melting-pot,” he observed, “I don’t believe in the melting-pot. Ever since I can remember the country has supposedly been on the verge of some gigantic cataclysm. At one time it has been socialism, at another a European war, at another Home Rule. At no period that I can remember has there not been some terrible thunder-cloud in the sky, and now I have seen too many thunder-clouds to believe{65} in thunder. And if you look at a book of memoirs of whatever age, you will always find precisely the same thing. The writers invariably represent their country as on the edge of an abyss. The ground is always trembling with subterranean menaces. But when was the volcano actually in a state of eruption in England? It never has been. It has smoked and steamed sometimes; that has always been its safety-valve.”

He looked serenely, triumphantly, at his companions, as if, in the character of a teacher, he had algebraically “proved” some problem, or as if, in the character of a conjuror, he had brought off some clever piece of manipulation. But Lady Grote shook her head at him.

“You think you can prove things by a theory,” she said. “But unfortunately experience can disprove your theory.”

He laughed gaily and rose.

“That is just where we part company,” he said. “The theory itself is founded on collective experience.”

“But the conditions now are different.”

“That is what every age says of its own age,” he replied, “and in each case it is wrong. Behind the conditions and governing them is that great immutable force called human nature. And behind human nature is the infinitely greater force and the most immutable of all, which, by one name or another, we agree to be God!”

He stood twisting his pince-nez by the string for a moment’s silence.

“But here’s this lovely Saturday afternoon running to seed,” he said. “May I borrow a motor, my dear Helen, and go out for a run? And can’t I persuade you to come with me?”

“I wish I could, but my guests will be beginning to arrive before long.{66}”

“Dear me, yes, I forgot. I was thinking that you and Gracie and I would be passing a quiet Sunday. Do you expect many people?”

“I think about thirty. I never really expect anybody till he arrives, for he may make some subsequent engagement.”

“And when he arrives you naturally cease to expect him, because he is already there. So you have no expectations with regard to people, and I wish you would apply the same principle with regard to cataclysms. But I think I shall go out, if I may, and return when your guests have mostly come. Then I can plunge head first into them. Seeing guests arrive one by one always rather reminds me of wading out on a flat shore to bathe.”

She laughed.

“My dear, order your car, will you? and take your header on your return. But don’t ask Gracie to go with you, because she would certainly say ‘Yes,’ and I want her here for moral support.”

“Very well. I feel no qualm about not offering you my moral support, because you would find me a broken reed.”

He looked round the great cool loggia a moment.

“Dear me, Grote’s ancestors were thieves with a great deal of taste,” he observed.

He drifted away in a rather rudderless manner, lost in subtle speculations on the subject that had been under discussion. Much the most interesting of these was Lady Grote herself, for whom he entertained the greatest admiration and the strongest affection of which he was capable. That, though it lacked any ardent quality, was undoubtedly deep; its very quietness almost guaranteed that. His pulses never beat quick for anybody, but for his friends they beat most{67} satisfactorily full. Passions of any sort, whether of temper or of temperament, were quite unknown to him: his analytic mind lived in a cool, pleasant cave with its affections grouped tidily round it, and his admirable conscience keeping a sort of sentry-go at the mouth of it, to call him out, when required, for the fulfilment of his public duties. But the moment they were over, it saluted, and let him bestow himself at ease again.

He seldom was surprised at anything, for if anything at all startling came across him, he always felt that a better knowledge of the soil from which it sprang would have enabled him to conjecture its existence. He had been unaware, for instance, until to-day, that Lady Grote was one of the cataclysmic party, whose bogies, whenever they appeared in the public Press, he looked at with mild and easily-satisfied curiosity. The future of Ireland was of these, labour trouble was another; even suffragettes were periodically supposed to contribute a menace to the tranquillity of this decently-ordered realm, or the possibility of a European war. Lady Grote had not said which of these she thought threatening, but she had spoken of the melting-pot being on the fire....

He found himself standing in the drawing-room in front of the great Vandyck picture of the Lady Grote of the period, who had been an ancestress of his own. Not till then did he remember that he had come indoors to order a motor-car—had he driven down from London in his own car that morning? He could not recollect whether he had or not, and pressed a bell to order it if it was here, and, if not, one of his hostess’s. Waiting for it to be answered, he continued looking vaguely at the antique Lady Grote and thinking of the modern one.{68}

How baffling to the analyst was the vivid and flame-like quality of her mind! No desire for the brooding activity of thought ever touched her; she was always eager for experience and psychical adventures in living; she loved coming in contact each day with new minds; she explored them like a traveller in unknown lands, but made no maps of them, no notes even of the fresh flora and fauna. She must be forty years old now, and yet in eagerness and elasticity of mind, just as in her fresh youth of body, she showed no signs of age and of the mellowness that age brought with it. She had still about her all the delicious effervescence and experimentalism of youth: her life was passed in the foam of rapids, and never by any chance did she float into a back-water. Time, with the buffetings and adventures that it brought, wrote no wrinkles on her, nor ever so slightly bruised her: the very quality of her vitality, like a wind, swept away catastrophes from her path in a mere cloud of dust.

He never made inquiries into the truth of scandals about his friends; such things did not interest him, but for as long as he had known her the world’s tongue had never ceased wagging about her affairs. Whatever they had been, they had in no way coarsened her or made her common: she remained the high-bred, exquisite woman, perched on a pinnacle of what he must suppose was called social standing. His passion for analysis did not trouble to exert itself over what that meant. In this prosperous, thoughtless, democratic day there was no end to the ingredients which composed it. She was a power, a centre, a comet....

Years ago there had been an awkward time, when Robin was quite a small boy. Grote had wanted to take very extreme steps, most ill-advised steps in Lord Thorley’s opinion, with regard to it. He had interested{69} himself in that, and eventually he had persuaded Grote to be reconciled with her again. No good could come of it, only harm all round, especially for the boy.... Naturally he had never spoken to Helen of what he had done on that occasion; probably to this day she was ignorant that it was he who had saved the situation. Besides Grote himself ... and then with a slight sense of disgust, as if he had seen an objectionable paragraph in a book, Lord Thorley turned over that page in his mind. All the rest, as far as he personally knew, was mere scandal and gossip. He had no means of judging its truth or falsity; he only knew that the subject-matter of it was unattractive to him, even positively distasteful.

It seemed that the bells in this house were answered with truly artistic deliberation, and going again to the side of the chimney-piece to repeat the summons, he observed that he had merely turned on the lights of the glass chandelier that hung in the centre of the room. He had been vaguely conscious of a good deal of sunlight about, and had even wondered where it came from.

“Dear me, dear me!” he said to himself, as he pressed the correct button. “I must really try to be a little more observant in practical affairs. Helen would never have done that. It is distinctly a waste of nervous force to attend too closely to trivial matters, but I suppose there is a compromise to be arrived at.{70}”