Chapter I

1

Mrs. Gray occurred suddenly, as has been said, but in accustomed surroundings: at one of those parties, in fact, that are nightly scattered about a corner of London, and are, through open first-floor windows, apt to hit the solitary passer-by of the small hours across the eyes with the vivid glare and gesticulation of their gaiety. These parties are much despised (_a_) by the people who go to them; (_b_) by the people who don’t get the chance; and (_c_) by essayists who begin their essays with: “I sometimes ask myself what hidden pleasures there are to be found in Crowds....”

This particular party, in June, 1912, in the Halliday house in Deanery Street, was quite small; or rather it looked small, for although there were present about a hundred people they were, as usual at a Halliday party, so scattered about the various rooms upstairs and downstairs that there were never more than ten or twelve couples to encourage the band in the ballroom; so that, if you were a bad dancer, you had no chance to use the excuse so often effective on a crowded floor, that the art of dancing is not to dance but to avoid other dancers.

This was an intimate party: no decorations or dowagers. The frequent Halliday parties of the intimate sort were justly renowned, for Euphemia, Mrs. Halliday, was expert in achieving that pleasant impromptu effect which is the result of a lavish and organised hospitality. (The name must not, by the way, be confused with that of the famous brewers. The Hallidays, Euphemia said, were, and always had been, bankers and gentlemen, not brewers and aristocrats.) No one “received” you at these parties, though they were by no means of that slack order to which “every one” could go; you just happened on your host, John, or your hostess, Euphemia--so dark and florid she always was!--as time went on; and you talked with the one and danced with the other according to the press of your business elsewhere. You had gone there that night in response to a casual telephone message from Euphemia’s butler, the formidable Hebblethwaite, and you left as casually; and you always left very late, and you always left wondering why you had stayed so long. But there was one young man, anyway, who on leaving Deanery Street that night did not wonder why he had stayed so long, and that young man’s name was Ivor Marlay. He was wondering about something else.

On his entrance, just after midnight, he had happened on Gerald Trevor descending the stairs alone, to have a peaceful “glass of wine” in the as yet uncrowded supper-room. From the stairs Trevor’s face lit up with his quick little smile of pleasure. There was a great deal of courtliness in the man, but he summarised it all in that jerky little smile: keeping his speech as free from it as every one else’s, or nearly.

“Join me,” he said, taking Ivor’s arm, “and we will talk a little.”

Gerald Trevor was inevitable at all such parties, but not nearly so boring as you might think from that inevitability. No one ever thought Gerald Trevor boring, not even the women who were tired of him. He was that rare person who can join two others without interrupting their conversation. He was in between the generations, neither the old nor the new, neither too courtly nor too careless; and he looked, with his small slender figure, his thick fair hair and fair moustache cropped very close to his lip, his keen and scholarly blue eyes, and the nose which rather surprisingly stuck out from his face like the peak of a cap and gave his features a surprising look of keen aggression--he looked delightfully like a man who has loved a few women and killed a few men. And he probably had, for he had been through the Boer war and had been divorced by his wife, though that was by arrangement, as she wanted to marry some one else; whereupon Gerald Trevor had thought to himself: “Thou shalt not commit alimony,” and didn’t.

“You and I,” said Trevor, juggling with a macaroon, a cigarette, and a glass, as they stood at the long table of Hebblethwaite’s kingdom--“You and I are always meeting at these places, Ivor. And, it seems to me, we’re meeting in spirit, as well as in fact. Now that’s very strange, don’t you think, considering----”

Ivor grinned. “You are about to refer,” he said softly, “to the amazing fact that you are old enough to be my father--yes, you are, Gerald. I never see you but you say that at least once and would like to say it twice, and I can’t help thinking that it’s a kind of parlour-game peculiar to the house of Trevor. I feel I ought to slap you on the shoulder twice and say “Bo,” and then you’ll tell me where you’ve hidden something....”

“Ass,” said Trevor.

“Age,” meditated Ivor gravely, “can’t matter in a man. I haven’t as yet the faintest idea what does matter in a man, but I’m sure age doesn’t. Consider how many children of ten are their father’s ancestors! Read Mrs. Besant. Read the late Mrs. Blavatsky. Read the late Mrs. Eddy. Read what you like....”

“When,” said Trevor gently, “you have finished gloating over your superficial knowledge of the indoor activities of elderly widows, two of whom are now quite old enough to know better, you may let me suggest that the spirit in which you and I meet at these parties is one of Looking for Something. But the difference is that I know what I’m looking for and you don’t.”

“I always was a backward boy,” lamented Ivor.

“Not at all!” said Trevor quickly, and took another macaroon; whenever Gerald Trevor took another macaroon you were warned--run away, or stay and listen. “It’s I who am the fool! Don’t you see, Ivor? You’ve got a right to begin, but I’m a fool to repeat things. You are searching for an enchantment, but I’m waiting for a repetition. Life is empty at the moment, and I want to fill it again--and the same thing will fill it again in almost the same way. It always does.”

“I know now,” said Trevor, “so much about women that I know no woman has ever loved me, nor can ever love me, as I want to be loved. I say that in no spirit of false modesty, Ivor, but judicially--and the frightfully funny part of it is that it’s not just a remark over a glass of wine, it’s true. I’m the legendary man who was born to be the perfect co-respondent, but has failed to live up to the promise of his birth....”

People were crowding round about, they flowed to and ebbed from Hebblethwaite’s kingdom; they sat at the various tables scattered about the supper-room, and the two men were casually interrupted, but nothing could distract Gerald Trevor from his rare mood of self-revelation. This young man, Ivor Marlay, with his attentive eyes under those sceptical-looking eyebrows, called up a mood of intimacy in the man of middle years which would have outraged him if applied by some one else to himself. He admitted, now, the outrageousness of his mood to Ivor, comically pleading Ivor as his excuse. (Hebblethwaite had placed a bottle before them, from which they automatically filled their glasses.)

“You’re so outrageous yourself, you see,” Trevor accused him, with that jerky little smile. “You goad me on! Not with the things you say, of course, but with the things you understand--or pretend to, anyway.”

“All my life,” Trevor said, “I’ve loathed men. And effeminate men worst of all, for that’s adding insult to injury. Yes, I’ve loathed men--they are, mentally, either too hairy or not hairy enough, and physically they are almost as deplorable as women. Taking, however, a liberal view of the flaws which are present in even the loveliest of the daughters of Eve, I have been partial to women, I have loved women. Sacredly, you’d never believe how sacredly--for one’s manner of speech rather hides the sacred things in one. Only to realise the other day that the only two women I’ve ever really loved were both harlots. Mentally, I mean, not financially....” And Gerald Trevor fell silent.

“That,” said Ivor sincerely, “must have been a great disappointment to you.” He had to say something.

Trevor emptied his glass. “That’s why I’m rather indecently telling you about it, Ivor,” he apologised, self-consciously. “They were both, don’t you see, so fiendishly complicated in their emotions and so direct in their direction--which, stripped of all the baubles of polite speech, was from one man’s bed to another. They talked of love, but they only desired. Damn it, that sounds dramatic....”

“But I like it like that!” cried Ivor.

“It all comes from the progress of science,” said Trevor. “All this easy infidelity and messing about. One is not protesting against a woman liking some one else, one is protesting against the chances of her liking some one else. The chances are so against one....”

“There are too many facilities for getting about,” he said. “A man nowadays has got very little chance of keeping a woman to himself as compared to even eighty years ago. She gets more chances of seeing other men, and comparing and developing and evolving--away from you. In the old days, if you lived at Wimbledon--well, why not?--your wife never met a soul without your knowing about it. Infidelity was a lengthy and ponderous business--it simply isn’t possible to snatch a quiet half-hour with a young man while your coach and footmen are waiting outside. But now, motors, undergrounds, telegrams, telephones! All modern life is directed towards letting your wife or mistress see as many men as she likes and when she likes. And out of those men how easy to meet one she likes as much as, and then more than, you. The way women go about finding Magnetism in impossible men is appalling! So where the devil are you? There’s no security, Ivor, simply none! A lover is a husband and then a cuckold before he knows what and where he is. And then people say the telephone service is too slow!”

“The pleasant thing about you, Gerald,” Ivor suddenly broke in, “is that you never speak of women as though you had been loved by them, but always as though you had done all the loving. It’s a very pleasant fiction, that....”

“The matter is, of course,” said Trevor reasonably, “that one wants rather too much. One wants a simple and direct love spiced with the divine and complex subtleties of a Cleopatra--and the two can’t go together at all. One wants the love and constancy of a dairymaid and the lust and pride and wit of a great lady....”

It was at that very moment, as Ivor Marlay will always remember, that he first heard the voice of Magdalen Gray, and was arrested by it. Trevor and he were still standing at the long table with their backs to the room and bunches of people, and Trevor was just thoughtfully exploring the bottle for what it might still contain--when the voice, but a phantom of a passing voice borne above the clatter of the room by some peculiarly light quality in it, suddenly caressed Ivor’s ear: like, he thought, a very sweet unscented breeze from the shadows of a green place to a sweating road where two men are breaking stones, for Trevor’s worldly wisdom is made of stones.... He looked round and peered among the accustomed faces round about, but he couldn’t hit on the face of the voice, nor the “Rodney” to whom it had been addressed.

“A pleasant voice, that,” he only said to Trevor--so little thinking that Trevor had also heard it, that he was very surprised when he returned:--

“Yes, isn’t it! A voice in this wilderness. Did you see her?” And Trevor looked round the room, keen eyes searching swiftly. Gerald Trevor was very popular--among men as among women, for all his “hatred”--and many eyes caught his and beckoned gaily, a voice here and there called “Gerald!” and a few men wondered what on earth Trevor found to say at such length to that rather mysterious young man, Marlay. They quite liked Marlay, he seemed and looked quite all right, but they weren’t, absurdly enough, quite sure whether he liked them! And that vague doubt is a most improper one for a young man to instil, no matter how vaguely, in other men. Thus, throughout his life Ivor was to find that it was to be made always much easier for him to be unpopular rather than popular. His was a nature to like a few people and be entirely indifferent to every one else; and very few people were to matter in his life, but they were to matter very much. As now, when Gerald Trevor, at five-and-forty, who was every one’s easy acquaintance and no one’s particular friend, was surprisingly Ivor’s good friend, and was steadfastly to remain so. For it is the consolation and distinction of a man whose instinct is to like very few people to be instinctively liked by those very few.

“She must have just passed through and gone upstairs,” Trevor said at last. “Anyway, she belongs to a generation that doesn’t loiter in bars, not even when they’re called buffets....”

“She loiters secretly,” he said mischievously, “and in secret places--which, after all, is what loitering is for.”

“Who is she, Gerald?”

Trevor regarded the young man severely.

“She,” he said, “is a woman of quality.”

“Oh!” cried the very young man; and Trevor was really surprised into his jerky little smile by the sudden pleasure of the exclamation.

“Gerald, you have said a marvellous thing--oh, but you have! I never thought to hear that said about any woman, I’d forgotten that such a phrase was ever made by fine men for fine women--a woman of quality! And here you’ve been ranting a lot of worldly-wisdom stuff for the last half-hour, keeping this pearl of price inside you until the magic of a voice dragged it out! Pah!...”

“A woman of quality!” And Ivor repeated the words softly, tasting in them wine finer than champagne and older than Falernian, while Trevor enjoyed the comedy of his chance phrase. Next time, he comically thought, it will not happen so accidentally.

Ivor was of an age which can confuse the precious and the beautiful into one dim, magnificent whole; and that chance, outmoded phrase had somehow lit a great light, an absurdly great light, within him, it seemed to him so coloured with forgotten splendours and luxuries of _race_ and manners. Everything desirable, everything exquisite, everything damnable, everything that could bewitch his mind and heart, seemed to lie in and about that phrase. It fired him, it so completely contained the rarest secrets of _fineness_--for him, anyway! He wouldn’t, he thought grandly, ever cheapen that phrase. They were words to fit an ideal. (He was only twenty-three, after all; and he had drunk his share of a bottle of champagne.)

“Tell me more of ‘this woman of quality’” he begged Gerald Trevor.

“Oh, no!” cried Trevor. “I’m just too old to make theories out of facts--especially feline facts. Besides, you will soon be meeting her for yourself----”

“But I haven’t as yet.”

“But you are only very few London years old yet, Ivor! and she is only just back from two years near Naples.”

“That,” said Ivor, “must be one of those facts you were shy of theorising about.”

“You would learn more,” Trevor gently warned him, “if you understood less, young man.”

“She has a husband,” he condescended to add, “who explores Asia. She explores everything else. He is at present in London, and at this very party, I think, but she does not cease to explore. And so he will go away again, because he is that kind of man.”

“And I,” he said, emptying his glass, “will now go upstairs to ask her to dance with me.”

“Telling her, please,” Ivor seriously detained him, and drew a deep breath, “that her unknown voice was much appreciated and its absence deeply regretted, even during a conversation with yourself.”

“Quite,” said Trevor sombrely. “But, on the other hand, the action of eggs on the liver has given rise to endless discussion.”

It was as Gerald Trevor reached the head of the stairs leading to the ballroom that he saw Magdalen Gray coming down the flight above, with Rodney West. Her dress, he thought, is of the colour of crushed orchids: it would be ... something just a bit rank....

“Magdalen!” he greeted her from below; “the psychological moment has now come for you and me to take the floor together.”

“And Gerald!” the light voice said gaily; “they’re just beginning a lovely waltz with a beard on it, to suit and soothe the dignity of your years....”

And Rodney West, his sharp and legal face more than ever sharp and legal at this smooth buccaneering and smooth surrendering, continued his now solitary way down the crowded stairs. Interruptions did not intrude upon _him_, not even in the most crowded places. He was a man set apart, the little smile that was crucified on his thin, handsome face set him apart, and rather grimly. Rodney West was one of those “darkish men with intelligent gestures” who are attractive to connoisseurs among women. It was Mrs. Gray who had so described him--and herself.

2

Dancing, Ivor thought, must be altogether a winter-sport, for it’s certainly too hot for it now. And eventually, after a glance into the ballroom, where he could not see Trevor and partner, he came upon the bunch of young people who centred mainly round Lois Lamprey and Virginia Tracy: both young and cool and remote, and ever so faintly contemptuous of those whom their carelessness about things might shock. They were so untouchable by people to whom they were indifferent--people are “awful,” they said--that their amorous reputations amazed one. (It amazed them, too. It was so untrue, really.) Lady Lois Lamprey was in particularly good looks to-night, in a Byzantine sort of dress of beaten gold that vividly brought out the sheen of her dark silken hair, coils and coils of dark silken hair, like a lustrous black decoration for the white oval of her face and the curiously blue weapons which were given to her for eyes. And Virginia Tracy, golden-white Virginia, her small face as grave as a Persian kitten’s--for she was very young and resented things--was dressed severely in black....

“So that,” she said surprisingly, viciously, to Ivor, who had just come upon them and remarked upon its dark severity, “I can dance with you, black Ivor Marlay, if you should happen to ask me.”

That swift, breathless little voice of Virginia’s--so pregnant, somehow!

“Virginia has got a _crise_,” Lois Lamprey commented into some one’s ear, very softly. Lois always commented on Virginia like that, very softly, and without emotion. Lois gave it to be clearly understood that she kept emotion for emotional moments. Watch the Lady Lois! For she will be a power in the land, in the land where she is already a legend, by reason of her great beauty, her birth, her wit, her various talents, and the facility for dexterous publicity which has always been vouchsafed to the Lamprey women. She will be the contriver of her own destiny, so watch her, it will be quite interesting. There is no snob like the well-born snob: Mr. E. F. Benson said that, and he knows about those things. The Lady Lois will get on, but not obviously, she will climb to the ultimate pinnacles of the world’s last aristocracy. Men will call her an _allumeuse_, but men give many different names to their disappointments. She will have no enemies, but most of her friends will dislike her. Only two weaknesses has Lady Lois of the silken black hair and the curious eyes that seem to see things a long way off and to laugh at things close-to--she is mean with money, and she is partial to a glass or so of wine between meals. But her complexion can stand that, for a thing to wonder at is her complexion. “_Ah, ce type anglais!_” Nothing in the world can beat it, even though it does sometimes dress atrociously.... Now Virginia was quite, quite different from Lois; though people didn’t realise that for quite a long time.

There was antagonism between Virginia Tracy and Ivor Marlay. There always is antagonism between some one and some one else at a party of the intimate sort. In this case it had something to do with Virginia’s lack of manners and Ivor’s lack of servility, but how were they to know that?

“I’ve asked you to dance so often, and so often been snubbed,” Ivor said, rather too quietly maybe. The formality, the “rightness,” of his manner always irritated Virginia into an impatient shrug. And, in this mood of hers, her blue eyes glittered just a little, dangerously.

Now in the furrow of Virginia Tracy’s little chin, and an inconsiderable little chin it was for a beautiful young lady, lay a tiny brown spot, which Ivor sometimes found very irritating....

It was as though the room seemed suddenly to be going rotten with silence. No one quite knew why--and Virginia and Ivor were the most nonchalant among them. The silence was made more than ever tangible by one Kerrison saying:--

“But Marlay’s not severe, Virginia! He’s a rakish and raffish young man.” But, as usual with Mr. Kerrison, the insolence was in the words rather than the manner, which was ingratiating. Mr. Kerrison was an intellectual architect of a certain reputation and a remarkably anæmic exterior. Kerrison just slops about, people said. He disliked Ivor Marlay because Ivor Marlay had once seen him powdering his nose in a lavatory, because he knew Lois liked him, and because he suspected Virginia of being deeper than her antagonisms....

“He’s suffering,” Virginia said quietly, “from silence. The kind of silence that knows the answer to every question!” Thus were the sayings of the polite and amiable M. Stutz retailed by “My Customers!”

“In the meanwhile,” Ivor was bored enough to say, “why _don’t_ we dance? Or are we not talking about that now?” That manner of his, when irritated, was certainly irritating. You could not like Ivor when he did not like you. He somehow wouldn’t let you. The more he was in the right the less you could like him.

Virginia shook her head, as though a little absent, a little bored; and said something in a low tone to Mr. Kerrison beside her, so that he laughed.... It really was very stupid, all this. Every one was aware of that, and of Ivor Marlay. Everything had been so charming and inconsequent until he had come in--darkly, so as to provoke Virginia, it seemed!--and now everything was pointed and personal. As everything always was when those two met in a room--the atmosphere somehow grew a point, even at the Mont Agel, most difficult of all places in which to be anything but inconsequent! Any one else but Ivor Marlay would have answered Virginia’s first remark in some human sort of way, with a jeer or a laugh or a cry or a grab--but Marlay must go and say the “right” thing, which any fool might know was the wrong thing to say to Virginia.

Ivor Marlay, feeling acutely that he was “out of all this,” just waited for someone to say something. He was damned if _he_ was going to be “put out” by this sort of childishness. And his eyes faintly appealed to Lois Lamprey: who liked him--for she had an instinct about people who might get on--and had watched the little comedy as she watched every comedy, including her own, with lazy intentness. Lois was twenty-five, two years older than Virginia, and it was said that she was more _balanced_ than Virginia.

“Every one is being very typical to-night,” Lois vaguely said, in her deep, soft voice.

“A ballroom,” she said, “is not the place for dancing in, anyway. One should only dance in meadows and green places....”

(It was at that time the fashion to make idiotic remarks in a dogmatic voice. It rather impressed some people.)

“And one should only dance towards the moon and back,” bubbled Pretty Leyton, who couldn’t dance at all. (Thank God that’s over, Ivor thought.) Pretty Leyton always bubbled over like that--and, in bubbling, simply adored you! His business in life was to be an optimist and celibate, and his pleasure in life was to encourage and edit young men’s poetry, dead or alive; and in that the war was to give him his wonderful chance, which he wonderfully took. The poetry Pretty Leyton discovered was often very good, for his was a delicate and conservative taste; but it would have been easier to appreciate the good if one could only have discovered it among the bad, for his was also a delicate and kindly nature. While as for the young poets, of whom many called and all were chosen, he was continually begging his women friends, particularly Lois and Virginia, not to be “_too_ cruel” to them, for they were so sensitive and worth-while. To see and speak to Pretty Leyton in a crowded room was really very comforting, sometimes--which was just as well, since he was always in every room that happened to be crowded, saying: “Isn’t it a marvellous party?” He was so intensely “happy” to be everywhere, people were “so wonderful.” ... And, at some hour or other, in whatever room or company or city you might be in, you would surely espy coming towards you the high, extended waving hand, the swaying shoulder, the mobile eyebrows, the restless hindquarters and the dainty step of Pretty Leyton. And he would be charming, always charming. He gave all his women friends beautifully bound copies of _Tristram Shandy_, which he said was _the only_ book.

The rest of the circle, innermost of all the young circles of that time and symbolic in the best way of them all, comprised that London “of waiting for the lamps to be lit or of hoping the lamps will never be lit, of waiting for the sun to rise or of hoping the sun will never rise,” as Virginia had said once. Little knowing, Virginia, that the sun was risen so brilliantly on your friends the sooner and more tragically to set....

It was the London of Whitehall, Chelsea, Mayfair, Cambridge, Bloomsbury, Downing Street, Oxford, and the Mont Agel--but of course the Mont Agel! The London of those new young men and women, but mainly young men, who in those few years before the war suddenly confronted and conquered it with a new and vivid charm, now never to be forgotten. They, even more acutely than the Russian Ballet, were the social success of that time, in a new and brilliant way. They were so immediately likeable, so fine! A new kind of young men they were entirely, these few from the Universities, and much less “provincial” than new young men had ever been before. They, just then beginning life, were much less provincial than those who were ending life. They were not good Londoners: for they were good Europeans. They were clean and intricate and pagan, and they were quick to believe in fine things; and they could both drink and think. In everything they were a denial of their fathers, for these young men were sceptical of generalisations: in everything they were a denial of the catchwords for which they were to fight; and in everything they were the finest expression of the paralytic civilisation for which they were to die. Vulgarity of thought was to them the abomination of abominations; and they died because of it. They were to go out to fight in a war for chivalry, and they were to die in a morass of spite.

And these young giants were friends to Lois Lamprey and Virginia Tracy, and often with them--too often, people said. And Lois was conscious of their beauty and her power over them, but Virginia was conscious only of liking them immensely. She loved one and then another, seldom alone but always in a crowd. She was swept magically off her feet, gaily, profoundly, almost impersonally; for Virginia was very much of them in spirit and in endeavour, and she, like them, for all the gaiety and publicity of their lives--for London loved these young men of destiny--had secret places in her being where she could think and strive impersonally--with what Lois could decide in one cunning, physical moment!

Great heights were reached in that swift circle of young people, and deep abysses plumbed. They were the new soldiers of fortune, Lois and Virginia and their laughing men. They intoxicated each other into brilliance, and often into truth. They were much more intoxicating to each other than was the wine which rumour so abundantly uncorked for them.

And, on a day seven years or so later, Virginia asked Ivor:--

“Why, just why, have they all gone, so utterly? Of that roomful of people at the Hallidays’ that night, the last night that I ever saw you there, there’s nothing left but the scum--except just you, who weren’t of them at all. There simply isn’t one of them left, Ivor----”

“And not only that,” he said. “But there is nothing _of_ them left. The war killed them, and then Pretty Leyton and the Press killed them even more effectually, by making of them idols of prose and poetry and good looks. And they made idols of them in their own precious image and to suit their own precious ideals, ‘wonderful’ and ‘inspired.’ What was so splendid about them was that they were not inspired: they were thoughtful....”

For the giants had now become little books, a tragic and inevitable fate that often overtakes giants. They, who had never scattered themselves, were now scattered everywhere on the wings of their chance verses and chance letters; and there were Prefaces to bring them near in death who had been so rarely distant in life.

“It isn’t fair,” Virginia sombrely said, “to judge them by what they wrote, even if they had wanted to be judged by that. They’ve made brilliant and gallant poets out of men whose reality was idealism. Their reality was a fierce and gay idealism, Ivor, and poetry and gallantry were only afterthoughts with them....”

It was a lazy afternoon in Paris, and they were in the garden of a studio on the Butte, a garden overlooking Paris from the Mont Valérien to the Lion de Belfort.

“Youth isn’t made of definite things like prose and poetry,” Virginia said. “It’s made of everything. It’s a subtle and versatile thing, I do think, with lovely lapses into carelessness.”

“And besides!” she suddenly said. “Every one forgets the main ingredient of the souls of fine, eager men. Like the Crusaders, you know. It used to be called the Holy Ghost, but there’s no name for it now....”

But that was the Virginia and the Ivor Marlay of more than seven years later, a man and a woman of thirty, who have come intruding into the Halliday room of that night in 1912: ghosts of serious mien, to relive again their brutal young intolerances of that time.... For Ivor Marlay, now too close to reality to separate the chaff from it, was to-night deciding that “all this” was distasteful to him. The fault was all his, he felt certain. He admired so much in them, and especially the way in which all the desires of their fathers were melted into cheap baubles by the magic of their laughter, which held in it so little superiority and so much conviction. And, admiring all that, he yet found it all distasteful, it seemed so, well, gutless and bloodless, it seemed, somehow, to carry its own rot within it--and as he thought that his eyes fixed on Mr. Kerrison and Pretty Leyton, the one white-faced and thin and limp and little-eyed, the other bubbling and fantastic. Ivor could not see them then as he later grew to see them, that such men are inevitably part of the wonderful comedy of cities. He saw them, and men like them, in a devilish light, he loathed them; and he despised those who suffered them....

Mr. Kerrison was sitting beside Virginia on a window-seat, vigorously talking. He was answering something she had asked, and through the smoke Ivor could see the interest on her face. Mr. Kerrison somehow held that lovely golden creature’s confidence, and Ivor thought: her confidence is wrapped away in him as in the folds of a jelly-fish. Semiramis was the first woman to invent eunuchs, and women have had sympathy for them ever since; for all Kerrisons are eunuchs, large and shining and secretive eunuchs with minutely clever little minds ... and women can tell them what they can’t tell other men. And Ivor, suddenly cheered by laughing at his absurd platitudes, and finding himself by the door, was going from the room.

“You are stealing away!” a voice from behind caught him sharply in the doorway.

“But, Virginia, you are always suspecting me of underhand things!”

“That may be because you never seem to be yourself, never genuine, Ivor,” she said. “You seem always to be straining at a leash, straining but never springing....”

“The devil!” he laughed at her. “You haven’t given me much chance of springing one way or the other, Virginia....” But Virginia looked suddenly very tired indeed.

“Oh, dear!” she sighed childishly. “How trivial we are about trivial things, aren’t we? instead of being grand and indifferent about them, as we like to think we are....” And she smiled quickly, and her smile was like a Red Indian’s, it came and left untouched the gravity of her face.

“You remind me of fire,” said Ivor suddenly, softly. “And fire is a glorious thing because it devours uncleanness yet remains clean. I read that in a funny old book about a great actress, but it somehow applies to you, Virginia....”

She was looking at him gravely, and she said nothing, so that he was ashamed of his affectation. He wasn’t genuine, she had said....

“Will we be friends, then?” she asked simply, out of the silence. She was like an earnest child.

“Please, Virginia.”

And she turned and left him swiftly, as was her way. Thus Virginia always left people and rooms, very suddenly and swiftly, as though she were moved to do so by a purpose that was almost mystic. For hers was not a languid queenliness; she walked always as though she were alone and unwatched and on a hidden quest--and, surely, any quest Virginia might follow would be a secret one, for Virginia was secret, she never confided. And she had such queerly little consciousness of her looks that you could take your fill of staring as she sat or walked, and not offend. You could admire the little fair face that topped the slim height of her figure with that quality peculiar to English loveliness. Her figure and face, you would say, are somehow compact of the same grace and clean lines, the one goes perfectly with the other, whereas a Frenchwoman’s figure can give the lie to her face even as her dressmaker can give the lie to her figure. And, as Virginia so swiftly passed, you could not but marvel at the slim elegance of her ankles, saying to yourself that Virginia had no visible means of support. But most of all you would admire the golden curls which tumbled, not wildly, down each side of her face, while the golden hair from which they tumbled was drawn tightly back from her forehead as though grudging itself the waves that insisted on waving. Those gay and golden curls of Virginia’s! the merry companions of her face! They were her main interest in her appearance; she took the rest of herself for granted, as far as any _soignée_ woman can--but she cared for her curls rigorously, and as often as she was in her room she combed and curled them: ever so swiftly, with a very little comb and a very little “iron,” the treasures of her toilet table. Now these amazing curls on each side of Virginia’s face were named, and their names were mighty in London. They were called “Swan and Edgar,” and never referred to by herself or her familiars but as “Swan and Edgar.” The curls were both alike to the naked eye, in curliness, in sheen and in goldiness, but the curl on the right was Swan and the curl on the left was Edgar--“reading from right to left, you see,” explained Virginia; and he was no familiar of Virginia’s who ever confounded their exact locality. “Swan and Edgar” were a source of endless trouble and annoyance to Virginia: sometimes the damp would affect them, and they would look so limp! and sometimes, damp or no damp, they would be disorderly, just when Virginia was trying to look her best, and she would almost cry with mortification. No matter where she might be, no matter at what party, if “Swan and Edgar” did not behave themselves Virginia would insist on taking them home--“a car, please,” she’d say to a young man--where she would very swiftly curl them anew, with that very little “iron”; and then she would return to the party, gaily, mysteriously. And oh, she was such a pretty girl!...

And Ivor Marlay, walking slowly down the stairs--that “slowness” of a man at a party who might or might not be going home--thought of Virginia Tracy softly; he thought of Virginia in a whisper: how she had so abruptly stood before him and somehow revealed herself to him and somehow stripped him of his antagonism and affectation. Virginia, he thought, was mysteriously adequate to mysterious moments. And, suddenly, queerly, he was sorry for Virginia, alone in that _galère_--which he himself would never, never re-enter again. And he was sorry for Virginia....

And so, thinking of Virginia, he met Magdalen Gray.

3

She was borne to him, before he realised it, in the hubbub at the foot of the stairs, on the polished ship of Gerald Trevor’s introduction.

“He writes poetry and his mother makes birds’ nests”--that courtly gentleman was sketching an imaginary Ivor for her benefit.

“And he also dances,” grinned Ivor, responding to her secret smile--and plundering Trevor even as Trevor had plundered Rodney West.

Said Gerald Trevor to George Tarlyon, whom he met wandering downwards:--

“George, I ask you to observe that women are odd: if you restrain yourself, they resent it: and if you don’t restrain yourself, you bore them. That’s all I’ve got to say.”

“Treat ’em rough, old man. And so to bed,” yawned George Tarlyon, handsome Tarlyon. Much will come of that young man, it was said. And much indeed was to come of that young man, in the fullness of war and peace. He will meet Ivor Marlay; and he will laugh at him. And George Tarlyon had an eighteenth century kind of laugh: the casual, fearless, handsome Lord Tarlyon....