Peter could have gone into the country—nothing really held him to London—but he had in literal truth no one with whom to go. In the past he had not grumbled at having no friends; that was after all his own choice—no one was to blame save himself—but during these last months something had happened to him. He was at length waking from a sleep that seemed to him as he looked back to have lasted ever since that terrible night that he had spent on the hill outside Tobias, the night of the day that Norah Monogue had died.
At last he was waking. What he had said to Millie was true—his interest in herself and Henry was the force that had stirred him—and stirred him now to what dangerous ends?
One night early in August flung him suddenly at the truth.
Two of the Three Graces—Grace Talbot and Jane Ross—were at home to their friends in their upper part in Soho Square. Peter went because he could not endure another lonely evening in his rooms—another hour by himself and he would be forced to face the self-confession that now at every cost he must avoid. So he went out and found himself in the little low-ceilinged rooms, thick with smoke and loud with conversation.
Grace Talbot was looking very faint and languid, buried in a large armchair in the centre of the room with a number of men round her; Jane Ross, plainer and more pasty than ever, was trying to be a genial hostess, and discovering, not for the first time, that a caustic tongue was more easily active than a kind heart. She wanted to be nice to every one, but, really, people were so absurd and so stupid and so slow. It wasn't her fault that she was so much cleverer than every one else. She didn't want to be. But there you were; one can't help one's fate.
Peter was greeted by one or two and settled down into a chair in a corner near a nice, fat, red-faced man called Amos Campbell. Campbell was a novelist who had once been of the Galleon school and full of Galleonish subtleties, and now was popular and Trollopian. He was, perhaps, a trifle over-pleased with himself and the world, a little too prosperous and jolly and optimistic, and being in addition the son of a Bishop, his voice at times rose to a pulpit ring, but he meant well, was vigorous and bland and kindly. The Graces thoroughly despised him and Peter was astonished to see him there. Perhaps Nister or Gale or one of the other men had brought him. He would have received no mention in this history had it not been for a conversation that had important results both for Peter and Henry.
Literary parties were curious affairs in 1920; they shared the strange general character of that year in their confusion and formlessness. It was a fact that at that time in London there was not a single critical figure who commanded general respect. No school of criticism carried any authority outside its immediate following—not one man nor woman alive in Great Britain at that moment, not one literary journal, weekly, monthly, or daily, carried enough weight behind its literary judgments to shift for a moment the success or failure of a book or a personality. Monteith, whose untidy black hair and pale face Peter saw in the distance, had been expected to do great things, but as soon as he had commanded a literary weekly he had shown that he had no more breadth, nor wisdom, nor knowledge than the other men around him, and he had fallen quickly into the hands of a small clique who wrote for his papers in a happy spirit of mutual admiration. All this was nobody's fault—it was the note of a period that was far stronger in its character than any single human being in it.
Everything was in the whirlpool of change, and that little room to-night, with its smoke, furious conversation, aimless wandering of dim figures moving in and out of the haze, formed a very good symbol of the larger world outside.
Peter exchanged a few sentences with Campbell then fell into silence. Suddenly the restraint that he had been forcing upon himself for the last two months was relaxed. He would think of her. Why should he not? For five minutes. For five minutes. In that dim, smoke-obscured room who would know, who could tell, who could see her save himself?