"Good-bye, selfish pig. You're being spoilt by success, you know."
Eric made no answer, but, as he snatched up his hat and cane, still more as he settled himself in the taxi with his feet on the opposite seat, he reflected with philosophic indulgence how wide of the mark his sister had fired. He was self-satisfied, perhaps, as he had some reason to be; self-sufficient, assuredly, as he had set out to become. After all, he could have entered the Civil Service ten years before, as his father had wished; and there would have been ten years of material comfort, an unchallengeable social position, a wife, a home, spiritual paralysis and soul-destroying domestic worries as his portion. Instead, he had elected to make his own way in a hard and somewhat despised school. A young journalist had no status. People invited him to their houses, because he had been at the same college as their sons, because other people had already taken the plunge; but he had always had enough detachment to recognize where the intimacy was to stop.
Now he was being accepted at his own valuation. As he passed the Ritz, two officers and a girl hailed a taxi and told the driver to take them to the Regency. At eleven o'clock they would be saying: "Good show, that." (Had he not loitered in the hall of the theatre, with coat-collar turned up, to hear just that?) In another month they would be going to "The Bomb-Shell," because it was by the fellow who wrote "A Divorce Has Been Arranged."… He had money, friends, adulators and the health to do a full day's work. In speaking to Sybil, he had only hesitated because he was not sure whether he wanted to meet Agnes Waring yet. When they became engaged.… If they became engaged, he would lose in interest with the women like Lady Poynter who were always inviting him to be lionized.…
As the taxi drew up in Belgrave Square, he looked at his watch. Twenty-seven minutes past eight. He handed his hat and cane to a footman and followed the butler upstairs with complete self-possession. As he was asked his name at the door of the drawing-room, however, he stammered:
"Mr. Eric L-lane."
It was intolerable that he could not overcome that stammer, so entirely alien to a new young Byron.…
2
Lady Poynter had finished dressing and was writing in her diary when her maid entered to ask whether Mrs. Shelley might come in. At luncheon the Duchess of Ross had complained that no one would give her a chance of meeting young Eric Lane; Gerald Deganway had murmured, "One poor martyr without a lion"; and, as Deganway was incapable of originating anything, Lady Poynter felt that she was not infringing any copyright in recording the jest against that day when Eleanor Ross tried to steal any more of her young men the moment she had put a polish on them and made them known.…
"Angel Marion!" cried Lady Poynter, throwing down her pen so that it described an inky semi-circle. "The idea of asking!"
She embraced her guest as effusively as she had addressed her. Lady Poynter was forty-eight years of age, daily increasing in bulk, masculine in voice, intellectual through vanity and childless by preference. Her husband was rich, patient, stupid and self-indulgent, bearing with her literary passions and in self-defence displaying that care for household comfort which it was Lady Poynter's pride to neglect. Why, she asked, were men given brains if they made gods of their bellies? Mrs. Shelley was the widow of a well-known free-lance journalist, who in his day had brought her into contact with a sufficient number of authors for her to imitate on austerely simple lines the symposia of wit and learning which Lady Poynter assembled on the strength of her own personality and her husband's cellar. There was a long-standing gentle competition between the two, which they abandoned in common hostility to Lady Maitland, who excelled them both in the ruthlessness and speed of her hunting. At the moment, however, Mrs. Shelley had eclipsed both her rivals by the chance of having known Eric Lane for ten years; to Lady Maitland he was still "Mr. Eric," to Lady Poynter "Mr. Lane."