The Project Gutenberg eBook, Lady Lilith, by Stephen McKenna

THE SENSATIONALISTS: I

LADY LILITH

STEPHEN McKENNA

By STEPHEN McKENNA

THE SENSATIONALISTS

Part One: LADY LILITH

Parts Two and Three: In preparation

SONIA MARRIED

SONIA

MIDAS AND SON

NINETY-SIX HOURS' LEAVE

THE SIXTH SENSE

SHEILA INTERVENES

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

LADY LILITH

BY

STEPHEN McKENNA

AUTHOR OF "SHEILA INTERVENES," "MIDAS AND
SON," "SONIA," "SONIA MARRIED," "NINETY-SIX HOURS' LEAVE,"
ETC.

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1920,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
MY MOTHER
AND
THE MEMORY
OF
MY FATHER

CONTENTS

LADY LILITH

"I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation ... I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character...."

Oscar Wilde: De Profundis.

LADY LILITH

CHAPTER ONE THE DEATH OF THE PHOENIX

"Conceive of your life as an unfinished biography, and try to discover the next chapter and the end."

J. A. Spender: "The Comments of Bagshot."

"Within ten years five of us will be married and five will be dead," cried O'Rane, writing rapidly. "(Every one of us will have made such a fool of himself that it's wishing himself dead he'll be.) One will have had to cut the country. One will have lost all his money. As you seem to like jam with your powder, I've said that one—and not more—will achieve fame—by the mercy of God; one—and not more—will make great money."

The prophecy, delivered with apparent sincerity in the mellow atmosphere of dinner to a score of men between the optimistic ages of twenty and twenty-five, was, on the face of it, discouraging. He who achieved fame and he who amassed a fortune were condemned, with the rest, to pass through the contemplation of suicide or, at least, the prayerful expectation of death. And the moment for the forecast was undoubtedly ill-chosen. Seventeen of the twenty members of the Phoenix had spent the last week wrestling with examiners in their final schools; O'Rane spoke with the subconscious triumph of one who was not bidding farewell to Oxford for another year; and, if a vote had been taken, nine-tenths of his friends would have accorded him the scant portion of worldly success with which Providence in his grudging prophecy would crown their ambitions.

"Dry up, Raney," growled Jack Waring. "It's all very well for you——"

"It's a twenty-to-one chance I'm giving you," O'Rane pointed out. "You might bring off the double event. And get a wife thrown in. It would be no fun, if we all leaped to the top. 'When everybody's somebody, then no one's anybody.'"

Waring jumped up and turned to the president.

"I have to report Mr. O'Rane for singing at dinner, sir. A good, thumping fine, Sinks," he added.

Jack Summertown intercepted the ruling.

"On a point of order, sir; was that singing? If it was—oh, my Lord!"

Sinclair rose majestically from the presidential chair and turned his eyes from one disputant to the other.

"The accused is acquitted, but he's not to do it again," he ruled diplomatically. "I have to censure Lord Summertown for addressing the Chair without rising."

Ten suspended conversations were resumed, as he sat down; and Waring reverted to his own gloomy thoughts. Unaccustomed to look more than a day ahead, he was only beginning to recognize that in twenty-four hours he would have gone down from Oxford for the last time and that within four months he would have to begin reading for the bar. He had interrupted his dressing an hour before to stare out of the window, sprawling on the sill and dangling a collar and tie with idle hand.

Outside, the setting sun of a late June day filled the Broad with sleepy warmth and dyed the crumbling stone of the Sheldonian rose-red. In the middle of the road two cabmen slumbered on their boxes, pillowing their heads on their arms and leaving their horses to munch contentedly from frayed nosebags and to twitch an ear or flick a tail at too persistent flies. Rare groups of sight-seers approached the deserted gates of Trinity and Balliol, sought inspiration from guide-books and vanished diffidently from view. Oxford belonged to the ages; and for the first twenty-fifth part of the twentieth century Waring had fancied that it belonged to him. A hansom, overfilled by an American and her two daughters, jingled lazily from Holywell; the driver exhibited a contempt for Oxford no less profound than for America and waved his whip from side to side in rough time with the scornful scraps of information which he drawled through the trap.

"Ol' Clar'nd'n Buildin'. Bodleian be'ind it. Trin'ty. Balliol."

Three heads nodded and turned mechanically from right to left. The driver paused for new instructions, and an anxious voice from inside exclaimed:

"Gracious! it's a quarter of seven! Say, how many blocks are we from the depot?"

The high nasal intonation seemed to shiver the warm repose of the afternoon, and in another moment the Broad was echoing with life. A stream of bicycles poured down Parks Road; blazers of every colour flashed into sight and disappeared; men bareheaded and men in panamas, men with tennis racquets and men with dogs, men in flannels and men in tweeds, a few, even, still in white ties and coats of subfusc hue, parading the bondage of the Examination Schools, all hurried back to make ready for Hall. Oxford still belonged to them. At the gates of the colleges, deserted a moment since, the heirs of all the undergraduate ages assembled in careless disregard of their heritage; the last bicycles were tumbled into place; the last rainbow blazers and hat-ribbons vanished from sight; pipes were replaced in pockets, and necks bared from the dingy embrace of tattered gowns.

With a glance at the watch on his dressing-table, Jack Waring twisted himself to catch the reflection of his bottle-green dress-coat. It was the envied livery of the Phoenix Club, which—consistently with its name—died and came to life again once a year. At the end of every summer term not more than one survivor remained; the following Michaelmas the new president proposed and elected his own friends, choosing one junior to carry on the life and traditions of the club at the year's end. The institution had ensured for nearly two university generations and was the one constructive effort of Lord Loring's life at Oxford. With the grave self-absorption of nineteen he had demanded a club to which none but his own friends had access and of which he could nominate himself president and ordain the rules as he went on. He had long wanted a pretext, he explained in his inaugural address, for wearing a bottle-green dress-coat with brass buttons and white silk facings; and his position as founder of the club would give him an excuse for revisiting Oxford at the end of his lawful term.

A faint frown of regret and perplexity hovered over Jack Waring's plump and cheerful face, as he resumed his dressing. He had no fault to find with Oxford, where he had done more than most men and all that could be expected of any man. A case full of silver cups testified to his success in college and university Grinds; he had been Master of the Drag and a member of the Bullingdon; less than three days before he had shewn his versatility by proceeding, without the ostentation of an Honour School, to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. Colonel Waring had urged him to enjoy himself, and the four years had passed very satisfactorily.

"Eric!"

"Hullo! Are you ready?"

The door was kicked open, and Eric Lane sauntered in and inspected his own clothes by the revealing light of the afternoon sun. He also was frowning, for the sense of departure was heavy upon him too, and the papers that day had not been to his liking.

"Our final dissipation!" cried Jack, seizing him by the arm and clattering down the narrow staircase into the Turl. "I say, Eric, I don't half like the idea of not coming up next term; I was just beginning to find my way about this place. There you see Lincoln. Here we have Jaggers. I've never been inside Jaggers. Shall we make up a party and go to-morrow?"

A knot of Jesus men glared with the dumb fury which the small nations of the world feel towards the Great Powers. A sing-song Welsh voice commented devastatingly on the vanity of bottle-green dress-coats and their wearers.

"I can't go after that," murmured Jack with dignity. "Never imagined they understood English. Ought I to go back and apologize?" He stopped short in front of a haberdasher's shop and nodded gravely at the seductive window. Club colours and college colours contended and clashed with giant brown and yellow silk handkerchiefs adorned with white bulldogs. "We might buy them a peace-offering."

"I always wonder why you're not more disliked than you are," mused Eric.

"People only dislike me until I've given them time to see that I'm right and they're wrong," explained Jack complacently. "I was very unpopular at New College my first term. They wanted me to row—just because I'd rowed at Eton. You can't row and hunt. I never did any of the things they wanted; the people here are such sheep. Did I ever tell you that the rowing push came to rag my rooms just because I chose to dress for Hall? They said it was 'side.' Unfortunately, their spokesman was drunk, so I had to ask him to leave. It's such bad form to drink more than you can carry. Now any number of men dress for Hall. Sheep, just sheep. I think the reason you and I get on so well together is that you don't try to lead my life for me."

"Oh, I'm used to you," Eric interrupted. "Ever since I can remember, you've sat still and let every one else revolve round you. Your people, Agnes, me——"

Jack smiled at his reflection in the window. Though his self-satisfaction annoyed women and older men, no one could remain impatient with him for long. He was always too good-tempered to provide sport and too sure of himself to mind criticism. The man who is content to do nothing starts, too, with an advantage over the man who not only wants something done but would like it done in his own way. In childhood the threat that he would not be taken to a party unless he behaved himself well had only once been used against Jack; his mother found afterwards that he had genuinely enjoyed himself more at home; and ever since he had won his own way by studied inertia.

"You're so efficient!" he explained. "I should never have got through my schools but for you. And you pack so well. By the way, you've looked out the trains for to-morrow, haven't you? And arranged with Agnes for a cart to meet me? I hate writing letters.... Shall we dig together in London? If you'll find some decent rooms and a man to look after us—Agnes will help you choose the furniture—and if you'll make everything shipshape and comfortable, I'm hanged if I don't come and live with you! There!"

Eric held out his hand with affected emotion.

"That's uncommon good of you! I thought you'd want me to choose some one to live with me in your place."

"I wish you'd find somebody to go to the bar in my place," murmured Jack with a momentary return of his earlier gloom. "Can't you? The exams are quite easy for a man of your powerful intellect, and you only have to eat a few dinners and get called. I should live at Lashmar as the simple, old English country gentleman.... Hullo! we're late! You'll see about paying the fine, won't you?"

They crossed the High to a chorus of welcome flung at them from a first-floor window over a pastry-cook's shop. Two sleek heads protruded over the cushions in one tier, with three more, less lovingly cemented, in the background.

"Hurry up, Spurs," shouted the president.

The name, applied jointly and severally to the two men, had passed through ingenious refinements before reaching its present brief clarity. If Waring's Christian name was Jack, his inseparable companion Lane must be Jill; if Jack's surname was Waring, Eric's must be Gillow; the home of the furnishing trade, if not of Waring and Gillow, was Tottenham Court Road, which readily suggested Tottenham Hotspurs. An unexplained intellectual craving was at length satisfied when the pair were renamed "the Spurs."

After their first term no one shewed the psychological curiosity to wonder why so incongruous a couple lived together. Though neighbours in Hampshire, they were from different schools and of different colleges; the shrewd but consummately indolent Master of the Drag was the arbiter of taste for sporting, ultra-conservative Oxford—already a personality and almost a tradition; the fine-drawn scholar of Trinity was a recluse, a dreamer and a rebel, with ambition corroding the fabric of a too frail constitution. Outside the Phoenix they had few friends in common, for Eric's disputatious poets grew silent under the breezy onslaught of a more robust generation; Jack's intellectual hunger was satisfied by Surtees, the text-books for his schools, the Sportsman and Morning Post; while Eric, who had divided the first ten years of his life between his father's library at Lashmar Mill-House and a verandah at Broadstairs, had read quickly, brooded deeply and taken up an attitude, sometimes precocious but always clearly defined, towards problems which as yet did not exist for Jack. On one side, the friendship was founded on a worship of opposites; Eric never forgot that he had gone friendless through six years at school because he was forbidden by his doctor to play games. On the other, Jack found devotion a convenience; he respected Eric's brains and needed some one to relieve him of minor exertions and to make up his mind for him. Accordingly, though all the fourth-year men in the University would have been honoured to live with him, it was to Eric that he drawled, "By the way, have you arranged to dig with any one next term? Well, do go and find some decent quarters, there's a good fellow."

"Hullo! No fine to pay after all!" cried Jack, as he burst into the club dining-room and compared the number of covers with the members of the Phoenix already assembled. "Who's coming, Mr. President?"

"O'Rane and Deganway haven't turned up yet," answered Sinclair. "I've just had a wire from Loring to say that he's motoring down with Oakleigh and they'll probably be late. Summertown and Pentyre you can hear. It's their idea of music," he added, as a free fight broke out over the piano in the adjoining room.

Jack studied the menu, inspected the wine on the side-board and elbowed himself a place in the kneeling row at the open window. An interrupted conversation struggled back to plans for the Long Vacation and discussion of the schools. Sinclair, a stocky, simple-minded sportsman, now pitifully embarrassed by his presidential duties, had been chosen to play at Lord's for the University and for the Gentlemen; after that he would tour with the Authentics till the end of the season; and, until the following season, he would interest himself in the management of his father's mines in Yorkshire. Knightrider and Framlingham were destined for the army; Deganway and Pentyre were due to cram for the Foreign Office; Draycott proposed to study art in Paris; and Mayhew had forced his way into Fleet Street and the offices of the "Wicked World." It was a wide dispersal; and all felt that they were changing a life of proved comfort for something unknown and presumably less easy.

"What are you doing, Spurs?" Sinclair asked Eric.

"I'm not quite sure. My people want me to try for the Civil Service. I want to have a shot at journalism. You can't do anything in the Civil Service."

"Who wants to do anything?" retorted Waring from his window-seat. "Late as usual, Raney.... I only want money and decent holidays.... Sounds of a car, furiously driven. You'll have to fine 'em double, Mr. President, if it's Jim and George; once for being late and once for not coming in club dress. It is! Two dozen of fizz from each!"

He withdrew his head from the window as the car came to a standstill. A moment later Loring entered apologetically in morning dress, fingering his moustache and smiling with pleasure at the volley of welcome; George Oakleigh followed, peering with approval at the familiar beams and dingy panels of the low-ceilinged room; while O'Rane strode across the passage and brought the free fight to an end by putting the heads of the disputants into chancery, the president rapped the table and tried to allot the places.

"Gentlemen! The toast of the Phoenix will be drunk in silence," he proclaimed, as every one obstinately seated himself next to his greatest friend.

Sinclair waited until the sherry was served and then rose to his feet. Of the twenty members present only O'Rane was staying up another year: in obedience to ritual he remained seated in the vice-president's chair.

"The Phoenix is dead," announced the president.

"The Phoenix will rise again," answered the vice-president with awful gravity. Then, as the others sat down, he added reflectively, "'Wonder where we shall all be in ten years' time? 'Wonder what we shall be doing? 'Wonder how many of us will be dead?"

"You can always depend on Raney for an irresistible little note of cheerfulness," commented Loring, as he pulled in his chair and looked round to see who was present.

It was then that O'Rane flung his prophecy at the head of the club.

"Bah! You know as much about life as a Sunday School teacher!" he retorted contemptuously, banging his hand on a bell. "Where's the betting-book? And give me a pen, somebody. Let you mark my words. 'Mr. David O'Rane bets the Marquess Loring ten sovereigns that within ten years of this date five out of the twenty members present to-night will be married. A further ten sovereigns that five will be dead——'"

"Always the optimist," murmured Oakleigh from Loring's side.

"I'll bet that every one of us will have made such a fool of himself that it's wishing himself dead he'll be.... A further ten sovereigns that one at least will have had to cut the country. A further ten that one at least will have lost all his money.... I'm only dealing in averages. Ten years, I said; that's not much for any positive achievement, but I'll bet a further ten pounds that one—and not more than one—will have achieved what an independent tribunal considers fame. A further ten pounds that one of us will make great money——"

"That's sixty pounds," interposed Sinclair warningly.

"But I shan't have to pay it," answered O'Rane, writing rapidly. He read out a summary of the wager and passed the book for Loring to sign. "Besides, I'm going to be the one who makes all the money. I hope you won't be one of the five who die, Jim; or I shall have to claim against your estate and all. Which of us will achieve fame in ten years? Draycott as an Academician? I don't see it. Spurs as a judge? 'Don't see it either. The Gander as an ambassador? The other Spurs?" He looked round the table and went on quickly; half-unconsciously he had decided that Eric Lane would be the first of the five to die. "I should mark down Sinks as the first to marry; there's an appealing domesticity about him. And we shall all make colossal fools of ourselves; don't forget that! Folly's the great leveller. Jim, I think you'd better give a dinner once a year to the survivors just to see how we're getting on."

"If I don't die or cut the country," Loring assented.

O'Rane snapped the clasp of the betting-book and tossed it on a chair behind him.

"You're far too healthy and respectable," he grunted, concentrating his attention on the cooling soup. "Besides, I'm reserving that for Summertown. You know he's been sent down for good and all?"

"A man cuts the country because of the disreputability of others," answered Loring. "By the way, I'm not going to be fined for being late, Mr. President, because I had a good reason. Also, the founder of a club is never fined."

"Let's hear the reason," suggested the president.

"I've been taking the chair at a family council." Loring looked round the table until he located his cousin Knightrider. "You ought to have been there, Victor. I don't want to wash my dirty linen in public, but Victor and I have a young cousin of twelve," he explained, "who's driven her father out of one continent and is on the point of driving him out of another. Crawleigh's a most dignified and worthy viceroy, and he's my own uncle, and I wouldn't say a word against him; but a fellow on his staff told me that he'd no more control over that child than over the man in the moon. She does whatever she pleases; Government House is turned upside down, and, if any one tries to coerce her, she just runs away. They've pursued her across Canada and they've pursued her across India. Now she's been sent home. The family council was convened to decide what was to be done with her. All the uncles and aunts and cousins met together; and I need hardly tell you that we got stuck with her. So, if I disappear suddenly, you'll know that my young cousin has been too much for me. If that isn't a good reason for being late, I don't know what is."

The president adroitly reserved judgement on a fine which he knew would never be paid, and the conversation reverted to the former grim discussion of the schools and vague plans for the future. Eric Lane felt out of sympathy with his surroundings, for he alone lacked money and influence and a ready-made niche. In ten years' time Deganway would be progressing gently and comfortably in the Diplomatic; Summertown and Pentyre, who were avowedly waiting for their fathers to die, would either still be waiting or would have already succeeded; Framlingham and Knightrider would be swallowed by the army, even Jack Waring would make a career for himself at the bar or elsewhere, because men with his backing were not allowed to fail. George Oakleigh would be in the House, probably an under-secretary; Loring, with his position and an income which fluctuated between a hundred thousand and a hundred and fifty thousand a year in accordance with the yield of certain mines, might be anywhere.

"What are you going to do, when you go down?" Eric asked O'Rane.

"I haven't the least idea. That's where the fun comes in," O'Rane answered buoyantly.

"Starting behind scratch?"

"Yes, that gives you an incentive. I wonder which of us will get to the top first."

"I wonder how one starts."

"Oh, you'll write. I've never had any doubt of that. That rot I was talking about averages wasn't all rot; we ought to turn out one genius, and you're going to do something very big. I declare to my soul I'm not ragging! I've seen the things you wrote for Cap and Bells, I've heard you talk and I can see you're on a different plane from the rest of us. I could probably beat you at pure scholarship, but you've a literary sense which I should never attain in a life-time. Do you care for a bet with me?"

Eric shook his head; but he felt the need of encouragement, and O'Rane was more serious than he usually condescended to be.

"I won't rob you, Raney."

"Robbery be blowed! You won't bet against your destiny. In ten years' time you'll have beaten the whole of our generation, starting behind scratch. And, God's my witness, I'd sooner have that than be born with a title and a million pounds a minute like Jim. Hullo, they're off! Jim, may I take wine with you?"

He raised his glass and was quickly followed by Oakleigh and Summertown. Loring flushed a little at the compliment of being chosen first. In order of popularity O'Rane followed as a close second, with Waring third. Pentyre, Summertown and Deganway toasted one another; Oakleigh was honoured as an afterthought by half the table. There was a moment's silence, as the glasses were recharged, and Jack Waring leaned forward with a smile.

"Eric? Best of luck."

"Best of luck, Jack."

Their eyes met, and both smiled. Then the interrupted dinner went on. Oakleigh was detected, reported and fined for smoking without permission; Pentyre was deprived of port wine for allowing the decanter to stand at his elbow. A vote was taken, and Draycott was censured for wearing a pleated shirt. Less constitutionally, Deganway was stretched on the floor and deprived of his eye-glass amid falsetto protests. Then the loving-cup went round, and all stood to drink the health of the king and of fox-hunting, the president and vice-president, absent members and "our glorious founder." Sinclair presented a seven-branch candlestick to the collection of club plate; and Loring proposed and carried a unanimous vote of thanks.

"And now a little Gilbert and Sullivan from Raney," ordained the president, as the last speech came to an end and he led the way into the next room.

Prising open a box of cigars, he sniffed it with the suspicion of inexperience and proffered it diffidently to Oakleigh. O'Rane slid on to the music-stool, while Deganway and Waring, Summertown and Eric sprawled over the top of the piano with pipes doggedly gripped between their teeth and with their chins resting on their arms, demanding of the musician that he should give them "something with a chorus." Pentyre withdrew to an armchair and fell asleep; the others formed themselves into a circle round Loring and tried to talk against the music.

"Long years ago, fourteen, may be,

When but a tiny babe of four,

Another babe played with me,

My elder by a year or more.

A little child of beauty rare,

With marvellous eyes and wondrous hair,

Who, in my child-eyes, seemed to me

All that a little child should be.

Ah, how we loved, that child and I,

How pure our baby joy!

How true our love—and, by-the-by,

He was a little boy!"

Waring, as "Angela" struck in with a deep, reproachful bass:

"Ah, old, old tale of Cupid's touch!

I thought as much—I thought as much!

He WAS a little boy"

"Patience" justified herself shyly.

"Pray don't misconstrue what I say—

Remember, pray—remember, pray,

He was a LITTLE boy"

O'Rane gave the "Wandering Minstrel" as a solo, followed by "A Pair of Sparkling Eyes" and "Is Life a Boon?"

Loring turned approvingly to George Oakleigh.

"Raney's got a ripping voice," he said. "And he's in good form to-night. All the same, we must be getting back, George, if you want to be in London early to-morrow morning. It's very pleasant to see all these boys again. Sad, too, very sad; the young lions with all their troubles before them."

"I suppose this is absolutely the end," sighed Sinclair. "Shall I see you at Lord's, Jim?"

As the party began to break up, a chill of collective wistfulness descended upon it, too strong for even O'Rane to dispel.

"Yes, if you don't want me to watch the play. But I'll look intelligent."

It was still so early when the straggling escort convoyed Oakleigh and Loring into the safety of their hotel that an hour was agreeably spent by each in accompanying every one else home. Jack and Eric reached the Broad, only to turn back and take Deganway to Grove Street, and from Grove Street they all proceeded by Boar Lane to St. Aldates. Here O'Rane protested that he could not go to bed until he had disposed of Sinclair in comfort. At a quarter to twelve the whole party, intact and a little bored, found itself on Magdalen Bridge; Jack and Eric broke away at a run up Long Wall, and the others, led by O'Rane, traversed the High for the fourth time that night.

The familiar rooms at the corner of the Turl were bare and disordered with the signs of coming departure. The undulating floor of the sitting-room was littered with paper and straw, with cases of books and half-filled crates of pictures; on a dusting-sheet in one corner was gathered a miscellany of broken pipes and perished pouches, tattered note-books and sprung rackets, torn photographs, old shoes and a policeman's helmet. Overflowing trunks and yawning Gladstone bags projected from the bedrooms on to the narrow, gas-lit landing.

"Nice, comfortable quarters," observed Jack, as he looked for somewhere to sit. "It was quite a good evening, you know. The part I liked best was when it was all over. Oxford looks quite decent at night."

Eric had been trained to economy of enthusiasm in talking to Jack, who would not have understood him if he had said that the Meadows on a May morning or the Bodleian from All Souls, or the Trinity limes in leaf or a pack of low, grey clouds racing across the sky behind Magdalen Tower made him drunk with the consciousness of physical beauty. And he wondered what he could ever have said to betray to O'Rane his secret yearning for self-expression.

"Our last night in Oxford," he murmured.

"Oh, I think I shall come up occasionally and dine with the lads."

Eric said nothing; but the sense of incongruity with his surroundings still oppressed him, and he privately resolved that he would not revisit Oxford until he had done something to put himself at least on the level of his friends, perhaps above them. That night he lulled himself to sleep with a vision in which he burst on the world as a new Byron and took London by storm in a night. Comely heads turned and whispered his name, as he strode down Bond Street; the windows were full of his photograph; when he entered a room there was a hush of reverence for the new novelist, the rising playwright, the last wit and latest fashion. All his day-dreams led him to the stage. There, after twisting the house to laughter and tears, he would nonchalantly allow himself to be called before the curtain; after three gossamer epigrams, he would retire with a perfunctory bow. And there would follow supper on the stage for George Oakleigh, who was only a subordinate minister, and Loring, who was only governor of a colony, and Jack, who was only a successful barrister, and Knightrider, who was only a subaltern in the Guards, and Summertown, who was only a third secretary on leave from a distant legation, and Pentyre, who had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had done nothing.... The vision was so stimulating that he resolved to conjure it up again whenever he felt depressed.

They were roused in the morning by the cheerful and insistent voices of a cavalcade which reined in under Jack's windows for the last opportunity of wishing him good-bye.... Unembarrassed by spectators, he made a leisurely toilet and refused to be intimidated by Eric's prophecies that they would lose their train. "There is sure to be another," he pointed out, as he finished brushing his short, mouse-coloured hair and satisfied himself that he was smoothly shaved. Undergraduate Oxford was all too careless of its appearance, and Jack secretly believed that slovenliness in clothes was the visible sign of depravity in morals. Colonel Waring had said so, basing himself on his experience in the army. Jack respected his father's judgement, because it so often coincided with his own.

He appeared in time to see Eric distributing the last tips and counting the luggage as it was piled on top of the cabs. Waving good-bye to their landlord and surrounded by their escort, they drove with self-conscious solemnity to the station, cut a passage through the jungle of dogs and cricket bags on the platform and bribed a porter to find an empty first-class carriage and to lock the door after them. While Jack possessed himself of the papers, Eric watched the familiar landmarks fading one by one from view as the train steamed out of Oxford: Tom Tower and the Cathedral spire, the reservoir and gasworks, the Abingdon Road and Boar's Hill. The whistle of the engine as it entered Culham sounded like the last chord in an operatic score. Oxford was over. He remembered his shyness in first approaching it four years earlier and wondered whether he would as quickly overcome the sense of loneliness which filled his mind at the thought of working in London.

"When do your bar lectures start?" he asked with a drawl which attempted to emulate his companion's easy carelessness.

Jack tossed aside the Sportsman and yawned with lazy contentment.

"I haven't the least idea," he answered.

"I was thinking about rooms. I'm going up almost at once for a month on trial with the London News. You've got no preferences?"

"I'd trust your taste and judgement anywhere."

Eric laughed a little impatiently.

"You—are—the—laziest—brute—I've ever come across. Are you going to behave like this at the bar?"

Jack put up his feet and closed his eyes.

"It's not half a bad idea," he mused. "I believe, if I let it be known that I didn't want briefs, the solicitors would form up at the early door out of sheer perversity. Everything comes to him who doesn't much care whether it comes or not. You see, as soon as you want anything, you increase the demand and raise the price against yourself; it's a great thing to have studied political economy. If I ever marry it will be some one who's madly in love with me and whom I can just tolerate. If you're fool enough to try it the other way round, you're simply selling yourself into slavery.... As a matter of fact, I'm not lazy at all, but I refuse to fuss about unimportant things. I had all this business out with the guv'nor two years ago; I'd got to do something for a living, and he had all sorts of gold-lace jobs in contemplation—clerk in the House of Lords, agent to my uncle at Penley, private secretary to this man and that. I said it wasn't good enough. If I couldn't go into the army like him, I'd go somewhere where I could make money. We haven't any particular influence in the city, so I chose the bar; and I've every intention of making money there. That's important. But I can't wear myself out looking for digs when I've a kind friend to do it for me. And I never try to do more than one thing at a time. During the next few weeks I shall stay with several very pleasant people. Lady Knightrider's invited me to Raglan as usual; and I'm going to Croxton with the Pentyres; and to House of Steynes with Jim Loring; and to Ireland with George Oakleigh. I wish you'd come, too; I've got such a good country-house manor, I should like you to see it."

"I've got to work."

"So have I—every bit as much as you," Jack answered aggressively. "But I never believe in meeting trouble half-way." His voice became drowsy, and he composed himself for sleep. "Wake me, when we get to Reading."

Such philosophic detachment was a birthright, not to be bought or borrowed; and Eric looked with a mixture of amusement and envy at his slumbering friend. Some time in the autumn the bar term would begin, there would be lectures and examinations, Jack would be called; later he would pay a hundred pounds to an overworked junior for the privilege of sitting in a pupil-room and confusing his head with such papers as he was allowed to see; he would find chambers of his own and choose a circuit and open it. And get together a practice—or fail. In the meantime he slept with the sun shining on his face, trimly brushed and shaved, smiling, rosy and round-cheeked as a plough-boy.

Eric could not so casually leave the future to look after itself; and he was preparing, with a highly-strung man's dread of altercation, for a conflict with his family. Dr. Lane's suggestions were purely scholastic—a fellowship, if possible; failing that, a position on the staff of one of the great public schools. Either would give him security and a chance of earning money at once. There must be other things, of course, but a philologist lived too much out of the world to give practical advice.... Mrs. Lane favoured the Civil Service; but Eric, from the editorial chair of Cap and Bells, had lately made journalism the fabric of his day-dreams. During his last term the editor of the London News came to Oxford as guest of honour at a dinner of the Sherbrooke Club; with eye professionally skinned for rising talent, he had been first amused and then impressed by his young host; there followed a vague proposal of an article, and Eric had been careful to thrust his foot into the yielding doorway of the paper until a month's trial was suggested.

A red-brick wilderness of villas warned him that they were running into Reading. He prodded Jack awake, collected his luggage from the rack and changed into the Basingstoke train. At Winchester a dog-cart, driven by a stiff, military groom, and a pony trap, with an eight-year-old child and her governess, awaited them. The luggage appeared unhurriedly and was separated and stowed out of sight. Jack edged away after a shy greeting to Sybil Lane, and a moment later they were heading through the town for the Melton and Lashmar road.

"Roll round some time and discuss those digs," Eric shouted, as the pony-trap turned from the high-crowned Melton road and jolted into the twilight of unreclaimed woodland whose youngest trees were old and firm-rooted before the New Forest had begun to show the first green of its leaves.

"No, you come to me," Jack called back. "It's shorter for you, because you walk so much faster."

As the low lines of the Mill-House came in sight, Mrs. Lane rose from her chair by the studded front door, closed her book and waved a handkerchief in welcome. For the first time in his life Eric felt that this was no longer his home. Lashmar and Oxford belonged to a youth wherein he was not required to look for a career or to trouble about money and ambition. Within a week he would be occupying chambers of his own and earning his own living.

"Well, dear Eric, I'm very glad to see you again. You're looking thin," said his mother.

"I'm all right, thanks. How are you, mother? Is the guv'nor working?" asked Eric.

The need for action was strong upon him, and he had to explain once and for all that he aimed at something more than security and a chance of earning money at once.

"He's indoors."

Eric ducked his head and entered the long, low house. It was dark after the glowing June sunlight outside, chillingly cold, too; from the back of the house came the gentle murmur of the Bort with an unchanging drone of falling water and a regular double creak from the mill-wheel, like the slow cadence of a grandfather's clock. Through the open French windows of the dining-room he sniffed the stream's familiar scent of decay, half-smothered by the coarse reek of a blazing patch of marigolds. Lashmar Mill-House was, for Eric, a place where ambition was brought to die.

Without waiting to be disturbed, Dr. Lane rattled open the door of the library and appeared in his shirt-sleeves, fleshless, tall and stooping, with the gentle, brown eyes, black hair and aquiline nose which he had handed down to Eric. An unkempt brown moustache drooped drearily on either side of a long corncob pipe-stem, and his bony hands fidgetted with an untanned strap round his waist.

"I want to have a talk with you," said Eric to his parents. "I'm starting work next week with the London News. Jack and I are going to live together."

Mrs. Lane nursed a well-founded suspicion that Jack preyed on her son's scant vitality, but she shrank from confessing jealousy of his friend.

"Let's have a day or two to think things over," she proposed. "Journalism is very wearing."

"But everything's arranged," Eric answered.

And next morning he rose from breakfast and started through the Forest to Red Roofs and the task of pinning Jack down to the joint establishment in London. Every step on the familiar road was a gesture of farewell. There was a recognized point in the two-mile walk where even the smoke of the Mill-House chimneys was invisible; another point where he had to jump from stone to stone across a furlong of marsh; and another where the forest thinned imperceptibly and vanished. Over the tops of the last trees appeared a row of small-bricked Tudor chimneys, dusty-grey in the sunshine; then the deep red tiles of the gabled roofs; then the house itself, three-quarters covered in creeper that swung in the breeze and veiled the narrow windows with a curtain of tangled green. It was the perfect frame, Eric thought, for a perfect picture of country toryism; a social analyst could not look at the house without peopling it in imagination with the cadet branch of a rankly conservative family—conventional, godly, sporting, military and, by a freak, unexpectedly evangelical—in a word, with such a family as the Warings. The colonel was returning home from an early gallop; he reined in his horse and walked beside Eric to the gate of the stable-yard, erect and dapper, with a dictatorial voice and a hint of ill-temper in his bearing, his face weather-beaten and the white of his eyes faintly tinged with yellow.

"Hullo! How are you? How's your father? How's the magnum opus?" he asked, as he dismounted and walked towards the house. The three questions never varied, and the colonel derived immense private amusement from the thought that Dr. Lane had given thirty years of his life to an Anglo-Saxon dictionary. "Jack tells me you're going to be a journalist. Dog's life, I've always heard."

"I hope it won't be only journalism," said Eric, who was sensitive enough to be daunted by the misgiving which his proposed career excited first in his parents and now in an unbiased outsider. "I hope to do some rather more original work as well."

"Original? That's bad! Seven-act tragedies and five-volume novels." Colonel Waring had evolved the belief that young men could be coaxed out of their natural shyness by well-timed jocosity. "You must excuse me, I'm going to have my bath. You'll find every one in the smoking-room, I expect."

Eric escaped with relief and ran Jack to earth in the faded dining-room, where he was finishing a late breakfast. His sister ministered to his wants, keeping the food warm in a chafing-dish, plying him with coffee and fetching him clean plates. Mrs. Waring, plump, idle and self-indulgent, was fondly overhauling her son's wardrobe when Eric entered the room.

"Dear Jack, you can't go to Lady Knightrider's until you've ordered yourself some new shirts. These are a disgrace," she protested.

Jack nodded without looking up from his paper.

"I know. I was waiting till I got home so that Agnes could write to my man. I always forget his name. Hullo, Eric! You're bursting with energy this morning. Have some capital kidneys and bacon?"

"I came to talk about where we are going to live," Eric explained, shaking hands with Mrs. Waring.

"But I thought I'd left that to you? Why don't you and Agnes arrange something?" Jack filled a pipe and strolled towards the open window. "The guv'nor seems to have got me elected to the County Club; he rather favours my trying to get a bedroom there."

Eric felt a twinge of dismay. It was only natural that a club should have been found for Jack, as everything else was found; but Eric could not afford to let him slip away. Perhaps the suggestion was only a diplomatic hint that, if he were troubled further, he would follow the line of least resistance.

"Oh, no! You're coming with me. If you've no preferences, Agnes and I will go straight ahead."

He motioned to the girl, and they went out into the garden together. Agnes Waring, in company with her mother, had been brought up to believe that Jack was the one person in the house who mattered; though intellectually head and shoulder his superior, she had been kept at home from the day when Colonel Waring demonstrated incontrovertibly that he could not afford to send her to Newnham if Jack was to be given an adequate allowance at Oxford. Once isolated at home, she had nothing to do but to run errands for her father and brother. At her suggestion it was now arranged that Eric should look for rooms in the Temple.

Two days later he wrote that he had discovered an ideal set of chambers in Pump Court, and for a week they worked to get it in order for Jack's arrival in October. On the last afternoon Agnes looked on her completed handiwork and sighed with satisfaction and envy.

"If you're not comfortable, you ought to be," she declared. "Men are lucky creatures. I wish I could change places with you, Eric."

"So that you could wait on Jack?"

"I should like that, of course.... I hope Jack does well at the bar. You will make him work, won't you?"

Eric shrugged his shoulders and looked into the silent little court.

"Can any one make him do anything he doesn't want to? I wonder whether he was wise to choose the bar. I wonder whether I was wise to choose journalism, whether any of us.... We had a very cheerful dinner on our last night at Oxford. There were about twenty of us, and one man bet that in ten years' time five of us would be dead and a certain number bankrupt. A certain number more would have to cut the country. So far as I remember only one was to make anything of a success. Not an encouraging forecast."

"A very cynical forecast," Agnes distinguished.

"Will he win his bet?"

"Oh, a man of character can make anything of his life," she answered with a glance of fleeting interest and affection which he did not see.

Eric recalled the extraordinarily young faces at the last dinner of the Phoenix. Their outlook was frivolous and their talk trivial. He was already feeling older in ten days.

"Do you get more than one man of character in twenty?" he asked.

CHAPTER TWO THE COMING OF LILITH

"What private man in England is worse off than the constitutional monarch?... I don't believe he may even eat or drink what he likes best: a taste for tripe and onions on his part would provoke a remonstrance from the Privy Council."

Bernard Shaw: "An Unsocial Socialist."

The partnership in Pump Court lasted for more than four years. After nicely judging the minimum of work which would carry him through his bar examinations, Jack surprised his friends by closing the former life of indolence with a snap. When assizes were on, he made an undiscriminating round of the North Eastern circuit, conducting a dock defence as though it were a state trial; in London he attended suburban county courts with as much zeal as if he had been sent special. During the Long Vacation he remained at the end of a wire; the Bar Point-to-Point was sacrificed without a murmur, and invitations during his working day seldom penetrated farther than the telephone in his clerk's room.

Once a year, indeed, he consented to meet his friends at dinner with Loring, but they were contracting new ties and professing enthusiasms which he did not share. Framlingham and Knightrider had been drilled into the professional rigidity and limited outlook of junior subalterns in crack regiments: Oakleigh was a politician, Pentyre a man of leisure; Summertown had abandoned diplomacy for the army—the life of a public danger for that of a private nuisance, as Valentine Arden, the novelist, complained in a moment of exasperation. Deganway, on the same authority, rested in the Foreign Office by day and spent tireless nights adding to the number of those who addressed him by his Christian name. O'Rane and Mayhew were abroad.

Had he ever felt the inclination, Jack professed to be without the time or energy to take part in a social life of dinners and dances. Exchanging one pose for another, he had ceased to be the arbiter of "good form," as that is understood at Eton and New College, and was aping the manners of an older generation; the new aloofness, like the old, dispensed him from doing anything that he did not like and gratified his faint but ineradicable sense of superiority. At night he now chose the society of his own profession at the County Club and steeped himself in forensic retorts discourteous and the aroma of judicial wit; by day he chopped leading cases at luncheon in Hall and smoked one cigarette in the Gardens, striding up and down with his chin deep on his white slips and his hands locked beneath the tails of his coat. He was too busy for week-end parties, too old to take his sister to dances.

"It doesn't do to be seen lunching at your club too much," he explained to Eric, when at the end of four years he had decided that the inconvenience of moving was less than that of continuing to live in the Temple. "People think you've no work. Trouble is, I'm getting no exercise. I think I shall have to move away so that I can get a walk in the morning."

Eric received the news with little surprise and hardly more regret. Jack was in chambers before he himself got up in the morning and in bed before the London News began to print off. The dissolution would only cost them an occasional half-hour's talk in the early evening and a rare Sunday walk when Jack was not staying at Red Roofs.

"Nineteen nine, nineteen five," Eric calculated. "We're twenty-six and we've had four years here. By the way, are you dining with Jim to-night? Give him my love and say I wish I could come too. It's no good, if I have to run away after the fish. I remember your father telling me that journalism was a dog's life. He never spoke a truer word."

"But you've done extraordinarily well," Jack insisted, rousing reluctantly from the contemplation of his own career. "What are you? Dramatic critic and assistant literary editor? And you're making a dam' sight more than I am. I've decided to give up this twopenny ha'penny criminal work. Otherwise I shall get left in a rut."

Eric was thinking less of his routine work than of four dog's-eared plays which he had sent the round of the London managers; a critic was ever one who could not create.

"The right people have died at the right time," he explained. "It's not quite what I hoped, though."

Jack knocked out his pipe and left Eric to finish his early dinner by himself. It was the anniversary of their last Phoenix Club gathering at Oxford; and for the last four years a dozen or more of them had contrived to meet at the end of every June. So far, O'Rane's pessimistic forecast had halted short of fulfilment; none was dead, none was bankrupt, though Draycott was living at Boulogne with a warrant in readiness for him, if he ever returned to England. Sinclair was married, but the others had not yet found time for triumph or disaster. If Eric enjoyed a good salary and a responsible position, they had been bought with hard work, unsleeping contrivance and two severe illnesses; the instant spectacular effect of Lord Byron's descent upon London remained a day dream.

"You'll be able to find some one to take on my room, won't you?" asked Jack, with fleeting compunction, as he reappeared from his bedroom in shirt and trousers.

"I shan't try," answered Eric. "My books are overflowing into every room.... And I loathe strangers as much as you do."

Like Jack, he had soon found that it was impossible to play on equal terms with men who did not pretend to work for a living; and Eric's rare excursions from the Temple led him only to the supper-table of the Thespian Club and occasional luncheons in Chelsea. In the days of his apprenticeship to the London News, he had won the friendship of Martin Shelley by attending first nights when, as happened three times out of five, the dramatic critic was indisposed. For ultimate reward he succeeded to a coveted position; in payment by instalments he received a careless regard and full-blooded advice on drama and life. When Shelley's ill-used brain and nerves had been flogged to activity and not yet drowned, he would talk of theatrical art as a master. "Don't forget what I'm telling you, Lane," he would say through a cloud of smoke and whiskey fumes. "I've taught you what construction is—and dialogue—and technique—and characterization. You could write a successful play to-morrow, but you must wait until you've filled a sketch-book or two. You don't know live men and women yet; you're too much the maiden of bashful fifteen. The public isn't ready for naturalism; so, if you want to kill theatricality—which is what I've tried to do all my life—you must do it with a play that's overwhelming. I could teach you a hell of a lot, if I had time.... When I'm gone, fire in your application for my berth so that no one else gets in before you and yet leave just enough margin to keep the old man from thinking you pushed me under the wheels. Not that I'd blame you, we've all got to make our way. But the old man finds me rather an asset. My poor wife runs teetotal salons in Chelsea on the strength of my name. I'll take you to one. You'll fill a sketch-book with society smatterers alone."

Eric went from courtesy and stayed from compassion. Mrs. Shelley, the faded, pretty daughter of a Cambridge tutor who had left her a few hundreds a year, threw herself tacitly on his mercy, as though he had come to blackmail her with sordid tales of her husband's degradation. They had no children; and she had set herself to make a life of her own. So long as she could fill her house with the North Street school of poets, the Fitzroy Square impressionists—and all who came humbly to her for a chance of meeting them—she shut her eyes to her husband's excesses and infidelities. He was required to act as decoy for new literary and artistic lions, to appear at one party out of five freshly shaved and decently habited, to lend her a hand when she could climb no longer unaided and to accept a rare invitation in return to lunch with Lady Poynter or the Duchess of Ross, when "the society smatterers" wanted him to write up a charity matinée or the amateur performance of a Restoration comedy.

Before and after her husband's unheroic death under a newspaper van, Mrs. Shelley was Eric's single link with the world outside Fleet Street and the Thespian Club. Jack's white waist-coat and button-hole were occasionally a galling remainder of his own bondage.

"God! this is a life!" he broke out, as he looked at the clock and brought his dinner to an untimely end. "I never dine anywhere; I don't speak to a woman from one year's end to another——"

"Nor do I. It only encourages them," Jack returned, as he filled his case with cigarettes and gave a final polish to his hat.

"It would bring a little colour into one's life," said Eric, looking with disfavour at the grimly celibate sitting-room.

"Some people don't know when they're well off. I can't dance and I've nothing to say to the modern girl. Why they won't take 'no' for an answer I can never make out. I suppose you like women, Eric. Every time you go to a theatre, you come back raving about somebody's dress or pearls or eyes—honestly, you do! It's like a fashion article. I'm beyond all that. I don't mind 'em when they're as old as Lady Knightrider; they've ceased to be exacting then, and you can count on them to see that you're comfortable and that you have plenty of bath-salts. But the vulgar little atrocities of nineteen! I'm not ragging; if you compare a girl like my sister Agnes, who's twenty-two, with the hoydens who think they constitute London Society! Brains of spidgers and manners of factory hands! In my day.... However, they're all pure young girlhood to you. The Lord preserve you in your innocence and keep you from marrying one of them! I must fly!"

He ran down the stairs and hailed a taxi at the top of Middle Temple Lane. Since the downfall of Draycott, the Phoenix Club dinners had lost their old strict form and were no longer confined to members of the club. As Jack entered the hall, Valentine Arden, a satirical consumptive, was divesting himself of a violet-lined cloak, smoothing his long straight hair back from his forehead, patting the tie that wound twice round his collar and adjusting the straps of his trousers under his insteps. There were other friends of a younger generation whom Loring had acquired in his easy-going progress, but the older members were meagrely represented.

The first arrivals were already in the library, exchanging fragmentary news of the absentees, when their host appeared with a preoccupied frown and a jejune apology for his lateness.

"Where's Pentyre?" he asked, as he looked round the room. "Here, my friend, you'll get yourself into hot water, if you give any more parties like your last one."

"What's the row?" asked Pentyre in surprise.

"Well, I won't mention names," Loring answered, "but one of your guests has come to grief as the result of your last little gathering at Croxton. I don't say that it's your fault," he added, "except that you ought to exercise more general control in your own house. There was a certain amount of gambling, wasn't there? Some fairly big sums of money changed hands? One man lost who couldn't afford to lose, I believe. It may have been absence of mind or it may have been the only way out of the difficulty, but the man in question signed his father's name on a cheque instead of his own. The son is now on his way to one of those 'thoughtful islands where warrants never come.' D'you mean this is all news to you?"

Pentyre tugged at his moustache and shook his head in wide-eyed wonder. The only sign of discord that he could remember had occurred between his mother and Loring's own cousin, Barbara Neave. On the first night she had stayed up after Lady Pentyre had shepherded the women of the party to bed. In the morning there had been a gentle reprimand, but Lady Barbara ignored it and persisted in staying up as long as any one would stay up with her. She or one of the men—Pentyre could not remember—had started poker, which they played until two or three o'clock in the morning.

"I've never heard a word of it," he said. Less than a year had passed since he succeeded to his father's title and the ownership of Croxton Hall. The social life of the county had been brightened; but there had been one or two regrettable mishaps, and Loring always seemed to hear of them. "How did you get hold of the story?" he asked with a touch of bluster.

"From the man's father in the first place; then from my cousin Barbara. We're supposed to be responsible for her, and I tackled her about it. She won nearly five hundred pounds from this wretched boy. Of course, I made her disgorge it; but the fellow may be ruined for life. I told her so pretty plainly, and she seemed to take it as an enormous compliment."

"Who was the man?" asked Pentyre.

"Well, it wasn't your fat friend Webster, and it wasn't John Gaymer; they played poker before they could walk. I think you can guess now. Really, Pentyre, if you admit people of that kind to your house.... That girl will be the death of my poor mother. Thank goodness, Crawleigh's on his way home! D'you know, in the four years we've been nominally in charge of her we've been asked to have her removed from three different schools? Once it was for holding a table-turning séance in her bedroom after lights-out, and twice simply because they didn't know what to do with her. She's a holy terror. But I've got rid of her now, so let's have some dinner and forget all about her."

The three-hour discussion, which had been brought to an end by the dressing-gong, was only the latest of a long succession of family councils; but hitherto Lady Barbara had split the court of enquiry into factions and escaped between the feet of the disputants. On this, as on earlier occasions, she had won over her two aunts, but Loring proved himself to be of sterner stuff. "It's no use her saying that it's just as if she hadn't a father and mother of her own! She has,—and they'll discover it to their cost," he said. "The immediate point is that, if Barbara stays in this house, I go out of it. She's not in the least sorry. You think she's crying, but she isn't. I've seen her do that a dozen times when she wants to get round the servants. It's time some one else had a turn of her. If you believe in her repentance, Aunt Kathleen, you're welcome to her." While he dressed for dinner, the girl's clothes were packed and disposed in Lady Knightrider's car. She herself came to his door with a woebegone face, begging him to forgive her, for life with Lady Knightrider involved discipline, religious exercises and banishment for most of the year to Scotland or Monmouthshire. He refused and felt so small-minded at using his authority against a child that it was a relief to vent his ill-humour on a man.

"This is all very well," said Pentyre stolidly, as they sat down to dinner, "but I refuse to be bully-ragged because you can't keep your own cousin in order."

"I can't make out how you can be seen in the same street as Webster and Gaymer," answered Loring. "To me they're everything that's wrong in the life of the present day. Webster, Pennington, Lady Maitland, Erckmann——"

"You're so infernally narrow-minded."

"If it's narrow-minded to dislike a noisy little clique of rich cads who try to dominate society by being one degree more outrageous than anybody else."

A murmur of dissent made itself heard; but Loring warmed to his work, and the party divided into two camps and joined battle over the bodies of their friends. It was a stimulating encounter and afforded unrestricted opportunity for personal attack. For several years there had been raging a secret warfare which Valentine Arden compared with a tournament in a dark room between blindfolded combatants who did not know why they were fighting. On the one side was a group of influential and highly respected families led by the Lorings, the Knightriders and the Pebbleridges, on the other the cosmopolitans. They were an ill-defined host without leader or tenets. In every other capital of the world they had found their place as a wealthy and cultured class, excluded from the houses of the historic aristocracy but forming an artistic aristocracy of their own. In Paris, Vienna and New York Sir Adolf Erckmann was a social power; he would not, indeed, be found with the Princesse de Brise or Mrs. Irwin T. Churton, but he was known and reverenced in a world of music and pictures which did not know Mrs. Irwin T. Churton or the Princesse de Brise by name.

In England there were no such recognizable lines of demarcation. Erckmann was received by the Duchess of Ross, because she wanted him to subsidise a French theatre for London and hoped that he might be induced to take Herrig on a long lease; he was blackballed for the County Club, because the committee disliked his race, his accent, his friends and his too frequent appearance in the Divorce Court. With one foot in a Promised Land, from which the society of Paris, Vienna and New York had excluded him, Sir Adolf lifted the second; it was at this point that the battle was joined, and both sides fought blindly. The cosmopolitans were not always fortunate in their manners or their allies; and to Loring their very toleration meant the invasion of society by "a noisy clique of rich cads." Their antagonists were no less unfortunate in a few of their prejudices; and the cosmopolitans claimed with some reason to be fighting against a Philistine oligarchy. As there was not even a common ground of dispute, the warfare degenerated into indecisive skirmishes, and the discussion of it into embittered personalities.

"They're a bit hairy about the heel," said Summertown, "but they are alive, and some of their shows are great fun. Val can bear me out."

Arden assumed non-moral detachment and explained that the novelist, like the sanitary inspector, entered all houses with professional impartiality.

"They've no sense of responsibility and not much feeling for decency. I don't want to make too much of this business," said Loring, as acrimony slipped out of control and threatened the peace of the dinner. "But I was thoroughly stirred up over that wretched boy and I felt it was time to make a stand."

"What are you going to do?" demanded Pentyre.

"Well, I've been knocking about in London for half a dozen years, watching these gentry, and I can see that we're not assimilating them. The egregious Pennington, that young swine Webster——"

"Both of whom I've met in this house," interposed Pentyre.

"I know. One gets roped in. Some one dragged me along to their parties, so I had to invite them back. But I don't go any more. The danger now is that they'll assimilate us. I went through my mother's book a short time ago and put a mark against certain names; and in future those people will not be invited or admitted to the house. No doubt they'll get on very happily without me, but so much mud is thrown at us in the ordinary way of business that I can't afford to put up gratuitous targets for the amusement of the gutter-press. Honestly, Pentyre, you'd feel rather small, if the Sunday Budget or Morton's Weekly came out with a 'Society Gambling Scandal.' Wouldn't you?"

Pentyre adroitly evaded the question and continued his own bombardment.

"Is your cousin's name in the condemned list?" he asked.

"It will be, if I have any trouble from her again. What I can't get people to see is that we're hanging on by our eyelids to such position as we've got. A hundred years ago we were a class apart and above criticism; nobody thought the worse of us, if we appeared at the theatre with a notorious cocotte or drank ourselves gently under the table. Our present accursed democracy was unborn. But, when once that came into existence, we could only keep ourselves from proscription by saying very loudly that we were still a class apart and were setting a standard. Democracy's too lazy and snob-ridden to be very exacting, but it's had its eye on us. George and his friends are conspiring to hamstring the poor, decent House of Lords; and, if they succeed, the rot won't stop there. I find life very pleasant, and it isn't worth a tremendous upheaval simply for the amusement of behaving like a Bank Holiday crowd.... Let's go and smoke in the library."

Under the tranquilling influence of tobacco, Loring recovered his good-humour and the controversy flickered to extinction. There was a short attempt to revive and explore the scandal of Croxton Hall, but Pentyre was secretly frightened by the possibility of seeing his name in the papers; and he knew from long experience that there was no surer way of achieving notoriety than that of telling anything in confidence to those of his friends whose social importance was measured by their range and freshness of gossip.

"You're too provoking!" Deganway protested shrilly, pinning him in an embrasure and flapping irritably with his eye-glass. "You know it's not fair to tell a story without giving all the names."

"I didn't tell the story," Pentyre pointed out.

"But I've asked Jim, and he won't say. Val! Do make him tell! He's being so tiresome."

Arden shrugged his shoulders and, with the outward frozen detachment which had become second nature to him, retired to a table by himself where he called for China tea and produced a pack of patience cards. There were other means of investigating the poker episode, and he had decided that it was more than time for the social satirist to make Barbara Neave's acquaintance. For the merits of the controversy he cared nothing, but his sense of humour was maliciously stirred in contemplation of a self-consciously decorous clan stung into undignified curvettings by a gadfly girl of sixteen. Though he ostentatiously refused to be drawn into partisanship, the stiff blamelessness of the interlocked Catholic families occasionally oppressed him; and the material outcome of Loring's tirade was to stimulate his desire to explore the domestic dissension at first hand.

"One feels that Lady Barbara would repay study," he observed to Jack, as they left the house together. "She is a new element in our worn-out social system."

"You must study her for me," answered Jack. "I agree with every word Jim said. I'm too busy to go out much, but some of the people I meet.... My father says that twenty years ago they wouldn't have been tolerated. But since the South African diamond boom and all the new money.... Of course, the girl just wants slapping."

"You have met her? No? One hoped that you would have effected the introduction."

"I avoid the present-day girl like the plague," said Jack.

The following afternoon Arden called in South Street with a book which, he assured Lady Knightrider, he had promised to lend her. Lady Barbara was at Hurlingham with Webster; but, as she was expected back to tea, he planted himself immovably in a chair and awaited her return. When at last she came, he found her utterly unlike the rebellious school-girl of his imagination. A childhood spent in public had matured her beyond her years so that she had the looks of twenty-two and the self-possession of forty. Instead of studying her, he found himself being studied; slender and lithe as a boy, she was tall enough to look down on him. He found her haggard with restlessness and a life of nervous excitement; her tired eyes, ever changing in size and colour, brightened as she took in his affectations of dress and mannerisms of speech; he felt that she was harmonizing her pose with his and that her vitality and quickness had already given her an advantage.

"I've read all your books. Witty, but very artificial," she said, as they were introduced. "The French do that sort of thing more easily, but you've not read much French, have you? There are several things I want to discuss with you. A play I've written." She drew off her gloves jerkily, splitting the thumb of one. "Did you come to see me or Aunt Kathleen? And you know Jim, of course. I want your opinion of him."

"He knows me," Arden distinguished, as he watched her carelessly calculated movements. Within sixty seconds she had shewn herself full-face and in profile, with a hat and again with two tapering hands smoothing a mass of wayward hair. He had seen her wistful and tired, as she came into the room, and again alert and galvanised at finding him there. Yet she had certainly noticed his hat in the hall; probably she had read the name and thought out her attack as she came upstairs. He was charmed by her conscientious artifice.

"You talk just like Fatty Webster's imitations of you! That's so clever of you! But why do you do it? You've arrived. There's no need to be eccentric now. But perhaps you've grown into your own pose? In that case you're right to express yourself in your own medium. Life is simply self-expression, isn't it? The discovery of the Ego, the refinement of the Ego, the presentation of the Ego." She nodded quickly at a portrait of her father in Garter robes. "It would never do to be submerged by that kind of thing. I'm always so sorry for Royalty."

As he hesitated for an answer, she put her hands to her throat, unclasped her necklace and threw it out of the window. Arden sprang across the room and looked down into the street to make sure that he had seen aright. A District Messenger-boy approached, whistling; he explored the necklace with his foot and finally picked it up.

"My dear, what are you doing?" cried Lady Knightrider in amazement.

"I went flying to-day," Lady Barbara answered, as she poured herself out a cup of tea.

"Flying!"

"Yes, I didn't tell you beforehand, because I was afraid of a scene. Besides, I should have done it, whatever you said. Johnnie Gaymer promised to take me up. I haven't been near Hurlingham. Don't bother, Mr. Arden."

"But why——?" Valentine began, startled out of his invertebrate placidity by a sensationalist more original than himself.