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The Sensationalists: I

LADY LILITH

by

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.

[Illustration: Logo]

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

CHAPTER                           PAGE
   I THE DEATH OF THE PHOENIX        9

  II THE COMING OF LILITH           34

 III THE SPIRIT OF PAN              58

  IV APHRODITE DEMI-MONDAINE        79

   V NOBODY'S FAULT                107

  VI THE SHADOW LINE               124

 VII A MATTER OF DUTY              141

VIII A MATTER OF PLEASURE          161

  IX THE JUDGEMENT OF SOLOMON      177

   X VINDICATION                   198

  XI THE LAUREL AND THE ROSE       217

 XII AN ERROR OF JUDGEMENT         230

XIII A NOTE OF INTERROGATION       257

 XIV THE ANSWER OF THE ORACLE      277

  XV PRELUDE TO ROMANCE            294

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.

"Because I wasn't killed. I love that necklace more than anything in
the world. It was given me when I was recovering from typhoid and every
one thought I _must_ die.... The engine stopped in mid-air, and I made
sure I was going to be killed. Johnnie thought so, too. I felt I owed
something to Nemesis.... I've known you by sight all this season, Mr.
Arden. You weren't at the Poynters last night, by any chance? I couldn't
go, because I was in disgrace. And Lord Poynter sent his car this
morning with a wreath of lilies, because he was afraid I must be dead."

The short, disjointed sentences, flung out rapidly as she helped herself
to cake, demanded all Arden's attention and left her aunt far behind.
Lady Knightrider hurried belatedly to the window and then stretched her
hand to the bell. Lady Barbara took her arm soothingly and led her back
to her chair.

"Your disgrace was our diversion," said Arden.

"Did Jim tell you about it," asked Lady Barbara. "How like him! I'm
beginning to think he's naturally cruel. Or unnaturally. Conscious
cruelty is what divides men from animals.... Aunt Kathleen, if you fuss,
I shall scream; I've been badly frightened and I hated throwing it
away.... I'd sooner die than hurt any one.... Have you ever flown? I've
wanted to for years; I felt it would be a new sensation. Won't it be
awful when we've done so much that there are no sensations left? Aunt
Kathleen's quite irrepressible, isn't she?"

After an interval of indecision Lady Knightrider had hurried out of the
room and downstairs. Arden looked at his watch and prepared to follow
her.

"One always lies down before dinner," he explained.

"You're going--just when we've been left a moment together?" she asked
with a smile that had less of amusement than of artistic sympathy.
"That's a brilliant effect. Not one man in a million would have thought
of it. We must meet again. Why did you come at all? What had you heard
about me? I don't recommend Aunt Kathleen's cigarettes."

She offered him her case, and Arden lighted one.

"A poker party was mentioned at dinner last night," he told her. "One
casually wondered who the man was."

"Claude Arkwright. Jim says I've got his soul on my conscience. Any more
questions?"

Arden laughed and for a moment shed all his mannerisms.

"Yes. What's behind all this?" he asked.

"All this what? All this me? What I do?" Lady Barbara met him
unreservedly on his own chosen ground of sincerity, and her voice and
smile changed. "_I'm_ behind it. Come, you're quite clever enough to
understand. I want to enjoy life and know life and meet people and read
books and do things.... I won't be treated like a minor Royalty. The
world's full of Jim Lorings. Wherever I go, some one says 'Not there,
not there, my child.' And then! _Then_ I go quite mad! You'll like me, I
think. Good-bye."

"Good-bye, Lady Lilith."

"Lilith? Who was she? Wasn't she Adam's first wife?"

"She existed before Man tasted of the tree of knowledge; before good and
evil came into the world," said Arden impressively.

"_I_ remember. I hope you won't become sententious. That went out with
the last of the Wilde plays."

Lady Knightrider was standing in the hall, plump, white-haired and
perplexed, peering through her lorgnettes into the street. The
messenger-boy had disappeared, and the necklace with him.

"He will take it to Scotland Yard," predicted Arden reassuringly. "And
then Lady Barbara will throw it away again for fear of cheating Nemesis.
One despaired of meeting honest superstition in these degenerate latter
days."

"I've never heard----," began Lady Knightrider. One crime jostled
another and confused her mind. "Crawleigh will be furious if he finds
out she's been flying."

Arden walked back to the Ritz, wondering whether the fuller study of
Barbara Neave justified him in giving away points by betraying interest
in her. His preliminary diagnosis discovered energy with no outlet,
premature experience with unsated curiosity; public life held no mystery
or attraction for the only daughter of a viceroy; unless Lord Crawleigh
set himself to gain a dukedom, there were no social heights to scale;
the family was too rich for her to be troubled about money; and so
energy sought its outlet in making and receiving new sensations. This
was well enough at sixteen or seventeen, but after another five years
emotion-hunting...? He was still undecided when he encountered her a
week later at Covent Garden, sitting with Summertown and Webster on a
sofa outside Lady Maitland's box and having her fortune told by Sonia
Dainton. Her setting was of more interest than her occupation, for
Summertown and Miss Dainton were leaders of the younger cavalry in the
cosmopolitan army; they echoed the noise and reflected the insistent
glare of Sir Adolf Erckmann without sharing his solid prestige as a
critic and patron of art. Webster was a sodden, characterless youth, who
bought his way into toleration which he mistook for popularity. Arden
wondered what Loring would say if he found his cousin in such company.

"The discovery of the Ego?" he enquired.

"Hullo! We're having such fun!" said Lady Barbara. "Miss Dainton's
wonderful! I've had two bad illnesses, and something is going to happen
soon which will change the whole of my life. I'm going to have an
enormous success of some kind. And then an enormous tragedy. I'm very
artistic and full of intuition. I've got a strong will and a great
influence over people. Go on, Sonia."

"The line of heart--give me your other hand a minute," said Sonia
Dainton. "Yes, the line of heart hasn't begun yet. When it _does_!"

Lady Barbara withdrew her hand abruptly.

"I don't believe you know anything about it, Sonia. Are there any good
palmists in London, Mr. Arden? I collect fortune-tellers. Let's go
somewhere to-morrow. Father will be back in England next month, and then
I shan't be able to do anything."

"You believe in all this?" Arden asked, remembering her action with the
necklace and wondering how far she was trying to beat him at his own
game of extravagant effects.

"Oh, implicitly. Don't you? And I do want to find out all about the
future. Let's devote a week to it and try _every one_."

"I might spare you two days," he answered, as he passed on to his box.

At the end of the first Arden's curiosity was satisfied. Lady Barbara
was a study in crude contrasts. While she pained her family by sceptical
indifference to religion, there seemed nothing that she would not
believe, provided only that it did not come to her from the lips of a
priest. As they drove from one clairvoyant to another, she revealed a
curious knowledge of necromancy; she had read every book that she could
find on Satanism and the Black Mass and would talk of astrology and the
significance of dreams with grave conviction. But the cult of the
fortune-tellers was inspired primarily by a desire to discuss herself
and to be discussed. A single morning exhausted the possibilities of
amusement from such a source, and her companions were less diverting
than herself; Sonia Dainton dropped out when she found herself accorded
second place, Summertown played a thin stream of monotonous jocosity
over the survivors, and Webster fell asleep with an air of duty well
done when he had provided luncheon for every one, discovered a new
clairvoyant and driven the party to her at breakneck speed in the latest
of the racing cars whose purchase constituted the overt business of his
life.

They were to have met again with Lady Knightrider at the end of the
season; but, when Arden and Jack Waring entered the train for Raglan,
Loring awaited them with a grave face and pointed to a column notice in
his paper, headed "Serious Flying Accident."

"Thank Heaven, it happened when she was with her people and not with
me," he began. "That's my silly little fool of a cousin again! She got
that fellow Gaymer down to Crawleigh Abbey; and, when her parents' backs
were turned, they went off for a jaunt to Salisbury Plain. The
manoeuvres were on, so they brightened them up by flying so low that the
inspecting general bolted and the troops scattered in panic. There'll be
the deuce to pay for that alone. Then, on the way back, they came down
in the New Forest and got hung up on a tree. Gaymer's broken a
collar-bone and two ribs; and Barbara's badly shaken and bruised. Here's
an opportunity for your literary genius, Valentine; help me to draft a
telegram of sympathy which will shew at the same time that I think she
richly deserved all she got."

The accident was Lady Barbara's formal introduction to England.
Throughout 1909 there was an official pretence that she was not yet out;
she would still be no more than seventeen when her parents returned, and
both Lady Loring and Lady Knightrider refused to present her before
that. The baptism of blood in the New Forest made her name and face
known to every reader of every illustrated paper. "The ideal _début_ for
her," exclaimed Loring in disgust. "I can see her spending the rest of
her life trying to live up to it."

Four days later he came into Arden's room with a letter which he threw
onto the bed with a grim smile.

_"Dearest Jim,_

_"It was sweet of you to send me that wire. I've strained my back and
covered myself with bruises, but it was worth it. Fear is a wonderful
sensation; I believe it's the strongest of all the emotions. I certainly
feel that I shall never again get that sublimated degree of fear. I got
Death. (D'you spell Death with a capital D? I always do--from respect;
Death will outlast God.) You heard I had concussion? I knew I was dying
and that one step would carry me over the dividing-line. There was a
black curtain, like a drop-scene; and I knew that, as soon as that
lifted, I should be dead and on the other side. I said to myself I
wouldn't die. When I came to, the doctor was frowning terribly, and I
heard him mutter, 'Just about time, too, young lady.' I wonder whether
you'd be sorry, if I died, Jim. When I had appendicitis at Simla, you
couldn't get through the streets for the people who were waiting to hear
how the operation had gone off. The wires were blocked for three days
with enquiries._

_"I'm to be allowed out at the end of the week and hope to be well
enough to come to you at House of Steynes with father and mother._

_Your loving Barbara."_

Arden smiled as he handed back the letter.

"Characteristic," he commented.

"Oh, very! Not a word about Gaymer. Or the feelings of her parents.
She's had two new sensations and she can't be sure whether she'd get as
good a press for her death here as in India. Crawleigh will have his
hands full. You've not met him? Well, it's one thing to govern India and
another to keep a little devil like that in order."

A month later, still in the detached spirit of the social satirist,
Arden allowed himself to be introduced to Lady Barbara's parents in
Scotland. He was anxious to study her family setting, for Lord Crawleigh
was already beginning to be regarded primarily as the father of his own
daughter and only in afterthought as a distinguished public servant.
Fifteen years earlier he had first shewn the administrative brilliance
and incapacity to work with colleagues which impel a man to a
viceroyalty or the leadership of a disgruntled party of one on the
cross-benches. In Canada, in Ireland and in India he had been publicly
admired and privately abhorred. Without the backing of long established
authority, however, he was thrown on his own resources; and paper-work
genius proved itself powerless without palpable force of character.
Over-sensitive to his personal dignity, he treated his wife and children
with the pomp and despotism of Government House; according to Loring's
description, councils were convened to decide what train should bear
them from London to Crawleigh Abbey; the cook's shortcomings were
minuted to Lady Crawleigh for observations and appropriate action; the
servants were pinned to the straight path of their duties by
proclamation, and the household books were scrutinized with an
exhaustive particularity not vouchsafed to the preparation of an Indian
budget.

It was the self-protective assertion of a man sensitive to his physical
inadequacy. Lord Crawleigh's domed head, ascetic face and rimless
spectacles were impressively intellectual, but he degenerated as he went
lower. The bottom half of his face was confused with a straggling blonde
moustache intended for an operatic viking; his body was too short, his
legs too long; and, when he became excited, his voice rose querulous and
shrill. But the viceregal manner carried him far. Lord Neave and his two
younger brothers had been taught obedience at Eton; Lady Crawleigh, as
her passivity and plumpness hinted, suffered from a family streak of
laziness, which she shared with Lady Loring and Lady Knightrider, and
from twenty-five years' experience of her husband, which she could share
with no one. It required Barbara's temperamental irreverence and gipsy
craving for liberty to break down the imposing forms and spirit of her
father's rule. The boys, who could be caned while she remained immune,
sheltered themselves behind their younger sister; and, with a woman's
genius for tactical alliances and strategical choice of ground, she
explored and profited by the weak places in the enemy's system of
defences. Her father's public position and private dignity were her
strongest accessories. "She can always blackmail him by threatening a
scandal," as Loring explained.

So long as she had her own way, Arden discovered a rule of peace and
mutual affection. Lady Barbara hated to be on bad terms with any one;
and her parents were humanly, if reluctantly, proud of her. Throughout
his visit to House of Steynes, she dominated the party by her vitality
and versatile charm. Loring was in the early stages of devotion to Sonia
Dainton and disappeared as long and often as possible to escape his
mother and sister, who were trying to avert an engagement, and Lady
Dainton, who was forcing it to a head; and in his absence Arden watched
Lady Barbara posing herself in the middle of the stage, methodically
sharing herself among the guests and holding her own with all. It was
the fruit of early years, during which she had lived consistently in
public, meeting men of every profession and country, listening,
remembering, learning and giving her best in return. She shewed a nice
appreciation of personality and varied her attitude with her audience.
In talking to Arden himself she still gravely met pose with pose and
extravagance with extravagance.

"D'you feel you know me adequately now?" she asked him on the last
night. "Mr. Deganway told me you were going to write a book about me."

"And you replied, 'Only one?' It is unfortunate that Meredith has
already taken 'The Egoist' as a title."

Lady Barbara turned slowly, as though he were a mirror, and gave him
time to appreciate her slender height and lithe figure. One hand
directed attention to her hair, as she brushed away a curl from her
forehead; and she looked at him sideways with her fingers pressed
against one cheek so that he should see the size and deep colour of her
eyes.

"D'you think I'm unduly vain?" she asked.

"Genius demands vanity. But one comes back to the old question: what is
behind it? One thinks of you in six years' time and asks oneself what
will be left. You have been everywhere, Lady Lilith, and met every one
whom the world considers worth meeting--they were not too numerous?
No?--and you have read so much.... In six years' time you will be the
best known woman in London, but there will be nothing left for you to
do."

"There are always new experiences. When I had that accident in the New
Forest, a man came from the other end of England, because he'd fallen in
love with my photograph. He said he couldn't marry any one else after
seeing me."

"It is surfeiting to be easily loved," Arden sighed. "One does not shoot
sitting birds. Some day, perhaps, Lady Lilith will meet a man who goes
to the other end of England to avoid her. That will be a new experience.
She will follow him, of course. To find a heart will be the greatest
experience of all. One will watch your career with interest."

"And describe it? Or are you afraid to risk my friendship?"

"The only book that could offend Lady Lilith is one in which she does
not appear."

For the next six months Arden was compelled to study her through the
press. Loring went abroad for the winter in his yacht, Lady Knightrider
withdrew to Scotland, and Lord Crawleigh moved his seat of government
from Berkeley Square to Hampshire. Despite the rival claims of a general
election, however, she secured creditable space in the daily and weekly
papers. A ball at Crawleigh Abbey was followed by an abortive rumour of
her engagement to her cousin Lord John Carstairs. A prompt and
unambiguous disclaimer was issued, but the findings of the commission,
which Lord Crawleigh appointed under his own chairmanship to investigate
his daughter's conduct, were such that he deemed it prudent to transfer
his seat of government from Hampshire to Cap Martin. A series of
photographs from the Riviera correspondent of the 'Catch' shewed her
walking demurely with her father, playing tennis and participating less
demurely in a battle of flowers and a fancy-dress carnival.

In the spring of 1910 public interest was deflected to another branch of
the family, for Loring's engagement to Sonia Dainton was announced. But
by that time, as Arden pointed out, a man had only himself to blame if
he did not know all that was to be known of Lady Barbara Neave.

"How poor Jim must loathe all this self-advertising," said Jack Waring,
when he met Arden at the County Club to discuss the engagement. "I've
never even seen her, but I've had _her_ and her _hats_ and her _clothes_
thrust under my eyes by these infernal papers till I'm sick of them.
She's talented, she's charming. I know all the things she said to all
the big pots in India. When she is twenty-one she comes in for all her
godfather's money on condition that she marries a Catholic.... I suppose
there must be a public for this kind of stuff, or the papers wouldn't
print it; but she's on the level of a musical-comedy star. Arden, my
lad, I'm an old man, but I swear people had a little more dignity and
restraint in my young days. The one good thing about the court mourning
is that she doesn't get so much opportunity for her antics."

"She'll emerge again, when it's over," Arden predicted. "Meanwhile,
London is becoming very tiresome. Has life lost its savour? Are we
growing old? One would give much for the tonic of a good scandal."

"There'll be no lack of that," Jack prophesied, "judging from the people
I see in London nowadays."

CHAPTER THREE

THE SPIRIT OF PAN

     "A maid too easily
     Conceits herself to be
         Those things
       Her lover sings;
     And being straitly wooed,
     Believes herself the Good
         And Fair
       He seeks in her."

     FRANCIS THOMPSON: "ANY SAINT."

"D'you remember once saying that you wanted the tonic of a good
scandal?" asked Jack Waring one night three years later. "It was soon
after King Edward's death."

"And we were all very respectable and dull." Valentine Arden roused from
sleep, blinked at the clock and rang for a whiskey and soda. "One
recalls it. There is a difference between court mourning and the second
coming of Christ, but the English are the last people in the world to
recognize it. And there is a difference between taking a tonic and being
pelted to death with medicine bottles. Since those days one scans the
paper each morning to see what new reputations have been lost. Who has
made the latest Roman holiday?"

"Oh, it's this old business about your friend Barbara Neave."

Jack threw the paper to Arden and took up another in which he could
read, with insignificant verbal changes, a second and equally gratifying
account of his own prowess in the Court of Appeal that day. Three years
earlier he had talked to Eric Lane of abandoning his unproductive
criminal work on circuit; he now wondered whether he dared abandon
circuit work altogether and concentrate on his London practice. After,
perhaps, six years more he would be wondering whether to risk his whole
practice by applying for silk. Success was none the less gratifying
because he had backed his own determination against the disparaging
anticipations of his friends. Jack knew as well as any one that he was
not a great lawyer; but natural shrewdness gained him a reputation for
sound judgement; slowness passed for caution; and the inelasticity which
saved him from seeing all round a case was reinforced by an obstinate
refusal to let go the single point which he had grasped. More than one
over-astute witness in those three years had entered the box with
assurance and left it in dismay.

Only those who had known him longest wondered occasionally whether his
practice had not been bought at the price of his soul. The plea of work
and a ponderous affectation of age excused him from any effort to widen
his interests. As old a friend as Eric Lane was allowed to drop out of
his life; he refused to enter a new house and on one pretext or another
reduced the number of the old, until any time that he could spare from
work was divided between his club and his home in the country. At the
first his friends were at liberty to visit him, if they chose; but he
was obviously happier with the two Chancery silks and the one Indian
judge, all of them twice his age, in whose company he dined nightly. And
the influence of Red Roofs was even more lamentable on a man who was
born self-centred and opinionated; Mrs. Warning and Agnes idolized and
spoiled him, the colonel crystallized an intolerant conservatism of
ideas which was better justified as the mature experience of a
middle-aged soldier and country gentleman than as the untried prejudice
of a thirty-year-old barrister. "A man may be a prig or a bore or both,"
said Pentyre at a time of temporary estrangement, "but he needn't be so
infernally pleased with himself about it." The school of sport and
fashion which Jack had once led at Oxford entertained the same feeling,
if it expressed it with more disappointment and less candour.

"The coroner would seem to have spoken with visible emotion," commented
Arden, trying to disguise his relish as he read the paper which Jack had
thrown to him. "One wishes one had stayed to the end."

"I've no doubt she'll try to use it as another advertisement," Jack
grunted. "What her unfortunate people must think.... _And_ what the
younger generation is coming to. It's a good thing for Jim that he's
being spared all this."

"Yet he also has unselfishly contributed to the general diversion," said
Arden.

Three years had passed since Sonia Dainton delighted her friends by
becoming engaged to Loring, and two since she astonished them by
breaking off the engagement. He had at once gone abroad and was reported
to be still cruising aimlessly in the East. The social ghouls had hardly
sated themselves with gossip, when Webster entangled himself with the
proprietress of a dancing academy and was constrained to pay damages for
breach of promise; and, while this case was still being discussed, Jack
Summertown proceeded to occupy the press for three days with an enquiry
into a series of minor outrages inflicted on an unpopular brother
officer. Valentine Arden sat through the whole variety programme,
unamused and detached, watching his friends succumbing one after another
to epidemic madness. "The spirit of Pan is abroad," he explained
gravely.

Lady Barbara Neave had flitted on the outskirts of each new scandal;
but, since her flying accident, she had contributed no scandal of her
own.

For the first year of the three she opened her social circuit as
comprehensively as an unfledged barrister. Lady Crawleigh carried her
from Milford to Kenworth, from Warmslow to Lenge and from Cheniston to
Granlake. Lady Barbara's interest in social analysis was roused and fed
by her tour of the great houses; they required a technique different
from the absolutism of Government House and the unaided personal
ascendancy of London; and, if she remained unabsorbed into the new
atmosphere, at least she returned to Crawleigh Abbey with a mature
country-house philosophy and clear-cut ideas of what to avoid and
extrude from her own parties. The second year was devoted to romantic
exploration. At the end of the court mourning she met a pleasant
undistinguished soldier on furlough and chose, for no better reason--so
far as her parents could see--than that he was already married, to fancy
herself in love with him. Their few meetings--and still more their
emotional parting--convinced at least the theatrical side of her
temperament that she had broken her heart in a hopeless passion. Always
thin, she artistically allowed herself to waste. For twelve teeming
months she passively accepted the worship of all who were intrigued by
her attitude of mystery and unresponsiveness; then native impatience
broke through the unconvincing crust of cynicism, and she returned to
London in a dangerous state of expectancy and unsatisfied excitement. In
the absence of an overt scandal, her father hoped that she was sobered
from the tomboy who had spread devastation through his three viceregal
terms of office; the lesser optimists opined that she was only awaiting
adequate opportunity.

Disaster overtook her in the summer of 1913; and, whatever other
criticism was made, no one could deny that she won notoriety in the
grand manner. The facts, as disclosed in court, revealed that Sir Adolf
Erckmann had given a ball at his house in Westbourne Terrace. Lady
Barbara decided within a few minutes of her arrival that the party was
over-crowded and tiresome. Finding her slave Webster unoccupied, she
suggested that he should drive her to another dance in the country and
return to Westbourne Terrace when the congestion had been relieved. As
his own car was gone home, they explored the line until the unknown
chauffeur of some one else's car was persuaded to take them to
Rickmansworth, wait half an hour and bring them back. Lady Barbara
promised that there should be no awkward consequences, if they were
discovered; Webster substantiated her guarantee with a five-pound note;
and, by the time that they had further cajoled him with a stimulating
supper of champagne and cutlets, the driver's last reluctance was
overcome.

The story was liberally punctuated with questions on the general
propriety of a girl's bribing a strange chauffeur and stealing an
unknown car, with comments, too, on the dignity of their carrying a
bottle of champagne and a plate of cutlets into the middle of Westbourne
Terrace. There followed a digression to discover how much had been
consumed; Lady Barbara and Webster asserted unshakably that the
chauffeur was sober and that, if his driving became erratic at any
point, this was due to his admitted ignorance of the route.

While the question of sobriety was left in suspense, the expedition was
reconstructed to the moment when the car reached a fork in the road and
the chauffeur turned to Webster and asked "Right or left, sir?" Examined
on the question of speed, Lady Barbara was sure that they were not going
more than fifteen or twenty miles an hour; twenty-five at the outside,
Webster conceded unwillingly; they could not see the speedometer. It was
suggested, however, that they must have calculated how long the double
journey would take; they had even noticed when the car started and when
it stopped; a damaging calculation shewed that their average pace was
thirty-seven miles an hour and that, if they drove slowly out of London,
they must have reached forty-five or fifty miles an hour in the
country. And they had not told the man to moderate his pace; it even
seemed that they had encouraged him to drive faster.

At the fork in the road Webster called out, "To the right, I think";
then he saw that he was mistaken and shouted, "No! the left." In trying
to change direction, the chauffeur drove into a wedge-shaped brick wall
and was instantly killed. Lady Barbara and her companion escaped with a
severe shaking and a few scratches from the broken glass of the
wind-screen; the front of the car was smashed beyond repair.

The accident took place in open country without a house in sight. As
soon as they saw that the driver was dead, Lady Barbara spread her cloak
over the crushed head and broken face; Webster's nerve was gone, and she
left him, whimpering, to guard the body, while she went in search of
help. An early market-cart came to their rescue, and they rumbled slowly
back to London, shivering in their thin clothes and glancing over their
shoulders at a pair of twisted legs in black gaiters, which protruded
stiffly from beneath a blood-stained cloak.

The news swept through London in the evening papers, and Lady Barbara
was inundated next day with enquiries and messages of sympathy. So
grudging a critic as Jack Waring contended warmly at the County Club
that, apart from her silliness in rushing away to the country in the
middle of the night and borrowing a car without leave, she was really
not to blame; and it was a dreadful experience for any girl. By
comparison with Webster she had kept her head and behaved very properly,
taking the body straight to a hospital, communicating with the widow,
making herself personally responsible for a liberal pension and
undertaking to replace the shattered car. Before night two papers had
published sympathetic interviews with her, reproducing in her own not
undramatic words the abrupt transition from a careless drive to violent
death, the slow passage of a funeral procession between barren grey
fields, the silence and desolation of the night, the early-morning chill
which beat on her unprotected arms and shoulders and the haunting sense
of helplessness which dominated every other feeling. Inset was one
photograph of her in evening dress and another with hollow cheeks and
big ghostly eyes, in the subdued black frock which she had worn to
receive her interviewers; for these Jack blamed the notorious vulgarity
of the Press.

Admiration changed again to pity when the inquest opened. Sonia Dainton,
who attended as an act of friendship, reported that the coroner was
underbred and ill-tempered; Lady Maitland, who felt no curiosity but did
not want Barbara to think that her friends were deserting her, added
that he was a natural bully; and the Duchess of Ross, who hated any
unpleasantness and only went--with Lord Poynter, Mrs. Shelley and Val
Arden--to give the girl confidence, brought back word that, to the best
of his ability and the utmost of his despotic functions, he was resolved
to humiliate Lady Barbara, to discredit her associates and, without
respect of persons, to put such a brand on her family and herself that
they would never again dare to shew themselves among decent men and
women. The witness learned on the first day that she was a pampered and
spoiled child; _blasée_ and restless, she would do anything for a new
excitement; with that absence of rudimentary decorum which some people
appeared to think "smart," she had lawlessly appropriated a car--the
coroner wondered what she would think if any one took one of her
father's cars "just for a joke"--she had helped to make the driver
intoxicated, thereby shewing characteristic disregard for the safety of
mere ordinary people who might also want to use the road; she or her
companion--was it usual for a girl to ride about at night unattended in
this way?--had incited the chauffeur to drive at a reckless rate of
speed. And the price of this prank--the momentary diversion of the Lady
Barbara Neave, daughter of the Marquis of Crawleigh, one time
Governor-General of Canada, Viceroy of India and Lord Lieutenant of
Ireland--was the hideous death of a man who left behind him a widow and
four small children. Lady Barbara, who naturally thought that money paid
for everything, was graciously and of her abundance trying to compute
the dead man's cash value to his wife. The hearing was adjourned for a
week, as Mr. Webster was indisposed by the shock of the accident.

Had the coroner been inspired by malice, he could not have waged a
deadlier warfare than by taking three days for the inquest and allowing
intervals of a week for the case to be discussed. The stream of sympathy
ran dry; and, if no one criticized Lady Barbara to her face, every one
chattered about the enquiry and took his time from the coroner.
Repenting his precipitate tolerance, Jack Waring told the two Chancery
silks and the Indian judge that it was absurd for Crawleigh to say that
the man was abusing his position and stirring up class prejudice; when
one looked back over the last few years, one remembered a dozen things
which Lady Barbara had been allowed to do for no better reason than that
she was Lady Barbara Neave; but a line had really to be drawn somewhere.
If Crawleigh disliked having mud thrown at him in public, he should
exercise his authority with the girl; her friends were wholly
impossible....

By the time that Webster was well enough to give evidence, the tide was
in flood against him. The breach of promise case was fresh in the public
mind; and, if it could not relevantly be brought up against him, it had
at least familiarised his appearance and history and made a dark
background to his examination. Mr. Webster was a young man; he did not
work for his living, as he had considerable private means; in fact, he
had nothing to do except to spend money and amuse himself. Pressed to
state what good he was effecting for himself or the world at large, he
could only say that he was interested in the theatre and fond of
motoring--another instance of this small, rich, insistent class whose
social importance varied in inverse ratio as its public usefulness. Put
shortly, his object in life was to kill time, to avoid boredom.

The story of the night drive was rehearsed a second time, as the coroner
wished to know who had proposed it; and the suspended question of the
driver's sobriety was brought up for retrial. A bottle of champagne had
been mentioned; had Mr. Webster and Lady Barbara partaken of it in their
idyllically democratic picnic? Mr. Webster had dined at his club; could
he remember what he had drunk with his dinner? His bill would no doubt
shew that.

On the second adjournment a sordid note had been introduced, alienating
the last sympathisers and sinking a tragedy in a drunken frolic. No one
acquainted with Webster would associate him with a temperate life; those
who saw him for the first time in court with twitching hands, a puffy
face and flickering eyelids drew their own conclusions. If it was a
shock to look at Lady Barbara and to hear it suggested that she, too,
had been hardly accountable for her actions, the shock was not wholly
displeasing to those who believed in the rottenness of so-called
"society."

"They say I've murdered the man," she whispered to her father, as she
left the court. "They've made the foulest insinuations about Fatty
Webster and me. Now they say I drink. There's not much left, is there? I
shouldn't be surprised if the people in the street hooted me."

Lord Crawleigh chewed his blonde, viking moustache and hurried her
across the pavement into a closed car. He had never been present at an
inquest before; and a voice had murmured that the coroner was working
for a verdict of manslaughter. A nondescript crowd, dotted with cameras,
waited in a half-circle outside the court; it was curious, but at
present it was silent. Valentine Arden paused at the door and
ostentatiously raised his hat. He, too, would not have been surprised to
hear hooting; and he was disappointed to have no vivid contrast for his
gesture of chivalry. He wondered whether Lady Barbara was missing the
hostile demonstration; it would have been a new sensation....

On the third day she appeared once more in a black hat and dress and sat
with her veil up, waiting for the verdict and the coroner's comments.
Arden decided that she was modelling herself on Marie Antoinette and
hoped that she would be given an opportunity of speaking. At the end,
the jury found that death was due to misadventure; the reporters closed
their note-books, and Lord Crawleigh reached for his hat. Arden left at
once for fear of spoiling his earlier effect by repetition, but the
evening papers reported the invective of the coroner in full.

_"I suggest to the representatives of the press that it is their duty to
give the widest publicity to this case. In an experience which goes back
for a good many years now, I have never regretted so bitterly that I
have no power to punish those who by wanton carelessness or evil
disposition contribute to the death of a man or woman as surely as if
they had killed him with their own hands. We have had an illuminating
picture of the life and habits of some of those who traditionally expect
us to look up to them for an example. If these people are too idle or
vicious or brainless to live a life which shall be of use to the
community, there should at least be power to restrain them from becoming
a source of public danger. The proper treatment for such incipient
hooligans and reformatory children is the birch-rod: I wish I had
authority to order it. Rank and wealth can only be defended if they
impose obligations: to these bright ornaments of the leisured classes
they only afford opportunities. There has been far too much of this kind
of thing lately, and I hope I shall never again be required to deal with
so disgraceful a case. These young hobbledehoys, unchecked by any
domestic discipline, unrestrained by common decency, owing no
obligation to any one, a law unto themselves, are a new and poisonous
growth in our social life. They fulfil no useful purpose, there is no
room for them."_

"There _was_ a hostile demonstration in the street," Arden announced, as
he came to the end of the report.

"How she must have enjoyed it!" grunted Jack.

"One wishes one had stayed to the end. The court was not unlike a gala
night at Covent Garden. You have read the descriptions of the dresses?
No?"

"All this only encourages her," Jack pointed out. "I'm about the one man
in London who's succeeded in not meeting her, but, if there's ever a
revolution, that young woman will have done more than any one else to
bring it about. And she'll be photographed getting into the tumbril; and
some one will interview her on the scaffold. On my honour, I can't see
what amusement she gets out of it."

"Emotion, drama, limelight, romance," Arden suggested. "Lady Barbara may
be sure that every one in London is talking about her at this moment;
London is her stage."

"Well, she'll have to retire from it after this," said Jack.

"She will re-emerge," Arden prophesied.

Both predictions were fulfilled before the end of the summer. Lord
Crawleigh held his hand until the inquest was over, because he could not
trust himself to deal even justice while the offence was fresh. For
three weeks he was equally indifferent to Lady Barbara's tragic
attitude, the sympathy of friends and the infamies of a hostile press:
more than one anonymous letter reached him, to be read with a frown and
silently filed with the documents in the case; and it was reported that
a reference to his family had crept into the patter of a music-hall
comedian. In the rich silence of a choleric and expressive man the
nerves of family and retainers stretched to breaking-point.

On the morrow of the verdict he assembled his wife and children in the
library, rehearsed the charges against Lady Barbara and made known his
will. Henceforward she was to go nowhere unless attended by her mother,
one of her brothers or her maid. The family would proceed to Crawleigh
Abbey that day and would remain there until further notice. The ball
which Lady Crawleigh was giving would be cancelled; his daughter was to
refuse all invitations already accepted and to accept no more. At the
end of the season she would stay in no house unless one at least of her
parents accompanied her.

As he ended, Lady Barbara stole a glance round the hushed library. Her
three brothers were silent and submissive; her mother helpless and
pained, like an "honest broker" who saw the nations of the world flying
at one another's throats, when she had exhausted herself to keep the
peace; her father's eyes were burning, and he dragged at one side of his
moustache as though he were trying to tear it out by the roots. In every
altercation, great and small, Lady Barbara had to fight single-handed.

"But, father, you seem to think this was my _fault_!" she cried in
bewilderment.

Lord Crawleigh handed his wife a paper with fingers that trembled.

"Here are the dates and trains," he said. "You will go to the Abbey by
the 4.10 from Waterloo. I shall join you at the end of the session." He
turned to his daughter without trusting himself to face her dark,
reproachful eyes. "I contemplate taking you to Raglan in August and
House of Steynes in September, if your aunts see fit not to withdraw
your invitation----"

"But how long is this going on?" Lady Barbara interrupted.

"I cannot permit any discussion," he answered in something that was half
a whisper and half a sigh.

Lady Barbara looked at him reflectively and went to her room. When she
came of age, in little more than a year's time, he would have no means
of coercing her. Without waiting a year she could go to Harry Manders
and demand to be given a part; he had offered her one in her own
duologue. But the tension of the last three weeks and the dazing
examination and attack at the inquest had left her uncertain of herself.
A day or two at the Abbey, even though she were snatched away in the
middle of the season, would give her time to find her bearings and
discover what people really thought of her.

The more she pondered, the deeper grew her bewilderment. If all had gone
well, the dash to Rickmansworth and back would have been regarded as a
wholly innocent diversion in the course of a tiresome evening; on her
return every one else would have regretted that he had not come too;
even the borrowing of the car was venial, for the owner refused to
accept any compensation, though the insurance company might well make
difficulties; even he regarded the expedition as a joke, which had
unhappily turned to tragedy, and was far sorrier that Lady Barbara
should have been upset than that the chauffeur should have been killed.

If the facts, then, were innocent, she was being persecuted by the
coroner and threatened with persecution by society at large for an
accident to which she had contributed nothing. The chauffeur was sober
enough to drive through dense traffic on the Harrow Road; Webster--she
remembered his words--had looked at his watch and said through the
speaking-tube, "You can let her out a bit now, I should think. We don't
want to keep you out too long." The charge that any one of them was
drunk would have been more insulting if it had been less grotesque. And
for this the coroner had suggested that she should be ostracized. And
her simple-minded father imagined that there were other simple-minded
souls who would take such a Jack-in-office at his own pontifical
valuation.

She almost hoped that they would, so that she might force them in
triumph to acknowledge her innocence. To start as an outcast and win her
way back was a dramatic dream which almost made her wish that she was
guilty. To become an outcast might be as dramatic as to rise from
obscurity to a pinnacle of fame.... Napoleon owed half his place in
history to St. Helena.

An undistracted fortnight at the Abbey cooled Lady Barbara's resentment
and checked the more romantic flights of her imagination. Her father's
judgement was clearly at fault; to run away was to admit herself in the
wrong. By the time that she had got herself into perspective, the season
was so near its end that she did not think it worth while to make a
demonstration and to occupy her room in Berkeley Square by force. But
the late summer and autumn lay before her, and, when her father came to
the Abbey for a week-end in July, she informed him that she had not yet
cancelled any of her arrangements for staying with friends.

"You will remain here till we go to the Riviera in February," he
answered.

"But, father, I'm not going to. This is quite serious. I've been here a
month without seeing a soul; I should go mad, if I had to vegetate for
another seven months. If you won't let me go, I'm afraid I must go
without your leave."

"That may not be as easy as you think."

"What d'you mean?"

Lord Crawleigh unlocked a red leather despatch-box, turned over his
files and produced a sheet of paper which he spread before her.

"This is a copy of a cable which your cousin has sent to his mother from
Surinam. I had intended taking you to House of Steynes, but that is out
of the question now."

_"Please arrange that Barbara and her friend are not admitted to my
house. This applies to Monmouthshire and Scotland as well as London."_

Lady Barbara handed back the paper and tried to laugh, but she knew
that her expression was out of control. If the news had reached Surinam,
it had reached every cable-station on the way; and the operators had
hardly done feasting themselves on the inquest before a message, signed
"Loring" and mentioning her by name, added a dainty titbit to the
savoury repast. Sooner or later it would be common property that her own
cousin had slammed his door in her face for fear of contamination; the
family would be divided into those who knew her and those who publicly
refused to know her; she would become a test-case for disreputability.

"Jim has his own standards of loyalty, hasn't he?" she commented and was
infuriated to find her voice trembling. "He's usually so keen on the
family that I shouldn't have thought he'd have wanted to take the whole
world into his confidence. One good thing, he can't call _me_
self-advertising after this. Have you seen the darling boy's mother? Is
she--_proud_ of him over this?"

"She was as much shocked as I was that you should have made it
necessary."

"I? Father, you can't make me responsible for _this_. But is she proud
of his chivalry? And I suppose _you_ didn't make a fight for me? I must
see her. I want to tell her about the accident." She pressed her hands
to cheeks which were still hollow from the anxiety of the last two
months and looked at her father over her finger-tips. "I'd never seen
any one killed before, I'd never seen a dead body; and I couldn't sleep
at night, because of it. I kept seeing that unhappy woman's face, too,
when I had to tell her that her husband was dead. I didn't ask for
sympathy, but I thought perhaps my own father and mother might have seen
that I wasn't exactly--enjoying myself, that I was ill, worried out of
my mind. If _I_ had a daughter, I should have felt for her, I think,
when a foul-mouthed little reptile hinted that she was _drunk_ and that
her _lover_ had helped her kill an innocent man for her own amusement.
Never a word! Do you know that for three weeks you only said
'Good-morning' to me, father? Even if I was guilty a hundred times over,
it wouldn't have compromised you to be sorry that I was suffering. I
don't complain. You at least left me alone. But Jim waits till I'm
beaten to my knees, waits till I'm bleeding--and then hits wherever he
can see a bruise or wound. That _wasn't_ necessary, father."

Lord Crawleigh rearranged his papers without answering. He was himself
so much humiliated by his nephew's cable that he had hardly thought how
it might affect Barbara. She was always most formidable when she stood,
as now, with drooping head, composed and subdued, speaking in an
undertone and rejecting in advance any sympathy that he might belatedly
offer her. She had learned in childhood to fight men with their own
weapons and to fall back on her sex when the battle was going against
her. He had seen her trading on pathos a hundred times with her mother
and aunts, using to full advantage a pose of tired frailty, a wistful
mouth and big eyes which filled with tears at will or flashed black with
indignation; she could droop her head and body until she looked like a
tortured martyr, or cough until she looked consumptive. Almost certainly
she was acting now, but her passion for romance and a dramatic impact
led her to act without knowing it.

"If you had behaved properly, this would not have happened," he threw
out with weak, inconsequent irritability.

"It's too late now. Are you going to House of Steynes? Do you allow
people to say that they'll be glad to see you on condition you don't
bring your daughter with you? And will you invite Amy and Aunt Eleanor
here to meet somebody who can't be admitted to their house?"

Lord Crawleigh had enough imagination to see the more obvious
consequences of his nephew's ultimatum; but he could not devise an
effective reply, and it was merely exasperating to have his own
disadvantage explored and stated by Barbara.

"I talked to your aunt. She says she daren't go against Jim's wishes.
After all, they're his houses. She's writing to him----"

"To intercede for me?" Lady Barbara interrupted scornfully. "When next I
enter House of Steynes, it will be on his invitation. And, before I
allow him to invite me, he will apologize."

"It's no use taking _that_ line," cried her father testily. Her last two
sentences had exceeded the probable limits of sincerity, and he swooped
before she could escape into a convincing pathos. "If _any one_ ought to
apologize----"

Lady Barbara caught sight of her reflection, full-length, in a mirror,
with her father fidgetting at her side. He looked insignificant, almost
ridiculous, with his domed forehead and straggling blonde moustache, his
short body and long legs. She wanted to make him see himself and to play
up to their two reflections like Metternich and L'Aiglon in the mirror
scene.

"I can only apologize for the fact of my existence," she sighed. "I was
_not_ responsible, father, and you know it. And, instead of standing up
for your own daughter, you let her be insulted. I can't do anything with
people who stab in the back, but I'm ready to meet every one! I _will_
meet them. If they want to insult me, they can insult me to my face."

The embargo on Lady Barbara's presence only extended to the houses
controlled by her cousin. In August she went to stay with Lady
Knightrider in Raglan and was received with demonstrative affection. A
gentle reaction had set in, inspired directly by Lord Crawleigh and
aided by all who felt that Jim Loring's precipitous cable had placed the
family in an intolerable position. Working in a sympathetic atmosphere,
Lady Barbara enlisted her aunt's support in a campaign which was to
rehabilitate her or at least to shew whether she stood in need of
rehabilitation. As soon as they returned to London for the autumn, Lady
Knightrider undertook to give a dance and to insist that Lady Loring
and Amy should come; if Jim were home by then, she would make him come,
too, and the whole ridiculous quarrel would be forgotten. Lady Barbara
intended to go farther than the settlement of a family difference. The
party should be a challenge to all who felt disposed to criticise her;
she was determined to appear side by side with Webster and to give them
their opportunity; and any one who declined to come would have to shew
convincing justification for his refusal.

The invitations were sent out six weeks in advance; Lady Knightrider
reasoned with those who made excuses, sent reminders to those who had
accepted and surrounded herself with a staff of energetic lieutenants.

"_You're_ coming on, Val, aren't you?" asked George Oakleigh
distractedly on the night of the ball, as he prowled hungrily through
the County Club with a list in his hand. He had undertaken to bring six
men and was bribing them beforehand with dinner.

"A doubt has crept in," Arden replied uncertainly. "One invitation may
be attributed to hospitality; four suggest panic."

"Well, if there are too few men, you'll be all the more popular; if
there are too many, you can go home early. Gerry, I'm counting on you."

Deganway paused for an instant on his way to the cloak-room.

"My dear, I wouldn't miss it for anything."

Oakleigh added a tick to his list and hurried after Jack Waring. They
were still disputing, when Eric Lane was announced.

"I don't dance, I can't talk and I want to go to bed," said Jack firmly.

"You can go after half an hour," Oakleigh promised.

"Well, I'll come for one cigar, if Eric comes too. I'm an old man,
George; I haven't been to a ball for ten years."

At eleven o'clock Oakleigh convoyed them securely into the drawing-room
of Lady Knightrider's house in South Street. By the test of numbers the
dance promised well, for the house was already crowded and Lady
Barbara's relations were in full attendance. Her triumph was left
incomplete by the absence of Webster, but he had been snubbed more than
once in the last few months and was waiting for time to heal his
reputation. She had spent the afternoon arguing with him until she felt
her dignity compromised, and the embers of her ill-humour smouldered
through the night.

By prearrangement Jack escaped to the smoking-room for a cigar, while
Eric unbosomed himself of news which had been choking him for three
days; Harry Manders had accepted a play, which was to be produced in the
following autumn; after eight years of disappointment the daydream was
being realized. They were still bandying congratulations and thanks,
when the smoking-room was invaded by Deganway and a girl.

"Isn't that the famous Lady Barbara Neave?" Eric whispered.

Jack half turned and shook his head.

"Don't ask me. I'm shortly starring at the Halls as the one man in the
world who doesn't know her and doesn't want to. I think it must be, all
the same. Gerry seems to be getting called over the coals for
something."

Lady Barbara's annoyance with Webster was spending itself on Deganway.
There were long silences, broken by deferential squeaks of small-talk
from him and restored by petulant rejoinders from her. She treated her
companion with a contempt that was almost insolent and jumped restlessly
to her feet, as the band began to tune up. Deganway hurried after her to
the door, and the calm of the smoking room was only disturbed by
half-heard music and the sound of high, rapid voices on the stairs. As
his second cigar burnt low, Jack looked at his watch and beckoned Eric
from his chair.

"Come and say good-bye; then you can drop me at the club," he
suggested.

They steered a tortuous and apologetic course through the couples seated
on the stairs and looked hopelessly for Lady Knightrider. In their
absence the drawing-room had filled to overflowing, and the landings and
balconies were packed to the limit of their capacity. As the next dance
started, Deganway entered, blinking in the light, from one of the open
French windows; Lady Barbara was still with him, but, as the music
began, she was claimed and taken away.

"First time I've ever seen you indulging in frivolities like this,