IV

That was two years before. And there I am, on that night two years

later, still in that taxi and running up an unconscionably high fare

towards Roger Poole's house in Regent's Park; and Antony back again in

England....

The intervening two years were full of an exaggeration of my state;

which in itself would have no importance for this tale but for the

reasons that caused it. Most of us, nowadays, seem, after all, to have

developed our emotions to a more, well, civilised plane than that of

mere constancy; an Armenian I know once told me that his father and

mother had loved each other for fifty years, but I shouldn't wonder if

that wasn't one more of those exaggerations for which oppressed peoples

are remarkable, so it must be almost unbelievable that a normal kind

of man could still be in a feverish state about a woman for so long a

time--and with, to be frank, so little for his trouble.

But there's no cynical twist about the thing, it is very easily

explained. One can't be dogmatic about the state of love, except just

to say that it is full of profoundly logical contradictions. For,

however serious you may be about your passions, you (you and I, I

mean; not odd people) cannot for ever go on plaguing a woman who is

not only so insensible to your attractions that she marries some one

else, but is actually happy with him when married. A belated sense of

humour must come to your rescue eventually, to point in a tired sort

of way at the rather ludicrous figure you cut to yourself, fussing

about with a passion that is of no earthly use to any one. Anyway, it

stands to reason that the appalling certainty of her happiness must

inevitably draw something from the fire of your love, so that it fades

and fades--unless, of course, you are a minor poet and worried with

your own sense of superiority and sonnets, in which case you will write

to her a cycle of the latter explaining the former, and choosing, if

possible, a date in another world when your bodies (both of which have

caused _you_ so much trouble) shall be rotten.

No: an unhappy love such as I speak of must be fed so that it can

continue; and, if by nothing positive, by what more acutely fed than by

her unhappiness? So, since it came about that Iris was unhappy, that

sufficiently explains my persistent love for her. But its exaggeration?

How can I hope to give any reason for that, but in my own fatuity? How

trivial it seems merely to say that there were moments, in that second

year of her marriage, when Iris gave me an acute sense of nearness,

of almost physical nearness; as though, in our destined journey, we

were every day nearing a point where the road would be so narrow that

perforce we must touch, where she and I would at last have to face each

other in a complete moment....

Not, however, that I knew anything of Iris's unhappiness for some

time--it had not outlasted her honeymoon, and yet her best friend

knew nothing of it for many months! Simply because, of course, it

is always the most tiresome of one's friends who confide in one....

Had I suspected that she might be unhappy I might have expected it

sooner. But, as it was, that first year of their marriage seemed to

confirm every hope one had for its success. A vivid, crowded year it

was--for Roger did do things supremely well! The original Poole money

had not been quite negligible, but from all one heard "the present

baronet" must have more than trebled it by lucky speculation (of course

there must always be those who slur away the "s" from that word)

and gambling; and his wife had brought him a considerable dowry. So

that he could and did let himself go, and indulged his passion for

entertaining in every sense in which that wretched word can possibly

rob people of their sleep.

The house in Regent's Park, with its large and decorous, too decorous,

rooms, and gardens down to the water (is it river or lake? One only saw

it at night, and then not very clearly, when it was either beautiful

or sombre) became a more frequent scene of parties than any other

responsible dwelling in London: a kind of holocaust of drink, cards,

and dancing from which one emerged an entirely different person to the

one who had entered a few hours before. One never entered that house

without drinking more than one had ever drunk before, the thing was

somehow in the atmosphere, and time over again one heard some poor

wretch tell another that he had never been so drunk since Oxford.

But the frequent parties were not merely rowdy affairs, though

rowdiness was never far absent for those who liked that sort of

thing. Roger, as I've said, knew what he was about; and now there

was forming around him, around the card-tables and the buffets, a

small but dominating nucleus of people whose serious purposes were

decently shielded, let's say, rather than submerged, by the riot and

extravagance of the passing moment. He was becoming, in fact, the

leader of a new old-school: and one as inimical to wasters as it was

indifferent to dullards. From the, after all, considerable eminence of

his means and position he was influencing the most promising of his

contemporaries and juniors to what he considered a useful, sympathetic,

and amusing mode of life: to think well and to live well, to live hard

and to work hard.... Not, if you look full at it, a very elevating

philosophy, not very original, since Haroun-al-Raschid lived and died

so many years ago. But, elevating or no, it was one with a deal of

practicable arrogance in it, and it is surprising how people will be

influenced by anything that appeals practicably to their arrogance.

And, I suppose, it is not so difficult as all that to influence people

to one's own conception of life if one has Roger Poole's advantages;

not only those of his means and his abilities but, as definitely,

of his looks and air; and, to top it all, the possession of such a

wife--an advantage more vivid and compelling than any he could find in

himself.

Of course I took it for granted that she was happy during that year!

She seemed supremely content--as why, one might ask, shouldn't she

be? Of all the men who had and might have come her way, Roger Poole,

in spite of his indulgences in cards and brandy-and-ginger-ale, was

certainly the most distinguished and eligible; and, what's more, the

most courteous and considerate of husbands, who so far forgot the

sardonic reticence one had thought natural to him as to seem, even in

public, always to be making love to his wife.

Personally, I found that year, full of Poole extravagance, so

entertaining that I think my vision of Iris, who since her marriage,

and her busy household's calls upon her time, came much less often to

see me in the afternoons, must have been as much confused by the gaiety

and bustle always round her, as by her hypocrisy about the thing. She

was, I think, as perfect a hostess as ever made a demand on one's time

(for I, her old friend, was allowed no excuse by which to absent myself

from any gathering whatsoever. Who else, said she, could give her the

necessary confidence in herself?) She evoked gaiety. And how bald

that sentence seems when I mean it to imply the elation caused in me,

anyway, by the mere sight of that figure here and there about the now

faintly and now brilliantly lit, whitepanelled rooms of that familiar

house. And her hair, that wanton, tawny hair! It was so cunningly

contrived of rich amber colours that it was always the most noticeable

ornament in the richest room; there was about it some curious and

wondrous quality of bedizening itself to suit and startle the various

pleasures of every eye, even the most accustomed, that traced its vivid

course round a crowded room.

It was not until almost the middle of the second year after her

marriage that Iris again began to come more or less frequently to see

me in the afternoons; but even then several weeks had to pass before I

came to realise, and ever so dimly, what lay behind her quietness and

silences, to understand the splendid, to me, faith which she put in my

companionship.... What had from the first drawn me to her, as to one

different from her tiresome and worldly friends, was that she was never

noisy in her personal relations. And so, when she now again came to see

me after the lapse of that feverish year I had allowed myself, I was

slow to see the difference in her usual quietness and silence, slow to

find sadness where I had ceased to suspect any.

She never told me anything. That was ever the worst of Iris, she never

did tell one anything, anything _actual_, I mean. She said not a word

about her unhappiness until one day I rather violently taxed her

with it, and then she seemed surprised that I should ask so obvious

a question: that I had not realised for myself the reasons for her

failure to capture happiness. She actually seemed to imply that I, her

friend, had eyes to see! whereas, God knows, I had little else but a

heart to feel....

What a plague to us our friend's reticence can be! No one can well

have suffered more from it than I with Iris throughout that time--she,

so well versed in that unselfish philosophy of trusting but never

burdening a friend; an unselfishness a little unfair to the friend, I

think, for he is crowned with friendship's laurels without ever being

allowed to pay for them with service. But such was Iris, with her

philosophy of barricades.... "No one," said she, "can ever really help

one, except, of course, in fetching one a taxi and the like. No one can

ever help one to do the odd jobs of the heart and mind. It isn't to be

expected. One must work out everything for oneself. There's no real

help from outside, it must all come to us from ourselves--though when

and how, for I've had mighty little of it."

But I suppose she was right in choosing her own language of silence.

For one doesn't, as she said, talk about hell in the Fourth

Dimension.... I grew to know quite well enough what it was all about.

She could have added nothing to my knowledge but the details of

disagreements and the like, which are so often apt to be as mean in

repetition as in fact. And she spared me all that at the risk of my

impatience--and of much more, she once confided to me later. Dear Iris!

How very much good a little more conceit would have done you! you who

looked so like an autocrat but never ceased to wonder at the admiration

men paid you....

It was Roger Poole who mainly perplexed me. A particular conceit

of mine, in fact, received now a sharp rebuff; for, owing to my

long familiarity with them, it was always with something of inner

superiority that I had listened to any mention of Poole extravagances,

thinking that I had measured the brothers with some profundity--to

discover now that I had known nothing but the outward complexion of

anyway one of them! How could one view him squarely?

But how can a man ever get a whole perspective of another without, as

it were, the bedroom key to his passions? _In vino veritas_ may be a

good enough test of drunkards by topers, but _in amore veritas_ is

surely the very secret of the sphinx, be he drunk or sober. I once

heard it said of a popular French Society _abbé_ that "there's no man

in France who is more confided in by people who hate each other";

and at the time I thought rather dismally that I had missed my

vocation--for, in my small way, the same has happened to me throughout

my life; and had I had an orderly mind I might have weaved the

intricacies of other peoples' emotions into a famous book, instead of

letting them settle into the deplorable chaos which they have always

been. But I do know this, that I would know even less than I do of

women if I had ever listened to what men said of them, and nothing at

all of men if I hadn't listened very attentively to what women said of

them. But Iris said almost nothing at all to explain the perversities

of this particular man; except, once, that his nerves were as tight and

taut as violin strings, and "sometimes so suddenly tuneless that it is

difficult to remember what a very precious violin it really is."

In spite of the fact that her mother was passing a very pleasant

middle age in widely bewailing that Iris was wasting her youth, that

Iris didn't like nor love any one, not even her husband--"that child

doesn't like any one, you know! She is so contemptuous!" she'd say

brilliantly--Iris, under a becoming air of inaccessibility which could

rather appall one, hid an ability to love utterly--such as would quite

have shocked those who inveighed against her coldness! And perhaps

that hidden warmth of desire in her, the human but divine possibility

of absolute surrender, must have been why her very presence in a room

so often disturbed one. And now, to Roger! She had given it all to him,

the whole surrender--that thing, so warmly full of potentiality, had

been all given to him. A marvellous box of tricks to open, each passion

to unwind its mystic and craved-for gift! If only he could have taken

her love but a tithe so generously as she had given it! And she never

dreaming that he wouldn't....

Whether it was from a colossal conceit or from a meanness of vision,

he seemed actually not to believe in her love--or, if this was a mad

world, he seemed to want more! And he disbelieved not humbly, but with

that sharpened scepticism which leaves so lasting a stain--and if he

wanted more, he wanted silently, else maybe he had incited her to the

bitterest rebellion of all: of telling him that she could love him no

more than she already did, were she Psyche and he Cupid in Apuleius's

book. He was that difficult kind of man (difficult, anyway, in a

woman's first adventure) who never says "I love you," will rather say

anything else than that; seeming, perversely, always to be waiting for

something else, some further revelation. He was like a wall jagged

here and there with sharp flints, against which Iris, in those first

months, had hopefully then blindly thrown herself and her love, only

to be hurt. He hurt her always, and inexplicably.... Indeed there's

no pride in any love worthy of the name. Pride is just an imp, the

very last of last resources, to be only used when all those gentler

attributes of love have failed--for if love is humbled too far, then

pride must become a part of it.

She had felt, even before her marriage, that there were queer depths in

Roger which might sometimes make him a little ... unexpected. And, of

course, difficult. She might, with this man, have to waive the slight

advantage a woman has in loving a gentleman rather than, say, a Dago,

which is that a gentleman more or less does what is expected of him, a

dull advantage, which Iris's thoughts very easily waived aside, for she

was quick to allow as wide a licence for other people's improbabilities

as she expected them to allow her. But she hadn't dreamt that the

queerest of these, in him, could take so grotesque a shape as cruelty!

For, however refined as an art cruelty may become, there is something

vulgar and stupid in it as a trait, it must always be the very

opposite of the immaculate--and that, as a man and as a lover, Roger

had seemed to be. That idea of him, as essentially immaculate, had

helped to compel her to him. And so now, hurt her as his cruelty did,

it jarred and shocked her even more--that an illusion should have gone

so distastefully awry!

There was the perversity of the man--to love, as it were, upside-down.

He could not accept a thing as it was, he must dominate and improve

it, he in his own way! The joy and gaiety of just loving and being

loved seemed to be meaningless to him--a wondrous deficiency in a man

who made so brave a show of pleasure seeking! And so, jeering at her

spontaneity, sneering at her "effusion"--Iris "effusive"!--dominating

her with his sardonic humours, he gradually subdued her. "Subduing"

people doesn't depend on your strength but on the other's weakness; and

Iris had the terrible weakness of being too easily saddened, too easily

influenced to credit that ever-present sense of the inutility and

worthlessness of herself as compared to everything and every one; the

most weakening trait of all for oneself, the most maddening for one's

friends....

There was, then, this much excuse for him, that this weakness in Iris's

nature acted as a kind of counterpart to his perversity. It was as

though from all the world of fair women Iris had been chosen to bring

out and accentuate Roger's great faults, as though from all the world

of men who would have cherished her Roger Poole had been chosen as the

only one who could belittle her and her love. If only she had been of

a more stalwart confidence in herself, if only she had less easily

given way to the subjection of herself before her high standards of

worth! But, as she was, the nerve of her weakness once touched, she

acted as a direct challenge to Roger's peculiar cruelty; which was

of just the malevolent kind to confirm her in the belief, not only

of his worthlessness, but of her own--this man who saw through her

and despised her! How very treacherously your sadnesses treated you,

Iris....

Once, in that second year, after one more of those scenes which now her

"coldness" caused as once had her "effusiveness," she made a rather

feeble attempt to leave him, but he called her back; which, somehow, he

easily could, for there was always that magnetism about him for her,

compelling her to him almost bodily.... For three weeks he had left

her in peace and without a sign, at the friend's house in the country

to which she had gone, saying blindly that she would never return to

him; and then, one day, he had turned up after lunch, and with no

resistance but that of a set face she had gone back to London with him.

So, in his perverse way, it seemed that he loved her, or rather that

she was necessary to him; (Iris told me later that she never really

doubted her attraction for him. But these things are too strange and

too subtle for me).

He seemed to have need of her presence, always. She must be always

there. If she were indisposed there would be no parties in Regent's

Park, since he seemed to enjoy no gathering of people in his house

without her vivid presence.... I went as seldom as I could to his

parties during that second year, but even so remarked how often his

eyes followed her round a room, though he might not speak to her nor

dance with her for hours on end; and if he did not dance with her he

danced with no one else--he never had since the first time they had

danced together; and, though she still lost as consistently as ever

at any games of hazard that might be played, he seemed always to be

brighter and sharper for her presence about the table.

He was a Pasha kind of man, Iris told me later; which would not have

been so difficult to deal with if he had been consistent about it. But

she never knew where she was, for he would let her be for weeks on

end, while she lunched here and dined there, danced with this man and

with that--and then, suddenly, blaze out into a fury of, presumably,

jealousy; a cold kind of fury, in which bitter abuse was couched in

liveliest terms and his opinion of her, and himself, defined with that

outrageous clearness peculiar to scientists and sadists. Heaven only

knows how she stood it at all--but then Heaven is our only really

discreet friend, and never tells.

V

The reason why I was so late in going to the party at Roger's house

that sultry night in June was that I hadn't up to the last moment

intended to go. And, as I paid off the cab before the house, was still

uncertain enough to hesitate--until I suddenly had an acute feeling

that I simply couldn't bear the crowd inside, all those usual and

vivacious faces; that I couldn't bear the idea of the large rooms and

noisy groups here and there, nor of Roger and his cultivated smile, nor

of Iris in that confounded _gallère_. I may go in later, I told myself,

thinking it would be a more pleasant folly to smoke a cigarette in the

gardens behind the house. An ugly Victorian house, large and flabby,

and an illiterate garden, I grumbled, but as I skirted the front to it

I had to admit that for all its poverty and disorder it was a queerly

attractive garden, a very special garden. Its hundred yards or so of

length sloped in an absent-minded way down to the water, but where one

would have expected an immaculate lawn for the cultivation of afternoon

tea were only patches of grass traversed erratically by paths that led

to nowhere in particular, and adorned by random trees and bushes that

always might just as well have been anywhere else; a garden without any

conscience even at night-time, and with scarcely any flowers, because,

said Roger, a garden in London needs no flowers to be wonderful....

I blessed the little spots of rain that had been falling for some time,

for there would be none of the usual wanderers about the place. There

would be nothing but the garden's own silent and sombre contrast to the

rattling and bumpy music that gesticulated at one through the wide open

French windows of the ballroom. And the noise of that music was as the

noise of a leering destiny, from which there could be no escape but

only an occasional release....

A pleasant spectacle, this, from my dark station under an elm, but for

a mind clouded with discontents and futile longings; the three large

windows of brilliant light, in which were framed the passing figures of

young people, here and there a very fair face reflecting the serious

abandon of suiting steps to a tireless measure: those sidelong steps of

the modern dance which I, anyway, find so much more attractive than the

steps of the waltz, which is still regretted by people with listless

feet and superior minds who take themselves but not dancing seriously.

But now I had no pleasure from the spectacle, I only wished, and

heartily, that the room was empty of its music and people, empty of all

but Iris ... to whom, if miracles could happen at all, I would enter

suddenly and brave her startled gaze with my love-making, and take her.

But the most wonderful thing about miracles is that they never happen,

so I could do nothing but stare at her as far as I could disjointly

see her among the moving crowd; a creature of green and gold that

night, for her dress was of jade, and her hair, I thought, couldn't

of course be but gold to ornament it fittingly; so that, I said, she

will always be her own carnival, even in a desolate place. And once

again, with that white face under hair which seemed that night more

than ever barbaric in its splendour, she gave me that feeling of her as

a strange thing from some wild legend, a woman of doubt and desire so

consummately human as to be almost inhuman: tamed into life just for

this moment, but only for this moment, without a why nor whence nor

whither....

Thoughts, such vain thoughts as those, are apt to engross one's mind

and very senses so utterly as to shut out for a few moments the whole

noise of the world. So now, as I stood under the darkness of my tree,

even the rustling turmoil of the ballroom must have become lulled by

the vagaries of my thoughts, for it was out of the deepest silence that

suddenly a voice behind my shoulder, as though from the trunk of the

tree, asked softly:--

"And is the wise sentinel posted to keep the fools in or to keep the

fools out?"

With a start I found behind me--Antony! a huge looming figure, his head

bent to avoid the branches, a gleam of white shirt front and a red

face, smiling impishly down at me. My utter surprise involuntarily took

the shape of his simile, and I couldn't help saying: "The sentinel is

the biggest fool of all, Antony, but he's going to stay outside." ...

But as I looked at him, his eyes fixed over my shoulder at the

ballroom, his suddenly furtive appearance, the shameless espionage of

it, angered me, and I added: "One way and another we seem to be seeing

a good deal of each other to-night, don't we?"

"Um," said Antony, but his eyes didn't heed me.

"If that's your way of asking me why the hell I'm here," he said,

"--then, Ronnie, the answer is that you do get in the way so to-night.

"And, anyway," he asked, "why are _you_ here?"

"Simply because I suddenly thought I wouldn't go in--"

"Oh, stuff--you are in love with Iris, my boy," he suddenly threw at

me. "I've acquired a taste for plain-speaking, you see," he added as I

stared at him.

"What you needed was a touch of decency," I could only suggest.

"You only say that because you think you have a reputation to keep up,"

he said wearily. "Why on earth shouldn't you be in love with Iris if

you want to be? I am."

Verily, Red Antony had changed in two years! It was never his way

before to tell the truth about himself. And now ... or was it, my

confusion asked, just a fancy on his part, born that moment of a

desire to disturb me. His vanity had always inclined him to disturb and

startle, whether by a lie or by a truth. And one is always confounded

by the sudden froth of a fool's mind.

"Anyway, it's the sort of thing one keeps to oneself," I said,--lamely,

I suppose. He had so much of an advantage over one in any unseemly

discussion.

"Remarkable amount of good that seems to have done you," he quizzed me,

mildly. But he seemed to be taking as little heed of me as what he said

to me, his attention was all for the windows of the ballroom. There

was something pitiable about the way his eyes followed the scene from

our vantage, as any poor alien might bitterly watch the revelries of a

strange country.

"I heard this afternoon," he said, "that there was a party here

to-night--and when I saw you on Piccadilly I knew where you must be

going, so I suddenly thought I'd come too. Just to have a look at my

betters enjoying themselves, you know.

"If you were a human being instead of a gentleman," he said steadily,

"you'd be telling a man something. You'd tell him, for instance, if the

marriage is a success, and if Iris is happy, and what her recreations

are, and so on. Wouldn't you now?"

"Oh, Antony, what a dolt you are!" I told him. "If you'd only approach

a man properly, without any of that bluff and bluster that so gets on

one's nerves, one might tell you quite a lot."

In spite of that, however--"that candour peculiar to habitual liars who

read novels"--I was thinking very hard about what exactly I would tell

him about Iris, for Antony evoked the truth as little as he indulged in

it.

"Of course the marriage is a success," I said. "And as to Iris being

happy I've never seen any reason to doubt it."

"So long as she's got health, beauty, riches, sort of thing, eh!" he

added with a laugh. "I just wondered, that's all. Mexico is the devil

of a country for wondering in...."

I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly three. The ballroom was

deserted, and I could imagine the crowd in the supper-room.... I would

make some excuse to Iris to-morrow, I thought, and suggested to Antony

that we might have a last drink at my flat, so that he could tell me

some of his news.

The decanter was empty and the night done when at last Antony left

me--having told me many amusing tales of his experiences in Mexico and

the West, in which of course he was always the first mover and main

_motif_; and that he had come back to England with many good ideas of

how to make certain money, if he could only find the capital. "We must

talk seriously about all that one of these days, Ronnie," said he.

As a matter of fact, Antony's frequent ideas for making fortunes--out

of the mugs, of course--weren't quite the silly vapourings of the usual

waster, for he had a strain of financial genius which, if he could but

have concentrated on anything, might long ago have made him a rich

man. And so now I was less sceptical about his ability than about his

seriousness.

"And is brother Roger as rich as he was?" he had asked me.

"Well, he seems to manage very well. But one never really knows about

Roger," I said. "There's always rumours, of course, that he's stacked

money on a horse, an oil well, or a silver mine; but he never shows any

excitement about it."

"That," said Antony, "is because he's lucky. Plucky too, but mainly

lucky." ...

"But about you--how on earth are you going to live? and at the Carlton?"

"For a wonder they dealt me some good cards now and then," he vaguely

explained, with a laugh. "And when that's gone--well, I must make some

more, that's all, Ronnie. And, bless your heart, there's always you to

lend a man a fiver, so I won't starve."

I was not surprised when Antony, with his wonted casual neglect of such

things, did not turn up to lunch the next day. But I was surprised to

hear why--from Iris, later in the afternoon.

"And so that's why you didn't come to the party last night," she

accused me as she came in.

She had been bewildered that morning by an unfamiliar voice on the

telephone, but of course he had not needed to stress the fact that

he was a "relation by marriage" before she had guessed who he was;

and had lunched with him at Kettner's. And she was in one of those

matter-of-fact moods which made it difficult to discover if she was

very pleased or not by Antony's re-appearance.

"He was very nice," she said, "and full of a thousand and odd things

to say, and some of them very odd indeed. Like a boy back home for the

holidays, he seems...."

"The sort of boy some one I know by sight wouldn't like to meet again

on a dark night in a bad temper," I threw in, reminiscently.

"My dear, you are getting very difficult!" she protested. "And you

weren't very nice to poor Antony last night, maybe, for he said he had

found you a trifle suspicious."

"I suspicious! Why, the man's full of it, he throws the stuff about

like ink--he's suspicious even of me, the only friend he's got!"

"You had better glower at him not at me, Ronnie. And anyway, he's quite

changed now, you will soon not be able to see him for tea-parties and

the like! There's two lots of people in the world, he said, those who

take tea and those who don't; you can either have your headache from

boredom or from drink--and Antony is now going to try the first kind."

And as I stared rather satirically at her, Iris suddenly sat up in her

chair and became very serious. "It's quite true, Ronnie--and if you're

the man you've led me to believe you are, you will take a hand and

help. The poor man realises he has made a horrible mess of his life,

and he realises that it hasn't been worth it. He's tired of wandering,

and he's tired of being an outsider...."

"You don't mean to tell me he said that!"

"Not in those very words," she admitted, "but he was very sweet and

pathetic, and I think he might be given a chance...."

"A chance at what?" I asked bluntly.

"Well, whatever it is men are given a chance about. Don't, please, be

thick-headed, Ronnie. I suppose he wants to get back."

"What, into the divorce court again!"

Iris jumped up from her chair, and there was no smile on the face she

turned to me.

"I think you are being horrible about him, perfectly beastly. And you

say you are a friend of his!..."

"Iris, for the Lord's sake don't let us get dramatic about Antony--and

we can't do it half so well as he can, anyway." And as she turned away

with that little grimace of contempt that she reserved for peculiarly

tiresome people, I got up from my chair the better to defend myself.

And I was getting very hot and bothered about the whole thing, too.

"Don't you see that it's exactly because I'm a friend of his and know

him pretty well that I know all this 'getting back' talk is simply

stuff?" I put to her. "My dear, I've been 'sympathetic' about Antony

for years, but it's never done him or myself any good--simply because

there's never one circumstance in life when he will give up his

vanities and bravadoes, he's so full of silly contempt that he will

never even compromise. It's not possible to help a man who won't help

himself...."

"The one after that in my copy-book was 'every cloud has a silver

lining,'" Iris said dangerously.

"You are being unfair about Antony," she said. "You aren't allowing for

the least change in him since he went away. And you are judging him

entirely by his old weaknesses, without giving him any credit for new

thoughts and--and longings...." I couldn't help grimly thinking of the

quickly emptied decanter the night before, but I didn't interrupt. Iris

is following a theory, I thought, and she won't find herself out until

she has made a pet-dog of it and it makes a mess of her cushions.

"It's a perfectly human desire to want to get back into the world," she

said. "Not, of course, the silly dull world, but that of affairs and

the like. The city, for instance...."

"Anyway, Iris, your intentions are very honourable--but what are you

going to do about it? How will you begin?"

"Isn't it perfectly obvious that to begin with he and Roger must make

up their wretched quarrel or whatever it is?" she rather impatiently

put to me. "I've always thought it absurd and childish, this civil

war kind of thing, but now I think it's horrible too--the rich brother

not even allowing the poor one into his house! Like silly schoolboys

playing a cruel game...." she added desperately.