"In what way?"

She was almost affronted.

"What becomes of me? Oh, I don't know. And it doesn't matter, not to anybody but myself."

"What becomes of anybody, anyhow? We live till we die. What do you want?"

"Why, I keep saying I want to get married and feel sure of something.

But I don't know--I feel dreadful sometimes--as if every minute would be the last. I keep going on and on--I don't know what for--and IT keeps going on and on--goodness knows what it's all for."

"You shouldn't bother yourself," he said. "You should just let it go on and on--"

"But I MUST bother," she said. "I must think and feel--"

"You've no occasion," he said.

"How--?" she said, with a sudden grunting, unhappy laugh. Then she lit a cigarette.

"No," she said. "What I should really like more than anything would be an end of the world. I wish the world would come to an end."

He laughed, and poured his drops of brandy down his throat.

"It won't, for wishing," he said.

"No, that's the awful part of it. It'll just go on and on-- Doesn't it make you feel you'd go mad?"

He looked at her and shook his head.

"You see it doesn't concern me," he said. "So long as I can float by myself."

"But ARE you SATISFIED!" she cried.

"I like being by myself--I hate feeling and caring, and being forced into it. I want to be left alone--"

"You aren't very polite to your hostess of the evening," she said, laughing a bit miserably.

"Oh, we're all right," he said. "You know what I mean--"

"You like your own company? Do you?--Sometimes I think I'm nothing when I'm alone. Sometimes I think I surely must be nothing--nothingness."

He shook his head.

"No," he said. "No. I only want to be left alone."

"Not to have anything to do with anybody?" she queried ironically.

"Not to any extent."

She watched him--and then she bubbled with a laugh.

"I think you're funny," she said. "You don't mind?"

"No--why--It's just as you see it.--Jim Bricknell's a rare comic, to my eye."

"Oh, him!--no, not actually. He's self-conscious and selfish and hysterical. It isn't a bit funny after a while."

"I only know what I've seen," said Aaron. "You'd both of you like a bloody revolution, though."

"Yes. Only when it came he wouldn't be there."

"Would you?"

"Yes, indeed I would. I would give everything to be in it. I'd give heaven and earth for a great big upheaval--and then darkness."

"Perhaps you'll get it, when you die," said Aaron.

"Oh, but I don't want to die and leave all this standing. I hate it so."

"Why do you?"

"But don't you?"

"No, it doesn't really bother me."

"It makes me feel I can't live."

"I can't see that."

"But you always disagree with one!" said Josephine. "How do you like Lilly? What do you think of him?"

"He seems sharp," said Aaron.

"But he's more than sharp."

"Oh, yes! He's got his finger in most pies."

"And doesn't like the plums in any of them," said Josephine tartly.

"What does he do?"

"Writes--stories and plays."

"And makes it pay?"

"Hardly at all.--They want us to go. Shall we?" She rose from the table.

The waiter handed her her cloak, and they went out into the blowy dark night. She folded her wrap round her, and hurried forward with short, sharp steps. There was a certain Parisian _chic_ and mincingness about her, even in her walk: but underneath, a striding, savage suggestion as if she could leg it in great strides, like some savage squaw.

Aaron pressed his bowler hat down on his brow.