"Oh, then your friend knows Lady Holme?"

"He did once. I believe he isn't allowed to now. Ah, here is Carey!"

A quick step was audible on the stairs, the door was opened, and a broad, middle-sized young man, with red hair, a huge red moustache and fierce red-brown eyes, entered swiftly with an air of ruthless determination.

"I came, but I shall be devilish bad company to-night," he said at once, looking at Sir Donald.

"We'll cheer you up. Let me introduce you to Sir Donald Ulford--Mr.

Rupert Carey."

Carey shook Sir Donald by the hand.

"Glad to meet you," he said abruptly. "I've carried your Persian poems round the world with me. They lay in my trunk cheek by jowl with God-forsaken, glorious old Omar."

A dusky red flush appeared in Sir Donald's hollow cheeks.

"Really," he said, with obvious embarrassment, "I--they were a great failure. 'Obviously the poems of a man likely to be successful in dealing with finance,' as _The Times_ said in reviewing them."

"Well, in the course of your career you've done some good things for England financially, haven't you?--not very publicly, perhaps, but as a minister abroad."

"Yes. To come forward as a poet was certainly a mistake."

"Any fool could see the faults in your book. True Persia all the same though. I saw all the faults and read 'em twenty times."

He flung himself down in the big armchair. Sir Donald could see now that there was a shining of misery in his big, rather ugly, eyes.

"Where have you two been?" he continued, with a directness that was almost rude.

"Dining with the Holmes," answered Pierce.

"That ruffian! Did she sing?"

"Yes, twice."

"Wish I'd heard her. Here am I playing Saul without a David. Many people there?"

"Several. Lady Cardington--"

"That white-haired enchantress! There's a Niobe--weeping not for her children, she never had any, but for her youth. She is the religion of half Mayfair, though I don't know whether she's got a religion. Men who wouldn't look at her when she was sixteen, twenty-six, thirty-six, worship her now she's sixty. And she weeps for her youth! Who else?"

"Mrs. Wolfstein."

"A daughter of Israel; coarse, intelligent, brutal to her reddened finger-tips. I'd trust her to judge a singer, actor, painter, writer.

But I wouldn't trust her with my heart or half a crown."

"Lady Manby."

"Humour in petticoats. She's so infernally full of humour that there's no room in her for anything else. I doubt if she's got lungs. I'm sure she hasn't got a heart or a brain."

"But if she is so full of humour," said Sir Donald mildly, "how does she--?"

"How does a great writer fail over an addition sum? How does a man who speaks eight languages talk imbecility in them all? How is it that a bird isn't an angel? I wish to Heaven we knew. Well, Robin?"

"Of course, Mr. Bry."

Carey's violent face expressed disgust in every line.

"One of the most finished of London types," he exclaimed. "No other city supplies quite the same sort of man to take the colour out of things.

He's enormously clever, enormously abominable, and should have been strangled at birth merely because of his feet. Why he's not Chinese I can't conceive; why he dines out every night I can. He's a human cruet-stand without the oil. He's so monstrously intelligent that he knows what a beast he is, and doesn't mind. Not a bad set of people to talk with, unless Lady Holme was in a temper and you were next to her, or you were left stranded with Holme when the women went out of the dining-room."

"You think Holme a poor talker?" asked Sir Donald.

"Precious poor. His brain is muscle-bound, I believe. Robin, you know I'm miserable to-night you offer me nothing to drink."

"I beg your pardon. Help yourself. And, Sir Donald, what will you--?"

"Nothing, thank you."

"Try one of those cigars."

Sir Donald took one and lit it quietly, looking at Carey, who seemed to interest him a good deal.

"Why are you miserable, Carey?" said Pierce, as the former buried his moustache in a tall whisky-and-soda.

"Because I'm alive and don't want to be dead. Reason enough."

"Because you're an unmitigated egoist," rejoined Pierce.

"Yes, I am an egoist. Introduce me to a man who is not, will you?"

"And what about women?"

"Many women are not egoists. But you have been dining with one of the most finished egoists in London to-night."

"Lady Holme?" said Sir Donald, shifting into the left-hand corner of the sofa.

"Yes, Viola Holme, once Lady Viola Grantoun; whom I mustn't know any more."

"I'm not sure that you are right, Carey," said Pierce, rather coldly.

"What!"

"Can a true and perfect egoist be in love?"

"Certainly. Is not even an egoist an animal?"

Pierce's lips tightened for a second, and his right hand strained itself round his knee, on which it was lying.

"And how much can she be in love?"