"Very much."

"Do you mean with her body?"

"Yes, I do; and with the spirit that lives in it. I don't believe there's any life but this. A church is more fantastic to me than the room in which Punch belabours Judy. But I say that there is spirit in lust, in hunger, in everything. When I want a drink my spirit wants it.

Viola Holme's spirit--a flame that will be blown out at death--takes part in her love for that great brute Holme. And yet she's one of the most pronounced egoists in London."

"Do you care to tell us any reason you may have for saying so?" said Sir Donald.

As he spoke, his voice, brought into sharp contrast with the changeful and animated voice of Carey, sounded almost preposterously thin and worn out.

"She is always conscious of herself in every situation, in every relation of life. While she loves even she thinks to herself, 'How beautifully I am loving!' And she never forgets for a single moment that she is a fascinating woman. If she were being murdered she would be saying silently, while the knife went in, 'What an attractive creature, what an unreplaceable personage they are putting an end to!'"

"Rupert, you are really too absurd!" exclaimed Pierce, laughing reluctantly.

"I'm not absurd. I see straight. Lady Holme is an egoist--a magnificent, an adorable egoist, fine enough in her brilliant selfishness to stand quite alone."

"And you mean to tell us that any woman can do that?" exclaimed Pierce.

"Who am I that I should pronounce a verdict upon the great mystery? What do I know of women?"

"Far too much, I'm afraid," said Pierce.

"Nothing, I have never been married, and only the married man knows anything of women. The Frenchmen are wrong. It is not the mistress who informs, it is the loving wife. For me the sex remains mysterious, like the heroine of my realm of dreams."

"You are talking great nonsense, Rupert."

"I always do when I am depressed, and I am very specially depressed to-night."

"But why? There must be some very special reason."

"There is. I, too, dined out and met at dinner a young man whose one desire in life appears to be to deprive living creatures of life."

Sir Donald moved slightly.

"You're not a sportsman, then, Mr. Carey?" he said.

"Indeed, I am. I've shot big game, the Lord forgive me, and found big pleasure in doing it. Yet this young man depressed me. He was so robust, so perfectly happy, so supremely self-satisfied, and, according to his own account, so enormously destructive, that he made me feel very sick.

He is married. He married a widow who has an ear-trumpet and a big shooting in Scotland. If she could be induced to crawl in underwood, or stand on a cairn against a skyline, I'm sure he'd pot at her for the fun of the thing."

"What is his name?" asked Sir Donald.

"I didn't catch it. My host called him Leo. He has--"

"Ah! He is my only son."

Pierce looked very uncomfortable, but Carey replied calmly:

"Really. I wonder he hasn't shot you long ago."

Sir Donald smiled.

"Doesn't he depress you?" added Carey.

"He does, I'm sorry to say, but scarcely so much as I depress him."

"I think Lady Holme would like him."

For once Sir Donald looked really expressive, of surprise and disgust.

"Oh, I can't think so!" he said.

"Yes, yes, she would. She doesn't care honestly for art-loving men. Her idea of a real man, the sort of man a woman marries, or bolts with, or goes off her head for, is a huge mass of bones and muscles and thews and sinews that knows not beauty. And your son would adore her, Sir Donald.

Better not let him, though. Holme's a jealous devil."

"Totally without reason," said Pierce, with a touch of bitterness.

"No doubt. It's part of his Grand Turk nature. He ought to possess a Yildiz. He's out of place in London where marital jealousy is more unfashionable than pegtop trousers."

He buried himself in his glass. Sir Donald rose to go.

"I hope I may see you again," he said rather tentatively at parting. "I am to be found in the Albany."

They both said they would call, and he slipped away gently.

"There's a sensitive man," said Carey when he had gone. "A sort of male Lady Cardington. Both of them are morbidly conscious of their age and carry it about with them as if it were a crime. Yet they're both worth knowing. People with that temperament who don't use hair-dye must have grit. His son's awful."

"And his poems?"

"Very crude, very faulty, very shy, but the real thing. But he'll never publish anything again. It must have been torture to him to reveal as much as he did in that book. He must find others to express him, and such as him, to the world."

"Lady Holmes?"

"_Par exemple_. Deuced odd that while the dumb understand the whole show the person who's describing it quite accurately to them often knows nothing about it. Paradox, irony, blasted eternal cussedness of life!

Did you ever know Lady Ulford?"

"No."

"She was a horse-dealer's daughter."

"Rupert!"

"On my honour! One of those women who are all shirt and collar and nattiness, with a gold fox for a tie-pin and a hunting-crop under the arm. She was killed schooling a horse in Mexico after making Ulford shy and uncomfortable for fifteen years. Lady Cardington and a Texas cowboy would have been as well suited to one another. Ulford's been like a wistful ghost, they tell me, ever since her death. I should like to see him and his son together."

A hard and almost vicious gleam shone for as instant in his eyes.

"You're as cruel as a Spaniard at a bull-fight."

"My boy, I've been gored by the bull."