Pierce was silent for a minute. He thought of Lady Holme's white-rose complexion and of the cessation of Carey's acquaintance with the Holmes.

No one seemed to know exactly why Carey went to the house in Cadogan Square no more.

"For God's sake give me another drink, Robin, and make it a stiff one."

Pierce poured out the whisky and thought:

"Could it have been that?"

Carey emptied the tumbler and heaved a long sigh.

"When d'you go back to Rome?"

"Beginning of July."

"You'll be there in the dead season."

"I like Rome then. The heat doesn't hurt me and I love the peace.

Antiquity seems to descend upon the city in August, returning to its own when America is far away."

Carey stared at him hard.

"A rising diplomatist oughtn't to live in the past," he said bluntly.

"I like ruins."

"Unless they're women."

"If I loved a woman I could love her when she became what is called a ruin."

"If you were an old man who had crumbled gradually with her."

"As a young man, too. I was discussing--or rather flitting about, dinner-party fashion--that very subject to-night."

"With whom?"

"Viola."

"The deuce! What line did you take?"

"That one loves--if one loves--the kernel, not the shell."

"And she?"

"You know her--the opposite."

"Ah!"

"And you, Carey?"

"I! I think if the shell is a beautiful shell and becomes suddenly broken it makes a devil of a lot of difference in what most people think of the kernel."

"It wouldn't to me."

"I think it would."

"You take Viola's side then?"

"And when did I ever do anything else? I'm off."

He got up, nodded good-night, and was gone in a moment. Pierce heard him singing in a deep voice as he went down the stairs, and smiled with a faint contempt.

"How odd it is that nobody will believe a man if he's fool enough to hint at the truth of his true self," he thought. "And Carey--who's so clever about people!"

CHAPTER III

WHEN the last guest had grimaced at her and left the drawing-room, Lady Holme stood with her hand on the mantelpiece, facing a tall mirror. She was alone for the moment. Her husband had accompanied Mrs. Wolfstein downstairs, and Lady Holme could hear his big, booming voice below, interrupted now and then by her impudent soprano. She spoke English with a slight foreign accent which men generally liked and women loathed.

Lady Holme loathed it. But she was not fond of her own sex. She believed that all women were untrustworthy. She often said that she had never met a woman who was not a liar, and when she said it she had no doubt that, for once, a woman was speaking the truth. Now, as she heard Mrs.

Wolfstein's curiously improper laugh, she frowned. The face in the mirror changed and looked almost old.

This struck her unpleasantly. She kept the frown in its place and stared from under it, examining her features closely, fancying herself really an old woman, her whimsical fascination dead in its decaying home, her powers faded if not fled for ever. She might do what she liked then.

It would all be of no use. Even the voice would be cracked and thin, unresponsive, unwieldy. The will would be phlegmatic. If it were not, the limbs and features would not easily obey its messages. The figure, now beautiful, would perhaps be marred by the ungracious thickness, the piteous fleshiness that Time often adds assiduously to ageing bodies, as if with an ironic pretence of generously giving in one direction while taking away in another. Decay would be setting in, life becoming perpetual loss. The precious years would be gone irrevocably.

She let the frown go and looked again on her beauty and smiled. The momentary bitterness passed. For there were many precious years to come for her, many years of power. She was young. Her health was superb. Her looks were of the kind that lasts. She thought of a famous actress whom she resembled closely. This actress was already forty-three, and was still a lovely woman, still toured about the world winning the hearts of men, was still renowned for her personal charm, worshipped not only for her talent but for her delicious skin, her great romantic eyes, her thick, waving hair.

Lady Holme laughed. In twenty years what Robin Pierce called her "husk"

would still be an exquisite thing, and she would be going about without hearing the horrible tap, tap of the crutch in whose sustaining power she really believed so little. She knew men, and she said to herself, as she had said to Robin, that for them beauty lies in the epidermis.

"Hullo, Vi, lookin' in the glass! 'Pon my soul, your vanity's disgustin'. A plain woman like you ought to keep away from such things--leave 'em to the Mrs. Wolfsteins--what?"

Lady Holme turned round in time to see her husband's blunt, brown features twisted in the grimace which invariably preceded his portentous laugh.

"I admire Mrs. Wolfstein," she said.

The laugh burst like a bomb.

"You admire another woman! Why, you're incapable of it. The Lord defend me from hypocrisy, and there's no greater hypocrisy than one woman takin' Heaven to witness that she thinks another a stunnin' beauty."

"You know nothing about it, Fritz. Mrs. Wolfstein's eyes would be lovely if they hadn't that pawnbroking expression."

"Good, good! Now we're goin' to hear the voice of truth. Think it went well, eh?"

He threw himself down on a sofa and began to light a cigarette.

"The evening? No, I don't."

"Why not?"