She laid one soft hand on his knee and squeezed his leg with all her might.

"Now you're to imagine me ugly and just the same as I am now."

"You wouldn't be the same."

"Yes, I should. I should be the same woman, with the same heart and feelings and desires and things as I have now. Only the face would be altered."

"Well, go ahead, but don't pinch so, old girl."

"I pinch you to make you exert your mind. Now tell me truly--truly; would you love me as you do now, would you be jealous of me, would you--"

"I say, wait a bit! Don't drive on at such a rate. How ugly are you?"

"Very ugly; worse than Miss Filberte."

"Miss Filberte's not so bad."

"Yes, she is, Fritz, you know she is. But I mean ever so much worse; with a purple complexion, perhaps, like Mrs. Armington, whose husband insisted on a judicial separation; or a broken nose, or something wrong with my mouth--"

"What wrong?"

"Oh, dear, anything! What _l'homme qui vir_ had--or a frightful scar across my cheek. Could you love me as you do now? I should be the same woman, remember."

"Then it'd be all the same to me, I s'pose. Let's turn in."

He got up, went over to the hearth, on which a small wood fire was burning, straddled his legs, bent his knees and straightened them several times, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his trousers, which were rather tight and horsey and defined his immense limbs. An expression of profound self-satisfaction illumined his face as he looked at his wife, giving it a slightly leery expression, as of a shrewd rustic. His large blunt features seemed to broaden, his big brown eyes twinkled, and his lips, which were thick and very red and had a cleft down their middle, parted under his short bronze moustache, exposing two level rows of square white teeth.

"It's jolly difficult to imagine you an ugly woman," he said, with a deep chuckle.

"I do wish you'd keep your legs still," said Lady Holme. "What earthly pleasure can it give you to go on like that? Would you love me as you do now?"

"You'd be jolly sick if I didn't, wouldn't you, Vi, eh?"

"I wonder if it ever occurs to you that you're hideously conceited, Fritz?"

She spoke with a touch of real anger, real exasperation.

"No more than any other Englishman that's worth his salt and ever does any good in the world. I ain't a timid molly-coddle, if that's what you mean."

He took one large hand out of his pocket, scratched his cheek and yawned. As he did so he looked as unconcerned, as free from self-consciousness, as much a slave to every impulse born of passing physical sensation as a wild animal in a wood or out on a prairie.

"Otherwise life ain't worth tuppence," he added through his yawn.

Lady Holme sat looking at him for a moment in silence. She was really irritated by his total lack of interest in what she wanted to interest in him, irritated, too, because her curiosity remained unsatisfied. But that abrupt look and action of absolutely unconscious animalism, chasing the leeriness of the contented man's conceit, turned her to softness if not to cheerfulness. She adored Fritz like that. His open-mouthed, gaping yawn moved something in her to tenderness. She would have liked to kiss him while he was yawning and to pass her hands over his short hair, which was like a mat and grew as strongly as the hair which he shaved every morning from his brown cheeks.

"Well, what about bed, old girl?" he said, stretching himself.

Lady Holme did not reply. Some part of him, some joint, creaked as he forced his clasped hands downward and backward. She was listening eagerly for a repetition of the little sound.

"What! Is mum the word?" he said, bending forward to stare into her face.

At this moment the door opened, and a footman came in to extinguish the lights and close the piano. By mistake he let the lid of the latter drop with a bang. Lady Holme, who had just got up to go to bed, started violently. She said nothing but stared at him for an instant with an expression of cold rebuke on her face. The man reddened. Lord Holme was already on the stairs. He yawned again noisily, and turned the sound eventually into a sort of roaring chant up and down the scale as he mounted towards the next floor. Lady Holme came slowly after him. She had a very individual walk, moving from the hips and nearly always taking small, slow steps. Her sapphire-blue gown trailed behind her with a pretty noise over the carpet.

When her French maid had locked up her jewels and helped her to undress, she dismissed her, and called out to Lord Holme, who was in the next room, the door of which was slightly open.

"Fritz!"

"Girlie?"

His mighty form, attired in pale blue pyjamas, stood in the doorway.

In his hand he grasped a toothbrush, and there were dabs of white tooth-powder on his cheeks and chin.

"Finish your toilet and make haste."

He disappeared. There was a prolonged noise of brushing and the gurgling and splashing of water. Lady Holme sat down on the white couch at the foot of the great bed. She was wrapped in a soft white gown made like a burnous, a veritable Arab garment, with a white silk hood at the back, and now she put up her hands and, with great precision, drew the hood up over her head. The burnous, thus adjusted, made her look very young. She had thrust her bare feet into white slippers without heels, and now she drew up her legs lightly and easily and crossed them under her, assuming an Eastern attitude and the expression of supreme impassivity which suits it. A long mirror was just opposite to her. She swayed to and fro, looking into it.

"Allah-Akbar!" she murmured. "Allah-Akbar! I am a fatalist. Everything is ordained, so why should I bother? I will live for the day. I will live for the night. Allah-Akbar, Allah-Akbar!"

The sound of water gushing from a reversed tumbler into a full basin was followed by the reappearance of Lord Holme, looking very clean and very sleepy.

Lady Holme stopped swaying.

"You look like a kid of twelve years old in that thing, Vi," he observed, surveying her with his hands on his hips.

"I am a woman with a philosophy," she returned with dignity.

"A philosophy! What the deuce is that?"

"You didn't learn much at Eton and Christchurch."

"I learnt to use my fists and to make love to the women."

"You're a brute!" she exclaimed with most unphilosophic vehemence.

"And that's why you worship the ground I tread on," he rejoined equably.

"And that's why I've always had a good time with the women ever since I stood six foot in my stockin's when I was sixteen."

Lady Holme looked really indignant. Her face was contorted by a spasm.

She was one of those unfortunate women who are capable of retrospective jealousy.

"I won't--how dare you speak to me of those women?" she said bitterly.

"You insult me."

"Hang it, there's no one since you, Vi. You know that. And what would you have thought of a great, hulkin' chap like me who'd never--well, all right. I'll dry up. But you know well enough you wouldn't have looked at me."

"I wonder why I ever did."

"No, you don't. I'm just the chap to suit you. You're full of whimsies and need a sledge-hammer fellow to keep you quiet. It you'd married that ass, Carey, or that--"