"It is impossible. You could not sit there and look like that if you were thirty-two."

"The impossible is so often the true. I'm glad you don't think I seem old. It is nice to believe one can keep young at heart, in spite of the years. Shall we go to the lounge?"

Again they moved through the admiring crowd, but this time Lorraine felt less idle interest and more inward wonder; and without any misgiving she steered to a quiet alcove, where they could talk without again being the cynosure of many eyes.

Here, in a pleasant, friendly way, she led him once again to talk of the future, and was glad to find, in answering sincerity with sincerity, he was ready to admit that he was a little sorry about his own lack of ambition and want of application. He did not pretend now that it was of no moment. He told her he would like to achieve, only somehow he always found his attention wander to other things, and his desire grow slack after a week of rigid application.

She recognised that the motive-power was missing, and that unless something deeper than mere desire of achievement stirred him, he would probably never attain. He needed a goal that should make everything else in the world pale before it, and something that seemed almost as life and death to hang on his success. But how get it for him? If he loved, and was bidden wait until he had prospered, the end was all too sure and the love too easy.

It was something different that was needed; something that would bring him up with dead abruptness against a blank wall, and leave him with a taste of life that was dust and ashes unless he found a way through.

Either that or some sweet, wild, unattainable desire, that might drive him to work and ambition by way of escape.

And there again, where should he encounter such a desire? One had only to look into his calm, fine face to feel that the unattainable in the form of love, barred by marriage vows as lightly made as broken, would never stir the depths of his heart, nor appeal to his real self in any way whatever.

He would not love such a woman, however for a time she might fascinate him; and afterwards there would only be the nausea and the memory that was like an unpleasant taste. Such a woman might teach him many things it is no harm for a man to know; but she would never call to the best in him, nor help him to realise himself.

"Have you seen your friend the d.u.c.h.ess lately?" she asked, with a disarming smile, not wishing to appear merely curious.

"Yes; I saw her on Friday, at a ball. She was in great form."

"You danced with her?"

"Yes. She's not a good dancer."

"Then you only had one, I suppose?"

"No, three." He smiled a little. "We sat out two."

"You ought to have felt highly honoured."

"Oh, I don't know. She is very amusing. A very funny thing happened last week. Out of sheer devilry, she and a friend and two men went to the Covent Garden Fancy Dress Ball, disguised of course, and just for an hour or two. To their horror, after the procession, the friend was handed a large gla.s.s-and-silver salad bowl, as a prize for being the best 'twostep' dancer in the room. Of course she had to go off with the beastly thing; but she was so proud of winning it, she couldn't resist giving their escapade away, and it got round everywhere."

"I wonder if our escapade with Lady Bounce is out yet? I haven't seen Hal since Thursday."

"Oh yes, it is," eagerly; "the d.u.c.h.ess had heard about it. She was pumping me to know who was in the joke. We are longing to see Quin and hear the latest, but he is down east."

"What an oddity he is!" thoughtfully. "I liked him so much: but it is difficult to reconcile him with slumming."

"He's one of the best. Every one loves him. And he does his slumming in quite a way of his own. I've been with him sometimes, and he just goes among the rough characters down there as if he hated being a swell and wanted to be one of them. He positively asks them for sympathy, and of course it takes their fancy and he is friends with them all."

"I think you are a remarkable trio altogether. Hal's cousin d.i.c.k is just as original in his way as St. Quintin. And you, of course, are somehow different to the majority. I wonder how you will each end?

St. Quintin will perhaps become a bishop. d.i.c.k Bruce will write an astounding, weird novel, and bound into fame. And you? ..."

He flushed a little. "I shall be left far behind by both of them, futilely wishing to catch up."

"I hope not. Your chance is just as good as theirs, if you choose to make it so,"

"I fail to see that I have any chance at all."

"Most chances rest chiefly with ourselves. It's a great thing to be ready for them if they come. I hope you'll be that."

"I hope so too, but it would be easier if one were more sure they were coming," and he laughed with a lightness that jarred a little.

She rose to go, as it was getting late, feeling slightly disappointed in some vague way; and when they parted she noticed that his handshake was slightly limp, as of one who would not grasp life tightly enough to compel it to surrender its good things to him.

But in her own sanctum she rallied herself, and hardened her heart, asking what had it to do with her after all, and how could his success or non-success in any way concern her.

Doubtless in the end he would share the fate of the great majority and attain only mediocrity; having missed that one great blinding shaft of pain or joy that might have stabbed him into tense, pulsing life, and spurred him up the heights of fame and glory.

She let her evening-cloak slide to a chair, turning to glance at a calling card on the table, with a renewal of the old, callous, cynical air. The practical force of Flip Denton's conversation was making itself felt. Of course it was an absurdity for her to imagine herself in love with a youth of twenty-four - almost the dullest of all ages - be he never so good to look at. She might very well keep a motherly eye on him, and show him a side of life he might perhaps not see otherwise, but it must end there.

No doubt a certain novelty had made the evening unusually pleasant: after two or three more they would certainly pall, and then she would go back to her old chums; the men of the world who had paid their footing and won their experience, and come through, careless enough devils at best in their own phraseology, but non the worse for a fall or two, and a win or two, and a self-taught hardihood for most things life was likely any more to send.

She smiled a little as she remembered how calmly he had thanked her and said good-night. Of a surety he took his fruits quietly and unconcernedly enough. She wondered if he were secretly in love with some pink-and-white debutante, who flushed and smiled when he spoke, and gazed up at him with fond, adoring eyes. It was likely enough.

No doubt he would tell her all about it soon, as a very young man tells a favourite sister, or a jolly, not too elderly aunt. She rather hoped he would. It would be an anti-climax humorous enough to cure her all in a moment of seeming anything to him other than that jolly, not too elderly aunt. Then she would invite Flip to dinner, and they would be gay together - she could imagine the tone in which he would call her "aunty" - and her folly would fall from her like an outgrown chrysalis, leaving her sane, and cynical, and wordly, and whole again.

The train of thought pleased her, and soothed in some way an indefinable rasping sense of the general futility of all feeling and all striving. Surely she, with her young-old heart, her world-worn memories, and her youth that never was, should know that worldly-wise dictum full well.

Of course she kew it.

The things that mattered were beauty and brilliance and success; and these she had in good measure, br.i.m.m.i.n.g over. Her mood made her cross suddenly to the many-sided mirror, and switch on a blaze of light that would brook no feigning.

In its searching gleams she looked at herself with clear, fearless eyes. Yes; it was all there still, untouched and unimpaired by those thirty-two years: the colouring, the skin, the rounded, supple figure - all the things for which men loved her and the world gave her fame.

She gave herself a little mocking salute, and then turned away to hurry into her pretty, cosy bed.

But what the blaze of light had not seen the mothering darkness hid tenderly. Two bright tear-drops, filling tired eyes that had tried so often to fool themselves into blind and callous content.

CHAPTER XII

"d.i.c.k Bruce will write an astounding, weird novel, and bound into fame," Lorraine had remarked to her companion, and away somewhere down in Kent, an hour or so earlier, d.i.c.k had remarked to Hal as they spun along:

"I've got the maddest idea for a novel you ever heard of. I'm going to make the hit of next season."

"I hope it's not about babies," said Hal, thinking of his doggerel.

"Yes, it is - babies and vegetables."

"Oh, nonsense. You can't make a novel out of babies and vegetables."

"You see if I can't. The vegetables are all to be endowed with life, and of course the scene of my tale will be the vegetable kingdom."