at her, had found excuses to thrust their petrifaction through the very glasses of four-wheelers.  She lost herself in these reminiscences, the moral of which was that poor Mr. Dawling was only one of a million.  When therefore the next autumn she flourished into my studio with her odd companion at her heels her first care was to make clear to me that if he was now in servitude it wasn’t because she had run after him.  Dawling explained with a hundred grins that when one wished very much to get anything one usually ended by doing so—a proposition which led me wholly to dissent and our young lady to asseverate that she hadn’t in the least wished to get Mr. Dawling.  She mightn’t have wished to get him, but she wished to show him, and I seemed to read that if she could treat him as a trophy her affairs were rather at the ebb.  True there always hung from her belt a promiscuous fringe of scalps.  Much at any rate would have come and gone since our separation in July.  She had spent four months abroad, where, on Swiss and Italian lakes, in German cities, in the French capital, many accidents might have happened.

CHAPTER V

I had been again with my mother, but except Mrs. Meldrum and the gleam of France had not found at Folkestone my old resources and pastimes.  Mrs. Meldrum, much edified by my report of the performances, as she called them, in my studio, had told me that to her knowledge Flora would soon be on the straw: she had cut from her capital such fine fat slices that there was almost nothing more left to swallow.  Perched on her breezy cliff the good lady dazzled me as usual by her universal light: she knew so much more about everything and everybody than I could ever squeeze out of my colour-tubes.  She knew that Flora was acting on system and absolutely declined to be interfered with: her precious reasoning was that her money would last as long as she should need it, that a magnificent marriage would crown her charms before she should be really pinched.  She had a sum put by for a liberal outfit; meanwhile the proper use of the rest was to decorate her for the approaches to the altar, keep her afloat in the society in which she would most naturally meet her match.  Lord Iffield had been seen with her at Lucerne, at Cadenabbia; but it was Mrs. Meldrum’s conviction that nothing was to be expected of him but the most futile flirtation.  The girl had a certain hold of him, but with a great deal of swagger he hadn’t the spirit of a sheep: he was in fear of his father and would never commit himself in Lord Considine’s lifetime.  The most Flora might achieve was that he wouldn’t marry some one else.  Geoffrey Dawling, to Mrs. Meldrum’s knowledge (I had told her of the young man’s visit) had attached himself on the way back from Italy to the Hammond Synge group.  My informant was in a position to be definite about this dangler; she knew about his people; she had heard of him before.  Hadn’t he been a friend of one of her nephews at Oxford?  Hadn’t he spent the Christmas holidays precisely three years before at her brother-in-law’s in Yorkshire, taking that occasion to get himself refused with derision by wilful Betty, the second daughter of the house?  Her sister, who liked the floundering youth, had written to her to complain of Betty, and that the young man should now turn up as an appendage of Flora’s was one of those oft-cited proofs that the world is small and that there are not enough people to go round.  His father had been something or other in the Treasury; his grandfather on the mother’s side had been something or other in the Church.  He had come into the paternal estate, two or three thousand a year in Hampshire; but he had let the place advantageously and was generous to four plain sisters who lived at Bournemouth and adored him.  The family was hideous all round, but the very salt of the earth.  He was supposed to be unspeakably clever; he was fond of London, fond of books, of intellectual society and of the idea of a political career.  That such a man should be at the same time fond of Flora Saunt attested, as the phrase in the first volume of Gibbon has it, the variety of his inclinations.  I was soon to learn that he was fonder of her than of all the other things together.  Betty, one of five and with views above her station, was at any rate felt at home to have dished herself by her perversity.  Of course no one had looked at her since and no one would ever look at her again.  It would be eminently desirable that Flora should learn the lesson of Betty’s fate.

I was not struck, I confess, with all this in my mind, by any symptom on our young lady’s part of that sort of meditation.  The one moral she saw in anything was that of her incomparable aspect, which Mr. Dawling, smitten even like the railway porters and the cabmen by the doom-dealing gods, had followed from London to Venice and from Venice back to London again.  I afterwards learned that her version of this episode was profusely inexact: his personal acquaintance with her had been determined by an accident remarkable enough, I admit, in connexion with what had gone before—a coincidence at all events superficially striking.  At Munich, returning from a tour in the Tyrol with two of his sisters, he had found himself at the table d’hôte of his inn opposite to the full presentment of that face of which the mere clumsy copy had made him dream and desire.  He had been tossed by it to a height so vertiginous as to involve a retreat from the board; but the next day he had dropped with a resounding thud at the very feet of his apparition.  On the following, with an equal incoherence, a sacrifice even of his bewildered sisters, whom he left behind, he made an heroic effort to escape by flight from a fate of which he had already felt the cold breath.  That fate, in London, very little later, drove him straight before it—drove him one Sunday afternoon, in the rain, to the door of the Hammond Synges.  He marched in other words close up to the cannon that was to blow him to pieces.  But three weeks, when he reappeared to me, had elapsed since then, yet (to vary my metaphor) the burden he was to carry for the rest of his days was firmly lashed to his back.  I don’t mean by this that Flora had been persuaded to contract her scope; I mean that he had been treated to the unconditional snub which, as the event was to show, couldn’t have been bettered as a means of securing him.  She hadn’t calculated, but she had said “Never!” and that word had made a bed big enough for his long-legged patience.  He became from this moment to my mind the interesting figure in the piece.

Now that he had acted without my aid I was free to show him this, and having on his own side something to show me he repeatedly knocked at my door.  What he brought with him on these occasions was a simplicity so huge that, as I turn my ear to the past, I seem even now to hear it bumping up and down my stairs.  That was really what I saw of him in the light of his behaviour.  He had fallen in love as he might have broken his leg, and the fracture was of a sort that would make him permanently lame.  It was the whole man who limped and lurched, with nothing of him left in the same position as before.  The tremendous cleverness, the literary society, the political ambition, the Bournemouth sisters all seemed to flop with his every movement a little nearer to the floor.  I hadn’t had an Oxford training and I had never encountered the great man at whose feet poor Dawling had most submissively sat and who had addressed him his most destructive sniffs; but I remember asking myself how effectively this privilege had supposed itself to prepare him for the career on which my friend appeared now to have embarked.  I remember too making up my mind about the cleverness, which had its uses and I suppose in impenetrable shades even its critics, but from which the friction of mere personal intercourse was not the sort of process to extract a revealing spark.  He accepted without a