favourite showed stately Madame des Essarts playing a prominent part with Bertram Kyndersley of the Melting Eye; though Peter inclined more to a fanciful alliance she had promoted between the Sphinx and the Albert Memorial—with dire results to the white flower of a blameless statue’s life.

Merle caught Peter’s infectious trick of light brilliant patter-talk, so that the likeness between the twain was marvellous to those who could not pierce beneath exterior resemblances. It was Peter who invariably started the vein of nonsense, Merle who capped it at the finish. Merle did not breathe the atmosphere as a matter of course; she had too long been nourished in hot-house solemnity, and her witticisms tumbled out with a surprised little lift in the voice, as if in astonishment at their escape from bondage. Nor could she ever learn sublime disregard of the feelings and conveniences of others, but would linger to propitiate the breathless fragments scattered by the swift onrush of Peter’s imperial passage; continued, in spite of her friend’s laughing remonstrances, to pay reverential homage to white hairs, and display a certain polite hauteur where persons of inferior station were in question. One jested, yes,—mais pas avec les autres! “You deserve to die on the guillotine,” quoth Peter.

But she gave in, notwithstanding her leadership, before the chill of Merle’s little reserves. For—and here lay the sting of the matter—instinct would not lead her exactly to where these reserves lay hidden; she would stumble on them unawares, without the remotest notion for what reason just that particular mention or sally or point of view, should call forth in the other a mood resembling cold water, finely sprayed. Merle herself, thus argued Peter, could on occasions be as daringly demurely blasphemous, so why....

But Peter knew well enough that the careless years she had spent knocking about with her parents and their shoddy coarse-grained good-natured associates, had done their destroying work. It is always absurd to suppose, in the popular fashion, that whatever a girl’s surroundings, her outlook can remain pure and flower-like and uncontaminated. Certain words had to be checked on her tongue; the itch for a cigarette was ever in her fingers; she was familiar with what she termed the “man-look,” and recognized too soon the dawning of intentions that needed to be checked. Other traces there were: a cool disregard as to the state of undress in which circumstances might chance to discover her straight young limbs; meanings of the under-world that attached themselves to perfectly innocent phrases. Not a very profound under-world; just below the glazed surface. And experiences had been hers, squalid enough to give pleasure in the recollection, when balancing a fragile teacup at some opulent afternoon reception.

These after-effects could hardly be considered serious; merely annoying to have perceptions so far blunted as to give no warning on the rare occasions when Merle’s greater fineness was in danger. “I would not have the bloom brushed from your girlhood, my Pepita!”—it amounted to that, after all.

CHAPTER III
PLAYING AT GOD

“I think it is going to be Logan Thane,” Peter decided, as she paused for a moment in the pleasing process of dressing for the dance, to stand bare-limbed before the fire, and feel its warmth run and leap and shiver over her skin; one of those luxuries to which memories of chill apartments and scrambled toilets now gave a zest and flavour. Peter liked equally the action of slowly drawing a cigarette from its silver case; the use of a bathroom, gleaming white tiles and silver taps and mist-wreaths dimming the mirror on the wall. Things which Merle took as a matter of course. Merle found her keenest enjoyment in escape for a whole day to Thatch Lane, to trespass over barbed-wire fencing in dank and thorny woods; discarding, for an old skirt and jersey of Peter’s, the elaborately suitable-for-the-country raiment provided by Madame des Essarts. Madame’s mental vision of these expeditions showed her granddaughter reclining upon a cushioned chair, in a very clean field, the while Miss Worthing’s footman (non-existent) asked if she took sugar and milk, and Peter added solicitously: “You must put up with our picnic teas, Merle, dearest. Will you have some Devonshire cream on your home-baked bread?”

Ever since their conversation on the second-empire bedspread, a fortnight before, the two girls were almost hypnotically persuaded that the forthcoming ball was to furnish, as far as their scheme of things was concerned, some startling issue. During their intercourse of two and a half years, the male element in its more serious form had been conspicuously and even unnaturally lacking. Peter was aware that this state of things could not possibly continue, in the case of two so magnetically alive. She had sought to forestall the Inevitable, by herself weaving in the thread. To-night she would choose its colour. To-night!... it was fun, playing at God.

Logan Thane fixed himself firmer and ever firmer in her imagination, while she put on her gold stockings and shoes, her bronze evening-dress, with its border of rich fur, and swathed gold sash. His name held possibilities; and she was not averse to the background of antlers and hothouse grapes, catalogued by Merle. She added to these, roses, and a sweet white-haired mother; picturing agreeably how the latter would describe Merle and herself as “quite at home in Thane Manor; running in and out all day; dear girls, both of them!”—Logan at this juncture tossed them an expressive smile from where he stood, as per arrangement, smiting his boot with a riding-whip.

And if he should fall in love with one or the other of them....

“It would be rough luck on Merle,” mused Peter, drawing on her long white kid gloves.

Certainly Peter was divinely human!

Someone knocking at the door:

“Are you ready?” cries Jinny, aged fourteen; “the Lesters are here, and don’t I just wish I was going too!”

Peter is staying the week-end with some twice-removed cousins in a Turnham Green boarding-house; a convenience of which she frequently availed herself, when evening pleasure-seeking made it impossible for her to catch the last train from Euston to Thatch Lane. The Lester boys and their sister, friends of Merle, had offered to fetch her in their car and bring her home again.

“And so if we don’t enjoy ourselves,” proposes Rose-Marie, a nervous débutante, “we can keep to our own party....” The car moves slowly forward in a long queue.

Peter is not enthusiastic. Both the Lester boys are under twenty, and have pimples on their chins. She wishes—in the cloakroom now, and in the approved fashion letting her wrap fall languidly from her shoulders, to be caught by dexterous and silent attendants—that the thought of Merle hostess of this magnificence, did not remove her so very far from the Merle of their adventure days.

The staircase again, and conventional figures in black and white, struggling with their glove-buttons. Which of them is Logan Thane? “Wait for me,” pleads Rose-Marie, still busy with her powder-puff. A burst of music from the ballroom, striking thrilling response from the tuned-up senses. Events moving with the swift unreality of a cinema. The ballroom swims forward and engulfs Peter with its hum of talk, rising and falling like waves on a flat beach; its light mellowed by blossoms; blossoms made translucent by light. Impression of a group just within the doorway; Merle’s grandmother, from a mere solicitous voice in Lancaster