of manifestly stricken men, the keeping
of tamed and hopeless admirers, seemed to her to be the most natural and
reasonable of feminine privileges. They did their useful little services
until it pleased the Lord Cheetah to come to his own. That was how she
put it....

But at last he was talking to her in tones that could no longer be
ignored. He was manifestly losing his temper with her. There was a
novel austerity in his voice and a peculiar whiteness about his face on
certain occasions that lingered in her memory.

He was indeed making elaborate explanations. He said that what he wanted
to do was to understand "the collective life of the world," and that
this was not to be done in a West-End study. He had an extraordinary
contempt, it seemed, for both sides in the drama of British politics. He
had extravagant ideas of beginning in some much more fundamental way.
He wanted to understand this "collective life of the world," because
ultimately he wanted to help control it. (Was there ever such nonsense?)
The practical side of this was serious enough, however; he was back at
his old idea of going round the earth. Later on that might be rather
a jolly thing to do, but not until they had struck root a little more
surely in London.

And then with amazement, with incredulity, with indignation, she began
to realize that he was proposing to go off by himself upon this vague
extravagant research, that all this work she had been doing to make
a social place for him in London was as nothing to him, that he was
thinking of himself as separable from her....

"But, Cheetah! How can you leave your spotless leopard? You would howl
in the lonely jungle!"

"Possibly I shall. But I am going."

"Then I shall come."

"No." He considered her reasons. "You see you are not interested."

"But I am."

"Not as I am. You would turn it all into a jolly holiday. You don't want
to see things as I want to do. You want romance. All the world is a show
for you. As a show I can't endure it. I want to lay hands on it."

"But, Cheetah!" she said, "this is separation."

"You will have your life here. And I shall come back."

"But, Cheetah! How can we be separated?"

"We are separated," he said.

Her eyes became round with astonishment. Then her face puckered.

"Cheetah!" she cried in a voice of soft distress, "I love you. What do
you mean?"

And she staggered forward, tear-blinded, and felt for his neck and
shoulders, so that she might