*

That was the first confidence that ever had passed between Valerie West
and Rita Tevis. And after it, Rita, apparently forgetting her own
philosophical collapse, never ceased to urge upon Valerie the wisdom,
the absolute necessity of self-preservation in considering her future
relations with Louis Neville. But, like Neville's logic, Rita's failed
before the innocent simplicity of the creed which Valerie had embraced.
Valerie was willing that their relations should remain indefinitely as
they were if the little gods of convention were to be considered; she
had the courage to sever all relations with the man she loved if anybody
could convince her that it was better for Neville. Marry him she would
not, because she believed it meant inevitable unhappiness for him. But
she was not afraid to lay her ringless hands in his for ever.

Querida called on them and was very agreeable and lively and
fascinating; and when he went away Valerie asked him to come again. He
did; and again after that. She and Rita dined with him once or twice;
and things gradually slipped back to their old footing; and Querida
remained on his best behaviour.

Neville had prolonged the visit to the parental roof. He did not explain
to her why, but the reason was that he had made up his mind to tell his
parents that he wished to marry and to find out once and for all what
their attitudes would be toward such a girl as Valerie West. But he had
not yet found courage to do it, and he was lingering on, trying to find
it and the proper moment to employ it.

His father was a gentleman so utterly devoid of imagination that he had
never even ventured into business, but had been emotionlessly content to
marry and live upon an income sufficient to maintain the material and
intellectual traditions of the house of Neville.

Tall, transparently pale, negative in character, he had made it a life
object to get through life without increasing the number of his
acquaintances--legacies in the second generation left him by his father,
whose father before him had left the grandfathers of these friends as
legacies to his son.

[Illustration: "She and Rita dined with him once or twice."]

It was a pallid and limited society that Henry Neville and his wife
frequented--a coterie of elderly, intellectual people, and their
prematurely dried-out offspring. And intellectual in-breeding was
thinning it to attenuation--to a bloodless meagreness in which they, who
composed it