etween her eyebrows and the
irregular curve of her brown hair. She was growing very weary of it
all, the distraction which she had sought, the forgetfulness of self
which she had hoped to achieve, by living perpetually in a crowd.
Indeed, to such a point had she carried her endeavours, that Mrs.
Lightmark's beauty was already becoming a matter of almost public
interest. She was a person to be recognised and recorded by
sharp-eyed journalists at the play-houses on "first nights"; her
carriage-horses performed extensive nightly pilgrimages in the
regions of Kensington and Mayfair; and she had made a reputation for
her dressmaker. And already she realized that her efforts to live
outside herself were futile; moments like these must come, and the
knowledge that, in spite of her countless friends and voluminous
visiting list, she was alone.

Her mother? Dick? After all, they were only in the position of
occupying somewhat exceptionally prominent places on the
visiting-list.

As for her husband, after all these long months of married life, she
could not say that she knew him. She regarded him with a kind of
admiration of his personal, social attractions, in which she
recognised him as fully her equal, with a kind of envy of the
genius, which she could not entirely comprehend, but which seemed to
make him so vastly her superior. And yet there was a shadow of doubt
about it all: there had been sinister flashes, illumining, dimly
enough, depths which the marital intimacy still left unfathomed,
making her wonder whether her husband's candour might not mask
something more terrible than forgotten follies, something that might
prove a more real and irremovable barrier between them than even
that indefinable want of a mutual horizon, of common ground upon
which their traditions could unite themselves.

So long as Dick had remained cheerfully masterful, and picturesquely
_flamboyant_, without even an occasional betrayal of the bitterness
which makes the one attribute savour of insolence, and the other of
oppression, his wife had regarded him as exactly fulfilling the part
for which he had obviously been cast--of a good-humoured,
ornamental, domestic tyrant, to be openly obeyed and covertly
coerced. A husband who assisted her acquisition of social laurels;
who gave her more money than she asked for; who designed for her the
most elaborate and enviable dresses--yes, her mother certainly had
reasons for declaring him a paragon! But