his apparently simple and naive question with a
strange intimate meaning. The men who surround a woman such as I, living
as I lived, are always demanding, with a secret thirst, 'Does she really
live without love? What does she conceal?' I have read this interrogation
in the eyes of scores of men; but no one, save Lord Francis, would have
had the right to put it into the tones of his voice. We were so mutually
foreign and disinterested, so at the opposite ends of life, that he had
nothing to gain and I nothing to lose, and I could have permitted to this
sage ruin of a male almost a confessor's freedom. Moreover, we had an
affectionate regard for each other.

I said nothing, and he repeated in his treble:

'What is the matter?'

'Love is the matter!' I might have passionately cried out to him, had we
been alone. But I merely responded to his tone with my eyes. I thanked
him with my eyes for his bold and flattering curiosity, senile, but
thoroughly masculine to the last. And I said:

'I am only a little exhausted. I finished my novel yesterday.'

It was my sixth novel in five years.

'With you,' he said, 'work is simply a drug.'

'Lord Francis,' I expostulated, 'how do you know that?'

'And it has got such a hold of you that you cannot do without it,' he
proceeded, with slow, faint shrillness. 'Some women take to morphia,
others take to work.'

'On the contrary,' I said, 'I have quite determined to do no more work
for twelve months.'

'Seriously?'

'Seriously.'

He faced me, vivacious, and leaned against the back of the settee.

'Then you mean to give yourself time to love?' he murmured, as it were
with a kind malice, and every crease in his veined and yellow features
was intensified by an enigmatic smile.

'Why not?' I laughed encouragingly. 'Why not? What do you advise?'

'I advise it,' he said positively. 'I advise it. You have already wasted
the best years.'

'The best?'

'One can never afterwards love as one loves at twenty. But there! You
have nothing to learn about love!'

He gave me one of those disrobing glances of which men who have dedicated
their existence to women alone have the secret. I shrank under the
ordeal; I tried to clutch my clothes about me.

The chatter from the other end of the room grew louder. Vicary was gazing
critically at his chandeliers.

'Does love bring happiness?' I asked Lord Francis, carefully ignoring
his remark.

'For forty years,' he quavered, 'I made love