all
for life. I dare say the wife of the editor of the _Haste_ has a pretty
good front window for the show. Jane likes playing about with people, as
you like playing with ideas, and I with chemicals.... Besides, beauty
counts with Jane. It does with every one. She's probably fallen in love.'

That was all we said about it. We talked for the rest of the evening
about the _Fact_.

6

But when I went to Jane's wedding, I understood about the 'number of
other people' that Hobart let Jane in to. They had been married that
afternoon by the Registrar, Jane having withstood the pressure of her
parents, who preferred weddings to be in churches. Hobart didn't much
care; he was, he said, a Presbyterian by upbringing, but sat loosely to
it, and didn't care for fussy weddings. Jane frankly disbelieved in what
she called 'all that sort of thing.' So they went before the Registrar,
and gave a party in the evening at the Carlton.

We all went, even Juke, who had failed to snatch Jane from the burning. I
don't know that it was a much queerer party than other wedding parties,
which are apt to be an ill-assorted mixture of the bridegroom's circle
and the bride's. And, except for Jane's own personal friends, these two
circles largely overlapped in this case. The room was full of
journalists, important and unimportant, business people, literary people,
and a few politicians of the same colour as the Pinkerton press. There
were a lot of dreadful women, who, I supposed, were Lady Pinkerton's
friends (probably literary women; one of them was introduced to Juke as
'the editress of _Forget-me-not_'), and a lot of vulgar men, many of whom
looked like profiteers. But, besides all these, there were undoubtedly
interesting people and people of importance. And I realised that the
editor of the _Haste_, like the other editors of important papers, must,
of necessity, as Katherine had said, have a lot to do with such people.

And there, in the middle of a group of journalists, was Jane; Jane, in a
square-cut, high-waisted, dead white frock, with her firm, round, young
shoulders and arms, and her firm, round, young face, and her dark hair
cut across her broad white forehead, parted a little like a child's, at
one side, and falling thick and straight round her neck like a mediaeval
page's. She wore a long string of big amber beads--Hobart's present--and
a golden girdle round her high, sturdy waist.

I saw Jane in a sense newly that evening, not ha