ula's... not to speak of silver foxes and sables... nor
yet of the Altringham jewels.

She knew all this by heart; had always known it. It all belonged to the
make-up of the life of elegance: there was nothing new about it. What
had been new to her was just that short interval with Nick--a life
unreal indeed in its setting, but so real in its essentials: the one
reality she had ever known. As she looked back on it she saw how much
it had given her besides the golden flush of her happiness, the sudden
flowering of sensuous joy in heart and body. Yes--there had been the
flowering too, in pain like birth-pangs, of something graver, stronger,
fuller of future power, something she had hardly heeded in her first
light rapture, but that always came back and possessed her stilled soul
when the rapture sank: the deep disquieting sense of something that
Nick and love had taught her, but that reached out even beyond love and
beyond Nick.

Her nerves were racked by the ceaseless swish, swish of the rain on the
dirty panes and the smell of cabbage and coal that came in under the
door when she shut the window. This nauseating foretaste of the luncheon
she must presently go down to was more than she could bear. It brought
with it a vision of the dank coffee-room below, the sooty Smyrna rug,
the rain on the sky-light, the listless waitresses handing about food
that tasted as if it had been rained on too. There was really no reason
why she should let such material miseries add to her depression....

She sprang up, put on her hat and jacket, and calling for a taxi drove
to the London branch of the Nouveau Luxe hotel. It was just one o'clock
and she was sure to pick up a luncheon, for though London was empty
that great establishment was not. It never was. Along those sultry
velvet-carpeted halls, in that great flowered and scented dining-room,
there was always a come-and-go of rich aimless people, the busy people
who, having nothing to do, perpetually pursue their inexorable task from
one end of the earth to the other.

Oh, the monotony of those faces--the faces one always knew, whether one
knew the people they belonged to or not! A fresh disgust seized her at
the sight of them: she wavered, and then turned and fled. But on the
threshold a still more familiar figure met her: that of a lady in
exaggerated pearls and sables, descending from an exaggerated motor,
like the motors in magazine advertisements, the huge arks in which
jewelled