ver are in an English village--and she was
too young for Rowsley's brother officers, or they were too young
for her. She had dreamed of fairy princes (blases-men-of-the-world,
mostly in the Guards or the diplomatic service), but it was never
precisely Isabel Stafford whom they clasped to their hearts--no, it
was LaSignora Isabella, the star of Covent Garden, or the Lady Isabel
de Stafford, a Duke's daughter in disguise. And Lawrence came to her
in the mantle of these patrician ghosts.

But--and at this point Isabel hid her face on her arm--he was no
ghost: he knew what he wanted and he meant to have it: and it was a
far cry from visionary Heroes to Lawrence Hyde in the flesh, son of a
Jew, smelling of cigar-smoke, and taking hold of her with his large,
fair, overmanicured hands. A far cry even from Val or Jack Bendish:
from the cool, mannered Englishman to the hot Oriental blood. When
people were engaged they often kissed each other . . . but when it
came to imagining oneself . . . one's head against that thick
tweed . . . no . . . it must be one of the things that are safe to do
but dangerous to dream of doing. Oh, never, never!--But she had been
trained in sincerity: and was this cry sincere? Her mind was chaos.

And yet after all why dangerous? Even Laura, Val's adored Laura,
had been engaged twice before she married Major Clowes: as for
Yvonne, Isabel felt sure she had been kissed many times, and not
by Jack Bendish only. Such things happen, then! in real life,
not only in books. As for the cigars and the valet . . . and
Val's warnings . . . one can't have all one wants in this world!
It contains no ideal heroes: what was it Yvonne had once said?
"Every marriage is either a delusion or a compromise." And Isabel
had shortcomings enough of her own: she was irritable, lazy,
selfish: read novels when she ought to have been at her lessons:
left household jobs undone in the certainty that Val, however
tired he was, would do them for her: small sins, but then her
temptations were small! Take it by and large, she was probably
no better than Captain Hyde except for want of opportunity. And
how he would laugh if he heard her say so!

She liked him for laughing. She had been brought up in an
atmosphere of scruple. Her father overworked his conscience,
treating a question of taste as a moral issue, and drawing no
line between great and small--like the man who gave a penny to a
beggar and implored him not to spe