nd it on debauchery. Charity
and a sense of fun saved Val, but if more lenient to others he
was ruthlessly stern to himself. Lawrence blew on Isabel like a
breath of sea air. In her reaction she liked his external
characteristics, his manner to servants, his expensive clothes
and boots, all the signs of money spent freely on himself.

She even liked his politics. Isabel had been brought up all her
life to talk politics. Mr. Stafford was a Christian Socialist, a
creed which in her private opinion was nicely calculated to
produce the maximum of human discomfort: and from a conversation
between Hyde and Jack Bendish she had learnt that Hyde was all of
her own view. There was no nonsense about him--none of that
sweet blind altruism which, as Isabel saw it, only made the
altruist and his family so bitterly uncomfortable without doing
any good to the poor. The poor? She knew intuitively that
servants and porters and waiters would far rather serve Hyde than
her father. Mr. Stafford longed to uplift the working classes,
but Isabel had never got herself thoroughly convinced that they
stood in need of uplifting. Her practical common sense rose in
arms against Movements that tried to get them to go to picture
galleries instead of picture palaces. Why shouldn't they do as
they liked? Does one reform one's friends? Captain Hyde would
live and let live.

And he was rich. Few girls as cramped as Isabel could have
remained blind to that wide horizon, and she made no pretence of
doing so: she was honest with herself and owned that she had
always longed to be rich. No one could call her discontented!
her happy sunny temper took life as it came and enjoyed every
minute of it, but her tastes were not really simple, though Val
thought they were. She had long felt a clear though perfectly
good-humoured and philosophic impatience of her narrow scope.
Hyde could give her all and more than all she had ever desired--
foreign countries and fine clothes, books and paintings, and
power apparently and the admiration of men . . . Isabel Hyde
. . . Mrs. Lawrence Hyde . . . .smiling she tried his name under
her breath . . .and suddenly she found herself standing before
the mirror, examining her face in its dusky shallows and asking
of it the question that has perplexed many a young girl as
beautiful as she--"Am I pretty?" She pulled the pins out of her
hair and ran a comb through it till it fell this way and that
like an Indian veil