He himself has known the subject of their discourse ever since they were
boys, and had that sort of intimacy with him which exists between men
who live in the same sets and belong to the same clubs. But to him
Gervase seems a _petit-maitre_, a _poseur_, a man artificial,
conventional, ambitious in small things, and to Gervase he himself seems
much as he does to Lady Usk, a perverse and lawless Bohemian, only saved
from the outer darkness by the fact of his aristocratic birth.

Meanwhile, in her own room, Xenia Sabaroff is pursuing her own
reflections whilst her maid disrobes her.

"It will be better to see him once and for all," she muses. "I cannot go
on forever avoiding him in every city in Europe. Very likely he will not
even remember my face or my name."

She feels a strong temptation to invent some plausible reason and break
off her visit to Surrenden; but she is a courageous woman, and flight is
repugnant to her. More than once of late she has avoided a meeting which
is disagreeable to her, by some abrupt change of her own plans or
reversal of her own engagements. To continue to do this seems weakness.
Indeed, to do it at all seems too great a flattery to the person
avoided. What is painful is best encountered without procrastination. It
is the old question of grasping the nettle.

A haughty flush passes over her face at her own reflections. After all,
to have any emotion at all about it, pleasurable or painful, is
humiliation. She is a proud woman, as well as a courageous one. There
are memories associated with this coming guest which are bitter and
hateful.

Women like Mrs. Wentworth Curzon carry such memories lightly, or rather
do not carry them at all, but bury them by scores, pell-mell, one on the
top of another, like old letters, and forget all about their interment;
but she is different from them.

It has not been difficult for her to avoid meeting Lord Gervase; he is
one of those persons whose movements are known and chronicled; but she
is conscious that the time is come when she can no longer escape doing
so, except by such an abrupt departure that it would seem to herself too
great a weakness, and be to him too great a flattery, for such a step to
enter for an instant into the category of possibilities. It is, she
reflects, or it should be, a matter to her of absolute indifference to
see again a person whom she has not seen for seven years.

Yet she is conscious of a sense of pain and excitation