and fear to omit the one or excuse the other.
Everything follows from those three."

"And how do you know when you have found them?"

He looked up and out into the country. "A sudden glory," he said, "a
flare of insight. There's no mistake possible."

"Who was the man," she asked him, rather mischievously, "who saw a
girl at a ball, and said, 'That's a fine girl; I'll marry her'--and
did it--and was miserable?"

He twinkled as he answered, "That was Savage Landor; but it was his
own fault. He could never make concessions." She thought him a very
interesting companion.

On the way home he talked more fitfully, with intervals of brooding
silence. But he was not morose in his fits, and when he excused
himself for sulking, she warmly denied that he did any such thing. "I
expect you are studying the motor," she said; and he laughed. "I'm
very capable of that."

Altogether, a successful day. She returned braced to her duties, her
James, and his hidden-up Eros. To go home to James had become an
exciting thing to do.

CHAPTER VII

PATIENCE AND PSYCHE

There are two ways of encountering an anti-climax, an heroic, an
unheroic. Lucy did her best to be a heroine, but her temperament was
against her. Her imagination was very easily kindled, and her reasons
much at the mercy of the flames. By how much she was exalted, by so
much was she dashed. But she had a conscience too, a lively one with a
forefinger mainly in evidence. It would be tedious to recount how
often that wagged her into acquiescence with a James suddenly revealed
freakish, and how often she relapsed into the despair of one sharply
rebuffed when she found him sedately himself. However, or by means of
her qualities, the time-cure worked its way; her inflammation wore
itself out, and her life resumed its routine of dinner-parties, calls
and callers, Francis Lingen's purring, and letters to or from
Lancelot--with this difference, mind you, that far recessed in her
mind there lay a grain, a grain of promise: that and a glamorous
memory.

She was able to write her first letter to Lancelot in high spirits,
then, to tell him her little bits of news and to remind him (really to
remind herself) of good days in the past holiday-time. Something she
may have said, or left unsaid, as the chance may be, drew the
following reply. She always wrote to him on Friday, so that he might
answer her on Sunday.

"Dear Mama," he wrote, "I was third in weakly order which