was unaccountable therefore that he should find
himself at the edge of the terrace. He wondered why on earth Clarice
couldn't have helped him a little, and then as if in response to his
deep instinctive demand upon her, he heard her call softly to her
husband from the door of the house. At the scrape of Julian's chair on
the terrace tiling, Peter cast away his cigar and hurried into the dusk
of the garden.

He found her at last by the herbacious border, keeping touch with the
flight of a sphinx-head moth along the tall white rockets of phlox.
Peter whipped out his handkerchief and dropped it deftly over the
fluttering wings. In a moment he had stilled them in his hand. Miss
Goodward cried out to him:

"You've spoiled his happy evening!"

"He's not hurt...." Peter laid the moth gently on a feathery flower
head, and the tiny whispering whirr began again. "I thought you wanted
him."

"I did--but not to catch him," Miss Goodward explained. "I wanted just
to want him."

"Ah, I'm afraid I'm one of those people with whom to want a thing is to
go after it," Peter justified himself.

"So one gathers from what one hears." She brushed him as lightly with
the compliment as with the wings of a moth. "I wasn't really wanting him
so much as I was wanting to _be_ him for a while. Just to pass from one
lovely hour to another and nothing to pay! But we humans have always to
pay something."

"Or some one pays for us."

"Well, isn't that worse ... taking it out of somebody else?"

"I'm not so sure; some people enjoy paying. It's not a bad feeling, I
assure you: being able to pay. Haven't you found that out yet?"

"Not in Trethgarten Square." Mrs. Lessing had managed to let him know
during the day that her guest had been reared within the sacred pale of
those first families in whom the choice stock of humanness is refined by
being maintained at precisely the same level for at least three
generations.

"In Trethgarten Square," Peter reminded her, "we are told that you
settle your account just by _being_; that you manage somehow to become
something so superior and delectable that the rest of us are willing to
pay for the privilege of having you about." He would have liked to add
that recently, no later in fact than the evening before, he had come to
think that this was so, but as she hesitated in her walk beside him, he
saw that she was concerned in putting the case to herself quite as much
as to him.

"It's not that exactly