on't, eh?"

He made a stride, snatched Lady Holme up as if she were a bundle, and
carried her off to bed.

She was on the point of bursting into angry tears, but when she found
herself snatched up, her slippers tumbling off, the hood of the burnous
falling over her eyes, her face crushed anyhow against her husband's
sinewy chest, she suddenly felt oddly contented, disinclined to protest
or to struggle.

Lord Holme did not trouble himself to ask what she was feeling or why
she was feeling it.

He thought of himself--the surest way to fasten upon a man the thoughts
of others.

CHAPTER IV

ROBIN PIERCE and Carey were old acquaintances, if not exactly old
friends. They had been for a time at Harrow together. Pierce had six
thousand a year and worked hard for a few hundreds. Carey had a thousand
and did nothing. He had never done anything definite, anything to earn a
living. Yet his talents were notorious. He played the piano well for
an amateur, was an extraordinarily clever mimic, acted better than most
people who were not on the stage, and could write very entertaining
verse with a pungent, sub-acid flavour. But he had no creative power and
no perseverance. As a critic of the performances of others he was cruel
but discerning, giving no quarter, but giving credit where it was due.
He loathed a bad workman more than a criminal, and would rather have
crushed an incompetent human being than a worm. Secretly he despised
himself. His own laziness was as disgusting to him as a disease, and
was as incurable as are certain diseases. He was now thirty-four and
realised that he was never going to do anything with his life. Already
he had travelled over the world, seen a hundred, done a hundred things.
He had an enormous acquaintance in Society and among artists; writers,
actors, painters--all the people who did things and did them well. As a
rule they liked him, despite his bizarre bluntness of speech and manner,
and they invariably spoke of him as a man of great talent; he said
because he was so seldom fool enough to do anything that could reveal
incompetence. His mother, who was a widow, lived in the north, in an
old family mansion, half house, half castle, near the sea coast of
Cumberland. He had one sister, who was married to an American.

Carey always declared that he was that _rara avis_ an atheist, and that
he had been born an atheist. He affirmed that even when a child he had
never, for a moment, felt that ther