ditor and I got him to shove it in.
As my own advertising agent, I take a lot of beating. Good-bye, Sybil."

"Good-bye, selfish pig. You're being spoilt by success, you know."

Eric made no answer, but, as he snatched up his hat and cane, still more
as he settled himself in the taxi with his feet on the opposite seat, he
reflected with philosophic indulgence how wide of the mark his sister
had fired. He was self-satisfied, perhaps, as he had some reason to be;
self-sufficient, assuredly, as he had set out to become. After all, he
could have entered the Civil Service ten years before, as his father had
wished; and there would have been ten years of material comfort, an
unchallengeable social position, a wife, a home, spiritual paralysis and
soul-destroying domestic worries as his portion. Instead, he had elected
to make his own way in a hard and somewhat despised school. A young
journalist had no status. People invited him to their houses, because he
had been at the same college as their sons, because other people had
already taken the plunge; but he had always had enough detachment to
recognize where the intimacy was to stop.

Now he was being accepted at his own valuation. As he passed the Ritz,
two officers and a girl hailed a taxi and told the driver to take them
to the Regency. At eleven o'clock they would be saying: "Good show,
that." (Had he not loitered in the hall of the theatre, with coat-collar
turned up, to hear just that?) In another month they would be going to
"The Bomb-Shell," because it was by the fellow who wrote "A Divorce Has
Been Arranged." . . . He had money, friends, adulators and the health to
do a full day's work. In speaking to Sybil, he had only hesitated
because he was not sure whether he wanted to meet Agnes Waring yet. When
they became engaged. . . . _If_ they became engaged, he would lose in
interest with the women like Lady Poynter who were always inviting him
to be lionized. . . .

As the taxi drew up in Belgrave Square, he looked at his watch.
Twenty-seven minutes past eight. He handed his hat and cane to a footman
and followed the butler upstairs with complete self-possession. As he
was asked his name at the door of the drawing-room, however, he
stammered:

"Mr. Eric L-lane."

It was intolerable that he could not overcome that stammer, so entirely
alien to a new young Byron. . . .

2

Lady Poynter had finished dressing and was writing in her diary when her
maid entered to as