you've been
everywhere, seen everything, met everybody. You're utterly uncontrolled
and so sated and restless that, rather than go to bed, you'll compromise
yourself by sitting talking to me half the night in a bachelor flat."

"Poor Val Arden used to talk like that. He always called me Lady Lilith,
because I was older than good and evil. I'm sorry Val's dead; he was
such fun. 'In six years' time--one asks oneself the question. . . .' It
wasn't 'rather than go to bed,' not altogether."

"It's a nervous disease," Eric interrupted shortly.

"Because I cried just now? I was very unhappy, Eric."

"My dear Lady Barbara, you live in superlatives. You don't know what
happiness or unhappiness means. You were badly overwrought then, so you
cried and said you were miserable."

She looked at him and raised her eyebrows without speaking.

"It's wonderful how wrong quite clever people can be," she said at
length. "I _was_ miserable, I _wanted_ to be kissed, I was _hungry_ for
the smallest crumb of affection. I wanted to be _happy_. . . . And you
can only see me as neurotic. D'you feel you're a good judge?"

"Of happiness?"

Eric smiled complacently and again glanced lovingly round the room.
Barbara sighed in pity and looked at her watch.

"_I_ seem to have come in the way rather," she interrupted.

"The butterfly that settles on the railway track may be said, I suppose,
to come in the way of a train. . . . I'm going to take you home now."

"You're not sorry I came? _I'm_ not."

"It was worth while meeting you," he laughed.

As Eric struggled with the sleeves of his coat, she twined her arms
round his neck. The scent of carnations was now faintly blended with the
deeper fragrance of the single rose behind her ear.

"And you'd never kissed any one before," she whispered.

It was nearly day-light when they found themselves in the street. Two
special constables, striding resonantly home, looked curiously at them;
but Barbara had again pulled up her shawl until it covered half her
face. Piccadilly was at the mercy of scavengers with glistening black
waders and pitiless hoses; otherwise they seemed to have all London to
themselves.

With a head aching from fatigue, Eric tried to reconstruct the fantastic
evening. Little detached pictures jostled their unconvincing way through
his brain--Lady Poynter's formal dining-room and the barren,
self-conscious literary discussion; Lord Poynter's wheezing confidences
about the wo