things. He had leisure, in especial, for going from
country-house to country-house, where he was immensely in demand, and
where he hunted, danced, and acted in private theatricals--usually in
company with his cousin Helen. Helen's position in life was very much
like his own, but that she hadn't even an informal secretaryship to
depend upon. He had known Helen all his life, and she was almost like a
sister, only nicer; for he associated sisters with his own brood, who
were lean, hunting ladies, pleasant, but monotonous and inarticulate.
Helen was very articulate and very various. He loved to look at her, as
he loved to look at birds and flowers, and he loved to talk with her. He
had many opportunities to look and talk. They stayed at the same houses
in the country, and in London, when she was with old Miss Buchanan, he
usually saw her every day. If he didn't drop in for a moment on his way
to work at ten-thirty in the morning, he dropped in to tea; and if his
or Helen's day were too full to admit of this, he managed to come in for
a goodnight chat after a dinner or before a dance. He enjoyed Helen's
talk and Helen's appearance most of all, he thought, at these late
hours, when, a little weary and jaded, in evening dress and cloak, she
lit her invariable cigarette, and mused with him over the events and
people of the day. He liked Helen's way of talking about people; they
knew an interminable array of them, many involved in enlivening
complications, yet Helen never gossiped; the musing impersonality and
impartiality with which she commented and surmised lifted her themes to
a realm almost of art; she was pungent, yet never malicious, and the
tolerant lucidity of her insight was almost benign.

Her narrow face, leaning back in its dark aureole of hair, her strange
eyes and bitter-sweet lips--all dimmed, as it were, by drowsiness and
smoke, and yet never more intelligently awake than at these nocturnal
hours--remained with him as most typical of Helen's most significant and
charming self. It was her aspect of mystery and that faint hint of
bitterness that he found so charming; Helen herself he never thought of
as mysterious. Mystery was a mere outward asset of her beauty, like the
powdery surface of a moth's wing. He didn't think of Helen as
mysterious, perhaps because he thought little about her at all; he only
looked and listened while she made him think about everything but
herself, and he felt always happy and altogether