’I don’t write because I’ve got things to say.  I haven’t a message, like mother.  I write because it amuses me.  And because I like to be a novelist.  It’s done.  And I like to be well spoken of—­reasonably well, that is.  It’s all fun.  Why not?’

‘Oh, don’t ask me why not.  I can’t preach sermons all the evening.’

He smiled down on her out of his long sad black eyes, glad of her because she saw straight and never canted, impatient of her because her ideals were commercial, loving her because she was gray-eyed and white-skinned and desirable, seeing her much as Nancy Sharpe, who lived for music, saw Johnny Potter, only with ardour instead of nonchalance; such ardour, indeed, that his thoughts of her only intermittently achieved exactitude.

Two girls came up to admire Charles.  Jane said it was time she took him to bed, and they went up with her.

Gideon turned away.  He hated parties, and seldom went even to Jane’s.  He stood drinking coffee and watching people.  You met most of them at the club and elsewhere continually; why meet them all again in a drawing-room?  There was his sister Rosalind and her husband Boris Stefan with their handsome faces and masses of black hair.  Rosalind had a baby too (at home); a delicate, pretty, fair-haired thing, like Rosalind’s Manchester mother.  And Charles was like Jane’s Birmingham father.  It was Manchester and Birmingham that persisted, not Palestine or Russia.

And there was Juke, with his white, amused face and heavy-lidded eyes that seemed always to see a long way, and Katherine Varick talking to a naval officer about periscopes (Jane kept in with some of the Admiralty), and Peacock, with whom Gideon had quarrelled two hours ago at the Fact office, and who was now in the middle of a group of writing young men, as usual.  Gideon looked at him cynically.  Peacock was letting himself be got at by a clique.  Gideon would rather have seen him talking to the practical looking sailor about periscopes.  Peacock would have to be watched.  He had shown signs lately of colouring the Fact with prejudices.  He was getting in with a push; he was dangerously in the movement.  He was also leaning romancewards, and departing from the realm of pure truth.  He had given credence to some strange travellers’ tales of Foreign Office iniquities.  As if that unfortunate and misguided body had not enough sins to its account without having melodramatic and uncharacteristic kidnappings and deeds of violence attributed to it.  But Peacock had got in with those unhappy journalists and others who had been viewing Russia, and, barely escaping with their lives, had come back with nothing else, and least of all with that accurate habit of mind which would have qualified them as contributors to the Weekly Fact.  It was not their fault (except for going to Russia), but Peacock should have had nothing to do with them.

Katherine Varick crossed the room to Gideon, with a faint smile.