‘Pallor suits you,’ he piped gallantly, and then added:  ’But do not carry it to extremes.’

‘Am I so pale, then?’ I faltered, trying to smile naturally.

I sat down beside him, and smoothed out my black lace dress; he examined it like a connoisseur.

‘Yes,’ he said at length.  ‘What is the matter?’

Lord Francis charged this apparently simple and naive question with a strange intimate meaning.  The men who surround a woman such as I, living as I lived, are always demanding, with a secret thirst, ’Does she really live without love?  What does she conceal?’ I have read this interrogation in the eyes of scores of men; but no one, save Lord Francis, would have had the right to put it into the tones of his voice.  We were so mutually foreign and disinterested, so at the opposite ends of life, that he had nothing to gain and I nothing to lose, and I could have permitted to this sage ruin of a male almost a confessor’s freedom.  Moreover, we had an affectionate regard for each other.

I said nothing, and he repeated in his treble: 

‘What is the matter?’

‘Love is the matter!’ I might have passionately cried out to him, had we been alone.  But I merely responded to his tone with my eyes.  I thanked him with my eyes for his bold and flattering curiosity, senile, but thoroughly masculine to the last.  And I said: 

‘I am only a little exhausted.  I finished my novel yesterday.’

It was my sixth novel in five years.

‘With you,’ he said, ‘work is simply a drug.’

‘Lord Francis,’ I expostulated, ‘how do you know that?’

‘And it has got such a hold of you that you cannot do without it,’ he proceeded, with slow, faint shrillness.  ’Some women take to morphia, others take to work.’

‘On the contrary,’ I said, ’I have quite determined to do no more work for twelve months.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously.’

He faced me, vivacious, and leaned against the back of the settee.

‘Then you mean to give yourself time to love?’ he murmured, as it were with a kind malice, and every crease in his veined and yellow features was intensified by an enigmatic smile.

‘Why not?’ I laughed encouragingly.  ‘Why not?  What do you advise?’

‘I advise it,’ he said positively.  ’I advise it.  You have already wasted the best years.’

‘The best?’

’One can never afterwards love as one loves at twenty.  But there!  You have nothing to learn about love!’

He gave me one of those disrobing glances of which men who have dedicated their existence to women alone have the secret.  I shrank under the ordeal; I tried to clutch my clothes about me.

The chatter from the other end of the room grew louder.  Vicary was gazing critically at his chandeliers.

‘Does love bring happiness?’ I asked Lord Francis, carefully ignoring his remark.