anything face to face.  So long as they can bury their heads like ostriches! ...  Faugh!” There would be a moment’s silence; then Adrian would complete his thought.  “In my uncle’s case,” he would grumble in the darkness, “one phase of the selfishness is obvious.  He couldn’t even get himself originally, I suppose, to face the inevitable matter-of-fact moments of marriage.  It began when he was middle-aged, a bachelor—­I suppose he wants the sort of Don Juan, eighteen-eighty, perpetual sort of romance that doesn’t exist outside the brains of himself and his like....  Camellias!”

Usually he tried to stir up argument with his wife, who in these matters agreed with him utterly; even more than agreed with him, since she was the escaped daughter of rich and stodgy people, and had insisted upon earning her own living by portrait-painting.  Theoretically, therefore, she was, of course, an anarchist.  But at moments like the present her silent assent and the aura of slight weariness over an ancient subject which emanated from her in the dusk, affronted Adrian as much as positive opposition.

“Why don’t you try to understand me?”

“I do, dearest!”—­a pathetic attempt at eager agreement.

“Well, then, if you do, why is the tone of your voice like that?  You know by now what I think.  I’m not talking convention; I believe there are no laws higher than the love of a man for a woman.  It should seek expression as a seed seeks sunlight.  I’m talking about honesty; bravery; a willingness to accept the consequences of one’s acts and come through; about the intention to sacrifice for love just what has to be sacrificed.  What’s the use of it otherwise?  That’s one real advance the modern mind has made, anyhow, despite all the rest of the welter and uncertainty.”

“Of course, dearest.”

He would go on.  After a while Cecil would awake guiltily and inject a fresh, almost gay interest into her sleepy voice.  She was not so unfettered as not to dread the wounded esteem of the unlistened-to male.  She would lean over and kiss Adrian.

“Do go to sleep, darling!  What’s the sense?  Pretty soon your uncle will be dead—­wretched old man!  Then you’ll never have to think of him again.”  Being a childless woman, her red, a trifle cruel mouth would twist itself in the darkness into a small, secretive, maternal smile.

But old Mr. Henry McCain didn’t die; instead he seemed to be caught up in the condition of static good health which frequently companions entire selfishness and a careful interest in oneself.  His butler died, which was very annoying.  Mr. McCain seemed to consider it the breaking of a promise made fifteen or so years before.  It was endlessly a trouble instructing a new man, and then, of course, there was Adlington’s family to be looked after, and taxes had gone up, and Mrs. Adlington was a stout woman who, despite the fact that Adlington, while alive, had frequently interrupted Mr. McCain’s breakfast newspaper reading by asserting that she was a person of no character, now insisted upon weeping noisily every time Mr. McCain granted her an interview.  Also, and this was equally unexpected, since one rather thought he would go on living forever, like one of the damper sort of fungi, Mr. Denby came home from the club one rainy spring night with a slight cold and died, three days later, with extraordinary gentleness.