saloons of the great hotels.  The majority of the members were acutely tedious to George, but Lois was quite uncritical, save on the main point; she divided the members into good dancers and bad dancers.  George was a pretty good dancer.  He liked dancing.  Membership of these clubs involved expense, it interfered with his sleep, it made his early mornings more like defeats than triumphs, it prevented him from duly reading and sketching.  But he liked dancing.  While resenting the compulsion to outrage his conscience, he enjoyed the sin.  What exasperated him was Lois’s argument that that kind of thing “did him good” professionally, and was indeed essential to the career of a rising or risen young architect, and that also it was good for his health and his mind.  He wished that she would not so unconvincingly pretend that self-indulgence was not what it was.  These pretences, however, seemed to be a necessity of her nature.  She reasoned similarly about the dinners and theatre-parties which they gave and attended.  Next to dancing she adored dinners and theatre-parties.  She would sooner eat a bad dinner in company anywhere than a good dinner quietly at home; she would far sooner go to a bad play than to none at all; she was in fact never bored in the theatre or in the music-hall.  Never!

Once, by misfortune—­as George privately deemed—­he had got a small job (erection of a dwelling-house at Hampstead) through a dinner.  Lois had never forgotten it, and she would adduce the trifle again and again as evidence of the sanity of her ideas about social life.  George really did not care for designing houses; they were not worth the trouble; he habitually thought in public edifices and the palaces of kings, nobles, and plutocrats of taste.  Moreover, his commission on the house would not have kept his own household in being for a month—­and yet the owner, while obviously proud to be the patron of the celebrated prodigy George Cannon, had the air of doing George Cannon a favour!

And so her ambition, rather than his, had driven them both ruthlessly on.  Both were overpressed, but George considerably more than Lois.  Lois was never, in ordinary times, really tired.  Dinners, teas, even lunches, restaurants, theatres, music-halls, other people’s houses, clubs, dancing, changing clothes, getting into autos and taxis and getting out of autos and taxis, looking at watches, writing down engagements, going to bed with a sigh at the lateness of the hour, waking up fatigued to the complexities of the new day—­she coped admirably with it all.  She regarded it as natural; she regarded it as inevitable and proper.  She enjoyed it.  She wanted it, and that which she wanted she must have.  Yet her attitude to George was almost invariably one of deep solicitude for him.  She would look at him with eyes troubled and anxious for his welfare.  When they were driving to a dance which he had no desire to attend, she would put her arm in his and squeeze his arm and murmur:  “Coco, I don’t like you working so hard.” (Coco was her pet name for him, a souvenir of Paris.)