So she was sorry for him.  That, at any rate, was amusing.  Or perhaps she thought he was afraid of her in the obscure duel that was being fought out between them.

Cosgrave caught hold of him as he passed.

“The end of it all will be that I’ll go back to my old swamp and tell the fellows that I’ve had a first-rate leave.  I’ll tell ’em about her, and they’ll sit round open-mouthed—­thinking I’m no end of a dog—­and that they’ll do the same next time they get a chance.  They’ll be awfully bucked to hear there’s a good time going after all.”  He pleaded drowsily:  “Say you’ll come though, Robert.  You’re such a brick.  I’m beastly fond of you, you know.”

Robert Stonehouse withdrew his hand sharply from the hot, moist clasp.  (How he had run that night!  As though the devil had been after him instead of poor breathless little Cosgrave with his innocent confession.)

“Oh, I’ll come,” he said.

2

After all, nothing changed very much.  Grown-up people masqueraded.  They pretended to laugh at the young fools they had been and were still behind the elaborate disguise of adult reasonableness and worldly wisdom.  For Robert Stonehouse, at any rate, it was ridiculously the old business over again—­children whose games he despised and could not play, despising him.

It seemed that she had invited everyone and anyone whose name had come into her head, without regard for taste or sense, and the result, half raffish and half brilliant, somehow justified her.  The notable and notorious men there, the bar-loungers whose life gave them a look of almost pathetic imbecility, the women of fashion and the too fashionable ladies of the chorus had, at least temporarily, accepted some common denominator.  They rubbed shoulders in the stuffy, dingy, green-room with an air of complete good-fellowship.

Robert Stonehouse stood alone among them, for nothing in his life had prepared him to meet them.  He had been accustomed to encounter and master significant hardship, not an apparently meaningless luxury and aimless pleasure.  He knew how to deal with men and women whose sufferings put them in his power or with men of his own profession, but these people with their enigmatic laughter, their Masonic greetings, almost their own language (which was the more troubling since it seemed his very own), threw him from his security.  They made him self-conscious and self-distrustful.  They might be ten times more worthless than he believed them to be, and he might be ten times a bigger man than the Robert Stonehouse who had made such a good thing of his life.  They had still the power to put him in the wrong and to make him an oaf and an outsider.  And they knew it.  He felt their glances slide over him furtively and a little mockingly.  Yet outwardly he conformed to them.  He wore his clothes well enough, and his self-control covered over his real distress with a rather repellent arrogance.  He was even handsome, as a plain man can become handsome whose mind has dominated from the start over a fine body.  And with this air of power went his flagrant youthfulness.