“Very nice rooms, at the top of the house, looking over the river.”

“Darling Nicky, I shall go and see him.  What are you thinking of, Dorothy?”

Dorothy was thinking that Nicky’s address at Chelsea was the address that Desmond had given her yesterday.

XIII

When Frances heard that Nicholas was going about everywhere with the painter girl they called Desmond, she wrote to Vera to come and see her.  She could never bring herself to go to the St. John’s Wood house that was so much more Mr. Lawrence Stephen’s house than it was Vera’s.

The three eldest children went now and then, refusing to go back on Vera.  Frances did not like it, but she had not interfered with their liberty so far as to forbid it positively; for she judged that frustration might create an appetite for Mr. Stephen’s society that otherwise they might not, after all, acquire.

Vera understood that her husband’s brother and sister-in-law could hardly be expected to condone her last aberration.  Her attachment to Ferdie Cameron had been different.  It was inevitable, and in a sense forgivable, seeing that it had been brought about by Bartie’s sheer impossibility.  Besides, the knowledge of it had dawned on them so gradually and through so many stages of extenuating tragedy, that, even when it became an open certainty, the benefit of the long doubt remained.  And there was Veronica.  There was still Veronica.  Even without Veronica Vera would have had to think of something far worse than Lawrence Stephen before Frances would have cast her off.  Frances felt that it was not for her to sit in judgment under the shelter of her tree of Heaven.  Supposing she could only have had Anthony as Vera had had Ferdie, could she have lived without him?  For Frances nothing in the world had any use or interest or significance but her husband and her children; her children first, and Anthony after them.  For Vera nothing in the world counted but her lover.

“If only I were as sure of Lawrence as you are of Anthony!” she would say.

Yet she lived the more intensely, if the more dangerously, through the very risks of her exposed and forbidden love.

Vera was without fidelity to the unreturning dead; but she made up for it by an incorruptible adoration of the living.  And she had been made notorious chiefly through Stephen’s celebrity, which was, you might say, a pure accident.

Thus Frances made shelter for her friend.  Only Vera must be made to understand that, though she was accepted Lawrence Stephen was not.  He was the point at which toleration ceased.

And Vera did understand.  She understood that Frances and Anthony disapproved of her last adventure considerably more on Ferdie’s and Veronica’s account than on Bartie’s.  Even family loyalty could not espouse Bartie’s cause with any zest.  For Bartie showed himself implacable.  Over and over again she had implored him to divorce her so that Lawrence might marry her, and over and over again he had refused.  His idea was to assert himself by refusals.  In that way he could still feel that he had power over her and a sort of possession.  It was he who was scandalous.  Even now neither Frances nor Anthony had a word to say for him.