She liked him for laughing.  She had been brought up in an atmosphere of scruple.  Her father overworked his conscience, treating a question of taste as a moral issue, and drawing no line between great and small—­like the man who gave a penny to a beggar and implored him not to spend it on debauchery.  Charity and a sense of fun saved Val, but if more lenient to others he was ruthlessly stern to himself.  Lawrence blew on Isabel like a breath of sea air.  In her reaction she liked his external characteristics, his manner to servants, his expensive clothes and boots, all the signs of money spent freely on himself.

She even liked his politics.  Isabel had been brought up all her life to talk politics.  Mr. Stafford was a Christian Socialist, a creed which in her private opinion was nicely calculated to produce the maximum of human discomfort:  and from a conversation between Hyde and Jack Bendish she had learnt that Hyde was all of her own view.  There was no nonsense about him—­none of that sweet blind altruism which, as Isabel saw it, only made the altruist and his family so bitterly uncomfortable without doing any good to the poor.  The poor?  She knew intuitively that servants and porters and waiters would far rather serve Hyde than her father.  Mr. Stafford longed to uplift the working classes, but Isabel had never got herself thoroughly convinced that they stood in need of uplifting.  Her practical common sense rose in arms against Movements that tried to get them to go to picture galleries instead of picture palaces.  Why shouldn’t they do as they liked?  Does one reform one’s friends?  Captain Hyde would live and let live.

And he was rich.  Few girls as cramped as Isabel could have remained blind to that wide horizon, and she made no pretence of doing so:  she was honest with herself and owned that she had always longed to be rich.  No one could call her discontented! her happy sunny temper took life as it came and enjoyed every minute of it, but her tastes were not really simple, though Val thought they were.  She had long felt a clear though perfectly good-humoured and philosophic impatience of her narrow scope.  Hyde could give her all and more than all she had ever desired—­ foreign countries and fine clothes, books and paintings, and power apparently and the admiration of men . . .  Isabel Hyde . . .  Mrs. Lawrence Hyde . . . .smiling she tried his name under her breath . . .and suddenly she found herself standing before the mirror, examining her face in its dusky shallows and asking of it the question that has perplexed many a young girl as beautiful as she—­“Am I pretty?” She pulled the pins out of her hair and ran a comb through it till it fell this way and that like an Indian veil, darkly burnished and sunset-shot with threads of bronze.  “Lawrence has never seen it loose,” she reflected:  “surely I am rather pretty?” and then “Oh, oh, I shall be late!” and Isabel’s dreams were drenched and scattered under the shock of cold water.