Lawrence had the curiosity to get out of bed and carry Mrs. Cleve to the window.  Yes, she certainly was an expensive luxury, this smiling lady, her eyes large and liquid, her waved hair rippling under its diamond aigrette, her rather wide, eighteenth century shoulders dimpling down under a collar of diamonds to the half bare swell of her breast:  and for an amateur of her type she was charming, with her tired, sophisticated glance and her fresh mouth, like a rouged child:  but it was borne in on Lawrence that she was not for him.  He had kissed her two or three times, as occasion served and she seemed to desire it, but he had never lain awake afterwards, nor had his heart beaten any faster, no, not even in the summerhouse at Bingley when she was fairly in his arms.  He pitched the photograph into a drawer.  Frederick Cleve was safe, for him.

Strolling out on the balcony, Lawrence folded his arms on the balustrade.  The night was hot:  perhaps that was why he could not sleep.  By his watch it was ten minutes past two.  The moon was near her setting.  She lay on her back with tumbled clouds all round her:  mother & pearl clouds, quilted, and tinged with a sheen of opal.  He wondered whether Bernard was asleep:  poor Bernard, lying alone through the dreary hours.  Perhaps it was because Lawrence was not at all like a curate that Bernard had already made his cousin free of certain dark corners which Val had never been allowed to explore.  “My wife?  She’s not my wife,” Clowes had said, staring up at Lawrence with his wide black eyes.  “She’s my nurse.”  And he went on defining the situation with the large coarse frankness which he permitted himself since his accident, and which did not repel Lawrence, as it would have repelled Val or Jack Bendish, because Lawrence habitually used the same frankness in his own mind.  There was some family likeness between the cousins, and it came out in their common contempt for modern delicacy, which Bernard called squeamishness and Lawrence damned in more literary language as the Victorian manner.

The moon dipped lower over the trees while Lawrence took one of his sharp turns of self-analysis.  Most men live in a haze, but Lawrence was naturally a clear thinker, and he had neither a warm heart nor a sentimental temperament to blind him.  Cleve was safe:  but with his Rabelaisian candour and cultivated want of scruple Lawrence reflected that Cleve had been anything but safe at Bingley.  Whence the change?  From Isabel Stafford!  Lawrence shrugged his shoulders:  he was accustomed to examine himself in a dry light of curiosity, and no vice or weakness shocked him, but here was pure folly.

What was he doing at Wanhope?  “I’m contracting attachments,” he reflected, unbuttoning his silk jacket to feel the night air cool on his chest, a characteristic action:  wind, sunshine, a wandering scent, the freshness of dew, all the small sensuous pleasures that most men neglect, Lawrence would go out of his way to procure.  “I’m breaking my rule.”  Long ago he had resolved never to let himself get fond of any one again, because in this world of chance and change, at the mercy of a blindly striking power, the game is not worth the candle:  one suffers too much.