Knowing Elfrida as she thought she knew her, Kendal’s talk wounded her once for herself and twice for him.  He was going on blindly, confidently, trusting, Janet thought bitterly, to his own sweetness of nature, to his comeliness and the fineness of his sympathies—­who had ever refused him anything yet?  And only to his hurt, to his repulse—­from the point of view of sentiment, to his ruin.  For it did not seem possible to Janet that a hopeless passion for a being like Elfrida Bell could result in anything but collapse.  Whenever he came to Kensington Square, and he came often, she went down to meet him with a quaking heart, and sought his face nervously for the haggard, broken look which should mean that he had asked Elfrida to marry him and been artistically refused.  Always she looked in vain; indeed, Kendal’s spirits were so uniformly like a schoolboy’s that once or twice she asked herself, with sudden terror, whether Elfrida had deceived her—­whether it might not be otherwise between them, recognizing then, with infinite humiliation, how much worse that would be.  She took to working extravagantly hard, and Elfrida noticed with distinct pleasure how much warmer her manner had grown, and in how many pretty ways she showed her enthusiasm.  Janet was such a conquest!  Once when Kendal seemed to Janet on the point of asking her what she thought of his chances, she went to a florist’s in the High, and sent Elfrida a pot of snowy chrysanthemums, after which she allowed herself to refrain from seeing her for a week.  Her talk with her father about helping Elfrida to place her work with the magazines had been one of the constant impulses by which she tried to compensate her friend, as it were, for the amount of suffering that young woman was inflicting upon her—­she would have found a difficulty in explaining it more intelligibly than that.

As he settled together the pages of Miss Bell’s article on “The Nemesis of Romanticism” and laid them on the table, Lawrence Cardiff thought, of it with sincere regret.

“It is hopeless—­hopeless,” he said to himself.  “It must be rewritten from end to end.  I suppose she must do it herself,” he added, with a smile that he drew from some memory of her, and he pulled writing materials toward him to tell her so.  Re-reading his brief note, he frowned, hesitated, and tore it up.  The next followed it into the waste-paper basket.  The third gave Elfrida gently to understand that in Mr. Cardiff’s opinion the article was a little unbalanced—­she would remember her demand that he should be absolutely frank.  She had made some delightful points, but there was a lack of plan and symmetry.  If she would give him the opportunity he would be very happy to go over it with her, and possibly she would make a few changes.  More than this Cardiff could not induce himself to say.  And he would await her answer before sending the article back to her.