“Well, then, my good friend, when you have done philosophising—­I don’t mean to be rude, but you see my nerves have been at strain for the last four-and-twenty hours; you will excuse me.  My notion now is that everything has happened for the best.”  And he confided to Harding his hopes of being able to persuade Evelyn to marry him.  “Only by marriage can she be saved, and I think I can persuade her.”  And he babbled about her appearance last night after her long sleep, comparing her with the portrait in his room.  The painter had omitted nothing of her character; all that had happened he read into the picture—­the restless spiritual eyes, and the large voluptuous mouth, and the small high temples which Leonardo would like to draw.  The painting of this picture was as illusive as Evelyn herself, the treatment of the reddish hair and the grey background.

And Harding listened, saying, “So this is the end.”

“You think she will marry me?”

“Everything in nature is unexpected, that is all I can tell you.  Art is logic, Nature incoherency.”

“Well, let us hope that Nature will be a little more coherent to-morrow than she was last night, and that Evelyn will do the right thing.  Women generally marry when it is pressed upon them sufficiently, don’t you think so, Harding?”

“I hope it will be so, since you desire it.”

“And you will be my best man, won’t you?”

“I shall be only too pleased.  Now, if you wait for me while I change my boots we’ll go out together.”  And the two men crossed the Green Park talking of the great moral laxity of the time they lived in; whereas in the eighteenth century men were even accused of boasting of their successes, now the conditions were reversed, men never admitting themselves to be anything else but virtuous; women, on the contrary, publishing their liaisons, and taking little pleasure in them until they were known to everybody.

“Liaisons have become as official as marriages.  Who doesn’t know—­” And Harding mentioned a number of celebrated ‘affairs’ which had been going on for ten, some twenty years.  “The real love affair of her ladyship now is probably some little tenor or drawing-master, and Cecil’s a little milliner; but her ladyship and Cecil are forced to keep up appearances, for if they didn’t who would talk about them any more?”

“You should write that as a short story,” Owen suggested.  And the two friends began to argue as to the number of lovers which fell to the lot of fashionable women, from the age of twenty-three to fifty.  Two or three ladies were mentioned whose liaisons reached a couple of hundred, and there was another about whom they were not agreed, for some of her liaisons had lasted so long that Owen did not believe she had had more than fifty lovers.