Looking back as well as forward, only the pleasant and sweet things of his marriage remained impressed on his mind.  The cosiness of the home and not the worry of paying for it instalment by instalment; the good dinners Marie cooked, not the grudge of giving out that housekeeping allowance which paid for them; the prettiness and sunniness of his wife rather than the faded looks and uncertain temper of the last few years; the three fine kids he’d got, not the nuisance and noise and expense which he had so often declared them.

The rosy cloud of time and distance had rolled between Osborn and all that was his at No. 30 Welham Mansions.  Before his year of adventure was up he found himself thinking of them sentimentally; he found that they were embedded pretty deep in his heart.  They were real; other things were—­

Looking about for a definition, he stigmatised other things:  “They’re trash.”

He added therefore a postscript to his letter to his wife, an addition written in a sudden thrust of pathos, a want of her almost like the old want: 

“I wonder if you’ve missed me, old girl.”

In the trash he felt, though he had not given the idea the form of a thought, that Roselle Dates was included.  She had never bored, being too clever in her stupid, instinctive way for that; but sometimes she had sickened him.  She had wanted so much.  She seemed always wanting something.  At first her pallid and raven beauty and her clever silliness had been sheer stimulation, but when you grew used to her....

She had nothing behind.  And she was mean with the sex meanness, the cold prudence of the sex-trafficker.  She would never have given; she would only have sold, and that at a price far beyond Osborn Kerr’s pocket-book even at its recent splendour.  But she did not want to sell either; she wanted to take and take, to squeeze and squeeze.  Once—­that was in San Francisco, where she had beaten together a concert party and shone as its brightest star—­when he had been disappointed of a big deal and had come to her with the story....

She had refused to listen.

She had said:  “Look here, boy!  What do you mean by asking me out to lunch and moping?  I don’t want to hear your troubles.  There are plenty of people here who’ll amuse me without pulling long faces over dropping a little cash.”

She looked at him very coldly.  In that moment he had suddenly thought of another woman, a young bride, who, with tears of consternation and sympathy in her eyes, had brought out an account-book and pencil and said:  “I’ll get the gas out of the thirty shillings, too.”

That was the kind of reception a man expected for his troubles.  But after Roselle had let him pay for their expensive lunch, she had needed other things—­perfume and candy.  And she “borrowed” the rent of her rooms from him for several weeks.

She went back to London two months ahead of him, having written for and secured a moderately good engagement.