Shaftesbury Avenue, an immaculately turned-out young man in evening dress passed along the baked pavements and dived into one of the theatres.  Notwithstanding the heat, there seemed to be a sort of voluptuous atmosphere brooding over the crowded streets.  The sky over Piccadilly Circus was almost violet and the luminous, unneeded lamps had a festive effect.  The strain of a long day had passed.  It was the pleasure-seekers alone who thronged the thoroughfares.  Tallente turned and looked into the corner of the cab, to meet a soft, reflective gleam in Nora’s eyes.

“Isn’t London wonderful!” she murmured dreamily.  “On a night like this it always seems to me like a great human being whose pulses you can see heating, beating all the time.”

Tallente, a person very little given to self-analysis, never really understood the impulse which prompted him to lean towards her, the slightly quickening sense of excitement with which he sought for the kindness of her eyes.  Suddenly he felt his fingers clasped in hers, a warm, pleasant grasp, yet which somehow or other seemed to have the effect of a barrier.

“You asked me a question at dinner-time,” she said, “winch I did not answer at the time.  You asked me why I disliked James Miller so much.”

“Don’t tell me unless you like,” he begged.  “Don’t talk about that sort of person at all just now, unless you want to.”

“I must tell you why I dislike him so much,” she insisted.  “It is because he once tried to kiss me.”

“Was that so terrible a sin?” he asked, a little thickly.

She smiled up at him with the candour of a child.

“To me it was,” she acknowledged, “because it was just the casual caress of a man seeking for a momentary emotion.  Sometimes you have wondered—­or you have looked as though you were wondering—­what my ideas about men and women and the future and the marriage laws, and all that sort of thing really are.  Perhaps I haven’t altogether made up my mind myself, but I do know this, because it is part of myself and my life.  The one desire I have is for children—­sons for the State, or daughters who may bear sons.  There isn’t anything else which it is worth while for a woman thinking about for a moment.  And yet, do you know, I never actually think of marrying.  I never think about whether love is right or wrong.  I simply think that no man shall ever kiss me, or hold me in his arms, unless it is the man who is sent to me for my desire, and when he comes, just whoever he may be, or whenever it may be, and whether St. George’s opens its doors to us or whether we go through some tangle of words at a registry office, or whether neither of these things happens, I really do not mind.  When he comes, he will give me what I want—­that is just all that counts.  And until he comes, I shall stay just as I have been ever since my pigtail went up and my skirts came down.”

She gave his hand a final little pressure, patted and released it.  He felt, somehow or other, immeasurably grateful to her, flattered by her confidence, curiously exalted by her hesitating words.  Speech, however, he found an impossibility.