John Morley lay upon Alicia’s table many days together for this reason.  She sometimes remembered what she expected of these volumes, what plein air sensations, or what profound plunges, and did not quite like her indifference as to whether her expectations were fulfilled.  She discovered herself intellectually jaded—­there had been tiring excursions—­and took to daily rides which carried her far out among the rice-fields, and gave her sound nights to sustain the burden of her dreaming days.  She had ideas about her situation; she believed she lived outside of it.  At all events, she took a line; the new Arab was typical, and there were other measures which she arranged deliberately with the idea that she was making a physical fight.  Life might weigh one down with a dragging ball and chain, but one could always measure the strength of one’s opinions against these things.  She made it her sorry and remorseless task to separate from her impulses those that she found lacking in philosophy, hinting of the foolish woman, and to turn a cruel heel upon them.  She stripped her meditations of all colour and atmosphere; she would not accept from her grief the luxury of a rag to wrap herself in.  If this gave her a skeleton to live with, she had what gratification there was in observing that it was anatomically as it should be.  The result that one saw from the outside was chiefly a look of delicate hardness, of tissue a little frayed, but showing a quality in the process.  We may hope that some unconfessed satisfaction was derivable from her continued reception of Duff’s confidences, her unflinching readiness to consult with him; granting the analytic turn we may almost suppose it.  Starvation is so monotonous a misery that a gift of personal diagnosis might easily lend attraction to poisoned food as an alternative, if one may be permitted a melodramatic simile in a case which Alicia kept conventional enough.  She did not even abate the usual number of Duff’s invitations to dinner, when there was certainly nothing to repay her for regarding him across a gulf of flowers and silver and a tide of conversation about the season’s paper-chasing except the impoverished complexion which people acquire who sit much in Bentinck street, desirous and unsatisfied.

It may very well be that she regretted her behaviour in this respect, for it was effectively after one of these parties that Surgeon-Major Livingstone, pressing upon his departing guest in the hall the usual whiskey and soda, found it necessary instead to give him another kind of support, and to put him immediately and authoritatively to bed.  Lindsay was very well content to submit; he confessed to fever off and on for four and five days past, and while the world went round the pivotal staircase, as Dr. Livingstone gave him an elbow up, he was indistinctly convinced that the house of a friend was better than a shelf at the club.  The next evening’s meeting saw his place empty under the window of the hall in Crooked lane, noticeably