with some chance saying or doing.  Things recalled her, a passage in a book, a sentiment she would have shared, an opinion she would have combated.  Or perhaps it was that some one he met set him thinking of her shrewd swift judgments; some scene in which he played a part that made him imagine her an amused spectator of its unconscious absurdity.  He had turned her thyme flowers out of his pocket; he had no sentiment about them or her, but he did not forget her; their acquaintance had, to a certain extent, been a thing of mind, and in mind it seemed he occasionally came in contact with her still.  Also there is no doubt she must have been one of those virile people who take hold, for though one could sometimes overlook her presence, in absence one did not forget.

Of herself and her doings he never heard; at first he had half thought he might have some communication from Mr. Gillat, but as the autumn went on and he heard nothing, he came to the conclusion that she really must have arranged something satisfactorily and there was an end to the whole affair.  He settled down to his own concerns and became very thoroughly absorbed in them, to the exclusion of nearly everything else.  For women he never had much taste, and now, being busy and preoccupied, he got into the way of scanning them more critically than ever when he did happen to come across them.  Not comparing them with any ideal standard, but just finding them uninteresting, whether they were the cultivated, well-bred girls of the country, or the smart young matrons and wide-awake maidens of the town.

That autumn the young Rawson-Clew, Captain Polkington’s acquaintance, came into a fortune and took a wife.  The latter was, perhaps, on the whole, a wise proceeding, for, though the wife in question would undoubtedly help him in the rapid and inevitable spending of the fortune, she was likely also to enable him to get more for his money than if he were spending alone.  Rawson-Clew was not introduced to this lady till the winter, then, one evening, he met her at a friend’s “at home.”

She was very pretty, small and fair and plump, with childish blue eyes, and an anything but childish mind behind them.  She had dainty little feet, as well shaped as any he had ever seen, and she was perfectly dressed, her gown a diaphanous creation of melting colours and floating softness, which suggested more than it revealed of her person, like a nymph’s drapery.  She was the centre of attraction and talked and laughed a great deal, the latter in little tinkles like a child of five, the former from the top of her throat with the faintest lisp and in the strange jargon that was the slang of the moment.  She knew no more of Florentine art or Wagner or Egyptology than Julia did, and cared even less.  She set out to be intelligently ignorant—­to be anything else was called “middle-class” in her set—­and she achieved her end, although she could do some things extremely well—­play bridge, gamble in stocks and shares and anything else,