“Ha, ha, ha!”

It was a formidable explosion on the part of the Commissioner, in an adjoining room.

He was talking to some friends about Napoleon.

They wanted a fellow like that on Nepenthe—­a fellow who got things done.  Napoleon would have made no bones about the Wilberforce woman over there.  It was a scandalous state of affairs.  What was the use of a Committee for trying to keep her in order and getting her locked up in a sanatorium?  Everybody knew what a Committee meant.  Committee!  It was a preposterous word.  Committees were the same all the world over.  Committee!  He was in charge of that particular one; they were dong all they could, but what did it amount to?  Nothing.  To begin with, there was not enough money coming in, unless somebody could wheedle a cheque out of that rich old Koppen sensualist whose yacht might be arriving at any moment.  And then her own pig-headedness!  She refused to be talked over into doing what was in her own interests.  Napoleon, he reckoned, might have talked her over—­ha, ha, ha!

The lady in question, all unaware of these humanitarian designs, had taken up a strategic position in the neighbourhood of the drinks, and was glancing shyly round the room in search of a likely male who would fetch her a stiff glass of something from the buffet, and that soon.  She was groggy, but not sufficiently primed to go there herself; she knew that everybody’s eye would be fixed upon her; she had been much talked about of late.  Drunk, she was impossible; dead sober, almost as bad—­haughty, sullen, logical, with a grieved and surprised air suggestive of wounded dignity.

People avoided Miss Wilberforce.  And yet you could not help liking her in those rare moments when she was just a little disguised.  She had a pretty wit, then; a residue of gentle nurture; tender instincts and a winsomeness of manner that captivated you.  Nor were appearances against her.  That frail, arrowy figure was invariably clothed in black.  She wore the colour by instinct.  They said she had lost her sailor fiance who was drowned, poor lad, in the Mediterranean; and that now she wandered about at night looking for him, or trying to forget him and seeking oblivion in tipple.

The story happened to be true, for a wonder.  She had received a twist for life.  The death of this young lover gave to her impressionable being a shock which never passed off again.  The world was turned inside out for Amy Wilberforce.  She seldom spoke of his fate.  But she was always talking about the sea.  She tried to drown herself, once or twice.  Then, gradually, she put on a new character altogether and relapsed into queer ancestral traits, stripping off, like so many worthless rags, the layers of laboriously acquired civilization.  The refined and bashful girl became brusque, supercilious, equivocal.  When sympathizing friends said that they had also lost lovers, she laughed and told them to look for new ones.  There were better fish in the sea, etc., etc.