Eleven children!  Well, some people were prepared to take any risks and to face any responsibilities.  Was it very absurd to find in the coming of one child a tremendous event?  Really, Doctor Mayson had almost succeeded in making Dion feel a great fool.  Just another child in the world—­crying, dribbling, feebly trying to grasp the atmosphere; another child to cut its first tooth, with shrieks, to have whooping-cough, chicken-pox, rose rash and measles; another child to eat of the fruit of the tree; another child to combat and love and suffer and die.  No, damn it, the matter was important.  Doctor Mayson and his rosy face were unmeaning.  He might have eleven, or a hundred and eleven children, but he had no imagination.

Dion shut himself into his room, sat down in a big armchair, lit his pipe and thought about the Clarke case.  He had just told Doctor Mayson a white lie.  He was determined not to think about his Rosamund:  he dared not do that; so his mind fastened on the Clarke case.  Almost ferociously he flung himself upon it, called upon the unknown Mrs. Clarke, the woman whom he had never seen to banish from him his Rosamund, to interpose between her and him.  For Rosamund was inevitably suffering, and if he thought about that suffering his deep anxiety, his pity, his yearning would grow till they were almost unendurable, might even lead his feet to the room upstairs, the room forbidden to him to-night.  So he called to Mrs. Clarke, and at last, obedient to his insistent demand, she came and did her best for him, came, he imagined, from Constantinople, to keep him company in this night of crisis.

As Daventry had described her, as Bruce Evelin had, with casual allusions and suggestive hints, built her up before Dion in the talk after dinner that night, so she was now in the little room:  a woman of intellect and of great taste, with an intense love for, and fine knowledge of, beautiful things:  a woman who was almost a sensualist in her adoration for fine and rare things.

“I detest the sensation of sinking down in things!”

Who had said that once with energy in Dion’s hearing?  Oh—­Rosamund, of course!  But she must not be admitted into Dion’s life in these hours of waiting.  Mrs. Clarke must be allowed to reign.  She had come (in Dion’s imagination) all the way from the city of wood and of marble beside the seaway of the Golden Horn, a serious, intellectual and highly cultivated woman, whom a cruel fate—­Kismet—­was now about to present to the world as a horrible woman.  Pale, thin, rather melancholy she was, a reader of many books, a great lover of nature, a woman who cared very much for her one child.  Why should Fate play such a woman such a trick?  Perhaps because she was very unconventional, and it is unwise for the bird which sings in the cage of diplomacy to sing any but an ordinary song.

Daventry had dwelt several times on Mrs. Clarke’s unconventionality; evidently the defense meant to lay stress on it.