fidelity.  The whole world of women now were different creatures to him, but they left him as utterly unmoved as in his unawakened days.  It was Elizabeth only he wanted, craved for fiercely, with all this late-born passion of mingled sentiment and desire.  He felt himself, as he hung round there upon the pavement, rubbing shoulders with the liveried servants, the loafers, and the passers-by, a thing to be despised.  He was like a whipped dog fawning back to his master.  Yet if only he could persuade her to come with him, if it were but for an hour!  If only she would sit opposite him in that wonderful little restaurant, where the lights and the music, the laughter and the wine, were all outward symbols of this new life from before which her fingers seemed to have torn aside the curtains!  His heart beat with a fierce impatience.  He watched the thin stream of people who left before the play was over, suburbanites mostly, in a hurry for their trains.  Very soon the whole audience followed, commissionaires were busy with their whistles, the servants eagerly looking right and left for their masters.  And then Elizabeth!  She came out in the midst of half-a-dozen others, brilliant in a wonderful cloak and dress of turquoise blue, laughing with her friends, to all appearance the gayest of the party.  Tavernake stepped quickly forward, but at that moment there was a crush and he could not advance.  She passed within a yard of him, escorted by a couple of men, and for a moment their eyes met.  She raised her eyebrows, as though in surprise, and her recognition was of the slightest.  She passed on and entered a waiting motorcar, accompanied by the two men.  Tavernake stood and looked after it.  She did not even glance round.  Except for that little gesture of cold surprise, she had ignored him.  Tavernake, scarcely knowing what he did, turned slowly towards the Strand.

He was face to face now with a crisis before which he seemed powerless.  Men were there in the world to be bullied, cajoled, or swept out of the way.  What did one do with a woman who was kind one moment and insolent the next, who raised her eyebrows and passed on when he wanted her, when he was there longing for her?  Those old solid dreams of his—­wealth, power, his name on great prospectuses, a position in the world—­these things now appeared like the day fancies of a child.  He had seen his way towards them.  Already he had felt his feet upon the rungs of the ladder which leads to material success.  This was something different, something greater.  Then a sense of despair chilled his heart.  He felt how ignorant, how helpless he was.  He had not even studied the first text-book of life.  Those very qualities which had served him so well before were hopeless here.  Persistence, Beatrice had told him once, only annoys a woman.