They are real, thought Fanny Elmer, setting her feet on the mantelpiece.  Some people are.  Nick perhaps, only he was so stupid.  And women never—­ except Miss Sargent, but she went off at lunch-time and gave herself airs.  There they sat quietly of a night reading, she thought.  Not going to music-halls; not looking in at shop windows; not wearing each other’s clothes, like Robertson who had worn her shawl, and she had worn his waistcoat, which Jacob could only do very awkwardly; for he liked Tom Jones.

There it lay on her lap, in double columns, price three and sixpence; the mystic book in which Henry Fielding ever so many years ago rebuked Fanny Elmer for feasting on scarlet, in perfect prose, Jacob said.  For he never read modern novels.  He liked Tom Jones.

“I do like Tom Jones,” said Fanny, at five-thirty that same day early in April when Jacob took out his pipe in the arm-chair opposite.

Alas, women lie!  But not Clara Durrant.  A flawless mind; a candid nature; a virgin chained to a rock (somewhere off Lowndes Square) eternally pouring out tea for old men in white waistcoats, blue-eyed, looking you straight in the face, playing Bach.  Of all women, Jacob honoured her most.  But to sit at a table with bread and butter, with dowagers in velvet, and never say more to Clara Durrant than Benson said to the parrot when old Miss Perry poured out tea, was an insufferable outrage upon the liberties and decencies of human nature—­or words to that effect.  For Jacob said nothing.  Only he glared at the fire.  Fanny laid down Tom Jones.

She stitched or knitted.

“What’s that?” asked Jacob.

“For the dance at the Slade.”

And she fetched her head-dress; her trousers; her shoes with red tassels.  What should she wear?

“I shall be in Paris,” said Jacob.

And what is the point of fancy-dress dances? thought Fanny.  You meet the same people; you wear the same clothes; Mangin gets drunk; Florinda sits on his knee.  She flirts outrageously—­with Nick Bramham just now.

“In Paris?” said Fanny.

“On my way to Greece,” he replied.

For, he said, there is nothing so detestable as London in May.

He would forget her.

A sparrow flew past the window trailing a straw—­a straw from a stack stood by a barn in a farmyard.  The old brown spaniel snuffs at the base for a rat.  Already the upper branches of the elm trees are blotted with nests.  The chestnuts have flirted their fans.  And the butterflies are flaunting across the rides in the Forest.  Perhaps the Purple Emperor is feasting, as Morris says, upon a mass of putrid carrion at the base of an oak tree.

Fanny thought it all came from Tom Jones.  He could go alone with a book in his pocket and watch the badgers.  He would take a train at eight-thirty and walk all night.  He saw fire-flies, and brought back glow-worms in pill-boxes.  He would hunt with the New Forest Staghounds.  It all came from Tom Jones; and he would go to Greece with a book in his pocket and forget her.