with him. She could not help picturing herself as the fixed point to which he would, after his veerings, return in the end; meanwhile his share of the temperament excused the veerings. Lady Kilnorton had forced the game with entire apparent success, but Alice's quick eyes questioned the real completeness of that victory. She would play a waiting game. There was no question of an orthodox marriage with the young lady from over the way or round the corner, an arrangement which would have been odious in its commonplace humiliation and heart-breaking in its orderly finality. But Ora Pinsent was not a finality, any more than she was the embodiment of an orderly arrangement. That fortunate impossibility which attached to her, by virtue of Jack Fenning's existence, forbade despair, just as her fascination and her irresistibility seemed to prevent humiliation and lessen jealousy. The thing was a transient craze, such as men fell into; it would pass. If she joined her life to Ashley Mead's she was prepared (so she assured herself) for such brief wanderings of allegiance, now and then; as time went on, they would grow fewer and fewer, until at last she conquered altogether the tendency towards them. "And she must be ten years older than I am," her reflections ended; that the real interval was but seven did not destroy the importance of the point.
Having offered Ashley a lift to Piccadilly, she went off to get ready, and presently Bowdon, who had called to pick up Irene, strolled into the garden for a cigarette.
"Hullo, what are you doing here? You ought to be making your living," he cried good-humouredly.
"I've been throwing it away instead," said Ashley. "Should you like to be a partner in Muddock and Mead?"
"A sleeping one," said Bowdon with a meditative pull at his moustache.
Ashley explained that he would have been expected to take an active part. Bowdon evidently thought that he ought to have been glad to take any part, and rebuked him for his refusal.
"Take the offer and marry the girl," he counselled. "She'd have you all right, and she seems a very good sort."
"I don't feel like settling down all of a sudden," said Ashley with a smile.
They walked side by side for a few paces; then Bowdon remarked,
"Depend upon it, it's a good thing to do, though."
"It's a question of the best date," said Ashley, much amused at his companion. "Now at your age, Lord Bowdon – "
"Confound you, Ashley, I'm not a hundred! I say it's a good thing to do. And, by Jove, when it means a lump of money too!"
A pause followed; they walked and smoked in silence.
"Good creatures, women," remarked Bowdon.
Ashley did not find the remark abrupt; he traced its birth. Alice had left much the same impression behind her in his mind.
"Awfully," he answered; there was in his voice also a note of remorse, of the feeling that comes when we cannot respond to a kindness so liberally as it deserves.
"Of course they aren't all alike, though," pursued Bowdon, as though he were reasoning out an intricate subject and coming on unexpected conclusions. "In fact they differ curiously, wonderfully."
His thoughts had passed, or were passing, from Irene Kilnorton to Ora Pinsent; obedient to this guidance Ashley's followed in a parallel track from Alice Muddock to Ora Pinsent.
"They're charming in different ways," said he with a slight laugh. Bowdon shewed no signs of mirth; he was frowning a little and smoked rather fast.
"And men are often great asses," he observed a few moments later. Again Ashley had kept pace, but his face was more doubtful than his companion's and there was hesitation in his voice as he replied,
"Yes, I suppose they are."
This subterranean conversation, shewing above ground only faint indications of what it really meant to each of the talkers, had carried them to the end of the garden. Turning round at the fence, they saw Irene and Alice walking towards them, side by side. Both ladies were well dressed, Irene rather brilliantly, Alice with quiet, subdued good taste; both seemed attractive, Irene for her bright vivacity and merry kindness, Alice for her strength of regard and a fine steady friendliness. A man who was fortunate enough to gain either of them would win a wife of whom he might justly be proud when he talked with the enemy in the gate, and moreover would enjoy an unusually good prospect of being happy in his own house. The man who had won one, and the man who could, if he would, win the other, approached them in a slow leisurely stroll.
"Yes, great asses," repeated Bowdon in a reflective tone.
"I didn't say we weren't," protested Ashley Mead with an irritated laugh.
They would have found a most heartfelt endorsement of the view which they reluctantly adopted, had Sir James Muddock known how small a share of Ashley's visit had been honestly devoted to a consideration of the advantages of a partnership in Muddock and Mead, and how much larger a part had been given to a subject concerning which Sir James could have only one opinion.
CHAPTER VII
UNDER THE NOSEGAY
When Alice Muddock reached Ora's little house in Chelsea and was shewn into the drawing-room, she found herself enjoying an introduction to Mr. Sidney Hazlewood and forced to shake hands with Babba Flint. Hazlewood struck her favourably; there was a repressed resolution about him, a suggestion of being able to get most of what he might happen to want; no doubt, though, his desires would be limited and mainly professional. Babba was, as usual, quite inexplicable to her and almost intolerable. The pair had, it seemed, come on business, and, after an apology, Ora went on talking business to them for fully a quarter of an hour. She was in a businesslike, even a commercial money-grubbing mood; so were the men; amid a number of technical terms which fell on Alice's ignorant ears the question of what they would make was always coming uppermost. There was indeed a touch of insincerity in Ora's graspingness; it did not seem exactly affectation, but rather like a part for which she was cast on this occasion and into which she threw herself with artistic zeal. She had to play up to her companions. There was in her neither the quiet absorption in the pecuniary aspect which marked Mr. Hazlewood, nor the tremulous eagerness with which Babba counted imaginary thousands, the fruit of presupposed successes. Hazlewood, a clean-shaven hard-lined man of close on fifty, and Babba with his long moustache, his smooth cheeks, his dandiness, and his youth, treated Ora exactly in the same way – first as a possible partner, then as a possible property. They told her what she would make if she became a partner and how much they could afford to pay her as a property if she would hire herself out to them. Ora had her alternative capacities clearly grasped and weighed their relative advantages with a knowing hand. Alice thought it a strange scene by which to make her first more intimate study of the irresistible impossible Miss Pinsent, the Miss Pinsent of uncontrollable emotions and unknowable whims. What images the world made of people! Yet somehow, in the end, had not the world a way of being just right enough to save its credit?
At last the conference appeared to be about to break up. Alice was almost sorry; she could have gone on learning from it.
"Only remember," said Mr. Hazlewood, "that if we do make a deal, why, it is a deal!"
Ora began to laugh; an agreement was an agreement, she remembered, and a deal, by parity of reasoning, a deal. Hazlewood's wrinkle clamoured for seriousness; hard money was at stake, and over that surely even genius could look grave.
"Oh, she won't want to cry off this," said Babba with a sagacious nod.
Alice had never known how Babba lived (any more than she knew why). It appeared now that he supported himself by speculations of this description;
