looking disgustedly at the enormous glass stone on her son's finger. "However, I do not want to distress you, Jimmy dear; only, as your mother, one had to say a few words. Let us forget about it, and see what the others have done to themselves."
The things that the others had done to themselves were indeed strange and various. Louis was triumphant in a Beefeater's suit that had, after all, not proved too small for him; and St. Algers had himself personally converted Stephen Pontisbury into a very passable imitation of Sydney Carton.
He entered the room after everyone else had arrived, and even' when the evening was in full swing, with the twelve or fourteen guests who had driven over to dinner in various feeble attempts at Pierrot costumes, or with flour-sprinkled hair, he was incontestably the handsomest, as he was the tallest, man in the room.
Across the glittering space of the dinner-table Zella cast one or two rapid glances at him through lowered lashes, and felt strangely excited.
He asked her for the first dance, and a sudden suffocating shyness made her answer constrainedly:
"I believe I ought to look after people a little just at first. Miss Oliver is all by herself; do let me introduce you to her."
Stephen stood his ground.
"It is you I want to dance with," he said, looking full at her. How many will you give me?"
"I'll tell you later on. We'll dance No. 7, if you like."
Zella could not have told what instinctive desire was urging her to put off the moment she foresaw. She wanted Stephen to say that he loved her, and she told herself that she loved him; but she was glad when by a sudden request of St. Algers the seventh dance turned into the Lancers, and ended in a species of General Post.
"Give me the next one," said Stephen masterfully. "I can't. I haven't another one until No. 14. I will give you that one."
"Who has the next one?"
"My cousin James. I dare say he wouldn't mind," hesitated Zella, looking up at him.
"I should mind very much," said the voice of James unexpectedly, behind her.
Stephen turned away, looking very like Sydney Carton indeed.
James took Zella on to the terrace. Surprisingly, and uncharacteristically, he was an unusually good dancer, but he said in a dispassionate tone:
"If you don't very much mind, Zella, I want to talk. Let's come out."
She came obediently, surprised and rather flattered. At the back of her mind, the subconscious excitement induced by the thought of Stephen grew steadily.
She felt so much as though she were on the stage, that it was without any active feeling of astonishment that she heard James remark:
"I have made up my mind to thrust upon you a conversation in the very worst possible taste, Zella, to speak like a cad and a bounder, and if necessary to resort to the cowardly and unmanly expedient of brute force in order to compel you to listen to me. You are on the verge of making an appalling muddle, and if nobody else will try to stop you, I shall."
"What are you talking about?"
"I am talking about Pontisbury. He wants to marry you, and I believe you mean to accept him— though whether you'll ever marry him God only knows. I hope to Heaven you'll break it off before it's got to that."
Zella knew that she ought to feel far angrier than she did, and simulated violent indignation in her tones.
"Are you mad, James, to speak to me like this? Even if what you say is true, what right have you to say it?"
"Don't talk about 'what right'; you're taking your stand upon false ground," said James vehemently. "No one has any right—I haven't the shadow of a right; I know that as well as you do. I loathe interference and officiousness, and I've never interfered with anyone before."
"Then, you are simply taking advantage of a near relationship."
"You know that isn't true, Zella," said James earnestly; "have you ever known me officious? If I see you out on a cold night without a wrap on, do I offer to fetch you one?"
He did not, indeed, reflected Zella, not without a touch of humour.
"I may know it's a cold night, but so do you; but you prefer to have no wrap. It's your own affair. But in this case you apparently don't know."
"What don't I know?"
"That Pontisbury would make you wretched or drive you mad. He's in love with you, of course, as far as he knows how, but what does he know of the real you? You're playing up to him all the time, being what he wants you to be and what he expects you to be, answering his endless catchwords with others as meaningless. You never get down to bedrock for one single instant. What do you suppose Pontisbury would do if you told him a lie, and he found it out?"
"James!"
Zella felt a pang that was physical in its intensity shoot through her.
"You want to think that I'm insulting you by the suggestion. Stephen Pontisbury would think I was insulting you. But I'm not; I'm speaking of the real things, the things that are at the back of us all, and most of all at the back of a temperament like yours. Because I understand you, though we're poles apart. But if you told Pontisbury a lie, he'd attitudinize, and say his star had fallen out of heaven; and he'd be heart-broken, and then he'd forgive you and say that his trust had risen stronger than ever through it all, and spend the rest of his life in trying to catch you out again."
"Why do you assume that I should deceive him?"
"Because you would," he answered unhesitatingly. "You couldn't live with him and be absolutely sincere. He wouldn't understand it. You'd jar on his susceptibilities, and you haven't the moral courage to do that."
To Zella's absolute dismay, she began to weep uncontrollably. Something in her cousin's words, and in the violence of his unmistakable sincerity, hurt her unbearably.
"Thank God, you're crying," said James earnestly. "We may get to the back of it all now. Don't you see that he isn't any good to you, and never can be, nor you to him? He can never touch your reality, and what his may be, God only knows. I suppose it's there somewhere, smothered."
"James," said Zella, with the tears pouring down her face, "what is my reality? Nothing is real to me. I shall never, as long as I live, say this to anyone again, but nothing is real to me. I've only played at being unhappy, and at religion, and at every other emotion I've ever felt, and somewhere in the depths of me I've known all the time that I'm only pretending. Shall I never be sincere about anything? or only just as you said— being what the people with me expect and want me to be?"
"It's because you want to be liked, and because you want to be admired, and because you are naturally sympathetic; but it's most of all because you want to be loved. Don't you see, Zella? What good would Pontisbury's love do you when it wouldn't be for the real you at all, but only for the surface bit you showed him?"
"Nobody who knew me really would love me," said Zella, voicing for the first time in her life her deepest and most intimate conviction. "I am not true. I've always known it, ever since I was a little girl. I don't suppose there's a day," she said recklessly, "when I haven't spoken more or less insincerely, simply for the sake of
