ch party broke up.

In leaving the restaurant Lady Sellingworth passed so close to the young
man that her gown almost brushed against him. He looked up at her, and
this time the meaning of his glance was unmistakable. It said: "I want
to know you. How can I get to know you?"

She went home feeling almost excited. On the hall table of her house she
found a note from Rupert Louth asking her whether she would help "little
Bertha" by speaking up for her to a certain great dressmaker, who
had apparently been informed of the Louths' shaky finances. Louth's
obstinate reliance on her as a devoted friend of him and his
disdainfully vulgar young wife began to irritate Lady Sellingworth
almost beyond endurance. She took the letter up with her into the
drawing-room, and sat down by the writing-table holding it in her hand.
It had come at a dangerous moment.

Louth's blindness now exasperated her, although she had desperately done
her best to close his eyes to the real nature of her feeling for him and
to the unexpressed intentions she had formed concerning him and had been
forced to abandon. It was maddening to be tacitly rejected as a possible
wife and to be enthusiastically claimed as a self-sacrificing friend.
Surely no woman born of woman could be expected to stand it. At that
moment Lady Sellingworth began almost to hate Rupert Louth.

What a contrast there was between his gross misunderstanding of her and
the brown man's understanding! Already she began to tell herself that
this man who did not know her nevertheless in some subtle, almost
occult, way had a clear understanding of her present need. He wanted
sympathy--his eyes said that--but he had sympathy to give. She began
to hate the controlling absurdities of civilization. All her wildness
seemed to rise up and rush to the surface. How inhuman, how against
nature it was, that two human beings who wished to know each other
should be held back from such knowledge by mere convention, by the
unwritten law of the solemn and formal introduction! A great happiness
might lie in their intercourse, but conventionality solemnly and
selfishly forbade it, unless they could find a common acquaintance to
mumble a few unmeaning words over them. Mumbo-Jumbo! What a fantastic
world of stupidly obedient puppets this world of London was! She said to
herself that she hated it. Then she thought of her first widowhood and
of her curious year in Paris.

There she might more easily have made