It might be a long time before
he was again attached to an embassy.

When he reached his rooms, or, rather, his flat, which was just off
Curzon Street, he went to look at his bookshelves, and ran his finger
along them until he came to the poems of William Watson, which were next
to Rupert Brooke's poems. After looking at the index he found the lyric
he wanted, sat down, lit his pipe, and read it four times, thinking of
Lady Sellingworth. Then he put away the book and meditated. Finally--it
was after one o'clock--he went almost reluctantly to bed.

In the morning he, of course, felt different--one always feels different
in the morning--but nevertheless he was aware that something definite
had come into his life which had made a change in it. This something was
his acquaintance with Lady Sellingworth. Already he found it difficult
to believe that he had lived for twenty-eight years without knowing her.

He was one of those rather unusual young men who feel strongly the
vulgarity of their own time, and who have in them something which seems
at moments to throw back into the past. Not infrequently he felt that
this mysterious something was lifting up the voice of the _laudator
temporis acti_. But what did he, the human being who contained this
voice and many other voices, know of those times now gone? They seemed
to draw him in ignorance, and had for him something of the fascination
which attaches to the unknown. And this fascination, or something akin
to it, hung about Lady Sellingworth, and even about the house in which
she dwelt, and drew him to both. He knew that he had never been in any
house in London which he liked so much as he liked hers, that in no
other London house had he ever felt so much at home, so almost curiously
in place. The mere thought of the hall with its blazing fire, its
beehive-chair, its staircase with the balustrade of wrought ironwork and
gold, filled him with a longing to return to it, to hang up his hat--and
remain. And the lady of the house was ideally right in it. He wondered
whether in the future he would often be there, whether Lady Sellingworth
would allow him to be one of the few real intimates to whom her door was
open. He hoped so; he believed so; but he was not quite certain about
it. For there was something elusive about her, not insincere but just
that--elusive. She might not care to see very much of him although he
knew that she liked him. They had touched the fringe of intimacy on