aware of that. Besides,
she did not fascinate him in the motherly way. No; but owing to the
great difference in their ages he felt that he could talk to her as he
could talk to nobody else. For he was in no intimate relation with any
other woman so much older than himself. And to young women somehow one
can never talk so freely, so companionably. Even in these modern days
sex gets in the way. Craven told himself that as he folded up Lady
Sellingworth's letter. She was different. He had felt that for him there
was quite a beautiful refuge in Berkeley Square. And now! What could
have happened? She must surely be vexed about something he had done,
or about something which had occurred on the previous evening. And he
thought abut the evening carefully and minutely. Had she perhaps been
upset by Lady Wrackley and Mrs. Ackroyde? Was she self-conscious as he
was, and had she observed their concentration upon herself and him? Or,
on the other hand, could she had misunderstood his manner with Miss Van
Tuyn? He knew how very sensitive women are about each other. And Lady
Sellingworth, of course, was old, although he never bothered, and seldom
thought, about her age. Elderly women were probably in certain ways even
more sensitive than young women. He could well understand that. And he
certainly had rather made love to Miss Van Tuyn because of the horribly
observing eyes of the "old guard." And then, too, Miss Van Tuyn had
finally almost required it of him. Had she not told him that she had
insisted on Lady Sellingworth's being asked to the theatre to entertain
Braybrooke so that Craven and she, the young ones, might have a nice
little time? After that what could he do but his duty? But perhaps Lady
Sellingworth had not understood. He wondered, and felt now hurt and
angry, now almost contrite and inclined to be explanatory.

When he left the Foreign Office that day and was crossing the Mall he
was very depressed. A breath of winter was in the air. There was a bank
of clouds over Buckingham Palace, with the red sun smouldering just
behind their edges. The sky, as it sometimes does, held tenderness,
anger and romance, and was full of lures for the imagination and the
soul. Craven looked at it as he walked on with a colleague, a man called
Marshall, older than himself, who had just come back from Japan, and
was momentarily translated. He voyaged among the clouds, and was carried
away across that cold primrose and delicate green, and hi