lent and invincible that even time would flee in dismay before its
progress? Where, too, was the laughter that once had seemed illimitable
and immortal? Now there was nothing so gay as to keep even laughter
constant to Jenny's world. For her there was no joy in lovely
transcience. She knew by heart no Horatian ode which, declaiming against
time, could shatter the cruelty of impermanence. Without an edifice of
love or religion or art or philosophy, there seemed no refuge from
decay.

When the body finds existence a mock, the mind falls back upon its
intellectual defences. But Jenny had neither equipment, commissariat or
strategic position. She was a dim figure on the arras of civilization,
faintly mobile in the stressful winds of life. She was a complex
decorative achievement and should have been cherished as such. Therefore
at school she was told that William the Conqueror came to the throne in
1066, that a bay is a large gulf, a promontory a small cape. She had
been a plaything for the turgid experiments by parrots in education on
simple facts, facts so sublimely simple that her mind recorded them no
more than would the Venus of Milo sit down on a bench before a pupil
teacher. When she was still a child, plastic and wonderful, she gave her
dancing and beauty to a country whose inhabitants are just as content to
watch two dogs fight or a horse die in the street. When ambition
withered before indifference, she set out to express herself in love.
Her early failures should not have been fatal, would not have been if
she had possessed any power of mental recuperation. But even if William
the Conqueror had won his battle at Clacton, the bare knowledge of it
would not have been very useful to Jenny. Yet she might have been useful
in her beauty, could some educationalist have perceived in her youth
that God as well as Velasquez can create a thing of beauty. She lived,
however, in a period of enthusiastic waste, and now brooded over the
realization that nothing in life seemed to recompense one for living,
however merrily, however splendidly, the adventure began.

Such was Jenny's mood when, just after her twenty-second birthday, Mr.
Corin announced that his friend, Mr. Z. Trewhella, would arrive in three
days' time.

Chapter XXXIV: _Mr. Z. Trewhella_

Mr. Corin was anxious to make his friend's visit to London as pleasant
as possible, and in zeal for the enjoyment of Zachary Trewhella to
impress him with the importan