re it must be Love; and he thought at once of that fellow
with the red moustaches. Ideas were all very well--no one would object
to as many as you liked, in their proper place--the dinner-table, for
example. But to fall in love, if indeed it were so, with a man who not
only had ideas, but an inclination to live up to them, and on them, and
on nothing else, seemed to Lord Dennis 'outre'.

She had followed him to the wall, and he looked--at her dubiously.

"To rest in the waters of Lethe, Babs? By the way, seen anything of our
friend Mr. Courtier? Very picturesque--that Quixotic theory of life!"

And in saying that, his voice (like so many refined voices which have
turned their backs on speculation) was triple-toned-mocking at ideas,
mocking at itself for mocking at ideas, yet showing plainly that at
bottom it only mocked at itself for mocking at ideas, because it would
be, as it were, crude not to do so.

But Barbara did not answer his question, and began to speak of other
things. And all that afternoon and evening she talked away so lightly
that Lord Dennis, but for his instinct, would have been deceived.

That wonderful smiling mask--the inscrutability of Youth--was laid aside
by her at night. Sitting at her window, under the moon, 'a gold-bright
moth slow-spinning up the sky,' she watched the darkness hungrily, as
though it were a great thought into whose heart she was trying to see.
Now and then she stroked herself, getting strange comfort out of the
presence of her body. She had that old unhappy feeling of having two
selves within her. And this soft night full of the quiet stir of the
sea, and of dark immensity, woke in her a terrible longing to be at one
with something, somebody, outside herself. At the Ball last night the
'flying feeling' had seized on her again; and was still there--a queer
manifestation of her streak of recklessness. And this result of her
contacts with Courtier, this 'cacoethes volandi', and feeling of clipped
wings, hurt her--as being forbidden hurts a child.

She remembered how in the housekeeper's room at Monkland there lived a
magpie who had once sought shelter in an orchid-house from some pursuer.
As soon as they thought him wedded to civilization, they had let him go,
to see whether he would come back. For hours he had sat up in a high
tree, and at last come down again to his cage; whereupon, fearing lest
the rooks should attack him when he next took this voyage of discover