her because
she saw straight and never canted, impatient of her because her ideals
were commercial, loving her because she was gray-eyed and white-skinned
and desirable, seeing her much as Nancy Sharpe, who lived for music, saw
Johnny Potter, only with ardour instead of nonchalance; such ardour,
indeed, that his thoughts of her only intermittently achieved exactitude.

Two girls came up to admire Charles. Jane said it was time she took him
to bed, and they went up with her.

Gideon turned away. He hated parties, and seldom went even to Jane's. He
stood drinking coffee and watching people. You met most of them at the
club and elsewhere continually; why meet them all again in a
drawing-room? There was his sister Rosalind and her husband Boris Stefan
with their handsome faces and masses of black hair. Rosalind had a baby
too (at home); a delicate, pretty, fair-haired thing, like Rosalind's
Manchester mother. And Charles was like Jane's Birmingham father. It was
Manchester and Birmingham that persisted, not Palestine or Russia.

And there was Juke, with his white, amused face and heavy-lidded eyes
that seemed always to see a long way, and Katherine Varick talking to a
naval officer about periscopes (Jane kept in with some of the Admiralty),
and Peacock, with whom Gideon had quarrelled two hours ago at the _Fact_
office, and who was now in the middle of a group of writing young men, as
usual. Gideon looked at him cynically. Peacock was letting himself be got
at by a clique. Gideon would rather have seen him talking to the
practical looking sailor about periscopes. Peacock would have to be
watched. He had shown signs lately of colouring the _Fact_ with
prejudices. He was getting in with a push; he was dangerously in the
movement. He was also leaning romancewards, and departing from the realm
of pure truth. He had given credence to some strange travellers' tales of
Foreign Office iniquities. As if that unfortunate and misguided body had
not enough sins to its account without having melodramatic and
uncharacteristic kidnappings and deeds of violence attributed to it. But
Peacock had got in with those unhappy journalists and others who had been
viewing Russia, and, barely escaping with their lives, had come back with
nothing else, and least of all with that accurate habit of mind which
would have qualified them as contributors to the _Weekly Fact_. It was
not their fault (except for going to Russia), but Peacock should have ha