him was Lois's argument that that kind of thing "did him
good" professionally, and was indeed essential to the career of a rising
or risen young architect, and that also it was good for his health and
his mind. He wished that she would not so unconvincingly pretend that
self-indulgence was not what it was. These pretences, however, seemed to
be a necessity of her nature. She reasoned similarly about the dinners
and theatre-parties which they gave and attended. Next to dancing she
adored dinners and theatre-parties. She would sooner eat a bad dinner in
company anywhere than a good dinner quietly at home; she would far
sooner go to a bad play than to none at all; she was in fact never bored
in the theatre or in the music-hall. Never!

Once, by misfortune--as George privately deemed--he had got a small job
(erection of a dwelling-house at Hampstead) through a dinner. Lois had
never forgotten it, and she would adduce the trifle again and again as
evidence of the sanity of her ideas about social life. George really did
not care for designing houses; they were not worth the trouble; he
habitually thought in public edifices and the palaces of kings, nobles,
and plutocrats of taste. Moreover, his commission on the house would not
have kept his own household in being for a month--and yet the owner,
while obviously proud to be the patron of the celebrated prodigy George
Cannon, had the air of doing George Cannon a favour!

And so her ambition, rather than his, had driven them both ruthlessly
on. Both were overpressed, but George considerably more than Lois. Lois
was never, in ordinary times, really tired. Dinners, teas, even lunches,
restaurants, theatres, music-halls, other people's houses, clubs,
dancing, changing clothes, getting into autos and taxis and getting out
of autos and taxis, looking at watches, writing down engagements, going
to bed with a sigh at the lateness of the hour, waking up fatigued to
the complexities of the new day--she coped admirably with it all. She
regarded it as natural; she regarded it as inevitable and proper. She
enjoyed it. She wanted it, and that which she wanted she must have. Yet
her attitude to George was almost invariably one of deep solicitude for
him. She would look at him with eyes troubled and anxious for his
welfare. When they were driving to a dance which he had no desire to
attend, she would put her arm in his and squeeze his arm and murmur:
"Coco, I don't _like_ you working so hard.