had been adamantine in the
difference which separated them, as the image of pliancy, sweetness,
altruism, and devotion; and he saw her lips and the rapt glance of her
eyes as beautiful as in the past. What a soft, soothing, assuaging
contrast with the difficult Lois, so imperious and egoistic! (An
unforgettable phrase of Lois's had inhabited his mind for over a decade:
"Fancy quarrelling over a man!") He had never met Marguerite since their
separation, and for years he had heard nothing whatever about her; he
did not under-estimate the ordeal of meeting her again. Yet he at once
decided that he must meet her again. He simply could not ignore her in
her bereavement and new loneliness. To write to her would be absurd; it
would be a cowardly evasion; moreover, he could not frame a letter. He
must prove to her and to himself that he had a sense of decent
kindliness which would rise above conventional trifles when occasion
demanded.

At the top of Elm Park Gardens, instead of turning east towards
Piccadilly he turned west in the direction of the Workhouse tower. And
thus he exposed the unreality of the grandiose pleas with which
professional men impose on their wives and on themselves. A few minutes
earlier his appointment at the club (not Pickering's, to which, however,
he still belonged, but a much greater institution, the Artists, in
Albemarle Street) had been an affair of extreme importance, upon which
might depend his future career, for did it not concern negotiations for
a London factory, which was to be revolutionary in design, and to cost
L150,000, and which, erected, would form a permanent advertisement of
the genius of George Cannon? Now he remembered that Sir Isaac Davids,
the patron of all the arts and the influencer of commissions, had said
that he would probably but not certainly be at the club that afternoon,
and he argued that in any event half an hour sooner or later would not
make or mar the business. Indeed, he went further, and persuaded himself
that between that moment and dinner he had nothing to do except sign a
few routine letters at the office. Still, it was just as well that Lois
should remain in delusion as to his being seriously pressed for time.

As he curved, slackening and accelerating, with the perfect assurance of
long habit, through the swift, intricate, towering motor traffic of
Fulham Road, it was inevitable that he should recall the days, eleven
years ago, when through a sedate traffic