ve
all been jumping in other directions. I asked the Steuvenfeldts, the
Boulters, the Felix Fowles, the Brutons, the Sheltons, and that fellow
Mackerel, who has so much money he doesn't know what to do with it and
twenty others; and Mackerel was the only one who would give me anything
at all large. He gave me ten thousand pounds. But I want fifty--fifty,
my beloved. I'm simply broken-hearted. It would do so much good, and I
could manage the thing so well, and I could get other splendid people
to help me to manage it--there's Effie Lyndhall and Mary Meacham. The
Mackerel wanted to come along, too, but I told him he could come out
and fetch us back--that there mustn't be any scandal while the war was
on. I laugh, my dear, but I could cry my eyes out. I want something to
do--I've always wanted something to do. I've always been sick of an
idle life, but I wouldn't do a hundred things I might have done. This
thing I can do, however, and, if I did it, some of my debt to the world
would be paid. It seems to me that these last fifteen years in England
have been awful. We are all restless; we all have been going,
going--nowhere; we have all been doing, doing--nothing; we have all
been thinking, thinking, thinking--of ourselves. And I've been a
playbody like the rest; I've gone with the Climbers because they could
do things for me; I've wanted more and more of everything--more
gadding, more pleasure, more excitement. It's been like a brass-band
playing all the time, my life this past ten years. I'm sick of it. It's
only some big thing that can take me out of it. I've got to make some
great plunge, or in a few years more I'll be a middle-aged peeress with
nothing left but a double chin, a tongue for gossip, and a string of
pearls. There must be a bouleversement of things as they are, or
good-bye to everything except emptiness. Don't you see, Jasmine,
dearest?"

"Yes yes, I see." Jasmine got up, went to her desk, opened a drawer,
took out a book, and began to write hastily. "Go on," she said as she
wrote; "I can hear what you are saying."

"But are you really interested?"

"Even Tynemouth would find you interesting and convincing. Go on."

"I haven't anything more to say, except that nothing lies between me
and flagellation and the sack cloth,"--she toyed with the
sjambok--"except the Climbers; and they have failed me. They won't
play--or pay."

Jasmine rose from the desk and came forward with a paper in her hand.
"No, they