that she was tired and that something had made her low-spirited.

'Right oh,' he said. 'Let's go back to town. I want to see Amershams and
find out how those sonnets have sold.'

He then left her to wire to Augusta.

Their life in town resumed its former course, interrupted only by a
month in North Devon. Jack's cure was complete; he was sunburnt, fatter;
the joy of life shone in his blue eyes. Sometimes Victoria found herself
growing younger by contagion, sloughing the horrible miry coat of the
past. If her heart had not been atrophied she would have loved the boy
whom she always treated with motherly gentleness. His need of her was so
crying, so total, that he lost all his self-consciousness. He would sit
unblushing by her side in the bow of a fishing smack, holding her hand
and looking raptly into her grey eyes; he was indifferent to the red
brown fisherman with the Spanish eyes and curly black hair who smiled as
the turtle doves clustered. His need of her was as mental as it was
physical; his body was whipped by the salt air to seek in her arms
oblivion, but his mind had become equally dependent. She was his need.

Thus when they came back to town the riot continued; and Victoria,
breasting the London tide, dragged him unresisting in her rear. She
hated excitement in every form, excitement that is of the puerile kind.
Restaurant dining, horse shows, flower shows, the Academy, tea in Bond
Street, even the theatre and its most inane successes, were for her a
weariness to the flesh.

'I've had enough,' she said to Jack one day. 'I'm sick of it all. I've
got congestion of the appreciative sense. One day I shall chuck it all
up, go and live in the country, have big dogs and a saddle horse, dress
in tweeds and read the local agricultural rag.'

'Give up smoking, go to church, and play tennis with the curate, the
doctor and the squire's flapper,' added Holt. 'But Vicky, why not go
now?'

'No, oh, no, I can't do that.' She was frightened by her own suggestion.
'I must drain the cup of pleasure so as to be sure that it's all pain;
then I'll retire and drain the cup of resignation . . . unless, as I
sometimes think, it's empty.'

Jack had said nothing to this. Her wildness surprised and shocked him.
She was so savage and yet so sweet.

Victoria realised that she must hold fast to the town, for there alone
could she succeed. In the peace of the country she would not have the
opportunities she had now. Jack was in h