rican to see me, won't you!... No, Joan Senechal's too
fair for my taste.... Insipid...."

Yes: the taste of it all was again sweet on her lips. A few days later
she began to wonder how the thought of Strefford's endearments could
have been so alarming. To be sure he was not lavish of them; but when he
did touch her, even when he kissed her, it no longer seemed to matter.
An almost complete absence of sensation had mercifully succeeded to the
first wild flurry of her nerves.

And so it would be, no doubt, with everything else in her new life. If
it failed to provoke any acute reactions, whether of pain or pleasure,
the very absence of sensation would make for peace. And in the meanwhile
she was tasting what, she had begun to suspect, was the maximum of
bliss to most of the women she knew: days packed with engagements, the
exhilaration of fashionable crowds, the thrill of snapping up a jewel
or a bibelot or a new "model" that one's best friend wanted, or of being
invited to some private show, or some exclusive entertainment, that
one's best friend couldn't get to. There was nothing, now, that she
couldn't buy, nowhere that she couldn't go: she had only to choose and
to triumph. And for a while the surface-excitement of her life gave her
the illusion of enjoyment.

Strefford, as she had expected, had postponed his return to England,
and they had now been for nearly three weeks together in their new, and
virtually avowed, relation. She had fancied that, after all, the easiest
part of it would be just the being with Strefford--the falling back
on their old tried friendship to efface the sense of strangeness. But,
though she had so soon grown used to his caresses, he himself remained
curiously unfamiliar: she was hardly sure, at times, that it was the
old Strefford she was talking to. It was not that his point of view had
changed, but that new things occupied and absorbed him. In all the small
sides of his great situation he took an almost childish satisfaction;
and though he still laughed at both its privileges and its obligations,
it was now with a jealous laughter.

It amused him inexhaustibly, for instance, to be made up to by all the
people who had always disapproved of him, and to unite at the same table
persons who had to dissemble their annoyance at being invited together
lest they should not be invited at all. Equally exhilarating was
the capricious favouring of the dull and dowdy on occasions when the
brilliant