y shrugged his shoulders resignedly. 'Come, then; I
shall fetch it now. Coming, Betty?'

'No.'

Betty was talking to Gina Lunelli. Gina was a fine young woman, rather
beautiful, with black curly hair, and an immense amount of experience,
on and off the music-hall stage, for her twenty-seven years. She was a
great friend of the Crevequers; it rather entertained her that anyone
should be so silly and so young. All the men she knew made love to her
as a matter of course--or possibly she made love to them; it, anyhow,
between the two, was invariably made. Tommy Crevequer's love-making was
to both an excellent joke; to Betty also, for they were nearly always a
three-cornered party. Gina and Betty went out now and stood in the
street and talked; or rather Gina talked, and Betty listened and rather
often laughed; it took very little to amuse the Crevequers. Soon Tommy
came back; he carried a parcel; his face was rather gloomy.

'Grollo's got it all,' he remarked resentfully. 'But I've got my
dress-clothes; I met Venables.'

'He who walks home from the theatre with you?' Gina said to Betty.

'Yes. He's always so kind about lending us money,' Betty explained.

Gina nodded. She had once been introduced to Venables in the Crevequers'
room; she had been a little embarrassed with him; it was a type outside
her fairly wide sphere of experience.

'Well, good-bye till to-night; I must go.'

The Crevequers walked home through the darkening December afternoon.

'Venables is really decent,' Tommy observed, with some enthusiasm.

Betty nodded. They had seen a good deal of Venables lately. Yesterday he
and Betty had been to Baja in a motor-car; it had amused them both very
much. He was a good companion, being quite ready and able to enter into
the game of being hopelessly silly, which, the Crevequers had long since
found, very many people, otherwise pleasant, quite failed to understand.
Nobody, it seemed to them, understood it quite as well as they did
themselves; it was fortunate, therefore, as they sometimes remarked,
that they had each other to go about with.

In the evolution of relations with the Venables, that with Warren seemed
now to be, on the whole, the most satisfactory. The relation with Mrs.
Venables, though her own 'achievement of intimacy' suffered no flagging,
had been to the Crevequers a little spoiled by a renunciation on their
side. For sometime they co-operated readily and cheerfully in the
process of eductio