d that no ideas were forthcoming they took it
out of him in labour. He was too busy and too happy to notice what
Desmond was doing.

One day Vera said to him, "Nicky, do you know that Desmond is going
about a good deal with Alfred Orde-Jones?"

"Is she? Is there any reason why she shouldn't?"

"Not unless you call Orde-Jones a reason."

"You mean I've got to stop it? How can I?"

"You can't. Nothing can stop Desmond."

"What do you think I ought to do about it?"

"Nothing. She goes about with scores of people. It doesn't follow that
there's anything in it."

"Oh, Lord, I should hope not! That beastly bounder. What _could_ there
be in it?"

"He's a clever painter, Nicky. So's Desmond. There's that in it."

"I've hardly a right to object to that, have I? It's not as if I were a
clever painter myself."

But as he walked home between the white-walled gardens of St. John's
Wood, and through Regent's Park and Baker Street, and down the north
side of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, he worried the thing
to shreds.

There couldn't be anything in it.

He could see Alfred Orde-Jones--the raking swagger of the tall lean body
in the loose trousers, the slouch hat and the flowing tie. He could see
his flowing black hair and his haggard, eccentric face with its seven
fantastic accents, the black eyebrows, the black moustache, the high,
close-clipped side whiskers, the two forks of the black beard.

There couldn't be anything in it.

Orde-Jones's mouth was full of rotten teeth.

And yet he never came home rather later than usual without saying to
himself, "Supposing I was to find him there with her?"

He left off coming home late so that he shouldn't have to ask himself
that question.

He wondered what--if it really did happen--he would do. He wondered what
other men did. It never occurred to him that at twenty-two he was young
to be considering this problem.

He rehearsed scenes that were only less fantastic than Orde-Jones's face
and figure, or that owed their element of fantasy to Orde-Jones's face
and figure. He saw himself assaulting Orde-Jones with violence, dragging
him out of Desmond's studio, and throwing him downstairs. He wondered
what shapes that body and those legs and arms would take when they got
to the bottom. Perhaps they wouldn't get to the bottom all at once. He
would hang on to the banisters. He saw himself simply opening the door
of the studio and ordering Orde-Jones to walk out of it. Re