ad spun with the
effort not to hear what other people were saying--so much more
important, always, than what your partner was. James's height and
eyeglass seemed to give him an impartial air at these dreadful
ceremonies. Behind his glass disk he could afford to be impertinent.
And he was certainly rude enough to be an Under-Secretary. Without
that shining buckler of the soul he would have been simply nobody;
with it, he was a demi-god. Here then, under the very shadow of his
immortality, Lucy pursued her researches. What of the romantic,
hidden, eponymous James? Where did he stand now in her regard?

Since Easter at Wycross, James had not been her veiled Eros, but the
possibilities were all there. He was not a garden god, by any means,
nor a genius of the Spring. January and Onslow Square had not frozen
his currents; February and the Opera House had heightened his passion.
At any moment he might resume his devotional habit--even here in
Carlton House Terrace. And what then? Well--and this was odd--this
ought to have produced a state of tension very trying to the nerves;
and, well--it hadn't. That's all. At that very party in Carlton House
Terrace, with a band braying under the stairs, and a fat lord
shouting in her ear, her secret soul was trembling on a brink. She was
finding out to her half-rueful dismay--it was only half--that she was
prepared to be touched, prepared to be greatly impressed, but not
prepared to be thrilled as she had been, if James should kiss her
again. She was prepared, in fact, to present--as statesmen do when
they write to their sovereign--her grateful, humble duty--and no more.
In vain the band brayed, in vain Lord J----, crimson by her ear,
roared about the weather in the West of Ireland, Lucy's soul was
peering over the edge of her old world into the stretches of a misty
new one.

This was bad enough, and occupied her through busy nights and days;
but there was more disturbing matter to come, stirred up to cloud her
mind by Mabel's unwonted discretion. Mabel had been more than
discreet. She had been frightened. Pushing out into a stream of new
surmise, she had suddenly faltered and hooked at the quay. Lucy
herself was at first merely curious. She had no doubts, certainly no
fears. What had been the matter with Mabel, when she hinted that
perhaps, after all, James had never done anything? What could Mabel
know, or guess, or suspect? Lucy owned to herself, candidly, that
James was incomprehen