ed in at several newspaper offices on my way home from South
Kensington, but found that subordinate members of the staffs had no
information to give, and that their superiors maintained an attitude of
strict reticence. As I passed the dark windows of my own office I
thought of our "feature" for the coming week: the demand for
disarmament, in order that naval and military expenditure might be
diverted into labour reform channels; Herr Mitmann's voluble assurances
of the friendliness of the German people; of the ability and will of the
German Socialists to make German aggression impossible, for the sake of
their brother workers in England.

I thought of these things, and wished I could spurn under foot my
connection with _The Mass_. Then, sitting at the window of my little
bed-sitting-room in Bloomsbury, I looked into my petty finances. If I
left Clement Blaine I had enough to subsist upon for six or eight weeks.
It was a risky business. Then I pictured myself casually mentioning to
Constance Grey that I was no longer connected with _The Mass_. I fancied
that I saw the bright approval in her eyes. Before blowing my light out,
I had composed the little speech to Blaine which, in the morning, should
set a period to our connection.

And then I thought of Beatrice. It was barely twenty-four hours since we
had parted beside Battersea Park (though it seemed more like twenty-four
days), and recollection showed me Beatrice in her rather rumpled finery,
with the bleakness of the gray hour that follows such pleasures as most
appealed to her, beginning to steal over her handsome face, sapping its
warm colour, thinning and sharpening its ripe, smooth contours. Beatrice
would pout when she heard of my leaving her father. The thought showed
me her full red lips, and the little even white teeth they so often
disclosed.

The curves of Beatrice's mouth were of a kind that have twisted many
men's lives awry; and those men have thought straightness well lost for
such red lips. Yes, Beatrice was good to look upon. She had a way of
throwing her head back, and showing the smooth, round whiteness of her
throat when she laughed, that had thrilled me time and again. And how
often, and how gaily she laughed.

In the midst of a picture of Beatrice, laughing at me across a
restaurant table with a raised glass in her hand, I had a shadowy vision
of Constance Grey beside the foot of the stairs in South Kensington.
There was no laughter in her face