started out with Hartley.

The night was clear as the two men went off together hatless through the
soft moonlight. Neither Coryndon nor Hartley talked much as they walked
by a short cut across the park to the Wilders' bungalow, a servant
carrying a lantern going before them like a dim will-o'-the-wisp; the
yellow lamplight paling into an ineffectual blur against the clear
moonlight.

"I think it is only ourselves," said Hartley after a long pause. "You
are looking a bit done, Coryndon, so you'll be glad if it isn't a late
night."

Coryndon agreed, and conversation flagged again. They crossed the road,
turned up the avenue and were lost in the shadows of the trees, coming
out again into a white bay of light outside the door.

Everyone, man or woman, who is endowed at birth with a sensitive nature
is subject to occasional inrushes of detachment that without warning cut
him off from realities for moments or hours, converting everyday matters
into the consistency of dream-life. It was through this medium that
Coryndon saw Mrs. Wilder when he came into the large upstairs
drawing-room. It would have annoyed her to know that she appeared
indefinite and shadowy to his mind, just as it annoyed Alice when she
was told that she was only "Something in the Red King's dream," but
Coryndon could not help his sensations. Mrs. Wilder was smiling with her
careless, easy, confident smile, and yet he saw only an unaccounted bit
of the puzzle, that he could not fit in. She was dressed in the latest
fashion, and talked with a kind of regal amiability, but nevertheless,
she was not a real woman, a real hostess, or a positive entity; she was
vague, and the touch of her floating personality added to the baffled
sensation that drained Coryndon's mind of concentrated force, and made
him physically exhausted.

Wilder had something to say to Hartley, and Coryndon handed himself over
like a coat or an umbrella to Mrs. Wilder, who, he knew, was placing a
low valuation upon him, and was already a little impatient at his lack
of vitality. She was calling him a bore, behind her fine, hard eyes, and
having exhausted Mangadone in a few sentences, wondered what sort of
bore he really was. There were golf bores, fishing bores, and shooting
bores, but Coryndon hardly appeared to belong to any of those families,
and she began to suspect him of "superiority," a type of bore aggressive
to others of his cult. Mrs. Wilder did not tolerate a type to which s