ngs
with women. He perceived the symptoms of this unforgetfulness on
Liosha's part, but seems to have been absolutely fogged in diagnosis.

"Liosha flourishes," he writes in one of his last _Vesta_ letters,
"like a virgin forest of green bay trees. Gosh! She's splendid. I
take back and swallow every presumptuous word I've said about her.
And, I suppose, owing to our knockabout sort of intimacy, she has
adopted a protective, motherly attitude towards me. In her great,
spacious, kind way, she gives you the impression that she owns
Jaffery Chayne, and knows exactly what is for his good. Women's
ways are wonderful but weird."

He must have thought himself vastly clever with his alliterative
epigram. But he hadn't the faintest idea of the fount of Liosha's
motherliness.

"Owing to our knockabout sort of intimacy"! Oh, the silly ass!

CHAPTER XXII

It was not until the end of October that Doria completed her round of
country-house visits and returned to the flat in St. John's Wood. The
morning after her arrival in town she took my satirical counsel and
called at Wittekind's office, and, I am afraid, tried to bite that very
pleasant, well-intentioned gentleman. She went out to do battle,
arraying herself in subtle panoply of war. This I gather from Barbara's
account of the matter. She informs me that when a woman goes to see her
solicitor, her banker, her husband's uncle, a woman she hates, or a man
who really understands her, she wears in each case an entirely different
kind of hat. Judging from a warehouse of tissue-paper-covered millinery
at the top of my residence, which I once accidentally discovered when
tracking down a smell of fire, I know that this must be true. Costumes
also, Barbara implies, must correspond emotionally with the hats. I
recognised this, too, as philosophic truth; for it explained many
puzzling and apparently unnecessary transformations in my wee wife's
personal appearance. And yet, the other morning when I was going up to
town to see after some investments, and I asked her which was the more
psychological tie, a green or a violet, in which to visit my
stockbroker, she lost as much of her temper as she allows herself to
lose and bade me not he silly. . . . But this has nothing to do with
Doria.

Doria, I say, with beaver cocked and plumes ruffled, intent on striking
terror into the heart of Wittekind, presented herself in the outer
office and sen