search for a definite, recognisable
personality--something to lean on with security, a standard and a prop.
With growing dismay she could find only a sorry little group of
shivering hopes and shaken adages. What was she? Only a well-educated
nonentity with, for all coherence and purpose in life, a knowledge of
art and literature and a helpless feeling for charm. Poor Althea was
rapidly sinking to the nightmare stage of introspection; she saw,
fitfully, not restoringly, that it was nightmare, and dragging herself
away from these miserable dissections, fixed her eyes on something not
herself, on the thing that, after all, gave her, even to the nightmare
vision, purpose and meaning. If it were only that, let her, at all
events, cling to it; the helpless feeling for charm must then shape her
path. Gerald was coming, and to be subjugated was, after all, better
than to disintegrate.

She drove down to meet him in the little brougham that was now
established in the stables. It was a wet, chilly day. Althea, wrapped in
furs, leaned in a corner and looked with an unseeing gaze at the
dripping hedgerows and grey sky. She fastened herself in anticipation on
the approaching brightness. Ah, to warm herself at the light of his
untroubled, unquestioning, unexacting being, to find herself in him. If
he would love her and charm her, that, after all, was enough to give her
a self.

He was a little late, and Althea did not feel willing to face a public
meeting on the platform. She remained sitting in her corner, listening
for the sound of the approaching train. When it had arrived, she heard
Gerald's voice before she saw him, and the sound thrilled through her
deliciously. He was talking to a neighbour, and he paused for some
moments to chat with him. Then his head appeared at the window, little
drops of rain on his crisp hair, his eyes smiling, yet, as she saw in a
moment, less at her in particular than at the home-coming of which she
was a part. 'Yes,' he turned to the porter to say, 'the portmanteau
outside, the dressing-case in here.' The door was opened and he stepped
in beside her. 'Hello, Althea!' He smiled at her again, while he drew a
handful of silver from his pocket and picked out a sixpence for the
porter. 'Here; all right.' The brougham rolled briskly out of the
station yard. They were in the long up-hill lanes. 'Well, how are you,
dear?' he asked.

Althea was trembling, but she was controlling herself; she had all the
p