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Could it be?... No, it was impossible.... Impossible? Pepa had died in mortal sin ... she was there.

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Arnold Lane and Guy Cust had been great friends at Cambridge, in spite of having been at different colleges, and having cultivated different poses.

Guy, who was an Etonian, had gone in for intellectual and sartorial foppishness, for despising feminine society, for quoting “Mr. Pope” and “Mr. Gibbon,” and for frequenting unmarried dons.

Arnold had been less exclusive—had painted the town a “greenery-yellow” with discalceated Fabians, read papers on Masefield to the “Society of Pagans,” and frequently played tennis at the women’s colleges; he had also, rather shamefacedly, played a good deal of cricket and football.

Then, at the end of their last year, came the War, and they had both gone to the front.

The trenches had turned Arnold into an ordinary and rather Philistine young man.

As to Guy—he had undergone what he called a conversion to the “amazing beauty of modern life,” and, abandoning his idea of becoming a King’s don and leading that peculiar existence which, like Balzac’s novel, is a recherche de l’Absolu in a Dutch interior, when the War was over he had settled in London, where he tried to express in poetry what he called “the modern mysticism”—that sense, made possible by wireless and cables, of all the different doings of the world happening simultaneously: London, music-halls, Broad Street, Proust writing, people picking oranges in California, mysterious processes of growth or decay taking place in the million trees of the myriad forests of the world, a Javanese wife creeping in and stabbing her Dutch rival. One gets the sense a little when at the end of The Garden of Cyrus Sir Thomas Browne says: “The huntsmen are up in America and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.” Its finest expression, he said, was to be found in the Daily Mirror.