And the distress of _not_ being with her! She was such a proud and lovely and entrancing and distressing being to remember, and such a vain and difficult thing to be with. She knew clearly that she was made for love, for she had made herself for love; and she went through life like its empress with all mankind and numerous women at her feet. And she had an ideal of the lover who should win her which was like a oleographic copy of a Laszlo portrait of Douglas greatly magnified. He was to rise rapidly to great things, he was to be a conqueror and administrator, while attending exclusively to her. And incidentally she would gather desperate homage from all other men of mark, and these attentions would be an added glory to her love for him. At first Captain Douglas had been quite prepared to satisfy all these requirements. He had met her at Shorncliffe, for her people were quite good military people, and he had worshipped his way straight to her feet. He had made the most delightfully simple and delicate love to her. He had given up his secret vice of thinking for the writing of quite surprisingly clever love-letters, and the little white paper models had ceased for a time to flutter in lonely places. And then the thought of his career returned to him, from a new aspect, as something he might lay at her feet. And once it had returned to him it remained with him. “Some day,” he said, “and it may not be so very long, some of those scientific chaps will invent flying. Then the army will have to take it up, you know.” “I should _love_,” she said, “to soar through the air.” He talked one day of going on active service. How would it affect them if he had to do so? It was a necessary part of a soldier’s lot. “But I should come too!” she said. “I should come with you.” “It might not be altogether convenient,” he said, for already he had learnt that Madeleine Philips usually travelled with quite a large number of trunks and considerable impressiveness. “Of course,” she said, “it would be splendid! How could I let you go alone. You would be the great general and I should be with you always.” “Not always very comfortable,” he suggested. “Silly boy!—I shouldn’t mind _that_! How little you know me! Any hardship!” “A woman—if she isn’t a nurse—” “I should come dressed as a man. I would be your groom....” He tried to think of her dressed as a man, but nothing on earth could get his imagination any further than a vision of her dressed as a Principal Boy. She was so delightfully and valiantly not virile; her hair would have flowed, her body would have moved, a richly fluent femininity—visible through any disguise. § 6