"Do you suppose I am never tired of things? Sick, sick to death! but I know that to be happy one must keep moving. That's a law of human life. You'd better come, Vera. You'll be moped to extinction alone." "I don't mind loneliness, and I shall have Susan part of the time, and there will be a meeting in the Albany." "De gustibus? Well, if you prefer Symeon and his spooks to a racecourse in an old English park, there's nothing more to be said." He stooped to kiss the pale forehead before he sauntered out of the room, yawning as he went. He had always a tired air; but it had verily become a law of his being to keep moving. "Nemesis is like the policeman on night duty," he used to say. "She won't let us lie in the dust and sleep. We must trudge on." Trudging from one costly pleasure to another might not suggest hardship to the loafer on the Embankment, but to a self-indulgent worldling who has drained the cup of life to the dregs, that necessity of going on drinking when there are only dregs to drink may seem hard to bear. CHAPTER XXIII Vera told her husband that she did not mind solitude; yet it was a face of ashen whiteness that he left behind when he shut the door of her dressing-room, after his hurried and cheerful good-bye on the first day of the Goodwood meeting. He was driving his sixty horse-power Daimler to Goodwood, steering for himself, while the chauffeur sat behind ready for road repairs, or to give a hand in carrying a corpse to the nearest hospital. The speed limit was naturally disregarded, as the thing that Claude wanted was excitement, the hazards of the road as they sped past hamlet and farm, followed by the long, white dust-cloud that flashed across the landscape like the fiery tail of a comet, while startled villagers gaped, and wondered if a car had passed. Peril was the zest that made the journey worth doing: to feel that his hand upon the wheel held life at his disposal, and that any awkward turn in the road might bring him sudden death. He was gone, and Vera was alone in the gloomy London house--so much more gloomy than the vast halls and galleries of the Roman villa, where colossal windows let in vast spaces of blue sky. Here the heavily-draped sashes admitted only a slit of sunshine, tempered by London smoke.