She had now, apart from her old desire for self-development and knowledge about life, all these dull lonely hours to fill; and as she went about, slowly getting to know the people near, she found like our enthusiast that every one of them was full of something--some vital, all-absorbing topic, if nothing more than golf or their own handicap. And that, she saw at once, was what she had to have if she wished ever to make her life really full. She could not go to matinées, like some, or Hubert missed her all the afternoon; and if they went to an At Home, he always dashed away at five, which looked so rude, and people--she felt sure--said afterwards that she could not have much hold over him, so soon. She tried novels, but these she really could not understand. Hubert watched cynically her attempts to get at grips with a sex-novel more sexual than is expected even in these days of censorships and free advertisement. "But, Hubert," she said finally, "why did she do that? Wasn't she fond of her husband? He seems quite nice. Do these terrible things really happen?" "Oh no," he answered, as one would speak to a child. "Of course they never happen really." Helena looked puzzled. "Then why do people write or read them?" she asked. "My dear girl," he answered in the heavy-father manner that gave him such pleasure, "if you could answer that, you would have solved one of the most interesting problems about human nature!" So then she was puzzled again and laid aside the book half read, before she got even to the chapter that was really censured and commonly read first. Not that way, she saw, lay illumination. At last she tried another road. "You know," she said reflectively one night, during those long hearthside chats that neither really would have changed for any other social form, "I like all the people here and so on, but they're terribly busy, aren't they, and I always feel I've sort of come too late." "How sort of?" he replied indulgently. "Well, I've got no real friends and you're busy so much with your dull old work. Don't you know anybody?--really know, I mean--old friends, who aren't too far away?" Hubert thought for a few moments. "It sounds absurd," he said at last, "but I was such a hermit till I met you that I don't believe I've got a single woman friend." Helena, he noticed, was not flattered in the least degree. That sort of thing was what made her so splendid. He told himself that a woman who was womanly would be a bore about the house, and smiled adoringly on his own child-like specimen, who waited silently, as though quite sure that he would find a friend in the same way that after some time he had found her brooch. But there was a long pause and he made no suggestions. "Well, what about men then?" she added simply. "I don't mind." And he was once again enchanted by her naïveté. "You shall have the pick of all my man-friends," he said, and then puzzled her by laughing. "What is it?" she asked.