Ancram folded his arms and stood in the doorway and permitted himself to feel these things. If he was not actually looking for Judith Church, it was because he was always, so to speak, anticipating her; in a state of readiness to receive the impression of her face, the music of her voice. Mrs. Church was the reason of the occasion, the reason of every occasion in so far as it concerned him. She seemed simply the corollary of his perception of the exquisite night when he discovered her presently, on one of the more conspicuous sofas, talking to Sir Peter Bloomsbury. She was waiting for him to find her, with a little flickering smile that came in the pauses between Sir Peter’s remarks; and when Ancram approached he noticed, with as keen a pleasure as he was capable of feeling, that her replies to this dignitary were made somewhat at random. Their conversation changed when Sir Peter went away only to take its note of intimacy and its privilege of pauses. They continued to speak of trivial matters, and to talk in tones and in things they left unsaid. His eyes lingered in the soft depths of hers to ascertain whether the roses were doing well this year at Belvedere, and there was a conscious happiness in the words with which she told him that they were quite beyond her expectations not wholly explicable even by so idyllic a fact. The content of their neigbourhood surrounded them like an atmosphere, beyond which people moved about irrationally and a string band played unmeaning selections much too loud. She was lovelier than he had ever seen her, more his possession than he had ever felt her—the incarnation, as she bent her graceful head towards him, of the eloquent tropical night and the dreaming tropical spring. He told himself afterwards that he felt at this moment an actual pang of longing, and rejoiced that he could still experience an undergraduate’s sensation after so many years of pleasures that were but aridly intellectual at their best. Certainly, as he sat there in his irreproachable clothes and attitude, he knew that his blood was beating warm to his finger-tips with a delicious impulse to force the sweet secret of the situation between them. The south wind suggested to him, through the scent of breaking buds, that prudence was entirely a relative thing, and not even relative to a night like this and a woman like that. As he looked at a tendril of her hair, blown against the warm whiteness of her neck, it occurred to the Honourable Mr. Ancram that he might go a little further. He felt divinely rash; but his intention was to go only a little further. Hitherto he had gone no distance at all.