“Carey, for that matter.” “Matters not. She didn’t come home for Carey. You can’t make books without copy. Not her sort of book. Any more than you can make bricks without straw. But she didn’t make her bricks from his straw, that I’ll swear.” “No, she didn’t come home for Carey,” said Anita. “I tell you, that was the day she met him. It’s barely a year ago. She had made her name twice over by then. She was already casting about for her third plot. I think it was that that made her so restless. She’d grown very restless. But she certainly didn’t come home for Carey.” “Then why?” “Homesick.” “That’s absurd.” “I’m telling you what she said. She insisted on it. She used a queer phrase. She said—‘I longed for home till my lips ached.’” The lady with Mr. Flood stirred in her shadows. “She didn’t imagine that. That happens. That is how one longs——” She broke off. “For home?” he said, with that smile of his that ended at his mouth and left his eyes like chips of quartz. She answered him slowly, him only— “I suppose, with some women, it could be for home. If she says so——That is what confounds one in her. She knows—she proves that she knows, in a phrase like that, things that (when one thinks of her personality) she _can’t_ know—couldn’t know. It’s inexplicable. ‘Till one’s lips ache’——Oh, Lord!” She laughed harshly. Anita looked at them uncertainly. “Well, that’s what she said. And to judge from her description Westering was something to be homesick for. I expected a paradise.” “Westering? That’s quite a town.” “Yes, I know. There’s a summer colony. Madala mourned over it. She was absurd. She raced me out of the station and up the hill, and would scarcely let me look about me till we were at the top, because the lower end of the village had been built over. It might have been the sack of Rome to hear her—‘Asphalt paths! Disgraceful! The grocer used to have _blue_ blinds. They’ve spoiled the village green.’ And so it went on until we reached Upper Westering.” “Oh, where they live now?”