But as I asked I knew that he hadn’t. He had the look. Oh, he wore good clothes and I knew he wasn’t poor. But it was written all over him that he looked after himself and did it expensively and badly. He had, too, that other look that goes with it—of a man who has never found anyone more interesting to him than himself. And the queer part was that it didn’t seem selfish in him—and I’m sure it wasn’t. It was just like the way a child takes you for granted, and tells you about its own big affairs, and never guesses that you have your own little affairs too. I suppose it was a fault in him; but it made me like him. And he talked to me simply and almost as if he needed helping out; as if he’d been just anybody. I never had to help out anyone before: it had always been the other way round. I’d thought, too, that celebrated people were always superior and brilliant and overwhelming, like Anita and Mr. Flood. But he wasn’t. He was as simple as A, B, C. I liked him. I did like him. I felt happier, more at peace, standing there with him than I had felt since I had been in Anita’s house. I think he would have gone on talking to me too, if it hadn’t been for the Baxter girl. She spoilt it. She tilted back her chair, yawning, and so caught sight of us, and laughed, and leaning over to Miss Howe, whispered in her ear. She was a crazy girl. At once I got up and came across to them, panic-stricken, hating her. I had to. I didn’t want him worried, and you never knew what hateful thing the Baxter girl wouldn’t say, and think that she was pleasing you. But without knowing it, Anita helped me. Her voice, rising excitedly in answer to some word of Mr. Flood’s, recalled the Baxter girl. “Mystery? Of course there’s a mystery! She was at the height of her promise in _Ploughed Fields_. It’s as good as _Eden Walls_ in matter and, technically, better still. The third book ought to have settled her place in modern literature for good and all. It ought to have been her master-piece. But what does she do? We expect a chaplet of pearls, and she gives us a daisy-chain. Isn’t that a mystery worth solving? Won’t people read the _Life_ for that if for nothing else? Am I the only person who has asked what happened to her between her second and her third books?” “I tell you, but you won’t listen,” Mr. Flood insisted. “Your romantic has become a realist and is flying from it to the resting-place of romance.” “I do listen. Just so. You use your words and I use mine, but we mean the same thing. She’s been bruising herself against facts. She has been walled up by facts. Her vision is gone. Now what was, in her case, the all-obscuring fact?” “She was a woman,” said the blonde lady. “It could only be one thing. Don’t I know the signs? She even lost her sense of humour.” “Yes, she did, didn’t she?” cried the Baxter girl in a voice of relief. “Oh, I remember one day, just before the engagement was announced——” “As if that had anything to do with it,” said Anita scornfully.