But having once begun to pay attention to such matters as these, she pursued her researches--in and out of season. It was a busy time of year, and James always laid great stress on what he called "the duties of her station." She must edge up crowded stairways behind him, stand at his side in hot and humming rooms where the head spun with the effort not to hear what other people were saying--so much more important, always, than what your partner was. James's height and eyeglass seemed to give him an impartial air at these dreadful ceremonies. Behind his glass disk he could afford to be impertinent. And he was certainly rude enough to be an Under-Secretary. Without that shining buckler of the soul he would have been simply nobody; with it, he was a demi-god. Here then, under the very shadow of his immortality, Lucy pursued her researches. What of the romantic, hidden, eponymous James? Where did he stand now in her regard? Since Easter at Wycross, James had not been her veiled Eros, but the possibilities were all there. He was not a garden god, by any means, nor a genius of the Spring. January and Onslow Square had not frozen his currents; February and the Opera House had heightened his passion. At any moment he might resume his devotional habit--even here in Carlton House Terrace. And what then? Well--and this was odd--this ought to have produced a state of tension very trying to the nerves; and, well--it hadn't. That's all. At that very party in Carlton House Terrace, with a band braying under the stairs, and a fat lord shouting in her ear, her secret soul was trembling on a brink. She was finding out to her half-rueful dismay--it was only half--that she was prepared to be touched, prepared to be greatly impressed, but not prepared to be thrilled as she had been, if James should kiss her again. She was prepared, in fact, to present--as statesmen do when they write to their sovereign--her grateful, humble duty--and no more. In vain the band brayed, in vain Lord J----, crimson by her ear, roared about the weather in the West of Ireland, Lucy's soul was peering over the edge of her old world into the stretches of a misty new one.