"Just you, Nicholas--just you." "Well, I am here now, but an eye and a leg gone, and a crooked shoulder, changes me;--so it is true love--even the emotion of the soul, depends upon material things--" Nina thought for a while. "Perhaps not the emotion of the soul--if we have souls?--but what we know of love now certainly does. I suppose there are people who can love with the soul, I am not one of them." "Well, you are honest, Nina." She had her coffee and liqueur, she was graceful and composed and refined, either Jim or Rochester will have a very nice wife. Burton coughed when she had left. "Out with it, Burton!" "Mrs. Ardilawn is a kind lady, Sir Nicholas." "Charming." "I believe you'd be better with some lady to look after you, Sir--." "To hell with you. Telephone for Mr. Maurice--I don't want any woman--we can play piquet." This is how my day ended--. Maurice and piquet--then the widow and the divorcée for dinner--and now alone again! The sickening rot of it all. * * * * * _Sunday_--Nina came for tea--she feels that I am a great comfort to her in this moment of her life, so full of indecision--It seems that Jim has turned up too, at the Ritz, where Rochester still is, and that his physical charm has upset all her calculations again. "I am really very worried Nicholas," she said, "and you, who are a dear family friend"--I am a family friend now!--"ought to be able to help me." "What the devil do you want me to do, Nina?--outset them both, and ask you to marry me?" "My dearest Nicholas!" it seemed to her that I had suggested that she should marry father Xmas! "How funny you are!" Once it was the height of her desire--Nina is eight years older than I am--I can see now her burning eyes one night on the river in the June of 1914, when she insinuated, not all playfully, that it would be good to wed. "I think you had better take Jim my dear, after all. You are evidently becoming in love with him and you have proved to me that the physical charm matters most,--or if you are afraid of that, you had better do as another little friend of mine does when she is attracted--she takes a fortnight at the sea!" "The sea would be awful in this weather! I should send for both in desperation!" and she laughed and began to take an interest in the furnishings of my flat. She looked over it, and Burton pointed out all its merits to her (My crutch hurts my shoulder so much to-day I did not want to move out of my chair). I could hear Burton's remarks, but they fell upon unheeding ears--Nina is not cut out for a nurse, my poor Burton, if you only knew--! When she returned to my sitting room tea was in, and she poured it out for me, and then she remarked.