'Did you hear me 'phoning?' she inquired superfluously. 'It was to Mr. Doye. Fact is, I think he and I'd both be better for a little rest from each other. It'll give him time to cool down a bit. He's got keener than I like, lately. Fun's all very well, but one doesn't want to be hustled, does one? I don't want him asking me anything for a long time.' Alix, sitting on her bed with one shoe off, pulling at the other, said in a small voice, 'I don't think he will.' Evie turned round and looked at her, questioningly. 'You don't? Why, whatever do you know about it?' Alix was bent over her shoe; her voice was muffled. 'Basil is like that. He doesn't mean things....' 'Oh....' Evie turned to the glass, and drew four pins out of the roll of hair behind her head, and it fell in a heavy nut-brown mass, glinting in the yellow gaslight. She began to comb it out and roll it up again. 'Doesn't mean anything, doesn't he?' she said thoughtfully. 'You seem awfully sure about that.' 'Yes,' agreed Alix. She had pulled off both shoes now, and tucked her stockinged feet under her as she sat curled up on the bed. She drew a deep breath and spoke rather quickly. 'He's always the same, he was the same with me once, he doesn't really mean it....' 'The same with you--' Evie, without turning round, saw in the glass the blurred image of the huddled figure and small pale face in the shadows behind her. She drove in two more hairpins, then turned sharply and looked at Alix. 'You don't mean to say he used to be in love with you.' 'Oh ... in love....' Alix's voice was faint, attenuated, remote. 'Well--anything, then.' Evie was impatient. 'You needn't split hairs.... He went on with you, I suppose.... And you....' She broke off, staring, uncomfortably, at a situation really beyond her powers. Her cogitations ended in, 'Well, I think you might have told me at first. I thought you and he were just good friends. _I_ didn't want him. I wouldn't have let him come near me if I'd known it was like that. I never do that sort of thing. Now do I, Alix? You've never seen me mean to other girls like that, have you? I never have been and I never will be.... _I_ don't want him. You can have him back.' Alix giggled suddenly, irrepressibly. 'What's the matter now?' said Evie. 'Nothing. Only the way you talk of Basil--handing him about as if he was a kitten. He's not, you know.' Evie smiled grudgingly. 'Well, anyhow _I_ don't want him. Particularly if he doesn't mean anything, as you say.... It isn't every one I'd believe if they told me that; they might be jealous or spiteful or something. But I don't believe you'd say it, Al, if you didn't think it was true'--(Alix said, 'Oh,' on a soft, indrawn breath)--'and you know him, so I expect you're right. And I'm not going on playing round with a man who makes love like he does and doesn't mean anything. It isn't respectable.'