She was now twenty-five years old, and the Kensington flat, and abundant means had lost their novelty. She was never moved by a clever novel without detesting her own obscurity; never looked at the window of the Stereoscopic Company without a passion of envy for the successful artists; never accompanied Heriot to the solemn houses without yearning for a passport to Upper Bohemia instead. She was twenty-five years old, and marriage, without having fulfilled the demands of her temperament, had developed her sensibilities. It was at this period that she met Lucas Field. If her existence had been a story, nothing could have surprised her less than such a meeting. It would have been at this juncture precisely that she looked for the arrival of an artist, and Lucas Field would probably have been a brilliant young man who wore his hair long and wrote decadent verse. The trite in fiction is often very astonishing in one's own life, however, and, as a matter of fact, she found their introduction an event, and foresaw nothing at all. Lucas Field was naturally well known to her by reputation--so well known that when the hostess brought "Mr. Field" across to her, Mamie never dreamed of identifying him with the dramatist. She had long since ceased to expect to meet anybody congenial at these parties, and the fish had been reached before she discovered who it really was who had taken her down. Field was finding it a trifle dreary himself. He had not been bred in the vicinity of the footlights---his father had been a physician, and his mother the daughter of a Lincolnshire parson--but he had drifted into dramatic literature when he came down from Oxford, and the atmosphere of the artistic world had become essential to him by now. Portman Square, though he admitted its desirability, and would have been mortified if it had been denied to him, invariably oppressed him a shade when he entered it. He was at the present time foretasting hell in the fruitless endeavour to devise a scenario for his next play, and he had looked at Mamie with a little interest as he was conducted across the drawing-room. A beautiful woman has always an air of suggestion; she is a beginning, a "heroine" without a plot. Regarded from the easel she is all-sufficing--contemplated from the desk, she is illusive. After you have admired the tendrils of hair at the nape of her neck, you realise with despondence that she takes you no farther than if she had been plain. Field had realised that she left him in the lurch before his soup plate had been removed. Presently he inquired if she was fond of the theatre. "Please don't say 'yes' from politeness," he added. "Why should I?" She had gathered the reason in the next moment, and her eyes lit with eagerness. He had a momentary terror that she was going to be commonplace. "I couldn't dream that it was you--here!" she said apologetically. "Isn't a poor playwright respectable?" he asked.