“Good Lord, no. Money’s nothing. At best, only the counters with which we are paid for winning certain games. Mine, for instance. By failure, I mean not getting what you go for. Never mind what it is—fame, money, tranquillity, distinction. A girl or a seat in the House of Lords. As long as you know what you want, _and get it_, you’re a success.” “But some people don’t want anything in particular.” “I’ve no use for that kind.” Her trained mind told her that the man had voiced his whole creed. Her woman’s instinct resented it. “He didn’t want _her_ like that. She was only a side-issue. ‘Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his’—cigarette-factory.” “Idiot” said her reason. “Idiot! You’ve been married eight years. . . .” “If we want to be with Francis in time for tea,” said her voice, “you’d better ask for your bill.” Peter paid; and they passed out, picking up his hat and stick from the cloak-room; climbed the carpeted stairs into the Haymarket. It was the zenith of London’s last, maddest “season”; but her pleasure crowd—the dancers in her night-clubs; the befeathered scantily-draped women of her Opera House; the placemen, the panderers and the nincompoops who made pretence of governing her—had departed; were “week-ending” in pseudo-rusticity, twenty, thirty, a hundred miles away. And real London, heart of Empire, rested quietly in the soft sunshine—glad to be free of such parasites—as Peter and Patricia made way through her empty streets to Bloomsbury. § 2 When a young man, who has never done a day’s work except “to amuse himself,” comes down with a crash from ten thousand pounds a-year to about five hundred, it seems to him at first as though Life (with a capital L) were finished. Later on, the adaptability of the human animal begins to assert itself; a new standard of values replaces the old one; and the _man_—as apart from his chattels—emerges. Bruised, broken or strengthened according to his nature. Peter’s cousin, Francis Gordon, had come down with just such a crash: but in Francis’ case the human animal had more than altered conditions to which it needed adapt itself. For Francis Gordon at the very moment when Life (with a capital L) had looked its blackest, met a girl, _the_ girl, the ideal to whom his soul had been, was, and would always be, faithful. He looked up now—from the papers on the table where he sat working—at her photograph, the only one in the room. Beatrice Cochrane! A very ordinary, very human, very idealistic American girl. The sort of girl a man may meet in her hundreds from Los Angeles to Atlantic City; from New Orleans to Flushing, Long Island; from Dubuque, Iowa to Dallas, Texas. A girl still in her ’teens; slender-handed; with pale-gold hair and pale-gray thoughtful eyes.