That same evening he attended a fashionable lecture, wherein it was explained that marriage was an affair of State. The theme touched in Peter a strain of feeling that had slept from the moment he had lost Miranda. When the lecturer had shown how the erotic forces now loose in the world, and acting blindly, could be successfully run in leash by a committee of experts, Peter left the meeting and sat in a restaurant waiting for dinner. The place was gay with tongues. The tongues were German and French, or English that clearly was not natural; for this was a dining place of men who paid the bill for women they had not met before. The company was very select; and Peter, devouring an expensive meal, admired with the shyness that beauty still raised in him, the clothes, faces, and obvious charms of the lovely feeders. Sometimes his heart beat a little faster as the insolent, slow eyes of one of these women curiously surveyed him. There was a beautiful creature who especially fascinated him. He felt he would like just to look at her, and enjoy the play of her face. He could not do as he wished, because now and then she glanced at him, and he would not have met her eyes for the world. Once, however, there was a clashing of their looks, and Peter felt that his cheeks were burning. Tumultuously rebuking his pulse, Peter caught an ironic vision of himself leading a long file of these brilliant women to the lecturer from whom he had just escaped, with a request that he should deal with them according to his theory of erotic forces. May was drawing to an end when Peter's mother decided she must spend a few weeks with her brother in Hamingburgh. Peter realised, as she told him of this, how quietly necessary she had been to him during these last months. Always he returned to the still, beautiful figure of his mother as to something rooted and safe. Sometimes, as he entertained some of his talking friends, he watched her sitting monumentally wise, passively confounding them. "I won't stay alone in London," Peter suddenly announced. His mother calmly considered him. "I can easily arrange it for you," she suggested at last. "I should go mad," said Peter briefly. He crossed to where his mother was sitting. "Why, Peter," she said, "I hardly see anything of you." "You are always there," said Peter, putting his arm around her shoulder. "You simply don't know what a comfort it is to have you. Somehow you keep things from going to the devil. I don't mean the housekeeping," continued Peter, answering his mother's puzzled look. "The fact is, mother, you're quite wonderful. You're the only person I know who hasn't any opinions. You just _are_." Peter decided to go into the country, and return to London when his mother was ready to come back. The time for this had almost arrived, when he met Marbury in the lobby of the House of Commons. Marbury broke away from his friends as Peter was hesitating whether to pass him.