The affairs of her own set, female front benchers of one side or other as they were, were more tenuous. If they ever came to heads, their affairs, they had rather the nature of promiscuity and took place at the country houses where bells rang at five in the morning. Sylvia had heard of such country houses, but she didn't know of any. She imagined that they might be the baronial halls of such barons of the crown as had patronymics ending in schen . . . stein . . . and baum. There were getting to be a good many of these, but Sylvia did not visit them. She had in her that much of the papist. Certain of her more brilliant girl friends certainly made very sudden marriages; but the averages of those were not markedly higher than in the case of the daughters of doctors, solicitors, the clergy, the lord mayors and common councilmen. They were the product usually of the more informal type of dance, of inexperience and champagne--of champagne of unaccustomed strength or of champagne taken in unusual circumstances--fasting as often as not. They were, these hasty marriages, hardly ever the result of either passion or temperamental lewdness. In her own case--years ago now--she had certainly been taken advantage of, after champagne, by a married man called Drake. A bit of a brute she acknowledged him now to be. But after the event passion had developed: intense on her side and quite intense enough on his. When; in a scare that had been as much her mother's as her own, she had led Tietjens on and married him in Paris to be out of the way--though it was fortunate that the English Catholic church of the Avenue Hoche had been the scene of her mother's marriage also, thus establishing a precedent and an ostensible reason!--there had been dreadful scenes right up to the very night of the marriage. She had hardly to close her eyes in order to see the Paris hotel bedroom, the distorted face of Drake, who was mad with grief and jealousy, against a background of white things, flowers and the like, sent in overnight for the wedding. She knew that she had been very near death. She had wanted death. And even now she had only to see the name of Drake in the paper--her mother's influence with the pompous front bencher of the Upper House, her cousin, had put Drake in the way of colonial promotions that were recorded in gazettes--nay, she had only involuntarily to think of that night and she would stop dead, speaking or walking, drive her nails into her palms and groan slightly. . . . She had to invent a chronic stitch in her heart to account for this groan which ended in a mumble and seemed to herself to degrade her. . . .