Soltyk’s analogies with Kreisler worked in the dark to some end of mutual destruction. The nuance of possibility Soltyk liked his friendships with women to have, was a different affair to Kreisler’s heady and thorough-going intrigues. But he liked his soul to be marked with little delicate wounds and wistfulnesses. He liked an understanding, a little melancholy, with a woman. They would just divine in each other possibilities of passion, that was yet too _lasse_ and sad to rise to the winding of Love’s horns that were heard, nevertheless, in a _décor Versaillesque_ and Polonais. They were people who looked forward as others look back. They would say farewell to the future as most men gaze at the past. At the most they played the slight dawning and disappearing of passion, cutting, fastidiously, all the rest of the piece. So he was often found with women. Life had no lethargic intervals as with Kreisler. It at all times needed “expression” of such sort. For Anastasya, Soltyk was one of her many impresarios, who helped her on to and off the scene of Life. He bored her usually, but they had something equivalent to pleasant business relations. She appreciated him as an Impresario. These things arraying themselves in reality after this ordinary unexciting fashion, conventional figures of drama lacked. Kreisler was in the wrong company. But he conformed for the sake of the Invisible Audience haunting life. He emulated the matter-of-factness and aplomb that impressed him in the others _à outrance_. So much was this so that the Audience took some time to notice him, the vein of scandal running through the performance. * * * * * In the conservatory he established his head-quarters. From there he issued forth on various errands. All his errands showed the gusto of the logic of his personality, and not despair. He might have been enjoying himself. He invented outrage that was natural to him, and enjoyed slightly the licence and scope of his indifference. He, for instance, at the first sortie, noticed a rather congested, hot, and spectacled young woman, rather constantly fluttered over her womanhood, but overworked by her conscience, her features set by duty. He succeeded in getting her for a partner, and soon won her confidence by his scrupulous German politeness. He then, while marking time in a crush, disengaged his hand, and appeared to wish to alter the lie of her bosom, very apologetically. “Excuse me! It’s awkward. More to the left—so! Clumsy things and women are so proud of them! (No: I’m sure you’re not!) No. Let it hang to the left!” The young lady, very red, and snorting almost in his face, left him brusquely. Several young women, and notably a flapper, radiant with heavy inexperience and loaded with bristling bronze curls, he lured into the conservatory. They all came out with scarlet faces.