The month was extremely hot, but of the stifling air, of the emptiness of town, of the economy that Madge insisted on being observed, what a game their love made! They were stranded on a desert island, so ran the silly tale that was made up from day to day, in the midst of the tropics. A huge town was (unexplainedly) there, in which they dwelt; but though cabs jingled about it, it was forbidden, as in an allegory, to get into a cab. A mile away there were restaurants, which both in a dreamlike fashion seemed to know; in these, too, it was forbidden to set foot, for a lion called Ellesdee guarded the doors. Ellesdee, who gradually grew more elaborate, also crouched on the tops of the cabs they would otherwise have driven in, and lay in wait at the main terminuses which would have taken them out of town. Ellesdee could assume various forms; sometimes he became quite little, and crouched behind a box of hot-house peaches, which would have been pleasant for dinner; at other times he was an apparently bland attendant at the door of theatres. He even, this was Madge's contribution, nearly prevented Evelyn buying a couple of very expensive brushes which he wanted, but impassioned argument on his part convinced her that it was not Ellesdee at all who had taken the form of the shopman, and consequently the brushes were bought. He certainly guarded the furniture shops, where Evelyn was inclined to linger, and though he had an eye on what came in at the area gate, into the house itself he never penetrated. Nor was he to be found in Battersea Park, nor on the Embankment, where they used to walk in the cool of the evening. But the Ellesdee who had been responsible for the disaster in Metiekull never showed his face. That had been a big and a dead loss, but Evelyn had shaken it off from his mind, just as some retriever puppy shakes off the water after a swim, dispersing it over yards of grass in a halo. And if Madge on the day when they sat on the sands at Paris-plage had had disquieting thoughts as to whether it was a man she had married or a mere boy, here at any rate was some consolation if it proved to be the latter. For Evelyn had certainly that divinest gift of youth in being able to utterly expunge from the present and from his view of the future all that had been unpleasant in the past. The moment a thing was done, if the result was not satisfactory, it ceased to be; if consequences called, as now they called, in the shape of rigid economies, he was simply not at home to them. The results he accepted with cheerful blandness, but he never went back to the cause. Whether it might or might not have been avoided no longer mattered, since it had not been avoided. The cause, however, was done with; it belonged to the mistlike texture of the past. Meantime his exuberant spirits made the very most of the present.