Comyns was handsome, Comyns was wealthy. His father made bicycle lamps and motor horns in Wolverhampton, his grandfather had been a platelayer. He belonged to one of those families that go up in the world. Hellier belonged to one of the families that go down. When Comyns’ grandfather had been laying plate, Hellier’s had been eating off it. But the plate of the Helliers’ had vanished as utterly as their past, and of all the story there remained a single punch ladle, a speechless, yet eloquent witness, to tell of the good times gone. Hellier was a middle-sized man, and plain. Dark, clean-shaved, pre-eminently a gentleman. Just as a rose is a rose, or a pansy a pansy. Let the handsome and superficial Comyns walk with him down the street, and out of a hundred and one women a hundred would have looked with appreciation on the motor horn merchant’s son, but the hundred and first would have looked with interest at Hellier. He turned from contemplation of the harbour and came back down the pier slowly, breathing the keen east wind and wishing he was Comyns. He was in love for the first time in his life, and he was taking it badly. He was only thirty-three years of age, yet he was already summing up his life, looking back at his past, telling himself that had he not fooled away his time in the by-ways of literature and stuck to the hard high road of life, he might now have been well-to-do, like Comyns. It is only when a man is really in love that he sees the defects in himself and his position, sees them with a preternatural and startling vividness—if he is a man. So Hellier wished he was Comyns, utterly ignorant of the fact that if some magician had converted him into the object of his admiration, the woman he loved would not have looked at him twice. He had only known her ten days. Her name was Mademoiselle Cécile Lefarge, he had met her accidently at the Hotel des Bains, and had fallen in love with her on sight. When a man falls in love with a woman on sight, it is through his desires that love comes to him. Her body takes possession of his mind. This kind of love may fade away or endure for ever; as a rule it is unfortunate, and fades; sometimes it becomes converted into hatred, when the lover, after marriage, has discovered how the flesh has betrayed him, what a base soul beauty has palmed off on him, wrapped in an attractive wrapper. A bad bargain in love. Those five words contain in them the plot and essence of most of the tragedies in life. Cécile Lefarge was twenty-eight, and looked, perhaps, twenty-six. Pale, of medium height, voluptuously formed, dark, with blindish-looking violet grey eyes, serious-looking as a priestess of Aphrodite, yet with a nun-like spirituality, she was a woman to drive a sensualist mad with desire, a woman to inspire the dreams of a poet or a saint.