No doubt her vanity. . . . But she had had a good many spasms of vanity this last year. She had been inordinately set up when she had made a conquest of Eustace Bylant. . . . Her mirror had received a good many confidences. Yes, she was as vain as a peacock. No need of a man more or less to keep it awake. Certainly wouldn’t keep her awake. . . . She recalled the night of the manor ball when she and Pelham had sat alone in the drawing-room. He had outshone every man at the party in looks and distinction. . . . She remembered certain odd sensations. . . . Another Gita Carteret. That was it. No doubt if she had sat in that room two hundred years ago with a young man as handsome and winning as that she’d have fallen in love with him then and there. For the first time she was conscious of regret that such an exciting experience was denied her. It would be immeasurably interesting to love a man like Geoffrey Pelham—especially as he looked that night. Nothing very romantic about a man dressed like a waiter and eating chicken salad. . . . That, perhaps, was it. Romance. It was not the dearth of sex-fires she was regretting—that idea was as abhorrent as ever—but the romances all those beautiful Carteret girls had experienced before her and handed down as her birthright. She would even have been glad if her mother—who would have been happier dead anyhow—could have gone when she was a child and her father had sent her to her grandmother. She would have grown up a true Carteret girl and come into her birthright. She might or might not have met Geoffrey Pelham but she would have had her romance sooner or later. . . . But no, she had met a good many men now, some of them charming and congenial enough. It would have been Geoffrey Pelham and no other. Perhaps they were both living again after two hundred years’ sleep and had once met and loved in that old manor. There had been something oddly _aware_ that night—but that was nonsense. She might be too educated to assume that anything, including reincarnation, was fabulous, but she didn’t believe it all the same. It was merely the law of mutual attraction at work. Men and women were falling in love every day all over the world with no assistance from metempsychosis. . . . And she was by no means “in love.” Silly phrase. Moronotic. . . . What might have been and what was were two entirely different matters. It was merely that some subtle magnetic quality in his personality suggested romance—every girl’s birthright—or had that night. There was nothing very romantic about a surgeon always carving up people and getting blood all over himself . . . and they had to cut up corpses before they could do that, and hardly ever read anything but stiff medical journals.