"I? What I choose to give!" she replied. "Gillie, I'll do what I like with you." She shrank back in the corner of the cab with a little cry. Lothian's face was red and blazing with anger. "No names like that, Rita!" he said roughly. "You shan't call me that." It was a despairing cry of drowning conscience, honour bleeding to death, dissolving dignity and manhood. However much he might long for her: however strongly he was enchained, it was a blot, an indignity, an outrage, that this girl should call him by the familiar home name. That was Mary's name for him. Mrs. Gilbert Lothian alone had the right to say that. Just then the taxi-metre stopped outside the big red erection in the Marylebone Road, an unusual and fantastic silhouette against the heavy sky. They went in together, and there was a chill over them both. They felt, on this grey day, as people who have lived for pleasure, sensation, and have fed too long on honeycomb, must ever feel; the bitterness of the fruit with the fair red and yellow rind. Ashes were in their mouths, an acrid flavour within their souls. It is always and for ever thus, if men could only realise it. Since the Cross rose in the sky, the hectic joys of sin have been mingled with bitterness, torture, cold. The frightful "Colloque Sentimental" of Verlaine expresses these two people, at this moment, well enough. Written by a temperamental saint turned satyr and nearly always influenced by drink; translated by a young English poet whose wings were always beating in vain against the prison wall he himself had built; you have these sad companions. . . . _Into the lonely park all frozen fast, Awhile ago there were two forms who passed. Lo, are their lips fallen and their eyes dead, Hardly shall a man hear the words they said. Into the lonely park all frozen fast There came two shadows who recall the past. "Dost thou remember our old ecstasy?" "Wherefore should I possess that memory?" "Doth thy heart beat at my sole name alway? Still dost thou see my soul in visions?" "Nay!"--_ And on such a day as this, with such a weight as this upon their tired hearts, they entered the halls of Waxwork and stood forlorn among that dumb cloistered company. They passed through "Room No. 1. Commencing Right-hand side" and their steps echoed upon the floor. On this day and at this hour hardly any visitors were there; only a few groups moved from figure to figure and talked in hissing whispers as if they were in some church. All around them they saw lifeless and yet half convincing dolls in rich tarnished habiliments. They walked, as it were, in a mausoleum of dead kings, and the livid light which fell upon them from the glass roof above made the sordid unreality more real. "There's Charles the First," Rita said drearily. Gilbert glanced at the catalogue. "He was fervently pious, a faithful husband, a fond parent, a kind master, and an enthusiastic lover and patron of the fine arts."