“Why, there’s Guy!” said Hilary. “Must have just come up from Mace. There, by the door....” The carpet of colours, on which the men were sprinkled like the black smuts on a town garden, swayed between us and the doorway, but no crowd might hide that man, for he was tall as a tree and his crisp yellow hair glared like a menace above the intervening heads and his frozen blue eyes petrified smoke, noise, and distance. Hilary was standing, about to go towards Iris. He looked rather sheepish at being found by Guy at the Loyalty. Most unsmiling was Guy that night. “Ross must have told him we were here,” I said. “He’ll have come about Gerald....” “This foul place!” Hilary snapped. “You go downstairs with Guy, and I’ll get Iris to rid herself of her fancy friend and bring her down....” II And that was how, soon after midnight that night, I found myself for the first time in the car of the flying stork. For the first time.... Iris had dropped her boyish-looking chauffeur in the course of the evening, because, she said, she only liked driving at night, when the air blew clean and chill. She drove with assurance, that is to say, she drove as though her mind was not in the same world as the steering-wheel. The great bonnet swept round by the squat Palace and up the slope of Saint James’s Street, which only by night may remember a little of the elegance it has long since forfeited by day. “But that’s not the point,” I remember saying. “He won’t care a button what any one else is thinking about it. He’ll just go mad at the humiliation in himself, he’ll worry it, making a mountain of sordidness....” I had told her that Gerald had sent her his love, and her eyes had lit up at that, and she had laughed, shyly. “That’s better,” she had said, and now she said: “Yes, that’s the point. He’s proud, proud as Lucifer ... and such a baby! Oh, Gerald, you sensitive beast! I’m going abroad to-morrow, and he must either come with me or he must join me quickly, quickly. You’ll persuade him, too, won’t you?” I did not say that, if I knew Gerald, he would probably be in a state far beyond persuasion. But, I thought, there was no harm in trying to see him. At first, when Guy had told me downstairs at the Loyalty, I had just laughed. It seemed so absurd, fantastic. Gerald had been arrested in Hyde Park for “annoying women!” It was, you can see, unbelievable. How could Gerald “annoy” a woman, Gerald who was so shy that he could never even speak to one? “But there it is,” said Guy.