"--It's the devil for him because then he lets himself drift and the one who wants him collars him and then of course she always turns out to be the one he didn't want. My observations are as full of wants as an advertisement column. But the thing to do in all relations of life is to make up your mind what it is that you _do_ want, and then to jolly well see that you get it. What I want is a pipe." He filled and lighted one. "You talk," said Temple slowly, "as though a man could get anyone--I mean anything, he wanted." "So he can, my dear chap, if he only wants her badly enough." "Badly enough?" "Badly enough to make the supreme sacrifice to get her." "?" Temple enquired. "Marriage," Vernon answered; "there's only one excuse for marriage." "Excuse?" "Excuse. And that excuse is that one couldn't help it. The only excuse one will have to offer, some day, to the recording angel, for all one's other faults and follies. A man who _can_ help getting married, and doesn't, deserves all he gets." "I don't agree with you in the least," said Temple,--"about marriage, I mean. A man _ought_ to want to get married--" "To anybody? Without its being anybody in particular?" "Yes," said Temple stoutly. "If he gets to thirty without wanting to marry any one in particular, he ought to look about till he finds some one he does want. It's the right and proper thing to marry and have kiddies." "Oh, if you're going to be Patriarchal," said Vernon. "What a symbolic dialogue! We begin with love and we end with marriage! There's the tragedy of romance, in a nut-shell. Yes, life's a beastly rotten show, and the light won't last more than another two hours." [Illustration: "Unfinished, but a disquieting likeness"] "Your hints are always as delicate as gossamer," said Temple. "Don't throw anything at me. I'm going." He went, leaving his secret in Vernon's hands. "Poor old Temple! That's the worst of walking carefully all your days: you do come such an awful cropper when you do come one. Two women. The Jasmine lady must have been practising on his poor little heart. Heigh-ho, I wish she could do as much for me! And the other one? _Her_--I suppose." The use of the pronoun, the disuse of the grammar pulled him up short. "By Jove," he said, "that's what people say when--But I'm not in love--with anybody. I want to work." But he didn't work. He seldom did now. And when he did the work was not good. His easel held most often the portrait of Betty that had been begun at Long Barton--unfinished, but a disquieting likeness. He walked up and down his room not thinking, but dreaming. His dreams took him to the warren, in the pure morning light; he saw Betty; he told himself what he had said, what she had said. "And it was I who advised her to come to Paris. If only I'd known then--" He stopped and asked himself what he knew now that he had not known then, refused himself the answer, and went to call on Lady St. Craye.