"But"--she hesitated again--"snubs hurt, man." Thinking of various slights already endured, her eyes suffused, and she had difficulty in keeping back the tears. "Nobody shall hurt _you_." He came quickly across the room; put his arms round her; and kissed, very tenderly, the smooth skin behind her ears, her bared shoulders. "Oh, yes, they will. Not even you can prevent that. Women in my position are bound to get hurt. All the time! But it doesn't hurt much"--she looked up into his eyes, and smiled away the tears from her own;--"it doesn't really hurt at all so long as I've got you." Nevertheless, as they raced through their execrable meal in the empty dining-room, Aliette knew herself face to face with an ordeal. And the ordeal waxed more and more terrible in anticipation as the electric brougham, which Julia had insisted on sending to Baron's Court for them, rolled toward Bruton Street. She sat wordlessly, her hand clasped in Ronnie's, staring wide-eyed at the buses, the taxicabs, and the private cars which passed or overtook them. It was as though every soul in London, all the people in those buses, those taxicabs, and those private cars, were hostile to her; as though she were a woman apart from all other women, outcast indeed. She wanted to say to her man: "Must we do this unwise thing? Must we? Can't we turn back? Can't we go on hiding ourselves?" But she said nothing, only clung the closer to his responsive hand. 4 Literary folk can be peculiarly childish; which is perhaps the reason why great authors are usually little men. One part of Julia's mind--as she waited for Ronnie and Aliette to fetch her--positively grinned with mischief in anticipation of the new adventure, "defying Society." That part of her felt very much the heroine, a female knight-errant about to do lusty tilt against the dragon "Convention." But, in the main, her mood was retrospective. "Curious," she thought, looking back at her dead self; "curious how entirely my views have changed." And she remembered the reactionary stubbornness of her anti-divorce article for "The Contemplatory," her delight at the stir which that article had created, her delusions that it might "help to stem the flood of post-war immorality." Now even the closing sentence, "Until humanity learns to discipline the sentimental impulse, there can be no hope of matrimonial reconstruction," rang false in the auditorium of experience. She yearned suddenly to rewrite that sentence, to substitute "the lustful impulse" for "the sentimental impulse." But the written word, alas, could not be revoked. Then, vaguely she visioned herself writing a new article--perhaps a new book--some pronouncement, anyway, which should contradict and counteract her old doctrine. And from that, her creative mind--as though linking story to moral--started in to examine the individual case of her son and Aliette. The front door-bell rang; and Julia heard Ronnie's voice in the hall.