"Marry Lady Valenes. I'm sure you've made trouble and scandal enough in that quarter. Now old Valenes is dead you ought to marry her; and she's more beautiful than ever. I saw her at the opera last night." Sinclair stared straight in front of him with his long hands on his knees. His face, thickened and coarsened, fell easily into lines of fatigue and ill temper. "What is the use of Lady Valenes to me?" he said savagely. "What is the use of any woman in the world, except the right one?" "Well, you acted as if she was the right one when her poor jealous old husband was alive. It's just like you to think she won't do now he is dead and she is free." He was silent again. I was somewhat mollified by the remembrance that I had got Mildred, the most elusive and difficult of women, firmly under my thumb at last, and I said: "The truth is, you don't know what love is, you haven't got it in you to care a pin about anyone except yourself, or you would have married years ago. Who do you think you're in love with now?" "The same woman," he said wearily, "always the same." "Then marry her and have done with it, and turn this wretched museum into a home." "I can't find her." "What is her name?" "I don't know." "Just seen her once, I suppose," I retorted. "A perfect profile sailing past in a carriage under a lace parasol. And you think that's love. Little you know." I expanded my chest. Since I had come to terms with Mildred, some thirty hours before--and I had had a very uphill fight of it before she gave in--I felt that I was an expert in these matters. "Chipps," said Sinclair. (Chipps is not my name, but it has stuck to me ever since I was at school.) "Chipps, the truth is, we are in the same boat." My old wound gave a sudden twinge. "No," I said. "No. We aren't. I'm not taking any water exercise with you, so you needn't think it. Mildred and I are walking on the towing-path arm in arm, and I don't approve of boating for her because I don't like it myself. So she remains on dry land with me. In the same boat, indeed!" "I meant, we were both in love," he said with the ghost of a smile, "if your corkscrew advances towards matrimony can be called love. I did not mean that we were in love with the same woman." "I don't care if you are _now_. I did care damnably once, but I don't mind a bit now. Do your worst." "The conquering hero, and no mistake," Sinclair said, looking at me with something almost like affection, and he put out his hand. "Good luck to you, old turkey cock." I shook his hand harder than I intended, quite warmly, in fact. "Why don't you marry too?" I said. "It would make all the difference to you, as it has to me." We seemed suddenly very near to each other, as we had been in the old days; nearer than we had ever been since he had made trouble between Mildred and me. He looked at me with a kind of forlorn envy. "I cannot find her," he said again. The words fell into the silence of the large, dimly lighted room.