But for Roger's coming, she might have continued for years being proposed to decently and indecently by the young fops and financiers whose piracies the world so completely licences; not one of whom she would ever like enough, not one of whom could ever lead himself or her to anything but a country-house or to Deauville. So, as I imagine it, as she looked around her life, at the supposed pageantry and possibilities of it, she must have been in a state of watchful coma, just waiting, with a growing inner sadness, for that "something" to happen; that "something," that fulfilment of a longing, which would bring into actual being the woman in her--that thing compact with elemental passions and fierce desires which had so far only been present in an involuntary stiffening of her body, her spine, when a kiss, and maybe one that had faintly attracted her, had touched her. Her mind might compromise, it often desperately did, but it was as though an unhesitating iron had entered her body, so that it could never be lulled to even a pretence of acceptance. And so, as she was one night surveying the accustomed character of a crowded room, with what relief she must have realised, howsoever dimly at that first moment, that the "something" was at last about to happen, that Roger Poole was crossing the room into her life. She had met him only once before, four years ago, just after she had come out--and he had only just lately re-entered her world. She had, of course, often heard about him during that time, and not only in political chatter; for Roger, with a certain superciliousness, had withdrawn himself only from what he found dull and boring in life--from which Iris hadn't yet thought it worth while to rebel; unless braving an hysterical scene with her mother for a latchkey was rebellion. But as to the flouting of conventions and the like, it is easy enough to do as one likes; but so very much easier, after all, to know without doing so that the entertainment gained won't be worth while.