But now! there were only wasters, at best inefficient dilettanti in art and gambling, and drunkards who appalled you not by their drunkenness but by their dulness. You could walk London W. from midnight to daylight and see neither hint nor hope of your accomplished buck.... And that last description, Roger must have known, would so agreeably become the seeming contradictions of his public ambitions and private life, that from the presidency of the Union he stepped plumb into it; in solitary elegance re-created it, as it were, in the public and social eye, both of which were never far from his consideration; and having re-created it, successfully lived up to and never budged from it--until, when he was thirty-four, he again re-entered that society which he had always despised as dull but had never offended except with the most sympathetic disorders; and could now walk into it with the comforting thought that no dowager could say worse of him than a doubtful "He's a remarkable young man...." I knew by the little he told me that the main reason for his emergence was marriage. It was time to take a wife--but he had never bargained to fall in love with her as he did with Iris Portairley. And I've tried to explain Iris, at the age of twenty-two wanting a deal more vitality and reality than her surroundings could give her, half-consciously waiting for "something to happen"--is it very wonderful that she fell in love with him, not only with his person, but with the idea of him? It is only a very callous kind of critic who will discount reality from a love because--it is touched with glamour--for was there ever in all history a lovely reality without a lovely glamour? Since, be you ever so young, to kiss a courtesan is to kiss a courtesan, but, be you ever so calm, to kiss a lover is to make a fairy-tale.... I didn't wonder whether Iris had told Roger that she was seeing his brother. I knew very well that she hadn't--and, as Roger never mentioned even Antony's name, not even to me (and there was that rigidity about Roger that allowed no trespassing upon a distasteful subject), there was little chance of the subject ever being mentioned between them. But did Antony know of his brother's suit, so ironically parallel to his own? I suppose that he must vaguely have heard of something, from a remark he once let drop; but it could only have been vaguely and distantly, for the spirit of the thing, of his new gentleness, would have been broken much sooner if he had definitely heard what was commonly said, that Iris was to marry Roger Poole. I had often wondered how Antony would take the news of the engagement when it officially happened.... I left them alone that afternoon; and only re-entered the room when I had heard the front-door close to. He was sitting at my writing-table, and looked round at me without a smile, wearily.