He seemed to have need of her presence, always. She must be always there. If she were indisposed there would be no parties in Regent's Park, since he seemed to enjoy no gathering of people in his house without her vivid presence.... I went as seldom as I could to his parties during that second year, but even so remarked how often his eyes followed her round a room, though he might not speak to her nor dance with her for hours on end; and if he did not dance with her he danced with no one else--he never had since the first time they had danced together; and, though she still lost as consistently as ever at any games of hazard that might be played, he seemed always to be brighter and sharper for her presence about the table. He was a Pasha kind of man, Iris told me later; which would not have been so difficult to deal with if he had been consistent about it. But she never knew where she was, for he would let her be for weeks on end, while she lunched here and dined there, danced with this man and with that--and then, suddenly, blaze out into a fury of, presumably, jealousy; a cold kind of fury, in which bitter abuse was couched in liveliest terms and his opinion of her, and himself, defined with that outrageous clearness peculiar to scientists and sadists. Heaven only knows how she stood it at all--but then Heaven is our only really discreet friend, and never tells. V The reason why I was so late in going to the party at Roger's house that sultry night in June was that I hadn't up to the last moment intended to go. And, as I paid off the cab before the house, was still uncertain enough to hesitate--until I suddenly had an acute feeling that I simply couldn't bear the crowd inside, all those usual and vivacious faces; that I couldn't bear the idea of the large rooms and noisy groups here and there, nor of Roger and his cultivated smile, nor of Iris in that confounded _gallère_. I may go in later, I told myself, thinking it would be a more pleasant folly to smoke a cigarette in the gardens behind the house. An ugly Victorian house, large and flabby, and an illiterate garden, I grumbled, but as I skirted the front to it I had to admit that for all its poverty and disorder it was a queerly attractive garden, a very special garden. Its hundred yards or so of length sloped in an absent-minded way down to the water, but where one would have expected an immaculate lawn for the cultivation of afternoon tea were only patches of grass traversed erratically by paths that led to nowhere in particular, and adorned by random trees and bushes that always might just as well have been anywhere else; a garden without any conscience even at night-time, and with scarcely any flowers, because, said Roger, a garden in London needs no flowers to be wonderful....