Then, too, she found herself becoming more and more disappointed in Ellingham. He had aged. Still just on the right side of forty, he seemed to her to have had all the youth knocked out of him. His resilience had gone—sapped by the War—and with it his danger, which had been so attractive. He was now a quiet, repressed, responsible, dull—yes, dull,—man; in a sort of way the father of a family. When he talked it was about his regiment in India, his officers, his quartermaster sergeant, the health of his men, the ugly look of things in the East. All this made it seem to Feo that Beetle Ellingham had pulled away from her, left her behind. She was still fooling, while he, once as irresponsible as herself and almost as mad, had found his feet and was standing firmly upon them. Disappointment, disappointment. “What to do?” she asked, as they got into a taxicab. She rather hoped that he would say “Nothing. I’ll see you home and say good night.” But he didn’t. “I’ll drive you home and talk for an hour, if you can stand such a thing. I’m going to see my old people in Leicestershire to-morrow, and I don’t suppose I shall be back in town for a month or two.” She told him to make it Dover Street, and he did so, and there was silence until the cab drew up at the door of the house in which the man—whom she had for the first time seriously considered as the new Messiah—burnt himself up in the endeavor to find some solution to all the troubles of his country, and, like a squirrel in a cage, ran round and round and round. Feo let herself in and led the way to what she called her den,—a long, low-ceilinged room, self-consciously decorated in what purported to be a futuristic manner, the effect of which, as though it had been designed by an untrained artist striving to disguise his ignorance behind a chaos of the grotesque, made sanity stagger. And here, full stretch on an octagonal divan, she mounted a cigarette in her long green holder and commenced to inhale hungrily.