“Of course,” said Breezy, “walk. Best exercise in the world. Oils a man up.” But all the same he didn’t intend to go far. Athleticism was a pose with him. He had grown so fat sitting on that backless chair behind the glass screen, looking into the works of sick watches like a poor man’s doctor who treated a long line of ailing people. If it wasn’t the mainspring, then it was over-winding. Very simple. But Lola steered them away from Kensington Gardens because soldiers were there under canvas, and Chalfont was in command of the London district, and it might happen easily that all of a sudden that purring car would draw up at the curb and her name be called by the man with the cork arm. “Let’s go the other way,” she said, “for a change. I love to look at all the houses that are just the same and wonder what the people are like who live in them, and whether they’re just the same.” It was her evening. She was no longer the little girl to be told to do this or that and taken here and there with or against her will. She had broken out of all that, rather strangely and quietly and suddenly; and in a sort of way her parents had become her children. It always happens. It is one of the privileges of parenthood eventually to obey. It is the subtle tribute paid by them to a son or daughter of whom they are proud, who is part of them and who has come through all the vicissitudes of childhood and adolescence under their care and guidance. It is one of the nicer forms of egotism. And so these three little people, the Breezys, went into the labyrinths of villadom, up one street and down another. Some of the houses were smarter than the rest, with little trees in tubs, and Virginia creepers twined about their pillars, and perhaps a fat Cupid, weather-stained, standing in a little square of cat-fought garden, or with two small lions eying each other from opposite sides of the doorway with bitter antagonism. But the waning light of a glorious day still clung to the sky, in which an evening star had opened its eye, and even Bayswater, that valley of similitude, wore beauty of a sort. And all the way along, up and down and across, the high-sounding names of the various terraces ringing with sarcasm, they went together, these three little people, one far from little outwardly, in great affection. To Lola there was something unreal, almost uncanny about the whole thing. She had grown out of all these streets, all this commonplace, that entire world. She felt like some one who hears a very old tune played in a theater and looks down with surprise and a little thread of pain from a seat in a box,—a tune which seemed to take her back, away and away to far distant days, and stir dim memories.—Only last night she had been sitting in the Carlton with Chalfont as Madame de Brézé, and next Friday, if all went well——