But Lola was not in the least nonplussed. She had had so much practice. She was an expert in mentally making all sorts and conditions of men her brothers. She said, “Simpky,”—although the man looked extremely un-Russian,—“you mustn’t spoil me. Also you must remember that Ellen Glazeby has hopes. She’s a friend of mine.” “Oh, my God,” said Simpkins, with a touch of melodrama. “If I’d been engaged to ’er and on the verge of marriage, and then ’ad seen you,—or even if I’d been married for a couple of years and was ’appy and ’ad seen you——Religious as I am——” Lola turned to him with extreme simplicity. “But I’m a good girl, Simpky,” she said. And he gave a funny throaty sound, like a frog at night with its feet in water; and one of his hands fluttered out and caught hold of the end of Lola’s piece of fur, and this he pressed to his lips. “Oh, my God,” he said again, words failing. And so Lola was rather glad when the cab drew up at the house in Dover Street. A car arrived at the same time and honked impatiently and imperiously. Simpkins leapt from the taxi and said, “Pull out of the way, quick.” It did so. And as Lola descended and stood at the top of the area steps, she saw Fallaray go slowly up to the front door with rounded shoulders, as though he were Atlas with the weight of the world on his back. He was followed by a man whose step was light and eager. V It was George Lytham. The editor of a new weekly called _Reconstruction_ which had not as yet done more than take its place among all those elder brothers on the bookstalls which were suffering from a combination of hardening of the arteries and shrinkage of the exchequer, Lytham was a live wire, a man who could make mistakes, eat his own words, and having gone halfway up the wrong road, turn around without giving a curse for what other men would call dignity and retrace his steps at a run. Eton and Balliol, he had been a wet-bob, had a chest like a prize fighter and a forearm as hard as a cricket bat. The third son of old Lord Lockinge, he had sat in the House as member for one of those agricultural constituencies which are too dull and scattered to attract Radical propagandists and nearly always plump for Unionism. He had quickly made his mark. _Punch_ drew him in rowing shorts after his maiden speech and the Northcliff press made a point of referring to him as Young Lochinvar. But he had chucked the House in disgust after two years of it, one year of enormous enthusiasm during which he had worked like a dog and another year of sickly pessimism and disillusion brought about by contact with a set of political crows who fluttered over the carcass of England,—traditionless, illiterate, dishonest, of low minds and low accents, led by the Old Bad Men who had inherited the right or tricked their way to the front benches and had all died before the War but were still living and still clinging to office. He owed allegiance to no