Then there was his sister, Helena Lytham, a beautiful decorative person born to play the queen in pageants and stand about as in a fresco in a rather thick nightgown which clung decorously to her Leightonian figure,—respectable but airy. On Lytham’s return from Coblenz after the Armistice she had presented him to a little dapper person who barely came up to her shoulder, who smoked a perpetual cigar out of the corner of his mouth, wore a waistcoat with a linoleum pattern, skin-tight trousers and boots with brown leather uppers. He realized George’s idea of the riding master of a Margate livery stable. And so it went on all the way through.—And here was Fallaray. The truth of the thing was that Fallaray had not married Lady Feo. Lady Feo had married Fallaray. What she had said to Mrs. Malwood was perfectly true. At eighteen her hobbies were profiles and tennis. At twenty-four Fallaray’s profile was at its best. He looked like a Greek god, especially when he was playing tennis with a shirt open at the neck, and she had met him during the year that he had put up that superb fight against Wilding in the good old days. The fact that he was Arthur Fallaray, the son of a distinguished father, born and bred for a place on the front bench, a marked man already because of his speeches in the Oxford Union, didn’t matter. His profile was the finest that she had seen and his tennis was in the championship class, and so she had deliberately gone for him, followed him from house party to house party with the sole intention of acquiring and possessing. At the end of six weeks she had got him. He had been obliged to kiss her. Her face had been purposely held in place to receive it. The rest was easy. Whereupon, she had immediately advertised the engagement broadcast, brought her relations down upon Fallaray in a swarm, sent paragraphs to the papers and made it literally impossible for the unfortunate man to do anything but go through with the damned thing like a gentleman,—dazed by the turn of events and totally unacquainted with the galloping creature who had seemed to him to resemble a thoroughbred but untrained yearling, kicking its heels about in a paddock. It had all been just a lark to her,—no more serious than collecting postage stamps, which eventually she could sell or give away. If ever she were to fall really in love, it would be perfectly simple, she had argued, either to be divorced or to juggle affairs so that she might divorce Fallaray. Any man who played tennis as well as he had done could do a little thing like that for her. The result was well known. A man of high ideals, Fallaray had gone through with this staggering marriage with every intention of making it work. Being in love with no other girl, he had determined to do his utmost to play the game and presently stand proudly among a little family of Fallarays. But he had found in Feo some one who had no standards, no sense of right and wrong, give and take; a girl who