Then a piece of news with which Kitty came home one night added its trifle to her smart. She was alone in the flat that night; Jimmy had been in bed two hours and more, and Louie, after having folded his clothes, cleared up his litter of toys from the floor, and tried to read a newspaper, had turned low the gas, drawn up a chair to one of the three windows that looked down on the New Kings Road, and sat gazing out over the trees and houses and scattered lights that stretched away to Earls Court. It happened that that night the Exhibition was closing for the season; a firework demonstration was in progress; and out of the little pool of orange light rockets rose from time to time, falling again in slow showers of red and green and white. If no cart was passing she could just hear the muffled detonations. She knew that if an impossibility could have happened, and Jim could have walked into the room, sat down by her, and watched the white and green and red rockets with her, that slight constant smart at her heart would have gone; but now she told herself that it was not as if she was young, with unlimited time before her. She was thirty-two, and too much absence is not sustenance enough for thirty-two. But that, she supposed, meant nothing to a man. Men did not appear to get old in quite the same way. The man who had tried to make love to her at the French picture exhibition was sixty if he was a day; sixty, and still fiery; and apparently he had found her still desirable also. But it was not for much longer. Women died with their beauty. Of course she had her little darling asleep there; men had the comfortable theory that women wanted nothing more than to "live again" (as they called it) in their children; well, all that Louie could say was that she did not agree with them. She knew one woman who wanted more. It might be wicked and unnatural to endow Jimmy, as she had done, with a sort of vicarious father, but Roy was gone out of her life--gone; to have married him would have made more mischief than it would have cured; and Louie saw no reason for not telling herself the truth about herself. But a vicarious father who stayed away was altogether too vicarious.... Well, well, she supposed that if a woman would have a man at all she must put up with a selfish one.