“As you will, belovedest,” he said. “Yet,” he added, with a curious note of wistfulness, “I learned to love the house and the sleepy old town and the mouldering castle.” The practical decision to which she was brought out of honeymoon lotus-land was the first cloud on her married happiness. It had never occurred to her before that she could have anything to conceal from her husband. Not an incident in the Lydian galley had her ingenuousness not revealed. But now she felt consciously disingenuous, and it was horrible. How could she confess the real reason for her refusal to live in Medlow? Was she not to him the Fairy Princess? He had told her so a thousand times. He had pictured his first vision of her glowing flame colour and dusk beneath the theatre portico, his other vision of her exquisite in moonlight and snowflake in the great silent street. His faith in her based itself on the axiom of her regality. Woman-like, she had laughed within herself at his dear illusions. But that was the key of the staggering position; his illusions were inexpressibly dear to her; they were the priceless jewels of her love. With just a little craft, so sweet, so divinely humorous, to exercise she could maintain these illusions to the end of time. . . . But not at Medlow. She had gone forth from it, on her pilgrimage, in order to establish herself in her mother’s caste. And she had succeeded. The name of her grandfather, Bagshawe of the Guides, had been a password to the friendships which now she most valued. Marriage had defined her social ambitions. They were modest, fundamentally sane. Her husband, a man of old family and gentle upbringing, ranked with her mother and General and Janet Philimore. He was a man of genius, too, and his place was among the great ones of the social firmament. She thought solely in terms of caste, gentle and intellectual. She swept aside the meretricious accessories of the Sydney Rooke gang with a reactionary horror. A few days before, Alexis, lyrically lover like, had said: “You are so beautiful. If only I could string your neck with pearls, and build you a great palace . . .” etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, in the manner of the adoring, but comparatively impecunious poet. And she had replied: “I don’t want pearls, palaces or motor-cars. They’re all symbols, my dear, of the Unreal. Ordinary comfort of food and warmth and decent clothes—yes. But that’s all. So long as you string my heart with love—and my mind with noble thoughts.”