"What game do you mean?" I asked, when I had carefully blown out the match and deposited it in an ash-tray. "What game can I mean but—but that of your coming back?" "Oh, is that a game?" "Only in the sense of giving us something to play. We can’t just—just live it." "Why can’t we?" With a quick movement she was on her feet, flinging out her hands. "For all the reasons that I should think you’d see." She came and stood on the hearth-rug, confronting me. "Billy, I wonder if you have the faintest idea of what I’m doing for your sake?" "I’ve more than the faintest idea, Vio. Some day, when we’re able to talk more easily than we are as yet, I shall tell you how grateful I am. Just now I’m—I’m rather dazed. I have to get my bearings—" She, too, had taken a cigarette, lighting it nervously, carelessly, puffing rapidly at the thing and moving about the room. "And there’s another thing," she began, taking no notice of what I was trying to say; "I don’t mind your talking as you did just now, so long as it’s—as it’s through your hat; but if it isn’t—" "I can’t say that it is." "That’s just what I was afraid of. In the places where you’ve been—I don’t want to know anything about them," she interjected, with a passionate gesture of the hand that held the cigarette, "but in such places men do pick up revolutionary ideas, just as they do in prisons!" "I don’t know that it’s a question of getting revolutionary ideas, Vio, so much as it’s one of living in a revolutionary world." "And that’s what I want to warn you against. It won’t go down, Billy, not from you." "Why not from me, in particular?" "Oh, why do you make me explain things? Isn’t it perfectly clear? If you’re coming back among your old friends you’ll have to be, after what’s happened, more—how shall I put it?—more conservative, more like everybody else—than any one. _You_ can’t afford to have wild ideas, because people will only say that you re trying to drag us along the way you went yourself." I renounced this discussion to ask the question that was chiefly on my mind. "Vio, who’s that man that just went out?" She threw me a look from the other side of the room. "You heard. He’s—where can you catch on? He’s Emmy Fairborough’s brother." "Wasn’t there—wasn’t there a divorce?" "Emmy’s? Yes; Lord Fairborough and she are divorced, but what difference does that make?" "I wasn’t thinking of Lady Fairborough. I forgot she had been a Stroud. I meant—I meant him." "Oh, he? Yes, I think he was." "Divorced?" "Yes, divorced. What of it?" "To whom had he been married?" "How should I know? It was to—to some low creature, an actress or something, the sort of thing men do when they’re young and—and—" "And wild?" "Wild, if you like. Why are you asking?"