For while woman's beauty is coeval with Time itself, you have only your own allotted portion of it. The loveliness that comes too early or too late is no more your affair than the dawns before your time, the sunsets after you are gone. Madge at the midday of her life was still within my reach at my post-meridian, but Jennie would bloom like a rosy daybreak when my own evening star appeared. Young Rugby, young Charterhouse, would write his vers-libre to that small head, sweet throat and the red-gold of her hair.... But I hardly know why I write all this. I am only trying to show how sorely I had needed a change and how grateful I was now that it had come. I knew that I was welcome to stay with the Airds as long as I pleased. It didn't matter if I didn't write another book for ten years, it didn't greatly matter if I never wrote another. I didn't want to write. That ethereal sea, that multi-coloured plage, the genet-scented air, the feeling that all about me were people who knew what they could not do and wasted no time in attempting to do it--ah, they live their lives from the beginning and end them at the end in that fair and unperplexed land of northern France. II Both by Alec and Madge, Jennie's education was discussed before me with complete freedom. "Stuff and nonsense!" Madge would roundly declare. "Look at those two Beverley girls!" "Very nice girls, I should have thought," Alec would growl. "Yes, and who's ever going to marry them? Nobody as far as I can see. That's Vi Beverley's fault. She's let them sit in one another's pockets, and have their own silly family jargon, and think that the rest of the world's a cinema just to amuse them, till they don't know how to talk to a stranger without being rude. They positively freeze any young man who goes near them, and when they do go away it's to cousins. Family affection's all very well in its place, but you can have too much of it. Jennie shall take people as they are. If she does miss an hour's sleep once in a while she can stay in bed all next day if she wants." "Better teach her baccarat and have done with it." "Well, she needn't faint when it's mentioned. This is 1920. If ever those Beverley girls marry it will be one another." "If she begins to think of marrying in another four or five years----" "She's not going to sit on the arm of your chair for five years while you read the _Paris Daily Mail_.... Anyway, about to-night's party----" Then, on the way to the Stade or the Club, I should have Alec's view of the matter. "When we were kids, if we were allowed to stop up once a year for a pantomime ... beastly mixed sort of place like this too! Madge doesn't know half that goes on. Why, before I'd been here three days one of the waiters at the Grand had the infernal neck to come up to me and whisper----" I broke into uncontrollable laughter. The idea of a waiter whispering alluring suggestions to Alec Aird of all people was altogether too much for me.