All this Lady Holme had foreseen as she sat in her box at the British Theatre. The wrong impression of her was enthroned. She had to reckon with it. This fact, fully recognised by her, made her wish to walk warily where otherwise her temper might have led her to walk heedlessly. She wanted to do an unusual thing, to draw her husband’s attention to an intimacy which was concealed from the world--the intimacy between herself and Leo Ulford. After her visit to the house in Half Moon Street she began to see a great deal of Leo Ulford. Carey had been right when he said that they would get on together. She understood him easily and thoroughly, and for that very reason he was attracted by her. Men delight to feel that a woman is understanding them; women that no man can ever understand them. Under the subtle influence of Lady Holme’s complete comprehension of him, Leo Ulford’s nature expanded, stretched itself as his long legs stretched themselves when his mind was purring. There was not much in him to reveal, but what there was he revealed, and Lady Holme seemed to be profoundly interested in the contents of his soul. But she was not interested in the contents of his soul in public places on which the world’s eye is fixed. She refused to allow Leo to do what he desired, and assumed an air of almost possessive friendship before Society. His natural inclination for the blatant was firmly checked by her. She cared nothing for him really, but her woman’s instinct had divined that he was the type of man most likely to rouse the slumbering passion of Fritz, if Fritz were led to suspect that she was attracted to him. Men like Lord Holme are most easily jealous of the men who most closely resemble them. Their conceit leads them to put an exaggerated value upon their own qualities in others, upon the resemblance to their own physique exhibited by others. Leo Ulford was rather like a younger and coarser Lord Holme. In him Lady Holme recognised an effective weapon for the chastisement, if not for the eventual reclamation, of her husband. It was characteristic of her that this was the weapon she chose, the weapon she still continued to rely on even after her conversation with Robin Pierce. Her faith in white angels was very small. Perpetual contact with the world of to-day, with life as lived by women of her order, had created within her far other faiths, faiths in false gods, a natural inclination to bow the knee in the house of Rimmon rather than before the altars guarded by the Eternities.