For a while she did not associate her meeting Blaise Olifant with her distaste for the night club. In the flush of her new existence she had almost forgotten him. There had been no reason to correspond. His rent was paid through the Trivett and Gale office. His foraminiferous pursuits did not appeal to a girl’s imagination. Now and then she gave a passing thought to what was happening in her old home, and vaguely remembered that the romantically named traveller was there as a guest. But that was all. Now, the presence of Olifant had suddenly recalled the little scene in her mother’s room, when she had suddenly decided to let him have the house; he had brought with him a breath of that room; a swift memory of the delicate water-colours and the books by the bedside, the _Pensées de Pascal_ and _The Imitation of Christ_. . . . Besides, she had felt a curious attraction towards the companion, the boy with the foreign manner and the glistening eyes and the suffering-stricken face. Both men, as she conceived them, belonged to the higher intellectual type that had their being remote from the inanities of dissipation. So, impelled by a muddled set of motives, she suddenly found herself abhorring Percy’s. She read herself into a state of chastened self-approbation, and then to sleep, with Rupert Brooke’s poems. CHAPTER VII OLIVIA sat by her little table, dispensing tea and accepting homage with a flutter of pleasure at her heart. She had been oddly nervous—she who had entertained the stranger Olifant, at Medlow, with the greatest self-confidence, and had grown to regard tea parties at the flat as commonplaces of existence. The two men had drifted in from another sphere. She had reviewed her stock of conversation and found it shop-worn after five months’ exposure. The most recent of her views on “Hullo, People!” and on the food at the Carlton had appeared unworthy of the notice of the soldier-scientist and the adventurous man of letters. She had received them with unusual self-consciousness. This, however, a few moments of intercourse dispelled. They had come, they had seen and she had conquered. “At first I didn’t recognize you,” said Olifant. “I had to look twice to make sure.” “Have I changed so much?” she asked. “It was a trick of environment,” he said, with a smile in his dark blue eyes. The feminine in her caught the admiration behind them and delightedly realized his confusion, the night before, at her metamorphosis from the prim little black-frocked quakeress into the radiant creature in furs and jewels and flame-coloured audacity. “And now you’re quite sure it is me—or I—which is it?” “I’m quite sure it’s my charming landlady who for the second time feeds the hungry wanderer. Miss Gale, Triona, makes a specialty of it.” “Then, indeed, I’m peculiarly fortunate,” said Triona, taking a tomato sandwich. “Will you feed me again, Miss Gale?” “As often as you like,” she laughed.