“Am I?” asked Olivia, this being the first she had heard of it. “And who’s going to be best man—Mavenna?” Lydia looked aghast. So might a band of primitive Christians have received a suggestion of inviting the ghost of Pontius Pilate to a commemorative supper. “My dear child, you don’t suppose we’re going to ask that horror to the wedding?” “The other day,” Olivia remarked drily, “I understood that you and Sydney loved him dearly.” Lydia sighed. “I’m beginning to believe that you’ll never understand anything.” So the breach, if breach there were, was healed. Olivia, relating the matter to Triona at their next meeting, qualified Lydia’s attitude as one of callous magnanimity. Meanwhile her intimacy with the young man began to ripen. One evening Janet Philimore invited her to dine at the Russian circle of a great womans’ club, which was entertaining Triona at dinner. This was the first time she had seen him in his character of modest lion; the first time, too, she had been in a company of women groping, however clumsily, after ideals in unsyncopated time. The thin girl next to her, pretty enough, thought Olivia, if only she had used a powder puff to mitigate the over-assertiveness of a greasy skin, and had given less the impression of having let out her hair to a bird for nesting purposes, and had only seized the vital importance of colour—the untrue greeny daffodil of her frock not being the best for a sallow complexion—the girl next to her, Agnes Blenkiron, started a hectic conversation by enquiring what she was going to do in Baby Week. The more ignorant Olivia professed herself to be of babies and their antecedents, especially the latter, the more indignantly explicit became Miss Blenkiron. Olivia listened until she had creepy sensations around the roots of her hair and put up an instinctive hand to assure herself that it was not standing on end. Miss Blenkiron talked feminist physiology, psychology, sociological therapeutics, until Olivia’s brain reeled. Over and over again she tried to turn to her hostess, who fortunately had a pleasant male and middle-aged neighbour, but the fair lady, without mercy, had her in thrall. She learned that all the two or three thousand members of the club were instinct with these theories and their aims. She struggled to free herself from the spell. “I thought we were here to talk about Russia,” she ventured. “But we are talking about Russia.” Miss Blenkiron shed on her the lambency of her pale blue eyes. “The future of the human race lies in the hands of the millions of Russian babies lying in the bodies of millions of Russian women just waiting to be born.” A flash of the devil saved Olivia from madness. “That’s a gigantic conception,” she said.