It had been the customary formula between them for many years; for Jimmie Padgate lacked the sense of time and kept eccentric hours, and although Connie Deering delighted in her rare confidential chats with him, a woman with a heavy morrow of engagements must go to bed at a reasonable period of the night. She was a woman in the middle thirties, a childless widow after a brief and almost forgotten married life, rich, pleasure-loving, in the inner circle of London society, and possessing the gayest, kindest, most charitable heart in the world. Her friendship with Norma Hardacre had been a thing of recent date. She had cultivated it first on account of her cousin Morland King; she had ended in enthusiastic admiration. “It is awfully good of you,” she said, when they were comfortably settled down to talk, “to waste your time with my unintelligent conversation.” “There's no such thing as unintelligent conversation,” he declared. “For a man like you there must be.” “I could hold an intelligent conversation with a rabbit,” said Jimmie. Norma Hardacre, on arriving home, entered the drawing-room, where her mother was reading a novel. “Well?” said Mrs. Hardacre, looking up. Norma threw her white silk cloak over the back of a chair. “Connie sent her love to you.” “Is that all you have to say?” asked her mother, sharply. She was a faded woman who had once possessed beauty of a cold, severe type; but the years had pinched and hardened her features, as they had pinched and hardened her heart. Her eyes were of that steel grey which the light of laughter seldom softens, and her smile was but a contraction of the muscles of the lips. Even this perfunctory tribute to politeness which had greeted Norma's entrance vanished at the second question. “Morland King drove me home. What a difference there is between a private brougham and the beastly things we get from the livery-stable!” “He has said nothing?” “Of course not. I should have told you if he had.” “Whose fault is it?” Norma made a gesture of impatience. “My fault, if you like. I don't lay traps to catch him. I don't keep him dangling about me, and I don't flatter his vanities or make appeal to his senses, I suppose. I can't do it.” “Don't behave like a fool, Norma,” said Mrs. Hardacre, rapping her book with a paper-knife. “You have got to marry him. You know you have. Your father and I are coming to the end of things. You ought to have married years ago, and when one thinks of the chances you have missed, it makes one mad. Here have we been pinching and scraping--” “And borrowing and mortgaging,” Norma interjected. “--to give you a brilliant position,” Mrs. Hardacre continued, unheeding the interruption, “and you cast all our efforts in our teeth. It's sheer ingratitude. Why you threw over Lord Wyniard I could never make out.” “You seem to forget that, after all, there is a physical side to marriage,” said Norma, with a little shudder of disgust.