“That wouldn’t matter. But while they last they keep you on a monorail. All specialists are on monorails.” “Monomaniacs, eh? Now tell me who is the lassie in the white smock?” “That’s a djibbêh. And her name is Nora Beaworthy. Keep your pun. Although I daresay in the end she will. All those pink people will be worthy when they’re grey. Anyhow it’s no good. Having had a thoroughly vivid time and made a number of hurried young men take up socialism, she’s now engaged.” “She leaves me heart-whole, my dear. But I saw her on the way here, running at top speed down Pall Mall in her white gown, the spirit of spring.” His glance was wandering as it always would, gathering up and delighting in bright youth, in the appearance of animation; utterly blind to all the tricks of conscious attractiveness. Blind, too, to cattish subtleties. He was wax in the hands of his mondaines. She looked round for people upon whom he might exercise his social graces. Who would give him what he needed to keep him at his glowing best. But there were none here of his kind. None who rushed thoughtlessly through ready-made evolutions. Refusal to accept these evolutions at their surface value he would see only as uncharitableness. Alone together, he and she might make terms. But in his ready-made social surroundings they would at once be antagonists. The so much less sociable, so much more discriminating socialists became suddenly dear, the salt of the earth. They were, after all, little as she knew them, her own people. She thought with them, was ready to act with them. They, and not those others, were her family. She chose a group of young women and set him in the midst of their ready smiles and swift replies. Saw them sum him up. Dancing was beginning in the end room. The first dancing she had seen since she left home. It held her eyes. People transfigured, circling, lit from above. But only for a moment. It was memory that had put the happy haze about them. They were clear and cold, not lost in their dancing. Not even those whose heads gleamed with youth. They danced with a difference. They were the new generation. She longed to dance and drop the years. And here, as if in ironic commentary, was old Hayle-Vernon, handsome in smooth evening dress, stepping elegantly towards her. With a light in his young dark eyes. He too felt his youth beckon and come close. “Shall we dance?” His pallor was flushed. With boyish uncertainty. With the distance he came in ignoring that they were strangers.