. OP CALIF. LIBPJPV. Tnc < ANGELES
 
 INTRUSION
 
 INTRUSION 
 
 BEATRICE KEAN SEYMOUR 
 
 AUTHOR OF "INVISIBLE TIDES" 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THOMAS SELTZER 
 1922
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 
 THOMAS SELTZER, INC. 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
 First Printing, April, 19Si 
 Second Printing, June, 192% 
 
 Printed in the United States of America
 
 2132647
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PROLOGUE ,...-! 
 
 BOOK I . . . 3 
 
 BOOK II . , * * . . . 128 
 
 BOOK III '. 2 35 
 
 EPILOGUE ... 335
 
 PROLOGUE 
 
 IT was on an afternoon in October that they saw her first, 
 and to Guen Suffield that fact alone might well have made 
 the day memorable, even if there had not been about it 
 some special quality of memorableness that made her see it, long 
 afterwards, in the vivid way she did as though it has been 
 etched into her mind, ineffaceably, like a drawing in copper. 
 
 The morning had dawned wild and wet, but later, when some 
 of its wildness had left it, you saw the new day as Autumn's 
 own a little wistful in spirit, but exquisitely dressed in green 
 and gold, hung about with deep blue shadows and veiled, every 
 now and then, by the silver mist of the fine-driving rain. If 
 you looked closely you could almost see Autumn slipping a little 
 deeper into the embrace of Winter, her sombre lover. . . . 
 
 That, somehow, was how the day stayed, coloured and wistful 
 and reluctant, in Guen Suffield's mind. 
 
 And yet this is not Guen's story. . . . It is true, however, 
 that she is inextricably mixed up with the telling of it, since, 
 but for her, neither Allan nor Caryl would ever have seen 
 Roberta, whose story this really is. 
 
 That, at least, was what Guen always contended, which was 
 why, after the thing happened, there were times when she felt 
 worse about it than anybody else: worse than Allan, worse, pos- 
 sibly, than Caryl, both of whom it so much more closely con- 
 cerned. One thing was certain. The thread of Allan's misery 
 there, at the end, was snapped suddenly by the sight of Caryl's 
 and by something else which doesn't, properly, belong to this 
 story. . . . 
 
 Guen, Caryl and Allan. Concerned as closely as, these 
 three there was a fourth. Difficult to say how much he suf- 
 fered or how long. Perhaps Caryl knew but Caryl never 
 said. She was too deeply occupied in pretending that the thing 
 had never happened at all. She wanted everybody to know that
 
 2 INTRUSION 
 
 it hadn't crushed her. She couldn't bear any of them to think 
 her wound was mortal. You couldn't look at her without realis- 
 ing that she, at least, was convinced it was not. 
 
 Yet it was always Caryl who stood in the way of the easy 
 conclusion that Fate had been kind. Even though you knew 
 the roots of her happiness went so deeply you must kill her to 
 destroy them: even though you knew there was some little bit 
 of herself she held always impregnable; though you realised that, 
 for Caryl, there would always be something left. 
 
 Certainly Guen never doubted that Fate had been kind to 
 Roberta. "The best thing that could have happened to her!" 
 she said afterwards and with utter dispassion to Tony Gore, 
 who didn't agree with her. But he couldn't shake her con- 
 viction. She was quite certain Fate might have done so much 
 worse for them all even for Roberta. Even for Roberta. 
 She put it like that, remembering that Roberta had walked 
 in beauty like the night. . . . 
 
 Whatever else Guen and Allan forgot it wasn't likely they 
 would forget that. You don't forget beauty as unequivocal as 
 Roberta's. When you'd stripped her of everything else all 
 the things you hated and despised and despaired of the beauty 
 remained. They saw it always, Guen and Allan, as a vivid, 
 enduring thing like dawn and sunset and the golden noon. 
 
 Heaven only knows how Caryl saw it. When you felt best 
 about it you hoped she didn't see it at all; that she had wiped 
 put Roberta's beauty as she had wiped out Roberta's sin.
 
 INTRUSION 
 
 BOOK I 
 CHAPTER ONE 
 
 THE whole house was full of Jan's ragtime. Played with 
 a maddening precision it floated up to Guen in her study 
 and offered yet another argument against her attempt to 
 wort. Every now and then the syncopated notes came 
 ludicrously muted by the soft pedal, as though Jan remembered 
 that his sister had gone upstairs to work or that his mother 
 dozed on the Chesterfield. Guen frowned at the ragtime but 
 she endured it, because, somehow, one always did "endure" 
 things from Jan even Guen who saw through him, perhaps, 
 more than anybody else. 
 
 Besides, it wasn't only the ragtime. There was the rain, 
 and the noise of the river falling over the lock; the sound of 
 hurrying feet; the rustling of leaves on a futurist lawn, and, 
 every now and then, the bright laugh of a girl out there some- 
 where on the towing-path that ran, like a brown streak, beyond 
 the green of the garden gate. And also there was the garden 
 itself, the one really beautiful thing about this old stone house 
 at Teddington which the Suffield family had taken two years 
 before to escape the air raids. From the centre of the lawn a 
 cedar rose proudly, outlined blackly against the changeable 
 autumn sky. In the broad borders Michaelmas daisies and 
 marguerites were growing, beaten and flat to-day beneath the 
 heavy showers; bronze and tawny chrysanthemums bloomed 
 
 3
 
 4 INTRUSION 
 
 in loose and wilful bunches in the flower-beds, stabbed here 
 and there by the red-gold of the tritoma plant that stood stiff 
 and straight in unyielding defiance of the sheeted rain like 
 the spear of some old god of the sun. At the foot of the 
 garden a black semi-circle in the far corner was a summer- 
 house, old and dilapidated, that Guen had wanted to write in 
 but which she had given up in despair, because it harboured 
 draughts and weird insects and protected you neither from 
 the wind nor the rain. Beyond the summer-house, a little 
 wooden gate, just latched, not bolted; beyond that the towing- 
 path and beyond that again, the river puckered and dimpled, 
 this afternoon, by the rain. 
 
 But it was certainly the laugh of the girl down there on 
 the towing-path that came chiefly between Guen and her work, 
 because it was somehow incredible that here in October, 
 nineteen-eighteen, there could possibly be anyone left who 
 could laugh like that as though there had been no four years' 
 slaughter of youth and the merriment that belongs to it. Even 
 now, with peace in the air and its messengers on the way, 
 Guen could not think, untouched, of the past four years. The 
 Suffields, it is true, had come out of the war practically 
 unscathed, but for Guen, as for all imaginative people, the war 
 was much more than a family affair. It was a thing which 
 had bitten right down to the heart of things, so that nothing 
 could ever be quite the same again. There in August, nine- 
 teen-fourteen, some little part of you had died the part that 
 had laughed as that girl on the towing-path laughed. Not to 
 this world, at least, would there ever be any resurrection. . . . 
 
 Suddenly, as Guen looked down upon the garden and remem- 
 bered these things, the girl who had laughed stepped through 
 the gate and like a thread of bright colour came running 
 towards the summer-house across the futurist lawn. Following 
 her came a young man in uniform, only more slowly, and 
 rather as if he disliked the whole adventure and mistrusted 
 the bond-fides of the summer-house. 
 
 They disappeared, but to the other distractions of the after- 
 noon was added now the noise of the garden gate as, insecurely 
 fastened, it swung open and hurled itself to and fro in help- 
 less indignation, as if it understood that the refugees in the 
 summer-house were going to ignore it. Guen pushed back her 
 papers and reflected that the obvious and human thing to do
 
 INTRUSION 5 
 
 was to ask them into the house, for that girl, ridiculously clad, 
 must already be wet to the skin. And. in any case, this was 
 no afternoon for work. Happily there would be others. She 
 locked away her manuscript, pocketed the key, and went down- 
 stairs. And all the way Jan's music rushed out at her and 
 smote her, and she thought, "I hate ragtime. ... I wonder 
 why?" Afterwards, when her thoughts travelled back to this 
 afternoon it was Jan's ragtime that affected her most. Always 
 it was a twisting sword, unendurable, because . . . never 
 again would she hear it. 
 
 In the drawing-room nobody had heard or seen anything 
 at all. In there, with Jan at the piano, life lapsed gently by 
 a syncopated prelude to afternoon tea. Mrs. Sumeld slept 
 peacefully and beautifully on the Chesterfield, for she was 
 still pretty at fifty-two. Leader, Jan's dog, with his nose up 
 against the warm fender, behaved as though he slept, too, 
 though the look he bent upon Guen as she entered said plainly 
 that sleep was impossible while his master continued to make 
 that queer noise on the black box in the corner. But at Guen's 
 instigation the queer noise ceased, and Jan went out on to the 
 doorstep and invited the couple in the summer-house to come 
 in. The couple in the summer-house, however, did not rush 
 to accept the offer. A head and a pair of uniformed shoulders 
 appeared round the edge of the summer-house, and the owner 
 of them replied that he thought they were all right there, thanks 
 very much. He sounded stiff and indifferent, ungrateful, even. 
 Guen thought Jan had better have another shot. 
 
 "You'll find it a good deal drier in here, you know. You'd 
 better try it," he shouted. 
 
 The head and shoulders disappeared. There was a murmur 
 of conversation, that pretty laugh again, a flash o'f green and 
 gold-red and white on the lawn, and a slim damp figure landed 
 itself there on the doorstep at Jan's side. 
 
 "Thanks awfully,'' said a charming voice. "Isn't it a hell 
 of a day?" 
 
 "Quite," said Jan. But he blinked not because of her 
 language, to which he was used, but because of her beauty, to 
 which even Jan was not.
 
 6 INTRUSION 
 
 They were certainly very wet, and Mrs. Suffield, rising up 
 from the Chesterfield, eyed them with undisguised concern, 
 seeing in them already, perhaps, two more victims of the influ- 
 enza epidemic. So Guen took the girl upstairs and found her 
 some dry clothes of her own, and the young man in uniform 
 followed Jan upon a similar errand. He went, Mrs. Suffield 
 thought, as one who lodged a protest, as though, even now, he 
 was meditating flight. She was a kind woman, and putting 
 it down to shyness was instantly sorry for him, for shyness, so 
 her children had many times told her, was a dreadful handicap 
 in life. 
 
 But Anne Suffield was wasting her sympathy, as, five minutes 
 later, Jan could have told her if he had thought it was the 
 sort of thing she would have liked to hear or the sort of thing 
 mothers should be told. However, by the time he came down- 
 stairs Mrs. Suffield had gone off to hurry forward the pleasant 
 meal of tea, and there was nobody in the drawing-room but 
 Guen, who was making a good deal of noise with the poker 
 in the interest of a moribund fire. Jan shut the door with 
 emphasis, and with equal emphasis remarked that he was 
 damned. 
 
 "Why?" asked Guen, but she stopped making the noise with 
 the poker and sat back on her heels and looked at him. 
 
 "My dear old thing, he doesn't even know her name. He 
 picked her up half an hour ago, outside our garden-gate." 
 
 And Jan laughed. He didn't himself "pick girls up." He 
 was too fastidious for that: but there were other ways of 
 accomplishing the same result, and Jan was master of them all. 
 
 "How do you know?" Guen asked. 
 
 "He told me so. Said he thought he owed it to us. ... 
 What rot! Besides, what a mean skunk to give a girl away 
 like that." 
 
 If Jan hadn't "picked a girl up" in his life, neither had he 
 ever given a girl "away." One was risky and the other cad- 
 dish. Jan's code of honour might be a queer thing, and 
 limited: but within those limits it was certainly rigid. 
 
 Guen smiled. She could see that, in Jan's opinion, young 
 Ancell, for that seemed to be his name, had bungled the whole 
 business. He had had half an hour, anyhow, in which to 
 discover the girl's name. He was not only a skunk, but a 
 fool. Guen recognised, of course, that no man has any right
 
 INTRUSION 7 
 
 to be both, but she felt a certain amount of sympathy, all the 
 same, with young Ancell. For neither had she discovered the 
 name of this girl. True, she had only had three minutes to 
 his half-hour, but that would not really have made any differ- 
 ence, because names, to Guen, were so much less important 
 than the people to whom they belonged. 
 
 Then the girl herself came in and immediately Guen was 
 smitten with the thought that, somewhere, she had seen her 
 before. She had on a blue frock of Guen's and a pair of red 
 shoes that were Guen's also, and a size too large. Her hair, 
 still damp from its encounter with the afternoon, curled round 
 her head like a nimbus. Faintly flushed and guiltless of pow- 
 der, her skin was that wonderful thing that should belong to 
 red hair, but which, perhaps mercifully, seldom does. Her 
 eyes, queerly hazel, considering that hair and skin, were very 
 bright in a face that was a small, pure oval. But queerer 
 than the hazel eyes were the long lashes that shaded them; 
 that curled upwards and were dark, save at the edges which 
 showed bronze, like her hair. (You really could forgive people 
 for saying she "made up.") Her mouth Guen judged too 
 small, perhaps, for intelligence, but since it carried a dimple 
 in each corner few men would find fault with it. The only 
 word Guen could think of when she looked at her was "deli- 
 cious," forgetting that years ago she had learned at school that 
 "delicious" is a word you can only apply, legitimately, to some- 
 thing you are able to eat. This new-comer had the extraor- 
 dinary lighted-up beauty that puts out all other, and Jan 
 thought that never before had he seen Guen look so plain. 
 Even her hair, which he always rather admired, he saw now 
 as an indeterminate mass of uninteresting brown. 
 
 Guen, looking deeper than Jan, saw something that he did 
 not see that would not have made any difference if he had. 
 This beautiful face was a mask: there was nothing whatever 
 behind it. But even beautiful masks are rare, and to that 
 extent, at least, Guen found this one pleasing enough to look 
 at, though troubled all the time by the conviction that she 
 had seen it before. Its owner, so Jan elicited, was Roberta 
 Leigh. She seemed anxious that he should spell it like that, 
 and announced that her friends called her "Bobbie." 
 
 "Wish I were a friend," said Jan. "Have a cigarette?"
 
 8 INTRUSION 
 
 "Oh go on," said Miss Leigh, taking the cigarette and light- 
 ing up with aplomb. "When's the old war going to end?" 
 
 "Ask me another," said Jan, who was bored by the war as 
 a topic of conversation. 
 
 "It'll be funny without it, you know," Miss Leigh told them. 
 She was one of the people who had grown used to the war, 
 who had used it first as a fillip to life and then as a back- 
 ground against which she draped the whole of her existence 
 a rather paltry thing, Guen felt, like the conversation, which 
 did not seem to include her. She stood by the long windows 
 and looked out on to the rain-swept garden, and wondered why 
 suddenly she should see not the garden at all, but a dawn of 
 opal and pearl in which she had sat waiting for Allan to come 
 down to breakfast. Allan, who, there at three in the morning, 
 had been going back to France. . . . Outside, the April 
 morning had been dark and still. No movement at all and 
 no sound, save, suddenly, the clear, unbearable whistling of a 
 blackbird. 
 
 All that was over. The horrors she had feared for Allan had 
 passed him by. Allan, save that he limped a little, was safe 
 and well. But that girl's laugh so cheerful, so heartless, like 
 the blackbird's cry that April morning had brought these 
 things drifting back. In time, perhaps, one would forget 
 them. . . . 
 
 But because, to-day, she remembered, Guen's heart rose 
 within, her hot and bitter, and she hated the owner of this 
 beautiful mask to whom the war was not a cockpit but a cock- 
 tail. She turned and fled. 
 
 Miss Leigh prattled on. Prattled was certainly the word: 
 she had no conversation, but just a string of nouns and verbs 
 and adjectives, but chiefly adjectives. Not that Jan minded. 
 If a girl was as pretty as all that it didn't matter in the least 
 what she said. 
 
 Lieutenant Ancell, coming in presently in Jan's clothes, made 
 Guen's discovery that the string of words was not inclusive. 
 He sat down and tried to hide himself behind the pages of 
 the Daily Telegraph which he found lying on a chair. He 
 looked as pathetic as a person reading the morning paper after 
 midday always does look, and Alice, Anne Suffield's excellent 
 maid, coming in with the tea-tray, was suddenly sorry for him. 
 Not because of the newspaper, however, but because she thought
 
 INTRUSION 9 
 
 Roberta belonged to him and that she deserved to have her 
 ears boxed. 
 
 But Roberta, of course, did not belong to him, and he read 
 the Telegraph (though "read" is scarcely the word) with a 
 foot tapping the floor and a general air of impatience, as though 
 he would be gone. He cared nothing whatever for Roberta or 
 her social shortcomings. He didn't even care for her beauty 
 which had betrayed him into this. He only wanted to be 
 wearing his own things and to be gone. 
 
 Alice laid tea with a certain emphasis, which expressed not 
 only her opinion of Roberta, but her prejudice against the 
 laying of five o'clock tea at a quarter to four. And when it 
 was done she went out into the kitchen and pushed young 
 Ancell's coat nearer the fire, so that some of Roberta's things, 
 hurt at Alice's favouritism, fell down among the ashes and 
 had to be hastily rescued. They were cheap clothes, much 
 be-ribboned and be-laced, and bore distinct traces of Roberta's 
 dislike of needle and thread. Alice did not approve of them. 
 She had been carefully brought up by parents who, without 
 knowing it, agreed with the popular music-hall song which 
 asserted that the index to feminine morality was the feminine 
 washing on the line. Moreover, Alice had an unreasoning 
 dislike of red-haired people, even when they were as pretty as 
 Roberta and had managed to elude the light eyelashes which 
 were its proper concomitant, and she considered that this par- 
 ticular red-haired girl had been getting on much too well with 
 Mr. Jan in the drawing-room. If you asked Alice, the red- 
 haired girl was a minx. . . . 
 
 Tea, so far as Guen was concerned, turned out a very dull 
 meal. Even Leader's one trick didn't enliven matters, because 
 Roberta said "Good dog!" at the wrong moment and shattered 
 his nerve, so that he did the trick even less successfully than 
 usual. Jan's triumph as a social entity, however, was emphatic, 
 if one might judge by the number of times Roberta's pretty, 
 callous laughter rippled out and over the room. Guen, hear- 
 ing it across her desultory conversation with young Ancell, 
 wondered why anything so pretty should remind her of so 
 many things she wanted to forget. And whenever her eyes
 
 io INTRUSION 
 
 rested upon Roberta's face she was certain that somewhere she 
 had seen her before. Only where and when? 
 
 There at her silver tea-tray, pink and flushed and smiling, 
 Anne Suffield sat and dispensed tea. The drawing-room was 
 red and stereotyped and rather ugly, but in it Anne Suffield 
 looked like a pink rose in a poppy field. That was the sort of 
 beauty hers had been delicate, like a pastel-drawing or a 
 piece of old china set in the sun. The ghost of it hung about 
 her now and made people who admired it (or who remem- 
 bered what it had once been) say that none of her children 
 had inherited her beautiful skin. It was quite true: they 
 hadn't. At least, not if your standard was porcelainic pink 
 and white and fragile. Guen's skin was brown, surmounted, 
 when she was warm or excited, with pink. She was neither, 
 this afternoon, so she remained a study in brown. Brown skin 
 and brown eyes, that were quiet and brooding beneath their 
 short lids, and hair that was all shades of brown and quite 
 straight. She wore it short, not because it was fashionable 
 it had been short long before then but because it was com- 
 fortable. 
 
 Not talking much, Anne Suffield sat there at her tea-tray, 
 gathering up the odds and ends of what Roberta was saying 
 to Jan. She couldn't make much of them: chiefly they seemed 
 to be odd little bits of slang and the queer, over-worked exple- 
 tives of the modern girl. Not that Anne Suffield really minded. 
 She had long since learned to take anything anybody said 
 without turning a hair; and yet she was at heart a thoroughly 
 old-fashioned woman. She did not think it at all nice for 
 young women to swear or use so much slang, or to smoke, or 
 to do a good many of the other things they did do. She couldn't 
 pretend that she liked it personally, and she thought, vaguely, 
 that war wasn't good for young women. But she was proud, 
 this afternoon, of Jan and the witty things he said, because 
 she did not know that you did not need to be particularly 
 witty to make a girl laugh when her teeth were as pretty as 
 Roberta's. But Guen did, so she did not think Jan so clever 
 or so witty as her mother thought him. 
 
 Lieutenant Ancell, of course, didn't think him clever or witty 
 in the least degree. You couldn't expect it.
 
 INTRUSION ii 
 
 \ 
 
 4 
 
 Towards the end of the meal a tall dark girl arrived whom 
 Anne Suffield introduced to Roberta as "Miss Hervey" and 
 addressed affectionately as "Madeleine." Madeleine Hervey 
 was an old friend of the Suffields, and with Allan and Guen 
 was going on, after an early dinner, to a literary lecture. For 
 the past seven months her home had been in the Isle of Wight, 
 but nearly a week ago she had come up to dig out some refer- 
 ences for her employer. They had taken so long, she said, 
 when the introductions were over, that they had eaten into the 
 two days she had hoped to spend at Mount Calm. 
 
 "I simply must go back to-morrow morning," she told them; 
 "I'm wretchedly disappointed." 
 
 Anne Suffield's eyes approved her for the adverb. Caryl or 
 Jan, of course, would have said "horribly" or "dreadfully" or 
 "beastly." Guen, too, perhaps, for in her mother's opinion her 
 speech lacked the dignity of her written word. But Madeleine, 
 somehow, had escaped the domination of the devastating adjec- 
 tive and adverb, as she had escaped the modern tricks of the 
 casual expletive and the eternal cigarette. Madeleine did 
 smoke, but only occasionally, not so much because she didn't 
 care about it, as because she cared more about fresh air. (At 
 least, Madeleine called it "fresh air" most other people called 
 it a draught.) Somehow she stood alone. In a generation that 
 ambled she came moving like a thoroughbred. 
 
 Mrs. Suffield offered her tea and the opinion that Allan would 
 be very disappointed. Madeleine said, "Will he?" and hast- 
 ened on, as though, here, the conversational ground was shift- 
 ing. With the colour in her pale face she darted back and 
 took refuge in the British Museum. Ungratefully she com- 
 plained that the Reading Room had been hotter than ever 
 to-day, that it had given her a headache. Anne Suffield said 
 that once, years ago, someone had let her stand just inside the 
 swing doors of the Reading Room and look round. You 
 gathered that she had been impressed. So many books and so 
 many people and everybody looking so busy. All united, she 
 remembered thinking, in the common desire for knowledge. 
 
 "No, mother dear, for sleep," interposed Guen from out the 
 vague struggle that was her conversation with young Ancell. 
 
 "Yes," said Madeleine. "I've never understood why the
 
 12 INTRUSION 
 
 insomnious haven't discovered it. It would be a lot cheaper 
 than drugs." 
 
 Jan and Roberta, who had been momentarily arrested by 
 Guen's interposition from the corner, were not in the least 
 interested in the Reading Room of the British Museum. They 
 had never been there in their lives, and did not intend, if 
 they could help it, to go. They went back to their string of 
 words that did duty as conversation, and Mrs. Suffield suddenly 
 looked at the clock and remarked that Caryl must have missed 
 her train. 
 
 Caryl was the youngest Suffield and had been week-ending 
 urthe country. 
 
 "With the Hestons," Mrs. Suffield told Madeleine. "You 
 remember the Hestons? Marjorie and Jack? We used to 
 think at one time that he was fond of Caryl. They've taken a 
 cottage down in Berkshire, near Wokingham, and Caryl goes 
 down a good deal. Dear child, it's so nice for her! I'm sure 
 she's working much too hard. It's such a handy place, Wok- 
 ingham. You -come straight through to Clapham Junction on 
 the South Western. It's really an excellent journey." 
 
 As she poured out for Madeleine a second cup of tea she 
 seemed to find that a thing of infinite consolation that the 
 journey from Wokingham to Teddington was really an excel- 
 lent one. 
 
 And then, five minutes later, young Ancell rose to go. Guen 
 rose, too, and mentally stretched herself, hoping that nobody 
 would put obstacles in his way. She had found it very diffi- 
 cult to talk to him. He didn't care for books or music or the 
 theatre, and certainly he didn't care for the Army, and was 
 finding the war dull because he had been wounded in one of 
 the back-to-the-wall battles in April last and was still in 
 hospital. (So much, at least, she had got out of him.) In 
 some sense, Guen felt, the "picking up" of Roberta had been 
 are action from these things of anti-climax, for Roberta cer- 
 tainly looked as though she would make life considerably 
 more worth while. Obviously, however, she hadn't, and 
 altogether young Ancell had had a wretched afternoon. He 
 was, Guen felt, quite a nice boy, though it had been rather
 
 INTRUSION 13 
 
 mean of him to give Roberta away so easily. There she 
 agreed with Jan. One really ought not to shout one's mistakes 
 from the house-tops. . . . But because she was sorry for him 
 she combated her mother's officious attempts to keep him 
 from his damp clothes and the doctor. In Roberta's case, 
 however, she was adamant, so Jan passed over his notebook 
 that she might write down her address. The clothes could 
 then be sent on. 
 
 "I will not have you both on my conscience," Anne Suffield 
 said, "one of you will be more than sufficient." 
 
 Jan looked at the untidy mess Roberta had made of his 
 notebook and smiled at what she had written "Bobbie Leigh, 
 202 Manningtree Avenue, Highgate, N." 
 
 They had all heard of Manningtree Avenue, for Highgate, 
 when there was no war, was their home, and, optimistically, 
 they still cherished hopes of some day returning to it. To 
 .Anne Suffield, Manningtree Avenue was a name, signifying 
 nothing: but to Jan and Guen and Madeleine it was a dull 
 street of three-story houses let out these days to two families 
 or more. It was a decayed street not even cheerfully and 
 blatantly ugly where too many children played and street 
 criers and barrel-organs went unrestrained. It appalled Guen 
 that Roberta belonged to so dreary a place, that she was 
 taking her youth and beauty back to it. You couldn't wonder 
 she made life livelier by the creation of casual acquaintance- 
 ships. Poor child! Fate had not been too kind. That it 
 should have given Roberta so little beside that beautiful 
 appearance struck her suddenly as outrageous like giving her 
 a palace and no banking account. 
 
 "Of course, Haighgate's very naice," Roberta was saying 
 to Madeleine, "but you do miss the river, don't you?" 
 
 Her voice, for all its affected pronunciation, was remarkably 
 pretty. It had, so Guen thought, the qualities of a physical 
 caress. It was like a paw, incredibly soft, which reached out 
 and stroked their faces. 
 
 "But there's the Heath, you know," Madeleine replied. "To 
 me the river doesn't nearly make up for its loss. But then, 
 I haven't any river tricks. I don't row or punt." 
 
 "Oh, neither do I," said Roberta. "Rowing spoils your 
 hands, but there's always plenty of naice boys who do." 
 
 Guen felt there would be, somehow, for Roberta. Even
 
 14 INTRUSION 
 
 with a war on, and that accent and that awful background of 
 Manningtree Avenue. 
 
 As they trooped into the hall Jan managed, somehow, to 
 get a word with Roberta, and the end of what he said drifted 
 out to Madeleine. "All right, then. To-morrow. That's 
 settled. Don't forget." She wondered for an instant what it 
 was that Roberta was not to forget and what it was they had 
 "settled." But only indifferently, because Jan, she knew, was 
 incorrigible where a pretty face was concerned, and besides, 
 Madeleine did not like Jan, and was not given to wasting 
 conjecture upon him. 
 
 The grandfather clock in the hall was striking the quarter- 
 past five as the good-byes were being said, and Madeleine fell 
 to wondering why they had all trooped out in this ridiculous 
 fashion to see two people off whom, an hour ago, they had 
 never met. Then Jan's hand was on the door-knob. He turned 
 it, and a young man, key in hand, looked in upon them. 
 
 Afterwards they tried, some of them, to pretend that they 
 saw, even then, the finger of fate in his appearance at that 
 particular moment. But, of course, they couldn't possibly 
 have done. They didn't, any of them, see anything at all save 
 the perfectly ordinary phenomenon of a young man coming 
 home early, as he had promised; that he had two large volumes 
 (publishers' "remainders" as Guen knew) under his arm, and 
 a black smudge across the bridge of his nose. 
 
 "Hallo, Allan!" said Guen, and Allan came in.
 
 CHAPTER TWO 
 
 HE was a plain edition of Jan, and he limped a little, 
 which detracted, somehow, from his height. Just 
 now, too, he looked tired, and there was that black 
 smudge on the bridge of his nose. ... If it was a less 
 handsome face than Jan's it was also a more sensitive one. 
 People meeting Allan casually remembered for long after- 
 wards some look in his deep-set eyes, something unusually 
 tender about his mouth that was wide and not beautiful in 
 any ordinary sense of the word. He had the look of one 
 who sees and feels more than most other people, which means 
 that he suffered, or could suffer, more as well. 
 
 "Hallo!" he said now, as he stepped into the hall. "What's 
 up?" And then he saw Ancell and Roberta, or, more properly, 
 he understood that a stranger in a Second Lieutenant's uni- 
 form was there. Really, of course, he saw nothing and no 
 one at all but Roberta. She stood there with her flaming 
 hair curling up over the edge of her green wool hat, her 
 hands dug deeply into the pockets of the jersey that was Guen's, 
 and her delicate complexion intensified by the hot tea she 
 had drunk and the stronger brew that had been Jan's admir- 
 ing glances. Once again, performing the introductions, Guen 
 was caught by the sense of familiarity. Somewhere she had 
 seen Roberta in some such hat and jersey, her hands dug 
 deeply into the pockets, and smiling, as she smiled now on 
 Allan. Her attitude gave to Guen the sense of a thing studied, 
 cultivated before a mirror. But she felt that Roberta smiled 
 upon Allan because she always did smile upon the young 
 men who swam into her orbit, and because, usually, they liked 
 it. Not that Roberta cared whether Allan liked it or not. 
 She thought him a very uninteresting edition of his handsome 
 brother, and she considered that a man looked ridiculous 
 with a smudge on his nose. Yet she was not unconscious 
 
 IS
 
 1 6 INTRUSION 
 
 that his eyes were on her face, and that he was returning her 
 smile. Something she read in the look he gave her sent a 
 glow of flattered vanity through her soul what there was 
 of it and she laughed. That pretty laugh that was heartless 
 and a little cruel that already Guen hated. But what Roberta 
 said was for Jan, who was dragging Leader back into the hall. 
 
 "That's a funny name for a dog," she said. "Why did you 
 give it him?" 
 
 "I didn't," said Jan. "My brother here chose it. After 
 some dog in a book. ..." 
 
 "Oh, I see," said Roberta. 
 
 But Allan could see she didn't, and was moved to explain. 
 
 "Emily Bronte," he said, "had a dog called Leader." 
 
 "And who," asked Roberta sweetly, "was Emily Bronte?" 
 
 Allan smiled. 
 
 "She isn't read nowadays," he said. "She wrote a book 
 called Wuthering Heights and some poems." 
 
 "Oh, an authoress," said Roberta, with a magnificent air of 
 condescension. 
 
 Quite suddenly, and without another word, Allan turned 
 away, hung up his hat and began to struggle out of his coat. 
 From her corner by the stairs Madeleine stepped forward and 
 helped him. 
 
 "Hullo, Mad!" he said. 
 
 She knew then that, until that moment, he hadn't seen her 
 at all. He had seen no one save Roberta, flushed, smiling, 
 delicious. (The word had come to him, too.) Even now it 
 was not at Madeleine he looked, but at Roberta, flirting her 
 way down to the gate, with Jan at her side and Leader, scenting 
 a walk, barking furiously at her heels. Her last look and smile 
 were for Jan. 
 
 Back there in the hall Allan looked at Madeleine. He 
 thought she looked tired, and he resented it, because he was 
 tired himself. . . . He forgot that anybody would have 
 looked tired after Roberta. Or perhaps he didn't know. . . * 
 
 Allan declined tea because dinner was to be ready at six. 
 He felt suddenly dull and dispirited, and it was certainly some- 
 body's fault that there were no letters for him. He stood
 
 INTRUSION 17 
 
 there leaning against the mantelpiece, taking no notice of an 
 eager Leader, and not talking: completely forgetful of 
 Madeleine, whom he had looked forward so much to seeing; 
 whom he hadn't seen for many months. Worse than that, 
 he had forgotten how much he had wanted to see her. It 
 was Guen who thought of Madeleine. 
 
 "Headache?" she asked. 
 
 Madeleine said yes and put it on to the Reading Room. 
 Guen recommended aspirin, and Jan went off to fetch it. 
 They heard him whistling all the way upstairs, as if he felt 
 tremendously gay, as he probably did. Guen and Madeleine 
 sat talking of Roberta: they were sure, both of them, that 
 somewhere they had seen her before. But neither could think 
 where. Allan learned that they found her nice to look at, 
 but rather boring as a conversationalist, and interrupted to say 
 that most people were, if it came to that. His voice was so 
 heavy with grievance that Guen laughed. 
 
 "Poor old Allan!" she said. "Is that how you feel?" 
 
 Allan said nothing merely sat there glooming by the fire 
 and frowning at Guen's attempts to work out the problem of 
 Roberta's identity. For some reason or other it seemed to get 
 on his nerves, and suddenly he rapped out at them : 
 
 "Oh, for God's sake leave her alone, both of you. We 
 shan't see her again, so what does it matter?" 
 
 They were, all of them, very sure of that except Jan, and 
 Jan was very sure that he would. But Allan's irritability 
 stung them into silence. They sat there listening to Jan's 
 cheerful whistling. He was a long time over the aspirin hunt, 
 but Madeleine had forgotten the aspirin and her need of it. 
 She sat there realising that here was the end not the begin- 
 ning as she had hoped, for which, ever since that day, just a 
 year ago, when she had gone to see Allan in hospital, she 
 seemed to have been waiting. And it had never come. There 
 had never been anything more than that stupendous wave of 
 feeling in which she had been like to drown, sitting there at 
 Allan's white bedside. She knew, now, that there never would 
 be. It bore you up and it cast you down. There was no more 
 in it than that. 
 
 Allan and Madeleine had known each other from their 
 schooldays from the time when she had been brought home 
 to tea by Guen, and her twin brother Reg had played with
 
 1 8 INTRUSION 
 
 Allan in their school eleven. (But Reg, poor boy, had thrown 
 his last ball. Done with games, and not needing them, he 
 slept very peacefully now beneath the Turkish sky.) In a way, 
 perhaps, Allan and Madeleine had known each other too 
 well, so that the ways of friendship had seemed so much 
 pleasanter, so much more natural, than the ways of love. 
 Moreover, they were uncannily self-possessed: had kept their 
 heads even over the war. They remained "friends" even when 
 Allan went out in nineteen-fifteen to France, and when he 
 came home on leave. It didn't look as though anything else 
 at that time had entered their heads. 
 
 Until that day in hospital. . . . 
 
 Madeleine remembered this afternoon, and very vividly, 
 how the thing had come to her. She had gone alone that day 
 to the Hospital, and the Sister of the ward had come over to 
 say how much better the patient seemed. "I'm afraid," she 
 said, "that he's always going to be a little lame, but there are 
 no more wars ever for him." These two facts that he 
 would be lame and that he would never fight again it was 
 which suddenly opened up the truth to Madeleine. It was 
 like lifting a curtain to the sunrise one felt dazed and blinded 
 afterwards. . . . New and startlingly precious these two facts 
 stared at her until, slowly, they merged into one. "A lame 
 man's no use to them!" then divided again, "He belongs, 
 now to me." 
 
 Later, she thought she must have been mad. . . . All the 
 same, it was unendingly strange that the madness should have 
 seized hold upon her there in that quiet place of rest and 
 healing. She had -been sane enough during the misery that 
 was August, nineteen-fourteen, and that greater misery that 
 was France. 
 
 But in the days that followed Allan showed no sign at all 
 of realizing that anything between them was altered or altering. 
 Quite quietly and naturally he picked up again the silver 
 thread of their happy friendship, not seeing that now it dragged 
 its way through Madeleine's fingers like an iron chain, tearing 
 the flesh. . . . 
 
 It was in the March of the following year that John Osenton, 
 to whom Madeleine acted as secretary, and for whom she did 
 research work, bought a house in the Isle of Wight, whence 
 with his household he departed. After that there was nothing
 
 INTRUSION 19 
 
 between Allan and Madeleine but letters, and letters, with a 
 person of Allan's temperament and his flair for words, are apt 
 to be dangerous things. Either Allan had written more than 
 he meant or Madeleine had read more than he put into them. 
 Anyway, this afternoon, she saw his letters as shams as the 
 rock upon which he tried his soul, upon which he carved the 
 path to self-expression. He wasn't in the least glad to see 
 her again; he didn't care enough even to pretend he was glad. 
 He only thought of her as a person he had known all his life, 
 as a person to write to, as a person to write to him. Words, 
 words, words! He cared, properly, for nothing else at all. 
 Then Roberta's pretty face got in the way, and she wasn't sure 
 even of that. 
 
 And it was of Roberta that Jan, coming back with the 
 aspirin, began to talk. Roberta, he told Allan, was a "peach" 
 that her companion, lucky dog, had "picked her up" down 
 there on the towing-path. "Picked her up, my boy. Ab-so- 
 bally-lutely." 
 
 But the exquisite humour of the situation did not, somehow, 
 reveal itself to Allan. 
 
 "He told you that, did he?" he growled, and sat there in 
 his gloom while Jan went on with the story. When she 
 thought it had gone far enough Guen interposed. 
 
 "She's like someone I've met or have seen somewhere," she 
 said. "Her face was oddly familiar. Was it to you, Allan?" 
 
 Jan chortled. 
 
 "Rather not," he said. "You know Allan never looks at a 
 girl." 
 
 Allan got up as though the subject bored him. 
 
 "I'm going to wash," he told them. 
 
 "I should, old chap," said Jan. "You need it. You've a 
 black smudge on your nose you'd look better without." 
 
 Then Guen remembered. 
 
 "Got it!" she said. "You'll find that girl's face on Kilmer 
 Roydon's tube advertisements. I suppose she's what's known 
 as a photographer's model." 
 
 They all knew Roydon, of course. He was the man people 
 went to for a photograph, and who presented them eventually 
 with a beautiful picture. 
 
 "Lord, yes!" said Jan, who looked at the photographs on 
 tubes.
 
 20 INTRUSION 
 
 Allan, who did not, scowled at his face in the glass and tools 
 himself off. A moment or so later Guen followed, ostensibly 
 to change her frock. Jan whistled. 
 
 "Paying out funeral money hasn't been good for Allan's 
 little temper," he observed, and turned to talk to Madeleine 
 who looked, he thought, remarkably "off colour" this after- 
 noon. Not that Jan admired Madeleine much at any time. 
 He had never been able to see what Guen and Allan saw 
 in her, for Madeleine, with her broad white brow, her darkly 
 earnest eyes and pale, delicate face, was not a type that 
 appealed to Jan; and always her little air of quietness stood 
 like a stout wall between them. There were other things, 
 too. . . . Their natural antipathy was deepened and strength- 
 ened by Jan's knowledge that Madeleine "saw through" him 
 and by her knowledge, extraordinarily irritating, that no one 
 else did. Not even Guen, though she had seen something, 
 of course, a good deal more than the rest of his adoring family, 
 who saw him for what, superficially, he was a delightful 
 creature, handsome, affable, affectionate. And kind not only 
 to people, but to animals, who adored him. At Highgate 
 all the dogs of the neighbourhood had known him, and all 
 the cats. She remembered the cats, especially, how they would 
 run, purring, along the front-garden railings to have their 
 heads rubbed. It was a queer world. . . . 
 
 But because these reflections came between her and her 
 attempts at conversation, she was glad when Jan rose and 
 went out to give Leader a run before dinner. Left to her 
 own thoughts she found that they were neither very interesting 
 nor profitable, though outrageously persistent, and she wished 
 fervently that she could find some excuse for escaping the 
 evening's lecture in that stuffy room in the Tottenham Court 
 Road. But there the aspirin had cut the ground from under 
 her feet, for by this time everybody knew that the English 
 variety could be depended upon. It was of no use at all to 
 pretend that it didn't do you any good. 
 
 Suddenly the door burst open and a young girl, hatted and 
 cloaked, came into the room. 
 
 "Hallo, Caryl!" said Madeleine. 
 
 Caryl came forward, threw both arms round Madeleine's 
 neck and kissed her. 
 
 "How perfectly lovely to see you again!" she cried. "And, 
 oh, Mad, I've had the most heavenly week-end."
 
 INTRUSION 
 
 When she had thrown off her hat and seated herself beside 
 Madeleine you saw with a start how like she was to Guen. 
 There was the same brown-tinted skin, the same short-lidded 
 brown eyes, the same brown straight hair worn short, but with 
 a line of fringe as straight as the rest of it. Perhaps it struck 
 you that everything about Caryl was "straight" not only 
 her hair, but the slight boyish figure and the glance she gave 
 you from her short-lidded eyes. She was, moreover, one of the 
 few girls who look "right" with short hair, perhaps because 
 it was not contradicted, as it is in so many women, by her 
 figure. Her sex did not flaunt itself in physical curves or in 
 feminine tricks. She was supremely unselfconscious. 
 
 But though the likeness between Caryl . and Guen was so 
 strong that it startled you sometimes to see them together, 
 there was a note about Caryl that Guen had not; the eager, 
 passionate note that showed in the way she talked and listened, 
 and in the way she walked quickly, with head thrown back 
 and lips slightly apart. She was decidedly not beautiful. 
 No one even would have called her "pretty," but for most 
 people she had an instantaneous attraction none the less real 
 because it was difficult to give it a name. 
 
 "You don't look a bit well, you know," she told Madeleine. 
 "I believe that horrid Osenton creature gives you too much 
 work to do. I think you ought to leave." 
 
 "Rubbish, my dear," said Madeleine. "I'm all right. My 
 pale face doesn't mean anything." 
 
 "Oh, I know colour hasn't anything to do with it. It isn't 
 that. But you look so tired tired right through !" 
 
 Madeleine laughed. 
 
 "I believe, you know," she said, "that I've merely got the 
 hump." 
 
 "You want a holiday." 
 
 "My dear, I want so many things . . . and I'm not going 
 to have one of them." 
 
 "You won't want them presently." 
 
 "You mean I'll get tired of wanting them that I'll change 
 my mind?" 
 
 "No, I don't. I don't mean anything of the sort. I mean 
 that you'll learn to do without them." 
 
 "I* wonder if I shall?"
 
 22 INTRUSION 
 
 " 'Course. You're like me. There's a spark somewhere in 
 us that never goes out . . . there isn't anything at all that can 
 put it out." 
 
 "I'm sure my spark's quite gone out." 
 
 "It hasn't. It never will till you're dead. Neither will 
 mine. Both of us are so glad, you see, to be alive." 
 
 "Lots of people are that." 
 
 "But they're not like us. ... They aren't willing to take 
 everything that comes the rough with the smooth. And you 
 know we are. We're grateful for anything." 
 
 "That isn't true of me any longer, Caryl. I'm not the 
 amiable person you knew seven months ago. I've grown hard 
 and resentful and . . . carping. I think that's the word. 
 And the worst of it is it hasn't anything to do with the war. 
 It's something intimate and personal and the war stopped 
 being that a long while ago. It's just something I want for 
 myself and shan't get ever." 
 
 "How do you know?" asked Caryl. "That's the lovely part. 
 You never do. Yon can't get a lien on the future quite like 
 that, you know." 
 
 Years ago someone Guen knew had made a cartoon of Caryl 
 and given it her. It showed a queer elfin little creature 
 crawling sideways out of the stride of a monster labelled Woe, 
 and underneath it was written, "Extraordinary Convolutions 
 of a Young Person Who Means To Be Happy." It hung now 
 above Caryl's dressing-table, so that she was reminded of her 
 goal every time she brushed her hair. 
 
 "What was there specially nice about that week-end of 
 yours, Caryl?" 
 
 "Nothing was specially nice. It was all nice. There was 
 only Marjorie and Jack and Mrs. Heston and a young man 
 Jack knew, named Merrick, Richard Merrick. He had a 
 motor-car and took us all out. Not a Rolls-Royce, you know, 
 or anything like that. Just a common or garden sort of thing, 
 but still a car. He exceeded the speed limit abominably." 
 
 "You're quite sure Mr. Merrick wasn't 'specially' nice?" 
 
 "I don't know. . . . Probably. ... I didn't think about 
 it. He just fitted in, you know. Better, I'm afraid, than we 
 fitted into his car. We did look a crew! I sound, don't I, 
 like Matthew Arnold criticising the Shelley menage?" 
 
 Caryl was not "literary"; her penchant was mathematical,
 
 INTRUSION 23 
 
 but it was not for nothing that she had a booky brother and 
 sister. Besides, as she would have told you, you can't hear 
 Keats and Shelley talked about as though they were first 
 cousins without its having some sort of an effect upon you. 
 
 "I suppose it's time I went and washed," she said, just as 
 Guen came in with the sound of the dinner-gong. Guen wore 
 a polychromatic frock and a diminutive frown, which cleared 
 as her eyes fell upon Caryl. 
 
 "Hallo, Caryl," she said. "You just arrived? Had a good 
 time?" 
 
 "Rather!" said Caryl, collecting her belongings. There was 
 the usual hunt for gloves, always traitorously inclined, while 
 Guen explained that Allan had had a wretched day at the 
 office and that his ankle had been very painful. 
 
 "He'll be all right soon, I expect," she said, "but, of course, 
 it would happen to-day!" 
 
 "Why to-day, particularly?" Caryl wanted to know, and 
 then unexpectedly read her answer in Madeleine's face in 
 which something was stabbing two patches of brilliant colour. 
 . . . When Caryl had done thinking how nice Madeleine looked 
 when she blushed, she reflected that love "that sort of love" 
 was somehow connected for her with poetry and scenery, 
 which she always tried to ignore, and with the couples on the 
 Heath, the Embraced and Embracing, whom you couldn't 
 ignore. . . . Still, if Madeleine was "in love" with Allan, it 
 was certainly a thousand pities that Allan was not in love with 
 Madeleine. Caryl would have liked Madeleine for. a sister. . . . 
 
 "Guen," she said suddenly, over a pile of her outdoor 
 clothes, "need I change? I look quite nice underneath all this. 
 Or does that frock mean that someone's coming?" 
 
 "Only 'A.G.' " said Guen. 
 
 "Only 'A.G.,' " said Caryl, but Guen did not turn a hair. 
 
 "Hurry up you'll be late," she said calmly. 
 
 Caryl went. She was not coming to the lecture. Caryl 
 didn't care for lectures and besides, she had an essay to write 
 upon the subject, "Is Shelley greater as a Nature or as a Love 
 Poet?" It was no subject for Caryl who didn't like poetry, 
 knew nothing about love (of "that" sort) and never looked 
 at the scenery. She did not shine at English. Ten to one 
 the essay would come back to her marked "Peculiarly unfeeling. 
 Read the Ode to the West Wind again."
 
 24 INTRUSION 
 
 It was very extraordinary, Caryl used to think, that a girl 
 couldn't take her B.A. without having to wade through all 
 these gentleman-poets. Not that the women were any better, 
 except that there were fewer of them. They were a gloomy lot. 
 Caryl didn't care very much for literary people. Most of 
 Guen's friends she voted tiresome, and was very glad it was 
 so hard to get them to come out to the suburbs, which they 
 despised. Her strictures, however, did not apply to "A.G.," 
 who was coming to dinner and going on to Guen's lecture-affair. 
 (Fancy anybody electing to listen to a lecture!) Caryl con- 
 sidered that Antony Gore, to his friends, was a quite delight- 
 ful person, not in the least resembling that dull, high-brow 
 journal, Life and Letters, which he edited. She wondered, as 
 she brushed her hair, whether Guen really intended to marry 
 him. Here again it was not the problem of love which interested 
 her, but only the idea of Antony Gore as brother-in-law. A.G., 
 so Caryl thought, would do. He had many excellent qualities 
 good temper and humour and enthusiasm. But, best of all, he 
 was so completely unlike the things he wrote and he wasn't ever- 
 lastingly thrusting English literature down your throat. He 
 was one of the few "writing" people who seemed to know that 
 books weren't everything. Even Allan thought they were. 
 Caryl could quite understand why Allan was not in love with 
 Madeleine. Properly, he hadn't seen her yet. She was only 
 a person who liked books and could talk and write good letters 
 about them. . . . 
 
 Gore had arrived by the time Caryl got downstairs and was 
 standing in the middle of the hearthrug listening to something 
 that Allan was saying and which Guen kept interrupting. 
 Caryl liked the look of A.G. She admired his sleek dark head, 
 with its well-brushed hair, and thought that the way in which 
 his eyes were set back in his head made his brow look even 
 more enormous than it really was. Good temper lurked in 
 the corners of his mouth and decision in the jut of his chin. 
 Caryl noticed these things afresh about him to-night, and saw 
 that he had brought the new number of Life and Letters, at 
 which Madeleine sat looking. It was, she knew, to include a 
 new poem of Allan's and a sketch of Guen's, and it was the 
 sketch she sat down now to look at over Madeleine's shoulder. 
 Of course, she hated it. She always did. Guen's work hurt. 
 It was full of little pin-pricks that got home each time and
 
 INTRUSION 25 
 
 nearly drove you mad. Caryl glanced across at her now and 
 wondered how she did it. She looked kind and benevolent 
 and amused. You'd never imagine she would write like this. 
 But there were several Guens. The Guen that stood there 
 now, listening with kind eyes to what Gore was saying, never 
 put pen to paper. 
 
 From Allan you got what you expected. You knew that 
 what Allan wrote would be full of savage discontent and bitter 
 contrast, because that was Allan. Forever tilting at life, at 
 a world he could neither understand nor tolerate. And the 
 war hadn't made him any better. The poems Allan had 
 written from the trenches were awful. It was like him to call 
 them Roses and Rue. If she turned her head the name stared 
 down at her from a slim green volume amongst its fellows on 
 the little shelf Anne Suffield kept for the "family works." 
 
 "No wonder I'm not booky," Caryl thought, as she sat there 
 on the arm of Madeleine's chair, "I'm a blooming reaction, 
 that's what I am." 
 
 Also, she was very hungry and was glad when the dinner- 
 gong cut what A.G. was saying in half and they all trooped 
 in to dinner. 
 
 To Madeleine it was a horrible affair, for she swallowed with 
 it the caviare of disappointment. Allan and his headache sat 
 at her side, talking very little about anything. Jan, on the 
 other hand, talked to everybody about nothing, and Guen and 
 Caryl and Antony Gore talked to everybody, most unselfishly, 
 about everything. Mrs. Suffield never "talked." She made 
 remarks, more or less intelligent, but generally uncorrelated. 
 She was deeply engaged with the ritual of dinner and in being 
 proud of her children. She thought how gay Caryl was after 
 her week-end, and what a pity it was Jan would have to go 
 back without seeing his father; and how nice Guen looked in 
 her new frock, and how unlike her idea of an editor that nice 
 Mr. Gore was to be sure, and what a pity it was Allan's head 
 was so bad. 
 
 But Madeleine sat there like one in a dream and with a 
 strange pain in her heart. Madeleine was only twenty-four, 
 but this evening she felt old old with the suffering of all the
 
 26 INTRUSION 
 
 women who have ever loved. And while the meal went on 
 and the talk and Allan's silence she sat there with that pain 
 in her heart that never stopped. 
 
 For she did not want to suffer. And she resented bitterly 
 that she should suffer through love. Love was not the only 
 thing in life. Life was packed full of wonder and interest. 
 Caryl was right there, at least. You wished you could believe 
 she was right altogether, for it was absurd anyone should feel 
 like this about one little bit of life. Throughout Anne Suffield's 
 carefully-cooked meal these were the things Madeleine Hervey 
 thought of. She longed with all the passion of youth and all 
 the fury of pain for a world in which men were not, or for a 
 return of that blessed time when no man had disturbed her 
 peace, when she looked qn them with indifferent eyes, talking 
 her glib rubbish about "friendship. . . ." 
 
 Of the evening's lecture she remembered little beyond the 
 fact that the young poet who was alleged to be the subject of 
 it had married a Greek lady and had not deserted her. She 
 couldn't very well have missed that because the lecturer 
 repeated it three times, as though it was a fact he wished above 
 all to impress upon you. But personalia did not interest 
 Madeleine. The research work she did for Mr. Osenton (and 
 her living) had sickened her for it. She remained one of those 
 beautifully rare people who can be content to know a man or 
 woman's work without wishing to pick over the rags of their 
 private lives. Moreover, this little group of young men who 
 called themselves the Poetry Circle, and under whose auspices 
 the lecture had been given, irritated her quite alarmingly. 
 They were clever young men with a determination to be heard 
 a laudable object they had many ways of achieving. Their 
 verse was essentially and startlingly modern, never quite so 
 good as they imagined nor as bad as those alleged who didn't 
 approve of it or of them. In it either the old technique died 
 a painful death or a new "one came to even more painful 
 birth. The writers of it cared, as a Society, so little for the 
 poetic traditions that even those among them whose knowledge 
 of technique was beyond dispute, preferred to copy out their 
 carefully-written sonnets into the vers libre form, or lack of
 
 INTRUSION 27 
 
 form. When you got used to the new method (and you were 
 apt, at first, to find it very disturbing) you began to notice a 
 number of other things about these productions of this little 
 group. These poems, coloured, imagistic, drenched in a 
 sort of violent, primal beauty, were yet protests against the 
 older canons of art against the deliberate shutting up of 
 art to anything that was not ordinarily "beautiful." They 
 gave you life raw, jagged and bloody, as they gave you the 
 war and the base hospitals, so that you couldn't help feeling 
 that they agreed with Matthew Arnold's dictum that poetry 
 should be at bottom a "criticism of life," even though they 
 spent much time in wondering, privately and publicly, why 
 that misguided gentleman ever tried to write poetry! They 
 struggled frantically, these young men, in an inarticulate 
 effort to be articulate; none of the violent, impatient things 
 they saw and felt and believed would fit at all into the old 
 forms and "poetic diction" that had done for the "old buf- 
 fers" like Tennyson and Wordsworth and Arnold, whom they 
 derided in public. It was their own phrase: they wrote news- 
 paper articles which justified it and poems which didn't. But 
 none of them ever made the mistake of including Keats among 
 the "old buffers" whose methods they scorned, for always, and 
 in spite of themselves, they remembered that Keats was a 
 Greek! Allied with their contempt of older methods was a 
 love of queer words and of the extraordinary adjective that 
 had never qualified that particular noun before, and looked 
 as though it did not like doing it even now. 
 
 They had their faults glaring even to the people who had 
 no quarrel with their modernity and didn't really mind their 
 manners. They used the phrase "professional poet" a good 
 deal too frequently and they showed an unhealthily snobbish 
 tendency to make of poetry a fashionable occupation. They 
 laboured, most of them, under a really painful delusion that 
 they could read verse aloud extremely well (their own, of 
 course, because they did not believe in reading other people's), 
 and they suffered, like Wordsworth, from a faulty sense of 
 humour and a thoroughly uncritical faculty in relation to their 
 own productions, so that, like Wordsworth again, they thought 
 all their work was equally good, whereas (unlike his) it was 
 often merely equally bad. 
 
 Guen, at least, had another thing against them. You
 
 28 INTRUSION 
 
 wouldn't have gathered from their membership list, from their 
 conversation or from their annual anthology, that there were 
 any women poets at all. There weren't many of them, it is 
 true, but there were some, and Guen couldn't help feeling they 
 ought to have made an effort to find them. 
 
 Allan believed that he detested literary people that if he 
 admired anyone it was the little clerk who went home and 
 tended his garden, and saw nothing either in words or fame. 
 He resented the fact that he did not care for gardening 
 that he invariably pulled the wrong things up and that 
 clerking produced in him a mental and spiritual atrophy. 
 
 After the lecture Guen went on with Gore to his room in 
 Bloomsbury, where they would sit with a lot of other people 
 and talk "shop" and drink coffee. These things to-night 
 did not appeal to Allan or Madeleine, so they took themselves 
 off, and burrowing into the tube, got down to Kensington, 
 Outside Barker's they climbed on to a Twickenham bus and 
 sat together on the front seat. The night was beautiful. 
 There was no wind at all: nothing but a large white moon, 
 and silence. 
 
 Night had come, peaceful, large, indifferent. And Madeleine 
 hated herself because beneath night's calm and quiet the wings 
 of her spirit beat furiously. 
 
 "Cold?" Allan asked her presently. 
 
 She said no, but he felt her shiver against his arm. He had 
 an instinct to put the mackintosh cover more closely about 
 her, but he left it as it was. The bus ran out of Kensington 
 into Kensington's anti-climax, the Hammersmith Road, and 
 Allan sat there glaring down upon it out of his tangled mood. 
 He could not understand why Madeleine's coming should have 
 dispelled the glamour, that, for the last few months, had 
 belonged to every thought of her. He saw her now as the 
 link she had always been with the things he cared for, as a 
 reinforcement of his own beliefs and ideals. The brief glamour 
 was gone. He felt now no stir of the blood, no beating of 
 the pulse: he wanted just nothing at all of her but the old 
 "sisterly sweet hand-in-hand." Allan knew nothing of women; 
 none of the casual, fragmentary encounters that come to most 
 young men of his age had been his: he had been bound 
 by not so much as the lightest of kisses, and he had no way 
 of discovering how much of that "glamour" had got into
 
 INTRUSION 29 
 
 his letters how much of it had reached Madeleine. But, 
 at least, he understood that something had happened to his 
 friendship with Madeleine, that if he wanted to keep it he 
 would have to fight. And he wasn't going to fight. At least 
 he was clear about that. Like most young men in October, 
 nineteen-eighteen, he was tired of fighting. So he sat there 
 saying nothing until, at Hammersmith Broadway, Madeleine's 
 voice cold, incisive, like the night broke the silence. 
 
 "I'm rather chilly. I think I'll go inside." 
 
 He let her go did not offer to accompany her. Perhaps he 
 knew she hoped he would not. His face was set and frowning : 
 his chin dug deeply into his turned-up collar. He looked 
 neither attractive nor amiable and was not. 
 
 And, there, inside a crowded bus, with several strap-hangers 
 blocking her mercifully from the public gaze, Madeleine had 
 liberty to look as miserable as she felt. There was a certain 
 amount of relief, she discovered, just in being able to do that. 
 But it was the last time. Misery was a luxury not a thing 
 you cherished made a memory of. She was only thankful 
 that here and now she could see that the thing was over 
 that at last she knew where she was. To-morrow she would 
 go back again to the Osentons at Sea View, in the north-east 
 corner of the Isle of Wight. Joliffe would meet her at Ryde 
 and drive her in, because the boat service was suspended 
 during the war and, in any case, only ran in summer. And 
 at Sea View would be Mrs. Osenton with something hot 
 after her long drive, and dinner put back to give her time to 
 change and rest. And in her room a fire and flowers and a 
 new book somebody was feeling enthusiastic about. And 
 there would be busy mornings at work; the walks along the 
 sand in the afternoon with Mrs. Osenton and the children 
 and Gyp, the new puppy. And energetic days when they would 
 walk into Ryde and have tea, or into St. Helens, where you 
 would not get tea, but only a laugh at the notice board which 
 warned you against bathing without a decent costume! 
 Nothing more exciting than that. Good, plain, healthful, use- 
 ful days which had been so happy. . . . The Osenton 
 regime held no elements of tragedy or comedy. Madeleine 
 had worked for John Osenton since she was a girl of seventeen 
 with her hair down her back. She knew exactly what he 
 wanted and how he liked it done. John Osenton was forty-
 
 30 INTRUSION 
 
 five; his wife six or seven years younger, and they were 
 devoted to each other. Nothing troubled the peace of their 
 home save the fear that some day Madeleine would get married 
 and leave them. In their hearts they were terribly afraid of 
 this "somebody" with whom she corresponded. With so very- 
 much smoke, surely there must be a tiny flame, at least. . . . 
 There, suddenly beneath her veil of misery, Madeleine 
 shut her heart up tightly to woe, striving to see nothing but 
 the loving kindness of these people who were fond of her and 
 appreciated the work she did. There was nothing there on 
 the future for her but that and the things which she associated 
 with it the sea, the long stretch of sand, and bathing on warm 
 days, decently, from the Osentons' tent: the sweetness and 
 freshness of the simple things of life which she remembered, 
 here in this crowded bus, with a little pang that was half joy 
 and half pain. Caryl was right. There wasn't anything in the 
 world which could take your happiness from you unless you 
 chose to let it. And love wasn't all, but only a little bit of 
 life. In spite of all the poets and novelists that ever were, that 
 was true. You had to remember it when, with knit brows, 
 love passed you by.
 
 CHAPTER THREE 
 
 THE Suffields were an affectionate family yet with a 
 strong tendency to split up naturally into groups of 
 two. There were Jan and Penelope, Guen and Allan, 
 and John and Anne Suffield, who, as the parents, held the fort 
 between them from the fierce onslaught of the modernity of 
 their children. And there was Caryl, with a foot in both camps 
 and an encouraging hand held out to the fort. . . . 
 
 Jan and Pen were twins, so that, in a measure at least, their 
 affinity had a natural basis. But, also, it had another, because 
 Pen happened to be the type of girl Jan most appreciated. 
 Penelope Suffield was neat, in mind and features; running, 
 like her mother before her, to plumpness and platitude, but 
 always ready to do the dull domestic things for you that it 
 bored you to do for yourself, and always to be placated with a 
 seat at some revue or musical comedy if things went wrong. 
 In nineteen-sixteen Pen had married Tom Warren, with the 
 proviso of "no babies till after the war"; but even Tom 
 Warren had grown tired of waiting for a thing so vague as 
 the end of the war, which explains, perhaps, why Pen was 
 expecting a baby in the New Year. Pen was ridiculous about 
 babies. . . . That always was how she put it, "babies" not 
 "children" helpless little animals in long-clothes at the stage 
 at which Mrs. Suffield (most excellent and old-fashioned of 
 mothers) had found her children the most trying and least 
 prepossessing. "Oh, I love 'em," Pen would say. "I love 'em 
 so much, I could eat 'em." 
 
 In her queer fastidious fashion Guen was revolted, somehow, 
 by this outrageous suggestion that a child was a lollipop. Yet 
 she knew that, after all, babies in war time were all right if 
 you were like Pen who had been born without imagination 
 and never worried; and if you took care to have a husband 
 whose factory was deemed of National Importance, and if
 
 32 INTRUSION 
 
 you moved out of the air-raid zone. Tom insisted on that; 
 but even the air raids wouldn't have put Pen "off." Looking 
 after Tom and having babies and being inordinately proud of 
 her twin in khaki was now Pen's business in life. Jan, sniffing 
 prospectively at the babies, thought it sounded dull; but it 
 wasn't Pen who would find fault with it war or no war. 
 
 And, on the whole, the Suffields had had remarkable luck 
 over the war. 
 
 John Suffield, of course, didn't count. He was fifty-five 
 when the war began and was out of things from the start. He 
 remained out of it even when Parliament had done its worst, 
 but he had the belligerent tendencies of his age and class, and 
 the sight of him poring over maps and his newspaper used, 
 in the early days, to irritate Allan beyond all bearing. "As 
 though the war has justified itself," he said bitterly to Guen, 
 "if it helps him to rub up his geography." 
 
 But it wasn't only that John Suffield was out of it and 
 Pen's Tom, with his factory of National Importance and his 
 new duties as a "Special" (which, in his honester moments, 
 he confessed he preferred to those of a soldier). Always there 
 remained the extraordinary luck of Jan and Allan. It surprised 
 you afresh every time you thought of it. 
 
 Jan (who had been christened Arthur Jannison) had, of 
 course, attested under the Derby scheme, and (in his honest 
 moments, less frequent, perhaps, than Tom's and less honest) 
 he would have told you that though he was inordinately glad 
 to wear the sign of attestation on his arm because it saved so 
 much unpleasantness, he did not in the very least want to 
 join the Army. The Army and here he would have been 
 perfectly frank did not accord with his temperament, and it 
 was for Jan a stroke of extraordinary good luck that his father's 
 firm, as well as Tom's factory, was deemed of "National 
 Importance," for Jan had been made a junior member of the 
 firm of Linton and Suffield (now Linton, Suffield and Co.) 
 and, in his peregrinations on the firm's behalf, had already 
 revealed a prodigious faculty for extracting orders from a 
 granite block. Later, when the firm would do no more for 
 him, his unexpected "B" category had secured for him a post
 
 INTRUSION 33 
 
 as Equipment Officer in the Flying Corps. "B" category was 
 explained by a "murmuring" heart, which troubled everybody 
 very much except its owner and Guen both of whom were 
 apt to be scornful of doctors and never really believed in it. 
 
 But Jan did very well as an Equipment Officer and early 
 revealed himself as one of the few square pegs the War Office 
 really had fixed up with a square hole. Also the hole was 
 continually dug anew and elsewhere, so that for Jan life was 
 perpetually a thing of fresh woods and pastures new. More 
 than that, he became presently as clever at obtaining leave 
 as he had been at obtaining orders, and though life in the 
 army was not the life Jan would have chosen, he would have 
 been the first to admit that, all things considered, he had not 
 done badly, thanks in particular to that unsuspected "murmur- 
 ing heart." Jan was glad he wouldn't have to fight. You 
 can't put up a good fight, so some placard or other has told 
 us, "unless your blood boils." And Jan's never did. His 
 thinking apparatus never reached sufficiently high pressure for 
 that. Jan liked being alive and he could not spare time to 
 hate anybody even a German. "Live and let live" was 
 his motto, and to him all others would have been hideously 
 disturbing. 
 
 To Allan, however, luck had been less kind had given him 
 no heart that murmured but only a temperament that hated 
 war and a conscience that would not let him stand aside. He 
 could not have borne, like Jan, to have found a square hole of 
 comfort. If Jan's temperament was one that accorded ill 
 with the Army and the things the Army required you to do, 
 these were facts ten times more true of Allan's. There were 
 few things, on the whole perhaps, that Allan's "temperament" 
 did accord with. It wasn't only the war that had revealed 
 him as a square peg in a round hole. Somehow, he had always 
 been that. He loved life so much that it hurt its beauty, its 
 pathos, its futility and stupidity. Life never was but eternally 
 about to be something inexpressible. Always, in its essence, 
 life slipped through his fingers. He loved form, and was but 
 an indifferent draughtsman: colour, and had no skill with 
 paint: poetry and the music of words, and was only a "minor" 
 poet with little hope of growing the wings of a "major." The 
 only figures he cared about were figures of speech and he 
 was a clerk in the Comet Insurance Company.
 
 34 INTRUSION 
 
 At seventeen, "drawing the line at engines, anyhow," Allan 
 had chosen the Comet instead of "the firm," as, six months 
 before, Maurice Linton had chosen art. Maurice, in John 
 Suffield's opinion, was "at the bottom of things." (All those 
 things about Allan, he meant, which he found it difficult to 
 associate with any son of his.) Maurice Linton had "ideas," 
 and "ideas" in a young man were always dangerous, especially 
 if they centred round art and literature which, as everybody 
 knew, took you nowhere. At seventeen, however, art (or his 
 love of it) had taken Maurice to the Slade, whilst Allan got 
 through his "matric" and was profoundly bored by the pros- 
 pect of the business career which he saw lying in wait for him 
 round the corner. At seventeen, during these last few months 
 at school, Allan had seen life rather as one unending visit 
 to the library, with quiet intervals for reading the volumes 
 one secured or for snaring impressions and thoughts on to 
 paper, with book-talk walks in the company of Guen or Made- 
 leine on the Heath, or up in the tiny room Maurice called his 
 "studio." Each of the four pitched life by the same keynote; 
 somewhere there was an invisible thread, holding them together. 
 
 In a way, and earlier, John Suffield had been proud of these 
 two children of his. "Our two bookworms guaranteed harm- 
 less," he would say of them to visitors, but as they grew older 
 this was an opinion he tended to modify at least as far as 
 Allan was concerned. For Allan, being a boy, would have 
 his living to earn. His itch for scribbling, tolerable in a school- 
 boy, was a good deal less so in a young man about to take 
 his place in the world. It was time, so he thought, that Allan 
 concentrated on the "things that mattered," and these, to John 
 Suffield, had extraordinarily little to do with art and literature. 
 
 But though there were times when Allan was oppressed by 
 a sense of utter antipathy to his father ("glowing," as he 
 said to Guen, "with beef and bullion,") he had for his mother, 
 for all she shared his father's view of life, that deep accepting 
 love of the boy for whom other women do not as yet exist. 
 It was for her sake that he wished he did not find so hideous 
 all these things that she and his father believed so Important. 
 But hideous he certainly did find them. Looking beyond the 
 comfort of Adelaide Lodge, the house at Highgate which John
 
 INTRUSION 35 
 
 Suffield had bought some ten years before, Allan saw all that 
 went to produce it all that was behind the steady, never- 
 failing family income: the earnest application of one man 
 to business, the sure but certain cutting out of extraneous 
 interests; the dredging of life of all but "essentials." Books 
 and art in this world of competition were luxuries. You could 
 afford but little of them. And from such a world Allan's mind 
 jibbed eternally away, just as Maurice's had done. 
 
 With Maurice, however, it had been different. For him 
 there had been the definite path with a definite goal, with 
 which Allan's vague idea of a booky life was simply not com- 
 parable. He knew nobody who could help him, and there 
 was the eternal example of Guen who, at nineteen, after two 
 years' steady effort had reached the pinnacle of fame proper 
 to the writer who has had three stories accepted. Two years 
 later the outlook for Allan might have been different, but at 
 seventeen there had certainly been nothing at all but "the firm" 
 or the Comet. Profoundly bored at this stage with the present, 
 he had at times a desperate dreadful vision of the future as 
 a frantic clutching at the skirts of leisure. And it was leisure 
 he wanted: leisure in which to live; not money at all or a 
 comfortable home. At twenty his contempt for money was 
 enormous. 
 
 Guen thought he was wrong." Her contempt was not for 
 money but for the money standard, and she laughed at Allan's 
 vague notions of life in a book-lined cottage on nothing at all. 
 For Guen loved not only books, but theatres and the London 
 streets and shops and Mudie's and picture-galleries. These 
 things didn't "go" with a cottage in the wilds on nothing at all. 
 
 "You only think you'd like the cottage and nothing," she 
 told Allan, "because you don't want to be bothered with the 
 other side of life to which all these things belong. And you 
 must be bothered. Somehow, you've got to make them fit in." 
 The trouble was that Allan had no skill at all as a joiner and 
 fitter. 
 
 There was, too, the more human question of girls. In the 
 Suffield household there was a legend that Allan did not really 
 know there were any girls in the world beside his sisters and 
 Madeleine Hervey. Occasionally others did swim into his 
 orbit, but it was not exactly true to say that Allan actually 
 saw them. They were just people about whom he discovered
 
 36 INTRUSION 
 
 the most extraordinary things. Of one he would say, "She's 
 the sort of girl who wears furs," or "the sort of girl who 
 doesn't," and asked if he remembered Miss So-and-So would 
 say, "Oh, yes . . . quite well. She can't stand Conrad," or 
 "She says Dickens bores her." "As though it matters what 
 a girl reads!" John Suffield would say to his wife. Even 
 Guen was amused and Guen thought, as Allan did, that what 
 people read mattered tremendously. 
 
 That was why he and Guen drew together out of the family 
 circle. Always between them they had this love of literature, 
 their sense of the beauty and value of words, and the itch for 
 scribbling with which both of them had been born. At twenty 
 Allan's hadn't taken him very far: but Guen, two years his 
 senior, had already discovered Antony Gore and America. A 
 year later her first novel appeared and fell like a bombshell 
 into the midst of her family. No one agreed with her point 
 of view but Allan, and upon Allan the effect of the book was 
 enormous. In some queer unexpected fashion it seemed to co- 
 ordinate his ideas and showed him, for the first time, how 
 thoroughly he and Guen agreed upon essentials. They met, 
 here, not only in the pleasant land of words, but out beyond 
 upon the hinterland of ideas. It was an exciting discovery. 
 
 Guen Suffield was, on the whole, an extraordinary young 
 woman for an Anne and John Suffield to have had for a 
 daughter. Also, she was an extraordinary young woman to 
 have found in the suburbs. Gore had said so from the first, 
 but Guen was not to be enticed away from them and he grew 
 content, later, to leave her there, "studying the beasts in their 
 lair." By "the beasts" he meant the comfortable middle 
 classes. You gathered he didn't like them overmuch. Neither 
 did Guen. But her seemingly deep and instinctive dislike of 
 this class to which she belonged was very disturbing to her father 
 until he decided that what she said meant nothing, that she 
 was merely "writing." Even then it savoured of disloyalty, 
 which John Suffield, class-conscious and class-proud, found it 
 hard to forgive. He couldn't see, he said, what Guen and 
 Allan were driving at. He did not read Omar, and if he had 
 would not have shared that gentleman's desire to remould this 
 sorry Scheme of Things. To John Suffield the world was, on 
 the whole, very well as it was; he was essentially the strong 
 sane man who prided himself on "seeing life whole," though
 
 INTRUSION 37 
 
 he saw, actually, nothing whatever of it save his own little 
 corner, which was all he wanted to see. He had the keen, 
 nimble brain that, in a world of commerce, commands success, 
 and he saw no uneasy connection between his comfortable 
 middle-class existence and the poverty and misery that sat like 
 a curse on the world though that was not, of course, how 
 John Suffield saw it. He paid Trade Union rates, he would 
 have told you, and it wasn't his workmen, anyway, who lived 
 in hovels. He believed that the rock bottom ambition of every- 
 body living for which they would willingly give up all other 
 was to get rich. What the malcontents resented was not capi- 
 talism, but the simple fact that they were not capitalists. 
 
 "Good God, Anne!" he said. "Do these children of yours 
 want to turn the world upside down?" 
 
 They said they did, and then, in nineteen-fourteen, the war 
 came and did it for them. But they weren't grateful. They 
 said the war was no good at all to them . . . that they 
 hated it. 
 
 "The war's only going to turn things over. That's no good. 
 The things that matter will get shelved: the rest'll just settle 
 down again and people'll be too knocked about to care. The 
 war won't settle anything, father." 
 
 "It'll settle the Germans, anyway," John Suffield had said. 
 
 But in nineteen-fourteen it looked as though it might, inci- 
 dentally, settle a good many other people as well! 
 
 It was Tom Warren who professed to regard the war as an 
 opener of doors a means of escape and Guen hated him for 
 it. But especially she hated him when he said playfully to 
 Allan, "Well, you never liked the office, did you, old chap? 
 This may be a way out." Unfortunately, however, Allan hated 
 the war even more than he had hated the Insurance Office: 
 he hated it because it was stupid and unnecessary, and because 
 of what it could do, not to him, but to other people. When 
 he said that Guen knew he was thinking of Maurice, to whom 
 already things were happening all the usual unpleasant things 
 that always happen to young men who, in war time, make the 
 mistake of taking the New Testament too literally. The sight 
 of Maurice, who never went to church and to whom the bishops
 
 38 INTRUSION 
 
 were anathema, taking his stand, these days, by the Sermon 
 on the Mount was a fit sight, Allan said, for tears. Certainly 
 there were times when he nearly came to them. Allan agreed 
 that the Sermon on the Mount was the finest moral code 
 extant which was the very reason why he would not have 
 attempted to act upon it. No modern system run on the lines 
 of the Sermon on the Mount would last ten hours, war or no 
 war; and individuals who tried it would find themselves in 
 prison, or a lunatic asylum, in far less time than that. And 
 prison was just where Maurice eventually did find himself. 
 That, said John Suffield darkly, was what ideas did for you ! 
 
 Allan's ideas, however, took him (and earlier, in nineteen- 
 fifteen) into the Army as a private. He went off to camp, 
 taking with him the memory of Madeleine's pale face and the 
 look of the Spaniards Road, white and hard beneath the Feb- 
 ruary moon. Taking something else, too, that hurt more and 
 lasted longer the sound of Maurice Linton's voice as he had 
 shaken his hand and wished him luck. And what it had said. 
 "I'm going on, old chap in the opposite direction." 
 And Allan had known, somehow, that the road was darker 
 even than his own. 
 
 In the following November Allan had gone out to France 
 just a week after Madeleine's brother Reg had been killed at 
 Ctesiphon. It was a miserable time. One would not talk of 
 it at all if Allan had not, miraculously, lived through it, and 
 if it did not happen that the attitude of people to the war was, 
 in some sense at least, their attitude to everything else. 
 
 Allan was never one of those people who talked of the justice 
 or righteousness of the war. (These were not terms he would 
 have applied to any war.) But he did want to help to get 
 it over. His quarrel with Maurice's position was that if you 
 objected to war you must also object (when there was no war) 
 to all the things that went to produce it. You ought, at least, 
 to have done something to stop the Juggernaut. And most 
 people had done nothing of the sort. Maurice himself had 
 done nothing beyond cutting himself off from his life of 
 inherited comfort and going to live in a garret with a paint 
 box. It wasn't the same thing as fighting, of course, but then
 
 INTRUSION 39 
 
 Maurice had never pretended it was. At least in the garret 
 one could think, and the desire to fight might come later when 
 one could fight, perhaps, to some purpose. . . . But Allan 
 hadn't even cut himself off: he had betaken himself not to a 
 garret, but down to the street of commerce. He had "accepted" 
 things. To the same degree he "accepted" the war ajid to the 
 same degree he hated it. 
 
 Perhaps it was because Guen agreed with him that she found 
 the courage to finish her new book, though she felt like Jane 
 Austen writing her quiet novels amid the turmoil of the 
 Napoleonic wars. . . . Wrapped in her armour-plate deter- 
 mination to think of the war as little as possible, Caryl worked 
 steadily for her "matric," her mind on a "first." She never 
 mentioned the war and never seemed to listen to others who 
 did; but that proved nothing, and there were mornings when 
 Caryl came down to breakfast with tell-tale eyes. For all 
 that, she secured her "first." The summer of nineteen-sixteen 
 was a difficult time. With Jan still going to and fro on his 
 father's business, it was all hideously like the old familiar life, 
 save that it was punctuated with Allan's letters which (like 
 Caryl) never mentioned the war and with theirs to him, which 
 scarcely mentioned it either. They gave him what they knew 
 he wanted; raised for him the curtain behind which so much 
 of the old world had got bundled. It didn't even matter that 
 what they showed him was rather broken and battered. Things 
 like that didn't, to Allan, who could always build them up 
 anew for himself. 
 
 It was Guen who went to hear Maurice state his case to the 
 local Tribunal. It was hopeless, of course, from the first, with 
 Maurice taking his stand like that on the Sermon on the Mount 
 and not so much as a church membership to show ! According 
 to the puzzled old gentlemen of the Tribunal if you really 
 believed in the Sermon on the Mount you went to church. 
 Maurice, on the contrary, insisted that it was the one really 
 valid reason for staying away. This was beyond the old 
 gentlemen, who seemed depressed about things and had noth- 
 ing at all to suggest when the Military Representative said, 
 "I'm afraid, sir, we must have this man!"
 
 40 INTRUSION 
 
 They had him, though not very usefully. He was arrested 
 just a week later, during Allan's first "leave," and Guen had 
 loathed them because they couldn't arrange things better. Even 
 Caryl, looking at Allan's white face, was moved to tears. They 
 were a miserable seven days, and everyone was relieved when 
 they came to an end. 
 
 Presently, during the summer, Anne Suffield developed 
 ''nerves" over the Zeppelin raids and fled with her protesting 
 family to Teddington, where in the blue and gold weather 
 Guen saw her new book through the Press and punted her 
 mother up through the lock to Kingston. The winter was a 
 gap, with one bright gleam at the end of it in April when Allan 
 came home again on leave and saw Maurice Linton's face, 
 though behind bars, for a while. Madeleine was at Rotting- 
 dean with the Osentons, so that Allan and she did not meet 
 until the October when Allan had his leg injured at Passchen- 
 daele Ridge and came home for good. 
 
 Limping a little Allan got back presently to his Insurance 
 Office, and for the first time in his life found in himself a 
 positive grain of gratitude for the existence of that institution. 
 Here at the beginning of nineteen-eighteen he showed more 
 sign of that "settling down" process than ever before, and his 
 father never able to understand Allan's disinclination to "come 
 to grips with life" began to talk complacently, though not 
 to Allan, of the good the war had done him. The correspond- 
 ence, too, with Madeleine, away there in the Isle of Wight, 
 was not lost upon John Suffield, who believed in marriage as 
 another of the means whereby the nonsense is knocked out of 
 young people with too many "ideas." Allan, John Suffield 
 said to his wife, was "moving along." To his standards, he 
 meant, and to his conception of what a young man should be, 
 as perhaps Anne Suffield knew. 
 
 Actually, however, Allan was not "moving along" at all, 
 but standing still. His attitude to life at this stage was best 
 expressed, perhaps, by the phrase Carpe diem, and certainly 
 that other the dream and the business epitomised it. The 
 undisciplined child in Allan that had cried out for the dream 
 had been dragged through the war, and though the war, miracu-
 
 INTRUSION 41 
 
 lously, had not killed it, something, certainly, had happened 
 to it. Silent now, and unassertive, it gave Allan no trouble at 
 all, so that though he still saw life as an adventure beckoning 
 from the edge of things, and himself as a prisoner within four 
 walls, he was strangely able to bear it. For, at the moment, 
 he had had enough of adventure. He was tired. The dull 
 houses, dull people and dull jobs to which he had returned 
 were so many sedatives, and sedatives, at the moment, were 
 what he wanted most. Goodness knows how long he would 
 have continued to want them or how long this interval of 
 serenity would have lasted if it had been left to itself. But 
 it was not left to itself. Suddenly, into the middle of it was 
 flung the news of Maurice Linton's death in prison which not 
 only smashed up Allan's little patch of serenity, but for a time 
 withered and devastated the universe. 
 
 A month later, when he stumbled out of his misery and a 
 little blindly began to pick up again the threads of his life, a 
 passionate anger took hold of him. Maurice had turned his 
 back contemptuously upon the juggernaut and the juggernaut 
 had crushed him. But there was worse in it than that. There 
 had been those who had watched the juggernaut at work 
 who hadn't lifted a hand to save the man who was being 
 crushed, who thought, perhaps, that he deserved his fate. 
 That was what Allan hated most the callous swinging-by of 
 an indifferent world. Contemplating it, his old air of quiet 
 detachment dropped from him. He began to plunge into 
 movements and local "protest" meetings, and helped to pass 
 resolutions and gave a good deal more money to the Cause of 
 Progress than he could afford. But with the hot weather (when 
 even the Cause of Progress showed a tendency to slow down) 
 Allan emerged, looking, Guen thought, rather like an automatic 
 figure jerked by invisible wires and mouthing the word "democ- 
 racy." The feverish phase passed and a quieter Allan sat 
 down to clarify his opinions. The result was the beginning 
 of a novel; several bitter poems and two satires in free verse. 
 The satires, later, found their way into a slim volume with, 
 others, like-minded; the bitter poems appeared one by one in 
 Antony Gore's Life and Letters, and the novel was never fin- 
 ished. Somehow Allan lost faith in it when Guen shook her 
 head over it and said he was only interested in what his 
 characters believed about the Cause of Progress, that as persons
 
 42 INTRUSION 
 
 he didn't care about them at all. This was so true that Allan 
 gave up the role of novelist with percipitancy and got back to 
 his satires. 
 
 And there Guen encouraged him. She thought that this age 
 had failed miserably because it had produced no real satirist > 
 no Dryden, no Byron, no Jonathan Swift. 
 
 There was another thing, too, that resulted from Allan's 
 many meetings and his attempts to clarify their effect upon 
 him and that was a general understanding that at the next 
 election Allan would vote Labour. He was certainly "moving 
 along." Unfortunately, however, from John Suffield's point 
 of view, he was moving in quite the wrong direction.
 
 CHAPTER FOUR 
 
 1 
 
 IF, as Jan had suggested, Lieutenant Ancell had really had 
 doubts as to Roberta's honesty, he was mistaken, for two 
 mornings after the incident of the rain the things Guen had 
 lent her were returned. 
 
 "Well, she's been quick enough!" Jan said, recognizing the 
 handwriting on the label. 
 
 Rather too quick, it seemed, because after breakfast Allan 
 came across his sister in the bath-room dropping the contents 
 of Roberta's misshapen parcel into the dirty linen basket, for 
 Roberta had been in such a hurry to show herself honest she 
 had not stayed to show herself fastidious. Guen's clothes had 
 been returned unlaundered. She caught Allan's eye and she 
 laughed. Allan, however, did not, and Guen laughed again 
 not this time at herself, but at Allan, whose face was positively 
 funny in its intensity. As though it mattered! She shrugged 
 her shoulders and began to fold up the brown paper, not seeing 
 the little note which slipped out from it on to the floor. Allan 
 went on with the business, of washing his hands, wondering 
 why he should mind so much that that sort of habit should go 
 with that sort of face, and why he wanted Guen to go out 
 without seeing Roberta's note down there on the floor. 
 
 She did presently, with a word of warning to Allan about 
 the time. He stooped down, recovered the note and read it. 
 A moment later he screwed it up and pushed it down into 
 his coat pocket. It could not, he decided, be shown to Guen 
 because it would amuse her, and somehow or other he had to 
 shield Roberta from the amusement of his family. They would 
 smile at her note as they had smiled when she had said sweetly, 
 "And who is Emily Bronte?" or when they said afterwards 
 that her face went oddly with the things she said. . . . Yet 
 there was not so very much wrong with the note except, per- 
 
 43
 
 44 INTRUSION 
 
 haps, its ending, and a certain vagueness as to the spelling of 
 "Suffield." 
 
 Out there in the roadway Allan fished it out again and read 
 it once more before tearing it into fragments and tossing it 
 into the gutter. He watched the October wind whirl the white 
 pieces round and round before scattering them broadcast; and 
 as he walked on to the station he felt pleased and triumphant, 
 as though in some absurd fashion he had saved the writer 
 of that poor little note from something that might have hurt 
 her. From what? From Guen's funny little trick of raised 
 eyebrows and shoulders, from her faint, amused smile that he 
 knew she wouldn't be able to help? Why did he care what 
 Guen thought of this girl he had only seen for a moment, whom 
 he never expected to see again and who had never heard of 
 Emily Bronte? The girl was a fool, of course. Why on earth 
 did he mind that Guen should show that she thought so, too 
 a fool of not too delicate perceptions, who couldn't write 
 English and couldn't spell what passed for it? "I am, Yours 
 truely. . . ." How Jan would have laughed if he had got 
 hold of it! 
 
 But Jan laughed enough as it was and for reasons of his 
 own. 
 
 "Did she wash 'em?" he asked Guen when she came down 
 from the bath-room and Guen had said, "No ... I suppose 
 it's ridiculous that I should have liked her better if she 
 had. . . ." 
 
 "Oh, hang it all!" Jan said, "she does have a cold bath 
 every morning." 
 
 "You've made enquiries on the subject, I suppose?" Guen 
 had asked. But Jan had retreated behind his Morning Post. 
 
 "Oh, well ... she looked as though she did, anyhow 1" 
 he said and smiled a little, as though at his own perspicacity, 
 but really because he could hear Roberta saying it "Oh, hang 
 it all, I do have a cold bath every morning!" 
 
 She had sat opposite him only the evening before in a little 
 Soho restaurant and had smiled at him over her glass of Graves. 
 This meeting was the explanation of that "To-morrow then, 
 that's settled!" which Madeleine had overheard on the thres-
 
 INTRUSION 45 
 
 hold of the Mount Calm drawing-room. Jan, due to return 
 to Camp on the Wednesday, did not believe in missing an 
 opportunity. And Roberta, sipping her wine, told him that 
 she had that afternoon taken his sister's belongings to the post. 
 "So she'll see I'm honest, anyway," she said. And Jan had 
 said teasingly, "I hope you washed 'em!" 
 
 "Washed them? Why, there wasn't time. After all, I 
 only wore them home. Of course, I changed at once. . . . 
 Besides ... oh, hang it all, I do have a cold bath every 
 morning!" 
 
 Jan had laughed and laughed. It was so screamingly funny, 
 somehow, that she shouldn't know that Guen would care so 
 much less about that fine virtue of honesty than about this 
 lesser one of finesse. People were absurd about their skins, 
 of course. . . . Guen with her "I'd have liked her better if 
 she had," and Roberta with her comic insistence on her morn- 
 ing tub. 
 
 He had sobered down presently and eaten his dinner, after 
 which he secured a taxi and took Roberta down to the Coliseum. 
 Roberta had no sort of objection whatever to taxis nor any 
 objection, either, it seemed, to Jan's arm round her waist nor 
 to a stray kiss or two. They make you comfortable in the 
 stalls at the Coliseum and provide just the sort of amusement 
 Jan and Roberta enjoyed. Nothing highbrow, thank you very 
 much, for them. Later, when the "show" was over (Roberta 
 called it that, carelessly, in the approved fashion of the initiate) 
 they agreed they had had a very jolly evening. 
 
 "We'll have another next time I'm up," Jan said. "Rotten 
 luck I go back to-morrow." 
 
 Trifles like unwashed linen and badly-written letters were 
 not likely to upset Jan. His uses for Roberta were quite 
 unconnected with laundries or grammar. Besides, if it came 
 to that, Guen had a good deal more money to spend on laundries 
 than Roberta had. 
 
 Guen would have agreed. It wasn't that at all, of course, 
 but only that a thing of this sort somehow stamped one. You 
 couldn't get away from it. It was like picking your teeth at 
 the meal table or coming down to breakfast with a divorce 
 between your blouse and skirt and your hair in curling pins. 
 They argued, all of them, some want in the woman who could 
 be guilty of them some lack of personal nicety. It was diffi-
 
 46 INTRUSION 
 
 cult to explain. You only knew that no woman who valued 
 her self-respect would do them . . . that you would hate to 
 do them yourself. 
 
 But Roberta cared very little about that vague and unfriendly 
 virtue of self-respect. Perhaps, at heart, she cared for nothing 
 very much save other people's admiration, for that was what 
 she lived by and on. It was a sort of mental and bodily 
 pabulum, and she concentrated only on the things which pro- 
 duced it. Her future, as she knew, depended upon her raising 
 someone's admiration sufficiently to get the someone to marry 
 her. The idea of marriage was disturbing: but you couldn't, 
 if you were a woman, have everything. . . . 
 
 Not that Jan intended to marry her. That young man, 
 indeed, saw marriage as a wholly supererogatory ceremony in 
 life with nothing whatever to recommend it. He found other 
 ways of putting this belief, however, when Anne Suffield hoped 
 audibly that her sons, when the war was over, would marry 
 and settle down. Jan would smile and throw her a fond glance. 
 "All right, mater. When I see anybody half as nice as you, 
 I will." 
 
 It sounded very well and Anne Suffield loved it. She 
 thanked God she had such good sons. But perhaps she thanked 
 Him especially for Jan, who never gave you the dreadful feel- 
 ing of futility that oppressed you, sometimes, with Allan. 
 Jan was a crystal vase. Nothing was hidden. He neither 
 worried nor disturbed you. Anne Suffield, true to her class 
 and tradition, did not want to be disturbed or worried. No 
 wonder that, in her heart, she loved Jan best, even if she were 
 too good a mother to admit it. 
 
 Jan, of course, was one of the first people to get out of the 
 Army after the signing of the Armistice. Nobody was at all 
 surprised that he took immediate advantage of that blessed 
 word "pivotal," which no one could define, but which, like 
 somebody's pen, was a boon and a blessing to men! 
 
 Jan shook the war from his shoulders as a dog shakes water. 
 The Armistice was signed and the war over. (It irritated him 
 when Allan said it wasn't.) He had done his bit and wanted 
 to be allowed to forget it. So Jan bought a couple of new
 
 INTRUSION 47 
 
 suits and went out in the evenings to meet a lot of other people 
 similarly minded. He thought it about time that his parents 
 turned out the Canadians who were living in their house at 
 Highgate. He was never an enthusiast for the great London 
 river, and besides, just now, Highgate would have suited all 
 his arrangements a good deal better than Teddington. But the 
 distance between Teddington and Highgate was made the 
 excuse for his non-appearance at dinner at least one evening 
 a week, and for the occasional nights when he didn't come home 
 at all. It was much more comfortable, so he said, to have a 
 meal out and go across for "a game with the boys over North." 
 Jan was an ardent billiard-player, but his mother thought he 
 let the "game with the boys" go on far too late. 
 
 "I'm sure you don't get enough sleep," she would say, look- 
 ing at him for traces of the truth of her remark and sometimes, 
 but not always, finding them. It used to amuse Jan. 
 
 "Don't you worry, old lady," he would say, "I'll look after 
 that all right." 
 
 You couldn't help feeling that Jan "got enough" of most 
 things in the world of all the things, anyway, that he thought 
 worth while. There were a good many of them. 
 
 November, in nineteen-eighteen, was a dull month in spite 
 of London's Day of Rejoicing and the crowd that gathered 
 outside Buckingham Palace and shouted that it wanted the 
 King. Madeleine was in the Isle of Wight, writing occasion- 
 ally to Guen, but never to Allan; and somehow the knowledge 
 that she never intended to write to him again made life very 
 flat. December was better, because there was the excitement 
 of the coming election, the political meetings that preceded 
 it and the results, which Allan did not find exciting at all. 
 
 Christmas came and was disappointing in the way that only 
 Christmas can be. It passed, and January came, fine and mild 
 and engaging. Towards the end of it Anne Suffield had a 
 birthday, and coming out of a shop one evening in Oxford 
 Street from purchasing a handbag Guen thought she might 
 like, Allan came face to face with Roberta. 
 
 At first Roberta looked annoyed. Allan had come out of the 
 shop in a hurry and had cannoned with some force against her
 
 48 INTRUSION 
 
 shoulder. In the midst of his apologies came mutual recog- 
 nition. 
 
 "HalZo/" he said, and then, somehow, could think of nothing 
 at all to say. The blood surged up into his face; he felt very 
 foolish. Roberta, however, smiled the pretty smile she kept 
 for young men and held out her hand. 
 
 "My word!" she said, "surprises do happen and no mistake. 
 But I mustn't stop a minute. I'm meeting a friend and I'm 
 late already. Men hate to be kept waiting, don't they?" 
 
 Allan said vaguely that he supposed they did. His intelli- 
 gence had not drifted back to him, or if it had was occupied 
 in thinking that here, on this bitter night, she looked even 
 lovelier than when he had seen her before. She was well- 
 dressed, too, in an excellently cut coat with a deep fur collar. 
 And she looked gay as though life, since he had seen her last, 
 had been very kind to her. 
 
 "I can't stop reely I can't," she said, as Allan showed 
 some inclination to linger. "I've got a dinner on and a 
 theatre." She smiled again and was affable. Allan found her 
 wonderful to look at. All Oxford Street faded into insignifi- 
 cance before the warmth and glow and colour that was Roberta. 
 To Allan, tired and jaded from the day's dull work, it was like 
 a tonic just to look at her. 
 
 "Come to a theatre with me one evening, will you?" he asked, 
 and for the first time he seemed to hear himself speaking. 
 His voice sounded unfamiliar, and what he said ridiculous, for, 
 of course, he didn't want to take Roberta to a theatre. She 
 would bore him to death. You couldn't sit and stare at a girl 
 all the evening without saying something, and what on earth 
 did you find to say to a girl who had never heard of Emily 
 Bronte? But Roberta was already accepting. 
 
 "All right," she said, "if I can choose the play." 
 
 Again his unfamiliar voice saying unfamiliar things. 
 
 "Of course. When shall it be?" 
 
 She considered. "Not 'to-morrow. I must have my beauty 
 sleep. What about the day after Thursday?" 
 
 "Right-o. What time?" 
 
 "Seven?" 
 
 "Make it six-thirty, then we can eat something some- 
 where. . . . You want to get on, don't you ? Let me walk 
 with you."
 
 INTRUSION 49 
 
 "Oh, no thank you, I'm not going your way at all. Besides, 
 you're in a hurry, too." 
 
 "I'm not now." 
 
 He fancied that her colour deepened, that her eyes hardened 
 as they left his face and searched the roadway. 
 
 "Oh, do you mind?" she said. "I think I'd better get this 
 bus. . . . Thursday. Six-thirty at the Circus, Central 
 London Tube. Good-bye!" 
 
 The bus was stopping to set down a passenger. Roberta 
 jumped on the footboard, waved her hand and was gone. 
 
 "Well, I'm damned!" Allan said and walked on with his 
 slightly perceptible limp. But all the way home his blood 
 raced hot in his veins and a pulse beat fiercely against his 
 temples. The image of Roberta tortured his brain which yet 
 saw the whole episode as an oddity there was no accounting 
 for. And he wanted to account for it. It couldn't be merely 
 that Roberta was good to look at: he had met many girls who 
 were that, girls whom Guen and Jan had called "pretty" or 
 "handsome," and he felt they would know. And yet what else 
 was there about Roberta which attracted him? She hadn't 
 any brains: she wasn't interested in things or ideas and was 
 obviously very ill-read. His life and hers didn't touch at any 
 point at all it was inconceivable that they ever could! And 
 yet some part of him over which he had no control had asked 
 her to spend an evening with him! He would be expected to 
 talk and make himself agreeable. And all he wanted to do 
 was to sit still and look at her. The situation was absurd. 
 Also, it was vaguely disturbing. 
 
 Something else, too, was disturbing the knowledge that for 
 the first time in his life there was something he could not tell 
 Guen; it got, somehow, everlastingly in the way of all the things 
 that he could. It ought to have been quite simple to say "I 
 met Miss Leigh to-day in Oxford Street." But it wasn't. It 
 was, in fact, so difficult that he couldn't even attempt it. Coin- 
 cidence was the most ridiculous thing. Yet if Guen hadn't 
 asked him to collect that handbag he would never have met 
 Roberta, for one didn't walk down Oxford Street for pleasure. 
 It was a street he loathed, yet de Quincey had walked up and 
 down it with his Ann. That, somehow, ought to have made 
 more difference than it did. 
 
 But even if coincidence would explain his encounter with
 
 ISO INTRUSION 
 
 Roberta, it certainly wouldn't explain that invitation to the 
 theatre. Nothing really explained that. 
 
 Jan that night did not come home. They had all gone to 
 bed, leaving the door unbolted, and in the morning it was 
 unbolted still. At breakfast Anne Suffield was mildly con- 
 cerned with the results of this infatuation for billiards, and 
 her husband, less mildly, with the shortcomings of the South 
 Western time-table. 
 
 Jan was home in the early afternoon, however, loaded with 
 apologies and parcels and with theatre-tickets in his pocket for 
 some performance that evening. He hoped they had guessed 
 he had missed the train: he had meant to wire and had been 
 so busy it had slipped his memory. He thanked God for 
 Bloomsbury and the Waverleys. They did you very well, those 
 IWaverley people. 
 
 It was Anne Suffield who suggested that when they got back 
 to Highgate they might have a billiard-table fixed up. "Jan's 
 so fond of his game," she said. And John Suffield didn't see 
 why not at all. "It wouldn't do me any harm to have a quiet 
 game occasionally. And I daresay Jan wouldn't mind giving 
 me a lesson or two." 
 
 "Not at all, sir. Delighted!" Jan said. 
 
 He was really a most admirable son. You would never have 
 guessed from his manner that a billiard-table "in the family" 
 was about the last thing he wanted or meant to have. The 
 supreme and resistless merit of the game was that you played 
 it in other people's houses. Because for Jan billiards was less 
 a game than an explanation. There was, in fact, nothing at 
 all that you couldn't explain by it. That "game with the boys" 
 saved a deal of trouble all round, for it was a legend in which 
 everybody believed. Even Guen. 
 
 It was Allan of all unlikely people who suspected it first. 
 It began the next morning by Allan's finding a lace handker- 
 chief on the floor of the hall and by Jan's appearance as he was 
 examining the border for a clue to its owner. 
 
 "It's not the girls'," he said, "because of the scent." Both 
 Caryl and Guen detested perfumery.
 
 INTRUSION 51 
 
 "It's all right," Jan said, "I know whose it is. Rather nice 
 that scent. . . . Amami, isn't it?" 
 
 "Don't ask me!" said Allan, and laughing they went in to 
 breakfast. They were alone that morning. Guen and Caryl 
 (both bad risers) were not yet down, and Mrs. Suffield after 
 her theatre was breakfasting leisurely in bed. 
 
 "You're quite a stranger," Allan said, pushing an uninter- 
 esting post on one side. "I hear you missed your train on 
 Tuesday." 
 
 "You can put it like that if you like," Jan said. 
 
 "Like what?" asked Allan. "Don't be a silly ass." 
 
 "Oh, it's all right, old chap. You needn't go off the deep 
 end. It was only a theatre and a girl and supper afterwards. 
 You're so damn Puritanic." 
 
 There was a little silence. A queer, unaccountable constraint 
 had settled upon Allan which was three parts distaste. It 
 was not what Jan said, but his manner of saying it, as though 
 he invited you to tear away the veils; to read into that legend 
 of billiards and lost trains whatever you chose. "You can put 
 it that way if you like!" But Allan didn't like. Something 
 in him was hurt and smarted horribly. . . . But he reacted 
 presently from his own distaste. What a fuss about nothing! 
 As though he hadn't known for years that Jan was for ever 
 carting some girl about. Jan was made that way; he would 
 philander at sixty. 
 
 "It's a pity you don't pop off to a theatre more often, old 
 chap," Jan told him now. "Do you a world of good." 
 
 It was Thursday the day of his appointment with Roberta. 
 Allan blushed. 
 
 "Well, as a matter of fact, I'm going to see something or 
 other to-night." 
 
 "Highbrow or fluff?" , 
 
 "^ Allan's blush at least did not lessen. 
 
 "Well, not 'highbrow,' I should say." 
 ^ Jan whistled, then laughed suddenly and explosively. 
 
 "You gay dog!" he said. "Ask her if she's seen Chu Chin 
 Chow." And again he laughed in that sudden boisterous 
 fashion. 
 
 "All right," said Allan. "What's the matter?" 
 
 "Nothing, oh, nothing!" Jan said, "but you ask her if she's 
 seen Chu Chin Chow."
 
 52 INTRUSION 
 
 The sound of Jan's hilarious merriment followed Allan out 
 into the street. He pulled up his coat collar and scowled 
 blackly into the bright face of the January morning, and Alice 
 coming in with Guen's porridge was informed by Jan that the 
 world was a damn-funny place. 
 
 "I suppose it is, Mr. Jan if you come to think of it! I've 
 heard my father say that a sense of humour's a great asset in 
 life." 
 
 "Asset's the word, Alice. Asset does you and your father 
 credit. And you can take it from me that a sense of humour's 
 the only thing in life that matters. You may tell a man he's 
 a liar, a scoundrel, a thief, and he won't care a tuppenny damn. 
 But if you tell him he hasn't a sense of humour he'll want to 
 flay you alive. . . ." 
 
 "Good morning," said Guen's voice from the doorway. 
 "Allan gone?" 
 
 She sat down and began turning over her letters evidently 
 a dull lot, with the exception of one which she slipped unopened 
 into the pocket of her brown frock. Alice collected Allan's 
 plates and cup and went out. 
 
 "Enjoy your play?" Guen asked Jan over the edge of her 
 porridge spoon. 
 
 "Rather. I say, Guen, what do you think? Allan's taking 
 a girl to the theatre to-night. . . . Fact." 
 
 "Why shouldn't he?" 
 
 "Oh, no reason only, you know, Allan doesn't." 
 
 "Take girls to the theatre? No, but I wish he would. It 
 would be very nice for him and for them." 
 
 "Oh, I daresay ... all depends, of course . . ." and 
 Jan shrugged eloquent shoulders. 
 
 "Don't be beastly," said Guen. "And how do you know 
 it's a girl to-night? Did he tell you?" 
 
 "Allan? Rather not." 
 
 "Then how do you know?" 
 
 "Well ... he wanted me to recommend a play. . . . 
 Verb. sap. to quote the classics. I suggested Chu Chin Chow. 
 But, of course, it wont BE Chu Chin Chow." 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "Oh, well ... the girl's seen it. Sure to have, I mean. 
 Everybody has." 
 
 "7 haven't."
 
 INTRUSION 53 
 
 "Oh, you! You don't count. You don't care for the East. 
 You're like the chimney sweep who was shown a photograph 
 of Jerusalem and saw nothing but a sad lack of chimneys. 
 Here, I must be off." 
 
 At the door he cannoned into Caryl. 
 
 "You seem very gay!" she said. 
 
 "Do I? Well, I've heard a lot of funny things this morn- 
 ing. What do you think? Allan's taking a girl to the theatre 
 to-night." 
 
 "I don't call that funny. That's merely nice for the girl." 
 
 Jan laughed. 
 
 "I say, Caryl, do you know a chap named Merrick Richard 
 Merrick?" 
 
 "Of course. He's a friend of the Hestons." 
 
 "I heard yesterday that he's very fond of a little girl named 
 Caryl Suffield!" 
 
 Sudden colour burned Caryl's face and neck a deep red as 
 she came across to the table. 
 
 "What rot!" she said. "Who told you that?" 
 
 "Jack Heston. He seemed pretty sick about it. I met him 
 in Cheapside. . . . We had lunch together." 
 
 Caryl became nasty. 
 
 "I always understood," she said, "that Jack Heston was 
 wounded in the leg. And I think it's time you caught your 
 train." 
 
 Still laughing Jan went
 
 CHAPTER FIVE 
 
 ALLAN got down punctually to the Oxford Street Tube, 
 but Roberta was late. She usually was on principle, 
 believing that it "did a man good" to wait for a girl; 
 showed him that she wasn't "falling over herself" for his 
 favours. So Allan, unaware that he was being carefully put 
 in his place, bought an evening paper to help pass the time it 
 was taking Roberta to do it. But he discovered that he was 
 too excited to read anything except a column on the weather, 
 which told him that it was the coldest day of the year; that 
 ice lay on the ponds at Bushey Park three-quarters of an inch 
 thick; and that the thermometer at Hampton Court registered 
 eleven degrees of frost. Somehow these facts made the air at 
 Oxford Circus Tube station colder than before. The rising 
 and plunging of the lifts made horrible draughts : Allan turned 
 up his coat collar and moved over to the bookstall to escape 
 them. The home-bound crowd surged on and on presumably 
 everybody lived on the Central London Tube. Every now and 
 then somebody planked down a penny and asked for a paper, 
 and turning away again bumped hard into Allan's shoulder. 
 They said "Sorry" and Allan "Granted" until he got tired of 
 it. Sorry and granted! What a vocabulary! The automatic 
 ticket-machines made a hideous noise, and all the people who 
 used them seemed to want to see how violently they could 
 manipulate the apparatus which tirelessly belched forth tickets. 
 Two girls at a cigarette kiosk discussed a recent dance they 
 had been at together and seemed to think Allan was interested 
 in it, too. People came in and looked at the clock, then went 
 out again and looked at the street. (Evidently other folk were 
 late, too!) The plaintively affectionate voices of the flower- 
 sellers at the street corner floated in to him. "Vilets, dearie? 
 All fresh . . . vilets?" He took out his paper again and 
 stamped his feet, but the paper reeked of unpleasant happen- 
 
 54
 
 INTRUSION 55 
 
 ings a resumed inquest on an actress who had died from an 
 overdose of cocaine; comment on the fighting in the Berlin 
 streets and more talk of the deaths of Liebknecht and Rosa 
 Luxemburg. The sight of their names in print sent a wave of 
 pity through Allan. He wondered if they knew, now, how 
 much their effort and suffering was worth, whether it was worth 
 anything at all or whether, for those two restless souls, it was, 
 at the last; just the quiet and the dark. . . . But here the Lon- 
 don crowd surged on its after-the-war way, in search of gaiety 
 and the youth that one had supposed dead! And Allan who 
 had lived through unspeakable things waited here in the cold 
 for a girl who had caught him somehow by a pretty face . . . 
 a girl who couldn't (even on such a night!) manage to get 
 there to time It was a strange world! 
 
 Then Roberta came. 
 
 "Hallo!" she said. "Not late, am I?" 
 
 "Fifteen minutes," said Allan, and then, looking at her his 
 anger melted. 
 
 "It's all right," he said, "now you've come." 
 
 He felt it was! Nothing, now, seemed to matter. He 
 piloted her through the crowd, down the street to the Marguerite 
 for dinner. He was cold no longer, for the hot blood coursed 
 through him like a river in full flood: his face and neck 
 burned and he wished he didn't limp. Roberta however, rather 
 liked it. As early as this in nineteen-nineteen a young man 
 who limped was an object of interest to the passers-by and of 
 pride to the young woman he escorted. 
 
 Allan found it better sitting down. He did not talk much, 
 but he listened to what Roberta said, though without hearing 
 very much of it. It was strangely exciting, somehow, to sit 
 opposite to her and he was filled with a vague pleasure because 
 her face showed no more than the merest dusting of powder 
 that Guen's might have exhibited. Allan detested the modern 
 craze for cosmetics. It made a girl look as though she had 
 been turned out with hundreds of others in a factory and 
 to one colour-scheme. Roberta did not make up: but then 
 Roberta did not need to. She was the lucky possessor of a. 
 flawless skin : neither sun nor wind, heat nor cold had the least 
 effect upon it. To Allan it was a perfectly wonderful phe- 
 nomenon. Good skins appealed to him as years ago (per- 
 haps still) they appealed to his father. Roberta had taken
 
 $6 INTRUSION 
 
 off her coat and sat clad in a gauzy frock of pale blue, cut 
 wide on the shoulders and with short sleeves a ridiculous 
 frock (even under the warm coat) for one who travelled by 
 Shanks's pony and the omnibus. And her shoes were ridiculous, 
 too, and what she said, so that you had to keep looking at 
 her face and her wonderful hair to stand her conversation. 
 Certain words like "awfully" and "dreadfully" and "naturally" 
 came out with appalling regularity, and certain phrases. She 
 seemed to have a working vocabulary of about fifty words. 
 And Allan found himself trying to remember how many 
 Shakespeare was reputed to have had and Milton and a lot 
 of other people Roberta had probably never heard of! But 
 she had a sense of humour uncertain, perhaps, and limited, 
 but in good working order. So that Allan stopped thinking 
 about the dead and their vocabularies to reflect that Roberta 
 was, in her way, quite clever. He discovered, too, that Guen 
 had been right about the photographs on the tube. Roberta 
 had gone to Hilmer Roydon's studio to help in "touching up" 
 processes, to interview clients and to make appointments for 
 them; but had stayed to be photographed. 
 
 "You wouldn't believe how tired you get of having your 
 photograph taken," she said. "And it's awfully dull at the 
 studio now Tommy's gone. ... Oh, you needn't look like 
 that; it's all right, Tommy's a girl. Ethel May her real name 
 is; Ethel May Carew, but since she left to go on the pictures 
 she calls herself Tommy. She got the second prize in a kinema 
 competition. P'raps ycu read about it in the Sunday papers? 
 (Allan hadn't.) / think she's awfully clever. But mother 
 doesn't like her; she never approves of my friends. No, reely. 
 She's always on to me to drop Tommy. ... I say, what play 
 are we going to see!" 
 
 "I thought," Allan stammered, "I thought, perhaps, Chu 
 Chin Chow ... if you haven't seen it." 
 
 Roberta had. He saw that at a glance before she said, "Oh, 
 you haven't bought the tickets?" Allan's face seemed to be 
 slipping beyond his control. Even his voice seemed not to 
 belong to him as he murmured something about having only 
 'phoned the box office. "Oh, then that's all right," Roberta 
 said, "we needn't collect 'em. Can I have an ice? I hope 
 they won't rush you." 
 
 He didn't care if they did. He felt he had been rushed
 
 INTRUSION 57 
 
 already; could hear again Jan's boisterous laughter and his, 
 "Ask her ... if she's seen Chu Chin Chow." 
 
 Certainty descended upon him. It was Jan who had taken 
 Roberta to see Chu Chin Chow on Tuesday. It was Jan she 
 had been going to meet on Tuesday evening when he nearly 
 knocked her down coming out of that shop in Oxford Street. 
 The thought stayed with him, kept him quiet in the taxi that 
 took them down to the play Roberta had elected to see. He 
 was horribly conscious of her sitting there with her mocking 
 roguish air; conscious, too, that she was thinking him a "mug" 
 because he made no effort to kiss her, because he sat stiffly and 
 awkwardly at her side, not touching her. 
 
 She was, of course, though her mood was comparative; 
 she was thinking less of Allan than of Jan, of whom Allan in 
 some perverse way kept reminding her. Anybody could see, 
 she would have said, that they were brothers, only Jan was 
 ever so much better looking! But a mere family likeness! 
 What was that beside these greater (and fundamental) differ- 
 ences she discerned between them ? You knew where you were 
 with Jan, and he would have seen to it that riding in a taxi 
 was not the dull business it was with Allan. 
 
 The play Roberta had chosen was an exclamation mark and 
 probably no worse than others of its class. Certainly it didn't 
 bore Allan half as much as he had expected probably because 
 he wasn't thinking very much about it. He was thinking that 
 Roberta, for all she had for him this queer fascination, though 
 she stirred his pulses and his emotions as no other girl had 
 done, was not for him. She didn't "link" up. They didn't 
 even speak the same language. What could they possibly have 
 in common? He had been mad ... to think they could have 
 even for an evening. You could not imagine so impossible a 
 friendship going on. It wasn't going on, of course. This was 
 the beginning and the end. He was horribly level-headed 
 about it, as though some part of his brain stood aside and 
 condemned the failure of the rest. But when the piece was 
 over he suggested supper. Roberta refused. 
 
 "I daren't," she said. "I get into such an awful row if I'm 
 late. . . . Mother's so strict. Thanks awfully, all the same.**
 
 $8 INTRUSION 
 
 "When shall I see you again?" he asked as he put her into 
 her North London bus. 
 
 Roberta smiled back at him from the step of it. 
 
 "Oh, I don't know. . . . I'm dreadfully full up, reely. 
 Drop me a card to the Studio." 
 
 She liked saying "to the Studio." It made people look at 
 her with a keener interest, even if, in their minds, they dubbed 
 her "Artist's model." 
 
 "*But I don't know the address," Allan began. 
 
 "Oh, turn it up in the telephone book. . . ." 
 
 "'Old tight!" said the conductor, and rang his bell. His 
 manner said as plainly as possible that the step of a bus and 
 at this time of night was no place for a conversation of this 
 sort. The bus moved on and left Allan standing on the curb 
 staring after it. Half-way across Waterloo Bridge he found 
 he had only ten minutes in which to catch his last train. No 
 wonder that on Tuesday Jan had lost it. The wonder was 
 that anybody ever caught it. 
 
 Jan was still up when Allan arrived home, and roused him- 
 self to inquire after the success of his evening. 
 
 "By the way, old chap, had she seen Chu Chin Chow?" 
 
 Unexpectedly Allan lost his temper. 
 
 "You know quite well that you took her to see it yourself 
 last Tuesday evening," he said. "Why the devil do you think 
 it necessary to keep this up?" 
 
 "My dear old chap! Keep what up?" 
 
 "This pretence that you don't know it's Roberta Leigh I've 
 been to the theatre with this evening . . . that she didn't tell 
 you I met her and asked her on Tuesday evening." 
 
 "Oh, that's all right ! I thought you didn't ivant me to know, 
 you were so deep about it. Was she nice to you?" 
 
 "Nice? I suppose she was. I haven't thought about it." 
 
 Jan laughed. 
 
 "No, you wouldn't have to, with Bobbie. As a matter of fact, 
 when you're with her you don't think of anything else except 
 how damn pretty she is. Did it take you like that? You 
 get used to it in time." 
 
 "Have you got used to it?" 
 
 "Oh, more or less . . . but then, I'm not such a silly ass 
 about a pretty girl as you are. You're so damn serious. Pretty
 
 INTRUSION 59 
 
 girls don't like it. If you take 'em out you should play the 
 game." 
 
 "What is the game?" 
 
 "Didn't Bobbie show you?" 
 
 "What the devil do you mean?" , 
 
 "Oh, nothing a kiss or two . . . you know. Quite harmless, 
 I assure you. Little Bobbie Leigh can take care of herself. 
 She knows her way about very well indeed, does Bobbie I 
 Besides . . . mother's so strict. Did she tell you that?" 
 
 Allan had been stirring the cup of cocoa which Alice left 
 habitually on the hob for late comers, but he was smitten now 
 by a distaste for it. Again, in that queer fashion of the morn- 
 ing, the veils were torn asunder and life showed, beastly. Even 
 after the Army, it made Allan feel sick, because this wasn't 
 the Army. There was more, too, than that more than his 
 mere personal revulsion, for unexpectedly his thoughts had 
 moved on. ... Why, it was on Tuesday night that Jan 
 hadn't come home. ... He remembered his explanation. . . . 
 "Only a theatre and a girl and supper afterwards." Oh, it 
 couldn't be. You couldn't believe that of Roberta. All the 
 same, Allan felt suddenly stifled and oppressed; had, for one 
 moment, an insane desire to throw Alice's cocoa into Jan's 
 handsome, smiling face. Then the feeling passed. He was 
 only cold and tired, and he thought of nothing save that cocoa 
 was a simply beastly concoction and that somebody ought to 
 tell Alice of leaving it about like that. 
 
 "I'm going to bed!" he said. 
 
 "I should, old chap. And you give it up. A fast life doesn't 
 agree with you. Legs and bosoms and backs don't go with 
 your temperament, and it's a pity to spoil it. Next time you 
 make Bobbie go to something highbrow. Do her good." 
 
 "Oh, shut up," said Allan. "There isn't going to be any 
 next time." 
 
 This seemed to amuse Jan, for as he knocked out his pipe 
 against the edge of the fender, he smiled. 
 
 "My dear old chap," he said, "I wouldn't be rash, if I were 
 you." 
 
 "Oh, go to hell!" said Allan.
 
 CHAPTER SIX 
 
 1 
 
 AS the days passed it seemed to Allan that there were 
 a thousand things holding him to his resolution not 
 to see Roberta again. There were the things he knew 
 of her, that he had seen for himself, and there were the things 
 he didn't know at all, that he could only guess at, and which 
 were concerned not only with Roberta but with Jan. And, 
 more than all else, perhaps, there were Jan's witticisms. 
 
 But in the middle of February these came to an end, for 
 Jan went up to Manchester for "the firm." He did not go 
 too willingly because "it always rained in Manchester," and 
 Jan hated the rain. But on this Monday of mid-February he 
 left behind him a wretchedly wet day and the Thames in 
 flood, and it seemed improbable that even Lancashire could 
 be more depressing, as he told Guen who had come down to 
 the station, with Leader, to see him off. And Leader howled 
 so mournfully when Jan's train moved out of the station that 
 Guen could not hear what it was Jan called out to her. It 
 was probably nothing important, but it worried her in the 
 stupidly persistent way such a thing always does. 
 
 When the train had gone she coaxed Leader on to the top 
 of a bus and rode over the bridge into Richmond town, from 
 where she walked up the hill and into the Park. It had stopped 
 raining. A whispering wind was abroad and the afternoon 
 was one tender harmony of green that was light and blue that 
 was shadow. 
 
 But it was not these things that remained, later, in Guen's 
 mind, but only that one miserable little fact that she had 
 not heard what Jan had called out to her. 
 
 He was to return on the Friday, but on that evening came 
 a note to the effect that he had gone out to the coast and was 
 spending the week-end at St. Julian's. He would not be home 
 until the Monday evening. But at two o'clock on Monday, 
 
 60
 
 INTRUSION 61 
 
 as Anne Suffield was settling down for her afternoon nap, a 
 telegram arrived. It was from St. Julian's, but it was not 
 from Jan, and it said: 
 
 "Your son HI. Please come at once. Goodman." 
 
 "No answer," Anne Suffield said and stood quite still, hold- 
 ing on to the head of the Chesterfield while Alice sent the boy 
 away and closed the door. Outside it was raining. It seemed 
 to Anne Suffield that she stood there for a century with her 
 eyes on the soft-falling mist of it before she found words. 
 
 "Mr. Jan is ill at a place called St. Julian's. . . . We mustn't 
 be frightened. They don't say very ill. Get an A.B.C., will 
 you, while I get my things on?" 
 
 The Mrs. Goodman who had sent the telegram proved a 
 tall, well-dressed woman with an unpleasant trick of looking 
 at you via the bridge of her nose, and an air of resentment 
 against the things which happen to the owners of first-class 
 boarding houses. But she led the way upstairs and gave Anne 
 Suffield what information she had. It didn't amount to much. 
 Influenza and complications, following a sore throat and pain 
 in the side of which Jan had complained on the Saturday night. 
 He ought not, of course, to have gone out: there was a cold 
 wind. But he would go. ... Mrs. Goodman's whole manner 
 was a protest against people with sore throats and pains in 
 their sides insisting upon going out in the cold. Then she 
 opened a door at the top of the second flight of stairs, and at 
 the sight of the white face on the pillow Anne Suffield s heart 
 contracted. She wanted to shriek at the woman at her side, 
 "Can't you see he's dying?" 
 
 , She was sure of it: nobody could look like that and live. 
 But he was conscious: he knew her, and he was glad she had 
 come. He said that over and over again, his head on her 
 breast. He never said anything else, and soon he was beyond 
 words altogether. 
 
 The doctor came back at ten. It was useless, he said, he 
 could no nothing. Anne Suffield was glad when he went. 
 
 Towards morning Jan died.
 
 62 INTRUSION 
 
 His mother sat there all through the dawn, never moving. 
 The sound of the sea came up insistent and sad, as though its 
 heart was broken too. And presently, when the post office 
 opened, she went out and sent a telegram: 
 
 "Dear Jan died last night. Mother." 
 
 The telegram, to John Suffield, was like a physical blow. He 
 had not, that morning, gone up to the office, but had waited 
 for news. When it came he was stunned. Allan had already 
 left for town, and it fell to Guen to accompany her father to 
 St. Julian's. Alice, weeping and distracted, packed a handbag 
 for them, and Leader sat disconsolately by it in the hall, as 
 though he wondered why all forsook him and fled. He knew 
 the signs. 
 
 It was a bright but showery morning, with fine rain falling 
 at intervals like a film before the sun and blurring all the land. 
 Up the quiet suburban road Jan would never again come 
 walking, nor Leader run, barking, at his side. A thought not 
 so much lacerating as queer. You couldn't, somehow, imagine 
 Jan dead. Despite the "murmuring" heart the Army doctors 
 had given him, he had never been ill in his life. It was absurd 
 he should have died in two days snuffed out, like a candle in 
 the wind. But on the station she was stricken to the heart by 
 the sudden memory that came to her of Jan shouting from a 
 moving train, something she could not hear. 
 
 They caught a fast train at Euston which landed them at 
 St. Julian's about half-past three. Anne Suffield was waiting 
 for them at the station. Her white face and frozen air stabbed 
 at Guen's heart, but, too, they stirred her to effort. Her very 
 years protected her, in a measure, from feeling this thing as 
 her mother and father felt it, for whom there was none of the 
 resilience that was youth. Youth, for Anne and John Suffield, 
 had died with Jan. They would bury it presently in his grave 
 and go on their way without it. 
 
 They left things, now that Guen had come, to her; and 
 with a sense of relief she found that they would be able to 
 return on the morrow, and Jan would go with them, very 
 still and perfectly quiet. It was like a cold hand squeezing at
 
 INTRUSION 63 
 
 your heart to think of it. The crowded train and the long, 
 polished coffin, with his name on it. . . . Arthur Jannison 
 Suffield. 
 
 Half an hour after her arrival Guen interviewed Mrs. Good- 
 man in her cold, prim drawing-room that looked out to sea 
 and smelt of furniture polish. Guen felt that good temper 
 was never a strong point with Mrs. Goodman, and she saw 
 that just now what there was of it was being unduly tried. 
 Perhaps her resentment was natural. People who keep board- 
 ing-houses do not care for other people to come and die in 
 them. Luckily, as she said to Guen, she had just then but 
 few visitors, because people didn't like a corpse in the house, 
 and were scared of this influenza at least the doctors called 
 it influenza, but Mrs. Goodman reserved her opinion on the 
 matter. Guen felt she was expected to apologise for Jan 
 and for death. Between them, Mrs. Goodman, no doubt about 
 it, was seriously inconvenienced. She seemed to have charged 
 something for that in her bill though it was not that which 
 staggered Guen, but the fact that the bill was made out for 
 two people. 
 
 "I don't understand . . ." she began. 
 
 "Mrs. Suffield left on Sunday morning, first thing, before 
 Mr. Suffield was taken ill. She had a telegram over-night." 
 
 "Mrs. Suffield?" 
 
 Guen's face was blank. 
 
 "Mr. Suffield was here with his wife, so I understood. . . ." 
 
 Guen made a superhuman effort and contrived to smile. 
 
 "Oh, yes ... of course ... I had forgotten. ..." 
 
 She paid the double bill, and while the woman receipted it 
 she struggled to regain composure. The mask of a cold, 
 unmeaning smile slipped over the pink and brown of her face, 
 but the beating of her heart was a fierce pain. v 
 
 "Would you mind telling me," she said, as she took the 
 receipt and folded it up, "if you have mentioned Mrs. Suffield's 
 visit to my parents." 
 
 Mrs. Goodman, miraculously, had not. 
 
 "Then I should be obliged," Guen said, "if you would not. 
 It might distress them, just now. You see ... the marriage 
 
 . was secret. . . ."
 
 64 INTRUSION 
 
 "Very well, as you please, of course." Mrs. Goodman's 
 voice was cold with suspicion and her angry resentment. Guen 
 caught her gaze and held it. 
 
 "Thank you very much," she said. 
 
 When the woman had gone she sat down in a chair by the 
 window and let the meaning of what she had said drift into 
 her mind. It surprised her to find that the thing which really 
 disturbed her was not this knowledge that had come to her, 
 but the fear it should reach her mother. Allan and she 
 between them must see to it that it never did, because she would 
 mind so much; she wouldn't understand. With the impudence 
 of omniscient youth Guen was positive about that. Her mind 
 worked quickly: Allan and she, between them, must save her 
 from the knowledge. There would be Jan's papers and cor- 
 respondence for which they must make themselves responsible. 
 It could be done. There was no real danger save that 
 woman's tongue. . . . 
 
 She sat up and snatched at a paper as a timid knock came at 
 the door. "Come in," she called softly. 
 
 The girl who had brought them tea came in and stood just 
 inside the door. Guen had noticed her then as an under-sized, 
 under-nourished girl of less than twenty, and saw now that 
 she had large pansy-blue eyes in a thin white face, and that her 
 hair, which should have been prettily picturesque, was merely 
 untidy. She was desperately unattractive even to a feminine 
 eye but the pansy eyes, like the untidy hair, ought to have 
 been pretty. 
 
 "If you please, miss, I wanted to give you this. . . ." 
 
 She held out her hand its fingers clenched tightly over 
 whatever it was she held. 
 
 "What is it?" said Guen, "something I've dropped?" 
 
 "No, Miss. . . . Something I found . . . after Mrs. Suffield 
 left." 
 
 The girl opened her hand and dropped into Guen's a gold 
 ring set with one large ruby. "But how do you know," she 
 asked, "that this belonged to ... Mrs. Suffield?" 
 
 The girl had noticed her wearing it. Besides, she'd left it 
 about before. She used to take it off when she washed her 
 hands. . . . 
 
 Guen turned the ring over. It was certainly the sort of 
 thing you'd notice. You'd notice, too, what was written inside
 
 INTRUSION 65 
 
 it: Diana Wells. Keith Barrington Hill. May 20th, 1913. 
 To leave a compromising thing like that about! 
 
 Guen sat there turning it over in her hands. She was sud- 
 denly very tired and her head ached. Twilight was stealing 
 into the room: outside an amber sunset crept over the sand- 
 hills: the long grasses waved back, showing their silvery sides. 
 The girl turned to go, dabbing at her eyes with her apron. 
 "I can't bear to think he's dead," she said. "He was so kind 
 to me." 
 
 "We used to think he was kind to everybody," Guen told her. 
 
 When the girl had gone she sat there, quite still, staring 
 through the window. Beyond it the land was dim. Beneath 
 the paling yellow gleam that was the sunset the silver grasses 
 waved there on the sandhills. The moon was up, chill and 
 small, in a cold, ^grey sky, painted with that one faint smear 
 of yellow, towards which the restless sea yearned, sighing. The 
 world had shrunk to a microcosm. Everything in it had grown 
 small. Guen herself felt small and utterly unimportant. 
 The mighty spectacle of Death dwarfed everything else. 
 
 At dinner the eyes of the little maid to whom Jan had been 
 kind were red. She looked as though at any moment she 
 would break down and cry into their soup or onto their fish. 
 But Anne Suffield did not see her. She saw nothing but a 
 white face that had death in it. 
 
 There were things to do, and later Guen went into the town 
 to do them. It was ten o'clock when she returned and went in 
 to say good-night. Her father and mother were in bed, but 
 not asleep. Side by side they lay there straight and silent, 
 thinking their own thoughts as they must have done all those 
 years ago before Jan or Pen or any of them were born. She 
 stooped over and kissed them. Nobody spoke, save, just as 
 Guen turned to go, her mother. "Guen, leave the door a little 
 open. . . ." 
 
 It was what she had said when they were all little and she 
 was afraid they might want her in the night.
 
 CHAPTER SEVEN 
 
 THE first thing to do was to tell Allan. Guen saw that: 
 saw, too, that nobody else must know. Not even A.G. 
 Jan was dead and you couldn't go about repeating that 
 story: the idea was revolting. So Allan was told and had 
 shown no surprise at all. Guen had expected surprise, cer- 
 tainly; had looked for everything, anything, but this queer 
 little air of knowledge, detached, cynical. 
 
 For Allan had said nothing to Guen nothing to anybody 
 of that suspicion which a few weeks before had shot up in his 
 mind like a rocket and died down; instantly, perhaps, but 
 reeking and objectionable. Now, under the spur of Guen's 
 information, it rose again, and with it came the memory of 
 things that years ago men at the office had said to the callow 
 youth he had then been; at which he had reddened and 
 stammered. They must have found him amusing, those middle- 
 aged men, with wives and families and few ideals and fewer 
 illusions, all hinting at their "pasts" and other men's "pres- 
 ents." To practically all of them women were no more than 
 confectionery upon which they glutted their appetites or fed 
 their emotions. Even before the war, though he still cowered 
 inwardly beneath their phrases, beneath their sex jokes and 
 their insistence upon the "beastliness" of life, Allan had 
 learned not to show it. It was an attitude that life in the Army 
 had done much to strengthen. The Army had been informative; 
 the education it gave you in at least one direction was cer- 
 tainly liberal. Among the many things it had taught Allan 
 was the fact that he belonged to a tiny minority, because here, 
 at twenty-six, he was still without sexual experience. His, 
 flag of personal chastity flew still at high mast. It waved there, 
 on that evening of Guen's return, in a stiff breeze, so that 
 he saw it, somehow, for the first time, as a thing belonging 
 to and immediately concerned with himself. For the first time, 
 
 66
 
 INTRUSION 67 
 
 too, he saw that chastity was a thing he expected that he 
 took for granted not of himself alone, but of others for whom 
 he had affection and respect. He had never before thought 
 about it in this way definitely, as a hard, strong line, of 
 conduct, a green path in a muddy country. He could not 
 bear to have thought of women in the same way some of the 
 men in his battalion had done; his mother, Guen, Madeleine, 
 had stood there as an eternal bulwark, and somehow he had 
 expected that they stood there also for Jan. And they hadn't. 
 In that way they simply hadn't been there at all 
 
 On the morning following Jan's funeral there were two 
 letters addressed to him, one from the owner of the ring in 
 Guen's keeping and the other from Roberta. The latter Allan 
 read hastily, then tore it in half and flung it down into the 
 centre of the fire. "Nothing important," he said to Guen, 
 thankful they were breakfasting alone. Nothing important! 
 But from the clean surface of the opposite wall what she had 
 written stared relentlessly back at him: 
 
 "/ waited over an hour at Piccadilly last night and you 
 never came. I'm so miserable. Please tell me if I've offended 
 you. Yours always, Bobbie." 
 
 There was a good deal more of Mrs. Hill's letter, but it 
 affected him differently. None of its sentences wrote them- 
 selves on the wall. . . . They were written in a neat, educated 
 hand and signed "Di," and, no two ways about it, "Di" had 
 given herself away altogether. She had even written on paper 
 bearing an embossed address somewhere in Parson's Green 
 out Fulham way. They wanted, both of them, not to read it; 
 but they had, somehow, to find out enough. They found 
 more than enough, though they tried not to look at it too 
 hard. There was something cruel and indecent in this cold 
 calculated reading of a "love-letter" written to a man now 
 cold in his grave. But it had to be done: here and now the 
 thing had to be scotched. There must never be the faintest 
 chance that this woman would write again. . . . The points 
 Allan and Guen were after now were all there: she had
 
 68 INTRUSION 
 
 missed none of them. Evidently letter-writing was a form of 
 self-expression with her: she was one of those people who, 
 pen in hand, let themselves "go." Guen guessed that her 
 letters, at times, had probably bored Jan, for neither she nor 
 Allan believed that Jan had taken this affair as seriously as all 
 that. It had none of the saving grace of a grande passion. 
 
 Mrs. Hill wrote that she had reached home before K.B., 
 after all, thank the Lord. "K.B.," of course, as you'd guessed 
 from the ring, was her husband, Keith Barrington Hill; she 
 wrote his name out in full every now and then, as though that 
 had point, as though they had used it, she and Jan, as a joke 
 between them. K.B., it seemed, not yet demobilised, had come 
 home unexpectedly on leave, and somebody it was not clear 
 who had telegraphed the imminence of his arrival. Mrs. 
 Hill's head, so she said, had ached all the way home with 
 thinking of excuses if he had got there first; and when she 
 arrived it ached a good deal more because she found she had 
 lost her ring ("the badge of all my tribe," she called it) and 
 "Keith Barrington" had an observant eye and would notice. 
 That, apparently, was still troubling her peace, though K.B. 
 ' yet hadn't noticed. Her instructions for its return, if Jan 
 had found it, were explicit and did not make pretty reading. 
 (Allan skipped.) She remembered the sore throat and pain 
 in his side and hoped it was better. The rest of the letter 
 went unread: neither Allan, nor Guen presently, had stomach 
 for it. Over an indecent business one could, if one cared, be 
 tolerably decent. Or less blatantly indecent, perhaps. . . . 
 
 Guen, too, shirked the final page. She had read enough. 
 Here, as far as this, was her whole case K.B.'s, too, if ever 
 he got hold of it. But he wouldn't! They she and Allan ; 
 were going to make very sure of that. 
 
 "What a fool!" said Allan. 
 
 "For having loved Jan?" 
 
 "Love!" said Allan. 
 
 "You can't judge," Guen said. "I mean, you've no right 
 to judge ! None of us has !" 
 
 "Oh, I know. One tries not. But it makes me sick. . . . The 
 world's full of this beastliness. Love is a euphemism. . . . 
 Are you going to see this Mrs. Hill?" 
 
 "I suppose I must. God knows what I shall find to say to 
 her. I wish I'd never known. . . I'd rather never have known."
 
 INTRUSION 69 
 
 "Not you!" said Allan. "You're one of those people who'd 
 always rather know everything. So am I though I've only 
 just found it out. There are some things I'd give my head 
 to know for certain." 
 
 But he wouldn't. There were some things he would never 
 know. Because Jan was dead and these things that he wanted 
 most to know were mixed up with him and Roberta. 
 
 Roberta! He wouldn't think of her. He wouldn't go near 
 her. He hadn't seen her since that night at the theatre. She 
 might go to the devil. And yet those words in her untidy 
 handwriting. He saw them yet. You never came. I'm so 
 miserable. . . . 
 
 He pushed back his chair and got up. He would be late. 
 Not that it mattered. Chiefs and colleagues were kind at times 
 like these almost as if they expected you to be late; as if 
 they would be surprised if you came early. 
 
 Guen did not find courage enough for the journey to Parson's 
 Green until several days later, and by then she and Allan 
 had discovered something else that this affair with Diana 
 Hill was not the only one with which Jan had enlivened his 
 days. There was nothing to tell how much he had felt or 
 if he had felt anything at all. The feeling, it seemed, had 
 always been on the side of the women. They wondered, Allan 
 and Guen, how Jan had managed so neatly to steer clear of 
 tragedy; there was no trace of it in any of the letters they 
 found and there were a good many of them. Was it that 
 the feeling didn't go deep: that, for the girls, as for Jan, these 
 affairs were just "larks," something you indulged in and were 
 never sorry or regretful about afterwards? There were women, 
 they knew, who thought that "larks" of this sort connoted 
 freedom. 
 
 Yet the thought of the interview was distressing. She felt 
 instinctively that it was going to be exactly the sort of thing 
 she could not bear. Some people turned sick and faint if they 
 looked upon physical wounds, but to Guen it was always the 
 moral hurt that did the harm: the ordeal of looking on at 
 the brutal murder of someone's self-respect, of courage, 
 honesty and truth. At school once a girl had been expelled
 
 70 INTRUSION 
 
 for theft: the code of the head mistress demanded that she 
 be dragged from room to room, made to stand in front of 
 each class while a detailed charge was read out against her. 
 The culprit had not wept nor hidden her face: her attitude 
 was referred to as "brazen," and yet to Guen it was as if she 
 had withered, there before her eyes. The girl who sat next to 
 Guen had begun to cry, and Guen always remembered how she 
 had envied her. So much nicer to be able to cry than to 
 try to suppress this miserable feeling in the pit of your stomach 
 that warned you that if you didn't get out into the fresh air 
 you'd make a dreadful exhibition of yourself. 
 
 It was a weakness which had grown up with her a tendency 
 to shirk not the physically abhorrent, but the thing that was 
 morally distasteful, that cut at life's essential dignity and 
 decency. Yet, remembering her mother, she would not shirk 
 this time. She set out for the address in Parson's Green given 
 on Diana Hill's embossed note-paper, but as she went the 
 sombre beauty of the February afternoon, with its pageant of 
 pale colour in the sky drawing out already to the west, seemed 
 but to emphasise the ugliness of the scene to which she was 
 going, so that only her strong sense of its absolute necessity 
 drove her on. They had, somehow, to silence Mrs. Hill. 
 
 Mrs. Hill's house was called "The Elms" probably because 
 there were no elms within half a mile of it, but only acacia 
 trees in a neatly-kept front garden. A maid showed Guen 
 into a pink-and-white room that overlooked another garden, 
 whose peace was marred by the passing of trains at the bottom, 
 and presently a tall, dark girl in a lavender frock came in. She 
 was very pale, but you felt that ordinarily her colour was deep 
 and vivid like the heart of a damask rose. She wasn't cordial, 
 yet somehow at the sight of her Guen's courage revived. 
 Aloofly her pride came up and reinforced it. She introduced 
 herself. Mrs. Hill's face seemed to say that she had heard of 
 Guen (as though Jan had boasted of his "clever" sister) ; it 
 said, too, that she found Guen like most clever women not 
 much to look at, and that black was the last colour she ought 
 to have worn. 
 
 It was, as Guen had known it would be, an impossible 
 interview. The air was electric with the hostility of this dark, 
 handsome woman whose ring and letter Guen carried in her 
 handbag. Every second the hostility grew thickened and
 
 INTRUSION 71 
 
 deepened, until it was suffocating. And Guen could find 
 nothing to say: was utterly bereft of all ideas, all thought, 
 save that it was an offence she should be there at all; an 
 outrage that she had those things in her bag and an indecency 
 that she must say what she had come to say. Had she 
 invented this situation in a novel she would have known how 
 to handle it; faced with the reality in this astounding fashion 
 she could do nothing with it at all. Out of the intolerable 
 *,juiet came the sound of Mrs. Hill's voice quivering with pride 
 and enmity, and the sound of her own, saying strange things 
 you didn't believe true, that were like the nails they had put 
 in Jan's coffin, that hurt somehow in the same dreadful fashion. 
 And when they stopped Mrs. Hill sat down. She sat down 
 like a log and she said nothing for what seemed an eternity. . . . 
 She sat there tearing up the letter Guen had handed her back, 
 looking as if she were tearing up some little bit of herself. Her 
 face was twisted with misery; its youth had gone, its very 
 skin seemed dry and shrunken. The house was very quiet as 
 she rose and threw the torn-up letter into the fire. The white 
 flames leapt at the pieces, drawing them in, so that almost 
 immediately nothing at all remained of Diana Hill's attempt 
 at self-expression save the few charred scraps of paper that 
 lay on the top of her bright wood fire. It had been singularly 
 unsuccessful. 
 
 To Guen it was all dreadful and revolting and completely 
 iinbearable. She rose, stricken with the need to escape. 
 
 And then, before she could get out of the room, there came 
 a ring at the front door: a ring that sent a sudden mask of 
 carefulness slipping over the twisted misery of Diana Hill's 
 face, veiling even the eyes and the tiny treacherous nerves at 
 the corners of the mouth. It had the facility of the thing that 
 has become a habit. This affair with Jan may not have been 
 a lark: but it had carried deception in its train. It had made 
 life nasty. 
 
 Out there in the hall a murmur of words . . . indistinct, 
 yet with a hideous clarity. To Guen it was as if the girl who 
 had opened the door was purposely delaying, as though giving 
 her mistress time to gather her forces, to realise whom it was 
 she was letting in. But it was as if the man said no more and 
 no less than this: "Don't talk to me. You're a woman and 
 women hold together." She wondered if it was going on for
 
 72 INTRUSION 
 
 ever. She sat there staring at the door, expecting it to open. 
 Her marvellous calm had gone to pieces: she wanted to shriek, 
 and all the time she was wondering, with some detached corner 
 of her brain, what fool first thought of putting brass fittings 
 on a white-painted door. 
 
 In that brief fraction of time the details of Diana Hill's 
 pink drawing-room stamped themselves for ever upon the 
 tablets of Guen's mind. Months after she saw them as clearly 
 as she saw them then. The hideous modern furniture, the 
 polished fender of brass, the pink tiles, the white muslin 
 curtains, draped back and fluted at the edges, the small square 
 garden beyond, the neat patterned wall-paper hung with 
 pictures that didn't matter; the fern in its brass stand (how 
 fond people were of something to polish!), the bowl of narcissi 
 in the window, smelling, as Alice would have said, as if you 
 were going to your own funeral and, in the midst, Diana 
 Hill's face, white and a little disgusting, because though she 
 had readjusted the mask she did not seem able to prevent her 
 fright from peeping out at the eyes and mouth. 
 
 Then the door opened and a thick-set man in khaki came 
 into the room. Self-possession descended upon Guen as a 
 mantle. She flashed Diana Hill a look which though it said, 
 "Introduce me, please 1" said a good deal more than that. 
 It said, "Oh, play up! For heaven's sake play up!" 
 
 Mrs. Hill "played up." She "played up" desperately, the 
 cracks in the mask no longer visible. 
 
 "Hallo, K.B.," she said. Her tone was so marvellously 
 indifferent you knew she had done this sort of thing before. 
 "This is Miss Brown. She called to return my purse." 
 
 "That's very kind of you, Miss . . . Brown." "K.B." held 
 out his hand, but his voice was hostile, thick with suspicion of 
 her, his wife and the universe. "But I didn't know it was her 
 purse my wife had lost." 
 
 You saw her true colour then. It came up, red, like a rose, 
 over cheek and neck, tearing its way through the white mask 
 that impeded it. 
 
 "Oh, the ring," she said. "I found that behind the bath 
 this morning. I must really be more careful." 
 
 K.B. looked at her. 
 
 "You must," he said quietly. 
 
 She flinched at that, as though the lash in the quiet words
 
 INTRUSION 73 
 
 got home. The slash it made in the mask of carefulness 
 showed livid, and from it deadly fear reached out and stabbed 
 Guen's precarious calm to the heart. Once again she had a 
 furious longing to escape, to get away from this man's quiet 
 eyes and hostile voice. How much did he suspect? How 
 much did he know? She felt that once she got outside she 
 would run. 
 
 "Let me see you out, Miss Brown." 
 
 He held the door open, his eyes upon her face, so that she 
 did not dare look round. She walked past him into the hall, 
 racking her brain to think of something that should detain 
 him at the door long enough to give the woman in there in the 
 drawing-room time to pull herself together. But she could 
 think of nothing at all, save that his lawn was in excellent con- 
 dition and the winter jasmine in bloom which he could quite 
 well see for himself. He wasn't grateful for what she said, 
 and interested neither in it nor in her. As he stood there 
 holding open the door for her his whole manner and bearing 
 said, as his voice in the hall had done, "You're a woman . . . 
 and women hold together. And I wish you'd take yourself off." 
 
 She did. She walked down to the gate, which she carefully 
 latched; smiled, and saw the door of "The Elms" shut to. 
 A few steps and she was out of sight and out of hearing. She 
 could run if she liked. 
 
 But she didn't run. She walked out into the high-road 
 (where there were placards announcing a Labour victory for 
 West Ley ton) and climbed on to a bus. She was cold and her 
 hands were trembling so that she could scarcely find the 
 coppers- for her fare. Horror and disgust swept over her in 
 waves; she felt physically unclean as, if she would never get 
 rid of the atmosphere of that unspeakable household, where 
 deceit lurked and suspicion and intrigue. How much did that 
 man know? Nothing. He couldn't possibly know, and what 
 he suspected didn't matter. He had no proof. They were 
 safe her mother, her father; and Jan in his grave. There 
 would be no scandal. Her unbearable afternoon had justified 
 itself. But she was so tired she could have cried, and she hated 
 herself because she minded so much that this should have 
 happened to her. 
 
 At home, her mother sat by the fire in an unlighted room. 
 She had evidently been sewing, for as Guen moved across the
 
 74 INTRUSION 
 
 room she stumbled over a reel of cotton and sent it rolling 
 noisily on to the polished floor that skirted the carpet. But 
 Anne Suffield was not sewing now; her hands, idle and folded, 
 rested in her lap. Guen slipped down at her feet, and put 
 her head on her mother's knee. 
 
 "I'm so tired!" she said. She was more than tired: she 
 was faint with nausea and disgust: her nerves felt frayed. 
 She wanted to shriek. 
 
 Anne Suffield said nothing. Her idle hands did not move; 
 Just remained there, cool, like flowers, beneath Guen's hot 
 cheeks and lips, and suddenly a spasm of anger ran through her 
 because her mother did not care for her or for Allan or for 
 Pen or for anyone as she had cared for Jan. Guen turned 
 in her modernity and rebelled. It wasn't fair: parents ought 
 to love their children equally; it wasn't right that her mother 
 should have loved Jan best that she should still love him best. 
 But she always would: you couldn't alter or change her. 
 She'd love him that way even if she knew what Guen and 
 Allan knew. But she never would. It was on that thought 
 Guen's anger trickled out like sand through an hour-glass 
 and was spent. She was only infinitely tired and weary, and 
 her head ached unbearably. Long sobs shook her body; tears 
 flowed thickly upon the cool hands folded like flowers beneath 
 her face. They moved, hovered for a second about her rough 
 head and over her ears, and were still. 
 
 "Ssh ... s ... sh," said Anne Suffield, as though she were 
 soothing a child. "S ... sh ... s ... sh ..." and presently, 
 "Why do you cry?" 
 
 Guen raised her head and stared at the fire. She wanted to 
 say : "Because I'm tired and because my head aches and because 
 you sit here in the dark and forget us all." But she said 
 nothing, only got up and sat in a chair, staring down into the 
 fire until presently her father came in from the city. She rose 
 then and escaped. When Allan came in she encountered him 
 in the hall. 
 
 "Come up to my room," she said, " I want to speak to you." 
 
 He gave her one quick look and put down his stick and got 
 out of his coat 
 
 "It's all right," she said. "Horrible but all right. . . . 
 We can't talk about it here." 
 
 They went upstairs.
 
 INTRUSION 75 
 
 At dinner that night Allan exerted himself to talk to his 
 mother. . . . They had saved her from a painful piece of 
 knowledge, he and Guen between them: what they had to do 
 now all of them was to make things up to her; to be, 
 between them, so bright and entertaining that she didn't notice 
 the gap quite so much. She was very brave; when her eye 
 caught his she smiled: she was attentive, saw that your plate 
 was replenished. But she was very pale and her eyes appeared 
 to have slipped farther back into her head. Her face, like a 
 fading flower, had shut up. Her dark, soft hair still showed 
 scarcely a thread of grey; but in some strange subtle fashion 
 she looked older. Allan understood what Guen had known 
 that night at St. Julian's that the last remnant of Anne 
 Suffield's youth had died with Jan. She had carried it about 
 with her so long it was strange, as yet, to see her without it. 
 You couldn't believe that in one short week she had become 
 definitely middle-aged. 
 
 Allan, as he looked at her, felt queerly old and protective. 
 It seemed to him that his love for his mother had suffered some 
 deep and rare change, so that now, for the first time, it demanded 
 something of him effort or thought or vigilance. It no longer 
 just accepted. Instead of absorbing, it gave out, strove and 
 yearned and divined. He had a sense he had never experienced 
 before of being of use. The knowledge, strangely, was like a 
 strong wind blowing through his soul, bracing him to effort 
 and purpose. 
 
 So, too, did Caryl's swift smile across the table. It was to 
 Allan as though she answered his thought, as though, too, she 
 had crystallised her grief and was able to see down through its 
 depths to the heart of life. Allan, smiling back, saw that brief 
 parting and widening of Caryl's red mouth as a thing beautiful 
 and brave, and memorable as the glimpse of a bird flying low 
 between the dark and the light. 
 
 But Caryl was not smiling when, after dinner, she took Allan 
 on one side and asked him what was wrong with Guen. Allan 
 said he thought she had had a rather unpleasant afternoon. 
 
 "Unpleasant!" said Caryl. "She looks as though she's seen 
 something nasty a street accident or something like that and 
 it's making her violently sick inside."
 
 76 INTRUSION 
 
 Anne Suffield coming in just then said Guen had gone 
 upstairs to work. 
 
 "Oh, Lord!" said Caryl, as though she thought something 
 ought to be done about it. "I thought the new book was to 
 be pleasant?" 
 
 "Why shouldn't it be?" 
 
 "Oh, no reason," said Caryl. But the look she gave Allan 
 said quite plainly that she didn't believe you could write 
 anything pleasant while you felt violently sick somewhere 
 inside. When life made you retch it wasn't a pen you wanted 
 in your hand. That, Caryl thought, was where the writers 
 of to-day made their mistake. They would write about life 
 just when life was making them sick, and as if that weren't 
 enough they called the result Realism. Literature was a 
 thoroughly depressing subject an unending procession of 
 Shropshire Lads and Judes the Obscure and Widows in Bye- 
 Streets just as though nothing pleasant had ever happened 
 to anybody at all, as though war and death and misery were 
 all that life had to offer you. And it wasn't, it wasn't. . . . 
 Even with her mother's face, shut like a flower, before her and 
 with Leader's mournful, questioning eyes, she knew it wasn't. 
 Life was something far more than the mere things which hap- 
 pen to you. Its springs went deep down, its meaning and 
 Caryl did not doubt it had a meaning must be sought inside 
 yourself. She had an awkward wayward genius for seeing life 
 as a boon whatever it did to you: but even Caryl knew that 
 there were times when she ought to have the decency to forget 
 it. Yet even to-night, over some trigonometry problem that 
 was eluding solution, the old thought was running through her 
 brain. "I don't want to miss anything that's coming to me. 
 I'll never be sorry whatever it is!" Once she had said some- 
 thing like that to Jan, and Jan had laughed. "Oh, you!" he 
 said. "Good Lord, yes. You'd think it a privilege to break 
 a front tooth." 
 
 The recollection, somehow, and the wound that it made, 
 drew her nearer to life. Her heart melted in passionate pity 
 because death, like a gigantic broom, had swept Jan out of the 
 house of life, so that nothing that happened in it mattered to 
 him any longer. He was dead and missing everything; the 
 fierce, exquisite things of joy and pain, the look of the cool, 
 dark night, the ecstasy of the new days that were moving out
 
 INTRUSION 77 
 
 in long procession over the hill of the future. Nothing ever 
 again would happen to Jan. He had passed on out of reach, 
 and life, moved neither to pity nor regret, swung by, implacable. 
 And Caryl fighting down the sobs that climbed up in her 
 throat sat there and watched it
 
 CHAPTER EIGHT 
 
 THEY had silenced Mrs. Hill: but they had not silenced 
 Roberta. Her letters went on. Not that Guen realised 
 whom they were from. She had left the perusal of 
 Jan's correspondence to Allan, and he did not tell her. Always 
 he read Roberta's letters and tore them up; always he threw at 
 Guen the same formula: "Nothing important." Yet some- 
 thing about the handwriting struck her as familiar. 
 
 And then she found out why. Hunting for brown paper, 
 she came across the piece Roberta had used when returning 
 Guen's clothes: "Miss Suffield, Mount Calm, Teddington." 
 Roberta's handwriting. There it was the same ugly capitals, 
 the same indecision about the "e" and the "i" in Suffield. 
 She wondered why Allan should have made such a secret of it. 
 Why shouldn't he have told her that Jan had kept that up? 
 Jan wouldn't forget a face as pretty as Roberta's. Besides, 
 what did it matter now how much or how little he had 
 "kept it up"? It never occurred to her that Allan, too, had 
 "kept it up" (even as little as he had) ; but, for all that, she 
 found herself worrying at intervals during the day how the 
 subject might be broached that evening when Allan came home 
 to dinner or whether it were best not broached at all. 
 
 But Allan did not come home that evening to dinner. He 
 wired that business detained him. The "business," as it hap- 
 pened, took him to Highgate found him knocking, with a 
 beating heart, at Number two-hundred-and-two Manningtree 
 Avenue. 
 
 He had fought all day against his sudden decision to see 
 Roberta. Why shouldn't he write? The only thing that mat- 
 tered was that her notes to Jan should cease that she should 
 
 78
 
 INTRUSION 79 
 
 know that Jan's need for her letters, if it had ever existed 
 at all, existed no longer. 
 
 But was that all? Allan knew that, somehow, it wasn't, 
 that he wanted to see her again; wanted to see how she took 
 this news of Jan's death. Something brutal and savage within 
 him urged him to confront her with it. He wanted to know 
 just how much there had been between Roberta and Jan, and 
 had an idea that just by seeing how she took it he would 
 know all there was to know. And he had to know whether 
 Jan had been her lover or not ! 
 
 It was extraordinary that he should care like that. He told 
 himself that but for the arrival of her notes to Jan (Jan who 
 was dead and cold in his grave) he would have "got over 
 it" whatever "it" was. He would certainly not have called 
 it "love." But she had for him some sort of deep physical 
 attraction that had been disturbing, partly because he had 
 never experienced it before and partly because, apart from her 
 youth and vigour and sheer animal spirits, she bored him to 
 death. But the things that attracted him were irresistible: 
 he could not imagine Roberta tired or worried or ill. She did 
 not belong to the tiny minority who hurl themselves against 
 life as against a brick wall, and Allan did. Life for her was a 
 stream in which she dabbled her feet, and the very look of her 
 there, strolling lazily, barefoot, was somehow unspeakably 
 delightful. That, perhaps, was the secret of it. 
 
 Allan had never known anybody who infected him with that 
 sense of pleasure, of light-heartedness. Certainly Madeleine 
 had never done anything of the sort. Their friendship had 
 always, in a sense, "taken it out of them." They could infect 
 each other with their moods, with their despondencies and 
 despairs. They hated the same things about life and with the 
 same intensity; sought for life's meaning with the same per- 
 sistency and failed always to find it. They found, indeed, 
 nothing but facts. And from facts you were curiously defence- 
 less. If you couldn't bear them you shut yourself away from 
 them, as Maurice Linton had done. Maurice had been afraid 
 of facts, and facts eventually had killed him. But Roberta 
 never looked at facts more than she could help: certainly she 
 never allowed them to worry her. However it was, Allan was 
 beyond question intrigued by her trick of seeing a brick wall 
 as a summer stream. It was an amiable trick, though other
 
 8o INTRUSION. 
 
 girls had had it beside Roberta: but unfortunately Roberta was 
 the first girl Allan had ever really looked at. And because he 
 was tired and disheartened he was in the mood to find her and 
 her trick absurdly attractive on the principle that one admires 
 all the things one has not and is not. The mood did not include 
 a vision of the other moods when the people who persist in 
 regarding a brick wall as a stream are apt to get on your nerves; 
 nor realisation of the fact that Roberta's complete lack of 
 imagination was the real attraction to one who had been born 
 with to much. 
 
 There remained the towing-path incident with that boy 
 Ancell and this friendship with Jan. The Ancell incident, of 
 itself, might well be nothing: but as evidence of Character it 
 was damning. The rigid, austere Puritan that was buried 
 beneath the opulence of Allan's temperament rose up in sternest 
 disapproval. But, for all that, there was something that opposed 
 the harsh judgment and the stern Puritan who delivered it, as 
 though it understood that Roberta "picked up" her male 
 acquaintances not because she was wicked, but because she was 
 a fool. The windows of her mind opened to one side only of 
 life: she did not know that the other windows had any view 
 at all. . . . 
 
 On the whole, it seemed that the incident of the towing- 
 path and the things it connoted counted with Allan for but 
 little. The things which disturbed him were all mixed up with 
 Jan, and it was they that had sent him knocking at Roberta's 
 door. That much Allan would have acknowledged. What he 
 would not have acknowledged was the longing to see her again. 
 .Yet that, really, was what it came down to. 
 
 The door of two-hundred-and-two was opened presently by a 
 stout woman who wore, with other things, a coloured apron and 
 an air of surprise, as though Allan was not at all the person 
 she had expected to find on her doorstep. She had Roberta's 
 hazel eyes, and beneath the flush of the over-stout woman some 
 hint of Roberta's fine skin was perceptible. But somehow, 
 even here in inaction she gave you the sense that she was in a 
 terrific hurry. To Allan it seemed ridiculous in a person of 
 her bulk.
 
 INTRUSION 8 1 
 
 "Miss Leigh," he said. "Is she at home?" 
 
 "Come in," said the woman, and shut the door after Allan 
 with that devastating air of having not a moment to lose. 
 Allan wiped his boots, somewhat unnecessarily, for the streets 
 were white and dry, while the woman went to a descending 
 staircase and called down it: 
 
 "Berta ! Here's someone to see you." 
 
 Her voice was a contradiction of her size. It was querulous 
 and thin, as though begging you to believe that her corpulence 
 was not natural, but an outrageous accident which had over- 
 taken her. Before Allan could recover from the surprise of it 
 its owner precipitated him into the front room and with 
 ridiculous speed produced a light. 
 
 "My daughter's been washing her hair, so you mustn't mind 
 if she keeps you waiting a bit. What name is it, sir?" 
 
 "Sumeld!" said Allan. 
 
 Mrs. Leigh had heard the name. Yes, of course, the gentle- 
 man from Teddington. Roberta had often talked of him, and 
 she was so grateful to Miss Sumeld for lending Roberta a 
 change that wet day in October, wasn't it? 
 
 "Oh . . . don't mention it!" said Allan, who was nervous 
 and inattentive, and only realised that Mrs. Leigh was in a 
 hurry and that he (or his family) was being thanked for some- 
 thing. 
 
 "I'll go and hurry her up." 
 
 That, you felt, was her mission in life to hurry people up! 
 On this occasion, at least, Allan thought it was a mission which 
 should be encouraged. 
 
 "If you would, please," he said, wanting fervently to get 
 the interview over and be gone. 
 
 Mrs. Leigh went out with the air of one whose motto in 
 life is "No time to be lost and the devil take the hindmost." 
 Even in the midst of his sudden and desperate shyness Allan 
 wanted to laugh: he felt very tired, as if she had robbed him 
 of his own share of energy. He sat there on the edge of a 
 chair and stared about the room, not seeing much, save that 
 it was ugly and that there was no fire in the grate. It seemed 
 ages before Roberta came in. 
 
 He awoke to a sense of her standing in the doorway with a 
 loose mane of hair about her face, out of which, as her eyes 
 dwelt upon him, some of the brightness faded.
 
 32 INTRUSION 
 
 "Oh . . ." she began. "It's you. . . ." 
 
 He was suddenly appalled by the fact of his own presence 
 there. Afterwards he supposed they must have shaken hands; 
 but he had no recollection of it. His emotions, so far as he 
 could disentangle them, were those of pity and remorse. The 
 savage instinct that had sent him there deserted him, leaving 
 him sadly and unexpectedly open to attack. And he was 
 nervous and didn't know how to begin. 
 
 "Well," said Roberta, "and what do I owe the pleasure of 
 this visit to?" 
 
 The emotion induced in Allan by the masses of Roberta's 
 wonderful hair got queerly mixed up with the wish that she 
 would learn to put her prepositions in their proper place, but 
 before he could find anything to say she had noticed the black 
 band on his grey overcoat. As she sat there on the sofa he 
 saw the coquettish, seductive air drop from her; the exquisite 
 colour creep back from her clear skin. In that instant she was 
 blanched to the lips: nothing of the brilliant colour that had 
 flamed up at him was left save the red-gold of her hair and 
 that, somehow, intensified the etiolation of the rest. After all, 
 it wasn't going to be necessary to say anything. Roberta under- 
 stood. He stood there wondering why it was he had been so 
 certain he would read what he wanted to know in her face. 
 It said so much, that blanched, pathetic countenance, or so 
 little, and whatever it was he couldn't read it. Any girl would 
 have looked like that if you had told her brutally that a man 
 she had gone about with had been dead and buried for a 
 fortnight. It was the look of youth that, scarcely knowing that 
 death existed, had been suddenly confronted with its handi- 
 work. . And because the look hurt him atrociously Allan hastened 
 to soften the blow. But his words seemed peculiarly meaning- 
 less: he made an effort to galvanize them into significance. 
 "You knew," he said, "that he always had a weak heart?" 
 
 Roberta said, miserably, that she did. She, too, seemed to 
 plunge after the meaning of words. "He used to laugh about 
 it," she said, then suddenly she broke down and cried, her face 
 buried in the muslin cushions of the sofa. There was some- 
 thing in her crying which both hurt and angered Allan; and, 
 more than that, he was afraid that downstairs they would hear 
 and come in to see what was wrong. To-night he couldn't bear 
 a scene. If anyone came in he would turn and rush out of the
 
 INTRUSION 83 
 
 house. He sat down on the sofa and wondered if Guen's visit 
 to Parson's Green had been like this. He was unspeakably 
 wretched. After an interval he leaned forward and touched 
 Roberta's shoulder. 
 
 "Don't cry," he said, "please, don't cry!" He hadn't 
 imagined, somehow, that she could. It was unbearable, but 
 it went on. His anger choked down the hurt of it. 
 
 "Stop crying like that!" he commanded her. "Stop it at 
 once! Do you want the whole household to come in?" 
 
 To his surprise she did stop and sat up limply from the 
 cushions. 
 
 "I don't care," she said. "I don't care about anything!" 
 
 "Why don't you care about anything?" 
 
 She looked sulky and her mouth trembled. Her hand 
 rested upon the back of the sofa, and Allan put his upon it. 
 He sat quite still, watching her, seeing the stormy heaving of 
 her little firm breast and the trembling of the red, dimpled 
 mouth. To Allan breathing had become an almost painful 
 affair. 
 
 "Why don't you care about anything?" he repeated. His 
 voice was purposely dull and toneless. 
 
 She pulled her hand free. 
 
 "What's the use ? The people you like always die or go away 
 or like other people better than you ... or something." 
 
 "You . . . were fond of my brother?" 
 
 She nodded. 
 
 "Very fond?" 
 
 Again the nod. 
 
 "How fond?" 
 
 "What d'you mean, how fond?" 
 
 "Just that." 
 
 "I suppose you mean would I have married him if he'd 
 asked me?" 
 
 "He wouldn't have asked you. Jan was not the 'marrying' 
 sort. Hadn't you discovered that?" 
 
 "P'raps I had. I can look after myself, thank you." 
 
 "Can you?" 
 
 "Of course I can. . . . I'm not that sort, anyhow." 
 
 "Which sort?" 
 
 "Oh, don't think I don't know what you meant. The Mrs. 
 Hill sort "
 
 84 INTRUSION 
 
 "Then you know about Mrs. Hill?" 
 
 "Of course I know. . . . And about the others, too. . . ." 
 She looked sulky again: her fingers plucked at the crumpled 
 muslin cushions. 
 
 "And you didn't mind?" 
 
 "What was the good of minding? He was that sort . . . 
 only it doesn't matter if you're a man. Everybody liked him 
 . . . and he liked everybody, pretty nearly. I wanted him to like 
 me best. He didn't. He said I had old-fashioned ideas. . . . 
 He used to call me a Puritan. . . . But he was good to me, 
 though." 
 
 "How 'good'?" 
 
 "He took me about ... to theatres and dances. He was 
 awfully generous with his money. . . ." 
 
 "Go on." 
 
 She drew herself up, sharply and suddenly on the defensive. 
 
 "I shan't," she said. "What's it got to do with you?" 
 
 "Nothing. But I mean to know." 
 
 "I suppose you think you're very clever?" she said, looking 
 not at him, but at her fingers, which fidgeted with the lace 
 edge of the muslin cushions. 
 
 "Not very," he said. His hand came down again on hers. 
 "What else? Theatres and dances . . . and kisses?" 
 
 "I never said so." 
 
 "They go together." 
 
 "What if they do?" 
 
 "Theatres and dances and kisses. Was that all?" 
 
 He saw the colour come up just beneath her ear, spread over 
 her neck and up into her cheek. "I hate you !" she hissed at 
 him, and suddenly he laughed on a queer high note of relief. 
 His hand left her hand, slid up the arm and turned her round 
 by her shoulder. Some new queer sensation was awake in him, 
 overpoweringly alert. His whole being stood poised upon the 
 edge of some new emotion. It seemed as if he must topple 
 Over the edge and be swamped. 
 
 "Do you?" he said, his mouth very near to Roberta's. 
 
 He felt her go limp in his arms. The effect upon him was 
 like a douche of cold water. 
 
 "All right!" he said, pushing her away. "I'm not going to 
 kiss you." 
 
 She fell back, looking limp and stupid, on the crumpled
 
 INTRUSION 85 
 
 muslin cushions. He hated her. And he no longer wanted 
 to kiss her. That lax yielding of her body to his arms had 
 killed the desire in him. He got up and picked up his hat and 
 stick, despising her. She was a fool : she cared only about men 
 and their flattery any man who wasn't a freak. He felt that 
 never so long as he lived could he bear to see her again. 
 
 "Good-bye," he said, and walked away to the door. But 
 he did not open it, for Roberta, instead of speaking, fell sud- 
 denly to crying again. He saw the tears falling between her 
 fingers and the red mark his hands had made on her wrist. 
 He couldn't bear it. Putting down his stick and hat, he came 
 nearer. "Oh, don't," he said, "I'm so sorry!" 
 
 She looked up after a while, dabbing at her eyes. 
 
 "You . . . were horrid," she said. 
 
 "I know. . . . But I couldn't help it. I imagined . . . beastly 
 things. ... I had to know." 
 
 "Why?" she asked. 
 
 "I can't tell you. . . . Don't think about it any more." 
 
 "I'm so miserable," she said. 
 
 He came and sat down at her side. 
 
 "Don't be miserable any more. . . ." He took her hands and 
 held them. "Don't you think you could forgive me and let us 
 be friends?" 
 
 She nodded. He wasn't Jan, but he was alive. And Jan 
 was dead. She would never see him again. The thought bit 
 through the thinness of her soul and filled her with profound 
 self-pity, so that her tears almost came back. But not quite 
 for it was unwise to make your eyes really red, however miser- 
 able you were. So she went on dabbing at her eyes and appeared 
 to be considering Allan's proposal of friendship. 
 
 "All right," she said presently and quite casually. But then 
 she felt casual about him. The only person, if it came to that, 
 about whom she hadn't felt casual was dead. Nothing mattered. 
 
 The look she gave Allan was sombre and a little uncertain, 
 for she was afraid she had made her eyes red, after all. They 
 ached, and so did her head. She felt a sight and wished Allan 
 would go. 
 
 And soon he did. It came to him suddenly that he must go 
 at once, and his farewell was made with some of the precipi- 
 tancy with which Mrs. Leigh had shown him in, and compli- 
 cated by that lady's unexpected appearance in the doorway
 
 .86 INTRUSION 
 
 with cocoa on a tray and an invitation to partake of it on her 
 lips. His gesture seemed to be refusing it and Roberta and the 
 ugly little household altogether. He must get away. He 
 murmured something about a train and found himself a moment 
 or so later in the street, where the moonlight chequered the 
 dingy houses into queer new shapes of black and white. His 
 heart beat rapidly, his face and hands were hot. Thoughts 
 raced after him: he was tremendously excited, uplifted. . . . 
 
 He burrowed presently and went down to the tube. On the 
 platform was a Hilmer Roydon advertisement, and Allan found 
 himself looking at it with fresh interest. Even here, denuded 
 of its colouring, the face was exquisite. More than that, it did, 
 somehow, suggest that there was something a good deal 
 behind it. It didn't look just a mask. Perhaps it wasn't. 
 Perhaps it was only that Roberta had never had a chance. He 
 didn't quite know what he meant by the phrase, but it exon- 
 erated Roberta for her lack of brains and, in a way, explained 
 himself to himself, which certainly did seem to be necessary. 
 Also it definitely took her out of the rather vague crowd of 
 Allan's acquaintances and put her into that tiny group in 
 which was his mother, Pen and Caryl, who had, in one respect 
 at least, to be "protected." Roberta, too, wanted protecting 
 from herself and her lack of "chance," and her surroundings 
 and her curious assumption that the only things that mattered 
 in life were her own pretty face and the having of a "good 
 time." Allan did not know that he was putting it as definitely 
 as all that : but he certainly was. He, who wanted passionately 
 to remould the world, wanted also if, at this stage, less pas- 
 sionately to remould Roberta, so that the things she did and 
 said no longer contradicted her face, or her face, perhaps, no 
 longer contradicted the things she said and did. Neither was 
 it likely that his failure with the world would in^any way deter 
 him from attempting the reformation of Roberta, though Guen 
 could have told him that the task was, if anything, more dif- 
 ficult. But there at the beginning, when she might have hoped 
 to convince him, she did not even know he was thinking of 
 attempting it. 
 
 Neither did Allan. Down there in the tube he sat opposite 
 a row of faces which succeeded presently in blotting out the 
 much more pleasing one of Roberta's. In so far as the faces 
 were features Allan might, perhaps, have said they were dif-
 
 INTRUSION 87 
 
 ferent: but in so far as he saw them as faces (mere expressions) 
 he saw them all as exactly similar. For they wore that curi- 
 ously blank stare of complacency that tube-travelling seems to 
 engender. They looked out, every one of those faces, on a dull 
 world to which they were used and in which nothing ever really 
 happened. Allan wanted to laugh because all these people 
 were half dead without knowing it. It was so funny, that 
 thought. . . . 
 
 Before he reached home, however, his excitement had died 
 away. Nothing whatever would have moved him to laughter. 
 A sense of frustration and loneliness was upon him. Beneath 
 the moon, that still cut up the houses into fantastic shapes, 
 his face was white and tired very like the faces he had wanted 
 to laugh at in the tube.
 
 CHAPTER NINE 
 
 WHAT followed for Allan was like nothing at all. 
 He was torn, all the time, between conflicting 
 emotions. He did ridiculous things, was saved, 
 miraculously, from doing others much more ridiculous. He 
 wandered up to Hilmer Roydon's studio, hung about outside 
 because he hadn't sufficient courage to go in, wondered, at 
 seven o'clock, if he had missed Roberta, and went home. The 
 thought of her was a torture that kept him from work and 
 sapped his energy. A distorted and unreal week went by, and 
 then one day he rang up the studio, enquired for Miss Leigh 
 and learned that she had been away three days with influenza. 
 A sort of panic seized upon Allan as he listened; he asked for 
 particulars in a peremptory fashion, in a queer, excited voice 
 he found it difficult to control. At six o'clock, when he left 
 the City, he went over to Highgate, stopping en route to buy 
 a bunch of spring flowers that looked out at him from a florist's 
 window. The tube was crowded, and he wondered why the 
 flowers made him feel such a fool and why people looked at 
 him as though it was an unheard of thing for a young man to 
 be seen abroad with such a bouquet. 
 
 He was not allowed to see Roberta, who was still in bed and 
 the proud possessor of a temperature; but Mrs. Leigh relieved 
 him of his flowers with a gesture that had all the force of a 
 snatch without its rudeness, and promised to deliver any mes- 
 sage. Allan found it difficult to reduce his emotion to words. 
 What was it he wanted to say to Roberta, save that he couldn't 
 keep away from her and that he'd been panic-stricken when 
 he heard of her illness over the phone? Obviously this was 
 not the sort of thing to retail to Roberta certainly not 
 through the medium of her mother. He said something banal 
 and idiotic, and withdrew. 
 
 Two days later, on the Saturday, he called again. It was a
 
 INTRUSION 89 
 
 fine, warm day after a heavy fall of snow in the early morning. 
 Roberta was up and lying on the sofa in the dingy little 
 drawing-room of number two-hundred-and two. She did not 
 look very ill a little paler, perhaps, and with an invalid's trick 
 of languor and half-closed eyes and soft tones. It seemed to 
 Allan that he stood for an hour in the doorway, looking at her, 
 trying to smile, feeling as if something had happened to the 
 muscles of his face and to his legs. Neither would respond to 
 his bidding. 
 
 He found himself presently inside the room, shaking hands 
 in his shy fashion and hoping she was better. He never remem- 
 bered much that they said : he had an idea that they said very 
 little; but gradually his shyness left him. He looked about 
 him, saw that they had dumped his flowers ungracefully in an 
 ugly vase on a small table in the window, and that the pictures 
 and the looking-glass had evidently been hung by a very tall 
 man with a slightly crooked eye. Later Roberta's mother came 
 in to lay tea. With a velocity that took your breath away she 
 moved the hideous vase containing Allan's bouquet on to the 
 piano, hurled the table into the middle of the room and pro- 
 ceeded to dispose her cups and saucers with all the noise and 
 fury of a tornado. Allan found her energy exhausting. Why 
 should anybody lay tea with an air of expecting the last trump 
 to sound before she could get it finished? 
 
 When the meal was over the door opened and the man who 
 had evidently hung the pictures came into the room. "My 
 father," said Roberta, and Allan wondered how it was she had 
 missed being like either of her parents, but was glad that she 
 had. Mr. Leigh was tall and spare, with a kindly, tired face 
 and limp movements, as though his wife had annexed his 
 energy and made it her own. That was how Allan thought of 
 her as a woman who went about snatching at other people's 
 energy as some others snatch at stray cats and umbrellas and 
 overcoats. Roberta and her father (and Allan himself, though 
 he was not aware of it) had an air of warding her off. It was 
 comic. So, in a way, was the air of relief with which, when 
 his wife had gone out, Mr. Leigh stood by the fire and talked 
 of the trouble with the miners and railway men, and the 
 increased bus and tram fares and wondered what we were 
 coming to. Also, he grumbled at the Government and at 
 snow in March, which, Allan gathered, were phenomena quite
 
 90 INTRUSION 
 
 beyond him. Later, Mrs. Leigh bustled in again and decapi- 
 tated an interesting conversation about the proposed tax on 
 bachelors. The head of the talk rolled down among the group 
 of three and broke it up. Mr. Leigh drifted out of the room 
 and Allan announced that he must be going. 
 
 Roberta was not returning to work until the Wednesday, and 
 Allan promised to come in on the Tuesday evening if Mrs. 
 Leigh would allow him. Mrs. Leigh would. 
 
 "Oh, come whenever you like, young man," she said. "I'll 
 be much obliged to you. You'd be doing me a real kindness 
 if you could keep Roberta at home a bit. I never saw such a 
 girl for gadding about. I might as well never have had a 
 daughter for all I see of her. And it isn't as if she isn't allowed 
 to bring her friends home." 
 
 She hustled Allan out of the house as though he were a 
 dispatch rider on some forlorn hope, and came back to collect 
 her piled-up tray. 
 
 But not alone for that, as Roberta saw at a glance. Her 
 mother had something to say and was not going to be prevented 
 from saying it. She began. Her approval of Allan was 
 unqualified, like the terms which she employed to express it. 
 And as unending, Roberta thought. She looked bored. It was 
 an expression she had practised very carefully before the glass, 
 and singularly successful with everyone save her mother. Also, 
 it was one of Hilmer Roydon's favourite photographic effects. 
 
 "Oh, mother, do be quiet. He's all right, but he's not a 
 patch on his brother." 
 
 Mrs." Leigh stood there holding the loaded tray in her hands 
 and looking down at her daughter. 
 
 "Well, and if he isn't! His brother's dead and he'd never 
 have married you, from what I can make out of it, neither. 
 And you'll never be happy until you've got a man of your own." 
 
 "But I don't want to get married . . . not yet, anyway. (Do 
 put that tray down, for goodness' sake!) I think marriage is 
 rotten. A girl's finished, when she's married." 
 
 "Is she? Well, and a good job, my lady, when you're 
 'finished,' as you call it. ... I tell you, I shan't have any 
 peace of mind till you're safely married and off my hands." 
 
 Roberta deepened the expression of boredom on her face and 
 called up another, less successful; to keep it company. 
 
 "I think you're thoroughly disgusting!" she said. 

 
 INTRUSION 91 
 
 "It doesn't matter a scrap what you think or what you don't 
 think, Roberta. Once is enough of that sort of thing in a 
 family, thank you." 
 
 "Oh, do come off it, mother. It's time you forgot that old 
 affair. I'm not Delia's sort. Besides, I'm tired of having her 
 pushed down my throat." 
 
 "Delia" had been Delia King and Roberta's cousin. Two 
 years ago she had had an illegitimate child and had died of it. 
 That, probably, was the most considerate thing Delia ever 
 did for her family. But her aunt Roberta's mother was 
 ungrateful even for that, for Roberta and Delia had been too 
 intimate for her peace of mind. If it were not such a very 
 wise mother that knows her own child Mrs. Leigh might have 
 known Roberta; might have understood that, although Roberta 
 shared ' the extraordinary prettiness of her cousin and her 
 equally extraordinary lack of brains, she shared neither her 
 warmth nor her generosity of nature. It was these things which 
 had proved Delia's undoing, and from them Roberta never 
 stood in the very least danger. Nothing whatever swept 
 Roberta off her feet. She remained always cold and detached; 
 her feet firmly planted on the right side of conventional moral- 
 ity, from whence she had looked across at Delia, voting her 
 a little fool and the thing she had done nasty rather than 
 wicked. Roberta had known many men, but had never gone 
 down into the jungle of their desires. She did not live, as 
 Delia had done, on the slippery slopes of love. Love, indeed, 
 was not a thing she really cared about or understood. She 
 was cold all through, but she was vain. She wanted admira- 
 tion and amusement and excitement, and she had no other 
 means of procuring them than through her own delightful 
 appearance. Marriage was another matter and more difficult 
 to achieve. It had, too, certain obvious disadvantages which 
 disturbed her when she thought of them, so that her Prince 
 Charming tended to become a rather incorporeal figure, whose 
 hand was constantly in the pocket of the trousers he had scarcely 
 sufficient body to need. 
 
 But Roberta's mother was not "wise" and she did not know 
 these things about her own daughter. She "knew," actually, 
 nothing whatever of Roberta, save that she ought to be mar- 
 ried. She had a vague idea that it would take a husband to 
 keep Roberta in order "a husband and babies" was how the
 
 92 INTRUSION 
 
 phrase formed itself in her mind, though whether or not 
 Roberta would keep the babies in order was another matter. 
 From the brilliant marriage that had included a motor-car 
 and a houseful of servants and furniture, Mrs. Leigh had come 
 to desire for Roberta any marriage at all. And she despaired 
 because even that didn't seem too easy, since Roberta would 
 not look at the young men who would have married her, and 
 the young men she would look at did not mean marriage. 
 Money married money, position gravitated towards position 
 that much was mere platitude, and Roberta had neither money 
 nor position. She was the daughter of a London warehouse- 
 man and earned two pounds a week at Hilmer Roydon's studio 
 of which Mrs. Leigh strongly disapproved, firstly because 
 Roberta had gone there to make appointments and write out 
 receipts and had remained to be photographed, and Mrs. Leigh 
 thought it couldn't be good for Roberta to be photographed 
 so frequently and in such ridiculous positions, and found it 
 disturbing to find Roberta's face staring out at her from the 
 tube lifts and platforms whenever she was minded to travel. 
 And secondly, she disapproved of the studio because it was 
 there Roberta had met Tommy Carew, who had eventually 
 left to go "on the pictures." Not that Mrs. Leigh believed 
 that, for she had met Miss Carew had had the privilege 
 of entertaining her to tea one day and of calling her "common" 
 the next. But it wasn't her "commonness" to which Mrs. 
 Leigh objected mainly, but her good looks, which she consid- 
 ered too emphatic, and because she had come to the point when 
 distrust of "good looks" male or female was an overpowering 
 instinct. 
 
 But whilst Allan's lack of title to the distinction of good 
 looks ingratiated him first with Roberta's mother, the fact that 
 he was the first of "Roberta's young men" to come to the 
 house certainly reinforced it. That he had done so staggered 
 even Roberta, who usually said of the young man she affected 
 that of course she "couldn't bring them to the house," and 
 perhaps her mother knew that was only Roberta's way of say- 
 ing, "they wouldn't come if I asked them." Roberta, no doubt 
 about it, was too big for her shoes. She threw a wide net 
 and caught nothing. And sometimes, with Delia and her story 
 in mind, Mrs. Leigh ran amok and Delia was made into a 
 cat-o'-nine-tails with which Roberta was mercilessly afflicted.
 
 INTRUSION 93 
 
 And always this sort of scene ensued. Always it ended with 
 Roberta in tears and a strained, uncomfortable atmosphere for 
 several days. 
 
 Roberta wept now. But her mother was adamant 
 
 "Now you can just stop that, Roberta, and find something 
 to do. You've sat there polishing your nails and being sorry 
 for yourself and goodness knows what for the last three days. 
 There's a pile of stockings in the kitchen to be mended and 
 they'll give you something to occupy your mind." 
 
 She went out after them like a whirlwind, and Roberta sobbed 
 on into her cushions. She wasn't really sure what she was 
 crying about. Perhaps because her mother had "pushed Delia 
 down her throat" again, and because influenza, even a mild 
 attack, makes one depressed; but most of all, perhaps, because 
 she hadn't yet got used to the fact that Jan was dead, and in 
 her shallow way, and as much as she had ever cared for any- 
 body, she had cared for Jan. Besides, Roberta was a senti- 
 mentalist : it was the nearest she ever got to real feeling. 
 
 It was probably true, as her mother had said, that Jan would 
 never have married her: but at twenty-one that had not really 
 bothered her. Some day or other she supposed she would 
 have to get married, but she meant none the less to resist 
 her mother's idea of marriage, which seemed to mean the keep- 
 ing of some man's house, the cooking of his dinner and the 
 mending of his socks. None of these things appealed to 
 Roberta. There were a good many things that didn't appeal 
 to Roberta. Marriage (as delineated by Miss Carew) was 
 one of them, which, however, she was prepared to endure for 
 the sake of the other things which went with it the assured 
 income she was not inconvenienced to earn, and the comfortable 
 home in which the work was not done by her, but in which 
 she moved leisurely in pretty frocks. Seen thus, marriage was 
 a quite bearable institution, scarcely disturbed by the return 
 at seven o'clock of that incorporeal Somebody (with a bunch 
 of violets or a box of chocolates) who kissed her and said how 
 charming she looked. He never omitted that. Roberta liked 
 men to have nice manners, even if she liked them to have 
 no bodies to speak of! 
 
 It didn't Roberta's view of marriage run to babies. 
 
 That was where Mrs. Leigh might have saved herself a 
 good deal of worry. It was quite true, though her mother
 
 94 INTRUSION 
 
 never knew it, that Roberta wasn't "Delia's sort." She was 
 a voluptuary she loved bodily ease and comfort and pretty 
 clothes and good food but sexually she was cold. Far from 
 regarding sex as a joke, as Tommy Carew did, or as a means of 
 expression as Delia had done, she regarded it as one of the 
 trials of existence, a thing she could very well do without. 
 "I think all that's horrid," was her attitude, and for it she 
 took a great measure of personal pride, as though it were some- 
 how a tremendous virtue. Roberta saw herself as a delicate 
 creature in an indelicate world, and was occasionally sorry for 
 herself. She hated her mother, as she had hated Allan, for 
 suggesting that she had the ordinary passions of humanity and 
 was (or had been) in any danger of submitting to them. 
 
 In its own way, of course, it was funny, though Roberta 
 was in no immediate danger of perceiving it. 
 
 Meanwhile she mended her stockings and Allan rode home 
 on the top of a bus and watched the coming of the dark. The 
 moonlight crept up over the houses and the muffled wings of- 
 night beat softly about him. And as he looked down over the 
 edge of night, for the first time for a week the thought of 
 Roberta slipped out of his mind. 
 
 Tuesday was much like the Saturday, save that the people 
 upstairs were frying fish for their evening meal, which was 
 scarcely an improvement. The dingy sitting-room was a little 
 less dingy, perhaps, because at the window fresh curtains had 
 appeared over which trailed a pattern of queerly-shaped leaves 
 and flowers and things that looked like beetles. His flowers 
 were still on the table looking (and probably smelling by 
 now) as hideous as the vase in which they stood. For the rest, 
 Roberta reclined as gracefully as ever on the couch before the 
 fire and Mrs. Leigh dashed in and out of the room like a 
 tornado. And once Mr. Leigh came in and talked about the 
 first issue of the Daily Herald, and the marriage of Elizabeth 
 Asquith, and the collapse of a warehouse at Liverpool all of 
 which things, it seemed, happened on the previous day. It 
 dawned presently on Allan that Roberta's parents were bent on 
 not leaving them alone together for any appreciable length of 
 time. The conviction somehow disgusted Allan, and his disgust
 
 INTRUSION 95 
 
 recoiled upon Roberta. It was as though even her parents 
 knew she was not to be trusted with men. He left early in 
 an abrupt fashion, feeling, once more, that he never wanted to 
 see her again. 
 
 After the Tuesday he wore himself out in the effort to keep 
 away from her, and, though he haunted the door of Hilmer 
 Roydon's studio, he haunted it against his will his feet drew 
 him towards it irresistibly, so that his will went for nothing. 
 But at least he gave up his visits to Manningtree Avenue. He 
 could not stand the atmosphere of that terrible little sitting- 
 room, where, beneath the watchful eye of Roberta's parents, 
 he felt he might at any moment, be asked to "declare" himself. 
 Neither did Roberta show any anxiety to have him there, caring 
 no more for the parental eye than Allan, to whom, somehow, 
 it never once occurred to take Roberta to Teddington. Besides, 
 if it had, Teddington and Highgate were so far apart. 
 
 Presently, however, that excuse existed no longer, for the 
 Canadian family suddenly decided to go home by the next boat 
 and the Suffields moved back again to Highgate. 
 
 Alan was distressed, when he came to think of it, that 
 during this period he had forgotten all those things which had 
 happened in February. He had forgotten his brother (save 
 when he remembered him, disastrously, among his thoughts 
 of Roberta) ; he had forgotten his mother and his intention 
 of "making things up" to her. Yet when he had time to remem- 
 ber, it seemed to him that his mother no longer needed to 
 have things "made up" to her. Almost, indeed, she made his 
 solicitude ridiculous. There was something about her that 
 baffled him, but when he forgot that he was strangely affected 
 by the dignity and quiet with which she had taken up again 
 the threads of life, had gone on weaving life's pattern. Weav- 
 ing in quieter colours, perhaps, but with hope and high cour- 
 age. You simply couldn't be sorry for her any longer; but 
 Allan and Guen were glad they had saved her from the 
 knowledge they had buried within themselves. 
 
 But other people besides Allan were occupied just now with 
 their own affairs. There was Pen with her month-old baby
 
 96 INTRUSION 
 
 (they had called him Arthur Jannison) : and Caryl, now that 
 the fine weather was coming in, was week-ending again with 
 the Hestons at Wokingham. Guen was in bondage to her new 
 book that had arrived at the stage when it seemed just a string 
 of nouns, verbs and conjunctions, signifying nothing. This 
 occurred every time she wrote anything, and while the fit lasted 
 she was irritable and given to long silences and longer walks. 
 
 It was the time for walks. The sweet young months were 
 climbing up the wall of the year. Young April, green and 
 gold and very lovely, looked with her bright face over the wall, 
 younger May at her heels. The country shone with delicate 
 tints, like a pastel drawing. Laughing, the spring winds ran 
 over it and the scent of the spring flowers. On the Heath the 
 birds sang; there were buds on the hawthorn and beech trees, 
 and violets hidden in the woods. And on Jan's grave the 
 wallflowers were in bloom. . . . 
 
 But though Allan's home now lay within twenty minutes' 
 walk of Roberta's, he did not go again to Manningtree Avenue; 
 neither did he propose that Roberta should come to Adelaide 
 Lodge. To ask her there would be to do that for which he 
 felt he could no longer go to Manningtree Avenue; it would 
 be, in effect, a declaration of his position. He would be 
 virtually engaged to Roberta, or at least that was how it 
 seemed to him. He couldn't ask her to come home with him 
 and never ask her to be engaged to him. Yet an engagement, 
 though it might be a long road, had marriage at the end of it, 
 and he did not want to marry Roberta neither was he able to 
 keep away from her. The position seemed to him to be 
 supremely idiotic. It was, but he would have felt better about 
 it if he had known that most young men had found them- 
 selves in similarly idiotic positions not once, but many times 
 before they had arrived at Allan's age. Yet he remained clear- 
 sighted enough about Roberta. He was still a little contemptu- 
 ous of her, seeing her after these weeks of acquaintanceship 
 as he had done at the first, as the girl who had never heard 
 of Emily Bronte. She was ignorant, vain and egotistic. She 
 couldn't think, and there were times when she bored him pro- 
 foundly. There was very little about her that his intellect 
 approved of, and his intellect was annoyed with that other 
 part of him which, no doubt at all about it, approved of a good 
 deal, of all the things which formed a part of the overwhelming
 
 INTRUSION 97 
 
 effect of youth and vitality which she had upon even the most 
 casual of beholders. 
 
 It was to these things Allan was led captive, dodging thought 
 as best he might, but in no mood whatsoever to dodge Roberta. 
 Throughout April he took to haunting the studio door again, 
 and each time he made an appointment for some evening to 
 come. Generally Roberta kept him waiting, and sometimes 
 it was worth it and sometimes it was not. They rode on 
 buses to Richmond and Kew and sat in the park or by the 
 river: or they strolled over the Heath or went down to Epping; 
 and sometimes they went to a theatre or out to dinner, which 
 Roberta liked better, because she was not over-fond of walking. 
 She wouldn't be: she wore the wrong kind of shoes. 
 
 Here in the early spring all Allan's spare time was given to 
 Roberta. Books, for the first time in his life, were relatively 
 unimportant. By the middle of April he had spent a good 
 deal of money, but he had not kissed Roberta. Roberta (giving 
 him no credit at all for self-control) voted him dull and 
 disappointing, and began to make excuses when he asked her 
 to go out. She developed an abrupt and surprising conscience 
 over what she called her "neglect" of Tommy Carew, at whose 
 flat she seemed to be meeting with disturbing regularity a 
 young man to whom she referred as "Duggie," but whose name 
 appeared, upon enquiry, to be Douglas Rayne. Mr. Rayne, 
 it further appeared, was on the brink of deserting the tobacco 
 business for the cinema hence, probably, his friendship with 
 Tommy Carew, or, much more probably, hers with him. Pres- 
 ently, when a demon of jealousy sprang up in Allan, Roberta 
 showed it small mercy. At the times of its worst manifesta- 
 tions she would beg him in that mincing voice which got so 
 dreadfully on Allan's nerves, to remember that there were 
 other men in the world a phenomenon of which Allan was 
 only too acutely and uncomfortably aware. Also (and no more 
 comfortably) he was aware that if he didn't know his own 
 mind in regard to Roberta there were probably other men 
 who did, and it was absurd to blame Roberta for knowing it, 
 too. But whilst she removed herself from him he suffered. He 
 suffered horribly. 
 
 Presently, however, she began to go out with him again, and 
 Tommy Carew slipped a little into the background. "Duggie," 
 so Allan gathered, was going over to America. When he men-
 
 98 INTRUSION 
 
 tioned him one day to Roberta she became evasive and 
 shrugged her shoulders as if she shrugged Mr. Rayne not only 
 out of England, but off the map altogether. Mr. Rayne, it 
 seemed only reasonable to suppose, had not come up to scratch. 
 Anyway, the friendship between Allan and Roberta took a new 
 lease of life just when, in the English way, Summer suddenly 
 descended upon a world that, clad still in its Winter garments, 
 was looking optimistically for Spring. 
 
 About this time, too, Guen's new book suddenly acquired a 
 meaning, and she found time to notice that something was 
 happening to Allan. But before she was able to discover what 
 it was she was swept off to Kent to look at a house Gore had 
 found there, so that in the end it was quite by accident that 
 she stumbled on the fact of Allan's friendship with Roberta. 
 Coming home late one evening she encountered them at the 
 station, and, because there was no help for it, Allan took the 
 bold course. 
 
 "Guen," he said, "I think you know Miss Leigh?" 
 
 For a second, in Guen's mind, the name leapt meaningless. 
 Then she remembered. That day in October and those three 
 letters to Jan. This, then, was why there had never been a 
 fourth! "Of course," she said. "How do you do, Miss Leigh?" 
 
 When Allan came in a quarter of an hour later she asked 
 him if he saw much of Roberta. 
 
 "Yes, I suppose I do," Allan said. 
 
 "Do you find her interesting?" 
 
 "Interesting? Good God, she bores me to death!" 
 
 "Then why see quite so much of her?" 
 
 "I think it's only one side of me that's bored, and I can't 
 decide whether that's the important side or not. . . . Oh, I'm 
 blest if I know. Do you?" 
 
 Guen looked at him a soft, penetrating glance with 
 understanding in it and, perhaps, a little regret. 
 
 "I think I do," she said. "But it's rather a pity, isn't it?" 
 
 He flashed out then in defence of Roberta. She had never 
 had a chance: it wasn't her fault if she was stupid. . . . 
 
 "Nor your mission to correct it," said Guen. "Is that what 
 you think you're doing?" 
 
 "Perhaps. I don't know. ... I think I try. I read her things, 
 lend her books . . . take her to see good plays." 
 
 Guen laughed, as though she did not take this queer friend-
 
 INTRUSION 99 
 
 ship very seriously or as though she considered this part of 
 Allan's education had already been sufficiently delayed. Per- 
 haps she was vaguely sorry he had not taken her into his con- 
 fidence and sorry, too, only less vaguely, that Allan's first 
 teacher should be Roberta. Yet there were things, she supposed, 
 that even a Roberta could teach him. But as though the knowl- 
 edge annoyed her she switched the conversation suddenly into 
 another channel. 
 
 "I've two pieces of news for you," she said. "The first is 
 that Tony's offering you a job on his new paper. He hopes to 
 get it started in September. The second seems to me rather 
 more important, but I'm probably prejudiced. Don't jump. 
 It's this. Tony and I are to be married on Friday morning."
 
 CHAPTER TEN 
 
 CONCESSIONS to Friday's ceremony in the Registry 
 Office at Bloomsbury were few. Guen's appeared to 
 begin and end with a new costume; Allan's with an 
 extension of his normal luncheon hour and, the substitution of 
 Rumpelmeyer's for Slater's. But John Suffield abandoned work 
 for the day and took his family off to a matinee when Allan 
 had gone back to the office and Antony and Guen had caught 
 the three something to Havering Hill where Antony had found 
 the house Guen had re-named "Green Hedges" and in favour 
 of which she had at last consented to leave the suburbs. They 
 believed, Guen and A.G., that the place in which to spend your 
 honeymoon was the place in which you intended to live if it 
 was nice enough. And Guen and Antony seemed to think 
 "Green Hedges" was. 
 
 Anne Sumeld who had gone to the altar with orange blos- 
 som, old point lace, and half a dozen bridesmaids took the 
 day calmly. All the same, she would certainly have agreed 
 with Roberta that it was "the queerest wedding." And Roberta 
 said that to Allan on the following Monday when he took her 
 to the Czecho-Slovak concert at the Queen's Hall. The con- 
 cert bored her extremely, and to make up for it Allan suggested 
 that on the coming Saturday afternoon they should walk out 
 into the country. But the weather had suddenly become very 
 hot and Roberta didn't fancy, she said, walking "all down 
 those country roads." 
 
 "We won't go near the roads," Allan said. "We'll keep to 
 the field paths." 
 
 "You don't," Roberta told him. "You always leave them 
 and walk where it says 'Private,' or 'Trespassers will be prose- 
 cuted.' You have got a nerve." Roberta never could see that 
 a walk was improved by the possibility of police-court pro- 
 ceedings to follow; and she thought Allan was merely being 
 
 100
 
 INTRUSION 101 
 
 "clever," as he probably was, when he said that he was the 
 special instrument, under Providence, of improving the knowl- 
 edge of the gamekeepers as to the iniquitious game laws of 
 England and the private ownership of land. 
 
 The heat on Saturday was intense, and Allan was tired and 
 hot when he met Roberta at Charing Cross. But neither heat 
 nor cold made the least difference to Roberta's appearance. 
 She took the summer sun as she took the northern wind, with 
 beauty. She remained always a marvel and delight to the eye. 
 The heat never fagged her out as it did Allan; but she was 
 incorrigibly lazy and did not care for walking in the way Allan 
 cared for it even now after that injury to his leg. But on 
 this afternoon she was especially amiable and agreeable, and 
 Allan, for once, did not want to talk. They took train con- 
 siderably farther down the line than usual, and made them- 
 selves comfortable under some trees in a friendly wood, and 
 at intervals Allan read aloud to her. She was amiable, too, 
 about that: more amiable certainly than Allan, who wished 
 Roberta was less definitely the sort of person who said, "Yes, 
 all right, you know," if you asked whether or not she liked 
 what you read. Sometimes she said, "I don't know, quite, 
 what it all means; but then you don't, with poetry, do you? 
 You either do or you don't, reely." She had no criteria at all, 
 and could not in the least understand why she ought to prefer 
 Browning to Ella Wheeler Wilcox, nor why it was so delightful 
 that a man named Herrick should have thought of calling a 
 primrose "the sweet infanta of the year." Allan had tried to 
 read modern verse to her, but the violence of war imagery 
 disgusted her and it was difficult, somehow, to escape it. 
 Difficult also to know where to begin in this matter of Roberta's 
 education, for her knowledge of literature was infinitesimal. 
 She couldn't, she said, "see the use of poetry"; but for Brown- 
 ing Allan had elicited a faint meed of appreciation, probably 
 because he read well and was sensible enough to choose the 
 dramatic monologues. Scott's stories in verse and in prose 
 sent her to sleep. In Shakespeare she cared only for the story 
 and then found fault with it. With Dickens and Thackeray 
 she had the merest nodding acquaintance. Of Shelley she 
 knew nothing save some horrible version of his life story, and 
 Allan discovered with a pang that she agreed with Lord Cole- 
 ridge's opinion of his moral character or would have done so
 
 102 INTRUSION 
 
 had she been acquainted with it. Of Keats she knew no more 
 than that he had been a chemist, and Allan gathered that she 
 thought he would have been of considerably more use to the 
 world as a chemist than as a poet. 
 
 "Why couldn't he find something cheerful to write about?" 
 Roberta inquired presently. "Personally, I can't see why any- 
 body should want to write about autumn. It's a beastly season 
 of the year. Enough to depress a saint." 
 
 "I have a sister who would agree with you. She thinks the 
 poets are a gloomy lot." 
 
 Roberta smiled. "Well, they are," she said. "Still, you 
 know, I'm not lit'ry." 
 
 She stretched her arms above her head and laughed up into 
 the face of the day, and as Allan looked at her something 
 stirred within him, like some faint quiver of his soul. She 
 had the beauty of the early summer of the blue sky and the 
 white clouds, of the green hills and soft winds. 
 
 Presently Allan went on with his reading, and when he had 
 finished she said nothing only rolled over and propped herself 
 up on her elbows, laughing softly. 
 
 "I tell you," she said, "I'm not lit'ry." 
 
 "It doesn't matter," Allan said. 
 
 Silently Roberta relaxed her elbows and laid her arms along 
 the cool grass, her fingers plucking at it. Allan watched her 
 split the blades neatly down the centre and throw them away. 
 He did not speak. He had forgotten Keats. He was thinking 
 that Roberta's hands were the least pretty part of her. They 
 were short and plump and the finger-tips were square. Allan 
 had a weakness for beautiful hands. Caryl had them and 
 Madeleine. Madeleine especially, as he remembered sud- 
 denly and to his own surprise. They were long, with taper- 
 ing fingers and finely modelled nails, and he used to wonder 
 how a girl who used a typewriter managed to retain them. 
 Madeleine's hands, for the young Suffields, had set a standard 
 of beauty, and Maurice Linton had once taken a plaster cast 
 of them and hung them upon a nail on his wall. Heaven 
 only knew what had become of them now: the Lintons were 
 not the sort of folk to want other people's hands upon their 
 walls. ... A gust of impatience ran through the corridor of 
 Allan's mind, chasing out the vivid memory and banging the 
 door upon it What nonsense it all was! Why was the long,
 
 INTRUSION 103 
 
 slim hand any more beautiful than the short, plump one that 
 had dimples at the knuckles, as Roberta's had? The very sight 
 of it somehow stopped the current of- his thoughts. He said 
 again, stupidly, "It doesn't matter." 
 
 "It does sometimes," Roberta said. "Sometimes it matters 
 a lot." 
 
 "Does it?" 
 
 "You know it does!" 
 
 He drew himself nearer to her. Her white, thick hands in 
 the grass were still. She looked at him archly, without turning 
 her head, and deep down within him that something that had 
 stirred before stirred again a sensation curiously painful. 
 
 "It doesn't matter to-day, anyway," he said. "Perhaps it 
 never really did." 
 
 "But you'd like me better, wouldn't you, if I were lit'ry?" 
 
 "I couldn't like you better." 
 
 Her oblique smile flashed again. He went nearer and with 
 a single movement pulled her up sharply to him. Suddenly 
 she lifted her arms and put them round his neck. His grip 
 tightened, then, scarcely realising what he did, he lifted her 
 chin with his own and fastened his mouth on hers. 
 
 Afterwards, watching her as she lay back on the grass, the 
 thought came to him that this was the first time he had ever 
 kissed a girl, and he was twenty-seven. It seemed ridiculous. 
 But mixed up with his sense of absurdity was a sense of satis- 
 faction because, though Roberta had struggled at the last 
 second to be free, she had, in the first, submitted. She had 
 wanted to be kissed, or, at least, had wanted him to kiss her. 
 Even there, in those moments of intoxicating aftermath, the 
 subtle distinction between the two states of mind was not 
 entirely lost upon him. Even now the Puritan that lurked 
 somewhere within Allan raised its head and frowned at him 
 over the hot wall of his high ecstasy. 
 
 "Shall we go and look for tea?" he said presently. 
 
 "All right," said Roberta, staring at her face in a few inches 
 of pocket looking-glass. She sounded extraordinarily matter- 
 of-fact and self-possessed; and Allan, cramming his Keats 
 down into his pocket, wondered for an instant why he should 
 resent it, why he should have this feeling that he had been 
 tricked and trapped.
 
 104 INTRUSION 
 
 2 
 
 Tea, that afternoon, had about it a note of intimacy which 
 had belonged to no other that had preceded it. It had, too, 
 on Roberta's part, a subtly proprietorial air which Allan found 
 both amusing and disturbing. But what was infinitely more 
 disturbing was the way in which, at intervals throughout the 
 meal, Allan found himself thinking of nothing but Roberta's 
 eyes and mouth. . . . Even her air of wanting to please him 
 was a little disconcerting, because Allan was so unused to it. 
 iWith him Roberta had usually rather overdone that amiable 
 trick she had of condescending to the male creature who took 
 her about and stood her meals. Here to-day, for the first time, 
 she seemed to Allan to be taking pains over him, as though, 
 belatedly, she had at last decided that he was worth while. 
 She had taken the trouble, Allan thought a little savagely 
 even amid this new ecstatic happiness to bring the whole of 
 herself out with him. He couldn't remember that she had 
 ever done it before. Here, this afternoon, there was suddenly 
 very much more of her than he had imagined, and the knowl- 
 edge pleased him, so that throughout the meal a sense of 
 satisfaction burned steadily through to him. He was happier 
 than he ever remembered to have been before or more con- 
 scious, perhaps, of his happiness, and when Roberta told him 
 presently that he was eating nothing at all he laughed. Because 
 tea was not a meal, an occasion when you ate and drank, but 
 a queer throbbing delight, an interlude of passionate joy a 
 wild sensing of days just as wonderful to come. 
 
 He saw that Roberta, too, looked happy. He did not see, 
 what was equally obvious, that she also looked triumphant. 
 
 They set out to- walk to the station, and it was Roberta's 
 fault that they found themselves instead inside the local cin- 
 ema. Allan, who was not addicted to the "pictures," had 
 demurred that it would make them too late in getting home. 
 He had no desire to cross propriety swords with Mrs. Leigh 
 and was very uncertain about the time of the last train. But 
 Roberta knew. She was very positive had heard the porter 
 telling someone that afternoon at the station. And Roberta
 
 INTRUSION 105 
 
 carried her point because Allan had a sudden enticing vision of 
 close seats, lowered lights, Roberta's misty hair and bright eyes. 
 The vulgar truth swept over him. He wanted to sit there in 
 the dark with Roberta, holding her hand, perhaps. . . . He 
 forgot Mrs. Leigh brandishing the drawn sword of propriety. 
 
 As he sat there at the back with Roberta he was conscious 
 every 'now and then of a sense of irritation that the cinema 
 should be so banal and so vulgar when there were so many 
 other things it might have been. But he did not think of the 
 cinema overmuch. His sensations in so far as he realised 
 them at all were of being separate and remote ; of being caught 
 up from himself and from life and held suspended midway 
 between that world of reality and some other that was dazzling 
 and bewitching and beckoning. At times he struggled to climb 
 up or to climb down; but for the most part he let himself 
 dangle, content to feel Roberta's cool hand in his, to note the 
 beauty of the white line of her profile in the half dark, the 
 flash of even teeth and her little tantalising, downward 
 smile. . . . 
 
 When at last he thought of the time, sudden panic seized 
 him. It had already turned the half-hour past ten. The 
 station was some distance off, and he was not too sure of its 
 direction. He seized his hat and rushed Roberta out into the 
 street. Afterwards it seemed to him that they must have run 
 all the way to the station: he remembered that he had held 
 Roberta's hand in his, that he had pulled her roughly along 
 when she showed signs of flagging, and that as they entered 
 the station a porter on the other platform shouted across to 
 them that there was plenty of time. Allan's heart gave a 
 bound of relief. He released Roberta's hand and snatched at 
 his personal dignity. 
 
 "Last train down from this side, sir!" the porter cried. 
 "Eleven five." 
 
 "But it's the London train we want," Allan objected. His 
 voice was slightly querulous; it indicated a pained surprise 
 that anyone should imagine he could possibly want to be going 
 down the line at that time of night. The porter remained calm. 
 
 "Last London train leaves at ten-forty, sir!" he replied. 
 
 "Ten-forty? Then we' ve missed it!" 
 
 The porter accepted that. 
 
 "That's it, sir," he said.
 
 io6 INTRUSION 
 
 "We've done it!" Allan said briefly to Roberta. Mechani- 
 cally his mind registered the fact that she stood there looking 
 pale and a little frightened. Long afterwards he remembered 
 that expression on her face. Fright and something else not so 
 easily denned: but certainly not surprise. Months later he 
 would have sworn to that in a court of law. 
 
 "There must be some way of getting home," Roberta said. 
 "It's so absurd." 
 
 "How in the world," Allan asked her, "did you come to make 
 such a mistake?" 
 
 "I don't know. ... I made sure that was what he said. 
 Last train eleven-five, Marylebone. It's no good glaring at me: 
 you don't suppose I wanted to miss the train, do you? " 
 
 "I'm not glaring at you," Allan said. "It's my fault. I 
 oughtn't to have chanced it. I'm afraid we've got to stay here 
 for the night." 
 
 "But there must be some way of getting home," Roberta 
 said again. "I'm tired. . . . I'll sit down while you go and 
 find out." 
 
 Allan went. He was away some fifteen minutes or so, and 
 when he returned Roberta had taken off her hat and was lean- 
 ing back against the wall of the station with her eyes closed. 
 The bright moonlight had robbed her of colour, leaving her 
 a red-gold mist for hair and a face and neck of alabaster. Allan 
 wanted to kick himself. He had set out to help and look after 
 her and this was how he began ! He was a fool ! As though 
 the conviction humbled him, he stooped and kissed the top of 
 her head. 
 
 "It's all right," he said, at which Roberta opened her eyes 
 and sat up. 
 
 "There is a train, after all?" 
 
 "No not until the seven-twelve to-morrow morning. I tried 
 to get a conveyance. No luck. But the porter says his wife 
 will put you up. Come along, I'll take you down." 
 
 "What about you?" 
 
 "I? Oh, I'm going for a walk! . . . Afterwards I can 
 shake down here. I'll be all right. I don't matter. It's you. 
 Do you think you'll get into a row?" 
 
 Roberta jammed on her hat. 
 
 "Oh, I don't know. ... I dare say. It's quite the sort of 
 thing mother's likely to make a fuss about."
 
 INTRUSION 107 
 
 "Well you can hardly blame her." 
 
 "Oh, mother's impossible! She doesn't trust people you'll 
 have to stick up for me." 
 
 He would do that, he said. But he hoped Mrs. Leigh was 
 going to be reasonable. His eyes rested, thoughtfully, upon 
 the daisies that grew on the railway bank, looking like big stars 
 beneath the white moon. And again he hoped Roberta's 
 mother would be reasonable. It wasn't the sort of situation 
 he'd care to argue about. 
 
 Outside the porter's house he shook hands with Roberta, but 
 did not offer to kiss her. He was too uneasy for that. He 
 realised, vaguely, that Roberta was uneasy too, and at the back 
 of his mind lurked the knowledge that when you took a girl 
 out into the country you did not miss the last train home. You 
 were most careful about that. It really did matter. 
 
 The mood of the afternoon had gone: so had that other 
 and different of the cinema. All that was unreal. The only 
 thing that was real, that existed, was this ridiculous fact that 
 he had allowed Roberta to lose the last train. 
 
 It depressed him. It depressed him so much that the idea 
 of a walk and the rest of the night on the station no longer 
 appealed to him. He went into the first inn he came to he 
 never even knew its name and asked for a bed. "I shan't 
 need breakfast," he said. "I want to catch the first train to 
 town." He had said something like that to Roberta. "Tell 
 them you don't want breakfast that you must get home by 
 the first train." 
 
 The people at the hotel were accommodating. They were 
 also sympathetic, and while Allan wrote his name in the 
 Visitors' Book they agreed that the train service was painfully 
 inadequate and were quite sure the young lady would be very 
 comfortable with the porter's wife. Later they gave him his 
 bill, promised he should be called in good time and showed 
 him to his room. Allan sat down in it and, feeling not in the 
 least like bed, began to re-read the Ode to Autumn that Roberta 
 that afternoon and Caryl before her had labelled "depres- 
 sing." It seemed to him now that they were right. The strain 
 of melancholy was there. For Keats, autumn crowned, even 
 while it killed, the hope that summer had given. It was a 
 world of slain hopes, of unfulfilled promises. Allan shut up 
 the book, turned out the light and got into bed.
 
 io8 INTRUSION 
 
 But not to sleep. 
 
 The green and gold of the afternoon danced before his eyes, 
 and the figure of Roberta, flat in the grass, pulling at the grass 
 with fingers that were thick and short and not beautiful, some- 
 how, like the rest of her. 
 
 His thoughts would not leave him. He wondered if she were 
 asleep or if she, too, lay awake, restless and concerned for the 
 morrow, as he was. He got out of bed and drew up the blind. 
 Outside the summer night passed on. The warm air moved 
 about him, and the perfume of syringa and jasmine. Between 
 the dark trees of the garden a silver moon hung, like a lantern. 
 The cool woods on the hill-side where they had lain that 
 afternoon were folded duskily in amethystine. Save for the 
 soft voice of the wind in the trees the silence was unbroken. 
 It seemed, somehow, to hem in the world. . . . 
 
 It was a long while before Allan got back into bed, and when, 
 much later, he fell asleep, it was to dream of racing with 
 Roberta through the streets of town after town, his fingers 
 twisted in hers. Once or twice she fell, huddled, at his feet. 
 He pulled her up again and they sped on. The moon faded 
 and the sun came up, and the turquoise morning sky, but they 
 never paused. They were running, he and she, to the end of 
 the world. And then, miraculously, she slipped her hand, 
 darted forward and out-distanced him. He ran on and on, 
 but for all his effort he never gained one inch upon her. He 
 saw her run, staggering, up a green hill above which the sun 
 was heaving his broad shoulder. For one second she paused, 
 threw up her arms in the face of the sun and disappeared. 
 Nothing, when he reached the top, but the green hill and the 
 red-gold sun and the moon-daisies white beneath it. 
 
 He awoke shivering, to find it morning and someone knocking 
 at the door. 
 
 He hurried to the station with a sense heavy upon him that 
 he had been hurrying like this all night. So vivid as all that 
 had his dream been; it had left him tired and unrefreshed. 
 
 Roberta was on the platform, waiting. She looked pale and 
 had not slept well, either, she said. And she had had no break- 
 fast. No one had been up at the house. She had let herself 
 out. 
 
 They were very quiet on the way to Marylebone. Roberta 
 spoke little: she smiled when he spoke to her and let her hand
 
 INTRUSION 
 
 rest within his. The bells for early service were ringing when 
 they got into town. Here and there from tall dark houses 
 communicants stole out and hurried away each with a hungry 
 look, as Allan thought. He was hungry, too and Roberta. 
 As they neared Manningtree Avenue she pulled sharply at his 
 arm. 
 
 "Go slower ... it looks so silly to hurry like this." 
 
 "Are we hurrying? I didn't know." 
 
 "You stride so ... you've given me a stitch. There's no 
 need to hurry." 
 
 "None. . . . None at all. I say, do you feel faint?" 
 
 "A little and oh, Allan, I believe I'm afraid! . . ." 
 
 "Why? There's nothing to be afraid of. We haven't done 
 anything to be ashamed of." 
 
 "I know. . . . But I am frightened. . . ." 
 
 He stopped suddenly on the pavement and took her by the 
 arm. For the moment resolutely, and for Roberta's sake 
 he put from him the uneasiness of the night, refusing to see 
 in the sagging, bulky figure of Mrs. Leigh any dire personifica- 
 tion of Mrs. Grundy. 
 
 "Look here, Bobbie," he said, "you're to stop being fright- 
 ened. There's nothing whatever to feel like that about. We 
 were rather silly and careless nothing else. No one's going 
 to suggest anything else. It was the sort of mistake anybody 
 could make. An accident. Now, wasn't it?" 
 
 Roberta didn't look at him. 
 
 "Yes," she said, "of course." 
 
 "Come along, then," said Allan, "and don't be silly!" 
 
 They went on again, past windows in which people sat, 
 furtively pulling at the curtains, in the way Suburbia has, to 
 glance at them. As they went in at the gate of two-hundred- 
 and-two the man from upstairs opened the door and came out 
 with his dog. He said good morning to Roberta and raised his 
 hat: but Allan, turning his head, saw him look at his watch. 
 
 "Damn!" he said to himself. Not alone because of the 
 man with the dog and his watch, but because behind the Not- 
 tingham lace curtains of the ground floor window he saw the 
 waiting figures of Mr. and Mrs. Leigh. They, too, must have 
 seen the encounter with the man from upstairs. Of course, 
 they had seen. They had seen everything. They had been 
 there at the window all night. That was the impression Allan
 
 no INTRUSION 
 
 received that they had been standing there behind the curtains 
 all night, watching. 
 
 It was Mrs. Leigh who opened the door. An odour of bacon 
 rushed out at them; then the door closed again, shutting them 
 inside with the smell. Out there in the narrow passage nobody 
 spoke. Allan and Roberta wiped their mudless boots very 
 carefully upon the mat and followed Airs. Leigh into the front 
 sitting-room, where Mr. Leigh stood uneasily upon the hearth- 
 rug and fidgeted with the tails of his coat. There was a hor- 
 rible air of suppressed emotion about Roberta's mother. Her 
 face was white and strained. She said nothing, only moved 
 about the room picking things up and putting them down 
 again. A sort of mental paralysis seemed to have overtaken 
 Allan. His brain felt numb : he could think of nothing to say. 
 Something of the same process seemed to have taken place with 
 Roberta's father, but he recovered more quickly than Allan. 
 
 "Mr. Suffield ... I must really ask for an explanation. . . ." 
 
 Mrs. Leigh, as at a given signal, dropped the china dog she 
 was moving for the third time and went over and shut up the 
 window. That, somehow, woke Allan up. 
 
 "The explanation, sir, is quite simple. We missed the last 
 train and had to stay the night." 
 
 The nervous energy ebbed out of Mrs. Leigh's fingers and 
 feet. They were suddenly still. But her lips moved and her 
 tongue. 
 
 "Missed the train!" she said. "Why don't you tell us Queen 
 Anne's dead, Mr. Suffield?" 
 
 Allan felt suddenly idiotic. He wanted to laugh. 
 
 "I imagined you knew," he said. "She's quite famous for 
 being dead." 
 
 "Young man," said Mr. Leigh sternly, "people 'don't miss 
 last trains when they take young women out into the country." 
 
 "I know it isn't done," said Allan, "but, you see, we did it." 
 
 "This is no occasion for levity, Mr. Suffield. You ought to 
 be able to see that for yourself." 
 
 "I beg your pardon," said Allan. "I do see that, of course;' 
 but I'm afraid, you know, that I don't quite see that it is an 
 occasion for sackcloth and ashes." Sanity returned to him:
 
 INTRUSION in 
 
 the ghost of Queen Anne no longer gibbered at him from the 
 dead centuries. He only saw Roberta standing there on the 
 edge of tears: her face white and frightened and puckered up 
 in a fashion horribly pathetic. He began to explain. . . . 
 "We caught the very first train back this morning . . ." he 
 finished. "We didn't even wait for a meal." 
 
 He saw suddenly that it would have been better if they had. 
 He saw it before Roberta's mother came and sat in her tem- 
 pestuous fashion on a chair in the middle of the room and said 
 she wished to God they had. 
 
 "Coming in 'ere at half-past eight in the morning. . . . 
 What do you think people think? specially that woman 
 upstairs, who knows Roberta didn't come home last night as 
 well as I know it myself. It'd have looked more natural-like 
 if you'd come in about one as if you were coming to lunch. 
 Now it'll be all over the road by to-morrow morning." 
 
 "I can't see what it has to do with the neighbours," Allan 
 said. He was amazed at her passion: it seemed wasted, some- 
 how, to him, on mere neighbours. He couldn't, for the life 
 of him, see where the neighbours came in, even allowing for 
 that man and his watch. . . . 
 
 "Who else has it got to do with, then? It's the neighbours 
 that matter," enunciated Mrs. Leigh. 
 
 "I really can't see it," Allan said. "I can't see that any- 
 body's concerned but you and Mr. Leigh. I have given you 
 the truth ! If you accept it, there is nothing more to be said : 
 save that I'm very sorry indeed I ever allowed it to happen." 
 
 Mrs. Leigh took out her handkerchief and began to weep 
 into it. Mr. Leigh turned and gazed into the empty grate, 
 then away from it to the shut window as if, even now, the 
 eagle eye of one of the neighbours might be glued to it. 
 
 "You don't understand," Mrs. Leigh sobbed. "It isn't that 
 I don't believe what you say, nor yet her father, neither. I'm 
 sure we trust you, Mr. Suffield. I've always said you were a 
 gentleman. It isn't that. But I've been through this sort of 
 thing before. After what has happened she really couldn't 
 afford to do it, Mr. Suffield. I always said we ought to have 
 moved out of the neighbourhood though where we should have 
 gone, goodness knows." 
 
 "Now, mother, leave it alone," advised her husband. "No 
 use crying over spilt milk."
 
 112 INTRUSION 
 
 "But you needn't keep on spilling it," Mrs. Leigh said. 
 
 Once again Allan was caught by that tremendous desire for 
 laughter, and once again mysteriously kept from laughter by 
 something he read in Roberta's face. 
 
 "I'm afraid I don't understand," he said. 
 
 Something at that seemed to happen to Roberta. The colour 
 came to her face and she took a step forward. "Oh, do shut 
 up, mother!" she said. 
 
 But Mrs. Leigh showed no inclination to do anything of the 
 sort. 
 
 "Now, my girl," she said, "you listen to me. You can pack 
 your things and take yourself off. You can't say I haven't 
 warned you. Once in a lifetime's sufficient. I won't have you 
 at home no more. So you know. ..." 
 
 Roberta's tears fell in a sudden shower over her face. She 
 made no attempt to wipe them away: they ran salt into her 
 mouth as she opened it to speak. 
 
 "I haven't done anything, mother. I haven't done anything 
 at all." 
 
 "You've done enough, my girl. You've done too much by 
 half. And now you go!" 
 
 Her phrases fell like a lash upon Allan's understanding. The 
 fog of her innuendo smothered him. 
 
 "I can't imagine what you mean," he said. "You can't 
 possibly be meaning to turn Roberta out of the house because 
 of this occurrence, especially as you say you accept my version 
 of the facts. There's something behind it all. If it concerns 
 me ... or my brother, perhaps ... I think I ought to hear it." 
 
 Mrs. Leigh blew her nose and said that it didn't concern him 
 or his brother, but that she thought he ought to be told. 
 
 "Don't be a fool, Martha!" her husband cautioned her from 
 the window, and Roberta a new, distracted, agitated Roberta 
 cried out in protest. 
 
 "Oh, mother, please. . . . Not that old story, please . . . 
 please. It isn't fair!" 
 
 What happened after that was never very clear to Allan, save 
 what came at the end. For the rest of his life he carried with 
 him a vague recollection of a number of things happening at 
 once and of something queer and unexpected happening sud- 
 denly to himself there at the end. With the passing of time 
 they made, all of them, in his mind a faint grey mist, out of
 
 INTRUSION 113 
 
 which Roberta^s wet face rose always and stabbed at him. . . . 
 
 But they were clear and actual that Sunday morning, for all 
 he comprehended them so little. Roberta and her mother in 
 tears, their raised voices and that of Mr. Leigh hushing them 
 down, his eyes wandering all the time to the window ; the steady 
 rise and fall of Mrs. Leigh's voice and the gradual implacable 
 emerging of the story she had to tell the story of Delia King, 
 known of all the neighbours and that woman upstairs. . . . 
 
 It stood there stark and sheer when Mrs. Leigh had done 
 with it. Poor little Delia King! Between them they left her 
 nothing not even her breathless oblivion nor the dark secrecy 
 that was the grave! The sight of her standing there naked 
 and shamed in her compassionate youth hurt Allan to the soul. 
 His garment of speech closed round her tenderly. 
 
 "I shall be honoured, Mrs. Leigh," he said, "if Roberta will 
 be my wife." 
 
 He hadn't meant to say it. The words surprised nobody more 
 than they surprised him, but he did not wish them unsaid. 
 Under cover of them poor little Delia King stole back to her 
 grave, and Allan was worried by the sight of her no longer. 
 Suppliant, he held out his hands to Roberta. 
 
 "Bobbie," he said, "will you marry me?" 
 
 Half an hour later they were eating fried bacon and buttered 
 toast and Mrs. Leigh was saying that all was well that ended 
 well. She seemed very certain of that. 
 
 For the edification of the neighbours they went, presently, 
 for a walk before dinner, which was to be ready at two o'clock. 
 And to edify the neighbours still further Mr. Leigh went with 
 them, and his wife came to the gate to see them off. In the 
 afternoon Allan and'Roberta sat in the front room and Roberta 
 played tunes on the cracked piano. She played the wrong 
 things and she played them badly. ... It was a long time 
 before Allan had her to himself. . . . 
 
 That afternoon she was, perhaps, as near to loving him as 
 she ever came, and though she was exultant and triumphant 
 she was grateful, too. For Allan was going to take her away 
 from this poky little house and from her mother's suspicions 
 and muck-rakings in the past. She hated her mother, but she
 
 114 INTRUSION 
 
 was fond of Allan fonder than she had ever been of anyone 
 before, unless it was Jan and him she had already forgotten. 
 Besides, Jan had never asked her to marry him. 
 
 But Allan had as she had meant he should, since that day 
 when she had first seen him as her means of escape. Not that 
 it had been too easy there had been a risk in that idea of the 
 train. . . . 
 
 For Allan there was no escape. He was caught in the web 
 of her scheming and of her beauty a web hung with bryony 
 and jasmine and heavy with scent. The wings of his soul 
 fluttered once, as if to find hers, and were still. The web was 
 Strong and held. He could not escape. 
 
 But he was very happy.
 
 CHAPTER ELEVEN 
 
 ALLAN'S courtship was very much like all other court- 
 ships, save that he had no standards whereby to judge 
 it. Against the days that were quite certainly happy 
 there were others that just as certainly were not. Against the 
 times when Allan lived, with uplifted air, as one about to 
 make a tremendous discovery, there were others when the world 
 shrivelled to the dimensions of the Comet office or the span 
 of Roberta's pretty arms. And certainly at this period he 
 never discovered anything worth discovering, save that an 
 engagement can be a disappointing affair, and that there were 
 days when the very thought of Roberta tortured him: when he 
 almost hated her not because she had so much of him, but 
 because she hadn't all of him, because there were reserves out 
 of reach, that she did not even suspect. Yet, on the whole, 
 these days, she was affable, good-humoured and patient. 
 Patient she needed to be, for Allan was at times distinctly 
 trying. He could no more accept Roberta as he found her 
 than he could accept the world. Behind the mask-like 
 beauty of the Roberta to whom he was engaged he saw always 
 the image of some other Roberta he imagined she could become 
 and to whom he would like much better to be engaged. And 
 Roberta, who was enjoying the role of engaged girl and would 
 have been extremely bored by this vision of her metamorphic 
 self, sacrificed at this time quite a number of her own inclina- 
 tions to keep her reformer-lover in good humour. She did not 
 like him to criticise her or to find fault not because she had 
 reached that stage when the arrows of disapproval could pierce 
 between the armour of her amour-propre, but because she 
 believed that it was necessary to stem the tide of Allan's critical 
 tendencies until marriage had built up the sea-wall that would 
 defy it. That was why she tried to say "nice" and "good night" 
 instead of "naice" and "good naight" which came so much 
 
 "5
 
 n6 INTRUSION 
 
 more easily, but which had an extraordinarily irritating effect 
 upon Allan. For the same reason, though she made up for it 
 by reading her novelettes in bed at night, she suffered Allan 
 to direct her literary education, and formed part of the intel- 
 ligentsia in the pit to see "high brow" plays, stifling her 
 yearning for "fluff" and the revue. 
 
 But God, tempering the wind, had sent the Russian Ballet 
 and here Allan and Roberta met on something like common 
 ground. For they both loved the Russian Ballet. That they 
 loved it for different reasons didn't matter, though they cer- 
 tainly did. Roberta went to the Russian Ballet for much the 
 same reason as respectable paterfamilias from the suburbs went 
 to see Kismet and Chu Chin Chow, and Allan's talk of design, 
 of co-ordination and setting mystified her, as did his flat refusal 
 to read the "story" beforehand. M. Diaghileff's productions, 
 however, were undoubtedly a godsend, and Allan and Roberta 
 went night after night to the Alhambra and saw Karsavina, 
 Lopokova, Lydia Kyasht, Massine and the rest, and heard 
 the music of Rimsky-Korsakoff and Maurice Ravel and Stra- 
 vinsky and Moussorgsky and (incidentally) how many times 
 their neighbours had heard it before. 
 
 Even the Russian Ballet, however, did not entirely wipe out 
 Allan's moods of wretchedness which at times touched pro- 
 fundity. It wasn't always Roberta's affected pronunciation 
 nor her constitutional inability to spell; but the fact that she 
 attracted so much notice. There were times when he could 
 have murdered the men who sat opposite her in a bus. He 
 hated people to stare at her, though he knew that if he'd been 
 in their place he would have stared just the same. He always 
 felt somehow that Roberta enjoyed the attention she evoked. 
 Frequently she didn't attend in public to what he said: her 
 replies were absent and she smiled too much. "What's funny?'* 
 Allan would say, and at her "Nothing," rage would consume 
 him. "Then what are you smiling for?" he would say, and 
 Roberta would blush and look angry (which only made her 
 nicer to look at), and the man opposite would glare as though 
 he considered him a bully who didn't deserve his luck. Worst 
 of all, however, were the days when their outings together were 
 spoiled because of the things that came between the things 
 he knew, the many more he imagined: the kisses other men 
 had given her, the kisses Jan had given her.
 
 INTRUSION 
 
 Sometimes, perversely, he talked to her of Jan, and she 
 showed no disinclination until she saw it made him angry. 
 After that nothing would induce her to respond, and sometimes 
 that, too, made him angry: a black devil of jealousy sat in his 
 heart and spoilt their hours together, until Roberta discovered 
 that the charm which worked was her tears. He never could 
 stand seeing her cry. But at such times Allan could not have 
 said whether he hated her because she had known Jan or 
 because she had already forgotten him. 
 
 That, however, was an incident of which Allan's family knew 
 nothing. And Allan's family had accepted Roberta, though 
 the thought that they might not had earlier kept Allan awake 
 for nights, as it certainly had not kept Roberta. To that 
 initial interview Roberta took her best clothes and the assur- 
 ance of her beauty, believing that, in their hearts, people 
 cared more for that in a woman than anything else. Anne 
 Suffield, it is true, wrote to Guen that she thought there 
 ought to be more mental equality between a man like Allan 
 and the girl he was going to marry: but Guen knew she 
 wasn't really worried; scarcely even surprised. Her belief 
 that the chief characteristic of her children was that they did 
 the things you least expected of them, was by this time firmly 
 rooted. Pen, too, thought Allan ought to marry somebody 
 whp would look after him (an operation she thought no man 
 could manage for himself) and give him children, but her 
 attitude did not lack affability though unbroadened by ostenta- 
 tion, so that Roberta had nothing really to complain of. Con- 
 sidering her reading of Roberta, Pen was strictly decent; amaz- 
 ingly decent, according to Tom (who thought all women were 
 "cats") when you remembered how Roberta's looks spoilt her 
 own. 
 
 But if Roberta's subjugation of Pen lacked completeness, it 
 lacked nothing where Allan's father was concerned. John 
 Suffield's leaning was always more towards looks (in a woman) 
 than brains, and Roberta, he thought, combined the maximum 
 of looks with as many brains as was necessary. She was no 
 fool. She . was shrewd and ambitious, and would correct 
 Allan's idiotic tendency to behave as though money didn't 
 matter. The picture of Roberta keeping Allan's nose to the 
 grindstone seemed to afford Allan's father much private satis- 
 faction, so that he not only accepted Roberta, but Roberta's
 
 ii 8 INTRUSION 
 
 father and mother a much more difficult matter. With an 
 uncanny skill he ignored Mrs. Leigh's tendency to abolish the 
 letter "h" and her husband's to abolish Conservatives and 
 landlords and the private ownership of land. He even swal- 
 lowed the warehouse and Henry Leigh's unsatisfactory position 
 in it, and was properly snubbing to Pen when she said that 
 the only word she could think of when she saw Mrs. Leigh 
 was avoirdupois. 
 
 There remained Caryl and Guen. 
 
 Caryl, like her father, had been instantly subjugated. What 
 she liked about Roberta was her vitality; her unashamed joy 
 in herself and in life and her unliterary attitude towards it. 
 Intellect, so Caryl thought, had been overdone in the Suffield 
 family, and Allan had more than enough for two people. Intel- 
 lect was apt to get in the way. There was such a thing as 
 being too clever. You might as well be dead as too clever: 
 you'd be happier, anyway. Roberta, so Caryl said, was a very 
 necessary piece of leaven and she would have beautiful babies. 
 
 "Babies!" said Pen. "She won't have any!" 
 
 "Rot, of course she will!" Caryl said, "she's just the sort. 
 You've only got to look at her." 
 
 "I don't know what you're driving at," Pen said, "unless 
 you mean that it's the brainless women who have the children." 
 
 "Who make the best job of it," amended Caryl. "The brainy 
 woman either doesn't have any children, or doesn't want 'em 
 or comes to grief over the business. Not always, I know, but 
 it's a pretty safe generalisation. I think Nature ought to do 
 better: she ought to sort us out. Perhaps she will a thousand 
 years hence. The women with brains, who think brains matter 
 most and want to do the world's work, won't be able to have 
 children, won't want 'em and won't be expected to have 'em. 
 I daresay the old-fashioned sort of men will be rude about 
 them in the Press, but at least we'll know where we are." 
 
 Pen laughed. 
 
 "Which would you want the brains or the babies ?" 
 
 "Both," said Caryl "I shouldn't fit in. Wouldn't it be 
 perfectly damnable?"
 
 INTRUSION 119 
 
 That, too, was the phrase Guen employed when she received 
 her mother's letter with its news of Allan's engagement. Allan's 
 own letter came afterwards and was brief. Worse, it told her 
 nothing. She replied, also saying nothing, save that Allan was 
 to come and see her on Saturday. 
 
 He went. 
 
 It was, on the whole, a painful interview so painful that 
 Guen, trying afterwards to see just exactly where it had taken 
 her, wrote it all down in a long letter to Madeleine, but tore 
 it up when it was finished as though she did not care, after 
 all, to see quite so plainly where she and Allan had landed 
 each other; or did not care, perhaps, for Madeleine to see it. 
 What she had hoped to do with Allan had never been very 
 clear, but whatever it was she had failed completely. She had 
 done nothing at all, save stare at Allan across a stretch of 
 hostile country, shouting out things in a language that had 
 ceased to be common. She could have cried out with relief 
 when the luncheon bell rang and she could escape. 
 
 And over luncheon the conversation showed a tendency to 
 dwell on trivialities until Gore, arriving in the middle of it, 
 forced it for a time into the channels of his own particular 
 interests. He wanted a critical article, he said, on Galdo's 
 novels, and seemed to think it unreasonable of Allan not to 
 know anything about them. Also, he wanted articles concerned 
 with the Drama of Ideas, and upon the art of Nijinsky and 
 Massine. Massine, according to Gore, had missed the vital 
 point of Scheherazade. He made you think that the black 
 men desired the white women, and Tony thought it was the 
 other way round. Massine, too, was never really tragic gro- 
 tesque, almost, at times. Allan agreed and was commissioned 
 forthwith to do the article. 
 
 When Allan had gone Guen sat down to write to Madeleine. 
 Her letter plunged because, already, Madeleine had the facts. 
 Caryl a week ago had written them, and Madeleine had not 
 replied. Neither had she congratulated Allan. She wouldn't, 
 of course, Guen said. She didn't, these days, write ever to
 
 120 INTRUSION 
 
 \ 
 
 Allan. Caryl had shrugged her shoulders. "Well, she might 
 stretch a point in a case like this. She might just say she 
 hoped he would be happy, anyway." 
 
 So far, however, Madeleine had not done anything of the 
 sort. And Guen's letter was not intended as a reminder. It 
 was an attempt not to explain to Madeleine, but to explain 
 to herself; and, anyway, it was never sent. 
 
 I so badly want to talk to you, my dear Madeleine, and 
 you aren't here and there's nobody else. Not even Tony. 
 Tony on this point is dense. He isn't really interested in 
 women except when they "do" things, and Roberta doesn't, 
 so he says. He won't see that she has already done too 
 much. He thinks I'm making a fuss over nothing. And 
 I'm not. 
 
 For Allan's been here and I know. It was like shouting 
 across a desert in a sandstorm. I felt thwarted and desolate, 
 and Allan had, all the time, the look of one guarding his 
 defences. But I did once or twice get beneath them. I did 
 see I see now why he's going through with this, and why, 
 in a sense, it has to be. More than all else, perhaps, it was 
 the look of him. It wasn't that he looked ill, though he 
 didn't, I thought, look too well. He was pale and owned 
 to a headache. I daresay he overdoes it. But it was hi?, 
 eyes that gave him away: that said quite plainly what his 
 lips guarded so jealously for in words he told me nothing. 
 (I wish I didn't keep remembering that Allan used to tell 
 me most things.) I got the sense of things having sprung 
 upon him from some hidden comer. Quite suddenly he's 
 appallingly grown-up adult. It's so absurd that Roberta 
 that stupid little person we rescued that day in October (do 
 you remember?) from the rain could have done all that. 
 And to Allan! Yet you simply can't look at him without 
 realising how much "all that" is and what it means. 
 
 There isn't, anyway, the least doubt about that. Nothing 
 anyone could do or say would prevent his marrying Roberta. 
 And that is just, of course, what he oughtn't to do. ... 
 Morality seems a farce in the face of this . . . this disaster: 
 that, I am sure, is what it is or will be. And none of us can 
 stop it. That's the awful thing. It's like watching a street 
 accident that you can see coming but can't prevent.
 
 INTRUSION 121 
 
 It would be better, somehow, if Allan believed less in 
 marriage and what it could do for you. Not that he would 
 admit that, however. He wasn't admitting anything; but 
 for all that I felt he did think I ought to understand some- 
 thing he thought I didn't : that he wanted, violently, to make 
 me, and that the violence of his desire hurt and puzzled 
 him. I believe I said something disparaging of marriage: 
 bad taste, of course, in a woman happily married. He 
 said, "Well, you look as if marriage agreed with you, any- 
 way." I said that it ought and reminded him that Luther 
 said it was what we were here for. We agreed that 
 Luther had rather overdone it. I said that marriage had 
 been "overdone" altogether; talked up and talked down 
 and the truth falling, as truth always does, of course, to the 
 ground. 
 
 "But you like being married?" he asked me. 
 
 I said I liked being married to Tony. 
 
 He said he supposed that mattered tremendously, whom 
 one married. 
 
 I said that it mattered everything. 
 
 He said what about the women who didn't seem to care 
 whom they married as long as they married somebody? 
 What would they make of my "everything"? 
 
 I said "Nothing"; but that they wouldn't, either, make 
 anything of anything at all. With them it was like jumping 
 into the sea to escape a lion : they were so much more afraid 
 of the lion. 
 
 "You mean they're much more afraid of never being 
 married than of marrying the wrong man?" 
 
 I said: "Something like that. . Now tell me about yourself 
 and Roberta." 
 
 Of course, he didn't. At least, he didn't tell me anything 
 I didn't know or hadn't guessed. They're to be married 
 soon; wretchedly soon because there's a man at the Comet 
 who's being sent abroad and they've the chance of his house. 
 Roberta, Allan said, was in no hurry. "And you?" I asked. 
 
 He wouldn't answer that. I said, "You are. You think 
 marriage is a miracle-worker. It isn't." 
 
 Allan said "Good God! Do you think I've reasoned it 
 out like that? I only know that I can't live without her." 
 I didn't say anything to that because I couldn't think of
 
 122 INTRUSION 
 
 anything to say except "But can you live with her?" which 
 didn't seem adequate or too adequate. Anyway, it seemed 
 to me much more important. We sat and looked at each 
 other, and presently Allan said, "I don't know what you're 
 driving at Or perhaps (as I smiled) I do. But it isn't any 
 good. I'm not made like that. Marriage is the only way 
 out for me for us. You don't know Roberta. But you 
 know me. 
 
 I did. 
 
 "Damn," I said. I felt savage. I added, "It would be, 
 for you!" I hated Roberta. I'd have shouted for joy if 
 he'd suddenly announced that he was going off to live with 
 her. I think Allan was shocked. Then, thank Heaven, he 
 got angry again and said, "Good God!" and couldn't I 
 understand ! 
 
 I said I did, but that "that" would come to an end 
 before marriage did. Then I wished I hadn't. And I 
 wanted to cry. 
 
 I think, I always knew this would happen. Men like 
 Allan are inevitably the victims of their own natures. Some 
 day he had to wake up. Somebody was going to rouse feel- 
 ings and desires which till her coming had slumbered. But 
 why is it that the person who can arouse can so seldom 
 satisfy? It's just one little bit of Allan Roberta can get at, 
 and no more. Only he doesn't believe it. He said I was 
 unfair to my sex as all women are. Even in my rage I 
 smiled at that. His precious Roberta had never had a 
 chance. I'd simply got, he said, to remember that. We 
 had to help her he and I and the rest of us, I gathered. 
 "That's what I feel," he said, "that I've got to help her. 
 I want to look after her . . . protect her. I can't explain." 
 
 But he had, of course. That word "protect" had given 
 it me. Roberta's disadvantages, the things he hated and 
 despised and despaired of in her had given him an object 
 in life. Roberta, he thought, needed him, as none of us 
 ever did. More than mother, now there's the new Jan. 
 That, writ small, is what it all comes down to, yet it struck 
 me then and it strikes me now as ridiculous, because to me 
 it's so obvious that it's Allan who wants looking after. You'd 
 have said so, too, if you'd heard his absurd story about some 
 missed train, the parental wrath and the dragging out of the
 
 INTRUSION 123 
 
 family skeleton because he began then to tell me things. 
 It was just here that the defences broke down. . . . He 
 threw Roberta at me. Roberta with her uncongenial home 
 life, her dull work at the studio and her parents with theii 
 outraged conventions. . . . She'd thrown them at Allan often 
 enough, I've no doubt: they caught him, the lot of them, 
 on his vulnerable side that day after the missed train. 
 
 "You're like Shelley," I said, "when Harriet caught him 
 by that story of persecution at school." But he isn't really, 
 because Shelley never believed in marriage even when he 
 married his Harriet, and it's pathetic to see how Allan believes 
 in it. 
 
 I think that must have been why I made another effort 
 to make him "see." I hated Roberta, but I put her case 
 for her. It wasn't generosity: it was simply that I knew 
 it was no good putting his. He was ready enough to be 
 sacrificed. I saw that so plainly it terrified me, and I was 
 terrified, too, because he seemed to be getting small and 
 distant. I had the sense of shouting as if he were out- 
 distancing me, and my voice had to travel to catch up with 
 him. I had a mental vision of myself trailing over the dusty 
 distances dragging a dishevelled and weary Roberta at my 
 heels, and what I said went, somehow, like this. 
 
 "Allan, listen to me. Do please listen to me. Let's see 
 things as they are. You're not going to be rich. Marriage 
 on a small income makes big demands on a girl unfair 
 demands, doubtless, only if she cares enough it doesn't mat- 
 ter so much, though it's still unfair. How much of that 
 does Roberta understand? Or haven't you discussed it 
 with her?" 
 
 Allan said, "She knows, of course, what my position is." 
 
 "But does she know what it means? Girls don't, very 
 often. There'll be meals to cook, clothes to mend, rooms 
 to clean and, perhaps . . . babies." 
 
 "We needn't have any babies." 
 
 "You may want them. Oh, not at first, perhaps, buti 
 later on." 
 
 He said he couldn't discuss that with Roberta. Here's 
 a pretty pair of modern lovers for you ! There were actually 
 things they couldn't "discuss." I think I shrugged my 
 shoulders, not a pretty trick, I know, in a plain woman.
 
 124 INTRUSION 
 
 But I wanted to shake Allan to shake sense into him and 
 some of his fantastic illusions out of him. And again I 
 started putting Roberta's case for her. I said: 
 
 "Well, I think you ought to discuss it, that's all." (I 
 seemed to be getting angrier: the words kept rushing up 
 quicker than I could get them out.) I went on. "You 
 ought to tell her what things mean, if you think she doesn't 
 know; or do you want to marry a child?" (Roberta a 
 child! But you see how well I put her case!) ''It isn't a 
 pretty fact and men don't admit it, I know, but marriage for 
 thousands of women means just their automatic conversion 
 into wife, housekeeper, mother, nurse and maid-of-all-work. 
 It's either worth it (but never so entirely worth it as men 
 imagine) or it isn't worth it at all. But you ought to be 
 certain that it's going to be worth it for Roberta." 
 
 Still Allan said nothing. I began to see that he didn't 
 mean to say anything. The distance between us increased. 
 I ploughed after him, but I dropped Roberta. I was getting 
 very tired. Perhaps that was why I let myself go why I 
 got on to my pet theories and attacked Allan's ridiculous 
 idea of marriage, his extraordinary idea of it as a miracle- 
 worker. I used a lot more words than that and I stopped, 
 presently, to let them sink in. They didn't seem to, some- 
 how. . . . 
 
 I plunged again began to develop my theories. I said 
 that on this business of sex the world was mad: that sex, 
 somehow, had to be put back in its proper place . . . that 
 it had no business to sprawl, indecently, as it does, over the 
 whole of life, and I attacked the marriage that has nothing 
 more than sex behind it, declared that such a marriage 
 wouldn't do for Allan, who would discover that sex feeling 
 is the most fleeting of all human emotions. You couldn't 
 build a future upon it. 
 
 Allan laughed. He laughed and was crushing and uncon- 
 vinced. He said, "Rubbish, old girl, you can't underrate 
 sex like that or its power." 
 
 I knew then that I'd lost: that nothing I could say would 
 touch him. All the same I went on. Heaven only knows 
 why or what I hoped to achieve. Actually, of course, I 
 achieved nothing. The desert between us flung the words 
 back in my face. ... I said:
 
 INTRUSION 12 5 
 
 "You're being stupid, Allan ... or am I? You can't 
 ignore sex: that's as stupid as overrating it, as most people 
 do. The truth is somewhere in between. Marriage the 
 best sort of marriage isn't all sex, and love, even sexual 
 love, isn't what the world thinks it: it's finer than mere 
 sentimentality, nobler than desire. It's comradeship and 
 understanding and community of interests and toleration 
 and recognition of the soul in each." 
 
 Then I saw Allan's face, and suddenly I found myself 
 throwing Roberta at him again. 
 
 "If Roberta can't give you that, Allan, don't, for God's 
 sake, marry her. Because ultimately that's what you're 
 going to want." 
 
 Well, that was the end, because Allan looked at me and 
 said in that quiet way of his, "My dear old girl, do you 
 know that you're positively shouting?" I said idiotically 
 "I had to ... you wouldn't have heard else." Then we 
 both laughed, but it was the end right enough. Allan 
 began talking suddenly of the police strike and the mobs at 
 Liverpool, and I became intelligent again and stopped 
 wanting to laugh or to cry. I saw that he wasn't going to 
 escape. 
 
 That, somehow, wasn't a fact that made you want either 
 to laugh or to cry. You accepted it, quietly, as you always 
 do accept the inevitable. There's always a time when you 
 know you can't do anything, when the most rebellious of us 
 sit down and fold our hands. 
 
 Well, there it is. You'd have said that after the war 
 France it couldn't happen. The war is supposed to have 
 cured young men of making fools of themselves ... to 
 have given them insight and understanding. . . . The only 
 thing against that theory is that it isn't true. The war 
 has shifted standards and muddled them. Experience piled 
 Pelion upon Ossa is worse than no experience at all, and 
 it leaves the more sensitive open to attack at too many 
 points. With Allan Roberta must have had an easy task 
 (and you'll see I'm putting it on to Roberta. I'm so sure 
 that missed train had more significance than meets the eye). 
 Allan stood defenceless : the walls were down. She had him 
 all ways, through his reformist sense; through his eyes and 
 through his newly awakened instincts that had slept too
 
 126 INTRUSION 
 
 long. To a Roberta it couldn't have been difficult, for she 
 is, to look at, the most delightful creature. And the worst 
 of it is you'd swear there was something behind the mask. 
 She doesn't look empty and yet I'm sure she is. There just 
 isn't anything there at all that matters. 
 
 I don't see that there's anything to be done, except to 
 smudge out of my mind all these beliefs and conjectures con- 
 cerning Roberta which yet seem so damnably like certainties 
 and will take, I can tell you, some erasing. I've got to start 
 afresh : play the Optimist, believe that Allan is getting what 
 he wants . . . what he wants now . . . without asking myself 
 how long he's going to want it and whether he's going to 
 get it actually after all. Even there, you see, I don't trust 
 Roberta. 
 
 You see, too, how difficult it is to do the smudging with 
 any will. But I must. At least, Roberta shall have her 
 chance even with me, who don't want, in the least, to give 
 it her. 
 
 It was just here that Guen broke off and tore her letter up, 
 as if she realised that Roberta must have her "chance," too, 
 with Madeleine. And, anyway, her pen had been running 
 away with her. 
 
 Allan and Roberta were to be married in August. The 
 young man at the Comet had gone off earlier to his foreign 
 appointment than was expected and the opportunity of securing 
 his house was too good to be missed. So, at least, Roberta 
 said to Caryl, who agreed. Guen agreed, too, but stood there 
 faring out across the months to come as across centuries. 
 Caryl, catching her at it on one of her home visits, waxed 
 .scornful. 
 
 "My dear old thing," she said, "all this fuss because Bobbie 
 isn't 'booky' or 'brainy!' You're as bad as Pen. Yes, you 
 &re, you're snobs, both of you. For Pen Bobbie's family isn't 
 >ood enough (Pen's beastly about Mrs. Leigh and she's a 
 'dear!); for you it's her brains. I should have thought Allan 
 had more than enough for two. As a family we seem rather 
 o run to brains."
 
 INTRUSION 127 
 
 "It's a good fault, isn't it?" Guen asked. 
 
 "I don't know," said Caryl. "I can't help wishing some- 
 times that my features got on a little better together. It 
 must be jolly to have a face that's as ... harmonious . . . 
 as Bobbie's. It ought to be possible to buy fresh faces at the 
 shops." 
 
 "It is more or less," Guen said. "If we think it worth 
 while." 
 
 "Oh, that!" said Caryl. 
 
 Guen laughed. 
 
 "My dear child, you should have taken the precaution of 
 falling in love with a man who never looks at faces." 
 
 "What do you mean? Can't one get tired of one's mug 
 without your drawing unwarrantable conclusions?" 
 
 "Quite," said Guen. "I apologise. Your aspirations after 
 beauty are, of course, strictly impersonal." 
 
 But as though she knew they weren't she opened the subject 
 later with Pen, who since Guen's marriage had come with Tom 
 and Master Jan to live at Adelaide Lodge. And Pen wasn't a 
 bit satisfactory this evening: a little distraite, too, for she was 
 bathing her small son. Oh yes, she believed Caryl still saw that 
 young man Merrick at the Hestons. Why not? There wasn't 
 anything in that now. Oh, on his side once, perhaps; but 
 Caryl had choked him off. So Jack Heston had said, anyway, 
 just as she'd choked him off. Caryl hadn't any use for men 
 in that sort of way. She was like Madeleine. To both of them 
 men were like tables and chairs, nice useful things that were 
 there when you wanted them. They only wanted men as 
 friends. . . . Pen gathered that young Merrick was interested 
 at the moment in Marjorie's quarter. But Guen wasn't 
 Marjorie had never been anything to Guen but a pink and white 
 china doll with quantities of fair, fluffy hair, who was bound 
 to get fat, anyway. . . . "Queer, isn't it?" Pen said, "that 
 Caryl's like that about men, because she's so fond of 
 children. . . ." 
 
 But Guen had ceased to listen. She had forgotten Caryl and 
 the significance (or otherwise) of Richard Merrick. She was 
 watching the rosy curves of Baby Jan's body and wishing they 
 had given him some other name.
 
 BOOK II 
 CHAPTER ONE 
 
 ALLAN and Roberta spent their honeymoon in the Isle of 
 Wight. Allan had suggested a tiny village he knew by 
 the Devon sea, but Roberta had stuck to Shanklin. 
 She did not want, she said, to be buried alive in Devon. 
 
 Later, it occurred to Allan that Roberta did not intend to 
 be buried alive anywhere at all. Quite early she let him see 
 that very plainly indeed. "We may just as well look at the 
 place now we're here," she said, and frowned upon his tendency 
 to go and sit with her upon the cliffs. Roberta hadn't bought 
 her fine clothes for the purpose of sitting in them upon the 
 cliffs. And even from Allan's point of view the cliffs were not 
 wholly satisfactory, for beyond Sandown their walks were cir- 
 cumscribed by barbed wire and notices which warned them of 
 unexploded hand grenades and poison gas. Roberta, who 
 thought the war had stopped long ago, found them amusing; 
 Allan, who knew it hadn't, did not. More, too, than that. 
 He was constitutionally incapable of connecting the war with 
 anything amusing or "funny," as Roberta put it. Roberta 
 thought this a pity, for in this connection she was very proud 
 of him, and was given to saying sweetly at their private hotel, 
 "My husband, you know, will never talk about his experiences 
 in France. No one would ever believe he has three wound 
 stripes." 
 
 Allan, of course, detested the hotel, though he liked the spot 
 where they had built it up there on the esplanade they had 
 named after Keats, which was generous of them since Keats, 
 visiting Shanklin for the first time, had decided against it and 
 gone on to Carisbrooke. Allan, as he might have known he 
 would, had decided against the hotel before he had got through 
 
 128
 
 INTRUSION 129 
 
 the first evening's dinner. Allan had never liked the people he 
 found in private hotels and "superior" boarding-houses, and 
 after five years of war it was not to be supposed he would like 
 them any better. He hated their approval of himself as a boy 
 who had "done his bit" (which even his aloofness and his 
 unpopular opinions could not disturb), and he hated their air 
 of having, as a class, used up all the available backbone of 
 England. But he was amused by their belief in themselves, in 
 Lloyd George and the Almighty, and by their conception of 
 the Deity as a sort of British Field Marshal raised possibly to 
 the nth degree. He knew that many of them had "given" 
 sons in this cause of Humanity that was the War: he knew 
 that others had given money; that still others had made it; 
 but he only saw that they all had excellent appetites and an 
 air of justifying the genial optimism of Browning to the 
 remnants of a youthful generation that had suffered from it. 
 
 It was during that first week of pinpricks, when Allan was 
 wondering, at savage intervals, why he hadn't insisted on that 
 cottage on the Devon coast, that there arrived a young man 
 who came in heavily and unexpectedly on Allan's side when 
 these discussions arose. He had brought with him a copy of 
 Siegfried Sassoon's war poems and a small anthology of Verse 
 Written in War Time which Allan hadn't seen. Inside both 
 of these their owner had scrawled his name Martyn Thorp 
 and Martyn Thorp and Allan took an instantaneous and warm 
 liking to each other, based upon their agreement upon the 
 subject of war poetry and the people in boarding-houses who 
 didn't read it. Martyn, it transpired, was at the private hotel 
 because in a day or two his people were to join him there. 
 They would, so Martyn said, fit in: they liked "that sort of 
 place." Martyn, like Allan, did not; but "we haven't had 
 a holiday together for years," he explained. "The mater was 
 keen on it. You see, they sent me to Mesopotamia. You didn't 
 get much leave there. . . ." 
 
 But even before the arrival of the parents who liked "this 
 sort of place" and called Roberta "that charming-looking 
 girl," and admired her clothes, they did not see too much of 
 Martyn Thorp, certainly not as much as Roberta would have 
 liked. Martyn had found favour in her sight, never having 
 made the mistake of talking to her about books and politics and 
 dull things of that description. Also it wasn't difficult to see
 
 130 INTRUSION 
 
 that he admired Roberta tremendously and considered Allan a 
 "lucky dog." He was younger than Allan, and, for all his talk 
 of the soldier-poets, took life a good deal less seriously. The 
 strain of natural gloom in Allan was altogether missing in young 
 Thorp. In a discussion he was always on the right side: 
 theoretically he was sound, but when it came to practicalities 
 he saw none clearer the folly of running your head against 
 a brick wall. He wore an air of cheerful pessimism, as of one 
 who realises that the world is pretty nearly everything it 
 shouldn't be, but who realises, too, that he is not the man to 
 cope with it. The only criticism which at this stage Roberta 
 had to level against her new acquaintance was that he was over- 
 proficient in the gentle art of making himself scarce. He knew 
 well enough (before Roberta told him) that she and Allan were 
 on their honeymoon, but she had not meant that to imply quite 
 so much as he seemed to think it did. She had only meant to 
 quicken his interest in her, to deepen the atmosphere of 
 romance with which, so far as the hotel was concerned, she was 
 quite well aware she had been surrounded. All Roberta's 
 instincts were histrionic: she played always to an audience. 
 Allan, to her surprise, was slightly annoyed that she had "given 
 them away" and reflected that a private hotel was a ridiculous 
 place in which to spend a honeymoon. But Roberta had 
 laughed. 
 
 "Well, I did it for you. I thought you believed two's 
 company. You're not very grateful." 
 
 Two days later Allan suggested spending the rest of their 
 holiday in a creeper-clad house which they passed on one of 
 their walks and which displayed the phrase "Board Residence." 
 Roberta was amazed. 
 
 "Leave the hotel? Don't be absurd, Allan. All my clothes 
 are there. Besides, they'd make you pay for the fortnight, 
 anyway." 
 
 "Oh, let them!" said Allan. "It would be worth it. I'd 
 be much nicer here. . . . You'd see ... and we could do just 
 as we liked." 
 
 "But, Allan, we do as we like now . . . and you're quite 
 nice. Really, you are. . . . I'm quite satisfied with you." 
 
 "Then you won't come?" 
 
 "Don't be silly, Allan; you know we can't do it. ... It'd 
 look so silly."
 
 INTRUSION 131 
 
 "To all that crowd? P'raps; but what do they matter? 
 We shan't see any of them again." 
 
 "Why, you said only the other day how nice it would be if 
 Mr. Thorp'd come and see us when we get back." 
 
 "I know. Thorp's different. We could write to him from 
 here. He'd understand. I think you might, Bobbie. It'd be 
 such a lark." 
 
 But Roberta didn't see it as a lark at all. 
 
 "Oh, Allan, dear," she said, "I just love being at the hotel. 
 Don't be a beast and drag me away just when I'm having such 
 a good time!" 
 
 So Allan gave up the idea and went back and dressed for 
 dinner and was profoundly wretched, because he couldn't forget 
 how happy he would have been if Roberta had agreed to come 
 away with him to the creeper-clad house on the Ventnor Road. 
 That was all, really, that mattered that she should have 
 wanted to come. And she hadn't. 
 
 Allan chose that evening after dinner to ask Martyn if he 
 would come and see them when they all got back to London. 
 Martyn said "Rather," and that Roberta must come down and 
 have tea with the mater. The Thorps lived, it seemed, at 
 Bromley. They spoke of it with pride as "the town." 
 
 "Of course, we've only got a tiny little house," Roberta told 
 him. "Just six rooms, you know, and a bath-room." 
 
 "I fancy," said young Thorp, with his frank and charming 
 smile, "that I shan't come exactly to see the house, you know." 
 
 Roberta blushed, and Allan reflected that it was really time 
 he began to make some friends. He had never at any time had 
 many, for Maurice Linton had somehow made other friend- 
 ships unnecessary. Here and on his honeymoon he found 
 himself yearning for that old circle of talk and aspiration which 
 had been made up of himself, Guen, Madeleine and Maurice. 
 How they had talked and talked, with the keynote always in 
 harmony and that invisible thread holding them all together! 
 His thoughts of it now seemed to constitute a veritable elegy 
 of friendship. 
 
 Vaguely Allan understood that he was disappointed with this 
 first holiday with Roberta. Perhaps that was always how you
 
 132 INTRUSION 
 
 felt if you elected to spend your honeymoon in a private hotel. 
 Perhaps it served you right. 
 
 But it was more than the hotel of which Allan was critical. 
 His feeling of disappointment extended beyond the hotel garden 
 and its edge of green cliff to the whole of the Garden of 
 England, or as much of 'it as he managed to see. He did not 
 care at all for the Isle of Wight. He found its air enervating 
 and its inhabitants conservative-minded and suffering from 
 many other of the drawbacks of life on an island. Roberta, 
 however, thrived upon the warmth and did not object to the 
 condition of mind of its inhabitants. She thoroughly enjoyed 
 the drives about the island, and laughed at the interest Allan 
 took in Swinburne's grave at Bonchurch and his need to photo- 
 graph it. It seemed to Roberta that all the people who had 
 become "classics" had lived or stayed some time or other at 
 Bonchurch. Tennyson had come (and lady admirers, so the 
 guide-book said, had cut up his hat between them), and 
 Thackeray, Dickens and Macaulay. But of them all Roberta 
 most resented Macaulay, because Allan walked her along the 
 road to Ventnor to find the house where he had once resided, 
 and she thought it thoughtful of Swinburne to have lived so 
 near to the place where he had intended to be buried. She 
 thought, too, that Allan might have taken a photograph of her 
 sitting on the gate of East Dene, but Allan wouldn't even let 
 her sit on the gate, but had dragged her into the churchyard, 
 where he used up his films on Swinburne's grave and St. 
 Boniface church. On another day they went to St. Helens 
 and Sea view (where the house where Madeleine had recently 
 lived was marked "To let"), and on another to Carisbrooke, 
 where they tried to decide whether it was Mary Queen of Scots 
 or Charles the First, or neither, who was imprisoned in the 
 castle there. Roberta, on the whole, was inclined to think that 
 her honeymoon was eminently successful. Certainly she had 
 never been so well dressed before nor stayed in so excellently 
 appointed a house (it wasn't Roberta who'd find fault with 
 the hotel!). Her days were pleasant beyond all doubt. In the 
 mornings she bathed (which means that she donned a pretty 
 bathing costume and dabbled about on the edge, withstanding 
 Allan's invitations to "come out here where it's deep"), and 
 in the afternoons she went for a drive and returned just in time 
 to dress herself prettily for dinner. To any but the Robertas
 
 INTRUSION 133 
 
 of the world it may well sound dull; but Roberta was very far 
 from finding it dull. She was admired and envied, and because 
 she loved being admired and envied she was happy. Marriage 
 had given her a strange new dignity and importance that she 
 found extremely pleasurable. It amused her to watch the look 
 that came over people's faces when their eyes alighted on her 
 wedding-ring. She thrilled when someone said, "My dear, that 
 child's actually married to that nice young man. . . . Aren't 
 they a charming-looking pair?" 
 
 They were, rather, Roberta thought. 
 
 There was, of course, another side to marriage. . . . 
 
 Roberta had summed it up when two days before her wedding 
 she had said suddenly to Allan that, of course, they weren't 
 going to have any children. In no sense whatever had what 
 she had to say about it degenerated into discussion: it remained, 
 first and last, Roberta's personal declaration. Yet the very 
 way in which she had broken in upon the subject had offended 
 something within Allan. It wasn't that he thought such a 
 subject should not be discussed, but only that Roberta hadn't 
 done it; she had simply taken her stand, given him, as it were, 
 an ultimatum. It was as though there, at the outset, she had 
 been defending herself against him. The little spurt with 
 which the words had come out; the deepening of her colour 
 and her averted eyes had given him a feeling of shame; some- 
 how these things had stamped their relationship unmistakably, 
 as a thing not really intimate, not beautiful or delicate. It 
 had no soul. Neither had it created, so far, any soul in 
 Roberta, nor given her a robuster view of life. Still she dab- 
 bled about on its edge, untouched by desire or passion, yet 
 slightly afraid that life might, at this juncture, become incon- 
 venient or painful. Certain things in life were still "horrid," 
 and really nice people didn't talk about them. But, at least, 
 Allan realised that between himself and Roberta there was 
 nothing whatever of that sense of comradeship which your 
 modern lovers demand and with which Guen and Antony had 
 scaled the heights. You couldn't see them together without 
 knowing they had done that; but Guen and Antony, so Allan 
 thought, were exceptions. The average marriage wasn't in the
 
 134 INTRUSION 
 
 least like that: was a good deal more like this queer union of 
 his with Roberta. Here, just a week after marriage, he was 
 very far from seeing love as Guen and Antony saw it. To him 
 love, on the one side, was a disturbing physical condition; on 
 the other, a deep-rooted sense of protectorship, a desire less to 
 possess than to be possessed; a craving of the blood and the 
 spirit, unsatisfied, perhaps unsatisfiable. . . . 
 
 Unsatisfied he certainly was, and with a feverish longing 
 for something with which he seemed never to come within 
 hailing distance. That declaration of Roberta's had not pre- 
 pared him, somehow, for the coldness he had discovered beneath 
 the warm, vital look of her. Neither though he had not 
 assumed that her feeling for him reached anything like the 
 degree of intensity of his for her had he guessed at the frigid 
 voluptuousness of her nature, which confronted him now at 
 every turn. Yet though in a sense he suffered by this cold 
 reserve she brought to marriage, in another it comforted him. 
 It slew for him those old hideous doubts which it disturbed 
 him now to find he had never altogether succeeded in driving 
 out of some corner of his brain, and it confirmed that pathetic 
 tearful statement of Roberta's that she was not "that sort." He 
 did not realise (any more than she) that her virtue was merely 
 indifference; man-like, he thought she was still unroused: 
 thought, even, that he could rouse her. He believed there 
 were things deep things and profound which were there to 
 be awakened. He saw her soul as a still water, running deep, 
 not realising that it was an artificial lake in a prettily laid-out 
 park. He assumed still that somewhere slept the maternal 
 instinct he believed to be in every woman, and his faith in it 
 and in its power was very nearly pathetic. Only he kept it to 
 himself. Roberta's opinion of him during those first two weeks 
 soared unexpectedly. She found him kind, good-tempered and 
 considerate. She wrote to Tommy Carew that he wasn't in the 
 very least "horrid" or "beastly," and quite saw her point about 
 the children. 
 
 He did, of course, for at this stage he simply could not 
 imagine Roberta as the mother of his children. He saw her 
 as herself a child wilful, ignorant and ill trained; but he 
 saw, too, that it was Roberta he wanted: nothing and no one 
 else. And Roberta he felt it in his bones! was going to be 
 a sufficient responsibility.
 
 INTRUSION 135 
 
 But for all that he took with him, when presently the holiday 
 came to an end, a vague sense of disappointment and a muddled 
 conviction that a honeymoon was a greatly overrated affair. 
 Once again, it seemed, life in its essence had managed, 
 somehow, to slip through his fingers.
 
 CHAPTER TWO 
 
 1 
 
 THE little house which the adventurer abroad had vacated 
 in Allan and Roberta's interest was distant not more 
 than half an hour from Adelaide Lodge and rather less 
 from Roberta's old home in Manningtree Avenue. That, at 
 the beginning, seemed to be the only drawback which Roberta 
 had to urge against it, and then but faintly, because the incon- 
 veniences attaching to the keeping of two sets of relatives 
 round the corner were not unduly pressing there in the middle 
 of September, with both sets obligingly taking late holidays. 
 
 At first the idea of living in Number Sixteen Meldon Avenue 
 had sent Roberta into transports of delight that were quashed 
 not at all by Allan's disapproval of white paint for a front doof 
 and his doubts of her capacity to wrestle with the brass fittings 
 which adorned it. But on his initiative the door, during thfr 
 fortnight in Shanklin, had suffered a sea change. It had been 
 painted dark green, and the fittings were brass no longer, but 
 black, a scheme which Allan had intended to make general 
 throughout the house, until he saw the bill, which dashed his 
 enthusiasm so considerably that Roberta had been allowed to 
 keep her beloved white paint. A little later she loved it a good 
 deal less. "It would be all right," she said, when this stage 
 had been reached, "if we only had a servant." That was 
 Allan's whole case, he said. The people who built houses that 
 size had no right to go on the principle of servants. "You'll 
 have to get Mrs. Noakes to look after it," he told her. 
 
 Mrs. Noakes was the charwoman. She came once a week to 
 "turn out." But Mrs. Noakes no more than Roberta cared 
 for the cleaning of white paint. Between them it suffered 
 dismally. 
 
 For Roberta's transports of delight over Number Sixteen 
 Meldon Avenue were early and considerably modified. There 
 were other things, it transpired, which she disliked quite a* 
 
 136
 
 INTRUSION 137 
 
 much as the cleaning of white paint. "Messing about in a 
 kitchen" was one of them, and sweeping and dusting were 
 others. Also she was appalled at the rate with which stockings 
 and underclothing wore themselves into holes. Roberta hated 
 sewing: it irked her unspeakably, and she had no "method." 
 It was Allan (roused to action by the desperate plight of his 
 shirts and socks) who hit at length upon sorting their defaulting 
 belongings into two neat piles which he identified to Roberta 
 as the "Must be Dones" and the "May be Lefts." The chief 
 characteristic of the "Must be Dones" proved, however, to 
 be a decided tendency to find their way into the "May be 
 Lefts," but Roberta (perhaps also roused to some sort of action 
 by the desperate plight of her own belongings) at least made 
 some effort to suppress it. Things there did begin to improve. 
 
 But, taken altogether, this business of housework and cook- 
 ing and mending certainly took the fine edge off the romance of 
 that smart hotel on Keats Green at Shanklin. These things of 
 the kitchen spoiled her hands and made life commonplace. 
 Besides, it seemed so outrageous that she, Roberta, who had 
 sat in all attitudes and in nearly all costumes or (almost) no 
 costume at all for her portrait, and had written down appoint- 
 ments in a book and been charming to people who made them, 
 should have to descend to work of this menial description. She 
 was bitterly disappointed that Allan's income would not run 
 to a servant, and was of the opinion that insurance clerks were 
 shamefully underpaid. 
 
 Allan agreed with her. 
 
 So did Miss Tommy Carew, who was lazy and worked as 
 little as she could, and whom Roberta's mother credited with 
 having discovered a means of livelihood which had nothing 
 whatever to do with work on the cinema, or elsewhere. But 
 Roberta's mother so Roberta said had a really nasty mind. 
 Miss Carew these days, however, certainly had a good deal of 
 time on her hands, judging by the amount she was able to spend 
 in a polite paraphrase of her conviction that Roberta, with her 
 advantages, ought to have done better for herself. She said 
 this in a surprising number of ways, sitting in her elegant 
 clothes in the little drawing-room of Number Sixteen, of which 
 Roberta was very proud. The drawing-room furniture was 
 John Suffield's wedding present to Allan and Roberta and, 
 Allan said, "looked" like him. There was no nonsense about
 
 138 INTRUSION 
 
 it. It was solid and good, and was regarded by Allan as a 
 really admirable collection of the things he hated most in the 
 furnishing line. But Roberta had no fault to find with the 
 room save that it had no pictures unless you counted (as 
 Roberta certainly didn't) the two things by that young man 
 Linton, who had died in prison as a C.O. Allan, so he said, 
 couldn't afford the pictures he wanted and wouldn't afford the 
 others. Tommy agreed that the drawing-room was rather 
 "nice" and was negative about the pictures, preferring 
 photographs of herself. 
 
 "I can't see, my dear," she said to Roberta, "why you were 
 in such a hurry to give up your job with Roydon. Especially 
 as you aren't going to have a little family. But perhaps Mr. 
 Allan objects to his wife earning some money of her own?" 
 
 Roberta didn't know. That point with Allan had never 
 arisen. She had left the office because she was tired of it: 
 because she thought she was worth "something better than an 
 office." She had never intended to go there after her marriage, 
 but she had meant to go on with her sittings for Roydon. 
 Allan, however, had objected, and there, for the present, the. 
 matter had come to rest. But listening to what Tommy waft 
 saying about Woman's economic independence, she sensed bat" 
 tie. Also she thought how clever Tommy was and how well 
 she talked, for this afternoon Miss Carew warmed to her subject. 
 She knew a great number of arguments against the economic 
 dependence of women; mostly the wrong ones, but as Roberta 
 did not know this she went on pouring out tea and thinking 
 how clever Tommy was and how beautiful and lucky. If 
 she hadn't won that newspaper competition prize nobody would 
 have known how clever a cinema actress she was. And Roberta 
 remembered that she had wept because her mother wouldn't 
 let her enter for the competition. So nobody would ever know 
 whether she was any good on the pictures or not. Besides, 
 on the pictures you earned a good deal of money; you only 
 worked when you chose, and did not need to spoil your hands 
 with the cooking of dinners and washing up. 
 
 But presently Miss Carew went off to Paris; the holiday- 
 makers in Devon and Cornwall came home, and suddenly the 
 weather turned cold and a new domestic terror was added to 
 Roberta's life in the shape of a fire, which became a necessary 
 adjunct to breakfast.
 
 INTRUSION 139 
 
 Roberta's capacities, however, seemed to stop short of the 
 creation of a fire. For three mornings she struggled with the 
 task, for three mornings in succession Allan signed the late book 
 at the office, and on the fourth Roberta was led, weeping, from 
 the cold fire-place to lay breakfast in the kitchen, which could 
 be warmed by the gas oven, whilst Allan struggled with the 
 collection of sticks and paper and knobs of coal which Roberta 
 had failed to convert into a fire. 
 
 His success, so Roberta thought, was unearthly ; also it estab- 
 lished a precedent, for throughout the winter Allan continued 
 to rise a quarter of an hour earlier and there was a fire each 
 morning in time for breakfast. 
 
 But; even with Roberta's shortcomings over fires and meals 
 and a needle and thread, the first few weeks of her life at 
 Number Sixteen with Allan were devoid of dissension. Their 
 first quarrel, when it came, was over something that was much 
 more serious, at the moment, than Roberta's dislike of house- 
 work and her deficiencies as a housekeeper. It was over The 
 Miscellany, and the hopes Allan had entertained of joining its 
 permanent staff. 
 
 Allan had dined that evening with Gore in town and had 
 reached home at half-past nine with concrete proposals con- 
 cerning which he was inclined to be enthusiastic. Over 
 Roberta's badly-made coffee and a cigar of Gore's he began to 
 discuss them, but from them Roberta learned nothing beyond 
 the fact that Allan was proposing to leave the Comet and that 
 his salary would be decreased by some twenty pounds per 
 annum. 
 
 "Well, I like that," she said. "How do you think I'm going 
 to manage on less than I do now? It's hard enough as it is. 
 Besides, if you stop at the office you'll be getting another rise 
 at the end of the year, and it's only three months to that." 
 
 Allan, admitting this, found that Roberta had her head 
 screwed on very much in the right way. She got to the heart 
 of his financial position so quickly, in fact, that he was taken 
 unawares, defenceless. There seemed no arguments against 
 what she said: though he was sure there should have been if
 
 HO INTRUSION 
 
 he could only have thought of them. The Comet, according 
 to Roberta, was a "safe" job, and "safe," she gathered, was 
 about the last word to apply to this new venture of Antony 
 Gore's. "Who wants to read a dull thing about books and 
 poems and the people who write them?" she asked. "Of 
 course it won't pay. And then where are you, I'd like to know? 
 And me, too, for that matter?" 
 
 Still the arguments that Allan was certain were there eluded 
 him. He could think of nothing to say except, a trifle feebly, 
 that if the paper did fail (and Roberta was wrong in being so 
 confident that it would) Gore would be pretty certain to find 
 him something else to do, and doubtless, too, he could go back 
 to the Comet. Anyway, there was no real anxiety on that score, 
 if that was all. 
 
 But it wasn't. Roberta made that very clear. It was not 
 only a question of the difference of twenty pounds a year: 
 there was the fact that the Comet now paid his income-tax 
 a thing, Allan agreed, unheard of in Fleet Street. Also there 
 were his bonuses. Most certainly it wasn't only the loss of 
 twenty pounds a year and safety. There was a good deal more 
 in it than that. Allan, Roberta said, must be mad. 
 
 It is difficult to prove that you are not when there are so 
 many arguments all ready to give you the lie. Allan's attempts 
 went for nothing. Roberta would not admit that, once estab- 
 lished on the staff of The Miscellany, many opportunities 
 would come to him for making up deficiencies in income. She 
 had no interest whatever in Allan as a writer, and no belief. 
 Besides, she had heard too many conversations at Adelaide 
 Lodge not to be aware that there was "no money in literature." 
 And "literature," so she had come to understand, was what all 
 these "lit'ry" folk she knew believed themselves to write. 
 
 "Can't you see, Bobbie," Allan said to her, "that it's the 
 work I'm fitted for that it's the only sort of work I care about, 
 that isn't just drudgery? It means a tremendous lot to me, 
 my accepting this offer." 
 
 The word "drudgery" was unfortunate. Roberta, suddenly 
 losing her temper, repeated it with scorn. 
 
 "Drudgery, indeed ! Do you imagine you're the only person 
 who drudges? What do you think / do all day? I suppose 
 you imagine I like it that a little more or less won't make any 
 difference? Thank you. If you wanted a general servant
 
 INTRUSION 141 
 
 when you married, it would have been honester to have said 
 so!" 
 
 And Roberta dashed out of the room, banging the door after 
 her. 
 
 Allan had an instinct to follow her, but instead he looked at 
 the clock, picked up his book and sat there by the fire making 
 a pretence of reading. It was barely ten; Roberta, he thought, 
 would be certain to come down again. But she did not. 
 Wretched, disappointed and resistant, he sat on, making through 
 his enormous pretence of reading what excuse he could for her. 
 He couldn't believe that she had really been attempting to veto 
 his right of action; it was only that he had failed to make her 
 understand. Recalling the feeling of impotence that had come 
 over him as he had talked to her, he realised afresh how badly 
 he had put the whole thing. He had had a sense not only of 
 distance between them, but of unintelligibility, as though they 
 no longer spoke the same language; as if right at the first he 
 had seen she was hostile and something inside him had hard- 
 ened crystallised with vague irritation. Even now, sitting 
 here before the fire he was too miserable to make up, the scrn 
 in Roberta's voice drifted back to him. It was curiously upsetting. 
 An unnatural tenseness took him, in which he sat on the edge 
 of his chair listening for sounds of Roberta's movements above. 
 But none came. What was she doing? Had she thrown her- 
 self down to cry, or merely undressed and got quietly into bed ? 
 He began to understand that she was not coming down again. 
 Impatiently he went back to his chair and forced his mind upon 
 his book, and though at first his mood surged up between him 
 and the printed word, he became gradually sensible that his 
 anger was waning. Its fine edge was being worn down by the 
 gnawing misery of his disquiet because, upstairs, Roberta was 
 so still. The utter silence began to get on his nerves. He put 
 away his book, fastened doors and windows and went upstairs. 
 
 Roberta was in bed, and the moonlight covered her with 
 beauty. Her face was hidden in her pillow, and her hair 
 streamed across it like a tangled skein whose red-gold maze the 
 moon had threaded with silver. To Allan it was as though the 
 extraordinary coloured beauty of her hair had never revealed 
 itself before: the sight of it stirred him to gentleness, winnow- 
 ing his anger. He turned away to the window, drew the 
 curtains across, undressed in the dark and got into bed.
 
 H2 INTRUSION 
 
 Roberta did not move. He thought she must be asleep, but 
 when presently he slipped an arm across her he found that she 
 was not. She flung his arm fiercely away from her. 
 
 "Don't touch me!" she said. "Don't dare to touch me!" 
 Something in her voice, in the very vehemence of tone and 
 gesture, roused Allan's resentment anew. He turned his back 
 on her and lay still, fresh anger flooding his heart. He lay there 
 in the dark, resentful, hurt and estranged: and he swore that 
 he'd be damned before he "touched" her again. But sleep 
 would not come to him. When Roberta moved her hair brushed 
 across his face; and sometimes his foot encountered hers in 
 the coolness that lurked at the bottom of the bed; but he gave 
 no sign. Rigid and straight, he lay there at her side, staring 
 at misery. And midnight came. 
 
 The week that followed (at the end of which he had prom- 
 ised to give Antony Gore his decision) was for Allan a humili- 
 ating one. Roberta was difficult, distant and silent. Though 
 devoid of scenes, their hours together yet shuddered with dis- 
 cord: despair alternated in Allan with angry resentment, and 
 both were like grit between his teeth. Night was only a vast 
 blankness in which Roberta withheld herself, shuddering away 
 from his touch when he was not too sore and miserable to offer 
 it. Once when he did she broke into sobbing that was like a 
 knife in his heart, and because he could not bear it the determi- 
 nation seized him to go off to the spare room and sleep there 
 alone. He got out of bed and stood for a second looking down 
 upon her. But he could find nothing to say. He felt stunned 
 and chilled and apprehensive. He wanted to hate her because 
 she fought unfairly, but all the time there was only this sick 
 longing, this hurt, grievous thing in his heart that was shame 
 and desire and bitterness. He bowed his head and went out. 
 
 But not to sleep. He was cold and restless, and his brain 
 pounded away behind his eyes like an engine. His feet, stretch- 
 ing themselves down there at the end of the bed, were lonely, 
 missing Roberta's. He could not lie still. Though he closed 
 his eyes and fixed his mind on sleep, sleep would not come. 
 The night was warm, and flinging off the bedclothes, he went
 
 INTRUSION 143 
 
 and stood over at the wide-flung window that looked down on 
 to their tiny garden. Little was growing in it save marguerites 
 and a tiny square of grass they called the lawn. The night was 
 soft and gleaming, with a suggestion of rain and low clouds 
 that hid a dwindling moon. Down there in the garden nothing 
 stirred and no wind came. And as Allan stood looking at it 
 a feeling of exhaustion flooded him and a sensation of failure 
 acute, like a physical pain. He gulped down the scents of the 
 London night, with his brain pounding, still against his fore- 
 head, hurting him. It seemed to him as he stood there at the 
 window that the best of life swung by at a stride; that never 
 again as long as he lived would he be able to catch up with it. 
 
 Presently, when a clock in the house struck one, a sort of 
 despair seized upon him and a sickening sense of the imminence 
 of the morning that had to be met whether he was ready for 
 it or not. And Allan would not be. He felt weak and wretched, 
 and his head ached in this hideous fashion as though his brain 
 strove to push itself out at his temples. "If I could only 
 sleep!" he thought, and imagined he had forgotten Roberta 
 until he remembered that somewhere in the room where she 
 lay was some aspirin that she kept for the headaches she never 
 had. He could not make up his mind to fetch it. It was as 
 if he dared not go into the room, as if he had not the courage. 
 
 But presently he did go, opening the door softly, without 
 knocking, so as not to awaken Roberta if she slept. But she 
 was awake, and as he moved round the room he had a sense of 
 her stirring . . . propping herself on her elbow. Through the 
 half-dark he knew that her eyes followed him. "I want some 
 aspirin," he said, opening drawers on the dressing-table and 
 forgetting to shut them again. "Do you know where it is?" 
 
 "In the little drawer on the left. You've woke me up." 
 
 "I'm sorry," Allan said, pulling open the drawer. He came, 
 with the bottle in his hand, and sat on the edge of the bed. 
 
 "They won't do you much good if you don't take them, you 
 know," said Roberta. Out of the half-darkness her voice came 
 soft and caressing, like a south wind. Allan took out a couple 
 of the tablets and put them in his mouth. Roberta watched 
 him. 
 
 "You want some water," she said. 
 
 "No, I don't," said Allan. He gulped the aspirin down and 
 put his head on Roberta's shoulder.
 
 144 INTRUSION 
 
 "That's what I want," he said. "You shouldn't shut me 
 out." 
 
 "Shut you out? I didn't. You went of your own accord." 
 
 "But you did shut me out. Out of your heart." 
 
 "Oh, that!" 
 
 She held back his encircling arm and seemed to sink away 
 from him. He lifted his head from her shoulder and looked 
 at her. In the soft darkness of the room her hair and face 
 gleamed palely. As she lifted her hands to push back her hair 
 he saw the faint outline of her breasts beneath her thin night- 
 dress, and because he could scarely bear to look at her he rose 
 and put away the aspirin. As he shut the drawer some little 
 part of him hated her; but all the other was caught and held 
 by the sound of her voice and the glimpse he had had of her a 
 moment before. One set of instincts rose to combat what he 
 was going to say: another urged him forward to the saying of 
 it. Yet as he spoke it was as if his blood leaped back in his 
 veins; he was conscious of a sinking feeling in the pit of his 
 stomach, and his voice seemed to stand out in the darkness like 
 a thing naked and shamed. 
 
 "Bobbie ... I daresay you're right about A. G.'s offer." 
 
 There was a little silence, while the words danced in letters 
 of flame before his eyes and Roberta seemed to consider. 
 
 "I think I am, you know, reely," she said at length. "Only, 
 you please yourself, of course." 
 
 He was conscious of a little inward shrinking from himself, 
 from her. 
 
 "It's a risk," he said presently. "Perhaps . . . now ... I 
 ought not to take it." 
 
 Again she seemed to consider, and again she said at length: 
 
 "Well, you please yourself." 
 
 This time he did not shrink. He threw back his head, 
 seeming to brace himself for the inevitable. 
 
 "I'll write A. G. and say I've decided not to make the 
 plunge," he said. ^ 
 
 There was a little silence. All about them was the dark- 
 ness, shutting them away from things like a drawn curtain, and 
 beyond it the night, heavy with inextinguishable desire. 
 
 "Do you mean that?" Roberta asked. 
 
 "If it will please you. Will it, Bobbie?" 
 
 He came and sat on the bed again, putting out a hand and
 
 INTRUSION 145 
 
 drawing her to him by the shoulder. He felt her head nod 
 "yes." Her breast, warm and soft, came against him. He 
 pressed his lips to her neck and held her close. 
 
 "Never shut me out again," he said. "Don't keep me 
 outside. . . ." 
 
 Roberta released herself and sank back into bed. 
 
 "I'm so tired," she said, "and it's late." 
 
 Allan bent down and covered her up. His mind was full of 
 the thought that Roberta had won and that she hadn't won 
 fairly. Dividing this thought came another. He began to 
 laugh. 
 
 "Joke?" said Roberta. 
 
 "I was only thinking," Allan told her, "of something Balzac 
 said." 
 
 "What?" asked Roberta, who recognised Balzac as the author 
 of a singularly dull book about an ass's skin. 
 
 "That a man in love is like an ape playing the violin." 
 
 Roberta laughed. The simile meant nothing to her, but it 
 added to her knowledge of Balzac as a French writer who 
 showed an extraordinary interest in the nastiest of the 
 animals. . . . 
 
 "You ought to lie down at once after that aspirin," she 
 admonished Allan, who said, "Yes, I know." 
 
 He was aware, too, of another thing that he knew, which was 
 that Roberta would always win, with these tactics, while he 
 continued to want her and was moved like this by the sight 
 of her. She glanced up at him now as he hovered there above 
 her, and she smiled. 
 
 "Hurry up, old thing!" she said.
 
 CHAPTER THREE 
 
 AG. took Allan's decision philosophically. He said that 
 he was probably quite right to play for safety and 
 * reflected that Allan was not the only person who saw 
 The Miscellany as a crazy venture. For at the moment A.G. 
 was in no position to give guarantees. The thing was certainly 
 a risk; even Life and Letters only just paid its way. All the 
 same, Allan's decision not to come in was somehow, he said, a 
 tremendous pity. 
 
 He said it, in fact, so frequently that Guen lost patience 
 and scrawled a scrap of the truth down upon the slate she had 
 smudged clean two months ago in Roberta's interest. It irri- 
 tated her that A.G. should stand there like that talking about 
 Allan "playing for safety" Allan, with his enormous con- 
 tempt for money, his hatred of the money standard by which 
 all life was clipped and toed. 
 
 "It isn't Allan's decision at all," she snapped, "but 
 Roberta's." Certainly it was defeat Allan's defeat She knew 
 that and she sat down to it as, at the end, she had sat down 
 to the fact of his marriage. She folded her hands before it, 
 as before a thing with which, at the moment, she could do 
 nothing; and she smiled, as though she didn't want, either, 
 to attempt to do anything with it. Once again Roberta had 
 caught him on his vulnerable side. Heaven alone knew how 
 long she was going to be able to do that, how long there was 
 going to be a "vulnerable" side. One had to wait, to fold 
 one's hands and keep quiet. 
 
 Guen kept quiet even when her father wrote her his 
 approval of Roberta. For John Suffield made no mistake. He 
 knew whose decision lay behind that letter of refusal. Roberta 
 was an excellent wife: she was making Allan "see sense." He 
 commended her as a shrewd person, who understood, as he 
 did, that there was no money in literature. . . . But beneath 
 
 146
 
 INTRUSION 147 
 
 her quiet Guen mentally kicked herself and Antony because 
 they'd both said that to John Suffield too often; that there 
 was no money in literature. She saw him suddenly as the devil 
 quoting Scripture for his own and Roberta's purpose. 
 
 But Roberta's slate, so far as Guen was concerned, was no 
 longer clean. What she had scrawled on it remained and was 
 more deadly than what had been erased. It was a conjecture 
 Guen had rubbed out, a certainty she had now written in. 
 
 As for Allan himself. . . . 
 
 In the days that immediately followed, though he saw well 
 enough how thorough Roberta's victory was, he did not see, 
 in the very least, how very thorough, too, was his defeat; 
 nor that it was a defeat as much mental and moral as it was 
 physical indicative of his whole relationship with Roberta 
 and hers with him. Herself destitute of passion, Roberta had 
 yet learned how to use Allan's, how to make it serve her own 
 ends. She saw it suddenly as a key that fitted a good many 
 locks all the locks Roberta cared so far to manipulate. 
 
 Looking back, it seemed to Allan that the night when he 
 had definitely turned his back upon the door Antony Gore 
 had held open for him, was the beginning of a period of 
 happiness that never came again. And though it was brief 
 Allan got, later, into the habit of being grateful for it. He 
 used to clench the teeth of his mind upon the thought of it. 
 He had had it. No one could take it away from him. 
 
 Afterwards it wasn't easy to remember the things that went 
 to the making of it. Very little reading, certainly, and less 
 writing, because, somehow, he cared less for writing as a hobby 
 now that he had abandoned it as a career. The definite things 
 about it were Martyn's return from Shanklin, his visits to 
 Meldon Avenue and two trips of Roberta's to Bromley, there 
 to take afternoon tea, for all of which things Allan was grate- 
 ful, because he imagined quite wrongly that Roberta must 
 be having a dull time, since Caryl had distinguished herself 
 by spraining her ankle during the week-end at Workingham 
 which was to have wound up her holiday, and without Caryl 
 Roberta did not show over-much anxiety to present herself 
 at Adelaide Lodge. Miss Carew, Allan was aware, was still
 
 H8 INTRUSION 
 
 in Paris. He had not met Tommy, and, despite Roberta's 
 mother, was endeavouring to keep an open mind about the lady, 
 whom Roberta said she "missed." These things, he thought, 
 must leave Roberta very much alone. 
 
 They did, of course, but to nothing like the extent that Allan 
 imagined, who was not aware of the afternoons she spent with 
 Martyn at some place he knew where tea was made an excuse 
 for dancing. Roberta loved dancing and so did Martyn: but 
 it was Roberta who suggested that these afternoons should be 
 conducted sub rosa. 
 
 "Good lord, why?" Martyn asked. "Why shouldn't he 
 know? There's nothing in it. Allan's not that sort of ass." 
 
 "All right," said Roberta, "but let us know where we are. 
 What about your people? How do you explain your absence 
 from the office?" 
 
 Martyn flushed. 
 
 "That's rather different, isn't it?" he asked. 
 
 "How?" queried an innocent-eyed Roberta. 
 
 "I mean . . . you see. . . . Oh, hang it all, my dear girl, 
 I'm supposed to be at work. Until I definitely chuck it I've 
 got to let the guvnor down lightly. He'd kick up an awful 
 dust if he thought I took days off like this. He'd think the 
 business was going to the dogs, whereas the truth is that it's 
 much more likely to do that if I don't take days off." 
 
 "I see," said Roberta, "then we'd better make this our last 
 day. We can't play half-and-half like this." 
 
 So in the end it was sub rosa for Allan as well just as 
 Roberta had meant it should be. Allan was so old-fashioned. 
 
 Martyn, despite an occasional inward twinge, did certainly 
 find these afternoons with Roberta a welcome relief to the 
 uncongenial business of being a junior partner in the concern 
 which bore the family name and which took him daily or 
 should have taken him to that dull maze of streets and 
 traffic which Londoners call the Borough. Commerce attracted 
 Martyn no more than it attracted Allan, and all his ambition 
 lay in quite another direction. He had wanted all his life to 
 go prospecting, or to join some Expedition bound for the 
 Unknown, and his sojournings in Mesopotamia had done noth- 
 ing to reconcile him to this life of the desk. Some day when 
 it meant less to his father he meant to break away. Roberta 
 laughed when he said this sort of thing to her: she couldn't
 
 INTRUSION 149 
 
 see, she said, what he had to grumble at. To Roberta his 
 prospects were rosy enough, for the fortunes of the Thorps 
 were founded upon a substratum of custard powder. It was 
 Martyn's grandfather who had discovered the quite supereroga- 
 tory nature of the hen, and had proceeded to put the creature 
 in her place by the building of a custard factory and the 
 establishment of Thorp's Custard Powder Co., Ltd., which 
 had paid a large dividend at the end of its first year's working 
 and placarded England with pictures of rosy children who 
 hugged large bowls of custard and made rude remarks to 
 interested-looking hens. To Martyn, who preferred real eggs 
 in his custard, who loved dancing, appreciated pretty girls and 
 was not at all inflammable, some such outlet as this which now 
 offered was not only necessary but inevitable, although he 
 had no hope whatever of getting his father to acknowledge it. 
 Seen in prospective these afternoons had made custard just 
 remotely possible; even when he was engaged in covering his 
 tracks they went on being attractive for some time until, in 
 fact, he was discovered. There was a certain woman who had 
 met Roberta in Mrs. Thorp's drawing-room at Bromley, who 
 knew Martyn very well by sight and who had a daughter. The 
 daughter, like Martyn and Roberta, was a dancing enthusiast; 
 her mother was not, but she had old-fashioned ideas about 
 the newfangled dances and insisted upon coming to eat the 
 tea for which her daughter's men-friends paid and never had 
 time. "Making a damned nuisance of herself" the men- 
 friends called it an extensive role which reached out to 
 embrace Martyn and Roberta. Really, two afternoons in one 
 week. ... It was her duty to speak. She spoke. 
 
 What followed was altogether too painful, and from it 
 Martyn emerged crumpled and soiled in his self-esteem and i 
 incredibly surprised. Not because he had been found out: 
 sooner or later, and as far as his father was concerned, he had 
 expected that; but because something had happened which 
 in no way at all had he expected, either late or soon. It wasn't 
 only that his father had made a fuss, that his mother had said 
 harsh things of Roberta. He would have got over all that. 
 What he could not get over were the things within himself 
 which had arisen suddenly and confronted him. He saw them 
 first when, done with custard for ever, he had stalked out of 
 the house to send a cablegram accepting some wild-cat opening
 
 150 INTRUSION 
 
 (his father's term for it) which had offered itself a week ago 
 and which he had never seriously contemplated accepting. With 
 the message written and staring up at him he had seen in one 
 moment of devastating vision what its dispatch would mean. 
 Not only the end of custard, but the end, for him, of Roberta. 
 The realisation ought not to have hurt: he ought to have minded 
 scarcely at all, but he did. He minded horribly. It was that 
 which surprised him, for it was not in the bond. There 
 Roberta had been written down plainly as Recreation; Some- 
 thing Nice to Look At. She had no right to appear suddenly, 
 as she did, as a Complication. 
 
 Truth to tell, Martyn was not used to complications of this 
 sort, and tearing up his message he went home to work this 
 one out. It was not, he found, very easy, though he did not 
 come to this adventure of love as Allan had come to it. Roberta 
 was by no means the only girl Martyn had looked at, though 
 he had looked at her to some purpose, seeing from the first 
 a good deal more of the real Roberta than Allan ever had and 
 probably ever would. And, too, there was Allan himself. . . . 
 
 The thing was inexplicable. . . . Nothing like it had ever 
 happened to Martyn before. He had fallen in love and he had 
 fallen out again, and he had always known that these things 
 were about to happen. But falling in love with another man's 
 wife was against Martyn's code. Freedom on both sides had 
 belonged to all Martyn's love-affairs, that had gone, as yet, so 
 little deeply. One was attracted; one was attracted no longer. 
 The flame burned up and burned down, and no one was any 
 the worse. Candles in the wind, all of us, with our little lives, 
 our little loves. ... So Martyn reasoned, who did not look 
 for permanence in human emotions and was not attracted to 
 marriage which so obviously does. In love he was an experi- 
 mentalist, with the right of choice in his own hands. That, 
 in this instance, was the devil of it. He had not chosen to 
 fall in love with Roberta. She was Allan's wife, for one thing, 
 and for another, he had never imagined there was enough of 
 her to fall in love with. Yet somehow he had done it. He 
 knew, of course, that it wouldn't last. It wasn't Roberta who 
 would inspire a lifelong passion if such a thing were possible 
 in any man. Why, on a really clear day, you could see right 
 through her. . . . She was empty, a mere beautiful shell. . . . 
 No affair that he or any other man had with her would last.
 
 INTRUSION i si 
 
 It couldn't. It was like being in love with a shadow. Prop- 
 erly, of course, she simply didn't exist. When he found that 
 out God help the man who had married her. 
 
 Yet but for Allan the man who had Martyn was well 
 enough aware that he would have drifted into an "affair" with 
 Roberta at least as far as Roberta would have allowed him, 
 which was probably a good deal less far than he imagined. 
 Anyway, it would have been very pleasant while it lasted. 
 Martyn, looking his proposition straight in the eye, worked out 
 the answer at six months. He'd be very tired in six months, 
 he thought; six months would certainly exhaust Roberta and 
 her attraction for him. 
 
 Martyn, making these precise calculations, never doubted 
 their accuracy nor what they implied. Six months wasn't good 
 enough. He wasn't going to play the cad for stakes as short 
 as that. And Roberta wasn't worth it. He saw far enough 
 to see that. So he went out the next morning and sent his 
 cablegram; and hi the afternoon he went down to Meldon 
 Avenue to see Roberta. 
 
 Roberta was delighted to see him and gave him tea, which 
 he allowed to get cold while he crumbled his bread-and-butter 
 in his saucer and either talked at random or didn't talk at all. 
 Neither, so far, had he complimented Roberta on her appear- 
 ance, which was probably why she asked him presently what 
 was wrong. 
 
 "You do seem funny," she said. 
 
 "Funny," he thought, expressed it. He would never have 
 believed that he could feel like this about a thing which he had 
 reasoned out so carefully. A profound gratitude seized upon 
 him that he had sent the cablegram that morning. This 
 afternoon would have been too late. 
 
 "What's up?" Roberta repeated. 
 
 "Nothing much," he said, putting down his cup and saucer 
 and suddenly horribly aware of the hideous mess he had made 
 of it, "only I've a surprise for you. I'm off on Friday to 
 the Rockies." 
 
 With a ridiculous assumption of sang-froid he came and stood 
 with his back to the fire-place. A score of emotions were tear-
 
 152 INTRUSION 
 
 ing at him, yet he was conscious of nothing as he lit his 
 cigarette but a desire to tell Roberta not to stare at him so. 
 Frankly, she was incapable, just then, of doing anything else: 
 he had taken her so completely unawares that she had not had 
 tune to adopt her air of histrionics. It was the natural Roberta 
 who stared and who said, "The Rockies?" in a thin, astonished 
 interrogative, as though she had never heard of them before. 
 
 "Yes, they're mountains in North America. Perhaps geog- 
 raphy wasn't your strong point at school!" 
 
 Roberta began to recover. 
 
 "Is it a joke?" she enquired. 
 
 "Far from it, I imagine," Martyn told her. 
 
 "But it's absurd," Roberta insisted. "You can't possibly 
 mean that you're leaving England on Friday why, that's the 
 day after to-morrow." 
 
 "That's it," said Martyn. The cigarette, he found, was 
 helpful. 
 
 "But it's absurd," said Roberta again. 
 
 "It is, rather," Martyn agreed. "But most things are, you 
 know, when you come to think of it. Only this one's true 
 which most things aren't. I'm off on Friday." 
 
 "But, Martyn, why?" 
 
 "Fed up." 
 
 "With me?" 
 
 "Oh, rot! Of course not with you with things generally." 
 
 "Which includes me. You don't want to come out with me 
 any more. Is that it?" 
 
 "You know it isn't." 
 
 "But you don't any longer care so much about it?" 
 
 "You know I'd rather come out with you than with any- 
 body." 
 
 Roberta smiled. 
 
 "Well, then?" she said. 
 
 Martyn said nothing. He was only overwhelmingly grateful 
 that he'd had the sense to send off that cablegram before he 
 came. 
 
 "Martyn, don't be silly. We aren't doing any harm, and it 
 isn't as though I'd go out with you if Allan were free. I 
 wouldn't, of course. It wouldn't be right." 
 
 Martyn winced. 
 
 "Of course not," he said.
 
 INTRUSION 153 
 
 "Well, then," said Roberta again. "Be nice again, Martyn." 
 
 "I can't," he said. "At least, I won't. That's done, finished 
 with." 
 
 "I see," said Roberta. "Someone's found us out and told." 
 
 He explained. 
 
 "There was a row," he said, "and I'm clearing out." 
 
 "Just because of that? How absolutely silly, Martyn." 
 
 "It isn't just because of that. It's only hurried things up." 
 
 "I haven't the least idea what you mean," Roberta told him. 
 
 "Haven't you?" 
 
 "Well, how should I?" 
 
 "You mean to say it's never occurred to you that I'm getting 
 rather too fond of you?" 
 
 "My dear Martyn, why should it?" 
 
 "Because it happens to be true." 
 
 "Don't be silly," said Roberta. "Why do you want to go 
 and spoil things?" 
 
 "That's what I'm trying not to do. That's why I'm going. 
 You see. ... I like Allan too well to spoil things for him. . . ." 
 
 "But you don't mind spoiling them for me?" 
 
 "I shan't do that . . . much." 
 
 Roberta got up from her chair and came over to stand in 
 front of him. She was herself again, and mistress of the 
 situation. 
 
 "How do you know?" she said. 
 
 "I just do ... that's all. It isn't you that's in danger of 
 losing your head. I can't imagine you'd ever do that." 
 
 She smiled her appreciation of that as she put out a hand 
 and caught at a button of his coat. 
 
 "Martyn, do shut up talking rot and be nice." 
 
 "I'm not talking rot." 
 
 "Aren't you?" 
 
 He looked down at her twisting the button of his coat. 
 
 "Don't do that," he said. 
 
 She went on doing it. 
 
 "I do think men are silly," she remarked. 
 
 "I know," he said, "but I'm going to be less silly than I 
 might quite possibly be if circumstances were different. You 
 see . . . you're married to Allan. Nothing can alter that." 
 
 "Well . . . who wants to alter it? Allan's all right," 
 
 "I know. Allan's so very much 'all right' that I can't go
 
 154 INTRUSION 
 
 on. You may as well have the truth. I'm not a plaster saint. 
 I'd go on, right enough, if it weren't for Allan. . . . D'you 
 know, it's very difficult to explain with you twiddling about 
 like that with my coat. ..." 
 
 "This," said Roberta, still fiddling with the button, "is most 
 frightfully interesting." 
 
 "I thought you'd find it so." 
 
 "Don't be beastly," said Roberta, "and go on with the 
 explanation." 
 
 "There isn't much more of it. Besides, explanations never 
 explain . . . but I think that what I mean is that I'd lose my 
 head . . . over you . . . fairly comfortably and be damned 
 to it if it weren't for Allan. But as it is I shall probably hate 
 you pretty badly later on for having knocked our friendship 
 mine and Allan's on the head." 
 
 Roberta smiled. 
 
 "Really, you know," she said, "you're being awfully funny 
 this afternoon." 
 
 "I'm glad I'm amusing." 
 
 "But you're rather silly, too. I can't think what you're 
 making all this fuss about. Why, you've never once even 
 attempted to kiss me." 
 
 "No, there isn't even that between us. Well, you can score 
 it to my credit." 
 
 "I think you're perfectly horrid." 
 
 "Don't think that . . . and, I say, do stop twiddling that 
 button. You're making it very difficult for me. . . ." 
 
 "Not to go?" 
 
 "Not to kiss you." 
 
 "Oh, that!" 
 
 Roberta shrugged her shoulders, stopped twiddling the button 
 and moved a step away from him. But Martyn caught her 
 by the shoulder and pulled her up sharply against him. 
 
 "Do you care a tuppenny damn about me, anyhow?" he 
 demanded. 
 
 "Of course. ... I like you very much. . . ." 
 
 "I see. You like me very much. And it rather amuses 
 you, doesn't it, to see me making a fool of myself over you?" 
 
 "Don't be silly," said Roberta. "And please let me go." 
 
 "It's all right. Don't be afraid. I'm not going to kiss 
 you."
 
 INTRUSION 155 
 
 She went limp suddenly in his arms. 
 
 "Martyn . . . don't go," she said. 
 
 His mouth was very near hers. 
 
 "Please . . . because I ask you," she said. 
 
 She could feel his arms round her like a grip of steel. Her 
 breast, beneath her thin frock, was crushed painfully against 
 his. His breath came hot on her face. She shut her eyes and 
 was still. If he kissed her he would stay. She knew that. . . . 
 
 But he didn't kiss her. There at the end something got in 
 his way, came down likp a shutter before her passionless eyes 
 and cool red pouting mouth. It was as if her innate frigidity 
 took shape and stood, forbidding, before the fire of his own 
 passion, treading it out He let go his hold of her and stepped 
 back. He never remembered what he said, there at the last. 
 Neither did Roberta. She only remembered that he collected 
 his hat and stick, shook her by the hand and departed. 
 
 It was an anti-climax and Roberta, being chagrined, wanted 
 to cry. But she thought better of it and sat down to ponder 
 the situation. Men, of course, were idiots, fools, for ever 
 spoiling things, making them beastly. The nicest men, so she 
 reflected, were like that: even Jan Suffield, who had been 
 quite the nicest man she had known. They had no morals 
 except Allan, who was an idealist and had too many and didn't 
 approve of anybody else's. Friendship as Roberta under- 
 stood and practised it, a queer thing, stretched to the inclusion 
 of kisses that were mutual and presents that were not had 
 never been sufficient for the men Roberta had known. Event- 
 ually you came always to their impudent assumption that you, 
 too, had no morals. When you asserted them they called you 
 "puritanic" and "old-fashioned," and left you for someone 
 who wasn't, as Jan had left her for that woman at Fulham 
 and goodness knew how many others. Martyn was the first 
 of her acquaintances who had left her not for her scruples 
 but for his own, and thus far he had a certain claim to her 
 regard: but he, too, had "spoilt" things, which was tiresome 
 because life looked now as though it might for a while be 
 dull. Roberta had found Martyn excellent company, and 
 was annoyed that fate, or whatever it was that controlled 
 events, didn't manage better. Chronologically fate was all 
 at sea: things never happened in the right order. This did 
 not mean that Roberta was "in love" (or any rubbish of that
 
 156 INTRUSION 
 
 sort) with Martyn Thorp, but only that there would have been 
 distinct advantages in having married Martyn rather than 
 Allan, if only fate had been sensible enough to have reversed 
 the order of their meeting. And now that she would not see 
 him again she was inclined to be sorrowful over the manner of 
 his departure. He ought not to have gone so calmly, carrying 
 his stick and gloves and wishing her good-bye as though they 
 would meet again on the morrow. Looked at romantically it 
 was all wrong. Most of life was. . . . 
 
 She cheered up considerably when the five o'clock post 
 brought her a letter from Tommy Carew in Paris, for Tommy 
 wanted to know if Roberta remembered a Mr. Rayne a Mr. 
 Douglas or "Duggie" Rayne and hinted that at least Mr. 
 Rayne remembered Roberta. Tommy seemed to have run up 
 against him in Paris and they were returning together at the 
 end of the week. When, wrote Miss Carew, "we must all 
 foregather." 
 
 So, as she had shrugged others, Roberta now shrugged 
 Martyn not merely out of England, but off the map altogther. 
 She had "done" with Martyn. 
 
 But Allan hadn't. 
 
 That same evening after the badly-cooked meal which, with 
 a robust optimism, they both called "dinner," he wondered 
 suddenly what had become of him. "Perhaps he'll look us 
 up this week," he remarked. 
 
 Roberta, lighting her cigarette, became suddenly absorbed 
 in the occupation. 
 
 "No," she said, "he won't." 
 
 "How do you know?" Allan asked. 
 
 "He isn't coming here any more at all." 
 
 Allan stared at her. 
 
 "Oh," he said, "why not?" 
 
 "Because he's accepted that job in the Rockies." 
 
 Allan continued to stare at her. 
 
 "I thought," he said, "that he'd given up all idea of that?" 
 
 "Well, anyhow, he sails on Friday," said Roberta, and tossed 
 her burnt-out match into the fire. "That's all I know about 
 it. I suppose he knows his own business best."
 
 INTRUSION 157 
 
 "Friday ! But that's the day after to-morrow." 
 
 "I know. Well, there it is. He's going right enough. He 
 came down this afternoon to tell me." 
 
 "Look here," said Allan, "what's up? This is all con- 
 foundedly mysterious. Why should he go off suddenly like 
 that, without saying a word to anybody about it? He can't 
 mean to go off without even saying good-bye. What's up 
 exactly?" 
 
 "Well," said Roberta, "I suppose I ought to tell you, 
 though it isn't very nice for me, reely. You mustn't mind, 
 Allan. Of course it's all very silly. . . . The fact is Martyn's 
 clearing off to the Rockies, so he says . . . because of me." 
 
 Allan's face was a blank. 
 
 "Because of you? What on earth do you mean?" 
 
 "I think," said Roberta, "that you might make an effort to 
 be intelligent." 
 
 "But upon my word," Allan began, "I really don't see. . . ." 
 
 Then suddenly he did. 
 
 "You mean Martyn's in love with you? Good lord, what 
 rot I" 
 
 "You're not very complimentary," Roberta said. 
 
 "Complimentary be damned," said Allan. "Do you mean 
 to tell me that Martyn came here for the purpose of telling 
 you he'd fallen in love with you?" 
 
 "No, of course I don't. He came to tell me he was leaving 
 England and to say good-bye. The other just . . . happened." 
 
 "Well, I'm . . . jiggered," said Allan. 
 
 His face became very red, then paled again. His voice when 
 he spoke was quiet. 
 
 "What else 'just happened?'" he asked. 
 
 "Nothing," said Roberta. "Why should it?" 
 
 Allan made no attempt to answer that. 
 
 "He's never . . . kissed you?" he asked. 
 
 "Of course not." 
 
 "Not even this afternoon?" 
 
 "Don't be absurd." 
 
 "I'm not," Allan told her. "I want to know, that's all. 
 Did Martyn kiss you this afternoon? Yes or no? I shan't go 
 out and shoot him. I only want to know. Yes or no, now?" 
 
 "Well," said Roberta, "if you reely must know, he did
 
 158 INTRUSION 
 
 try . . . but of course I wouldn't let him. It wouldn't have 
 been right." 
 
 Allan looked at her. "I see," he said. "Thank you for 
 telling me." 
 
 The next day Allan tried to ring Martyn up, but without 
 success, and at luncheon time wired him at the office and at 
 Bromley "Can you dine with me to-night?" And Martyn 
 couldn't. His answer came a couple of hours later. 
 
 "Extremely sorry, rushed off my feet. Regret unable wish 
 you good-bye." 
 
 That was the end. They never met again. In the spring 
 of the following year Martyn was killed on some hunting 
 expedition in the neighbourhood of the Red River Settlement. 
 It was Roberta who saw the account of it in some newspaper 
 and was suitably thrilled. It is possible the thrill might have 
 gone deeper and lasted longer if she had known that a bitter- 
 tongued woman in a Bromley drawing-room ascribed her son's 
 death, not to the wild animals of North America, not even, 
 as did his father, to the bad shooting of his companions, but 
 just to "that girl he met at Shanklin." Behind the wild 
 animals and the mishandled gun she saw everlastingly Roberta, 
 but for whom she believed Martyn would never have encount- 
 ered either. Martyn's mother, like the girl she hated, was 
 a sentimentalist: neither of them would have been grateful 
 if you had told them that Martyn had forgotten Roberta 
 before he reached the end of his voyage out. But it would 
 have been true.
 
 CHAPTER FOUR 
 
 LATER, whenever Allan looked back upon this period 
 of his life with Roberta it was always the ruins of his 
 friendship with Martyn Thorp that seemed to top it. 
 Yet at the time of the crash they had certainly done nothing 
 of the sort. Martyn 's confession to Roberta (and her version 
 of it to Allan) had acted upon her as a tonic, so that she had 
 thrilled once again to a sense of her own importance. Like 
 a tree in spring she fairly budded with sweetness, as though 
 she strove still to make up to Allan for the thing he had given 
 up. Yet it was impossible not to see that she hated and 
 mistrusted this need of his to write. For all, these days, he 
 did so little of it, the sight of him sitting there so quietly 
 with paper and pencil had sometimes an extraordinary effect 
 upon Roberta and her budding sweetness. Every line he 
 wrote was nothing to her but a form of masculine selfishness, 
 a thing which rendered him distrait and irritable and left her 
 to do a good many dull things in the kitchen which, but for 
 this writing mood, he would have shared with her. For Allan 
 hated to see her doing things for him; could not bear to think 
 of her growing tired in his service and spoiling her hands. 
 That was how he put it. Actually, of course, it would have 
 taken a good deal more housework than Roberta did to break 
 down the barrier of her vitality and make her tired. Neither 
 were her hands in any danger of being spoiled, because she 
 spent a good deal in their interest at the local chemists and 
 left all the really injurious tasks to Mrs. Noakes, whose hands 
 didn't matter and who had no money to spend on them at the 
 chemist's, anyway. 
 
 If he thought about it at all, Allan doubtless believed him- 
 self to be happy. Certainly he was absorbed in this self- 
 appointed task of "moulding" Roberta. He believed it could 
 be done that it was in a sense his job in life; his job to 
 
 159
 
 i6o INTRUSION 
 
 make the Roberta that was into the Roberta of his dreams, 
 into the Roberta that he saw every time he kissed her. Guen, 
 spending a week-end with them at Meldon Avenue, found the 
 spectacle of Allan's efforts in this direction rather more than 
 she could stand. For it wasn't true: you couldn't mould 
 Roberta. But it was true that she had brains of a sort; she 
 was clever enough to let you think you were moulding her, 
 since things, that way, were easier. During the two days of 
 her visit Guen raged inwardly against her brother's persistent 
 endeavour to save Roberta trouble: was rendered speechless 
 with anger at seeing him frittering his time away over helping 
 her to wash up. Damn it all, why shouldn't Roberta wash 
 up? It was her part of the bargain, and it wasn't as though 
 she was ill or wanted to do other things. She didn't. She 
 didn't want to do anything at all except be amused or enter- 
 tained, or sing the wrong songs in a sweet untrained voice at 
 you. But while Allan washed up Guen remembered that his 
 Life and Letters "copy" was always late, and understood why 
 and let it get on her nerves. She went home and swore mildly 
 about it to A.G., who said he thought it very nice of Allan 
 to help his wife wash up, and that it wasn't Roberta's fault 
 his "copy" came late. There were people who were always 
 late with their "copy." "Allan, he supposed, was one of 
 them. . . . 
 
 So Allan went on being late with it and saving Roberta 
 trouble. At least two evenings a week he took her out to 
 dinner and sometimes to a theatre or cinema afterwards, 
 though not too often, because Roberta didn't care for galleries 
 and pits (which were all Allan could afford) and Allan didn't 
 care for the cinema. He spent, of course, a good deal more 
 money than he should have done, but it pleased him to please 
 Roberta and preserved to him this ecstasy that was his feeling 
 for her and his joy and pride in her beauty, which marriage 
 in a quite definite way had deepened and enriched. Every- 
 thing about her had been, as it were, toned-up, reinforced; 
 her exquisite colouring, her hair and eyes, her very health and 
 vitality. To it all something something without a name but 
 very definite for all that had been added. Even Guen admit- 
 ted that, always acknowledging Roberta's beauty without ever 
 being in chains to it as was Allan or Caryl. She saw it as 
 the one thing she possessed; her one claim to your toleration.
 
 INTRUSION 161 
 
 But it was Caryl, meeting her for the first time since her 
 marriage, who said that Roberta was a supremely excellent 
 advertisement for matrimony. 
 
 Caryl had made the occasion of her birthday and her 
 approaching exam, the excuse for ignoring the medical opinion 
 that she ought not to think of getting home for another week. 
 She wrote to her mother that she must come and fetch her 
 in something, anything, that went on wheels. And when her 
 mother arrived with a private car which looked as though it 
 might prove expensive Mrs. Heston at once made it look 
 superfluous by explaining that Mr. Merrick had been quite 
 willing to drive Caryl back, but that Caryl had refused. She 
 had. Unusual colour in her cheeks and surprising determin- 
 ation in her voice Caryl had refused point-blank. She wasn't 
 going, she said to her mother on the way home, to smash up 
 the week-end like that. No more than that: she wasn't com- 
 municative. She only leant back in her corner, twisted her 
 face as though her foot was hurting her and announced in 
 her queer, emphatic way that she was tired of other people's 
 houses, anyway. 
 
 On this afternoon Guen and Roberta had come to tea. 
 Guen, whose imagination always stopped short at birthday 
 presents, came desiring to be told what Caryl wanted most (as 
 if people ever knew!) and Roberta, whose imagination stopped 
 short of most things, had this time risen to the occasion with 
 a new photograph of herself in a silver frame at which Alice 
 sniffed perceptibly, not liking Roberta and seeing in her present 
 only one more thing to be polished. Later, when A.G. and 
 Allan arrived, there was to be a family gathering to dinner. 
 Meantime tea and chatter of presents and holidays and solici- 
 tations over Caryl's injured ankle. Guen said very little and 
 not very nice things (as Caryl pointed out) when she did; 
 but then Guen's new book was due in a few days' time, which 
 explained her mood to everybody except Roberta, who merely 
 resented it. Caryl, herself to-day not quite free from nerves, 
 lay on her couch, monopolising Roberta and coming to that 
 cheerful decision about her that she was a really excellent 
 advertisement for matrimony. And most women weren't. Not
 
 1 62 INTRUSION 
 
 for nothing had Caryl watched the painful metamorphosis of 
 several of her acquaintances who had exchanged a career for 
 a husband and contrived ever afterwards to look as though 
 the change disagreed horribly with them. As though nothing 
 further mattered in life, they had "crumpled up" visibly; had 
 got to themselves babies and nerves and a general indisposition 
 to brush their hair. Not that the crumpled-up wives admitted 
 their condition; they admitted nothing save the babies, who 
 were self-evident. Marriage and motherhood, for them, were 
 the end of all things: contemplating them you saw life as a 
 tunnel, infrequently lighted. You kept coming to lamps and 
 passing lamps. You moved on ... always leaving things 
 behind . . . always coming to others. . . . School, college . . . 
 love . . . marriage . . . experience . . . motherhood. . . . Not 
 much after that, perhaps, but more motherhood. . . . Was even 
 that as dull as the crumpled-up wives made it seem? 
 
 Caryl, passionately fond of children and passionately fond 
 of life, wanted to know. Since it couldn't be motherhood that 
 dulled marriage, was it marriage that dulled motherhood? 
 Was marriage the last lamp in the tunnel? 
 
 Here was Roberta, not exactly saying no but looking it, 
 certainly. She was so evidently not just coming to lamps and 
 passing them. She denied the metaphor of the tunnel alto- 
 gether in her pretty clothes (that Guen had helped her to 
 choose) and with her sunny looks. Allan's image of a barefoot 
 Roberta, strolling lazily by a summer stream, was much more 
 accurate if you had to have one, even now that she wore that 
 strange little air, that those other women had worn, of knowl- 
 edge, experience . . . initiation. But she wore it with a 
 difference, a difference so immense, so unmistakable that Caryl 
 positively clanked her chains before it her chains of grati- 
 tude and affection. But certainly Roberta was "different" 
 from those others Caryl had known and remembered. It was 
 as though, giving herself reluctantly, some rag of her virginity 
 remained yet with her, as though it peeped out beneath the 
 matron's cloak she wore so prettily. Roberta didn't look 
 married. That, Caryl decided, was the secret of it. Those 
 others had and so early. Finality was written all over them. 
 But not over Roberta. Roberta had made marriage not the 
 end, but the beginning. . . . 
 
 "Of what?" Guen wanted to know when, later, Caryl said
 
 INTRUSION 163 
 
 that to her. "Of what?" But, like Pilate, Guen did not 
 wait for an answer. A.G. was shouting from the front door 
 that they would lose their train. 
 
 "The bill for your motor ride's come in," Pen told Caryl 
 the next morning when she went upstairs to fetch her break- 
 fast tray. 
 
 "Is father bearing up?" 
 
 "Fairly well. Says it's a bit thick and that he can't for 
 the life of him see why you couldn't have accepted Mr. Mer- 
 rick's offer and saved the expense." 
 
 "Oh, can't he? Any elaborations of his state of mind?" 
 
 "Not many . . . except that Wokingham to Highgate's no 
 distance, and that if you'd started soon after breakfast the 
 young man could have got back in excellent time for his 
 appointment. . . . Had he really got one, Caryl?" 
 
 " 'Course. He was taking Marjorie over to White Horse 
 Hill for the day. . . . Marjorie suggested it. ... I happened 
 to overhear. . . . You see, I was tied to the house with this 
 beastly foot. I've been an awful nuisance . . . you always are 
 in other people's houses when things happen to you, and 
 Marjorie can't stand people being ill. She was fed up with 
 me enough, shouldn't wonder, as it was, without my spoiling 
 her day. I had to play the game, anyhow." 
 
 "Marjorie's game?" 
 
 "And Dick's." 
 
 "Oh, it's Dick's, too, is it? Sure of that?" 
 
 "No," said Caryl. "I'm not sure of anything." 
 
 "My recollection of Marjorie Heston is that from her cradle 
 she's dangled men after her and cut the string quite comfort- 
 ably when the young man at the end of it became tedious." 
 
 "I know . . . still, this may be the real thing. You have 
 to go on that assumption. ... At least, I do. That's 
 why . . ." 
 
 "You choked Master Dick off." 
 
 "Why, I wouldn't let him drive me up on Saturday." 
 
 "But you did, earlier . . . choke him off?" 
 
 "Who said so?" 
 
 "Does it matter?"
 
 1 64 INTRUSION 
 
 Caryl shrugged her shoulders. 
 
 "I can guess," she said. 
 
 "And it's true?" 
 
 "Oh, in a way, perhaps. I don't know. You see, I wasn't 
 sure and I thought Marjorie was. I couldn't keep him 
 hanging about. ..." 
 
 "But surely you knew . . . whether you liked him or not?" 
 
 "Oh, like . . . what a stupid word! Of course I like him. 
 He's what's called 'popular.' That isn't nearly enough. . . . 
 I couldn't keep him hanging about while I studied the situa- 
 tion." 
 
 "But why study it?" 
 
 "Had to quite suddenly. Things were what you call pre- 
 cipitated." 
 
 "How?" 
 
 "Well, Marjorie had a head and it was raining. We both 
 like rain . . . Dick, I mean, and I ... so we went out together. 
 We had only one umbrella, and it began to pour when we 
 were in the wood. We stood up under a big tree. . . ." 
 
 "And he 'tried to kiss you ? Well ?" 
 
 "Nothing else I ran away." 
 
 "Heavens!" said Pen. 
 
 "Pretty feeble, wasn't it?" 
 
 "Feeble!" 
 
 "Well, it's some time ago, thank goodness. 
 
 "When?" 
 
 "Oh . . . months . . . April . . . June, or something like 
 that. I forget." 
 
 She didn't: she remembered perfectly. April somewhere 
 about the middle, too, because the land was dotted with the 
 red and white of fruit trees. . . . 
 
 "I see," said Pen. "So you let Marjorie absorb him. . . . 
 Was he absorbed?" 
 
 "Not altogether. There seems to be a good deal of him." 
 
 "Too much for Marjorie? Or is it only that the victim 
 struggles. Does he struggle, Caryl?" 
 
 "Oh, a bit ... not often, though." 
 
 "But in your direction?" 
 
 "Perhaps. ... I don't know. It isn't any good talking 
 about it. . . ." 
 
 "But wouldn't it be just as well to make up your mind?"
 
 INTRUSION 165 
 
 "About Dick?" Caryl shrugged her shoulders again. "I 
 s'pose so, only I can't. Oh, look here, Pen, you've been 
 through it: you must know. How does one tell for certain?" 
 
 Pen laughed. 
 
 "You missed your chance," she said, "that day in the 
 wood . . . under the umbrella." 
 
 "You mean that if I'd let him kiss me I'd have known?" 
 
 "Something like that." 
 
 "But supposing I'd only known he was the wrong man?" 
 
 "Well, that's it you'd have known" 
 
 "But I don't want the wrong man to kiss me. . . ." 
 
 "That does complicate matters, rather, but still you've got 
 to begin some time." 
 
 "But with the wrong man!" 
 
 "Not necessarily. You might as well look on the bright 
 side." 
 
 "Emulate Mr. Bennett, in fact." 
 
 "Which Mr. Bennett?" They knew several. Mr. Bennett 
 the milkman, Mr. Bennett four doors away . . . and the man 
 who called for waste-paper. . . . 
 
 "Jane Austen's," said Caryl. 
 
 Pen laughed and said "Oh!" as if she'd never heard of 
 him as she probably hadn't. 
 
 "It's a horrid risk!" said Caryl. "Dropping kisses about 
 all over the place on the chance of one of 'em alighting pres- 
 ently upon the right person." 
 
 "But kissing isn't horrid except when the man's got 'wrong' 
 written all over him." 
 
 "Not for you, perhaps. But, then, you like kissing . . . 
 you're the kissing sort. I'm not. Why, I don't even kiss the 
 family except on special occasions, like a reunion or illness or 
 a birthday." 
 
 "I've noticed it," Pen said. 
 
 "Pen . . . how many 'wrong' ones before . . . Tom?" 
 
 "It's an improper question, but I'd tell you if I could 
 remember." 
 
 "Oh as many as all that!" 
 
 "There's baby," said Pen. "I must go. I'll come and help 
 you into your clothes presently. Stay where you are." 
 
 Caryl stayed. Flat on her pillows she lay contemplating the 
 ceiling. It wanted white-washing, and there was a little com-
 
 1 66 INTRUSION 
 
 pany of flies (that ought to have died, by now, with the 
 summer) chasing each other in circles just beneath it. Caryl 
 hated flies, but she hated fly-papers and fly-traps even more. 
 So she had to put up with the flies. They were disgusting, she 
 thought but so were kisses, considered as arbiters of one's 
 matrimonial fate. Arbiter wasn't the word, either: it suggested 
 a decision from which there was no appeal something that was 
 beyond control. . . . And a kiss wasn't oughtn't to be, any- 
 way. A kiss could be influenced by many things . . . ever 
 so many things; your own mood, time, place . . . and the 
 fact that you knew the man wanted it; especially if you 
 were a philanthropist, like Pen. Caryl's thoughts journeyed, 
 like the flies, in a circle. There was no end to this sort of 
 thing. 
 
 And yet she didn't see how you could take things . . . your 
 first kiss! . . . quite like that. One had standards standards 
 that made Pen's implications revolting. And not only 
 Pen's. . . . There were girls she knew who went much farther 
 than that; who made experiments that went far beyond a 
 mere kiss; who were quite candid crude even about it. They 
 weren't, they said, going to miss things; they weren't going 
 "to tie themselves up" without knowing. Only, Caryl wasn't 
 like them. She had in her a strain of the Puritan that was in 
 Allan: she couldn't bear to spoil things that way you so 
 easily might. The Experimentalists laughed at her, called her 
 Diana . . . Artemis. But they would have laughed, too, at 
 Pen's suggestion that a kiss could help you, could tell you all 
 that. 
 
 Weren't there people who "knew" without any of these 
 things? Guen and A.G. must have known: they couldn't 
 have had much use or time for kisses. . . . Too brainy by 
 half the marriage of pure intellect. Allan must have known. 
 And Roberta? You couldn't help feeling that Pen was right 
 when she said that no kisses given or returned would be likely 
 to mean much to Roberta. Madeleine remained. "Nothing 
 between us," she had said of herself and Allan, "not even a 
 kiss." Yet Madeleine had known. 
 
 And she hadn't. That, Caryl knew, was the hard core of her 
 depression that she had fallen below her own standards. . . . 
 It might or might not be absurd to run from a kiss, but to run 
 because you simply couldn't decide whether you wanted it or
 
 INTRUSION 167 
 
 not was certainly more than absurd. It wasn't, she knew, the 
 kiss that she had shrunk from, but herself and her own 
 uncertainty . . . that horrible, clutching, idiotic fear that he 
 who offered it might be the wrong man, that she couldn't tell 
 whether he was or not. She had, first of all, to be sure. 
 
 She wished she didn't keep remembering that day in the; 
 Berkshire wood; the dripping trees and undergrowth; herself 
 and Dick beneath one umbrella, arms touching. . . . And 
 presently Dick's face very near hers and curiously eager and 
 certain. Oh, yes, Dick had been certain enough of himself, 
 of her. And she had pulled herself free and run. . . . She saw 
 herself now pushing his face away, racing through the April 
 woods Artemis . . . Diana . . . flying instinctively from the 
 first chord of love's overture. . . . 
 
 And yet not Artemis, not Diana at all. . . . Perpetual vir- 
 ginity, chosen, not obligatory, was not what she asked of life 
 or desired. She wanted all the things that life had to offer 
 the smooth with the rough, pain, joy, happiness and unhappi- 
 ness. Fulfilment, experience. . . . All life to hold in her 
 hands; not to spill or reject a grain of it. 
 
 It was not as Artemis she ran. The Experimentalists were 
 wrong. Neither as a coquette, with quick feet and backward 
 beckoning glance. Prude, fool, or Impossible Idealist? Which 
 of these three? 
 
 She knew. Impossible Idealist saving everything for the 
 one man, not wanting to spoil things, to brush off the bloom. 
 How the Experimentalists would laugh! 
 
 To-day as she thought of these things Caryl's straight mouth 
 hardened into a thin red line of disgust. The Impossible 
 Idealist looked frowning out of her short-lidded, wide-open 
 eyes, seeing Pen and the Experimentalists generally as prodi- 
 gals, spoiling things, wasting the substance of life. And Caryl 
 could not bear to waste anything at all not so much as a 
 kiss. . . . Yet if you wouldn't risk spoiling things you took the 
 much bigger risk of missing them altogether. Well, suppos- 
 ing she had missed this, whatever it was? Supposing Dick 
 married Marjorie? One got over that sort of thing at least, 
 the right sort of girl got over it. One belonged to a generation
 
 1 68 INTRUSION 
 
 that no longer accepted the Byronic ipse dixit about love 
 "that sort" of love. One knew, now, that it wasn't the whole 
 edifice of life, but just one department. Important, no doubt, 
 but still, only one department. There was much more in the 
 world, in life, than love and marriage. You didn't want to 
 miss them, of course, but you very well might since there 
 weren't enough men to go round. . . . And if you did if this 
 department of life never opened to you nobody was going to 
 make you believe there was nothing else at all worth while. 
 That was the sort of thing men liked to believe and one sort 
 of woman. But always there was Madeleine giving it the lie 
 Madeleine, who knew it wasn't what you took out of life, but 
 what you put in that counted; not what you received, but 
 what you gave of effort and courage and truth.
 
 CHAPTER FIVE 
 
 THE process of "moulding" Roberta went on. 
 Her occasional visits to the Poetry Circle were meant 
 to contribute towards it, but the interest she found in 
 them was of a very different kind from that which Allan im- 
 gined. Here in that stuffy room in the Tottenham Court Road 
 she met some of the people Guen used to coax out on rare 
 occasions to the suburbs among them Constance Maugham 
 and Grace Hardwick. Grace Hardwick, Allan told her, wrote 
 satirical novels and vers Ubre, the one as a relaxation from 
 the other, though he could never remember which way round 
 it was. He also said that she held some position in the Post 
 Office, and that all the other people who did wished that Miss 
 Hardwick did not. She bored Allan because she kept all her 
 brilliant remarks for her novels, and he found it exhausting 
 to try to get some glimpse of the clever novelist through the 
 very dull things she said as a woman. Roberta, too, thought 
 Miss Hardwick dull though for quite other reasons. But she 
 liked her clothes and understood that she wore furs not because 
 it was cold (it wasn't), but because furs suited her. The sort 
 of woman, she said afterwards to Tommy, who at the fall of 
 the first leaf rushes to take her furs out of cold storage. 
 
 Miss Maugham was well dressed, too, in a grey frock made 
 by somebody whose idea of a frock was evidently that it should 
 look as much like a coat as possible. Roberta, taking in its 
 details, decided that she had never really understood before 
 how very trying the colour grey could be. She was, moreover, 
 terribly bored by Constance Maugham, who had told her that 
 poetry had become a fashionable occupation of the moneyed 
 and criticism a thing of cliques and coteries. She seemed quite 
 worried about it. 
 
 Besides the Poetry Circle, Roberta thanked heaven (here, ten 
 weeks after her marriage!) there was Caryl. And Caryl, hav- 
 
 169
 
 170 INTRUSION 
 
 ing sat for her B.A. Honours degree in October, was, here at 
 the beginning of November, taking a rest. Roberta liked 
 Caryl because, as she said to Allan, she was "jolly" and didn't 
 think her stupid because she didn't like books. The two of 
 them came to see a good deal of each other, and Allan, though 
 not in the least understanding the friendship, bestowed his 
 blessing upon it. But whilst Roberta's friendship with Caryl 
 was one thing, that with Tommy Carew was quite another. 
 Allan regarded Tommy as a doubtful ingredient in this care- 
 ful moulding process upon which he was embarked, and he 
 had been glad that, despite Tommy's epistolary expression of 
 a wish to "foregather," Roberta had seen nothing of her since 
 her return from France; and then, one evening in early Novem- 
 ber, from the front row of the pit at the St. James's, Roberta 
 espied her sitting luxuriously in the stalls with Mr. Rayne. 
 Essentially an evening-dress woman, Tommy wore a bright 
 orange frock cut to reveal an alarming expanse of alabaster 
 shoulder. She looked vivid and blatant and alive. Mr. Rayne 
 was neat, smooth and insolently self-possessed. Allan hated 
 the way he stuck his feet straight out beneath the opposite stall 
 and roved an appraising eye over the femininity that surrounded 
 him. But more than all else he hated the taxi-driver whose 
 obduracy landed them into an encounter in the street when the 
 play was done, for Rayne turned away from the squabble and 
 the taxi just in time to cannon heavily into Roberta. There 
 followed mutual apologies, recognitions and Mr. Rayne's state- 
 ment that Count Tolstoy's play (which he referred to as "the 
 show") had bored him stiff. Roberta, who had also been 
 bored by it, seemed to find Mr. Rayne interesting, and in the 
 subsequent quartette, which walked down Piccadilly and split 
 neatly into twos, it was Roberta who walked with Rayne, while 
 Tommy and Allan brought up the rear. The talk, so far as 
 Allan and Tommy were concerned, harked back to Tolstoy. 
 For Allan the play had been a quite remarkable but unsatis- 
 factory performance, that had revealed to him the immense 
 gulf fixed between the Russian temperament and the English, 
 and the fact that there is, as yet, no bridge wide enough to 
 span it. All the evening it had been this sense of a foreign 
 temperament which had come between Allan and the stage, 
 pulling the fabric of the play into a myriad loose ends which 
 had defied his efforts to gather them up and wind them upon
 
 INTRUSION 171 
 
 the skein of understanding. But no such attempts had both- 
 ered Tommy Carew, who knew nothing of the Russian novel 
 and had found it a good deal simpler to regard Fedya Protasov 
 as an Englishman. And as an Englishman, of course, Fedya 
 was simply unaccountable. She was slightly baffled by Allan's 
 "We are an egotistic race!" but was not reduced to silence. 
 She loved to hear the sound of her own voice. Allan judged 
 she was one of those incorrigible people who go to the theatre 
 to be amused, and it puzzled him that she should have gone 
 to see Reparation. He learned later that she had complimen- 
 tary tickets and it was evident that she had had her amusement, 
 though it was of an oblique sort. It was all one to Tommy. 
 
 At the tube was the usual theatre crowd, and to please 
 Roberta Allan agreed to be taken to the Macasnas cafe for 
 coffee. "You'll miss the crowd," Tommy said as they went 
 along, "and sometimes the Macaenas is quite good fun. You 
 can make as much row as you like, and if you're looking for 
 copy. . . ." 
 
 Allan wasn't. He wasn't looking for anything save some 
 reason why he wanted to push Rayne off into the gutter as 
 Roberta trotted along in her absurd shoes at his side ; and why 
 every time his hand touched her arm and every time she 
 smiled at him in that tantalising downward fashion Allan knew 
 so well, a sharp little pain should dart through him and leave 
 him quivering. 
 
 The cafe when they reached it, proved disappointing. It 
 was small and ugly and very full of smoke and human beings, 
 mostly men, with a sprinkling of women in odd, gaily-coloured 
 clothes, a good many of whom Tommy seemed to know. The 
 noise and heat were intolerable. Everybody talked and smoked 
 and drank coffee or liqueurs or tea out of glasses. Rayne 
 ordered coffees and creme de menthe liqueurs, and while they 
 drank them a young man at the next table tried to persuade 
 them to play football with his bowler hat. He was summarily 
 suppressed by Tommy, who picked up his gloves from the 
 floor, stuffed them into his pocket and advised him to go home. 
 
 "You're a nice girl," he said. 
 
 "I know," said Tommy. "Do go home. You're very 
 drunk. I'll have that game of football to-morrow." 
 
 "Riyouah," said the young man and lurched out into the 
 night.
 
 INTRUSION 
 
 "The Macsenas," said Tommy, with a yawn, "is one of 
 those places that never are but always to be raided by the 
 police. It's damn dull here to-night. Let's hop it." 
 
 Allan thought it was dull, too, and as a preliminary to 
 "hopping it" called to the proprietor for a bill. The man 
 worked a complicated sum on the corner of the table and 
 announced "Twelve zheelings and zixpence, if you please." 
 
 "His arithmetic's as queer as Sir Auckland Geddes'," Tommy 
 said; but no one disputed Allan's right to be the victim of it. 
 
 "We must meet again," Mr. Rayne said affably when they 
 got outside. "Your wife and I are quite old friends, Mr. 
 Suffield." And again Allan thought how really nice it would 
 be to knock Mr. Rayne off the pavement into the gutter! 
 
 "We foregather every Thursday," Tommy told him. "Why 
 not look us up? Bobbie knows the address." 
 
 Allan murmured excuses which Tommy seemed not to hear. 
 
 "Any old time," she said, "always delighted, I'm sure." 
 
 Allan and Roberta caught the last tube, but the bus upon 
 which they had been relying at the other end was gone, and 
 they had to walk. They were very tired, but Roberta said she'd 
 had a jolly evening and that it was worth it. Allan began to 
 say that he was afraid they were incurring extravagant habits: 
 he thought they'd have to begin retrenching. 
 
 "Oh, what a shame!" Roberta said. "It's been so nice." 
 
 "Well, we won't talk of it now," Allan said. "The night's 
 too good. Isn't it perfectly wonderful, Bobbie? You'd never 
 dream it was November." 
 
 They walked on, arm in arm, silently, the early November 
 night wrapping them round. After the hot cafe the air on 
 their faces was like a cool hand stretched out in the darkness, 
 and over the tree-tops the stars hung like a crown of silver. 
 The moon, very pale and young, swam in a sea of sapphire. 
 
 That walk after midnight through the quiet streets of a North 
 London suburb passed steadfastly into Allan's memory. It 
 stood clear. Etched in lines of black and silver it remained, 
 undimmed of time and change. And with it was treasured up 
 the vision of Roberta's face and the sound of her pretty voice 
 that never said anything that mattered, that said to-night that 
 its owner had had such a jolly evening. . . . Always it seemed 
 as though the night had taken her beauty and folded it closely 
 in the mesh of its own, so that the loveliness of the stars 
 belonged to it and the quiet of the sleeping earth. . . .
 
 CHAPTER SIX 
 
 TWO days later the morning post brought a confirmation 
 of Tommy's invitation and an invitation of another sort 
 from Hilmer Roydon. He wanted, so he said, some 
 special photographs for an exhibition, and he begged Roberta 
 to give him a sitting. For reasons of her own Roberta said 
 nothing of this to Allan, hiding its arrival under that of 
 Tommy's. And Tommy's invitation Allan persuaded her to 
 forego. 
 
 "There's no point, darling, in knowing that crowd of 
 hangers-on. And they'll make you discontented and dissatis- 
 fied. I don't want you made either." 
 
 Roberta wrote pleading a prior engagement, but she was 
 inclined to repent her acquiescence in what she called Allan's 
 "prejudices" when she found that he had come home that 
 evening to write. She, for her part, dragged a heap of mend- 
 ing from a cupboard and sorted it listlessly into its two piles 
 of "Must Be Dones" and "May Be Lefts." The "Must Be 
 Dones" were appallingly numerous and she went at them 
 viciously, occasionally relieving her feelings by throwing a badly 
 afflicted sock or stocking on to the fire. "It's no good, I 
 simply can't mend that . . . it's more hole than sock," she'd say 
 when with a questioning look Allan glanced up from his work 
 and wrinkled his nose at the smell of burning. At ten o'clock 
 she gave it up and retired to bed, where, an hour later, Allan 
 discovered her in tears and temper. It wasn't easy to pacify 
 her nor to get at the root of her complaint. But he gathered 
 she'd been dull and felt neglected. 
 
 "But, darling, we've been out so much . . . four evenings 
 practically out of every six. . . . And I did want to work 
 to-night." 
 
 173
 
 174 INTRUSION 
 
 "Then you might have let me go to Tommy's. That 
 wouldn't have cost anything, except my fare to Bloomsbury." 
 
 Allan weakened. 
 
 "We can't go into all that again now. You know what I 
 think about it." 
 
 Two days later at four o'clock Roberta received a telegram 
 from Allan which told her not to expect him before eleven. 
 He had been asked to work late. Roberta swam down a rushing 
 torrent of resentment during the evening and had landed herself 
 in a whirlpool of self-pity by the time Allan reached home. 
 She complained that she hated being alone in the evenings. 
 
 "How long is this late work going on?" 
 
 "Until Christmas," Allan told her. "Seven weeks, about. 
 I needn't have accepted. I did it for policy. You see, we 
 shall be very glad of the money. We've been very extravagant 
 of late." 
 
 "Oh, dear, I hate all this about money!" Roberta moaned. 
 
 "So do I. I've always hated it. But what's to be done? 
 We must have money, unfortunately. Of course, we could 
 plunge ... go away into the country somewhere and chance 
 our luck. A.G. could get me a good deal of reviewing. . . . 
 I haven't time for much now. And you can live much more 
 cheaply in the country. I'm game if you are." 
 
 But Roberta wasn't. She dismissed his ridiculous scheme 
 in three words. 
 
 "Don't be silly!" she said. "Do you mean to go on with 
 this late work?" 
 
 Allan bumped back to earth. "I think I must," he said, 
 bending his head before this strong wind of ways and means. 
 
 "And what happens to me?" said Roberta. 
 
 "Nice things, I hope." He outlined them. Teas and din- 
 ners at Adelaide Lodge: visits to the theatre or pictures with 
 her mother or Caryl. They sounded dull to Roberta, who 
 hated what she called the "family stunt." Also, she noticed 
 he had not included Tommy. She supposed he imagined he 
 had disposed of Tommy once and for all. 
 
 "It's hateful being poor," she complained. 
 
 "There are worse things, darling," Allan said. 
 
 "Then I'm sure I don't know what they are. I think money's 
 frightfully important. I wish you'd let me earn some." 
 
 "How do you mean?"
 
 INTRUSION 175 
 
 "With Kilmer Roydon." 
 
 "But I thought you hated the studio? You were quite glad 
 to leave it." 
 
 "I know . . . but I thought we'd be better off ... I don't 
 want to go back in the old way. Only just for occasional 
 photos." 
 
 "For the tubes?" 
 
 "No, not always. There are exhibitions . . . things like 
 that" 
 
 "Darling, I'd so much rather you didn't." 
 
 "But it would only be occasionally, and the money'd be so 
 useful." 
 
 "We're not so hard up as all that." 
 
 "I am. I haven't a sixpence of my own." 
 
 "But my dear girl, you can have what you want, within 
 reason. It isn't my money, but ours." 
 
 Roberta settled herself in bed and turned her back on the 
 argument and on Allan. 
 
 "I think that's a perfectly silly thing to say," she remarked. 
 
 And there the subject ended. But Roberta's decision was 
 made. The next morning she sent Roydon a reply in the 
 affirmative, making an appointment for Thursday of that 
 week. Later Tommy turned up unexpectedly to tea and agreed 
 with Roberta that if people wouldn't let you be honest you had 
 to deceive them. Anything, anyway, for a quiet life. 
 
 "Thursday's my 'do,' " she said. "You'd better make a day 
 of it and come on to lunch when Roydon's finished with you. 
 And don't be surprised if you find Duggie there. . . ." 
 
 Duggie was there and looking very much at home, his feet 
 on the mantelpiece and a whisky-and-soda at his side. He 
 greeted Roberta with affability and paid her neatly-turned com- 
 pliments while Tommy dug out a fragmentary lunch from 
 unexpected places and planked it down in places even more 
 unexpected. 
 
 Roberta saw, she could not help seeing, that Mr. Rayne's 
 eyes rested upon her appreciatively. But Roberta was used to 
 that. What she did not see was that his eyes, insolently steady, 
 divested her of clothing, left her naked to his cold, appraising 
 gaze. She judged him by what he said, and that was correct 
 and casual enough. 
 
 "Do much of this sort of work?"
 
 176 INTRUSION 
 
 "Not now." 
 
 "Husband object, eh?" 
 
 "He would if he knew." 
 
 "Ah ... so he doesn't know?" 
 
 Roberta blushed. 
 
 "I hate rows," she said. 
 
 "So do I. You're a wise child, Bobbie. Bring up a husband 
 in the way he should go. Modern woman idea . . . independence 
 and all that. Quite right. ... I hope you don't mind my calling 
 you Bobbie. Ethel May said I might." 
 
 "But I didn't say you might call me 'Ethel May,' " Tommy 
 observed. "Here, hike over the cheese." 
 
 Duggie "hiked" it over. 
 
 "I wonder," he said to Roberta, "if you'll let me take a 
 couple of photographs one day? It's just a hpbby of mine. . . . 
 I might be able to get you a commission for our cigarette 
 boxes ... if you care about that sort of thing. The guvnor 
 likes variety and he'd consider any friend of mine. . . Perhaps 
 you'll come along and see my studio one day. It's quite 
 pretty, isn't it, Ethel May? You can bring her with you as 
 a sop to Mrs. Grundy and A Possibly Jealous Husband. . . ." 
 
 And when Roberta hesitated Tommy said: "That's it, Bob- 
 bie. Keep him in his place. Don't let him think you're ready 
 to jump. . . . Here, have another tomato, and when you've done 
 sitting on the butter, Dug, I'd like a bit." 
 
 Mr. Rayne handed over the butter, or as much of it as was 
 not adhering to his trousers, and smiled abstractedly in 
 Roberta's direction. 
 
 "Ever thought of going on the pictures?" he enquired. 
 
 "Well . . . not lately," Roberta confessed. 
 
 "Shouldn't if I were you," Tommy said. "Thinking's the 
 devil. Never think. My motto." 
 
 "We're aware of it, dearest," Duggie assured her. "Also 
 that this is very rotten coffee. Your idea of coffee, Ethel May, 
 is suburban." 
 
 "Well, there's a Lyons round the corner," said Tommy. 
 
 "I'd thought of that. ... A word in your ear, Bobbie. 
 If you ever decide to go on the pictures I hope you'll work a 
 little harder than Ethel May. Ethel ought to be earning pots. 
 But Ethel isn't. 'Cos why? 'Cos no producer in England can 
 depend upon her. She says she finds it tiring being a vamp."
 
 INTRUSION 177 
 
 "So it is," said Tommy. "You try it and see. And I wish 
 you'd go out for a little while. I want to have a feminine jaw. 
 Can't you see it in my eye?" 
 
 "Can I go and sponge your butter off my trousers first?" 
 
 "Water's no good. There's some benzine in the kitchen. 
 It has a nasty temper. It evaporates if you leave the cork 
 out, and if you get it near the gas it's you who'll evaporate." 
 
 Mr. Rayne was some time over the benzine and his trousers, 
 but eventually he went and Tommy and Roberta had things 
 to themselves. The "feminine jaw" was fairly comprehensive, 
 and when at the end of it Tommy suggested that Roberta 
 might like to wash, the moralist might have thought that it 
 was not alone Roberta's hands which needed to be washed. . . . 
 Yet it was not what Tommy said so much as what she implied; 
 her cynical attitude to life; her cold, calm sensualism, her 
 "pricing" of everything on earth, her denial of the godhead in 
 humanity. Her tongue left neither Galahad clean nor Lancelot 
 brave. . . . 
 
 "You know where the bath-room is?" she said. 
 
 Roberta did, and went to it. Tommy, too, got up and went 
 into her bedroom, which might have been tidier. She pushed 
 up a window, removed Mr. Rayne's pipe from her dressing- 
 table, shut up odds and ends in a drawer, threw Mr. Rayne's 
 slippers into the wardrobe and camouflaged his silk pyjamas 
 with the eiderdown quilt. These things done she stood for a 
 moment looking round. "All serene," she reflected; nothing 
 remained in evidence calculated to bring a blush to the cheek 
 of the young person. 
 
 "Right-o!" she called to the particular young person who 
 was asking on the other side of the door if she might come in. 
 She came in, took the pins out of her hair and said she didn't 
 agree with all Tommy had been saying. She thought the world 
 was perfectly disgusting. 
 
 "You can't speak to a man without his imagining things," 
 she complained. 
 
 "I know," said Tommy, "but they're right, you know, nine 
 times out of ten. All women aren't lumps of ice, like you. They 
 do really want the things you call horrid, my girl the plain, 
 blunt, physical act called marriage, that hasn't got anything 
 whatever to do with orange blossom and white satin and a 
 ceremony in some church. A man, not a husband. . . . Sorry
 
 178 INTRUSION 
 
 to be so brutal, my dear, but you mustn't mistake coldness for 
 virtue." 
 
 "But there are other things in life." 
 
 "None so important. Sex, you can take it from me, rules 
 the world whether you like it or not. I've known that since 
 I was seventeen. So've you only you won't admit it." 
 
 "Oh, I don't mind admitting it only it doesn't appeal to me, 
 that side of life." 
 
 "No, duckie, but it appeals to other people. Try and remem- 
 ber that. Let's trot back, shall we?" 
 
 They trotted back and pursued this entertaining subject of 
 marriages and husbands until Mr. Rayne returned with several 
 bottles in brown paper, a promise of others that were being 
 "sent round," and a demand for tea. 
 
 Tommy's guests proved to be a heterogeneous collection of 
 invertebrates, for whom life was little but a peregrination from 
 one Soho restaurant to another, with brief intervals for a vague 
 something they referred to as "work," and of which they didn't 
 seem too fond. They viewed the world through a perpetual 
 haze of tobacco smoke, squinted at life over the rim of a liqueur 
 glass. . . . They had a profound contempt for the people who 
 lived in neat houses, paid their bills and kept regular hours. 
 Some of the men had been in the Army, but the Army had 
 done little for them beyond colouring their vocabulary. Besides, 
 they hated the war because of its uprooting tendencies and 
 because it had "spoiled" the Cafe Royal. Hatred is a stronger 
 cement than love, and it was the hates of these people that 
 held them together. They all hated the same people and the 
 same things, and through all their jabber of studios and New 
 Art and "movements" and the sex adventures of themselves 
 and their friends, that fact emerged clear and unmistakable. 
 
 They had, between them, plenty of parlour tricks: they 
 could, in their way, be entertaining: their scandalous talk 
 had point and wit: their common hatreds had at least the 
 virtue of virility the only things about them, perhaps, that 
 had. They flamed together this evening against two of their 
 number who had committed the solecism of marriage. Really, 
 this sort of thing wasn't done. The company frowned upon 
 bride and bridegroom who, between them, had so seriously 
 lowered the moral currency, and a girl with a pale face and a 
 mouth scarlet as her frock and her language announced
 
 INTRUSION 179 
 
 that she wasn't going to be any gentleman's sanguinary bride, 
 thank you very much . . . too damn monotonous. Roberta, 
 who, as a respectably married woman, was beginning to feel 
 uncomfortable, was grateful to a frowsy individual in check 
 trousers who at this point interrupted the disquisition on the 
 moralities by taking a poem from his pocket and beginning to 
 read it aloud. There was a good deal of it and it concerned 
 a girl limned with yellow and with orange hair who had danced 
 naked on an emerald lawn while the sun went down in the 
 sky like a rotting peach, and who eventually had her brains 
 knocked out by a proud gentleman with a clipped black mous- 
 tache, mobile eyes and deliberate chin, who appeared to object 
 to her morals. The audience, who didn't, showed signs of 
 restiveness when it became apparent that the poet desired to 
 repeat the poem about the gentleman who did. 
 
 "One poem, once," Tommy told him, "is all right. The 
 same poem, twice, is a blasted nuisance. Besides, your lemon 
 and orange girl can't stand having her brains clubbed out twice 
 in the same evening, and the gentleman with the moustaches 
 oughn't to be encouraged to make a habit of it. Now go and 
 sit in a corner and keep quiet." 
 
 To that end they gave him some wine and the girl in the 
 scarlet frock and got back to the things that mattered. Later 
 they wound up the gramophone and there was dancing. Danc- 
 ing was emphatically one of the things that "mattered" which 
 was probably why the good dancers went about it with the 
 solemn faces of mutes at a funeral and frowned at the bad 
 ones who kicked their heels about and seemed to be enjoying 
 themselves. 
 
 Roberta danced all the time with Duggie Rayne in a sort 
 of ecstasy of silence. With her firm young body pressed close 
 against his, speech for Mr. Rayne was certainly supererogatory : 
 his reasons for dancing were hardly conversational. But at 
 the end, when, like any Cinderella,* Roberta flew from the 
 festive dance, he whispered, "You dance divinely, little girl. 
 Come again." 
 
 She did. She went twice and then Allan found out, for 
 again like Cinderella, she failed one evening to leave quite
 
 1 8o INTRUSION 
 
 fearly enough, and when she reached home Allan had already 
 arrived and was raking about in the kitchen, in the pathetic 
 male fashion, for something to eat. Taken unawares Roberta 
 could think of no explanation that would avoid the truth. It 
 was only half-past eleven, so obviously she had not been to a 
 theatre even if, on the spur of the moment, she could have 
 thought of some explanation of seats which would justify her 
 frock. There was nothing for it but the truth. Allan, she 
 thought, took it well. He was very quiet. 
 
 "Is this the first time?" he asked. 
 
 "No," said Roberta, who thought she might as well be 
 hung for a sheep as for a lamb, "I've been twice before." 
 
 "Why didn't you tell me?" 
 
 "I thought you'd say I wasn't to ... I mean, I thought you 
 wouldn't like it." 
 
 "I don't, but still less do I like things done behind my 
 back." 
 
 Roberta's red mouth pouted, but said nothing. 
 
 "Are there many of them, Roberta?" 
 
 "Many of what?" 
 
 "These things you don't tell me of." 
 
 "No . . . not many." 
 
 "What others?" 
 
 "I can't think of any . . ." 
 
 "Roberta! Do let us be honest with each other. Why 
 couldn't you have been honest about this?" 
 
 "I would have, only I do hate a fuss. And you would have 
 made a fuss. You're like mother." 
 
 "But don't you see that even a fuss, as you call it, is better 
 than deception? It's awful for two people who are married 
 not to trust each other." 
 
 "I do trust you, Allan." 
 
 "We don't keep things from people we trust, Bobbie." 
 
 "Well you shouldn't be so critical." 
 
 "Of whom?" 
 
 "Well, of Tommy. You don't know anything about her." 
 
 "I only know that her standards are not ours, and that the 
 only influence she can have on you will be an unsettling one. 
 I don't want to spoil your pleasures, but I don't want people 
 to come along and make you discontented. I know you don't 
 have all the things you want: I wish I could give you more:
 
 INTRUSION 181 
 
 but we do have a good deal more than many people and it 
 isn't money that makes you happy." 
 
 "But not having it makes you unhappy," said Roberta. 
 
 "Rubbish! You're not unhappy, are you?" 
 
 "I'm a bit lonely. . . ." 
 
 "Still? Look here, shall I cancel this evening work? I can, 
 now, if I like. . . . Otherwise, it's going on till Christmas. It's 
 for you to say." 
 
 "I wouldn't like you to do that," Roberta said. "I shall 
 be all right. Caryl was talking about a dance the other 
 night . . . and, oh, I daresay I'll get used to it. ... Of course, 
 if you're going to make me promise not to go to Tommy's . . ." 
 
 "I'm not," said Allan. "I don't issue orders. Only . . . 
 be careful . . . and I shouldn't, if I were you, go too often. 
 Aren't you reading anything?" 
 
 "Yes, there's that Conrad you lent me." 
 
 "Don't you like it?" 
 
 "Oh, yes but it's so tiring. I can't follow it." 
 
 Roberta did not find it easy to read Conrad. She had come 
 up rather too sharply against Marlow, the super-narrator of 
 the earlier Conrad of Lord Jim and of Youth, and had 
 stumbled badly over Chance. Even Allan had admitted that 
 only Conrad could have got that story out through the twisting 
 maze of the method he had there adopted. 
 
 The conversation slipped down the by-path of Roberta's 
 reading-matter, and that young woman congratulated herself 
 upon the fact that Allan had forgotten Mr. Rayne's existence. 
 Half an hour later, however, he remembered it. Roberta stood 
 brushing out her hair, Allan sat on the edge of the bed, kicking 
 off his boots. He was essentially the sort of person who sat 
 on beds, constitutionally incapable of acknowledging the exist- 
 ence of bedroom chairs. 
 
 "You don't, by any chance, meet that young Rayne at Miss 
 Carew's, do you?" he asked. 
 
 Roberta brushed her hair over her face and answered with 
 studied carelessness. 
 
 "I believe he was there to-night," she said. 
 
 "Don't you know?" 
 
 "Well, I hardly spoke to him." 
 
 Allan's face clouded.
 
 1 82 INTRUSION 
 
 "Why quibble? Why couldn't you say right out, at first, 
 that he was there?" 
 
 "Well, if I didn't speak to him " 
 
 "I didn't ask you that. ... I asked you if you met him." 
 Hopelessness assailed him, took and shook him by the throat. 
 "My dear girl," he said, "can't you see how awful it's going 
 to be if I can't trust you?" 
 
 She said: 
 
 "Well, it's only a white lie ... and a weeny one. Sorry. . ." 
 
 "Not even white lies, Bobbie, please. Good heavens, where 
 are we if we can't tell the truth to each other? Can't you see 
 how important it is?" And again hopelessness assailed him 
 because he felt she couldn't. 
 
 But Roberta said she could. 
 
 "Allan . . . don't lecture me. ... I do hate being lectured." 
 
 "I don't want to lecture you." 
 
 "Then don't. Be nice." 
 
 She brushed her hair back from her face and came and 
 leaned over the rail of the bed. 
 
 "Why do you hate poor Mr. Rayne so much?" she enquired. 
 
 "Because he's got 'bounder' written all over him. I don't 
 want you to know bounders, Bobbie." 
 
 "But I don't believe he is ... not really, darling." 
 
 "You're an extraordinary girl. You ought to be able at a 
 glance to see what he is. Where's your instinct?" 
 
 "Oh, that's so silly. . . . Even if there were anything . . . 
 anything . . . not nice . . . about him. After all, men always 
 take their cue from the girl." 
 
 "But it's never worth risking that sort of thing. It's hateful. 
 I can't bear the thought of your knowing questionable men. 
 Besides, it isn't necessary." 
 
 "Well, how's one to tell? Most men are the same, on top. 
 There was Martyn: you didn't think he was questionable, yet 
 he wanted to make love to me. . . . And there was your brother. 
 Everybody thought he was all right. Pen and your mother 
 think so now." 
 
 "I know. Don't let us talk of that. . . ." 
 
 A shadow moved across his face: his level brows drew 
 together. 
 
 "Well, you see," said Roberta. "Besides, Allan musn't be a 
 naughty horrid birdlet and be jealous of his nice little wife."
 
 INTRUSION 183 
 
 Allan looked up at her. The cloud moved across his face 
 and disappeared like a shadow before the sudden shining of the 
 sun. He smiled. 
 
 "Not jealous," he said, catching her mood. 
 
 Through her thin ridiculous night-dress the grace and beauty 
 of her burned and scorched him. Her hazel eyes, like two 
 Veiled servants, guarded and shrouded the cool calculation 
 which rose up and looked out of them. Coquettishly she 
 touched Allan's shoulder with the edge of the silver-backed 
 brush she never had time to polish. 
 
 "Don't like living in a cage," she said. "Birdlets ought to 
 trust each other." 
 
 "This birdlet does." 
 
 "What's the matter then?" 
 
 "Nothing. . . . Come and kiss me, Bobbie." 
 
 She came slowly and sat on his knee, putting her face against 
 his. He put his arms about her and held her tight. With the 
 calm resolute abandon of dispassion she yielded herself to his 
 embrace. Her eyes closed in an ecstasy of distaste and a little 
 quiver of self-pity ran through her, not that she gave herself 
 in cold blood, but that she must give herself at all.
 
 CHAPTER SEVEN 
 
 ALLAN, with Roberta's kisses to brace him, bent himself 
 anew to this task of moulding or remoulding the giver 
 of them. He went warily, realising that though he 
 hated and distrusted this friendship of Roberta's with the 
 Invertebrates (which was his name for Tommy Carew and her 
 friends), he must not put himself out of court by forbidding 
 it. You wouldn't get far that way with Roberta, who had all 
 the obstinacy of weak natures, all the jargon of liberty and 
 freedom of those who never come within a hundred miles of 
 understanding the meaning of either. Her acquaintance with 
 the Invertebrates, so Allan calculated, would come to an end 
 with his own late work, either at Christmas or ever so little 
 beyond it. And seeing that it was now the middle of the first 
 week in December it certainly looked as if the Invertebrates 
 would have but little time to mar his beautiful attempts to 
 achieve for Roberta a really crystal soul. 
 
 He had just settled down to this comfortable conviction when 
 something else happened which revealed to him how unques- 
 tionably muddy was the material upon which he had to work. 
 
 It was in the tube, and his gaze alighted suddenly upon three 
 studies of Roberta in Hilmer Roydon's advertisement frames. 
 In a way he had grown used to seeing Roberta's face staring 
 out at him in this public fashion, but it was now so long since 
 it had done so that he crossed the lift to look particularly at 
 these new studies. There was a study of Roberta in Japanese 
 costume; another in a garden and another in very little at all. 
 And, strangely enough, though it was the last which first caught 
 Allan's eye (as it probably caught other people's), it was at the 
 one in Japanese costume that he found himself staring. For it 
 was that which gave the truth away. These studies were new. 
 Roberta had "sat" for them recently. He knew that beyond 
 
 184
 
 INTRUSION 185 
 
 doubt because the Japanese costume was fastened with a brooch 
 which he had given Roberta less than a month ago. She had 
 seen and admired it in some shop window, and his pleasure in, 
 Roberta's improved taste had triumphed over his conviction 
 of extravagance when he went inside and bought it for her. 
 Even in this colourless photographic reproduction that single 
 emerald set in its thin ring of platinum was as familiar as the 
 nose on his face. He became suddenly very angry. He walked 
 up from the station at a breakneck pace and let himself into 
 the house. It was Roberta's birthday, and he had left the office 
 early in order to take her out to dinner and to a theatre, for 
 which he had secured Dress Circle tickets. She was upstairs 
 dressing, and as he let himself into the house her gay voice 
 called down that she was nearly ready and that he was to go 
 up. He would have gone up to-night in any case; for he was 
 too angry to cool his heels down there in the hall. Roberta 
 had put on her prettiest frock and stood in front of her glass 
 putting the finishing touches to her hair. 
 
 "Hallo!" she said. "You're nice and early Will I do?" 
 
 She turned and waited for him to come up and kiss her. He 
 did nothing of the sort. The anger in his face looked out at 
 her, killing her smile and checking the words on her lips. 
 
 "Roberta, why didn't you tell me you had given Roy don a 
 new sitting?" 
 
 "Roydon? A new sitting? Whatever do you mean?" said 
 Roberta. Her voice had the pathetic inflection of the unjustly 
 accused; she looked injured and very pretty. But that didn't 
 help her, because, for the moment, Allan was beyond the 
 appeal of the physical. 
 
 "You know quite well what I mean," he said. "Roydon is 
 showing three new photographs of you, and I want to know 
 when they were taken." 
 
 He hated himself for laying the trap, but it had to be. There 
 was nothing big or fine about him and nothing generous. He 
 was male to his finger-tips, blatant, rampart male, with all the 
 cave-dweller's instinct to hurt the woman who had deceived 
 him. He wanted, savagely, to humiliate her, here in the midst 
 of her finery, and to spoil her evening's treat. Roberta, on the 
 other hand, was concerned less with Allan's anger (with which 
 she thought she could cope) than with Hilmer Roydon's 
 duplicity (with which she was aware she couldn't). He had
 
 1 86 INTRUSION 
 
 expressly told her that the photographs should be used not for 
 publicity, but for exhibition purposes. 
 
 "When," said Allan again, "were those photographs taken?" 
 
 "Oh, months ago. . . . What a fuss to make over a few 
 photographs!" 
 
 Allan came nearer. 
 
 "Now be careful, Roberta. When were those photographs 
 taken?" 
 
 "Months ago, I tell you." 
 
 She saw from the whitening of his face that he was very 
 angry. 
 
 "How many months?" 
 
 "How can I remember? Before we were married, anyway." 
 
 "All of them? What about the one in Japanese costume?" 
 
 "Oh!" She laughed. "I didn't think it was that one you'd 
 make a fuss about." 
 
 Something, not alone the thing she said, but the coarse note 
 in her voice as she said it, jerked his mind painfully back to 
 things he thought he had forgotten once again he held her 
 for the first time in his arms, felt her suddenly grow limp at 
 his touch. Beneath the veneer of her beauty she was 
 common. . . . 
 
 "I'm not making a 'fuss' about any of them. I'm asking 
 you a plain question. When was that study in Japanese 
 costume taken?" 
 
 "With the others, of course . . . months ago." 
 
 "Before we were married?" 
 
 "I've said so, haven't I?" 
 
 "You have. I give you one more chance to take it back." 
 
 "Take it back? Of course I shan't take it back. Why 
 should I?" 
 
 He was very quiet. 
 
 "You still stick to it that the Japanese one was taken months 
 ago?" 
 
 "Of course I stick to it. Do you think I'm a liar?" 
 
 "I think you're lying now. Because you seem to have for- 
 gotten that the brooch that fastens the Japanese frock is the 
 brooch I bought you less than a month ago." 
 
 Her face fell: a look half fear, half cunning, crept into her 
 eyes. Then she shrugged her shoulders and turned away. 
 
 "Well? What have you to say?" he asked.
 
 INTRUSION 187 
 
 "Nothing," she said. 
 
 "Nothing at all?" 
 
 He came over and touched her arm. 
 
 "Roberta, you told me a deliberate lie. Was it necessary?" 
 
 She pulled herself away from his hand. 
 
 "Oh, don't touch me! You make me sick. You've got a 
 filthy mind, you have. ... I detest you !" 
 
 "Why didn't you tell me you were going to Roydon's studio?" 
 
 "Because I knew you'd object. ... I did ask you . . . 
 twice before. . . . You didn't like it. You object to so many 
 things!" 
 
 "Do I, Roberta?" 
 
 "Oh, don't talk to me. ... I'm sick of it, I tell you. . . . 
 Such a fuss . . . about a little white lie! ... While we're 
 about it, you may as well know something else as well. Mr. 
 Rayne's given me the chance of getting a photograph contract 
 with some firm or other in America. If you hadn't made all 
 that fuss about my sitting for Roydon I'd have told you all 
 about it; but I can't stand arguments and rows. It's your 
 own fault and, anyway, you can't say I haven't told you about 
 this new offer. It isn't a job you see advertised. It's all a 
 matter of influence." 
 
 "I see. Mr. Rayne's influence?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "And why should Mr. Rayne take so much interest in you?" 
 
 "Oh, Lord, do shut up! You make me tired. I call it jolly 
 decent of him. And why shouldn't I earn a little for myself? 
 It isn't as though you're rolling not exactly." 
 
 Allan stood like stone. It seemed to him that whole cen- 
 turies passed before he got out what he wanted to say. 
 
 "I want to know what Mr. Rayne is getting out of it." 
 
 "Getting out of it?" Roberta withered him with scorn. 
 "Getting out of it? What should he get out of it? What on 
 earth do you mean?" 
 
 Through the thin frock he saw her bosom rise and fall in 
 her anger: her eyes darkened with it and her face flushed. Even 
 in her fury her beauty put out fingers and touched him. He 
 clenched his hands and looked away. If he looked at her, 
 even now, he was lost. 
 
 "You know well enough what I mean." 
 
 She stared at him. The flush had died out of her face; her
 
 1 88 INTRUSION 
 
 eyes lashed him like cold steel. It was as though she measured 
 him up, delivered judgment; but with a low, insolent satis- 
 faction, infinitely galling. 
 
 "You've got a nice sort of mind, I must say!" 
 
 Standing there by the window, he was deadly quiet. What 
 she said didn't matter: but that she said it in that cold, 
 passionless tone hurt hideously. He couldn't think why. 
 
 "If I thought things like that I'd keep them to myself. It 
 shows what you must be yourself. . . . Besides, do you think 
 being married to you isn't enough? I give you my word it 
 is. . . ." 
 
 He hated her in the sudden furious way he hated people 
 who spat on the public highway. 
 
 "Oh, for God's sake!" he said and, turning on his heel, 
 went out of the room. 
 
 Downstairs, in the front room they called the dining-room, 
 the fire was at its last gasp. Allan went over to it, leaned 
 his arms on the mantelshelf and bowed his head on them. He 
 stayed so for several minutes, and when he moved the sleeves 
 of his coat were grey with dust. He brushed it off mechani- 
 cally, as though he scarcely saw it, as though in this 
 hideous clarity of vision which had come to him he saw so 
 many other things, so much more important. It was as though 
 upstairs he had looked down over the edge of Roberta's beauty 
 and found nothing there. And even the beauty somehow had 
 coarsened and cheapened. He remembered things that had 
 happened, that he did not know had worked like that into his 
 memory, as though they had been written in invisible ink and 
 Roberta's dull scorn had been the acid which made the writing 
 visible. 
 
 The door opened and she came in, switching on the light. 
 She had slipped her coat over her thin frock, and her face rose, 
 flushed and charming, over its black fur collar. The red-gold 
 of her hair escaped beneath a brimless hat of black tulle that 
 was bound with a wreath of green leaves. 
 
 "I'm ready," she said, "if you are." 
 
 The honey sweetness of her tone, the soft amiability of her
 
 INTRUSION 189 
 
 face both were incredible. He stared at her, then, stammer- 
 ing a little, he said, "I'm not . . . I'm not going." 
 
 "Don't be silly!" she said. "I'm sorry I lost my temper, 
 but you were very aggravating." 
 
 "You told me a lie. . . . You deceived me ! Not for the first 
 time. . . . You're making it impossible for me to trust you any 
 more!" 
 
 "Oh, if you're going to begin all over again. . . ." 
 
 "I'm not. But we can't go out . . . now. . . . You must 
 see we can't. They'd turn us out in five minutes for brawling." 
 
 The amiability of her face cracked, like a mask. 
 
 "You mean you refuse? You'll deliberately spoil my 
 evening?" 
 
 "It isn't I who've spoilt it." 
 
 "Who is it, then? I'm never to have any pleasure, I sup- 
 pose? I'm just to stick here in this poky place and slave for 
 you for nothing." 
 
 He remembered the dust on his coat. 
 
 "You don't slave very hard," he said. "You haven't even 
 dusted^the mantelshelf to-day." 
 
 "I suppose you think you're very clever?" she said. Her 
 voice was not angry, but quite sweet and seductive. She smiled 
 and came closer, so that he saw the fine, the almost incredibly 
 fine, texture of her skin and its flawless transparency. Beneath 
 the open coat and the thin frock her body stirred: she held 
 his eyes with her own. 
 
 "I don't think I'm clever at all," he said slowly; "but I 
 think you are." 
 
 Her smile deepened. 
 
 "Then be nice to me. . . . I'm sorry I was a beast." 
 
 She leaned towards him, her eyes narrowed and shining. 
 The scent she affected sprang out at him, faint but enticing. 
 Her hand touched his shoulder. 
 
 "Allan ... be nice. . . ." 
 
 Allan stood rigid, but his eyelids flickered. Something fierce 
 and hot flowed over him like lava, then suddenly streamed back 
 from him, leaving him strangely calm and still. It was his 
 calmness which astounded him. It was a thing so real, so 
 intense, it seemed almost to be imbued with visibility. He 
 looked into its eyes with his own, and those of Roberta, nar- 
 rowed, shining, infinitely alluring, he no longer saw at alL
 
 190 INTRUSION 
 
 "I'm sorry," he said; "but I'm not coming." 
 
 "You mean that?" 
 
 "Absolutely." 
 
 She swung round and began buttoning up her coat. 
 
 "Very well!" she said, "as you please. Only don't say I 
 haven't apologised. ... It isn't my fault" 
 
 He said nothing. He looked at her, but even now the only 
 thing he saw was the startling phenomenon of his own intense 
 unbelievable calm. But over ft, as Roberta turned and went 
 out and the closing of the front door reached his ears, there 
 came, flooding, a sense of triumph. It had been a fight. 
 Against Roberta and the maddening quality of her beauty and 
 her intention that he should succumb. And he had won. It 
 was his first victory, and it elated him. 
 
 He was full of it as he made up the fire, drew up a chair to 
 the table, collected his materials and sat down to write. He 
 was surprised at the perspicacity of his mind, at its cool 
 deliberate concentration: at the ease with which he marshalled 
 his ideas and set them down in writing before him. He 
 worked on steadily until the clock on the mantelshelf struck 
 eleven with the sharp triumph of its kind. Allan's mind, jerked 
 out of its avenue of tranquillity, shifted uneasily from thought 
 to thought, then recoiled in dismay. Where and with whom 
 was Roberta? At a quarter past the hour she returned. He 
 heard her key in the lock and the sound of her footsteps going 
 on up the stairs. Stifling an instinct to rush out after her, 
 Allan sat there and finished his article. At twelve o'clock, when 
 he wrote the last word, only a painful throbbing of his senses 
 proclaimed at how great a cost the victory had been won and 
 where it was incomplete; that and the barb of wretchedness 
 when his eyes fell upon the blankness of his undisturbed bed. 
 
 For Roberta, majestic, offended, had elected to sleep in the 
 spare room. 
 
 The amiability of her manner next morning was not more 
 surprising than the sullen sweetness of it. It seemed impossible 
 that the two things could go together like that, or that she 
 could keep them united for so long. She answered his morning
 
 INTRUSION 191 
 
 greeting in a tone several degrees more affable than his and 
 made intelligent remarks about the weather, which, here in the 
 second week of December, was making commendable efforts to 
 emerge from wet warmth into bright, windy coldness. Allan, 
 in no mood for conversation, read the morning paper and 
 thought how delightful a world without newspapers would be 
 and that John Wilkes, after all, had gone to prison for very 
 little. . . . 
 
 Suddenly he put the paper down and plunged. 
 
 "It would be interesting," he said, "to know who had the 
 privilege of paying for your dinner last night." 
 
 Roberta smiled. "I shouldn't worry if I were you," she 
 said. "He could well afford it." 
 
 Allan got up out of his chair, pushed it back and stood lean- 
 ing over the table, gripping its edge with his hands. 
 
 "So it was Rayne, was it?" 
 
 Roberta stirred her tea, but did not look at him. 
 
 "Well, it was your own fault. I had to have some dinner, 
 anyway; and I'd promised to let Mr. Rayne have an answer 
 about his offer, which, by the way, I've accepted." 
 
 "Am I to understand that you went and gave it him in 
 person?" 
 
 "Oh, it was quite proper! I knew Tommy was going to 
 be there. . . . We all had dinner in Soho. After that we went 
 back to Mr. Rayne's studio and I had three photographs taken. 
 That was quite proper, too. Tommy was there all the time. 
 I've arranged for the proofs to be sent to you. ... So you see 
 you're really making a lot of fuss about nothing, aren't you?" 
 
 Allan let go of the table, pushed the chair up against it and 
 stood clear. 
 
 "Is that another lie?" he asked. 
 
 "No, it isn't. It's the truth." 
 
 "You give me your word of honour that Miss Carew was 
 there all the evening?" 
 
 "Of course she was. Really, you know, Allan, you haven't 
 got a very nice mind." 
 
 "Oh, damn my mind!" said Allan, and lighted a cigarette. 
 
 Roberta laughed. 
 
 "Don't you think you ought to apologise?" she asked. 
 
 "What for? My mind?" 
 
 "Well, yes."
 
 192 INTRUSION 
 
 "Then I'm not going to." 
 
 "You ought to do something with it, you know. It wants 
 sterilising." 
 
 She laughed again and followed him out into the hall, watch- 
 ing him get into his coat and collect his hat and stick. When 
 he was ready she opened the front door and stood there, raising 
 her face as if she expected him to kiss her. From the house 
 opposite a middle-aged man let himself out into the street and 
 smiled across at Roberta, raising his hat. Roberta was always 
 charming to her neighbours. 
 
 Allan bent and kissed her cheek. 
 
 "Good morning," he said, and went. 
 
 "Good morning" was the sign and symbol of Allan's dis- 
 pleasure. Its formal politeness was meant to rebuke the easy 
 assumption of her casual "good-bye"; but, somehow, when 
 the hall door was shut it made Roberta laugh. She went back 
 into the breakfast-room and began piling the crockery on a 
 tray, until she remembered and stopped. For this was Mrs. 
 Noakes's day: Mrs. Noakes, this morning, would deal with the 
 aftermath of breakfast. She would also polish the grates, get 
 rid of the dust and make the bed. Roberta put it in the singu- 
 lar like that because Roberta intended to make the bed in the 
 spare room herself. Otherwise Mrs. Noakes might wonder : and 
 it wasn't good that Mrs. Noakes should do anything of the sort. 
 The placid waters of Mrs. Noakes's respectable soul must not 
 be disturbed: she was obviously one of those people who 
 believed that in all happy marriages husbands and wives slept 
 together. It was an arrangement, Roberta thought, which had 
 drawbacks, but she did not feel equal to explaining what they 
 were to Mrs. Noakes. It was a good deal easier to make that 
 single bed herself. 
 
 She went upstairs to do it and she did it very badly. Its 
 amazing badness struck even Roberta. 
 
 "Oh, well," she said to herself, "I shouldn't get a prize for 
 bed-making, anyhow. And I'm sure I don't want to." 
 
 In the front bedroom, where Allan had slept, the bed was 
 unstripped and the curtains still drawn against the morning. 
 Roberta rectified matters with some show of impatience, her 
 thoughts running on the ways of a man with a house. 
 
 "Lazy beasts!" she said, and eyed herself critically in the 
 glass.
 
 INTRUSION 193 
 
 "Well, it's time I got some money somehow," she reflected, 
 "if this is the best costume I've got." 
 
 It was. She brushed it anew, pulled on the tulle hat (which 
 did not "go" with the costume) and ran downstairs, wrote a 
 note for Mrs. Noakes (which told her there was cold ham and 
 rice pudding for lunch), left the key of the kitchen door in its 
 customary place and took herself off. 
 
 Mrs. Noakes's reflections upon reading Roberta's note and 
 looking at Roberta's house were, perhaps, not entirely unin- 
 fluenced by the fact that Mrs. Noakes was not partial to cold 
 ham and warmed-up rice pudding. But the germ of truth 
 was in those reflections, all the same. They approximated to 
 those of Roberta herself when she had thrown open Allan's bed 
 and pulled back the window curtains; but they were not half 
 so printable. 
 
 Not that Roberta would have cared. She was going over to 
 Highgate to see her mother, who had a cold, and whom she 
 would leave in good time for her lunching appointment with 
 Douglas Rayne. He was bringing with him, not Tommy Carew, 
 who said she had something a good deal more exciting to do, 
 but the proofs of last night's photographs. There were two 
 that must not be sent to Allan, but she wanted to see them. 
 Not that there was anything wrong with the photographs, of 
 course, only Allan wouldn't be likely to understand how a 
 glimpse of a rounded shoulder could improve a photograph ; but 
 no one could say Mr. Rayne hadn't behaved like a gentleman. 
 Allan would have to get used to it. Why, there were girls who 
 sat for the . . . altogether. Quite nice girls, too. Roberta had 
 met some of them at Tommy's "affairs." Allan was a Puritan 
 and therefore always imagined the worst. It was so silly of 
 him, because he ought to know by now 'that she wasn't that 
 sort. 
 
 She smiled, partly at her thought and partly at the conductor 
 who stood at her side and demanded fares. 
 
 "Haighgate, please," said Roberta. 
 
 The "a" slipped in unnoticed, as it always did when Roberta 
 was excited.
 
 194 INTRUSION 
 
 Roberta found her mother in bed with a hot-water bottle 
 and a temperature. She followed the woman from upstairs 
 (who had let her in) into the kitchen, and stood watching her 
 as she mixed bovril in a cup and said that Roberta's mother 
 was "pretty bad." Mrs. Miller had not liked Roberta as 
 Roberta Leigh, and did not give any indication of liking her 
 any better now that she was Roberta Suffield. She looked at 
 the dark blue costume Roberta had despised and at the little 
 hat which didn't belong to it, and she sniffed. 
 
 "You've not come to work, seemingly," she said. "Your 
 mother ought to see a doctor." 
 
 "Why doesn't she, then?" 
 
 "Can't abear them, she says. But I don't like the looks 
 of her." 
 
 "I'll call on Dr. Young as I go back," Roberta said. "But 
 I expect she'll be all right if she stays in bed." 
 
 The woman from upstairs sniffed again, with more decision, 
 perhaps, but no more delicately. Sniffing, Roberta reflected, 
 wrinkling her nose in disgust, was not at all a pretty habit. 
 
 "Mrs. Miller thinks you ought to see a doctor," she said to 
 her mother, taking a seat at the bedside and sticking out her 
 feet because she liked to look at them. 
 
 "Does she?" said Mrs. Leigh in a hoarse whisper. "Well, 
 Mrs. Miller can go on thinking so if she likes." 
 
 "But it's so silly," Roberta said. "If you're ill you ought 
 to see a doctor. Anybody'd think you were a Particular Baptist 
 or a Peculiar Brethren or something." 
 
 "I'm particular enough, thank you," said Mrs. Leigh, "and 
 I'm peculiar enough to stop at home and do my own work 
 instead of gallivanting out in the morning." 
 
 "I'm not gallivanting," Roberta said. "I've got an appoint- 
 ment." 
 
 "Appointment! What sort of an appointment?" 
 
 "I've got to see some photograph proofs ... if they're not 
 good I'll have to sit again. If they are 111 give you one." 
 
 "You needn't trouble. The house is littered up with your 
 photographs as it is." 
 
 "You can't be very ill, you know," said Roberta, "because 
 you're so disagreeable."
 
 INTRUSION 195 
 
 "May be," wheezed her mother. "Who's taking these 
 photographs?" 
 
 "A friend of Tommy's. He's an art photographer and his 
 people are tobacconists or cigarette-makers or something. He's 
 trying to get me a contract for the lids of boxes and advertise- 
 ments. It may mean a hundred a year to me." 
 
 "What's this young man taking so much interest in you 
 for?" 
 
 "Well, he's a photographer himself . . . it's his business. 
 I s'pose he'll get a commission. I'm sure I don't know. Any- 
 way, it's a nice friendly act." 
 
 "I'm sure it is," croaked Mrs. Leigh, and was interrupted 
 by a hideous fit of coughing, in the middle of which Mrs. 
 Miller came up with the bovril and stood at the bedside 
 sniffing with devastating regularity. 
 
 "You'd better drink this," she said when the fit subsided, 
 "yer pore chest sounds quite raw." 
 
 "It feels it," said Mrs. Leigh. 
 
 "Look here, Mrs. Leigh," said the woman from upstairs, 
 "you'd best see a doctor, if you asks me." 
 
 "I haven't," snapped Mrs. Leigh, who had her own reasons 
 for disliking the woman from upstairs and detested being 
 under an obligation to her. 
 
 "Well, I'm only speaking for yer good. . . . With a cold on 
 yer chest like that it ain't reasonable not to see a doctor." 
 
 "Then I'll be wnreasonable," said Mrs. Leigh, and worked 
 hard at swallowing the bovril. 
 
 "Really, mother, you're ridiculous," Roberta said. "I'm 
 going to call on Dr. Young as I go along: so we needn't argue 
 about it any more." She rose to go. 
 
 "Well, if he comes I shan't see him, so that's flat." 
 
 "Oh, nonsense," said Roberta. "I'll look in to-morrow 
 and see how you are. Now good-bye, and do be sensible. 
 Father can look after himself when he conies in. I don't 
 suppose it'll hurt him to do something for himself for once." 
 
 She kissed her mother, picked up her gloves and walked to 
 the door. Mrs. Miller followed her, sniffing. She sniffed all 
 the way along to the front door, saying nothing. She was not a 
 woman at all: she had become the personification of a sniff. 
 
 "Good-bye," said Roberta. 
 
 "Good morning," said Mrs. Miller.
 
 196 INTRUSION 
 
 It was the second time that morning that Roberta's "Good- 
 bye" had been so qualified; and for the second time she 
 laughed as though she found it amusing. 
 
 Mrs. Miller shut the door and sniffed herself back into the 
 kitchen. She hated Roberta. She always had hated her, but 
 she hated her more than ever now because she had found some- 
 body to marry her. Mrs. Miller had two girls of her own and 
 nobody, so far, had been found to do anything of the sort for 
 them. Good .honest girls, too, they were, that would make 
 anybody good wives. It was so she distinguished them from 
 Roberta. But men were fools. Pretty faces were all they 
 thought about. 
 
 The faces of the Misses Miller were not pretty. 
 
 Mrs. Leigh reiterated her intention concerning the doctor 
 many times before his arrival. "I won't see him," she said 
 obstinately: but she did. For by the time he came she was 
 beyond protestations, saving all her energy for the fight with 
 Death. 
 
 "I won't die," she said to Henry Leigh, as he sat, speechless, 
 at her side. "I won't ... I won't." 
 
 The fight was long and difficult. Martha Leigh did not 
 die easily. She gave Death infinite trouble; but for all that, 
 at five o'clock next morning Death dragged her, protesting and 
 fighting still, out into the dark. She lay there, at the last, 
 very quietly, taking the rest she had never taken in life. 
 Nothing now disturbed her; neither her doubts of Roberta nor 
 that young woman's noisy grief when she came later and 
 indulged it. It was as if, even now, she still saw through 
 Roberta; understood that her crying was not really painful and 
 that she would know the exact moment at which to stop. And 
 the quiet smiling of the dead face seemed to say that here, in 
 Death, a sense of the exquisite humour of things had come to 
 her, as in life it had certainly never done.
 
 CHAPTER EIGHT 
 
 FOR Allan the mask of Roberta's tears shut out a multi- 
 tude of new miseries and uncertainties. Roberta wept 
 That, for Allan, was sufficient. He did not know, as 
 that quiet sleeper knew, that Roberta would not weep too much 
 and not painfully. He knew only that she was unhappy and 
 needed comfort: and whilst he strove to give it her the breach 
 between them drew together and was healed. 
 
 Roberta's grief was becoming, perhaps because she indulged 
 it wisely. At the funeral she looked as pretty in her black 
 clothes as nearly four months ago she had looked at her wed- 
 ding. (Ridiculous to remember they had been married no 
 longer than that!) Black suited Roberta, if possible, better 
 than white satin and orange blossom, and on the whole she 
 was grateful to her mother, if not for dying, at least for dying 
 at such a convenient time of the year. It would, as she observed 
 to Tommy Carew, have been "a good deal worse if this had 
 happened in the spring. It would have been awful to have had 
 to wear black just when the weather was getting warm." 
 
 Allan, however, was much more deeply affected by the death 
 of Roberta's mother than he understood or would have believed 
 possible. It came to him not only as a shock, but as a bewilder- 
 ing example of the dreadful possibility of the impossible. You 
 could not believe that the energy which had propelled her 
 through fifty odd years had come suddenly to an end. It 
 struck Allan continually as ridiculous. Even in church before 
 her coffin he had the impression that at any moment the lid 
 would lift and she would rise and chide them all for sitting 
 there wasting time. For weeks he had at intervals a funny 
 insistent picture of her hurling herself through Eternity, as 
 she had hurled herself through Time. . . . 
 
 But her death, whatever else it did or did not do, drew Allan 
 
 197
 
 198 INTRUSION 
 
 and Roberta together again. The wound, for Allan, had been 
 deep, but the skin was healthy and healed quickly. Hilmer 
 Roydon's photographs were not mentioned between them, and 
 so far as those of Mr. Rayne were concerned he tried to believe 
 that he didn't really mind Roberta's face being hawked about 
 in America. And the money would be useful. That was a 
 contention which held continually. Bills went up week by 
 week; living was dearer the statements of politicians to the 
 contrary notwithstanding than during the war and Roberta 
 was not exactly a genius at housekeeping. This death in the 
 family, too, had been an expense: there had been new clothes 
 for himself and for Roberta, and the cheque Hilmer Roydon 
 had sent her had gone nowhere. Most certainly money was 
 useful: you could always "do" with it. But every now and 
 then there swept over Allan the old passion of distaste. He 
 grudged the amount of time and energy that went to the pro- 
 duction of life's wherewithal. Capitalism had caught him 
 up at last in its vast machinery: it would not stop nor let 
 him rest, and there were times when he couldn't even bear to 
 think about it. He saw civilisation as nothing but a vast 
 dividend-paying concern, and he hated it. 
 
 "I don't see what you're all driving at," John Suffield, 
 uneasy, would say. "This Bolshevist blather is a menace to 
 Society. I'm sorry to hear a son of mine repeating it." 
 
 Allan said he didn't know that he was; but that the 
 Bolshevists had discovered one thing, anyway that if a man 
 wouldn't work then he had no right to eat. 
 
 "And you'll look nice under Bolshevism," John Suffield said. 
 "I expect they'd make you a scavenger." 
 
 He seemed to enjoy the idea of Allan as a scavenger. Allan 
 enjoyed it, too. "I shouldn't mind scavenging," he said, "one 
 little bit if I need only scavenge from eight to twelve. It 
 would be better than the office twelve hours a day." He objected, 
 he said, to the Comet eating into all his day, as it had done 
 for so many weeks past. He forgot that he stayed late of his 
 own free will. That, somehow, didn't make it any better. The 
 world's work, if everybody worked, could be done, he said, in 
 half the time. His father laughed. 
 
 "Another Utopia!" he said, with the air of one who con- 
 sidered all such schemes optimistic and impossible dreams. As 
 a business man he had no use for them.
 
 INTRUSION 199 
 
 "It isn't the world you want to alter, but human nature," 
 he told Allan. "And human nature doesn't change." 
 
 "I don't agree with you," Allan said. Allan had been to the 
 war and knew that it did. It was one of the things the war had 
 taught him that human nature was continually changing. 
 
 But John Suffield had not been to the war and he stuck to 
 his belief that human nature was the one unchangeable reality. 
 That was why he thought war would go on for ever and that 
 all Utopias were absurd. His power of resistance to all ideas 
 that were distasteful or disturbing was astounding: he could 
 not imagine a world where men and women no longer acted 
 from tradition or from habit. Any Utopia of which he might 
 have been able to conceive would have been only a glorified 
 earth, where things went on as to-day, but with the element 
 of suffering somehow and miraculously eliminated. He did 
 not want people to be unhappy or to suffer. But Allan's Utopia 
 if he had framed one would have been just rather than 
 happy, built not upon a common inability to suffer, but upon 
 a standard of equality, in which the type went down before the 
 individual. And change was the essence of it. But John Suf- 
 field's Utopia would never have changed. It would have had 
 a quality of hideous permanence. And whenever the talk ran 
 to this subject Allan saw that world hovering between them 
 that static world that his father loved opposed for ever to 
 that kinetic world of progression and initiative about which 
 his own thoughts played so unceasingly. 
 
 Roberta's Utopia, of course, had nothing in common with 
 either of them: she conceived it only as a place where money 
 grew plentifully on trees. But when Allan talked like this of 
 the office she grew worried, because she remembered it was 
 she who kept him there. Not that he ever reminded her of 
 that. She had nothing there to complain of. Nobody more 
 generous than Allan. 
 
 But this heavy toll of his evenings no longer left her dull. 
 She had found many ways during the last month of combating 
 that. What worried her now about Allan's late evenings was 
 not that they had begun and had continued, but that they 
 couldn't go on for ever. Even Roberta knew that some day 
 they must come to an end. 
 
 And she wondered sometimes what she would do when they 
 did.
 
 200 INTRUSION 
 
 December of nineteen-nineteen was essentially a month 
 which reminded you of the old joke that England has no 
 climate but only a number of samples of weather, and Roberta, 
 delicately plaintive, imagined she had caught a cold. Over 
 the Christmas holidays, and much to Allan's satisfaction, she 
 was inclined to play the invalid, and in this new mood of restful 
 submission Allan found her enchanting. He plied her with 
 tonic wines and consideration, and felt his old instinct of pro- 
 tection blossom anew beneath the sun of her rare docility. The 
 things to which he was hostile were buried in some mysterious 
 fashion beneath it; he saw only the Roberta of the red-gold 
 hair, the hazel eyes, the delicate skin and exquisite mouth. He 
 burned with eagerness to please her. It was absurd and 
 pathetic, his eagerness: he gave himself up to it with passion. 
 
 And then Roberta got better, or grew tired of the role of 
 invalid. At any rate, her lassitude left her and her morning 
 lack of appetite. She buoyed herself up with Allan's cosseting 
 and his wines, and clung, as to a raft, to his suggestion that she 
 had suffered profoundly from the shock of her mother's death. 
 But in her heart disquiet had already entered. 
 
 To drown it she turned and plunged back into the centre 
 of the things from which she had temporarily stood aside. 
 She went to matinees and shops with Caryl a new triumphant 
 Caryl with the right to put B.A. (Hons.) after her name! 
 "And Honours in Pure Maths!" Allan would say as though to 
 him his sister's achievement savoured of black magic ! Tommy 
 came again to tea and dragged Roberta off with her to her 
 flat in Bloomsbury. Douglas Rayne was there, as of old; as 
 thin as ever, as insolent, too, and as exquisitely dressed. Allan 
 had called him a "bounder," but Allan was predisposed to 
 jealousy and was always inclined to take this attitude to any- 
 one who did not care for books as he did. Rayne, of course, 
 knew numbers of women: but he was a gentleman. He had 
 never even kissed her. Never even tried to kiss her, which was 
 much more remarkable. Roberta was grateful, though she was 
 ready to sell her kisses to obtain what she wanted. Was she 
 going to get it? She couldn't help feeling that it was time 
 word came from America about those photographs. Would she 
 get that contract or not ?
 
 INTRUSION 201 
 
 But that was a subject to which Mr. Rayne never referred. 
 He just went on being affable, amusing and "gentlemanly," 
 and Roberta could not imagine why Allan should object to 
 him. Even on those occasions when they dined tete-a-tete 
 Mr. Rayne conducted the proceedings with every semblance 
 of propriety. A bishop, so Roberta put it, might have listened 
 to their conversation: it was impossible, she thought, that Mr. 
 Rayne could be a "rotter." He seemed to want nothing save 
 the sight of her happiness and enjoyment. His bored acqui- 
 escence in life quivered at the sight of her vivacity, as though 
 it borrowed deeply from her youth and vitality. His air of 
 habitual fatigue fascinated her; that and the subtle suggestion 
 he carried about with him of some hidden grief that poisoned 
 the springs of happiness. He seldom laughed and his smile 
 was not as other people's. It restricted itself to the right of 
 his mouth as though one side only of his face saw a joke 
 and it never spread to his eyes. They smouldered and stared, 
 taking in Roberta's "points" as though she had been a race- 
 horse. Roberta rather admired his eyes, which were dark and 
 heavily lashed and lidded. She was not clever enough to know 
 that they proclaimed aloud the fact that their owner had long 
 ago scrawled "Vanitas Vanitatum" across the whole of the page 
 of life. And perhaps she wouldn't have cared if she had known; 
 Roberta considered herself a match for any man. She believed, 
 as she believed in nothing else, in that shield of her not 
 "being that sort." Amid the clouds of her perennial vanity 
 she moved serenely. Besides, it may be that one does not have 
 a Delia King in the family for nothing ! 
 
 Out of his manifold experience young Rayne went carefully. 
 Very carefully: he never made a mistake. He was always 
 stealthy and leisured, so pre-eminently what Roberta thought 
 "so gentlemanly." He had reduced seduction to a fine art, 
 and he knew how to wait without sign or quiver of impatience. 
 The plum invariably dropped, exquisitely ripe, into his mouth : 
 and this particular plum in the ripening amused him con- 
 siderably. He had found the taking of those photographs as 
 interesting as useful. Woman's natural vanity was a marvel- 
 lous piece of foresight upon the part of Providence: it made the 
 way of the male a good deal easier. Because of it he told far 
 fewer lies than would otherwise have been necessary, which 
 was just as well, because lies were exhausting, since you had to
 
 202 INTRUSION 
 
 remember the lies yo.u had told before and to what they had 
 committed you a trying business for one who liked a quiet 
 life. Not that many lies, with Roberta, had been necessary: 
 the one concerned with the tale of a contract had been so tre- 
 mendously successful. She had swallowed it whole. And it 
 really had been fun taking those photographs. The girl was 
 a beauty right enough: her neck and shoulders were like blue- 
 veined marble, from which her head rose, flower-like and 
 exquisite. But catch the guvnor giving anybody a contract 
 of that sort! 
 
 Out of his experience, too, he saw that Roberta was a fool, 
 for, even as Martyn Thorp had done, he had looked at her to 
 some purpose. She was a fool right enough, but she was an 
 extraordinarily pretty fool. The freshness of her skin, its 
 freedom from paint and powder was unusual and unbelievably 
 fascinating to the thin young Rayne who, in the whole range 
 of his experience, had never encountered anyone with such a 
 flawless complexion. He amused himself by wondering how 
 she had come to marry that solemn young man with a limp 
 and a taste for literature! Literature! Douglas Rayne would 
 laugh, remembering the picture Tommy had drawn for him 
 of a courtship, honeymoon and marriage conducted like a 
 reading-tour in the company of Lamb and Keats and Shelley 
 and Johnnies like that. It was funny, that, damn funny! 
 Some fellows never knew their luck! 
 
 Not that the thin young Rayne regarded marriage as "luck." 
 Marriage was opportunity; nothing else, except, perhaps, an 
 unnecessary complication. It was a complication now, of 
 course; but Rayne had not hitherto known marriage to form 
 any permanent obstacle to his desires. Only one went more 
 carefully. 
 
 He went so carefully with Roberta that her stupid phrase 
 about his gentlemanliness bit down deeply into her mind. It 
 went to strengthen the moral shield she carried about with 
 her that undying belief that she was not "that sort." Taken 
 together Tommy found them a trifle tiresome, because Tommy 
 was "that sort" (it explained why she need work so seldom)' 
 and she knew the truth about the thin young Rayne's quality 
 of gentlemanliness. Like the beauty of Tommy's complexion 
 it went no more than skin-deep. Not that Miss Carew cared 
 in the least about his lack of faithfulness to her. She asked a
 
 INTRUSION 203 
 
 good deal of him, but not that. It was the last thing she 
 would ask of any man certainly of Duggie Rayne. They were 
 admirably matched. 
 
 For all that she told him, once, that he might leave the kid 
 alone. 
 
 "She's cold, Dug. Constitutionally unaffected by the genus 
 Man. Fact. ... Of course she likes men to make fools of 
 themselves over her, but that's another matter." 
 
 "She's a taker, is she, not a giver?" Rayne wanted to know. 
 
 "You can put it that way if you like," Tommy told him. 
 
 Rayne did like. 
 
 As for Tommy, her sense of duty to Roberta was served by 
 advising her never again to visit Rayne's studio alone. 
 
 "Oh, well no reason," she said. "But you may as well be 
 on the safe side. And I know men better than you do. You 
 just take my tip !" 
 
 Roberta grieved for the state of Tommy's mind. But whilst 
 Tommy, no doubt about it, underrated Mr. Rayne's quality of 
 gentlemanliness quite alarmingly, she had implanted a doubt 
 which took root. For the moment Roberta's confidence in her 
 own virtue and that which it inspired in other people quivered 
 away from its foundations. For the time being things were 
 "spoiled." After the tete-a-tete dinners now she insisted primly 
 that she must go straight home. 
 
 She went, and Rayne took himself off. A tiger of rage may 
 have smarted within him, but you would never have guessed it; 
 his amiability remained unimpaired. The gesture with which 
 he raised his hat and accepted her ruling pleased Roberta's lit- 
 tle soul. It was a very little soul and easily pleased. It loved 
 a gesture, even when there was nothing behind it, or when, 
 perhaps, there was too much. 
 
 Occasionally Allan had a thrust of memory, apt to be dis- 
 turbing. But Roberta was learning how to deal with such 
 occasions, so that it was not she who found them disturbing. 
 But other things were. . . . 
 
 One Thursday evening midway through January, Allan sur- 
 prised Roberta by reaching home a good hour earlier than he
 
 204 INTRUSION 
 
 was expected. Roberta had been to Tommy's, but at eight 
 o'clock an intolerable lassitude had descended upon her and 
 she had come away, her thoughts resolutely fixed on bed and 
 sleep to keep away those other thoughts, must less comforting, 
 which assailed her with the numbing effect of pellets of ice. 
 And though it was only nine o'clock there was a light in the 
 hall, and as she fitted her key in the lock Allan's step came up 
 the passage and Allan's hand on the door-knob anticipated the 
 turning of her key. 
 
 She offered her face for his caress, said she was tired and 
 that she would go straight up to bed. 
 
 "What's the matter?" Allan asked. 
 
 "Nothing much. . . . I'm a bit run down, I think, and I 
 suppose I've been dancing too much." 
 
 She spoke indifferently, but the fear in her heart looked out 
 at her once more. It disturbed her because, until this evening, 
 she thought she had forgotten it. 
 
 Later Allan came up with hot milk and biscuits, and the 
 information that the close of the following week would see the 
 end of his evening work. He was jovial about that and full of 
 plans. They would make up for lost time. Caryl should get 
 up a dance at Adelaide Lodge, where the rooms were big enough 
 for dancing. Also there were plays to see, and Guen and 
 Antony were going to have evenings at Tony's old room in 
 Bloomsbury which since their marriage had been occupied by 
 some artist or other who had only just cleared out. Tony's 
 evenings, he explained, were a definite feature of the early 
 days of Guen's acquaintance with him. "I expect they made 
 love there," he said, "if they made it anywhere. . . . Love in an 
 attic. A nice attic, Bobbie, in Bloomsbury . . . but not perhaps 
 in the nice part of Bloomsbury. In Theobald's Road, over- 
 looking half London. You might like to go occasionally." 
 
 Roberta said she would, and begged him to turn the light 
 out because her head ached. So Allan pulled back a curtain 
 and began to undress by the faint light of the street lamp 
 without. 
 
 Beyond the window the night was beautiful, wrapped in 
 January's diaphanous veil. The white stars clustered in its 
 floating silver, and the stunted suburban trees rose dim behind 
 it. The little road held an air of enchantment, and Allan stood 
 there looking at it as if he were enchanted too. The night had
 
 INTRUSION 205 
 
 a beauty that somehow one missed in the day. Or had he 
 merely a trick of "missing" things? 
 
 "You'll be horribly tired in the morning," said Roberta. 
 
 Allan dropped the blind and began his preparations for bed. 
 
 "By the way, darling," he said presently, "I hope you don't 
 see much of young Rayne these days?" 
 
 "No not much," said Roberta. She said it unblushingly, 
 and to it she added, "And when I do it's business. . . . That 
 old contract." 
 
 "Isn't that settled yet?" 
 
 "No. They want some more photographs." 
 
 "Then they can't have them." 
 
 "No, I don't think they can ... it makes one so cheap." 
 
 "I hope you'll be firm about it. ... I don't like to think 
 of you having anything whatever to do with the bounder." 
 
 "I don't see why you want to begin about that at this time 
 of night," said Roberta. "What's started you on it again?" 
 
 "Oh . . . just that he happened to come into the office to-day 
 i some difficulty over a policy. ... I wish you'd promise me 
 not to see him again. . . . Don't you think you might?" 
 
 Under the bedclothes Roberta shrugged careless shoulders 
 and took the line of least resistance. 
 
 "Oh, all right," she said, "if it'll please you." 
 
 "It will," said Allan. 
 
 There wouldn't be much chance, Roberta reflected, of her 
 seeing anyone now that her freedom was coming to an end. 
 
 That was how she thought of Allan's imminent early arrival 
 from the office as a curtailment of her liberty. She really 
 thought liberty was like that. She had a sudden vision of long 
 winter evenings stretched out dully in front of her, dotted at 
 intervals with a dinner in town, or a play or dance. And 
 coffee and talk on Guen and Gore's "Thursdays." Talk that 
 she couldn't understand, and coffee for which she had no 
 great liking. 
 
 She was still conscious, lying there in her white bed, of that 
 horrible sensation of fatigue. She couldn't imagine why she 
 should get tired of late in this dreadful fashion. And it wasn't 
 only the tiredness. . . . She remembered the moment when 
 in the dance her hand had dragged on Rayne's, when she had 
 said, "I'm so sorry. . . . I'm afraid I must sit down for a 
 minute." The red wine he had brought her had revived her,
 
 206 INTRUSION 
 
 but as she drank it a nightmare of a thought seared its way 
 through her mind. It came again to her now. Of course, it 
 couldn't be. ... It was impossible. And the impossible did 
 not happen. Only supposing, sometimes, it did? Self-pity 
 engulfed her. She wished she had never got married. . . . 
 She began to cry. 
 
 "Allan, I'm so tired, and you keep on lecturing me!" 
 Instantly Allan's arms enfolded her with an immense 
 tenderness. 
 
 "My dear, I forgot. Don't cry. ... I'm a clumsy 
 beast! . . . You want a holiday. We must see what we can 
 arrange." 
 
 She lay passive and weeping in his arms, and over him again 
 there flooded that inordinate sense of tenderness, a great wave 
 of that protective instinct by which she had caught and by 
 which she held him. She was still a child to be comforted 
 and looked after. He put his lips to her hair, patting her 
 shoulder. 
 
 "No, don't, please, dear . . . don't, don't cry like that!" 
 For once, however, Roberta forgot the importance of leaving 
 off at the right moment. She went on crying; not passionately, 
 but drearily, hopelessly, and all the time Allan went on patting 
 her shoulder and wondering what there was in her crying that 
 should tear at him like this. He simply could not bear it. 
 
 Allan's late work broke up even earlier than he had expected. 
 On the Thursday of the following week he suddenly found 
 himself free at seven o'clock to go home. Antony Gore had 
 phoned during the morning to tell him that they were all to 
 be at the Attic that evening, and that Guen hoped he would 
 come along and bring Roberta. At ten o'clock that morning 
 the pleasing project had appeared hopeless; but work had 
 sloughed off soon after six, and by seven Allan had his hat and 
 coat on and was making a bee-line for Roberta and Highgate. 
 
 But Roberta was not at Highgate. On the dining-room 
 mantelpiece a piece of paper was propped up upon which was 
 written in Roberta's handwriting, which nothing seemed able 
 to improve, "Have gone out. Shall not be later than ten."
 
 INTRUSION 207 
 
 It was signed with a big round childish "B," which stood for 
 "Berta" or "Bobbie," as your fancy pleased. 
 
 "Damn!" Allan said, and was sensible of a chill, as though 
 the fireless room had struck cold. He went upstairs, opened 
 the wardrobe door and discovered that Roberta's evening dress 
 was missing. Light dawned upon him. She had gone to one 
 of Tommy's "affairs": it was only on these occasions, he 
 knew these days, that Roberta wore her nicest frock. He recol- 
 lected, too, that Tommy's flat was in Bloomsbury, near enough 
 to the Attic to make it possible for him to collect Roberta 
 en route. 
 
 Tommy's flat was not self-contained. Allan knocked at the 
 big front door and asked for "Miss Carew." 
 
 "You'd better go up!" said the old hag who opened it. 
 "She's having one of her everlasting parties by the sound of 
 things. You're about the tenth I've opened the door to this 
 evening and I'm about tired of it. Why you can't ring her 
 bell I don't know." 
 
 Allan apologised and went on up the stairs. The house 
 smelt musty and the stairs were not too clean: but as he 
 ascended things improved. Red carpet appeared on the stair- 
 case, and black and white and purple drapings. Three closed 
 doors opened out of the landing upon which Tommy's name 
 appeared, and from behind the centre one noises of various 
 and vociferous character were issuing. Allan hesitated for an 
 instant, his hand on the knob of the door; then knocked. No 
 answer. Allan repeated the knock, then, partly because he 
 was in a hurry and partly because he was assailed not so much 
 by impatience as by misgiving, he turned the handle and 
 looked in. Through a haze of smoke he saw a number of 
 unfamiliar faces and figures, whose owners were not yet aware 
 of his presence. Above the din of laughter and talk a young 
 man, dangling his legs from the table, was shouting something 
 that seemed to be poetry of sorts: 
 
 "To-morrow all our passion will be ashes." 
 
 "I beg your pardon," said Allan from the doorway. "I beg 
 your pardon . . . but is my wife here?" 
 
 The din went on. Allan, raising his voice, tried again. "I 
 beg your pardon. . . ." But the result was the same. He 
 walked farther into the room and addressed himself to a young 
 woman in a purple cloak and very little else, who turned her 

 
 .208 INTRUSION 
 
 head at that moment and saw him. "I want my wife," he 
 said. "Can you tell me if she is here? Suffield . . . Mrs. 
 Suffield." 
 
 The young woman in the purple coat turned from him, put 
 her hands to her mouth and yelled: 
 
 "Here, shut up, some of you! Mr. Poet, you shut up. ... 
 Here's a gentleman wants his wife!" 
 
 The din quieted. Through the comparative peace a feminine 
 voice floated, insolently affectionate. 
 
 "You've come to the wrong house, darling." 
 
 Allan's good humour was deserting him. 
 
 "Is Miss Carew here?" he demanded. His voice sounded 
 rude and angry, but it did not reach Miss Carew, who had her 
 back to the door and her arms round the necks of two male 
 somebodies. 
 
 "To-morrow . . ." began the poet again, as though afraid it 
 would arrive before he had finished the first verse. 
 
 "Oh, shut up!" yelled the young woman in the purple 
 cloak. "Do you think we want to hear your blasted rot all 
 night, and with a gentleman wanting his wife, too?" 
 
 The poet subsided. The young woman in purple went over 
 to Tommy and shook her. 
 
 "I don't know if you're gone suddenly deaf or what, but 
 I've told you three times here's a gentleman wants his wife! 
 D'you want me to yell myself hoarse?" 
 
 Tommy turned, still clinging to the necks of her companions 
 who perforce turned with her, looking queerly at Allan, with 
 their faces very close together, over Tommy's shoulder. 
 
 "Who wants his wife?" she demanded. "Most unreas'n'ble 
 request, I call it ... most unreas'n'ble. . . ." 
 
 Then she saw Allan and removed her arms so suddenly that 
 the heads of her companions struck painfully together before 
 their owners found themselves on the floor. 
 
 "Oh, it's you!" she said. 
 
 She came unsteadily over to Allan and stood looking at him 
 as if striving to remember something. 
 
 "You're . . . you're Suffield, aren't you?" she said. She 
 was very drunk. 
 
 "Yes," said Allan. "I thought I should find my wife here." 
 
 "Oh, you're the gentleman who wants his wife! . . ." She 
 drew herself up, still making this tremendous effort to remember
 
 INTRUSION 209 
 
 something that dodged about on the brink of recollection. Then 
 it came. 
 
 "Oh ... s'cuse me, Mr. Suffield. ... I couldn't think for 
 the moment who you were. No, Bobbie isn't here. I asked 
 her to come, but she had something better to do. ... I'm 
 having a little bottle party. . . . The idea is everybody comes 
 with a bottle ... of cold tea, of course! . . . Have a glass 
 of something?" 
 
 "Thank you, no!" said Allan, and made for the door. As 
 he closed it the voice of the poet was heard asking in a loud 
 voice for the port. 
 
 Outside on the landing Allan stood still and tried to collect 
 his thoughts. So this was the sort of "affair" Miss Carew 
 gave and to which Roberta went so often? It was outrageous. 
 His brain seemed to be boiling round with fury: he couldn't 
 think. He could scarcely walk down the stairs. 
 
 But he reached the bottom at last, and opening the front 
 door he let himself out into the street. It was beginning to 
 rain, and the sensation of the drops on his face seemed to cool 
 his anger. The thing struck him suddenly as funny. He stood 
 still in the quiet street and laughed aloud. 
 
 Presently, when he stopped laughing and moved on, he dis- 
 covered that he was overwhelmed with relief that Roberta had 
 not been there. He wondered what he would have done, what 
 he would have said, if she had been. But this friendship with 
 Tommy Carew was coming to an end. He would make sure 
 of that, at least. 
 
 He walked on to the Attic, turning that resolution over in 
 his mind, and wondering vaguely once or twice where Roberta 
 had actually gone. 
 
 Tommy, drunk as she was, could have told him. If he had 
 listened outside her door he would have heard her telling her 
 guests. 
 
 "Well, here's a do!" she said. "You wouldn't like to know, 
 any of you, where the genelman's wife really is, I suppose?" 
 
 The company sat up. It wanted very much to know where 
 the gentleman's wife really was. . . . 
 
 "Well, she's in a geneleman's flat at Victoria . . . gentleman 
 you all know Mr. Douglas Rayne Esquire ... I don't 
 think. . . . Well, 'ere's luck to 'em, anyway!" 
 
 It was quite true. Roberta was with Douglas Rayne, but
 
 210 INTRUSION 
 
 she had gone there expecting to find Tommy. She knew noth- 
 ing of the "bottle" party and had not been asked. Rayne 
 had seen to that. 
 
 "It's a dirty trick, you know," Tommy had said to Rayne, 
 but, after all, Roberta was a fool; a fool who didn't play the 
 game; and she deserved to be taught a lesson. In any case, 
 too, Miss Carew could not afford just then to offend Mr. 
 Douglas Rayne, who for the time being had the "cinch" on her. 
 It was awkward, damned awkward; but it couldn't be helped. 
 All the same, once or twice during the evening, even through 
 the fumes of drink and the smoke and innuendo she had 
 evoked to drown misgivings, a streak of pity showed for the 
 poor pretty fool she called her friend. But when Tommy felt 
 the twinge of it she lulled it to sleep with more drink and the 
 reflection that whatever happened Roberta would keep her 
 mouth shut. She'd have sense enough for that. And she was 
 married. Marriage, thank the Lord, covered a multitude of 
 sins. Whenever Miss Carew remembered that she would 
 toss off another glass of wine to the toast of "Well, 'ere's to 
 marriage . . . the friend of every pore girl. I don't think! . . ." 
 
 And the poet would begin again, "To-morrow all our passion 
 will be ashes. . . ."
 
 CHAPTER NINE 
 
 TO Allan's way of thinking, Guen's "first" evening was 
 very far from successful. At the last moment A.G. had 
 been prevented from coming, but a good many other 
 people had not, and between them they hemmed Guen in so 
 successfully that Allan's ideas of a "quiet talk" had no chance 
 whatsoever of survival. Quite early in the evening his amiable 
 dislike of the writing fraternity broke out upon him like a 
 rash, and he was glad when at nine o'clock the pretext of 
 handing round coffee delivered him from the hands of a gen- 
 tleman in knee-breeches who owned several woman's weeklies 
 and ran them on the assumption that the feminine world is 
 made up of flappers and expectant mothers. But in the mid- 
 dle of the coffee operations the door opened and Madeleine 
 Hervey came in. Allan started, spilling hot coffee over his 
 hand and down his trouser-leg. 
 
 "How do you do, Allan?" she said. "It's ages since we 
 met!" 
 
 "Ages," said Allan. "Have some coffee?" 
 
 "No, thanks. I've just come from a terrific dinner. I heard 
 Guen was in town and rushed on to see her." 
 
 Her bare head and thick wrap confirmed her statement, 
 which seemed likely to be the Alpha and Omega of their con- 
 versation. To Allan, standing there before her with the cup 
 of spilled coffee in his hand, it was as if he had never really 
 seen Madeleine before. Her face, pale as ever in its soft frame 
 of dark hair, yet suggested not only health, but happiness 
 the sort of happiness one strives after and wins for one's self, 
 that is the result of character far more than of good fortune, 
 that only comes to those who have built up their castle of hope 
 from the ruins which have fallen clattering about their feet. 
 But Allan, not knowing this, was strangely disconcerted by the 
 quiet that looked out of her eyes, which invested the smile she 
 
 211
 
 212 INTRUSION 
 
 bent upon him when she suggested that he put down the coffee 
 or offer it, perhaps, to somebody else. . . . Allan found her 
 self-possession intolerable, and it dismayed him, because he 
 hadn't any. He could feel the colour rising in his face and 
 rising the higher because Madeleine's did not rise at all, or rose 
 so very little that in that dun room it was not betrayed. Only 
 her pale face and quiet eyes, soft and gleaming, like black vel- 
 vet. ... To Allan, who could think of nothing to say, it 
 seemed an age before she turned away to greet Guen and the 
 people she knew. He finished with the coffee and, watching 
 his opportunity, went over to Guen. 
 
 "Do you mind if I slip off?" he inquired. 
 
 "Of course I mind. . . ." She edged him into a corner by 
 the door. "Look here, I've an editor to see in the morning 
 and I can't sleep here. The bed hasn't been aired. Can you 
 and Roberta put me up?" 
 
 He said "of course," and that she was to come on as soon 
 as she liked. 
 
 "But why not wait? It isn't ten yet. And don't you want 
 to have a chat with Madeleine?" 
 
 "I don't think so," he said. He resented Madeleine or, 
 more particularly, he resented the undeniable fact that her 
 unexpected appearance had meant hot colour in his face, hot 
 coffee down his trouser-leg. And it ought not to have done, 
 for across the path of their friendship emotion of that sort had 
 never been spilled. Even now Allan saw it only as a green and 
 pleasant path in a familiar country; had forgotten, even if he 
 had ever properly realised, that something which had given it 
 a twist . . . carried it briefly and unsuccessfully into country 
 much less familiar. Besides, it was just at that point they had 
 turned their backs on the treacherous path: to Allan such 
 glimpses of new country as the twist in the path had opened up 
 had been fleet and meaningless, and if they had been anything 
 else to Madeleine it was obvious she had forgotten them. That 
 air of hers of peace, of quiet happiness was of the soul and 
 indestructible. She stood alone, firmly rooted. She had char- 
 acter and just a little hardness. You couldn't be sorry 
 for her or anxious. She had the courage to bid life stand and 
 deliver. She couldn't be beaten or crushed. Neither could 
 you prevent her from achieving happiness: she depended for 
 that upon nobody.
 
 INTRUSION 213 
 
 Number Sixteen, when Allan reached it, was in darkness. 
 He saw at once that Roberta had not returned. "Not later 
 than ten," her note had said, and it was now well after eleven. 
 
 "Theatre, I expect," Guen said when she arrived. She 
 sounded detached and unconcerned, as she probably was. 
 Detachment and unconcern were the qualities she had brought 
 at last to Allan's marriage. They masked other things. But 
 she saw that to-night he was worried. "Any reason why she 
 shouldn't have gone to a theatre?" she asked. 
 
 "Only that she couldn't have meant to go to a theatre if 
 she intended to be home by ten o'clock." 
 
 "But couldn't she alter her mind?" 
 
 "Yes. But she hasn't. I'm being a fool, of course. It's 
 running into that awful crowd." 
 
 "Miss Carew's crowd, you mean? Is 'awful' very fair? 
 I'm quite sure you thought my crowd pretty 'awful/ didn't 
 you?" 
 
 "But for different reasons. These people are mere hangers- 
 on: they belong to the very outside edge of the fringe of the 
 Arts. They've no standards, no occupation, no anything that 
 matters. . . . The Bolshevists would shoot the lot of them. 
 To-night Miss Carew was very drunk. So, for that matter, 
 was everybody else." 
 
 "Give me a cigarette, will you?" said Guen. "It's Tommy 
 Carew, isn't it, the girl who won some newspaper cinema com- 
 petition a few years ago? I know people who thought awfully 
 well of her." 
 
 "Of her ability? Yes, but she hardly ever works. ... If 
 she drinks, that explains it." 
 
 "But does she?" 
 
 "She was drunk to-night." 
 
 "That doesn't prove your case. However, why do you let 
 Roberta see so much of her if you disapprove of her like 
 that?" 
 
 "How on earth am I to stop her? She's here, night after 
 night, on her own. You can't wonder she gets bored. Thank 
 God, that's over, anyway! This late work's the devil. . . . 
 I've tried to get her to go round home to tea and to stay to 
 dinner: but I gather Pen spreads herself there a bit too much. 
 Caryl . . . whom she likes ... is always shut up with her 
 books or running off to the Hestons."
 
 214 INTRUSION 
 
 "My dear Allan, the Hestons gave up the Wokingham cot- 
 tage back in October, and since they've been home Caryl's left 
 them rather severely alone. (The family, by the way, spends 
 an appalling amount of time wondering why!) It certainly 
 isn't Caryl who's inaccessible: to my knowlege she's made at 
 least three abortive efforts to drag Roberta into some dissipation 
 or other within the last month." 
 
 "I've heard nothing of it." 
 
 Guen shrugged her shoulders. 
 
 "Hasn't she any other friends?" 
 
 "I don't think so. She doesn't seem to have a genius for 
 friendship. Neither do I, for that matter. Of course, there 
 was Martyn . . . Martyn Thorp you never met him. He 
 didn't last. He made a fool of himself over Roberta and cleared 
 out." 
 
 Guen raised her eyebrows as one who said "Really! That's 
 very interesting!" But she did not interrupt, and Allan went 
 on. "She looked, once, as though she was getting too friendly 
 with some awful bounder she was meeting at the Carew girl's 
 flat. I saw him one night at some play ... oh, an awful 
 bounder! It made me sick Roberta should get within a mile 
 of him. . . . He flattered her by making out he could get her 
 some contract or other for photographs for cigarette boxes in 
 America." 
 
 "And could he?" 
 
 "God knows!" 
 
 "And the bounder. . . . What happened?" 
 
 "Photographs, as usual You'll find 'em in the next room. 
 The house is becoming a blooming photographer's shop. Then 
 one day it occurred to me that the photograph stunt was being 
 a bit overdone. So I got her to promise to make an end of it." 
 
 "And did she?" 
 
 "Promise? Oh, yes." 
 
 "I didn't mean that. Did she 'make an end of it'?" 
 
 Allan looked at her with puckered brows. 
 
 "What are you getting at?" he said. 
 
 "You wouldn't thank me for telling you." 
 
 "I've never thanked you for most of the things you've been 
 good enough to tell me about Roberta. This time you're trying 
 to suggest that Roberta hasn't exactly a strict regard for truth. 
 Is that it?"
 
 INTRUSION 215 
 
 Guen smiled. 
 
 "Few people have, you know. It's an open question whether 
 a strict regard for truth's a virtue or not. Like punctual- 
 ity." 
 
 Allan remembered the number of paltry lies in which he had 
 already found Roberta out, and suddenly the implication of 
 what Guen had hinted what he thought she hinted knocked 
 at his brain. "Good God!" he said. "I never thought of 
 that!" 
 
 But he had. He realised now that he'd been thinking, all 
 the time, of nothing else. Roberta was spending the evening 
 with Douglas Rayne! 
 
 "I shouldn't get so dramatic about it if I were you," Guen 
 said. "You can't expect to keep Roberta from her chosen pals 
 as easily as all that. She likes 'em. I shouldn't wonder if 
 she didn't want a little relaxation from you . . . from us. 
 Besides, Roberta can look after herself. . . ." 
 
 "She says she can. But can she? Sometimes I have visions 
 of her getting herself into some impossible position." 
 
 "Oh, bosh! Anyway, you can't alter her . . . not really, 
 not radically, I mean. You've got to learn to like her as she 
 is." 
 
 Sometimes one got tired of sitting quiet with folded hands: 
 one had to ram some nail or other into position; pin down 
 some truth upon Allan's canvas of life; even if it were not a 
 very large or important one. Allan sat up and looked at this 
 nail Guen had driven home; this truth she had plumped down 
 before him. And he rejected it. 
 
 "That's rubbish!" he said. "I've never seen Roberta as 
 the Beautiful Illusion you seem to imagine. I see what she is 
 and what she isn't. I've always done that only you can't 
 admit it because you've never forgiven me for not marrying 
 Madeleine. But Madeleine never wanted me in the way 
 Roberta did. Madeleine's stronger than I am. . . . I'm 
 stronger than Roberta. That's how it worked. Roberta has 
 no moral fibre." 
 
 "I thought love made us blind?" 
 
 "It doesn't. It makes us see more and deeper." 
 
 She looked up at him sharply, as if she had not expected him 
 to know that. 
 
 "You're getting on," she said.
 
 2i 6 INTRUSION 
 
 At midnight she went up to bed, and in the cold dining-room 
 Allan kept vigil alone. 
 
 What Guen had said had disturbed him as nothing else she 
 had said of Roberta (and she had said a good deal) had ever 
 done before, because somehow it had never occurred to him 
 that Roberta would deliberately break a promise. That she 
 told lies, he knew: stupid, unnecessary lies about trivial things, 
 like dates and times and photographs; but that was different. 
 He had always believed her on the bigger things. She was 
 weak, not wicked; vain, not vicious. She couldn't possibly 
 be spending the evening with Rayne. For all that, the 
 monstrous suspicion that she was stayed in his mind. He 
 hunted it out once, but it recurred. Every moment it grew, till 
 it filled the whole universe. 
 
 It was absurd to think that he had to sit there until she came 
 that, even supposing she were with Rayne, he could not 
 go to fetch her because he had no idea where the bounder 
 lived. 
 
 Half-past twelve came, and five minutes later the sound of 
 the little front gate opening, shutting, and the turn of a key 
 in the lock. He rushed to the door of the room, and for a 
 fraction of a second he and Roberta stood looking at each door 
 across the narrow space of the little square hall. Then Roberta 
 turned, shut the door, put her umbrella in the stand and came 
 past him into the room. 
 
 "I'm sorry I'm so late," she said. 
 
 Allan stood irresolute, arrested by the tired whiteness of her 
 face, the way her ungloved hand caught at the table, as if for 
 support. It kept him, even in that moment, from hurling his 
 monstrous suspicion at her the suspicion that had filled the 
 universe. He said instead, irritably, as though her lateness had 
 merely inconvenienced him, "Where on earth have you been?" 
 For, now that she had actually come, his suspicion seemed as 
 absurd as it was nasty, and the uglier things of life never went, 
 somehow, with Roberta's appearance but only the things that 
 were silly or vain or capricious. Looking at her, his anger fell 
 from him, leaving only this absurd ill-humour of the man who 
 has been kept, unnecessarily, out of his bed. 
 
 "I've been worried to death. ... I wish you wouldn't do 
 this sort of thing, Roberta. It's most inconsiderate." 
 
 Roberta's left hand still clung to the edge of the table, as if
 
 INTRUSION 217 
 
 for support. With the other she dragged off her hat and began 
 to unbutton her coat, which was very wet. 
 
 "I'm awfully sorry. I went to a party of Tommy's. I quite 
 forgot how the time was going." 
 
 She knew at once that she had said the wrong thing. The 
 Allan who stood there in front of her was not the Allan she 
 knew, the Allan she had known, so far, how to manage. He 
 had gone a step beyond her: the magic circle was broken. 
 Something in his white face frightened her. Besides, she was 
 feeling horribly ill. . . . 
 
 "Why do you lie to me?" Allan said quietly. 
 
 "I'm not lying." 
 
 Allan's suspicion fell upon him again like a pall, choking 
 him. He went forward and took Roberta fiercely by the arm, 
 so that she cried out with the pain of it. 
 
 "Allan . . . you're hurting my arm!" 
 
 "Don't lie to me, then. Tell me the truth!" 
 
 "I have. Why don't you believe me?" 
 
 "Because I happen to know that you haven't been near 
 Tommy Carew." 
 
 She shrank back from the thing she read in his face. In 
 some queer fashion the room seemed to be receding: the lights 
 swayed, grew dim. She opened her mouth to speak, but closed 
 it again without saying anything at all. Allan's grip tightened 
 on her arm, pulling her away from the support of the table. 
 
 "Look here, Roberta, I want the truth now!" 
 
 "I can't . . . not to-night, Allan, please. I'm not well. . . . 
 Let me go. ... I'll explain to-morrow. Please let me go." 
 
 "When you've told me the truth. Not a second before. Not 
 if it keeps us up all night." 
 
 His voice was rough, like his touch, with anger. He hated 
 her. 
 
 "Allan . . . please. . . ." 
 
 She clutched suddenly at the table edge, missed and twisted 
 into a crumpled heap at his feet. 
 
 Even then his anger didn't leave him. Its force crashed 
 down upon pity and killed it. Roberta in his arms might have 
 been a wooden image. He laid her down upon the settee 
 behind the door and went out of the room. Guen, roused out 
 of her first sleep by the sound of raised voices, had hurried into 
 a dressing-gown and was already half-way down the stairs.
 
 2i 8 INTRUSION 
 
 Speechless, Allen strode past her and went on up the stairs. 
 She heard the opening and shutting of his bedroom door and 
 the turning of the key in the lock. 
 
 On the dining-room settee Roberta lay still, with her head 
 sideways against the cushions. She opened her eyes as Guen 
 came into the room and tried to sit up. Her beauty was 
 blurred and dimmed ; its vivid streak paled and thinned. 
 
 "I think I must have fainted I'm better now," she explained. 
 
 For a moment her hands did futile feeble things with her 
 hair. Then suddenly she flung her arms around Guen's neck 
 and began to cry. 
 
 "Oh, I'm so miserable!" she sobbed; "and I'm not well, 
 and I wish I was dead!" 
 
 "Oh, nonsense!" Guen said, patting her shoulder. "You'll 
 feel better to-morrow. One always does." 
 
 She meant, probably, that the Robertas always do. 
 
 "I shan't," said Roberta, and sat up. "I think life's beastly 
 i perfectly beastly. And I wish I'd never been born." 
 
 "I think you'd better tell me why," said Guen, "and then 
 have some hot milk and come straight up to bed. It's getting 
 late." 
 
 "Yes," said Roberta; but she was a long while beginning, 
 and what she had to say took some time because its "beastli- 
 ness" clogged her tongue and brought her many times to silence. 
 
 "I can never tell Allan, never!" sobbed Roberta when what 
 she had to say was finished. "I never meant to tell anybody 
 ever. It's too beastly. I needn't have if Allan hadn't known 
 I hadn't been to Tommy's. How did he know, Guen?" 
 
 Guen explained. 
 
 "Tommy's a beast," Roberta said. "She's let me down 
 properly. . . . I'll never speak to her again never!" 
 
 "Of course you won't," said Guen. "But you must tell 
 Allan what you have told me." 
 
 "I can't. ... I won't!" 
 
 "Then I must!" 
 
 If she had expected a passionate protest from Roberta she 
 was mistaken. A look of relief ran over Roberta's face, like 
 wind over grass. 
 
 "Would you really?" she asked. "That would be kind of 
 you." 
 
 "If you'd rather," said Guen.
 
 INTRUSION 219 
 
 "Oh, I would, I would! Will he believe it?" 
 
 "I think so." 
 
 Had he not foreseen this sort of thing? "Some impossible 
 position." His own words. He couldn't fail to believe it. ... 
 
 "Do try to make him. I wouldn't like him to think that 
 of me. I wouldn't like anybody to. I'm not that sort. You 
 don't think so, do you?" 
 
 "Of course I don't. I think you're a very stupid little 
 person and that what you really want is a good whipping and 
 some hot milk." 
 
 A streak of pity flashed zigzag through the enormous con- 
 tempt that filled Guen's mind. You couldn't help being sorry 
 for anyone quite so vain as all that. She kissed Roberta and 
 went out to get the milk. 
 
 And Roberta, having pushed the burden of her foolishness 
 on to somebody else's shoulders, rested content. She was 
 beginning to feel better and her beauty emerged slowly from 
 behind the cloud of her sudden indisposition. It was silly of 
 her to faint like that. But she had been frightened to death, 
 what with one and the other. . . . And that lie about being 
 at Tommy's was so silly. She ought to have done better than 
 that. A theatre would have sounded, at that hour, so much 
 more plausible. Then nobody would have known. She could 
 have kept it to herself. As it was she had only herself to 
 blame. And Guen would tell Allan. She breathed deeply at 
 that, with relief. Guen would make him believe she was 
 telling the truth. For she was; she hadn't done anything 
 "wrong," but she would never trust any man again. Men 
 were "beastly." Allan was an exception, but Allan only proved 
 that you couldn't have it both ways. When they weren't 
 beastly they were dull. Certainly Allan was dull. Perhaps 
 it was the fault of the Comet; but, too, it was the fault of 
 literature. Allan wrapped all life up between the covers of 
 a book and it annoyed him because she wouldn't squeeze in 
 as well. You either liked books or you didn't. And Roberta 
 didn't. She wasn't "lit'ry." (Even now, to herself, she 
 pronounced it like that.) 
 
 So, along the pleasant maze of her own littleness, Roberta 
 moved again towards the comfortable thing life had been 
 before that evening. Comfort was what she asked of life 
 and pleasure. Her soul what there was of it was made for
 
 220 INTRUSION 
 
 those things. Impinging upon reality at no point at all, it 
 wanted only a good time and no bother and men whose admira- 
 tion fell short of passion impotent, clipped, toeing the line. 
 
 She smiled when Guen came in with the milk and the tiny 
 soul looked out of her eyes. But Guen did not see it. Her 
 vision had turned inwards, so that she saw again that day 
 of Roberta's coming, through a silver mist of rain . . . over a 
 futurist lawn. And what came later. Allan standing there 
 in the doorway: Jan dragging Leader back into the hall; 
 Roberta's laugh, the vivid look of her and what she said. 
 "That's a queer name for a dog. . . ." Allan, amazingly 
 social, moved to explain . . . and later biting their heads off, 
 because they "discussed" Roberta. "For God's sake leave her 
 alone!" 
 
 And they had put it on to the Comet had not understood 
 that there, at the very first glance, Allan had spread his dreams 
 beneath Roberta's feet. Perhaps he had thought she would 
 tread softly because of them. But Roberta had not trodden 
 softly. Nobody but Allan would ever have supposed that she 
 would. 
 
 It was Guen who rose the next morning and prepared break- 
 fast. Roberta had hers in bed. Guen, too, was responsible 
 for that. She wanted to talk to Allan. 
 
 Allan, however, when he came, did not show any great 
 readiness to talk or to be talked to, and an abysmal gloom 
 descended upon Guen whilst the porridge stage was reached 
 and passed. She felt that Allan resented her appearance at 
 his breakfast-table; resented the accident which had landed 
 her there in the middle of things after all his efforts to keep 
 her out of them altogether. It seemed to her that she spent 
 an outrageous part of her life in straightening out difficult 
 situations or in attempting to straighten them out, for always 
 they proved too much for her. The thing which, on paper, 
 she could do so well, she could not in real life manage at all. 
 This morning she had not the faintest idea how she might 
 begin to tell Allan this thing she had undertaken; this recital 
 of Roberta's achievement of Allan's "impossible position." And 
 she resented the fact that upstairs Roberta sat up in bed in
 
 INTRUSION 221 
 
 a blue dressing-jacket and enjoyed her breakfast. Guen was 
 certainly not enjoying hers, though she made a pretence of 
 appetite while she told Allan the sordid little story she had 
 promised Roberta to pass on. Allan said nothing till she had 
 finished, then he pushed back his chair and got up. 
 
 "I see," he said. "I'm to believe, am I, that Roberta (hav- 
 ing given me her promise not to see Rayne again!) went to 
 his rooms under an assurance that Tommy Carew was to be 
 there, whereas, in fact, Tommy was getting very drunk some- 
 where else, as Rayne (and Roberta) probably knew quite well. 
 Further, I'm asked to believe that she'd never been to his 
 rooms before except in the company of this Carew creature; 
 that, until this evening, Rayne had always behaved as a 'per- 
 fect gentleman,' but that, finding himself alone with her, for 
 this first occasion, he made her certain proposals which took 
 her completely by surprise; that she repulsed him with scorn 
 and fled. That's the story, isn't it?" 
 
 "Substantially," said Guen. 
 
 "Very well, I may as well say quite frankly that I don't 
 believe it. But as a story I admire it." 
 
 "But it's exactly the sort of scrape Roberta'd be certain, 
 sooner or later, to land herself into. You said so yourself only 
 last night." Amazement tangled up Guen's thought. She 
 had expected anger; she had not expected this this stagger- 
 ing, unqualified disbelief, this quiet scorn that put an edge on 
 his words. 
 
 Allan shrugged his shoulders and began to hunt for some- 
 thing in the leather case he had withdrawn from his pocket. 
 
 "Last night!" he said. "Oh, I'd have believed your story 
 this time yesterday. It's surprising what a lot you can learn 
 in a night. I'm willing to grant you one thing that Roberta 
 hasn't gone the whole hog; that she hasn't to use the damnable 
 pErase 'betrayed' me to this Rayne creature. But that, some- 
 how, doesn't seem half so important as it ought to be. She 
 wouldn't give herself to another man, but she'll give him a 
 good deal else. Encouragement, for one thing. . . ." 
 
 "You think she has encouraged this man Rayne?" 
 
 "I don't think. I know. Roberta's virtue is coldness. Thus 
 far and no farther. . . ." 
 
 Guen was dumbfounded not so much by what he said as 
 by the air of certainty with which he said it. It was as if, in
 
 222 INTRUSION 
 
 the night, he had pulled open the door of Roberta's little 
 soul and looked in. He took something from his pocket-book 
 and threw it down on the table. "Look at that," he said. 
 Guen picked it up and saw that it was a photograph of Roberta. 
 It conveyed nothing to her. As a photograph it was excellent. 
 It showed the delicate line of Roberta's profile and the half 
 of a rounded shoulder from which the white frock had slipped 
 down. 
 
 "Here's another!" said Allan. 
 
 Guen looked at that, too; but her face said quite plainly 
 that she could not see why Allan thought either of them so 
 important. After all, Roberta was a professional photographer's 
 model. 
 
 "Look on the back!" said Allan. 
 
 Guen looked. On both was written, in a scrawling, mascu- 
 line hand, "In memory of a very pleasant evening, stolen, 
 Thursday, December llth, 1919. D.R." 
 
 A glimmer of understanding came to Guen. 
 
 "Who took these?" she said. 
 
 "Rayne. He's initialled his beautiful inscription. And 
 notice the date." 
 
 "December llth. Why, that's Roberta's birthday." 
 
 "Precisely. That fixes it. ... I'd come home early to take 
 her to a theatre and we quarrelled. ... I found her out in some 
 stupid lie and she angered me by sticking to it. I refused 
 to go and she went off somewhere by herself. The next 
 morning she told me she'd been giving Rayne the sitting he'd 
 been bothering her for and that Tommy Carew was there all 
 the time. A carefully selected set of proofs was sent me a day 
 or so later: I needn't say that it didn't include these two. 
 Those I found last night in an old handbag of Roberta's. . . . 
 Oh, it's no good talking about that. It was just plain spying. 
 I had to find out. ... I can't explain. . . ." 
 
 How explain that last night he had hated Roberta in that 
 sudden frantic way he had hated her that night of her birth- 
 day; that upstairs in his room while she slept peacefully at 
 Guen's side, he had been torn, brutally, as he had never been 
 torn before, by suspicion and despair? How explain, ever, 
 that one moment of devastating insight; that stream of amazing 
 comprehension over which the wrack of his dreams went riding? 
 
 Guen said nothing, only put the photographs down and
 
 INTRUSION 223 
 
 pushed them along the table to Allan, who picked them up 
 and put them back into his pocket-book. 
 
 "There were other things," he said. "Letters. . . ." 
 
 "Roberta's?" 
 
 "Miss Carew's, mostly, but there was one of Roberta's to 
 her unfinished and several from Rayne, addressed to her 
 c/o Miss Carew." 
 
 "You read them?" 
 
 "I told you. ... I was spying. I had to know . . . for 
 certain . . . the things you've always known." 
 
 And again the conviction came to her that Allan resented 
 her presence; not because she was an intruder, but because 
 she could say, "I told you so!" That she would not say it, 
 that she was very far from saying it, was not likely, just then, 
 to affect Allan. She made a little moue of distaste at the trick 
 fate had played her again. Her courage drooped as it had 
 drooped in that pink drawing-room at Parson's Green; but 
 this time her pride did not rise to reinforce it. Amid these 
 ruins of Allan's dreams pride had no place. Utterly crushed 
 she sat there, overwhelmed by her hatred of the sordid and 
 hating herself because it affected her like that. . . . 
 
 "At least we shan't you and I have to pretend any 
 longer. . . . That's something, I suppose." 
 
 She started. "How long have you been pretending?" 
 
 "That Roberta was straight? Oh, always though I didn't 
 realise it till last night. I knew there'd been men; young 
 Ancell Jan. (Did you ever guess that?) Oh, she was virtu- 
 ous enough, if it comes to that. Men, to her, never meant 
 anything but theatres, presents . . . the possibility of marriage. 
 If I ever doubted it marriage reassured me. Lord, it's funny 
 what a lot marriage teaches you." 
 
 He paused, as if to look back upon the lessons he had learned 
 at the hands of matrimony, then went on. 
 
 "It might have been all right if I'd had plenty of money. 
 I might then have got faithfulness . . . spiritual faithfulness. 
 ... I mean I might have been the last of the procession. God 
 knows. . . . Even Roberta had her price, I suppose. I didn't 
 reach it. ... So she went back to the old game. ... If 
 Rayne hadn't turned up it would have been someone else. 
 Only ... I could have forgiven her if she'd left Martyn 
 alone. ..."
 
 224 INTRUSION 
 
 "But you can't blame her because Martyn fell in love with 
 her." 
 
 "I don't. But I blame her for helping him; for boasting 
 about it, for trying to keep him hanging about her when she 
 knew what had happened; for blackening his character to 
 me. . . . She gave me a pretty account of the story: the one 
 that emerges from her own handwriting is a good deal less 
 pretty, but stamped with truth. And it wasn't as if she cared 
 tuppence about Martyn: one could forgive the big thing so 
 much more easily. There's nothing 'big' about Roberta: she 
 hasn't an ounce of real passion, but finds other people's useful. 
 It flatters her to rouse it: to her it's a sauce piquante to life. . . . 
 She writes to this Carew girl that she could have married Mar- 
 tyn as easily as lifting her little finger if she'd met him in 
 time ! And then a lot of blather about masculine morality. . . . 
 It makes me sick!" 
 
 He began to talk with passion of the "technical morality" of 
 the "modern girl." 
 
 "Roberta isn't 'modern,' " Guen said when he had finished, 
 "She's as old as time. What you call the technical morality 
 of the modern girl is the technical morality of the same sort 
 of girl throughout the ages. Only nowadays you see it more 
 clearly: she doesn't need to hide it so carefully." 
 
 She paused, but Allan said nothing, nor looked at her. She 
 went on. 
 
 "Can you manage here alone for a bit? If so, I'll take 
 Roberta down to Green Hedges for a couple of weeks. You 
 say she hasn't been very fit. That'll do as an excuse." 
 
 Anything would do as an excuse, Allan told her. He wanted, 
 he said, to get away somewhere alone to think things out. 
 
 "Are you going up to see her?" 
 
 "I can't ... I simply can't see her until I've grown a 
 pachyderm. Even now, if I saw her, she'd get through to 
 me." 
 
 Her queer fastidious look hovered for a second over Guen's 
 drawn face. 
 
 "I don't know," she said, "what to say to you." 
 
 The instant flash of tenderness on her face as she spoke hurt 
 him. But he went on smoking as if it did nothing of the sort. 
 
 "There isn't anything to say, is there?" he said presently. 
 
 "Nothing," said Guen, "except this. It is true, you know,
 
 INTRUSION 225 
 
 that Roberta wants looking after. I think she'll always want 
 looking after." 
 
 "And that's to be my job, is it?" 
 
 "You took it on, dear. . . ." 
 
 "I know. But one grows tired. Besides . . ." He pulled 
 himself up and tossed his half-smoked cigarette into the fire. 
 Somehow, the gesture with which he did it, far more than the 
 thing he said, showed her the truth. Also it showed her the 
 thing he left unsaid . . . that it wasn't, quite, this job he had 
 taken on. . . . Allan had never been static, but his moving on 
 this time was astounding. It left Guen breathless; for the 
 Allan who knew all this was a very different person from the 
 Allan who had married Roberta. Yet, in a sense, it was still 
 unbelievable that he who had seen so little before should see 
 so much now, though Guen knew it was not what he had dis- 
 covered last night that counted, but only that it had revealed 
 so much that had gone before that he'd seen and not under- 
 stood. In one blinding flash, that had lit up the past, present 
 and future, he had seen what Guen had always known; that 
 you couldn't mould Roberta; that there was nothing to mould. 
 She was merely a beautiful shell that cracked if you came 
 too near it with the breath of passion or of truth. For that 
 one brief moment, even as Martyn had done, Allan had seen 
 right through her. . . . 
 
 The last thing he said to her stayed in her mind. 
 
 "Our secret, Guen. . . . Another skeleton in the cupboard." 
 
 And her reply. "Two of them. As a family, we're over- 
 doing it a bit, aren't we?" 
 
 Her sense of humour had come to her rescue: it reached out 
 and rapped Fate, feebly, over the knuckles. 
 
 When Allan had let himself out into the street Guen sat 
 for some time before Roberta's coffee-pot and stared out through 
 the window at the beautiful day that was climbing already 
 out of the early morning mist. She tried to think, but her 
 thoughts were not very useful: they seemed but to lead her 
 to that cupboard into which they'd bundled their skeleton 
 and to leave her there. She wished she knew just what Allan 
 was going to do: if he was really going to lock the cupboard,
 
 226 INTRUSION 
 
 and, turning his back upon it, go on as before, with nobody 
 any the wiser, save only themselves? Did she want that? 
 She didn't know. She couldn't bear to think of it: couldn't 
 bear to think of Allan going on with a thing from which the 
 last red drop of happiness had ebbed out, into which had 
 flowed intrigue and suspicion. Guen envisaged that with 
 loathing, remembering again that little house at Parson's Green 
 and the face of the man who had shown her out of it. 
 
 Suddenly she pushed back her chair, rose and went upstairs 
 to Roberta. 
 
 And to Roberta had been given, amid so much else, the 
 delightful gift of looking lovely in the morning. She looked 
 so now and was aware of it. 
 
 "Well," she said, "is it all right?" "All right for me," she 
 meant, as Guen seemed to know. 
 
 "I think so," she said, "but I want you to come down to 
 Green Hedges with me this afternoon for a week or so. You 
 want a holiday and it'll give Allan time to get over things." 
 
 "Allan! I like that!" said Roberta. "It's me, I should 
 have thought, that wants time to 'get over' things." 
 
 "Well, you shall have it. ... Do you feel well enough to 
 get up now and help me wrestle with the chores? I've a man 
 to see at twelve o'clock. . . . You'd better meet me somewhere 
 for lunch and we'll catch the three-five down." 
 
 "All right," said Roberta. "But I say, Guen, do tell me. 
 Is Allan awfully wild with me? He didn't come up. . . ." 
 
 "I think he's very tired and disheartened." 
 
 "Oh, Lord! Is that all?" 
 
 "Isn't that a-good deal?" 
 
 "Not for Allan. He's always tired and disheartened about 
 something. Ted up' I call it. Allan's one of those people 
 who want to alter everything and everybody. The world 
 isn't a bit as he wants it. Most of the people in it are wrong, 
 of course, and the Government's wrong and everybody reads 
 the wrong books; or the right books for the wrong reasons 
 like me. And the Comet's wrong and something he calls the 
 'system,' and me. Me most of all, I shouldn't wonder. He 
 tries hard to alter me. Wants to make me lit'ry and all that. 
 So silly, isn't it?" 
 
 "I suppose it is," Guen said, "because you can't be altered, 
 can you?"
 
 INTRUSION 227 
 
 "Not much. Besides, it takes all sorts to make a world, 
 doesn't it?" 
 
 "So they say," said Guen, rather as if she thought there 
 were some "sorts" the world could very well do without. 
 
 "I say, you do seern depressed!" Roberta told her. "What's 
 up? You're not just having me on, are you? It is all right, 
 isn't it?" 
 
 "About Allan? It will be," said Guen, "after a little." 
 ("Our secret " he had said.) 
 
 Roberta frowned, and getting out of bed sat on its edge. 
 She took up her dressing-gown from the bed rail and sat there 
 holding it crushed up against her. 
 
 "But he believed what I said, didn't he?" 
 
 "In the main." 
 
 The beauty of her sitting there with that blue thing crushed 
 up against her white skin was extraordinary. Looking at her 
 Guen remembered something Allan had said: "I haven't yet 
 grown a pachyderm . . . she can get at me still sometimes. . . ." 
 She could "get" at anybody, Guen thought, a little bitterly. 
 She could play, in excelsis, did she desire, the role of the 
 martyred wife. Candour and innocence looked out of her 
 eyes and a soul. And she wasn't candid and she possessed 
 neither innocence nor soul. But not one man in a thousand 
 would believe it. 
 
 "He didn't think I'd done anything wrong, did he, Guen?" 
 
 "Not in the way you mean." 
 
 "Well, good heavens, what other way is there?" 
 
 "Allan seemed to think there are several." 
 
 "You mean ... he thinks I asked for it ... that I led Rayne 
 on?" 
 
 "I'm afraid he does!" Guen said. "And there were two 
 photographs . . . things you didn't mean him to see, and 
 some letters. . . ." 
 
 "Oh, Lord!" said Roberta. "Fancy spying on me like that! 
 I think men are beastly. I do reely. So's life. . . . Perfectly 
 beastly." 
 
 She wrinkled her brows with disgust, and standing up began 
 to draw the blue dressing-gown about her. She did it with an 
 air of fastidious distaste, as if with the act she folded herself 
 away from the essential interminable "beastliness" of men and 
 things.
 
 CHAPTER TEN 
 
 ALLAN'S interview with Douglas Rayne accounted, that 
 same morning, for his luncheon hour. He had not 
 meant to see him; even now it wasn't Guen's, "I think 
 you ought to see this man" that sent him along to the address 
 he had found there among Roberta's letters. It wasn't that 
 he went to defend his "honour" (or did he mean Roberta's? 
 Rubbish! She hadn't any, and in a Court of Law she would 
 be held to have kept his undefiled!) It was for no such 
 reason as this that he went down to Victoria from the City: 
 scarcely, even, was it Rayne he went to see; but Roberta 
 the real Roberta who existed somewhere beneath all the dreams 
 he had woven about her; all the wrappings of protection and 
 illusion in which, as a natural integument, he had enveloped 
 her. The interview with Rayne might be illuminative; might 
 fill in the weak places in the case he had even now against her. 
 He was driven by a passion the like of which had never pos- 
 sessed him before: the passion to know all there was to know; 
 to have done with his dreams and wrappings for ever. . . . 
 
 Even so he had not guessed how much it would hurt. . . . 
 It was an extremely painful interview, not alone for Rayne, 
 who found it necessary to see a dentist before he departed 
 for Paris; but for Allan, in whom something hideously definite 
 and irrevocable seemed to be happening all the time. But 
 when it was over, when he had closed Mr. Rayne's door on 
 Mr. Rayne's curses and threats of the law, a sense of the 
 humour of the situation descended upon him. It supported 
 him all the way back to the office, and it did not leave him 
 until the middle of the afternoon when a hideous faintness 
 seized him. Nothing then was amusing any longer. His 
 chief was good-natured about it. "You'd better go and sit 
 under the trees somewhere," he said to Allan, and, to some- 
 
 228
 
 INTRUSION 229 
 
 one else, "These poor chaps! France seems to have crocked 
 'em up! Not the same, half of 'em!" 
 
 Allan went out and rode on a bus down the Strand. The 
 afternoon was beautiful. The morning's mist had rolled back 
 from a world of quiet winter trees and brooding shadows. 
 A red sun burned low in the sky, shedding a warm glow over 
 the London afternoon, making even the City, which Allan 
 detested, a thing of strange beauty. 
 
 But Allan was not looking at the afternoon, nor seeing the 
 queer things the winter sun was doing to the Temple of 
 Mammon. From the top of his bus he gazed down upon this 
 carnal life of the street as upon a thing that raised its head 
 above a whirlpool of intrigue and iniquity, having about it 
 the fierceness and obscenity of the thing long submerged. For 
 Allan London had become a place of Douglas Raynes, of men, 
 suave and polished, yet furtive-eyed, loose-lipped; and of 
 women who divided easily into two groups the anaemic, over- 
 worked and underpaid, and the over-dressed, who lived by their 
 power of inflaming men, within the bounds of marriage or 
 without. It made no difference. 
 
 At Charing Cross a girl with hair bright like an aureole 
 beneath a coquettish hat that sported an egret's feather flitted 
 across the road and captured Allan's gaze. There was about 
 her all the impudence and self-consciousness of youth and 
 beauty, and the gaze of the street, as impudent as she, followed 
 her as she went. Allan's mouth twisted into a reluctant smile 
 because she had Roberta's carriage and flaming hair; because 
 she wore silk stockings and high-heeled shoes with a coat of 
 fur, and because, outside the Bureau de Change, she met a 
 colourful youth who carried chocolates in a cardboard box and 
 violets in white paper! 
 
 Between them Roberta and Rayne had cheapened the uni- 
 verse. . . . And it wasn't only that. Riding down to Kew, 
 Allan was stunned by the knowledge that his interview with 
 Rayne had in some queer fashion used up the last ounce of that 
 protective feeling Roberta had aroused in him, as if, though 
 Rayne had been thrashed, something had happened to his 
 feeling for Roberta in the process. It lay there now at his feet, 
 withered and dead, inspiring not pity, not sorrow, not regret, 
 but only a vague wonderment that it should ever have existed 
 at all. '
 
 230 INTRUSION 
 
 Allan spent his week-end walking in the Chilterns and found 
 it a thing of surprising emotions. Out of them, slowly and 
 with pain, emerged the conviction that never again could he 
 bear to live under the same roof with Roberta. From this 
 conviction he stood away deliberately, considering it with a 
 feeling of chill detachment, as though it were somebody else's 
 conviction, somebody else's emotions, somebody else's thoughts. 
 And somebody else's wife. . . . 
 
 He saw Roberta as, during those few months of marriage, 
 she had slowly but certainly revealed herself. It wasn't only 
 that she was vain and ignorant; not only that she was ego- 
 tistical and stupid; but that she was these things incurably. 
 You couldn't alter her: she was shallow and trivial; her very 
 vices were paltry. She had neither desire nor courage not 
 even enough to allow her to be just a little wicked: she 
 remained paltry and venal; thin thin to the soul eternally 
 hemmed in by her technical morality. Garrisoned. ... It 
 was that Allan hated most. He despised her because of it; 
 could more easily have forgiven and forgotten some great wrong 
 she had done him. Or so it seemed to him now. 
 
 But here, as elsewhere, her technical morality was her 
 defence . . . He saw it variously as her shield and buckler, as 
 the bond which held her still to him. ... By virtue of it shi 
 remained his wife, whether the same roof sheltered them or 
 not. He had no case, in the eyes of the law, which had no 
 sympathy for mental states or moral finesse, but saw things in 
 black and white against an unshifting background of property. 
 Property in flesh and blood. The law was concerned with the 
 physical, and physically Roberta had not offended. She had 
 not "given" herself or "sold" herself to any other man. What 
 had he, the man in possession, to complain of? He turned 
 in his gnawing misery, shrugging his shoulders in the face of 
 the law. It was absurd that divorce should be concerned not 
 with spiritual, but with physical deflection. . . . Milton, away 
 there in his bleak century, had seen that And people were 
 still arguing about it. A slow world. 
 
 Darkness dropped fast. The road hung like a silver ribbon 
 beneath the red-browns and purples of the winter trees. Steep 
 banks shut it in; a pale moon shone down upon it. To Allan
 
 INTRUSION 231 
 
 there came the sense of walking within the frame of some 
 delicate picture, and he strode faster as if to get out of it. 
 
 A bitter disgust welled up within him. Love! That love! 
 He was overwhelmed with a sense of failure not Roberta's, 
 but his. Mixed up with his anger, his disillusion and his dis- 
 gust he recognised a grain a very tiny grain of pity. He 
 ought not to have married Roberta: he could give her had 
 given her none of the things she wanted, none of the things 
 which for her made life endurable. He did not argue about 
 her standards: he recognised them as paltry and left it at 
 that; but the fact remained. Had he been able to give her 
 more of the things she wanted she might not have gone seeking 
 them in dubious fashion. God alone knew! Hers was a 
 little soul that might yet have flourished and grown fat in pros- 
 perity: in poverty its bones stuck out incredibly. Morality for 
 one half the world, perhaps, is only a matter of money: 
 Roberta had her price, and most certainly Allan had not 
 attained to it. 
 
 The path turned abruptly and ran through the broad centre 
 of a little wood. Allan strode on, assurance beating into him. 
 This was the end. It should not, this passionate intrusion, 
 become permanent. It made it no better to call it marriage. 
 Whatever you called it you couldn't make it anything else. A 
 passionate intrusion. He wanted here, now and for ever, to 
 put an end to it all had finished hunting for motives and 
 dodging regrets. Truth stared at him. He had married 
 Roberta because he wanted her, hiding the real motive under 
 a shoal of others less personal, less immediate, as Guen had 
 known all the time. And Roberta had never loved him in 
 that way or any other. She would not mind that he put an 
 end to it, provided she did not suffer materially. She would, 
 he thought, wear her martyr's crown with becoming grace and 
 dignity. Not a man, hearing the story, but would admire and 
 pity her. . . . 
 
 Presently he stopped, took off his hat and leaned heavily 
 against the trunk of a tree. It was as if he had come suddenly 
 to the end of life: there was nothing beyond, and what was 
 behind no longer mattered. It never had mattered: nothing 
 that had ever happened to him and Roberta mattered at all; 
 there was no meaning to any of it. He saw that, felt it, knew 
 it for truth. The knowledge didn't even hurt. He was numb,
 
 232 INTRUSION 
 
 bereft utterly of emotion. He leaned there against the tree 
 trunk, looking at truth unthrilled by the vision. It simply 
 didn't matter, now. 
 
 On the edge of the little wood it was very quiet. The tran- 
 quillity of the night was all about him and the scent, sweeter 
 than all other, of moist earth. Gradually the stillness built 
 itself up around him, like a wall. He forgot he stood but a 
 few yards from the public footpath: nor realised how long he 
 stood there motionless: he knew nothing save that slowly, and 
 with intolerable pain, feeling came back to him. Things did 
 matter: these things which had happened to him and to 
 Roberta mattered horribly. Deep down within him something 
 small and very human cried pitifully for the beauty it 
 remembered. 
 
 But one did not remember for ever. You did forget: no 
 use pretending. Things you thought you'd go to the grave 
 remembering, you forgot. Cruel things that clung and hurt 
 and drew blood: you forgot them. Maurice Linton and Mar- 
 tyn. How often in the last few months had he remembered 
 either of them? Roberta had been the drug beneath which the 
 memory of them both had sunk, unprotesting, into slumber. . . . 
 
 How long before he should begin to forget Roberta? 
 
 When he reached home he wrote to Guen plainly, so that 
 she couldn't possibly misunderstand. It was much more diffi- 
 cult to write to Roberta, and eventually he gave it up, hoping, 
 perhaps, that Guen would break the ice. . . . But Guen kept 
 him waiting a whole week for a reply, and when it came four 
 lines of it only and on a postcard ! She was coming to town 
 the next morning. She told him where she intended to lunch 
 and asked him to meet her there. With superb indifference 
 she added, "Please don't be late. I've an appointment at half- 
 past two." 
 
 Allan was vaguely annoyed. A postcard in reply to a letter 
 that said the sort of things his letter had said. And cold, calm 
 mention of some business appointment! He felt like a small 
 boy who has played truant, has expected condign punishment 
 and has been told, carelessly, not to do anything so silly 
 again. . . .
 
 INTRUSION 233 
 
 But he turned up punctually at Guen's rendezvous. She had 
 not arrived. The day was deplorably wet and a wind like a 
 knife was abroad ... a beast of a day. Allan sat down at a 
 table set for two in a corner and near to the fire. The restau- 
 rant was a haunt of writing men, and it was Fleet Street that 
 drifted in through the door, shaking its umbrella. Two men 
 he didn't know came and stood by the fire, warming their hands 
 and talking . . . gravely assuring each other that they really 
 were the only two critics in London. They possessed, so they 
 said, a definite standard of criticism and spoke of it rather as 
 a duchess or a cinema actress might speak of a rope of pearls 
 which, though valuable, was always something of a responsi- 
 bility. They went away presently and sat at an adjacent table, 
 and Allan filled up time by wondering who they were. He 
 couldn't fit them in. Then Guen arrived and did it for him. 
 She ordered a chop with a crisp decision not common to her 
 sex in the matter of food, and nodded affably to the Only Two 
 Critics in London. Unaccountably nervous, Allan began to 
 talk of some book or other Gore had sent him to review for 
 Life and Letters. Guen said, "Yes, I know, it's excellent. But 
 look here, Allan, we're not going to talk about books. I want 
 to talk to you about Roberta." 
 
 "But surely not here. We can't possibly discuss our affairs 
 here." A kind of panic laid hold of him. 
 
 "I fancy," said Guen, "that there isn't going to be very 
 much discussion." 
 
 "You mean you haven't said anything to Roberta?" 
 
 "I've said a good deal, but not about your letter." 
 
 "I see." (All right, Guen was going to stand out, too. 
 He'd have to fight single-handed.) "I see. . . . You've come 
 to argue me out of it to make me see reason. Well, I may 
 as well tell you frankly I'm not going to. Not that sort of 
 reason, anyway. The thing's impossible. I thought you'd see 
 that. I thought you'd agree that there's no sense in going on 
 with a mistake that it's better to get out while there's 
 time." 
 
 Guen looked at him. 
 
 "I might if there were time, but there isn't. You're three 
 months too late." 
 
 Allan answered with an intensity that surprised himself.
 
 234 INTRUSION 
 
 "Really, Guen, old girl, I haven't the least idea what you're 
 trying to get at." 
 
 "Haven't you? It's very simple," Guen said. "You 
 see ... you can't leave Roberta now because she's going to 
 have a child!" 
 
 For a moment Allan stared at her in blankest surprise. The 
 thing was too idiotic. It simply couldn't be ! He and Roberta 
 were not going to have any children. Roberta had decided that 
 long ago. 
 
 "These things happen sometimes, you know," Guen said, 
 smiling a little, as though she divined his thoughts. But Allan 
 could find no words. He sat there holding a knife and fork 
 in his hands and bathed suddenly and dreadfully in emotion, 
 emotion so keen and unexpected that it was like a knife-stab 
 in his back. The blood rushed to his face, beating in his ears 
 and behind his eyes that mechanically watched the efforts of 
 a blonde youth at the next table to keep a piece of pie-crust 
 on a blue and white plate. The moment grew into an eternity. 
 He heard Guen say, "That's why I didn't answer your letter. 
 I wanted to be sure, and Roberta wouldn't see a doctor." 
 
 He made a great effort and spoke. 
 
 "When?" he asked. The sound of his own voice surprised 
 him, as though he heard it for the first time. 
 
 "June," said Guen. 
 
 For long afterwards the word "June" was associated in 
 Allan's mind with the sight of a blonde youth struggling with 
 pie-crust on a plate, and of the sheeted rain, white, before an 
 ever-swinging door.
 
 BOOK III 
 
 CHAPTER ONE 
 
 ROBERTA came home at the end of the week. The 
 babyish look had left her face, but about her mouth 
 was a look of sullen sweetness that, except at rare inter- 
 vals, had never been there before. Allan, touched unbeliev- 
 ably by the sight of the first hint of her impending mother- 
 hood, had drowned the past in a stream of surprising emotion, 
 in an overwhelming comprehension of the fact that his child 
 his child must be born properly. Immediately, and with a 
 thoroughness that to Guen was funny, he began to make a 
 fresh lot of mistakes about Roberta. He hadn't been able to 
 alter her; but Nature would. . . . The Roberta who was 
 going through all that could not possibly emerge as the 
 Roberta who had intended never to go through it. He believed, 
 as men will, that the very fact of motherhood was potent for 
 improvement; that it could change a woman's nature: could 
 work a miracle more wonderful than itself. And Guen did 
 not undeceive him. 
 
 And yet she could have done. She had only to hint at that 
 hour she had spent with Roberta after she had seen the doctor; 
 after doubt was no longer possible. Guen wasn't likely to 
 forget it, but she'd keep it to herself. Not that Roberta had 
 troubled at the first to do that. She had been at no pains to 
 hide her chagrin, her fright. . . . 
 
 "Poor kid," A.G. had said. "If I were a woman I'd want 
 a thousand down before I'd consider it!" Guen thought that 
 a healthy state of mind for a man, but beneath her smile she 
 had hidden her sense of soiled and outraged woman's dignity. 
 One ought not to show funk over one's special job even if 
 one felt it. 
 
 235
 
 236 INTRUSION 
 
 But at that moment Roberta was hiding her funk and her 
 smouldering anger beneath this disguise of sullen sweetness. 
 Her imagination was not keen enough to pierce beyond the 
 veil of the months that still stood between her and her ordeal. 
 She lived in the present, in the Now when she did not suffer, 
 save in her vanity, to which her condition was a constant goad. 
 She developed a distaste for walking abroad; giving you the 
 impression not so much of staying in the house as of hiding 
 in it. She couldn't bear to be seen. 
 
 Yet people persisted in coming to see her. Allan's parents, 
 Pen and Caryl, and her own father still with that lost air 
 which had descended upon him at the time of his wife's death. 
 Anne Suffield, of course, was delighted with Roberta, chiefly 
 because she was going to have a baby (Allan's baby), but also 
 because she was having it so soon after her marriage an 
 old-fashioned thing to do, which appealed to Anne in the way 
 things unexpected always did. Certainly she hadn't expected 
 this. . . . The child she had acquired was like the children 
 she had borne who always did what you'd never imagined 
 they would do. Even Pen was surprised into extending the 
 boundaries of her affability. She came relenting, bearing 
 gifts the baby clothes Roberta would not make. She could 
 not sew. From the first she said it, and to the end she main- 
 tained it. So others sewed for her. The whole feminine 
 resources of Adelaide Lodge were laid at her feet as a votive 
 offering. It gratified even Roberta, who loved to be the centre 
 of attraction even in a second-rate show. It amused her to 
 hear John Suffield dilating upon his mere-mannishness and 
 making up for his inability to sew by paying for things which 
 other people sewed. Allan had told her, too, that his father 
 had made himself financially responsible for this expensive 
 business of birth. Allan's bills were to be sent to him. He 
 was adamant, insisted. Never was a baby to be born with so 
 little expense to his parents. Never one born to such an 
 inheritance of clothes. You wished at times that it was you 
 who were first to see the light that day to come in early 
 June. . . . 
 
 It was Caryl who said that, turning the clothes over with her 
 hands, a new wistful expression on her face. "Wouldn't you 
 just love to wear them, Berta?" And Berta said, "Not par- 
 ticularly, and, anyway, you wouldn't know anything about it!"
 
 INTRUSION 237 
 
 "I want to bring someone to see you," Caryl said one day 
 towards the end of March. It was very warm and showery 
 and Roberta lay on the settee in the window, deep in an 
 account of the disappearance of Leonora Darbey. She looked 
 up with a little frown at Caryl, who sat on the edge of the 
 table swinging her feet and with much unusual colour in her 
 brown face. 
 
 "Who?" asked Roberta briefly. 
 
 "A friend of mine Dick Merrick." 
 
 "Oh, Caryl a man I don't know! Of course you 
 can't . . . now!" 
 
 Caryl stopped swinging her legs and stared at her. 
 
 "Why ever not?" she asked. 
 
 "Well . . . you might just ask yourself," Roberta said. 
 
 A faint light dawned on Caryl. "But Dick! Dick isn't 
 like that!" she explained. 
 
 "I don't know what you mean," said Roberta stiffly. 
 
 "Neither do I," said Caryl. But she tried to explain. "You 
 see, Roberta, Dick's . . . Dick's awfully kind and understand- 
 ing, and he doesn't care a bit what a girl looks like. . . . Oh, 
 that sounds wrong! I don't mean that you don't look nice. 
 You do. You look prettier than ever, somehow; but only that 
 you needn't mind Dick. . . . Dick's rather a dear." 
 
 "Well, he'll keep, I s'pose. ... I don't want him here 
 now. ... Is it the man Pen's always talking about, the man 
 you used to meet at the Hestons ? Pen always says she believes 
 he's going to marry Marjorie Heston." 
 
 "He isn't," said Caryl. "He's going to marry me." 
 
 Roberta dropped Leonora on to the floor and begged to be 
 told all about it. 
 
 "All" was out of the question. You couldn't possibly tell 
 Roberta any of the things that mattered. All that about Mar- 
 jorie and Dick and her own uncertainty, perhaps; that day 
 in the wood, too. These things no longer mattered. She 
 could laugh about them now. But she didn't laugh about that 
 afternoon at Kew. . . . That had beauty, intimacy: it lived 
 inside her . . . burnt up and up like a flame. She remembered 
 it still; the unexpected meeting, down there in the Arboretum 
 amid the scent of things that grew; their steps turning down 
 towards the river, the January day trembling before the embrace 
 of night and Dick's voice telling her strange things about the
 
 238 INTRUSION 
 
 wild birds that she scarcely heard because she wanted all the 
 time to say, "Oh, don't, don't talk! . . . Can't you see I 
 want you to kiss me again? . . ." Even now she remembered 
 that she had been a little appalled at her own certainty. 
 
 And then, suddenly, the thing had happened. Dick stopped 
 talking about his wild fowl: stopped, too, in his stride. Caryl 
 had moved on was a step in front. His hand on her arm 
 brought her up sharply, drew her up tightly against him. She 
 remembered what he said. "Do you want to- run away this 
 time?" And what she said, ages afterwards: "Oh, Dick, I 
 thought it was Marjorie! . . ." 
 
 She couldn't possibly get any of that into words, so she 
 fobbed off Roberta with all that tosh about Marjorie and what 
 she'd thought and not thought and about the day in the wood 
 and at the end of it she said: 
 
 "We want to be engaged. Dick's coming to see father 
 to-morrow. It sounds dreadfully old-fashioned, asking per- 
 mission. But, you see, I promised to keep off that sort of thing 
 until I'd got my degree, and it's eighteen months yet before I 
 can sit for my final." 
 
 Eighteen months was an eternity. You simply had to have 
 something to go on with. . . . They simply must let you be 
 engaged. If they didn't, it was going to interfere horribly 
 with your work. Strange how you knew that. . . . 
 
 Never for a moment did it occur to Caryl to drop the idea 
 of her degree. She was in love with Dick, but she was still in 
 love with the idea of her degree. Sitting there swinging her 
 legs, she dragged out her beliefs, her modern creed that love 
 wasn't all. Even when you felt like this it wasn't all. There 
 was a time when it was more important because more urgent 
 than anything else, but that wouldn't last. Presently that 
 bit of life would find its own level: it wouldn't obtrude. It 
 was now before you had had any of your things, when you 
 faced the idea of doing without them that they turned and 
 crowded in upon you. This was the price you paid when you'd 
 rejected the older creed, when you ceased to believe that when 
 you loved nothing else mattered that your brain could run to 
 seed. And Caryl knew that hers couldn't. She did not believe 
 that when a woman loved she ceased to belong to herself. . . . 
 This horrible theory of possession ! Never for a moment would 
 Caryl subscribe to it. Yet, being woman, in love for the first
 
 INTRUSION 239 
 
 time and honest, healthy and normal, she knew the urgency 
 of desire; was moved thereby to a sudden startling envy of 
 Roberta, who had had things, who knew. . . . Urged to them, 
 too, by the sight of the pile of baby clothes at her side. Not 
 the only thing, but horribly important while it lasted. She 
 broke off the train of thought. 
 
 "Do let me bring Dick to see you, Berta." 
 
 And Berta snapped her up. Berta retrieved Leonora from 
 the floor and answered, in a voice that was sharper than Caryl 
 had ever before heard it: 
 
 "My dear Caryl, I couldn't bear him to see me like this. . . . 
 Really, I should have thought you would have understood." 
 
 Caryl got off the table and came over to Roberta. 
 
 "I'm awfully sorry. Please forgive me. I hadn't any idea 
 you'd feel . . . like that . . . about it." 
 
 "Well, I do. ... It isn't very nice. You wait till it happens 
 to you!" 
 
 The hot colour sprang to Caryl's cheek. "I'm sorry," she 
 said again. "When is it, Berta?" 
 
 "June," Roberta said. "Two months yet" 
 
 She hung on to that as 'to a spar in a rough sea. She needn't 
 think about it yet. Two full months. 
 
 But there weren't. . . . 
 
 Nobody ever quite knew how it happened. ' Roberta herself 
 said she slipped coming downstairs. . . . Anyway, her child 
 was born prematurely, nearly eight full weeks before she had 
 expected it. It was a boy and delicate, who had, the doctor 
 said, rather less than the usual chances of a seven-months' 
 child ; chances that lessened perceptibly day by day until on the 
 fourth it became apparent he was doing nothing at all with 
 them. As though he realised how seriously he had incon- 
 venienced his mother, how little she wanted him, he slipped 
 quietly out of the world into which he had hurried so indec- 
 orously. 
 
 Roberta wept. 
 
 But Allan curbed his disappointment, the pain of his out- 
 raged, newly awakened sense of fatherhood upon the bridle 
 of his consideration for Roberta. For he thought she suffered, 
 and he had not yet recovered from the shock of her white face 
 on the pillow when, after that still, white night, so full of 
 suspense, they allowed him to see her. Her eyes haunted him;
 
 c 
 40 INTRUSION 
 
 he saw in them not alone the shadow of her agony, but her 
 implacable resentment; a resentment directed, he thought then, 
 against fate and the fact that she had suffered for nothing. . . . 
 It was some weeks before he discovered that even there he was 
 wrong. 
 
 He clung at this point to his new colossal mistake, his belief 
 that the Roberta who had suffered that must be different 
 from the Roberta who had not meant to suffer it. % 
 
 The hawthorn was in bloom before he realised that she 
 wasn't . . . that she didn't care that her child had died; that 
 she was, on the whole, relieved because Fate had let her off 
 left her free. 
 
 She was soon well again. She bloomed afresh in the world, 
 young as the spring, and as beautiful. Still nursing his pathetic 
 belief, still clutching his fond delusion, the lover in Allan came 
 back again. The old ecstasy sung in his veins, the old desire 
 reached out and stung him. He wanted her still even far 
 more. He wanted by his love to make up to her. ... It wasn't 
 merely passion: he cared with an enormous tenderness. . . . 
 
 And Roberta edged away. When Allan, refusing to be 
 snubbed, refusing to understand, blundered after her she 
 turned and rent him. 
 
 "I've had enough of that side of life. . . . I'm not taking 
 any more risks of that sort, thank you." 
 
 Once again his dreams came clattering about his feet. Inward 
 vision pierced him. He understood. The miracle hadn't come 
 off Roberta wasn't changed. Nature, neither, had been able 
 to do anything with her. She didn't care a scrap . . . for 
 him ... or that her child had died. She cared still about 
 nothing and no one save herself. The resentment he had 
 read in her eyes, that smouldered there still, was directed not 
 against fate, not against the futility of her pain, but against him, 
 because he had brought her to that, had made life painful, 
 "horrid." .
 
 CHAPTER TWO 
 
 AT first Allan thought he couldn't bear it: that he must 
 get up and walk out of the house altogether and never 
 come back. But presently he knew that he wouldn't 
 do that because he would be only more miserable away from 
 Roberta than he was with her. In the way that mattered, the 
 real, essential way, it was true he did not care for Roberta. 
 But in the way that mattered only because it hurt, because 
 he couldn't escape from it, he certainly went on caring. It 
 came to him that it was a dreadful thing to be "in love" without 
 loving; it meant the complete subjection of mind to body. 
 And yet, not quite perhaps for at least Allan recognised his 
 malady. If he was disgusted he was also, in a sombre, mirth- 
 less fashion, intrigued by the spectacle of his own symptoms 
 (heaven knows he considered them often enough). He was 
 amused at the memory of his emotions on the edge of a dusky 
 wood, at the egoism which had imagined it could wipe Roberta 
 out, and yet but for this trick Nature had played him he still 
 felt he might have succeeded in carrying out the part he had 
 ascribed to himself. Even now he couldn't believe that the 
 things which had beaten into him down there in the wood were 
 lies. He knew they weren't, even when Roberta came back, 
 when his soul melted in an unexpected and indescribable 
 tenderness at the sight and promise of her. Nature had 
 cheated him, but at least she had given him three months of 
 the truest happiness he had known, three months in which 
 the thought of his child had somehow purified his relationship 
 with Roberta. He had devoted himself to her, found new queer 
 little ways of pleasing her, of keeping her bright and cheer- 
 ful. . . . And then that door shut in his face; that night, 
 white and full of suspense . . . and, presently, Roberta's 
 passionate distaste, "I've had enough of that side of life, 
 thank you ... 1" 
 
 241
 
 242 INTRUSION 
 
 She meant it: at least there was no mistaking that. . . , 
 No mistaking, either, his own position. He wanted to go 
 and he couldn't. He was bound to Roberta by this passion 
 of the senses, by this horrible emotion of love that had, as it 
 were, no backbone of self-respect. It wouldn't last for ever. 
 He knew that: knew that the sort of feeling he had for 
 Roberta was of its essence transitory. It would pass. Some 
 day the revulsion would come; he would be free of her. But 
 not yet. . . . 
 
 Meantime he fell back on his pride, on his work and on the 
 barely-formed thought that Roberta some day might capitu- 
 late. . . . Even his pride wouldn't save him if she did. He 
 knew that, too. His contempt for himself was colossal. 
 
 Much of it his work absorbed. His evenings went in the 
 preparation of some pamphlet he had undertaken to get out 
 for one of the many Societies he attended but did not join. 
 He was doing it not because he cared for that sort of thing, 
 but because it was one of the few things he could do, for 
 though he had the reformist sense he lacked courage. The 
 crude, ugly facts he tilted at on paper drained him, in actuality, 
 of hope. He didn't believe you could alter things; at least 
 not enough to matter. His sense of humour boggled at the 
 spectacle of a world awry crying out for the man with a vision 
 and being offered a politican with an Act of Parliament under 
 his arm. Broadening down from precedent to precedent? 
 an irritating phrase that made a mere lifetime look so stupid. 
 And people were stupid, too: even the people who suffered 
 most, because they would not fight and distrusted change. As 
 though some day they hoped the luck might alter; the wheel 
 spin round. . . . Even the pamphlet he was writing would 
 be read, Allan knew, by the wrong people. Yet he went on 
 in a sort of hopeful hopelessness, even under the eye of 
 Roberta's scorn and his knowledge of Guen's verdict of 
 futility. 
 
 Somehow, here, Guen mattered most. . . . Perhaps because 
 she wouldn't leave the subject alone. All this propaganda 
 bad for his art. Besides, Allan was the wrong person. In 
 the practical world of reform you had to be hard : harder than 
 Allan, anyway. You had to be the sort of person facts didn't 
 hurt. . . . Whenever they met she and Allan went over the 
 ground afresh: mentally they picked up their feet and put
 
 INTRUSION 243 
 
 them down again in the same place an absurd proceeding, as 
 Allan, impatient, pointed out. 
 
 "But then we are absurd," Guen said. "Absurd and utterly 
 futile. None of us matter, over-much : the word 'indispensable* 
 ought to be cut out of the dictionary. Nobody's indispensable: 
 most of us simply don't count. We believe (some of us) in 
 ideas, and work for our Bottomleys. We loathe Mammon, 
 and form part of the procession in his temple. Oh, I know 
 it's inevitable, that we can't afford to choose, can't afford to 
 think, that if we did there'd be no place for us in the world 
 at all. But that only makes our futility the more unanswer- 
 able. ... I'd like to have Caryl's faith in the essential goodness 
 and meaning of life, but I haven't got it. ... To me, life's 
 the one real absurdity, the ultimate outrage. . . ." 
 
 But Roberta's critical eye turned not upon life, but upon 
 Allan who wrestled with it. She complained that he was 
 neglecting her. 
 
 "When you've done reforming the world," she said, "p'raps 
 you'll remember me." 
 
 "But you can't be reformed," Allan said. 
 
 "Neither can the world," said Roberta. "I agree with 
 Guen. Much better leave it alone." (Had Guen really said 
 that?) "And I'm tired of the sight of you sitting there 
 write, write, write. I'm your wife . . . (she could say that!) 
 but I suppose I don't count." 
 
 It was difficult not to hate her: difficult not to point out 
 that she was not his wife . . . that he owed her nothing. 
 He did hate her, sometimes; but sometimes, too, he put away 
 his work and took her to the theatre. 
 
 Roberta was very clever: she believed in keeping up appear- 
 ances, so that nobody guessed. But she was horribly dull. 
 Tommy had gone to America. So had Rayne. Roberta had 
 met one of the Invertebrates one day who had given her this 
 information. She also said that Tommy had "chucked" Rayne, 
 and seemed surprised that Roberta had not guessed that 
 Tommy had been Rayne's mistress. "She never made a secret 
 of it with us. I s'pose she thought you were too young to 
 know. Not that she stuck to him or him to her ... he was 
 gone on you, once, wasn't he? Of course he was 'fasdnatmg." 
 
 Roberta reflected that Tommy had played her a mean trick, 
 but Tommy was good company. You were never dull with.
 
 244 INTRUSION 
 
 her. She wished vaguely that Tommy had not gone to 
 America. She wished, too, that Caryl would come in more 
 often, and that she would bring Dick Merrick to see her. 
 Caryl had been engaged to him a whole month and Roberta 
 had not yet set eyes upon him. It was true that Pen in her 
 new loquacious mood had been informative, had told her that 
 Dick was a popular favourite, but restless. He couldn't settle 
 down, had done nothing definite since his release from the 
 Army, beyond taking a languid interest in one or two ventures 
 which had come to nothing. Of course that, as Pen said, 
 wouldn't "do." The man who was going to marry Caryl 
 must have an assured income. Besides, it wasn't good for a 
 man to hang about, doing nothing. Roberta had agreed. 
 Certainly men ought to work. That was the one certain fact 
 in an uncertain world. She never doubted it. 
 
 "Tell her to bring him to tea," Roberta said. "Only not 
 a Sunday, because if Allan's here he'll button-hole him and I 
 shan't get a look in." 
 
 May went by in her green-gold sandals and it was in the 
 second week of June that Caryl came in, alone, to tea. Dick 
 had gone to Sheffield: would be there a week. Caryl was full 
 of two pieces of news. Her father had been smitten by the 
 idea that Dick, by virtue of his Jan-like smile and his Jan-like 
 "charm," must possess at least a modicum of his talent for 
 extracting orders from a granite block. Anyway, Sheffield 
 was to be the acid test: if it came off Dick was to have a 
 junior partnership in the firm and was "settled" for life. An 
 awful nuisance all this fuss about a proper income. . . . Her 
 second item of news was much more interesting, Caryl thought : 
 it was that Dick had sold his ramshackle old car and in its 
 place had bought a motor-cycle and sidecar. Caryl and he 
 had ideas about scouring England during the summer months. 
 
 "Well, you might begin with Number Sixteen," said Roberta. 
 "You're a pig to keep him all to yourself." 
 
 "I know," said Caryl, "but Berta, I don't have much of 
 him, you know I don't really. I have to be so strict with 
 myself I keep saying 'no' when I'm simply dying to say 'yes.'
 
 INTRUSION 245 
 
 I simply haven't time to be engaged. . . That's what Dick says. 
 He's not a bit keen on my. swotting ... he isn't a bit 'brainy.' 
 Yet, really, he's much cleverer than / am. He knows all the 
 things that matter. . . . (I don't quite know what they are, but 
 he knows them.) Berta . . . didn't you love being engaged ?" 
 
 "Rather," said Roberta. "It's much more fun than being 
 married! I shouldn't be in a hurry, if I were you. When 
 you're married it's different. Marriage is awfully changing. . . ." 
 
 "Who changes? The woman?" 
 
 "No, the man. . . . Oh, marriage is horrid for the woman." 
 
 "You don't really think that," said Caryl. 
 
 "Don't I? Nobody ever says what they think about mar- 
 riage. I don't see why everybody pretends. . . . Oh, you 
 needn't think I've been quarrelling with Allan. I haven't. 
 I never quarrel with Allan. ... To start with, I couldn't. 
 He hardly knows I'm here. He's everlastingly writing. I 
 don't mind telling you, my dear, that my life's damn dull. . . . 
 I'd rather, any day, be back in the old studio. Marriage is 
 rotten. . . . It's just what Tommy used to say: when you're 
 married you're expected to be maid-of-all-work, wife, child- 
 bearer and general cook ... all for nothing. . . ." 
 
 "No for love, surely," said Caryl. 
 
 "Oh, love!" said Roberta. "I don't believe in it, and any- 
 way it's poor payment. You can't buy anything with it." 
 
 "Don't you love Allan?" 
 
 "I don't know. ... I liked him, once, better than anybody 
 else." 
 
 "And now?" 
 
 "Well, there just isn't anybody else. . . . I'm fed-up. Allan 
 doesn't care about anything but his beastly writing. Write, 
 write, write. Every night it's the same ... as soon as ever 
 dinner's finished." 
 
 "You should teach him better." 
 
 "Oh, I'm tired of trying. I let him get on with it. . . ." 
 
 "Don't you ... care?" 
 
 "Not so long as he leaves me alone." 
 
 But Caryl was very far from understanding. She said : 
 
 "I know Allan can be very trying, but he's awfully fond of 
 you, Berta." 
 
 "Queen Anne's dead," said Roberta. "Let's talk of some- 
 thing else. When will you bring Mr. Merrick?"
 
 246 INTRUSION 
 
 "Never if you call him that. He's 'Dick' to everyone." 
 
 "He mayn't like me," said Roberta. 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "I may bore him stiff. . . ." 
 
 "You won't," said Caryl. "I've told you, Dick isn't brainy." 
 
 "You're very complimentary, I must say!" 
 
 "Oh, I'm awfully sorry. . . . But really, you'll get on admira- 
 bly. . . . You see ... you're so dreadfully pretty." Her voice 
 was a little wistful. 
 
 "I feel plain enough these days," said Roberta, angry that 
 she must waste her sweetness now upon the desert air. It 
 didn't do to flirt, even ever so mildly, with Allan, and there was 
 simply nobody else. Some day she would hate Allan. 
 
 But except in sudden gusts of anger it wasn't possible for 
 her really to hate anybody. There wasn't enough passion in 
 her for that. Yet sometimes as she watched Allan's grave 
 face bent over his work she thought, "Good heavens! I'm 
 twenty-three! How long am I to go on with this? If only 
 Allan would go off with some other girl . . . put himself in 
 the wrong. . . ." 
 
 Anne Suffield noticed presently that something was amiss. 
 She thought Roberta was restless and discontented. So dread- 
 ful for her that her child had died. . . . She had suffered 
 terribly . . . seemed to have been plucked up by the roots. . . . 
 
 Roberta considered that a safe card to play. She didn't 
 suppose Allan would give her away, and if he did, so much the 
 better. . . . He'd have everybody against him. The role of 
 the bereaved mother. ... It would suit her admirably. 
 
 Allan did not "give her away." He was tired. His unsatis- 
 fied passion was wearing him out. There were times when 
 he could hardly keep his hands off Roberta, and he hid it 
 not only that, but the surge of emotions that swept over him 
 beneath an appearance of calm so absolute that even Anne 
 Suffield wondered if it might not be indifference. She 
 thought Allan was rather too wrapped up in his work. "Don't 
 you think, dear," she asked, "that perhaps you leave Roberta 
 rather too much to herself? Isn't she, perhaps, rather lonely?" 
 
 "Does she complain?" 
 
 "Complain? Berta? Oh no, dear. I didn't for a moment 
 mean to suggest that. . . . Only, things have been rather hard 
 upon her. ... Of course, she may have another child. . . ."
 
 INTRUSION 247 
 
 Allan said nothing. 
 
 "Meanwhile, dear, you oughtn't to forget how young she 
 is ... and how pretty." 
 
 "No," said Allan dryly. "Strangely enough, mother, that's 
 a thing I never forget." 
 
 This sort of conversation didn't take you very far. 
 
 In the middle of June Antony Gore offered Allan another 
 chance of the sub-editorship of The Miscellany. The sixth 
 number was just going to press and A.G., who had other irons 
 in the fire, wanted the bulk of the work it represented taken 
 off his hands; for since Allan had refused at the beginning to 
 come in he had gone on single-handed. "Ask Allan again," 
 Guen had suggested, "I think it very likely he'll accept now." 
 "Reasons," she said in reply to A.G.'s laconic "Why?" But 
 she didn't tell him what they were. 
 
 Roberta was clever at keeping up appearances, but not quite 
 clever enough, perhaps, for Guen, who had quite recently paid 
 a visit to Number Sixteen. But Guen was right. Allan was 
 asked and Allan accepted. When it was all over, when he 
 had shaken hands with his chief and turned his back on the 
 Comet for ever, he told Roberta. It was not so much that he 
 had not meant to tell her as that, quite simply, it hadn't 
 occurred to him. He was getting so used to ordering his life 
 without Roberta. 
 
 And Roberta said nothing just shrugged her shoulders as 
 though his affairs had no interest for her, as indeed they had 
 not. She only wanted, in her own expressive language, to 
 "get quit" of Allan to get out of the net. What a fool she 
 was to have married him 1 When she might have done so much 
 better for herself! 
 
 So she shrugged her shoulders at his news. . . . Really, she 
 didn't care what he did. All the same, her boredom reached 
 the point at times when she was flung back upon caring, when 
 she had to ask him to take her out. . . . Twice in one week. 
 (She was reduced to that! If only Tommy had not gone to 
 America or would come back . . . !) And on both occasions 
 Allan refused. It was on the second that Roberta said sweetly, 
 "I see. . . . We can't afford luxuries nowadays."
 
 248 INTRUSION 
 
 "We can afford the pit of a theatre, if that is what you 
 mean." 
 
 "It isn't," she said. "Not the pit. . . . But if we can afford 
 it why can't we go?" 
 
 "Because I'm too busy." 
 
 "I don't matter, I suppose?" 
 
 "Not very much." 
 
 "You're a nice sort of husband, aren't you?" 
 
 "You should know best." 
 
 "I wonder why on earth you ever married me!" she said. 
 
 "I don't," said Allan. "I know." 
 
 "So do I because you knew you couldn't get what you 
 wanted without." 
 
 He wanted to strangle her, but he said quietly, "You put 
 it vulgarly but truthfully." 
 
 Roberta smiled. "And you call that 'love'?" 
 
 "There you mistake. I shouldn't dream of calling it any 
 such thing." 
 
 "I don't believe in 'love,' " said Roberta. 
 
 "I am aware of it. That being so it's extraordinary that 
 you should have been able to teach me so well what love is 
 and is not." 
 
 "Well you pretended you were in love with me, anyhow." 
 
 "In love! That's a very different matter. . . ." 
 
 She knit her brows and passed on. "Well, you can't say / 
 ever pretended. ... I never told you I was in love with you. 
 You knew I married you to get away from Manningtree 
 Avenue and mother. Particularly mother." 
 
 "I see," he said. "Any other man would have done as 
 well?" 
 
 "Any presentable man. . . ." 
 
 "I'm glad I came up to standard." 
 
 She laughed and came and sat on the edge of the table. 
 
 "I liked you," she said, "because you were different. At 
 least I thought you were different. . . . You never asked me 
 to spend week-ends with you." 
 
 "I see. I appealed as a novelty?" 
 
 "Well, I wasn't used to it. ... Not exactly. Men are awful 
 beasts. Even the nice ones like that brother of yours." 
 
 "He won't offend again," said Allan. "We can leave him 
 out of it. May this conversation now end?"
 
 INTRUSION 249 
 
 "You mean I'm to shut up? My conversation bores you?" 
 
 "I mean it doesn't seem very profitable." 
 
 Roberta sat there swinging her legs, a little mocking smild 
 on her lips. 
 
 "You think you're awfully clever, don't you?" she said. 
 
 Allan shrugged his shoulders and looked down at his unfin- 
 ished work. 
 
 "I wish," he said, "you'd go away." 
 
 He looked up at her and the blood came suddenly into his 
 face. He understood she was flirting with him; she was 
 amusing herself, but, also, she wanted to assert herself to 
 prove that she still had the power to make him do what she 
 wanted. Not that she really wanted him to kiss her: she 
 only wanted him to want to kiss her and take her out. And 
 only that because she was dull. Her manless world was a 
 desert. . . . 
 
 "Go away," said Allan again. 
 
 "I shan't," she said. 
 
 He got up and came to her. 
 
 "Well ?" she said. "You look very fierce." 
 
 The light, dropping directly upon her hair, called out its 
 latent loveliness. Out of the dark green frock she was wear- 
 ing her exquisitely modelled face and neck rose like a flower 
 on its stalk. Her beauty had come back had emerged from 
 the mist that had shrouded it through the winter and early 
 spring. And she had grown a little plumper. As he looked at 
 her the old throb of the senses came back to him: his mind 
 seemed to stop short as he looked at her. The old yearning 
 swept over him: the old longing to see in her all he had 
 imagined she might one day become. And then, suddenly, it 
 had gone. He didn't care what she was or was not. He only 
 knew she was beautiful. ... He pulled her up against him and 
 kissed her roughly. 
 
 "I hate being kissed like that," she said. 
 
 "Sorry," he said. "Go and get your things on." 
 
 He would pay for his kiss. He would pay for anything else 
 she gave him. So much for so much. . . . He shrugged his 
 shoulders. Well, what was he grumbling at? He'd always 
 known that when it came to the point his pride wouldn't save 
 him. . . . 
 
 It hadn't.
 
 CHAPTER THREE 
 
 CARYL'S plan of scouring England in Dick's sidecar did 
 not appear to mature very quickly. In the early sum- 
 mer Dick was out of town a good deal and on his 
 unexpected reappearances circumstances were usually horribly 
 against them. Once, unromantically, Caryl had a bilious attack; 
 once, not expecting him, she had gone off to Green Hedges 
 for the week-end, and once or twice some lecture she dare not 
 miss got in the way. But at least she fulfilled her promise 
 and took Dick to have tea with Roberta. 
 
 And Roberta had found him interesting. She liked the look 
 of him, with his dark blue eyes, narrow, short-lidded like 
 Caryl's own, giving that impression of laughter even when his 
 mouth was serious. His features, though clear-cut, were not 
 remarkable, save for the laughing blue eyes, to which your 
 own always came back. He had an excellent skin, unusually 
 fair, of the kind that tans easily, and a wide mouth, not 
 beautiful, but with teeth that were, to redeem it. And he 
 had charm a stupid word that may mean anything or nothing. 
 In Dick's case it seemed to mean good temper, a trick of 
 making people care for him, and another of wearing the 
 honours of his victories gracefully. Certainly they cost him 
 little beside, perhaps, a sort of sincere insincerity. He looked 
 happy and free, and perhaps because people are so seldom 
 either the one or the other they loved him for the illusion. 
 They used about him the phrase "a nice boy"; a nice boy, 
 Guen thought, who took people (even Caryl) and things a 
 little too much for granted, and with a gift for seeing no 
 more than he wanted to see. She had the impression that 
 he didn't feel very much or very deeply: as though he had 
 not yet gone far down to the waters of life, but stood pot- 
 tering about on the edge. He needed, she thought, to suffer. 
 Even after the war and his share in it she thought that; 
 
 250
 
 INTRUSION 251 
 
 for the war had caught him young and had been kind. His 
 flights over the German lines had been so many exciting 
 adventures: no time for fear, no time for thought. Even 
 those two crashes, of which only Caryl knew the facts, had 
 been adventures, too "awfully big adventures" you felt, as 
 Peter Pan said of Death. They hadn't destroyed his nerve. 
 He was like a schoolboy, and his imagination, if he had any, 
 did not oppress him. Already the memory of the war was 
 dropping from him like a cloak from his shoulders, just as it 
 had done with Jan. Queer, Guen thought, how people could 
 forget what she wouldn't forget in a lifetime. She hid her 
 envy under a moment's anger; with herself, with the people 
 who forgot. What did it matter, anyway, what happened to 
 a world that forgot as easily as all that? 
 
 But certainly it mattered what happened to Caryl, and Guen 
 wondered sometimes how firmly she held Dick. Easy enough 
 to see how firmly he held her. Yet that exhilarating sense they 
 had of To-day, that still more invigorating sense of To-morrow, 
 surely that ought to do something for them ? 
 
 Roberta, on his first visit, though she found Caryl's beloved 
 interesting, found him also a little disappointing. At no point 
 during the afternoon had he shown that he was aware of her 
 in the way that young men of his age usually were, and Roberta 
 deserved some credit for the perspicacity which got through 
 to the charm which, for that short interval, was certainly in 
 abeyance. "He'd be all right," she thought, "if you could 
 get at him," and the bulk of the conversation was left to Caryl 
 while Roberta worked out the problem thus presented. Because 
 she, most certainly, was not "getting at him." He seemed 
 hardly to look at her and showed an unflattering anxiety to fall 
 in with Caryl's suggestion that they must be getting along. It 
 was true Caryl had said Dick didn't care what a girl looked 
 like; but Roberta knew that if it was true of any man in the 
 world (and she doubted it), it certainly wasn't true of Richard 
 Merrick. Let Caryl think it, little fool, if she liked. . . . She 
 obviously did, or she'd never let him see her in brown the 
 colour of all others she ought never to wear. How was it she 
 didn't see that her particular shade of brown hair was ruined 
 by the colour of her frock, that it robbed it of life, made it 
 drab and uninteresting? So silly of Caryl not to be more 
 careful !
 
 252 INTRUSION 
 
 But Caryl, ignorant of sartorial shortcomings, was oppressed 
 by those of Dick's mood. Really, not at all a successful 
 afternoon. 
 
 "Didn't you like her?" she asked him out in the roadway, 
 and Dick said, "Oh, she's all right . . . not much in her. A 
 sort of anodyne, isn't she? I mean she looks as though she'd 
 make life practically painless. . . ." 
 
 "How disappointing you are! I wanted you to admire her 
 tremendously. And she specially wanted to see you." 
 
 "Well, she's seen me." 
 
 "But you'll go again? You do like her well enough for 
 that?" 
 
 "What an extraordinary creature you are! Always shoving 
 me on to somebody else. It used to be Marjorie. . . ." 
 
 "Oh, rot!" said Caryl. "Besides, you needn't pretend it 
 was any hardship. . . . You know you like Marjorie quite a 
 lot. And I did want you and Roberta to be friends." 
 
 "You're a most unnatural creature," Dick told her as he took 
 her arm and felt her press herself against him. 
 
 "Reason number one," she said. 
 
 "Because you're always wanting me to like other girls." 
 
 "Only girls I like. . . . Why shouldn't you? I'm not a 
 vampire: you're too good to keep all to yourself. ... I can't 
 think how anybody lives, somehow, without knowing you. I 
 don't mind sharing a little bit of you if I can have all the other 
 part . . . the best part . . . for myself. Reason number two?" 
 
 "You don't powder your face." 
 
 "No good. I've got the sort of skin powder won't stop on. 
 Besides, they don't make any powder that looks well on a brown 
 skin. . . . But Roberta doesn't use powder, either!" 
 
 "What! You mean to say it's real?" 
 
 "Every bit. Oh, Dick!" (a comical look of dismay came 
 on Caryl's face) "you don't mean to say you thought she 
 made up?" 
 
 "Of course I did. Most of the complexions that look too 
 good to be true, aren't. . . . Besides, those eyes with that skin 
 and hair!" 
 
 Allan heard of Dick's visit with no particular interest. He 
 did not think Dick good enough for Caryl, though he saw 
 plainly enough what it was Caryl liked about him. He had 
 her sense of life, her radiant happiness hi the mere fact of exist-
 
 INTRUSION 253 
 
 ence. Allan granted him that, but with this difference: he 
 cared about life because life was pleasant. Allan did not 
 believe his happiness was innate, as was Caryl's, as much a 
 part of her as her skin. Whatever you had or had not, there 
 was always the coloured pageantry of life. ... So she might 
 have that, Caryl, in rags upon life's highway, would go 
 blithely. But for Dick the coloured pageantry would not be 
 enough: he would want a coloured part of his own, complete 
 with his nicely cooked food, his assured income and his motor- 
 cycle or whatever the toy of the moment might be. He could 
 not be happy, as Caryl could, with his eyes wide open. He'd 
 see, Allan felt, no more ever than he wanted to see, and yet 
 that phrase lodged in the mind. He was, quite definitely, "a 
 nice boy." 
 
 Allan, to Dick, was a "queer fish." To Caryl he called 
 him the Revolutionary, sniffed, as much as Caryl would allow 
 him, at his ideas, and without knowing it paraphrased Steven- 
 son in approval of the Allan behind them quite mad, of 
 course, but decent awfully decent. Of Guen he declared he 
 was terrified. Pure intellect, he told Caryl, knocked him flat. 
 
 "You can see her intellect sticking out of her," he said. 
 "Just look -at her forehead. It makes me want to hide." 
 
 And when Caryl said: "What'll happen when I get my 
 degree?" he told her that she was different that her intellect 
 didn't stick out. "You don't look clever. You just look alive." 
 
 "Same to you!" said Caryl, and they grinned at each other, 
 as though they knew exactly where the bond that held them 
 was strongest. 
 
 It happened that summer that the Hestons abandoned the 
 solidly-built Berkshire house they called the Cottage in favour 
 of something they called a bungalow somewhere else, and the 
 Suffields, tempted by the early fine weather, took it off their 
 hands. Thither, at the end of June, Anne Suffield departed, 
 taking Caryl and Roberta with her, because Caryl, she thought, 
 was working too hard and Roberta looked as though she wanted 
 a change. She did: and though it was not quite the change 
 afforded by the Berkshire cottage, she had reached the point 
 when anything was better than Meldon Avenue. Caryl, torn.
 
 254 INTRUSION 
 
 from her work, went protesting, until Dick came home with an 
 interregnum yawning between Manchester and Leeds and went 
 off to Wokingham to dispose of it. 
 
 Peace reigned. 
 
 During that fortnight of Roberta's absence Allan strove 
 resolutely to put her out of his thoughts. He was very busy. 
 The new number of The Miscellany was going to press, and his 
 pen itched to get to work on the proofs of his satires which 
 Guen had eventually succeeded in getting him to collect. That 
 young woman herself was in town; having fled shrieking, so 
 she alleged, from the quiet and comfort of Green Hedges, which 
 at times got on her nerves, as the weather will on other people's. 
 Here, during the long July days, she worked at A.G.'s old 
 room in Bloomsbury, and sometimes Allan took his work there 
 in the afternoons and stayed to meet the people who dropped 
 in later to tea. 
 
 It was not until Roberta came home that Allan realised how 
 frequently Madeleine Hervey had been included among them. 
 There was really no reason why Roberta should not have 
 dropped in to tea at the Attic, but it took Allan by surprise 
 when she did. It was the day following her return, very few 
 people had turned up, and he and Madeleine sat together 
 on the verandah. They had gone out there primarily because 
 of the heat; but it wasn't always the heat which explained why 
 they paired off together in this fashion. The truth was they 
 were getting into the habit of sitting themselves down together 
 in some corner and forgetting the rest of the company, although 
 this, too, Allan did not realise until Roberta, not by anything 
 she said, but by her very presence, had drawn his attention to 
 it. Her eyes had taken them in as she entered the room; not 
 only the close-drawn intimacy of their chairs, but the eager 
 glow upon their faces as they talked; the obvious air of 
 having forgotten their surroundings. But she refrained from 
 coming out to them and made herself amiable enough to Miss 
 Hardwick and the gentleman with knee-breeches, who got on 
 with her admirably because he could see that she had a beautiful 
 face and guessed that she was stupid. He was essentially the 
 sort of man who was never really at home with a woman unless 
 he could, ever so faintly, despise her. 
 
 Roberta and Madeleine had never met since that first after- 
 noon eighteen months ago at Teddington, but when Allan came
 
 INTRUSION 255 
 
 into the room and brought Madeleine over to Roberta, that 
 young woman was affability itself. 
 
 "Of course I remember you," she said. "You came to tea, 
 didn't you? And you had a headache. Isn't this a nice room?" 
 
 They abandoned Allan and walked round together looking 
 at it, and as his eyes followed Roberta (as did the eyes of all 
 the other men in the room) he realised with something akin 
 to dismay that she had not done with him yet nor he with her. 
 Even now, with a single turn of her lovely head, she could 
 possess him anew. The beauty to which a year ago he had 
 surrendered held him still, and not all his knowledge of the 
 poverty of mind and spirit behind it could make it otherwise. 
 She had nothing to give that was worth while, but there were 
 still to be times when he would relinquish everything for just 
 that something worthless she had it in her power to bestow. 
 Some day that might no longer be true, but it was true now. 
 He was as far as ever from opening the door and walking out, 
 and that feeling of dismay came to him again as he realised 
 how much more difficult it was going to be now to keep things 
 up to play Roberta's game as he had played it for the past 
 two months, though heaven alone knew how or why or what 
 he hoped to gain by it. At least their life together had flowed 
 along on a semblance of amiability. They had few open dis- 
 agreements. He had been able to go on with his work and had 
 lived for a whole fortnight without her. It had looked like a 
 triumph. . . . 
 
 And he saw now that it wasn't, for here was Roberta again, 
 beckoning him with the colour and grace and sheer delight of 
 her. So markedly had she the appearance of possessing all the 
 feminine graces, it was difficult, even now, when his passion no 
 longer deluded him, to realise that they all belonged to her 
 body that her soul was lean and angular. 
 
 At the corner of the Tottenham Court Road Allan refused 
 Guen's invitation to go off somewhere together for a meal and 
 climbed with Roberta into a North London bus, which was 
 crowded, so that they had to strap-hang. And Roberta, leaning 
 to Allan, expressed her chagrin that he should not have accepted 
 Guen's offer.
 
 256 INTRUSION 
 
 "If you're going to work all the evening," she said, "it 
 won't be very lively for me, and as Miss Hervey would have 
 been there too I should have thought you'd have jumped at it." 
 
 He looked at her. She smiled. 
 
 "Oh, it's all right. I'm not jealous. After all, she's your 
 sort. ... I don't blame you. You ought to have married 
 someone lit'ry. . . ." 
 
 "Two, please," said Allan to the conductor, and was astound- 
 ingly grateful to the young man in the corner who at that 
 moment caught sight of Roberta's face and rose to give her 
 his seat. 
 
 Left to his thoughts and his strap, Allan wondered for just 
 one second why he should have received the impression that 
 Roberta approved of this friendship with Madeleine Hervey 
 that she wanted, for some reason or other, to encourage it. 
 And then the thought rode out upon the tide of his gratitude 
 that at least she had not objected that she had not pushed 
 Madeleine with wifely determination into the background. He 
 tried to think what he would have done if she had . . . what, 
 too, he was going to do when Guen went back to Green Hedges 
 and these afternoon meetings with Madeleine came to an end. 
 Somehow this afternoon his friendship with her seemed like a 
 tonic after the fever of his passion for Roberta. It was as if 
 his year with Roberta had drained him to the dregs, emptied 
 him of strength and vitality* as though Madeleine, with her 
 quiet eyes, her restful presence, poured strength into him again, 
 making him whole, building up his self-respect. Her attraction 
 for Allan was, so far, a purely sexless thing, for in Madeleine, 
 as in Caryl, sex did not flaunt itself. You desired her not as a 
 woman, but as a human being. She was devoid of tricks, and 
 if she had beauty it was not of the devastatingly feminine kind. 
 That, perhaps, was a virtue you could not wholly appreciate 
 unless you had lived with Roberta. But Allan had. . . . 
 Strange what a lot of things Roberta had inadvertently taught 
 him: but nothing, surely, as strange as this, that she should 
 have shown him the beauty of Madeleine's friendship and his 
 own poignant need of it.
 
 CHAPTER FOUR 
 
 CARYL came back from Wokingham with a cold, a gen- 
 eral inability to work, and evasive replies about her 
 holiday. She brought back, too, a strange un-Caryl- 
 like reserve alternately shrouded and revealed by the air of 
 smouldering excitement which hung about her. She went often 
 to Meldon Avenue, so often that when she could forget how 
 much time it took up, how much study it dissipated, Anne 
 Suffield smiled with approval, for she still thought Allan did 
 not realise how much he left Roberta to herself; how few 
 friends she seemed to have. 
 
 Yet even with Roberta Caryl preserved her odd new manner 
 of excitement. She talked less or she talked too much, and 
 occasionally she flashed out something which betrayed the 
 trouble beneath, or would have betrayed it to anyone but 
 Roberta. There was the morning she came in upon that young 
 woman struggling with the aftermath of the washing of her 
 hair. A red-gold mop, it hung drying upon her shoulders. 
 Caryl had thrown herself down in a seat by the window, talked 
 of a thousand and one things that didn't matter and then, 
 suddenly, had said the one thing that did. "I wish I'd let 
 my hair grow, Berta!" 
 
 And Roberta had said, "Now don't be soppy! You only say 
 that because Dick said those silly things that day I washed my 
 hair at the Cottage." 
 
 "What day? I don't remember," Caryl said in the new 
 evasive way that had come to her of late. 
 
 But she did remember. The whole scene rose up now before 
 her. ... Dick running his fingers through Roberta's hair and 
 turning to Caryl with a little laugh. "Why didn't you ever 
 let your hair grow, Caryl? I wonder what you'd look like with 
 long hair?" And Caryl (she remembered this, too) had grown 
 
 257
 
 258 INTRUSION 
 
 very hot about the face and said, "Oh, much the same, I 
 expect!" But later, upstairs in her own room, she had looked 
 at herself critically in the glass and clenched her hands. "It's 
 true," she had admitted. "It's damn monotonous, this short 
 hair! . . . There's never any surprise in it!" And she had 
 remembered the surprise in Dick's face when he had come in 
 and seen Roberta sitting there before the fire. . . . 
 
 She had stayed up there in her room, half-sick with misery : 
 not understanding quite why it assailed her, but understanding 
 enough, anyhow. Beside Roberta she was so plain. She felt 
 plain. ... It wasn't that she felt jealous of Roberta: it was 
 only that Roberta showed you, somehow, the enormous possi- 
 bilities of the human face. You were crushed by the knowledge 
 of your own limitations just when you wanted to look your 
 best. Caryl remembered that impulsive cry of hers to Guen, 
 that sudden frantic longing after an "harmonious" face, and 
 Guen's laugh as she drew her "unwarrantable conclusions" 
 ("You should take the precaution of falling in love with a man 
 who never looks at faces!"). It was impossible to believe there 
 were such men. All men looked at faces. Faces mattered to 
 them tremendously. You might despise them for it, but you 
 couldn't alter them. 
 
 To-day she paused in her admiration for Roberta's unbound 
 hair to remember that little twinge of pain she had suffered 
 when Dick had admired it a few yesterdays ago. And not only 
 the incident of the hair, but something that had belonged to 
 the evening that followed it. 
 
 They had started out, the three of them, for a stroll, and at 
 the last moment Caryl had run back to change a shoe which 
 was chafing her heel. There was a knot in one of the laces, 
 which delayed her, so that when she got down to the gate Dick 
 and Roberta were out of sight. They had not said in which 
 direction they were going (Caryl was positive about that), and 
 she set off along the route of a walk she and Dick most favoured, 
 which they had named the Triangle. But a quarter of an hour's 
 brisk walking failed to bring her on the heels of the earlier 
 starters. She stood by a field gate and considered the situation. 
 "This is absurd," she thought; "they might have waited a 
 minute." She didn't see how they could have come this way, 
 for the road ran straight from the point at which she stood, 
 and had they been in front she must have seen them. It wasn't
 
 INTRUSION 259 
 
 possible they had reached the little wood where you turned 
 off and came back along the third side of the Triangle. She 
 knew it wasn't possible and yet she went on. She came to the 
 little wood, pushed open its swing gate and slammed it after 
 her. If they had really come this way; if they were actually 
 down there in the wood, they would hear that and wait for her. 
 But they weren't in the wood: that was soon apparent. She 
 had the wood to herself she and the birds and the sunset. 
 
 And in the wood she sat down on a fallen tree trunk, not 
 looking at the sunset and desperately inclined to tears. She 
 was tired ; her shoe was chafing her heel again, and Dick and 
 Roberta had taken her beautiful evening and annihilated it. 
 And Caryl hated them for it. She hated Dick and Roberta. 
 
 She sat in the wood a long time, but presently she got up 
 and went on along the path out on to the hill from which the 
 long road, curving and curving, led eventually home. She had 
 walked slowly, not alone because her foot pained her, but 
 because she did not want to hurry: she did not want to meet 
 them. The sunset had flickered out in a palely-reflected 
 golden light through massed trees there at the top of the hill 
 behind her, and up the darkly-blue sky a yellow moon came 
 climbing slowly. The fragrance and sweetness of the July 
 night stabbed into her, so that her dull, inexplicable misery left 
 her. She took off the shoe that was hurting her, and then the 
 gravel roadway hurt her instead. She took off the other shoe 
 and walked on the grass that edged the road. There was a 
 heavy dew: it came through her thin stockings and drenched 
 her feet. When she got home she would have a hot bath and 
 go straight to bed. She must remember that: a summer cold 
 was so hateful. . . . But she didn't remember, for as she came 
 in at the gate of the Cottage Dick moved out of the strong light 
 of the hall into the soft darkness of the night. A little behind 
 him Caryl could see the gleam on Roberta's wonderful hair. 
 Dick's voice rang out. 
 
 "Where on earth have you been? We waited hours down 
 there by Walling's Farm." 
 
 Caryl stood still at the gate. The moonlight seemed to be 
 making Dick's face very white. "I never dreamt you were 
 going that way," she said. A cold hand had clutched at her 
 heart. 
 
 Roberta's voice from the doorway :
 
 2,60 INTRUSION 
 
 "But we said that way. I called out to you. . . . Down 
 past Walling's. . . ." 
 
 The cold hand became a red-hot iron. Her voice rang with 
 the pain of it. 
 
 "None of us said which way we were going. But of course 
 I thought we were going the Triangle walk. Why, Dick and 
 J always go that way. . . ." 
 
 Dick's voice again: 
 
 "I'm awfully sorry, old girl. It never occurred to me. . . . 
 It's miles round by the wood. I thought we were just going 
 for a stroll. Really, I'm most awfully sorry." 
 
 He had forgotten her walk . . . their walk . . . the walk 
 they had taken together hundreds of times, to which when they 
 agreed upon a walk their feet turned instinctively. Extraor- 
 dinary how a thing like that could hurt. Caryl swept on into 
 the house, past Dick, past the glowing, radiant vision of Roberta 
 in the doorway. In the hall she stopped to hang up her hat. 
 There was a queer burning sensation in her throat and at the 
 back of her eyes. Her voice slipped in like a knife between 
 Dick's explanations and Roberta's apologies. 
 
 "You needn't explain or apologise," she said. "You did it 
 on purpose.'* 
 
 For a second she stared at them, head up, eyes flashing, hold- 
 ing her shoes in one hand by the laces. Then with one swift 
 movement she dropped the shoes and ran quickly up the stairs 
 into her room. 
 
 Later, Dick tapping at her door and his voice, pleading, 
 "Caryl ... let me in, darling." And the sound of Caryl's 
 sobs filtered through the doorway even while she hardened her 
 heart and would not let him in. 
 
 In the morning she went downstairs and apologised. She 
 had a cold and a blistered heel, but neither mattered because 
 Dick was so penitent and suggested running over to Henley 
 and spending the day on the river. . . . 
 
 Roberta was very sweet about it. She accepted Caryl's 
 apologies and effaced herself quite beautifully and humbly. 
 Caryl felt she had been horrid to her simply horrid. And she 
 bore her no grudge at all. Her self-effacement was complete. 
 
 And not on that Henley day only, but for the remaining 
 evenings after dinner. Three of them sweet enough, you'd 
 have thought, to have wiped out the memory of that other
 
 INTRUSION 261 
 
 which had been so singularly unsuccessful. You'd have sworn 
 you'd forgotten all about it. And yet, here you were, remem- 
 bering it again this morning. Caryl took herself sharply to 
 task. 
 
 "How long is that hair going to take to dry?" she enquired. 
 
 "It's nearly dry. Why?" 
 
 "Well, can't we go out? I can't work the weather's too 
 hot or something. . . . Do come!" 
 
 Nothing loath, Roberta went off to get ready, and Caryl 
 amused herself by looking at the current copy of The Miscel- 
 lany, which contained a review by Guen of somebody's book 
 and a sonnet of Allan's about a view from a hill and what 
 "she said to him" as they sat there looking at it. Caryl 
 hated it. 
 
 Roberta came down drawing on her gloves. ("Gloves on 
 the Heath!" thought Caryl. "Oh, fair, fat woman, whom 
 nobody loves. Why do you walk through the fields in gloves?") 
 "Seen Allan's poem?" said Roberta. "The girl in it's me." 
 
 "Oh, rot!" said Caryl politely. 
 
 Roberta laughed. 
 
 "Fact. ... I always say the wrong thing, you know. I get 
 on Allan's nerves most horribly, shouldn't wonder. . . . He 
 ought to have married someone lit'ry like that Miss Hervey." 
 
 "I think it's perfectly beastly of you to say things like that," 
 Caryl flashed out, 
 
 "Why not if they're true? ... Of course, it's awfully nice 
 of you to stick up for me: but, well, I'm not the sort of wife 
 for Allan." Roberta looked at Caryl out of pathetic hazel 
 eyes. Her mouth quivered. "People who write ought to marry 
 people who write ... or people who understand what they 
 write, anyway. Of course, if you've got plenty of money it 
 doesn't matter so much." 
 
 "I don't see what money's got to do with it." 
 
 "Oh, well, you would fast enough if you were married. . . . 
 I mean, if you've got money you needn't be lonely. . . . You 
 can go about on your own." 
 
 "Are you lonely, Berta?" 
 
 "Well, I should be ... rather ... if it weren't for you. 
 Oh, I don't blame Allan. After all, birds of a feather, you 
 know. . . . It's only natural. If I were Allan I'm sure I
 
 262 INTRUSION 
 
 should want to talk to Miss Hervey quite as much as he does." 
 
 "But how often does Allan see Madeleine?" 
 
 "Oh, only at Guen's tea-parties, I s'pose. ... I don't 
 know. I never ask; but he goes there every afternoon now 
 Guen's at the Attic. . . . Oh, I don't mean he goes to see Miss 
 Hervey. But it takes up time, and then when he comes home 
 he has to work in the evenings, and whenever I suggest going 
 out he can't spare the time. ... It isn't exactly lively, for 
 me. . . . However, are we ready?" 
 
 They were and they set out. Caryl was very talkative on the 
 way down to the tube; but her thoughts moved as quickly as 
 her tongue. She was thinking that it was a shame if Allan was 
 really being beastly to Roberta; if he was neglecting her . . . 
 making her unhappy. These writing people! How absurd 
 they were always imagining that nothing mattered except the 
 making of books and articles. Books were all right in their 
 own way, of course, but they were, at bottom, a bloodless 
 substitute for life. In a stupendous assembly of books, the 
 sort of sight you stared at in the Reading Room of the British 
 Museum, there was something positively indecent. Anton 
 Tchehov was right when he said in one of his letters that to 
 have at the end of life nothing but a collection of books was 
 horrible. . . . One could read Tchehov because he didn't 
 attempt to squeeze all life between the covers of a book, 
 because he knew it couldn't really be done. Besides, there 
 were enough books in the world already; Caryl could see no 
 reason at all for adding to them. And that Allan could was 
 no reason at all for making Roberta unhappy. 
 
 For a week Caryl did little work, devoting herself to Roberta, 
 until a word from her mother (who thought she was over- 
 doing it) pulled her up. She settled down then and did a 
 fortnight's solid reading, whilst the weather broke up and 
 became wet and cold, and plans for week-ending at the Cottage 
 came to nothing. Dick was somewhere in the Midlands, where 
 it rained (so he wrote, despondent) everything but orders. 
 Then suddenly the sun appeared, briefly beautiful, and with 
 it a letter from Dick announcing his return on the Saturday. 
 Caryl received the letter on the Thursday evening, and on the
 
 INTRUSION 263 
 
 Friday afternoon she put away her work and went round to 
 Meldon Avenue to see if Roberta was at home and if she'd 
 come out somewhere and have tea. The sun and the promise 
 of Dick seemed altogether too much that afternoon for Caryl. 
 Work became suddenly impossible. 
 
 Roberta was at home. She came to the door, flushed and 
 beautiful and in one of her nicest frocks. "I thought you 
 were hard at it!" she said. "Guess who's here?" "Can't!" 
 'Caryl said and then her eyes fell upon a pair of gloves upon 
 vhe table in Roberta's hall. She picked them up and looked 
 at them. 
 
 "Dick!" she said and felt the colour flaming in the face she 
 turned enquiringly towards Roberta. 
 
 Roberta nodded. "I ran into him to-day coming along to 
 you. I said he'd catch it for coming home before time and 
 disturbing you. . . . He said he hadn't thought of that . . . 
 that he'd better take the jigger back and go off somewhere on 
 his own. ... I asked him to come in for tea ... he wouldn't 
 until I said you might drop in before he went I thought the 
 sun might tempt you out. . . ." 
 
 "It did," said Caryl, oppressed, somehow, by Roberta's volu- 
 bility. Something had gone wrong with her voice. She couldn't 
 control it. She was horribly aware that Dick had come out 
 of Roberta's little drawing-room and was coming towards 
 her. She didn't move; but all her being quivered with the 
 sense that flooded her that he had been standing just inside 
 the door of the room, listening to what Roberta had said. It 
 was as though he had been waiting in the wings for his cue. 
 
 "We never really thought you'd come!" said his voice behind 
 her. She made a superhuman effort and turned to face him, 
 her hands clenched tightly against Roberta's hall table. The 
 colour had faded from her brown face, her eyes were surpris- 
 ingly bright, her chin had an angry tilt. 
 
 "I'm quite sure you didn't," she said. 
 
 "Oh, don't be ridiculous, Caryl," Roberta said. "Come 
 and have some tea." 
 
 She led the way into the room where across a chair lay a 
 close-fitting hat and veil of Roberta's and on another Roberta's 
 shower-proof coat of rust red. Without a word Caryl crossed 
 to the French window, opened it and stepped out into the 
 garden, and there, by Roberta's kitchen door, stood Dick's
 
 264 INTRUSION 
 
 motor-cycle and sidecar. Gazing at it Caryl lived through an 
 awful moment. Her world rocked. It wasn't true. It simply 
 wasn't true, this story they had told her. 
 
 Whether Dick had come home early by accident or by design 
 this afternoon's encounter was no accident. Dick and Roberta 
 were going out together. That was certain. If she had been 
 half an hour later they would have been gone and she would 
 have known nothing about it. Here was Dick's sidecar and 
 there, in that room, where they expected her to have tea, were 
 Roberta's hat and cloak the little close-fitting hat and veil 
 and the rainproof coat which on a day like this Roberta would 
 never have worn if she hadn't being going in the sidecar. And 
 that pretty frock of Roberta's would she have worn that if 
 she hadn't been expecting Dick? Three weeks since Dick had 
 gone away and on his return he comes straight to Roberta. 
 He gave her this first afternoon: this first afternoon of sun- 
 shine. . . . Oh, she simply couldn't bear it. What did it 
 matter whether Roberta's story of her meeting with him was 
 true? What wasn't true was that Roberta had beguiled him 
 with thoughts of Caryl with the hope that he might see her 
 without having it on his conscience that he had "disturbed" 
 her work. He hadn't wanted her to come. She was horribly 
 certain of that -with the hideous finality of certainty that 
 leaves you quivering as from a physical blow. She turned 
 and walked back into the drawing-room. 
 
 Dick was there alone. He stood by the mantelshelf, hands 
 in pockets, looking glum. Caryl came in and sat on the arm of 
 a chair in the middle of the room. 
 
 "Do you usually take the sidecar away with you on your 
 business expeditions?" she asked. 
 
 Dick looked at her. 
 
 "Don't be idiotic," he said shortly. "I went home and got 
 the beastly thing on purpose to take you out." 
 
 "Or Roberta?" said Caryl. 
 
 Dick came over to where she sat and put his hands on hei 
 arms. She could feel his fingers, warm and deliberate, througl 
 her thin voile frock. His eyes had not lost their lurking 
 suspicion of a smile: they seemed now to be smiling do\ 
 into her own pathetic, appealing as she sat there, with his 
 hands upon her, her shoulders drooping with the blind, swift 
 misery that had descended upon her. 
 
 "You blessed idiot!" said Dick. 
 
 She dropped her face against his arm. He could feel he
 
 INTRUSION 265 
 
 kissing his sleeve, pressing herself against it. She was not 
 crying: save for that passionate pressure against his arm 
 that caressing movement of her mouth she was still as a 
 stone. 
 
 "It's all right," he said, "it's all right." 
 
 She stood up and stared at him out of tragic dark eyes. 
 
 "Dick I must go home," she said. 
 
 "Without any tea?" 
 
 "Tea? Oh, Dick, I couldn't " 
 
 The expression in her eyes baffled him, and he wished she'd 
 stand up straight in that arrow-like way he had always thought 
 a part of her. Even while he thought it she did it. He held 
 out his hand and drew her to him. He felt her elusiveness 
 had an air of gathering it and her up together. She shut her 
 eyes and endured his kisses, unresponsive. 
 
 "Dick ... I want to go home," she said when he'd finished. 
 
 "You shall . . . when you've kissed me." 
 
 "I can't . . . not now. . . ." 
 
 She was standing straight again: still darkly tragic her eyes 
 met his. 
 
 "I'm going home," she said, "now." 
 
 "It'll look so absurd. . . . Berta's getting tea." 
 
 You could hear her at it in there in the kitchen. Caryl 
 shook her head. 
 
 "I must go home," she said. "Don't come, please. . . ." 
 
 "Not come? Of course I'm coming. Don't be an ass." He 
 stood in the doorway, barring her exit. Her head went up. 
 
 "Dick, please ... I can't bear it if you come." 
 
 "Aren't you being rather idiotic?" he asked her. 
 
 "Probably," she said. 
 
 He lowered his arms and let her go. He watched her walk 
 down the narrow hall to the front door. She opened it and 
 was gone. She had left him ... in there . . . with Roberta . . . 
 to have tea. Why not? Wasn't that why he had gone there? 
 
 Was it? Did she really believe it? She didn't know. She 
 didn't see how she was ever going to know. And then the 
 thought, hot and biting, like acid dropping on her heart: "How 
 can I go on if I don't?" 
 
 Tea was over when she reached Adelaide Lodge, but Alice 
 brought up a cup to her. She drank it and sat there over her 
 books until the soft gong in the hall announced the serving
 
 66 INTRUSION 
 
 of their evening meal. She brushed her hair, averting her 
 eyes from the cartoon above her dressing-table of the Young 
 Person Who Means To Be Happy, and in her crushed voile 
 frock went down to the meal and the inquisitorial gaze of the 
 family and its interest in her afternoon. 
 
 The first five minutes were a blur, in which she heard herself 
 saying that Roberta had been at home, but was engaged and 
 couldn't come out. Pen said, "Engaged? Oh, too busy to 
 come out. That didn't sound a bit like Roberta. . . ." And 
 her mother: "You couldn't have gone far, dear. Oh, yes, it 
 lasted out the sunshine, if it comes to that. Artichokes, dear?" 
 Tom passed them to her. She shook her head. "I hate 
 artichokes . . . such an absurd name for a vegetable!" Tom 
 grinned. What time was she expecting Dick on the morrow? 
 She wasn't. "He'll just come," she said. "His letter only 
 said 'Saturday/ " Tom Warren winked solemnly across the 
 table to her father, as one who said, "These young folk I And 
 calling themselves lovers!" 
 
 Oh no, they hadn't guessed. They'd never believe she cared 
 as much as this so that it hurt in this appalling fashion even 
 to sight the possibility that he cared less. . . . Desperate, she 
 dragged the truth out of the corner of her mind in which it 
 was hiding and looked at it. What hurt her most was the 
 thought, nay the fear, that Dick -had lied to her, that he had 
 really been waiting there to get his cue from Roberta. She 
 wanted to know if what Roberta said was true if he had 
 encountered her by accident on his way to Adelaide Lodge 
 or if he and she had "arranged" it all beforehand. Hateful 
 that she should suspect it: she wouldn't have done but for 
 that evening of the walk. Impossible to sponge some things 
 from your mind. They left a smear. . . . 
 
 That Dick could lie and deceive ! Unthinkable ! Yet here she 
 was, thinking it. She would not. But to-morrow Dick would 
 come and she would know. But supposing he came to-night? 
 He wouldn't. Officially he was still in Manchester. Besides, 
 he'd leave her alone. She was certain of that yet not too 
 certain. "I couldn't see him here . . . to-night. . . ." Certain 
 of that, anyhow. She couldn't face it. She gulped her coffee, 
 ran upstairs for her hat, called Leader and announced she 
 was going out to walk upon the Heath. If Dick came she 
 wouldn't be there.
 
 INTRUSION 267 
 
 He didn't come. They would have told her if he had. 
 And no word in the morning. But at three o'clock the sound 
 of his cycle in the road, his voice in the hall and the sound of 
 Alice laughing as she shut the door upon him. (He was like 
 Jan he could always make Alice laugh!) Caryl was there in 
 the drawing-room with Pen and her mother. She had on a 
 buttercup frock of some uncrushable material (that beastly 
 crushed voile of yesterday!) and in a passion of self-glorifica- 
 tion she had that morning washed her hair. It stood now 
 like a thick dark shield about her head, with that suggestion 
 of fluffiness, that subtle hint at a wave that redeems straight 
 hair from the charge of lankness. She had not slept last night 
 and her eyes were shadowed, but beneath the clear olive of 
 her skin waved the red banner of her inner excitement. At 
 the sound of Dick's arrival she looked up from her book, 
 hesitating, lips slightly apart, a tiny frown beneath the straight 
 line of fringe, and while she waited Alice put her head in at 
 the door. 
 
 "Mr. Merrick, Miss Caryl. . . ." 
 
 Caryl got up and went out as one going to execution. 
 
 Dick wasn't in the hall; he was out there in the road doing 
 something to his machine. She moved forward down the 
 steps, because out there, she knew, he would not kiss her for 
 "all the neighbours to see." In his sudden, easy fashion he 
 turned and smiled upon her. 
 
 "Hallo!" he said. 
 
 She thought: "It can't be true if he can look at me like 
 that, and then: "But if he were lying, that'd be part of it ... 
 that open frank look. . . ." 
 
 She said: "Are we going out?" 
 
 "Kew, I thought." 
 
 He had turned back to his engine that was making queer, 
 excited noises, so that he didn't see the way she bit her lip or 
 the little spasm that crossed her face like a shadow on a blind. 
 There was nothing about her "Right-o!" to show what it was 
 going to cost her, this afternoon, to go to Kew. Because Kew 
 was bound up with the magic of a late February afternoon, 
 with the river slipping past the reeds and the hand of evening 
 already in the sky. . . . The picture built itself up anew in
 
 268 INTRUSION 
 
 her mind. How could she possibly bear it this visit to Kew 
 this afternoon? 
 
 "Will you put your things on? We ought to get off pretty 
 soon while the fine day lasts. It'll rain before long." 
 
 She turned from him and went back into the hall. He did. 
 not come in stayed there still fiddling with his engine until 
 she had gone up to her room. She knew exactly when he 
 came in. The sound of his voice floated up to her from the 
 drawing-room . . . with Pen's laughter, that ran up and down 
 the scale, like the thing of joy it was; and the little pause 
 which meant that her mother was speaking. Anne Suffield's 
 voice did not penetrate: she had that low, sweet voice the 
 old-fashioned man found excellent in the woman of yesterday 
 and misses in her daughters. 
 
 Caryl, summoning her courage, went down presently, stood 
 inside the door and said, "Ready!" The veil she had tied 
 over her little straw hat seemed to give her a fictitious con- 
 fidence, for through its mesh her eyes met Dick's, smiling at 
 her above a mouth that was serious. "You want another 
 wrap," he said. "It'll be cold before we get back." Through 
 the tulle veil her lips demurred. After all, it was July! 
 
 "Only by the calendar," Dick said, holding the door open 
 for Anne Suffield going in search of a silk scarf of her own. 
 
 Pen and her mother came and saw them off watched Dick 
 tucking her into the sidecar, coaxing that devil, his engine, 
 running beside it in encouragement, jumping into his seat. . . . 
 Neither spoke as they turned a bend in the road and were out 
 of sight. The engine saw to that. And Dick's speed. . . . 
 
 This afternoon he went faster than ever. He rode recklessly, 
 as though he rode away from, rather than towards, something. 
 Caryl, looking at the straight line of his profile, saw that his 
 gaze was fixed upon the road ahead, his mouth set in a grim 
 line. Even to-day she wanted to smile, because his eyes were 
 so like a cat's whiskers they seemed to tell him just where he 
 could squeeze through an opening and when he couldn't. The 
 deadly precision of it enchanted and fascinated her: conversa- 
 tion was out of the question. Besides, even if she had 
 thought of anything to say beyond the "Dick it's simpl) 
 marvellous how you do it" that rose to her lips, she'd neve 
 have said it. Dick hated the girl who talked while he steere 
 her through London traffic. "Marjorie jabbers," he had saic
 
 INTRUSION 269 
 
 once to Caryl. "No pleasure to take her out in the old jigger. 
 She'd enjoy a bus-ride as well!" You weren't likely, after 
 that, to catch Caryl "jabbering." Even when they turned off 
 over Hammersmith Bridge and were stopped by a policeman 
 she didn't open her mouth. The constable had given Dick 
 a friendly warning that he was exceeding the speed limit, and 
 Dick had evinced an intense surprise. "Good girl!" he said 
 as he rode on. Not to have given him away, he meant, by so 
 much as a smile. But she smiled now, though briefly, for 
 the thought stung. It had happened before : Dick was always 
 exceeding the speed limit and was constantly being warned 
 by friendly constables. Always he assumed that air of inno- 
 cent surprise, of bland blankest astonishment. And always 
 the constables were taken in. It had amused her before, but 
 to-day it didn't amuse her at all, because she could think of 
 nothing save that if he could do it here where, after all, it 
 didn't matter he might do it where it did. And you'd never 
 know any more than the constables that he was deceiving 
 you. 
 
 The road to Kew wound by the river, and though Caryl 
 loved the river she scarcely saw it this afternoon, for her 
 vision had turned inwards and she saw nothing but the fear 
 that looked at her the fear that, after all, she wasn't going to 
 know. With cold fingers that thought seemed to be pushing 
 her out of a friendly world into a region where you were sure 
 of nothing believed in nothing. . . . 
 
 Then, at the last, in the Kew Road, sanity opened the door 
 of her misery and looked in upon her. Dick had stopped 
 was there at a greengrocer's buying her cherries. 
 
 "I'll put the jigger up here!" he said, coming over to her 
 with the bag in his hands. "White-hearts. Real beauties. . . . 
 Think we'd better carry the rug, the grass may be damp. 
 No . . . you're going the wrong way . . . three doors to your 
 left. That's it. Sign of the 'Shell.' " 
 
 Returning sanity pushed wide the door and came right in. 
 Caryl stood there by the garage door listening to what Dick 
 was saying to the man in charge. "Oh . . . about six ... no 
 thanks . . . running splendidly. . . ." When he came back 
 she put her hand through his arm and walked along towards 
 the Cumberland Gate. There they paid their pennies and 
 walked in past the high wall to a spot they knew to which
 
 270 INTRUSION 
 
 few people came. Folk came to Kew to look at the roses . . . 
 to see the "houses." The uncultivated parts you might have, 
 an' you would, to yourself. And Dick and Caryl went to them 
 as a matter of course, their feet turning instinctively along by 
 the wall. . . . 
 
 And down there under the trees Dick made his acknowledg- 
 ment of the need of confession. . . . 
 
 Caryl, propped up on her elbows, kept her face turned 
 slightly away from him, the business of taking two bites at a 
 cherry seeming to absorb all her attention. Presently her 
 head bent lower. She was not eating her cherries any longer, 
 but making tea-pots of them, twisting and detaching their 
 stalks artfully to form handle and spout a form of industry 
 that seemed to require much care and attention. 
 
 Dick was a long time beginning. Caryl had a sense of him 
 lighting a cigarette; of his arm sweeping out to throw the 
 match over her head . . . and then what he said seemed to 
 blind her. She was stunned. The cherry stalk broke in her 
 hands. She sat there, a cherry in each hand, what he had said 
 ringing in her ears. 
 
 "Darling ... it wasn't quite true ... all that about 
 yesterday!" 
 
 Suddenly strength came to her. She lifted her head and 
 looked at him. 
 
 "You mean . . . you hadn't met Roberta . . . accident- 
 ally . . . you'd arranged it?" 
 
 "Good God! You think that of me?" 
 
 If he had amplified that exclamation, embroidered it with 
 self-pity, she would have flashed out, "Why shouldn't I? 
 Why shouldn't I have thought of it?" but the plain unvarnished 
 statement stopped her. Something in the ring of it and in 
 his face hurt her. She hadn't known that anybody's face 
 could hurt you. And this was Dick's. . . . 
 
 She looked away, not speaking. 
 
 "You don't think so now?" he asked. 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 "Not now," she said. She was miserable and covered witK 
 shame because she had misjudged him. She was sure of that 
 before he had spoken a word. "Not now," she repeated, as
 
 INTRUSION 271 
 
 though the repetition was a thing she owed him a sort of 
 insufficient reparation. Something humble and childlike looked 
 out of her eyes as she waited for him to speak. He did 
 presently, not looking at her. It was quite true what Roberta 
 had said. Coming back a day earlier than he expected from 
 Manchester, he had been coming on to see Caryl: he had 
 encountered Roberta in the High Street; she had alleged 
 Caryl to be "swotting" and had invited him to tea. 
 
 "I refused. . . ." Dick said. "I said you'd think it unkind. 
 She accepted that. . . . We stood there talking a little while 
 and she told me there was an account in the Star she'd just 
 bought of the death of some young man she used to know. 
 Thorp, I think his name was. He was killed while out shooting 
 game. She seemed very upset. . . ." 
 
 Six cherry tea-pots, now, in a neat row. Thorp? Thorp? 
 went her brain. Oh yes, the young man Allan and Roberta 
 had met at Shanklin. . . . Caryl had seen him once: tall, 
 dark and with Dick's air of saying, "I'm so glad I'm alive! 
 Life's so jolly, don't you think?" Horrible to think he was 
 dead! 
 
 "We walked back towards Meldon Avenue. I didn't think 
 about it ... you know how you do that sort of thing 
 mechanically. She talked about young Thorp . . . they were 
 very good pals, apparently she'd missed him no end. And 
 I remembered that letter of yours about her being lonely. 
 You remember? Anyway, she said she was lonely . . . that 
 the Revolutionary that night was going out to dinner. She'd 
 gone out to buy a paper because the house was getting on her 
 nerves. . . . And then she'd seen the report of Thorp's 
 death. ... It must have been while we were standing there 
 that she renewed the invitation to tea. It seemed so silly to 
 make such a fuss. I thought I could come on to Adelaide 
 Lodge directly afterwards. . . . Anyway, I went . . . took the 
 old jigger round the back for safety. Really, Caryl, that is 
 just how it happened. I swear it, dear." 
 
 By the simple expedient of lengthening its spout Caryl was 
 thoughtfully converting her sixth cherry tea-pot into a bron- 
 chitis kettle. Suddenly she looked up from it and smiled. 
 
 "I believe it," she said. "Let's chuck it, shall we? I've 
 just been a fool, that's all. Let's forget it." 
 
 "But I haven't finished. . . . You've got to understand that
 
 272 INTRUSION 
 
 I didn't go in to have tea with Roberta because I thought you 
 might run in. ... I didn't believe you would. . . . And I didn't 
 go because or not only because I was sorry for Roberta. 
 Besides, I didn't stay sorry for her. . . . You see, it struck 
 me she couldn't be so very cut up about young Thorp because 
 directly we got in she went upstairs and changed her frock. . . ." 
 
 Caryl's eyes were looking at him with a sort of gentle 
 patience, as though she knew what he was going to say, and 
 wondered how long he was going to take to get it out. 
 Suddenly she smiled. 
 
 "You mean," she said, "that you went to tea with Roberta 
 because you wanted to?" 
 
 He stared at her. "How do you know?" he asked. 
 
 She said, "Oh, it's quite simple! Besides ... I can under- 
 stand that you should want to have tea with Roberta. And 
 that when she'd changed her frock you wanted it even more . . . 
 that you should have suggested taking her for a run." 
 
 Dick continued to stare at her. 
 
 "It's quite right," he said, "it did happen just like that 
 only it's wrong, somehow, that you should know it ... that 
 you should understand. I thought women never understood 
 things of that sort. Never knew, I mean, that a man could be 
 attracted, even for a minute, by a girl he didn't care a snap of 
 the fingers for." 
 
 She smiled, and the tender familiarity of it hurt him. 
 
 "I couldn't bear," she said, "to be like that ... to be afraid. 
 So that I kept you to myself . . . made you pretend that you 
 never looked at any other girl . . . never saw that there are 
 hundreds of quite charming girls who are much nicer to look 
 at than I am. They say that if you're in love you're jealous 
 . . . that you can't help it. The girls and I at King's are 
 always arguing that point. They think, most of them, that 
 jealousy's natural. I think it's mean . . . loathsome. If you're 
 really in love you can't really be jealous, because that means you 
 doubt. . . . Isn't that how it seems to you?" 
 
 Dick's face wore a look of perplexity. 
 
 "I don't know. ... I believe I could be furiously jealous. 
 I used sometimes to hate young Jack Heston with his adoring 
 eyes following you about." 
 
 A fat man with an umbrella was crossing behing Dick's back. 
 When he had gone Caryl said softly:
 
 INTRUSION 273 
 
 "You needn't be jealous of Jack. He knows there'll never 
 be anybody in the world for me but you. That's why it was 
 so awful yesterday when I thought you were deceiving me. . . . 
 I couldn't bear that, Dick. . . . Whatever happens, I must 
 know. I can bear anything but not knowing." 
 
 "Nothing's going to happen. ... I shan't pay Roberta any 
 more visits unless you come too." 
 
 "Oh! but why not if you want to? I couldn't bear her 
 to think I'd forbidden you. ... I wish she hadn't seen yesterday 
 that I minded . . . such an awful exhibition." 
 
 Dick smiled. 
 
 "Don't you want to know what we did when you'd gone." 
 
 "No it doesn't matter." 
 
 But she was torn suddenly with the hope that he would tell 
 her: wanted to hug him when he did. 
 
 "I went off home," he said. "I saw you tearing off down 
 the road and deliberately went in the opposite direction." 
 
 "You were angry with me?" 
 
 "No, with myself. . . . But not angry enough to punish you 
 by staying with Roberta. . . ." 
 
 She smiled at that. 
 
 "Oh, Dick!" she said. 
 
 And Dick said: "Darling come over here." 
 
 She moved towards him. 
 
 "Meet me half-way." 
 
 He obeyed. He put his hands on her arms as he had done 
 yesterday, and, as it had done yesterday, his touch burned 
 through and scorched her. Suddenly she was at the mercy of 
 the tempestuous emotion it roused in her. 
 
 "Oh, Dick," she said, "I'd give all the world to be even 
 half as beautiful as Roberta!" 
 
 Then, quite suddenly, she burst into tears. When he took 
 her in his arms she hid her face against his sleeve as she had 
 done yesterday. He drew her up closely against him. 
 
 "I don't want you altered," he said; "you are beautiful 
 beautiful all through. . . . There isn't anybody but you, Caryl. 
 There never will be. ... It's you I want all the time." 
 
 She sat up and dried her eyes. The fat man with the 
 umbrella was coming back again. 
 
 "He thinks we've been quarrelling," she said, hastily putting 
 her handkerchief out of sight.
 
 274 INTRUSION 
 
 "And we haven't been, have we, darling?" 
 
 She smiled at him, gathering up her cherries. 
 
 "No," she said, "we've only been trying to understand . . . 
 to get things right. . . ." 
 
 "And are they right now?" 
 
 "Absolutely." 
 
 "You blessed dear," he said, and waited for the fat man to 
 pass before he kissed her.
 
 CHAPTER FIVE 
 
 DICK was in town the greater part of July, and those 
 few weeks represented for Caryl a period of happiness 
 she was scarcely to know again. It was mixed up with 
 much talk of Russia and Poland, with jaunts to the swimming 
 baths and frantic journeyings in the sidecar to and fro on the 
 face of the earth. It came to her out of the blue ... a golden 
 thing of love and laughter, in which she not only neglected 
 her work, but forgot all about it. John Suffield, pleased with 
 Dick's prowess in the provinces, was disposed to look with 
 kindly eyes upon his period of partial slacking in those July 
 weeks. At the end of them Caryl was going away with her 
 mother, and Dick's nose should be kept more rigidly to the 
 grindstone. He wasn't going to encourage any idea of slack- 
 ness in Caryl's husband. Caryl, like Allan, thought money 
 didn't matter an extraordinary conviction for his children to 
 hold, though he expected, so far as Caryl was concerned, to 
 use her pride in Dick to prove his own contrary conviction. 
 Dick would know that Caryl didn't care for people to fail. 
 True, she didn't associate success with money, but she thought 
 it was "up" to you to do what you set out to do. Thus Caryl's 
 father upon Caryl and the man Caryl loved. "A charming 
 chap, that fiance of young Caryl's," he'd say to people and 
 invite them home to dinner to meet him. 
 
 Throughout the doubtful July of nineteen-twenty Caryl's 
 leisure and Dick's seemed to be equally divided between the 
 "scouring England" campaign and the open-air swimming 
 bath at Chiswick. Occasionally they took Roberta with them, 
 but Roberta did not swim and did not really care for riding on 
 the carrier of a motor-cycle. Moreover, she did not take kindly 
 to the goggles in which Caryl cheerfully disguised herself, and 
 a slight spill in which she grazed her ankle was used as an 
 excuse for discontinuing a bad practice. Thereafter their 
 
 275
 
 276 INTRUSION 
 
 jaunts h trois were made minus the sidecar, much to Anne 
 Suffield's relief. "It really isn't safe, Caryl," she'd said so 
 often; "and dear, I wish you'd ask Dick to drive a little more 
 slowly. It does look so dreadfully dangerous." 
 
 They only laughed at her. The risk was the pleasure of it, 
 they told her. But John Suffield backed his wife. "What the 
 pleasure is, going at that rate, I can't see," he said. "You 
 motor-cycle people are the most selfish people on the road. 
 You'll have your licence suspended some day, my boy, and 
 serve you right!" 
 
 "You haven't seen Dick smile at policemen," Caryl ventured. 
 
 "I've seen him smile at you," said her father. 
 
 "Not at all the same thing!" declared Caryl. 
 
 The happiness that came to her now was sunny and golden. 
 Little things went to its make-up, unconsidered trifles, simple 
 youthful adventures that spoil in the telling and yet made, 
 together, a wealth of experience that sat blooming in Caryl's 
 heart like a rose. 
 
 But Pen carped. 
 
 "I can't think why you cart Roberta about with you so 
 much," she said once to Caryl. "Even for you modems I 
 should have thought two was company. . . ." 
 
 "But we don't . . . often," Caryl said, who felt an inward 
 twinge that "often" was not often enough. She was worried 
 by the thought of Roberta, who plainly these days was not 
 happy. To be as pretty as all that and to get so little out of 
 life! Caryl was quite certain she and Allan were not happy 
 together. Probably it wasn't cither's fault: just that they had 
 no interests in common. Guen, she knew, had always main- 
 tained that. But Roberta was so loyal: she never "discussed" 
 Allan. It was always just casually you heard that he spent 
 all his evenings over his books and papers, that he sat up far 
 into the night; that Roberta, in town with a friend, had seen 
 Allan with Miss Hervey at Oxford Circus Station. . . . She 
 never complained. Things just came out, as things will, of 
 course. But Caryl, calling Roberta friend as well as sister, 
 and absurdly sorry for her, could not leave her entirely out of 
 her own happiness. On those occasions when Roberta came to 
 Adelaide Lodge to tea or dinner, and Caryl and Dick went off 
 together somewhere afterwards, Caryl would be worried by the 
 sight of the wistful look in Roberta's eyes, the soft envy of her
 
 INTRUSION 277 
 
 "Good-bye . . . lucky people!" The least she could do upon 
 occasion was to ask Roberta to share her own happiness, which 
 was so tremendous she felt she had scarcely any right to it. 
 
 Yet Pen continued to carp, sniffing with irritating regularity 
 at what she called an "idiotic business." Caryl, she indicated, 
 was beyond her. All this nonsense talk of "possession," this 
 pooh-poohing of natural jealousy! Possessive? Of course love 
 was possessive. One man, one woman ridiculous to pretend 
 otherwise. Besides, it only led to trouble. Certainly she 
 wouldn't have been so calm about it if Tom showed as much 
 interest in a pretty girl as Dick showed in Roberta. And yet 
 there wasn't anything to go upon: nothing you could label 
 or lay hold of. Seen together, Dick and Roberta seemed to 
 have extraordinarily little to say to each other; moreover, what 
 Dick said often had an edge to it. He was frequently rude: 
 not just carelessly rude, but deliberately so, as if he disliked 
 Roberta and really wanted to hurt her. You'd have sworn 
 Roberta didn't mind, she took it with such astonishing good 
 humour and with a quiet, inscrutable smile; a smile that 
 seemed to hide things, that was almost articulate the smile of 
 a woman who has some secret inner knowledge and knows that 
 the man has it too, that he is struggling not to recognise it. 
 And when Caryl, catching what; Dick had said, would rush in 
 with some lightly worded reproach, Roberta would stop smiling. 
 Her face would take on a slightly pained expression, as though 
 she said to herself, "Surely they can't be going to quarrel 
 about me!" 
 
 So silly of Roberta, Pen would think and so conceited. No 
 nice woman ("married, too!") would imagine that an engaged 
 couple could quarrel about her. And yet those evenings when 
 Roberta and Allan came to dinner and afterwards there was 
 dancing, how could Caryl endure it? For Roberta danced far 
 too frequently with Dick. She gave him every waltz. You 
 couldn't help noticing it. 
 
 And Caryl could endure it. "Oh, I hate waltzing!" she 
 said airily. "I can't see why anybody bothers about it to-day!" 
 
 But Roberta said she "adored" it (even Pen could read that 
 in her ecstatic face), and Dick was "such a ripping partner." 
 "So are you, silly!" Caryl would say. She thought Roberta 
 danced divinely. Pen, of course, merely thought she danced 
 a good deal too frequently with Dick.
 
 278 INTRUSION 
 
 However, at the end of July Caryl went away with her 
 mother and father to the Cornish coast. Pen remained behind 
 to keep house for a husband unable to get away so early. Dick, 
 on and off, was to be still in town, and though Cornwall was 
 a long way off and railway fares were the devil, he promised 
 himself at least a few days of Caryl's fortnight if they could 
 be worked in. 
 
 The Wokingham cottage was neglected. Save for a couple 
 of week-ends nobody had used it. The summer was too bad. 
 Nobody could stand the country in wet weather, except Caryl 
 and Dick, who swore they liked it. And with nobody to 
 chaperon them the Cottage was useless even to them. (Pre- 
 sumably even they saw that ! ) John Sumeld swore at it mildly 
 as a needless expense and wished the Hestons would take it off 
 his hands again. But the Hestons wouldn't. The Hestons were 
 enjoying life at Herne Bay at least, Marjorie was, amid the 
 delights of a new flirtation, with a young Army captain well 
 in tow. Meantime there were threats of war and strikes: 
 Labour victories and Labour conferences, and peace rocking 
 perilously again on the knife-edge of diplomacy. . . . 
 
 Guen had gone back to Green Hedges at the beginning of 
 July, and Allan had lost in the first round of his fight with 
 Madeleine for the retention of the new lease of their friend- 
 ship. There was to be nothing now but those occasional meet- 
 ings when they might both choose the same Thursday evening 
 to come and talk to Guen. 
 
 "But has it struck you that it isn't Guen we talk to?" Allan 
 asked. 
 
 It had, Madeleine said. Her dark eyes surveyed him calmly. 
 No suggestion of agitation in their brown depths. "It's so 
 difficult," she said, "to throw off a bad habit!" 
 
 It was the nearest she had come to any definite reference to 
 the days of their old friendship, and <even now she backed 
 away from it instantly, ratifying her refusal by a gentle "good- 
 bye." Impossible to open up the topic afresh. Allan was 
 beaten: he knew it. 
 
 There would be the second round. .
 
 INTRUSION 279 
 
 It came, most unexpectedly, just a week later when Allan 
 dropped in to a concert at the Queen's Hall and, promenading 
 in the interval, came face to face with Madeleine. It was a 
 mixed evening of Bach and Rimsky-Korsakov and MacDowell, 
 and finding a couple of seats belonging to temerarious people 
 who had ventured upon stretching their legs, Allan and Made- 
 leine sat down and grumbled that the Rimsky-Korsakov had 
 not included Scheherazade. 
 
 "After all," Madeleine said presently, "we're ungrateful to 
 complain, because they might have given us Saint Saens," and 
 out of the crowded past a memory came drifting to Allan. 
 "Of course," he said, "you don't like Saint Saens." And he 
 remembered her exact phrase: "He makes quite delightful 
 noises. ..." 
 
 It .struck him that he wasn't doing much with this second 
 round. It struck him, further, that Madeleine did not mean 
 him to do much with it. He heard her say that she wished 
 Sir Henry Wood would cut out the vocal items, because mere 
 technical skill afflicted her, it seems, as Saint Saens afflicted 
 them both it meant nothing. And nobody's singing this eve- 
 ning had meant much except that of the woman who'd sung the 
 thing from Butterfly. Old-fashioned and quite wrong, perhaps, 
 to admire the tuneful Puccini, but they couldn't help it. Extraor- 
 dinarily moving that Finale in the first Act of Butterfly. . . . 
 Opera didn't affect Madeleine like that as a rule. It was so 
 difficult to get worked up about the sorrows people recounted 
 in song. A queer artificial convention this of opera, this 
 singing of the things which happened to you. And yet, Allan 
 hazarded, not so queer, after all. The earliest poems and 
 stories were always sung, and the first sagas. Widsith singing 
 at the Court of Eormanric: the poet of Beowulf and The Fight 
 at Finnsburg. "It's we who've grown artificial," he said, "who 
 no longer sing of our adventures." 
 
 "Isn't it because we have so few?" Madeleine asked. "Life's 
 become essentially undramatic grey, not black, don't you 
 think ? Wordsworth knew that. Urban life is not adventurous : 
 it's full not of physical, but of mental fights. It's impulse, 
 not action, our life to-day." 
 
 He looked at her; saw that her eyes were steady, empty of
 
 280 INTRUSION 
 
 concern, that her face showed nothing of embarrassment. Her 
 hands, clasped loosely in her lap, her programme beneath them, 
 were quite still. They, no more than her face, showed hint of 
 trouble gave anything away. It came to Allan in that 
 moment that she was happy really happy, in the way Words- 
 worth must have been in a wood, and to-night he was In the 
 mood to envy her: to envy her the happiness she had wrested 
 from life's unwilling hands. 
 
 That second round ! Nothing to hope for from that. Allan 
 abandoned it. "What have you been doing with yourself 
 lately?" he asked. 
 
 Crowds of things, it seemed. She was very busy over Mr. 
 Osenton's new book a startling Shakespearean theory for 
 which the critics would slay him. Quite soon, when the book 
 was through the Press, they were going off to Devon. ... At 
 odd moments she had found time to go to some Exhibition and 
 to some Food Reform Lecture. (The queer things they sent 
 people tickets for!) The exhibitions, in their way, had been 
 hilarious: the Food Lecture depressing. It had told her nothing 
 except that all her life she'd been eating all the wrong things 
 at all the wrong times. 
 
 The audience began to straggle back. The promenade 
 slowed down and was still. Several people said "Sh-h-h" too 
 loudly and too late, so that the opening notes of Poeme Erotique 
 were lost. So, too, was the opportunity to reopen that ques- 
 tion of another meeting. And, somehow, walking down Regent 
 Street to the tube none other presented itself. Nothing could 
 have been more casual than their farewell and nothing more 
 remarkable than that Roberta should have been there to see it. 
 
 She came in within ten minutes of his arrival. 
 
 "I just missed your train," she said. 
 
 "My train?" 
 
 "The one you caught at Oxford Circus. I was behind you 
 in the queue at the booking office. . . I've never seen anyone 
 look so nice in that particular shade of blue as Miss Hervey 
 does." 
 
 "You saw us? We ran into each other at the Queen's Hall." 
 
 Roberta, standing there drawing off her gloves, smiled 
 understandingly. 
 
 "Oh, don't think I mind," she said. "I shouldn't care if it 
 hadn't been . . accidental."
 
 INTRUSION 281 
 
 Allan frowned. 
 
 "And who've you been gadding with?" 
 
 "Gadding? Why do you put it like that? I've been to the 
 show at the Palladium." 
 
 "I didn't say where. I said with whom." 
 
 "With Tommy." 
 
 "Oh! .... so that's started again, has it?" 
 
 "Only just." 
 
 "Supposing I object?" 
 
 "Oh, don't be silly! Why should you? Tommy's all right. 
 . . . Besides, if I don't object to your friends, I really can't 
 see why you should object to mine." 
 
 "A sort of blackmail arrangement, eh?" 
 
 "Really," said Roberta, "you're very disagreeable. I should 
 have thought it's much the best for us to go our own ways." 
 
 She took off her wrap, hung it over her arm and turned to 
 leave the room. 
 
 "Good night," she said. 
 
 "Good night," he answered. 
 
 When she had gone he stood there with clenched hands, as 
 he had done so many times before, wrestling with the desire 
 that assailed him to rush after her, take her by the shoulders 
 and assert himself. But the desire tended to grow fainter. He 
 still minded that she flung him her careless "Good night" 
 over an indifferent shoulder. He despised her, but he minded. 
 All his being stretched forward to that day when he would 
 not mind at all, when he would not suffer. Yet to-night he 
 was subtly aware of some change in her attitude, saw that her 
 cold indifference had been touched to the faintest show of 
 interest in him and his evening. For a moment he wondered 
 why, and then suddenly he understood. Roberta was interested 
 in this renewal of his friendship with Madeleine because she 
 might be able to make use of it. She wanted her freedom, and 
 she saw this friendship of his with Madeleine as the key which 
 might unlock the door. . . . True to her role of injured inno- 
 cence, she would put him, not herself, in the wrong. 
 
 In that one second of understanding his mind was made up. 
 He was not going to run any risks of that kind. Madeleine 
 and he must not meet again. . . . 
 
 He was appalled by the certainty of that piece of knowledge; 
 but he held to his decision, even when Thursday came and
 
 282 INTRUSION 
 
 Roberta, bedecked for Tommy's foregathering, supposed he 
 wasn't "going her way." He wasn't, he said, going anybody's 
 way. He wasn't, that evening, going out. . . . Roberta shrugged 
 her shoulders and went off alone. Ten minutes later she 
 returned, letting herself in with her latchkey and putting her 
 head in at the door to explain that there was something she 
 had forgotten. Also, her face declared, there was something 
 she had not expected. Clearly she had not believed she would 
 see Allan sitting there quietly over his book, had expected to 
 find him upstairs changing his collar or already, perhaps, out 
 of the house altogether. Quite obviously she hadn't believed 
 him when he said, "I'm not going out to-night." 
 
 Allan wanted to laugh had much ado to keep the corners 
 of his mouth from twisting upwards while Roberta stood in 
 the doorway looking in upon him. But he was very sure 
 that Roberta didn't laugh. She'd be too chagrined for that. 
 Besides, Roberta saw the thing that was funny, never the 
 thing that was humorous. 
 
 When the door closed upon her for the second time he bent 
 himself to absorption in his book. Ten o'clock came, and pres- 
 ently a knock at the door. Allan opened it and Guen came in 
 with reproaches that he had not turned up that evening at the 
 Attic. "I specially wanted to see you," she said. 
 
 "Anything up?" he inquired. What could possibly have 
 necessitated a special visit at this hour of the night? So 
 unlike Guen, this sort of thing. He followed her into the 
 little dining-room and shut the door. 
 
 "Nothing's up," she said, "only I had to come and tell you. 
 . . . We were wrong about that affair of Jan's being our secret. 
 It isn't. Not only that it never was." 
 
 "You mean mother knew?" 
 
 "All the time." 
 
 There was a little silence, out of which Allan spoke presently 
 with the air of one continuing a conversation begun dim 
 centuries ago. 
 
 "How do you suppose she found out?" he asked. 
 
 "That woman at St. Julian's. . . . She didn't hold her 
 tongue. ... I don't know why we ever supposed she would. 
 And then that afternoon I went to see Mrs. Hill there was 
 another letter. I don't know why mother opened it ... but 
 she did."
 
 INTRUSION 283 
 
 "So she knew . . . when you got back?" 
 
 Guen nodded. "And the next day she went to Parson's 
 Green herself. There's been a baby." 
 
 "Jan's? Mother knew that, too?" ' 
 
 "There isn't anything she doesn't know. While we were 
 kidding ourselves she didn't even suspect, she's been doing 
 things. You see, the husband found out . . . came across 
 some luggage label or other. He wasn't generous . . . demanded 
 his pound of flesh. Mother seems to have arranged things. 
 Her own people do something for her, and I gather that mother 
 and father do the rest." 
 
 "The old man, too! How did he take it?" 
 
 "Quite sensibly. . . . You see, there wasn't any scandal." 
 
 "That must have helped a lot." 
 
 "It did." Guen performed her funny little trick of raised 
 eyebrows and shoulders. 
 
 "And what about Pen and Caryl? Do they know?" 
 
 "Not Caryl. Mother's idea, that. She has a host of good 
 reasons why Caryl shouldn't know yet. Pen, I understand, is 
 doing the romantic stunt about it. Besides, Pen never believes 
 more than she wants to believe about anything." 
 
 That, Guen knew, was Pen's way of protecting herself. She 
 had made of it an effective shield. So many people had that 
 amiable trick it was strange that Guen, with all her cleverness, 
 could not achieve it. Though she drew the curtain she always 
 knew what was happening on the other side of it. 
 
 "Come and see me on Thursday week," she said. "I've 
 so much to say, and there's no time now. I promised to meet 
 Tony for the eleven-twenty-five at Charing Cross. ... If it's 
 Madeleine you're trying to dodge you needn't worry. She goes 
 out of town to-morrow for a week or two." 
 
 A strange empty feeling assailed Allan. "I'll come along 
 with you," he said, and together they went off down the high- 
 road and on to the tube that went to Charing Cross. It was 
 striking twelve when Allan let himself into the house. Roberta 
 met him in the hall, with a smile of satisfaction on her lips. 
 
 "So you went out, after all," she said. 
 
 "I've been up to Charing Cross with Guen," he explained. 
 "I didn't go up to the Attic. She wanted my advice and came 
 along here to see me." 
 
 "I see," said Roberta. But she continued to smile.
 
 CHAPTER SIX 
 
 1 
 
 ALLAN turned up on the Thursday week, and before 
 anybody else arrived he and Guen sat and talked it 
 out 
 
 "I want to bury my diminished head," she said, "because 
 I minded that visit to Parson's Green so much and because 
 mother didn't mind in that way at all. Because the . . . 
 nastiness ... of it didn't paralyse her as it paralysed me." 
 
 "Us!" said Allan. 
 
 "Oh, if you like. But it doesn't make it any better. Besides, 
 it was I who insisted that it would kill mother to know. I 
 really thought it would. It's our colossal arrogance that crushes 
 me . . . the impudent futile assumptions of youth. I thought 
 there were things in life mother simply couldn't bear and 
 it was I who couldn't bear them, who'd have given all I pos- 
 sessed to have escaped that visit to Parson's Green. And I 
 went and said all the wrong things. . . . Mother went and said 
 all the right ones. .. . She did something. She went out alone 
 and filled in the gaps. I didn't even seem to know there were 
 any. I went to get rid of evidence, mother to collect it. And 
 she was right and I was wrong. How do you account for it, 
 Allan?" 
 
 Allan didn't, but he said vaguely that it wasn't, perhaps, 
 a problem for youth to have tackled. 
 
 "But surely this was our subject. We pride ourselves on 
 our broad outlook, our common-sense view of sex. We can't 
 get out of it that way. It's borne in upon me, Allan, that 
 mother and her generation have something that ours hasn't, 
 don't mean that any one of our generation would have failed as 
 badly as we as I did. We overdid our belief in our hard- 
 ness. Not expecting to be hurt at all we were laid out com- 
 pletely at the first twinge. Let's hope that's peculiar to 
 
 284
 
 INTRUSION 285 
 
 ourselves . . . that Madeleine, for example, would have escaped 
 that." 
 
 "She would," said Allan out of his deep conviction that 
 Madeleine knew how to deal with her own wounds. 
 
 "I think so, too," said Guen. "Madeleine's like mother. 
 She knows that it isn't the growing of a pachyderm (our favour- 
 ite remedy) that protects us, but only that deep quiet of the 
 spirit that she and mother has and we have not. That's 
 why they can look at facts without being utterly crushed, with- 
 out wanting to be sick. Mother believes, deep down, in the 
 ultimate goodness of life in its worth- whileness as Caryl 
 does, and we don't, Allan. She can take the long view and we 
 can't." 
 
 "You mean our rebellions and our angers render us myopic?" 
 
 "Yes ... we see nothing save that everything is wrong and 
 that we can't put it right. Mother sees that, too, and is content 
 to make it ever so little less wrong. She believes that it is 
 worth doing, and we don't. We believe in nothing, Allan, save 
 our own futility." 
 
 "And that," said Allan, "has us eternally gagged and bound." 
 
 "That explains, doesn't it," said Guen, "why all our lives 
 we've hesitated on the threshold of things of our unpopular 
 societies, for instance. We'd go to their meetings because they 
 said the sort of things we think right. We gave to their, funds 
 for the same reason, though we never really identified ourselves 
 with them. We're essentially the sort of people, Allan, who 
 never 'join' things, not out of fear of their unpopularity, but 
 of their futility and ours. There isn't any plan of action 
 we believe in deeply enough . . . and as mongers of words we 
 get tired of them and hunger for deeds. We're destructive, not 
 constructive. We only see that what gets in the way of the 
 juggernaut gets crushed. For us nothing rises from the ashes 
 of sacrifice. We do not believe John Brown's spirit goes march- 
 ing on. Either there is no spirit to march or it, too, lies moulder- 
 ing in John Brown's grave. Isn't that how you feel?" 
 
 Allan nodded. "And yet," he said, "I do know that if there 
 is anything more blasphemous than a too-easy optimism it's a 
 too-easy pessimism. Our generation's in the dock to one or 
 other of the charges. Half of us are guilty of the one: and 
 half of the other."
 
 286 INTRUSION 
 
 "And between the two," said Guen, "we cancel each other 
 out." 
 
 She got up and made tea, kneeling to do it before a gas ring 
 that stood beside a wide hearth, so that her brown-clad back 
 was towards Allan. 
 
 "Allan, I'm so sick of myself," she said, "I simply can't stand 
 things . . . and Tony's as bad. We're no good, we scribblers. 
 This morning I asked him to go over to see some out-of-work 
 the News has been featuring. . . . You know the sort of thing 
 . . . complete with photograph of self and wife, with 
 progeny. . . . Oh, they gave his address, of course nothing's, 
 left to the out-of-works, not even their privacy. Well . . . 
 Tony wouldn't. He said he'd send on my cheque and add 
 to it: but there was an Unemployment Committee who had 
 their 'investigators.' " 
 
 "A.G.'s very busy," said Allan uneasily. 
 
 "Oh yes ... I know. But that wasn't the reason. . . ." 
 She swung round from tea-pot and kettle. "Allan, he didn't 
 want to go. ... He couldn't bear to go any more than I could, 
 Tony's like us, Allan . . . and I hadn't thought ,it of him, 
 He, too, can't bear to look at life . . . can't bear to think about 
 it. He, too, sits in a quiet corner and writes about it. . . .'* 
 
 Again Allan made that uneasy movement in his chair. 
 
 "Did you give him your cheque?" he asked. 
 
 "No ... I sent it along to the Committee, through the 
 post. . . . Oh, I know it wouldn't have done any good if I 
 had gone, but I despise myself because I couldn't. I remem- 
 ber how I despised Mrs. Hill . . . not because she'd had that 
 affair with Jan, but because she lacked courage and honesty. 
 As though that isn't what's the matter with the lot of us!" 
 
 "But at least we know it." 
 
 "Not always. ... At least we won't admit it. This morn- 
 ing I made excuses for asking Tony to go down to Islington for 
 me. ... I was too busy. ... It was only when he pleaded the 
 same excuse and got irritable that I admitted the truth. ... It 
 wasn't 'busyness* at all with him or with me! but funk 
 sheer funk. Do you remember that girl in Galsworthy's 
 Fraternity?" 
 
 Allan didn't, particularly. 
 
 "Oh, surely," said Guen. "Thyme, wasn't her silly name? 
 She tried slumming and went with her young man into a wood
 
 INTRUSION 287 
 
 and wept because she couldn't stand it. And her young man, 
 mighty scornful, took her home again and was beautifuly rude 
 to her father and mother. . . . My God, it's never occurred 
 to me before, Allan, but I'm like that girl. I simply can't 
 'stand' things. . . ." 
 
 "But you don't weep and no young man has taken you home 
 and been rude to your parents, beautifully or otherwise." 
 
 "I'm exactly like Thyme, all the same. And I think I hate 
 myself as much as I hope she did. God knows. . . . Only, 
 somehow, my failure's worse than Thyme's. It isn't only that 
 / lack courage and purpose, but that I supposed other people 
 lacked them too. At least Thyme never made that mistake 
 about her young man. Mine, in this particular instance, wasn't 
 only failure, but impudent failure as well." 
 
 She got up and with a twisted smile began to pour out tea. 
 
 "There really isn't anything you can say for me . . . for 
 'us' if you like." 
 
 There was a long silence in which Guen poured out more 
 tea and sat staring out through the long open window over the 
 London roofs. It was after six o'clock and the day seemed to 
 be standing still, poised for one tiny interval upon the edge of 
 evening. There was a glow already in the sky, stretching 
 down from the west to the east, like a slowly-spoken blessing. 
 There were times when the peace of Nature came cruelly 
 mocking the disruption of the universe man had created. One 
 hated Nature for her very indifference because she didn't 
 care. And envied her, too, because she could be like that and 
 remain beautiful, desirable. . . . 
 
 Later they talked of Roberta. . . . 
 
 Still later, when they had shaken hands in their undemon- 
 strative fashion and Allan had gone, Guen went out on to the 
 balcony. The colour in the sky had spread into a rich deep 
 harmony towards which the London roofs reached up like 
 hungry suppliants. The buzz of itinerant humanity floated 
 up to her. People were going home from their labours: out 
 to their suburbs ... to wives and children. It was as though 
 they were filing out from a beleaguered city, escaping. . . . 
 
 She would not "escape" for three hours yet. . . . Three
 
 5288 INTRUSION 
 
 hours yet, for her of "shop" of book-talk that wasn't life 
 and wasn't like life. . . . That, perhaps, was just as well: 
 life had a trick of being overwhelming. It had been that this 
 afternoon. She had the sensation, now, of drawing back her 
 skirts, of letting the stream flow on without her. She was 
 tired. 
 
 The door opened and A.G. came in. 
 
 "Allan gone?" he asked. 
 
 Guen came in from the verandah and stood watching him 
 as he tipped out the fruit he had brought in with him into 
 a large blue bowl that had a big chip out of its edge. 
 
 "Tony," she said, "it's nice to be married to you." 
 
 A.G. looked up, pipe in mouth. 
 
 "I gathered you felt that way about it," he said. "I return 
 the compliment. Why this sudden declaration, O Thou 
 Undemonstrative One?" 
 
 "Because it's so wonderful that I should be ... so wonder- 
 ful we should have found each other. . . . You see, we're the 
 only people in the world who know the truth about sex." 
 
 "You seem," said Tony, "to have been having a delightful 
 conversation with that brother of yours. The world's getting 
 better, Guen. . . . You have got to believe that. . . . Even 
 over this sex business." 
 
 Guen came over to her husband and put her arm through 
 his. 
 
 "Don't believe it," she said. "When I was seventeen a 
 man in London Wall stopped me and asked me to lunch with 
 him. A man in Holborn this afternoon suggested tea." 
 
 "I feel sure you dealt with the situation quite ably," Tony 
 said. "Have an apple?" 
 
 Guen shook her head, relinquished Tony's arm and moved 
 over to the window, beyond which the sky hung now like a 
 blue-grey awning. 
 
 "You tired?" A.G. enquired. 
 
 "Rather," she said, "but it isn't that. . . ." 
 
 "What then?" 
 
 "I only want to escape ... to get away from things." 
 
 He smiled, recognising her mood. He knew that, for the 
 moment, the world had sunk to the level of the bus and tube 
 announcements: "Please do not spit." "Mind your pockets." 
 Humanity, reduced to the lowest common denominator. . .. ,
 
 INTRUSION 289 
 
 "I'm not very brave, Tony. ... I can't escape from myself 
 I know: but I do want to get away from things. I want to 
 hide." 
 
 "Behind Green Hedges?" 
 
 She nodded. 
 
 Wasn't it what they all wanted all those people down below 
 hurrying away from London as from a doomed city, all pour- 
 ing out in everlasting procession towards their own particular 
 place of forget fulness ? Green Hedges! Behind which you 
 might shut yourself up from things. . . . Where you might draw 
 the curtains and shoot home the bolt. Where you might stop 
 thinking and catch at serenity and strength. . . . 
 
 Green Hedges and Tony. Life gave you that and life was 
 good because of it. She was silent, turning the good thought 
 over. 
 
 "By the way," said Tony suddenly, "I found time after 
 all to-day to run over and see that out-of-work chap at 
 Islington. . . ." 
 
 Guen swung round, hot colour in her cheeks. 
 
 "You -went? Oh, Tony, and I thought you funked it, 
 too. . . ." 
 
 "You were right. I did." 
 
 "What happened?" 
 
 "When I got there? Nothing sensational. I only saw the 
 wife. . . . The man's found temporary work. I left my 
 address and told her to get into communication with me when 
 it gave out. It was all I could do. ... They'll get the benefit 
 of your cheque, if you've sent it on to the Committee." 
 
 "Another patch! Oh, Tony, I wish we were Christian 
 Scientists. It must be so comforting to know that poverty 
 is only a delusion of the mind and that hunger can be cured 
 by thought!" 
 
 She turned away again and stood staring out across the 
 London roofs, and A.G. stealing a glance at her went on 
 polishing his apples. He knew that look on her face, had 
 grown used to seeing it during those difficult days of the war 
 when, beneath that quiet exterior, she was breaking her heart 
 over things. You couldn't help her. She suffered as do all 
 imaginative people who have moods of passionate distaste for 
 things as they are. But with Guen, as Tony knew, it was 
 more, too, than that. He was aware that she was despising
 
 INTRUSION 
 
 herself because she knew that though she suffered now, to- 
 morrow she would be writing all the better because of it. 
 
 He went over and slipped an arm round her. 
 
 "Seeing life as the one irrevocable disaster. No damn 
 good in anything, eh?" 
 
 She pressed herself against the pillar of his arm and let the 
 bitter tide of her self-contempt drift out upon the calm sanity 
 of their common affection. 
 
 "There's you and Green Hedges," she said, "for anchorage."
 
 CHAPTER SEVEN 
 
 THE story of Jan's illicit love-affair hardened in Pen a 
 determination not have "any more nonsense of that 
 sort" in the family, and a determination to give Caryl 
 a "good talking to" when the occasion offered. 
 
 It offered very nicely, as it happened, on the Monday follow- 
 ing the return from Cornwall on the Saturday. Anne Suffield 
 was out and at four o'clock Caryl put her books away and 
 came down to the drawing-room for tea. She had not seen 
 Dick since her return, and she seemed amused when Pen, 
 pouring out tea in her careful fashion, asked in a manner 
 heavily casual if she had heard much from him whilst she had 
 been in Cornwall. 
 
 "Letters you mean?" Caryl asked staring unconcernedly 
 over the rim of her cup. "No, he didn't write much. Neither 
 did I. We don't, you know. We haven't any flair for words. 
 It was for us Providence invented the picture post card." 
 
 "And he didn't come down, after all." 
 
 "That was father's fault. He kept him busy." 
 
 "Not only father," said Pen. 
 
 Caryl poured herself out another cup of tea and stared at 
 her sister. 
 
 "Oh, come off it, Pen," she said, "and spit it out." 
 
 Pen "spat it out." She said, "Are you aware that Dick is 
 in the habit of dropping in to Berta's for tea?" 
 
 "Not in the habit," said Caryl. Her face was untroubled. 
 "He goes to Berta's sometimes, if that's what you mean." 
 
 "It isn't," said Pen, and proceeded to explain that one 
 afternoon when she had been at Number Sixteen Dick had 
 appeared with his sidecar at the garden gate, very much as 
 though he were used to arriving in that casual fashion: that, 
 seeing Pen, he had made some excuse for his visit and for 
 not staying: that several days later Pen, again in Roberta's 
 
 291
 
 292 INTRUSION 
 
 neighbourhood to see a woman who proved to be not at home, 
 was seized with a bad head and had called in at Roberta's for 
 a rest before walking back. It wasn't true to say she had 
 gone there to "spy": she really hadn't been well. And Dick 
 was in Roberta's drawing-room, his cycle at the kitchen 
 door. . . . 
 
 The faintest of shadows passed over Caryl's face, indicative 
 of the reminiscential cloud which crossed her mind. 
 
 "Well?" she said. "Why not? There's no secret about 
 it: Dick's certain to tell me all about it when I see him this 
 evening." 
 
 "Of course, since he was discovered." 
 
 "Don't use stupid words. There was no discovery." 
 
 "You mean you . . . allow this?" 
 
 "Of course I allow it. Why shouldn't Dick have tea occa- 
 sionally with Roberta? You're too desparately old-fashioned 
 for words." 
 
 "If you are bent upon being a fool. . . ." 
 
 "I'm bent on being the exact opposite, if possible. It's no 
 good, old girl. I hate your world of possessive affection. 
 Always shall. I believe in the liberty of the individual." 
 
 "It sounds all right . . . but it never does. . . ." 
 
 Caryl smiled. 
 
 "That's just where women like you make a mistake. . . . 
 They won't understand that a man may be in love with one 
 woman and yet be aware that there are others in the world 
 worth talking to ... other women that he likes!" 
 
 "A man who's engaged or married hasn't any right to notice 
 other women much less like them enough to go and have tea 
 with them." 
 
 Again Caryl laughed. 
 
 "Oh," she said, "go away, go away. You're impossible!" 
 
 So Pen went away, and, as Caryl had supposed, that evening 
 when Dick came in he told her all about things at once 
 mentioned those two visits of his to Meldon Avenue in his 
 charmingly casual fashion as though they didn't matter, as 
 of course they didn't. He'd been at a loose end and had fallen 
 back on Roberta. "We had tea, and that second day a run 
 round," he said. "I'm afraid Mrs. Warren disapproved of 
 us and that she'd be awfully glad to know it rained and spoilt 
 Roberta's new hat."
 
 INTRUSION 293 
 
 Caryl exulted. The liberty of the individual! Of course 
 you believed in it! Pen was altogether too old-fashioned. 
 Really, you couldn't be bothered. . . . You couldn't even 
 if you wanted to! chain a man up quite like that. Besides, 
 they never stayed chained: they only pretended and then you 
 had lies and deceit and make-believe, than which there couldn't, 
 possibly, be anything worse. . . . 
 
 But the next time Pen saw Roberta with Dick they didn't 
 see her. He was taking Roberta in the sidecar up towards the 
 Heath and they were going much too fast to see anybody. . . . 
 The evening before there had been dancing at Adelaide Lodge 
 and Roberta and Dick had danced as usual, in Pen's opinion, 
 too much together. And Dick the next day was going to 
 Liverpool for a couple of days by some train in the afternoon. 
 Caryl did not ask for particulars because she never went to 
 see him off, considering that a silly habit in a girl engaged to a 
 man who was constantly going away. Going and coming, 
 breaking in upon you unexpectedly, disturbing your work. 
 Caryl liked it much better that way. 
 
 On this particular occasion, however, Dick must have altered 
 his mind about the train, because Pen was quite positive that 
 it was Dick she saw, soon after three, riding furiously like 
 that up towards the Heath. Vaguely Caryl was a little hurt. 
 He might, since he was free, have given her this afternoon, 
 even though she had impressed upon him that she was going 
 to "swot." Such a fine afternoon, too. It was horribly difficult 
 not to mind just a little. . . . 
 
 But to Pen she showed a different front. 
 
 "Well ... I told him I was too busy to see him off ... 
 though for once he did ask me . . . and, anyway, I shall hear 
 all about it when he comes back," she said. 
 
 But she didn't. Dick came back on Wednesday and said 
 nothing. Evidently he had forgotten. Caryl, gently provoca- 
 tive, jogged his memory. 
 
 "Have you seen Roberta lately?" she enquired, mischief in 
 voice and look. 
 
 Dick turned quickly and stared at her. 
 
 "Oh, I don't know . . . not for weeks, surely," he said. 
 
 That was how much he remembered his outings with Roberta. 
 Oh, but he couldn't have forgotten something that happened 
 only three days ago. , . .
 
 294 INTRUSION 
 
 "Darling ... it doesn't matter. . . . Please don't think 
 I mind or felt hurt . . . but didn't you see her on Saturday 
 afternoon the day you went up to Liverpool?" 
 
 "I did not!" said Dick. He had the surprised look of the 
 man who has been tripped up, caught out, but Caryl didn't 
 see. 
 
 "Then Pen must have been mistaken," she said easily. She 
 wasn't disturbed. She was quite certain that that was how 
 it had happened . . . that Pen had made a mistake. 
 
 She said so later to Pen herself, who stared at her. 
 
 "Rubbish, my dear child," she said. "Why, Roberta her- 
 self has admitted it!" 
 
 And again Caryl's world rocked. 
 
 She grew afraid. She was like a man living in a haunted 
 house afraid to go upstairs for fear of what he might see. 
 She moved about in a twilight of apprehension, holding aloft 
 her candle of common-sense and self-control. This thing 
 would pass if only you pretended it wasn't there . . . you 
 daren't believe anything else. And she pretended, all the 
 time and all the time, that there was nothing there. . . . 
 
 She did not refer again to the incident. Somehow Dick's 
 lie had shut it down into a pit it made you giddy to look 
 down. ... It ought, that lie ("I did not!" so emphatic 
 not just plain "No"), to have killed her love for Dick, bu 
 it hadn't. Deep down she knew it was not the lie that hur 
 half so much as this heart-breaking knowledge that Dick hac 
 chosen to spend an afternoon with Roberta when he migh 
 have spent it with Caryl herself. He had preferred Roberta 
 It wasn't that he had gone half so much as that he wanted 
 had elected, to go. That, surely, was what Pen missed when 
 she counselled an "ultimatum." She did not see that if Dick 
 wanted to go to Roberta there must be something drawing him 
 all the time. . . . 
 
 But Caryl saw it. There were times when she never saw 
 anything else. She was desperately aware that Dick was con- 
 stantly in Roberta's company, but she said nothing. Outwardly 
 her relationship with Dick had not altered: nobody guessed;
 
 INTRUSION 295 
 
 but beneath that quiet air of the usual there turned and 
 twisted and agonised some dreadful thing that caught her 
 at times by the throat, stifling her. She went still to the little 
 house in Meldon Avenue, but with a difference. Even in her 
 silent withdrawal, her hurt pride and love, there was something 
 which sent her constantly to Roberta. And from Roberta she 
 learnt nothing. She seldom mentioned Dick, and if she did 
 it was in such a casual way that it told you nothing or told 
 you, perhaps, too much. Her talk was all of Tommy Carew 
 and the people she was meeting at her flat. Impossible to 
 credit her with a secret passion for Dick. It must be Dick 
 himself who was just "making a fool of himself." Looking 
 at Roberta, you couldn't believe she was "encouraging" him, 
 yet, for all that, it came to Caryl one day that she was going 
 to Meldon Avenue so frequently because she simply couldn't 
 bear to let Roberta out of her sight. ... In a passion of dis- 
 gust she stopped going there altogether. 
 
 But she could not stop Roberta's occasional appearances at 
 Adelaide Lodge to tea: nor Roberta's reproaches that she 
 never came now to Meldon Avenue. And when she stayed 
 to dinner and Dick turned up it was unbearable, because you 
 couldn't possibly watch Dick sitting there in the same room 
 with Roberta without seeing how things were. Dick, with his 
 moods of silence, his blatant rudeness to Roberta, and 
 Roberta's quiet, inscrutable smiling. . . . He was like a man 
 struggling in the grip of something which he loathed but 
 which he could not shake off. And once after dinner she came 
 upon them in the garden, saw Dick turn suddenly, take her in 
 his arms and kiss her in a way that turned Caryl sick. She 
 sat there in the garden long after Dick and Roberta had gone 
 in : dull misery in her heart, her face white and drawn beneath 
 the evening sky. When Dick came presently to look for her 
 she did not make a scene. Some little bit of her had frozen: 
 all the rest palpitated with disgust and misery and a frantic 
 effort to understand. It was horrible, this thing that was 
 happening to her, this crumbling of her passionate happiness 
 to a heap of dust and ashes at her feet. 
 
 "You'll catch cold," Dick told her, sitting down at her side. 
 
 "I don't care," she said, letting her hand lie motionless in 
 his. 
 
 "What's the matter with you?" he asked.
 
 296 INTRUSION 
 
 "Nothing," she said. 
 
 "Why don't you say, outright, that you saw me kissing 
 Berta." 
 
 Her hand moved slightly in his. 
 
 "Don't," she said. 
 
 "But you did see?" 
 
 Her head bent lower. 
 
 "It wasn't the first time," he said. 
 
 "I knew that." 
 
 All about them the night came, slow-footed. A new moon, 
 a rim of silver, was rising slowly through the London trees. 
 Caryl raised her head and sat with wide eyes staring at misery. 
 
 "Caryl, I swear to you I don't want to kiss herl" 
 
 "I know that, too," she said. 
 
 She turned her face to him, and the look in her eyes robbed 
 him of excuses. He made a gesture of despair. 
 
 "It's you I care for ... not Roberta. It's just a damnable 
 kind of fascination. ... I try to keep away from her, God 
 knows!" 
 
 There was a humble look about him, very strange and pain- 
 ful to behold, as if he were beseeching her to understand. . . . 
 And she didn't. She didn't understand in the least. "If I 
 could," she thought, "perhaps it wouldn't hurt so much." 
 And suddenly she took his hands, bending over them in a 
 passion of tears. 
 
 "It's something in me," she said, "something I don't give 
 you. ... If I gave you all you wanted, you wouldn't find 
 things in Roberta." 
 
 "I don't find things in Roberta," he said. "Roberta gives 
 me nothing. She has nothing to give." 
 
 He caught her up against him and began kissing her. She 
 did not resist, but she sickened with the thought that this, half 
 an hour ago, was how he had kissed Roberta. 
 
 She stole in presently and went up to bed. Roberta had not 
 gone. In the little square hall she sat playing cards with 
 Caryl's father, and as Caryl came in, said good night and went 
 upstairs, a smile nickered for an instant across her face. 
 
 "Good night," she called softly. 
 
 "Fifteen-two," said Caryl's father, "fifteen-four . . ." 
 
 Cribbage. . . . 
 
 Dick came in through the open window. His voice floated
 
 INTRUSION 297 
 
 up and halted her there upon the staircase: "Well, sir, I think 
 I'll say good night." 
 
 And Roberta's slow, insolent drawl, like a soft paw stroking 
 their faces: "Aren't you going to see me home?" 
 
 Dick's voice again: "I'm sorry. . . . I'm afraid I can't 
 manage it." 
 
 And then her father's: "It's all right, my boy, I'll see 
 Berta home. . . . You get along." Dick went, and Caryl 
 moved on up the staircase. 
 
 In the days that immediately followed nothing happened to 
 reassure Caryl. If anything, it was the other way about. She 
 grew afraid almost to meet Dick, afraid of what he would tell 
 her, of what she might read in his eyes. His moods of coolness 
 towards herself alternated with those of passion, and both 
 frightened her, for always it was as if he was trying to make 
 up for something, for some loss that had come to her through 
 him, some loss of faith and trust, some thinning out of life's 
 joy. Yet in a way she never doubted his love for her. She 
 believed that beneath this queer attraction Roberta had for 
 him he loved her, Caryl, not best, but only. This feeling he 
 had for Roberta would pass. It must, since Roberta was 
 married and did not really care. She didn't. Caryl was sure 
 of that. She was only amusing herself, or flattered at the 
 power Dick allowed her to see she possessed over him. It 
 would soon pass. She had only to go on remembering that: 
 to sit tight and say nothing. . . . Yet it was difficult to sit 
 still at the death of her old ecstasies, of her implicit trust and 
 belief in her lover. 
 
 She no longer trusted him. She knew that. But she believed 
 that some day he would come back to her whole.
 
 CHAPTER EIGHT 
 
 1 
 
 IT was at the beginning of September that Pen, taking her 
 courage in both hands, spoke to Allan. 
 A visit to the theatre where she had seen Dick with 
 Roberta was the last straw in her secret fire of indignation. 
 
 "Did you tell Dick we saw him at the theatre?" Pen asked 
 Caryl when she returned the next day from some appointment 
 she had with Dick. And Caryl said, "I didn't think of it." 
 
 This conspiracy of lies! It roped everybody in! 
 
 So Pen went to Allan, who raised his eyebrows and appeared 
 unconcerned. But he spoke to Roberta none the less. 
 
 "You seem to go out a good deal lately," he said. "I 
 imagine you don't go alone." 
 
 "Tommy's back," said Roberta. 
 
 "I'm aware of that, but it wasn't Tommy you were at the 
 theatre with the other evening, though you told me you were 
 going with her when I passed on the tickets." 
 
 "She was engaged. ... I rang up Dick at the last 
 moment. . . ." 
 
 "Well, don't ring Dick up: or don't do it so frequently. 
 Pen says you see too much of him." 
 
 "But Caryl knows." 
 
 "You mean you tell her when you go out together?" 
 
 "Well, not every time, perhaps. . . ." 
 
 "Now look here, Roberta. I won't have it. Don't start the 
 old game with Dick you played with Thorp. It's just as well 
 to remember that Dick's engaged to Caryl. I won't have you 
 making her unhappy. It isn't as if you cared anything about 
 Dick." 
 
 "How do you know?" asked Roberta. 
 
 "Because I know you. You've never cared for anybody in 
 your life." 
 
 298
 
 INTRUSION 299. 
 
 "Well, it may interest you to know that I'm very fond of 
 Dick." 
 
 "What, precisely, do you mean by that?" 
 
 "What you mean when you say you're fond of Madeleine 
 Hervey." 
 
 "But I don't say it." 
 
 "Well, it's true, anyway. Everybody knows. Look here, 
 Allan, you leave me alone and I'll leave you alone." 
 
 Allan looked at her. He felt very calm, very quiet, and a 
 sense of inward satisfaction came to him as he acknowledged 
 these things. 
 
 "Understand me, Roberta," he said. "I won't have it! 
 You'll keep Madeleine Hervey's name off your lips and you'll 
 leave Dick Merrick alone." 
 
 Roberta laughed, but said nothing. Somehow, Allan was 
 strangely disconcerted by that laugh. A tremor passed over 
 the surface of his calm: something happened to that sense of 
 inward satisfaction. 
 
 "You're awfully funny, you know," she said, "and melo- 
 dramatic. If Dick likes to take me out sometimes, why 
 shouldn't he? It's Caryl's fault if he does. She should make 
 herself more attractive. She doesn't care what she wears, and 
 she's everlastingly swotting at that old degree of hers. As if 
 men cared for brains. . . . Good lord, / know men! Brains 
 are the last thing they want from a woman. Besides, Caryl's 
 always putting Dick off for something or other." 
 
 "Well, don't you step into the breach, that's all," said Allan. 
 
 Roberta laughed again. Allan looked at her leaning back 
 against the table, her hands flat upon its surface, her head 
 thrown back, her perfect teeth revealed in the laugh that 
 plunged a knife into the heart of Allan's calm. She was like 
 the woman in that poem of Rossetti's who had been stabbed 
 by her lover because she laughed ... as Roberta was laughing 
 now. And he was like the lover. He went over and shook her 
 into sobriety. 
 
 "Shut up," he said. "One of these days when you laugK 
 like that I shall kill you." 
 
 He hated her because she had made love an indelicacy . . . 
 because she thought it was just a thing for rouged lips and the 
 comedian's snigger. It was the only sort of love she knew. 
 And he hated her because she dragged out his passion for her
 
 300 INTRUSION 
 
 over the clean surface of life; so that, actually, he never got 
 away from it. 
 
 But though he had "spoken" to Roberta he was not really 
 concerned with her friendship for Dick: he thought Pen, 
 there, was altogether on the wrong track. Dick did not strike 
 him as the sort of young man to lose his head over Roberta, 
 and he was quite certain Roberta was only amusing herself as 
 she did with every man she met. She was vain and stupid, 
 but not vicious, and, in any case, Allan was tired of following 
 her about. It was up to the man, the particular man of the 
 moment, to protect himself. Never once did it occur to him 
 that Roberta might be using Dick as she had hoped to use 
 Madeleine Hervey. If he wouldn't, then she would . . . that 
 she wanted her freedom as badly as all that. Tommy Carew 
 could perhaps have told him why. 
 
 Certainly it was Madeleine's name on Roberta's lips rather 
 than her friendship with Dick that drove hardest, these days, 
 into the shell of Allan's understanding. He was utterly 
 obsessed by the idea that what Roberta wanted was that he 
 should put himself in the wrong: so that it never once occurred 
 to him that she might perform that office for herself. f He 
 reasoned, too, that if Roberta saw more of Dick than was good 
 for him, it must be Caryl's own fault. She was crazy about 
 this idea of giving a man his freedom, and Allan supposed she 
 knew her man. Also, Dick was one of the very few men he 
 had never seen Roberta "make eyes" at; they did not, she 
 and Dick, he thought, get on too well. Often, as he knew, 
 Caryl had had to keep the peace; had frequently persuaded 
 Roberta to go somewhere or other with Dick when she herself 
 was too busy to go. Allan believed Caryl could fight her own 
 battles and, anyway, was not just now particularly disposed 
 to take her part. He was irritated by her recent frank criticism 
 of himself in the role of husband. She had been, he thought, 
 infernally and unnecessarily sorry for Roberta: had accused 
 him of neglect and selfishness. You couldn't talk to a kid 
 like Caryl about things, of course; but "Pen's on the wrong 
 track," he wrote to Guen. "For God's sake, shut her up!" 
 
 What disturbed him, however, was the fact that where
 
 INTRUSION 301 
 
 Madeleine was concerned Roberta was very definitely not on 
 the wrong track a little piece of self-knowledge which partly 
 accounted for the energy with which he had shaken Roberta 
 when she laughed an evening or so ago. For it had shown 
 him, that ringing laughter of hers, not only the hollowness of 
 what he had attained, but the desirability of what he had 
 missed. Following a will-o'-the-wisp he had missed the thing 
 that mattered. Yet even now (and this he recognised, too) 
 the will-o'-the-wisp ran ahead seductively. He wanted not 
 to follow, but he could not yet turn back. Roberta was 
 infinitely stupid. The tactics she followed were the tactics to 
 keep him still following after her and that was not what she 
 wanted. She did not want to keep him, but she was not clever 
 enough to see that the satisfaction of his passion was the easiest 
 way of killing it. Had she satisfied him she would have lost 
 him: the thing that held him that defied and made naught 
 of his reading of the rest of her was his unsatisfied physical 
 longing. Always and he knew it and she did not it was the 
 mantle of her inaccessibility clinging about his feet that 
 hindered his escape. 
 
 God only knew if she was satisfied with this strange shape 
 into which she had twisted marriage. Allan only knew that 
 he wasn't. Did she really want no more out of it, out of life, 
 than what she had secured, immunity from claims of body and 
 soul, liberty in which to see her own friends, go her own way? 
 . . . They had arrived, these days, at the stage when they just 
 did not quarrel, and Allan wished with passion sometimes that 
 they did. He was appalled by the sense he had of their utter 
 separateness. It was awful to live with somebody with whom 
 you've not a single thing in common . . . who doesn't care, 
 in any way at all, what you are or do or feel. Roberta didn't 
 pretend any longer. She just didn't care. 
 
 Allan had been through hours of misery because he still did, 
 and of agony because he had thought, sometimes, that it was 
 going on for ever. But he knew now that it wasn't. He knew 
 it because Madeleine Hervey was back in town again, and he 
 was afraid to go to the Attic in case he should meet her.
 
 302 INTRUSION 
 
 At the beginning of September it was obvious even to Allan, 
 who had much else to think about, that Dick was seeing a good 
 deal less of Roberta than he had been doing during the summer. 
 Caryl had it from Dick himself, who persisted in telling her 
 when Roberta had "turned him down," and from Roberta 
 herself on one of those occasions when she came to Adelaide 
 Lodge to dinner. Finding Caryl alone in the drawing-room, 
 she had plunged headlong into her subject. 
 
 "Caryl . . . aren't you ever coming to see me again?" 
 
 "I don't know," said Caryl uneasily. "Not just yet." 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "I'd rather not say." 
 
 How explain that she was still kept away by that sense of 
 disgust which had swept over her in the summer when she 
 realised that she had been going to Meldon Avenue to keep an. 
 eye on Roberta? 
 
 "Caryl. ... It isn't my fault really about Dick. I don't 
 want him hanging around . . . not, I mean, if it's upsetting 
 you." 
 
 Caryl put down her book and directed a level stare at 
 Roberta. 
 
 "It isn't," she said quietly. 
 
 "Well, then, if it's all right, why don't you come to see 
 me ... be pally again? Look here, Caryl, twice last week I 
 refused to go out with Dick sent him off to you." 
 
 Caryl winced. Oh yes, Dick had come to her right enough: 
 had come complaining that Berta had "turned him down." 
 
 "Bobbie, please ... I really can't discuss this with you." 
 She picked up her book again. The words on the page danced 
 up and down ... up and down . . . and when at last they stood 
 still they had lost all their meaning. Roberta's honey-sweet 
 voice was taking the sense out of them and out of life. . . . 
 
 "Well, I know it can't be very nice for you," she was saying. 
 "But- then, it isn't for me, either. . . . Pen glares at me enough 
 to kill me, and Allan's been at me, too. Really, Caryl, it isn't 
 my fault. ... I haven't encouraged Dick." 
 
 She didn't need to, Caryl thought a little bitterly. 
 
 "I didn't suppose you had," she said. "Shall we drop the 
 subject?"
 
 INTRUSION 303 
 
 "That's all very well . . . but I can't have you and Dick 
 quarrelling over me." 
 
 Caryl's level brows drew together in sudden pain. 
 
 "We don't quarrel," she said. "Who told you we did?" 
 
 "Nobody. But that night when you came in from the gar- 
 den . . . and Dick followed. You looked as though you'd been 
 quarrelling then." 
 
 "We hadn't," Caryl said. 
 
 "Nor that afternoon ... a long while ago now . . . when 
 you went off without any tea?" 
 
 "Nor that day either," said Caryl. 
 
 "Then you haven't been . . . bothering?" 
 
 "About Dick's making himself ridiculous over you?" 
 
 "Yes . . '. if you like to put it like that." 
 
 "Isn't that what it is?" 
 
 "I suppose so. All men are like that." 
 
 "Over you, you mean?" 
 
 "I tell you, Caryl, men are rotters. . . . But I'm awfully 
 glad you don't mind about Dick . . . and me." 
 
 A funny little smile hovered for an instant over Caryl's 
 mouth. She sat there, her fingers twisted in her lap, and she 
 gave presently the very faintest shrug of her thin shoulders. 
 
 "Oh, mind!" she said just as Alice came in with the tea 
 tray. 
 
 Tea was ever a meal you could make as short or as long as 
 you pleased. On the plea of work Caryl made it this afternoon 
 very short indeed. But from dinner there would be no escape. 
 And to it Dick was coming. . . . Perhaps it was accidental 
 that Dick's visits to dinner synchronized so frequently with 
 Roberta's. You had to think that. Besides, to-night Allan 
 was coming, too. That ought to make it better. 
 
 But it didn't. Perhaps nobody and nothing could have made 
 it better. Or worse. From first to last it was simply unbearable. 
 
 And yet what was it exactly? What was there about the 
 meal which would have opened anybody's eyes without the 
 foreknowledge that was Caryl's? "I'm looking for things," 
 she said, "imagining things. . . ." And even that didn't help 
 . . . nor the flood of self-disgust which swept over her. 
 
 She sat this evening, for some reason, opposite Dick instead
 
 304 INTRUSION 
 
 of beside him. The dining-table was round, and Roberta sat 
 at what should have been the right-hand corner, so that she, 
 too, faced Dick. And every time Caryl raised her eyes it seemed 
 as if they went straight either towards Dick or Roberta. Yet 
 Dick and Roberta were not talking: they addressed scarcely 
 any remark to each other. Dick, it is true, kept up a running 
 fire of general conversation; but to Caryl it was as though 
 the talk was a shield between him and Roberta. His eyes were 
 constantly upon her, and every time Caryl noticed it was like 
 a physical pain, sharp and savage, as of a sting. When 
 Roberta's eyes met Dick's he looked away quickly "as if he 
 were afraid," went Caryl's thoughts. And yet Roberta was 
 behaving perfectly: just sitting there quite quietly eating her 
 food, exchanging trivial remarks with Pen and Anne Suffield. 
 Most certainly she was not coquetting with Dick making eyes. 
 Her air was one almost of indifference as if she didn't care 
 ... (as if she needn't trouble, went Caryl's traitor thoughts). 
 She had the unconcern of the woman who is sure of her man, 
 who knows she needn't even raise an eyebrow. Roberta never 
 gave herself any unnecessary trouble, and to Caryl this evening 
 that little air of quiet about her was deadly. More, it was 
 insolent as though she said, "You will observe I don't even 
 have to change my frock or powder my nose. ..." 
 
 And poor Caryl had done both had put on her nicest frock 
 and borrowed some of Pen's powder. . . . 
 
 Over coffee the talk turned for an instant upon a story of 
 Guen's in the current Miscellany. Even John Suffield was 
 moved to express admiration of the way it was done. As a 
 story it disturbed him, but less than it would have disturbed 
 him a few months ago. "You know," he said now to Allan, 
 "I don't see how we can afford this new world you and Guen 
 are after." 
 
 "But do you think," Allan asked him, "that we can really 
 afford the old one this world we've got?" 
 
 It was then that Roberta looked up from a contemplative 
 stirring of her coffee. 
 
 "I wish someone'd tell me," she said, "what really happened 
 at the end of Guen's story." 
 
 "Read it for yourself," said Allan bluntly. 
 
 "But I have," said Roberta. "Honestly . . . I've read the 
 ending twice and I don't understand it a scrap."
 
 INTRUSION 305 
 
 So they told her, and Roberta said prettily, "Thanks . . . 
 it must be awfully nice to have brains. . . ." 
 
 Allan frowned, but Caryl didn't see that. She only saw 
 Dick's smile and that look which passed between her father 
 and Pen's Tom. Her nerves, already stretched and strained, 
 snapped suddenly. 
 
 "I don't see," she said, "why men always wear that look 
 of gratification when a woman confesses she's a fool." 
 
 And Caryl rose and walked out into the garden. 
 
 Nobody followed her. She walked to the bottom of the 
 garden and sat down beneath September's yellow moon. 
 
 "I can't bear it ... I just can't!" she said, her hands 
 clasped in an agony of misery and her head bowed over them. 
 
 Yet presently within that high-walled garden fragrant with 
 the scent of late roses and of early asters, where already sum- 
 mer seemed folded like a memory against earth's heart, where 
 no wind or living thing stirred her misery stole out from her 
 as the sea from a moon-kissed shore. A world unseen, 
 unguessed at, drew near and blessed her. It ceased to matter 
 so dreadfully what happened to her. There were things that 
 remained things that nobody could touch. Out of the deli- 
 cate dark a laughing face came swimming . . . and Jan's voice 
 . . . "Oh, you! You'd think it a privilege to break a front 
 tooth!" 
 
 Jan had understood had known she was like that, perhaps 
 because he was like it himself as well. He, too, loved living, 
 loved life that had served him so scurvily. That phrase of his 
 would go down with her to the grave. . . . 
 
 She was young and she wanted to live. No one ever wanted 
 it as she wanted it. She wanted to live, whatever the years 
 had to offer her. 
 
 "I want to stay," she said, "until I'm burned out." 
 
 Nothing mattered nothing in all the world save the fate 
 that had overtaken Jan to die before you were old, before you 
 had lived, actually, at all. . . .
 
 CHAPTER NINE 
 
 1 
 
 NOT that the miseries the vague blur of unhappiness > 
 did not come back. But at least that little bit of 
 knowledge, that hidden pool of impregnable quiet, 
 helped her to keep her secret. Nobody guessed but Pen, and 
 Pen only guessed enough for vague disapproval: even she did 
 not believe there was "anything in it really," only even the 
 most harmless of philandering was not the sort of quality any 
 sensible woman encouraged in the man she was going to marry. 
 But Caryl wasn't sensible. Caryl was an idea-d little idiot, 
 full of theories that wouldn't work, that in this world never 
 would work. . . . All the same, Pen saw she could not help 
 seeing that Caryl no longer went to Meldon Avenue. Others 
 saw it too: but found in Caryl's studies for her Final reason 
 enough. Only Pen (clever at nothing but the reading of men 
 and women) saw down beneath the veneer of that affability 
 Caryl showed towards Roberta whenever she came to Adelaide 
 Lodge; read aright the signs of Caryl's distress when Dick and 
 Roberta were both at the house, and made no mistake over that 
 evening when Caryl rapped out her snub and walked out into 
 the garden. She saw that Caryl, for all her talk, was less brave 
 than her ideas. She suffered, but she suffered in silence. You 
 couldn't, try as you might, get anything out of Caryl. She 
 went to her lectures and returned from them; her mind centred, 
 to all outward seeming, upon the thesis with which she hoped 
 in the next year to take her M.A. Her Honours degree in 
 Pure Mathematics had been an achievement, and Anne Suf- 
 field thought she had overdone it. "Poor child!" she said that 
 night when Caryl had snubbed Roberta, "so unlike Caryl. 
 I'm sure she's working too hard!" 
 
 But it wasn't her M.A. thesis which was wearing her out 
 half so much as this problem of Roberta and Dick, from which 
 she could never escape and the answer to which eluded her. 
 
 306
 
 INTRUSION 307 
 
 Withdrawn, aloof, she looked at it steadily: approached it by 
 different methods and still arrived at no solution. Roberta's 
 part in it baffled her utterly. The things she knew of Roberta 
 and still more the things she didn't know, the things she was 
 quite hopelessly wrong about, did not tend in the least to 
 simplify the problem. At the most, she felt, Roberta was only 
 amusing herself, finding Dick useful, filling up the gaps. . . . 
 Yet if you admitted that you had also to admit something 
 else: you had to admit that Roberta would undoubtedly be 
 worried by this passion of feeling she'd inadvertently called into 
 being, not only because of Caryl (and Caryl thought she would 
 care something for that), but because Roberta had told her so 
 often how it distressed her when men lost their heads about 
 her. (They did it frequently: "If I were a man," Caryl used 
 to think, "I'd do it, too!") You had, no doubt at all about 
 it, Caryl reasoned, to acquit Roberta of malice prepense: she 
 was vain and fond of flattery even Caryl, not at all good at 
 psychology, saw that and she always let a situation get beyond 
 her in a fashion that argued stupidity. All those cases of all 
 those other men. Roberta had never known in time what was 
 happening: had always "let herself in" for things. She hadn't 
 known she never would know what to do with passion, with 
 this thing of the depths her beauty plucked out of men! 
 She'd find it always a thing of vast inconvenience, but it 
 wouldn't be Roberta who would be scorched. She'd merely 
 withdraw herself from the flame, delicately revolted, more 
 convinced than ever of her own essential delicacy and the 
 incurable, never-ending beastliness of the world she lived in. 
 
 Any fleeting doubt that might have come to Caryl as to 
 Roberta's indifference was disposed of not only by Roberta's 
 own disclaimers ("It's not my fault. ... I don't want him 
 hanging about. . . . Really, Caryl, I haven't encouraged 
 him!"), but by Allan's attitude when Pen had finished 'with 
 him. Pen had said outrageous things to Allan, and he had 
 remained calm. That, somehow, did seem to settle it, because 
 you couldn't help feeling Allan knew. He had seen the lighting 
 of all those other candles and their extinguishing. Always the 
 altar had remained beautiful, bare of sacrifice. Oh, yes, Allan 
 knew: he was used to men making fools of themselves over 
 Roberta. 
 
 Yet, though Roberta was thus far absolved, Caryl could not
 
 308 INTRUSION 
 
 find it in her heart to go to see her. That avalanche of disgust 
 which had swept down upon her when she realised she'd been 
 going to Meldon Avenue merely to "keep an eye" on Roberta 
 was still making that impossible. But it was not Roberta's 
 part in this contretemps that really worried her. It wasn't 
 Roberta she blamed if, indeed, she blamed anybody and per- 
 haps she didn't. Nor was it really Roberta's fate which inter- 
 ested her, for even Caryl sensed vaguely that Roberta's capacity 
 for suffering was not overwhelming. Just that delicate with- 
 drawal, that folding of herself away . . . little more. The 
 person who would suffer was suffering was Dick (she 
 omitted herself because her suffering was so utterly bound up 
 with his), and, whatever Roberta was doing, Dick was certainly 
 not "amusing" himself. This feeling he had for Roberta was 
 horribly real, and Caryl was far from despising it because she 
 knew it for so utterly a thing of the senses. She saw that, 
 indeed, as the one piece of brightness in her dark cloud, for 
 she did not believe that a thing so entirely physical could 
 possibly last. She believed and her faith was the rock to 
 which she clung in a raging sea that presently Dick's intel- 
 lectual disapproval would turn and stamp upon it : that all she 
 had to do was to sit still, to pretend that she saw less than she 
 did, that she suffered less. . . . 
 
 Only that, with Dick, was a thing horribly difficult to keep 
 up. Easier with anybody than with Dick . . . who only made 
 her realise how impossible it was to wear a mask before one 
 for whom all masks had for so long been doffed. There were 
 dreadful occasions during those early September days when she 
 didn't "keep it up" at all, when she stopped being aware of 
 Dick's pain, perceiving only her own. That was the unforgiv- 
 able sin to show what you were enduring. As though, here, 
 you mattered. . . . 
 
 It happened once when Dick came complaining that Roberta 
 had "turned him down" she did it often these days. . . 
 ("Sending him back to you," Roberta had called it, hadn't she, 
 to Caryl?) And suddenly the armour in which Caryl had come 
 clad to the interview slipped from her. The sword ran home. 
 
 "Oh, why, why do you tell me?" she said. It was some- 
 how outrageous that he should: that his own sense of dignity 
 didn't prevent it. And it didn't. 
 
 "I must," Dick said; "it's a sort of penance. . . ."
 
 INTRUSION 309 
 
 "But it's 7, /, who do the penance," groaned Caryl, forgetting 
 that she had said once, "I must know . . . whatever happens, 
 I must know!" 
 
 She saw now that he didn't understand, that he thought she 
 was hurt because Roberta had had to remind him that he was 
 engaged to Caryl, had "sent him back" to her. And it wasn't 
 that; at least, it wasn't that which had stripped her of her 
 armour, but only this outrageous sense of pity which assailed 
 her because he hadn't been able to keep from her this last 
 revelation of his weakness. It was as though, hideously, he 
 took some morbid delight in baring his wounds. . . . They 
 turned her sick. 
 
 In between these miserable days came others which were 
 not . . . days in which they believed they had forgotten and 
 were happy. It was always Dick who knocked this precarious 
 happiness over the head. Caryl would have forgotten if he 
 would have allowed her. 
 
 "It's you who ought to do the turning down," he told her 
 one day. "Why don't you chuck me, Caryl?" 
 
 She answered with averted face. 
 
 "I don't know . . . unless it's that I happen to care enough 
 to go on." 
 
 "For how long?" 
 
 "God knows!" she said, and seas of bitterness flowed over 
 her. "Would it be any satisfaction to you to know that you 
 could break my heart? Is that what you want?" 
 
 "Caryl, don't. . . ." 
 
 His look of misery did not stop her. The knife was in her 
 heart and turning all ways. She raised her chin and spoke with 
 the calm of the dying: "You can't. You can't break my heart. 
 Nobody can. . . . You can't, any of you, touch the real me. . . . 
 It wouldn't kill me to know you faithless . . . more faithless 
 than you are. . . . No, don't touch me ... I can't bear it!" 
 Her voice rose: the calm of the dying incontinently deserted 
 her. 
 
 "You . . . you make me angry," she said. "I could die of 
 shame for you. To grovel like this . . . before any girl . . . 
 to come to me ... whining about it ... don't touch me, I tell 
 you I despise you!" 
 
 It was a scene difficult to forget, hateful to remember. And 
 Caryl remembered it all night, and went off next morning to
 
 310 INTRUSION 
 
 a lecture on Elliptic Functions, of which she didn't hear a 
 word. This frightened her, and she decided that there must 
 be no more "scenes." 
 
 But there were. She was powerless, it seemed, to prevent 
 them. There was that day, scarcely a week later, when she 
 and Dick had gone down to Kew. ... A miserable day it 
 proved, forlorn and empty of hope. She was sore from a week 
 of petty disloyalties, of shifting and lies. Dick had hardly been 
 near her for the length of it, though he swore he hadn't been 
 with Roberta. She didn't believe him, or perhaps she wouldn't. 
 Was it better to believe that he'd been with Roberta than that 
 he hadn't wanted to come to her? She had to hold on to her 
 belief in his love for her, to her conviction that this feeling 
 for Roberta was no more than the wind across the grass. She 
 sat now straightly in her seat, her eyes fixed on the river, where 
 a streak of light ran swiftly up stream, betraying the path of a 
 water rat to the opposite bank. 
 
 "If only," she said suddenly out of a desperate silence, "if 
 only Roberta weren't married!" 
 
 "What difference would that make?" Dick wanted to know. 
 
 She looked at him. Her eyes did not waver, nor her voice. 
 
 "You might be able to go and get it over!" 
 
 It was a phrase some girl in Guen's room had used long ago 
 about the writers in some advanced quarterly, who had given 
 their imagination rein down a disgusting thoroughfare. The 
 girl had sounded amused, but Caryl's voice repeating her phrase 
 this afternoon to Dick had been resonant with passionate 
 disgust. 
 
 "Oh, I can't talk about it!" she said. "But anything would 
 be better than this . . . anything in the world." 
 
 Her voice broke. She sat quite still, unspeakably wretched, 
 staring down at her hands, her level brows drawn together. 
 
 It was a beautiful afternoon, clad in soft lights and shades, 
 in primrose and pearl and grey. Dick and she were sitting on 
 a seat on the very edge of the Gardens, in a quiet spot by the 
 river where it swung past the curve of the grounds. Nothing 
 and nobody was there to disturb them save the quiet beauty 
 of the day that mocked their own lack of tranquillity. Suddenly 
 Dick moved up to her and took her unresisting hands in his. 
 
 "You blessed infant," he said, "you don't know what you're 
 talking about."
 
 INTRUSION 311 
 
 The quick tears came into her eyes. 
 
 "I do," she said. "I know a lot more than you think." 
 
 "You mean, you'd marry me . . . afterwards?" 
 
 The tears in her eyes welled over and flowed down her face. 
 She made a pitiful effort to control them, gave it up, struggled 
 to free her hands, gave that up, too, and turned her head away. 
 
 "I don't know," she said, "I don't know." The tears rolled 
 down and down her face. "If anyone should see us!" Dick 
 thought; and then, "Oh, damn! what the hell does it matter?" 
 She looked, he thought, such a baby. Torn with pity, he was 
 torn also with anger against her because she let him see how 
 much he was making her suffer, against himself because he 
 could neither give her up nor keep away from Roberta. All 
 that was best in him wanted Caryl: but some little bit of him 
 (much stronger, somehow, than all the rest) wanted Roberta. 
 
 "Darling," he said, "don't cry. I'm not worth it." 
 
 He knew he wasn't, and yet it pleased him to hear himself 
 say so. And Caryl, as if she knew that, went on with her crying. 
 He would have drawn her to him, but she resisted. That hurt. 
 
 "You see," he said, "you can't any longer bear me to touch 
 you." 
 
 She conquered her nerves with an effort, let him put an 
 arm round her. 
 
 "It isn't what you do that hurts," she said presently. "It's 
 what you want to do. . . ." 
 
 "But I don't want. . . . Good God, I tell you I don't care 
 tuppence for Roberta! The only person I care about is you. 
 It always was you . . . even when you were doing your best to 
 make it Marjorie." 
 
 She said, presently, "Yes, but it isn't all me. If you cared 
 as I do there wouldn't be room for anybody else." 
 
 "There isn't. Berta's an intruder ... an interloper." 
 
 "I know, but you can't turn her out." 
 
 "Not yet." 
 
 Silence after that and the mist coming up and Caryl's white 
 face rising palely out of it. "Not yet. . . ." How long, oh 
 Lord, how long? 
 
 With unintentional humour came the cry of the keepers, 
 calling time. They rose and walked on towards one of the 
 Kew Road gates. They went out silently, and all the time the 
 sword twisted in Caryl's heart.
 
 312 INTRUSION 
 
 Faithfulness! not only physical, but mental and moral. 
 That was what she wanted, and she wasn't going to get it. 
 But how many women did? "You're very young, you know," 
 a girl at King's had said to her once, "if you don't know that 
 faithfulness is the one thing a woman never gets from a man. 
 There are women who think they do ... who like to think it. 
 I'm not such a fool. I merely face facts." 
 
 So Caryl "faced facts" all the way home on the top of the 
 Highgate bus, and profoundly miserable the proceeding made 
 her. 
 
 If only they could have got away from Roberta and not have 
 talked so much about her! If only she hadn't been there, 
 everlastingly, as a shadowy third, they could even then have 
 snatched some semblance of happiness from their hours together. 
 But she always was, and, strangely enough, it was Dick's fault 
 and not Caryl's that they so seldom escaped her. Even now 
 there were days when Caryl could have cheated herself into 
 believing that the incidents which disturbed her were trivial 
 and did not matter, if Dick had not persisted in his dreary 
 penance until she wanted to shriek. Only by erecting the wall 
 of her reserve could she at all these days avoid "scenes." 
 Instinctively she guarded her soul, that pool of impregnable 
 quiet, against intrusion. Love wasn't all: she still believed 
 it, and yet it didn't help her. . . . Gradually her unhappiness 
 ceased to be a vague blur and became a hideous definiteness 
 that was like a steel trap cutting the deeper into her the more 
 she struggled to escape. She could, she thought, have stood 
 it if Roberta had held him by any other thread or by more 
 than that one of physical intoxication: if he could have equipped 
 his passion with some element of greatness: if it hadn't been 
 possible for him to say, "I don't care tuppence about Roberta. 
 ... I despise her! The feeling I have for her is like the 
 measles!" Because one wasn't a nice object when one had 
 the measles and to discuss your symptoms was disgusting. 
 
 When she couldn't shut the door of her work upon her 
 thoughts she found they had a way of besieging her. She went 
 over things, sorting, explaining, accusing, until her head reeled 
 and ached.
 
 INTRUSION 313 
 
 "If only he wouldn't tell me," she said to herself, "I'd forget 
 ... at least, I shouldn't remember all the time. If only he'd 
 be quiet I wouldn't look. . . ." 
 
 And she couldn't bear to look. Her instinct was to turn her 
 head away as she had wanted to do when she saw Mr. Mase- 
 field's Nan. That love-scene between Dick and Nan when he 
 takes the pins out of her hair had struck her with crude horror. 
 She couldn't bear to look. To depict on the stage things you'd 
 instinctively look away from in real life was bad art, Guen had 
 said afterwards. "The essence of a love-scene is what you 
 leave out." And being Guen, she had forborne to add: "I 
 told you you wouldn't be able to bear it." 
 
 But Dick left nothing out: spared neither himself nor her. 
 And Caryl, all the time holding fast to her one conviction, 
 reminded herself that Roberta didn't matter. That she didn't 
 matter and never would. . . . She held on to it with the despera- 
 tion of the woman who knows that when that is gone there is 
 simply nothing else. Whatever happened, Roberta didn't mat- 
 ter. Surely there ought to have been more consolation in the 
 thought than there was. Even Dick knew it was true. 
 
 "I wouldn't really care," he said, "if I never saw her again. 
 Yet she's like a magnet: as long as I know she's there in that 
 little messy house" (messier than ever it was, these days) "I 
 have to go. And seeing her's the devil! . . . It's so ... so 
 futile ... we haven't anything to talk about and, besides, it 
 annoys her . . . my turning up unexpectedly, I mean. I make 
 myself a nuisance: she reminds me that she has other friends. 
 ... It isn't a dignified figure I cut, Caryl, if it's any 
 consolation to you to know that." 
 
 "It isn't," said Caryl. Nothing was. 
 
 "And there's another thing. You were all wrong about her 
 being unhappy. That's rot ... she's merely discontented. 
 It isn't the Revolutionary's fault they don't get on. ... I'll 
 say that for him. His only fault is that he hasn't enough 
 money. Pots of money, and she'd be happy anywhere, with 
 anybody. Not that she'll ever know what happiness is, or 
 unhappiness . . . she exists on some miserable middle plane. 
 ... I want to push her off it ... violently, so that it hurts. 
 But you can't hurt her. She has the supreme gift of hurting 
 other people while remaining untouched herself. . . . She doesn't 
 care for me ... but I flatter her vanity and she finds me
 
 3H INTRUSION 
 
 useful. . . . That's the feeling I have about it all the time . . . 
 that she's using me. God. only knows why. And I don't care!" 
 
 "You're content to be used?" Caryl asked, trying hard to 
 keep that high note of scorn out of her voice and not wholly 
 succeeding. 
 
 "No, I'm not. I'm not content about anything. ... I wish 
 she'd run off to the Antipodes with some millionaire. . . . Good 
 God, Caryl! Isn't it awful that we're sitting here talking like 
 this?" 
 
 Caryl assented. 
 
 "Yes, it's pretty awful," she said. "We're not making a 
 howling success of things. ... I thought an engagement was 
 such a glorious thing." The Mute Impossible Idealist climbed 
 up and looked despairingly out of her dark eyes. "It was, Dick, 
 ours, wasn't it, until . . ." 
 
 "I began to play the fool? I know . . . it's all my fault. 
 . . . Why don't you chuck me, Caryl, and have done with it?" 
 
 "I don't know," she said, and then suddenly lost courage. 
 
 "Dick ... I can't go on like this. I just can't. Something's 
 got to happen. . . ." 
 
 "You want to cut things?" 
 
 "Wouldn't it be best?" 
 
 "Tor you?" 
 
 -"For both of us." 
 
 Her voice sounded scornful. It wasn't that she felt scornful, 
 fout only that she was cold and frightened, and for the moment 
 this assumption of scorn was as a shield between them. He 
 came closer, slipped an arm round her waist. She controlled 
 her shivering with a mighty effort, but beneath his arm her 
 young body was suddenly rigid and unyielding. 
 
 "Mean it?" said Dicks voice in her ear. The arm round 
 her waist tightened: she felt his lips on her hair and, catching 
 her breath, she drew away. 
 
 "Don't !" she said, disgust elbowing her assumption of scorn. 
 To kiss her in that easy, intimate fashion, as though things 
 were what they were! He left her nothing, neither her old joy, 
 her love nor her dignity. He'd cheapened the whole universe. 
 
 "Mustn't I?" said Dick. "Do you hate me as much as all 
 that?" 
 
 "I don't hate you . . . only, I can't bear it." 
 
 She looked woefully stricken and pathetic. Her white face
 
 INTRUSION 315 
 
 was averted, and she struggled to unfasten the grip of his 
 fingers on her waist. Misery assailed her, for something 
 something vivid and unexpected, like a flash of lightning had 
 lit up the future, and there on the dark line of the horizon she 
 saw nothing but suffering. And her sight to-day seemed 
 preternaturally long. 
 
 "Dick," she said, "I can't, I simply can't bear it." 
 He stooped his mouth to hers, and kissed her. She did not 
 resist and he held her close, as though he would squeeze out 
 of her all the misery of the past six weeks, all the unhappiness 
 that had flowed into her through the channel of her love. And 
 she, her arms about his neck, her mouth to his, took solace 
 for the immediate unbelievable past in the overpowering ecstasy 
 of the moment. 
 
 It was quite true, it couldn't go on. Something had to 
 happen. Only what ? 
 
 Then something did happen something totally unexpected. 
 
 Caryl was due to spend the following week-end at Herne. 
 Bay with the Hestons, and on the Thursday evening a letter 
 came from Marjorie putting her off. Caryl, her mind else- 
 where, slipped the letter in her pocket and thought no more 
 of it, until Dick came two hours later and said casually, "By 
 the way, you're away, aren't you, this week-end?" "Told 
 anybody about it?" he asked when she took out Marjorie's 
 letter. "No? Then, I say, Caryl, don't." 
 
 "Why not?" she said, realising nothing save that she was 
 infinitely relieved to be spared the scrutiny of Marjorie's sharp 
 eye, the scourge of her merciless tongue. It wouldn't be easy 
 to hide things from Marjorie. . . . "Why not?" she asked again. 
 
 "Because I want you to come and spend it with me, and 
 they'd make a fuss here, wouldn't they, if they knew . . ." 
 
 "They couldn't object to a boarding house," Caryl said, 
 "it's done nowadays. Even mother knows that." 
 
 "But I wasn't thinking of a boarding house," Dick said., 
 
 Caryl looked at him. 
 
 "What then?" she asked. 
 
 There's the Cottage."
 
 3i 6 INTRUSION 
 
 "But Mrs. Day's not there now. Father paid her off weeks 
 ago. . . . The place is empty." 
 
 **That, rather, was my point." 
 
 The colour flamed in Caryl's face. She didn't answer. 
 
 "I see," said Dick slowly. "You're afraid. . . . You no longer 
 trust me. . . . Six weeks ago you'd have trusted me on a desert 
 island." 
 
 "I would now," she said. "Of course I'll come." 
 
 "But you don't want to much?" 
 
 "More than anything else," she said. "Oh, Dick . . . more 
 than anything else!" 
 
 "And you'll trust me to play the game?" 
 
 "Myself, too," she said. 
 
 So Caryl, with the air of a conspirator, told nobody of 
 Marjorie's letter. It would be easy enough, on the Friday 
 evening, to slip off as if she were going to the station. They 
 were used to her goings and comings: nobody would want to 
 see her off. She was not particularly in love with the role of 
 conspirator, but it was the simplest way and she wanted those 
 two days so desperately. She saw this sudden surprising 
 venture as her one hope of getting things back. If that failed 
 everything was over. No use whatever in trying again. . . . 
 
 So she and Dick went off for their chaperonless week-end, 
 and from it Caryl returned on the Sunday evening with 
 rapturous face. As she stood before her glass, beneath the eye 
 of the Young Person Who Means To Be Happy, the door 
 opened and Pen came in. 
 
 "I think I ought to tell you," she said at once, "that I 
 happen to know you haven't been with Marjorie. I met her in 
 Heath Street yesterday. She had to come home unexpectedly 
 and had written putting you off." 
 
 Caryl looked up, brush in hand. 
 
 "Quite right," she said. "What then?" 
 
 "Nothing except that it would be interesting to know where 
 you have been." 
 
 "With Dick at the Cottage." 
 
 "You little fool!" said Pen. 
 
 "I've had the loveliest time, Pen . . . and you needn't think 
 beastly things. We aren't . . . like that." 
 
 "You aren't, my dear." 
 
 "Neither is Dick. . . . Horrid of you, Pen, to suggest it."
 
 INTRUSION 317 
 
 "I don't suggest it ... but I've eyes in my head. I can see 
 quite well, thank you, what has been going on." 
 
 "Well, it isn't going on any longer." 
 
 "You mean Dick's given Berta up?" 
 
 "If you must put it like that. ... It never meant anything. 
 It was just silliness, and now it's over." 
 
 "You're sure of that?" 
 
 "And Dick. We're not talking of Roberta any more. She's 
 dropped out." 
 
 "I see," said Pen. "Well, it sounds all right." 
 
 "It is. ... I say, Pen, don't mention this week-end, not even 
 to Tom. (Pen always narrated the day's happenings to her 
 husband in bed at night!) And I especially don't want 
 mother to know. I don't think she'd understand and she 
 might be hurt. I wouldn't like that." 
 
 Pen smiled. Justifiably, since she had just seen her mother 
 off to an expedition into Surrey to spend the day with the 
 woman who had been Jan's mistress. 
 
 But Caryl was beyond her smiling. She had had her fine 
 moment, had stood looking down upon the kingdoms of the 
 world it had revealed to her. A thing so fine, so exquisite, 
 could never be forgotten or destroyed. It would go with you 
 through life and on out into the darkness that was death.
 
 CHAPTER TEN 
 
 OTHERS followed it, as September, coloured, wistful and 
 reluctant slipped like a gold-brown bead off the string 
 of the year. October arrived, unbelievably lovely 
 all summer crowded into its early days of blue skies and hot 
 sunshine. 
 
 Dick certainly did seem to have "recovered" from Roberta. 
 She no longer hovered, a shadowy third, between him and 
 Caryl, who stayed in her busyness over her thesis to luxuriate 
 in her own happiness and in this belated summer of nineteen- 
 twenty. It had happened as she had always known it must 
 even down there in her pit of misery. Roberta had grown 
 tired: was no longer intrigued by Dick. The fires of her 
 interest had begun to burn low before ever his fan of flattery 
 had come to rest, and now that it moved no more the flame 
 was altogether extinguished. When you met her she seemed 
 to spare no pains to show you the handful of ashes scattered 
 there on the hearth. . . . 
 
 Not that the meetings were frequent, for nobody at Adelaide 
 Lodge saw much of Roberta these days. As far as Dick was 
 concerned it was already as if she did not exist. He never 
 spoke of her. Only for Caryl she moved still in a delicate mist 
 of beauty: was drawn back at intervals into her life by that 
 remote, unreal longing after beauty which possessed her, and 
 by a vague gratitude towards Roberta because her critically 
 observant eyes had sharpened her own. Nowadays Caryl took 
 longer over her dress: tried experiments in colour and style 
 and regretted that she hadn't the sort of skin you could try 
 experiments with. Had she possessed it she would have taken 
 to face-creams and powders with the alacrity of a duck to 
 water. This, certainly, was a condition of mind that needed 
 study and yet it was, she found, extraordinarily simple. The 
 incident with Roberta had taught her that Dick cared
 
 INTRUSION 319 
 
 enormously what a woman "looked like": that beauty appealed 
 to him and that for this reason, though she was not beautiful 
 she must take pains to appear so. She must achieve an effect. 
 So here, in the warm October weather, she was happy in the 
 way people often are who have been desperately unhappy 
 as though they had snatched something out of the fire of their 
 chastening. Something in Caryl that before had slept was 
 now awake: some key turned, some door opened that would 
 never shut again. Her love for Dick had shed, perhaps, some- 
 thing of its wonder, something of its bloom, but it had taken 
 on some quality it had never had before. If it asked less 
 it understood more and would give more and differently. 
 Caryl now could "put up" with things. And more than that 
 it seemed as if what had happened had been necessary to pro- 
 duce the quiet peace that dwelt with her now. She under- 
 stood, as certainly she had never understood before, that you 
 absorbed whatever happened to you, that you couldn't sweep 
 things aside. They went ultimately, these things you endured, 
 to produce you. Here, perhaps, was the explanation of the 
 fact that Caryl bore Roberta no grudge for the part she had 
 played in these things which had happened to her. They had 
 given her something she had not had before, something 
 stabilising, indestructible. But Roberta at this stage seemed 
 in little need of the friendship Caryl tried to renew. Always 
 unequal, it seemed now more than a little absurd and utterly 
 superfluous. Caryl gathered that Roberta had very many 
 friends of her own; that she did not spend much time nowa- 
 days at Number Sixteen, which began to wear a faded second- 
 hand air. Neither did Roberta make any secret of the fact 
 that she and Allan were not happy together. The fiction that 
 they were had long grown too grievous a burden to sustain. 
 Roberta no longer cared, either way. Besides, you couldn't 
 help seeing that she had other things to think about. . . . 
 
 "I wasn't made for this sort of life," she would say to Caryl. 
 "This house and the beastly work gets on my nerves. Besides, 
 Allan and I bore each other to death. I don't see why you 
 should look so shocked, either. I don't see the use of 
 pretending." 
 
 Difficult to say how Caryl arrived at the knowledge that 
 Roberta resented more bitterly than she resented anything 
 else Allan's insistent morality that would not give her the
 
 320 INTRUSION 
 
 opportunity of escape. Certainly Roberta never put these 
 things into words, for her prudishness, like her beauty, remained 
 with her yet lone sentinels of her castle of self. There 
 were times when Caryl, burrowing into that secret knowl- 
 edge of her own, was more than a little sorry for Roberta 
 not alone because she was missing things, but because she 
 was not aware she was missing them. Roberta walked uncharted 
 through life: she had neither plan nor direction. 
 
 Or had she, now, for the first time? There was something 
 about her to-day that didn't seem to have a name, that it 
 wasn't possible to catch hold of and examine, but whicli 
 affected Caryl every time she came to see her. She decided 
 presently that it must be the effect of Dick's deflection. 
 Roberta missed him, of course, even among this crowd of new 
 friends, whose names, though she flung them at her so con- 
 tinually, Caryl could never remember. For after all, it was 
 Dick, not Roberta, who had made an end of things, and to 
 a Roberta, surely, that was the sort of thing which would mat- 
 ter tremendously. She might grow tired, but not the man. 
 That Dick so obviously had, inverted her values and turned 
 her silly little world topsy-turvy. 
 
 Poor Roberta, who shut the door on all the things she did 
 not like and believed she left the world clean and beautiful 
 thereby! who live'd on the assumption that if you pushed 
 things far enough away they were no longer there at all. 
 
 Caryl was sorry, too, for Allan, because she thought that, 
 loving Roberta, he must suffer. Then one day she discovered 
 that he did not love Roberta: that he moved in the same awful 
 bondage to her as Dick had done that he couldn't escape. 
 At least, not yet. But he would, of course. The people 
 who were worth while always escaped, in the end, from 
 that sort of thing. You couldn't make a life of that nor 
 of the pain it dealt you. And when Allan escaped, what 
 then? "He'll leave her," Caryl decided. She couldn't imagine 
 Allan going on with a tiling that was meaningless, dead. Oh, 
 he'd leave her right enough. No pity glanced back, bright- 
 eyed, for Roberta. Caryl was so sure, somehow, that Roberta 
 wouldn't mind . . . that even now she would herself do the 
 leaving if she had the courage. But she hadn't. She was 
 waiting for Allan to open the door. 
 
 And then one night at the Attic Caryl was suddenly sure of
 
 INTRUSION 321 
 
 something else. . . . Madeleine was there when she arrived 
 and Allan came in soon afterwards and found a seat at her 
 side. Later the conversation drifted upon a discussion of 
 some modern novel in which the heroine leaves her husband 
 for another man. The ethical discussion upon which the room 
 was embarked leaned definitely towards the view that the 
 woman was justified. Essentially modern, they took, all of 
 them all who were free of religious dogma or taboo that 
 marriage was like any other contract: if you found it impos- 
 sible to keep its conditions it might be broken. It wasn't the 
 sort of thing they'd do, any of them, flippantly, but they wouldn't 
 expect sane people to put obstacles in their way. 
 
 Madeleine, so far, had said nothing. And then someone 
 appealed to her. It struck Caryl that she had purposely kept 
 silent : that she did not want to speak and hoped the discussion 
 would pass her by. She seemed suddenly to realise that it 
 wasn't going to do anything of the sort: that she couldn't 
 get out of it whatever "it" was. Leaning slightly forward 
 in her chair and averting her face a little from Allan 
 (impossible to miss seeing that) she began to speak. 
 
 "I don't quite see," she said, "how it's possible to take that 
 very definite line about it. If I say that what would be right 
 for some people might be wrong for others you'll imagine I'm 
 talking about the religious taboo. And I'm not. To me, it's 
 purely a question of ... there doesn't seem any other word 
 personal fastidiousness. You see, what I mean is this. This 
 woman had no grievance against her husband: she recognises 
 his worth and character only, she loves somebody else." 
 
 Here somebody sitting in the shadow of A.G.'s curtain said 
 that was just it. Somebody young, by her voice (and by what 
 it said, Caryl would have added). "Wouldn't you say," it 
 enquired of Madeleine, "that love is the only justification for 
 marriage?" 
 
 "I should say," said Madeleine, "that you either believe 
 that or you don't. This woman obviously didn't or she 
 wouldn't have married a man she merely respected. And 
 doesn't it, this view of things, place rather too much 
 importance upon what we call 'love'? Surely, love of that 
 sort comes to few people. But if you believe in it at all you 
 ought to believe in it sufficiently to wait for it. You oughtn't 
 to take second-best and then snatch the real best when and
 
 322 INTRUSION 
 
 if it comes along. We ought to pay, oughtn't we, for our 
 own mistakes? At least, we oughtn't to make other people 
 pay. . . . And in this case, surely, the husband did the paying. 
 Somehow, I can't help feeling that this woman's refusal to pay 
 her own debt soiled her. She may have been happier. . . . 
 I'm sure she was. . . . But she was less fine. . . ." 
 
 Guen tossed a smoked cigarette into her empty fire-place 
 and lighted another. "You mean," she said, as she tossed 
 the match down after the dead cigarette, "that if you made 
 a mistake of that sort you'd go on with it. You wouldn't 
 . . . open the door?" 
 
 Madeleine hesitated. Caryl saw the colour come into her 
 face as though it disturbed her to have the subject made per- 
 sonal in this uncompromising fashion. "I think," she said 
 at length, "that I should want ... a better excuse." 
 
 "He'd have to do the husband, I mean something that 
 killed your respect . . . that made it impossible for you to stay ? 
 You couldn't just walk out?" 
 
 Madeleine seemed to accept this. "It might be quite all 
 right for others," she said. "I feel sure it is. They'd feel 
 unclean if they stopped. I should feel unclean if I went." 
 
 For a moment nobody said anything. Then Allan took the 
 pipe out of his mouth and spoke. 
 
 "I see," he said. "Marriage for you is what Matthew 
 Arnold said religion was an affair of morality touched with 
 emotion." 
 
 Madeleine turned her head and looked at him out of quiet 
 eyes. 
 
 "I think I shouldn't say anything half as definite as all 
 that," she told him. "It's merely my own feeling about it. 
 I don't feel it's a question of morality in the ordinary sense at 
 all: it is, to me, just what I said it was a matter of personal 
 fastidiousness. It sounds priggish, I know, but you can't say 
 what you mean in English. ... It just is that there are some 
 things you know you can't do. They revolt you like certain 
 things to eat or the feel of a cat's fur." 
 
 Why was it that to Caryl it was as if she uttered an ulti- 
 matum, as though she gave Allan a Roland for his Oliver in 
 making the discussion personal in the way he had?
 
 INTRUSION 323 
 
 Later, after Caryl had gone, Madeleine went outside on to 
 the verandah. The dropping of A.G.'s bright chintz curtain 
 behind her seemed to leave her free and isolated: she gave a 
 sigh of relief and stood there, her hands on the cold rail of the 
 balcony, her eyes on the maze of London roofs. Seen from 
 that height, the lights of the city were shorn of their blatancy: 
 line after line of them, like the white stones of the coastguards 
 on the green cliffs, they marked out the plan of the winding 
 streets. Every now and then, coming away sharply from the 
 general buzz and with the keenness of a pistol shot, some 
 sound arrested her the sharp ping-ping of the bell in a shop 
 down in one of the streets immediately below; an angry voice, 
 a sudden cry or a shrill laugh all rising out of the very heart 
 of the short vigil which night keeps with humanity. 
 
 A step sounded on the stone and turning she found that 
 Allan, too, had passed beyond the barrier of A.G.'s gay curtain. 
 He came to her side and stood there looking down and around. 
 
 "How clear the lights are," he said presently, "that shows 
 how humid the atmosphere is." 
 
 She murmured, "Does it?" and held a little tighter to her 
 rail. She was white and cold, like still waters under an October 
 moon. Allan moved nearer and put a hand on hers. 
 
 "Madeleine you meant all that in there, or were you just 
 talking?" 
 
 She turned her head and looked at him. 
 
 "I know," he said, "you never 'just talk.' So it was, in its 
 way, of course, an ultimatum to me. You wanted me to 
 understand?" 
 
 Her affection for him, always inarticulate, was inarticulate 
 still; but out there beneath a quiet sky it was as if the veil for 
 one moment was torn down. They saw just where they stood 
 and what, between them, they had managed to miss. Time 
 dissolved. Nothing had ever happened or could ever happen. 
 There was nothing in the world at all save that instant of com- 
 prehension. It was as if in it they had both just been born and 
 had died. 
 
 "We'd better go in," she said, and turned to do it, just as 
 A.G. lifted the curtain and his voice adjured them to come in 
 and be sociable.
 
 CHAPTER ELEVEN 
 
 IN the days that immediately followed Allan stood away 
 from life, striving to see things as they were, as they 
 must be, for Roberta, for him and for Madeleine. 
 
 For Roberta they seemed pleasant enough. She spent a 
 good deal of time, these days, away from home, shedding the 
 light of her beauty upon Tommy Carew and her friends at 
 Pangbourne. She wouldn't go there many more times that 
 year, for the Indian summer was already at its end. A hint 
 of fog now in the air, frost in the mornings and at nightfall. 
 Tommy would be driven by them back to town. Allan, how- 
 ever, was not interested in Miss Carew's movements and had 
 long ago given up trying to control Roberta's. Her life to 
 him was vague, incomprehensible: it didn't matter. He had 
 got used to living comfortably without her and was grateful 
 to her for living so comfortably without him, for leaving him 
 alone. It was only so they could make anything at all of this 
 bargain they'd made with life. If Roberta had made scenes 
 Allan could not have borne it. But she didn't: she had no 
 temperament for scenes and loved comfort too well. You had 
 at least to give her credit for that vague valueless amiability 
 she carried about with her. She did not reproach him hysteri- 
 cally for the dullness of her life perhaps even Roberta knew 
 it was scarcely his fault. She went out and found a queer 
 happiness of her own. At least, Allan supposed you had to 
 call it happiness. 
 
 Anyway, he left her to it. He had given her up. At some 
 point the shackles had broken: the pachyderm hardened and 
 thickened. He saw less and less that this girl he had married 
 was beautiful and only that she was vain and empty. He had 
 seen that many times before, but never without that halo of 
 beauty. Now it stood stark, not to be missed or qualified. 
 When she was there before his eyes her beauty no longer put 
 
 324
 
 INTRUSION 325 
 
 out fingers and touched him: but sometimes, when she was 
 not there, when he sat quietly at his work, some memory 
 would come creeping out at him some memory of the white 
 curve of a shoulder, a backward tantalising glance, or the 
 flame of her hair beneath a street lamp. Her beauty belonged 
 to her still. You couldn't take that away from her, but it 
 moved him now not to passion but regret. It was ranged 
 with the things that were dead, with the things that had 
 promised so much and proved so empty. Strange how it had 
 shrouded the petty soul, kept him for so long from separating 
 her beauty from her paltriness. But to that moment when 
 Allan had succeeded in tearing them apart not for a second, 
 but irrevocably, so that apart they must remain for ever 
 belonged the beginning of that subduing of his longing for 
 her. To-day and he realised it with a shock, half triumph, 
 half bitterness there was nothing left of his passion for her 
 save those faint fingers of beauty remembered stealing out 
 after him in the quiet dark. . . . 
 
 He no longer wanted her, and he found it no longer troubled 
 him to remember that there were other men who might, that 
 among Tommy Carew's queer collection of invertebrates there 
 were probably men who flattered her to her bent. 
 
 Even to himself, however, his detachment was extraordinary. 
 It seemed incredible that he had ever cared as he had or 
 incredible that he felt as he felt now. ... It was like moving 
 in a dream. Things happened inconsequently, for no reason 
 at all. And yet though he had always known that it must 
 happen like this: that always there had been the end in sight 
 though shrouded by the mist of his own passion, he was con- 
 scious now of an overpowering sense of impotence. He could 
 escape but escape no longer mattered. So far as he could he 
 had already excluded her. She had no part anywhere in his 
 life and he had locked his study door against her so that 
 her desultory tidying-up should not disturb his work. And the 
 tidying-up was very desultory indeed. Roberta was ceasing 
 to take even superficial pains with her house: it wore, sadly, 
 a mingled air of neglect and pathos, as though it realised its 
 shortcomings, but was prepared to do better for them with 
 a little encouragement. In the spring, if they were to go on 
 living there, Allan supposed the house would have to be done 
 up. But he hated it, not because of its shabbiness, its air of
 
 326 INTRUSION 
 
 wilting under Roberta's indifference and his own scorn, but 
 because it harboured memories of all the things that had 
 happened to him. He hated the rooms in which he had loved 
 and despaired: they seemed to be permeated with the very 
 essence of his bitter humiliation. He hated them as you 
 hate rooms in which you've been ill, in which you've stared 
 through heavy lids at pain and death. . . . 
 
 Nevertheless, here in this little house, poky, neglected, untidy, 
 ridiculously like a wooden box, he must stay. With Roberta. 
 Later he might exchange the box, but Roberta would still 
 be there, as she'd been all the time. He'd never be really free 
 of her. He knew that, even though he saw with a hideous 
 clarity of vision that there was simply no reason at all why this 
 thing should go on. She'd cheated him of most of the things he 
 wanted and now he no longer wanted anything of her at all. 
 There was nothing binding them together no living child, 
 no memory of the child who was dead. Neither did Allan 
 imagine for a moment that a child could have done anything 
 for them have drawn them together. Children could only 
 have made matters worse. How they would have quarrelled 
 over any child they might have had ! The imagination boggled 
 at the thought of Roberta as a mother. 
 
 Nothing held them. He could escape to-morrow if he liked 
 * if escape were the only thing that mattered. 
 
 And it wasn't. He knew now that all the things that mat- 
 tered were shut away behind Madeleine's quiet eyes, behind 
 the phrases that had assailed him as an ultimatum. He had 
 nothing, there, to hope for. "Happier but less fine. . . ." 
 "We ought to pay for our mistakes. . . ." He saw her stand- 
 ing there at the bar of her own judgment and knew that he 
 agreed with her verdict. It never occurred to him to argue 
 about it. It wasn't, anyway, the sort of thing you could argue 
 about. . . . Either you were like that, saw the thing like that, 
 or you weren't, you didn't. . . . You couldn't get away from it. 
 Allan made no attempt to get away from it. He did not 
 try to see Madeleine. Whenever he faltered he remembered 
 that look on her face in that one moment when time and space 
 had dissolved. It was all he was to have, that moment: he
 
 INTRUSION 327 
 
 daren't spoil it. The door of the future was locked: the key 
 in Madeleine's hands. There was to be no To-morrow. There 
 was only To-day and a something already strangely vague 
 and blurred called Yesterday, into which he had poured all 
 his hopes and emotions. 
 
 And even in the dull dead level of To-day Madeleine had 
 no share. He had to learn, somehow, to do without her 
 as she had learned, long ago, to do without him. He knew now 
 that he was not essential to her happiness, that she had made 
 life stand and deliver . . . had secured something satisfying. 
 God alone knew what or how. Allan only knew that he had 
 nothing that he never would have anything. . . . 
 
 Yet, as the autumn drew to its close, he was not entirely 
 unhappy, or even unhappy at all. His work interested him 
 and there was a good deal of it. It did not leave him over- 
 much time for thought of Yesterday or of To-morrow. He 
 came also to be grateful for two things that Roberta's queer 
 friends asked her so frequently to stay with them, and that 
 when Guen came she asked no questions, never showed that 
 she saw anything at all. Even now, it seemed, she folded her 
 hands, quiescent, before this fact of Allan's disastrous mar- 
 riage. It was as though she saw they were bound as ever, she 
 and Allan, by the cords of their own futility, as though she 
 said: "We won't talk about it. Words, words, words. . . . 
 What did they ever do for us?"
 
 CHAPTER TWELVE 
 
 1 
 
 THERE seemed no reason why things should not go on 
 like this for ever. Allan was not likely to complain. 
 He'd made a mess of things and he couldn't turn his 
 back upon it. He wasn't the first man who'd bungled this 
 business of marriage and he certainly wasn't going to be crushed 
 by it. He had slammed the 'door on ecstasy and on despair, 
 and he thought, "If I'm not to know what love is, at least I 
 know what it is not. It was worth suffering to have learnt 
 that." 
 
 He saw little of Roberta throughout October. Almost 
 invariably when he came home she was seeking amusement 
 elsewhere, but she always returned in respectable time and 
 amiably enough. Allan saw that if he left her alone he'd have 
 peace. He left her alone. 
 
 Week-ends were the worst, and he thanked Heaven that 
 Tommy Carew remained at Pangbourne, fog or no fog, and 
 continued to ask her down there. He was bored by her recital 
 of adventures and was glad when Caryl sometimes looked in 
 to listen to them and he might escape. 
 
 But Caryl's visits these days were not too frequent: she was 
 divided alternately between her work and Dick; but when 
 she came to Meldon Avenue she was always alone. As far as 
 Allan knew Roberta and Dick had not met for weeks. Of 
 course there had never been anything in that. Hadn't he 
 always known Pen was on the wrong track ? 
 
 Caryl, these days, was a cheerful person. The tense 
 strung-up note about her had gone, and Allan envied her, as he 
 had envied her before, her trick of happiness. 
 
 It was at the beginning of November that Roberta went 
 down to Pangbourne for her final week-end. (Tommy, she 
 said, "fed up with the fog," was coming back to her flat in 
 the following week.) It happened, too, that Dick was at Read- 
 
 328
 
 INTRUSION 329 
 
 ing that week-end, and Caryl turned up after lunch to reproach 
 Allan for not having come around to Adelaide Lodge for 
 the meal and to get him to take her and Leader for a walk. 
 She'd been bored to death, she explained, by the household 
 that day. Her father and mother had gone down into Surrey 
 to visit somebody or other (somebody Jan used to know. Did 
 Allan know who it was and why this horrible secrecy?) and 
 Tom and Pen together were a little too much for Caryl. She'd 
 got up at five to work and had taken Master Jan out until 
 lunch, but that young man was now sleeping and it was dull 
 work listening to Tom and Pen on the prospect of Master Jan's 
 baby-sister, who was to make her appearance in the spring. 
 
 "It's all very fine," Caryl sat on the edge of Allan's table 
 and complained, "but really they do rather overdo it. Tom 
 insists upon treating Pen like an invalid: anybody'd think 
 she was in danger of expiring at any moment in dreadful 
 torment before his eyes. This view of a wife as an actual or 
 potential invalid is depressing, you ;know, old thing. If I may 
 say so, you were a jolly sight more sensible over Roberta's little 
 affair " 
 
 "I'm glad I pleased you," Allan said, looking up from the 
 article he'd said he must finish before he took Caryl out. "I 
 know you want to let off steam, but do hold it in for five min- 
 utes. All the words I can think of are adjectives, and I've 
 a prejudice in favour of one noun and one verb at least in a 
 sentence. There are some cigarettes on the mantelpiece. Go 
 and help yourself." 
 
 Discovering the cigarettes Caryl discovered also the dust. 
 "Inches of it!" she said, "everywhere!" 
 
 Allan apologised. Roberta didn't care for dusting, and in 
 any case he didn't care for Roberta's interpretation of the 
 word flicking the dust from one place to another. "Besides," 
 he said, "she forgets all about it, and when she remembers 
 and arrives with the necessary implement I've got quite used 
 to the dust at least I prefer it where it is." 
 
 Caryl let him finish his article and she coaxed Leader into 
 doing it too. For Leader, who understood not only English 
 but French and German as well, and from whom the word 
 "walk" could not be disguised, was thoroughly well aware 
 that this trot from house to house was only a pleasant prelude 
 to a real outing upon the Heath. Presently, when Allan laid
 
 330 INTRUSION 
 
 down his pen, Caryl went out and found a cloth with which 
 she removed the dust from the furniture, whilst an agitated 
 Leader informed her she was wasting much precious time, 
 and Allan put on his boots. 
 
 Ready first, she pulled back Roberta's dirty curtains, which 
 that young woman kept flatly spread across the window, and 
 looked out. The quiet suburban road was deserted: nobody 
 else seemed smitten with this desire to walk. Nothing what- 
 ever to see save a row of tiny houses in the grip of Sunday, 
 and winter jasmine climbing like yellow stars over the one 
 immediately opposite. From the clipped suburban trees the 
 coloured leaves dropped straightly to the ground. There was 
 no wind. Where the dead leaf fell there did it rest. Almost 
 as if she had been Guen that line from Keats jumped out at 
 her and fixed the picture. A melancholy young man, Keats, 
 his mind full of nice thoughts about death and pain, but he'd 
 written lines that you couldn't forget. . . . And that yellow 
 jasmine ! how nice of those people opposite to have planted it. 
 
 When Allan came down they locked up the little wooden 
 box and went out on to the Heath. Allan hated the time of 
 the year, hated to see the months, growing wan and cold in 
 autumn's diaphanous robe, slipping one by one into the lap of 
 winter: and he, too, was grateful to the people who'd had the 
 foresight to plant the winter jasmine. 
 
 It was dark when they got back: the early stars gleamed 
 coldly through the branches of the trees: the sky had the quiet 
 of the windless day. On the still moist air were borne the 
 floating scents of autumn: one did not admit, yet, that it was 
 winter. 
 
 Indoors was a bright fire bright enough for toast, and 
 while Caryl was making it Allan found cups and saucers in 
 the kitchen and put on a kettle to boil. Leader, who loved a 
 fire, scorched his nose against a very hot fender and retired, 
 looking chagrined. 
 
 Caryl laughed. 
 
 "Do you remember how he used to sit by Alice while she 
 did the grate in the morning?" she asked Allan who came in 
 just then with his tray. "And how you used to say that in 
 his doggie mind you were sure he called Alice Prometheus?" 
 
 Allan laughed. 
 
 "Good Lord, yes ! How long ago that seems 1"
 
 INTRUSION 331 
 
 Caryl turned back to her toast. Allan, watching her, was 
 struck, as he had been every time he looked at her this after- 
 noon, by the air of quiet happiness she wore and which fitted 
 her like a garment. He was in the mood to envy her. He 
 supposed he'd feel like that pretty often, having made a mess 
 of things himself. But in a sense he'd always envied Caryl: 
 had always seen that she had something he and Guen had not. 
 The youngest of her family by more than seven years, it was 
 as if, in her, Nature had permitted herself a glorious finishing 
 up, giving her the best qualities of her brothers and sisters, 
 but toning them up, investing them with some bright quality 
 of optimism that was allied to, not divorced from, thought, 
 as it was in Pen and had been in Jan. 
 
 Caryl had toasted her third piece of bread and had impaled 
 the fourth on Roberta's toasting-fork when a step came outside 
 and the sound of a knock on the door. Leader, roused from 
 his reverie of hot fenders, trotted off to the door, then turned 
 to stare back at Caryl, who paused with her slice of bread in 
 mid-air and frowned. 
 
 "Allan! A knock! Will you go?" and as he came past the 
 half-shut door she called, "If it's Pen come to haul us off to 
 tea, we aren't going." 
 
 But it wasn't Pen. The voice at the door was deep and 
 gruff and it enquired for Mr. Suffield Mr. Allan Suffield. 
 Leader squeezed himself through the door and Caryl con- 
 tinued her toasting with a little wrinkling of her forehead. 
 With vague careless curiosity she wondered who Allan's visitor 
 might be. She hoped he wouldn't stay long. She wanted her 
 tea. 
 
 The toast smelt good and she turned her slice, pausing 
 once in the operation to listen, still with puzzled, frowning 
 brows. The deep, strange voice disturbed her and she noticed 
 that Allan didn't seem to be saying much. . . . The smell of 
 burning toast assailed her. She had forgotten it. Mechanically 
 she impaled another slice, held it out to the fire, then lowered 
 it into the ashes. She looked, on the instant, alert and nervous. 
 And the gruff voice out there at the door went on. 
 
 She realised now that she was listening and afraid. She 
 did not know why or of what: but as she knelt there on the 
 hearthrug all her body was one live wire of apprehension. 
 She felt suddenly most horribly alone deserted. Nothing
 
 332 INTRUSION 
 
 kept her company but her fear and gradually that was building 
 itself up about her like a wall. Another minute and she fled 
 from it as from something tangible. She flew to the door, 
 opened it and stood there, not daring to let go of the handle. 
 But she saw now to whom the gruff voice belonged, for there 
 at the front door stood a policeman, at whose coat tails Leader 
 sniffed with displeasure. A policeman! For a second her 
 mind seemed to stand still, then went on with a bound. . . . 
 Of course. Hadn't she known it? Hadn't she known that 
 gruff voice could belong to nobody else? But a policeman 
 at Allan's door! She stood there, staring at him, as if fas- 
 cinated. When he moved she could see, just beyond his 
 shoulder, the winter jasmine across the road, gleaming palely 
 in the dark. She tried to say something, to call Allan, but her 
 voice refused to obey her bidding. Leader, quite certain by 
 now that he disliked the smell of the policeman, began to 
 bark. . . . Allan's voice rang out with penetrating sharpness; 
 "Shut up!" Caryl, numb with the sense of impending horror, 
 saw the dog come instantly to heel, as if he realised that 
 something no dog could possibly understand was happening 
 to these people he loved. Again Caryl tried to speak and 
 again failed. Something awful had happened and to Dick. 
 At least, now, she knew that. In another moment she would 
 know what . . . but she stood there leaning weakly against 
 the door as if she would stretch that moment of not knowing 
 into eternity. Then with a horrible violence her voice came 
 tearing from her. 
 
 "Allan!" 
 
 He turned and she saw his grey face. As he came towards 
 her the protective gesture with which he put an arm about her 
 slew her last lingering hope. She turned in his arms, hiding 
 the white misery of her face against his coat. What he said 
 didn't matter. She knew. There'd been an accident and Dick 
 was dead! 
 
 But that wasn't the word he used. Dick wasn't dead. He 
 was only hurt . . . Oh, why didn't Allan say it straight out? 
 Did he think she couldn't bear it? She raised her head and 
 stared at him. Oh, but you didn't look like that just because 
 somebody was hurt. . . . Why should Allan look like that unless 
 Dick were killed?
 
 INTRUSION 333 
 
 "You mean, he's . . . dead?" she said, and still her voice 
 seemed to come tearing painfully out of her. 
 
 Allan shook his head. 
 
 "No," he said, "broken leg. He'll soon be all right." 
 
 Something desperate seemed to be happening to Caryl. She 
 pushed Leader's sympathetic nose away, moved out of the 
 circle of Allan's arms and stood there, a hand at her lips. All 
 this for a broken leg! Had they all gone mad? She wanted 
 to laugh. Then, suddenly, she saw that the broken leg wasn't 
 all. 
 
 "Allan, for God's sake . . . what is it?" 
 
 But she saw that he couldn't answer, that some horrible 
 emotion had seized him in its clutch. Something omnipotent 
 got hold of her, steadying her. She turned to the policeman 
 at the door. 
 
 "Please," she said, "will you tell me just what has 
 happened?" 
 
 He told her. No emotion clutched at the policeman and 
 he wore an air of being used to other people's. But he was 
 mercifully brief no fear, this time, that she wouldn't under- 
 stand. He gave her the facts a collision between a motor-car 
 and the motor-cycle belonging to a Mr. Richard Merrick. . . . 
 The people in the motor had escaped with shock and bruises, 
 but the motor-cycle and sidecar had overturned. Mr. Merrick 
 had sustained a broken leg: he'd be all right in a few weeks, 
 but the young lady, the policeman regretted to say . . . the 
 young lady was dead when they picked her up. 
 
 "The . . . young lady?" said Caryl, black waters all about 
 her. 
 
 "Name of Suffield, Miss. . . . This gentleman's wife, I 
 understand." 
 
 The black waters receded. Caryl's own unbelievable calm 
 dammed them up. 
 
 "Will you tell me, please, where the accident happened?" 
 
 "Ten minutes' run out of Wokingham village. . . ." 
 
 "They had been staying there?" 
 
 "Place called the Cottage. . . ." 
 
 Those three names rang in her ears. They'd do it, surely, 
 till she died. Wokingham . . . Reading . . . Pangbourne. . . . 
 Dick had been at Reading, Roberta at Pangbourne. So they 
 had believed. . . . And they hadn't been. They'd been there
 
 334 INTRUSION 
 
 together at Wokingham ... at her cottage, where lately she'd 
 been so happy. 
 
 Extraordinary how the mind boggled at a fact like that. It 
 simply couldn't be true. This sort of thing didn't happen . . . 
 at least it didn't happen to you. . . . 
 
 Presently somebody must have shut the door. The policeman 
 had gone. 
 
 If they hadn't chosen the Cottage she thought it might not 
 have hurt quite so much. "He might have spared me that!" 
 she said. It was all she did say, sitting there in Roberta's 
 little dining-room where still there lingered the smell of burnt 
 toast. There wasn't anything to say: it wasn't a thing you 
 could talk about : but you'd see it for ever a dark smear across 
 the pageantry of life. . . . 
 
 For ever. Caryl turned her head in dumb misery against 
 her cushion, as though she couldn't bear it, and something in 
 her face, when presently Allan found courage to turn and look 
 at her, snapped the thread of his own misery so that he could 
 think of nothing but her and her suffering. 
 
 He saw that it was profound : that it wrapped her round like 
 a ring of flame. She was beyond words: beyond tears. She 
 looked as though, very slowly, she was being burned alive.
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 AN intrusion, Guen called it, writing five weeks later to 
 Madeleine, something that came soiling the clean surface 
 of life, smudging its pattern. . . . 
 
 Already (she wrote) it's a little difficult to believe it has 
 really happened. It isn't possible, somehow, that this has 
 happened to us. Or is it that Roberta doesn't matter . . . 
 that she really doesn't, even now; that she was herself so 
 trivial that nothing that has happened through her can affect 
 us much, or for long? I'd believe that, I think, but for 
 Caryl. Caryl cuts clean across all the theories and consolations 
 one builds up for oneself. . . . 
 
 It must have been instantaneous, Roberta's death, for she 
 was dead when they picked her up. Though her neck was 
 broken, her face was untouched. She couldn't even have seen 
 Death coming. . . . She took her beauty, unimpaired, to the 
 grave, as though even Death knew what would please her most. 
 
 But to die like that, with all your littlenesses and deceits 
 upon you! Nothing, surely, can atone for that? For the 
 littlenesses and deceits were there, like her beauty, to the end 
 and as much a part of her. Even Death, I suppose, couldn't 
 separate them. 
 
 Caryl threw the story at me . . . that Sunday evening . . . 
 the story of Dick's infatuation. She'd been through a bad time 
 with him, had come to the end of her tether, and then, sud- 
 denly, Dick had "recovered." She sticks to it still that he 
 had, taking Dick's word for it, bending her head before what 
 he has since called that "moment of temptation." The near- 
 ness of Reading and Pangbourne, she said, had never worried 
 her. . . . She offers it, the poor child, as proof of her faith in 
 
 335
 
 336 INTRUSION 
 
 his "recovery." And then, on the Sunday, that story . . . that 
 pitched her faith, like her happiness, in the dust. Dick hadn't 
 "recovered." He'd been week-ending there at the Cottage with 
 Roberta and Roberta . . . was dead. 
 
 That was how Caryl and Allan had it like a smack in 
 the face. When Tony and I got there at midnight she was 
 quiet. She'd been like that all the time, Allan said. Not 
 frozen, not stunned: she wasn't missing any of the pain. 
 It was as though her misery were an inward flame, consuming 
 her. Allan's phrase gives it you. "I can't stand it," he said, 
 "she looks as though she's being burnt alive!" 
 
 She did. She went on looking like it for days. . . . And 
 Roberta's letter, confirming Sunday evening's story, wasn't 
 likely to help her. Roberta must have posted it just before 
 she set out for that last ride, with Death lurking, deliberative, 
 in the shadows. ("Oh, I'll leave you your beauty, never 
 fear!") Roberta-ish, that letter pure unadulterated Roberta! 
 and she offered it to Allan as documentary proof of her 
 "unfaithfulness." She wrote it with her eye on the Courts: 
 stated in her bald, not too-grammatical way that she'd not 
 spent that week-end at Pangbourne at all, but at the Cottage 
 with Dick. Allan had his remedy: would he please take it? 
 And at the end a still more Roberta-ish touch . . . that sug- 
 gestion of herself as a delicate creature in an indelicate world. 
 Of course she did not love Dick and nothing would induce her 
 to marry him. But Dick was in love with her . . . and the 
 law wouldn't let people be decent. Voila! If Allan wasn't 
 gentleman enough. ... In short, she wanted her freedom and 
 meant to have it. I try not to suspect some rich, not too 
 particular parti in the background. . . . 
 
 And this precious document Allan must needs show Caryl. 
 "She's got to know," he said. Reading it Caryl broke down. 
 When her wild fit of crying was done she said she must see 
 Dick. It wasn't possible, the hospital people said, and talked 
 about a dangerous temperature. It wasn't possible for a week 
 and for a whole week Caryl went on living with that story. . . . 
 
 In between came the inquest. Astonishing, there, what we 
 did with the story. ... It emerged a decent casual affair, 
 with tragedy running out at it ... clutching it by the heels. 
 Everybody was very kind. . . . "Great sympathy was expressed 
 for the relatives. . . ." I wanted to go somewhere and shriek.
 
 INTRUSION 337 
 
 We buried Roberta (how she would have enjoyed her own 
 funeral and the interest it aroused!) and two days later Caryl 
 sat by Dick's bedside and learned that the letter she had 
 written to Allan wasn't true. 
 
 It simply wasn't true . . . what she'd said. Knowing Roberta, 
 I wonder any of us ever believed it was. . . . What was true 
 was that she and Dick had met a mere chance encounter 
 on the Saturday in Reading: that for Dick the meeting had 
 meant a renewal of the old passionate attraction, the sudden 
 yielding to opportunity or what had looked like opportunity. 
 . . . For Roberta cheated him after all ... as she'd always 
 meant to cheat him. They went over together to the Cottage 
 on the Saturday and Roberta remained true to herself. . . . 
 
 Dick swears he didn't even sleep under the same roof: his 
 disgust drove him out into the Berkshire lanes and woods, 
 where he didn't sleep at all. He'd hated her all the night for 
 having made a fool of him ... for having, as he thought, lost 
 courage, backed out, at {he end. . . . 
 
 Then, in the morning, he saw that she hadn't "lost cour- 
 age," that she'd never meant to yield . . . that she'd been using 
 him. Him! with all the other men she might have fooled! 
 Or was it that she knew she couldn't that Dick was the only 
 man she could trust . . . who wouldn't make things unpleasant 
 for her, keep her to her bargain? She was so certain Dick 
 would hold his tongue: under promise, perhaps, of future 
 favours or because she didn't believe any man would like it 
 known that a girl had made that particular sort of fool of him. 
 
 Anyway, on the Sunday morning Dick seems to have indi- 
 cated that he wasn't going to hold his tongue. ... I gather 
 that he lost his temper, laid hands upon her. . . . Later, she 
 half won him by the bruises she showed him on her arms, 
 and ultimately he relented so far as to consent to drive her 
 back to the Carew woman's house at Pangbourne. . . . That 
 was at half-past one. At half-past one she'd been showing 
 him the bruises on her pretty arms . . . and at a quarter to 
 two she was dead in the roadway. . . . 
 
 To die like that, with all one's meannesses and lies thick 
 upon one! That's what's so shocking. There's something 
 in that, I think, which hurts as Roberta's death itself doesn't 
 hurt and never will. . . . 
 
 An episode, Roberta's coming and going. ... In a way I
 
 338 INTRUSION 
 
 think I've always seen it like that, and in a way it's fitting, 
 I suppose, that she should have provided it with so dramatic 
 a climax. . . . How it would please her histrionic little soul 
 if she could know how very dramatic it was! De mortuis. . . . 
 Ah, don't remind me. ... At present there's something hard, 
 something rebellious in me that refuses to fold quiet hands 
 before the obliterating kindliness of that phrase. 
 
 I could forgive her if I could forget Caryl. So, perhaps, 
 could we all. . . . Even Allan, who suffers so much less. And 
 there isn't anything any one of us can do for her. . . . 
 Her courage is greater than ours, and since that day at the 
 hospital she no longer looks as though she is being burned 
 alive. It's as though Dick's story his contradiction of 
 Roberta's "facts" relieved her from some intolerable pain, 
 stamped out the flame of despair that was eating her up and 
 lighted that of hope. You can almost see her standing there 
 before it, warming her hands. . . . 
 
 Do you remember how she used to say, during the war, that 
 life went deeper than all the horror and blood . . . that down 
 below was something fine, something indestructible ? As though 
 she seemed always to see life's smiling face beneath the trap- 
 pings of woe; as, God help us, we never did. . . . 
 
 She's like that now: I can't pretend to know what is going 
 to happen to her ... or to Dick. I only see her standing 
 there with wide eyes staring over the edge of her ruined Now 
 into the future ... as though she has braced her shoulders to 
 the burden of life and found it, after all, not too heavy. She 
 has something as you have and mother that Allan and I 
 have never had; some inner knowledge and quiet that never 
 fails her. Whatever she is, she is not futile. Life will not 
 take and break her. Be very sure of that. Her courage is 
 worth more to her than our happiness to us. ... She can 
 build anew what lies in ruins at her feet. 
 
 To-day Dick leaves England. Against everybody's advice 
 she went yesterday to say good-bye. "Why shouldn't I?" she 
 said. "It won't hurt me. ... I don't believe anything will 
 ever be able to hurt me again. . . ." 
 
 After those days, she meant, when she'd lived with the 
 thought that Dick had belonged to Roberta. 
 
 "And when he comes back!" I said, "what then? Are you 
 going to marry him in the face of the family wrath?"
 
 INTRUSION 339 
 
 "I don't know," she said, and she smiled a little I sup- 
 pose at the idea of the family wrath. Then suddenly she 
 stopped smiling. "A year's a long time," she said. 
 
 And there she stands, looking down the vista of days. . . . 
 The vista isn't empty, even now. . . . You can't look at her 
 without suspecting that already hope comes riding up out of the 
 shadows. . . .
 
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