Chapter 6

If he had meant to speak he changed his mind after his first sight
of her. He merely came in and closed the door behind him. Curious
experiences with which life had provided him had added finish to
an innate aptness of observation, and a fine readiness in action.

If she had been of another type he would have saved both her and
himself a scene and steered ably through the difficulties of the
situation towards a point where they could have met upon a normal
plane. A very pretty woman with whose affairs one has nothing
whatever to do, and whose pretty home has been the perfection of
modern smartness of custom, suddenly opening her front door in
the unexplained absence of a footman and confronting a visitor,
plainly upon the verge of hysteria, suggests the necessity of
promptness.

But Feather gave him not a breath's space. She was in fact not
merely on the verge of her hysteria. She had gone farther. And
here he was. Oh, here he was! She fell down upon her knees and
actually clasped his immaculateness.

"Oh, Lord Coombe! Lord Coombe! Lord Coombe!" She said it three
times because he presented to her but the one idea.

He did not drag himself away from her embrace but he distinctly
removed himself from it.

"You must not fall upon your knees, Mrs. Lawless," he said. "Shall
we go into the drawing-room?"

"I--was writing to you. I am starving--but it seemed too silly when
I wrote it. And it's true!" Her broken words were as senseless in
their sound as she had thought them when she saw them written.

"Will you come up into the drawing-room and tell me exactly what
you mean," he said and he made her release him and stand upon her
feet.

As the years had passed he had detached himself from so many
weaknesses and their sequelae of emotion that he had felt himself
a safely unreachable person. He was not young and he knew enough
of the disagreeableness of consequences to be adroit in keeping out
of the way of apparently harmless things which might be annoying.
Yet as he followed Mrs. Gareth-Lawless and watched her stumbling
up the stairs like a punished child he was aware that he was
abnormally in danger of pitying her as he did not wish to pity
people. The pity was also something apart from the feeling that it
was hideous that a creature so lovely, so shallow and so fragile
should have been caught in the great wheels of Life.

He knew what he had come to talk to her about but he had really no
clear idea of what her circumstances actually were. Most people
had of course guessed that her husband had been living on the
edge of his resources and was accustomed to debt and duns, but a
lovely being greeting you by