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There they all were waiting for him. The drawing-room gleamed and shone about them. Ruth was magnificent in a dress of old gold, and the guests were all talking with the amiability that comes from having reached the right house at the right time, and the prospect of a good dinner.

How well he knew them, how terribly well! Stout and cynical Carl Reynolds, eager and active Mary Malpas, shining and polished Horace Clay and--Jane Rose.

Carl Reynolds was his contemporary, two years older than he. Casual, careless, cynically contemptuous, omniscient, the best and greatest critic in England, who had read more than anyone else, remembered more than anyone else, written more living, twisted and ungrammatical prose than anyone else, the greatest authority in the world on Early Nineteenth-Century English Literature, so that he knew just what De Quincey had for tea on August 5, 1808, what books Southey was reviewing in November 1810, and exactly how far Coleridge went in his love-making with dear Dorothy Wordsworth. He was married to an old woman who was so impossible that no one ever asked her out anywhere, dropped food on his clothes, had hair in his ears and a very red nose. Ruth, Hans knew, detested him, but asked him because he was important.

Hans loved him.

Against him, was Horace Clay, whom Ruth loved and Hans detested. Well, to say that Ruth loved him was perhaps too strong, but he stood for everything that seemed to her good. He was fifty, and slim, with a beautiful profile, small eyes like marbles and an eyeglass on a thick black cord. In the season he dined at other people's houses, and out of the season he stayed with whom he might. He had, before the Revolution, had something to do with the Russian Embassy. He had now something to do with the City, whither, however, he never turned his steps.

He cackled like a hen when he laughed, smiled with all his teeth when he saw a friend, and left other gentlemen to pay taxis and supper bills. He gossiped among his familiars like three women alone at bedtime, and was very popular in his own world.

Then there was Mary Malpas. She was a tall bony woman with blonde hair. She was a widow, and not very rich, but entertained artistic celebrities.

She gave amusing parties in her little house in Charles Street. Everyone went to these, laughed at her afterwards, and then said how much they liked her, because they wanted to go to more parties.

In absolute fact she was an exceedingly kind woman, loyal to her friends, intelligent and amusing. Her great problem was how to have room in her very small house for the new artistic celebrities and still to retain the old ones. They would increase so fast.

Hans did not dislike her, but she would call him the Master.

Jane Rose was quite another pair of shoes. Ruth didn't like her, but had asked her because the new generation in London thought her important.

She looked like the wife of a Pre-Raphaelite painter, her dark hair brushed back in waves from her forehead, her grey dress cut in simple fashion, her thin pale face quiet and remote. She was, Hans thought, the best living novelist in England. She wrote the most beautiful prose in the most beautiful way. Her three novels, The Haycock, Garlands Passage and The Cattle Boat were lovely, wonderful things. Oh! if he could write like that, if he could observe and remember like that, if he could translate on to the page pity and irony and tenderness and humour like that! . . . But he could not. Here was a gulf between her generation and his fixed! Never, never, try as he might, could he win her lovely revelation of human nature, unwitting that it should be revealed.

Her London street and park and summer sun, her sea and sand and distant hill, her triumphant evocation of the drama of little things, her seemingly casual assembling of tiny significances that were the waving flags and beating drums of life's procession!

She had in her last novel spoken of the beam from a lighthouse 'stroking the floor of a lodging-house bedroom'--so her art illumined, gently and tenderly, the world that he knew. The debt that he owed her could never be paid.

Ruth didn't like her, because she looked odd and always in conversation (with Ruth at least) answered the last sentence but one. There was something terrifying in her gentle remoteness.

Ruth could not understand her novels, all about nothing, with a chair here and a duster there, and someone talking about cheese one moment and life and death the next.

However, people like Mary Malpas who 'knew' thought her 'dreadfully clever,' so Ruth asked her. And Jane Rose came, because she liked and respected Hans.

There they all were, and, as he came in, he knew that although he had been cross and rebellious coming downstairs his official 'charm' was, at sight of them, poking up its head. He couldn't but be 'charming.' He was expected to be. He was expected to smile that jolly, humorous, semi-sarcastic smile. He was expected to employ that easy, friendly voice, he was expected to be his public self. Hans Frost, the great (if slightly embalmed) writer, who had a lovely house and a lovely wife and a lovely position, whose books were already classics, although no one any more very much read them.

He heard himself saying: 'I'm so sorry I'm late. I do hope that you haven't been waiting. How are you, Carl? Good evening, Mrs. Malpas. How do you do, Miss Rose? Well, Clay, how are you?'

Everyone was very well.

They all went in to dinner.

Hans had on his right Mary Malpas, and on his left Jane Rose.

He was not hungry: he was excited and could not think why. Something had happened to him upstairs. What? He would not open the door and look, lest what he saw should be disappointing. So he remained sensationally in a mist, holding in one hand a jelly-fish and in the other a piece of golden seaweed--and in the meanwhile, from a long way off, Mary Malpas was saying:

'But truly, cher maître, I think she would amuse you. If one day you'd honour my poor roof. . . . She's so young that her impertinences aren't offensive. Si jeunesse savait.' (Mary Malpas's French accent was a poor one.) 'Why not try her? Really her poetry is remarkable. Everyone is agreed. . . .'

He looked at his soup, which was a clear translucent brown, and in it floated tiny lozenges of vegetable. It was one of those soups in perfect taste but without vitality--well bred and fin de siècle. He sighed. Martha, whose head was resting on his shoe under the table, sighed also.

'I'd like her, would I?' he asked, wondering whether it were true, as he'd read somewhere, that in Teheran the famous Persian gardens contained only trees and running water. No flowers at all. Very disappointing if that were so, after all the fuss the Persian poets had been making. . . .

'Tell me about her,' he said.

'There isn't very much to tell. She's taken everyone by surprise. No one dreamt that she had Fly-by-Nights in her. In fact some people say . . .'

Carl Reynolds was in trouble. He had spilt some soup on to his waistcoat, and he wouldn't have cared--oh, not in the least--had Horace Clay not been sitting opposite to him. Horace Clay made him feel as though he had been discovered in Piccadilly Circus with no clothes on--not that he would have minded that in the least had Piccadilly Circus not minded, but as soon as the Circus minded (which of course it did) he was unhappy.

He was a violent, abusive, ironical old man, but absurdly enough he could not bear that other people should be unhappy or that he himself should be laughed at. Now his hostess was unhappy, and Horace Clay was laughing at him.

He had spilled his soup--and a good deal of it--because he had become deeply interested in explaining to Ruth about an article only this very day completed on the Ettrick Shepherd and the virtues of his story The Brownie of Bodsbeck. When he talked of James Hogg he saw at once the Edinburgh of that day, the fine folk riding down Princes Street, and Burke and Hare skulking in their holes, and Scott coming out of the Court House and . . . So he spilled his soup.

He wiped it with his napkin. Ruth ever so faintly flushed. Carl saw his ancient mother--two years deceased--and his two ugly sisters, whom he loved, and his plain brown-faced wife (who was never asked anywhere and preferred not to be asked, but Carl felt always a traitor because he left her at home), all of them insulted, all of them contemned through the eyeglass of Horace Clay.

He stammered, trying to return once more to the 'wynds' and windy places of Edinburgh, but he could not. He had been cast out from them, because he had spilled his soup.

Hans, glancing over the brilliant shimmer of the round table, over the blue bowl on whose surface floated the heads of pale yellow roses, saw it all.

And at once when he saw it he felt everything within him rise to champion Carl. Carl was his friend and Horace Clay his enemy. Carl he understood and sympathised with and loved, as though they had leapt together from the same womb and had never from that moment been separated. He loved neatness and cleanliness, but he felt as though he himself had spilt Carl's soup and Carl, in a spirit of wonderful generosity, had taken the crime upon himself.

And he hated Horace Clay: he hated his eyeglass and his hen's cackle and his beautiful profile. Clay should have been a procuress in Dieppe or Ostend. Clay . . . But he must rush to champion Carl. So he raised his glass and cried:

'Your health, Carl. It's splendid to have you here again.'

But, alas, this was most unwise, because it was Carl's only failing that he was inclined to drink too much when under the roof of a friend who knew what good wine was like, and Carl knew that and would do his utmost, on a fine occasion, to drink only lemonade or beastly barley-water.

It was tacitly understood that he must not be encouraged; but now Hans had encouraged him, and Carl turned and said to Bigges: 'I think, after all, I will have a little sherry'; and after that there would be champagne and after that port . . . and the end of the evening would be perhaps disgraceful.

Hans knew at once that he should not have done this, and he knew that Ruth was angry with him, and so he, in return, was angry with Ruth.

'We must all drink your health soon, cher maître,' said Mary Malpas. 'Ruth tells us that they have given you a Manet. To be given a Manet, what bliss! We are pining to see it . . . and, indeed, it is no more than you deserve.'

So the Manet was to be insulted too. He resolved instantly that they should not see the Manet--none of them, not even Jane Rose.

Not to-night at least. She should come by herself to tea and he would show it to her then.

He turned to her.

'On my seventh birthday,' he said, 'I was given a Noah's Ark with a red roof. I've never liked any present so much since.'

'I was lost on my seventh birthday. The nurse went off with a soldier and I followed the man with the balloons. I was lost for a whole afternoon. I sat in the police-station for an hour. I've loved policemen ever since. They were so very kind to me and gave me a piece of seed cake. But don't you think,' she added, 'that possessions are a pity? Don't you feel sorry for your Manet, that it isn't free, dancing about on its own--a little like the tigers at the Zoo?'

'It shall be free,' he said. 'It shall do whatever it likes. I won't complain if it flies out of the window.'

'No, you wouldn't,' she said, smiling at him. 'You know what freedom means.'

But did he? Or, if he knew, had he got it?

No, he had not got it. He had had it possibly once, but now it had been stolen from him--stolen from him by Bigges, who was pouring out champagne--stolen by the beautiful saddle of mutton, the currant jelly, the crackling brown potatoes--stolen from him by the cheque-book in his dressing-room table, the roses in the flower bowl and the electric wires that ran behind the boarding--in any case they should not see his Manet.

But Horace Clay, who thought he knew about pictures (he took his ground mainly on the Russians, saying that no one could judge Tchehov unless they'd seen Stanislavsky and Knipper in The Three Sisters, which, of course, no one had. He had also drunk tea with Kuprin and vodka with the author of Sanine), took the Manet under his wing.

'Of course we must see the Manet. Of course we must see the Manet.' He was just like a hen scratching in a dust-heap.

'I'm afraid you won't see the Manet.' Hans, as though he were observing himself from the outside, was surprised at the tremor of excitement in his voice. 'Nobody's going to see it to-night.'

His voice was almost harsh. Certainly peremptory, rude, on the edge of violence. He knew that they were all surprised, as though he had taken up one of the plates in both hands and flung it to the ground. He knew also that Ruth was offended, deeply offended. He knew it still more surely when she laughed--her gay social laugh that was like a little gilt nail that you drove in somewhere with a sharp little tap to prevent a catastrophe.

'Why, Hans, what do you mean? Of course we're going to see the Manet. Why, I haven't seen it yet!'

He tried to laugh it off.

'I'm afraid not. It doesn't want to be seen to-night. It's shy after so much public exposure. I felt quite sorry for it this afternoon.'

'Oh, but when I ask you----'

'No, darling. Anything else to the half of my kingdom----' (Everyone was aware that husband and wife were in conflict.)

'Now come, Hans, I never heard anything so absurd. He will have these ridiculous ideas, you know.' (This to Horace Clay.) 'I insist on seeing it.'

'So you shall, my dear, to-morrow.'

'No, to-night. We must all see it.'

'Greatly distressed. . . . Manet invisible.'

'But really, Hans, this is too bad----'

Just that note too much in her voice--note of personal vexation, true irritation, rising anger. Horace Clay recognised it and--was it because he wanted to save her or to accentuate the trouble?--he raised his glass. 'Never mind the Manet,' he cried in his shrill and slightly effeminate, shop-walking, gently foreign, accentuated voice (as though he were an assistant in a very smart shop selling only the best Russian fabrics). 'We must drink to our host. The Master and his glorious works! May there be seventy more birthdays and seventy more masterpieces!'

'The Master,' called Mary Malpas shrilly. Jane Rose looked at him, smiling quietly and drinking in silence.

But Carl Reynolds rose to his feet. 'My friend! My friend!' he shouted huskily, his voice thick with champagne and great feeling.

Everyone saw that he had drunk too much. He sat down again and began peeling in a crazy way an apple while he related to them all how at one of George Eliot's famous afternoons George Henry Lewes had stood on his head to show them something he had observed in the country, and had looked exactly like a little performing dog, while George Eliot, seated in her chair, had been like a performing horse snorting through her nostrils and talking about Kant to Herbert Spencer. He might have his details wrong, he said. It was a considerable long time ago, but that was exactly what Lewes had done--stood on his head and waved his little legs in the air.

Everyone was greatly distressed. No one knew what Carl Reynolds' next gesture would be. Ruth rose in dignity and, followed by Mary Malpas and Jane Rose, moved off towards the drawing-room.

But Hans didn't care. It might be true that Carl had drunk too much, but Carl was his friend. He got up and moved to the chair next to Carl and put his hand on Carl's shoulder. He knew that he should have said something pleasant to Horace Clay, who was sitting now all by himself in a debris of fruit skins, wine-glasses and crumbled bread, but he could not. He was damned if he would. . . .

'It is jolly to have you here again,' he said to Carl.

That was enough for Carl, who, with another glass of port, would be in a vinous heaven, but had reached, without the extra glass, only the outer portals. His eyes were filled with tears, and he waved his hand in the air.

'You understand me, Hans,' he said. 'We understand one another. There's hardly anyone but ourselves left. Everyone dead, and a damnable new generation that doesn't know good writing when it sees it. A cold-blooded, whoring, ignorant generation. Why, there's that fool Mortlake despising the classics just because he never went to a University. University all wrong because he never went there. Latin and Greek all wrong because no one ever smacked his behind when he didn't do his Greek verses. Greek verses . . . Greek verses. . . . My God! . . .' He choked over a piece of apple, and a tear, moved by his choking, stole down his cheek. 'All this nonsense . . .'

Horace Clay, smiling only too courteously, leant across the table. 'Well now--Greek verses--do you really think they've ever done any good to anybody?'

Carl's chest heaved. 'Good! Good!' Then, like Parsifal, he asked violently, 'What is good? . . . Good to whom? Good to what? Good to your stomach? Good to your pocket? No. But good to your soul. But perhaps you don't care about your soul. Souls are old-fashioned. I'm old. And you'll be old one day and wonder what the world's coming to. Each to his taste. . . .'

He was angry, his voice shook, not only because he had drunk too much, but because he saw the Athenian streets screaming with motor-cars and Mount Olympus trodden by the gilt shoes of cinema ladies--also he hated Horace Clay. He didn't know who he was, he didn't care. He was to him like a dirty street boy cocking a snook at Sappho.

It was Horace Clay's art to allow nothing to ruffle him. He saw before him only a drunken old man who had spilt soup down his waistcoat, so he said, still smiling:

'I'm sure you're right. I never had any education. I think our modern world's absurd, of course, but as we belong to it we may as well make the best of it.'

'I don't belong to it! I don't belong to it!' Carl shouted. 'I'm better dead and buried, of course, but it isn't a question of you or me. Greek Art and Greek Literature are greater than either of us, and if we don't take what they offer what do they care? The sun will shine whether we sneeze at it or no. Yes, it will, thank God. We don't matter a damn.'

He was becoming rhetorical and on the verge of great personal rudeness, so Hans pressed his shoulder and said: 'Let's join the others.'

But as they walked into the drawing-room he was greatly, greatly excited. What did it matter whether Carl were drunk or no? With his clumsy fist he was pushing this door ever wider and wider. What door? The door that he had discovered only this afternoon, whose knob he had turned, and now a thin line of light was showing, and soon . . .

He had himself perhaps drunk a little too much champagne. But it didn't matter. He would drink more if only, by so doing, he could open the door more widely.

And then--would you believe it?--in the drawing-room Mary Malpas began once again about the Manet. She came to him with that air she had (she practised it only with the acknowledged great) of being on intimate and unique relations. She looked him in the eyes and said:

'Dear Master, won't you allow us just a teeny, teeny peep at the Manet? I know what you feel. We won't tell a soul that we've seen it. . . .'

Know what he felt? Indeed she did not. He answered:

'Dear Mrs. Malpas, take it as an absurd whim of mine. I hate to refuse you anything, but there it is. I'd rather it were left to itself.'

Then Ruth's voice broke in. 'Don't be ridiculous, Hans. Go and get it. I never knew you so absurd.'

He bowed.

'I am absurd. It's my seventieth birthday, the one day in one's lifetime when one's allowed to be absurd. The Manet is gone, vanished. It isn't there any longer, so how can I go and get it? To-morrow morning it may return. Who knows? As Miss Rose says, we've got to leave it its freedom. We can't capture it just because it's passed through the hands of some literary gentlemen. I'm sorry. When it returns I'll let you know.'

He was laughing, and Ruth was laughing too. How beautiful she looked in her dress of old gold, and the lovely carriage of her head, how beautiful and how remote! She looked at him as though she loved him. Why was he so sure to-night that she did not?

'Have it your own way. It's your picture,' and she turned, still smiling, to barricade herself off with Horace Clay, who sat down on the sofa beside her as though they had a special code of their own, something that was nearly Russian, but because Ruth had never seen Stanislavsky in The Three Sisters couldn't be quite.

Poor Carl had reached the stage when he was ashamed of himself and wanted to go home. He had been rude, had he not? But to whom? To that man with the eyeglass who didn't like Greek verses? Shame upon him for an untidy, worthless, old man. He was very near tears indeed, and Jane Rose, seeing this, because, having both heart and brain in equal splendour, she was able to understand the simplest distresses, took him under her wing. How tenderly and with what loving care she did it, Hans thought, making the old man sit down beside her, praising his book on De Quincey and his Critical Essays, 1770-1830, asking him exactly about Godwin and the novels of Bage. . . . Yes, out of goodness of heart all the splendours of life must come!

He himself stayed with Martha and Mary Malpas. Mary wasn't so bad, would have been very good indeed had she not been bitten by this curious social bug. But he could attend to her only slightly. He was listening--listening--for what? Was somebody sobbing somewhere? or was it laughter--very faint? Was somebody having dinner in bed and reading a bad novel, the book propped up against the coffee-pot?

Martha seemed to know. She was listening, her head on her paws, her beady eyes fixed upon the door.

They were going. They were saying good night. They were all happy now, all wishing to be twice as friendly now that they wouldn't have to be friendly any longer.

'You will come, won't you? I'm in almost every afternoon at five. . . .'

Jane Rose had asked Carl to come and see her. He was radiant. Bigges handed him his large woollen muffler. He was grasping Hans' hand.

And now they were all gone. Hans turned back from the door to see what it was that Ruth would have to say.