Actually he didn’t find it easy to spend money; the penurious habits of his early life clung to him; he didn’t think he ought to live beyond his income, the idea of spending capital appalled him. Gradually he reached a more realistic view of his financial position, and moved from his small house in the suburbs to a comfortable flat in South Kensington; but it was weeks before he felt he could afford it and months before he dared to give a party.

The party, however, was a success, for all those present were determined that it should be; and when the last guest left, George was left feeling that at last he had done something for somebody.

His men friends did not take the same view of George’s potentialities that his women friends took. Their attitude might be described as coarser. They did not, of course, take the same trouble with him, but none the less they had their eye on him—the dark horse, the unknown quantity. Needless to say they didn’t want to get him tied up in married life, but women came into their calculations. They thought of love in terms of money, not money in terms of love. At least, some of them did. Most of George’s new friends were men who talked of money, and with whom money talked; they had chosen him, not he them; he didn’t know his way about in this new world, and was both surprised and flattered when anybody showed an interest in him. The women he gravitated towards were of a gentler and more sensitive type than their husbands, they found George a pleasant change. But the men, being more objective and detached, summed up his position in some ways more accurately than they did.

‘What you want, George, is a dog,’ said one well-wisher, more discerning than the others.

‘A dog?’

‘Yes, something that would wag its tail when you come in, and lick your face.’

George thought about this.

‘But I should have to take it out for walks.’

‘Not all the time. You are such a glutton for responsibility. Sometimes it would look at you with huge pleading eyes, and then you could rub its ears and fondle it. A dog will absorb far more affection than a human being.’

‘Do you think I’m affectionate?’ asked George.

‘In a frustrated way, yes, very. These women you go about with aren’t much good to you, you’re half-afraid of them. I’m not saying anything against them, mind, in their way they’re tops, but not for you. They are too complex, you need something simpler, and more natural. A dog——’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, it would fawn on you and you could beat it.’

‘What a horrible idea.’

‘Or you could fawn on it and it would bite you.’

‘Isn’t there anything between the two?’

‘Not for you, there isn’t. No, you need a dog, with a strong emotional current uniting you. Not the sort of friendship you have with Mrs. Hake, or Halibut, or whatever her name is. She must freeze the pants off you.’

‘I don’t know who you mean.’

‘That middle-aged harpy who gets you on a sofa and twangs your heart-strings with her varnished nails.’

‘Oh, Délice de Sole! She’s an angel.’

‘That’s what I mean. You need someone more fleshly, who would let her hair down, and help you to let down yours. We must arrange a party for you.’

That was how George met Deirdre. At the party were two other girls rather like her, and decidedly unlike the women that George was in the habit of consorting with. An atmosphere of good-fellowship prevailed. Champagne loosened tongues and George’s feelings. As well as talking to him they talked at him and about him—the industrious apprentice who had made good and come into a fortune, the man who had the ball at his feet, the lucky chap whose name had got into the papers. Much of what they said was quite untrue but all of it was flattering, and even more intoxicating than the wine: under the admiring glances flashed at him, George began to feel the hell of a fellow.

Presently one of the other couples rose and the man, apologizing, said they had a date. ‘We don’t want to break up the party,’ he added, ‘That’s all right,’ their host said; ‘Annette and I have a date too, at that new place, the Late Session; and it will be pretty late before we’re back. But there’s plenty more to drink; why don’t you and Deirdre, George, stay on, and make an evening of it? It’s only eleven o’clock. That is, if neither of you has a date?’

George and Deirdre exchanged glances. ‘What do you think, Deirdre?’ he asked. He didn’t know her other name.

‘I’m all for staying here,’ she said.

‘Well,’ said their host, rising and taking Annette’s hand, ‘we couldn’t be more sorry—it’s too bad that it’s turned out like this. But you will make yourselves at home, won’t you? You know the geography of the house’—he waved his hand to indicate it—‘at any rate Deirdre does. Good-bye, my children, don’t get into mischief,’ and he was gone, with his companion, almost before they had time to thank him for their lovely evening.

It was the first of several such evenings, some organized by George, to whom spending money was now becoming easy, even exhilarating. But he grudged sharing Deirdre’s company; after the party he could have her to himself. Himself—his very self, only attainable in Deirdre’s arms.

But no, it was attainable in other ways. Everything he did for her, every present, every treat he gave her, every wish of hers, expressed by her or anticipated by him, that he fulfilled, gave him, in a lesser degree, the same sense of wholeness and integration. He felt, and even looked, proud of being a man, and walked down Piccadilly with his hands in his pockets, looking as if he owned it. Even thinking of her, he was twice the man he had been. Only she could give him this freedom; with other women, the women he had known, he was still shy and diffident, anxious to please and sometimes succeeding, but always being acted on, not acting. Gradually he frequented them less and less; the silken threads by which they held him were a frail tie compared to the hawser which fastened him to Deirdre.

So for two years he was entirely happy. She could do no wrong for him. Her moods and caprices, the small slights and snubs, rebuffs and disappointments, by which she sought to make herself more precious to him, all seemed part of her; he scarcely distinguished between her melting and her stony moods. But then something in him became sensitized and if she was unkind to him it began to hurt. Now there were two Deirdres instead of one; and the second made him suffer. In vain he told himself that she had always been like that; it was unreasonable that something he had always taken for granted and not minded should suddenly become a grievance. He blamed himself more than her for his resentment, and was miserable until, at whatever cost to his pride and sense of fairness, he had made it up with her. He tried to make these tiffs and reconciliations into a habit, part of his emotional routine; an item on his experience account; but it didn’t work out so. His feelings, instead of toughening, grew more tender; his eyes had a hurt, anxious look, which his other women friends, on the few occasions when he saw them, remarked upon. How quick they were to notice changes in him! He couldn’t conceal from himself that he was unhappy; the joys of reconciliation and forgiveness (forgiveness of himself rather than her) became of shorter duration; soon, as an anodyne, they hardly counted. He was forced into making a distinction, which he had never made before, between her acts and her: Deirdre was one thing, what she did was another, so he told himself; but try as he would he couldn’t keep them apart. It wasn’t only the smart of the disappointments, which she was so expert in inflicting, that made him miserable; it was the nature that prompted them, his sense of which was like a smell that persisted even through her most fragrant and most yielding moments, and had something frightening about it: the smell of cruelty.