“Oh, no,” she continued into the phone. “I’m so sorry. I haven’t time to go with her this week. We could try to wedge you in here though. So many people are craving for my little friend’s time that the days are not long enough. Perhaps you could come to breakfast.”

At last he was so generous and condescending as to say he would come to dinner that very day if we would not mind his running away immediately after. He had to open an artist’s show at five and was to be at an official gathering at Government House that evening. Mrs. Crasterton said that would fit nicely as we too would be engaged until six and had an after-dinner engagement.

On that night Gaddy went to his Club. His sister asked him to support her, “After all, Mr. Hardy is a really distinguished man,” she observed.

“Don’t lose your head,” Gaddy replied, “he certainly has marketed himself like a politician, but when it comes to literary genius, we have five hundred poets, every blooming one boomed as the greatest, but some of the greatest have yet to be born.”

Derek, on the other hand, loudly lamented that he was not to be home for dinner. “Hardy’s a regular swell,” he said, “not in the same street with the little unwashed ‘potes’.”

Edmée was half through an elaborate toilette when we got home that evening, and poor Mrs. Crasterton was taken with cramps and had to go to bed. Edmée unselfishly gave up her dinner engagement to dine at Geebung Villa.

“It’s really an amazing condescension for Goring Hardy to come to see you,” she said. “It must be because Zoë de Vesey’s mother knew yours and it has become the thing to see you. He is run after right and left. Some panjandrum in the literary world in London has written out to him to find out what you are like, and if you could ever write anything else. You had better make the most of your furore while it lasts.”

A little later Mr. Hardy telephoned that he found himself half-an-hour ahead of his schedule and would have a chat with me before dinner. “Don’t let him paralyse you,” Edmée said. “Women throw themselves at him, especially the married ones . . . I think,” continued Edmée reflectively, “it must be no end of sport to be safely married and then seek a little diversion.”

I sat tight in my room until the maid had a colloquy with Mrs. Crasterton and then came to me. I stole down the back stairway, catching sight of my reflection in a mirror—like a doll in the white dress and Gad’s big sash.

A tall figure in immaculate toggery—a dress-coat knight with silk on heel—rose from a couch and looked so hard at me that I was unable to withstand the battery of his glances. His whole face was indicative of keenness and might have been that of a money-lender, a bishop or any other manager of property and investments, instead of a poet and literary man.