to tell his mother everything, try to find an escape in her wise
counsel; but his emotion seemed so ugly that he could not lay it before
her. Besides, he had a conviction that it would be hopeless: he was
gone. She was discussing Ludowika now. "Really," she said, "they seem
very well matched, a good arrangement." She was referring, he realized,
to the Winscombes' experience. He never thought of Felix Winscombe as
married, Ludowika's husband; he had ceased to think of him at all. The
present moment banished everything else. "She has a quality usually
destroyed by life about a Court," the leisurely voice went on; "she
seems quite happy here, for a little, in a way simple. But, curiously
enough, she disturbs your father. He can't laugh with her as he usually
does with attractive women."

It was natural, Howat thought, that Gilbert Penny should be uneasy
before such a direct reminder of the setting from which he had taken
Isabel Howat. It was a life, memories, in which the elder had no part;
that consciousness dictated a part of his father's bitterness toward St.
James, the Royal Government. But Gilbert Penny had never had serious
reason to dread it. His wife had left it all behind, permanently,
without, apparently, a regret. He had a sudden, astonishing community of
feeling with the older man; a momentary dislike of St. James,
Versailles, the entire, treacherous, silk mob. A lover at fourteen!
Howat damned such a betrayal with a bitterness whose base lay deeply
buried in sex jealousy.

"I am glad," the other continued, "that you are not susceptible; I
suppose you'll be off hunting in a day or more; Mrs. Winscombe is bright
wine for a young man. Women like her play at sensation, like eating
figs." He thought contemptuously what nonsense was talked in connection
with feminine intuition; it was nothing more than a polite chimera,