of movements. For the moment, however, his place in public life
was sufficiently marked out to give him a secure footing in that
world where people are counted individually and not in herds. The
woman whom he would make his wife would have the chance, too, if
she had the will and the skill, to become an individual who
counted.

There was balm to Elaine in this reflection, yet it did not wholly
suffice to drive out the feeling of pique which Comus had called
into being by his slighting view of her as a convenient cash supply
in moments of emergency. She found a certain satisfaction in
scrupulously observing her promise, made earlier on that eventful
day, and sent off a messenger with the stipulated loan. Then a
reaction of compunction set in, and she reminded herself that in
fairness she ought to write and tell her news in as friendly a
fashion as possible to her dismissed suitor before it burst upon
him from some other quarter. They had parted on more or less
quarrelling terms it was true, but neither of them had foreseen the
finality of the parting nor the permanence of the breach between
them; Comus might even now be thinking himself half-forgiven, and
the awakening would be rather cruel. The letter, however, did not
prove an easy one to write; not only did it present difficulties of
its own but it suffered from the competing urgency of a desire to
be doing something far pleasanter than writing explanatory and
valedictory phrases. Elaine was possessed with an unusual but
quite overmastering hankering to visit her cousin Suzette Brankley.
They met but rarely at each other's houses and very seldom anywhere
else, and Elaine for her part was never conscious of feeling that
their opportunities for intercourse lacked anything in the way of
adequacy. Suzette accorded her just that touch of patronage which