And how, in the face of this fierce denunciation of the wealthy classes and all their ways, could Lionel Moore put in a word for Lady Adela’s poor little literary infant?  It would be shrivelled into nothing by a blast of this simulated simoom.  It would be trodden under foot by the log-roller’s elephantine jocosity.  In a sort of despair he turned to Maurice Mangan, and would have entered into conversation with him but that Mangan now rose and said he must be going, nor could he be prevailed on to stay.  Lionel accompanied him into the hall.

“That Jabberwock makes me sick; he’s such an ugly devil,” Mangan said, as he put on his hat; and surely that was strange language coming from a grave philosopher who was about to publish a volume on the “Fundamental Fallacies of M. Comte.”

“But what am I to do, Maurice?” Lionel said, as his friend was leaving.  “It’s no use asking for his intervention at present; he’s simply running amuck.”

“If your friend—­Lady What’s-her-name—­is as clever as you say, she’ll just twist that fellow round her finger,” the other observed, briefly.  “Good-night, Linn.”

And indeed it was not of Octavius Little, nor yet of Lady Adela’s novel, that Maurice Mangan was thinking as he carelessly walked away through the dark London thoroughfares, towards his rooms in Victoria Street.  He was thinking of that quiet little Surrey village; and of two boys there who had a great belief in each other—­and in themselves, too, for the matter of that; and of all the beautiful and wonderful dreams they dreamed while as yet the far-reaching future was veiled from them.  And then he thought of Linn Moore’s dressing-room at the theatre; and of the paints and powder and vulgar tinsel that had to fit him out for exhibition before the footlights; and of the feverish whirl of life and the bedazzlement of popularity and fashionable petting; and somehow or other the closing lines of Mrs. Browning’s poem would come ever and anon into his head as a sort of unceasing refrain: 

   “The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,—­
    For the reed that grows nevermore again
        As a reed with the reeds in the river.”

CHAPTER III.

NINA.

One morning Lionel was just about to go out (he had already been round to the gymnasium and got his fencing over) when the house-porter came up and said that a young lady wished to see him.

“What does she want?” he said, impatiently—­for something had gone wrong with the clasp of his cigarette-case, and he could not get it right.  “What’s her name?  Who is she?”

“She gave me her name, sir; but I did not quite catch it,” said the factotum of the house.

“Oh, well, send her up,” said he; no doubt this was some trembling debutante, accompanied by an ancient duenna and a roll of music.  And then he went to the window, to try to get the impenitent clasp to shut.