“I—­I have to be.  Good God!  Alixe, do you think this is nothing to me?—­this wretched mess we have made of life!  Do you think my roughness and abruptness comes from anything but pity?—­pity for us both, I tell you.  Do you think I can remain unmoved looking on the atrocious punishment you have inflicted on yourself?—­tethered to—­to that!—­for life!—­the poison of the contact showing in your altered voice and manner!—­in the things you laugh at, in the things you live for—­in the twisted, misshapen ideals that your friends set up on a heap of nuggets for you to worship?  Even if we’ve passed through the sea of mire, can’t we at least clear the filth from our eyes and see straight and steer straight to the anchorage?”

She had covered her pallid face with her muff; he bent forward, his hand on the arm of her chair.

“Alixe, was there nothing to you, after all?  Was it only a tinted ghost that was blown into my bungalow that night—­only a twist of shredded marsh mist without substance, without being, without soul?—­to be blown away into the shadows with the next and stronger wind—­and again to drift out across the waste places of the world?  I thought I knew a sweet, impulsive comrade of flesh and blood; warm, quick, generous, intelligent—­and very, very young—­too young and spirited, perhaps, to endure the harness which coupled her with a man who failed her—­and failed himself.

“That she has made another—­and perhaps more heart-breaking mistake, is bitter for me, too—­because—­because—­I have not yet forgotten.  And even if I ceased to remember, the sadness of it must touch me.  But I have not forgotten, and because I have not, I say to you, anchor! and hold fast.  Whatever he does, whatever you suffer, whatever happens, steer straight on to the anchorage.  Do you understand me?”

Her gloved hand, moving at random, encountered his and closed on it convulsively.

“Do you understand?” he repeated.

“Y-es, Phil.”

Head still sinking, face covered with the silvery fur, the tremors from her body set her hand quivering on his.

Heart-sick, he forbore to ask for the explanation; he knew the real answer, anyway—­whatever she might say—­and he understood that any game in that house was Ruthven’s game, and the guests his guests; and that Gerald was only one of the younger men who had been wrung dry in that house.

No doubt at all that Ruthven needed the money; he was only a male geisha for the set that harboured him, anyway—­picked up by a big, hard-eyed woman, who had almost forgotten how to laugh, until she found him furtively muzzling her diamond-laden fingers.  So, when she discovered that he could sit up and beg and roll over at a nod, she let him follow her; and since then he had become indispensable and had curled up on many a soft and silken knee, and had sought and fetched and carried for many a pretty woman what she herself did not care to touch, even with white-gloved fingers.