’It is.  The worst of it would be that, when the time came for breaking it off, a fellow might get into an action for breach—­women are so fond of that sort of thing now; and I hate love-affairs that don’t end peaceably!’

‘But end it by peaceably marrying, my dear fellow!’

’It would seem so singular.  Besides, I have a horror of antiquity:  and you see, as long as a man keeps single, he belongs in a measure to the rising generation, however old he may be; but as soon as he marries and has children, he belongs to the last generation, however young he may be.  Old Jones’s son is a deal younger than young Brown’s father, though they are both the same age.’

’At any rate, honest courtship cures a man of many evils he had no power to stem before.’

‘By substituting an incurable matrimony!’

‘Ah—­two persons must have a mind for that before it can happen!’ said Ladywell, sorrowfully shaking his head.

’I think you’ll find that if one has a mind for it, it will be quite sufficient.  But here we are at my rooms.  Come in for half-an-hour?’

‘Not to-night, thanks!’

They parted, and Neigh went in.  When he got upstairs he murmured in his deepest chest note, ’O, lords, that I should come to this!  But I shall never be such a fool as to marry her!  What a flat that poor young devil was not to discover that we were tarred with the same brush.  O, the deuce, the deuce!’ he continued, walking about the room as if passionately stamping, but not quite doing it because another man had rooms below.

Neigh drew from his pocket-book an envelope embossed with the name of a fashionable photographer, and out of this pulled a portrait of the lady who had, in fact, enslaved his secret self equally with his frank young friend the painter.  After contemplating it awhile with a face of cynical adoration, he murmured, shaking his head, ’Ah, my lady; if you only knew this, I should be snapped up like a snail!  Not a minute’s peace for me till I had married you.  I wonder if I shall!—­I wonder.’

Neigh was a man of five-and-thirty—­Ladywell’s senior by ten years; and, being of a phlegmatic temperament, he had glided thus far through the period of eligibility with impunity.  He knew as well as any man how far he could go with a woman and yet keep clear of having to meet her in church without her bonnet; but it is doubtful if his mind that night were less disturbed with the question how to guide himself out of the natural course which his passion for Ethelberta might tempt him into, than was Ladywell’s by his ardent wish to secure her.

* * * * *

About the time at which Neigh and Ladywell parted company, Christopher Julian was entering his little place in Bloomsbury.  The quaint figure of Faith, in her bonnet and cloak, was kneeling on the hearth-rug endeavouring to stir a dull fire into a bright one.

‘What—­Faith! you have never been out alone?’ he said.