"Yes."

"Nina, when you loved me—what did you want?"

"Just you, Nicholas—just you."

"Well, I am here now, but an eye and a leg gone, and a crooked shoulder, changes me;—so it is true love—even the emotion of the soul, depends upon material things—"

Nina thought for a while.

"Perhaps not the emotion of the soul—if we have souls?—but what we know of love now certainly does. I suppose there are people who can love with the soul, I am not one of them."

"Well, you are honest, Nina."

She had her coffee and liqueur, she was graceful and composed and refined, either Jim or Rochester will have a very nice wife.22

22

Burton coughed when she had left.

"Out with it, Burton!"

"Mrs. Ardilawn is a kind lady, Sir Nicholas."

"Charming."

"I believe you'd be better with some lady to look after you, Sir—."

"To hell with you. Telephone for Mr. Maurice—I don't want any woman—we can play piquet."

This is how my day ended—.

Maurice and piquet—then the widow and the divorcée for dinner—and now alone again! The sickening rot of it all.

 

Sunday—Nina came for tea—she feels that I am a great comfort to her in this moment of her life, so full of indecision—It seems that Jim has turned up too, at the Ritz, where Rochester still is, and that his physical charm has upset all her calculations again.

"I am really very worried Nicholas," she said, "and you, who are a dear family friend"—I am a family friend 

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