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or of Leslie. Sometimes when Leslie was talking with his usual good sense and intelligence about something interesting Simon would look at him with a glimmer of irony in those great black eyes of his and his sensual lips pursed in a sarcastic pucker. You would have thought Leslie was being prosy and a trifle stupid. Now and then when they were spending one of their pleasant quiet evenings together, chatting of one thing and another, he would go into a brown study; he would sit staring into vacancy, as though his thoughts were miles away, and perhaps, after a while, take up a book and start reading as though he were by himself. It gave you the impression that their conversation wasn’t worth listening to. It wasn’t even polite. But Venetia Mason chid herself.
    “Poor lamb, he’s never had a chance to learn manners. I
will
be nice to him. I
will
like him.”
    Her eyes rested on Charley, so good-looking, with his slim body, (“it’s awful the way he grows out of his clothes, the sleeves of his dinner-jacket are too short for him already,”) his curling brown hair, his blue eyes, with long lashes, and his clear skin. Though perhaps he hadn’t Simon’s showy brilliance, he was good, and he was artistic to his fingers’ ends. But who could tell what he might have become if she had run away from Leslie and Leslie had taken to drink, and if instead of enjoying a cultured atmosphere and the influence of a nice home he had had, like Simon, to fend for himself? Poor Simon! Next day she went out and bought him half a dozen ties. He seemed pleased.
    “I say, that’s jolly decent of you. I’ve never had more than two ties at one time in my life.”
    Venetia was so moved by the spontaneous generosity of her pretty gesture that she was seized with a sudden wave of sympathy.
    “You poor lonely boy,” she cried, “it’s so dreadful for you to have no parents.”
    “Well, as my mother was a whore, and my father a drunk, I daresay I don’t miss much.”
    He was seventeen when he said this.
    It was no good, Venetia simply couldn’t like him. He was harsh, cynical and unscrupulous. It exasperated her to see how much Charley admired him; Charley thought him brilliant and anticipated a great career for him. Even Leslie was impressed by the extent of hisreading and the clearness with which even as a boy he expressed himself. At school he was already an ardent socialist and at Cambridge he became a communist. Leslie listened to his wild theories with good-humoured tolerance. To him it was all talk, and talk, he had an instinctive feeling, was just talk; it didn’t touch the essential business of life.
    “And if he does become a well-known journalist or gets into the House, there’ll be no harm in having a friend in the enemy’s camp.”
    Leslie’s ideas were liberal, so liberal that he didn’t mind admitting the Socialists had several notions that no reasonable man could object to; theoretically he was all in favour of the nationalization of the coal-mines, and he didn’t see why the state shouldn’t run the public services as well as private companies; but he didn’t think they should go too far. Ground rents, for instance, that was a matter that was really no concern of the state; and slum property; in a great city you had to have slums, in point of fact the lower classes preferred them to model dwelling-houses, not that the Mason Estate hadn’t done what it could in this direction, but you couldn’t expect a landlord to let people live in his houses for nothing, and it was only fair that he should get a decent return on his capital.
    Simon Fenimore had decided that he wanted to be a foreign correspondent for some years so that he could gain a knowledge of Continental politics which would enable him when he entered the House of Commons to be an expert on a subject of which most Labour members were necessarily ignorant; but when Leslie tookhim to see the proprietor of the newspaper who was prepared to give a brilliant