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better so. For him, and me.'
    Basil, perforce, listened to this autobiography. While in Monte Carlo, he could not escape from Madame Calmier, and could not leave Monte Carlo while his sole means of livelihood lay there. But after three weeks of unsuccessful attempts at evasion, he suddenly succumbed to a sharp at tack of gastric influenza. He thought then that Providence had sent his illness as an order of release, but on the third evening he awoke from an uneasy sleep to find Madame Calmier sitting on his chaise longue, placidly polishing her rose-tipped finger-nails with his ivory-backed polisher.
    'Nobody seemed to know how you were or what was wrong, so I came to see for myself. Your landlady tells me it's la grippe. You certainly do look pretty mouldy.'
    Basil was unshaven. His bed was rumpled, his fair hair tousled as threshed straw, his room squalid, his head aching; and he knew that he was going to be sick. For the first time in his life, he swore at a lady.
    'God damn you, go away!" he cried in agony. Then that which he feared must happen, happened.
    Madame Calmier was neither embarrassed nor insulted.
    'My poor lamb!' she cried. 'You are in a bad way.'
    Then she rose, and with sensible promptitude set about making him more comfortable.
    She made his bed and washed his face and found him clean pyjamas and gave him milk and soda and bullied the landlady, secured a room for herself in the same house, and sat down to nurse him. She was lonely, and she had found a friend. She was bored, and she had found an occupation. Too indolent for professional efficiency, too feckless for pro longed caution, she made a good enough nurse to justify her presence in his room.
    As for Basil, his first horror melted into acquiescence. He derived a measure of comfort from her affirmation that there was nothing about a bedroom to embarrass her. The nature of his illness stripped him of all dignity. To his surprise, she never seemed to see his nakedness. Or perhaps, he reflected, she never saw men or women as anything but naked. Her cheerful glance ignored the masks and the ritual behind which men like Basil seek to hide themselves. She set no value on the decorum which he had cultivated with such care. At first he was too ill to do anything but surrender to her unperturbed initiative. Later he was amazed by the restfulness of complete collapse. As he grew stronger he found himself even enjoying her shameless intimacy, her Rabelaisian anecdotes, her absurd yet amicable limericks. He had found somebody before whom he could relax com pletely the rigid discipline of his pose, and he was grateful.
    A month after his recovery, he married her. 'And quite time too,' said she. 'Anyone could see with half an eye that you were a neglected only child from a country rectory. If I hadn't rescued you, you'd have been a finicky old maid in
    no time.' And that was the extent to which his grand poses had impressed her.
    §4

    For nearly five years Basil and Gloria drifted about the continent, losing a little money here, speculating profitably there. Gloria once did a good trade in Viennese em broideries, and once she lost money in a stupid venture in Hungarian gas works.
    'If the worst comes to the worst,' said Gloria, 'I'll sell out my French bonds and buy a little hotel somewhere between Nice and Cannes. We ought to do quite well there. You understand all about food and wines, and I know how to deal with people.'
    'That will indeed be the worst," said Basil.
    'Well, my friend, life being what it is, it's as well to have a way of retreat mapped out. Still, we won't despair yet. What about London for a change?'
    They went to London. Gloria found a post as sales woman of outsize models in a Hanover Square dress-maker's establishment. She and Basil took a small flat in Maida Vale, and Basil went home for a week-end to the Rectory. He showed his parents a photograph of his handsome wife, and they were too thankful to learn that she was a wife to ask disturbing