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people were unfair because they hadn’t understood; like Bret the night he’d found Jim in the car—
    Could you ever make anything decent of a life begun in such bitterness, such ugliness and hostility? Wouldn’t you always have pictures at the back of your mind—
    Swinging Japanese lanterns on the long verandah of Wondabyne; dancing; lovely air, cool and smooth with a smell of freshly-cut grass and the morning’s brief spring shower; happiness brimming in you – happiness you couldn’t account for now and didn’t bother toaccount for then; a feeling of being tremendously well, and tremendously vigorous, and glad that music sounded as it did, and the country smelt as it did, and that silk slid against your bare skin with just that elusive and delicious touch—
    And then Bret at her side:
    â€œCan you spare me a minute? I want to show you something.”
    She’d said, “Yes—” and looked up at him doubtfully. She hadn’t known him very well then, and she thought that in the barred light and shadow from the lantern overhead his face looked rather startling – distorted, almost as though it were mutilated with vast horizontal scars—
    But she’d walked with him down the drive to the car. He opened its door. She was rather bewildered and peered at him through the darkness.
    Jim had said once, grinning. “Bret’s a fish. He’ll never marry,” but at that moment she had wondered with the rather pathetic wordly half-knowledge of the pretty flapper whether he was quite such a fish after all. She said:
    â€œWhat is it?”
    And he answered harshly:
    â€œJim’s in there – drunk.”
    She said nothing. Stood for a rather whirling, blackening moment staring into the car. Then she leaned forward, groped into the darkness and the faint smell of whisky and cried miserably:
    â€œJim! Jim!”
    Bret said shortly from behind her:
    â€œDon’t try to rouse him, please. I’m going to drive him home now. I just wanted you to see your handiwork.”
    She flared round at him, shaking with anger.
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    He said, shutting the door, speaking over his shoulder:
    â€œDon’t be so absurd. You’re a pair of young fools. Do you think I’m going to watch Jim go to pieces, because a vain flapper wants his scalp to add to her collection?”
    She said, calmly enough:
    â€œI’m not responsible for this.
    He shrugged and got into the car.
    â€œYou know best what you’ve done or said to him to-night to make him drink. It isn’t one of his failings.”
    The car was gone. She stood in the drive watching its red tail-light disappear, and then she began to cry painfully, silently, with her hands over her face, because some loveliness was gone out of the night, and she didn’t quite know why it should have or whether it would ever come again—
    From beside her, Bret said, conversationally:
    â€œBut of course they’re extinct now.
Quite
extinct.”
    She looked round at him sharply, but his face was as wooden as ever. And suddenly irritated, determined that, for once, he should be forced to explain himself, she demanded:
    â€œWhat do you mean by that?”
    He looked at her too now and for a few horrible seconds the thing she was always trying to avoid happened. They stared straight into each other’s eyes and she could see in his, all over again, the jarring clamour of a year-old war. She supposed, dully, that he could see things in hers too, and that in a moment or two they would be both struggling alone like swimmers flung violently apart by a tremendous wave. She’d found that out quite a long time ago. So long asthey didn’t look at each other things weren’t so bad. They could laugh and joke and make amicable conversation. They could even, when people were about, fling in a “dear” or a “darling” that sounded quite convincing.