V

I have just come in. Again you will not guess from where. From choosing a motorcar with Burden and his fiancée. It seems incredible that I should be called upon to preside at these preparations for my own execution. I looked at hundreds of these shiny engines, with the monstrously inflated white wheels, and gave a half-amused⁠—but I can assure you a half-interested⁠—attention to my own case. For one of these will one day⁠—and soon now⁠—be arrested in a long rush, by my extinction. In it there will be seated the two young people who went with me through the garages. They will sit in some sort of cushioned ease⁠—the cushions will be green, or red, or blue in shiny leather. I think, however, that they will not be green⁠—because Miss Averies let slip to me, in a little flutter of shy confidence, the words: “Oh, don’t let’s have green, because it’s an unlucky colour.” Edward Burden, of course, suppressed her with a hurried whisper as if, in thus giving herself away to me, she must be committing a sin against the house of Burden.

That, naturally, is the Burden tradition: a Burden’s wife must possess frailties: but she must feign perfection even to a trusted adviser of the family. She must not confess to superstitions. It was amusing, the small incident, because it was the very first attempt that little Miss Averies has ever made to get near me. God knows what Edward may have made me appear to her: but I fancy that, whatever Edward may have said, she had pierced through that particular veil: she realizes, with her intuition, that I am dangerous. She is alarmed and possibly fascinated because she feels that I am not “straight”⁠—that I might, in fact, be a woman or a poet. Burden, of course, has never got beyond seeing that I dress better than he does and choose a dinner better than his uncle Darlington.

I came, of course, out of the motorcar ordeal with flying colours⁠—on these lines. I lived, in fact, up to my character for being orthodox in the