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Without looking round, he knew that every one was watching them and that both their voices had risen a tone. "Life!" she cried. "You've never met men and women. I told George Oakleigh so that night. That's why the public loves your play." Eric turned to Lady Poynter.

As Eric sought a chair, Oakleigh looked at him, stroked his chin, sighed gently and withdrew to the bridge-room as though he could not face seeing them together. "I want you to take this seriously," said Eric, when Barbara arrived for dinner. "Don't try to laugh it off by saying I'm conventional; I know I am. The fact is, people are beginning to talk about us. I want to discuss what's to be done."

"You said the other day that you had never met Eric Lane, though he was a great friend of Jim's. He was at Margaret Poynter's the other day when I was there. Ring me up between tea and dinner on Thursday. . . ." There remained Colonel Grayle, who had jerked out, as she left the "Divorce" with George Oakleigh: "Clever play! Rather like to meet the author. Decent feller, I believe."

Barbara had undergone some transformation in the last six months until she seemed hardly to need him. In the old days she was a slave to be summoned by a clap of the hands; but, since he had healed her spirit, she was a queen to be courted. "I'll come, if you like," she said. "It means throwing over George Oakleigh. And I haven't seen him since I came back."

My mother disliked what she saw of Kensington and Bayswater, and they thought in their simplicity that places with names like Mildmay Park, Finsbury Park, and finally Oakleigh Park, were good enough to begin on.

Later they heard a car driving past the open windows; George Oakleigh appeared in the doorway; Summertown's companion finished the champagne and rose to his feet protesting fretfully: "To declare war in the middle of supper is not the act of a gentleman. . . ." Then at last she had seen that she had tempted Jack to imperil his soul. . . .

Barbara had sought him out, when a hundred other men several of them, like George Oakleigh, undisguisedly in love with her might have been preferred to him; but he was offended by her proprietory attitude towards his work and life.

She was pleased by the stir with which her entrance galvanized them into alertness, by Oakleigh's sympathetic enquiries, even by Deganway's critical examination of her dress. "Well, make the most of me, everybody," she said. "I'm going back to bed immediately after lunch. What's everybody doing?" "I've been asleep," Oakleigh answered contentedly. Barbara looked round her and wrinkled her nose.

At present he was too novel a distraction for her to spare him easily; already he had become so important to her life that she had forgotten George Oakleigh and the thrill of gratitude and elation which she had felt when he began sluggishly but surely to fall in love with her. The house-party had dispersed before she came down next day.

George Oakleigh, in naval uniform, was unashamedly sleeping in a deep window-embrasure, his mouth open and his eyeglasses on his knees. Deganway and Carstairs were arguing in subdued tones and seemed as vacantly uninterested as Pentyre, who had exhausted the feuilleton of his paper and was studying the advertisements.