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Her thin, long face, between the great black ear-bosses, looked at him thoughtfully, without rancour. "Nicky," she said, "Alfred Orde-Jones slept with me last night." And he said, simply and quietly, "Very well, Desmond; then I shall leave you. You can keep the flat, and I or my father will make you an allowance. I shan't divorce you, but I won't live with you."

Nicky couldn't draw the plans and Drayton couldn't build the models. They said it was fifty times better fun to work at it together. Nicky was happy. Desmond watched them sombrely. She and Alfred Orde-Jones, the painter, laughed at them behind their backs. She said "How funny they are!

One day Vera said to him, "Nicky, do you know that Desmond is going about a good deal with Alfred Orde-Jones?" "Is she? Is there any reason why she shouldn't?" "Not unless you call Orde-Jones a reason." "You mean I've got to stop it? How can I?" "You can't. Nothing can stop Desmond." "What do you think I ought to do about it?" "Nothing. She goes about with scores of people.

He rehearsed scenes that were only less fantastic than Orde-Jones's face and figure, or that owed their element of fantasy to Orde-Jones's face and figure. He saw himself assaulting Orde-Jones with violence, dragging him out of Desmond's studio, and throwing him downstairs. He wondered what shapes that body and those legs and arms would take when they got to the bottom.

"I come into this room and I find Phyllis Desmond in it and Orde-Jones, drinking tea and talking. I go upstairs for peace, and Michael and Ellis are sitting there talking; trying to persuade themselves that funk's the divinest thing in God's universe. "And over there's the one thing I've been looking for all my life the one thing I've cared for. And you're keeping me from it." They left it.

Perhaps they wouldn't get to the bottom all at once. He would hang on to the banisters. He saw himself simply opening the door of the studio and ordering Orde-Jones to walk out of it. Really, there would be nothing else for him to do but to walk out, and he would look an awful ass doing it.

John's Wood, and through Regent's Park and Baker Street, and down the north side of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, he worried the thing to shreds. There couldn't be anything in it. He could see Alfred Orde-Jones the raking swagger of the tall lean body in the loose trousers, the slouch hat and the flowing tie.

She had no more interest in deceiving him. She had no more interest in him at all. She was interested in her painting again. She worked in long fits, after long intervals of idleness. She worked with a hard, passionless efficiency. Nicky thought her paintings were hideous and repulsive; but he did not say so. He was not aware of the extent to which Desmond imitated her master, Alfred Orde-Jones.