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artfulness. He was a bore, a crashing bore. He liked to tell Julia everything he did and every scheme that passed through his head; it had been charming when merely to have him with her was a delight, but for years she had found his prosiness intolerable. He could describe nothing without circumstantial detail. Nor was he only vain of his business acumen; with advancing years he had become outrageously vain of his person. As a youth he had taken his beauty for granted: now he began to pay more attention to it and spared no pains to keep what was left of it. It became an obsession. He devoted anxious care to his figure. He never ate a fattening thing and never forgot his exercises. He consulted hair specialists when he thought his hair was thinning, and Julia was convinced that had it been possible to get the operation done secretly he would have had his face lifted. He had got into the way of sitting with his chin slightly thrust out so that the wrinkles in his neck should not show and he held himself with an arched back to keep his belly from sagging. He could not pass a mirror without looking into it. He hankered for compliments and beamed with delight when he had managed to extract one. They were food and drink to him. Julia laughed bitterly when she remembered that it was she who had accustomed him to them. For years she had told him how beautiful he was and now he could not live without flattery. It was the only chink in his armour. An actress out of a job had only to tell him to his face that he was too handsome to be true for him to think that she might do for a part he had in mind. For years, so far as Julia knew, Michael had not bothered with women, but when he reached the middle forties he began to have little flirtations. Julia suspected that nothing much came of them. He was prudent, and all he wanted was admiration. She had heard that when women became pressing he used her as a pretext to get rid of them. Either he couldn't risk doing anything to hurt her, or she was jealous or suspicious and it seemed better that the friendship should cease.

"God knows what they see in him," Julia exclaimed to the empty room.

She took up half a dozen of his photographs at random and looked at them carefully one by one. She shrugged her shoulders.

"Well, I suppose I can't blame them. I fell in love with him too. Of course he was better-looking in those days."

It made Julia a little sad to think how much she had loved him. Because her love had died she felt that life had cheated her. She sighed.

"And my back's aching," she said.

10

THERE was a knock at the door.

"Come in," said Julia.

Evie entered.

"Aren't you going to bed today, Miss Lambert?" She saw Julia sitting on the floor surrounded by masses of photographs. "Whatever are you doing?"

"Dreaming." She took up two of the photographs. "Look here upon this picture, and on this."

One was of Michael as Mercutio in all the radiant beauty of his youth and the other of Michael in the last part he had played, in a white topper and a morning coat, with a pair of field-glasses slung over his shoulder. He looked unbelievably self-satisfied.

Evie sniffed.

"Oh, well, it's no good crying over spilt milk."

"I've been thinking of the past and I'm as blue as the devil."*

"I don't wonder. When you start thinking of the past it means you ain't got no future, don't it?"

"You shut your trap, you old cow," said Julia, who could be very vulgar when she chose.

"Come on now, or you'll be fit for nothing tonight. I'll clear up all this mess."

Evie was Julia's dresser and maid. She had come to her first at Middlepool and had accompanied her to London. She was a cockney, a thin, raddled, angular woman, with red hair which was always untidy and looked as if it much needed washing, two of her front teeth were missing but, notwithstanding Julia's offer, repeated for years, to provide her with new ones she would not have them replaced.

"For the little I eat I've got all the teeth I want. It'd only fidget me to 'ave a lot of elephant's tusks in me mouth."

Michael had long wanted Julia at least to get