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Optimal and Robust
Control
 Optimal and Robust
Control
Advanced Topics with MATLAB®
Second Edition

Luigi Fortuna
Mattia Frasca
Arturo Buscarino
MATLAB® is a trademark of The MathWorks, Inc. and is used with permission. The MathWorks
does not warrant the accuracy of the text or exercises in this book. This book’s use or discussion of
MATLAB® software or related products does not constitute endorsement or sponsorship by The
MathWorks of a particular pedagogical approach or particular use of the MATLAB® software.

Second edition published 2022

by CRC Press
6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Suite 300, Boca Raton, FL 33487-2742

and by CRC Press

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

© 2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

First edition published by CRC Press 2012

CRC Press is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

Reasonable efforts have been made to publish reliable data and information, but the author and pub-
lisher cannot assume responsibility for the validity of all materials or the consequences of their use.
The authors and publishers have attempted to trace the copyright holders of all material reproduced
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ISBN: 978-1-032-05300-4 (hbk)

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ISBN: 978-1-003-19692-1 (ebk)
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Dedicated to our wives
Contents

Preface xiii

Symbol List xv

1 Modelling of Uncertain Systems and the Robust Control

Problem 1

1.1 Uncertainty and Robust Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.2 The Essential Chronology of Major Findings in Robust Con-
trol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

2 Fundamentals of Stability 11

2.1 Lyapunov Criteria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

2.2 Positive Definite Matrices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.3 Lyapunov Theory for Linear Time-Invariant Systems . . . . 16
2.4 Lyapunov Equations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2.5 Stability with Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.6 Further Results on the Lyapunov Theory . . . . . . . . . . 26
2.6.1 Hystorical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
2.6.2 Lyapunov Stability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.7 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

3 Kalman Canonical Decomposition 35

3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.2 Controllability Canonical Partition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
3.3 Observability Canonical Partition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
3.4 General Partition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
3.5 Remarks on Kalman Decomposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3.6 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

4 Singular Value Decomposition 51

4.1 Singular Values of a Matrix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

4.2 Spectral Norm and Condition Number of a Matrix . . . . . 53
4.3 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

vii
viii Contents

5 Open-loop Balanced Realization 59

5.1 Controllability and Observability Gramians . . . . . . . . . 59

5.2 Principal Component Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
5.3 Principal Component Analysis Applied to Linear Systems . 64
5.4 State Transformations of Gramians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
5.5 Singular Values of Linear Time-invariant Systems . . . . . . 68
5.6 Computing the Open-loop Balanced Realization . . . . . . 69
5.7 Balanced Realization for Discrete-time Linear Systems . . . 73
5.8 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

6 Reduced Order Models and Symmetric Systems 77

6.1 Reduced Order Models Based on the Open-loop Balanced Re-

alization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
6.1.1 Direct Truncation Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
6.1.2 Singular Perturbation Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
6.2 Reduced Order Model Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
6.3 Symmetric Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
6.3.1 Reduced Order Models for SISO Systems . . . . . . . 86
6.3.2 Properties of Symmetric Systems . . . . . . . . . . . 88
6.3.3 The Cross-gramian Matrix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
6.3.4 Relations Between Wc2 , Wo2 and Wco . . . . . . . . . 90
6.3.5 Open-loop Parameterization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
6.3.6 Relation Between the Cauchy Index and the Hankel
Matrix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
6.3.7 Singular Values for a FIR Filter . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
6.3.8 Singular Values of All-pass Systems . . . . . . . . . . 102
6.4 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

7 Variational Calculus and Linear Quadratic Optimal Control 107

7.1 Variational Calculus: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

7.2 The Lagrange Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
7.3 Towards Optimal Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
7.4 LQR Optimal Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
7.5 Hamiltonian Matrices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
7.6 Solving the Riccati Equation via the Hamiltonian Matrix . 127
7.7 The Control Algebraic Riccati Equation . . . . . . . . . . . 127
7.8 Optimal Control for SISO Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
7.9 Linear Quadratic Regulator with Cross-weighted Cost . . . 134
7.10 Finite-horizon Linear Quadratic Regulator . . . . . . . . . . 135
7.11 Optimal Control for Discrete-time Linear Systems . . . . . 136
7.12 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Contents ix

8 Closed-loop Balanced Realization 139

8.1 Synthesis of a Compensator for High-Order Systems . . . . 139

8.2 Filtering Algebraic Riccati Equation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
8.3 Computing the Closed-loop Balanced Realization . . . . . . 142
8.4 Procedure for Closed-loop Balanced Realization . . . . . . . 144
8.5 Reduced Order Models Based on Closed-loop Balanced Real-
ization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
8.6 Closed-loop Balanced Realization for Symmetric Systems . 149
8.7 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

9 Positive-real, Bounded-real and Negative-imaginary Systems 153

9.1 Passive Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154

9.1.1 Passivity in the Frequency Domain . . . . . . . . . . 154
9.1.2 Passivity in the Time Domain . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
9.1.3 Factorizing Positive-real Functions . . . . . . . . . . 160
9.1.4 Passive Reduced Order Models . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
9.1.5 Energy Considerations Connected to the Positive-real
Lemma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
9.1.6 Closed-loop Stability and Positive-real Systems . . . 162
9.1.7 Optimal Gain for Loss-less Systems . . . . . . . . . . 163
9.2 Circuit Implementation of Positive-real Systems . . . . . . . 165
9.3 Bounded-real Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
9.3.1 Properties of Bounded-real Systems . . . . . . . . . . 169
9.3.2 Bounded-real Reduced Order Models . . . . . . . . . 170
9.4 Relationship Between Passive and Bounded-real Systems . . 170
9.5 Negative-imaginary Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
9.5.1 Characterization of Negative-imaginary Systems in the
Frequency Domain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
9.5.2 Characterization of Negative-imaginary Systems in the
Time Domain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
9.5.3 Closed-loop Stability and Negative-imaginary Systems 176
9.6 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178

10 Enforcing the Positive-real or the Negative-imaginary

Property in a Linear Model 181

10.1 Why to Enforce the Positive-real and Negative-Imaginary

Property in a Linear Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
10.2 Passification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
10.3 Forward Action to make a System Negative-Imaginary . . . 187
10.3.1 The SISO Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
10.3.2 The MIMO Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
10.4 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
x Contents

11 H∞ Linear Control 195

11.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

11.2 Solution of the H∞ Linear Control Problem . . . . . . . . . 197
11.3 The H∞ Linear Control and the Uncertainty Problem . . . 205
11.4 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208

12 Linear Matrix Inequalities for Optimal and Robust Control 209

12.1 Definition and Properties of LMI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210

12.2 LMI Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
12.2.1 Feasibility Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
12.2.2 Linear Objective Minimization Problem . . . . . . . 212
12.2.3 Generalized Eigenvalue Minimization Problem . . . . 212
12.3 Formulation of Control Problems in LMI Terms . . . . . . . 213
12.3.1 Stability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
12.3.2 Closed-loop Stability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
12.3.3 Simultaneous Stabilizability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
12.3.4 Positive-real Lemma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
12.3.5 Bounded-real Lemma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
12.3.6 Calculating the H∞ Norm Through LMI . . . . . . . 215
12.4 Solving a LMI Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
12.5 LMI Problem for Simultaneous Stabilizability . . . . . . . . 218
12.6 Solving Algebraic Riccati Equations Through LMI . . . . . 221
12.7 Computation of Gramians Through LMI . . . . . . . . . . . 223
12.8 Computation of the Hankel Norm Through LMI . . . . . . 224
12.9 H∞ Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
12.10 Multiobjective Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
12.11 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

13 The Class of Stabilizing Controllers 237

13.1 Parameterization of Stabilizing Controllers for Stable

Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
13.2 Parameterization of Stabilizing Controllers for Unstable
Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
13.3 Parameterization of Stable Controllers . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
13.4 Simultaneous Stabilizability of Two Systems . . . . . . . . . 245
13.5 Coprime Factorizations for MIMO Systems and Unitary
Factorization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
13.6 Parameterization in Presence of Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . 247
13.7 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
Contents xi

14 Formulation and Solution of Matrix Algebraic Problems

through Optimization Problems 253

14.1 Solutions of Matrix Algebra Problems Using Dynamical Sys-

tems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
14.1.1 Problem 1: Inverse of a Matrix . . . . . . . . . . . . 254
14.1.2 Problem 2: Eigenvalues of a Matrix . . . . . . . . . . 256
14.1.3 Problem 3: Eigenvectors of a Symmetric Positive Def-
inite Matrix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258
14.1.4 Problem 4: Observability and Controllability Gramian 259
14.2 Computation of the Open-loop Balanced Representation via
the Dynamical System Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
14.3 Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
14.4 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264

15 Time-delay Systems 265

15.1 Modeling Systems with Time-delays . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

15.2 Basic Principles of Time-delay Systems . . . . . . . . . . . 266
15.3 Stability of Time-delay Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269
15.4 Stability of Time-delay Systems with q = 1 . . . . . . . . . 270
15.5 Direct Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
15.6 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281

Recommended Essential References 283

Appendix A. Norms 291

Appendix B. Algebraic Riccati Equations 295

Appendix C. Invariance Under Frequency Transformations 299

Index 303
Preface

The main aim of this book is to provide for undergraduate and graduate
students, as well as researchers, who already possess the main concepts of
automatic control and system analysis, a self-contained resource collecting
advanced techniques for linear system theory and control design. Selected
theoretical backgrounds are also presented in the book, together with many
numerical exercises and MATLABr examples.
We intend to offer a complete and easy-to-read handbook of advanced
topics in automatic control, including techniques such as the Linear Quadratic
Regulator (LQR) and H∞ control. Large emphasis is also given to Linear
Matrix Inequalities (LMIs) with the purpose of demonstrating their use as a
unifying tool for system analysis and control design.
In presenting the different approaches to control design, the books explic-
itly takes into account the problem of the robustness of the obtained closed-
loop control. Robustness, in fact, represents the capability of a control system
to guarantee the stability in the presence of uncertainty, due to the model itself
or to the use of approximated models, and as such is deemed as particularly
important in view of the practical implementation of the control techniques.
Many books on LQR control and H∞ control have been proposed since
1980. The LMI technique has become well-known in the control community,
and MATLABr toolboxes to solve advanced control problems have been de-
veloped. However, these subjects are often presented for a specialist audience
in materials that are excellent resources for researchers and PhD students.
This book, on the contrary, is oriented to illustrate these topics in an easy
and concise way, using a language suitable for students, yet maintaining the
necessary mathematical rigor.
This book is, therefore, a compendium of many ordered subjects. For spe-
cific proofs, the reader is often referred to the proposed literature. Many ex-
amples and MATLABr based exercises are included here to assist the reader
in understanding the proposed methods. The book can be considered as a
palimpsest of advanced modern topics in automatic control, including an ad-
vanced set of analytical examples and MATLABr exercises. The topics in-
cluded in the book are mainly illustrated with reference to continuous-time
linear systems, even if some results for discrete-time systems are briefly re-
called.
The book is organized into chapters structured as follows. The first chapter
is an introduction to advanced control, the second discusses some fundamental
concepts on stability and provides the tools for studying uncertain systems.

xiii
xiv Preface

The third presents the Kalman decomposition. The fourth chapter is on sin-
gular value decomposition of a matrix, given the importance of numerical
techniques for systems analysis. The fifth and sixth chapters are on open-loop
balanced realization and reduced order models. The seventh chapter presents
the essential aspects of variational calculus and optimal control and the eighth
illustrates closed-loop balancing. The properties of positive-real, bounded-real
and negative-imaginary systems are the subject of the ninth and tenth chap-
ter. In the eleventh and twelfth chapter, the essential aspects of H∞ control
and LMI techniques commonly used in control systems design are dealt with.
The thirteenth chapter is devoted to discuss the class of stabilizing controllers.
The fourteenth chapter reviews some of the problems already discussed in the
book by introducing an approach based on the steady-state solution of a non-
linear dynamical system. Finally, the fifteenth chapter briefly discusses some
fundamental aspects of time-delay systems. The book also includes numerous
examples and exercises, considered indispensable for learning the methodology
of the topics dealt with, and a list of essential references.
This book is targeted at electrical, electronic, computer science, space and
automation engineers interested in advanced topics on automatic control. Me-
chanical engineers as well as engineers from other fields may also be inter-
ested in the topics of the book. The contents of the book can be learned
autonomously by the reader in less than a semester.

For MATLABr and Simulinkr product information, please contact:

The MathWorks, Inc.

3 Apple Hill Drive
Natick, MA 01760-2098 USA
Tel: 508-647-7000
Fax: 508-647-7001
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.mathworks.com
Other documents randomly have
different content
he called upon her, exclaimed:
“What’s the matter? You know you aren’t looking well. One
would think Peter was dead.”
“You’ve got,” he said, “to put on your things and come and see
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“I?” she protested. “What are they to me?”
He passed his hand over his forehead.
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to see the last of Pauline.”
Ellida said: “Oh!”
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of what I am to you. You’re the only sister I’ve got in the world.”
Ellida was walking up to him to put her hands upon his
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“Yes, dear,” she was beginning, with the note of tenderness in
her voice.
“And,” he interrupted her, “you’re the only sister that Katya’s got
in the world. If I’ve arranged this marriage it’s for your sake, to keep
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She gave a little indrawing of the breath:
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She shivered a little back from him.
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 “Be quick! be quick!” he insisted.
Whilst she was putting on her furs she sent in to the room the
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“She’s fainted!” she exclaimed. “Oh, poor child!”
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“Toto!” Ellida exclaimed in a tone of sharp terror and anguish,
“why did she throw them to you? She shouldn’t have. But why do
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His voice came harshly from his throat.
“They were my flowers—my gift. She was throwing them away.
Hadn’t you the sense to see that?” and his voice was cruel.
 She recoiled minutely, but at his next action she came swiftly
forward, her hands outstretched as if to stop him. He had picked up
the violets, his lips moving silently. He touched with them each of his
wrists, each of his eyes, his lips and his heart.
“Oh, don’t,” she said. “You aren’t serious—you can’t be serious!”
for, as it seemed to her, semi-ironically her cousin was going through
a Greek incantation that they had been told of by their old Greek
nurse. “You can’t want to retain that poor little thing’s affections.”
“Serious!” Robert Grimshaw muttered.
“Oh, Robert,” she said, “what have you done it for? If she’s so
frightfully in love with you, and you’re so frightfully in love with her ...
and you’ve only got to look at her face to see. I never saw such
misery. Isn’t it horrible to think of them steaming away together?”
Robert Grimshaw clenched his teeth firmly. “What did I do it
for?” he said.
His eyes wandered over the form of a lady who passed them in
earnest conversation with a porter. “That woman’s going to drop her
purse out of her muff,” he said; and then he added sharply: “I didn’t
know what it would mean; no, I didn’t know what it would mean. It’s
the sort of thing that’s done every day, but it’s horrible.”
“It’s horrible,” Ellida repeated. “You oughtn’t to have done it. It’s
true I stand for Katya, but if you wanted that child so much and she
wanted you so dreadfully, wasn’t it your business to have made her
happy, and yourself? If I’d known, I shouldn’t have stood in the way,
not even for Katya’s sake. She’s no claim—none that can be set
against a feeling like that. She’s gone away; she’s shown no sign.”
She stopped, and then she uttered suddenly:
“Oh, Robert, you oughtn’t to have done it; no good can come of
it.”
He turned upon her sharply.
“Upon my word,” he said, “you talk like an old-fashioned
shopkeeper’s wife. Nothing but harm can come of it! What have we
arrived at in our day and our class if we haven’t learnt to do what we
want, to do what seems proper and expedient—and to take what we
get for it?”
They turned and went slowly up the long platform.
“Oh, our day and our class,” Ellida said slowly. “It would be
better for Pauline to be the old-fashioned wife of a small shopkeeper
than what she is—if she cared for him.”
They were nearly at the barrier, and he said:
“Oh sentimentality, sentimentality! I had to do what seemed best
for, us all—that was what I wanted. Now I’m taking what I get for it.”
And he relapsed into a silence that lasted until they were nearly
at home. And seated beside him in her coupé, Ellida, with the little
deep wisdom of the woman of the household, sat beside him in a
mood of wonder, of tenderness, and of commiseration.
“And it’s always like this,” she seemed to feel in her wise, small
bones. “There they are, these men of ours. We see them altogether
affable, smiling, gentle, composed. And we women have to make
believe to their faces and to each other that they’re towers of
strength and all-wise, as they like to make out that they are. We see
them taking action that they think is strong; and forcible, and
masculine, and that we know is utterly mad; and we have to pretend
to them and to each other that we agree in placid confidence; and
then we go home, each one of us with our husbands or our brothers,
and the strong masculine creature breaks down, groans and drags
us after him hither and thither in his crisis, when he has to pay for his
folly. And that’s life. And that’s love. And that’s the woman’s part.
And that’s all there is to it.”
It is not to be imagined that Ellida did anything so unsubtle as to
put these feelings of hers, even to herself, into words. They found
vent only in the way her eyes, compassionate and maternal, rested
on his brooding face. Indeed, the only words she uttered, either to
herself or to him, were, with deep concern—he had taken off his hat
to ease the pressure of the blood in his brows—as she ran her
fingers gently through his hair:
“Poor old Toto!”
 He remained lost in his abstraction, until they were almost at her
door. Then he squared his shoulders and resumed his hat.
“Yet I’m sure I was right,” he said. “Just consider what it was up
to me to do. You’ve got to think that I don’t by any means care for
Katya less. I want her for myself. But I want to see to it that Pauline
has a good time, and I want to see her having it.”
“How can she have it if you’ve given her Dudley Leicester when
she wants you?”
“My dear child,” he answered, and he had become again calm,
strong, and infinitely lofty. “Don’t you understand that’s how Society
has to go on? It’s the sort of thing that’s got to happen to make us
the civilized people that we are. Dudley’s the best fellow in the world:
I’m sure he’s the best fellow in the world. I know everything he’s ever
done and every thought he’s ever thought for the last twenty years,
and everything that Pauline wants to do in this world he’ll do. She’ll
make a man of him. She’ll give him a career. He’ll be her life’s work.
And if you can’t have what you want, the next best thing is to have a
life’s work that’s worth doing, that’s engrossing, that keeps you from
thinking about what you haven’t got.”
Ellida refrained from saying that what a different thing it was,
and with his air of tranquil wisdom he went on:
“We’re all—all of us, in our class and our day, doing the same
thing. Every one of us really wants the moon, and we’ve got
somehow to get on with just the earth, and behave ourselves. I
suppose what I really want is both Katya and Pauline. That sort of
thing is probably in our blood—yours and mine—and no doubt in the
great days of our race I should have had both of them, but I’ve got to
sacrifice physical possession of one of them to the amenities of a
civilization that’s pleasant enough, and that’s taken thousands of
years to bring together. We’re the children of the age and of all the
ages, and if at times it’s painful, we’ve got to get over the pain
somehow. This is done with. You won’t see me wince again, not
ever. It’s my business in life just to wait for Katya, and to see that
Pauline has a good time.”
 Ellida did not say: “You mean, in fact, to keep as much as you
want of both of them?” She said instead: “What’s wanted is that
Katya should come back from Philadelphia to look after you. You
need to be looked after by a woman, and I’m going to get her.”
“Oh yes, I need to be looked after,” he said. And he added:
“But you know, dear, you do it splendidly.”
She nodded in the very least.
“Yes,” she said, “but you need to be looked after by at least two
of us, and to have the whole time of at least one. I’ve got Paul and
I’ve got Kitty as well as you.” She added to herself: “Katya will be
able to manage you with my hints. I don’t believe she could without,
if she is anything like the passionate darling she used to be.” And
she concluded out loud: “It’s Kitty that’s going to bring her back from
Philadelphia. I’ve had my trump card up my sleeve for some time,
but I haven’t wanted to interfere in matters with two such volcanoes
as you and she really are. It seemed too much of a responsibility.
And I’ve sort of felt that a little person like Pauline was the person
who ought to have married you. I know it now. You ought to have
married Pauline and given her a good time. Then you could have
gone on waiting for Katya till the end of the chapter.”
Robert Grimshaw said “Oh!”
“But you’re in,” she shut him up, “such a hopeless pickle as it is
that I don’t believe even Katya, darling as she is, could make you
any worse. So that if she comes back you’d better just take her on
her own terms, and make the very best of it.”

III

PAULINE LEICESTER’S mother’s cottage had only one spare

bedroom. It stood in the New Forest, some seven miles from
Brockenhurst, with no house nearer it than just that seven miles. And
Mrs. Lucas, the mother of Pauline Leicester, suffered from angina
pectoris. She was a little, pleasant woman, with the greatest tact that
was ever known; she played a variety of Patiences, and she had one
very attached servant. But, little and pleasant and patient and tactful,
she suffered very much pain.
It was not, indeed, angina pectoris, but pneumonia that brought
the Leicesters down in March.
“And, poor dear!” Pauline said to her husband, “no one knows
what she has borne. And now ...”
She was sitting alone opposite Leicester in the railway carriage;
she was still in furs, for March was by no means done with, and the
black, grey-tipped hairs encircling her porcelain cheeks and chin, the
black, grey-tipped furs crowning her brow, that was like soft and
translucent china, she leaned back in the seat, and was so tiny that
her feet did not touch the floor. Her brows curved out over her eyes;
their lashes curved out and upwards, so that she had an expression
of being a newly awakened and wondering child, and about her lips
there hovered always one of those faint ghosts of smiles that are to
other smiles as the faint odour of pot-pourri is to the scent of roses.
Her husband called her Puff-Ball, because he said a breath of wind
would scatter her like an odorous smoke, gone in a second; but she
had acquired her faint smile whilst tending five very robust children
when she had been a nursery governess. She was twenty-three.
“You see,” she went on, “it was always mother’s ambition—her
secret ambition—to have a white pony and a basket-work open
chaise. It must be a white pony and a basket-work chaise. You know,
the New Forest’s the place where all Admirals go to die, and all their
widows always set up these chaises, just as all the Admirals always
have parrots. Not that I ever considered mother as a widow. I
suppose that was because I hardly saw her at all in her weeds, and I
hardly ever saw her with my father—and yet she was in such an
agony of fear whenever the wind blew, or when the weather was
fierce. When it blew in the Forest, it used to remind her that there
might be wind at sea; when it was a dead calm, she was always
convinced that that meant that there was a particularly vicious
cyclone somewhere else. She always seemed most characteristic
when she was sitting bolt upright, with one hand close to her heart—
listening. And I don’t think she was the woman for father. He was so
big and grizzled, and loud and romantic. He used to shout at her:
‘What’d a puff of wind do to a first-class cruiser? What’d it do, d’you
think?’ It wasn’t that he wasn’t prouder of her than you are of me.
Why, I’ve seen him take her up in his arms and hoist her towards the
ceding, as if she had been a baby, and roar with laughter. But I don’t
think that was very good for mother. And you know she got her first
touch of heart trouble when the Victoria was rammed. She was in
Lyndhurst, and read it on the placards—Flagship sunk: Admiral and
six hundred lives lost.’ She put her hand over her heart and fell over
backwards. Oh! poor dear!”
Pauline looked at her husband.
“Yes, old boy,” she said, “you don’t know what we women have
to suffer.”
He was like a large, pleased spaniel assaulted by a Persian
kitten. He was so slow that he seemed never to get a word out; he
was so happy that he never made the effort. He had promised to
stand for Mid-Kent when they had been married one year, because
she declared that he needed an occupation, and would be tired of
her prattle. She said she could hold him a year; after that he’d have
to go out of the house. And, indeed, she ran on and on, but it was
pleasant enough to hear her as she thought aloud, her mind linking
up topic to topic.
“Yes,” she said, “there were father’s speculations, that were as
bad for her as the winds on the sea. He’d roar out: ‘I never put into
anything in any one year more than three-fifths of my year’s screw. I
never did, and I never will. And the wheel’s bound to turn right side
up.’ But it never did, and it never would. And he had expensive
tastes, and there was me to dress. And I’ve seen him sitting with his
chin between his hands. So that when he died his coffin stood in an
empty house—the brokers had cleared it that day. And I was at the
Brigstocks’—up in the nursery.”
Dudley Leicester swore suddenly at Fate that had so misused
his Puff-Ball.
 “I’ve never really told you this,” Pauline said, “though I dare say
you knew it.”
“I never knew it,” he said. “By God! I’d like to, ... Well, the most I
knew was, I heard the Brigstocks only gave you three days for your
father’s funeral, and cut it off your holidays next summer.”
“Well, I’ve got to thank them that I never really think of mother
as a widow. I’m glad of that; and there were five children in the
nursery, and only me to look after them.”
Mr. Leicester muttered beneath his breath that they were cursed
hogs.
“Well, I’ve got to thank them for you!” she said. “For if Mr.
Grimshaw hadn’t come up into the nursery—if he hadn’t been so
fond of children—he’d never have seen me, and so he’d never have
helped mother to patch up her impossible affairs, and get her
compassionate allowance, and keep out of rooms in Hampton Court
that she dreaded so. You’d never have come to Hampton Court.
You’ve never been to Hampton Court in your life.”
“I have,” Dudley Leicester asseverated. “When I was a kid I
scratched a wart off my hand on the hollies in the maze; there’s the
scar on the little finger. And I wish you’d call him Robert. I’ve told you
so many times. It’s deuced bad form to call him Mr. Grimshaw.”
Pauline’s lower lip curved inwards.
“Anyhow, mother’s ambition to have a pony was a secret all the
time.”
“She might have had fifty ponies if I’d known,” Leicester said.
“But you were engaged to Etta Stackpole all the while,” Pauline
mocked him. “You know you’d have married her if she had not flirted
with the boot-blacks. You’ve told me so many times! And anyhow,
she didn’t want fifty ponies: she only wanted one. And, now I’m off
her hands, and she’s been able to get one—there comes this....”
For Mrs. Lucas, driving out with her pony for the third time in the
Forest, the pony—white, with extreme age—had fallen, and lay still,
and a March storm had come sweeping up from the Solent. So that
there was the pneumonia.
“And the only reason I tell you all this,” Pauline said, “is to make
you very quiet and good, and careful not to knock things over,
because it’s such a tiny box of a place, and you’re such a clumsy
creature, and falling crockery is so bad for a weak heart. I should say
it’s worse than sudden deaths or runaway marriages....”

But Dudley Leicester had no chance of breaking his mother-in-

law’s china. He was fond of standing before her little mantelshelf,
and, with a motion of his shoulder-blades, knocking her blue vases
into the fender, and his dismal contrition then had always been
almost worse for Mrs. Lucas’s nerves than the actual crash and
collision. He had no chance, because the little cottage was full to
overflowing. There were two nurses in attendance; there were a
doctor and a specialist at the moment of the Leicesters’ arrival, and
there was only one spare bedroom, and only one servant. And there
was no other dwelling-place within seven miles. Dudley Leicester
was left to imagine that it was the cold, calm, closely-lipped nurses in
their white aprons that seemed to stand out so stiffly, to take up so
much space, and with their rustlings so to fill the tiny house—that it
was they who sent the quite dismal Dudley Leicester back to town.
But no doubt, though she never let him suspect it, or the shadow of
it, it was Pauline. With the secret consciousness that his presence,
though he never went near the sick-room, was a constant torture to
her mother—it was Pauline who really ejected him from the cottage,
who put against the fact that he was willing to sleep on the sofa or in
the loft over the white pony’s stable the other fact—that Ann, the
servant, was terribly overworked already, with so many extra beds to
make, meals to cook, and plates to wash up. In fact, gay and brave
and pleading, Pauline put her hands on her husband’s chest and
pushed him backwards out of the crowded house. And he never
realized that it was she who did it.

IV
SO tall that he looked over most men’s heads, so strong that his
movements must be for ever circumscribed and timid, Dudley
Leicester had never in his life done anything—he had not even been
in the Guards. Least of all did he ever realize personal attitudes in
those around him. The minute jealousies, the very deep hatreds, and
the strong passions that swelled in his particular world of deep
idleness, of high feeling, and of want of occupation—in this world
where, since no man had any need of anything to do, there were so
many things to feel—Dudley Leicester perceived absolutely nothing,
no complexities, no mixed relationships. To him a man was a man, a
woman a woman; the leader in a newspaper was a series of
convincing facts, of satisfying views, and of final ideals. Belonging as
he did to the governing classes, Dudley Leicester had not even the
one outlet for passion that is open to these highly groomed and stall-
fed creatures. The tradition of the public service was in his blood. He
owned a slice of his kingdom that was more than microscopic on the
map. But though he had come into his great possessions at the age
of twenty-seven, he made no effort whatever to put things straight,
since he had more than enough to satisfy his simple needs,—to
provide him with a glass bath and silver taps, to pay his subscription
at his club, to give him his three cigars a day, his box at a music-hall
once a week, his month on the Riviera—and to leave him a thousand
or two over every year, which was the fact most worrying to his
existence.
It was Robert Grimshaw who set his estates in order; who found
him a young, hard steward with modern methods; who saw to it that
he built additions to several Church schools, and who directed the
steward to cut down the rent on overburdened farms, to raise other
rents, to provide allotments, to plant heavy land with trees, and to let
the shootings to real advantage. It was, indeed, Robert Grimshaw
who raised Dudley Leicester’s income to figures that in other
circumstances Leicester would have found intolerable. But, on the
other hand, it was Robert Grimshaw who put all the surplus back into
the estates, who had all the gates rehung, all the hedges replanted,
all the roofs of the barns ripped and retiled, and all the cottages
rebuilt. And it was Robert Grimshaw who provided him with his
Pauline.
 So that at thirty-two, with a wife whom already people regarded
as likely to be the making of him, a model landlord, perfectly sure of
a seat in the House, without a characteristic of any kind or an enemy
in the world, there, gentle and exquisitely groomed, Dudley Leicester
was a morning or so after his return to town. Standing in front of his
mantelshelf in a not too large dining-room of Curzon Street, he
surveyed his breakfast-table with an air of immense indifference, of
immense solitude, and of immense want of occupation. His shoulder-
blades rubbed the glass front of the clock, his hand from time to time
lightly pulled his moustache, his face was empty, but with an
emptiness of depression. He had nothing in the world to do. Nothing
whatever!
So that turning round to take a note from the frame of the mirror
behind him was with him positively an action of immense
importance. He hadn’t a visit to pay to his tailor; there wouldn’t be at
his club or in the Park anyone that he wanted to be talked to by. The
one bright spot in his day was the P—— exercise that he would take
just before lunch in his bath-room before the open window. This
interested him. This really engrossed him. It engrossed him because
of his docility, his instructor having told him that, unless he paid an
exact attention to each motion of his hands and wrists the exercises
would cause him no benefit whatever. He longed immensely for
physical benefit, for he suffered from constant panics and ideas of ill-
health. He remembered that he had an aunt who had been a
consumptive; therefore he dreaded tuberculosis. He had read in
some paper that the constant string of vehicles passing us in the
streets of London so acted on the optic nerves that general paralysis
was often induced. Therefore sometimes he walked along the streets
with his eyes shut; he instructed his chauffeur to drive him from
place to place only by way of back streets and secluded squares,
and he abandoned the habit of standing in the window of his club,
which overlooked Piccadilly. Because Pauline, by diverting his
thoughts, diverted also these melancholy forebodings, he imagined
that marriage had done him a great deal of good. The letter that he
took from the mantelshelf contained an invitation from the Phyllis
Trevors to dine that night at the Equator Club, and to go afterwards
to the Esmeralda, the front row of whose stalls Phyllis Trevors had
engaged. That matter was one for deep and earnest consideration,
since Dudley Leicester had passed his last three evenings at the
place of entertainment in question, and was beginning to feel himself
surfeited with its particular attractions. Moreover, the Phyllis Trevors
informed him that Etta Stackpole—now Lady Hudson—was to be
one of the party. But, on the other hand, if he didn’t go to the Phyllis
Trevors, where in the world was he to spend his evening?
Promptly upon his return to town, he had despatched letters to
the various more stately houses where he and Pauline were to have
dined—letters excusing himself and his wife on account of the
extreme indisposition of his wife’s mother. He dreaded, in fact, to go
to a dinner alone; he was always afraid of being taken ill between the
soup and the fish; he suffered from an unutterable shyness; he was
intolerably afraid of “making an ass of himself.” He felt safe,
however, as long as Pauline had her eyes on him. But the Phyllis
Trevors’ dinners were much more like what he called “a rag.” If he
felt an uncontrollable impulse to do something absurd—to balance,
for instance, a full glass on the top of his head or to flip drops of wine
at his neighbour’s bare shoulders—nobody would be seriously
perturbed. It was not necessary to do either of these things, but you
might if you wanted to; and all the Phyllis Trevors’ women could be
trusted either to put up the conversation for you, or—which was quite
as good—to flirt prodigiously with their neighbours on the other side.
The turning-point of his deliberations, which lasted exactly three-
quarters of an hour, the actual impulse which sent him out of the
room to the telephone in the hall, came from the remembrance that
Pauline had made him promise not to be an irrational idiot.
He had promised to go out to some dinners, and it was only
dinners of the Phyllis Trevors’ sort that he could bring himself to face.
So that, having telephoned his acceptance to Mrs. Trevor, who
called him the Great Chief Long-in-the-fork, and wanted to know why
his voice sounded like an undertaker’s mute, a comparative
tranquillity reigned in Dudley Leicester’s soul. This tranquillity was
only ended when at the dinner-table he had at his side red-lipped,
deep-voiced, black-haired, large, warm, scented, and utterly
uncontrollable Etta Stackpole. She had three dark red roses in her
hair.

ETTA STACKPOLE—now Lady Hudson—had been Dudley

Leicester’s first and very ardent passion. She was very much his
age, and, commencing in a boy-and-girl affair, the engagement had
lasted many years. She was the only daughter of the Stackpoles of
Cove Place, and she had all the wilfulness of an only daughter, and
all the desperate acquisitiveness of the Elizabethan freebooters from
whom she was descended. Robert Grimshaw said once that her life
was a series of cutting-out expeditions; her maids used to declare
that they certainly could not trust their young men in the hall if Miss
Etta was likely to come down the stairs. It was perhaps her utter
disrespect for the dictates of class that made Dudley Leicester finally
and quite suddenly break off from her.
It was not exactly the case that he had caught her flirting with a
boot-black. The man was the son of the farrier at Cove, and he had
the merit of riding uncommonly straight to hounds. Dudley Leicester
—one of those men who are essentially monogamous—had suffered
unheard-of agonies at hunt balls, in grand stands; he had known the
landscape near the Park to look like hell; he had supported
somehow innumerable Greshams, Hewards, Traceys, Stackpole
cousins, and Boveys. But the name of Bugle stuck in his gorge.
“Bugle: Farrier,” was printed in tarnished gold capitals over the
signboard of the vet’s front-door! It had made him have a little sick
feeling that he had never had before. And that same afternoon Etta’s
maid Agnes had come to him, her cheeks distorted with pitiful rage,
to ask him for mercy’s sake to marry Miss Etta soon, or she herself
would never get married. She said that her young man—her third
young man that it had happened to—had got ideas above his place
because of the way Miss Etta spoke to him whilst he waited at table.
So that it wasn’t even only the farrier; it was the third footman too.
His name was Moddle....
 That very afternoon—it had been six years before—Dudley
Leicester had announced his departure. He had, indeed, announced
it to the maid Agnes first of all. It broke out of him, such a hot rage
overcoming him that he, too, very tall and quivering, forgot the limits
of class.
“I’m sorry for you, Agnes,” he had blurted out; “I’m sorry for
myself; but I shall never marry Miss Stackpole.” The girl had taken
her apron down from her eyes to jump for joy.
And very gradually—the process had taken years—hot rage had
given way to slow dislike, and that to sullen indifference. He sat at
her side at the dinner-table, and she talked to him—about concerts!
She had a deep, a moving, a tragic voice, and when she talked to
her neighbour it was with so much abandonment always that she
appeared to be about to lay her head upon his black shoulder and to
rest her white breasts upon the tablecloth. She perfumed herself
always with a peculiar, musky scent that her father, years ago, had
discovered in Java.
“Bodya,” she would say, “has the tone of heaven itself; it’s better
than being at the best after-theatre supper in the world with the best
man in the world. But he uses his bow like a cobbler stitching. If I
shut my eyes La Jeuiva makes me use all the handkerchiefs I can
get hold of. Real tears! ... But to look at, she’s like a bad kodak—
over-exposed and under-developed. She shouldn’t be so décolletée,
and she ought to sing in a wood at night. We’ve had her do it down
at Well-lands....
“But,” she added, “I dare say you never go to concerts now.”
“I haven’t been to one since the ones I went to with you,” Dudley
said grimly.
“Ah!” she said. “Don’t you remember our last? It was a Monday
Pop. We were passing through town, all the lot of us, from the East
Kent to Melton. What a lot of frost there was that year! Don’t you
remember? It was so hard on the Monday that we didn’t go down to
the Shires, but stayed up instead. And there was the quartette with
Joachim and Strauss and Ries and Piatti! I wonder what they
played? I’ve got the programme still. Those quaint old green
programmes! I’ll look it up and let you know. But oh, it’s all gone!
They’re all dead; there are no Pops now and St. James’s Hall.... And
yet it only seems yesterday.... Don’t you remember how dear old
Piatti’s head looked exactly like the top of his ’cello in shape?”

Dudley Leicester, gazing rigidly at the tablecloth, was at that

moment wondering how Etta Hudson got on with her footman. For as
a matter of fact, Dudley Leicester’s thoughts, if they were few and if
they rose very slowly in his rather vacant mind, were yet almost
invariably of a singular justnesss. He had broken off the habit of Etta
Stackpole, who, like many troublesome but delightful things, had
become a habit to be broken off. And Dudley Leicester had, as it
were, chopped her off in the very middle because of a train of
thought. She could carry on with the Traceys, the Greshams, the
Stackpole cousins and the rest. If it pained him he could yet just bear
it, for he imagined that he would be able to defend his hearth against
them. But when it had come to Bugle, the farrier’s son, and to
Moddle, the third footman, it had suddenly come into his head that
you couldn’t keep these creatures off your hearth. He knew it had
been as impossible as it would be sickening....
So whilst Etta Stackpole talked he had been wondering, not only
how Lady Hudson got on with her footman, but how Sir William liked
it. Sir William Hudson was the Managing Director of the Great
Southern Railway Company. As far as Dudley Leicester knew, he
passed his time in travelling from one end of the world to the other,
whilst Etta carried on her cutting-out expeditions from a very snug
harbour in Curzon Street, or from the very noble property known as
Well-lands in Surrey. But, indeed, although the Leicesters and the
Hudsons lived in the same street, their points of contact were almost
non-existent, and since their rupture Dudley Leicester and Etta
Stackpole had never met. His mother, indeed, who had managed his
estate a little too economically till her death three years ago, had let
Hangham, the Leicesters’ place, which was just next door to Cove
Park, and Etta, perhaps because she thought it was full time, or
perhaps because she had stipulated for some agreeable
arrangement with Sir William, had almost immediately “made a
match” with the director of railways. And although it would be hard to
say what was Dudley Leicester’s “line,” we may put it down in his
own words that railway directors were not in it. But vaguely and
without much interest, at odd moments Dudley Leicester had
gathered—it is impossible to know how one does gather these
things, or perhaps Robert Grimshaw had really formulated the idea
for his simple brain—that the Hudsons were one of several predatory
and semi-detached couples. They didn’t interfere apparently with
each other. They hit where they liked, like what used to be called
“chain shot,” dangerous missiles consisting of two cannon-balls
chained one to the other and whirling through Society. Robert
Grimshaw had certainly gained this impression from his two friends,
the Senhora de Bogota and Madame de Mauvesine, the wives of
two of the diplomatic body in London, two ladies who, though they
were upon the most intimate of terms with Etta Hudson, were yet in a
perpetual state of shocked and admiring envy. It was as if,
witnessing Etta’s freedom, these ladies of Latin origin and
comparatively circumscribed liberties, rubbed their eyes and
imagined that they had been allowed to witness scenes from a
fairyland—from a veritable Island of the Blessed. They couldn’t
imagine how it was possible to be married and yet to be so
absolutely free. They couldn’t, indeed, imagine how it was possible
to be so absolutely free in any state, whether married, single, or any
of the intermediary stages. And, indeed, Senhora de Bogota, at that
moment opposite them at the table, was leaning across the little
blonde man who was always known as Mr. “Phyllis” Trevor, for much
the same reason that Dudley Leicester came afterwards to be known
as Mr. “Pauline” Leicester—Senhora de Bogota was leaning, a
splendid mass of dark and opulent flesh, across her diminutive
neighbour’s form to whisper with a strong Brazilian accent to
Madame de Mauvesine:
“Regardez donc cette Etta! Ces Anglaises, a-t-on jamais vu rien
de pareilles!”
And Madame de Mauvesine, blonde with coppery hair and a
peaked, almost eel-like face, raised her eyes to heaven, or rather to
the ceiling that was painted to resemble a limpid blue sky filled with
chains of roses and gambolling cherubs.

VI

ETTA STACKPOLE raised herself in the hansom that carried them

home from the Esmeralda. She lifted her white hand above the roof,
and the horse, checked suddenly, came to a vacillating halt at the
kerb. They were midway in the curve of Regent Street, and it was
about half-past twelve of a fine night.
“We’re getting home much too fast,” she said to the wordless
Dudley Leicester. “There’s such oceans to remember yet.”
It was as if, years before, he had been married to a masterful
woman. He could no more control her to-day than he could then. He
saw her bend forward, lithe, large and warm, push open the apron of
the cab, and the next moment she was on the pavement. He thought
so slowly that he had no time to think anything at all before he found
himself, too, on the kerbstone, reaching up coins to the shadowy and
thankful driver.
“I say, you know,” he said, “if anybody saw us ...”
She hooked herself on to his arm.
“I don’t believe,” she said, “that I did shriek on the switchback at
Earl’s Court. It’s seventeen years ago now, and I was only fourteen
at the time. But I’ve always said I never shrieked in my life.” She
moved herself half round him, so that she seemed about to envelop
him in her black dress and hood, in order to gaze into his face. Her
features appeared long, white, and seductive: her voice was very
deep and full of chords.
“Whatever you can say against me ...” she began and paused.
Regent Street was very much as empty or as full as it always is
at that hour, the tall lamps sparkling, the hoofs of very few horses
sounding in cadence to innumerable whispers in polyglot tongues.
 “You don’t know who will see us,” Dudley repeated. He was
conscious that, as they passed, groups and individuals swung round
to gaze upon them.
“Whatever you may say against me,” her deep voice came, “you
can’t say I’ve ever been untruthful, and I’ve always said I never
shrieked in my life.”
“You did then,” Dudley Leicester asseverated. “And we were
alone in the car; it was not anyone else.”
They were at the top of Vigo Street, and suddenly she swung
him round.
“Oh, if you’re afraid to be seen,” she said, “let’s go down the
back streets. They’re as empty as sin, and as black. As to my
shrieking, you can’t prove it. But I can prove that you called me a
penguin in your last nice letter to me.”
In the black and tortuous streets, in the chilly and silent night,
her warmth as she clung to him seemed to envelop him, and her
subtle and comfortable Eastern perfume was round them, as it were
an invisible cloud. He appeared to hang back a little, and she,
leaning her body forward, her face back to him, to draw him along,
as in a picture a nymph might lead away a stripling into scented
obscurities into leafy woods.
“I might say,” Dudley Leicester was urged to a sudden lucidity,
“that I couldn’t have called you a penguin because I never rightly
knew what a penguin was.”
“Oh, but you did once,” she said. “It is one of the things you
have forgotten.” She laughed. “So many things you had forgotten,
but you are remembering them now.”
She laughed again.
“Now you’ll remember how you came to know what a penguin
was. On that day—the day of the evening we went to the Monday
Pop—we went to the Zoo. It was you who wanted to go there to be
alone with me; you considered that the Zoo in that weather would be
the most solitary place in London—the hard frost that it was. Colder
than this, colder than you are now. You’re thawing a little, you stiff
creature....”
She shivered under her cloak.
“We stopped most of the time with the monkeys, but we saw the
penguins, too. Don’t you remember?”
“I don’t,” he answered. “I don’t want to. It would not have been
like me to call you a penguin. You’re not like one.”
“Ah,” she said, “when you’re in love you don’t bother about
likenesses. I’ll bet you called your wife a penguin before you married
her, or a tooth-brush, or a puff-ball. I’ve heard that men always
transfer their pet names from woman to woman.”
He attempted to blurt out that she was to leave Pauline out of it,
but she cried:
“Oh, you traitor! You have called her one of these names.
Couldn’t you have kept them sacred? Isn’t anything sacred to a
man? I loved you so, and you loved me. And then...”
The memory of their past lives came suddenly over him.
“Go away,” she said—“go away.”
“I must see you to your door,” he muttered, with a sense of guilt,
and stood irresolutely, for she had torn her arm from his.
“I don’t want you,” she called out. “Can’t I walk twenty steps
without you?” And she began to glide swiftly away, with him
doggedly on the very edge of the pavement beside her.
Suddenly she slackened her steps.
“What did you give me up for, Dudley Leicester?” she said.
“What did you do it for? I cared more for your little finger than for all
the heads of all the other men. You knew it well enough. You know it
now. You feel like a coward. Don’t tell me you feared for the sanctity
of your hearth. You knew me well enough. What I was then I am
now.”
She paused, and then she brought out: