pompous battle scene with its solemn courtly warriors bestriding 
their heavily prancing steeds, grey or skewbald or dun, all gravely 
in earnest, and yet somehow conveying the impression that their 
campaigns were but vast serious picnics arranged in the grand 
manner.  Francesca could not imagine the drawing-room without the 
crowning complement of the stately well-hung picture, just as she 
could not imagine herself in any other setting than this house in 
Blue Street with its crowded Pantheon of cherished household gods.

And herein sprouted one of the thorns that obtruded through the 
rose-leaf damask of what might otherwise have been Francesca's 
peace of mind.  One's happiness always lies in the future rather 
than in the past.  With due deference to an esteemed lyrical 
authority one may safely say that a sorrow's crown of sorrow is 
anticipating unhappier things.  The house in Blue Street had been 
left to her by her old friend Sophie Chetrof, but only until such 
time as her niece Emmeline Chetrof should marry, when it was to 
pass to her as a wedding present.  Emmeline was now seventeen and 
passably good-looking, and four or five years were all that could 
be safely allotted to the span of her continued spinsterhood.  
Beyond that period lay chaos, the wrenching asunder of Francesca 
from the sheltering habitation that had grown to be her soul.  It 
is true that in imagination she had built herself a bridge across 
the chasm, a bridge of a single span.  The bridge in question was 
her schoolboy son Comus, now being educated somewhere in the 
southern counties, or rather one should say the bridge consisted of 
the possibility of his eventual marriage with Emmeline, in which 
case Francesca saw herself still reigning, a trifle squeezed and 
incommoded perhaps, but still reigning in the house in Blue Street.  
The Van der Meulen would still catch its requisite afternoon light 
in its place of honour, the Fremiet and the Dresden and Old 
Worcester would continue undisturbed in their accustomed niches.  
Emmeline could have the Japanese snuggery, where Francesca 
sometimes drank her after-dinner coffee, as a separate drawing-
room, where she could put her own things.  The details of the 
bridge structure had all been carefully thought out.  Only - it was 
an unfortunate circumstance that Comus should have been the span on 
which everything balanced.

Francesca's husband had insisted on giving the boy that strange 
Pagan name, and had not lived long enough to judge as to the 
appropriateness, or otherwise, of its significance.  In seventeen 
years and some odd months Francesca had had ample opportunity for 
forming an opinion concerning her son's characteristics.  The 
spirit of mirthfulness which one associates with the name certainly 
ran riot in the boy, but it was a twisted wayward sort of mirth of 
which Francesca herself could seldom see the humorous side.  In her 
brother Henry, who sat eating small cress sandwiches as solemnly as 
though they had been ordained in some immemorial Book of 
Observances, fate had been undisguisedly kind to her.  He might so 
easily have married some pretty helpless little woman, and lived at 
Notting Hill Gate, and been the father of a long string of pale, 
clever useless children, who would have had birthdays and the sort 
of illnesses that one is expected to send grapes to, and who would 
have painted fatuous objects in a South Kensington manner as 
Christmas offerings to an aunt whose cubic space for lumber was 
limited.  Instead of committing these unbrotherly actions, which 
are so frequent in family life that they might almost be called 
brotherly, Henry had married a woman who had both money and a sense 
of repose, and their one child had the brilliant virtue of never 
saying anything which even its parents could consider worth 
repeating.  Then he had gone into Parliament, possibly with the 
idea of making his home life seem less dull; at any rate it 
redeemed his career from insignificance, for no man whose death can 
produce the item "another by-election" on the news posters can be 
wholly a nonentity.  Henry, in short, who might have been an 
embarrassment and a handicap, had chosen rather to be a friend and 
counsellor, at times even an emergency bank balance; Francesca on 
her part, with the partiality which a clever and lazily-inclined 
woman often feels for a reliable fool, not only sought his counsel 
but frequently followed it.  When convenient, moreover, she repaid 
his loans.

Against this good service on the part of Fate in providing her with 
Henry for a brother, Francesca could well set the plaguy malice of 
the destiny that had given her Comus for a son.  The boy was one of 
those untameable young lords of misrule that frolic and chafe 
themselves through nursery and preparatory and public-school days 
with the utmost allowance of storm and dust and dislocation and the 
least possible amount of collar-work, and come somehow with a laugh 
through a series of catastrophes that has reduced everyone else 
concerned to tears or Cassandra-like forebodings.  Sometimes they 
sober down in after-life and become uninteresting, forgetting that 
they were ever lords of anything; sometimes Fate plays royally into 
their hands, and they do great things in a spacious manner, and are 
thanked by Parliaments and the Press and acclaimed by gala-day 
crowds.  But in most cases their tragedy begins when they leave 
school and turn themselves loose in a world that has grown too 
civilised and too crowded and too empty to have any place for them.  
And they are very many.

Henry Greech had made an end of biting small sandwiches, and 
settled down like a dust-storm refreshed, to discuss one of the 
fashionably prevalent topics of the moment, the prevention of 
destitution.

"It is a question that is only being nibbled at, smelt at, one 
might say, at the present moment," he observed, "but it is one that 
will have to engage our serious attention and consideration before 
long.  The first thing that we shall have to do is to get out of