II
THE winter passed pleasantly enough for her. Plenty of people came to the house, and there were many of the little dinners she enjoyed, when two, three, or more men came in informally and talked of their own affairs, or those of the nation, with varying degrees of effectiveness.
Nearly all these men were of the sort that, as she said, "lived by their wits." They were civilised, sophisticated, a little hard, living the rapid life of the city; and few of them had reached the age of forty, at which the pace would begin to tell against them. She liked their free speech, and the reflection of their intense and interested lives. Erhart came often, and rather bored her by his large and massive egotism; he did not fit in well with the others. He was, Basil said, too purely the artist type. Gerald Dallas came back, looking much older, quieter than ever, with more than his old devotion. Teresa was for him, she felt, not merely an attractive woman engaged in the laudable, but disabling work of child-bearing; she was an individuality which, once for all, had taken its place among the great facts of his life. His feeling for her was above any accident of her
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