That foreign and irritating substance was himself.

But he had forgotten in his vanity that which in his rawer shrewdness he should have remembered.

Eternal vigilance was the price; not the cancelled vouchers of the servitude of dead years and the half-servile challenge of the strange new days when his vanity had dared him to live.
* * * * * Rosamund, smoothly groomed, golden-headed, and smiling, rose as Neergard moved slowly forward to take his leave.
"So stupid of them to have overlooked you," she said; "and I should have thought Gladys would have remembered--unless--" His close-set eyes focussed so near her own that she stopped, involuntarily occupied with the unusual phenomenon.
"Unless what ?" he asked.
She was all laughing polished surface again.

"Unless Gladys's intellect, which has only room for one idea at a time, is already fully occupied." "With what ?" he demanded.
"Oh, with that Gerald boy "-- she shrugged indulgently--"perhaps with her pretty American Grace and the outlook for the Insular invasion." Neergard's apple face was dull and mottled, and on the thin bridge of his nose the sweat glistened.

He did not know what she meant; and she knew he did not.
As he turned to go she paced him a step or two across the rose-and-gold reception-room, hands linked behind her back, bending forward slightly as she moved beside him.
"Gerald, poor lad, is to be disciplined," she observed.