And the discreet Saunders, coming up the servants’ steps to answer the bell, saw his master’s friend strike himself suddenly on the high white forehead a hard blow with his still gloved hand. “Ah! I thought it would come to that,” he said to himself. V “WELL, you aren’t looking very chirpy,” Etta Stackpole said. “I’m not feeling it,” Robert Grimshaw answered. He was leaning over the rails in the Row, and Etta Stackpole sat on a huge chestnut that, its body motionless as a statue, its legs planted wide apart, threw its arched neck from time to time into the air, and dispersed great white flakes of foam. “Time goes on, too,” he continued. “It goes on, and it’s only you that it passes by.” “Thanks,” she said, and she touched her hat with her crop. With the clitter of stirrups and the creak of leather and the indistinguishable thud of hoofs, the riders went by behind her in twos and threes. Behind his back was the perpetual crushing of feet and whisper of innumerable conversations, conducted in discreet undertones. It was a place of a myriad rustlings and small, pleasant sounds; and along the great length of the Row, vanishing into the distance, the young green of the leaves swayed in the April breezes. A huge cloud toppled motionless above the barracks, pink against the blue sky and dull in its softened shadows. Robert Grimshaw had walked along nearer the rails than was his habit until he came to where Etta Stackpole--it was just as much her habit, so that he had known where to find her--was talking to three men in her brilliant way. And raising his head, Robert Grimshaw had inserted himself between Hugo van Voss, a Dutch Jew beginning to show adiposity, and Charles McDiarmid, who, with his grey peaked beard and slight lisp, was asking why she hadn’t come to the Caledonian Market last Tuesday to look for bargains in the bric-à-brac that is displayed there upon the broad flagstones. “Oh, I’m not a bit gone on bric-à-brac really,” she said, “and it’s the most tiring thing in the world.” “Well, Hugo there,” McDiarmid lisped slightly, in his gentle and sibilant tones, “got a Chinese tapestry in scarlet silk as big as the side of the Ritz, with realistic dragons and mandolines embroidered on it in sky-blue and purple. He got it for thirteen and sixpence, and he’s going to make dressing-gowns out of it.” Van Voss protested inaudibly. “Oh, you are, you know you are,” McDiarmid asserted gaily, “and we’re going to carry you in triumph down the Mall. Get Van Voss to give you one, Lady Hudson, and get Grimshaw here to drive you down to Bushey on a coach labelled ‘Queen of Sheba.’” “He doesn’t take me anywhere any more,” Etta Hudson said. And Grimshaw answered desultorily: “Only give me a chance.” Etta Hudson sustained, with a brilliant indifference, the glances from the half-closed eyes of McDiarmid and those of the dark, large, rather insolent and inscrutable orbs of the stockbroker.