Mrs Scattergood was said to have once been a very beautiful woman; and I can well believe it was even so. She was the daughter of a baronet, and had been brought up to think that the mission of women in this world is to have a good time. But her husband had thwarted this mission; at all events, he had not provided its fulfilment. And the lady made it a point of daily practice to remind him of the failure, driving the reminder home with the help of expletives learnt in her father's stables long ago. John Scattergood would retire from these interviews talking to himself. "If I could keep her from the morphia," he would say, "I think I could bear the rest." He would then shut himself up in his study, would take out the miniature of Ethelberta from his secret drawer--a foolish thing to do, but a thing which somehow he couldn't help; would shake his head and say for the thousandth time, "Wie brennt mein alte Wunde!" After which, having brushed aside a tear, he would take up his pen and continue his proof of the Friendliness of the Universe according to the Inflexible Method. If Scattergood could have seen himself, as I see him in memory, seated in his quiet study, with the household skeleton, the philosophical thesis, and the gold-rimmed miniature of Ethelberta, in their respective positions, forming as it were the three points of a mystic triangle, I think he might have discerned in the Universe something of deeper import than ever appeared within the four corners of his philosophy. But alas! All Q.E.D.'s are fatal to emotion, and it was Q.E.D. that Scattergood had placed at the end of his great thesis. In some respects he resembled that other great philosopher who became so absorbed in his proof of the existence of God that he forgot to say his prayers. The fact of the matter is, that after proving the ultimate nature of the Universe to be friendly his heart was no warmer than before. Indeed, his interest in that august Object had stiffened into the chill rigidity of a professional pose. His thesis, by becoming demonstrably true, had ceased to be morally exciting. He actually looked forward to his afternoon ride as a means of getting the taste of the Universe out of his mouth. By long and devious ways, John Scattergood had thus arrived at the point from which he had set out; he had arrived, I mean, at that extremely common state of mind when one actual smile seen on the face of the world, or a moment of contact with any one of the innumerable friendly presences which the world harbours, was worth more to him, both as philosopher and man, than were all the achievements of the Inflexible Method, past, present, and to come. And I have now to record that such a smile was vouchsafed to him, and such a living contact provided, by the mediation of a four-footed beast.