Poor Aunt Aggie! Oh, poor Aunt Aggie, indeed! In the light of Mr. Mercaptan’s boudoir her hammered copper and her leadless glaze certainly did look a bit comical. After tea Mr. Mercaptan played cicerone in a tour of inspection round the room. They visited the papier mâché writing-desk, the Condor fans, the Marie Laurencin, the 1914 edition of _Du Côté de chez Swann_, the Madonna that probably was a fake, the nigger mask, the Chelsea figures, the Chinese object of art in sculptured crystal, the scale model of Queen Victoria in wax under a glass bell. Toto, it became clear, had been no more than a forerunner; the definitive revelation was Mr. Mercaptan’s. Yes, poor Aunt Aggie! And indeed, when Mr. Mercaptan began to read her his little middle on the “Droit du Seigneur,” it was poor everybody. Poor mother, with her absurd, old-fashioned, prudish views; poor, earnest father, with his Unitarianism, his _Hibbert Journal_, his letters to the papers about the necessity for a spiritual regeneration. “Bravo!” she cried from the depths of Crébillon. She was leaning back in one corner, languid, serpentine, and at ease, her feet in their mottled snake’s leather tucked up under her. “Bravo!” she cried as Mr. Mercaptan finished his reading and looked up for his applause. Mr. Mercaptan bowed. “You express so exquisitely what we——” and waving her hand in a comprehensive gesture, she pictured to herself all the other fastidious ladies, all the marchionesses of fable, reclining, as she herself at this moment reclined, on upholstery of white satin, “what we all only feel and aren’t clever enough to say.” Mr. Mercaptan was charmed. He got up from before his writing-desk, crossed the room and sat down beside her on Crébillon. “Feeling,” he said, “is the im_port_ant thing.” Rosie remembered that her father had once remarked, in blank verse: ‘The things that matter happen in the heart.’ “I quite agree,” she said. Like movable raisins in the suet of his snouty face, Mr. Mercaptan’s brown little eyes rolled amorous avowals. He took Rosie’s hand and kissed it. Crébillon creaked discreetly as he moved a little nearer. It was only the evening of the same day. Rosie lay on her sofa—a poor, hire-purchase thing indeed, compared with Mr. Mercaptan’s grand affair in white satin and carved and gilded wood, but still a sofa—lay with her feet on the arm of it and her long suave legs exposed, by the slipping of the kimono, to the top of her stretched stockings. She was reading the little vellum-jacketed volume of Crébillon, which Mr. Mercaptan had given her when he said ‘good-bye’ (or rather, ‘_À bientôt, mon amie_’); given, not lent, as he had less generously offered at the beginning of their afternoon; given with the most graceful of allusive dedications inscribed on the fly-leaf: To BY-NO-OTHER-NAME-AS-SWEET, WITH GRATITUDE, FROM