In the warm yellow light of the coffee-stall at Hyde Park Corner loitered a little group of people. Among the peaked caps and the chauffeurs’ dust-coats, among the weather-stained workmen’s jackets and the knotted handkerchiefs, there emerged an alien elegance. A tall tubed hat and a silk-faced overcoat, a cloak of flame-coloured satin, and in bright, coppery hair a great Spanish comb of carved tortoiseshell. “Well, I’m damned,” said Gumbril as they approached. “I believe it’s Myra Viveash.” “So it is,” said Lypiatt, peering in his turn. He began suddenly to walk with an affected swagger, kicking his heels at every step. Looking at himself from outside, his divining eyes pierced through the veil of cynical _je-m’en-fichisme_ to the bruised heart beneath. Besides, he didn’t want any one to guess. “The Viveash is it?” Coleman quickened his rapping along the pavement. “And who is the present incumbent?” He pointed at the top hat. “Can it be Bruin Opps?” said Gumbril dubiously. “Opps!” Coleman yelled out the name. “Opps!” The top hat turned, revealing a shirt front, a long grey face, a glitter of circular glass over the left eye. “Who the devil are you?” The voice was harsh and arrogantly offensive. “I am that I am,” said Coleman. “But I have with me”—he pointed to Shearwater, to Gumbril, to Zoe—“a physiologue, a pedagogue and a priapagogue; for I leave out of account mere artists and journalists whose titles do not end with the magic syllable. And finally,” indicating himself, “plain Dog, which being interpreted kabbalistically backwards, signifies God. All at your service.” He took off his hat and bowed. The top hat turned back towards the Spanish comb. “Who is this horrible drunk?” it inquired. Mrs. Viveash did not answer him, but stepped forward to meet the newcomers. In one hand she held a peeled, hard-boiled egg and a thick slice of bread and butter in the other, and between her sentences she bit at them alternately. “Coleman!” she exclaimed, and her voice, as she spoke, seemed always on the point of expiring, as though each word were the last, utterly faintly and breakingly from a death-bed—the last, with all the profound and nameless significance of the ultimate word. “It’s a very long time since I heard you raving last. And you, Theodore darling, why do I never see you now?” Gumbril shrugged his shoulders. “Because you don’t want to, I suppose,” he said. Myra laughed and took another bite at her bread and butter.... She laid the back of her hand—for she was still holding the butt end of her hard-boiled egg—on Lypiatt’s arm. The Titan, who had been looking at the sky, seemed to be surprised to find her standing there. “You?” he said, smiling and wrinkling up his forehead interrogatively. “It’s to-morrow I’m sitting for you, Casimir, isn’t it?” “Ah, you remembered.” The veil parted for a moment. Poor Lypiatt! “And happy Mercaptan? Always happy?”