They halted in the middle of the studio. It was not a very large room and there were too many things in it. The easel stood near the centre of the studio; round it Lypiatt kept a space permanently cleared. There was a broad fairway leading to the door, and another, narrower and tortuously winding between boxes and piled-up furniture and tumbled books, gave access to his bed. There was a piano and a table permanently set with dirty plates and strewed with the relics of two or three meals. Bookshelves stood on either side of the fireplace and lying on the floor were still more books, piles on dusty piles. Mrs. Viveash stood looking at the picture on the easel (abstract again—she didn’t like it), and Lypiatt, who had dropped his hand from her shoulder, had stepped back the better to see her, stood earnestly looking at Mrs. Viveash. “May I kiss you?” he asked after a silence. Mrs. Viveash turned towards him, smiling agonizingly, her eyebrows ironically lifted, her eyes steady and calm and palely, brightly inexpressive. “If it really gives you any pleasure,” she said. “It won’t, I may say, to me.” “You make me suffer a great deal,” said Lypiatt, and said it so quietly and unaffectedly, that Myra was almost startled; she was accustomed, with Casimir, to noisier and more magniloquent protestations. “I’m very sorry,” she said; and, really, she felt sorry. “But I can’t help it, can I?” “I suppose you can’t,” he said. “You can’t,” he repeated and his voice had now become the voice of Prometheus in his bitterness. “Nor can tigresses.” He had begun to pace up and down the unobstructed fairway between his easel and the door; Lypiatt liked pacing while he talked. “You like playing with the victim,” he went on; “he must die slowly.” Reassured, Mrs. Viveash faintly smiled. This was the familiar Casimir. So long as he could talk like this, could talk like an old-fashioned French novel, it was all right; he couldn’t really be so very unhappy. She sat down on the nearest unencumbered chair. Lypiatt continued to walk back and forth, waving his arms as he walked. “But perhaps it’s good for one to suffer,” he went on, “perhaps it’s unavoidable and necessary. Perhaps I ought to thank you. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?” He halted in front of her, with arms extended in a questioning gesture. Mrs. Viveash slightly shrugged her shoulders. She really didn’t know; she couldn’t answer. “Ah, but that’s all nonsense,” he burst out again, “all rot. I want to be happy and contented and successful; and of course I should work better if I were. And I want, oh, above everything, everything, I want you: to possess you completely and exclusively and jealously and for ever. And the desire is like rust corroding my heart, it’s like moth eating holes in the fabric of my mind. And you merely laugh.” He threw up his hands and let them limply fall again.