It suddenly occurred to Gumbril that this was Rosie’s husband: he had not thought of that before. Could it be in the marital capacity that he presented himself so unexpectedly now? After this afternoon.... He had come home; Rosie had confessed all.... Ah! but then she didn’t know who he was. He smiled to himself at the thought. What a joke! Perhaps Shearwater had come to complain to him of the unknown Complete Man—to him! It was delightful. Anon—the author of all those ballads in the _Oxford Book of English Verse_: the famous Italian painter—Ignoto. Gumbril was quite disappointed when his visitor began to talk of other themes than Rosie. Sunk in the quagmire of his own comfortable guts, he felt good-humouredly obscene. The dramatic scabrousness of the situation would have charmed him in his present mood. Good old Shearwater—but what an ox of a man! If he, Gumbril, took the trouble to marry a wife, he would at least take some interest in her. Shearwater had begun to talk in general terms about life. What could he be getting at, Gumbril wondered? What particulars were ambushed behind these generalizations? There were silences. Shearwater looked, he thought, very gloomy. Under his thick moustache the small, pouting, babyish mouth did not smile. The candid eyes had a puzzled, tired expression in them. “People are queer,” he said after one of his silences. “Very queer. One has no idea how queer they are.” Gumbril laughed. “But I have a very clear idea of their queerness,” he said. “Every one’s queer, and the ordinary, respectable, bourgeois people are the queerest of the lot. How do they manage to live like that? It’s astonishing. When I think of all my aunts and uncles....” He shook his head. “Perhaps it’s because I’m rather incurious,” said Shearwater. “One ought to be curious, I think. I’ve come to feel lately that I’ve not been curious enough about people.” The particulars began to peep, alive and individual, out of the vagueness, like rabbits; Gumbril saw them in his fancy, at the fringe of a wood. “Quite,” he said encouragingly. “Quite.” “I think too much of my work,” Shearwater went on, frowning. “Too much physiology. There’s also psychology. People’s minds as well as their bodies.... One shouldn’t be limited. Not too much, at any rate. People’s minds....” He was silent for a moment. “I can imagine,” he went on at last, as in the tone of one who puts a very hypothetical case, “I can imagine one’s getting so much absorbed in somebody else’s psychology that one could really think of nothing else.” The rabbits seemed ready to come out into the open. “That’s a process,” said Gumbril, with middle-aged jocularity, speaking out of his private warm morass, “that’s commonly called falling in love.” There was another silence. Shearwater broke it to begin talking about Mrs. Viveash. He had lunched with her three or four days running. He wanted Gumbril to tell him what she was really like. “She seems to me a very extraordinary woman,” he said.