He spent some time trying to climb the garden wall because the door did not seem to be in the usual place. (Have to enquire about that in the morning. Difficult to see everything is all right when one is so bereaved). But finally he came on the door round a corner. He told his wife merely that he intended to have a peaceful night, and took off his boots in a defiant and intermittent manner. The morning would be soon enough. She looked at him pretty hard, and he looked at her ever and again, but she never made a guess at it. Bed. § 3 So soon as the week-enders had dispersed and Sir Peter had gone off to London to attend to various matters affecting the peptonizing of milk and the distribution of baby soothers about the habitable globe, Lady Laxton went back to bed and remained in bed until midday on Tuesday. Nothing short of complete rest and the utmost kindness from her maid would, she felt, save her from a nervous breakdown of the most serious description. The festival had been stormy to the end. Sir Peter’s ill-advised attempts to deprive Lord Moggeridge of alcohol had led to a painful struggle at lunch, and this had been followed by a still more unpleasant scene between host and guest in the afternoon. “This is an occasion for tact,” Sir Peter had said and had gone off to tackle the Lord Chancellor, leaving his wife to the direst, best founded apprehensions. For Sir Peter’s tact was a thing by itself, a mixture of misconception, recrimination and familiarity that was rarely well received.... She had had to explain to the Sunday dinner party that his lordship had been called away suddenly. “Something connected with the Great Seal,” Lady Laxton had whispered in a discreet mysterious whisper. One or two simple hearers were left with the persuasion that the Great Seal had been taken suddenly unwell—and probably in a slightly indelicate manner. Thomas had to paint Mergleson’s eye with grease-paint left over from some private theatricals. It had been a patched-up affair altogether, and before she retired to bed that night Lady Laxton had given way to her accumulated tensions and wept. There was no reason whatever why to wind up the day Sir Peter should have stayed in her room for an hour saying what he thought of Lord Moggeridge. She felt she knew quite well enough what he thought of Lord Moggeridge, and on these occasions he always used a number of words that she did her best to believe, as a delicately brought up woman, were unfamiliar to her ears....