Osprey had few visitors. Perhaps twice a year a gathering of extraordinary individuals with whom he had consorted at various periods and in many parts of the world crowded into the house, took possession of it, kept up a racket until morning and departed, leaving him with a few more intimate cronies, some to recover from the effects and others simply to prolong the reunion. These entertainments occurred usually in the early spring or fall, the seasons of change when people come together most spontaneously. And they were spontaneous. He had no use for set affairs. On rare occasions women drove out to see him, for luncheon or tea; and he himself went to town about once a month, seldom remaining longer than over night. He seemed to have cultivated not only the love of solitude, but the power to enjoy it for long periods. There was one visitor, however, who arrived often. Moira saw his heavy blue roadster drawn up beside the lawn three times during the first month of her stay, and she wondered who the impressive man was, with short grey curly hair, and the easy bearing of accomplishment. She was not surprised to learn later that he was somebody--no less a person, in fact, than Emmet Roget, the producer, a man who was both a power in the business phase of the theatre and an artistic radical in his own right. The friendship between these two men appeared to be less extraordinary now than it had been in past years, but it was still a friendship in which a certain inequality was apparent. The rôle of Roget toward Osprey, during three-fourths of their adult lives, had been that of a detached but watchful guardian. A dozen years ago Osprey had been something of a riderless horse, a centre of explosions, the victim of unexpected mishaps and misunderstandings, constantly involved with a woman, and taking his affairs with desperate seriousness, careless of his talent and his time. Much of this relationship he skilfully suggested to her himself, in his humorously philosophic moments. As he put it, he was born somewhere between his thirty-eighth and his fortieth year, and began to live his life in a sense backward; for though he went on having experiences it was always something in his life before his thirty-eighth year that he seemed to be living over in these experiences, and relishing where he previously had suffered. The actual occasion of the change had been a painful separation from the last of his devastating loves, and more or less complete celibacy since. The result was a fresh joy in work, a really enormous volume of production ... peace and contentment and plenty.