"Well," she said, "you wouldn't catch me having a telephone in my bedroom. I should never sleep if I knew there was a telephone in the room! Fancy being forced to telephone every time you want--well! I And how is one to know who there is at the other end of the telephone? No, I don't like that. All that's all very well for gentlemen that haven't been used to what I call _com_fort in a way of speaking. But----" He saw that if he persisted, nothing soon would be left of that noble pile, the Grand Babylon Hotel, save a heap of ruins. And, further, she genuinely did cause him to feel that throughout his career he had always missed the very best things of life, through being an uncherished, ingenuous, easily satisfied man. A new sensation for him! For if any male in Europe believed in his own capacity to make others make him comfortable Priam Farll was that male. "I've never been in Putney," he ventured, on a new track. _Difficulty of Truth-telling_ As she informed him, with an ungrudging particularity, about Putney, and her life at Putney, there gradually arose in his brain a vision of a kind of existence such as he had never encountered. Putney had clearly the advantages of a residential town in a magnificent situation. It lay on the slope of a hill whose foot was washed by a glorious stream entitled the Thames, its breast covered with picturesque barges and ornamental rowing boats; an arched bridge spanned this stream, and you went over the bridge in milk-white omnibuses to London. Putney had a street of handsome shops, a purely business street; no one slept there now because of the noise of motors; at eventide the street glittered in its own splendours. There were theatre, music-hall, assembly-rooms, concert hall, market, brewery, library, and an afternoon tea shop exactly like Regent Street (not that Mrs. Challice cared for their alleged China tea); also churches and chapels; and Barnes Common if you walked one way, and Wimbledon Common if you walked another. Mrs. Challice lived in Werter Road, Werter Road starting conveniently at the corner of the High Street where the fish-shop was--an establishment where authentic sole was always obtainable, though it was advisable not to buy it on Monday mornings, of course. Putney was a place where you lived unvexed, untroubled. You had your little house, and your furniture, and your ability to look after yourself at all ends, and your knowledge of the prices of everything, and your deep knowledge of human nature, and your experienced forgivingness towards human frailties. You did not keep a servant, because servants were so complicated, and because they could do nothing whatever as well as you could do it yourself. You had a charwoman when you felt idle or when you chose to put the house into the back-yard for an airing. With the charwoman, a pair of gloves for coarser work, and gas stoves, you 'made naught' of domestic labour. You were never worried by ambitions, or by envy, or by