The boy began to feel exceedingly confused. Yet he had never been less bored. Miss Haddon might be stout and sixty-four. Nevertheless, her net personality was far less wearisome than that of many a town-bred sylph. Unconsciously Claude ate with a hearty appetite, indulged immoderately in excellent roast beef, and even swallowed a beautifully-cooked Spanish onion without thinking of the committal of a crime. During dessert Miss Haddon gave him a racy description of a rural cricket match and of the supper and speeches which followed it, and he found himself laughing heartily and wishing he had been there. He pulled himself up short with a sudden sensation of horror, and his hostess rose to go into the drawing-room. "Shall we play Halma or Ek Bahr?" she asked; "or would they be out of order? I wish particularly to conform to all your tenets." "Dear lady, please, we have no tenets," he protested. "Do remember that, or you will never become what you wish. But I do not care for any games." "Then shall we sit down and each read a volume of the 'Yellow Book'?" She hastened towards a table to find copies of that work, but something in her brisk and anxious movement caused Claude to exclaim hurriedly: "Please--please teach me Halma." That night he went up to bed flushed with triumph. Miss Haddon had allowed him to win a couple of games. Never before had he felt so absolutely certain of the unusual acuteness of his intellect. IV Three days later, Miss Haddon and Claude Melville were feeding chickens--under protest. "I mean to give it up, of course," the former said. "It's a degrading pursuit; it's almost as bad as the 'things that Jimmy does,' the things that give him such a marvellous complexion and keep his figure so magnificent." She threw a handful of grain to the frenzied denizens of the enlarged meat-safe before them, and added in a tone of pensive reflectiveness: "Why is it, I wonder, that these actions which, as you have taught me, are unworthy of thinking people, tend to make the body so beautiful, the eyes so bright and clear, the cheeks rose-tinted, the limbs straight and supple?" All the time that she was speaking her glance crept musingly over Claude's tall, but weak-looking and rather flaccid form, seeming to pause on his thin undeveloped arms, his lanky legs, and his slightly yellow face. That face began to flush. She sighed. "There must be something radically wrong in the scheme of the universe," she continued. "But, of course, one ought to live for the mind and for subtle sensations, even though they do make one look an object."