When Mrs. Jopson departed and left Catherine alone in the familiar house, the atmosphere changed. The very furniture seemed charged with secrets--secrets concerning the manner in which Mr. Weston had spent his evenings. Whether he had gone out much, or read books or merely moped about. Only the gramophone seemed anxious to betray its information, and the tin horn, cocked up at an absurdly self-confident angle, had the appearance of declaring: “Judge from me what sort of a man he was. I was nearly the last thing he troubled about. I am the answer to one at least of his cravings.” From the gramophone Catherine turned to the writing-desk. That at any rate guarded what it knew with some show of modesty. It was full of papers belonging to Mr. Weston, but they all seemed to emphasize the perfect normality of his life. Algebra papers marked and unmarked, catalogues of educational book publishers, odd cuttings from newspapers, notes from parents asking that children should be allowed to go home early, printed lists of scholarship candidates, and so forth. Everything to show that Mr. Weston had gone on living pretty much as he had been accustomed. Everything to make it more mysterious than ever why he should suddenly cut his throat while shaving. Catherine was puzzled. She had been constructing a grand tragedy round this pitifully insignificant man; under the stimulating influence of her own imagination she had already begun to sympathize; doubtless if her imagination had discovered anything substantial to feed on she might have ended by passionate affection for her own dead father. Several times recently she had been on the verge of tears, not for him personally, but out of vague sympathy with the victim of a poignant tragedy. For to her it did indeed seem a poignant tragedy that a man so weak, so fatuous as he was should be left entirely alone at a time when he most needed the companionship of someone stronger. She did not in the least regret leaving him. That was inevitable. He wanted to boss the show. He was so pitifully weak, so conscious of weakness that he manufactured a crisis rather than yield on what he regarded as a crucial point. Afterwards, no doubt, he had regretted his hastiness. Yet that strange interview on the train to Liverpool Street seemed incapable of being fitted in.... Catherine had often thought of him sorrowing, regretting, mourning. She had regarded his suicide as a tragic confirmation of his misery. And now the interior of his writing-desk seemed to say: “Oh, he was much the same--you’d scarcely have noticed any difference in him.” And the gramophone chuckled and declared: “As a matter of fact the old chap was beginning to have rather a good time....”