Mrs Sawyer had instructed me to go into town to get a particular kind of drawing block for the drawing class which was to take place that afternoon. I knew where M. Doumer lived. When a newcomer appeared in his class it was his custom to present her--with an original article in bows which we irreverently described as the "Doumer twiddle"--with his card, in the corner of which was printed his address, so that the place of his habitation was known to all of us. It was close to the shop where they sold the drawing blocks. In returning one needed to go scarcely out of one's way at all to pass his house. I made it my business to pass his house. And when I reached it I marched straight up to the door, and I knocked. The door was opened by a nondescript-looking person whom I took for the landlady. There was a card in the window--"Apartments To Let"--so I immediately concluded that M. Doumer lived in lodgings and that this was the person who kept them. She was a small, thin, hungry, acidulated female, who struck me as being an old maid of the most pronounced type. I have a fatal facility for drawing instant definite deductions from altogether insufficient premises which will one of these days land me goodness alone knows where. "I wish to see M. Doumer." She led me into the room on the left, in the window of which appeared the legend about apartments. "M. Doumer is out. Is it anything which I can say to him?" It struck me, even in the midst of the boiling-over state of mind in which I was, that she might have informed me that the man was out before taking me into the house. But I was in much too explosive a condition to allow a trifle of that sort to deter me from letting off some of my steam. "Will you please ask him what he means by the way in which he has behaved to Miss Frazer?" To judge from the way in which she looked at me I might have said something extraordinary. She had rather nut-cracker jaws, and all at once her mouth went in such a way that one felt sure there must have been a click. And she did look at me. "I don't understand," she said. "I don't understand either. That's why I want M. Doumer to explain. He has been trampling on Miss Frazer, and broken her heart, so that she's crying her eyes out." The landlady person had not quite closed the door when showing me into the room, but had remained standing with her back to it, holding the handle in her hand. Now she turned right round, carefully shut it fast, and moved two or three steps towards me. There was something in her behaviour which, in a person in her position, I thought odd. "Who are you?" She asked the question in an exceedingly inquisitorial sort of way. I held up my chin as high as I could in the air. "I am Molly Boyes." "Molly Boyes?" She seemed to be searching in her mind for something with which to associate the name. "I don't remember to have heard of you."