Nina wanted to know if she could be given another room the next morning. She remarked that the slowest railways always made the most fuss, and that a train had been rehearsing outside her window half the night. "It rattled and snorted, and clashed and clanked till three o'clock." She acknowledged Conrad's regrets and assurances with a plaintive sigh, and shook her head feebly at her coffee cup. It was raining. That it can rain in Sweetbay for a fortnight on end with no longer intervals than the entr'actes at a fashionable theatre is not distinctive; the idiocrasy of Sweetbay is that it recommences raining twenty times a day as if the deluge had bee, hoarded for a year--it rains as if the heavens had fallen out. Nina and 'Gina, who had ventured into the lane "between the showers," were drenched before they could gain shelter, and they were taciturn when they had changed their clothes. The rain was still pelting when Ted went up to town on Monday, and a vicious wind lashed "sunny Sweetbay" when he came back. On Tuesday the ardour of the flood abated, but "the fairest spot in England" was sodden under a persevering drizzle, and a letter by the evening post made Regina nervous about the health of her baby. "Toto seemed a good deal worried," she said, "and she thought under the circumstances she ought to be at home." She departed on Wednesday in a cataract. "Do you think she's good-looking?" asked Nina. "She is not good-looking," said Conrad reflectively, "but she's so convinced that she is that she almost persuades you in moments." "That's it," Nina assented; "she attitudinises as if she were a beauty. When they're shown photographs of her with her face bent, men are quite eager to know her. Of course the baby's bosh." "I'll confess that I'm not anxious about the baby myself, I'm afraid she found it rather slow here. I got _Punch_ for her at the station, and a servant went round before breakfast to order a foot-warmer--it's necessary to give notice when you'll want a foot-warmer--but it was weak reparation. You were all very good to come." "If there were anything to read in the house, I wouldn't mind so much," she said, "I mean I wouldn't mind the weather. If it ever leaves off, we might go and try to find 'a select library in connection with Mudie's.'" "There are heaps of books in the house--I can lend you all the poets." "I would rather have something to read," she said, "thanks. Do you think if we found one, it would be open oftener than once a week?" "You mustn't misjudge the town by the theatre," he expostulated; "that the theatre only opens once a week is due to a combination of circumstances that I don't know anything about, but I am sanguine of the shops opening every day." "How long are you saddled with the place for?" Her tone was sympathetic.