He couldn't help it, he replied, with a slight responsive sharpening of his own speech; he had driven to the hotel, where he had secured their room, and Mrs. Grove had made it impossible for him to stay there. When he left--it would be late tomorrow or early the next day, Lee thought--she could meet him and do as they planned. But Fanny refused to agree: it would, now, be a needless expense. No, the other was what she had eagerly looked forward to. Lee, drawing her attention once more to the fact that it wasn't possible, was answered by so long a silence that he concluded she had hung up the receiver. “Have a good time,” Fanny said at last; “you will, anyhow, with the Raff woman. I suppose Mrs. Grove, who seems to get everything she wants, is fascinating as well.” “Indeed, I don't know, Fanny!” he exclaimed, his patience almost exhausted. “It hasn't occurred to me to think about her. I'm sorry you won't do what I suggest; it's not different from what we first thought of.” “Good-bye,” she answered reluctantly; “the children are here and send their love. They'd like to speak to you, but probably you're in a hurry.” “I may be late for dinner now,” he admitted. The receiver in his house was abruptly, unmistakably, replaced. No one else, and for so little perceptible cause, could make him as mad as Fanny frequently did. He put on his waistcoat, changed his money from the trousers on the bed to those he was wearing, in a formless indignation. This wasn't his fault, he repeated; positively, judged by her manner, he might be doing something wrong. Fanny even managed to convey a doubt of Mrs. Grove, Mrs. William Loyd Grove. But she couldn't see how ridiculous that was. William Grove Lee liked negatively; there was, patently, nothing in him to create an active response. His short heavy body was faultlessly clothed; his heavy face, with its moustache twisted into points, the clouded purple of his cheeks contradicted by the penetration of a steadily focussed gaze, expressed nothing more than a niceness of balance between self-indulgence, tempered by exercise, games in open air, and a far from negligible administration of the resources he had inherited. “You are a relative of the Morrises?” he asked Lee, turning from the menu set before him in a miniature silver frame. This Lee Randon admitted, and Grove's eyebrows mounted. “Can't anything be done with the young man?” “How are you succeeding with the young woman?” Lee returned. “Oh, women--” William Grove waved his hand; “you can't argue with women. Mina wants her Peyton--if that's his name; God knows I've heard it enough--and there's no more to that.” “It begins to look as though she'd get him,” Lee observed; “I must say we haven't got far with Morris.” “Extraordinary.”