So you must not be surprised if Mrs. Winterbourne’s emotion at the death of George almost immediately took an erotic form. She was lying on her bed in an ample pair of white drawers with very long ruffles and a remarkably florid, if chaste, chemise. And the sheik, strong, silent, restrained, tender, was dabbing her forehead and nose with Eau de Cologne, while she took large sips of brandy at increasingly frequent intervals. It was, of course, proper and even pleasant to have her grief so much respected; but she did wish Sam hadn’t to be poked always into taking the initiative. Couldn’t the man see that tender nerves like hers needed to be soothed with a little Real Love _at once?_ “He was so much to me, Sam,” she said in low, indeed tremulous, tones, subtly calculated, “I was only a child when he was born—a child _with_ a child people used to say—and we grew up together. I was so young that I did not put up my hair until two years after he was born.” (Mrs. Winterbourne’s propaganda about her perennial youth was so obvious that it would hardly have deceived the readers of “John Blunt”—but the sheiks all fell for it. God knows how young they thought she was—probably imagined Winterbourne had “insulted” her when she was ten.) “We were always together, such pals, Sam, and he told me everything.” (Poor old George! He had such a dislike for his mother that he hadn’t seen her five times in the last five years of his life. And as for telling her anything—why, the most noble of noble savages would immediately have suspected _her_. She had let George down so badly time after time when he was a boy that he was all tight inside, and couldn’t give confidence to his wife or his mistresses or a man.) “But now he’s gone,” and somehow Mrs. Winterbourne’s voice became so erotically suggestive that even the obtuse sheik noticed it and was vaguely troubled; “now he’s gone, I’ve nothing in the world but _you_, Sam. You heard how that vile man insulted me on the telephone to-day. Kiss me, Sam, and promise you’ll always be a pal, a _real_ pal.” Active love-making was not in the sheik’s formula for that day; consolation there was to be, but the “sacredness” of mother grief was not to be profaned by sexual intercourse; although that too, oddly enough, was “sacred” between a “clean” Englishman and a “pure” woman who had only had one husband and twenty-two lovers. But what can the Sam Brownes of the world do against the wills, especially the will to copulate, of the Mrs. Winterbournes? He rose—if the expression may be allowed—powerfully to the situation. He too found a certain queer perverse satisfaction in honeying and making love over a nasty corpse; while, if he had been capable of making the reflection, he would have realized that Mrs. Winterbourne was not only a sadist, but a necrophilous one.