Mr. Tubbe shook hands with an air of restrained but very considerable emotion. He treated Lord Congreve with a kind of dignified familiarity, rather like Phélypeaux playing billiards with Louis Quatorze. Mr. Shobbe, who was the third party to this interesting re-union, behaved more easily, with a _puissance-à-puissance_ geniality. George could not hear what they were saying, and did not want to. He was watching Mrs. Shobbe, who was talking gently with two younger women on a couch in one corner of the studio. Poor Mrs. Shobbe, of whom one always thought as a soft, kind, grey moth, for ever fluttering with kindly intent and for ever fluttering wrong. She had that sweet exasperating gentleness and refined incompetence which marked so many women of the wealthier class whose youth was blighted by Ruskin and Morris. Her portrait had been painted by Burne-Jones—there it was on the wall, over-sweet, over-wistful, stylized to look like one of his Arthurian damosels. And there she was, grey and moth-like, the sweetness gone insipid, the wistfulness become empty and regretful. Had she ever looked like that portrait? No one would have known it was she, unless they had been told. Poor Mrs. Shobbe! In turns one pitied, almost loved, despised and was exasperated by her. Such crushed insipidity. And yet such a gallant effort to do “what is right.” Yet she somehow disgusted one with refinement and trying to do what is right, and made one yearn sympathetically towards a hard-swearing, hard-working, hard-drinking motor mechanic. Her life must have been very unhappy. Her well-off Victorian parents (wholesale wine trade, retired) had given her a good education of travel and accomplishments, and had systematically and gently crushed her. It was chiefly the mother, of course, that abominable mother-daughter “love” which is compact of bullying, jealousy, parasitism and baffled sexuality. With what ghastly pertinacity does a disappointed wife “take it out” on her daughter! Not consciously, of course; but the unconscious cruelty and oppression of human beings seem the most dreadful. To escape, she had married Shobbe.