There are women who pry into the smallest details of a man’s privacy. Farquharson’s dressing-room even was not his own. In certain moods Dora discovered that the angle of his looking-glass pleased her better than her own; short of actually locking the door against her, he was never secure from interruption even there. She had developed a thousand whims and fancies since her marriage. She had her own boudoir and drawing-room, and a little sanctum on the stairs which she called her library, where she began to write many letters which were never finished, and to grapple with accounts which were always thrown aside a moment later. Farquharson, unaccustomed to women’s society, never once thought of forbidding her to invade his own large and austerely furnished study at the back of the house; it was not until returning unexpectedly one day he found her rummaging amongst some papers on the table that he spoke to her with unusual severity. "You have your own room, Dora; kindly keep there. I can’t allow you to come here. There are papers of importance which mustn’t be touched. What’s that you’ve got crumpled up in your hand? It looks like—why, these are some notes Blair made for me this morning. How did you manage to get hold of them?" "It’s perfectly absurd that Mr. Blair should be allowed to come in here and go out as he likes even if he is your secretary, when you forbid your own wife to come in," said Dora angrily. "Stupid old notes, I’m sure I don’t want them; I brought in papers of my own, and I suppose they’ve got mixed up, somehow. They’re written on just the same sort of paper as Louise’s bill. How on earth was I to know the difference? Besides, anyway it’s absurd to make such a fuss about a trifle like that. If I did happen to glance at your dull notes and see a word or two, who has a better right than I to read them, after all?" Farquharson smoothed out the paper and glanced down it. "There’s nothing that matters in this as it happens. Blair’s quite a careful boy; he would never leave out anything really important. But we are rather busy people, Dora, he and I, and he has his own way of arranging things. He’s complained to me before now that they’re upset and made disorderly by your coming in. Now, I don’t suppose, for instance, that you’ve the smallest notion where you got this from. Try and tax your memory, and put it back in exactly the same place."