This phase of reflection did not come immediately on opening Marianne's note. He had passed through a brief epoch of lunch for himself and dinner for Bob and Cat and Emmie since then. It had been a riotous but not unpleasant experience, and Challis was grateful for it. Bob's greeting to him had been, exactly transcribed: "Mater's gone to Tulse Hill. I say!--if you were to give me five shillings, I could buy a phonograph, because I've saved up fifteen. Tommy Eldridge has got one that does a menagerie, and you can hear a man having his head bit off." This felt jolly and cheerful, especially as the two little girls jumped with eagerness to hear the subsidy voted. Imitations of insubordinate wild beasts, and the sounds incidental to detaching a Bengal tiger from his prey with red-hot irons, made lunch pass pleasantly, and Challis felt much happier. He granted the five shillings on condition that no operatic records should be purchased. He had heard "Voi che sapete" through a gramophone once, and he knew! He was in his study, and Bob had probably nearly arrived at the phonograph local plague-centre in Putney, when he got to speculation, acknowledged as such, about a _modus vivendi_ for himself and the mother of those two little wenches. He denied Judith any place in the problem, preferring to recognize, as the sole difficulty he had to fight against, the attitude of Marianne towards what he summed up as "Grosvenor Square" compendiously. He refused to admit that the class of feelings he entertained towards that lady--or might have entertained; he wouldn't quite admit them--could possibly come under discussion so long as he kept them to himself. Why, if every trifling vibration of personal feeling, every grain of salt on the dish of a man's friendship for a woman, was to be made the foundation of an indictment of faithlessness to his wife, where would matrimony be? But he nearly lost the thread of his reflections in the obligation to define what the feelings were that he was refusing to admit. He would not allow for a moment that these feelings could possibly interfere with his affection for his wife. In fact, he actually shouted "Nonsense!" aloud in answer to some accusation to that effect for which he was not responsible. So loud, in fact, that Harmood came, and said, "Did you call, sir?" and disbelieved the "No, _I_ didn't!" that she was met with. He would not have felt foolish on hearing his own voice getting out of bounds, but he did when it came home to him that Harmood must have heard him two rooms off at least. This would never do. He would get back to the Ostrogoths. How about Estrild's little handmaiden?--a good name for her?--something ending in _illa_? Favilla?--Scintilla?--Yes, that would do, without the _S_; otherwise, like Law Courts and tittles of evidence! Yes--certainly Cintilla! But he got no further.