He departed to his room, to dress for dinner, with a disjointed, incomplete feeling that he was rather glad that a mere _au revoir_ had involved no handshake. Could he have trusted himself not to emphasize its pressure unduly? Faugh!--where was the sense of such an imbecile speculation, or the need for it? He was angry with himself for the thought--angry at the way he had enjoyed his walk with "that girl." He brushed her off his mind discourteously as "that girl." Why, he had only known her a couple of days! He even found that an impulse of his wanted him to say, "Damn all these people! What are they to me, or I to them, that they should come into my life, and make hay of a working contentment I have never dreamed of questioning?" But he refused to say it, merely noting what its syntax would have been if he had done so. _En revanche_, he made up his mind to write a jolly long letter to Marianne to-night. The other party--though, indeed, it is hard to say to what--retired to her room to dress, not very sorry to hear that Sibyl was not home yet. She had quite made up her mind that if her sister talked any nonsense about flirtations with married men, she would speak sharply to her--give her a piece of her mind. But she hated rows. So if the motor-car broke down--and it was pretty sure to--she shouldn't be sorry. In a day or two she was going up to London, and would go straight and call on Mrs. Challis, the Impossible one, and that would put the friendship with her husband on a footing. She would wear that white chiffon and the pearls again this evening, though; she had looked so well in them last night.