Posters on the platform at Durlingham announced in red letters that Professor Lee Ramsden, M.A., F.R.S.L., would lecture in the Town Hall at 8 P.M. She heard Miss Kendal saying, "If it had been at three instead of eight we could have gone." She had a supreme sense of something about to happen. Heavenly the long, steep-curved glass roof of the station, the iron arches and girders, the fanlights. Foreign and beautiful the black canal between the purplish rose-red walls, the white swans swaying on the black water, the red shaft of the clock-tower. It shot up high out of the Market-place, topped with the fantastically large, round, white eye of its clock. She kept on looking up to the clock-tower. At four she would see him. They walked about the town. They lunched and shopped. They sat in the Park. They kept on looking at the clock-tower. At the bookseller's in the Market-place she bought a second-hand copy of Walt Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_.... A black-grey drive between bushes of smutty laurel and arbutus. A black-grey house of big cut stones that stuck out. Gables and bow windows with sharp freestone facings that stuck out. You waited in a drawing-room stuffed with fragile mahogany and sea-green plush. Immense sea-green acanthus leaves, shaded in myrtle green, curled out from the walls. A suggestion of pictures heaved up from their places by this vigorous, thrusting growth. Curtains, cream-coloured net, sea-green plush, veiled the black-grey walks and smutty lawns of the garden. While she contemplated these things the long hand of the white marble tombstone clock moved from the hour to the quarter. She was reading the inscription, in black letters, on the golden plinth: "Presented to Thomas Smythe-Caulfield, Esqr., M.P., by the Council and Teachers of St. Paul's Schools, Durlingham"--"Presented"--when Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield came in. A foolish, overblown, conceited face. Grey hair arranged with art and science, curl on curl. Three-cornered eyelids, hutches for small, malevolently watching eyes. A sharp, insolent nose. Fish's mouth peering out above the backward slope of cascading chins. Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield shook hands at a sidelong arm's-length, not looking at you, holding Miss Kendal in her sharp pointed stare. They were Kate and Eleanor: Eleanor and Kate. "You're going to the lecture?" "If it had been at three instead of eight--" "The hour was fixed for the townspeople's convenience." In five minutes you had gathered that you would not be allowed to see Professor Lee Ramsden; that Professor Lee Ramsden did not desire to see or talk to anybody except Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield; that he kept his best things for her; that _all sorts of people_ were trying to get at him, and that he trusted her to protect him from invasion; that you had been admitted in order that Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield might have the pleasure of telling you these things.