I daren't even think what it would have been like if I'd tried to mix up Mamma and Richard in the same house.... And poor little Mamma in a strange place with nothing about it that she could remember, going up and down in it, trying to get at me, and looking reproachful and disapproving all the time. She'd have to be shut in her own rooms because Richard wouldn't have her in his. Sitting up waiting to be read aloud to and played halma with when Richard wanted me. Saying the same things over and over again. Sighing. Richard would go off his head if he heard Mamma sigh. He wants to be by himself the whole time, "working like blazes." He likes to feel that the very servants are battened down in the basement so that he doesn't know they're there. He couldn't stand Tiedeman and Peters if they weren't doing the same thing. Tiedeman working like blazes in the flat above him and Peters working like blazes in the flat below. Richard slept in this room last night. He will sleep in it again when I'm gone. She switched the light on to look at it for another second: the privet-white panelled cabin, the small wine-coloured chest of drawers, the small golden-brown wardrobe, shining. My hat's in that wardrobe, lying on Richard's waistcoat, fast asleep. If Tiedeman's flat's up there, that's Richard walking up and down over my head.... If it rains there'll be a row on the skylight and he won't sleep. He isn't sleeping now. III. It would be much nicer to walk home through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. She was glad that they were going to have a quiet evening. After three evenings at the play and Richard ruining himself in hansoms and not sleeping.... After this unbelievable afternoon. All those people, those terribly important people. It was amusing to go about with Richard and feel important yourself because you were with him. And to see Richard's ways with them, his nice way of behaving as if _he_ wasn't important in the least, as if it was you they had made all that fuss about. To think that the little dried up schoolmasterish man was Professor Lee Ramsden, prowling about outside the group, eager and shy, waiting to be introduced to you, nobody taking the smallest notice of him. The woman who had brought him making soft, sentimental eyes at you through the gaps in the group, and trying to push him in a bit nearer. Then Richard asking you to be kind for one minute to the poor old thing. It hurt you to see him shy and humble and out of it. And when you thought of his arrogance at Durlingham. It was the women's voices that tired you so, and their nervous, snapping eyes. The best of all was going away from them quietly with Richard into Kensington Gardens. "Did you like it, Mary?" "Frightfully. But not half so much as this." IV. She was all alone in the front room, stretched out on the flat couch in the corner facing the door.