He couldn’t for the life of him help watching Mrs. Neaves--in every attitude. He watched her as she rubbed the brush across his boots, swinging her big arm easily from the shoulder; as she knelt on the rug to coax the fire, her great, spread body bunched out and her pouch-like cheeks inflated. And in the evening when he sat in the widow’s house he used to compare her with that porcelain slip of a girl Clarissa. At fifty--Mrs. Neaves couldn’t be more--would Clarissa have such haunches, such pendulous cheeks! He idealized the laundress--quite unconsciously; he was the most matter-of-fact little chap in the world. Yet, in spite of himself, he became imaginative, degenerate. He took to engaging Mrs. Neaves in long conversations--about the lady at the cats’-meat shop in Red Lion Passage, who had just given birth to twins, and whose husband was doing three months for stamping on her (“a nice beast,” as Mrs. Neaves said righteously); about the other lady who got mad drunk regularly every Saturday night and threw all the household china out of the window--about anything, or anyone, for the mere sake of seeing her talk, of watching the changes on her coarse face, and the quick movement of her mouth, which could only boast three front teeth. Every wrinkle, every deeply-scored line on that woman’s face, every watery light in her blue eyes, meant to Arnold the track of some youthful charm. Was Mrs. Neaves like Clarissa at eighteen? Would Clarissa be like Mrs. Neaves at fifty? I really think that he would have ended by marrying Mrs. Neaves, out of pure, involuntary fascination, if Clarissa had not been a woman and inquisitive. She kept bothering him to take her to see his rooms. He was to leave them very soon, had sublet them to another man. He had taken a house at Clapham, a stone’s throw from the Common, and with a back garden a little bigger than usual--but only for Sol’s sake, Clarissa said. It was the first time she had shown a tinge of rebellion. “A great dog like that will make an awful mess in a nice house with his dirty feet. Can’t you keep him chained up?” “Chain a deerhound!” cried Arnold, in holy horror. Sol was a religion to him. “You’d spoil his legs.” He arranged to bring Clarissa up to the Inn some Saturday afternoon. She was to have tea with him in his rooms, and go out to dine somewhere afterward. He gave Mrs. Neaves an extra shilling to stay late and get the tea. At least, he said it was to get tea; he tried to persuade himself that it was to get tea; but I’m certain that his real reason for keeping her was his odd desire to see those two together, to compare notes. He said to her with deprecating apology--she was the sort of voluble, violent woman to compel respect from a man of his character: “I’ve a young lady coming here this afternoon to tea; the young lady--hum, hum--that I am going to marry. Can you stay a couple of hours later? I’ll make it worth your while.”