She led him to his study. An enormous desk, and in the middle of it a little pile of papers crushed by a block of crystal! The papers were all bills. The amounts of them alarmed him momentarily, but that was only because he could not continuously and effectively remember that he had over three hundred pounds a week coming in. Still, the bills did somewhat dash him, and he left them without getting to the bottom of the pile. He thought he would voyage through the house, but he got no further than his wife's boudoir. The boudoir also had an enormous desk, and on it also was a pile of papers. He offended the marital code by picking up the first one, which read as follows:--"Madam. We beg to enclose as requested estimate for buffet refreshments for one hundred and fifty persons, and hire of one hundred gilt cane chairs and bringing and taking away same. Trusting to be honoured with your commands--" This document did more than alarm him; it shook him. Clearly Eve was planning a great reception. Even to attend a reception was torture to him, always had been; but to be the host at a reception...! No, his mind refused to contemplate a prospect so appalling. Surely Eve ought to have consulted him before beginning to plan a reception. Why a reception? He glimpsed matters that might be even worse than a reception. And this was the same woman who had so touchingly arranged his clothes. IV He was idly regarding himself in an immense mirror that topped the fireplace, and thinking that despite the stylishness of his accoutrement he presented the appearance of a rather tousled and hairy person of unromantic middle-age, when, in the glass, he saw the gilded door open and a woman enter the room. He did not move,--only stared at the image. He knew the woman intimately, profoundly, exhaustively, almost totally. He knew her as one knows the countryside in which one has grown up, where every feature of the scene has become a habit of the perceptions. And yet he had also a strange sensation of seeing her newly, of seeing her for the first time in his life and estimating her afresh. In a flash he had compared her, in this boudoir, with Lady Massulam in Lady Massulam's bungalow. In a flash all the queer, frightening romance of 2 a.m. in Frinton had swept through his mind. Well, she had not the imposingness nor the mystery of Lady Massulam, nor perhaps the challenge of Lady Massulam; she was very much more prosaic to him. But still he admitted that she had an effect on him, that he reacted to her presence, that she was at any rate at least as incalculable as Lady Massulam, and that there might be bits of poetry gleaming in her prose, and that after a quarter of a century he had not arrived at a final judgment about her. Withal Lady Massulam had a quality which she lacked,--he did not know what the quality was, but he knew that it excited him in an unprecedented manner and that he wanted it and would renounce it with regret.