“It was the most extraordinary bit of luck, coming in for it. You know I went down on the machine to fetch her, to those awful rooms in Queen Street. She opened the door to me herself. She’d no hat on, and evidently hadn’t meant to come. So I told her about the rehearsal and suggested taking her along.” “Did she see you in the hall or in the sitting room?” Sallie inquired. One could see she wanted to be able to visualize the whole thing. “There wouldn’t have been room for both of us in the wretched little entrance passage. She asked me into the dining room, or, rather, she said, ‘You can go in if you want to,’ and I did go in. The room smelt of mutton chop and down draughts. There was a tray on the table with greasy plates and things and two ghastly affairs in frames, on the walls--some kids feeding swans and a nun trailing along past an open door and looking at a woman in her petticoat bodice undressing a small child on a table. It was all frightfully characteristic.” Sallie nodded vehemently. “I know. A sort of arrangement of brackets and shelves and a looking-glass over the mantelpiece, I suppose, and pink paper in the grate.” “More or less that. And Mrs. Harter stood in the middle of it looking rather like Cassandra. She simply asked if I’d wait while she finished a bit of ironing. I said I would, and she carried on at the other end of the table from the tin tray and the greasy plates. I think she was ironing a blouse--something white, anyhow.” “Did you talk?” “I tried to make _her_ talk,” said Martyn frankly, “but, by Jove, she’s a baffling woman. D’you remember how she turned down Leeds on the day of the picnic? I can quite understand it, of course, but I’m sorry for him, especially as she’d apparently been on quite the opposite tack when they met before. Well, she was just about as forthcoming with me to-day as she was with old Leeds when he would keep on with variations of that story about the cocktails. “I asked her if she thought the play was shaping all right, and she said, ‘I really couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ and all the time one felt that she was so tremendously on the defensive.” “I’ve had that feeling about her myself,” Sallie remarked, “as though life had used her pretty hard, which I daresay it has--through her own fault, too. Go on.” “Well, not having made any headway at all, I was just going to start on Cairo and the East generally when there was a ring at the door, and Mrs. Harter jumped as though she’d been shot. It’s my belief she thought it was Bill Patch, come to fetch her, but she went on with her ironing and I heard someone else go to the door--the woman of the house, I suppose. And almost directly the dining room door opened and a man walked in, and Mrs. Harter looked up and saw him.” Martyn paused like an actor who wants to enhance a coming effect. “How did he strike you?” said Sallie breathlessly.