In order to understand the impression which that evening left upon me, it is necessary to bear in mind the conditions under which I had been living for the last few weeks. In the earlier stages I had been oscillating between my office, with its ever-accumulating mass of papers, on the one hand; and the grime and clangour of the factories and furnaces upon the other. Then, gradually, I saw less and less of the concrete machinery of our safety and slipped almost wholly into the work of control from a distance. Lists, sheets of figures, graphs, letters dictated or read, telephonic communications, reports from factory managers, all surged up before me in a daily deluge. My meals were eaten hurriedly at a side-table in my office; and my lights burned far into the morning in the attempt to cope with the torrent which I had to control. Often as the dawn was coming up through the smoke-clouds of the city I walked home with a wearied mind through which endless columns of figures chased each other; and my eyes had broken down under the strain to the extent that I had to use pilocarpine almost constantly. I was beginning to look back on the old life in London, with its theatre parties and dinners, as if it were another existence which I should never re-enter. I seemed shut off from it by some nebulous yet impenetrable curtain; and when I thought of it at times, I felt that it had passed away beyond recall. All the softer side of civilisation, it seemed, must go down, once for all, in this cataclysm; and from our efforts a harder, harsher world would be born. Ease and luxury had vanished, leaving us stripped to our necessities. And suddenly I found myself in the old surroundings once more. I was ushered into a room which, though its simplicity recalled Nordenholt’s other environments, still betrayed a woman’s hand at every point. There was no litter of meaningless nicknacks; every touch went to build up a harmonious whole: and it was unmistakably a feminine mind which had designed it. As I glanced down the room, I saw Miss Huntingtower standing by the fireplace; and it flashed across me that, whether by accident or design, the room formed a framework for her. As she came forward to meet me, her smile effaced the strained expression which I had noticed in the morning. In these surroundings she seemed different, somehow. The artistry of the room fitted her own beauty so that each appeared to find its complement in the other. It seemed to me that she was designed by destiny for this environment, and not for the harder work of the world. And yet, she gave no suggestion of triviality; there was no hint of a feminine desire to attract. It must have been that she harmonised so well with the frame in which I saw her. And the personality which gazed from her eyes seemed in some way to blend with this world of shaded lights, graceful outlines and innate simplicity.