As he considered all these preparations, Old Mole thought amusedly that they were not at all for Miss Dufresne and Robert (who had been invited), but rather a homage paid to their possessions, and, searching within himself for the causes of the comfort and satisfaction he felt, he found that this dinner was the first action which had brought them into harmony with the London atmosphere. Ethically there was nothing to be said for such a pretence at hospitality; but as submission to the æsthetic pressure of their surroundings, as expedience, it was quite wonderfully right. It was the thin end of the wedge, the first turn of the gimlet in the boring of the bunghole of the fat barrel of London existence; and, if it were their fate to become Londoners, they were setting about it with sufficient adroitness. He was only afraid that Miss Dufresne would lead him back into the atmosphere of the theater from which he was so relieved to have escaped. The theater that he had known was only an excrescence on English life, a whelk or a wen on its reputable bald head. He had perched on it like a fly, but his concern, his absorbing concern, was to get at the brains inside that head and the thoughts inside the brain. On the morning of the day fixed for the dinner Robert wired that he could not come, and Old Mole was left with the awful prospect of tackling Miss Dufresne alone. His recollection of her was of a most admirably typical minx with an appetite for admiration and flattery that had consumed all her other desires. "Lord save us!" he said. "I was baffled by that type as a young man; what on earth can I do with it in my fifties?" And in his heart he was fearful of spoiling Matilda's pleasure. This dread so oppressed him that, finding her flurried and irritable with the work of preparation, he decided to absent himself, to lunch at Robert's club, of which he had just been elected a member, and to soothe himself with a walk through Whitehall and the parks in the afternoon.