John felt that he had trespassed too far upon the confines of Maud's humanity and retreated hurriedly. He would have liked to explain that his inquiry had merely been a venture into abstract esthetics and that he had not had the least intention of extracting her opinion about these suits _on him_; but he felt that an attempt at explanation would embarrass her, and he hummed instead over a selection of ties, as a bee hums from flower to flower in a garden, careless of the gardener who close at hand is potting up plants. "I will take these ties," he announced on the last stave of _A Fine Old English Gentleman_. Maud noted them gravely. "And I shall have a few books. Perhaps there won't be room for them?" "There won't be room for them, not in your dressing-case, sir." "Oh, I know there won't be room in that," said John, bitterly. His dressing-case might be considered the medal he had struck in honor of _The Fall of Babylon_: he had passed it every morning on his way to rehearsals and, dreaming of the triumph that might soon be his, had vowed he would buy it were such a triumph granted. It had cost L75, was heavy enough when empty to strain his wrist and when full to break his back, and it contained more parasites of the toilet table and the writing desk than one could have supposed imaginable. These parasites each possessed an abode of such individual shape that leaving them behind made no difference to the number of really useful articles, like pajamas, that could be carried in the cubic space lined with blue corded silk on which they looked down like the inconvenient houses of a fashionable square. Therefore wherever John went, the fittings went too, a glittering worthless mob of cut-glass, pigskin, tortoiseshell and ivory. "But in my portmanteau," John persisted. "Won't there be room there?" "I might squeeze them in," Maud admitted. "It depends what boots you're wanting to take with you, sir." "Never mind," he sighed. "I can make a separate parcel of them." "There's the basket what we were going to use for the cat, sir." "No, I should prefer a brown paper parcel," he decided. It would be improper for the books out of which the historical trappings of his _Joan of Arc_ were to be manufactured to travel in a lying-in hospital for cats.