"Come, come, Frida," said her father. "You won't disturb us by saying aloud what you want to say." He had leaned over majestically to emphasize his rebuke and in doing so brushed with his sleeve Grandmama's wrist. "Goodness, it's a cat," the old lady cried, with a shudder. "I shall have to go away from here, Johnnie, if you have a cat in the house. I'd rather have mice all over me than one of those horrid cats. Ugh! the nasty thing!" She was not at all convinced of her mistake even when persuaded to stroke her son-in-law's coat. "I hope it's been properly shooed out. Harold, please look well under all the chairs, there's a good boy." During the next few days John felt that he was being in some indefinable way ousted by Laurence from the spiritual mastery of his own house. John was averse from according to his brother-in-law a greater forcefulness of character than he could ascribe to himself; if he had to admit that he really was being supplanted somehow, he preferred to search for the explanation in the years of theocratic prestige that gave a background to the all-pervasiveness of that sacerdotal personality. Yet ultimately the impression of his own relegation to a secondary place remained elusive and incommunicable. He could not for instance grumble that the times of the meals were being altered nor complain that in the smallest detail the domestic mechanism was being geared up or down to suit Laurence; the whole sensation was essentially of a spiritual eviction, and the nearest he could get to formulating his resentment (though perhaps resentment was too definite a word for this vague uneasiness) was his own gradually growing opinion that of all those at present under the Ambles roof Laurence was the most important. This loss of importance was bad for John's work, upon which it soon began to exert a discouraging influence, because he became doubtful of his own position, hypercritical of his talent, and timid about his social ability. He began to meditate the long line of failures to dramatize the immortal tale of Joan of Arc immortally, to see himself dangling at the end of this long line of ineptitudes and to ask himself whether bearing in mind the vastness of even our own solar system it was really worth while writing at all. It could not be due to anything or anybody but Laurence, this sense of his own futility; not even when a few years ago he had reached the conclusion that as a realistic novelist he was a failure had he been so profoundly conscious of his own insignificance in time and space. "I shall have to go away if I'm ever to get on with this play," he told himself.