"I hope Mrs. Clay got the telegram all right." Miss Ronder's thin bosom was a little agitated beneath its white waistcoat. "You'll never forgive me if things aren't looking as though we'd lived in the place for months." Alice Ronder was over sixty and as active as a woman of forty. Ronder looked at her and laughed. "Never forgive you! What words! Do I ever cherish grievances? Never... but I do like to be comfortable." "Well, everything was all right a week ago. I've slaved at the place, as you know, and Mrs. Clay's a jewel--but she complains of the Polchester maids--says there isn't one that's any good. Oh, I want my tea, I want my tea!" They were climbing up from the market-place into the High Street. Ronder looked about him with genial curiosity. "Very nice," he said; "I believe I can be comfortable here." "If you aren't comfortable you certainly won't stay," she answered him sharply. "Then I _must_ be comfortable," he replied, laughing. He laughed a great deal, but absent-mindedly, as though his thoughts were elsewhere. It would have been interesting to a student of human nature to have been there and watched him as he sat back in the cab, looking through the window, indeed, but seeing apparently nothing. He seemed to be gazing through his round spectacles very short-sightedly, his eyes screwed up and dim. His fat soft hands were planted solidly on his thick knees. The observer would have been interested because he would soon have realised that Ronder saw everything; nothing, however insignificant, escaped him, but he seemed to see with his brain as though he had learnt the trick of forcing it to some new function that did not properly belong to it. The broad white forehead under the soft black clerical hat was smooth, unwrinkled, mild and calm.... He had trained it to be so.