Picture him, then, with his plump, amiable face bent over Phœbe’s imaginings, a perennial pipe in his mouth, and, invariably, two or three little tufts of cotton-wool struck on to his cheek or chin, where he had cut himself shaving that morning. Occasionally, but very rarely, he had to go into the drawing-room to ask the elucidation of some situation: how, for instance, was Algernon Montmorency to leap lightly out of the window, and so regain his motor-car, when Phœbe had laid the scene in the top room of the moated tower of Eagles Castle? But Phœbe could always suggest a remedy which cost the minimum of readjustment, and ten minutes afterwards Algernon would be thundering along the road with the lurid Semitic moneylender in close pursuit. But for such occasional interruption and the periodical lighting of his pipe he would not pause for a second till the morning’s work was over. He never hesitated for a word, for he had at his command the entire vocabulary of English _clichés_, and he often got through two instalments before lunch. At one precisely the parlourmaid came in, and groping through the fog of tobacco-smoke, opened all the windows and began to lay the table. Upon which Philip washed off his tufts of cotton-wool, snatched Phœbe from her imaginative visions, and strolled in the garden with her till the gong summoned them to the recuperative spell of a mutton chop and a glass of blood-making Australian Burgundy. After lunch they drove in the motor-car, returning for tea, and from tea till dinner they read over aloud and discussed their morning’s work. In this way Philip made acquaintance with the subject-matter he would be employed on next morning, and Phœbe learned how that which she had written yesterday had turned out. Philip had never any criticism to make: his wife’s imagination seemed to him one of the most glorious instruments ever devised for the delectation of the literary, and she often said that of all contemporary novelists her husband was the only man capable of handling the situations she poured out in this unending flood. After dinner they played patience, went early to bed, and awoke with an unquenchable zest for the labour and rewards of another day. * * * * *