An ordinary man would have said of Mrs. Eldred that she was rather a large woman. To Tanqueray, in his malady, she appeared immense. The appeal of her immensity was not merely to the eye. It fascinated and demoralized the imagination. Tanqueray's imagination was sane when it was at work, handling the stuff of life; it saw all things unexaggerated, unabridged. But the power went wild when he turned it out to play. It played with Mrs. Eldred's proportions till it became tormented with visions of shapeless and ungovernable size. He saw her figure looming in the doorway, brooding over his table and his bed, rolling through space to inconceivable confines which it burst. For though this mass moved slowly, it was never still. When it stood it quivered. Worse than anything, when it spoke it wheezed. He had gathered from Mrs. Eldred that her conversation (if you could call it conversation) was the foredoomed beginning of his day. He braced himself to it every morning, but at last his nerves gave way, and he forgot himself so far as to implore her for God's sake not to talk to him. The large woman replied placably that if he would leave everything to her, it would not be necessary for her to talk. He left everything. At the end of the week his peace was charged to him at a figure which surprised him by its moderation. Still he was haunted by one abominable fear, the fear of being ill, frightfully ill, and dying in some vast portion of her arms. Under the obsession of this thought he passed whole hours sitting at his desk, bowed forward, with his face hidden in his hands. He was roused from it one evening by a sound that came from the other end of the room, somewhere near the sideboard. It startled him, because, being unaccompanied by any wheezing, it could not have proceeded from Mrs. Eldred. It was, indeed, one of those small voices that come from things diminutive and young. It seemed to be trying to tell him that dinner was ready. He looked round over his shoulder to see what kind of creature it was that could thus introduce itself without his knowledge. It was young, young almost to excess. He judged it to be about two- or three-and-twenty. At his approach it drew as close as possible to the sideboard. It had the air of cultivating assiduously the art of self-effacement, for its face, when looked at, achieved an expression of inimitable remoteness. He now perceived that the creature was not only young but most adorably feminine. He smiled, simply to reassure it. "How on earth did you get in without my hearing you?" "I was told to be very quiet, sir. And not to speak." "Well, you have spoken, haven't you?" She, as it were, seized upon and recovered the smile that darted out to play reprehensibly about the corners of her mouth. "I had to," said she. Soft-footed and soft-tongued, moving like a breath, that was how Rose Eldred first appeared to George Tanqueray. He had asked her name, and her name, she said, was Rose.