Little Laura, holding herself very straight, greeted him with her funny smile, a smile that was hardly more than a tremor of her white lips. Laura Gunning, at twenty-seven, had still in some of her moods the manner of a child. She was now like a seven-year-old made shy and serious by profound excitement. She was a very small woman and she had a small face, with diminutive features in excessively low relief, a face shadowless as a child's. Everything about Laura Gunning was small and finished with an innocent perfection. She had a small and charming talent for short stories, little novels, perfect within the limits of their kind. Tanqueray laid before her his Wendover scheme. Laura said he must ask Jane. It was Jane's birthday. Jane, being asked, said, No, she didn't mind where they went, provided they went somewhere. She supposed there was a gate they could sit on, while Tanqueray called on Nicky. Tanqueray said he thought he saw Nicky letting her sit on a gate. Considering that Nicky had been pestering him for the last six months (he had) to bring her out to have tea with him on one of their days. "And we've never been," said he. Jane let it pass. But Nina Lempriere, as Tanqueray well knew, had a devil in her. Nina's eyes had the trick of ignoring your position in the space they traversed, which made it the more disconcerting when they came back and fixed you with their curious, hooded stare. They were staring at Tanqueray now. "Where have you been?" said she. "We haven't heard of you for ages." "I've been ill." Jane looked at him and said nothing. "Ill? And you never told us?" said Nina. "I was all right. I was well looked after." "Who looked after you?" He did not answer her. For in that instant there rose before him the image of Rose Eldred, tender and desirable, and it kept him dumb. Nina, whose devil was nothing if not persistent, repeated her question. He divined already in Nina a secret, subtle hostility. "Oh," he said abruptly. "I looked after myself." Jane stared intently at a notice of the departure and arrival of trains. Laura, aware of embarrassment somewhere, began to talk to him light-heartedly, in her fashion, and the moment passed. In the train, going down to Wendover, Laura talked to Jane. Nina did not talk. Her queer eyes, when they looked at him, had a light in them of ironic devilry and suspicion. They left him speculating on the extent to which he was cutting himself off. This journey down to Wendover was a stage in the process. He was going down to tell Nicholson, to ask Nicholson to see him through. How would Jane take it? How would Nina? How would Laura? He had said to himself, light-heartedly, that his marriage would make no difference, that he should retain them, all three, as an intellectual seraglio. Would this, after all, be possible? When they heard that he, George Tanqueray, was marrying a servant in a lodging-house?