To-day, however, there was more in his comfortable smiling countenance than merely paying a visit warranted. He stood for a moment at the door looking over at her, rather fat but not very, his white hair, his pearl pin, his white spats all gleaming, a rosiness and a cleanliness always about him so that he seemed, at any moment of the day, to have come straight from his tub, having jumped, in his eagerness to see you, into his beautiful clothes, and hurried, all in a glow, to get to you. "They're all chattering downstairs--chattering like anything. There's Roddy Seddon, old Lady Carloes and Crewner and some young ass Crewner's brought with him and your Uncle Dick looking bored and your Aunt Adela looking nothing at all--and so out of it I came." He came over and sat on the broad, fat arm of her chair and looked out, in his contented, amiable way, over the light, salmon-coloured and pale, that now had persuaded Portland Place into silence. His eyes seemed to say: "Now this is how I like things--all pink and quiet and comfortable." Rachel leant a little against his shoulder, and put her hand on his knee-- "You've had tea down there?" "Yes, thank you--all I wanted. What have you been doing all the afternoon?" He put his own hand down upon hers. "Oh! Aunt Adela and I went to look at grandmother's portrait." "Well?" "It's as clever as it can be. To anyone who doesn't know her, it's the most wonderful likeness. It's what grandmother would like herself." He caught the note in her voice that threatened the pink security of Portland Place. He held her hand a little tighter. "In what way?" "Oh, it's got the dragons and the tapestry and the purple carpet. All the coloured things that grandmother like so much and that help her so. Why, imagine her for a second in an ordinary room, in an old arm-chair with a worn-out carpet and everlastings on the mantelpiece; what _would_ she do? The young man, whoever he is, has helped her all he can." Rachel felt his grasp of her hand slacken a little. "Yes, I know it's wrong of me to talk like that. But it's all so sham. It's like someone in one of those absurd fantastic novels that people write nowadays when half the characters are out of Dickens only put into a real background. I'm frightened of grandmother--you know I always have been--but sometimes I wonder whether----" She paused. "Whether there's anything really to be frightened of. And yet the relief when I can get off this half-hour every evening--the relief even now when I'm even grown up--oh! it's absurd!" "Well, my dear, you're coming out, you're going to break away from all of us--you'll have your own life now to make what you like of."