"Can't you see other people dressed up without wanting to go and do the same yourself?" Henry asked. "What's the matter with the frock you've got on?" However, she talked to Monkley about it and had her own way. When she had new clothes, she used to walk about the streets again, but, though she was often accosted, she would never talk to anybody. Yet it was a dull life, really, and once she brought up the subject of getting work. "Work!" her father exclaimed, in horror. "Good heavens! what will you think of next? First it's clothes. Now it's work. Ah, my dear girl, you ought to have had to slave for your living as I had; you wouldn't talk about work." "Well, can I have a piano and learn to play?" Sylvia asked. "Perhaps you'd like the band of the Grenadier Guards to come and serenade you in your bedroom while you're dressing?" Henry suggested. "Why shouldn't she have a piano?" Monkley asked. "I'll teach her to play. Besides, I'd like a piano myself." So the piano was obtained. Sylvia learned to play, and even to sing a little with her deep voice; and another regular caller for money was added to the already long list. In the autumn Sylvia's father fell in love, and brought a woman to live in what was henceforth always called the flat, even by Henry, who had hitherto generally referred to it as The Hammam. In Sylvia's opinion the advent of Mabel Bannerman had a most vitiating effect upon life in Fitzroy Street. Her father began to deteriorate immediately. His return to England and the unsurveyed life he had been leading for nearly two years had produced an expansion of his personality in every direction. He had lost the shiftless insignificance that had been his chief characteristic in France, and though he was still weak and lacking in any kind of initiative, he had acquired a quaintness of outlook and faculty for expressing it which disguised his radical futility under a veil of humor. He was always dominated by Monkley in practical matters where subordination was reasonable and beneficial, but he had been allowed to preserve his own point of view, that with the progress of time had even come to be regarded as important. When Sylvia was much younger she had always criticized her father's behavior; but, like everybody else, she had accepted her mother's leadership of the house and family as natural and inevitable, and had regarded her father as a kind of spoiled elder brother whose character was fundamentally worthless and whose relation to her mother was the only one imaginable. Now that Sylvia was older, she did not merely despise her father's weakness; she resented the shameful position which he occupied in relation to this intruder. Mabel Bannerman belonged to that full-blown intensely feminine type that by sheer excess of femininity imposes itself upon a weak man, smothering him, as it were, with her emotions and her lace, and destroying by sensuality every trait of manhood that does not directly contribute to the justification of