Meanwhile she obviously hadn’t even begun to get over it. She stood looking at her and Rose with an expression that appeared to be one of anger. Anger. Fancy. Silly old nerve-racked London feelings, thought Mrs. Wilkins, whose eyes saw the room full of kisses, and everybody in it being kissed, Mrs. Fisher as copiously as she herself and Rose. “You don’t like us being in here,” said Mrs. Wilkins, getting up and at once, after her manner, fixing on the truth. “Why?” “I should have thought,” said Mrs. Fisher leaning on her stick, “you could have seen that it is my room.” “You mean because of the photographs,” said Mrs. Wilkins. Mrs. Arbuthnot, who was a little red and surprised, got up too. “And the notepaper,” said Mrs. Fisher. “Notepaper with my London address on it. That pen—” She pointed. It was still in Mrs. Wilkins’s hand. “Is yours. I’m very sorry,” said Mrs. Wilkins, laying it on the table. And she added smiling, that it had just been writing some very amiable things. “But why,” asked Mrs. Arbuthnot, who found herself unable to acquiesce in Mrs. Fisher’s arrangements without at least a gentle struggle, “ought we not to be here? It’s a sitting-room.” “There is another one,” said Mrs. Fisher. “You and your friend cannot sit in two rooms at once, and if I have no wish to disturb you in yours I am unable to see why you should wish to disturb me in mine.” “But why—” began Mrs. Arbuthnot again. “It’s quite natural,” Mrs. Wilkins interrupted, for Rose was looking stubborn; and turning to Mrs. Fisher she said that although sharing things with friends was pleasant she could understand that Mrs. Fisher, still steeped in the Prince of Wales Terrace attitude to life, did not yet want to, but that she would get rid of that after a bit and feel quite different. “Soon you’ll want us to share,” said Mrs. Wilkins reassuringly. “Why, you may even get so far as _asking_ me to use your pen if you knew I hadn’t got one.” Mrs. Fisher was moved almost beyond control by this speech. To have a ramshackle young woman from Hampstead patting her on the back as it were, in breezy certitude that quite soon she would improve, stirred her more deeply than anything had stirred her since her first discovery that Mr. Fisher was not what he seemed. Mrs. Wilkins must certainly be curbed. But how? There was a curious imperviousness about her. At that moment, for instance, she was smiling as pleasantly and with as unclouded a face as if she were saying nothing in the least impertinent. Would she know she was being curbed? If she didn’t know, if she were too tough to feel it, then what? Nothing, except avoidance; except, precisely, one’s own private sitting-room.