"Of course you are," she asserted. "That's just where the beauty of it all comes in. You're the veriest infant. One has only to look into your face to see that.--Don't go and freeze up now. You belong to another order of doctrine and practice to that current in contemporary society." Poppy gazed at the floor, still making herself small, the palms of her hands pressed together between her knees. "And that's just why you can be useful to me, awfully useful, if you choose--I don't mean money, business, anything of the kind. I'm perfectly competent to manage my own affairs, thank you. But you're good for me, somehow. You rest me." She began to rock herself gently backwards and forwards, but without taking the heels of her shoes off the ground. "Yes, you rest me, you rest me," she repeated. "I am glad," Iglesias said. He felt soberly pleased, thankful almost. Again Poppy glanced at him sideways. "Yes, I believe you are," she said. "And that shows things have happened to you--in you, more likely--since we last met. You have come on a great piece." "I doubt if I have come on, so much as gone back, to influences of long ago," he answered; "to things which had been overlaid by the dust of my working years almost to the point of obliteration." "Was it pleasant to go back?" Poppy asked. "Not at all. The going was painful. It required some courage to brush off the dust." "It usually does require courage--at least that's my experience--to brush off the dust." Dominic Iglesias made no immediate answer. He was a little startled at his companion's acute reading of him, a little touched by her confidence. Her words seemed to suggest the possibility of a relationship which fitted in admirably with the development of his idea. He sat looking away across the room, and, doing so, became aware that the said room possessed unexpected characteristics, calculated to elucidate his impressions of its owner's character. It was a man's room rather than a woman's, innocent of furbelows and frills. Two low, wide settees, well furnished with cushions and upholstered in dark yellowish-red tapestry, fitted into the corners on either side the double doors. A couple of large armchairs and a revolving book-table occupied the centre of the room. An upright piano, in an ebonised case, draped across the back with an Indian phulkari--discs of looking-glass set in coarsely worked yellow eyelet holes forming the border of it--stood at right angles to the wall just short of the bay window. In the window, placed slant-wise, was a carved black oak writing-table, a long row of photographs stuck up against the back shelf of it. The walls were hung with a set of William Nicolson's prints, strong, dark, distinct, slightly sinister in effect; a fine etching of Jean François Millet's _Gleaners_; and, in noticeable contrast to this last, a mezzotint of Romney's picture of Lady Hamilton spinning. Upon the book-table were a silver ash-tray and cigarette-box. The air was