Save for a ticking of clocks, silence prevailed throughout the house. The electric light, clear and steady, revealed every object in its completeness. The temperature was some degrees higher than during the day, and airless in proportion to its increased warmth. Half-way down the shining oak staircase, Laurence was saluted by the musky odour of the orchids. Clinging, enfolding, it seemed to meet him more as a presence than a scent. The dining-room door stood wide open. The under-butler came forth and went noiselessly towards the offices. There followed a muffled sound of baize doors swinging to. Then simultaneously, sharply, from all quarters, clocks struck the half hour. "Only half-past ten!" Laurence exclaimed. "How villainously early! I wish to goodness I had not lost my temper though. It was slightly imbecile. If the poor, old gentleman enjoys being offensive, why shouldn't he be so? He has none too many opportunities of amusement." He paused, looking down the bright, vacant, silent corridor, past the open doors of all the bright, vacant, silent rooms. "If it comes to that, nor have I," he added, "when I come to think of it. There's a notable paucity of excitement in this existence, and this beastly hot air makes one too muzzy to read." He yawned.--"What a mercy Virginia didn't come! She would have been most extensively and articulately bored." He sauntered aimlessly along the passage, past the fine, copper-plate engravings, and the impassive, Roman emperors, and drew up before the great, tapestry curtain. Again he looked curiously at the figures worked so skilfully upon it. The light took the silken surface, bringing the warm flesh-tints into high relief, against the dim, grey-green background of shadowy hill and grove. "No wonder my uncle blasphemes if that represents his only idea of the relation of the sexes." He sighed involuntarily. "Yes, but, thank God, there is more in it all than merely that," he said. Then he repeated:--"It is a mercy Virginia did not come. It would not have suited her from any point of view. She'd have been hideously bored, and she would have been offended and a good deal shocked. It is queer the way the Puritanic element survives over there, notwithstanding their modernity." Laurence smiled to himself, becoming aware of the slight inconsistency of his own attitude--his late heated championship of the claims of the Eternal Feminine, his self-congratulation at the fact that his own particular investment in the matter of womanhood was, at present, safely away on the other side of the Atlantic.