her tooth leapt upon her.... It came to her like some malign and secret enemy, who would influence her not so deeply through actual pain as through his insistence on what, please God, he would do afterwards. She hurried home to breakfast through the wet, grey morning, saying to herself: “It shall not ache! I forbid it to ache! You hear me! You shall not!” and always that sinister whisper replied in her ear: “Wait. Just see what I’ll do to you in a moment.” In her bedroom some iodine, which she applied to her gum, reduced the inside of her mouth to sawdust; through the dried discomfort of it all her enemy still beat at her heart ironically. She was determined that the tooth should not alter her day. She knew how easily ordinary human beings succumbed—such weakness should not be hers. Nevertheless her love of honesty compelled her to admit that, this morning, the house looked horrible. It had, as she had often told Harriet, been always overcrowded with ‘things’—with mats and jars and pots and photographs, old books, magazines, ink-bottles, china ornaments, stones and shells, religious emblems, old calendars, and again photographs, photographs, photographs.... It was not that the house was definitely untidy, but that once a thing was there, _there_ it remained. The place looked like home, because it was filled with properties that any newcomer would instantly discard. Everything was dim and faded—carpets, curtains, books, pictures; Katherine, Millie, Henry could remember how the water-colour of “Rafiel Beach,” the photograph of Trezent Head, the dining-room marble clock, surmounted by the Goddess Diana minus her right leg, the book-case in the drawing-room, with rows and rows of the novels of Anthony Trollope (each in three volumes), the cuckoo clock in the dark corner on the first landing, the glass case with sea shells in the hall near the hat-rack, the long row of faded Trenchard and Faunder photographs in the drawing-room, the little corner cupboard with the Sunday games in it—Bible Lotto, puzzle map of Palestine, Bible Questions and Bible Answers—all these things had been “first there” since the beginning of time, even as the oak on the lawn, the rough grass meadows that ran to the very posts of the house, the little wood and the tennis lawn with the brown hole in the middle of it had always been ‘there.’ Aunt Aggie herself had grown profoundly accustomed to it all—in her heart she would not have had a shell nor a photograph removed from its place. Nevertheless, upon this grey Sunday morning she was oppressed, almost triumphantly, about her sense of the dinginess and confusion of the house. It was as though she said to herself: “There! it’s not my tooth at all that makes me feel out of sorts with things. It’s simply Harriet’s inability to put things straight.” She found then that everyone was very quiet at breakfast—‘sulky’ one could be justified in calling it. Moreover, there