Henry, being very young, did not notice his eyes. Mark was thirty and looked it. His eyes were the eyes of a boy of twenty.... From Henry his dark neat clothes, his compact and resourceful air compelled envy and admiration—yes, and alarm. For Henry was, now, entirely and utterly concerned with himself, and every fresh incident, every new arrival was instantly set up before him so that he might see how he himself looked in the light of it. Never before, within Henry’s memory, had anyone not a relation, not even the friend of a relation, been admitted so intimately into the heart of the house, and it seemed to Henry that now already a new standard was being set up and that, perhaps, the family by the light of this dashing figure, who knew Russia like an open book and could be relied upon at the most dangerous crisis, might regard himself, Henry, as something more crudely shabby and incompetent than ever. Moreover he was not sure that Mark himself did not laugh at him.... Beyond all this there was the sense that Mark had, in a way, invaded the place. It was true that the family had, after that first eventful evening, pressed him to stay, but it had pressed him as though it had, upon itself, felt pressure—as though its breath had been caught by the impact of some new force and, before it could recover from its surprise, behold the force was there, inside the room with the doors closed behind it. “It’s hardly decent for him to stay on like this,” thought Henry, “and yet after all we asked him. And ... he _is_ jolly!” Jolly was something that only Henry’s father and Uncle Tim of the Trenchard family could be said to be, and its quality was therefore both enlivening and alarming. “Mother won’t like it, if he’s too jolly,” thought Henry, “I’m not sure if she likes it now.” Henry had, upon this afternoon, an extra cause for anxiety; a friend of his, a friend of whom he was especially proud, was coming to tea. This friend’s name was Seymour and he was a cheerful young man who had written several novels and was considered ‘promising’— The Trenchards had a very slight knowledge of that world known as ‘the Arts’ and they had (with the exception of Henry) a very healthy distrust of artists as a race. But young Seymour was another affair. He was a gentleman, with many relations who knew Trenchards and Faunders; his novels were proper in sentiment and based always upon certain agreeable moral axioms, as for instance “It is better to be good than to be bad” and “Courage is the Great Thing” and “Let us not despise others. They may have more to say for themselves than we know.”