Mr Stodham, in spite of professing a poor opinion of the subject, was delighted in his quiet way to speak of himself. He was at this time a nearly middle-aged clerk, disappointed in a tranquil style, and beginning to regard it as something to his credit that when he had been four years married he had talked a good deal of going to the colonies. If only he had gone--his imagination was unequal to the task of seeing what might have happened if only he had gone. The regret or pretence of it gave him a sort of shadowy grandeur by suggesting that it was from a great height he had fallen to his present position in a suburban maisonette. Here by some means he had secured to himself the exclusive rights to a little room known as “The Study.” This room was narrower than it was high, and allowed no more than space for his table between the two walls of books, when he sat facing the French window, with the door behind. He looked out on a pink almond-tree, and while this flowered he could see nothing else but the tree and the south-east sky above it; at other seasons the hind parts of many houses like his own were unmistakeable. At night a green blind was let down over the window before the lamp was lit. In this room, and in no other place but Abercorran House, he was at home. Seated at that table, smoking, he felt equal to anything with which his wife or the world could afflict him. He desired no change in the room, beyond a slowly increasing length to accommodate his increasing books. He would have liked to open the windows more often than, being of the French pattern, was deemed safe. The room was completely and unquestionably his own. For his wife it was too shabby and too much out of her influence; she would not take her fingers from the door-handle when she had to enter it. His children were stiff and awed in it, because in earlier days he had been strict in demanding silence in its neighbourhood. Much as he wished that they would forget the old rule they could not; he liked to see them standing at the door looking towards him and the window, but they made haste to be off. As to the servant, she dreaded being caught in the room since the mistress had commanded her to dust it daily, and the master to leave it to him.