He smiled at the uncomfortable figure she presented. "So that's what you call resting, is it?" "Walter--do you mind if I move some of the furniture in this room?" "Move it? Of course I don't. But why?" "Because I don't very much like the room as it is." "Why don't you like it?" (He really wanted to know.) "Because I don't feel comfortable in it." "Oh, I'm so sorry, dear. Perhaps--we'd better have some new things." "I don't want any new things." "What do you want, then?" His voice was gentleness itself. "Just to move all the old ones--to move everything." She spoke with an almost infantile petulance that appealed to him as pathetic. There was something terrible about Anne when armoured in the cold steel of her spirituality, taking her stand upon a lofty principle. But Anne, sitting on a high-backed chair, uttering tremulous absurdities, Anne, protected by the unconscious humour of her own ill-temper, was adorable. He loved this humanly captious and capricious, childishly unreasonable Anne. And her voice was sweet even in petulance. "My darling," he said, "you shall turn the whole house upside down if it makes you any happier. But"--he looked round the room in quest of its deficiencies--"what's wrong with it?" "Nothing's wrong. You don't understand." "No, I don't." His eye fell upon the corner where the piano once stood that was now in Edith's room. "There are three things," said he, "that you certainly ought to have. A piano, and a reading-stand, and a comfortable sofa. You shall have them." She threw back her head and closed her eyes to shut out the stupidity, and the mockery, and the misery of that idea. "I--don't--want"--she spoke slowly. Her voice dropped from its high petulant pitch, and rounded to its funeral-bell note--"I don't want a piano, nor a reading-stand, nor a sofa. I simply want a place that I can call my own." "But, bless you, the whole house is your own, if it comes to that, and every mortal thing in it. Everything I've got's yours except my razors and my braces, and a few little things of that sort that I'm keeping for myself." She passed her hand over her forehead, as if to brush away the irritating impression of his folly. "Come," he said, "let's begin. What do you want moved first? And where?" She indicated a cabinet which she desired to have removed from its place between the windows to a slanting position in the corner. He was delighted to hear her express a preference, still more delighted to be able to gratify it by his own exertions. He took off his coat and waistcoat, turned up his shirt cuffs, and set to work. For an hour he laboured under her directions, struggling with pieces of furniture as perverse and obstinate as his wife, but more ultimately amenable. When it was all over, Anne seated herself on the settee between the windows, and surveyed the scene. Majendie, in a rumpled shirt and with his hair in disorder, stood beside her, and smiled as he wiped the perspiration from his forehead.