Egidia said she must go home. Rivers unyoked his palette from his thumb, and laid it down carefully. He led her out of the studio, downstairs, past walls covered with framed diplomas, and medals, and all kinds of memoranda of a life spent in the service and honor of Art. His house in Bedford Square was pre-eminently a bachelor’s house; an indurated, deeply ingrained celibacy was suggested by the presence of many articles of furniture, and the absence of others. Rivers was of the orderly description of bachelor, of all kinds the most inveterate. Egidia, in her mind’s eye, could not see the little Elles throning it here, her trivial prettiness overwhelmed by the grandiose style of decoration appropriate to the mansions of Bloomsbury, her eyes resting on high wall spaces hung with old masters, her footsteps treading staircases whose angles were filled with yellow casts of heroic statues. There was never a bit of drapery, or a Tanagra figurine to reduce the scale a little. It was all the difference between the atmosphere of the British Museum, and a Louis Seize Boudoir. Egidia felt happier at the definition of this anomaly between the tastes of Rivers and Phœbe, and went away having absorbed some of the contagion of Rivers’ confidence in a renewed term of celibacy for himself. Mrs. Elles had not yet returned when she got home, but came fluttering in presently, and touched her shoulder as she sat over the fire shivering with the chill depression of thoughts that would rise, in spite of the consoling visit she had just made. “Cheer up!” said Mrs. Elles. “I have brought you a little present, nothing particular, only to show that I love you. A little gold lucky bean. Will you wear it to please me?” She sank down on the hearthrug, and laid her hand, and for the moment her head, on Egidia’s knee. This was one of her “caressing little ways,” to which Egidia was ashamed of objecting. “Where have you been?” she said coldly. “With the Doctor or the Lawyer?” “Lawyer. Right away down to Holborn. Of course, I got there too soon. I generally do. I am so eager to hear what fresh news they have. A divorce case is so exciting. But then I have to wait, in the lobby, among all that barren brownness of cheap varnish, and trodden oilcloth and japanned tin deed boxes stacked up to the very horizon. There I am on one of an awful row of bulging leather chairs, where the crowd of witnesses sit--I mean the grimy people that keep coming in, wiping their cuffs across their mouths, and sit down apologetically. They are to be examined in this or that disgusting case, as Jane Anne will be in mine. I watch the commissionaire adding up figures inside his queer hutch of a desk, and read up all about Salmon-Fishery Laws on the walls and see the little bow-legged clerks hop off their stools, and run about with sheaves of papers. Why can’t they make lawyers’ offices prettier?”