And as they never went to see anybody, nobody ever came to see them. The Hampstead ladies found Aggie dull and her conversation monotonous. It was all about Arthur and the babies; and those ladies cared little for Arthur, and for the babies less. Of Aggie's past enthusiasm they said that it was nothing but a pose. Time had revealed her, the sunken soul of patience and of pathos, the beast of burden, the sad-eyed, slow, and gray. The spirit of the place, too, had departed, leaving a decomposing and discolored shell. The beloved yellow villa had disclosed the worst side of its nature. The brown wall-paper had peeled and blistered, like an unwholesome skin. The art serge had faded; the drugget was dropping to pieces, worn with many feet; the wood-work had shrunk more than ever, and draughts, keen as knives, cut through the rooms and passages. The "Hope" and the "Love Leading Life" and the "Love Triumphant," like imperishable frescos in a decaying sanctuary, were pitiful survivals, testifying to the death of dreams. Saddest of all, the bookshelves, that were to have shot up to the ceiling, had remained three feet from the floor, showing the abrupt arrest of the intellectual life. It was evident that they hadn't kept it up. If anything, Arthur was more effaced, more obliterated, than his wife. He, whose appearance had once suggested a remarkable personality, a poet or a thinker, now looked what he had become, a depressed and harassed city clerk, no more. His face was dragged by deep downward lines that accentuated its weakness. A thin wisp of colorless mustache sheltered, without concealing, the irritability of his mouth. Under his high, sallow forehead, his eyes, once so spiritual, looked out on his surroundings with more indifference than discontent. His soul fretted him no longer; it had passed beyond strenuousness to the peace of dulness. Only the sounds made by his wife and children had power to agitate him. He was agitated now. "That will do," he said, looking up from the magazine he was trying to read, not because it interested him in the least, but because it helped to keep the noises out. But the children were clamoring for an encore. "Again, again!" they cried. "Oh Mummy, _do_ do it again!" "Hsh-sh-sh. Daddy's reading." And Aggie drew the children closer to her, and went on with the rhyme in her sad, weak whisper. "If you must read aloud to them, for goodness' sake speak up and have done with it. I can't stand that whispering." Aggie put down the picture-book, and Arty seized one half and Catty the other, and they tugged, till Catty let go and hit Arty, and Arty hit Catty back again, and Catty howled. "Can't you keep those children quiet?" "Oh, Arty, shame! to hurt your little sister!" At that Arty howled louder than Catty. Arthur sat up in his chair. "Leave the room, sir! Clear out this instant!" His weak face looked weaker in its inappropriate assumption of command. "Do you hear what I say, sir?"