Flutter-Duck began to clean the fish with intensified viciousness. She had bought them as a substitute for the goose, and they were a constant reminder of her complex illhap. Very soon she cut her finger, and scoured the walls vainly in search of cobweb ligature. Bitter was her plaint of the servant's mismanagement; when she herself had looked after the house there had been no lack of cobwebs in the corners. Nor was this the end of Flutter-Duck's misfortunes. When, in the course of the afternoon, she sent up to Mrs. Levy on the second floor to remind her that she would be wanting her embroidered petticoat for the evening, answer came back that it was the anniversary of Mrs. Levy's mother's death, and she could not permit even her petticoat to go to a wedding. Finally, the gloves that Flutter-Duck borrowed from the chandler's wife were split at the thumbs. And so the servant was kept running to and fro, spoiling the neighbours for the greater glory of Flutter-Duck. It was only at the eleventh hour that an embroidered petticoat was obtained. Altogether there was electricity in the air, and Emanuel was not present to divert it down the road of jocularity. The furriers stitched sullenly, with a presentiment of storm. But it held over all day, and there was hope the currents would pass harmlessly away. With the rising of Flutter-Duck from the work-table, however, the first rumblings began. Lewis did not attempt to restrain her from her society dissipation, but he fumed inwardly throughout her toilette. More than ever he realised, as he sat coughing and bending over the ermine he was tufting with black spots, the incompatibility of this union between ant and butterfly, and occasionally his thought would shoot out in dry sarcasm. But Flutter-Duck had passed beyond the plane in which Lewis existed as her husband. All day she had talked freely, if a whit condescendingly, to her fellow-furriers, lamenting the mischances of the day; but in proportion as she began to get clean and beautiful, as the muslins of the great mirror became a frame for a gorgeous picture of a lady, Flutter-Duck grew more and more aloof from workaday interests, felt herself borne into a higher world of radiance and elegance, into a rarefied atmosphere of gentility, that froze her to statue-like frigidity. She was not Flutter-Duck then.