“Is Mr. Marchbanks coming in to breakfast, Miss James?” said the housekeeper, more and more censorious. “I couldn’t say. But I’ll come down as soon as mine is ready. I’ll be down in a minute, anyhow, to see the policeman. Extraordinary that he is still here.” She sat down before her window, in the sun, to think a while. She could see the snow outside, the bare, purplish trees. The air all seemed rare and different. Suddenly the world had become quite different, as if some skin or integument had broken, as if the old, moldering London sky had crackled and rolled back, like an old skin, shriveled, leaving an absolutely new blue heaven. “It really is extraordinary!” she said to herself. “I certainly saw that man’s face. What a wonderful face it was! “I shall never forget it. Such laughter! He laughs longest who laughs last. He certainly will have the last laugh. I like him for that: he will laugh last. Must be some one really extraordinary! How very nice to be the one to laugh last. He certainly will. What a wonderful being! I suppose I must call him a being. He’s not a person exactly. “But how wonderful of him to come back and alter all the world immediately! _Isn’t_ that extraordinary. I wonder if he’ll have altered Marchbanks. Of course, Marchbanks never saw him. But he heard him. Wouldn’t that do as well, I wonder! I _wonder_!” She went off into a muse about Marchbanks. She and he were such friends. They had been friends like that for almost two years. Never lovers. Never that at all. But _friends_. And after all, she had been in love with him: in her head. This seemed now so funny to her: that she had been, in her head, so much in love with him. After all, life was too absurd. Because now she saw herself and him as such a funny pair. He so funnily taking life terribly seriously, especially his own life. And she so ridiculously _determined_ to save him from himself. Oh, how absurd! _Determined_ to save him from himself, and wildly in love with him in the effort. The determination to save him from himself! Absurd! Absurd! Absurd! Since she had seen the man laughing among the holly bushes—_such_ extraordinary, wonderful laughter—she had seen her own ridiculousness. Really, what fantastic silliness, saving a man from himself! Saving anybody. What fantastic silliness! How much more amusing and lively to let a man go to perdition in his own way. Perdition was more amusing than salvation anyhow, and a much better place for most men to go to. She had never been in love with any man, and only spuriously in love with Marchbanks. She saw it quite plainly now. After all, what nonsense it all was, this being-in-love business. Thank goodness she had never made the humiliating mistake. No, the man among the holly bushes had made her see it all so plainly: the ridiculousness of being in love, the _infra dig_ business of chasing a man or being chased by a man. “Is love really so absurd and _infra dig_?” she said aloud to herself.