She said it coldly, even the little familiar mockery of Jane and the Academy, and Eddy knew that she was angry with him. That he did not like, and he said quickly, “May I go with you as far as Gordon Place?” (which was where Billy’s grandmother lived), and she answered with childish sullenness, “If we’re going the one way at the one time I suppose we will be together,” and said no more till he broke the silence as they crossed Leicester Square in the sunshine with, “Please, is anything the matter, Eileen?” She turned and looked at him, her face hard in the shadow of the sweeping hat-brim, and flung back ironically, “It is not. Of course not; how would it be?” Eddy made a gesture of despair with his hands. “You’re angry too. I knew it. You’re all angry, because I had Tariff Reformers and Orangemen to lecture to the Club.” “D’you tell me so?” She still spoke in uncomfortable irony. “I expect you hoped we would be grateful and delighted at being dragged back from Greece just when Hugh was beginning to be better, and to enjoy things, by a letter from that miserable Pollard all about the way you had the Club spoilt. Why, we hadn’t been to Olympia yet. We were just going there when Hugh insisted on calling for letters at Athens and got this. Letters indeed! Bridget and I didn’t ask were there any for us; but Hugh always will. And of course, when he’d read it nothing would hold him; he must tear off home by the next train and arrive in London three weeks sooner than we’d planned. Now why, if you felt you had to go to spoil Hugh’s club, couldn’t you have had Pollard strangled first, the way he wouldn’t be writing letters?” “I wish I had,” said Eddy, with bitter fervour. “I was a fool.” “And worse than that, so you were,” said Eileen, unsparingly. “You were unprincipled, and then so wanting foresight that you wrecked your own schemes. Three weeks more, and you might have had twenty-one more captains and clergymen and young men from Ulster to complete the education of Hugh’s young Liberals. As it is, Hugh thinks you’ve not done them much harm, though you did your best, and he’s slaving away to put sense into them again. The good of Greece is all gone from him already; worry was just what he wasn’t to do, and you’ve made him do it. He’s living already again at top speed, and over-working, and being sad because it’s all in such a silly mess. Hugh cares for his work more than for anything in the world,” her voice softened to the protective cadence familiar to Eddy, “and you’ve hurt him in it. No one should hurt Hugh in his work, even a little. Didn’t you know that?” She looked at him now with eyes less hostile but more sad, as if her thoughts had left him and wandered to some other application of this principle. Indeed, as she said it, it had the effect of a creed, a statement of a governing principle of life, that must somehow be preserved intact while all else broke.