Speed was mumbling something appropriate and the Head was piloting him into the dining-room when Potter appeared again, accompanied by a dark-haired girl, short in stature and rather pale-complexioned. She seemed quite unconcerned as she caught up the tail end of the procession into the dining-room and remarked casually: "How are you, Doctor Ervine?--So sorry I'm a trifle late. Friday, you know,--rather a busy day for the shop." The Head looked momentarily nonplussed, then smiled and said: "Oh, not at all ... not at all... I must introduce you to our new recruit--Mr. Speed.... This is Miss Harrington, a friend of my daughter's. She--um, yes, she manage--most successfully, I may say--the--er--the bookshop down in the town. Bookshop, you know." He said that with the air of implying: Bookshops are not ordinary shops. Speed bowed; the Head went on boomingly: "And she is, I think I may venture to say, my daughter's greatest friend. Eh?" He addressed the monosyllable to the girl with a touch of shrewdness: she replied quietly: "I don't know." The three words were spoken in that rare tone in which they simply mean nothing but literally what they say. In the dining-room they sat in the following formation: Dr. and Mrs. Ervine at the head and foot respectively; Helen and Clare together at one side, and Speed opposite them at the other. The dining-room was a cold forlorn-looking apartment in which the dim incandescent light seemed to accomplish little more than to cast a dull glitter of obscurity on the oil-paintings that hung, ever so slightly askew, on the walls. A peculiar incongruity in it struck Speed at once, though the same might never have occurred to anybody else: the minute salt and pepper-boxes on the table possessed a pretty feminine daintiness which harmonised ill with the huge mahogany sideboard. The latter reminded Speed of the board-room of a City banking-house. It was as if, he thought, the Doctor and his wife had impressed their personalities crudely and without compromise; and as if those personalities were so diametrically different that no fusing of the two into one was ever possible. Throughout the meal he kept looking first to his left, at Mrs. Ervine, and then to his right at the Doctor, and wondering at what he felt instinctively to be a fundamental strangeness in their life together. Potter, assisted by a speckle-faced maid, hovered assiduously around, and the Doctor assisted occasionally by his wife, hovered no less assiduously around the conversation, preventing it from lapsing into such awkward silences as would throw into prominence the continual hissing of the gas and his own sibilant ingurgitation of soup. The Doctor talked rather loudly and ponderously, and with such careful and scrupulous qualifications of everything he said that one had the impressive sensation that incalculable and mysterious issues hung upon his words; Mrs. Ervine's remarks were short and pithy, sometimes a little cynical.