Julian Maldon faced Louis in the parlour. Louis had conducted him there without the assistance of Mrs. Tams, who had been not merely advised, but commanded, to go to bed. Julian had entered the house like an exasperated enemy--glum, suspicious, and ferocious. His mien seemed to say: "You wanted me to come, and I've come. But mind you don't drive me to extremities." Impossible to guess from his grim face that he had asked permission to come! Nevertheless he had shaken Louis' hand with a ferocious sincerity which Louis felt keenly the next morning. He was the same Julian except that he had grown a brown beard. He had exactly the same short, thick-set figure, and the same defiant stare. South Africa had not changed him. No experience could change him. He would have returned from ten years at the North Pole or at the Equator, with savages or with uncompromising intellectuals, just the same Julian. He was one of those beings who are violently themselves all the time. By some characteristic social clumsiness he had omitted to remove his overcoat in the lobby. And now, in the parlour, he could not get it off. As a man seated, engaged in conversation by a woman standing, forgets to rise at once and then cannot rise, finding himself glued to the chair, so was Julian with his overcoat; to take it off he would have had to flay himself alive. "Won't you take off your overcoat?" Louis suggested. "No." With his instinctive politeness Louis turned to improve the fire. And as he poked among the coals he said, in the way of amiable conversation-- "How's South Africa?" "All right," replied Julian, who hated to impart his sensations. If Julian had witnessed Napoleon's retreat from Moscow he would have come to the Five Towns and, if questioned--not otherwise--would have said that it was all right. Louis, however, suspected that his brevity was due to Julian's resentment of any inquisitiveness concerning his doings in South Africa; and he therefore at once abandoned South Africa as a subject of talk, though he was rather curious to know what, indeed, Julian had been about in South Africa for six mortal months. Nobody in the Five Towns knew for certain what Julian had been about in South Africa. It was understood that he had gone there as a commercial traveller for his own wares, when his business was in a highly unsatisfactory condition, and that he had meant to stay for only a month. The excursion had been deemed somewhat mad, but not more mad than sundry other deeds of Julian. Then Julian's manager, Foulger, had (it appeared) received authority to assume responsible charge of the manufactory until further notice. From that moment the business had prospered: a result at which nobody was surprised, because Foulger was notoriously a "good man" who had hitherto been baulked in his ideas by an obstinate young employer.