"Well," said I, "he won't speak to you about it. He will just be silent, and let you go on speaking--and when you've finished you can begin again." I got that gibe in just in time, as between the door-mat and the door, so to speak.... And I judged that it must have been very much as I said, for when I saw Iris again she was not even decently communicative about it, so that I had impatiently to accuse her of being the kind of woman who would liefer not mention her failures. But she said she hadn't failed, "and anyway the word 'failure' seems rather portentous about so childish a matter. "He was like a blank wall," she explained. "Or rather not a blank one, for he's never quite that. And, of course, his sort of silence made me lose my head as usual, so that I might just as well have been prattling about the cultivation of sweet potatoes as about poor Antony, for all the good I did. And in the end he merely said he would see about it, or words to that effect." "Or no effect," I amended, finally. But she did not tell me till much later that Roger had listened to her speech about Antony, an extremely unusual subject between them, with such a fine show of interest as he didn't generally lend to what she said; so that she had thought the thing was going on splendidly until, when she had finished, he had smiled, and murmured:-- "I wonder what other reason there could possibly be for Antony's wanting to make it up except that we are both acquainted with my wife...." VI So the matter dropped from my mind, except that I now and then gave a thought to Antony's queer idea, how and why on earth he had come to humble himself so--for that was the way the man would look at it. But I could not discover a hint of his possible motive until some days later; when, having asked Iris what he was about, for he hadn't come near me since that night of his arrival (obviously because he had no present use for me), she said he seemed to be dashing about the City seeing people, and, she hoped, profitably: "For I never see him but he has a pound or more registered on his taxi. But I daren't lecture him in case he loses his dash, and economises by not going to the City at all. For I think," she said with a hard look at me, "there's some good to come out of Antony yet." So that was it, then--Antony actually was taking something seriously for once! He really had brought back money schemes, big schemes of course, needing substantial backing, for like every other spendthrift he could only think in millions--and that was why he had suddenly found a use for Roger, the clever boy of the family!