“So you see now where you--where you--I mean, if I made the sacrifice, it had to be done completely. I had to make it easy for him to divorce and marry her. You see--she’s Doug’s happiness.” “May I ask, quite without prejudice, if she, the thin, brown-eyed child, is Doug’s _first_ happiness--since he married you?” Ursula flushed. “About the twenty-first; the heart of Doug has many splinters.” And though she laughed at the confession, her eyelids, like Mona Lisa’s, were a little weary.... She returned, with a touch of craftsman’s pride, to relation of her detailed scheme: “I invited Aunt Lavvy, so that she could be in the house when it all happened. That was a good idea, wasn’t it?” “The charming little Dresden lady with the coo in her voice? You hate her, don’t you, Ursula? Why did you wilfully select as chaperon, Aunt-Lavvy-whom-you-hate?” Ursula’s glance at him was now frankly admiring. He had wonderful perception, this--carpet-walker! “Why? Because somehow I enjoy building up a--bitterly comic state of affairs. And Aunt Lavvy and I ... and the room ...” She hesitated. “Sit down,” said Louis. “We have at least seven hours still to get through, in what is, for me in particular, another bitterly comic state of affairs. So, in the truly Russian-novel style, you shall tell me the whole story of Aunt Lavvy--and you--and the room.” Ursula did not read Russian novels. But it seemed oddly natural that to Louis, of all people, she should be able to talk more naturally than ever before to any one else.... ... “And yet people go on living with other people as though it weren’t the most important thing in the world,” said Ursula, by way of conclusion, epilogue, envoi and moral to her tale. “Aunt Lavvy, and our whole family, and Gums, and Stanley Watson, and the servants ... not selected to live together for any _reason_, but because it’s happened like that. It must be the same in millions of houses. Somebody always in a state of bruise through knocking up against somebody else, till we settle down to bruises, and get numb to them, and call the result ‘home’ or ‘family life,’ whichever you please. Do you know that some boarding houses advertise ‘family life’ ... with about thirty haphazard strangers. And nobody sees it’s funny. You choose your clothes with care and your career with care, but misfit houses are chosen anyhow, and rooms and meals are shared anyhow....” “Sometimes there’s a crisis--and combustion,” suggested Louis. And Ursula took him up jubilantly. “Yes, sometimes there’s a crisis. Over the last crisis, I lost the room and myself. This time----” she was about to say “this time I regain them both”; but once more she recalled what was undoubtedly a fact, that she was effacing herself so that Doug and Christine might be happy. “And”--her voice shook slightly over the amended version of her behaviour--“this time I’m going to run away, and so give Christine a present of her romance. It’s only decent, isn’t it? You’d say so?”