The Earl entered his library, and after lighting a few electric lights, which were only now throwing a dim and lurid light into the large room, he sank down into a huge armchair. It was very quiet in that room; double doors and double windows shut out the noise of the splashing rain against the window-panes, the thunder even was less violent in this well-padded room, and the lightning could not pierce through the shutters and the thick brocaded draperies. After the _fracas_ of the streets, it seemed to him as if he had already entered the Valley of Death as he sat in this silent place. The picture of his late father was hanging on the panel in front of him, and he looked at it for a considerable time. What could that face tell him at this critical hour, when for long years of his time he had never found one convincing argument with which to enlighten his son on all the grave problems of existence? It was always the same answers to the same inquiries: “My boy, others have gone through life besides yourself, and found it no worse than I have. Don’t think too hard, leave that to those who have to use their brains for a livelihood. You have a bed ready made to lie on, do not complain that it is too soft; but do not forget that you are a gentleman, and that when you have passed a few turnpikes of life—let us say, Eton, Oxford, the War or the Foreign Office—you can do whatever you like, for you are then innocuous; and no one, not even the most Argus-eyed dowager, will consider you dangerous, however wild your mode of life may be. My advice to you is, never fall into the clutches of any woman; to my mind the sex is divided into two dangerous species: the one that kill you before they bore you, the other that bore you before they kill you. But in either way you are a doomed man; though for myself I should prefer being killed to being bored—and as you know, I chose the former.”