He had been distinctly nasty about those hats, hatefully sarcastic over the number, as if some special devilry resided in the sum of twice two and one over. By virtue of some ingrained perversity he had censured her for a run of ill-luck--such runs will occur, as every woman knows, in clothes, as well as in cards, commerce, horses, hunting, everything not exclusively feminine--he had censured her for an inevitable misfortune common to the race; he might as well have found fault with her for being liable to death, disease and bad husbands. Many sorrows had in these last days fallen to Ermengarde's lot. She had been losing steadily at bridge; her last At Home had been a fiasco; hockey had become impossible to her; her cook had been ill; there were no golf-links within reach, and the motor flight, planned for her across Europe by an intimate friend, had come to nothing in consequence of the chauffeur being under arrest for manslaughter. Meditating on these griefs in the lemon and smut-coloured dusk, her heart sank, and she had just dried two very large tears on one very small handkerchief, when the door opened and a visitor was announced--that is, he would have been, had he not shot himself into the room with the indecent vigour of aggressive good spirits, squeezed her hand to a jelly, and filled the room with boisterously cheerful observations, before there was time for the correct and aggrieved maid to do anything but maliciously switch on a savage glare of electric light and vanish. "Not bucked up yet after that disastrous Flu? You want sunshine, colour, fresh life. Why not try a winter at Cairo? Nothing like desert air--like champagne--cheers but not inebriates. Yes, I'm off again, bag and baggage, easel and golf-clubs. Make Allonby take you to Egypt--you wouldn't know yourself in the sunshine." "Any more than in the darkness; but, should I know you?" "Well, you'd see me in a better light. Not that I say a word against the poetry and mysticism--misty schism, not bad, eh?--of our native fogs. Still, you can have too much of a good thing--when it's fog." "Or optimism," she sighed, switching off the light, and restoring the glamour of ever-thickening fog, till the entrance of another aggravatingly cheerful being obliged her to light one of the two umbrella lamps that impeded progress in that part of the room not entirely blocked by screens and potted palms and small and easily upsettable tables, laden with frail and cherished trifles and phalanxes of photographs, such as strew the suburban pilgrim's progress from door to fireplace with stumbling-blocks, pitfalls and stones of offence.