“Of course,” said Mr. Huss, “of course,” with a clear vision of Mrs. Croome confronted with the proposal. Sir Alpheus Mengo came down the next Saturday, and made a clandestine examination. He decided to operate the following week-end. Mr. Huss was left at his own request to break the news to his wife and to make the necessary arrangements for this use of Mrs. Croome’s rooms. But it was two days before he could bring himself to broach the matter. He sat now listening to the sounds of his wife moving about in the bedroom overhead, and to the muffled crashes that intimated the climax of Mrs. Croome’s preparation of the midday meal. He heard her calling upstairs to know whether Mrs. Huss was ready for her to serve up. He was seized with panic as a schoolboy might be who had not prepared his lesson. He tried hastily to frame some introductory phrases, but nothing would come into his mind save terms of disgust and lamentation. The sullen heat of the day mingled in one impression with his pain. He was nauseated by the smell of cooking. He felt it would be impossible to sit up at table and pretend to eat the meal of burnt bacon and potatoes that was all too evidently coming. It came. Its progress along the passage was announced by a clatter of dishes. The door was opened by a kick. Mrs. Croome put the feast upon the table with something between defence and defiance in her manner. “What else,” she seemed to intimate, “could one expect for four and a half guineas a week in the very height of the season? From a woman who could have got six!” “Your dinner’s there,” Mrs. Croome called upstairs to Mrs. Huss in tones of studied negligence, and then retired to her own affairs in the kitchen, slamming the door behind her. The room quivered down to silence, and then Mr. Huss could hear the footsteps of his wife crossing the bedroom and descending the staircase. Mrs. Huss was a dark, graceful, and rather untidy lady of seven and forty, with the bridling bearing of one who habitually repels implicit accusations. She lifted the lid of the vegetable dish. “I thought I smelt burning,” she said. “The woman is impossible.” She stood by her chair, regarding her husband and waiting. He rose reluctantly, and transferred himself to a seat at table. It had always been her custom to carve. She now prepared to serve him. “No,” he said, full of loathing. “I can’t eat. I _can’t_.” She put down the tablespoon and fork she had just raised, and regarded him with eyes of dark disapproval. “It’s all we can get,” she said. He shook his head. “It isn’t that.” “I don’t know what you expect me to get for you here,” she complained. “The tradesmen don’t know us—and don’t care.” “It isn’t that. I’m ill.” “It’s the heat. We are all ill. Everyone. In such weather as this. It’s no excuse for not making an effort, situated as we are.” “I mean I am really ill. I am in pain.”