At this moment the door opened, and a footman came in to extinguish the lights and close the piano. By mistake he let the lid of the latter drop with a bang. Lady Holme, who had just got up to go to bed, started violently. She said nothing but stared at him for an instant with an expression of cold rebuke on her face. The man reddened. Lord Holme was already on the stairs. He yawned again noisily, and turned the sound eventually into a sort of roaring chant up and down the scale as he mounted towards the next floor. Lady Holme came slowly after him. She had a very individual walk, moving from the hips and nearly always taking small, slow steps. Her sapphire-blue gown trailed behind her with a pretty noise over the carpet. When her French maid had locked up her jewels and helped her to undress, she dismissed her, and called out to Lord Holme, who was in the next room, the door of which was slightly open. “Fritz!” “Girlie?” His mighty form, attired in pale blue pyjamas, stood in the doorway. In his hand he grasped a toothbrush, and there were dabs of white tooth-powder on his cheeks and chin. “Finish your toilet and make haste.” He disappeared. There was a prolonged noise of brushing and the gurgling and splashing of water. Lady Holme sat down on the white couch at the foot of the great bed. She was wrapped in a soft white gown made like a burnous, a veritable Arab garment, with a white silk hood at the back, and now she put up her hands and, with great precision, drew the hood up over her head. The burnous, thus adjusted, made her look very young. She had thrust her bare feet into white slippers without heels, and now she drew up her legs lightly and easily and crossed them under her, assuming an Eastern attitude and the expression of supreme impassivity which suits it. A long mirror was just opposite to her. She swayed to and fro, looking into it. “Allah-Akbar!” she murmured. “Allah-Akbar! I am a fatalist. Everything is ordained, so why should I bother? I will live for the day. I will live for the night. Allah-Akbar, Allah-Akbar!” The sound of water gushing from a reversed tumbler into a full basin was followed by the reappearance of Lord Holme, looking very clean and very sleepy. Lady Holme stopped swaying. “You look like a kid of twelve years old in that thing, Vi,” he observed, surveying her with his hands on his hips. “I am a woman with a philosophy,” she returned with dignity. “A philosophy! What the deuce is that?” “You didn’t learn much at Eton and Christchurch.” “I learnt to use my fists and to make love to the women.” “You’re a brute!” she exclaimed with most unphilosophic vehemence. “And that’s why you worship the ground I tread on,” he rejoined equably. “And that’s why I’ve always had a good time with the women ever since I stood six foot in my stockin’s when I was sixteen.”