“I shouldn’t wonder,” he said, and stood with his back to the great Adam fireplace, and smoked his cigar. He was of medium-height, weathered looking, and broadly set: getting a little stout lately, and his fair hair thinning at the top. A commonplace face, you might call it, but the nose was good: straight, short and sensitive, very English. This was Ralph Loyalty, whose aunt, the late “John Loyalty,” had delighted our fathers with her books, which were of the sentimental-sophisticated sort and have now dated a good deal. Ralph Loyalty was more than usually happy in his aunt, for she had left him a fortune, a famous name, but, people said, only the more solid side of her good sense. He was a man who liked the company of men; his recreations were golf, joining clubs, auction-bridge, and dining with his wife; he enjoyed George Robey, and he admired other people’s brains. Some people thought him rather solid and unimaginative--“estimable qualities,” they said, “but rather heavy on the hand.” But, as “Ralph” in half a dozen clubs meant Ralph Loyalty, other people said that popularity was his form of genius, and they were probably right. He was said to be in love with his wife. He tolerated rakes, cads, and co-respondents among his acquaintance, but he never understood them. Effeminate men he laughed at rather shyly, and left it at that. He had no enemies, but most of his wife’s friends disliked him. They would have been surprised to see him at this moment, so miserable he looked, but they would not have been surprised at his wife’s attitude on the sofa, for naturally she was bored to death with the man. His wife’s friends had long since despaired of Ralph Loyalty ever seeing that his wife was bored to death with him, and that is why they would have been surprised to see him now, for it was obviously because he had realised that this evening, at last, that he looked so miserable. “Well ...” began Ralph Loyalty suddenly, and then very deliberately knocked the ash of his cigar into the fireplace, which was unlike him with an ash-tray at hand, for he was an orderly man. And then he said a wicked word and banged out of the room. The candles flickered madly in the sudden draught. But it was as though Mrs. Loyalty did not hear the crash of the door, she did not stir. She did not sigh, nor did she instantly light a match for the cigarette which had lain for many minutes forgotten near her hand.