Smithie I met before we were married, and afterwards she became a frequent visitor to our house at Ealing. She was a thin, bright-eyed, hawk-nosed girl of thirtyodd, with prominent teeth, a high-pitched, eager voice and a disposition to be urgently smart in her dress. Her hats were startling and various, but invariably disconcerting, and she talked in a rapid, nervous flow that was hilarious rather than witty, and broken by little screams of “Oh, my _dear!_” and “you never did!” She was the first woman I ever met who used scent. Poor old Smithie! What a harmless, kindly soul she really was, and how heartily I detested her! Out of the profits on the Persian robes she supported a sister’s family of three children, she “helped” a worthless brother, and overflowed in help even to her workgirls, but that didn’t weigh with me in those youthfully-narrow times. It was one of the intense minor irritations of my married life that Smithie’s whirlwind chatter seemed to me to have far more influence with Marion than anything I had to say. Before all things I coveted her grip upon Marion’s inaccessible mind. In the workroom at Smithie’s, I gathered, they always spoke of me demurely as “A Certain Person.” I was rumoured to be dreadfully “clever,” and there were doubts—not altogether without justification—of the sweetness of my temper. II Well, these general explanations will enable the reader to understand the distressful times we two had together when presently I began to feel on a footing with Marion and to fumble conversationally for the mind and the wonderful passion I felt, obstinately and stupidity, must be in her. I think she thought me the maddest of sane men; “clever,” in fact, which at Smithie’s was, I suppose, the next thing to insanity, a word intimating incomprehensible and incalculable motives.... She could be shocked at anything, she misunderstood everything, and her weapon was a sulky silence that knitted her brows, spoilt her mouth and robbed her face of beauty. “Well, if we can’t agree, I don’t see why you should go on talking,” she used to say. That would always enrage me beyond measure. Or, “I’m afraid I’m not clever enough to understand that.” Silly little people! I see it all now, but then I was no older than she and I couldn’t see anything but that Marion, for some inexplicable reason, wouldn’t come alive.