Tommy and Etta had halcyon days of their own, which, but by the free use of curmudgeonly roughness, would have merged into Clementina’s. Etta had cajoled an infuriated admiral, raving round the room after a horsewhip, into a stern parent who consented to receive Tommy, explicitly reserving to himself the right to throw him out of window should the young man not take his fancy. Tommy called and was allowed to depart peacefully by the front door. Then Quixtus; incited thereto by Tommy, called upon the Admiral with the awful solemnity of a father in a French play, with the result that Tommy was invited to dinner at the Admiral’s and given as much excellent old port as he could stand. After which the Admiral called on Clementina, whom he had not met before. During the throes of horsewhip hunting he had threatened to visit her there and then and give her a piece of his mind—which at that moment was more like a hunk of molten lava than anything else. But the arts and wiles of Etta had prevailed so that the above scheduled sequence of events had been observed. Clementina, caught in the middle of a hot afternoon’s painting, received him, bedaubed and bedraggled, in the studio, whose chaos happened to be that day more than usually confounded. The Admiral, accustomed to the point-device females of his world, and making the spick and span of the quarter-deck a matter of common morality in material surroundings, went from Romney Place an obfuscated man. “I can’t make your friend out,” he said to Etta. “I don’t mind telling you that if I had seen her, I should never have allowed you to visit her. I found her looking more like a professional rabbit-skinner than a lady, and when I went to sit down I had to clear away a horrid plate of half-finished cold pie, by George, from the chair. She contradicted me flatly in everything I said about you—as if I didn’t know my own child—and filled me up with advice.” “And wasn’t it good, dear?” “No advice is ever good. Like Nebuchadnezzar’s food, it may be wholesome but it isn’t good. And then she turned round and talked the most downright common sense about women I’ve ever heard a woman utter. And then, by Jove, I don’t know how it happened—I never talk shop, you know——” “Of course you don’t, dear, never,” said Etta. “Of course I don’t—but somehow we got on to the subject, and she showed a more intelligent appreciation of the state of naval affairs than any man I’ve met for a long time! As for those superficial, theoretical donkeys at the Club——” “And what else, darling?” said Etta, who had often heard about the donkeys, but now was dying to hear about Clementina. “Do tell me what she talked about. She must have talked about me. Didn’t she?” “About you! I’ve told you.” He took her chin in his hand—she was sitting on a footstool, her arms about his knee. “You can’t have told me everything, dear.”