Let him trace back things to Friday--or rather start with Friday, the day of Viola’s wedding. Viola was his daughter, a very young and modern girl who had made socially, though not financially, an excellent marriage. As Earls and Judges and Cabinet Ministers and their wives could not be expected to turn up at Ealing, where he dwelt, the wedding reception was held at the Hyde Park Hotel. There were two or three hundred people, a band and champagne and wedding presents and detectives and photographers and journalists and a young bridegroom with an Honourable before his name; everything that girlish bride could desire. A great success. When Cosmo Paradyne came to say good-bye to his daughter, it occurred to him that he was but distantly acquainted with her. Still, he performed his paternal duty. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I wish you weren’t going out to India, it’s so very far away.’ Whereat she laughed. ‘You never supposed I was going to live in Ealing all my life.’ He shrugged his shoulders. After all, it mattered very little where one lived. He remembered the shrug and the reflection. Everything was perfectly clear. His wife drove home in the car. He took a cab to his chambers where some work awaited him, papers to read in connection with that infernal ‘Phillibert _v_. Phillibert, Cohen & Smith.’ He took the train to Ealing, dressed, dined alone with Martha. The dinner was not particularly good. He was the last man in the world to insist on delicate cookery. He had neither the time nor the thought for pleasures of the table. But tough mutton was tough mutton; bad for the digestion and therefore bad for work. His wife, in her thin-lipped, acid, final voice, replied to his remonstrance: ‘I think it’s exceedingly good mutton. Roach is the best butcher in the neighbourhood. If he weren’t, I shouldn’t go to him.’ He did not press the point, having given up argument with Martha this many a year. He resumed their disconnected talk about the wedding and mentioned Viola’s scornful repudiation of Ealing. ‘Perhaps it’s a bit suburban,’ he said, with a smile. ‘It’s where I shall end my days,’ replied Martha. ‘And where, if Viola hadn’t married, she would have ended hers.’ [Illustration] She looked, with the pride of possession, around the decorous dining-room, its walls deadly with gloomy oil paintings; two full-length of her father and mother, ugly and awe-inspiring personages. For it was her own house, bequeathed to her (together with other worldly goods) by her father, a prosperous solicitor who had given Cosmo his first brief; and into it had she entered as a bride; and in it had she constructed and developed her own virtuous, dutiful and rigid life. ‘You’re not getting dissatisfied and wanting to change, I hope?’ ‘Oh, no, no,’ he replied hastily. ‘It’s good for me to live out of town.’ ‘You get your fresh air and your golf.’ ‘I do,’ said he. He remembered that when the butler came round with a cheese soufflé he waved it away.