“Ah no” said Mr. Shatov with a little laugh of sincere amusement, “Veslovski will not do foolish things.” She rose to her feet on the tide of her relief, meeting, as she garnered all the hours of her long day and turned with an out-spreading sheaf of questions towards the expanses of evening leisure so safely at her disposal in the oncrowding to-morrows, the rebuke of the brilliantly burning midnight gas. “But tell me; how has Mrs. Bailey been so good?” He sat conversationally forward as if it were the beginning of the evening. “Oh well.” She sought about distastefully amongst the phrases she had collected in descriptions given to her friends, conveying nothing. Mr. Shatov knowing the framework, would see the detail alive and enhance her own sense of it. She glanced over the picture. Any single selection would be misleading. There was enough material for days of conversation. He was waiting eagerly, _not_ impatient after all of personal experiences. Yet nothing could be told...... “You see she lets me be amphibious.” Her voice smote her. Mrs. Bailey’s kindliness was in the room. She was squandering Mrs. Bailey’s gas in an effort that was swiftly transforming itself under the influence of her desire to present an adequate picture of her own separate life. His quickening interest drove her on. She turned her eyes from the gas and stared at the carpet, her picture broken up and vanishing before the pathos of its threadbare faded patterns. “I’m neither a lodger nor a boarder,” she recited hurriedly. “I have all the advantages of a boarder; the use of the whole house. I’ve had this room and the piano to myself for years, on Sunday mornings until dinner time, and when there are interesting people I can go down to dinner. I do for weeks on end sometimes, and it is so convenient to be able to have meals on Sundays.” “It is really a most _admirable_ arrangement,” he said heartily. “And last year I had a bicycle accident. I was brought back here with a very showy arm; in a cab. Poor Mrs. Bailey fainted. It was not at all serious. But they gave me their best room, the one behind this, for weeks and waited upon me most beautifully, and mind you they did not expect any compensation, they knew I could not afford it.” “An injury that should disable for so many weeks shall not have been a light one.” “That was the doctor. You see it was Saturday. It was more than an hour before they could find anyone at all, and then they found a small surgeon in Gower Street. He stitched up my arm with a rusty darning needle taken from Mrs. Bailey’s work-basket just as it was. I told him I had some carbolic in my room; but he said Nevorr mind that. I’m not one of yrr faddists, and bound it all up and I came down to dinner. I had just come back from the first week of my holiday; bicycling in Buckinghamshire, perfect, I never felt so well in my life. I was going to Paris the next day.” “That was indeed most unfortunate.”