"I want to thank you," he said, "while I have the opportunity, for your sweetness and patience. My mother has coddled me so long; she loves doing it; and I let her because--well, because she is my mother. But don't be alarmed into believing I am the faddist she would make me appear. You will find, when we are married, it is I who will do the thinking for both. Don't worry your pretty head with trying to absorb these ideas. They amuse her; we need not distress ourselves about them." Prudence looked up at him with a smile in her wide blue eyes. "Have I really to see to the airing of your flannels before you change?" she asked. He laughed with her. "There is an airing cupboard. I don't think you need bother. But I believe she does." "You really are a reassuring person," she said, and held up her face to him to be kissed. "You are crumpling your shirt, Edward," Mrs Morgan said, entering the room at the moment, a commanding figure in black silk and fine old lace, with a critical eye on their grouping and an absence of sympathy in her look. Prudence moved away quickly with the feeling that she had been rebuked. The Henry Morgans arrived exactly five minutes in advance of dinner, and were received with restrained cordiality, and duly presented to Prudence. Mrs Henry, a bright little woman in the middle thirties, with a gay audacity of manner and a ready infectious laugh, took Prudence by the shoulders and kissed her effusively. Then she held her off at arm's length and scrutinised her closely. "It is absurd," she remarked, her amused eyes on the girl's blushing face; "you'll take precedence of me. You're the senior partner, you know. We really ought to change husbands." "Prudence is better suited to a serious-minded husband than you are, Rose, in everything but years," old Mrs Morgan retorted. Mrs Henry did not appear to resent this remark. She and her mother-in-law never met without an interchange of polite hostilities. "Now you know where to place me," she said to Prudence. "I'm the little lump of leaven amid the dough of Morgan responsibility. You and I have got to be friends. I've been blessing Edward ever since he broke the amazing news for introducing something youthful into the firm. We didn't expect it of him." The gong broke in on these indiscretions with its booming summons to the dining-room. Prudence went in with her fiance, and faced Henry Morgan and his wife at table. Henry was a younger edition of his brother, and not much more animated. It occurred to Prudence that Mrs Henry struck a bright note of contrast amid the semitones of the Morgan household.