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The large, clumsy but otherwise unnoticeable being that this fascinating man had brought in his train was setting up pretensions to her notice. He had just placed before her a small blue china plate that contained a little black caviare and a round of lemon; a small Sevres, pinkish, delicate plate that held the pinkest peach in the room. She had said to him: 'Oh...a little caviare! A peach!' a long time before, with the vague underfeeling that the names of such comestibles must convey to her person a charm in the eyes of Caliban.

She buckled about her her armour of charm; Tietjens was gazing with large, fishy eyes at the caviare before her. 'How do you get that, for instance?' he asked.

'Oh!' she answered: 'If it wasn't my husband's doing it would look like ostentation. I'd find it ostentatious for myself.' She found a smile, radiant, yet muted. 'He's trained Simpkins of New Bond Street. For a telephone message overnight special messengers go to Billingsgate at dawn for salmon, and red mullet, this, in ice, and great blocks of ice too. It's such pretty stuff...and then by seven the car goes to Ashford Junction...All the same, it's difficult to give a breakfast before ten.'

She didn't want to waste her careful sentences on this grey fellow; she couldn't, however, turn back, as she yearned to do, to the kindredly running phrases--as if out of books she had read!--of the smaller man.

'Ah, but it isn't,' Tietjens said, 'ostentation. It's the great Tradition. You mustn't ever forget that your husband's Breakfast Duchemin of Magdalen.'

He seemed to be gazing, inscrutably, deep into her eyes. But no doubt he meant to be agreeable.

'Sometimes I wish I could,' she said. 'He doesn't get anything out of it himself. He's ascetic to unreasonableness. On Fridays he eats nothing at all. It makes me quite anxious...for Saturdays.'

Tietjens said:

'I know.'

She exclaimed--and almost with sharpness:

'You know!'

He continued to gaze straight into her eyes:

'Oh, of course one knows all about Breakfast Duchemin!' he said. 'He was one of Ruskin's road-builders. He was said to be the most Ruskin-like of them all!'

Mrs Duchemin cried out: 'Oh!' Fragments of the worst stories that in his worst moods her husband had told her of his old preceptor went through her mind. She imagined that the shameful parts of her intimate life must be known to this nebulous monster. For Tietjens, turned sideways and facing her, had seemed to grow monstrous, and as if with undefined outlines. He was the male, threatening, clumsily odious and external! She felt herself say to herself: 'I will do you an injury, if ever--' For already she had felt herself swaying the preferences, the thoughts and the future of the man on her other side. He was the male, tender, in-fitting; the complement of the harmony, the meat for consumption, like the sweet pulp of figs...It was inevitable; it was essential to the nature of her relationship with her husband that Mrs Duchemin should have these feelings...

She heard, almost without emotion, so great was her disturbance, from behind her back the dreaded, high, rasping tones:

'Post coitum triste! Ha! Ha! That's what it is?' The voice repeated the words and added sardonically: 'You know what that means?' But the problem of her husband had become secondary; the real problem was: 'What was this monstrous and hateful man going to say of her to his friend, when, for long hours, they were away?'

He was still gazing into her eyes. He said nonchalantly, rather low.

'I wouldn't look round if I were you. Vincent Macmaster is quite up to dealing with the situation.'

His voice had the familiarity of an elder brother's. And at once Mrs Duchemin knew--that he knew that already close ties were developing between herself and Macmaster. He was speaking as a man speaks in emergencies to the mistress of his dearest friend. He was then one of those formidable and to be feared males who possess the gift of right intuitions.

Tietjens said: 'You heard!'

To the gloating, cruel tones that had asked:

'You know what that means?'