Once or twice I
glanced up, expecting to find some one in the room, that the door had
opened unobserved and Annie was waiting for instructions. I heard the
buses thundering across the bridge. I was aware of Oakley Street. Montenegro and the blue Adriatic melted into the October haze along that
depressing Embankment that aped a riverbank, and sentences from the
letter flashed before my eyes and stung me. Picking it up and reading it
through more carefully, I rang the bell and told Annie to find the
blouses and pack them for the post, showing her finally the written
description, and resenting the superior smile with which she at once
interrupted. "I know them, sir," and disappeared. But it was not the blouses: it was that exasperating thing "between the
lines" that put an end to my work with its elusive teasing nuisance. The
first sharp impression is alone of value in such a case, for once
analysis begins the imagination constructs all kinds of false
interpretation. The more I thought, the more I grew fuddled. The letter,
it seemed to me, wanted to say another thing; instead the eight sheets
conveyed it merely. It came to the edge of disclosure, then halted. There was something on the writer's mind, and I felt uneasy. Studying
the sentences brought, however, no revelation, but increased confusion
only; for while the uneasiness remained, the first clear hint had
vanished. In the end I closed my books and went out to look up another
matter at the British Museum library. Perhaps I should discover it that
way--by turning the mind in a totally new direction. I lunched at the
Express Dairy in Oxford Street close by, and telephoned to Annie that I
would be home to tea at five. And at tea, tired physically and mentally after breathing the exhausted
air of the Rotunda for five hours, my mind suddenly delivered up its
original impression, vivid and clear-cut; no proof accompanied the
revelation; it was mere presentiment, but convincing. Frances was
disturbed in her mind, her orderly, sensible, housekeeping mind; she was
uneasy, even perhaps afraid; something in the house distressed her, and
she had need of me. Unless I went down, her time of rest and change, her
quite necessary holiday, in fact, would be spoilt. She was too unselfish
to say this, but it ran everywhere between the lines. I saw it clearly
now. Mrs. Franklyn, moreover--and that meant Frances too--would like a
"man in the house." It was a disagreeable phrase, a suggestive way of
hinting something she dared not state definitely. The two women in that
great, lonely barrack of a house were afraid. My sense of duty, affection, unselfishness, whatever the composite
emotion may be termed, was stirred; also my vanity. I acted quickly,
lest reflection should warp clear, decent judgment. "Annie," I said, when she answered the bell, "you need not send those
blouses by the post. I'll take them down tomorrow when I go. I shall be
away a week or two, possibly longer." And, having looked up a train, I
hastened out to telegraph before I could change my fickle mind. But no desire came that night to change my mind. I was doing the right,
the necessary thing. I was even in something of a hurry to get down to
The Towers as soon as possible. I chose an early afternoon train. Chapter III


A telegram had told me to come to a town ten miles from the house, so I
was saved the crawling train to the local station, and traveled down by
an express. As soon as we left London the fog cleared off, and an autumn
sun, though without heat in it, painted the landscape with golden browns
and yellows. My spirits rose as I lay back in the luxurious motor and
sped between the woods and hedges. Oddly enough, my anxiety of overnight
had disappeared. It was due, no doubt, to that exaggeration of detail
which reflection in loneliness brings. Frances and I had not been
separated for over a year, and her letters from The Towers told so
little. It had seemed unnatural to be deprived of those intimate
particulars of mood and feeling I was accustomed to. We had such
confidence in one another, and our affection was so deep. Though she was
but five years younger than myself, I regarded her as a child. My
attitude was fatherly. In return, she certainly mothered me with a solicitude that never
cloyed. I felt no desire to marry while she was still alive. She painted
in watercolors with a reasonable success, and kept house for me; I
wrote, reviewed books and lectured on aesthetics; we were a humdrum
couple of quasi-artists, well satisfied with life, and all I feared for
her was that she might become a suffragette or be taken captive by one
of these wild theories that caught her imagination sometimes, and that
Mabel, for one, had fostered. As for myself, no doubt she deemed me a
trifle solid or stolid--I forget which word she preferred--but on the
whole there was just sufficient difference of opinion to make
intercourse suggestive without monotony, and certainly without
quarrelling. Drawing in deep draughts of the stinging autumn air, I felt happy and
exhilarated. It was like going for a holiday, with comfort at the end of
the journey instead of bargaining for centimes. But my heart sank noticeably the moment the house came into view. The
long drive, lined with hostile monkey trees and formal wellingtonias
that were solemn and sedate, was mere extension of the miniature
approach to a thousand semidetached suburban "residences"; and the
appearance of The Towers, as we turned the corner with a rush, suggested
a commonplace climax to a story that had begun interestingly, almost
thrillingly. A villa had escaped from the shadow of the Crystal Palace,
thumped its way down by night, grown suddenly monstrous in a shower of
rich rain, and settled itself insolently to stay. Ivy climbed about the
opulent red-brick walls, but climbed neatly and with disfiguring effect,
sham as on a prison or--the simile made me smile--an orphan asylum. There was no hint of the comely roughness of untidy ivy on a ruin. Clipped, trained, and precise it was, as on a brand-new protestant
church. I swear there was not a bird's nest nor a single earwig in it
anywhere. About the porch it was particularly thick, smothering a
seventeenth-century lamp with a contrast that was quite horrible. Extensive glass-houses spread away on the farther side of the house; the
numerous towers to which the building owed its name seemed made to hold
school bells; and the windowsills, thick with potted flowers, made me
think of the desolate suburbs of Brighton or Bexhill. In a commanding
position upon the crest of a hill, it overlooked miles of undulating,
wooded country southwards to the Downs, but behind it, to the north,
thick banks of ilex, holly, and privet protected it from the cleaner and
more stimulating winds. Hence, though highly placed, it was shut in. Three years had passed since I last set eyes upon, it, but the unsightly
memory I had retained was justified by the reality. The place was
deplorable.