“These things are everywhere,” he said after a gust of vehement handling, “I wish you’d tidy them up sometimes.”

“They were tidy enough till you began to throw them about,” Ethel pointed out.

“Confounded muck! it’s only fit to be burnt,” Lewisham remarked to the universe, and pitched one viciously into the corner.

“Well, you tried to write one, anyhow,” said Ethel, recalling a certain “Mammoth” packet of note-paper that had come on an evil end before Lewisham found his industrial level.  This reminiscence always irritated him exceedingly.

“Eh?” he said sharply.

“You tried to write one,” repeated Ethel—­a little unwillingly.

“You don’t mean me to forget that.”

“It’s you reminded me.”

He stared hostility for a space.

“Well, the things make a beastly litter anyhow; there isn’t a tidy corner anywhere in the room.  There never is.”

“That’s just the sort of thing you always say.”

“Well—­is there?”

“Yes, there is.”

“Where?”

Ethel professed not to hear.  But a devil had possession of Lewisham for a time.  “It isn’t as though you had anything else to do,” he remarked, wounding dishonourably.

Ethel turned.  “If I put those things away,” she said with tremendous emphasis on the “put,” “you’d only say I’d hidden them.  What is the good of trying to please you?”

The spirit of perversity suggested to Lewisham, “None apparently.”

Ethel’s cheeks glowed and her eyes were bright with unshed tears.  Abruptly she abandoned the defensive and blurted out the thing that had been latent so long between them.  Her voice took a note of passion.  “Nothing I can do ever does please you, since that Miss Heydinger began to write to you.”

There was a pause, a gap.  Something like astonishment took them both.  Hitherto it had been a convention that she knew nothing of the existence of Miss Heydinger.  He saw a light.  “How did you know?” he began, and perceived that line was impossible.  He took the way of the natural man; he ejaculated an “Ugh!” of vast disgust, he raised his voice.  “You are unreasonable!” he cried in angry remonstrance.  “Fancy saying that!  As though you ever tried to please me!  Just as though it wasn’t all the other way about!” He stopped—­struck by a momentary perception of injustice.  He plunged at the point he had shirked, “How did you know it was Miss Heydinger—?”

Ethel’s voice took upon itself the quality of tears.  “I wasn’t meant to know, was I?” she said.

“But how?”

“I suppose you think it doesn’t concern me?  I suppose you think I’m made of stone?”

“You mean—­you think—?”

“Yes—­I do.”

For a brief interval Lewisham stared at the issue she had laid bare.  He sought some crashing proposition, some line of convincing reasoning, with which to overwhelm and hide this new aspect of things.  It would not come.  He found himself fenced in on every side.  A surging, irrational rage seized upon him.