In the manner of youth the parlour-maids had come, worked, fallen in love and departed, but Mr. McCain, in the manner of increasing age, had if anything grown more faithful and exact to the moment.  If he were late the fraction of five minutes, one suspected that he regretted it, that it came near to spoiling his entire afternoon.  He was not articulate, but occasionally he expressed an idea and the most common was that he “liked his things as he liked them”; his eggs, in other words, boiled just so long, no more—­after sixty years of inner debate on the subject he had apparently arrived at the conclusion that boiled eggs were the only kind of eggs permissible—­his life punctual and serene.  The smallest manifestation of unexpectedness disturbed him.  Obviously that was one reason why, after a youth not altogether constant, he had become so utterly constant where Mrs. Denby was concerned.  She had a quality of perenniality, charming and assuring, even to each strand of her delicate brown hair.  Grayness should have been creeping upon her, but it was not.  It was doubtful if Mr. McCain permitted himself, even secretly, to wonder why.  Effects, fastidious and constant, were all he demanded from life.

This had been going on for twenty years—­this afternoon call; this slow drive afterward in the park; this return by dusk to the shining small house in the shining small street; the good-by, reticently ardent, as if it were not fully Mr. McCain’s intention to return again in the evening.  Mr. McCain would kiss Mrs. Denby’s hand—­slim, lovely, with a single gorgeous sapphire upon the third finger.  “Good-by, my dear,” he would say, “you have given me the most delightful afternoon of my life.”  For a moment Mrs. Denby’s hand would linger on the bowed head; then Mr. McCain would straighten up, smile, square his shoulders in their smart, young-looking coat, and depart to his club, or the large, softly lit house where he dwelt alone.  At dinner he would drink two glasses of champagne.  Before he drained the last sip of the second pouring he would hold the glass up to the fire, so that the bronze coruscations at the heart of the wine glowed like fireflies in a gold dusk.  One imagined him saying to himself:  “A perfect woman!  A perfect woman—­God bless her!” Saying “God bless” any one, mind you, with a distinct warming of the heart, but a thoroughly late-Victorian disbelief in any god to bless....  At least, you thought as much.

And, of course, one had not the slightest notion whether he—­old Mr. Henry McCain—­was aware that this twenty years of devotion on his part to Mrs. Denby was the point upon which had come to focus the not inconsiderable contempt and hatred for him of his nephew Adrian.