“I wonder,” said Emmy, “whether you know what this means to me.”

“It’s home,” replied Septimus, with an approving glance around the little dining-room.  “You must get me a flat just like this.”

“Close by?”

“If it’s too close I might come here too often.”

“Do you think that possible?” she said, with as much wistfulness as she dare allow herself.  “Besides, you have a right.”

Septimus explained that as a Master of Arts of the University of Cambridge he had a right to play marbles on the Senate House steps, a privilege denied by statute to persons in statu pupillari, but that he would be locked up as a lunatic if he insisted on exercising it.

After a pause Emmy looked at him, and said with sudden tragicality: 

“I’m not a horrible, hateful worry to you, Septimus?”

“Lord, no,” said Septimus.

“You don’t wish you had never set eyes on me?”

“My dear girl!” said Septimus.

“And you wouldn’t rather go on living quietly at Nunsmere and not bother about me any more?  Do tell me the truth.”

Septimus’s hand went to his hair.  He was unversed in the ways of women.

“I thought all that was settled long ago,” he said.  “I’m such a useless creature.  You give me something to think about, and the boy, and his education, and his teeth.  And he’ll have whooping cough and measles and breeches and things, and it will be frightfully interesting.”

Emmy, elbow on table and chin in hand, smiled at him with a touch of audacity in her forget-me-not eyes.

“I believe you’re more interested in the boy than you are in me.”

Septimus reddened and stammered, unable, as usual, to express his feelings.  He kept to the question of interest.

“It’s so different,” said he.  “I look on the boy as a kind of invention.”

She persisted.  “And what am I?”

He had one of his luminous inspirations.

“You,” said he, “are a discovery.”

Emmy laughed.  “I do believe you like me a little bit, after all.”

“You’ve got such beautiful finger-nails,” said he.

Madame Bolivard brought in the coffee.  Septimus in the act of lifting the cup from tray to table let it fall through his nervous fingers, and the coffee streamed over the dainty table-cloth.  Madame Bolivard appealed fervently to the Deity, but Emmy smiled proudly as if the spilling of coffee was a rare social accomplishment.

Soon after this Septimus went to his club with orders to return for tea, leaving Emmy to prepare for her meeting with Zora.  He had offered to be present at this first interview so as to give her his support, and corroborate whatever statement as to his turpitudes she might care to make in explanation of their decision to live apart.  But Emmy preferred to fight her battle single-handed.  Alone he had saved the situation by his very vagueness.  In conjunction with herself there was no knowing what he might do, for she had resolved to exonerate him from all blame and to attribute to her own infirmities of disposition this calamitous result of their marriage.