She hardly knew why she thought of going to tell Rokeby her news, but there was a want in her, a want of a wise someone’s comments, a kind someone’s sympathy.  She boarded a City omnibus and was carried to King William Street.

Here Desmond had his prosperous shipbroking office, and made his enviable thousands and sharpened his innately sharp brain, so well concealed below his lacklustre, almost naive, exterior.

A lift carried her up to the third floor, where she arrived before a door upon the glass panels of which were blazoned his name and profession, and pushing it open, she asked for him uncertainly.  A clerk said doubtfully:  “Have you come about the typist’s situation?” and looked at her in a summary fashion which made her timid.

She hated this timidity which had grown upon her with the married years; a timidity based upon loss of trust in her womanly powers, loss of the natural arrogance of beauty.  Holding her head very erect, she replied: 

“I am a friend of Mr. Rokeby’s.  Will you kindly say that Mrs. Osborn Kerr has called?” Second thoughts sent her fumbling in her bag and producing a card.

“You had better send in my card,” she said.

Desmond was busy with a client when the card was laid before him, but when he had glanced at it, he took it up and looked again, as if not believing his eyes.  “In five minutes,” he told the clerk; and, turning to the client, he clinched in that remarkably short while an arrangement which they had been discussing and quarrelling over for half an hour.

He stood up, waiting for Marie to enter.  When she came, he was struck, not having seen her since the birth of the third baby, by the further alteration in her.  How thin she was!  And quiet!  With that dullness which, in his judgment, too much domesticity always brought to women.  Like most ultra-modern men, while secretly making a fetish of the softer virtues in woman, he wanted them expressed somehow in an up-to-the-minute setting.  Yet he understood dimly the struggle of twentieth-century woman in trying to make herself at once as new as to-day and as old as creation.

“Well, this is nice,” he said very kindly, taking her hand with deference.  “I’ve a free hour, and lo! you come to fill it.  Let me pull the visitor’s chair right up to this fire, and give you a cup of tea.”

His kindness and attention were all about Marie with the benevolence of a new warm garment on a cold day.  She sat down in the great soft chair which he wheeled forwards for her, loosened her out-of-date fur neckwear, and looked around her with feminine interest.

“What a pretty office!” she said.  “And you have flowers.”

“Ladies sometimes come to tea,” he replied smilingly, pressing a bell.

To the clerk he said:  “Get tea from Fuller’s, right away.”