One Sunday afternoon a friendly orthoepical difference of this nature arose even as Mrs. Maper sat in her palatial drawing room waiting for callers, and they repaired to the library, Mrs. Maper arguing the point with loud good humour.  A glass door giving by corkscrew iron steps on the garden, banged hurriedly as they made their chattering entry.  The rows of books—­that had gone with the Hall like the family portraits—­stretched silently away, but amid the smell of leather and learning, Eileen’s lively nostrils detected the whiff of the weed, and sure enough on the top of a stepladder reposed a plain briar pipe beside an unclosed Greek folio.

“The scent is hot,” she thought, touching the still warm bowl.  “Bob seems as scared as a rabbit and as learned as an owl.”  Suddenly she had difficulty in repressing a laugh.  What if Bob were the corresponding male companion!

“I see Mr. Robert has forgotten his pipe,” she said audaciously.

Mrs. Maper was taken aback.  “The—­the boy is shy,” she stammered.

What!  Was there a son lying perdu in the house all this while?  What fun!  A son who did not even go to church or to his mother’s receptions.  But how had he managed to escape her?  And why did nobody speak of him?  Ah, of course, he was a cripple, or facially disfigured, morbidly dreading society, living among his books.  She had read of such things.  Poor young man!

After dinner she found herself examining the family album inquisitively, but beyond a big-browed and quite undistorted baby nursing a kitten, there did not seem anything remotely potential, and she smiled at herself as she thought of the difficulty of evolving bibs into briar pipes and developing Greek folios out of kittens.

From Mrs. Maper’s keenness about the University Boat Race as it drew near, and from her wearing on the day itself a dark blue gown trimmed profusely with ribbons of the same hue, Eileen divined that Bob was an Oxford man.  This gave the invisible deformed a new touch of interest, but long ere this Eileen had found a much larger interest—­the theatre.

She had never been to the play, and the Theatre Royal of the Black Hole was the scene of her induction into this enchantment.  In those days the touring company system had not developed to its present complexity, and the theatre had been closed during the first month or so of Eileen’s residence in Dromedary Town.  But at length, to Mrs. Maper’s delight, a company arrived with a melodrama, and as part of her duties, Eileen, no less excited over the new experience (which her Confessor had permitted her), drove with her mistress behind a pair of spanking steeds to the Wednesday matinee.  Mrs. Maper alleged her inability to leave her homekeeping husband as the cause of her daylight playgoing, but Eileen maliciously ascribed it to the pomp of the open carriage.