The street noises died down at last; she had slept two hours when they began again.  She lay listening.  And the noises and her thoughts became tangled in her exhausted brain—­one great web of weariness, a feeling that it was all senseless and unnecessary, the emanation of cross-purposes and cross-grainedness, the negation of that gentle moderation, her own most sacred instinct.  And an early wasp, attracted by the sweet perfumes of her dressing-table, roused himself from the corner where he had spent the night, and began to hum and hover over the bed.  Mrs. Pendyce was a little afraid of wasps, so, taking a moment when he was otherwise engaged, she stole out, and fanned him with her nightdress-case till, perceiving her to be a lady, he went away.  Lying down again, she thought:  ’People will worry them until they sting, and then kill them; it’s so unreasonable,’ not knowing that she was putting all her thoughts on suffering in a single nutshell.

She breakfasted upstairs, unsolaced by any news from George.  Then with no definite hope, but a sort of inner certainty, she formed the resolution to call on Mrs. Bellew.  She determined, however, first to visit Mr. Paramor, and, having but a hazy notion of the hour when men begin to work, she did not dare to start till past eleven, and told her cabman to drive her slowly.  He drove her, therefore, faster than his wont.  In Leicester Square the passage of a Personage between two stations blocked the traffic, and on the footways were gathered a crowd of simple folk with much in their hearts and little in their stomachs, who raised a cheer as the Personage passed.  Mrs. Pendyce looked eagerly from her cab, for she too loved a show.

The crowd dispersed, and the cab went on.

It was the first time she had ever found herself in the business apartment of any professional man less important than a dentist.  From the little waiting-room, where they handed her the Times, which she could not read from excitement, she caught sight of rooms lined to the ceilings with leather books and black tin boxes, initialed in white to indicate the brand, and of young men seated behind lumps of paper that had been written on.  She heard a perpetual clicking noise which roused her interest, and smelled a peculiar odour of leather and disinfectant which impressed her disagreeably.  A youth with reddish hair and a pen in his hand passed through and looked at her with a curious stare immediately averted.  She suddenly felt sorry for him and all those other young men behind the lumps of paper, and the thought went flashing through her mind, ‘I suppose it’s all because people can’t agree.’

She was shown in to Mr. Paramor at last.  In his large empty room, with its air of past grandeur, she sat gazing at three La France roses in a tumbler of water with the feeling that she would never be able to begin.