Mr. Paramor’s eyebrows, which jutted from his clean, brown face like little clumps of pothooks, were iron-grey, and iron-grey his hair brushed back from his high forehead.  Mrs. Pendyce wondered why he looked five years younger than Horace, who was his junior, and ten years younger than Charles, who, of course, was younger still.  His eyes, which from iron-grey some inner process of spiritual manufacture had made into steel colour, looked young too, although they were grave; and the smile which twisted up the corners of his mouth looked very young.

“Well,” he said, “it’s a great pleasure to see you.”

Mrs. Pendyce could only answer with a smile.

Mr. Paramor put the roses to his nose.

“Not so good as yours,” he said, “are they? but the best I can do.”

Mrs. Pendyce blushed with pleasure.

“My garden is looking so beautiful——­” Then, remembering that she no longer had a garden, she stopped; but remembering also that, though she had lost her garden, Mr. Paramor still had his, she added quickly:  “And yours, Mr. Paramor—­I’m sure it must be looking lovely.”

Mr. Paramor drew out a kind of dagger with which he had stabbed some papers to his desk, and took a letter from the bundle.

“Yes,” he said, “it’s looking very nice.  You’d like to see this, I expect.”

“Bellew v.  Bellew and Pendyce” was written at the top.  Mrs. Pendyce stared at those words as though fascinated by their beauty; it was long before she got beyond them.  For the first time the full horror of these matters pierced the kindly armour that lies between mortals and what they do not like to think of.  Two men and a woman wrangling, fighting, tearing each other before the eyes of all the world.  A woman and two men stripped of charity and gentleness, of moderation and sympathy-stripped of all that made life decent and lovable, squabbling like savages before the eyes of all the world.  Two men, and one of them her son, and between them a woman whom both of them had loved!  “Bellew v.  Bellew and Pendyce”!  And this would go down to fame in company with the pitiful stories she had read from time to time with a sort of offended interest; in company with “Snooks v.  Snooks and Stiles,” “Horaday v.  Horaday,” “Bethany v.  Bethany and Sweetenham.”  In company with all those cases where everybody seemed so dreadful, yet where she had often and often felt so sorry, as if these poor creatures had been fastened in the stocks by some malignant, loutish spirit, for all that would to come and jeer at.  And horror filled her heart.  It was all so mean, and gross, and common.

The letter contained but a few words from a firm of solicitors confirming an appointment.  She looked up at Mr. Paramor.  He stopped pencilling on his blotting-paper, and said at once: 

“I shall be seeing these people myself tomorrow afternoon.  I shall do my best to make them see reason.”