“You don’t even pick up my slipper,” she said.

“Ten thousand pardons,” I exclaimed, springing forward.  But she had anticipated my intention.  We remained staring into the fire and saying nothing.  As she professed to be tired I went away early.

At the front door of the mansions, finding I had left my umbrella behind, I remounted the stairs, and rang Judith’s bell.  After a while I saw her figure through the ground-glass panel approach the door, but before she opened it, she turned out the light in the passage.

“Marcus!” she cried, rather excitedly; and in the dimness of the threshold her eyes looked strangely accusative of tears.  “You have come back!”

“Yes,” said I, “for my umbrella.”

She looked at me for a moment, laughed, clapped her hands to her throat, turned away sharply, caught up my umbrella, and putting it into my hands and thrusting me back shut the door in my face.  In great astonishment I went downstairs again.  What is wrong with Judith?  She said this evening that all men are cruel.  Now, I am a man.  Therefore I am cruel.  A perfect syllogism.  But how have I been cruel?

I walked home.  There is nothing so consoling to the depressed man as the unmitigated misery of a walk through the London rain.  One is not mocked by any factitious gaiety.  The mind is in harmony with the sodden universe.  It is well to have everything in the world wrong at one and the same time.

I have changed my drenched garments for dressing-gown and slippers.  I find on my writing-table a letter addressed in a round childish hand.  It is from Carlotta, who for the last fortnight has been staying in Cornwall with the McMurrays.  I have known few fortnights so long.  In a ridiculous schoolboy way I have been counting the days to her return—­the day after to-morrow.

The letter begins:  “Seer Marcous dear.”  The spelling is a little jest between us.  The inversion is a quaint invention of her own.  “Mrs. McMurray says, can you spare me for one more week?  She wants to teach me manners.  She says I have shocked the top priest here—­oh, you call him a vikker—­now I do remember—­because I went out for a walk with a little young pretty priest without a hat, and because it rained I put on his hat and the vikker met us.  But I did not flirt with the little priest.  Oh, no!  I told him he must not make love to me like the young man from the grocer’s.  And I told him that if he wrote poetry you would beat him.  So I have been very good.  And darling Seer Marcous, I want to come back very much, but Mrs. McMurray says I must stay, and she is going to have a baby and I am very happy and good, and Mr. McMurray says funny things and makes me laugh.  But I love my darling Seer Marcous best.  Give Antoinette and Polifemus [the one-eyed cat) two very nice kisses for me.  And here is one for Seer Marcous from his
          
                                          “CARLOTTA.”