rage had gone. He looked at her locked door and wished, miserably, that he might die for her. . . .
III
Later, as he sat, hopelessly, over the dim and sterile pages of “Mortimer Stant,” Mrs. Rossiter came, heavily, in to talk with him. Mrs. Rossiter always entered the room with an expression of stupid benignity that hid a good deal of rather sharp perception. The fact that she was not nearly so stupid as she looked enabled her to look all the stupider and she covered a multitude of brains with a quantity of hard black silk that she spread out around her with the air of one who is filling as much of the room as she can conveniently seize upon. Her plump arms, her broad and placid bosom, her flat smooth face, her hair, entirely negative in colour and arrangement, offered no clue whatever to her unsuspected sharpnesses. Smooth, broad, flat and motionless she carried, like the Wooden Horse of Troy, a thousand dangers in the depths of her placidity.
She had come now to assist her daughter, the only person for whom she may be said to have had the slightest genuine affection, for Dr. Rossiter she had long despised and Mrs. Galleon was an ally and companion but never a friend. She had allowed Clare to marry Peter, chiefly because Clare would have married him in any case, but also, a little, because she thought that Peter had a great career in front of him. Now that Peter's career seemed already to be, for the most part, behind him, she disliked him and because he appeared to have made Clare unhappy suddenly hated him . . . but placidity was the shield that covered her attack and, for a symbol, one might take the large flat golden brooch that she wore on her bosom—flat, expressionless and shining, with the sharpest pin behind it that ever brooch possessed.
Peter, whose miseries had accumulated as the minutes passed, was ready to seize upon anything that promised a reconciliation. He did not like Mrs. Rossiter—he had never been able to get to close quarters with her, and he was conscious that his roughness and occasional outbursts displeased her. He felt, too, that the qualities that he had
