is so overcome by living in such continual grandeur, sleeping in a bed with gold trimmings—Napoleonic, Edith says—bathing in a bathroom with Florentine tiles, entertaining all the big bugs within a hundred miles, and travelling to the office every morning in a limousine, that he feels that he must have been a mere worm when Edith picked him up. I think he's more of a worm now! Anyhow he doesn't show any backbone.
Sometimes at the table I glance at him across the flowers, and once in a long, long while there's a look in his eyes when they meet mine that I recognise as my dear brother's. Usually it's when Ruth and Edith are discussing society; and after one of these clandestine meetings of Alec's and mine across the flowers, I always come up here to my room wonderfully comforted, with a feeling that I am not absolutely deserted, after all.
Perhaps that sounds as if I were unhappy. Please do not think so, because I'm not. I'm bound not to be. I should be ashamed of myself, if just because I happened to be ousted from my job and didn't fancy my successor, I simply "went out into the back yard and ate worms." That isn't what I'm doing at all. Once Alec was married and I had made up my mind that I couldn't run away to New York and earn my way, or hire a house of my own and live by myself, I buckled down and did my level best to adjust my likes and habits to the conditions of Edith's reign. One can get used to anything, I believe. I accepted Edith as a person ought to accept any circumstance that can't be avoided. What if her ambitions do seem to me unworthy? What if she has
