He leaned back luxuriously in his chair; he stretched his long legs.
“Never so fit in my life,” he said; and he extended his long hand to take from the desk at his side a little carved box that Pauline had bought of a Japanese to hold his nail-scissors.
He had observed a little speck of dirt beneath the nail of his forefinger. And in the pleasant well-being of the world he half dozed away, the box held nearly to his nose. It exhaled a faint musky odour, and suddenly his eyes opened as he jerked out of his day-dream.
“Etta!” he said, for the box exhaled the scent that Etta Hudson always had about her—a sweet, musky, cobwebby odour....
“By God!” he said; and he crossed himself as he had learned to do in St. Andrew’s, Holborn, where his wife worshipped.
The lines of his face seemed to decompose; his head fell forward; his mouth opened. Pauline was closing the door after her silent entry. It was a long, dusky slice of the rear-house, and he watched her approach, wide-eyed and panic-stricken, as if she held an animal-trainer’s whip. The little smile was about her lips when she stood over his huddled figure in the light of the stained-glass window that had been put in to hide the dreary vision of house-backs.
She held out her little gloved hand; her face was quite tranquil.
“She knows all about it,” he said, “Good God!”
“Dudley, dear,” she said, “I know all about it.”
IV