"But, John, you don't understand. I can't afford to keep you for more than—"
"There a cab!" observed Mr. Goble.
Hughie looked down out of the window.
"So it is," he said hastily. "I'll show them up, John. You go on with your work."
He was across and out of the room in three strides, and could be heard descending the stairs kangaroo fashion.
Mr. John Goble breathed heavily into a spoon and rubbed it with the point of his elbow.
"I wunner wha his visitors is," he mused caustically. "Of course he always opens the door himsel' tae all his visitors! Of course I dinna ken wha she is! Oh, no!"
He wagged his head in a broken-hearted manner, and gave vent to a depressing sound which a brother Scot would have recognised as a chuckle of intense amusement.
To him entered Miss Ursula Harbord. She wore pince-nez and a sage-green costume of some art fabric—one of the numerous crimes committed in the name of Liberty. She was Joan Gaymer's latest fad; and under her persuasive tutelage Joan was beginning to learn that the men who all her life had served her slightest whim were at once monsters of duplicity and brainless idiots; and that, given a few more fervid and ungrammatical articles in "The New Woman," women would shortly come to their own and march in the van of civilisation, and that people like Ursula Harbord would march in the van of the women.
Pending this glorious destiny, Miss Harbord acted as unsettler-in-general of Joan's domestic instincts, and worried Hughie considerably.