n doesn't need _you_," said Miss Goucher. "I don't wish to be
brutal; but she doesn't. In spite of this, she can easily stand alone."

"I see. And you think that would be best?"

"Naturally. Don't you?"

"I'm not so sure."

As I muttered this my eyes, too, fixed themselves on the fragments of
Buddha. Would the woman never go! I hated her; it seemed to me now that
I had always hated her. What was she after all but a superior kind of
servant--presuming in this way! The irritation of these thoughts swung
me suddenly round to wound her, if I might, with sarcasm, with implied
contempt. But it is impossible to wound the air. With her customary
economy of explanation Miss Goucher had, pitilessly, left me to myself.

IV

The evening of this already comfortless day I now recall as one of the
most exasperating of my life. Maltby Phar arrived for dinner and the
week-end--an exasperation foreseen; Phil came in after dinner--another;
but what I did not foresee was that Lucette Arthur would bring her
malicious self and her unspeakably tedious husband for a formal call.
Lucette was an old friend of Gertrude, and I always suspected that her
occasional evening visits were followed by a detailed report; in fact, I
rather encouraged them, and returned them promptly, hoping that they
were. In my harmless way of life even Lucette's talent for snooping
could find, I felt, little to feed upon, and it did not wholly displease
me that Gertrude should be now and then forced to recognize this.

The coming of Susan had, not unnaturally, for a time, provided Lucette
with a wealth of interesting conjecture; she had even gone so far as to
intimate that Gertrude felt I was making--the expression is entirely
mine--an ass of myself, which neither surprised nor disturbed me, since
Gertrude had always had a tendency to feel that my talents lay in that
direction. But, on the whole, up to this time--barring the Sonia
incident, which had afforded her a good deal of scope, but which, after
all, could not be safely misinterpreted--Lucette had found at my house
pretty thin pickings for scandal; and I could only wonder at the
unwearying patience with which she pursued her quest.

She arrived with poor Doctor Arthur in tow--Dr. Lyman Arthur, who
professed Primitive Eschatology in the School of Religion: eschatology
being "that branch of theology which treats of the end of the world and
man's condition or state after death"--just upon the heels of Phil,