le were photographs of Philip's mother, the frames had been
smashed and the glass shivered. Philip went into the tiny kitchen.
Everything that was breakable was broken, glasses, pudding-basins, plates,
dishes.

It took Philip's breath away. Mildred had left no letter, nothing but this
ruin to mark her anger, and he could imagine the set face with which she
had gone about her work. He went back into the sitting-room and looked
about him. He was so astonished that he no longer felt angry. He looked
curiously at the kitchen-knife and the coal-hammer, which were lying on
the table where she had left them. Then his eye caught a large
carving-knife in the fireplace which had been broken. It must have taken
her a long time to do so much damage. Lawson's portrait of him had been
cut cross-ways and gaped hideously. His own drawings had been ripped in
pieces; and the photographs, Manet's Olympia and the Odalisque of
Ingres, the portrait of Philip IV, had been smashed with great blows of
the coal-hammer. There were gashes in the table-cloth and in the curtains
and in the two arm-chairs. They were quite ruined. On one wall over the
table which Philip used as his desk was the little bit of Persian rug
which Cronshaw had given him. Mildred had always hated it.

"If it's a rug it ought to go on the floor," she said, "and it's a dirty
stinking bit of stuff, that's all it is."

It made her furious because Philip told her it contained the answer to a
great riddle. She thought he was making fun of her. She had drawn the
knife right through it three times, it must have required some strength,
and it hung now in tatters. Philip had two or three blue and white plates,
of no value, but he had bought them one by one for very small sums and
liked them for their associations. They littered the floor in fragments.
There were long gashes on the backs of his books, and she had taken the
trouble to tear pages out of the unbound French ones. The little ornaments
on the chimney-piece lay on the hearth in bits. Everything that it had
been possible to destroy with a knife or a hammer was destroyed.

The whole of Philip's belongings would not have sold for thirty pounds,
but most of them were old friends, and he was a domestic creature,
attached to all those odds and ends because they were his; he had been
proud of his little home, and on so little money had made it pretty and
characteristic. He sank down now in despair. He asked himself how she
could