been summoned to meet
his companion over the situation that, as he was now to learn, their
visitor's advent had created for them. It was actually more than
midnight, the servants had been sent to bed, the rattle of the wheels
had ceased to come in through a window still open to the August air, and
Robert Assingham had been steadily learning, all the while, what it
thus behoved him to know. But the words just quoted from him presented
themselves, for the moment, as the essence of his spirit and his
attitude. He disengaged, he would be damned if he didn't--they were
both phrases he repeatedly used--his responsibility. The simplest, the
sanest, the most obliging of men, he habitually indulged in extravagant
language. His wife had once told him, in relation to his violence of
speech; that such excesses, on his part, made her think of a retired
General whom she had once seen playing with toy soldiers, fighting and
winning battles, carrying on sieges and annihilating enemies with little
fortresses of wood and little armies of tin. Her husband's exaggerated
emphasis was his box of toy soldiers, his military game. It harmlessly
gratified in him, for his declining years, the military instinct; bad
words, when sufficiently numerous and arrayed in their might, could
represent battalions, squadrons, tremendous cannonades and glorious
charges of cavalry. It was natural, it was delightful--the romance, and
for her as well, of camp life and of the perpetual booming of guns. It
was fighting to the end, to the death, but no one was ever killed.

Less fortunate than she, nevertheless, in spite of his wealth of
expression, he had not yet found the image that described her favourite
game; all he could do was practically to leave it to her, emulating
her own philosophy. He had again and again sat up late to discuss those
situations in which her finer consciousness abounded, but he had never
failed to deny that anything in life, anything of hers, could be a
situation for himself. She might be in fifty at once if she liked--and
it was what women did like, at their ease, after all; there always
being, when they had too much of any, some man, as they were well
aware, to get them out. He wouldn't at any price, have one, of any sort
whatever, of his own, or even be in one along with her. He watched her,
accordingly, in her favourite element, very much as he had sometimes
watched, at the Aquarium, the celebrated lady who, in a slight, though
tight