He was very grateful, and also impressed by the accuracy of her intuitions and her quick resourcefulness.  She had comprehended at a glance that he had a profound and urgent need to be alone with her.  She was marvellously comforting, precious beyond price.  All his susceptibilities, wounded by the scene at Alexandra Grove, and further irritated by Agg, were instantaneously salved and soothed.  Her tones, her scarcely perceptible gesture of succour, produced the assuaging miracle.  She fulfilled her role to perfection.  She was a talented and competent designer, but as the helpmeet of a man she had genius.  His mind dwelt on her with rapture.

“You’ll be going out as soon as you’ve changed, dear?” she said affectionately to Agg.

“Yes,” answered Agg, who at the mirror was wiping from her face the painted signs of alcoholism.  She had thrown off the bag wig.  “You’d better take the key with you.  You’ll be back before I am.”  She sat down on one of the draped settees which were beds in disguise, and Marguerite got a hat, cloak, and gloves.

While George was resuming his overcoat, which Marguerite held for him, Agg suddenly sprang up and rushed towards them.

“Good night, Flora Macdonald,” she murmured in her deep voice in Marguerite’s ear, put masculine arms round her, and kissed her.  It was a truly remarkable bit of male impersonating, as George had to admit, though he resented it.

Then she gave a short, harsh laugh.

“Good night, old Agg,” said Marguerite, with sweet responsiveness, and smiled ingenuously at George.

George, impatient, opened the door, and the damp wind swept anew into the studio.

IV

It was a fine night; the weather had cleared, and the pavements were drying.  George, looking up in a pause of the eager conversational exchanges, drew tonic air mightily into his lungs.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“Tite Street,” said Marguerite.  “That’s the Tower House.”  And she nodded towards the formidable sky-scraper which another grade of landlord had erected for another grade of artists who demanded studios from the capitalist.  Marguerite, the Chelsea girl, knew Chelsea, if she knew nothing else; her feet turned corners in the dark with assurance, and she had no need to look at street-signs.  George regarded the short thoroughfare made notorious by the dilettantism, the modishness, and the witticisms of art.  It had an impressive aspect.  From the portico of one highly illuminated house a crimson carpet stretched across the pavement to the gutter; some dashing blade of the brush had maliciously determined to affront the bourgeois Sabbath.  George stamped on the carpet; he hated it because it was not his carpet; and he swore to himself to possess that very carpet or its indistinguishable brother.

“I was a most frightful ass to leave that letter lying about!” he exclaimed.