The function of afternoon tea was still being languidly observed in the big drawing-room when Yeovil returned to Berkshire Street.  Cicely was playing the part of hostess to a man of perhaps forty-one years of age, who looked slightly older from his palpable attempts to look very much younger.  Percival Plarsey was a plump, pale-faced, short-legged individual, with puffy cheeks, over-prominent nose, and thin colourless hair.  His mother, with nothing more than maternal prejudice to excuse her, had discovered some twenty odd years ago that he was a well-favoured young man, and had easily imbued her son with the same opinion.  The slipping away of years and the natural transition of the unathletic boy into the podgy unhealthy-looking man did little to weaken the tradition; Plarsey had never been able to relinquish the idea that a youthful charm and comeliness still centred in his person, and laboured daily at his toilet with the devotion that a hopelessly lost cause is so often able to inspire.  He babbled incessantly about himself and the accessory futilities of his life in short, neat, complacent sentences, and in a voice that Ronald Storre said reminded one of a fat bishop blessing a butter-making competition.  While he babbled he kept his eyes fastened on his listeners to observe the impression which his important little announcements and pronouncements were making.  On the present occasion he was pattering forth a detailed description of the upholstery and fittings of his new music-room.

“All the hangings, violette de Parme, all the furniture, rosewood.  The only ornament in the room is a replica of the Mozart statue in Vienna.  Nothing but Mozart is to be played in the room.  Absolutely, nothing but Mozart.”

“You will get rather tired of that, won’t you?” said Cicely, feeling that she was expected to comment on this tremendous announcement.

“One gets tired of everything,” said Plarsey, with a fat little sigh of resignation.  “I can’t tell you how tired I am of Rubenstein, and one day I suppose I shall be tired of Mozart, and violette de Parme and rosewood.  I never thought it possible that I could ever tire of jonquils, and now I simply won’t have one in the house.  Oh, the scene the other day because some one brought some jonquils into the house!  I’m afraid I was dreadfully rude, but I really couldn’t help it.”

He could talk like this through a long summer day or a long winter evening.

Yeovil belonged to a race forbidden to bear arms.  At the moment he would gladly have contented himself with the weapons with which nature had endowed him, if he might have kicked and pommelled the abhorrent specimen of male humanity whom he saw before him.

Instead he broke into the conversation with an inspired flash of malicious untruthfulness.

“It is wonderful,” he observed carelessly, “how popular that Viennese statue of Mozart has become.  A friend who inspects County Council Art Schools tells me you find a copy of it in every class-room you go into.”