And Ethel too had a fine emotional time.  She was mistress of a home—­their home together.  She shopped and was called “Ma’am” by respectful, good-looking shopmen; she designed meals and copied out papers of notes with a rich sense of helpfulness.  And ever and again she would stop writing and sit dreaming.  And for four bright week-days she went to and fro to accompany and meet Lewisham and listen greedily to the latest fruits of his imagination.

The landlady was very polite and conversed entertainingly about the very extraordinary and dissolute servants that had fallen to her lot.  And Ethel disguised her newly wedded state by a series of ingenious prevarications.  She wrote a letter that Saturday evening to her mother—­Lewisham had helped her to write it—­making a sort of proclamation of her heroic departure and promising a speedy visit.  They posted the letter so that it might not be delivered until Monday.

She was quite sure with Lewisham that only the possible dishonour of mediumship could have brought their marriage about—­she sank the mutual attraction beyond even her own vision.  There was more than a touch of magnificence, you perceive, about this affair.

It was Lewisham had persuaded her to delay that reassuring visit until Monday night.  “One whole day of honeymoon,” he insisted, was to be theirs.  In his prenuptial meditations he had not clearly focussed the fact that even after marriage some sort of relations with Mr. and Mrs. Chaffery would still go on.  Even now he was exceedingly disinclined to face that obvious necessity.  He foresaw, in spite of a resolute attempt to ignore it, that there would be explanatory scenes of some little difficulty.  But the prevailing magnificence carried him over this trouble.

“Let us at least have this little time for ourselves,” he said, and that seemed to settle their position.

Save for its brevity and these intimations of future trouble it was a very fine time indeed.  Their midday dinner together, for example—­it was a little cold when at last they came to it on Saturday—­was immense fun.  There was no marked subsidence of appetite; they ate extremely well in spite of the meeting of their souls, and in spite of certain shiftings of chairs and hand claspings and similar delays.  He really made the acquaintance of her hands then for the first time, plump white hands with short white fingers, and the engagement ring had come out of its tender hiding-place and acted as keeper to the wedding ring.  Their eyes were perpetually flitting about the room and coming back to mutual smiles.  All their movements were faintly tremulous.

She professed to be vastly interested and amused by the room and its furniture and her position, and he was delighted by her delight.  She was particularly entertained by the chest of drawers in the living room, and by Lewisham’s witticisms at the toilet tidies and the oleographs.