It was now a quarter past three. Harry was extremely late. The will was to be read at half past three, and Harry had half promised to be there for lunch at one o’clock, with the family. Where could he be?

A little later the front-door bell rang, and she flew up to open it. It was not Harry but Mr Marriot who stood there, not studying his reflection in the plate with ‘Hartley Garden, M.D., M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.’ on it, but looking disapprovingly sideways at a tram which was just rushing and clanging past the end of the alley. He’s thinking what an awful place to live in, and he’s quite right, thought Sophia.

‘Ah … goodafternoon, Miss Garden. Very dull, isn’t it? Looks as though we might have a fog this evening. Well, we’ve been spoilt, I suppose; it’s been such a mild winter on the whole, hasn’t it? How are you? How is the famous “job” going?’

‘Very well, thank you, Mr Marriot. Will you come upstairs? Everybody’s there …’ and she led him away before he could ask if Harry was there too.

Mr Marriot, who possessed a strong imagination and a heart which he quietly controlled, did not permit himself to have violent feelings as a rule, but he really detested the Garden family. If they had not been a source of income, he would have refused to act for them. But there were so many of them, and they had to be acted for such a lot that it would have been very foolish to decline their business. But he detested their talkativeness, their melodrama and their extraordinary, their almost unbelievable, ignorance of the manner in which ordinary persons conducted their affairs. Whenever he heard the phrase about seeing through a glass darkly, or the one about seeing men as trees walking, he was reminded of the manner in which the Gardens looked at life.

As for Sophia, her mind flung itself passionately on to Mr Marriot, as it did on to every person she knew, trying to imagine what it would be like to be him, to look at evening clouds with his small, dim eyes, to live in a large, comfortable, well-run house at Brixton, and be dreaded by an office in Cannon Street, and have an invalid wife.

But it was no use. She could never feel herself properly inside other people’s minds. She could only stare and stare, absorbing details with her long greenish-hazel eyes under their black eyelashes, until people muttered after she had gone, ‘Heavens! how that Garden girl stares!’ and Harry, when accompanying her on a walk, would nudge her and say fiercely ‘Sophia! Don’t stare!’

She had only just come down again when the bell rang. This time it must be Harry. She flew up, and flung open the door.

‘Darling, how late you are!’

There he was, with a soft hat cocked impudently on one side, an amiable smile, a muffler of checked silk which was a present from some girl or other, and a taxi just driving away in the background.