“You are always so sympathetic,” she said; and added, reflectively, “and one can talk of one’s troubles to you without any nonsense.” I wondered dimly if she meant that as a challenge. I helped myself to a biscuit thing that looked neither poisonous nor sandy. “You are one of the most puzzling human 
 
beings I ever met,” I said,—a perfectly safe remark to any woman under any circumstances.
“Do you find me so hard to understand?” she said.
“You are dreadfully complex.” I bit at the biscuit thing, and found it full of a kind of creamy bird-lime. (I wonder why women will arrange these unpleasant 
 
surprises for me—I sickened of sweets twenty years ago.)
“How so?” she was saying, and smiling her most brilliant smile.
I have no doubt she thought we were talking rather nicely. “Oh!” said I, and waved the cream biscuit thing. “You challenge me to dissect you.”
“Well?”
“And that is precisely what I cannot do.”
360“I’m afraid you are very satirical,” she said, with a touch of disappointment. She is always saying that when our conversation has become absolutely idiotic—as 
 
it invariably does. I felt an inevitable desire to quote bogus Latin to her. It seemed the very language for her.
“Malorum fiducia pars quosque libet,” I said, in a low voice, looking meaningly into her eyes.
“Ah!” she said, colouring a little, and turned to pour hot water into the teapot, looking very prettily at me over her arm as she did so.
“That is one of the truest things that has ever been said of sympathy,” I remarked. “Don’t you think so?”
“Sympathy,” she said, “is a very wonderful thing, and a very precious thing.”
“You speak,” said I (with a cough behind my hand), “as though you knew what it was to be lonely.”
“There is solitude even in a crowd,” she said, and looked round at the six other people—three discreet pairs—who were in the room.
“I, too,” I was beginning, but Hopdangle came with a teacup, and seemed inclined to linger. He belongs to the “Nice Boy” class, and gives himself ridiculous airs 
 
of familiarity with grown-up people. Then the Giffens went.
“Do you know, I always take such an interest in your work,” she was saying to me, when her husband(confound him!) came into the room.
361He was a violent discord. He wore a short brown jacket and carpet slippers, and three of his waistcoat buttons were (as usual) undone. “Got any tea left, Millie?” 
 
he said, and came and sat down in the arm-chair beside the table.
“How do, Delalune?” he said to the man in the corner. “Damned hot, Bellows,” he remarked to me, subsiding creakily.
She poured some more hot water into the teapot. (Why must charming married women always have these husbands?)
“It is very hot,” I said.
There was a perceptible pause. He is one of those rather adipose people, who are not disconcerted by conversational gaps. “Are you, too, working at Argon?” I said. 
 
He is some kind of chemical investigator, I know.
He began at once to explain the most horribly complex things about elements to me. She gave him his tea, and rose and went and talked to the other people about 
 
autotypes. “Yes,” I said, not hearing what he was saying.
“‘No’ would be more appropriate,” he said. “You are absent-minded, Bellows. Not in love, I hope—at your age?”
Really, I am not thirty, but a certain perceptible thinness in my hair may account for his invariably regarding me as a contemporary. But he should understand that 
 
nowadays the beginnings of baldness merely mark the virile epoch. 362“I say, Millie,” he said, out loud and across the room, “you haven’t been collecting Bellows 
 
here—have you?”
She looked round startled, and I saw a pained look come into her eyes. “For the bazaar?” she said. “Not yet, dear.” It seemed to me that she shot a glance of 
 
entreaty at him. Then she turned to the others ............