There lay about in Lord Ivywood’s numerous gardens, terraces, outhouses, stable yards and similar places, a dog that came to be called by the name of Quoodle. Lord Ivywood did not call him Quoodle. Lord Ivywood was almost physically¹ incapable² of articulating such sounds. Lord Ivywood did not care for dogs. He cared for the Cause of dogs, of course; and he cared still more for his own intellectual self-respect and consistency³. He would never have permitted a dog in his house to be physically ill-treated; nor, for that matter, a rat; nor, for that matter, even a man. But if Quoodle was not physically ill-treated, he was at least socially neglected, and Quoodle did not like it. For dogs care for companionship more than for kindness itself.  
Lord Ivywood would probably have sold the dog, but he consulted experts (as he did on everything he didn’t understand and many things that he did), and the impression he gathered from them was that the dog, technically⁴ considered, would fetch very little; mostly, it seemed, because of the mixture of qualities that it possessed⁵. It was a sort of mongrel bull-terrier, but with rather too much of the bull-dog; and this fact seemed to weaken its price as much as it strengthened its jaw⁶. His Lordship also gained a hazy⁷ impression that the dog might have been valuable as a watch-dog if it had not been able to follow game like a pointer; and that even in the latter walk of life it would always be discredited⁸ by an unfortunate talent for swimming as well as a retriever. But Lord Ivywood’s impressions may very well have been slightly confused, as he was probably thinking about the Black stone of Mecca, or some such subject at the moment. The victim of this entanglement⁹ of virtues¹⁰, therefore, still lay about in the sunlight of Ivywood, exhibiting no general result of that entanglement except the most appalling¹¹ ugliness.
 
Now Lady Joan Brett did appreciate dogs. It was the whole of her type and a great deal of her tragedy that all that was natural in her was still alive under all that was artificial; and she could smell hawthorn¹² or the sea as far off as a dog can smell his dinner. Like most aristocrats¹³ she would carry cynicism almost to the suburbs of the city of Satan; she was quite as irreligious as Lord Ivywood, or rather more. She could be quite equally frigid¹⁴ or supercilious¹⁶ when she felt inclined. And in the great social talent of being tired, she could beat him any day of the week. But the difference remained in spite of her sophistries¹⁷ and ambitions; that her elemental communications were not cut, and his were. For her the sunrise was still the rising of a sun, and not the turning on of a light by a convenient cosmic servant. For her the Spring was really the Season in the country, and not merely the Season in town. For her cocks and hens were natural appendages¹⁹ to an English house; and not (as Lord Ivywood had proved to her from an encyclopædia) animals of Indian origin, recently imported by Alexander the Great. And so for her a dog was a dog, and not one of the higher animals, nor one of the lower animals, nor something that had the sacredness of life, nor something that ought to be muzzled²⁰, nor something that ought not to be vivisected. She knew that in every practical sense proper provision would be made for the dog; as, indeed, provision was made for the yellow dogs in Constantinople by Abdul Hamid, whose life Lord Ivywood was writing for the Progressive Potentates²¹ series. Nor was she in the least sentimental²² about the dog or anxious to turn him into a pet. It simply came natural to her in passing to rub all his hair the wrong way and call him something which she instantly forgot.
 
The man who was mowing²³ the garden lawn looked up for a moment, for he had never seen the dog behave in exactly that way before. Quoodle arose, shook himself, and trotted²⁴ on in front of the lady, leading her up an iron side staircase, of which, as it happened, she had never made use before. It was then, most probably, that she first took any special notice of him; and her pleasure, like that which she took in the sublime²⁵ prophet from Turkey, was of a humorous character. For the complex quadruped had retained the bow legs of the bull-dog; and, seen from behind, reminded her ridiculously of a swaggering little Major waddling²⁶ down to his Club.
 
The dog and the iron stairway between them led her into a series of long rooms, one opening into the other. They formed part of what she had known in earlier days as the disused Wing of Ivywood House, which had been neglected or shut up, probably because it bore some defacements from the fancies of the mad ancestor, the memory of whom the present Lord Ivywood did not think helpful to his own political career. But it seemed to Joan that there were indications of a recent attempt to rehabilitate²⁷ the place. There was a pail of whitewash²⁸ in one of the empty rooms, a step-ladder in another, here and there a curtain rod, and at last, in the fourth room a curtain. It hung all alone on the old woodwork, but it was a very gorgeous curtain, being a kind of orange-gold relieved with wavy²⁹ bars of crimson³⁰, which somehow seemed to suggest the very spirit and presence of serpents, though they had neither eyes nor mouths among them.
 
In the next of the endless series of rooms she came upon a kind of ottoman, striped with green and silver standing³¹ alone on the bare floor. She sat down on it from a mixed motive³² of fatigue³³ and of impudence³⁴, for she dimly remembered a story which she had always thought one of the funniest in the world, about a lady only partly initiated³⁵ in Theosophy who had been in the habit of resting on a similar object, only to discover afterward³⁶ that it was a Mahatma, covered with his eastern garment and prostrate³⁷ and rigid¹⁵ in ecstasy³⁸. She had no hopes of sitting on a Mahatma herself, but the very thought of it made her laugh, because it would make Lord Ivywood look such a fool. She was not sure whether she liked or disliked Lord Ivywood, but she felt quite certain that it would gratify her to make him look a fool. The moment she had sat down on the ottoman, the dog, who had been trotting³⁹ beside her, sat down also, and on the edge of her skirt.
 
After a minute or two she rose (and the dog rose), and she looked yet farther down that long perspective of large rooms, in which men like Phillip Ivywood forget that they are only men. The next was more ornate and the next yet more so; it was plain that the scheme of decoration that was in progress had been started at the other end. She could now see that the long lane ended in rooms that from afar off looked like the end of a kaleidoscope, rooms like nests made only from humming birds or palaces built of fixed⁴⁰ fireworks. Out of this furnace of fragmentary colours she saw Ivywood advancing toward her, with his black suit and his white face accented by the contrast. His lips were moving, for he was talking to himself, as many orators⁴¹ do. He did not seem to see her, and she had to strangle a subconscious⁴² and utterly⁴³ senseless cry, “He is blind!”
 
The next moment he was welcoming her intrusion with the well-bred surprise and rather worldly simplicity⁴⁴ suitable to such a case, and Joan fancied she understood why his face had seemed a little bleaker⁴⁵ and blinder than usual. It was by contrast. He was carrying clutched to his forefinger⁴⁶, as his ancestors might have carried a falcon⁴⁷ clutched to the wrist, a small bright coloured semi-tropical bird, the expression of whose head, neck and eye was the very opposite of his own. Joan thought she had never seen a living creature with a head so lively and insulting. Its provocative⁴⁸ eye and pointed⁴⁹ crest⁵⁰ seemed to be offering to fight fifty game-cocks. It was no wonder (she told herself) that by the side of this gaudy⁵¹ gutter-snipe with feathers Ivywood’s faint-coloured hair and frigid face looked like the hair and face of a corpse⁵² walking.
 
“You’ll never know what this is,” said Ivywood, in his most charming manner. “You’ve heard of him a hundred times and never had a notion of what he was. This is the Bulbul.”
 
“I never knew,” replied Joan. “I am afraid I never cared. I always thought it was something like a nightingale.”
 
“Ah, yes,” answered Ivywood, “but this is the real Bulbul peculiar⁵³ to the East, Pycnonotus Hæmorrhous. You are thinking of Daulias Golzii.”
 
“I suppose I am,” replied Lady Joan with a faint smile. “It is an obsession⁵⁴. When shall I not be thinking of Daulias Galsworthy? Was it Galsworthy?” Then feeling quite touched by the soft austerity of her companion’s face, she caressed⁵⁵ the gaudy and pugnacious⁵⁷ bird with one finger and said, “It’s a dear little thing.”
 
The quadruped intimately called Quoodle did not approve of all this at all. Like most dogs, he liked to be with human beings when they were silent, and he extended a magnificent toleration to them as long as they were talking to each other. But conversational⁵⁸ attention paid to any other animal at all remote from a mongrel bull-terrier wounded Mr. Quoodle in his most sensitive and gentlemanly feelings. He emitted a faint growl

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