study-table is placed in the bay of a window, on the ground floor. It is
a French window, opening on a terrace. Beyond the parapet of the
terrace, the garden, with its apple and walnut trees, its beeches, its
lawn, its beds of tulips, its lilac and laburnum and may and all sorts
of other pleasant things, slopes lazily upwards to a horizon of iron
railings separating the garden from a meadow where now and then a cow,
when she desires to be peculiarly agreeable to the sight, poses herself
in silhouette against the sky. I like to gaze on that adventitious cow.
Her ruminatory attitude falls in with mine. . . . But I digress. . . .

I glanced up at the obscuring human form and recognized my wife. She
looked, I must confess, remarkably pretty, with her fair hair _blond
comme les blés_, and her mocking cornflower blue eyes, and her mutinous
mouth, which has never yet (after all these years) assumed a responsible
parent's austerity. She wore a fresh white dress with coquettish bits of
blue about the bodice. In her hand she grasped a dilapidated newspaper,
the _Daily Telegraph_, which looked as if she had been to bed in it.

"Am I disturbing you, Hilary?"

She was. She knew she was. But she looked so charming, a petal of
spring, a quick incarnation of pink may and forget-me-not and laburnum,
that I put down my pen and I smiled.

"You are, my dear," said I, "but it doesn't matter."

"What are you doing?" She remained on the threshold.

"I am writing my presidential address," said I, "for the Grand Meeting,
next month, of the Hafiz Society."