beautiful beliefs came back to her unimpaired. A flat in town, and a
house in the country that you can afford to look down upon--what more
could you desire?

Mrs. Nevill Tyson did not take the furniture very seriously. For quite
three days after her arrival she was content to sit in that very
respectable drawing-room, waiting for the callers who never came. She
could not have taken the callers very seriously either (what _did_ Mrs.
Nevill Tyson take seriously, I should like to know?), or else, surely she
would have had some little regard for appearances; she would never have
risked being caught at four o'clock in the afternoon sitting on Tyson's
knee, doing all sorts of absurd things to his face. First, she stroked
his hair straight down over his forehead, which had a singularly
brutalizing effect, so that she was obliged to push it back again and
make it all neat with one of the little tortoise-shell combs that kept
her own curls in order. Then she lifted up his mustache till the lip
curled in a dreadful mechanical smile, showing a slightly crooked,
slightly prominent tooth.

"Oh, what an ugly tooth!" said Mrs. Nevill Tyson; and she let the lip
fall again like a curtain. "How could I marry a man with a tooth like
that! Do you know, poor papa used to say you were just like
Phorc--Phorc--something with a fork in it."

"Phorcyas?"

"Yes. How clever you are! Who was Phorc-y-as?" Mrs. Nevill Tyson made a
face over the word.

"It's another name for Mephistopheles." (Tyson knew his Goethe better