It came over her now with a fresh shock, how very little, after all, she
had known of him. It was through Edith that she really knew him. And yet
it was impossible that Edith could have absorbed him utterly. Anne had
not counted his business; for it had not interested her, and to say that
Walter was a ship-owner did not define him in the very least. What
remained over of Walter was a secret that this room, his study, must
partially reveal.

She remembered how she had first come there, and had looked shyly about
her for intimations of his inner nature, and how it was his pipe-rack and
his boots that had first suggested that he had a life apart and dealings
with the outer world. Now she rose and went round the room, searching for
its secret, and finding no new impressions, only fresh lights on the old.
If the room told her anything it told her how little Majendie had used
it, how little he had been able to call anything his own. The things in
it had no comfortable look of service. He could not have smoked there
much, the curtains were too innocent. He could not have sat in that
arm-chair much, the surface was too smooth. He could not have come there
much at any time, for, though the carpet was faded, there was no
well-worn passage from the threshold to the hearth. As far as she could
make out he came there for no earthly purpose but to change his boots
before going upstairs to Edith.

The bookcase told the same story. It held histories and standard works
inherited from Majendie's father; the works of Dickens, and Thackeray,
and Hardy, read over and over again in the days when he had time for
reading; several poets whom, by his own confession, he could not have
read in any circumstances. One Meredith, partly uncut, testified to an
honest effort and a baulked accomplishment. On a shelf apart stood the
books that he had loved when he was a boy, the Annuals, the tales of