He was afflicted by a sense of the pathos of his position. It was
not as if he demanded much from life. He asked but little here
below. At that moment all that he wanted was a quiet spot where
he might read his Sunday paper in solitary peace, and he could
not find one. Intruders lurked behind every door. The place was
congested.

This sort of thing had been growing worse and worse ever since
his marriage two years previously. There was a strong literary
virus in Mrs. Pett's system. She not only wrote voluminously
herself--the name Nesta Ford Pett is familiar to all lovers of
sensational fiction--but aimed at maintaining a salon. Starting,
in pursuance of this aim, with a single specimen,--her nephew,
Willie Partridge, who was working on a new explosive which would
eventually revolutionise war--she had gradually added to her
collections, until now she gave shelter beneath her terra-cotta
roof to no fewer than six young and unrecognised geniuses. Six
brilliant youths, mostly novelists who had not yet started and
poets who were about to begin, cluttered up Mr. Pett's rooms on
this fair June morning, while he, clutching his Sunday paper,
wandered about, finding, like the dove in Genesis, no rest. It
was at such times that he was almost inclined to envy his wife's
first husband, a business friend of his named Elmer Ford, who had
perished suddenly of an apoplectic seizure: and the pity which he
generally felt for the deceased tended to shift its focus.

Marriage had certainly complicated life for Mr. Pett, as it
frequently does for the man who waits fifty years before trying
it. In addition to the geniuses, Mrs. Pett had brought with her
to her new home her only son, Ogden, a fourteen-year-old boy of a