planted, and it is called The Laburnums. My landlord, the owner of
the villas, is a builder. What profits he can get from building in
Murglebed, Heaven alone knows; but, as he mounts a bicycle in the
morning and disappears for the rest of the day, I presume he careers
over the waste, building as he goes. In the evenings he gets drunk at
the Red Cow; so I know little of him, save that he is a red-faced man,
with a Moustache like a tooth-brush and two great hands like hams.

His wife is taciturn almost to dumbness. She is a thick-set,
black-haired woman, and looks at me disapprovingly out of the corner of
her eye as if I were a blackbeetle which she would like to squash under
foot. She tolerates me, however, on account of the tongues and other
sustenance sent by Rogers from Benoist, of which she consumes prodigious
quantities. She wonders, as far as the power of wonder is given to her
dull brain, what on earth I am doing here. I see her whispering to her
friends as I enter the house, and I know they are wondering what I am
doing here. The whole village regards me as a humorous zoological freak,
and wonders what I am doing here among normal human beings.

And what am I doing here--I, Simon de Gex, M.P., the spoilt darling of
fortune, as my opponent in the Labour interest called me during the last
electoral campaign? My disciple and secretary, young Dale Kynnersley,
the only mortal besides Rogers who knows my whereabouts, trembles for
my reason. In the eyes of the excellent Rogers I am horn-mad. What my
constituents would think did they see me taking the muddy air on a soggy
afternoon, I have no conception. Dale keeps them at bay. He also baffles
the curiosity of my sisters, and by his diplomacy has sent Eleanor
Faversham on a huffy trip to Sicily. She cannot understand why I bury
myself in bleak solitude, instead of making cheerful holiday among the
oranges and lemons of the South.