evident that Elsa
Doland had taken pains to make it pretty and comfortable in a niggly
feminine way. Amateur interior decoration had always been a hobby
of hers. Even in the unpromising surroundings of her bedroom at
Mrs. Meecher's boarding-house she had contrived to create a certain
daintiness which Sally, who had no ability in that direction herself,
had always rather envied. As a decorator Elsa's mind ran in the
direction of small, fragile ornaments, and she was not afraid of
over-furnishing. Pictures jostled one another on the walls: china of all
description stood about on little tables: there was a profusion of lamps
with shades of parti-coloured glass: and plates were ranged along a
series of shelves.

One says that the plates were ranged and the pictures jostled one
another, but it would be more correct to put it they had jostled and
had been ranged, for it was only by guess-work that Sally was able
to reconstruct the scene as it must have appeared before Gerald had
started, as he put it, to clean house. She had walked into the flat
briskly enough, but she pulled up short as she crossed the threshold,
appalled by the majestic ruin that met her gaze. A shell bursting in the
little sitting-room could hardly have created more havoc.

The psychology of a man of weak character under the influence of alcohol
and disappointed ambition is not easy to plumb, for his moods follow one
another with a rapidity which baffles the observer. Ten minutes before,
Gerald Foster had been in the grip of a clammy self-pity, and it seemed
from his aspect at the present moment that this phase had returned. But
in the interval there had manifestly occurred a brief but adequate
spasm of what would appear to have been an almost Berserk fury. What had
caused it and why it should have expended itself so abruptly, Sally was
not psychologist enough to explain; but that it had existed there was
ocular evidence of the most convincing kind. A heavy niblick, flung
petulantly--or remorsefully--into a corner, showed by what medium the
destruction had been accomplished.

Bleak chaos appeared on every side. The floor was littered with every
imaginable shape and size of broken glass and china. Fragments of
pictures, looking as if they had been chewed by some prehistoric animal,
lay amid heaps of shattered statuettes and vases. As Sally moved slowly
into the room after her involuntary pause, china crackled beneath her
feet. She surveyed the stripped