e to learn that she has a
duty to me. I won't have it: I will not have it. She must forbid John
Tanner the house; and so must you.

The parlormaid returns.

OCTAVIUS. But--

RAMSDEN. [calling his attention to the servant] Ssh! Well?

THE MAID. Mr Tanner wishes to see you, sir.

RAMSDEN. Mr Tanner!

OCTAVIUS. Jack!

RAMSDEN. How dare Mr Tanner call on me! Say I cannot see him.

OCTAVIUS. [hurt] I am sorry you are turning my friend from your door
like that.

THE MAID. [calmly] He's not at the door, sir. He's upstairs in the
drawingroom with Miss Ramsden. He came with Mrs Whitefield and Miss Ann
and Miss Robinson, sir.

Ramsden's feelings are beyond words.

OCTAVIUS. [grinning] That's very like Jack, Mr Ramsden. You must see
him, even if it's only to turn him out.

RAMSDEN. [hammering out his words with suppressed fury] Go upstairs and
ask Mr Tanner to be good enough to step down here. [The parlormaid goes
out; and Ramsden returns to the fireplace, as to a fortified position].
I must say that of all the confounded pieces of impertinence--well, if
these are Anarchist manners I hope you like them. And Annie with him!
Annie! A-- [he chokes].

OCTAVIUS. Yes: that's what surprises me. He's so desperately afraid of
Ann. There must be something the matter.

Mr John Tanner suddenly opens the door and enters. He is too young to be
described simply as a big man with a beard. But it is already plain that
middle life will find him in that category. He has still some of the
slimness of youth; but youthfulness is not the effect he aims at: his
frock coat would befit a prime minister; and a certain high chested
carriage of the shoulders, a lofty pose of the head, and the Olympian
majesty with which a mane, or rather a huge wisp, of hazel colored
hair is thrown back from an imposing brow, suggest Jupiter rather than
Apollo. He is prodigiously fluent of speech, restless, excitable (mark
the snorting nostril and the restless blue eye, just the thirty-secondth
of an inch too wide open), possibly a little mad. He is carefully
dressed, not from the vanity that cannot resist finery, but from a sense
of the importance of everything he does which leads him to make as
much of paying a call as other men do of getting married or laying a
foundation stone. A sensitive, susceptible, exaggerative, earnest man: a
megalomaniac, who would be lost without a sense of humor.

Just at present the sense of humor is in abeyance. To say that