ciate the interpretation of old Mrs.
Verrall's appearance that leapt up at once in my mind.

She had come to compromise the disaster!

And the Stuarts WOULD compromise! I saw that only too well.

An enormous disgust at the prospect of the imminent encounter between
Stuart and his mistress made me behave in a violent and irrational
way. I wanted to escape seeing that, seeing even Stuart's first
gesture in that, at any cost.

"I'm off," said I, and turned my back on him without any further
farewell.

My line of retreat lay by the old lady, and so I advanced toward
her.

I saw her expression change, her mouth fell a little way open, her
forehead wrinkled, and her eyes grew round. She found me a queer
customer even at the first sight, and there was something in the
manner of my advance that took away her breath.

She stood at the top of the three or four steps that descended to
the level of the hothouse floor. She receded a pace or two, with
a certain offended dignity at the determination of my rush.

I gave her no sort of salutation.

Well, as a matter of fact, I did give her a sort of salutation.
There is no occasion for me to begin apologizing now for the thing
I said to her--I strip these things before you--if only I can get
them stark enough you will understand and forgive. I was filled
with a brutal and overpowering desire to insult her.

And so I addressed this poor little expensive old woman in
the following terms, converting her by a violent metonymy into a
comprehensive plural. "You infernal land thieves!" I said point-blank
into her face. "HAVE YOU COME TO OFFER THEM MONEY?"

And without waiting to test her powers of repartee I passed rudely
beyond her and vanished, striding with my fists clenched,
out of her world again. . .

I have tried since to imagine how the thing must have looked to
her. So far as her particular universe went I had not existed at
all, or I had existed only as a dim black thing, an insignificant
speck, far away across her park in irrelevant, unimportant transit,
until this moment when she came, sedately troubled, into her own
secure gardens and sought for Stuart among the greenhouses. Then
abruptly I flashed into being down that green-walled, brick-floored
vista as a black-avised, ill-clad young man, who first stared and
then advanced scowling toward her. Once in existence I developed
rapidly. I grew larger in perspective and became more and more
important and sinister ever