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West made a pretence of drinking his tea, but it was tepid, it was weak, and Nettie had put sugar into it without inquiring his taste.

She and Mimi Reade were still discussing the patterns of the brocade.

“I do think the green quite heavenly, Mimi, in colour,” she repeated, holding the scrap up at arm’s length, so that the lamplight might slant over it; “and yet the black is a softer, richer silk, and would make up awfully well with jet trimmings, as you say. I don’t know which I had better have.”

The two women turned and returned the problem, considered it again in all its bearings. They appeared to have forgotten West, which was but natural, he had sat silent for so long. To himself, his brain seemed mesmerised by the vapidity of their talk, so that an imbecile point of interest grew up within it, as to which of the two silks, eventually, Nettie would choose.

Meanwhile the study door opened, and Catterson’s cough, which carried such poignant suggestion to West, was heard again upon the stairs. It seemed to speak suggestively to Nettie too.

“After all,” she said in her curious, drawling voice, “it would be more prudent, I suppose, to decide on the black.”