‘The medieval divines’, I was reading, ‘strenuously resisted the profane philosophers who seemed to threaten the most cherished traditions of Christianity; however, the revolutionaries of yesterday are the respectabilities of tomorrow, and the aristotelean schoolmen themselves were to be the first to bear the brunt of the attack from the new scientific humanists, who...’—It was not the book, nor yet the chapter on Faith, Philosophy and Science, one would choose for reading on a wet afternoon, still less after the brown Windsor, mock cutlets with vapourish potatoes and khaki cabbage, topped by stewed pears and custard—all the Bishop and Mermaid at Barminster can rise to in these days. But it had to be reviewed. Still, I was not sorry for the distraction when three women were shown into the lounge.

They had that look of perennial middle age, of making for fifty but not a year beyond, presented by women who have never thought of marrying and who have occupied themselves with a routine without anxiety about a wage. Despite their differences, for one was stocky and bustling, the second vaguely rounded and languid, and the third rather angular and restrained, there was a family resemblance between them, elusive yet unmistakeable: the set of eyebrow or cheekbone perhaps, or a similar air of faint and well-bred insolence, the hint that they could never find themselves in circumstances to ask for permission. They might have been in their own drawing-room; they glanced at me with incurious interest as though I were of a piece with the leatherette armchair in which I was sunk.