would be still more unaccountable if that Michaelis
weren't staying in a cottage in the neighbourhood.«
    At the sound of that name, falling unexpectedly into this annoying affair,
the Assistant Commissioner dismissed brusquely the vague remembrance of his
daily whist party at his club. It was the most comforting habit of his life, in
a mainly successful display of his skill without the assistance of any
subordinate. He entered his club to play from five to seven, before going home
to dinner, forgetting for those two hours whatever was distasteful in his life,
as though the game were a beneficent drug for allaying the pangs of moral
discontent. His partners were the gloomily humorous editor of a celebrated
magazine; a silent, elderly barrister with malicious little eyes; and a highly
martial, simple-minded old Colonel with nervous brown hands. They were his club
acquaintances merely. He never met them elsewhere except at the card-table. But
they all seemed to approach the game in the spirit of co-sufferers, as if it
were indeed a drug against the secret ills of existence; and every day as the
sun declined over the countless roofs of the town, a mellow, pleasurable
impatience, resembling the impulse of a sure and profound friendship, lightened
his professional labours. And now this pleasurable sensation went out of him
with something resembling a physical shock, and was replaced by a special kind
of interest in his work of social protection - an improper sort of interest,
which may be defined best as a sudden and alert mistrust of the weapon in his
hand.
 

                                       VI

The lady patroness of Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle of humanitarian
hopes, was one of the most influential and distinguished connections of the
Assistant Commissioner's wife, whom she called Annie, and treated still rather
as a not very wise and utterly inexperienced young girl. But she had consented
to accept him on a friendly footing, which was by no means the case with all of
his wife's influential connections. Married young and splendidly at some remote
epoch of the past, she had had for a time a close view of great affairs and even
of some great men. She herself was a great lady. Old now in the number of her
years, she had that sort of exceptional temperament which defies time with
scornful disregard, as if it were a rather vulgar convention submitted to by the
mass of inferior mankind. Many other conventions easier to set aside, alas!
failed to obtain her recognition, also on temperamental grounds - either because
they bored her, or else because they stood in the way of her scorns and