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There was a little silence then. Dixon was right, of course, in what he said; I had realised it myself five years before. A man who lives entirely without women has only two alternatives as the years go on. He gets self-centred and dirty, or he dies.

I laughed. “All right,” I said at last, “I’ll have Irene. I suppose she’ll do as well as anyone. You might tell her when you go home. You’d better send her up to me this afternoon.”

I forgot all that he said to that, nor am I sure that I should write it down if I could remember it; he was very deeply hurt. His wife was dead and he had only the one daughter, and a son who was abroad. I had known the girl for some years by sight; I had watched her grow from a gawky schoolgirl into a plump and homely young woman who kept house admirably for her father, performed indifferently on the tennis courts, rode a bicycle about the town, and read some woman’s paper from cover to cover every week. A most estimable young woman and as dull as ditch-water, but he thought the world of her.