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It was thus at the breakfast table that he tended to be harshest with his Hester. The latter unquestionably had not the talent to leave 'Erotics' in the bedroom, and to create a neutral climate for herself among the bacon and eggs, the mail, and the morning papers. She had the knack, during the first hour of day, of reminding her husband of what he regarded as an undesirable excess. Her 'big baby' eyes, as he described them in his private thoughts, had at this period of great strain tended to irritate him more than usual. It had become almost a parlour-game with him of late to set little traps for her and to watch her rush into them.

He now sat staring at his 'blotter', on which, as was his habit, he fiercely 'doodled'. He censured himself in the severest manner, more especially for the 'eyeballs' part. For at least ten minutes he thus sat, analysing his behaviour with great care. The conclusion he reached was that this row must be regarded as a danger-signal of the first order. Ex-professors had just as much need of discipline as had professors. Was he by any chance afraid that Essie might leave him and was he reacting against such a feeling by rudeness, as it were to scorn the thing he feared? He rejected that at once, for he experienced no pang at the thought of Hester's departure. The response he received to further testing was that the great crisis in his affairs dwarfed into insignificance any merely domestic crisis. He would keep Hester at his side, if Hester would stop. But that was all. That settled, with a sigh he turned to the newspaper. But this interlude of self-examination did not proceed in the mechanical way in which, deprived of its density, it must seem to have done. Other matters intruded and were expelled. At one point he gave himself up to a fascinating doodle, and so forth. But academic life had compelled him to be methodic; and if it would be untidy to leave some unorthodox happening unexplained he would force himself to sit down and attempt to reduce it to logical proportions. It was not at all his nature to be methodical: as a consequence his life was a little over-full of the apparatus of method.