Mrs. Torp’s project of making Mr. Torp walk five miles that afternoon to hear himself damned became a desolate background now⁠—like that marble table in the Weevil villa⁠—to this wretched crisis in his life. The idea of some stuffy little room in Nevilton⁠—a village he particularly admired⁠—resounding to the voice of this protégé of Mr. Beard, on a day like this, seemed to paint the whole Dorset landscape with a mud-coloured pigment. A bitter, masculine anger stirred within him at the destructive emotionalism of these women, unable, as they always were, to “leave well alone.”