“And so I just came straight in,” he went on, beginning to feel a very odd sensation, a sensation as if he were addressing someone who was listening all the time in a kind of panic to a third person’s voice⁠—“straight in through your little green door and between those hyacinths.”

She still made no observation and he noticed that one marked quality of her ugliness was the dusky sallowness of her cheeks combined with the ghastly pallor of her upper lip, which projected from her face very much as certain funguses project from the brown bark of a dead tree.

“I’ve decided that your favourite cat is the white one,” he brought out after an uncomfortable pause.

She did relax at this, and, moving to the chair occupied by the grey cat, took up the animal in her arms and sat down, holding it on her lap.

“You’re wrong, wrong, wrong!” she whispered hoarsely. “Isn’t he wrong, Matthew?”