She regretted her comfortable rooms in Paris and the conditions of existence there of which Septimus was an integral part.

She had got used to them, to his forced association with the intimate details of her life, to his bending over the child like a grotesque fairy godfather and making astonishing suggestions for its upbringing.

She had regarded him less as a stranger to be treated with feminine reserve than the doctor.

Now it was different.

She was about to take up her own life again, with new responsibilities, and the dearly loved creature whom she had bullied and laughed at and leaned on would go away to take up his own queer way of life, and the relations between them could not possibly be the same again.