Mr Cridley was being fanciful when he said that Mr Turtle had proposed marriage to the woman who cleaned for him. It was true that he found the strain of his marriage tragedy difficult to bear and had, especially lately, regretted that a second alliance had not come about to take away the bitterness of it. But he had never seen his cleaning woman as a contender for his hand.  She was a source of terror to him; the kind of woman who seems designed, certainly physically, to be a source of terror to somebody. Mrs Strap, Aries, was forty-five, small, breastless and elaborately decorated: costume jewellery, earrings, hair a glitter of gold. There were touches of green about the rims of her eyes, powder the colour of a burst peach on her cheeks and nose. Despite the lipstick that marked her lips far beyond their natural boundaries, her mouth remained pitched and uninviting, metallic almost, as much like the slit of long-healed wound as H.L. Dowse’s had grown to be. This comparison did not occur to Mr Turtle; he was not, in such matters, an observant man. Mrs Strap was more of a blur to him; a useful fury, an ill-tempered necessity. When she snapped, her eyes lit up with anger, matching her tongue. They blinked and glowed behind elaborate spectacles that were a confection of bric-a-brac built up to a pair of tapering points: specks of coloured glass that were not for seeing through, with gold, or something, in triangular blobs at either hinge. That was Mrs Strap, to whom Mr Turtle had assigned a thousand pounds in his will and whom he did not wish to marry.