In the autumn Sylvia's father fell in love, and brought a woman to live in what was henceforth always called the flat, even by Henry, who had hitherto generally referred to it as The Hammam.
In Sylvia's opinion the advent of Mabel Bannerman had a most vitiating effect upon life in Fitzroy Street. Her father began to deteriorate immediately. His return to England and the unsurveyed life he had been leading for nearly two years had produced an expansion of his personality in every direction. He had lost the shiftless insignificance that had been his chief characteristic in France, and though he was still weak and lacking in any kind of initiative, he had acquired a quaintness of outlook and faculty for expressing it which disguised his radical futility under a veil of humor. He was always dominated by Monkley in practical matters where subordination was reasonable and beneficial, but he had been allowed to preserve his own point of view, that with the progress of time had even come to be regarded as important. When Sylvia was much younger she had always criticized her father's behavior; but, like everybody else, she had accepted her mother's leadership of the house and family as natural and inevitable, and had regarded her father as a kind of spoiled elder brother whose character was fundamentally worthless and whose relation to her mother was the only one imaginable. Now that Sylvia was older, she did not merely despise her father's weakness; she resented the shameful position which he occupied in relation to this intruder. Mabel Bannerman belonged to that full-blown intensely feminine type that by sheer excess of femininity imposes itself upon a weak man, smothering him, as it were, with her emotions and her lace, and destroying by sensuality every trait of manhood that does not directly contribute to the justification of herself. Within a week or two Henry stood for no more in the Fitzroy Street house than a dog that is alternately patted and scolded, that licks the hand of its mistress more abjectly for each new brutality, and that asks as its supreme reward permission to fawn upon her lap. Sylvia hated Mabel Bannerman; she hated her peroxide hair, she hated her full, moist lips, she hated her rounded back and her shining finger-nails spotted with white, she hated with a hatred so deep as to be forever incommunicable each blowsy charm that went to make up what was called "a fine woman"; she hated her inability ever to speak the truth; she hated the way she looked at Monkley, who should have been nothing to her; she hated the sight of her drinking tea in the morning; she hated the smell of her wardrobe and the pink ribbons which she tied to every projection in her bedroom; she hated her affectation of babyishness; she hated the way she would make Henry give money to beggars for the gratification of an impulsive and merely sensual generosity of her own; she hated her embedded garters and smooth legs.