Grace continues to tell her story in vivid detail, making an effort to keep the doctor interested. He is aroused by Grace's descriptions of James McDermott's advances and Thomas Kinnear's affair with Nancy Montgomery. The doctor's landlady, whose drunken husband had by then left her, throws herself at him. She is not attractive to him and he turns her away. He gives her money so she can keep the house, thinking she will stop bothering him, but that only provokes her to try harder until she succeeds in seducing him.