PART III

I LITMUS 239

II BY THE WAY 254

III _DE TROP_ 274

IV GREY YOUTH 285

TAILPIECE 307

A CROOKED MILE

I

THE WITAN

Lady Tasker had missed her way in the Tube. She had been on, or rather

under known ground on the Piccadilly Railway as far as Leicester Square,

but after that she had not heard, or else had forgotten, that in order

to get to Hampstead by the train into which she had stepped she must

change at Camden Town. Or perhaps she had merely wondered what Camden

Town supposed itself to be that she should put herself to the trouble of

changing there. With the newspaper held at arm's length, and a little

figure-8-shaped gold glass moving slightly between her puckered old eyes

and the page, she was reading the "_By the Way_" column of the

"Globe."--"All change," called the man at Highgate; and, still

unconscious of her mistake, Lady Tasker left the train. She was the last

to enter the lift. But for an unhurried raising of the little

locket-shaped glass as the attendant fidgeted at the half-closed gate

she might have been the first to enter the next lift.

Only from the policeman outside Highgate Station did she learn that she

must either take the Tube back again to Camden Town or else walk across

the Heath.

Now Lady Tasker was seventy, and, with the exception of the Zoo, a place

she visited from time to time with troops of turbulent great-nephews,

the whole of North London was a sort of Camden Town to her, that is to

say, she had no objection to its existence so long as it wasn't

troublesome. It was half-past three when she said as much to the

Highgate policeman, who up to that time had been an ordinary easy-going

Conservative; by five-and-twenty minutes to four she had made of him a

fuming Radical. He was saying something about South Square and Merton

Lane. Lady Tasker addressed the bracing Highgate air in one of those

expressionless and semi-ventriloquial asides that, especially in a mixed

company, always made her ladyship very well worth sitting next to.

"Merton Lane! Does the man suppose that conveys anything to me?.... I

want to know how to get to Hampstead, not the names of the objects of

interest on the way!"

The newly-made Radical told her that there might be a taxi on the rank,

and turned away to cuff the ears of an urchin who was tampering with an

automatic machine. It was a wonder that Lady Tasker's glare, focussed

through the gold-rimmed glass on a point between his shoulder-blades,

did not burn a hole in his tunic.

Taxis at eightpence a mile, indeed, with the house at Ludlow already

full of those children of Churchill's, and three of Tony's little girls

eating their way through the larder in Cromwell Gardens, and young

Tommy, Emily's boy, who had just "pulled" his captaincy, arriving at

Southampton in the "Seringapatam" on Saturday with another batch for her

to take under her wing! Did people suppose she was made of money?...

The policeman's tunic was just beginning to scorch when Lady Tasker,

dropping the glass, turned away and set out for Hampstead on foot.

She might very well have been excused had she omitted to return Mrs.

Cosimo Pratt's call. Indeed she had vowed that very morning that nothing

should drag her up to Hampstead that day. But for twenty times that Lady

Tasker said "I will not," nineteen she repented and went, taking out the

small change of her magnanimity when she got there. And after all, she

would be killing two birds with one stone, for her niece Dorothy also

lived somewhere in this northern Great Karroo, and unless she got these

things over before the "Seringapatam" dropped anchor on Saturday there

was no knowing when next she would have an hour to call her own. As she

turned (after a brush with a second policeman, who summed her up quite

wrongly on the strength of her antiquated pelisse and trailing old

Victorian hat) down Merton Lane to the ponds, she told herself again

that she was a foolish old woman to have come at all.

For the Cosimo Pratts were not bosom friends of hers. True, they had

been, until six months ago, her neighbours at Ludlow, and for that

matter she had known young Cosimo's people for the greater part of her

life: but she had not forgotten the hearty blackguarding the young

couple had got, any time this last two years, from the rest of the

country-side. Small wonder. What else did they expect, after the way in

which they had made farm-labour too big for its jacket and beaters

hardly to be had for love or money? Not that Lady Tasker herself had

seen very much of their antics. Great-nieces and nephews had kept her

too busy for that, and she was moreover wise enough not to believe all

she heard. And even were it true, that, she now told herself, had been

in the country. They would have to behave differently now that they had

let the Shropshire house and had come to live in town. They could hardly

dance barefoot round a maypole in Hampstead, or stage-manage the yearly

Hiring-Fair for the sake of the "Daily Speculum" photographer (as they

had done in Ludlow), or group themselves picturesquely about the feet of

the oldest inhabitant while that shocking old reprobate with the

splendid head recited (at five shillings an hour) the stories of old,

unhappy, far-off things he had learned by heart from the booklets they

had printed at the Village Press. No: in London they would almost

certainly have to do as other people did, and Shropshire, after its

three years of social and artistic awakening, would no doubt forget all

about the aesthetic revival and would sink back into a well-earned rest.

It was a Thursday afternoon in September, warm for the time of the year,

and a half-day closing for the shops. Had Lady Tasker remembered the

half-holiday she certainly would not have come. She hated crowds, and,

if you would believe her, had no illusions whatever about the sanctity

of our common nature and the brotherhood of man. She would tell you

roundly that there was far too much aimless good-nature in the world,

and that every sob wasted over a sinner was something taken away from

the man who, if he was a sinner too, had at least the decency to keep up

appearances. And so much for brotherhood. Great-nephewship, of course,

was another matter. Somebody had to look after all those youngsters, and

if her sister Eliza, the one at Spurrs, went into a tantrum about every

bud that was picked in the gardens and every chair-leg that was an inch

out of its place in the house, so much the worse for Lady Tasker, who

must walk because she had something else to do with her money than to

waste it on taxis.

She had been told by her niece Dorothy to look out for a clump of tall

willows and an ivied chimney; that was where the Pratts lived; but

Dorothy had spoken of the approach from the Hampstead side, not from

Highgate way. Lady Tasker got lost. She was almost dropping for want of

a cup of tea, and the Heath seemed all willows, and all the wrong ones.

No policeman, Radical or Conservative, was to be seen. Walking across an

apparently empty space, well away (as she thought) from a horde of

shouting boys, the old lady suddenly found herself enveloped in a game

of football. This completed her exhaustion. Near by, one of Messrs.

Libertys' carts was ascending a steep road at a slow walk; somehow or

other Lady Tasker managed to get her hand on the tail of it; and the car

gave her a tow. She was seventy after all.

As it happened, that was her first piece of luck in a luckless

afternoon. The cart drew on to the left; Lady Tasker trailed after it;

and suddenly it stopped before a high privet hedge with a closed green

door in the middle of it. Lady Tasker did not look for the ivied

chimney. On the door was painted in white letters "The Witan." She was

where she wanted to be.

Ordinarily Lady Tasker would have approved of the height of the privet

hedge, which was seven or eight feet; that was a nice, reassuring,

anti-social height for a hedge; but as it was she could not even put up

her hand to the bell. The carter rang it for the pair of them. Over the

hedge came the low murmur of voices and the clink of cups and saucers,

and then the door was opened. It was opened by the mistress of the

house. No doubt Mrs. Pratt had expected the cart, had heard its drawing

up, and had not waited for a maid to come. Her eyes sought the carman,

who had stepped aside. She spoke with some asperity.

"It's Libertys', isn't it?" she said. "Well, I've a very good mind to

make you take it back. It was promised for yesterday."

"Can't say, I'm sure, m'm."

"It's always the same. Every time I----"

Then she saw her visitor, and gave a little start.

"Why, it's Lady Tasker! How delightful! Do come in! And do just excuse

me--I shan't be a minute.... Why didn't this come yesterday? It was

promised faithfully----"

She stepped outside to scold the carman, leaving Lady Tasker standing

just within the green door.

The altercation was plainly audible:

"Very sorry, m'm. You see----"

"I will see, if it occurs again----"

"The orders is taken as they come, m'm----"

"They said the first delivery----"

"We wasn't loaded till one o'clock----"

"That's none of my business----"

"Very sorry, m'm----"

"Well, the next time it occurs----"

And so forth.

Now in reading what happened the next moment you must remember that Lady

Tasker was very, very tired. Had she been less tired she might have

wondered why one of the two maids she saw crossing to the tea-table

under the copper beech had not been allowed to take in Mrs. Cosimo

Pratt's parcel. And she would certainly have thought it extraordinary

that she should be left standing alone while Mrs. Cosimo Pratt scolded

the carrier, and wanted to know why the parcel had not been brought

yesterday. But, tired as she was, her eyes had already rested on

something that had momentarily galvanized even the weariness out of her.

It was this:--

Seven or eight people sat in basket-chairs or stood talking; and, under

the copper beech, as if Mrs. Pratt had just slid out of it, a hammock

of coloured string still moved, slung from the beech to a sycamore

beyond. Lady Tasker saw these things at once; she did not at once see

what it was that stood just beyond the hammock.

Then it moved, and Lady Tasker raised her glass.

No doubt you have seen the cover of Mr. Wells's "Invisible Man." It will

be remembered that all that can be seen of that afflicted person is his

clothes; and all that Lady Tasker at first saw of the Invisible Man by

the copper beech was his clothes. These were of light yellow tussore,

with a white double collar and a small red tie, sharp-edged white cuffs

and highly polished brown boots. At collar and cuffs the man ended.

And yet he did not end, for the lenses of a pair of spectacles made

lurking lights in the shadow of the beech, a few inches above the white

collar.

The phantom wore no hat.

Then Lady Tasker, suddenly pale, dropped her glass. Between the collar

and the spectacles a white gash of teeth had appeared. The Invisible Man

had smiled, and at the same moment there had shown round the bole of the

beech a second smoky shape, this one without teeth, but with white and

mobile eyes instead.

Lady Tasker was in the presence of two Hindoos.

* * * * *

Now all her life, and long before her life for that matter, Lady Tasker

had been accustomed ... but no: that is not the way to put it. The

following table will save many words:--

PORTION OF TREE OF THE LENNARDS AND TASKERS

(COMMENTS BY LADY TASKER)

Tasker, Sir Richard, 3rd Bart.; Lennard, "Old John," "Spurrs,"

"The Brear," Ludlow Montgomery

("Good old family? I don't know ("Can't say I like the striking family

about the 'good,' but they're resemblances you meet up and down the

certainly old.") valley; when you ask at a cottage-door

| for a glass of milk and see that nose----")

| |

| |

+---------+-----------+ +------+-----+-----+-----+--------+--------+

| | | | | | | | |

Lucy Arthur Noel, == GRACE Susan Dick; Emily; Trixie; Eliza;

| | 4th Bart.; (Lady | m. Ada m. Tony | _unmarried_

| ("Don't ask me d. 1900 Tasker) | Polperro: Woodgate, | ("Black

| how he got into _No issue_ | Woods and P.F.F. | pugs.")

| the India Office!") | Forests, | |

| | | 1873; | m. Sid Dealtry

("The Brear was | | d. 1886 | ("The groom, my

always open to | | | | dear, and far too

her, but of course | | | | good for her.")

if she _preferred_ | | | | |

to stay away----") | | | Hard-up young |

+====+==================+ | captains and ("Those children

| | subalterns of Trixie's:

Stanhope =====+============ Dorothy | colonies, assisted

| | passages: I rather

1. Noel Crowds of like the chauffeur

("They called him Anglo-Indian one: hope he

that to please me: babies, Lady marries well.")

innocents!") Tasker's charges |

2. Jack |

3. (See page 133) ("Can't keep

count. I

remember all the

birthdays, I can,

but----")

You see how it was, and had to be. Not only was Lady Tasker insular,

arrogant, and of opinion that Saint Paul made the mistake of his life

when he set out to preach the Gospel to all nations, but she made a

virtue of her narrowness and defect. Show her a finger-nail with a

purple half-moon, and you no longer saw a charming if acid-tongued old

English lady, who cut timber in order to pay for governesses for those

grandchildren of Emily's and sent, under guise of birthday gifts, useful

little cheques to the descendants of her brother-in-law the groom. Babu

or Brahmin, all were the same to her. No defence is offered of an

attitude so indefensible. Such people do still exist. Let us sigh for

their narrowness of mind, and pass on.

The smile of the first Hindoo was for Mrs. Pratt, who had got her row

with the carman over and had reappeared behind Lady Tasker and closed

the door of The Witan again. Her face, pretty and finished as a

miniature, and the great chestnut-red helm of her hair, showed over the

slant of the box in her arms. "Do excuse me, just _one_ moment!" she

said, smiling at Lady Tasker as she passed; and she ran off into the

house, her mistletoe-berry white robe with its stencilling of grey-green

whipping about her heels as she did so. And fortunately, as she ran in

at the door, Cosimo Pratt came out of the French window, saw Lady

Tasker, and strode to her. He broke into rapid and hearty speech.

"You here! How delightful!--Amory!--I didn't hear you come! So kind of

you!--Amory, where are you?--How are you? Do let me get you some

tea!--Amory!----"

Lady Tasker spoke faintly.--"I should like," she said, "to go into the

house."

"Rather! Hang on to my arm.--Amory! Where is that girl?--Sure you won't

have tea outside? I can find you a nice shady place under the beech----"

Lady Tasker closed her eyes.--"Please take me in."

"Tube headache? I hate the beastly thing. I thought you were in Ludlow.

Charming of you----"

And he led Lady Tasker into the house.

This was a low building of stucco, with slatted window-shuts which, like

the sashes of the slightly bowed French window and of the two windows

beyond, were newly painted green. This painting seemed rather to

emphasize than to mitigate a certain dogseared look the place had, not

amounting to dilapidation, but enough to make it probable that Cosimo

Pratt had taken it on a repairing lease. The copper beech, the high

privet hedge and the willows beyond it, shut out both light and air. The

fan-lighted door had two electric bell buttons, with little brass

plates. The upper plate read, "Mr. Cosimo Pratt"; the lower one "Miss

Amory Towers (Studio)."

But Lady Tasker noticed none of these things. In the hall she sank into

the first chair she came to. "Tea, please," she said faintly; and Cosimo

dashed out to get it. He returned, and began to murmur something

sympathetic, but Lady Tasker made a little movement with her hand. She

didn't want him to "send Amory." She only wanted to rest her tired legs

and to collect her dispersed thoughts.

An eight-foot hedge, not to shut the populace out, but to shut Indians

in! And she, Lady Tasker, had been kept standing while some parcel or

other had been taken into the house--standing, and watching a

still-moving hammock with a smiling Invisible Man bending over it! Was

this England, or a Durbar?... And even yet her hostess didn't come to

ask her if she felt better!... Not that Lady Tasker was greatly

surprised at that. She knew that Mrs. Pratt was quite capable of

reasoning that the greatest respect is shown to a tired old lady when no

fuss is made about her tiredness. The Pratts were like that--full of

delicacies so subtle that plain folk never noticed them, but jumped

instead to the conclusion that they were bad-mannered. And it would not

in the least surprise Lady Tasker if, presently, Mrs. Pratt allowed her

to leave without a word about her indisposition. Of course: Lady Tasker

had a little forgotten the Pratts at Ludlow. That would be it:

"Good-bye--and do come again!" She could see Mrs. Pratt's pretty

brook-brown eyes did anybody (say a Japanese or an Ethiopian) point out

this so-called omission to her. She could see the surprise in them. She

could hear her earnest voice: "_Say_ these things!... Why, does she

suppose I was _glad_ then?"...

Yes, Lady Tasker had a little forgotten her Pratts.

It was an odd little hall in which she sat. It appeared to be an

approach to the studio of which the electric bell gave notice, for it

was continued by a narrower passage that led to a garden at the back;

and either the studio "properties" were gradually thrusting the hatstand

and hall table out of the fan-lighted front door, or else these latter

ordinary and necessary objects were fighting as it were for admission.

Thus, the chair on which Lady Tasker sat was of oak, but it had a

Faust-like look; beyond it stood a glass-fronted cupboard of

bric-a-brac, with a trophy of Abyssinian armour hanging over it; and the

whole of the wall facing Lady Tasker was hung with a tapestry which, if

it had been the only one of its kind in existence, would no doubt have

been very valuable. And two other objects not commonly to be seen in

ordinary halls were there. One of these stood on the narrow gilt console

table next to Lady Tasker's cup of tea. It was a plaster cast, taken

from the life, of a female foot. The other hung on the wall above it.

This also was a plaster cast, of the whole of a female arm and shoulder,

ending with a portion of the side of the neck and the entire breast--of

its kind an exquisite specimen. Many artists make or buy such things,

but Brucciani has nothing half so beautiful.

It was as Lady Tasker finished her tea that her gaze fell on the two

casts. Half negligently she raised her glass and inspected, first the

foot, and then the other piece. It is probable that her first remark,

uttered in a casual undertone to the air about her, was prompted by mere

association of ideas; it was "Hm! I wonder if Mrs. Pratt nursed those

twins herself!" Any other reflection that might have followed it was cut

short by a sudden darkening of the doorway by which she had entered.

Mrs. Pratt stood there. Lady Tasker had been wrong. She _had_ come to

ask if she felt better. She did ask her, gathering up long swathes of

some newly unpacked white material she carried over her arm as she did

so.

"Sorry you were done up," she remarked. "Won't you have some more tea?"

Already Lady Tasker was rising.--"No more, thank you.--I was just

looking at these. What are they?" She indicated the casts.

The gesture that Mrs. Pratt gave she could probably no more have helped

giving than an eye can help winking when it is threatened with a blow.

Within one mistletoe-white sleeve an arm moved ever so slightly; very

likely a foot also moved within a curiously-toed Saxon-looking white

slipper; and she gave a confused and conscious and apologetic little

laugh.

"Oh, those silly things!" she said deprecatingly. "I really must move

them. But the studio is so full.... Do you know, it's a most horrid

feeling having them done--first the cold plaster poured on, and then,

when they take it off again--the mould--you know----"

Lady Tasker plainly did not understand. Perhaps she did not yet even

apprehend.--"But--but--," she said, "they're from a statue, aren't

they?"

Again Mrs. Pratt gave the pleased bashful little laugh. It was almost as

if she said it was very good of Lady Tasker to say so.

"No, they're from life," she said. "As a matter of fact they're me, but

I really must move them; they aren't so remarkable as all that.... Oh,

you're not going, are you?----"

For Lady Tasker had given a jump, and a movement as sudden and sprightly

as if she had only that moment got freshly out of her bed. Nervously she

put out her hand, while her hostess looked politely disappointed.

"Oh, and I was hoping you'd come and join us in the garden! We've Brimby

there, the novelist, you know--and Wilkinson, the young Member--and Mr.

Strong, of the 'Novum'--and I should so much like to introduce Mr.

Suwarree Prang to you----"

"Oh, thank you so much--," sprang as effusively from Lady Tasker's lips

as if she had been a schoolgirl allowed for the first time to come down

to dinner, "--it's so good of you, but really I half hoped you'd be out

when I called--I only meant to leave cards--I'm going on to see my

niece, and really haven't a moment----"

"Oh, I'm sure Dorothy'd excuse you for once!----," Mrs. Pratt pressed

her.

"Oh, she wouldn't--I'm quite sure she wouldn't--she'd never forgive me

if she knew I'd been so near and hadn't called," said Lady Tasker

feverishly.... "How do I get to Dorothy's from here?"

"Oh, Mr. Wilkinson will take you, or Mr. Prang; but are you sure you

won't stay?"

Lady Tasker was so far from staying that she was already out of the hall

and walking quickly towards the green door in the eight-foot hedge.

"Thank you, thank you so much," she was murmuring hurriedly. "I don't

see your husband anywhere about--never mind--so good of

you--good-bye----"

"Come again soon, won't you?"

"Yes, yes--oh, yes!... No, no, please don't!" (Mrs. Pratt had made a

half-turn towards the hammock and the copper beech). "Straight across

the Heath you said, didn't you? I shall find it quite easily! Don't come

any further--good-bye----"

And, touching Mrs. Cosimo Pratt's extended fingers as timorously as she

might have touched those of the cast itself, she fairly broke into a

run. The door of The Witan closed behind her.

II

THE POND-ROOM

The truth was not very far to seek: Lady Tasker was too old for these

things. Nobody could have expressed this more effectively than Mrs.

Cosimo Pratt herself, had it entered the mind of Mrs. Pratt to conceive

that any human soul could be so benighted as the soul of Lady Tasker

was. "Those casts!" Mrs. Pratt might have cried in amazement--or rather

Miss Amory Towers might have cried, for there is nothing in the Wedding

Service about making over to your husband, along with your love and

obedience, the valuable goodwill of a professional name. "Those poor

casts!... Of course they may not be _very_ beautiful--," here the

original of the casts might have modestly dropped her eyes, "--but such

as they are--goodness me! How _can_ people be so prurient, Cosimo? Don't

they see that what they really prove has nothing at all to do with the

casts, but--ahem!--a good deal to do with their own imaginations? I

don't want to use the word 'morbid,' but really!... Well, thank goodness

Corin and Bonniebell won't grow up like that! Afraid of the beautiful,

innocent human form!... Now that's what I've always claimed,

Cosimo--that that's the type of mind that's made all the mischief we've

got to set right to-day."

But for all that Lady Tasker was too old. Invisible Men in the garden

(or, if not actually invisible, at any rate as hard to be seen against

the leaves of the copper beech as a new penny would have been)--and in

the hall those extraordinary replicas! In the hall--the very forefront

of the house! It was to be presumed that Mrs. Pratt's foreign friends,

who were permitted to lean over her hammock, would not be denied The

Witan itself, and, for all Lady Tasker knew, the rest of Mrs. Pratt

might be reduplicated in plaster in the dining-room, the drawing-room,

and elsewhere....

Had she not said it herself, Lady Tasker would never have believed

it....

What a--what a--what an extraordinary thing!----

Lady Tasker had fled from The Witan still under the influence of that

access of effusive schoolgirlishness in which she had told Mrs. Pratt

that she really must go; nor did she grow up again all at once. But

little by little, as she walked, she began to resume the burden of her

years. She became eighteen, twenty-five, thirty again. By the time she

reached the lower pond Arthur had just got that billet in the India

Office, and her brother Dick, of the Department of Woods and Forests,

had married Ada Polperro, daughter of old Polperro of Delhi fame, and

her sister Emily had got engaged to Tony Woodgate, of the Piffers. (But

those casts!)... Then as she took the path between the ponds she

remembered the children at Ludlow, the three little girls at Cromwell

Gardens, and the arrival on Saturday of the "Seringapatam." (But those

natives!)... The thought of the children settled it. Her curious lapse

into juvenescence was over. By the time she rang Dorothy's bell she was

the same Lady Tasker who changed the political opinions of policemen and

deprecated the wanderings of Saint Paul.

Dorothy's flat was as different as it could well be from that other

house which (Lady Tasker had already decided) had something odd and

furtive about it--stagnant yet busy, segregated yet too wide open. The

flat had one really brilliant room. This room did not merely overlook

the pond in front of it; it seemed actually to have asked the pond to

come inside. A large triple window occupied the whole of one end of it;

this window faced west; and not only did the September sun shine

brightly in, but the inverted sun in the water shone in also, doubling

(yet also halving) all shadows, illumining the ceiling, and setting the

cream walls a-ripple with the dancing of the wavelets outside. Sprightly

chintzes looked as if they also might begin to dance at any moment; the

china in Dorothy's cupboards surprised the eye that had not expected

this altered light; and presently, to complete the complexity, the

shadow of the sycamore in the little garden below would move round, so

that you would hardly be able to tell whether the ceaseless creeping on

the cream walls was glitter of ripples, pattern of leaves, or both.

Dorothy sat in her accordion-pleats by the window, surrounded by

letters. And pray do not think it mere coincidence in this story that

her letters were Indian letters. Some interests that the home-amateur

takes up as he might take up poker-work or the diversion of jig-saw hold

a large part of the hearts and lives of others, and so Dorothy, as she

did more or less every week, had been reading her cousin Churchill's

letter, and that of her little niece and namesake Dot, up in Murree, and

Eva Woodgate's, who had sent her a parcel from Kohat, and others. She

rose slowly as her aunt was announced, and put her finger on the bell as

she passed.

"How are you, auntie?" she said, kissing Lady Tasker on both cheeks.

"Give me your things. Somehow I thought you might come to-day, but I'd

almost given you up. Do look what Eva's sent me! Really, with her own to

look after, I don't know how she finds the time! Aren't they sweet!----"

And she held them up.

Now Lady Tasker knew perfectly well the meaning of her niece's

accordion-pleating; but she was seventy and worldly-wise again now.

Therefore as she looked at the things she remarked off-handedly, "But

they're far too small."

"Too small!" Dorothy exclaimed. "Of course they aren't. Why, Noel was

only nine, and that's pretty big, and Jackie only just over

eight-and-a-half, though he put on weight while you watched him. They're

just right."

Lady Tasker reached for a chair. "But they _are_ for Jackie, aren't

they?"

Dorothy's blue eyes were as big as the plates in her

cupboards.--"Jackie! Good gracious, auntie!----"

"Eh?" said Lady Tasker, sitting down. "Not Jackie? Dear me. How stupid

of me. Of course, I did hear, but I've so many other things to think of,

and nobody'd suppose, to look at you----"

Dorothy ran to her aunt and gave her a kiss and a hug, a loud kiss and a

hug like two.

"You dear old thing!--Really, I'd begun to _hate_ all the horrid kind

people who asked me how I felt to-day and whether I shouldn't be glad

when it was over! What business is it of theirs? I nearly made Stan sack

Ruth last week, she looked so, and I positively refuse to have a young

girl anywhere near me!... But wasn't it sweet of Eva? I'll give you some

tea and then read you her letter. Indian or China?"

"China," Lady Tasker remarked.

"China, Ruth, and I'll have some more too. I don't know whether His

Impudence is coming in or not; he's gadding off somewhere, I expect....

But you weren't only _pretending_ just now, were you, auntie?----"

She put the plug of the spirit-kettle into the wall.

"Well, how are the Bits?" Lady Tasker asked....

(Perhaps "His Impudence" and "The Bits" require explanation. Both

expressions Dorothy had from her "maid," Ruth Mossop. "Maid" is thus

written because Ruth was a young widow, who, after a series of

disciplinary knockings-about by the late Mr. Mossop, was not

over-troubled with maternal anxiety for the four children he had left

her with. When asked by Dorothy whether she would prefer to be called

Mrs. Mossop or Ruth, Mrs. Mossop had chosen the latter name, giving as

her reason that it had been like Mr. Mossop's impudence to ask her to

accept the other name at all; and very many other memories also, brooded

on and gloomily loved, including the four children, had been bits of Mr.

Mossop's impudence. Stan had adopted the phrase, finding in it chuckles

of his own; and so His Impudence he had become, and Noel and Jackie the

fruits thereof.)

Dorothy put her fair head on one side, as if she considered the absent

Bits critically and dispassionately, and really thought that on the

whole she might venture to approve of them.

"Ra-ther little dears; but oh, Heaven, how _are_ we going to manage with

a third!"

Her aunt dissociated herself from the problem with a shrug.--"Well--if

Stan will persist in thinking that his dressing-room is merely a room

for him to dress in----"

"So I tell him," Dorothy murmured, with great meekness. "But--but flats

aren't made for children. We did manage to seize the estate agent's

little office for a nursery when all the flats were let, but when Stan

brings a man home we have to sleep him in the dressing-room as it

is--," (Lady Tasker shook her head, but the words "Wrong man" were

hardly audible), "--and a house will mean stair-carpets, and hall

furniture, and I don't know what else. Besides, Stan hasn't time to look

for one----"

"No?" said Lady Tasker drily.

"He really hasn't, poor boy," Dorothy protested. "And he's after

something really good this time--Fortune and Brooks, the

what-d'-you-call-'ems, in Pall Mall----"

"What about them?"

"Well, Stan's been told that they pay awfully good commissions, for

introductions, new accounts, you know; Stan dines out, say, and makes

himself nice to somebody with whole stacks of money, and mentions

Fortune & Brooks's chutney and pickled peaches and things, and--and----"

"I know," remarked Lady Tasker, with not much more expression than if

she had been a talking doll and somebody had pulled the string that

worked the speaking apparatus. She did know these dazzling schemes of

her smart and helpless nephew's--his club secretaryships, his projects

for journals that should combine the various desirable features of the

"Field" and "Country Life" and the "Sporting Times" and "Punch," his

pony deals, and his other innumerable attempts to make of his saunters

down Bond Street to St. James's and back _via_ the Junior Carlton and

Regent Street a source of income. Perhaps she knew, too, that Dorothy

knew of her knowledge, for she went on, "Well, well--let's hope there's

more in it than there was in the fishing-flies--now tell me what Eva's

got fresh."

"Oh, yes!" cried Dorothy, plunging her hand into her letters. "Eva sent

the things, but here's Dot's first--look at the darling's writing!----"

And from a sheet of paper with a regimental heading Dorothy began to

read:

"DEAREST AUNT DOROTHY,--

"were in murree and we got a servant that wigles his toes when we

speak to him and he loves baba and makes noises like him and

there are squiboos in the tres--"

--(she means squirrels)--

"--and ive got a parrot uncle tony bought me and uncle tony says

the monsoon will praps fale and the peple wont have anything to

eat but weve lots and i like this better than kohat the shops are

lovely but there are lots of flees and they bite baba and he

cries this is a long letter how are Jackie and noel i got the

photograf--"

--(that's the new one on the mantelpiece)--

"--were going to tifin at major hirsts little girls one is called

marjorie and were great friends----"

"Where's the other page got to? It was here----"

She found the other page, and continued the reading of the child's

letter.

Suddenly Lady Tasker interrupted her.

"Had Jack to borrow money to send them up there?"

"To Murree? I really don't know. Perhaps he had. But as adjutant of the

Railway Volunteers he'd have his saloon."

"H'm!... Anyway, the child oughtn't to be there at all. India's no place

for children."

"I know, auntie; but what can one do? They do come."

"H'm!... They didn't to me. Thank goodness I've done with love and

babies." (Dorothy laughed, perhaps at a mental vision of the houses in

Ludlow and Cromwell Gardens.) "Anyway, now they are here somebody's got

to look after them. They may as well be healthy...."

She mused, and Dorothy reached for other letters.

Lady Tasker's additions to her responsibilities usually began in this

way. Dorothy had very little doubt that presently little Dot also would

be handed like a parcel to some man or other coming home on leave, and

Lady Tasker would send to the makers for yet another cot.... Therefore,

pushing aside her last letter, she exclaimed almost crossly, "I _do_

think it's selfish of Aunt Eliza! There she is, with Spurrs all to

herself, and she never once thinks that Jack might like to send Dot to

England!"

"Neither would I if I had my time over again," said Lady Tasker

resolutely. "You needn't look like that--I wouldn't. Cromwell Gardens is

past praying for, and in another year there won't be a stick at the

Brear that's fit to be seen. The next batch I certainly intend to charge

for. I'm on the brink of the poorhouse as it is."

This time it was Dorothy who mused. She was a calculating young woman;

the wife of His Impudence had to be; and she was far too shrewd to

suppose for a moment that her aunt could ever escape her destiny, which

was to be imposed upon by her own flesh and blood while hardening her

heart against the rest of the world. Dorothy, and not Stan, had had to

keep that flat going, and the flat before it; unless Fortune & Brooks

turned up trumps--a rather remote contingency--she would have to

continue to do so; and she was quite casuistical enough to argue that,

while Aunt Eliza might keep her old Spurrs, Aunt Grace might properly be

victimized because Dorothy loved Aunt Grace. Therefore there were

musings in Dorothy's wide-angle blue eyes ... musings that only the

sound of a key in the outer lock interrupted.

"Hallo, that's His Impudence," Dorothy exclaimed. "I do hope he hasn't

brought anybody. I shall simply rush out if he has."

Stan hadn't. He came in at the door drawing off a pair of lemon-yellow

gloves, said "Hallo, Aunt Grace," and rang the bell. He next said,

"Hallo, Dot! Been out? Beastly smelly in town. No, I've not had tea.

Look here, you've eaten all the hot cakes; never mind; bread and

butter'll do, if you've got some jam--no, honey. Got an invitation for

you, Dot, to lunch, with Ferrers on Monday; can't you buck up and manage

it?... Well, Aunt Grace, what brings you up here? Bit off your beat,

isn't it? Awfully rude of me, I know, but it is a long way. Glad I came

in."

"I've been to see the Cosimo Pratts," said Lady Tasker.

Dorothy looked suddenly up.

"Oh, auntie, you didn't tell me that!" she exclaimed.

A grin lighted up Stan's good-looking face.

"Oh? How many annas to the rupee are they to-day? By Jove, they are a

rum lot up there! Any new prime cuts?"

"Stan, you mustn't!" said Dorothy, peremptorily. "Please don't! Don't

listen to him, auntie; he's outrageous."

But His Impudence went on, with his mouth full of bread and butter.

"I've only seen the fore-quarter and the trotter, but you see I haven't

been over the house. Did they show you the Bluebeard's Chamber? What is

there there? By Jove, it's like Jezebel and the dogs.... But I don't

suppose they'll have me up again. There was some chap there, and I got

him by himself and told him he didn't know what he was talking about;

rotten of me, I know, but you should have heard him! Anarchist--Votes

for Women--all the lot; whew!... More tea, Ruth, please----"

Lady Tasker felt the years beginning to ebb away from her again. She

had remembered the hammock and the Invisible Men.

"I hope he was--English?" she murmured.

"Who?"

"The man you say you were rude to."

"English? Yes. Why? English? Rather! No end of gas about the Empire.

Said it was on a wrong basis or something. Why do you ask?"

"I only wondered."

But Stan was perspicacious; he could see anything that was as closely

thrust under his nose as is the comparative rarity of the Englishman in

Hampstead. He laughed.

"Oh, that! We're used to that. We've all sorts up here.... By Jove, I

believe Aunt Grace has been thrown into the arms of a Jap or a nigger or

something! Well, if that doesn't put the lid on!... So of course you

wondered what I meant by the fore-quarter and Jezebel and the dogs.

Those are just some things they used to have.... Well, I'll tell you

what you can do about it next time, auntie. You talk to 'em about

Ludlow. That shuts 'em up. Sore spot, Ludlow; they're trying to forget

about Ye Olde Englysshe Maypole, and that row with old Wynn-Jenkins, and

old Griffin letting his hair grow and reciting those poems. They look at

you as if it never happened. But they didn't shut _me_ up."

"You seem to have been thoroughly rude," Lady Tasker remarked.

"Well, dash it all, they ask for it. She used to be some sort of a pal

of Dorothy's----"

"She's very clever, and she was always very kind to me," Dorothy

interpolated over her sewing.

"When, I should like to know? But never mind. I was going to say, Aunt

Grace, that I've had to put my foot down. I won't have the Bits meeting

those kids of Pratt's. It's perfectly awful; why, those children know as

much as I do--and I know a bit! They'll be wanting latchkeys presently.

That day I was up there I heard one of 'em say that little boys weren't

the same as little girls. I forget how she put it, but she knew all

right; think of that, at about four! I wish I could remember the words,

but it was a bit thick for four!----"

A restrained smile, perhaps at the thought of Stan putting his foot

down, had crossed Lady Tasker's face; no doubt it was part of the smile

that she presently said, toying with the little gold-rimmed glass,

"Quite right, Stan.... Anything fresh about Fortune & Brooks? Dorothy

told me."

Stan's feelings on any subject were never so strong but that at a word

he was quite ready to talk about something else. "Eh? Rather!" he said

heartily, and went straightway off at score.--New? Yes. He'd seen old

Brooks the day before; not a bad chap at all really; and they quite

understood one another, he and old Brooks. He'd told Stan things, old

Brooks had, (which Stan wasn't at liberty to disclose) about the

commissions they paid for really first-class introductions, things that

would astonish Lady Tasker!----

"You see," he explained, "as Brooks himself said, they can't afford to

advertise in the ordinary way; _infra dig_. They'd actually lose custom

if they put an ad. in the 'Daily Spec.' I don't mean that they don't put

a thing now and then into the right kind of paper, but just being

mentioned in general conversation, at dinners and tamashas and so on,

that's _their_ kind of advertisement! For instance--but just a minute,

and I'll show you----"

He jumped up and dashed out of the room. Lady Tasker took advantage of

his absence to give a discreet glance at Dorothy, but Dorothy's head

remained bent demurely over her work. Stan returned, carrying a small

parcel.

"Here we are," he said, unfastening the package: and then suddenly his

voice and manner changed remarkably. He took a small pot from the parcel

and set it on the palm of his left hand; he pointed at it with the

index-finger of his right hand; and a bright and poster-like smile

overspread his face. He spoke slightly loudly, and very, very

persuasively.

"Now I have here, Aunt Grace, one of our newest lines--Pickled Banyan.

Now I'm not going to ask you to take my word for it; I want you to try

it for yourself. It isn't what this man says or what that man says;

tasting's believing. Give me your teaspoon."

"My _dear_ Stan!" the astonished Lady Tasker gasped.

"We're selling a great many of this particular article, and are

prepared to stake our reputation on it," Stan went on. "Established

1780; more than One Hundred Gold Medals. Those are our credentials.

Those are what we lose.--Pass your spoon."

Lady Tasker was rigid. Perhaps Stan would have been better advised to

cast his spell over those who were going up in the world, and not on

those who, like themselves, were coming down or barely holding their

own. Again he went on, pointing engagingly at the small pot.

"But just try it," he urged, pushing the pot under his aunt's nose. "It

isn't what this man says or--I mean, it doesn't cost you anything to try

it. A free trial invited. Here's the recipe, look, on the

bottle--carefully selected Banyans, best cane sugar, lemon-juice refined

by a patent process, and a touch of tabasco. The makers' guarantee on

every label--none genuine without it--have a go!"

With a "Really, Stan!" Lady Tasker had turned away in her chair,

revolted. "And do you expect to go to a house again after an exhibition

like that?" she asked over her shoulder.

"Eh?" said Stan, a little discomfited. "Too much salesman about it,

d'you think? Brooks warned me about that. Fact is, he had a chap in as a

sort of object-lesson. This chap came in--I didn't know they had schools

and classes for this kind of thing, did you?--this chap came in, and I

was supposed to be somebody who didn't want the stuff at any price, and

he'd got to sell it to me whether I wanted it or not, and old Brooks

said to me, 'Now ask him how much the beastly muck is,' and a lot of

facers like that, and so we'd a set-to.... Then, when the fellow had

gone, he said he'd had him in just to show me how _not_ to do it.... But

he was an ingenious sort of beast, and I can't get his talk out of my

head. I'd thought of having a shot at it to-night, but perhaps I'd

better practise a bit more first. Thanks awfully for the criticism, Aunt

Grace. If you don't mind I'll practise on you as we go along. I'm dining

with a man to-night, but I'd better be sure of my ground.--Now what

about having the Bits in, Dot?"

"I think I hear them coming," said Dorothy, whose demureness had not

given as much as a flicker. Perhaps she was wondering whether she could

spare the sovereign His Impudence would presently ask her for.

The door opened, and Noel and Jackie stood there with a nurse behind

them. Noel walked stoutly in. Jackie, not yet very firm on his pins,

bumbled after him like an overladen bee.

III

THE "NOVUM"

Stan was quite right in supposing that the Cosimo Pratts wished to

forget all about the Ludlow experiment that had disturbed the Shropshire

country-side a year or more before, but he was wrong in the reason he

assigned them. They were not in the least ashamed of it. As a stage in

their intellectual development, the experiment had been entirely in its

place. Especially in Mrs. Pratt's career--as an old student of the

McGrath School of Art, a familiar (for a time) with Poverty in cheap

studios, the painter of the famous Feminist picture "Barrage," and so

forward--had this been true. Cosimo, in "The Life and Work of Miss Amory

Towers," a labour to which he devoted himself intermittently, pointed

out the naturalness and inevitability of the sequence with real

eloquence. Step had led to step, and the omission of any one step would

have ruined the whole.

But nobody with work still in them lingers long over the past. They had

dropped the task of regenerating rural England, or rather had handed it

over to others, only when it had been pointed out to them that capacity

so rare as theirs ought to be directed to larger ends. One evening

there had put in an appearance at one of the Ludlow meetings--a meeting

of the Hurdy-gurdy Octette, which afterwards gave instrumental

performances with such success at Letchworth, Bushey and Golder's

Green--Mr. Strong, the original founder and present editor of the "Novum

Organum," or, as it was usually called, the "Novum." Mr. Strong, as it

happened, was the man whom the scatter-brained Stan had met at The

Witan, and of whom he had expected that impossibility of any man

whomsoever--an admission that he did not know what he was talking about.

At that time Mr. Strong had been perambulating the country with a Van,

holding meetings and distributing literature; and whatever Mr. Strong's

other failings might have been, nobody had ever said of him that he did

not recognize a good thing when he saw it. The Cause itself had served

as an introduction between him and Cosimo; it had also been a sufficient

reason for his inviting himself to Cosimo's house for a couple of days

and remaining there for three weeks; and then he had got rid of the Van

and had come again. He was a rapturous talker, when there was an end to

be gained, and he had expressed himself as strongly of the opinion that,

magnificent a field for the sowing of the good seed as the country-side

was, there was simply stupendous propaganda to be done in London. He

knew (he had gone on) that Mrs. Pratt would forgive him (he had a

searching blue eye and an actor's smile) if he appeared for a moment to

speak disparagingly of what he might call the mere graces of the

Movement, (alluring as these were in Mrs. Pratt's capable and very

pretty hands); it was not disparagement really; he only meant that these

garlands would burgeon a hundred-fold if the stern and thankless work

was got out of the way first. Mr. Strong had a valuable trick of

suddenly making those searching blue eyes of his more searching, and of

switching off the actor's smile altogether; both of these things had

happened as he had gone on to point out that what the Cause was really

languishing for was a serious and responsible organ; and then, and only

then, when they had got (so to speak) the diapason, there would be time

enough for the trills and appoggiaturas of the Hurdy-gurdy Band.

Before the end of Mr. Strong's second visit Cosimo had put up the

greater part of the money for the "Novum."

So you see just where the feather-pated Stan was wrong. The Cosimo

Pratts were not outfaced from anything; they had merely seen a new and

heralding light. They did not so much recede from the Rural Experiment,

and discussions of the Suffrage, and eating buns on the floor at

assemblies of the Poets' Club, and a hundred and twenty other such

things, as become as it were translated. They still shed over these

activities the benignity of their approval, but from on high now. Amory

could no longer be expected actually to "run" the Suffrage Shop

herself--Dickie Lemesurier did that; nor the "Eden" (the new offshoot

off the Lettuce Grill)--that she left to Katie Deedes; nor the

"Lectures on Love" Agency--that was quite safe in the hands of her

friends, Walter Wyron and Laura Beamish. Amory merely shed approval

down. She was _hors concours_. She ... but you really must read Cosimo's

book. You will find it all there (or at any rate a good deal of it).

For Amory Pratt, in so far as Cosimo was the proprietor of the "Novum,"

was the proprietor of the proprietor of a high-class weekly review that

was presently going to put the two older parties out of business

entirely. She had more than a Programme now; she had a Policy. She had

crossed the line into the _haute politique_. Her At Homes were already

taking on the character of the political salon, and between herself and

the wives of ministers and ambassadors were differences, in degree

perhaps, but not in kind. And that even these differences should become

diminished she had taken on, ever since her settling-down at The Witan,

slight, but significant, new attitudes and condescensions. She was

kinder and more gracious to her sometime equals than before. She gave

them encouraging looks, as much as to say that they need not be afraid

of her. But it was quite definitely understood that when she took Mr.

Strong apart under the copper beech or retired with him into the studio

at the back of the house, she must on no account be disturbed.--Mr.

Strong, by the way, always dressed in the same Norfolk jacket, red tie

and soft felt hat, and his first caution to Cosimo and Amory had been

that Brimby, the novelist, was an excellent chap, but not always to be

taken very seriously.

Amory did not often put in an appearance at the "Novum's" offices. This

was not that she thought it more befitting that Mr. Strong should wait

on her, for she went about a good deal with Mr. Strong, and did not

always trouble him to come up to The Witan to fetch her. It was, rather,

if the truth must be told, that she found the offices rather dingy. Her

senses loved the newly-machined smell of each new issue of the paper,

but not the mingled odour of dust and stale gum and Virginia cigarettes

of the place whence it came. Moreover, the premises were rather

difficult to find. They lay at the back of Charing Cross Road. You

dodged into an alley between a second-hand bookseller's and a shop where

electric-light fittings were sold, entered a narrow yard, and, turning

to the right into a gas-lighted cavern where were stacked hundreds and

hundreds of sandwich-boards, some back-and-fronts, some with the iron

forks for the bearer's shoulders, you ascended by means of a dark

staircase to the second floor. There, at the end of a passage which some

poster-artist had half papered with the specimens of his art, you came

upon the three rooms. The first of these was the general office; the

second was Mr. Strong's private office; and the third was a room which,

the "Novum" having no need of it, Mr. Strong had thought he might as

well use as a rent-free bedroom as not. The door of this room Mr. Strong

always kept locked. It was more prudent. He was supposed to live

somewhere in South Kentish Town, and gave this address to certain of

his correspondents. The letters of these reached him sooner or later,

through the agency of a barber, in whose window was a placard, "Letters

may be addressed here."

Perhaps, too, the extraordinary people who visited Mr. Strong in the way

of business helped to keep Amory away. For an endless succession of the

queerest people came--contributors, and would-be contributors, and

friends of the Cause who "were just passing and thought they'd look in,"

and artists seeking a paper with the courage to print really stinging

caricatures, and article-writers who were out of a job only because they

dared to tell the truth about things, and Russian political exiles, and

Armenians who wanted passages to America, and Eurasians who wanted

rifles, and tramps, and poets, and the boy from the milkshop who brought

in the bread and butter and eggs for Mr. Strong's breakfast. And out of

these strange elements had grown up the paper's literary style. This was

unique in London journalism: philosophical, yet homely; horizon-wide of

outlook, yet never without hope that the shining thing in the gutter

might prove to be a jewel; and, despite its habitual omissions of the

prefix "Mr." from the names of statesmen, and its playful allusions to

this personage's nose or the waist-measurement of the other, with more

than a little of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine about it.

"Damn" and "Hell" were words the "Novum" commonly used. Once Amory had

demurred at the use of a word stronger still. But Mr. Strong had merely

replied, "If I can say it to you I think I can say it to them." He was

no truckler to his proprietors, and anyhow, the man whom the word had

encarnadined was only a colliery-owner.

The "Novum" had hardly been six weeks old when a certain desire on

Amory's part to make experiment of her power had, putatively at any

rate, lost it money. The little collision of wills had come about over

the question of whether the "Novum" should admit advertisements to its

columns or not. Now as most people know, that is a question that seldom

arises in journalism. A question far more likely to arise is whether the

advertisements can be got. But when a journal sets out to do something

that hitherto has not only not been done, but has not even been

attempted, you will admit that the case is special. The experience of

other papers is useless; their economics do not apply. What did apply

was the fact that Mrs. Pratt had been an artist, looked on sheets of

paper from another angle than that of the mere journalist and literary

man, and loved symmetry and could not endure unsightliness. Besides, "No

Compromise" was the "Novum's" motto, and what was the good of having a

motto like that if you compromised in the very form of your

expression?... A "shoulder-piece," "_The Little Mary Emollient_," had

brought out all Mrs. Pratt's finer artistic instincts. Here was a

journal consecrated to a great and revolutionary cause, and the very

first thing to catch a reader's eye was, not only an advertisement, but

a facetious advertisement at that--a Pill, without a Pill's robust

familiarity--a commercial cackle issuing from the "Novum's" august and

oracular mouth.... For the first time in her life Mrs. Pratt had wielded

the blue pencil, tearing the rubbishy proof-paper in the energy with

which she did so. Mr. Strong's blue eyes, bluer for the contrast with

his red knot of a tie, had watched her face, but he had said nothing. He

was willing to humour her....

But when all was said and done he was an editor, and no sooner was

Amory's back turned than he had restored the announcement. The paper had

appeared, and there had been a row....

"Then I appeal to Pratt," Mr. Strong had said, with all the good-nature

in the world. "I take it the 'Novum's' a serious enterprise, and not

just a hobby?"

Cosimo had glanced a little timidly at his wife. Then he had replied

thoughtfully.

"I don't know. I'm not so sure. That is, I'm not so sure it oughtn't to

be a serious enterprise _and_ a hobby. The world's best work is always

done for love--that's another way of calling it a hobby--you see what I

mean--Nietzsche has something about it somewhere or other--or if he

hasn't Ruskin has----"

Any number of effective replies had been open to Mr. Strong, but he had

used none of them. Instead his eyes had given as it were a flick to

Amory's face. The proprietor's proprietor had continued indignantly.

"It ruins the whole effect! It's _unspeakably_ vulgar! After that

glowing, that impassioned Foreword--_this_! Hardly a month ago that

lovely apostrophe to Truth Naked--that beautiful image of her stark and

innocent on our banners but with a forest of bright bayonets bristling

about her--and now _this_! It's revolting!"

But Mr. Strong had himself written that impassioned Foreword, and knew

all about it. Again he had given his proprietor's wife that quietly

humouring look.

"Do you mean that the 'Novum's' going to refuse advertisements?"

"I mean that I blue-pencilled that one myself."

"And what about the others--the 'Eden' and the Suffrage Shop and Wyron's

Lectures?"

"They're different. They _are_ the Cause. You said yourself that the

'Novum' was going to be a sort of generalissimo, and these the brigades

or whatever they're called. They are, at any rate, doing the Work. Is

_that_ doing any Work, I should like to know?"

Mr. Strong had refrained from flippancy.--"I see what you mean," he had

replied equably. "At the same time, if you're going to refuse

advertisements the thing's going to cost a good deal more money."

"Well?" Amory had replied, as who might say, "Has money been refused you

yet?"

Strong had given a compliant shrug--"All right. That means I censor the

advertisements, I suppose. New industry. Very well. The 'Eden' and

Wyron's Lectures and Week-end Cottages and the Plato Press only, then.

I'll strike out that '_Platinum: False Teeth Bought_.' But I warn you it

will cost more."

"Never mind that."

And so the incident had ended.

But perhaps Mrs. Pratt's sensitiveness of eye was not the only cause of

the rejection of that offending advertisement. Another reason might have

lain in her present relation with her sometime fellow-student of the

McGrath School of Art, Dorothy Tasker. For that relation had suffered a

change since the days when the two girls had shared a shabby day-studio

in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. At that time, now five years ago, Amory Towers

had been thrust by circumstances into a position of ignoble envy of her

friend. She had been poor, and Dorothy's people (or so she had supposed)

very, very wealthy. True, poor Dorothy, without as much as a single

spark of talent, had nevertheless buckled to, and, in various devious

ways, had contrived to suck a parasitic living out of the wholesome body

of real art; none the less, Amory had conceived her friend to be of the

number of those who play at hardship and independence with a fully

spread table at home for them to return to when they are tired of the

game. But the case was entirely changed now. Amory frankly admitted that

she had been mistaken in one thing, namely, that if those people of

Dorothy's had more money, they had also more claims upon it, and so were

relatively poor. Amory herself was now very comfortably off indeed. By

that virtue and good management which the envious call luck, she had

now money, Cosimo's money, to devote to the regeneration of the world.

Dorothy, married to the good-tempered and shiftless Stan, sometimes did

not know which way to turn for the overdue quarter's rent.

Now among her other ways of making ends meet Dorothy had for some years

done rather well out of precisely that kind of work which Amory refused

to allow the "Novum" to touch--advertisements. She had wormed herself

into the services of this firm and that as an advertisement-adviser. But

her contracts had begun in course of time to lapse, one or two fluky

successes had not been followed up, and two children had further

tightened things. Nor had Stan been of very much help. Amory despised

Stan. She thought him, not a man, but a mere mouth to be fed. Real men,

like Cosimo, always had money, and Amory was quite sure that, even if

Cosimo had not inherited a fortune from his uncle, he would still have

contrived to make himself the possessor of money in some other way.

Therefore Amory was even kinder to Dorothy than she was to Dickie

Lemesurier of the Suffrage Shop, to Katie Deedes of the "Eden," and to

Laura Beamish and Walter Wyron, who ran the "Lectures on Love." But

somehow--it was a little difficult to say exactly how, but there it

undoubtedly was--Dorothy did not accept her kindnesses in quite the

proper spirit. One or two she had even rejected--gently, Amory was bound

to admit, but still a rejection. For example, there had been that little

rebuff (to call it by its worst name for a moment) about the governess.

Amory had, in Miss Britomart Belchamber, the most highly-qualified

governess for Corin and Bonniebell that money and careful search had

been able to obtain; Dorothy lived less than a quarter of an hour's walk

away; it would have been just as easy for Britomart to teach four

children as to teach two; but Dorothy had twisted and turned and had

finally said that she had decided that she couldn't put Amory to the

trouble. And again, when the twins had had their party, Amory would

positively have _liked_ Noel and Jackie to come and dance "Twickenham

Ferry" in those spare costumes and to join in those songs from the Book

of Caroline Ditties; but again an excuse had been made. And half a dozen

similar things had driven Amory to the conclusion, sadly against her

will, that the Taskers were taking up that ridiculous, if not actually

hostile attitude, of the poor who hug their pride. It was not nice

between old friends. Amory could say with a clear conscience that she

had not refused Dorothy's help in the days when the boot had been on the

other leg. She was not resentful, but really it did look very much like

putting on airs.

But of course that stupid Stanhope Tasker was at the bottom of it all.

Amory did not so much mind his not having liked her from the first; she

would have been sorry to let a trifle like that ruffle her equanimity;

but it was evident that he did not in the least realize his position.

She was quite sure, in the first place, that he couldn't afford (or

rather Dorothy couldn't afford) to pay eighty pounds for that flat,

plus another twenty for the little office they had annexed and used as a

nursery. And in the next place he dressed absurdly above his position.

Cosimo dressed for hygiene and comfort, in cellular things and things

made of non-irritant vegetable fibre; but those absurdly modish jackets

and morning-coats of Stan's had, unless Amory was very much mistaken, to

be bought at the expense of real necessaries. And so with their

hospitality. In that too, they tried to cut a dash and came very near to

making themselves ridiculous. Amory didn't want to interfere; she

couldn't plan and be wise for everybody; she had her own affairs to

attend to; but she was quite sure that the Taskers would have done

better to regulate their hospitality as hospitality was regulated at The

Witan--that was, to make no special preparation, but to have the door

always open to their friends. But no; the Taskers must make a splash.

They must needs "invite" people and be a little stand-offish about

people coming uninvited. They were "At home" and "Not at home" for all

the world as if they had been important people. But Amory would have

thought herself very stupid to be taken in by all this ceremony. For

example, the last time she and Cosimo had been asked to the flat to

dinner she knew that they had been "worked off" only because the Taskers

had had the pheasants given by somebody, and very likely the fish too.

And it would have been just like Stan Tasker's insolence had he asked

them because he _knew_ that the Pratts did not eat poor beasties that

should have been allowed to live because of their lovely plumes, nor

the pretty speckled creatures that had done no harm to the destroyer who

had taken them with a hook out of their pretty stream.

But, kind to her old friend as Amory was always ready to be, she did not

feel herself called upon to go out of her way to be very nice to her

friend's husband. He had no right to expect it after his rudeness to

Edgar Strong about the "Novum." For it had been about the "Novum" that

Stan had given Strong that talking-to. Much right (Amory thought hotly)

he had to talk! Just because he consorted with men who counted their

money in rupees and thought nothing of shouldering their darker-skinned

brothers off the pavement, he thought he was entitled to put an editor

into his place! But the truth, of course, was, that that very

familiarity prevented him from really knowing anything about these

questions at all. Because an order was established, he had not

imagination enough to see how it could have been anything different. His

mind (to give it that name) was of the hidebound, official type, and too

many limited intelligences of that kind stopped the cause of Imperial

progress to-day. Or rather, they tried to stop it, and perhaps thought

they were stopping it; but really, little as they suspected it, they

were helping more than they knew. A pig-headed administration does

unconsciously help when, out of its own excesses, a divine discontent is

bred. Mr. Suwarree Prang had been eloquent on that very subject one

afternoon not very long ago. A charming man! Amory had listened from

her hammock, rapt. Mr. Prang did the "Indian Review" for the "Novum," in

flowery but earnest prose; and as he actually was Indian, and did not

merely hobnob with a few captains and subalterns home on leave, it was

to be supposed that he would know rather more of the subject than Mr.

Stanhope Tasker!----

And Mr. Stanhope Tasker had had the cheek to tell Mr. Strong that he

didn't know what he was talking about!

Amory felt that she could never be sufficiently thankful for the chance

that had thrown Mr. Strong in her way. She had always secretly felt that

her gifts were being wasted on such minor (but still useful) tasks as

the "Eden" Restaurant and the "Love Lectures" Agency. But her personal

exaltation over Katie Deedes and the others had caused her no joy. What

had given her joy had been the immensely enlarged sphere of her

usefulness; that was it, not the odious vanity of leadership, but the

calm and responsible envisaging of a task for which not one in ten

thousand had the vision and courage and strength. And Edgar Strong had

shown her these things. Of course, if he had put them in these words she

might have suspected him of trying to flatter her; but as a matter of

fact he had not said a single word about it. He had merely allowed her

to see for herself. That was his way: to all-but-prove a thing--to take

it up to the very threshold of demonstration--and then apparently

suddenly to lose interest in it. And that in a way was his weakness as

an editor. Amory, whom three or four wieldings of the blue pencil had

sufficed to convince that there was nothing in journalism that an

ordinary intelligence could not master in a month, realized this. She

herself, it went without saying, always saw at once exactly what Mr.

Strong meant; she personally liked those abrupt and smiling stops that

left Mr. Strong's meaning as it were hung up in the air; but it was a

mistake to suppose that everybody was as clever as she and Mr. Strong.

"I's" had to be dotted and "t's" crossed for the multitude. But it was

at that point that Mr. Strong always became almost languid.

It was inevitable that the man who had thus revealed to her, after a

single glance at her, such splendid and unsuspected capacities within

herself, should exercise a powerful fascination over Amory. If he had

seen all this in her straight away (as he assured her he had), then he

was a man not lightly to be let go. He might be the man to show her even

greater things yet. He puzzled her; but he appeared to understand her;

and as both of them understood everybody else, she was aware of a

challenge in his society that none other of her set afforded her. He

could even contradict her and go unsacked. Prudent people, when they

sack, want to know what they are sacking, and Amory did not know.

Therefore Mr. Strong was quite sure of his job until she should find

out.

Another thing that gave Mr. Strong this apparently off-hand hold over

her was the confidential manner in which he had warned her not to take

Mr. Brimby, the novelist, too seriously. For without the warning Amory,

like a good many other people, might have committed precisely that

error.... But when Mr. Brimby, taking Amory apart one day, had expressed

in her ear a gentle doubt whether Mr. Strong was quite "sound" on

certain important questions, Amory had suddenly seen. Mr. Strong had

"cut" one of Mr. Brimby's poignantly sorrowful sketches of the East

End--seen through Balliol eyes--and Mr. Brimby was resentful. She did

not conceal from herself that he might even be a little envious of Mr.

Strong's position. He might have been wiser to keep his envy to himself,

for, while mere details of routine could hardly expect to get Amory's

personal attention, there was one point on which Mr. Strong was quite

"sound" enough for Amory--his sense of her own worth and of how that

worth had hitherto been wasted. And Mr. Strong had not been ill-natured

about Mr. Brimby either. He had merely twinkled and put Amory on her

guard. And because he appeared to have been right in this instance,

Amory was all the more disposed to believe in his rightness when he gave

her a second warning. This was about Wilkinson, the Labour Member. He

was awfully fond of dear old Wilkie, he said; he didn't know a man more

capable in some things than Wilkie was; but it would be foolish to deny

that he had his limitations. He wasn't fluid enough; wanted things too

much cut-and-dried; was a little inclined to mistake violence for

strength; and of course the whole point about the "Novum" was that it

was fluid....

"In fact," Mr. Strong concluded, his wary blue eyes ceasing suddenly to

hold Amory's brook-brown ones and taking a reflective flight past her

head instead, "for a paper like ours--I'm hazarding this, you

understand, and keep my right to reconsider it--I'm not sure that a

certain amount of fluidity isn't a Law...."

Amory nodded. She thought it excellently put.

IV

THE STONE WALL

Amory sometimes thought, when she took her bird's-eye-view of the

numerous activities that found each its voice in its proper place in the

columns of the "Novum," that she would have allowed almost any of them

to perish for lack of support rather than the Wyron's "Lectures on

Love." She admitted this to be a weakness in herself, a sneaking

fondness, no more; but there it was--just that one blind spot that mars

even the clearest and most piercing vision. And she always smiled when

Mr. Strong tried to show this weakness of hers in the light of a merit.

"No, no," she always said, "I don't defend it. Twenty things are more

important really, but I can't help it. I suppose it's because we know

all about Laura and Walter themselves."

"Perhaps so," Mr. Strong would musingly concede.

Anybody who was anybody knew all about Laura Beamish and Walter Wyron

and a certain noble defeat in their lives that was to be accounted as

more than a hundred ordinary victories. That almost historic episode had

just shown everybody who was anybody what the world's standards were

really worth. Hitherto the Wyrons have been spoken of both as a married

couple and as "Walter Wyron" and "Laura Beamish" separately; let the

slight ambiguity now be cleared up.

Mrs. Cosimo Pratt became on occasion Miss Amory Towers for reasons that

began and ended in her profession as a painter; and everybody who was

anybody was as well aware that Miss Amory Towers, the painter of the

famous feminist picture "Barrage," was in reality Mrs. Cosimo Pratt, as

the great mass of people who were nobody knew that Miss Elizabeth

Thompson, the painter of "The Roll Call," was actually Lady Butler. But

not so with the Wyrons. Reasons, not of business, nor yet of fame, but

of a burning and inextinguishable faith, had led to their noble

equivocation. Deeply seated in the hearts both of Walter and of Laura

had lain a passionate non-acceptance of the merely parroted formula of

the Wedding Service. So searching and fundamental had this been that by

the time their various objections had been disposed of little had

remained that had seemed worth bothering about; and in one sense they

had not bothered about it. True, in another sense they had bothered, and

that was precisely where the defeat came in; but that did not dim the

splendour of the attempt. To come without further delay to the point,

the Wyrons had married, under strong protest, in the ordinary everyday

way, Laura submitting to the momentary indignity of a ring; but

thereafter they had magnificently vindicated the New Movement (in that

one aspect of it) by not saying a word about the ceremony of their

marriage to anybody--no, not even to the people who were somebody. Then

they had flown off to the Latin Quarter.

It had not been in the Latin Quarter, however, that the true character

of their revolt had first shown. Perhaps--nobody knows--their relation

had not been singular enough there. Perhaps--there were people base

enough to whisper this--they had feared the singularity of "letting on."

It is easy to do in the Boul' Mich' as the Boul' Mich' does. The real

difficulties begin when you try to do in London what London permits only

as long as you do it covertly.

And if there had been a certain covertness about their behaviour when,

after a month, they had returned, what a venial and pardonable

subterfuge, to what a tremendous end! Amory herself, up to then, had not

had a larger conception. For while the Wyrons had secretly married

simply and solely in order that their offspring should not lie under a

stigma, their overt lives had been one impassioned and beautiful protest

against any assumption whatever on the part of the world of a right to

make rules for the generation that was to follow. No less a gospel than

this formed the substance of those Lectures of Walter's; great as the

number of the born was, his mission was the protection of a greater

number still. The best aspects both of legitimacy and of illegitimacy

were to be stereoscoped in the perfect birth. And he now had, in quite

the strict sense of the word, a following. The same devoted faces

followed him from the Lecture at the Putney Baths on the Monday to that

at the Caxton Hall on the Thursday, from his ascending the platform at

the Hampstead Town Hall on the Tuesday to his addressing of a

garden-party from under the copper-beech at The Witan on the Sunday

afternoon. And in course of time the faithfulness of the followers was

rewarded. They graduated, so to speak, from the seats in the body of the

building to the platform itself. There they supported Laura, and gave

her a countenance that she no longer needed (for she had earned her

right to wear her wedding-ring openly now), and flocked about the

lecturer afterwards, not as about a mere man, but rather as seeing in

him the physician, the psychologist, the expert, the helper, and the

setter of crooked things straight that he was.

As a lecturer--may we say as a prophet?--Walter had a manner original

and taking in the extreme. Anybody less sustained by his vision and less

upheld by his faith might have been a little tempted to put on "side,"

but not so Walter. Perhaps his familiarity with the stage--everybody

knew his father, Herman Wyron, of the New Greek Theatre--had taught him

the value of the large and simple statement of large and simple things;

anyhow, he did not so much lecture to his audiences as accompany them,

chattily and companionably, through the various windings of his subject.

With his hands thrust unaffectedly into the pockets of his knickers,

and a sort of sublimated "Well, here we are again" expression on his

face, he allayed his hearers' natural timidity before the magnitude of

his mission, and gave them a direct and human confab. on a subject that

returned as it were from its cycle of vastness to simple personal

experience again. His every sentence seemed to say, "Don't be afraid;

it's nothing really; soon you'll be as much at your ease in dealing with

these things as I am; just let me tell you an anecdote." No wonder Laura

held her long and muscular neck very straight above her hand-embroidered

yoke. Everybody understood that unless she adopted some sort of an

attitude her proper pride in such a married lover must show, which would

have been rather rubbing it in to the rest of her sex. So she booked

dates for new lectures almost nonchalantly, and, when the platform was

invaded at the end of the Lecture, or Walter stepped down to the level

of those below, she was there in person as the final demonstration of

how well these things actually would work as soon as Society had decided

upon some concerted action.

Corin and Bonniebell, Amory's twins, did not attend Walter's Lectures.

It was not deemed advisable to keep them out of bed so late at night.

But Miss Britomart Belchamber, the governess, could have passed--had in

fact passed--an examination in them. It had been Amory who, so to speak,

had set the paper. For it had been at one of the Lectures--the one on

"_The Future Race: Are We Making Manacles?_"--that Miss Belchamber had

first impressed Amory favourably. Amory had singled her out, first

because she wore the guarantee of Prince Eadmond's Collegiate

Institution--the leather-belted brown sleeveless djibbah with the

garment of fine buff fabric showing beneath it as the fruit of a roasted

chestnut shows when the rind splits--and secondly because of her

admirable physique. She was splendidly fair, straight as an athlete, and

could shut up her long and massive limbs in a wicker chair like a

clasp-knife; and for her movements alone it was almost a sin that

Walter's father could not secure her for the New Greek Society's revival

of "Europa" at the Choragus Theatre. And she was not too quick mentally.

That is not to say that she was a fool. What made Amory sure that she

was not a fool was that she herself was not instinctively attracted by

fools, and it was better that Miss Belchamber should be ductile under

the influence of Walter's ideas than that she should have just wit

enough to ask those stupid and conventional and so-called "practical"

questions that Walter always answered at the close of the evening as

patiently as if he had never heard them before. And Miss Belchamber told

the twins stories, and danced "Rufty Tufty," with them, and "Catching of

Quails," and was really cheap at her rather stiff salary. Cosimo loved

to watch her at "Catching of Quails." If the children did not grow up

with a love of beauty after that, he said, he gave it up. (The twins, by

the way, unconsciously served Amory as another example of Dorothy

Tasker's unreasonableness. As the mother of Noel and Jackie, Dorothy

seemed rather to fancy herself as an experienced woman. But Amory could

afford to smile at this pretension. There was a difference in age of a

year and more between Noel and Jackie. No doubt Dorothy knew a little,

but she, Amory, could have told her a thing or two).

On a Wednesday afternoon about a fortnight after Lady Tasker's visit to

The Witan, Amory walked the garden thoughtfully. The weather was growing

chilly, the hammock had been taken in, and her feet in the fallen leaves

made a melancholy sound. Cosimo had left her half an hour before;

certain points had struck him in the course of conversation which he

thought ought to be incorporated in the "_Life and Work_"; and it was a

rule at The Witan that nothing must ever be allowed to interfere with

the impulse of artistic creation. For the matter of that, Amory herself

was creating now, or at any rate was at the last preparatory stage that

immediately precedes creation. Presently she would have taken the plunge

and would be deep in the new number of the "Novum." For the moment she

was thinking of Mr. Strong.

As she tried to clear up exactly what place Mr. Strong had in her

thoughts she was struck by the dreadful tendency words and names and

definitions have to attach themselves to vulgar and ready-made

meanings--a tendency so strong that she had even caught herself more

than once jumping to a common conclusion. To take an example, though a

rather preposterous one. Had Dorothy, with one of her ridiculous

advertisements waiting to be done, confessed to her that instead of

setting about it she was thinking of a male person with a pair of alert

blue eyes and a curiously mobile and clean-cut mouth (not that it was

likely that Dorothy would have had the candour to make such a

confession)--well, Amory might have smiled just like anybody else. She

was not trying to make herself out any better than others. She was

candid about it, however, which they were often not.

Still, the trouble about her feeling for Mr. Strong was to find a word

for it that had not been vulgarized. She was, of course, exceedingly

interested in him, but that was not saying very much. She "liked" him,

too, but that again might mean anything. Her difficulty was that she

herself was so special; and so on second thoughts she might have been

right in giving an interpretation to Dorothy's actions, and Dorothy

quite wrong in giving the same interpretation to hers merely because the

data were the same.

Nor had Mr. Strong himself been able to help her very much when, a

couple of days before, she had put the question to him, earnestly and

without hateful false shame.

"What _is_ this relation of ours?" she had asked him, point-blank and

fearlessly.

"Eh?" Mr. Strong had replied, a little startled.

"There _must_ be a relation of some sort between every two people who

come into contact. I'm just wondering exactly what ours _is_."

Then Mr. Strong had knitted his brows and had said, presently, "I

see.... Have you read '_The Tragic Comedians_?'"--Amory had not, and the

copy of the book which she had immediately ordered had not come yet. And

then she too had knitted her brows. She had caught the trick from him.

"I suppose that what it really comes to is knowing _yourself_," she had

mused; and at that Mr. Strong had given her a quick approving look,

almost as if he said that if she put in her thumb in the same place

again she might pull out a plum very well worth having.

"And not," Amory had continued, curiously heartened, "anything about the

other person at all."

"Good, good," Mr. Strong had applauded under his breath; "have you

Edward Carpenter's book in the house, by the way?... Never mind: I'll

send you my copy."

He had sent it. It was in Amory's hand now. She had discovered that it

had a catching and not easily identifiable smell of its own, of Virginia

cigarettes and damp and she knew not what else, all mingled; and somehow

the smell seemed quite as much an answer to the question she had asked

as anything in the book itself.

Nor, despite Walter's special knowledge of these indications, could she

go to the Wyrons for diagnosis and advice. For one thing, there was her

own position of high patronage to be considered; for another, splendidly

daring as the Wyrons' original protest had been, the Lectures had lately

begun to have a little the air of a shop, over the counter of which

admittedly valuable specifics were handed, but with a kind of "_And_ the

next article, please?" suspicion about it. Besides, the Wyrons, having

no children, had of necessity to "chic" a little in cases where children

formed a complicating element. Besides ... but anyway, Amory wasn't

going either to Laura Beamish or to Walter Wyron.

She made a charming picture as she walked slowly the length of the

privet hedge and then turned towards the copper beech again. Mr. Strong

had said that he liked her in that dress--an aluminium-grey one, very

simple and very expensive, worn with a handsome Indian shawl, a gift of

Mr. Prang's, the mellow colour of which "led up" to the glowing casque

of her hair; and she had smiled when Mr. Strong had added that Britomart

Belchamber's rough tabards and the half-gym costume in which she danced

"Rufty Tufty" would not have suited her, Amory, at all. Probably they

wouldn't--not as a regular thing. Cosimo liked those, especially when

the wearer was largish; indeed, it was one of Cosimo's humours to pose

as Britomart's admirer. But Amory was small, and never shut her limbs up

like a multiple-lever in a basket chair, but drew her skirt down a foot

or so below her toes instead whenever she sat down. She fancied, though

Mr. Strong had never used the word, that the "Novum's" editor found Miss

Belchamber just a little hoydenish.

Amory wished that something would bring Mr. Strong up that afternoon. It

was one of the days on which the editing of the "Novum" could take care

of itself, and besides, they would actually be editing it together. For

the next number but one--the forthcoming one was already passed--was to

be their most important utterance yet. It was to indicate clearly,

firmly and once for all, their Indian policy. The threatened failure of

the monsoon made the occasion urgent, and Mr. Suwarree Prang himself had

explained to Amory only the night before precisely what the monsoon was,

and how its failure would provide, from the point of view of those who

held that the present wicked regime of administration by the strong hand

was at last tottering to its fall, a providential opportunity. It had

struck Amory as wondrously romantic and strange that a meteorological

condition half-way round the world, in a place she had never seen,

should thus change the course of her quiet life in Hampstead; but,

properly considered, no one thing in this wonderful world was more

wonderful than another. It was Life, and Life, as she remembered to have

read somewhere or other, is for the Masters of it. And she was beginning

to find that after all these things only required a little confidence.

It was as easy to swim in six miles deep of water, like that place in

Cosimo's atlas of which the name escaped her for the moment, as it was

in six feet. And Mr. Prang had talked to her so long and so vividly

about India that she sometimes found it quite difficult to realize that

she had never been there.

Still wishing that Mr. Strong would come, she slowly left the garden

and entered the house. In the hall she paused for a moment, and a tender

little smile softened her face. She had stopped before the exquisite

casts of the foot and the arm. Pensively she took the foot up from the

console table, and then, coming to a resolution, she took the arm down

from its hook on the wall. After all, beautiful as she had to admit them

to be, the studio, and not the hall, was the proper place for them.

With the foot and Edward Carpenter in her left hand, and the plaster arm

hugged to her right breast, she walked along the passage and sought the

studio.

It was called the studio, and there certainly were canvases and easels

and other artists' paraphernalia there, but it was less used for

painting than as a room for sitting and smoking and tea and discussion.

It was a comfortable apartment. Rugs made islands on the thick cork

floor-covering, and among the rugs were saddlebag chairs, a long

adjustable chair, and a wide couch covered with faded tapestry. The room

was an annex of corrugated iron lined with matchboarding, but

electric-light fittings depended from the iron ties overhead, and in

place of an ordinary hearth was a sort of stage one, with an imitation

log of asbestos, which, when you put a match to it, broke into a licking

of blue and yellow gas-jets. The north window occupied the whole of the

garden end, and, facing it, was the large cartoon for Amory's unfinished

allegorical picture, "_The Triumph of Humane Government_." High up and

just within the door was the bell that answered to the button outside.

Amory was putting down the casts on a Benares tray when the ringing of

this bell startled her. But as it rang in the kitchen also, she did not

move to answer it. She stood listening, the fingers of one hand to her

lips, those of the other still resting on the plaster shoulder. Then she

heard a voice, and a moment later there came a tap at the door.

It was Mr. Strong.

He advanced, and did a thing he had not done before--lifted the hand she

extended to his lips and then let it drop again. But Amory was not

surprised. It was merely a new and natural expression of the homage he

had never concealed, and even had Amory been vain enough to suppose that

it meant anything more, the briskness of the "Good afternoon" that

followed it would have disabused her. "Glad I found you," Mr. Strong

said. "I wanted to see you. Cosimo in?"

Her husband was always Cosimo to him, but in speaking to herself he used

no name at all. It was as if he hesitated to call her Amory, and refused

to call her Mrs. Pratt. Even "Miss Towers" he had only used once, and

that was some time ago.

Amory's fingers left the cast, and Mr. Strong walked towards the

asbestos log.--"May I?" he said, drawing forth a packet of Virginia

cigarettes; and afterwards he put the match with which he lighted one of

the cigarettes to the log. Amory drew up a small square footstool, and

put her elbows on her knees and her interwoven fingers beneath her

chin. Mr. Strong examined the end of his cigarette, and thrust his chin

down into his red tie and his hands deep into his trousers pockets. Then

he seemed to plunge into thought.

Suddenly he shot a glance at Amory, and said abruptly, "I suppose you've

talked over the Indian policy with Cosimo?"

It was nice and punctilious of him, the way he always dragged Cosimo in,

and Amory liked it. She felt sure that the editor of the "Times,"

calling on the Prime Minister's wife, would not ignore the Prime

Minister. But to-day she was a little abstracted--dull--she didn't know

exactly what; and so she replied, without moving, "Would you like him

here? He's busy with the '_Life_'."

"Oh no, don't trouble him then."

There was a pause. Then, "I did talk to him about it. And to Mr. Prang,"

Amory said.

"Oh. Hm. Quite so," said Mr. Strong, looking at the toes of his brogues.

"Yes. Mr. Prang was here last night," Amory continued, looking at the

points of her own slippers.

"Yes."

Again Mr. Strong's chin was sunk into his red tie. He was rising and

falling slowly on his toes. His eyes moved ruminatively sideways to the

rug at Amory's feet.

"Yes. Yes. I've been wondering----" he said thoughtfully.

"Well?"

"Oh, nothing really. I dare say I'm quite wrong. You see, Prang----"

"What?" Amory asked as he paused again.

There was a twinkle in the eyes that rose to Amory's. Mr. Strong gave a

slight shrug.--"Well--Prang!----" he said with humorous deprecation.

Amory was quick.--"Oh!--You don't mean that Mr. Prang isn't sound?"

"Sound? Perfectly, perfectly. And a most capable fellow. Only I've

wondered once or twice whether he isn't--you know--just a little _too_

capable.... You see, we want to use Prang--not to have Prang using

_us_."

Amory could not forbear to smile. If that was all that was troubling Mr.

Strong she thought she could reassure him.

"I don't think you'd have been afraid of that if you'd been here last

night," she replied quietly. "We were talking over England's diabolical

misrule, and I never knew Mr. Prang so luminous. It was

pathetic--really. Cosimo was talking about that Rawal Pindi case--you

know, of that ruffianly young subaltern drawing down the blinds and then

beating the native.--'But how do they take it?' I asked Mr. Prang,

rather scornfully, you know; and really I was sorry for the poor fellow,

having to apologize for his country.--'That's it,' he said sadly--it was

really sad.--And he told me, frankly, that sometimes the poor natives

pretended they were killed, and sometimes they announce that they're

going to die on a certain day, and they really _do_ die--they're so

mystic and sensitive--it was _most_ interesting.... But what I mean is,

that a gentle and submissive people like that--Mr. Prang admits that's

their weakness--I mean they _couldn't_ use _us_! It's our degradation

that we aren't gentle and sensitive too. You see what I mean?"

"Oh, quite," Mr. Strong jerked out. "Quite."

"And that's why I call Mr. Prang an idealist. There must be something

_in_ the East. At any rate it was splendid moral courage on Prang's part

to say, quite openly, that they couldn't do anything without the little

handful of us here, but must simply go on suffering and dying."

There fell one of the silences that usually came when Mr. Strong lost

interest in a subject. Merely adding, "Oh, I've not a word to say

against Prang, but----," he began to rise and fall on his toes again.

Then he stepped to the Benares table where the casts were. But he made

no criticism of them. He picked the foot up, and put it down again. "I

like it," he said, and returned once more to the asbestos hearth. The

silence fell again.

Amory, sitting on the footstool with her knees supporting her elbows and

her wrists supporting her chin, would have liked to offer Mr. Strong a

penny for his thoughts. She had had an odd, warm little sensation when

he had picked up that cast of the perfect foot. She supposed he must

know that it was her foot, but so widely had his thoughts been ranging

that he had merely put it down again with an abstracted "I like it."

Amory was not sure that any other woman than herself would not have been

piqued. Any other woman would have expected him either not to look at

the thing, or else to say that it was small, or to ask whether the real

one was as white, or something foolish like that. But Amory was superior

to such things. She lived on higher levels. On these levels such an

affront to the pure intellect as a flirtation could not exist. Free Love

as a logical and defensible system--yes, perhaps; or a combination so

happy of marriage and cohabitation as that of the Wyrons'--yes again;

but anything lower she left to the stupid people who swallowed the

conventions whole, including the convention of not being found out.--So

she merely wondered about their relation again. Obviously, there must be

a relation. And yet his own explanation had been quite insufficient; it

had been no explanation at all to ask her whether she had read "_The

Tragic Comedians_" or whether she had Edward Carpenter in the house. No

doubt it was flattering to her intelligence to suppose that she could

"flash" at his meaning without further words on his part, but it was

also a little irritating when the flash didn't come. And, now that she

came to think of it, except that he allowed it to be inferred that he

found Britomart Belchamber a bit lumpish, she didn't know what he

thought, not merely of herself, but of women at all.

And yet there was a passed-through-the-furnace look about him that might

have piqued any woman. It was not conceivable that his eyes had softened

only over inspired passages in proof, or that the tenderest speeches his

lips had shaped had been the "Novum's" rallying-cries to the devoted

band of the New Imperialists. Amory was sure that his memory must be a

maze of things, less spacious perhaps, but far more interesting than

these. He looked widely now, but must have looked close and intense too.

He pronounced upon the Empire, but, for all he was not married, must

have probed deep into the palpitating human heart as well.

Amory was just thinking what a gage of intimacy an unembarrassed silence

can be when Mr. Strong broke it. He lighted another cigarette at the end

of the last, turned, threw the end on the asbestos log, and stood

looking at the purring blue and yellow jets. No doubt he was full of the

Indian policy again.

But as it happened it was not the Indian policy--"Oh," Mr. Strong said,

"I meant to ask you--Who was that fellow who came up here one day?"

This was so vague that when Amory said "What fellow?" Mr. Strong himself

saw the vagueness, and laughed.

"Of course: 'How big is a piece of wood?'--I mean the fellow who came to

The Witan in a morning-coat?"

This was description enough. Amory's back straightened a little.

"Oh, Stanhope Tasker! Oh, just the husband of a friend of mine. I don't

think you've met her. Why?"

Surely, she thought, Mr. Strong was not going to tell her that "Stanhope

Tasker was an excellent fellow in his way, but----," as he had said of

Mr. Brimby, Mr. Wilkinson and Mr. Prang!----

"Oh, nothing much. Only that I saw him to-day," Strong replied

offhandedly.

"He's often about. He isn't a very busy man, I should say," Amory

remarked.

"Saw him in Charing Cross Road as I was coming out of the office," Mr.

Strong continued. "I don't think he saw me though."

"After his abominable manners to you that day I should think he'd be

ashamed to look you in the face."

For a moment Mr. Strong looked puzzled; then he remembered, and laughed

again.

"Oh, I didn't mind that in the least! Rather refreshing in fact. Far

more likely he didn't notice me because he had his wife with him. I

think you said he was married?"

Amory was just about to say that Mr. Strong gave Stan far more

magnanimity than he deserved when a thought arrested her. Dorothy in

Charing Cross Road! As far as she was aware Dorothy had not been out of

Hampstead for weeks, and even then kept to the less frequented parts of

the Heath. It wasn't likely....

Her eyes became thoughtful.

"Oh? That's funny," she said.

"What, that he shouldn't see me? Oh no. They seemed far more interested

in electric-light fittings."

Amory's eyes grew more thoughtful still--"Oh!" she said; and added, "Did

you think her pretty?"

"Hm--in a way. Very well dressed certainly; they both were. But I don't

think these black Spanish types amuse me much," Mr. Strong replied.

Dorothy a black Spanish type!

"Oh, do tell me what she had on!" said Amory brightly.

She rather thought she knew most of Dorothy's dresses by this time.

A black Spanish type!

The task of description was too much for Mr. Strong, but he did his best

with it. Amory was keenly interested. But she pocketed her interest for

the present, and said quite banteringly and with an almost arch look,

"Oh, I should have thought Mrs. Tasker exactly your type!"

Again the quick motion of Mr. Strong's blue eyes suggested an audible

click--"Oh? Why?" he asked.

"Oh, there's no 'why' about it, of course. It's the impression of you I

had, that's all. You see, you don't particularly admire Miss

Belchamber----"

"Oh, come! I think Miss Belchamber's an exceedingly nice girl, only----"

"Well, Laura Beamish, then. But I forgot; you don't go to Walter's

Lectures. But I wonder whether you'd admire Laura?"

"If she's black and Spanish you think I should?" He paused. "Is she?"

"No. Brown and stringy rather, and with eyes that open and shut very

quickly.... But I'm very absurd. There's no Law about these things

really. Only, you see, I've no idea of the kind of woman you _do_

admire?"

She said it smilingly, but that did not mean that she was not perfectly

candid and natural about it too. Why not be natural about these things?

Amory knew people who were natural enough about their preferred foods

and clothing and houses; was a woman less than an entree, or a bungalow,

or a summer overcoat? Besides, it was so very much more intrinsically

interesting. Walter Wyron had made a whole Lecture on it--Lecture No.

II, "_Types and Tact_," and Walter had barely touched the fringe of the

subject. Amory wanted to go a little deeper than that. But she also

wanted to get away from those vulgarized words and ready-made

conclusions, and to have each case considered on its merits. Surely it

ought to be possible to say that the presence of a person affected you

pleasantly, or unpleasantly, without sniggering inferences of a

_liaison_ in the one case or of a rupture in the other!

Therefore it was once more just a little irritating that Mr. Strong,

instead of telling her what type he did admire, should merely laugh and

say, "Well--not Mrs. Tasker." If Amory had a criticism at all to make of

Mr. Strong it was this habit of his of negatives, that sometimes almost

justified the nickname Mr. Brimby had given him, of "Stone Wall Strong."

So she dropped one hand from her chin, allowing it to hang loose over

her knee while the other forearm still kept its swan's-neck curve, and

said abruptly, "Well--about the Indian Number. Let's get on."

"Ah, yes," said Mr. Strong. "Let's get on."

"What had we decided?"

"Only Prang's article so far."

"But you say you have your doubts about it?"

Mr. Strong hesitated. "Only about its selling-power," he said with a

little shrug. "We must sell the paper, you see. It's not paying its way

yet."

"Well, I'm sure that's not Mr. Prang's fault," Amory retorted. "He's

practically made the export circulation."

"You mean the Bombay circulation? Yes, I suppose he has. I don't deny

it."

"You can't deny it. Since Prang began to write for us we've done awfully

well in Bombay."

To that too, Mr. Strong assented. Then Amory, after a moment's pause,

spoke quietly. She did not like to think of her editor as jealous of his

own contributors.

"I know you don't like Mr. Prang," she said, looking fixedly at the

asbestos log.

"I!" began Stone Wall Strong. "Why, you know I think he's a first rate

fellow, if only----"

This time, however, Amory really did intend to get it out of him. For

once she would have one of those hung-up sentences completed.

"If only what?" she said, looking up at him.

"Oh, I don't know--as you said a moment ago, there's no 'why' about

these things----"

"But I did give you my impression. You don't give me yours."

"You did, I admit. Yes, I admit you did.... What is it you want to know,

then?"

"Only why you seem so doubtful about Mr. Prang."

"Ah!" said Mr. Strong....

Those who knew Edgar Strong the best said that he was a man who, other

things being equal, would rather go straight than not. Even when the

other things were not quite equal, he still had a mild preference for

straightness. But if other people positively insisted that he should

deviate from straightness, very well; that was their look-out. He had

been a good many things in his time--solicitor's clerk, free-lance

journalist, book-pedlar, election-agent's minion, Vanner, poetic

vagabond, and always an unerring "spotter" of the literary son of the

farming squire the moment he appeared in sight; and the "Novum" was the

softest job he had found yet. If the price of his keeping it was that he

should look its owner's wife long and earnestly in the eyes, as if in

his own there lay immeasurable things, not for him to give but for her

to take if she list, so be it; he would sleep none the less well in his

rent-free bedroom behind the "Novum's" offices afterwards. His

experience of far less comfortable sleeping-quarters had persuaded him

that in this imperfect world a man is entitled to exactly what he can

get.

His eyes, nevertheless, did not seek Amory's. Instead, roving round the

room to see if nothing less would serve (leaving him still with the

fathomless look in reserve for emergencies), they fell on the Benares

tray and the casts. And as they remained there he suddenly frowned.

Amory's own eyes followed his; and suddenly she felt again that little

creeping thrill. A faint colour and warmth, new and pleasurable, came

into her cheeks.

Then with a little rush, her discovery came upon her....

She _had_ got something from Mr. Strong at last!

Her head drooped a little away from him, and the hand that had hung

laxly over her knee dropped gently to the rug. It was a delicious

moment. So all these weeks and weeks Mr. Strong _had_ cared that that

foot, that arm, had been exposed to the gaze of anybody who might have

entered the house! He had not said so; he did not say so now; but that

was it! More, he had cared so much that it had quite distorted his

judgment of Mr. Prang. And all at once Amory remembered something

else--a glance Edgar Strong had given her, neither more nor less

eloquent than the look he was bending on the casts now, one afternoon

when she had lain in the hammock in the garden and Mr. Prang, bending

over her, had ventured to examine a locket about her throat....

So _that_ was at the bottom of his reserve! _That_ was the meaning of

his "buts"!...

Amory did not move. She wished it might last for hours. Mr. Strong had

taken a step towards the casts, but, changing his mind, had turned away

again; and she was astonished to find how full of meaning dozens of his

past gestures became now that she had the key to them. And she knew that

the casts _were_ beautiful. Brucciani would have bought them like a

shot. And she seemed to see Mr. Strong's look, piteous and frowning both

at once, if she should sell them to Brucciani, and Brucciani should

publish them to hang in a hundred studios....

The silence between them continued.

But speak she must, and it would be better to do so before he did; and

by and bye she lifted her head again. But she did not look directly at

him.

"It was very foolish," she murmured with beautiful directness and

simplicity.

Mr. Strong said nothing.

"But for weeks I've been intending to move them."

Mr. Strong shrugged his shoulders. It was as if he said, "Well better

late than never ... but you see, _now_."

"Yes," breathed Amory, softly, but aloud.

The next moment Mr. Strong was himself again. He returned to his station

by the asbestos log.

"Well, there's Prang's article," he said in his business voice. "Am I to

have it set up?"

"Perhaps we'd better see what Cosimo says first," Amory replied.

She did not know which was the greater delicacy in Mr. Strong--the

exquisite tact of the glance he had given at the casts, or the quiet

strength with which he took up the burden of editing the "Novum" again.

V

THREE SHIPS

A white October mist lay over the Heath, and the smell of burning leaves

came in at the pond-room window of Dorothy Tasker's flat. But the smell

was lost on Dorothy. All her intelligence was for the moment

concentrated in one faculty, the faculty of hearing. She was sure Jackie

had swallowed a safety-pin, and she was anxiously listening for the

click with which it might come unstuck.

"Shall I send for the doctor, m'm?" said Ruth, who stood holding the

doorknob in her aproned hand. She had been called away from her

"brights," and there was a mournful relish of Jackie's plight on her

face.

"No," said Dorothy.... "Oh, I _know_ there were twelve of them, and now

there are only eleven!... _Have_ you put one of these things into your

mouth, Jackie?"

"He put it up his nose, mumsie, like he did some boot-buttons once,"

said Noel cheerfully.

"But he couldn't do that.... _Have_ you swallowed it, Jackie?"

"Mmm," said Jackie resolutely, as who should say that that which his

hand (or in this case his mouth) found to do he did with all his might.

"Oh dear!" sighed Dorothy, leaning back in her chair....

She supposed it was the still white weather that weighed on her spirits;

she hoped so, for if it was not that it was something worse. Even dreary

weather was better than bankruptcy. She had sent her pass-book to the

bank to be balanced; until it should come back she refused to look at

the pile of tradesmen's books that stood on her writing-desk; and

borrowing from her aunt was not borrowing at all, but simply begging,

since Aunt Grace regarded the return of such loans as the last of

affronts.

And (she sighed again) she had been _so_ well-off at the time of her

marriage! Why, she had had well over a thousand a year from Hallowell

and Smith's alone!... But Stan had had a few debts which had had to be

settled, and Stan's knowledge of the style in which things ought to be

done had been rather a drawback on that trip they had taken to the

Riviera, for his ideas of hotels had been a little splendacious, and of

dinners to "a few friends" rather daring; and, with one thing and

another, the problem of how to satisfy champagne tastes on a beer income

had never been really satisfactorily solved by Stan, poor old boy. And

he never, never grumbled at home, not even when the cold beef came on

three evenings together, which was harder on him than it was on most

people. He did what he could to earn, too. It wasn't his fault that the

standard of efficiency in the Army was so impracticably high, nor that

he had been packed off to try his luck in Canada with the disadvantage

of being a remittance-man, nor that, at the age of twenty-seven, when

his father had died, he had had to turn to and compete for this job or

that with a horde of capable youngsters years his juniors and with fewer

hampering decencies. It was his father's fault and Aunt Susan's really,

for having sent him to Marlborough and Sandhurst without being able to

set him properly on his feet afterwards. Such victims of circumstances,

on a rather different level, made husbands who stopped at home and

cleaned the knives and took the babies out in the perambulator. In

Stan's case the natural result had been to make a young man fit only to

join as a ranker or to stand with his back to a mirror in a suspect

card-room.

"Shall I take him away, m'm?" Mrs. Mossop asked--("And prepare his

winding-sheet," her tone seemed to add).

"Yes, do," Dorothy replied, with a glance at Ruth's blackened hands.

"And please make yourself fit to be seen, Ruth. You know you oughtn't to

be doing all that on the very day I let Norah out."

She knew that her rebuke had set Ruth up in the melancholy enjoyment of

resentment for half a week, but she was past caring. Ruth rose an inch

in height at being chidden for the faithful performance of her most

disagreeable duties; she turned; and as she bore the Bits away the

mighty roar into which Jackie broke diminished in volume down the

passage.

Dorothy sighed, that all her troubles should thus crowd on her at once.

Her eyes fell again on the tradesmen's books. It hardly seemed worth

while to pay them, since they would only come in again next week, as

clamourous and urgent as ever. They were thrust through the letterbox

like letters; Dorothy knew very well the thud with which they fell on

the floor; but she could never help running out into the hall when they

came. She had tried the plan of dispensing with books altogether and

paying for everything in cash as she got it, but that had merely meant,

not one large worry a week, but harassing little ones all the week

through.

Oh, why had she squandered, or allowed Stan to squander, those good

round sovereigns of Hallowell and Smith's!----

Still--there is measure in everything--she had not sent her pass-book to

the bank in order to learn whether she had a balance. That would have

been too awful. It was the amount of her margin that she wanted, and

feared, to know. For presently there would be the doctor to pay, and so

many guineas a week at the Nursing Home, and the flat going on just the

same, and poor old Stan pathetically hoping that a casual dinner-table

puff in a Marlborough voice would result in fat new ledger-accounts for

Fortune and Brooks' and magnificent commissions for himself. If only she

could get just a little ahead of her points! But the money went out

just slightly quicker than it came in. Stan carved it as it were in

twopences off the cold beef, the Bits swallowed it in pennorths with

their breadcrumbs and gravy, and directly the strain eased for a little,

down swooped the rent and set everything back again exactly where it had

been three months before.

And the Income Tax people had actually sent Stan a paper, wanting to

know all about his income from lands, hereditaments, etc., and warning

him that his wife's income must be accounted as part of his own!

But it must not be supposed that Dorothy had allowed things to come to

this pass without having had an idea. She had an idea, and one that she

thought a very good one. Nevertheless, an idea is one thing, and the

execution thereof at the proper time quite another. For example, the

proper moment for the execution of this idea of Dorothy's was certainly

now, or at any rate at the Christmas Quarter (supposing she herself was

up and about again by that time and had found a satisfactory sub-tenant

for the flat). But the person against whom her idea was designed--who,

by the way, happened to be her unsuspecting and much-loved aunt, Lady

Tasker--was a very present difficulty. Dorothy knew for a fact that what

would be admirably convenient for herself at Christmas could not

possibly be convenient to her aunt until, at the very earliest, next

summer. That was the crab--the intervening period of nine months. She

knew of no mandragora that would put herself, Stan and her Bits of

Impudence gently to sleep, to wake up again to easier times.

Oh, why had she spent those beautiful thick sovereigns of Hallowell and

Smiths' so recklessly!--

The mist lay flat over the pond outside, making in one corner of it a

horrible scum, from which the swans, seeking their food, lifted

blackened necks. There was never a ripple on the pond-room walls to-day.

Slowly Dorothy rose. Moping was useless; she must do something. She

crossed to her writing-desk and took from one of its drawers a fat file,

concertina-ed like her own accordion-pleated skirts; and she sat down

and opened it fan-wise on her knee. It was full of newspaper-cuttings,

draft "ideas" for advertisements, and similar dreary things. She sighed

again as her listless fingers began to draw them out. She had not

thought at one time that she would ever come to this. By a remarkable

piece of luck and light-heartedness and ingenuity she had started at

Hallowell and Smith's at the top of the tree; the brains of underlings

had been good enough to cudgel for such scrap-stuff as filled her

concertina-file; but that was all changed now. Light come, light go; and

since the lapse of her contracts she had been glad not only to devise

these ignoble lures for the public, but to draw them also. They formed

the pennies-three-farthings that came in while Stan carved the twopences

from the joint. She had thought the good times were going to last for

ever. They hadn't. She now looked enviously up to those who had been her

own subordinates.

With no heart in her task at all, Dorothy set about the drafting of an

advertisement.

She was just beginning to forget about swallowed safety-pins, and poor

luckless Stan, and guineas for her Nursing Home, and the prospect of

presently having seven mouths, big and little, to feed--she was even

beginning to cease to hear the clamour of the Bits in the room along the

passage--when there came a ring at the bell. Her fair head did not move,

but her blue eyes stole abstractedly sideways as Ruth passed the

pond-room door. Then a man's voice sounded, and Dorothy dropped her

pen....

"Mrs. Tasker," she had heard, with the "a" cut very short and two "s's"

in her name....

The next moment Ruth had opened the pond-room door, and, in tones that

plainly said "You needn't think that I've forgotten about just now,

because I haven't," announced: "Mr. Miller."

Now it was curious that Dorothy had just been thinking about Mr. Miller.

Mr. Miller was Hallowells' Publicity Manager, and the time had been when

Dorothy had had Mr. Miller completely in her pocket. She had obtained

that comfortable contract of hers from Mr. Miller, and if during the

latter part of its continuance she had taken her duties somewhat lightly

and her pleasures with enormous gusto, she was not sure that Mr. Miller

had not done something of the same kind. But the firm, which could

excuse itself from a renewal of her own contract, for some reason or

other could not get rid of Mr. Miller; and now here was Mr. Miller

unexpectedly in Dorothy's flat--seeking her, which is far better for

you than when you have to do the seeking. He stood there with his grey

Trilby in his hand and his tailor-made deltoids almost filling the

aperture of the doorway.

"There, now, if I wasn't right!" said Mr. Miller with great

satisfaction, advancing with one hand outstretched. "I fixed it all up

with myself coming along that you'd be around the house. I've had no

luck all the week, and I said to myself as I got out of the el'vator at

Belsize Park, 'It's doo to change.' And here I find you, right on the

spot. I hope this is not an introosion. How are you? And how's Mr.

Stan?"

He shook hands heartily with Dorothy, and looked round for a place in

which to put his hat and stick.

"Why, now, this is comfortable," he went on, drawing up the chair to

which Dorothy pointed. "I like your English fires. They may not have all

the advantages of steam-heat, but they got a look about 'em--the

Home-Idee. And you're looking just about right in health, Mrs. Tasker,

if I may say so. You English women have our N'York ladies whipped when

it comes to complexion, you have for sure. And how's the family----?"

But here Mr. Miller suddenly stopped and looked at Dorothy again. If the

look that came into his eyes had come into those of a young unmarried

woman, Dorothy would have fled there and then. He dropped his head for a

moment as people do who enter a church; then he raised it again.

"If you'll pardon an old married man and the father of three little

goils," Mr. Miller said, his eyes reverently lifted and his voice

suddenly altered, "--but am I right in supposing that ... another little

gift from the storks, as my dear old Mamie--that was my dear old negro

nurse--used to say?" Then, without waiting for the unrequired answer, he

straightened his back and squared his deltoids in a way that would have

made any of Holbein's portraits of Henry the Eighth look like that of a

slender young man. His voice dropped three whole tones, and again he

showed Dorothy the little bald spot on the crown of his head.

"I'm glad. I say I'm glad. I'm vurry glad. I rejoice. And I should like

to shake Mr. Stan by the hand. I should like to shake you by the hand

too, Mrs. Tasker." Then, when he had done so: "It's the Mother-Idee. The

same, old-fashioned Idee, like our own mothers. It makes one feel good.

Reverent. I got no use for a young man but what he shows lats of

reverence for his mother. The old Anglo-Saxon-Idee--reverence for

motherhood.... And when, if an old married man may ask the

question----?"

Dorothy laughed and blushed and told him. Mr. Miller, dropping his voice

yet another tone, told her in return that he knew of no holier place on

oith than the chamber in which the Anglo-Saxon-Idee of veneration for

motherhood was renewed and sustained. And then, after he had said once

more that he rejoiced, there fell a silence.

Dorothy liked Mr. Miller. Once you got over his remarkable aptitude for

sincerities he had an excellent heart. Nevertheless she could not

imagine why he had come. She shuddered as he seemed for a moment to be

once more on the point of removing his shoes at the door of the Mosque

of Motherhood, but apparently he thought better of it. Squaring his

shoulders again, and no doubt greatly fortified by his late exercise, he

said, "Well, I always feel more of a man after I felt the throb of a

fellow-creature's heart. That's so. And now you'll be wondering what's

brought me up here? Well, the fact is, Mrs. Tasker, I'm wurried. I got

wurries. You can see the wurry-map on my face. Hallowells' is wurrying

me. I ain't going to tell you Hallowells' ain't what it was in its pammy

days; it may be, or it may not; mebbe you've heard the talk that's going

around?"

"No," said Dorothy.

"Is that so? Well, there is talk going around. There's a whole push of

people, knocking us all the time. They ain't of much account themselves,

but they knock us. It's a power the inferior mind has. And I say I'm

wurried about it."

Dorothy, in spite of her "No," had heard of the "knocking" of Hallowell

and Smiths', and her heart gave an excited little jump at the thought

that flashed across her mind. Did Hallowells' want her back? The firm

had been launched upon London with every resource of publicity; Dorothy

herself had been the author of its crowning device; and whereas the

motto of older firms had been "Courtesy Costs Nothing," Hallowells' had

vastly improved upon this. Courtesy had, as a matter of fact, cost them

a good deal; but the rewards of the investment had been magnificent. Mr.

Miller had known that if you say to people often enough "See how

courteous I am," you are to all intents and purposes courteous. But what

Mr. Miller had not known had been the precise point at which it is

necessary to begin to build up a strained reputation again.

Commercial credit too, like those joints Stan carved, comes in in

two-pence-halfpennies but goes out in threepences.... And so the

"knocking" had begun. Rumours had got about that Hallowells' was a shop

where you were asked, after a few unsuitable articles had been shown to

you, whether you didn't intend to buy anything, and where you might wait

for ten minutes at a counter while two assistants settled a private

difference behind it. Did Mr. Miller want her help in restoring the

firm's fair name? Did he intend to offer her another contract? Were

there to be more of Hallowells' plump, ringing sovereigns--that she

would know better how to take care of this time? It was with difficulty

that she kept her composure as Mr. Miller continued: