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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Sketches in Lavender, by Jerome
+#20 in our series by Jerome K. Jerome
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+Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green
+
+by Jerome K. Jerome
+
+June, 2000 [Etext #2234]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Sketches in Lavender, by Jerome
+******This file should be named sklbg10.txt or sklbg10.zip****
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+This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+from the 1920 J. W. Arrowsmith edition.
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+
+
+SKETCHES IN LAVENDER, BLUE AND GREEN
+
+by Jerome K. Jerome
+
+
+
+
+Contents:
+
+Reginald Blake, Financier and Cad
+An item of Fashionable Intelligence
+Blase Billy
+The Choice of Cyril Harjohn
+The Materialisation of Charles and Mivanway
+Portrait of a Lady
+The Man Who Would Manage
+The Man Who Lived For Others
+A Man of Habit
+The Absent-minded Man
+A Charming Woman
+Whibley's Spirit
+The Man Who Went Wrong
+The Hobby Rider
+The Man Who Did Not Believe In Luck
+Dick Dunkerman's Cat
+The Minor Poet's Story
+The Degeneration of Thomas Henry
+The City of The Sea
+Driftwood
+
+
+
+La-ven-der's blue, did-dle, did-dle!
+La-ven-der's green;
+When I am king, did-dle, did-dle!
+You shall be queen.
+
+Call up your men, did-dle, did-dle!
+Set them to work;
+Some to the plough, did-dle, did-dle!
+Some to the cart.
+
+Some to make hay, did-dle, did-dle!
+Some to cut corn;
+While you and I, did-dle, did-dle!
+Keep ourselves warm.
+
+
+
+
+REGINALD BLAKE, FINANCIER AND CAD
+
+
+
+The advantage of literature over life is that its characters are
+clearly defined, and act consistently.  Nature, always inartistic,
+takes pleasure in creating the impossible.  Reginald Blake was as
+typical a specimen of the well-bred cad as one could hope to find
+between Piccadilly Circus and Hyde Park Corner.  Vicious without
+passion, and possessing brain without mind, existence presented to
+him no difficulties, while his pleasures brought him no pains.  His
+morality was bounded by the doctor on the one side, and the
+magistrate on the other.  Careful never to outrage the decrees of
+either, he was at forty-five still healthy, though stout; and had
+achieved the not too easy task of amassing a fortune while avoiding
+all risk of Holloway.  He and his wife, Edith (nee Eppington), were
+as ill-matched a couple as could be conceived by any dramatist
+seeking material for a problem play.  As they stood before the
+altar on their wedding morn, they might have been taken as
+symbolising satyr and saint.  More than twenty years his junior,
+beautiful with the beauty of a Raphael's Madonna, his every touch
+of her seemed a sacrilege.  Yet once in his life Mr. Blake played
+the part of a great gentleman; Mrs. Blake, on the same occasion,
+contenting herself with a singularly mean role--mean even for a
+woman in love.
+
+The affair, of course, had been a marriage of convenience.  Blake,
+to do him justice, had made no pretence to anything beyond
+admiration and regard.  Few things grow monotonous sooner than
+irregularity.  He would tickle his jaded palate with
+respectability, and try for a change the companionship of a good
+woman.  The girl's face drew him, as the moonlight holds a man who,
+bored by the noise, turns from a heated room to press his forehead
+to the window-pane.  Accustomed to bid for what he wanted, he
+offered his price.  The Eppington family was poor and numerous.
+The girl, bred up to the false notions of duty inculcated by a
+narrow conventionality, and, feminine like, half in love with
+martyrdom for its own sake, let her father bargain for a higher
+price, and then sold herself.
+
+To a drama of this description, a lover is necessary, if the
+complications are to be of interest to the outside world.  Harry
+Sennett, a pleasant-looking enough young fellow, in spite of his
+receding chin, was possessed, perhaps, of more good intention than
+sense.  Under the influence of Edith's stronger character he was
+soon persuaded to acquiesce meekly in the proposed arrangement.
+Both succeeded in convincing themselves that they were acting
+nobly.  The tone of the farewell interview, arranged for the eve of
+the wedding, would have been fit and proper to the occasion had
+Edith been a modern Joan of Arc about to sacrifice her own
+happiness on the altar of a great cause; as the girl was merely
+selling herself into ease and luxury, for no higher motive than the
+desire to enable a certain number of more or less worthy relatives
+to continue living beyond their legitimate means, the sentiment was
+perhaps exaggerated.  Many tears were shed, and many everlasting
+good-byes spoken, though, seeing that Edith's new home would be
+only a few streets off, and that of necessity their social set
+would continue to be the same, more experienced persons might have
+counselled hope.  Three months after the marriage they found
+themselves side by side at the same dinner-table; and after a
+little melodramatic fencing with what they were pleased to regard
+as fate, they accommodated themselves to the customary positions.
+
+Blake was quite aware that Sennett had been Edith's lover.  So had
+half a dozen other men, some younger, some older than himself.  He
+felt no more embarrassment at meeting them than, standing on the
+pavement outside the Stock Exchange, he would have experienced
+greeting his brother jobbers after a settling day that had
+transferred a fortune from their hands into his.  Sennett, in
+particular, he liked and encouraged.  Our whole social system,
+always a mystery to the philosopher, owes its existence to the fact
+that few men and women possess sufficient intelligence to be
+interesting to themselves.  Blake liked company, but not much
+company liked Blake.  Young Sennett, however, could always be
+relied upon to break the tediousness of the domestic dialogue.  A
+common love of sport drew the two men together.  Most of us improve
+upon closer knowledge, and so they came to find good in one
+another.
+
+"That is the man you ought to have married," said Blake one night
+to his wife, half laughingly, half seriously, as they sat alone,
+listening to Sennett's departing footsteps echoing upon the
+deserted pavement.  "He's a good fellow--not a mere money-grubbing
+machine like me."
+
+And a week later Sennett, sitting alone with Edith, suddenly broke
+out with:
+
+"He's a better man than I am, with all my high-falutin' talk, and,
+upon my soul, he loves you.  Shall I go abroad?"
+
+"If you like," was the answer.
+
+"What would you do?"
+
+"Kill myself," replied the other, with a laugh, "or run away with
+the first man that asked me."
+
+So Sennett stayed on.
+
+Blake himself had made the path easy to them.  There was little
+need for either fear or caution.  Indeed, their safest course lay
+in recklessness, and they took it.  To Sennett the house was always
+open.  It was Blake himself who, when unable to accompany his wife,
+would suggest Sennett as a substitute.  Club friends shrugged their
+shoulders.  Was the man completely under his wife's thumb; or,
+tired of her, was he playing some devil's game of his own?  To most
+of his acquaintances the latter explanation seemed the more
+plausible.
+
+The gossip, in due course, reached the parental home.  Mrs.
+Eppington shook the vials of her wrath over the head of her son-in-
+law.  The father, always a cautious man, felt inclined to blame his
+child for her want of prudence.
+
+"She'll ruin everything," he said.  "Why the devil can't she be
+careful?"
+
+"I believe the man is deliberately plotting to get rid of her,"
+said Mrs. Eppington.  "I shall tell him plainly what I think."
+
+"You're a fool, Hannah," replied her husband, allowing himself the
+licence of the domestic hearth.  "If you are right, you will only
+precipitate matters; if you are wrong, you will tell him what there
+is no need for him to know.  Leave the matter to me.  I can sound
+him without giving anything away, and meanwhile you talk to Edith."
+
+So matters were arranged, but the interview between mother and
+daughter hardly improved the position.  Mrs. Eppington was
+conventionally moral; Edith had been thinking for herself, and
+thinking in a bad atmosphere.  Mrs. Eppington, grew angry at the
+girl's callousness.
+
+"Have you no sense of shame?" she cried.
+
+"I had once," was Edith's reply, "before I came to live here.  Do
+you know what this house is for me, with its gilded mirrors, its
+couches, its soft carpets?  Do you know what I am, and have been
+for two years?"
+
+The elder woman rose, with a frightened pleading look upon her
+face, and the other stopped and turned away towards the window.
+
+"We all thought it for the best," continued Mrs. Eppington meekly.
+
+The girl spoke wearily without looking round.
+
+"Oh! every silly thing that was ever done, was done for the best.
+_I_ thought it would be for the best, myself.  Everything would be
+so simple if only we were not alive.  Don't let's talk any more.
+All you can say is quite right."
+
+The silence continued for a while, the Dresden-china clock on the
+mantelpiece ticking louder and louder as if to say, "I, Time, am
+here.  Do not make your plans forgetting me, little mortals; I
+change your thoughts and wills.  You are but my puppets."
+
+"Then what do you intend to do?" demanded Mrs. Eppington at length.
+
+"Intend!  Oh, the right thing of course.  We all intend that.  I
+shall send Harry away with a few well-chosen words of farewell,
+learn to love my husband and settle down to a life of quiet
+domestic bliss.  Oh, it's easy enough to intend!"
+
+The girl's face wrinkled with a laugh that aged her.  In that
+moment it was a hard, evil face, and with a pang the elder woman
+thought of that other face, so like, yet so unlike--the sweet pure
+face of a girl that had given to a sordid home its one touch of
+nobility.  As under the lightning's flash we see the whole arc of
+the horizon, so Mrs. Eppington looked and saw her child's life.
+The gilded, over-furnished room vanished.  She and a big-eyed,
+fair-haired child, the only one of her children she had ever
+understood, were playing wonderful games in the twilight among the
+shadows of a tiny attic.  Now she was the wolf, devouring Edith,
+who was Red Riding Hood, with kisses.  Now Cinderella's prince, now
+both her wicked sisters.  But in the favourite game of all, Mrs.
+Eppington was a beautiful princess, bewitched by a wicked dragon,
+so that she seemed to be an old, worn woman.  But curly-headed
+Edith fought the dragon, represented by the three-legged rocking-
+horse, and slew him with much shouting and the toasting-fork.  Then
+Mrs. Eppington became again a beautiful princess, and went away
+with Edith back to her own people.
+
+In this twilight hour the misbehaviour of the "General," the
+importunity of the family butcher, and the airs assumed by cousin
+Jane, who kept two servants, were forgotten.
+
+The games ended.  The little curly head would be laid against her
+breast "for five minutes' love," while the restless little brain
+framed the endless question that children are for ever asking in
+all its thousand forms, "What is life, mother?  I am very little,
+and I think, and think, until I grow frightened.  Oh, mother, tell
+me, what is life?"
+
+Had she dealt with these questions wisely?  Might it not have been
+better to have treated them more seriously?  Could life after all
+be ruled by maxims learned from copy-books?  She had answered as
+she had been answered in her own far-back days of questioning.
+Might it not have been better had she thought for herself?
+
+Suddenly Edith was kneeling on the floor beside her.
+
+"I will try to be good, mother."
+
+It was the old baby cry, the cry of us all, children that we are,
+till mother Nature kisses us and bids us go to sleep.
+
+Their arms were round each other now, and so they sat, mother and
+child once more.  And the twilight of the old attic, creeping
+westward from the east, found them again.
+
+The masculine duet had more result, but was not conducted with the
+finesse that Mr. Eppington, who prided himself on his diplomacy,
+had intended.  Indeed, so evidently ill at ease was that gentleman,
+when the moment came for talk, and so palpably were his pointless
+remarks mere efforts to delay an unpleasant subject, that Blake,
+always direct bluntly though not ill-naturedly asked him, "How
+much?"
+
+Mr. Eppington was disconcerted.
+
+"It's not that--at least that's not what I have come about," he
+answered confusedly.
+
+"What have you come about?"
+
+Inwardly Mr. Eppington cursed himself for a fool, for the which he
+was perhaps not altogether without excuse.  He had meant to act the
+part of a clever counsel, acquiring information while giving none;
+by a blunder, he found himself in the witness-box.
+
+"Oh, nothing, nothing," was the feeble response, "merely looked in
+to see how Edith was."
+
+"Much the same as at dinner last night, when you were here,"
+answered Blake.  "Come, out with it."
+
+It seemed the best course now, and Mr. Eppington took the plunge.
+
+"Don't you think," he said, unconsciously glancing round the room
+to be sure they were alone, "that young Sennett is a little too
+much about the house?"
+
+Blake stared at him.
+
+"Of course, we know it is all right--as nice a young fellow as ever
+lived--and Edith--and all that.  Of course, it's absurd, but--"
+
+"But what?"
+
+"Well, people will talk."
+
+"What do they say?"
+
+The other shrugged his shoulders.
+
+Blake rose.  He had an ugly look when angry, and his language was
+apt to be coarse.
+
+"Tell them to mind their own business, and leave me and my wife
+alone."  That was the sense of what he said; he expressed himself
+at greater length, and in stronger language.
+
+"But, my dear Blake," urged Mr. Eppington, "for your own sake, is
+it wise?  There was a sort of boy and girl attachment between them-
+-nothing of any moment, but all that gives colour to gossip.
+Forgive me, but I am her father; I do not like to hear my child
+talked about."
+
+"Then don't open your ears to the chatter of a pack of fools,"
+replied his son-in-law roughly.  But the next instant a softer
+expression passed over his face, and he laid his hand on the older
+man's arm.
+
+"Perhaps there are many more, but there's one good woman in the
+world," he said, "and that's your daughter.  Come and tell me that
+the Bank of England is getting shaky on its legs, and I'll listen
+to you."
+
+But the stronger the faith, the deeper strike the roots of
+suspicion.  Blake said no further word on the subject, and Sennett
+was as welcome as before.  But Edith, looking up suddenly, would
+sometimes find her husband's eyes fixed on her with a troubled look
+as of some dumb creature trying to understand; and often he would
+slip out of the house of an evening by himself, returning home
+hours afterwards, tired and mud-stained.
+
+He made attempts to show his affection.  This was the most fatal
+thing he could have done.  Ill-temper, ill-treatment even, she
+might have borne.  His clumsy caresses, his foolish, halting words
+of tenderness became a horror to her.  She wondered whether to
+laugh or to strike at his upturned face.  His tactless devotion
+filled her life as with some sickly perfume, stifling her.  If only
+she could be by herself for a little while to think!  But he was
+with her night and day.  There were times when, as he would cross
+the room towards her, he grew monstrous until he towered above her,
+a formless thing such as children dream of.  And she would sit with
+her lips tight pressed, clutching the chair lest she should start
+up screaming.
+
+Her only thought was to escape from him.  One day she hastily
+packed a few necessaries in a small hand-bag and crept unperceived
+from the house.  She drove to Charing Cross, but the Continental
+Express did not leave for an hour, and she had time to think.
+
+Of what use was it?  Her slender stock of money would soon be gone;
+how could she live?  He would find her and follow her.  It was all
+so hopeless!
+
+Suddenly a fierce desire of life seized hold of her, the angry
+answer of her young blood to despair.  Why should she die, never
+having known what it was to live?  Why should she prostrate herself
+before this juggernaut of other people's respectability?  Joy
+called to her; only her own cowardice stayed her from stretching
+forth her hand and gathering it.  She returned home a different
+woman, for hope had come to her.
+
+A week later the butler entered the dining room, and handed Blake a
+letter addressed to him in his wife's handwriting.  He took it
+without a word, as though he had been expecting it.  It simply told
+him that she had left him for ever.
+
+
+The world is small, and money commands many services.  Sennett had
+gone out for a stroll; Edith was left in the tiny salon of their
+appartement at Fecamp.  It was the third day of their arrival in
+the town.  The door was opened and closed, and Blake stood before
+her.
+
+She rose frightened, but by a motion he reassured her.  There was a
+quiet dignity about the man that was strange to her.
+
+"Why have you followed me?" she asked.
+
+"I want you to return home."
+
+"Home!" she cried.  "You must be mad.  Do you not know--"
+
+He interrupted her vehemently.  "I know nothing.  I wish to know
+nothing.  Go back to London at once.  I have made everything right;
+no one suspects.  I shall not be there; you will never see me
+again, and you will have an opportunity of undoing your mistake--
+our mistake."
+
+She listened.  Hers was not a great nature, and the desire to
+obtain happiness without paying the price was strong upon her.  As
+for his good name, what could that matter? he urged.  People would
+only say that he had gone back to the evil from which he had
+emerged, and few would be surprised.  His life would go on much as
+it had done, and she would only be pitied.
+
+She quite understood his plan; it seemed mean of her to accept his
+proposal, and she argued feebly against it.  But he overcame all
+her objections.  For his own sake, he told her, he would prefer the
+scandal to be connected with his name rather than with that of his
+wife.  As he unfolded his scheme, she began to feel that in
+acquiescing she was conferring a favour.  It was not the first
+deception he had arranged for the public, and he appeared to be
+half in love with his own cleverness.  She even found herself
+laughing at his mimicry of what this acquaintance and that would
+say.  Her spirits rose; the play that might have been a painful
+drama seemed turning out an amusing farce.
+
+The thing settled, he rose to go, and held out his hand.  As she
+looked up into his face, something about the line of his lips smote
+upon her.
+
+"You will be well rid of me," she said.  "I have brought you
+nothing but trouble."
+
+"Oh, trouble," he answered.  "If that were all!  A man can bear
+trouble."
+
+"What else?" she asked.
+
+His eyes travelled aimlessly about the room.  "They taught me a lot
+of things when I was a boy," he said, "my mother and others--they
+meant well--which as I grew older I discovered to be lies; and so I
+came to think that nothing good was true, and that everything and
+everybody was evil.  And then--"
+
+His wandering eyes came round to her and he broke off abruptly.
+"Good-bye," he said, and the next moment he was gone.
+
+She sat wondering for a while what he had meant.  Then Sennett
+returned, and the words went out of her head.
+
+
+A good deal of sympathy was felt for Mrs. Blake.  The man had a
+charming wife; he might have kept straight; but as his friends
+added, "Blake always was a cad."
+
+
+
+AN ITEM OF FASHIONABLE INTELLIGENCE
+
+
+
+Speaking personally, I do not like the Countess of --.  She is not
+the type of woman I could love.  I hesitate the less giving
+expression to this sentiment by reason of the conviction that the
+Countess of -- would not be unduly depressed even were the fact to
+reach her ears.  I cannot conceive the Countess of --'s being
+troubled by the opinion concerning her of any being, human or
+divine, other than the Countess of --.
+
+But to be honest, I must admit that for the Earl of -- she makes an
+ideal wife.  She rules him as she rules all others, relations and
+retainers, from the curate to the dowager, but the rod, though
+firmly held, is wielded with justice and kindly intent.  Nor is it
+possible to imagine the Earl of --'s living as contentedly as he
+does with any partner of a less dominating turn of mind.  He is one
+of those weak-headed, strong-limbed, good-natured, childish men,
+born to be guided in all matters, from the tying of a neck-cloth to
+the choice of a political party, by their women folk.  Such men are
+in clover when their proprietor happens to be a good and sensible
+woman, but are to be pitied when they get into the hands of the
+selfish or the foolish.  As very young men, they too often fall
+victims to bad-tempered chorus girls or to middle-aged matrons of
+the class from which Pope judged all womankind.  They make capital
+husbands when well managed; treated badly, they say little, but set
+to work, after the manner of a dissatisfied cat, to find a kinder
+mistress, generally succeeding.  The Earl of -- adored his wife,
+deeming himself the most fortunate of husbands, and better
+testimonial than such no wife should hope for.  Till the day she
+snatched him away from all other competitors, and claimed him for
+her own, he had obeyed his mother with a dutifulness bordering on
+folly.  Were the countess to die to-morrow, he would be unable to
+tell you his mind on any single subject until his eldest daughter
+and his still unmarried sister, ladies both of strong character,
+attracted towards one another by a mutual antagonism, had settled
+between themselves which was to be mistress of him and of his
+house.
+
+However, there is little fear (bar accidents) but that my friend
+the countess will continue to direct the hereditary vote of the
+Earl of -- towards the goal of common sense and public good, guide
+his social policy with judgment and kindness, and manage his
+estates with prudence and economy for many years to come.  She is a
+hearty, vigorous lady, of generous proportions, with the blood of
+sturdy forebears in her veins, and one who takes the same excellent
+good care of herself that she bestows on all others dependent upon
+her guidance.
+
+"I remember," said the doctor--we were dining with the doctor in
+homely fashion, and our wives had adjourned to the drawing-room to
+discuss servants and husbands and other domestic matters with
+greater freedom, leaving us to the claret and the twilight--"I
+remember when we had the cholera in the village--it must be twenty
+years ago now--that woman gave up the London season to stay down
+here and take the whole burden of the trouble upon her own
+shoulders.  I do not feel any call to praise her; she liked the
+work, and she was in her element, but it was good work for all
+that.  She had no fear.  She would carry the children in her arms
+if time pressed and the little ambulance was not at hand.  I have
+known her sit all night in a room not twelve feet square, between a
+dying man and his dying wife.  But the thing never touched her.
+Six years ago we had the small-pox, and she went all through that
+in just the same way.  I don't believe she has ever had a day's
+illness in her life.  She will be physicking this parish when my
+bones are rattling in my coffin, and she will be laying down the
+laws of literature long after your statue has become a familiar
+ornament of Westminster Abbey.  She's a wonderful woman, but a
+trifle masterful."
+
+He laughed, but I detected a touch of irritation in his voice.  My
+host looked a man wishful to be masterful himself.  I do not think
+he quite relished the calm way in which this grand dame took
+possession of all things around her, himself and his work included.
+
+"Did you ever hear the story of the marriage?" he asked.
+
+"No," I replied, "whose marriage?  The earl's?"
+
+"I should call it the countess's," he answered.  "It was the gossip
+of the county when I first came here, but other curious things have
+happened among us to push it gradually out of memory.  Most people,
+I really believe, have quite forgotten that the Countess of -- once
+served behind a baker's counter."
+
+"You don't say so," I exclaimed.  The remark, I admit, sounds weak
+when written down; the most natural remarks always do.
+
+"It's a fact," said the doctor, "though she does not suggest the
+shop-girl, does she?  But then I have known countesses, descended
+in a direct line from William the Conqueror, who did, so things
+balance one another.  Mary, Countess of --, was, thirty years ago,
+Mary Sewell, daughter of a Taunton linen-draper.  The business,
+profitable enough as country businesses go, was inadequate for the
+needs of the Sewell family, consisting, as I believe it did, of
+seven boys and eight girls.  Mary, the youngest, as soon as her
+brief schooling was over, had to shift for herself.  She seems to
+have tried her hand at one or two things, finally taking service
+with a cousin, a baker and confectioner, who was doing well in
+Oxford Street.  She must have been a remarkably attractive girl;
+she's a handsome woman now.  I can picture that soft creamy skin
+when it was fresh and smooth, and the West of England girls run
+naturally to dimples and eyes that glisten as though they had been
+just washed in morning dew.  The shop did a good trade in ladies'
+lunches--it was the glass of sherry and sweet biscuit period.  I
+expect they dressed her in some neat-fitting grey or black dress,
+with short sleeves, showing her plump arms, and that she flitted
+around the marble-topped tables, smiling, and looking cool and
+sweet.  There the present Earl of --, then young Lord C-, fresh
+from Oxford, and new to the dangers of London bachelordom, first
+saw her.  He had accompanied some female relatives to the
+photographer's, and, hotels and restaurants being deemed impossible
+in those days for ladies, had taken them to Sewell's to lunch.
+Mary Sewell waited upon the party; and now as many of that party as
+are above ground wait upon Mary Sewell."
+
+"He showed good sense in marrying her," I said, "I admire him for
+it."  The doctor's sixty-four Lafitte was excellent.  I felt
+charitably inclined towards all men and women, even towards earls
+and countesses.
+
+"I don't think he had much to do with it," laughed the doctor,
+"beyond being, like Barkis, 'willing.'  It's a queer story; some
+people profess not to believe it, but those who know her ladyship
+best think it is just the story that must be true, because it is so
+characteristic of her.  And besides, I happen to know that it is
+true."
+
+"I should like to hear it," I said.
+
+"I am going to tell it you," said the doctor, lighting a fresh
+cigar, and pushing the box towards me.
+
+
+I will leave you to imagine the lad's suddenly developed appetite
+for decantered sherry at sixpence a glass, and the familiar currant
+bun of our youth.  He lunched at Sewell's shop, he tea'd at
+Sewell's, occasionally he dined at Sewell's, off cutlets, followed
+by assorted pastry.  Possibly, merely from fear lest the affair
+should reach his mother's ears, for he was neither worldly-wise nor
+vicious, he made love to Mary under an assumed name; and to do the
+girl justice, it must be remembered that she fell in love with and
+agreed to marry plain Mr. John Robinson, son of a colonial
+merchant, a gentleman, as she must have seen, and a young man of
+easy means, but of a position not so very much superior to her own.
+The first intimation she received that her lover was none other
+than Lord C-, the future Earl of --, was vouchsafed her during a
+painful interview with his lordship's mother.
+
+"I never knew it, madam," asserted Mary, standing by the window of
+the drawing-room above the shop, "upon my word of honour, I never
+knew it"
+
+"Perhaps not," answered her ladyship coldly.  "Would you have
+refused him if you had?"
+
+"I cannot tell," was the girl's answer; "it would have been
+different from the beginning.  He courted me and asked me to be his
+wife."
+
+"We won't go into all that," interrupted the other; "I am not here
+to defend him.  I do not say he acted well.  The question is, how
+much will compensate you for your natural disappointment?"
+
+Her ladyship prided herself upon her bluntness and practicability.
+As she spoke she took her cheque-book out of her reticule, and,
+opening it, dipped her pen into the ink.  I am inclined to think
+that the flutter of that cheque-book was her ladyship's mistake.
+The girl had common sense, and must have seen the difficulties in
+the way of a marriage between the heir to an earldom and a linen-
+draper's daughter; and had the old lady been a person of
+discernment, the interview might have ended more to her
+satisfaction.  She made the error of judging the world by one
+standard, forgetting there are individualities.  Mary Sewell came
+from a West of England stock that, in the days of Drake and
+Frobisher, had given more than one able-bodied pirate to the
+service of the country, and that insult of the cheque-book put the
+fight into her.  Her lips closed with a little snap, and the fear
+fell from her.
+
+"I am sorry I don't see my way to obliging your ladyship," she
+said.
+
+"What do you mean, girl?" asked the elder woman.
+
+"I don't mean to be disappointed," answered the girl, but she spoke
+quietly and respectfully.  "We have pledged our word to one
+another.  If he is a gentleman, as I know he is, he will keep his,
+and I shall keep mine."
+
+Then her ladyship began to talk reason, as people do when it is too
+late.  She pointed out to the girl the difference of social
+position, and explained to her the miseries that come from marrying
+out of one's station.  But the girl by this time had got over her
+surprise, and perhaps had begun to reflect that, in any case, a
+countess-ship was worth fighting for.  The best of women are
+influenced by such considerations.
+
+
+"I am not a lady, I know," she replied quietly, "but my people have
+always been honest folk, well known, and I shall try to learn.  I
+am not wishing to speak disrespectfully of my betters, but I was in
+service before I came here, ma'am, as lady's maid, in a place where
+I saw much of what is called Society.  I think I can be as good a
+lady as some I know, if not better."
+
+The countess began to grow angry again.  "And who do you think will
+receive you?" she cried, "a girl who has served in a pastry-cook's
+shop!"
+
+"Lady L- came from behind the bar," Mary answered, "and that's not
+much better.  And the Duchess of C-, I have heard, was a ballet
+girl, but nobody seems to remember it.  I don't think the people
+whose opinion is worth having will object to me for very long."
+The girl was beginning rather to enjoy the contest.
+
+"You profess to love my son," cried the countess fiercely, "and you
+are going to ruin his life.  You will drag him down to your own
+level."
+
+The girl must have looked rather fine at that moment, I should
+dearly love to have been present.
+
+"There will be no dragging down, my lady," she replied, "on either
+side.  I do love your son very dearly.  He is one of the kindest
+and best of gentlemen.  But I am not blind, and whatever amount of
+cleverness there may be between us belongs chiefly to me.  I shall
+make it my duty to fit myself for the position of his wife, and to
+help him in his work.  You need not fear, my lady, I shall be a
+good wife to him, and he shall never regret it.  You might find him
+a richer wife, a better educated wife, but you will never find him
+a wife who will be more devoted to him and to his interests."
+
+That practically brought the scene to a close.  The countess had
+sense enough to see that she was only losing ground by argument.
+She rose and replaced her cheque-book in her bag.
+
+"I think, my good girl, you must be mad," she said; "if you will
+not allow me to do anything for you, there's an end to the matter.
+I did not come here to quarrel with you.  My son knows his duty to
+me and to his family.  You must take your own course, and I must
+take mine."
+
+"Very well, my lady," said Mary Sewell, holding the door open for
+her ladyship to pass out, "we shall see who wins."
+
+But however brave a front Mary Sewell may have maintained before
+the enemy, I expect she felt pretty limp when thinking matters
+calmly over after her ladyship's departure.  She knew her lover
+well enough to guess that he would be as wax in the firm hands of
+his mother, while she herself would not have a chance of opposing
+her influence against those seeking to draw him away from her.
+Once again she read through the few schoolboy letters he had
+written her, and then looked up at the framed photograph that hung
+above the mantelpiece of her little bedroom.  The face was that of
+a frank, pleasant-looking young fellow, lightened by eyes somewhat
+large for a man, but spoiled by a painfully weak mouth.  The more
+Mary Sewell thought, the more sure she felt in her own mind that he
+loved her, and had meant honestly by her.  Did the matter rest with
+him, she might reckon on being the future Countess of --, but,
+unfortunately for her, the person to be considered was not Lord C-,
+but the present Countess of --.  From childhood, through boyhood,
+into manhood it had never once occurred to Lord C- to dispute a
+single command of his mother's, and his was not the type of brain
+to readily receive new ideas.  If she was to win in the unequal
+contest it would have to be by art, not by strength.  She sat down
+and wrote a letter which under all the circumstances was a model of
+diplomacy.  She knew that it would be read by the countess, and,
+writing it, she kept both mother and son in mind.  She made no
+reproaches, and indulged in but little sentiment.  It was the
+letter of a woman who could claim rights, but who asked only for
+courtesy.  It stated her wish to see him alone and obtain from his
+own lips the assurance that he wished their engagement to cease.
+"Do not fear," Mary Sewell wrote, "that I shall be any annoyance to
+you.  My own pride would not let me urge you to marry me against
+your desire, and I care for you too much to cause you any pain.
+Assure me with your own lips that you wish our engagement to be at
+an end, and I shall release you without another word."
+
+The family were in town, and Mary sent her letter by a trusty hand.
+The countess read it with huge satisfaction, and, re-sealing it,
+gave it herself into her son's hands.  It promised a happy solution
+of the problem.  In imagination, she had all the night been
+listening to a vulgar breach of promise case.  She herself had been
+submitted to a most annoying cross-examination by a pert barrister.
+Her son's assumption of the name of Robinson had been misunderstood
+and severely commented upon by the judge.  A sympathetic jury had
+awarded thumping damages, and for the next six months the family
+title would be a peg on which music-hall singers and comic
+journalists would hang their ribald jokes.  Lord C- read the
+letter, flushed, and dutifully handed it back to his mother.  She
+made pretence to read it as for the first time, and counselled him
+to accord the interview.
+
+"I am so glad," she said, "that the girl is taking the matter
+sensibly.  We must really do something for her in the future, when
+everything is settled.  Let her ask for me, and then the servants
+will fancy she's a lady's maid or something of that sort, come
+after a place, and won't talk."
+
+So that evening Mary Sewell, addressed by the butler as "young
+woman," was ushered into the small drawing-room that connects the
+library of No. -- Grosvenor Square with the other reception rooms.
+The countess, now all amiability, rose to meet her.
+
+"My son will be here in a moment," she explained, "he has informed
+me of the purport of your letter.  Believe me, my dear Miss Sewell,
+no one can regret his thoughtless conduct more than I do.  But
+young men will be young men, and they do not stop to reflect that
+what may be a joke to them may be taken quite seriously by others."
+
+"I don't regard the matter as a joke, my lady," replied Mary
+somewhat curtly.
+
+"Of course not, my dear," added the countess, "that's what I'm
+saying.  It was very wrong of him altogether.  But with your pretty
+face, you will not, I am sure, have long to wait for a husband; we
+must see what we can do for you."
+
+The countess certainly lacked tact; it must have handicapped her
+exceedingly.
+
+"Thank you," answered the girl, "but I prefer to choose my own."
+
+Fortunately--or the interview might have ended in another quarrel--
+the cause of all the trouble at this moment entered the room, and
+the countess, whispering a few final words of instruction to him as
+she passed out, left them together.
+
+Mary took a chair in the centre of the room, at equal distance from
+both doors.  Lord C-, finding any sort of a seat uncomfortable
+under the circumstances, preferred to stand with his back to the
+mantelpiece.  Dead silence was maintained for a few seconds, and
+then Mary, drawing the daintiest of handkerchiefs from her pocket,
+began to cry.  The countess must have been a poor diplomatist, or
+she might have thought of this; or she may have remembered her own
+appearance on the rare occasions when she herself, a big, raw-boned
+girl, had attempted the softening influence of tears, and have
+attached little importance to the possibility.  But when these
+soft, dimpled women cry, and cry quietly, it is another matter.
+Their eyes grow brighter, and the tears, few and far between, lie
+like dewdrops on a rose leaf.
+
+Lord C- was as tender-hearted a lout as ever lived.  In a moment he
+was on his knees with his arm round the girl's waist, pouring out
+such halting words of love and devotion as came to his unready
+brain, cursing his fate, his earldom, and his mother, and assuring
+Mary that his only chance of happiness lay in his making her his
+countess.  Had Mary liked to say the word at that moment, he would
+have caught her to his arms, and defied the whole world--for the
+time being.  But Mary was a very practical young woman, and there
+are difficulties in the way of handling a lover, who, however ready
+he may be to do your bidding so long as your eyes are upon him, is
+liable to be turned from his purpose so soon as another influence
+is substituted for your own.  His lordship suggested an immediate
+secret marriage.  But you cannot run out into the street, knock up
+a clergyman, and get married on the spot, and Mary knew that the
+moment she was gone his lordship's will would revert to his
+mother's keeping.  Then his lordship suggested flight, but flight
+requires money, and the countess knew enough to keep his lordship's
+purse in her own hands.  Despair seized upon his lordship.
+
+"It's no use," he cried, "it will end in my marrying her."
+
+"Who's she?" exclaimed Mary somewhat quickly.
+
+His lordship explained the position.  The family estates were
+heavily encumbered.  It was deemed advisable that his lordship
+should marry Money, and Money, in the person of the only daughter
+of rich and ambitious parvenus, had offered itself--or, to speak
+more correctly, had been offered.
+
+"What's she like?" asked Mary.
+
+"Oh, she's nice enough," was the reply, "only I don't care for her
+and she doesn't care for me.  It won't be much fun for either of
+us," and his lordship laughed dismally.
+
+"How do you know she doesn't care for you?" asked Mary.  A woman
+may be critical of her lover's shortcomings, but at the very least
+he is good enough for every other woman.
+
+"Well, she happens to care for somebody else," answered his
+lordship, "she told me so herself."
+
+That would account for it.
+
+"And is she willing to marry you?" inquired Mary.
+
+His lordship shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Oh, well, you know, her people want it," he replied.
+
+In spite of her trouble, the girl could not help a laugh.  These
+young swells seemed to have but small wills of their own.  Her
+ladyship, on the other side of the door, grew nervous.  It was the
+only sound she had been able to hear.
+
+"It's deuced awkward," explained his lordship, "when you're--well,
+when you are anybody, you know.  You can't do as you like.  Things
+are expected of you, and there's such a lot to be considered."
+
+Mary rose and clasped her pretty dimpled hands, from which she had
+drawn her gloves, behind his neck.
+
+"You do love me, Jack?" she said, looking up into his face.
+
+For answer the lad hugged her to him very tightly, and there were
+tears in his eyes.
+
+"Look here, Mary," he cried, "if I could only get rid of my
+position, and settle down with you as a country gentleman, I'd do
+it to-morrow.  Damn the title, it's going to be the curse of my
+life."
+
+Perhaps in that moment Mary also wished that the title were at the
+bottom of the sea, and that her lover were only the plain Mr. John
+Robinson she had thought him.  These big, stupid men are often very
+loveable in spite of, or because of their weakness.  They appeal to
+the mother side of a woman's heart, and that is the biggest side in
+all good women.
+
+Suddenly however, the door opened.  The countess appeared, and
+sentiment flew out.  Lord C-, releasing Mary, sprang back, looking
+like a guilty school-boy.
+
+"I thought I heard Miss Sewell go out," said her ladyship in the
+icy tones that had never lost their power of making her son's heart
+freeze within him.  "I want to see you when you are free."
+
+"I shan't be long," stammered his lordship.  "Mary--Miss Sewell is
+just going."
+
+Mary waited without moving until the countess had left and closed
+the door behind her.  Then she turned to her lover and spoke in
+quick, low tones.
+
+"Give me her address--the girl they want you to marry!"
+
+"What are you going to do?" asked his lordship.
+
+"I don't know," answered the girl, "but I'm going to see her."
+
+She scribbled the name down, and then said, looking the boy
+squarely in the face:
+
+"Tell me frankly, Jack, do you want to marry me, or do you not?"
+
+"You know I do, Mary," he answered, and his eyes spoke stronger
+than his words.  "If I weren't a silly ass, there would be none of
+this trouble.  But I don't know how it is; I say to myself I'll do,
+a thing, but the mater talks and talks and--"
+
+"I know," interrupted Mary with a smile.  "Don't argue with her,
+fall in with all her views, and pretend to agree with her."
+
+"If you could only think of some plan," said his lordship, catching
+at the hope of her words, "you are so clever."
+
+"I am going to try," answered Mary, "and if I fail, you must run
+off with me, even if you have to do it right before your mother's
+eyes."
+
+What she meant was, "I shall have to run off with you," but she
+thought it better to put it the other way about.
+
+Mary found her involuntary rival a meek, gentle little lady, as
+much under the influence of her blustering father as was Lord C-
+under that of his mother.  What took place at the interview one can
+only surmise; but certain it is that the two girls, each for her
+own ends, undertook to aid and abet one another.
+
+Much to the surprised delight of their respective parents, there
+came about a change in the attitude hitherto assumed towards one
+another by Miss Clementina Hodskiss and Lord C-.  All objections to
+his lordship's unwilling attentions were suddenly withdrawn by the
+lady.  Indeed, so swift to come and go are the whims of women, his
+calls were actually encouraged, especially when, as generally
+happened, they coincided with the absence from home of Mr. and Mrs.
+Hodskiss.  Quite as remarkable was the new-born desire of Lord C-
+towards Miss Clementina Hodskiss.  Mary's name was never mentioned,
+and the suggestion of immediate marriage was listened to without
+remonstrance.  Wiser folk would have puzzled their brains, but both
+her ladyship and ex-Contractor Hodskiss were accustomed to find all
+things yield to their wishes.  The countess saw visions of a
+rehabilitated estate, and Clementina's father dreamed of a peerage,
+secured by the influence of aristocratic connections.  All that the
+young folks stipulated for (and on that point their firmness was
+supernatural) was that the marriage should be quiet, almost to the
+verge of secrecy.
+
+"No beastly fuss," his lordship demanded.  "Let it be somewhere in
+the country, and no mob!" and his mother, thinking she understood
+his reason, patted his cheek affectionately.
+
+"I should like to go down to Aunt Jane's and be married quietly
+from there," explained Miss Hodskiss to her father.
+
+Aunt Jane resided on the outskirts of a small Hampshire village,
+and "sat under" a clergyman famous throughout the neighbourhood for
+having lost the roof to his mouth.
+
+"You can't be married by that old fool," thundered her father--Mr.
+Hodskiss always thundered; he thundered even his prayers.
+
+"He christened me," urged Miss Clementina.
+
+"And Lord knows what he called you.  Nobody can understand a word
+he says."
+
+"I'd like him to marry me," reiterated Miss Clementina.
+
+Neither her ladyship nor the contractor liked the idea.  The latter
+in particular had looked forward to a big function, chronicled at
+length in all the newspapers.  But after all, the marriage was the
+essential thing, and perhaps, having regard to some foolish love
+passages that had happened between Clementina and a certain
+penniless naval lieutenant, ostentation might be out of place.
+
+So in due course Clementina departed for Aunt Jane's, accompanied
+only by her maid.
+
+Quite a treasure was Miss Hodskiss's new maid.
+
+"A clean, wholesome girl," said of her Contractor Hodskiss, who
+cultivated affability towards the lower orders; "knows her place,
+and talks sense.  You keep that girl, Clemmy."
+
+"Do you think she knows enough?" hazarded the maternal Hodskiss.
+
+"Quite sufficient for any decent woman," retorted the contractor.
+"When Clemmy wants painting and stuffing, it will be time enough
+for her to think about getting one of your 'Ach Himmels' or 'Mon
+Dieus'."
+
+"I like the girl myself immensely," agreed Clementina's mother.
+"You can trust her, and she doesn't give herself airs."
+
+Her praises reached even the countess, suffering severely at the
+moment from the tyranny of an elderly Fraulein.
+
+"I must see this treasure," thought the countess to herself.  "I am
+tired of these foreign minxes."
+
+But no matter at what cunning hour her ladyship might call, the
+"treasure" always happened for some reason or other to be abroad.
+
+"Your girl is always out when I come," laughed the countess.  "One
+would fancy there was some reason for it."
+
+"It does seem odd," agreed Clementina, with a slight flush.
+
+Miss Hodskiss herself showed rather than spoke her appreciation of
+the girl.  She seemed unable to move or think without her.  Not
+even from the interviews with Lord C- was the maid always absent.
+
+The marriage, it was settled, should be by licence.  Mrs. Hodskiss
+made up her mind at first to run down and see to the preliminaries,
+but really when the time arrived it hardly seemed necessary to take
+that trouble.  The ordering of the whole affair was so very simple,
+and the "treasure" appeared to understand the business most
+thoroughly, and to be willing to take the whole burden upon her own
+shoulders.  It was not, therefore, until the evening before the
+wedding that the Hodskiss family arrived in force, filling Aunt
+Jane's small dwelling to its utmost capacity.  The swelling figure
+of the contractor, standing beside the tiny porch, compelled the
+passer-by to think of the doll's house in which the dwarf resides
+during fair-time, ringing his own bell out of his own first-floor
+window.  The countess and Lord C- were staying with her ladyship's
+sister, the Hon. Mrs. J-, at G- Hall, some ten miles distant, and
+were to drive over in the morning.  The then Earl of -- was in
+Norway, salmon fishing.  Domestic events did not interest him.
+
+Clementina complained of a headache after dinner, and went to bed
+early.  The "treasure" also was indisposed.  She seemed worried and
+excited.
+
+"That girl is as eager about the thing," remarked Mrs. Hodskiss,
+"as though it was her own marriage."
+
+In the morning Clementina was still suffering from her headache,
+but asserted her ability to go through the ceremony, provided
+everybody would keep away, and not worry her.  The "treasure" was
+the only person she felt she could bear to have about her.  Half an
+hour before it was time to start for church her mother looked her
+up again.  She had grown still paler, if possible, during the
+interval, and also more nervous and irritable.  She threatened to
+go to bed and stop there if she was not left quite alone.  She
+almost turned her mother out of the room, locking the door behind
+her.  Mrs. Hodskiss had never known her daughter to be like this
+before.
+
+The others went on, leaving her to follow in the last carriage with
+her father.  The contractor, forewarned, spoke little to her.  Only
+once he had occasion to ask her a question, and then she answered
+in a strained, unnatural voice.  She appeared, so far as could be
+seen under her heavy veil, to be crying.
+
+"Well, this is going to be a damned cheerful wedding," said Mr.
+Hodskiss, and lapsed into sulkiness.
+
+The wedding was not so quiet as had been anticipated.  The village
+had got scent of it, and had spread itself upon the event, while
+half the house party from G- Hall had insisted on driving over to
+take part in the proceedings.  The little church was better filled
+than it had been for many a long year past.
+
+The presence of the stylish crowd unnerved the ancient clergyman,
+long unaccustomed to the sight of a strange face, and the first
+sound of the ancient clergyman's voice unnerved the stylish crowd.
+What little articulation he possessed entirely disappeared, no one
+could understand a word he said.  He appeared to be uttering sounds
+of distress.  The ancient gentleman's infliction had to be
+explained in low asides, and it also had to be explained why such
+an one had been chosen to perform the ceremony.
+
+"It was a whim of Clementina's," whispered her mother.  "Her father
+and myself were married from here, and he christened her.  The dear
+child's full of sentiment.  I think it so nice of her."
+
+Everybody agreed it was charming, but wished it were over.  The
+general effect was weird in the extreme.
+
+Lord C- spoke up fairly well, but the bride's responses were
+singularly indistinct, the usual order of things being thus
+reversed.  The story of the naval lieutenant was remembered, and
+added to, and some of the more sentimental of the women began to
+cry in sympathy.
+
+In the vestry things assumed a brighter tone.  There was no lack of
+witnesses to sign the register.  The verger pointed out to them the
+place, and they wrote their names, as people in such cases do,
+without stopping to read.  Then it occurred to some one that the
+bride had not yet signed.  She stood apart, with her veil still
+down, and appeared to have been forgotten.  Encouraged, she came
+forward meekly, and took the pen from the hand of the verger.  The
+countess came and stood behind her.
+
+"Mary," wrote the bride, in a hand that looked as though it ought
+to have been firm, but which was not.
+
+"Dear me," said the countess, "I never knew there was a Mary in
+your name.  How differently you write when you write slowly."
+
+The bride did not answer, but followed with "Susannah."
+
+"Why, what a lot of names you must have, my dear!" exclaimed the
+countess.  "When are you going to get to the ones we all know?"
+
+"Ruth," continued the bride without answering.
+
+Breeding is not always proof against strong emotion.  The countess
+snatched the bride's veil from her face, and Mary Susannah Ruth
+Sewell stood before her, flushed and trembling, but looking none
+the less pretty because of that.  At this point the crowd came in
+useful.
+
+"I am sure your ladyship does not wish a scene," said Mary,
+speaking low.  "The thing is done."
+
+"The thing can be undone, and will be," retorted the countess in
+the same tone.  "You, you--"
+
+"My wife, don't forget that, mother," said Lord C- coming between
+them, and slipping Mary's hand on to his arm.  "We are both sorry
+to have had to go about the thing in this roundabout way, but we
+wanted to avoid a fuss.  I think we had better be getting away.
+I'm afraid Mr. Hodskiss is going to be noisy."
+
+
+The doctor poured himself out a glass of claret, and drank it off.
+His throat must have been dry.
+
+"And what became of Clementina?" I asked.  "Did the naval
+lieutenant, while the others were at church, dash up in a post-
+chaise and carry her off?"
+
+"That's what ought to have happened, for the whole thing to be in
+keeping," agreed the doctor.  "I believe as a matter of fact she
+did marry him eventually, but not till some years later, after the
+contractor had died."
+
+"And did Mr. Hodskiss make a noise in the vestry?" I persisted.
+The doctor never will finish a story.
+
+"I can't say for certain," answered my host, "I only saw the
+gentleman once.  That was at a shareholders' meeting.  I should
+incline to the opinion that he did."
+
+"I suppose the bride and bridegroom slipped out as quietly as
+possible and drove straight off," I suggested.
+
+"That would have been the sensible thing for them to do," agreed
+the doctor.
+
+"But how did she manage about her travelling frock?" I continued.
+"She could hardly have gone back to her Aunt Jane's and changed her
+things."  The doctor has no mind for minutiae.
+
+"I cannot tell you about all that," he replied.  "I think I
+mentioned that Mary was a practical girl.  Possibly she had thought
+of these details."
+
+"And did the countess take the matter quietly?" I asked.
+
+I like a tidy story, where everybody is put into his or her proper
+place at the end.  Your modern romance leaves half his characters
+lying about just anyhow.
+
+"That also I cannot tell you for certain," answered the doctor,
+"but I give her credit for so much sense.  Lord C- was of age, and
+with Mary at his elbow, quite knew his own mind.  I believe they
+travelled for two or three years.  The first time I myself set eyes
+on the countess (nee Mary Sewell) was just after the late earl's
+death.  I thought she looked a countess, every inch of her, but
+then I had not heard the story.  I mistook the dowager for the
+housekeeper."
+
+
+
+BLASE BILLY
+
+
+
+It was towards the end of August.  He and I appeared to be the only
+two men left to the Club.  He was sitting by an open window, the
+Times lying on the floor beside him.  I drew my chair a little
+closer and remarked:- "Good morning."
+
+He suppressed a yawn, and replied "Mornin'"--dropping the "g."  The
+custom was just coming into fashion; he was always correct.
+
+"Going to be a very hot day, I am afraid," I continued.
+
+"'Fraid so," was the response, after which he turned his head away
+and gently closed his eyes.
+
+I opined that conversation was not to his wish, but this only made
+me more determined to talk, and to talk to him above all others in
+London.  The desire took hold of me to irritate him--to break down
+the imperturbable calm within which he moved and had his being; and
+I gathered myself together, and settled down to the task.
+
+"Interesting paper the Times," I observed.
+
+"Very," he replied, taking it from the floor and handing it to me.
+"Won't you read it?"
+
+I had been careful to throw into my voice an aggressive cheeriness
+which I had calculated would vex him, but his manner remained that
+of a man who is simply bored.  I argued with him politely
+concerning the paper; but he insisted, still with the same weary
+air, that he had done with it.  I thanked him effusively.  I judged
+that he hated effusiveness.
+
+"They say that to read a Times leader," I persisted, "is a lesson
+in English composition."
+
+"So I've been told," he answered tranquilly.  "Personally I don't
+take them."
+
+The Times, I could see, was not going to be of much assistance to
+me.  I lit a cigarette, and remarked that he was not shooting.  He
+admitted the fact.  Under the circumstances, it would have taxed
+him to deny it, but the necessity for confession aroused him.
+
+"To myself," he said, "a tramp through miles of mud, in company
+with four gloomy men in black velveteen, a couple of depressed-
+looking dogs, and a heavy gun, the entire cavalcade being organised
+for the purpose of killing some twelve-and-sixpence worth of
+poultry, suggests the disproportionate."
+
+I laughed boisterously, and cried, "Good, good--very good!"
+
+He was the type of man that shudders inwardly at the sound of
+laughter.  I had the will to slap him on the back, but I thought
+maybe that would send him away altogether.
+
+I asked him if he hunted.  He replied that fourteen hours' talk a
+day about horses, and only about horses tired him, and that in
+consequence he had abandoned hunting.
+
+"You fish?" I said.
+
+"I was never sufficiently imaginative," he answered.
+
+"You travel a good deal," I suggested.
+
+He had apparently made up his mind to abandon himself to his fate,
+for he turned towards me with a resigned air.  An ancient nurse of
+mine had always described me as the most "wearing" child she had
+ever come across.  I prefer to speak of myself as persevering.
+
+"I should go about more," he said, "were I able to see any
+difference between one place and another."
+
+"Tried Central Africa?" I inquired.
+
+"Once or twice," he answered.  "It always reminds me of Kew
+Gardens."
+
+"China?" I hazarded.
+
+"Cross between a willow-pattern plate and a New York slum," was his
+comment.
+
+"The North Pole?" I tried, thinking the third time might be lucky.
+
+"Never got quite up to it," he returned.  "Reached Cape Hakluyt
+once."
+
+"How did that impress you?" I asked.
+
+"It didn't impress me," he replied.
+
+The talk drifted to women and bogus companies, dogs, literature,
+and such-like matters.  I found him well informed upon and bored by
+all.
+
+"They used to be amusing," he said, speaking of the first named,
+"until they began to take themselves seriously.  Now they are
+merely silly."
+
+I was forced into closer companionship with "Blase Billy" that
+autumn, for by chance a month later he and I found ourselves the
+guests of the same delightful hostess, and I came to liking him
+better.  He was a useful man to have about one.  In matters of
+fashion one could always feel safe following his lead.  One knew
+that his necktie, his collar, his socks, if not the very newest
+departure, were always correct; and upon social paths, as guide,
+philosopher, and friend, he was invaluable.  He knew every one,
+together with his or her previous convictions.  He was acquainted
+with every woman's past, and shrewdly surmised every man's future.
+He could point you out the coal-shed where the Countess of
+Glenleman had gambolled in her days of innocence, and would take
+you to breakfast at the coffee-shop off the Mile End Road where
+"Sam. Smith, Estd. 1820," own brother to the world-famed society
+novelist, Smith-Stratford, lived an uncriticised, unparagraphed,
+unphotographed existence upon the profits of "rashers" at three-
+ha'pence and "door-steps" at two a penny.  He knew at what houses
+it was inadvisable to introduce soap, and at what tables it would
+be bad form to denounce political jobbery.  He could tell you
+offhand what trade-mark went with what crest, and remembered the
+price paid for every baronetcy created during the last twenty-five
+years.
+
+Regarding himself, he might have made claim with King Charles never
+to have said a foolish thing, and never to have done a wise one.
+He despised, or affected to despise, most of his fellow-men, and
+those of his fellow-men whose opinion was most worth having
+unaffectedly despised him.
+
+Shortly described, one might have likened him to a Gaiety Johnny
+with brains.  He was capital company after dinner, but in the early
+morning one avoided him.
+
+So I thought of him until one day he fell in love; or to put it in
+the words of Teddy Tidmarsh, who brought the news to us, "got
+mashed on Gerty Lovell."
+
+"The red-haired one," Teddy explained, to distinguish her from her
+sister, who had lately adopted the newer golden shade.
+
+"Gerty Lovell!" exclaimed the captain, "why, I've always been told
+the Lovell girls hadn't a penny among them."
+
+"The old man's stone broke, I know for a certainty," volunteered
+Teddy, who picked up a mysterious but, in other respects,
+satisfactory income in an office near Hatton Garden, and who was
+candour itself concerning the private affairs of everybody but
+himself.
+
+"Oh, some rich pork-packing or diamond-sweating uncle has cropped
+up in Australia, or America, or one of those places," suggested the
+captain, "and Billy's got wind of it in good time.  Billy knows his
+way about."
+
+We agreed that some such explanation was needed, though in all
+other respects Gerty Lovell was just the girl that Reason (not
+always consulted on these occasions) might herself have chosen for
+"Blase Billy's" mate.
+
+The sunlight was not too kind to her, but at evening parties, where
+the lighting has been well considered, I have seen her look quite
+girlish.  At her best she was not beautiful, but at her worst there
+was about her an air of breeding and distinction that always saved
+her from being passed over, and she dressed to perfection.  In
+character she was the typical society woman:  always charming,
+generally insincere.  She went to Kensington for her religion and
+to Mayfair for her morals; accepted her literature from Mudie's and
+her art from the Grosvenor Gallery; and could and would gabble
+philanthropy, philosophy, and politics with equal fluency at every
+five-o'clock tea-table she visited.  Her ideas could always be
+guaranteed as the very latest, and her opinion as that of the
+person to whom she was talking.  Asked by a famous novelist one
+afternoon, at the Pioneer Club, to give him some idea of her,
+little Mrs. Bund, the painter's wife, had remained for a few
+moments with her pretty lips pursed, and had then said:
+
+"She is a woman to whom life could bring nothing more fully
+satisfying than a dinner invitation from a duchess, and whose
+nature would be incapable of sustaining deeper suffering than that
+caused by an ill-fitting costume."
+
+At the time I should have said the epigram was as true as it was
+cruel, but I suppose we none of us quite know each other.
+
+I congratulated "Blase Billy," or to drop his Club nickname and
+give him the full benefit of his social label, "The Hon. William
+Cecil Wychwood Stanley Drayton," on the occasion of our next
+meeting, which happened upon the steps of the Savoy Restaurant, and
+I thought--unless a quiver of the electric light deceived me--that
+he blushed.
+
+"Charming girl," I said.  "You're a lucky dog, Billy."
+
+It was the phrase that custom demands upon such occasions, and it
+came of its own accord to my tongue without costing me the trouble
+of composition, but he seized upon it as though it had been a gem
+of friendly sincerity.
+
+"You will like her even more when you know her better," he said.
+"She is so different from the usual woman that one meets.  Come and
+see her to-morrow afternoon, she will be so pleased.  Go about
+four, I will tell her to expect you."
+
+I rang the bell at ten minutes past five.  Billy was there.  She
+greeted me with a little tremor of embarrassment, which sat oddly
+upon her, but which was not altogether unpleasing.  She said it was
+kind of me to come so early.  I stayed for about half an hour, but
+conversation flagged, and some of my cleverest remarks attracted no
+attention whatever.
+
+When I rose to take my leave, Billy said that he must be off too,
+and that he would accompany me.  Had they been ordinary lovers, I
+should have been careful to give them an opportunity of making
+their adieus in secret; but in the case of the Honourable William
+Drayton and the eldest Miss Lovell I concluded that such tactics
+were needless, so I waited till he had shaken hands, and went
+downstairs with him.
+
+But in the hall Billy suddenly ejaculated, "By Jove!  Half a
+minute," and ran back up the stairs three at a time.  Apparently he
+found what he had gone for on the landing, for I did not hear the
+opening of the drawing-room door.  Then the Honourable Billy
+redescended with a sober, nonchalent air.
+
+"Left my gloves behind me," he explained, as he took my arm.  "I am
+always leaving my gloves about."
+
+I did not mention that I had seen him take them from his hat and
+slip them into his coat-tail pocket.
+
+We at the Club did not see very much of Billy during the next three
+months, but the captain, who prided himself upon his playing of the
+role of smoking-room cynic--though he would have been better in the
+part had he occasionally displayed a little originality--was of
+opinion that our loss would be more than made up to us after the
+marriage.  Once in the twilight I caught sight of a figure that
+reminded me of Billy's, accompanied by a figure that might have
+been that of the eldest Miss Lovell; but as the spot was Battersea
+Park, which is not a fashionable evening promenade, and the two
+figures were holding each other's hands, the whole picture being
+suggestive of the closing chapter of a London Journal romance, I
+concluded I had made an error.
+
+But I did see them in the Adelphi stalls one evening, rapt in a
+sentimental melodrama.  I joined them between the acts, and poked
+fun at the play, as one does at the Adelphi, but Miss Lovell begged
+me quite earnestly not to spoil her interest, and Billy wanted to
+enter upon a serious argument as to whether a man was justified in
+behaving as Will Terriss had just behaved towards the woman he
+loved.  I left them and returned to my own party, to the
+satisfaction, I am inclined to think, of all concerned.
+
+They married in due course.  We were mistaken on one point.  She
+brought Billy nothing.  But they both seemed quite content on his
+not too extravagant fortune.  They took a tiny house not far from
+Victoria Station, and hired a brougham for the season.  They did
+not entertain very much, but they contrived to be seen everywhere
+it was right and fashionable they should be seen.  The Honourable
+Mrs. Drayton was a much younger and brighter person than had been
+the eldest Miss Lovell, and as she continued to dress charmingly,
+her social position rose rapidly.  Billy went everywhere with her,
+and evidently took a keen pride in her success.  It was even said
+that he designed her dresses for her, and I have myself seen him
+earnestly studying the costumes in Russell and Allen's windows.
+
+The captain's prophecy remained unfulfilled.  "Blase Billy"--if the
+name could still be applied to him--hardly ever visited the Club
+after his marriage.  But I had grown to like him, and, as he had
+foretold, to like his wife.  I found their calm indifference to the
+burning questions of the day a positive relief from the strenuous
+atmosphere of literary and artistic circles.  In the drawing-room
+of their little house in Eaton Row, the comparative merits of
+George Meredith and George R. Sims were not considered worth
+discussion.  Both were regarded as persons who afforded a certain
+amount of amusement in return for a certain amount of cash.  And on
+any Wednesday afternoon, Henrick Ibsen and Arthur Roberts would
+have been equally welcome, as adding piquancy to the small
+gathering.  Had I been compelled to pass my life in such a house,
+this Philistine attitude might have palled upon me; but, under the
+circumstances, it refreshed me, and I made use of my welcome, which
+I believe was genuine, to its full extent.
+
+As months went by, they seemed to me to draw closer to one another,
+though I am given to understand that such is not the rule in
+fashionable circles.  One evening I arrived a little before my
+time, and was shown up into the drawing-room by the soft-footed
+butler.  They were sitting in the dusk with their arms round one
+another.  It was impossible to withdraw, so I faced the situation
+and coughed.  A pair of middle-class lovers could not have appeared
+more awkward or surprised.
+
+But the incident established an understanding between us, and I
+came to be regarded as a friend before whom there was less
+necessity to act.
+
+Studying them, I came to the conclusion that the ways and manners
+of love are very same-like throughout the world, as though the
+foolish boy, unheedful of human advance, kept but one school for
+minor poet and East End shop-boy, for Girton girl and little
+milliner; taught but the one lesson to the end-of-the-nineteenth-
+century Johnny that he taught to bearded Pict and Hun four thousand
+years ago.
+
+Thus the summer and the winter passed pleasantly for the Honourable
+Billy, and then, as luck would have it, he fell ill just in the
+very middle of the London season, when invitations to balls and
+dinner parties, luncheons and "At Homes," were pouring in from
+every quarter; when the lawns at Hurlingham were at their
+smoothest, and the paddocks at their smartest.
+
+It was unfortunate, too, that the fashions that season suited the
+Honourable Mrs. Billy as they had not suited her for years.  In the
+early spring, she and Billy had been hard at work planning costumes
+calculated to cause a flutter through Mayfair, and the dresses and
+the bonnets--each one a work of art--were waiting on their stands
+to do their killing work.  But the Honourable Mrs. Billy, for the
+first time in her life, had lost interest in such things.
+
+Their friends were genuinely sorry, for society was Billy's
+element, and in it he was interesting and amusing.  But, as Lady
+Gower said, there was no earthly need for his wife to constitute
+herself a prisoner.  Her shutting herself off from the world could
+do him no good and it would look odd.
+
+Accordingly the Honourable Mrs. Drayton, to whom oddness was a
+crime, and the voice of Lady Gower as the voice of duty, sacrificed
+her inclinations on the social shrine, laced the new costumes tight
+across her aching heart, and went down into society.
+
+But the Honourable Mrs. Drayton achieved not the success of former
+seasons.  Her small talk grew so very small, that even Park Lane
+found it unsatisfying.  Her famous laugh rang mechanically.  She
+smiled at the wisdom of dukes, and became sad at the funny stories
+of millionaires.  Society voted her a good wife but bad company,
+and confined its attentions to cards of inquiry.  And for this
+relief the Honourable Mrs. Drayton was grateful, for Billy waned
+weaker and weaker.  In the world of shadows in which she moved, he
+was the one real thing.  She was of very little practical use, but
+it comforted her to think that she was helping to nurse him.
+
+But Billy himself it troubled.
+
+"I do wish you would go out more," he would say.  "It makes me feel
+that I'm such a selfish brute, keeping you tied up here in this
+dismal little house.  Besides," he would add, "people miss you;
+they will hate me for keeping you away."  For, where his wife was
+concerned, Billy's knowledge of the world availed him little.  He
+really thought society craved for the Honourable Mrs. Drayton, and
+would not be comforted where she was not.
+
+"I would rather stop with you, dear," would be the answer; "I don't
+care to go about by myself.  You must get well quickly and take
+me."
+
+And so the argument continued, until one evening, as she sat by
+herself, the nurse entered softly, closed the door behind her, and
+came over to her.
+
+"I wish you would go out to-night, ma'am," said the nurse, "just
+for an hour or two.  I think it would please the master; he is
+worrying himself because he thinks it is his fault that you do not;
+and just now"--the woman hesitated for a moment--"just now I want
+to keep him very quiet."
+
+"Is he weaker, nurse?"
+
+"Well, he is not stronger, ma'am, and I think--I think we must
+humour him."
+
+The Honourable Mrs. Drayton rose, and, crossing to the window,
+stood for a while looking out.
+
+"But where am I to go, nurse?" she said at length, turning with a
+smile.  "I've no invitations anywhere."
+
+"Can't you make believe to have one?" said the nurse.  "It is only
+seven o'clock.  Say you are going to a dinner-party; you can come
+home early then.  Go and dress yourself, and come down and say
+good-bye to him, and then come in again about eleven, as though you
+had just returned."
+
+"You think I must, nurse?"
+
+"I think it would be better, ma'am.  I wish you would try it."
+
+The Honourable Mrs. Drayton went to the door, then paused.
+
+"He has such sharp ears, nurse; he will listen for the opening of
+the door and the sound of the carriage."
+
+"I will see to that," said the nurse.  "I will tell them to have
+the carriage here at ten minutes to eight.  Then you can drive to
+the end of the street, slip out, and walk back.  I will let you in
+myself."
+
+"And about coming home?" asked the other woman.
+
+"You must slip out for a few minutes before eleven, and the
+carriage must be waiting for you at the corner again.  Leave all
+that to me."
+
+In half an hour the Honourable Mrs. Drayton entered the sick-room,
+radiant in evening dress and jewels.  Fortunately the lights were
+low, or "Blase-Billy" might have been doubtful as to the effect his
+wife was likely to produce.  For her face was not the face that one
+takes to dinner-parties.
+
+"Nurse tells me you are going to the Grevilles this evening.  I am
+so glad.  I've been worrying myself about you, moped up here right
+through the season."
+
+He took her hands in his and held her out at arm's length from him.
+
+"How handsome you look, dear!" he said.  "How they must have all
+been cursing me for keeping you shut up here, like a princess in an
+ogre's castle!  I shall never dare to face them again."
+
+She laughed, well pleased at his words.
+
+"I shall not be late," she said.  "I shall be so anxious to get
+back and see how my boy has behaved.  If you have not been good I
+shan't go again."
+
+They kissed and parted, and at eleven she returned to the room.
+She told him what a delightful evening it had been, and bragged a
+little of her own success.
+
+The nurse told her that he had been more cheerful that evening than
+for many nights.
+
+So every day the farce was played for him.  One day it was to a
+luncheon that she went, in a costume by Redfern; the next night to
+a ball, in a frock direct from Paris; again to an "At Home," or
+concert, or dinner-party.  Loafers and passers-by would stop to
+stare at a haggard, red-eyed woman, dressed as for a drawing-room,
+slipping thief-like in and out of her own door.
+
+I heard them talking of her one afternoon, at a house where I
+called, and I joined the group to listen.
+
+"I always thought her heartless, but I gave her credit for sense,"
+a woman was saying.  "One doesn't expect a woman to be fond of her
+husband, but she needn't make a parade of ignoring him when he is
+dying."
+
+I pleaded absence from town to inquire what was meant, and from all
+lips I heard the same account.  One had noticed her carriage at the
+door two or three evenings in succession.  Another had seen her
+returning home.  A third had seen her coming out, and so on.
+
+I could not fit the fact in with my knowledge of her, so the next
+evening I called.  The door was opened instantly by herself.
+
+"I saw you from the window," she said.  "Come in here; don't
+speak."
+
+I followed her, and she closed the door behind her.  She was
+dressed in a magnificent costume, her hair sparkling with diamonds,
+and I looked my questions.
+
+She laughed bitterly.
+
+"I am supposed to be at the opera to-night," she explained.  "Sit
+down, if you have a few minutes to spare."
+
+I said it was for a talk that I had come; and there, in the dark
+room, lighted only by the street lamp without, she told me all.
+And at the end she dropped her head on her bare arms; and I turned
+away and looked out of the window for a while.
+
+"I feel so ridiculous," she said, rising and coming towards me.  "I
+sit here all the evening dressed like this.  I'm afraid I don't act
+my part very well; but, fortunately, dear Billy never was much of a
+judge of art, and it is good enough for him.  I tell him the most
+awful lies about what everybody has said to me, and what I've said
+to everybody, and how my gowns were admired.  What do you think of
+this one?"
+
+For answer I took the privilege of a friend.
+
+"I'm glad you think well of me," she said.  "Billy has such a high
+opinion of you.  You will hear some funny tales.  I'm glad you
+know."
+
+I had to leave London again, and Billy died before I returned.  I
+heard that she had to be fetched from a ball, and was only just in
+time to touch his lips before they were cold.  But her friends
+excused her by saying that the end had come very suddenly.
+
+I called on her a little later, and before I left I hinted to her
+what people were saying, and asked her if I had not better tell
+them the truth.
+
+"I would rather you didn't," she answered.  "It seems like making
+public the secret side of one's life."
+
+"But," I urged, "they will think--"
+
+She interrupted me.
+
+"Does it matter very much what they think?"
+
+Which struck me as a very remarkable sentiment, coming from the
+Hon. Mrs. Drayton, nee the elder Miss Lovell.
+
+
+
+THE CHOICE OF CYRIL HARJOHN
+
+
+
+Between a junior resident master of twenty-one, and a backward lad
+of fifteen, there yawns an impassable gulf.  Between a struggling
+journalist of one-and-thirty, and an M.D. of twenty-five, with a
+brilliant record behind him, and a career of exceptional promise
+before him, a close friendship is however permissible.
+
+My introduction to Cyril Harjohn was through the Rev. Charles
+Fauerberg.
+
+"Our young friend," said the Rev. Mr. Fauerberg, standing in the
+most approved tutorial attitude, with his hand upon his pupil's
+shoulder, "our young friend has been somewhat neglected, but I see
+in him possibilities warranting hope--warranting, I may say, very
+great hope.  For the present he will be under my especial care, and
+you will not therefore concern yourself with his studies.  He will
+sleep with Milling and the others in dormitory number two."
+
+The lad formed a liking for me, and I think, and hope, I rendered
+his sojourn at "Alpha House" less irksome than otherwise it might
+have been.  The Reverend Charles' method with the backward was on
+all fours with that adopted for the bringing on of geese; he cooped
+them up and crammed them.  The process is profitable to the
+trainer, but painful to the goose.
+
+Young Harjohn and myself left "Alpha House" at the end of the same
+term; he bound for Brasenose, I for Bloomsbury.  He made a point of
+never coming up to London without calling on me, when we would dine
+together in one of Soho's many dingy, garlic-scented restaurants,
+and afterwards, over our bottle of cheap Beaune, discuss the coming
+of our lives; and when he entered Guy's I left John Street, and
+took chambers close to his in Staple Inn.  Those were pleasant
+days.  Childhood is an over-rated period, fuller of sorrow than of
+joy.  I would not take my childhood back, were it a gift, but I
+would give the rest of my life to live the twenties over again.
+
+To Cyril I was the man of the world, and he looked to me for
+wisdom, not seeing always, I fear, that he got it; while from him I
+gathered enthusiasm, and learnt the profit that comes to a man from
+the keeping of ideals.
+
+Often as we have talked, I have felt as though a visible light came
+from him, framing his face as with the halo of some pictured saint.
+Nature had wasted him, putting him into this nineteenth century of
+ours.  Her victories are accomplished.  Her army of heroes, the few
+sung, the many forgotten, is disbanded.  The long peace won by
+their blood and pain is settled on the land.  She had fashioned
+Cyril Harjohn for one of her soldiers.  He would have been a
+martyr, in the days when thought led to the stake, a fighter for
+the truth, when to speak one's mind meant death.  To lead some
+forlorn hope for Civilisation would have been his true work; Fate
+had condemned him to sentry duty in a well-ordered barrack.
+
+But there is work to be done in the world, though the labour lies
+now in the vineyard, not on the battlefield.  A small but
+sufficient fortune purchased for him freedom.  To most men an
+assured income is the grave of ambition; to Cyril it was the
+foundation of desire.  Relieved from the necessity of working to
+live, he could afford the luxury of living to work.  His profession
+was to him a passion; he regarded it, not with the cold curiosity
+of the scholar, but with the imaginative devotion of the disciple.
+To help to push its frontiers forward, to carry its flag farther
+into the untravelled desert that ever lies beyond the moving
+boundary of human knowledge, was his dream.
+
+One summer evening, I remember, we were sitting in his rooms, and
+during a silence there came to us through the open window the
+moaning of the city, as of a tired child.  He rose and stretched
+his arms out towards the darkening streets, as if he would gather
+to him all the toiling men and women and comfort them.
+
+"Oh, that I could help you!" he cried, "my brothers and my sisters.
+Take my life, oh God, and spend it for me among your people."
+
+The speech sounds theatrical, as I read it, written down, but to
+the young such words are not ridiculous, as to us older men.
+
+In the natural order of events, he fell in love, and with just the
+woman one would expect him to be attracted by.  Elspeth Grant was
+of the type from which the world, by instinct rather than by
+convention, has drawn its Madonnas and its saints.  To describe a
+woman in words is impossible.  Her beauty was not a possession to
+be catalogued, but herself.  One felt it as one feels the beauty of
+a summer's dawn breaking the shadows of a sleeping city, but one
+cannot set it down.  I often met her, and, when talking to her, I
+knew myself--I, hack-journalist, frequenter of Fleet Street bars,
+retailer of smoke-room stories--a great gentleman, incapable of
+meanness, fit for all noble deeds.
+
+In her presence life became a thing beautiful and gracious; a
+school for courtesy, and tenderness, and simplicity.
+
+I have wondered since, coming to see a little more clearly into the
+ways of men, whether it would not have been better had she been
+less spiritual, had her nature possessed a greater alloy of earth,
+making it more fit for the uses of this work-a-day world.  But at
+the time, these two friends of mine seemed to me to have been
+created for one another.
+
+She appealed to all that was highest in Cyril's character, and he
+worshipped her with an unconcealed adoration that, from any man
+less high-minded, would have appeared affectation, and which she
+accepted with the sweet content that Artemis might have accorded to
+the homage of Endymion.
+
+There was no formal engagement between them.  Cyril seemed to
+shrink from the materialising of his love by any thought of
+marriage.  To him she was an ideal of womanhood rather than a
+flesh-and-blood woman.  His love for her was a religion; it had no
+taint of earthly passion in its composition.
+
+Had I known the world better I might have anticipated the result;
+for the red blood ran in my friend's veins; and, alas, we dream our
+poems, not live them.  But at the time, the idea of any other woman
+coming between them would have appeared to me folly.  The
+suggestion that that other woman might be Geraldine Fawley I should
+have resented as an insult to my intelligence:  that is the point
+of the story I do not understand to this day.
+
+That he should be attracted by her, that he should love to linger
+near her, watching the dark flush come and go across her face,
+seeking to call the fire into her dark eyes was another matter, and
+quite comprehensible; for the girl was wonderfully handsome, with a
+bold, voluptuous beauty which invited while it dared.  But
+considered in any other light than that of an animal, she repelled.
+At times when, for her ends, it seemed worth the exertion, she
+would assume a certain wayward sweetness, but her acting was always
+clumsy and exaggerated, capable of deceiving no one but a fool.
+
+Cyril, at all events, was not taken in by it.  One evening, at a
+Bohemian gathering, the entree to which was notoriety rather than
+character, they had been talking together for some considerable
+time when, wishing to speak to Cyril, I strolled up to join them.
+As I came towards them she moved away, her dislike for me being
+equal to mine for her; a thing which was, perhaps, well for me.
+
+"Miss Fawley prefers two as company to three," I observed, looking
+after her retreating figure.
+
+"I am afraid she finds you what we should call an anti-sympathetic
+element," he replied, laughing.
+
+"Do you like her?" I asked him, somewhat bluntly.
+
+His eyes rested upon her as she stood in the doorway, talking to a
+small, black-bearded man who had just been introduced to her.
+After a few moments she went out upon his arm, and then Cyril
+turned to me.
+
+"I think her," he replied, speaking, as was necessary, very low,
+"the embodiment of all that is evil in womanhood.  In old days she
+would have been a Cleopatra, a Theodora, a Delilah.  To-day,
+lacking opportunity, she is the 'smart woman' grubbing for an
+opening into society--and old Fawley's daughter.  I'm tired; let us
+go home."
+
+His allusion to her parentage was significant.  Few people thought
+of connecting clever, handsome Geraldine Fawley with "Rogue
+Fawley," Jew renegade, ex-gaol bird, and outside broker; who,
+having expectations from his daughter, took care not to hamper her
+by ever being seen in her company.  But no one who had once met the
+father could ever forget the relationship while talking to the
+daughter.  The older face, with its cruelty, its cunning, and its
+greed stood reproduced, feature for feature, line for line.  It was
+as though Nature, for an artistic freak, had set herself the task
+of fashioning hideousness and beauty from precisely the same
+materials.  Between the leer of the man and the smile of the girl,
+where lay the difference?  It would have puzzled any student of
+anatomy to point it out.  Yet the one sickened, while to gain the
+other most men would have given much.
+
+Cyril's answer to my question satisfied me for the time.  He met
+the girl often, as was natural.  She was a singer of some repute,
+and our social circle was what is commonly called "literary and
+artistic."  To do her justice, however, she made no attempt to
+fascinate him, nor even to be particularly agreeable to him.
+Indeed, she seemed to be at pains to show him her natural--in other
+words, her most objectionable side.
+
+Coming out of the theatre one first night, we met her in the lobby.
+I was following Cyril at some little distance, but as he stopped to
+speak to her the movement of the crowd placed me just behind them.
+
+"Will you be at Leightons' to-morrow?" I heard him ask her in a low
+tone.
+
+"Yes," she answered, "and I wish you wouldn't come."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because you're a fool, and you bore me."
+
+Under ordinary circumstances I should have taken the speech for
+badinage--it was the kind of wit the woman would have indulged in.
+But Cyril's face clouded with anger and vexation.  I said nothing.
+I did not wish him to know that I had overheard.  I tried to
+believe that he was amusing himself, but my own explanation did not
+satisfy me.
+
+Next evening I went to Leightons' by myself.  The Grants were in
+town, and Cyril was dining with them.  I found I did not know many
+people, and cared little for those I did.  I was about to escape
+when Miss Fawley's name was announced.  I was close to the door,
+and she had to stop and speak to me.  We exchanged a few
+commonplaces.  She either made love to a man or was rude to him.
+She generally talked to me without looking at me, nodding and
+smiling meanwhile to people around.  I have met many women equally
+ill-mannered, and without her excuse.  For a moment, however, she
+turned her eyes to mine.
+
+"Where's your friend, Mr. Harjohn?" she asked.  "I thought you were
+inseparables."
+
+I looked at her in astonishment.
+
+"He is dining out to-night," I replied.  "I do not think he will
+come."
+
+She laughed.  I think it was the worst part about the woman, her
+laugh; it suggested so much cruelty.
+
+"I think he will," she said.
+
+It angered me into an indiscretion.  She was moving away.  I
+stepped in front of her and stopped her.
+
+"What makes you think so?" I asked, and my voice, I know, betrayed
+the anxiety I felt as to her reply.  She looked me straight in the
+face.  There was one virtue she possessed--the virtue that animals
+hold above mankind--truthfulness.  She knew I disliked her--hate
+would be, perhaps, a more exact expression, did not the word sound
+out of date, and she made no pretence of not knowing it and
+returning the compliment.
+
+"Because I am here," she answered.  "Why don't you save him?  Have
+you no influence over him?  Tell the Saint to keep him; I don't
+want him.  You heard what I said to him last night.  I shall only
+marry him for the sake of his position, and the money he can earn
+if he likes to work and not play the fool.  Tell him what I have
+said; I shan't deny it."
+
+She passed on to greet a decrepit old lord with a languishing
+smile, and I stood staring after her with, I fear, a somewhat
+stupid expression, until some young fool came up grinning, to ask
+me whether I had seen a ghost or backed a "wrong 'un."
+
+There was no need to wait; I felt no curiosity.  Something told me
+the woman had spoken the truth.  It was mere want of motive that
+made me linger.  I saw him come in, and watched him hanging round
+her, like a dog, waiting for a kind word, or failing that, a look.
+I knew she saw me, and I knew it added to her zest that I was
+there.  Not till we were in the street did I speak to him.  He
+started as I touched him.  We were neither of us good actors.  He
+must have read much in my face, and I saw that he had read it; and
+we walked side by side in silence, I thinking what to say,
+wondering whether I should do good or harm, wishing that we were
+anywhere but in these silent, life-packed streets, so filled with
+the unseen.  It was not until we had nearly reached the Albert Hall
+that we broke the silence.  Then it was he who spoke:
+
+"Do you think I haven't told myself all that?" he said.  "Do you
+think I don't know I'm a damned fool, a cad, a liar!  What the
+devil's the good of talking about it?"
+
+"But I can't understand it," I said.
+
+"No," he replied, "because you're a fool, because you have only
+seen one side of me.  You think me a grand gentleman, because I
+talk big, and am full of noble sentiment.  Why, you idiot, the
+Devil himself could take you in.  HE has his fine moods, I suppose,
+talks like a saint, and says his prayers with the rest of us.  Do
+you remember the first night at old Fauerberg's?  You poked your
+silly head into the dormitory, and saw me kneeling by the bedside,
+while the other fellows stood by grinning.  You closed the door
+softly--you thought I never saw you.  I was not praying, I was
+trying to pray."
+
+"It showed that you had pluck, if it showed nothing else," I
+answered.  "Most boys would not have tried, and you kept it up."
+
+"Ah, yes," he answered, "I promised the Mater I would, and I did.
+Poor old soul, she was as big a fool as you are.  She believed in
+me.  Don't you remember, finding me one Saturday afternoon all
+alone, stuffing myself with cake and jam?"
+
+I laughed at the recollection, though Heaven knows I was in no
+laughing mood.  I had found him with an array of pastry spread out
+before him, sufficient to make him ill for a week, and I had boxed
+his ears, and had thrown the whole collection into the road.
+
+"The Mater gave me half-a-crown a week for pocket-money," he
+continued, "and I told the fellows I had only a shilling, so that I
+could gorge myself with the other eighteenpence undisturbed.  Pah!
+I was a little beast even in those days!"
+
+"It was only a schoolboy trick," I argued, "it was natural enough."
+
+"Yes," he answered, "and this is only a man's trick, and is natural
+enough; but it is going to ruin my life, to turn me into a beast
+instead of a man.  Good God! do you think I don't know what that
+woman will do for me?  She will drag me down, down, down, to her
+own level.  All my ideas, all my ambition, all my life's work will
+be bartered for a smug practice, among paying patients.  I shall
+scheme and plot to make a big income that we may live like a couple
+of plump animals, that we may dress ourselves gaudily and parade
+our wealth.  Nothing will satisfy her.  Such women are leeches;
+their only cry is 'give, give, give.'  So long as I can supply her
+with money she will tolerate me, and to get it for her I shall sell
+my heart, and my brain, and my soul.  She will load herself with
+jewels, and go about from house to house, half naked, to leer at
+every man she comes across:  that is 'life' to such women.  And I
+shall trot behind her, the laughing stock of every fool, the
+contempt of every man."
+
+His vehemence made any words I could say sound weak before they
+were uttered.  What argument could I show stronger than that he had
+already put before himself?  I knew his answer to everything I
+could urge.
+
+My mistake had been in imagining him different from other men.  I
+began to see that he was like the rest of us:  part angel, part
+devil.  But the new point he revealed to me was that the higher the
+one, the lower the other.  It seems as if nature must balance her
+work; the nearer the leaves to heaven, the deeper the roots
+striking down into the darkness.  I knew that his passion for this
+woman made no change in his truer love.  The one was a spiritual,
+the other a mere animal passion.  The memory of incidents that had
+puzzled me came back to enlighten me.  I remembered how often on
+nights when I had sat up late, working, I had heard his steps pass
+my door, heavy and uncertain; how once in a dingy quarter of
+London, I had met one who had strangely resembled him.  I had
+followed him to speak, but the man's bleared eyes had stared
+angrily at me, and I had turned away, calling myself a fool for my
+mistake.  But as I looked at the face beside me now, I understood.
+
+And then there rose up before my eyes the face I knew better, the
+eager noble face that to merely look upon had been good.  We had
+reached a small, evil-smelling street, leading from Leicester
+Square towards Holborn.  I caught him by the shoulders and turned
+him round with his back against some church railings.  I forget
+what I said.  We are strange mixtures.  I thought of the shy,
+backward boy I had coached and bullied at old Fauerberg's, of the
+laughing handsome lad I had watched grow into manhood.  The very
+restaurant we had most frequented in his old Oxford days--where we
+had poured out our souls to one another, was in this very street
+where we were standing.  For the moment I felt towards him as
+perhaps his mother might have felt; I wanted to scold him and to
+cry with him; to shake him and to put my arms about him.  I pleaded
+with him, and urged him, and called him every name I could put my
+tongue to.  It must have seemed an odd conversation.  A passing
+policeman, making a not unnatural mistake, turned his bull's-eye
+upon us, and advised us sternly to go home.  We laughed, and with
+that laugh Cyril came back to his own self, and we walked on to
+Staple Inn more soberly.  He promised me to go away by the very
+first train the next morning, and to travel for some four or five
+months, and I undertook to make all the necessary explanations for
+him.
+
+We both felt better for our talk, and when I wished him good-night
+at his door, it was the real Cyril Harjohn whose hand I gripped--
+the real Cyril, because the best that is in a man is his real self.
+If there be any future for man beyond this world, it is the good
+that is in him that will live.  The other side of him is of the
+earth; it is that he will leave behind him.
+
+He kept his word.  In the morning he was gone, and I never saw him
+again.  I had many letters from him, hopeful at first, full of
+strong resolves.  He told me he had written to Elspeth, not telling
+her everything, for that she would not understand, but so much as
+would explain; and from her he had had sweet womanly letters in
+reply.  I feared she might have been cold and unsympathetic, for
+often good women, untouched by temptation themselves, have small
+tenderness for those who struggle.  But her goodness was something
+more than a mere passive quantity; she loved him the better because
+he had need of her.  I believe she would have saved him from
+himself, had not fate interfered and taken the matter out of her
+hands.  Women are capable of big sacrifices; I think this woman
+would have been content to lower herself, if by so doing she could
+have raised him.
+
+But it was not to be.  From India he wrote to me that he was coming
+home.  I had not met the Fawley woman for some time, and she had
+gone out of my mind until one day, chancing upon a theatrical
+paper, some weeks old, I read that "Miss Fawley had sailed for
+Calcutta to fulfil an engagement of long standing."
+
+I had his last letter in my pocket.  I sat down and worked out the
+question of date.  She would arrive in Calcutta the day before he
+left.  Whether it was chance or intention on her part I never knew;
+as likely as not the former, for there is a fatalism in this world
+shaping our ends.
+
+I heard no more from him, I hardly expected to do so, but three
+months later a mutual acquaintance stopped me on the Club steps.
+
+"Have you heard the news," he said, "about young Harjohn?"
+
+"No," I replied.  "Is he married?"
+
+"Married," he answered, "No, poor devil, he's dead!"
+
+"Thank God," was on my lips, but fortunately I checked myself.
+"How did it happen?" I asked.
+
+"At a shooting party, up at some Rajah's place.  Must have caught
+his gun in some brambles, I suppose.  The bullet went clean through
+his head."
+
+"Dear me," I said, "how very sad!"  I could think of nothing else
+to say at the moment.
+
+
+
+THE MATERIALISATION OF CHARLES AND MIVANWAY
+
+
+
+The fault that most people will find with this story is that it is
+unconvincing.  Its scheme is improbable, its atmosphere artificial.
+To confess that the thing really happened--not as I am about to set
+it down, for the pen of the professional writer cannot but adorn
+and embroider, even to the detriment of his material--is, I am well
+aware, only an aggravation of my offence, for the facts of life are
+the impossibilities of fiction.  A truer artist would have left
+this story alone, or at most have kept it for the irritation of his
+private circle.  My lower instinct is to make use of it.  A very
+old man told me the tale.  He was landlord of the Cromlech Arms,
+the only inn of a small, rock-sheltered village on the north-east
+coast of Cornwall, and had been so for nine and forty years.  It is
+called the Cromlech Hotel now, and is under new management, and
+during the season some four coach-loads of tourists sit down each
+day to table d'hote lunch in the low-ceilinged parlour.  But I am
+speaking of years ago, when the place was a mere fishing harbour,
+undiscovered by the guide books.
+
+The old landlord talked, and I hearkened the while we both sat
+drinking thin ale from earthenware mugs, late one summer's evening,
+on the bench that runs along the wall just beneath the latticed
+windows.  And during the many pauses, when the old landlord stopped
+to puff his pipe in silence, and lay in a new stock of breath,
+there came to us the murmuring voices of the Atlantic; and often,
+mingled with the pompous roar of the big breakers farther out, we
+would hear the rippling laugh of some small wave that, maybe, had
+crept in to listen to the tale the landlord told.
+
+The mistake that Charles Seabohn, Junior partner of the firm of
+Seabohn & Son, civil engineers of London and Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
+and Mivanway Evans, youngest daughter of the Rev. Thomas Evans,
+Pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Bristol, made originally, was
+marrying too young.  Charles Seabohn could hardly have been twenty
+years of age, and Mivanway could have been little more than
+seventeen, when they first met upon the cliffs, two miles beyond
+the Cromlech Arms.  Young Charles Seabohn, coming across the
+village in the course of a walking tour, had decided to spend a day
+or two exploring the picturesque coast, and Mivanway's father had
+hired that year a neighbouring farmhouse wherein to spend his
+summer vacation.
+
+Early one morning--for at twenty one is virtuous, and takes
+exercise before breakfast--as young Charles Seabohn lay upon the
+cliffs, watching the white waters coming and going upon the black
+rocks below, he became aware of a form rising from the waves.  The
+figure was too far off for him to see it clearly, but judging from
+the costume, it was a female figure, and promptly the mind of
+Charles, poetically inclined, turned to thoughts of Venus--or
+Aphrodite, as he, being a gentleman of delicate taste would have
+preferred to term her.  He saw the figure disappear behind a head-
+land, but still waited.  In about ten minutes or a quarter of an
+hour it reappeared, clothed in the garments of the eighteen-
+sixties, and came towards him.  Hidden from sight himself behind a
+group of rocks, he could watch it at his leisure, ascending the
+steep path from the beach, and an exceedingly sweet and dainty
+figure it would have appeared, even to eyes less susceptible than
+those of twenty.  Sea-water--I stand open to correction--is not, I
+believe, considered anything of a substitute for curling tongs, but
+to the hair of the youngest Miss Evans it had given an additional
+and most fascinating wave.  Nature's red and white had been most
+cunningly laid on, and the large childish eyes seemed to be
+searching the world for laughter, with which to feed a pair of
+delicious, pouting lips.  Charles's upturned face, petrified into
+admiration, was just the sort of thing for which they were on the
+look-out.  A startled "Oh!" came from the slightly parted lips,
+followed by the merriest of laughs, which in its turn was suddenly
+stopped by a deep blush.  Then the youngest Miss Evans looked
+offended, as though the whole affair had been Charles's fault,
+which is the way of women.  And Charles, feeling himself guilty
+under that stern gaze of indignation, rose awkwardly and apologised
+meekly, whether for being on the cliffs at all or for having got up
+too early, he would have been unable to explain.
+
+The youngest Miss Evans graciously accepted the apology thus
+tendered with a bow, and passed on, and Charles stood staring after
+her till the valley gathered her into its spreading arms and hid
+her from his view.
+
+That was the beginning of all things.  I am speaking of the
+Universe as viewed from the standpoint of Charles and Mivanway.
+
+Six months later they were man and wife, or perhaps it would be
+more correct to say boy and wifelet.  Seabohn senior counselled
+delay, but was overruled by the impatience of his junior partner.
+The Reverend Mr. Evans, in common with most theologians, possessed
+a goodly supply of unmarried daughters, and a limited income.
+Personally he saw no necessity for postponement of the marriage.
+
+The month's honeymoon was spent in the New Forest.  That was a
+mistake to begin with.  The New Forest in February is depressing,
+and they had chosen the loneliest spot they could find.  A
+fortnight in Paris or Rome would have been more helpful.  As yet
+they had nothing to talk about except love, and that they had been
+talking and writing about steadily all through the winter.  On the
+tenth morning Charles yawned, and Mivanway had a quiet half-hour's
+cry about it in her own room.  On the sixteenth evening, Mivanway,
+feeling irritable, and wondering why (as though fifteen damp,
+chilly days in the New Forest were not sufficient to make any woman
+irritable), requested Charles not to disarrange her hair; and
+Charles, speechless with astonishment, went out into the garden,
+and swore before all the stars that he would never caress
+Mivanway's hair again as long as he lived.
+
+One supreme folly they had conspired to commit, even before the
+commencement of the honeymoon.  Charles, after the manner of very
+young lovers, had earnestly requested Mivanway to impose upon him
+some task.  He desired to do something great and noble to show his
+devotion.  Dragons was the thing he had in mind, though he may not
+have been aware of it.  Dragons also, no doubt, flitted through
+Mivanway's brain, but unfortunately for lovers the supply of
+dragons has lapsed.  Mivanway, liking the conceit, however, thought
+over it, and then decided that Charles must give up smoking.  She
+had discussed the matter with her favourite sister, and that was
+the only thing the girls could think of.  Charles's face fell.  He
+suggested some more Herculean labour, some sacrifice more worthy to
+lay at Mivanway's feet.  But Mivanway had spoken.  She might think
+of some other task, but the smoking prohibition would, in any case,
+remain.  She dismissed the subject with a pretty hauteur that would
+have graced Marie Antoinette.
+
+Thus tobacco, the good angel of all men, no longer came each day to
+teach Charles patience and amiability, and he fell into the ways of
+short temper and selfishness.
+
+They took up their residence in a suburb of Newcastle, and this was
+also unfortunate for them, because there the society was scanty and
+middle-aged; and, in consequence, they had still to depend much
+upon their own resources.  They knew little of life, less of each
+other, and nothing at all of themselves.  Of course they
+quarrelled, and each quarrel left the wound a little more raw.  No
+kindly, experienced friend was at hand to laugh at them.  Mivanway
+would write down all her sorrows in a bulky diary, which made her
+feel worse; so that before she had written for ten minutes her
+pretty, unwise head would drop upon her dimpled arm, and the book--
+the proper place for which was behind the fire--would become damp
+with her tears; and Charles, his day's work done and the clerks
+gone, would linger in his dingy office and hatch trifles into
+troubles.
+
+The end came one evening after dinner, when, in the heat of a silly
+squabble, Charles boxed Mivanway's ears.  That was very
+ungentlemanly conduct, and he was heartily ashamed of himself the
+moment he had done it, which was right and proper for him to be.
+The only excuse to be urged on his behalf is that girls
+sufficiently pretty to have been spoilt from childhood by everyone
+about them can at times be intensely irritating.  Mivanway rushed
+up to her room, and locked herself in.  Charles flew after her to
+apologise, but only arrived in time to have the door slammed in his
+face.
+
+It had only been the merest touch.  A boy's muscles move quicker
+than his thoughts.  But to Mivanway it was a blow.  This was what
+it had come to!  This was the end of a man's love!
+
+She spent half the night writing in the precious diary, with the
+result that in the morning she came down feeling more bitter than
+she had gone up.  Charles had walked the streets of Newcastle all
+night, and that had not done him any good.  He met her with an
+apology combined with an excuse, which was bad tactics.  Mivanway,
+of course, fastened upon the excuse, and the quarrel recommenced.
+She mentioned that she hated him; he hinted that she had never
+loved him, and she retorted that he had never loved her.  Had there
+been anybody by to knock their heads together and suggest
+breakfast, the thing might have blown over, but the combined effect
+of a sleepless night and an empty stomach upon each proved
+disastrous.  Their words came poisoned from their brains, and each
+believed they meant what they said.  That afternoon Charles sailed
+from Hull, on a ship bound for the Cape, and that evening Mivanway
+arrived at the paternal home in Bristol with two trunks and the
+curt information that she and Charles had separated for ever.  The
+next morning both thought of a soft speech to say to the other, but
+the next morning was just twenty-four hours too late.
+
+Eight days afterwards Charles's ship was run down in a fog, near
+the coast of Portugal, and every soul on board was supposed to have
+perished.  Mivanway read his name among the list of lost; the child
+died within her, and she knew herself for a woman who had loved
+deeply, and will not love again.
+
+Good luck intervening, however, Charles and one other man were
+rescued by a small trading vessel, and landed in Algiers.  There
+Charles learnt of his supposed death, and the idea occurred to him
+to leave the report uncontradicted.  For one thing, it solved a
+problem that had been troubling him.  He could trust his father to
+see to it that his own small fortune, with possibly something
+added, was handed over to Mivanway, and she would be free if she
+wished to marry again.  He was convinced that she did not care for
+him, and that she had read of his death with a sense of relief.  He
+would make a new life for himself, and forget her.
+
+He continued his journey to the Cape, and once there he soon gained
+for himself an excellent position.  The colony was young, engineers
+were welcome, and Charles knew his business.  He found the life
+interesting and exciting.  The rough, dangerous up-country work
+suited him, and the time passed swiftly.
+
+But in thinking he would forget Mivanway, he had not taken into
+consideration his own character, which at bottom was a very
+gentlemanly character.  Out on the lonely veldt he found himself
+dreaming of her.  The memory of her pretty face and merry laugh
+came back to him at all hours.  Occasionally he would curse her
+roundly, but that only meant that he was sore because of the
+thought of her; what he was really cursing was himself and his own
+folly.  Softened by the distance, her quick temper, her very
+petulance became mere added graces; and if we consider women as
+human beings and not as angels, it was certainly a fact that he had
+lost a very sweet and lovable woman.  Ah! if she only were by his
+side now--now that he was a man capable of appreciating her, and
+not a foolish, selfish boy.  This thought would come to him as he
+sat smoking at the door of his tent, and then he would regret that
+the stars looking down upon him were not the same stars that were
+watching her, it would have made him feel nearer to her.  For,
+though young people may not credit it, one grows more sentimental
+as one grows older; at least, some of us do, and they perhaps not
+the least wise.
+
+One night he had a vivid dream of her.  She came to him and held
+out her hand, and he took it, and they said good-bye to one
+another.  They were standing on the cliff where he had first met
+her, and one of them was going upon a long journey, though he was
+not sure which.
+
+In the towns men laugh at dreams, but away from civilisation we
+listen more readily to the strange tales that Nature whispers to
+us.  Charles Seabohn recollected this dream when he awoke in the
+morning.
+
+"She is dying," he said, "and she has come to wish me good-bye."
+
+He made up his mind to return to England at once; perhaps if he
+made haste he would be in time to kiss her.  But he could not start
+that day, for work was to be done; and Charles Seabohn, lover
+though he still was, had grown to be a man, and knew that work must
+not be neglected even though the heart may be calling.  So for a
+day or two he stayed, and on the third night he dreamed of Mivanway
+again, and this time she lay within the little chapel at Bristol
+where, on Sunday mornings, he had often sat with her.  He heard her
+father's voice reading the burial service over her, and the sister
+she had loved best was sitting beside him, crying softly.  Then
+Charles knew that there was no need for him to hasten.  So he
+remained to finish his work.  That done, he would return to
+England.  He would like again to stand upon the cliffs, above the
+little Cornish village, where they had first met.
+
+Thus a few months later Charles Seabohn, or Charles Denning, as he
+called himself, aged and bronzed, not easily recognisable by those
+who had not known him well, walked into the Cromlech Arms, as six
+years before he had walked in with his knapsack on his back, and
+asked for a room, saying he would be stopping in the village for a
+short while.
+
+In the evening he strolled out and made his way to the cliffs.  It
+was twilight when he reached the place of rocks to which the fancy-
+loving Cornish folk had given the name of the Witches' Cauldron.
+It was from this spot that he had first watched Mivanway coming to
+him from the sea.
+
+He took the pipe from his mouth, and leaning against a rock, whose
+rugged outline seemed fashioned into the face of an old friend,
+gazed down the narrow pathway now growing indistinct in the dim
+light.  And as he gazed the figure of Mivanway came slowly up the
+pathway from the sea, and paused before him.
+
+He felt no fear.  He had half expected it.  Her coming was the
+complement of his dreams.  She looked older and graver than he
+remembered her, but for that the face was the sweeter.
+
+He wondered if she would speak to him, but she only looked at him
+with sad eyes; and he stood there in the shadow of the rocks
+without moving, and she passed on into the twilight.
+
+Had he on his return cared to discuss the subject with his
+landlord, had he even shown himself a ready listener--for the old
+man loved to gossip--he might have learnt that a young widow lady
+named Mrs. Charles Seabohn, accompanied by an unmarried sister, had
+lately come to reside in the neighbourhood, having, upon the death
+of a former tenant, taken the lease of a small farmhouse sheltered
+in the valley a mile beyond the village, and that her favourite
+evening's walk was to the sea and back by the steep footway leading
+past the Witches' Cauldron.
+
+Had he followed the figure of Mivanway into the valley, he would
+have known that out of sight of the Witches' Cauldron it took to
+running fast till it reached a welcome door, and fell panting into
+the arms of another figure that had hastened out to meet it.
+
+"My dear," said the elder woman, "you are trembling like a leaf.
+What has happened?"
+
+"I have seen him," answered Mivanway.
+
+"Seen whom?"
+
+"Charles."
+
+"Charles!" repeated the other, looking at Mivanway as though she
+thought her mad.
+
+"His spirit, I mean," explained Mivanway, in an awed voice.  "It
+was standing in the shadow of the rocks, in the exact spot where we
+first met.  It looked older and more careworn; but, oh! Margaret,
+so sad and reproachful."
+
+"My dear," said her sister, leading her in, "you are overwrought.
+I wish we had never come back to this house."
+
+"Oh!  I was not frightened," answered Mivanway, "I have been
+expecting it every evening.  I am so glad it came.  Perhaps it will
+come again, and I can ask it to forgive me."
+
+So next night Mivanway, though much against her sister's wishes and
+advice, persisted in her usual walk, and Charles at the same
+twilight hour started from the inn.
+
+Again Mivanway saw him standing in the shadow of the rocks.
+Charles had made up his mind that if the thing happened again he
+would speak, but when the silent figure of Mivanway, clothed in the
+fading light, stopped and gazed at him, his will failed him.
+
+That it was the spirit of Mivanway standing before him he had not
+the faintest doubt.  One may dismiss other people's ghosts as the
+phantasies of a weak brain, but one knows one's own to be
+realities, and Charles for the last five years had mingled with a
+people whose dead dwell about them.  Once, drawing his courage
+around him, he made to speak, but as he did so the figure of
+Mivanway shrank from him, and only a sigh escaped his lips, and
+hearing that the figure of Mivanway turned and again passed down
+the path into the valley, leaving Charles gazing after it.
+
+But the third night both arrived at the trysting spot with
+determination screwed up to the sticking point.
+
+Charles was the first to speak.  As the figure of Mivanway came
+towards him, with its eyes fixed sadly on him, he moved from the
+shadow of the rocks, and stood before it.
+
+"Mivanway!" he said.
+
+"Charles!" replied the figure of Mivanway.  Both spoke in an awed
+whisper suitable to the circumstances, and each stood gazing
+sorrowfully upon the other.
+
+"Are you happy?" asked Mivanway.
+
+The question strikes one as somewhat farcical, but it must be
+remembered that Mivanway was the daughter of a Gospeller of the old
+school, and had been brought up to beliefs that were not then out
+of date.
+
+"As happy as I deserve to be," was the sad reply, and the answer--
+the inference was not complimentary to Charles's deserts--struck a
+chill to Mivanway's heart.
+
+"How could I be happy having lost you?" went on the voice of
+Charles.
+
+Now this speech fell very pleasantly upon Mivanway's ears.  In the
+first place it relieved her of her despair regarding Charles's
+future.  No doubt his present suffering was keen, but there was
+hope for him.  Secondly, it was a decidedly "pretty" speech for a
+ghost, and I am not at all sure that Mivanway was the kind of woman
+to be averse to a little mild flirtation with the spirit of
+Charles.
+
+"Can you forgive me?" asked Mivanway.
+
+"Forgive YOU!" replied Charles, in a tone of awed astonishment.
+"Can you forgive me?  I was a brute--a fool--I was not worthy to
+love you."
+
+A most gentlemanly spirit it seemed to be.  Mivanway forgot to be
+afraid of it.
+
+"We were both to blame," answered Mivanway.  But this time there
+was less submission in her tones.  "But I was the most at fault.  I
+was a petulant child.  I did not know how deeply I loved you."
+
+"You loved me!" repeated the voice of Charles, and the voice
+lingered over the words as though it found them sweet.
+
+"Surely you never doubted it," answered the voice of Mivanway.  "I
+never ceased to love you.  I shall love you always and ever."
+
+The figure of Charles sprang forward as though it would clasp the
+ghost of Mivanway in its arms, but halted a step or two off.
+
+"Bless me before you go," he said, and with uncovered head the
+figure of Charles knelt to the figure of Mivanway.
+
+Really, ghosts could be exceedingly nice when they liked.  Mivanway
+bent graciously towards her shadowy suppliant, and, as she did so,
+her eye caught sight of something on the grass beside it, and that
+something was a well-coloured meerschaum pipe.  There was no
+mistaking it for anything else, even in that treacherous light; it
+lay glistening where Charles, in falling upon his knees had jerked
+it from his breast-pocket.
+
+Charles, following Mivanway's eyes, saw it also, and the memory of
+the prohibition against smoking came back to him.
+
+Without stopping to consider the futility of the action--nay, the
+direct confession implied thereby--he instinctively grabbed at the
+pipe, and rammed it back into his pocket; and then an avalanche of
+mingled understanding and bewilderment, fear and joy, swept
+Mivanway's brain before it.  She felt she must do one of two
+things, laugh or scream and go on screaming, and she laughed.  Peal
+after peal of laughter she sent echoing among the rocks, and
+Charles springing to his feet was just in time to catch her as she
+fell forward a dead weight into his arms.
+
+Ten minutes later the eldest Miss Evans, hearing heavy footsteps,
+went to the door.  She saw what she took to be the spirit of
+Charles Seabohn, staggering under the weight of the lifeless body
+of Mivanway, and the sight not unnaturally alarmed her.  Charles's
+suggestion of brandy, however, sounded human, and the urgent need
+of attending to Mivanway kept her mind from dwelling upon problems
+tending towards insanity.
+
+Charles carried Mivanway to her room, and laid her upon the bed.
+
+"I'll leave her with you," he whispered to the eldest Miss Evans.
+"It will be better for her not to see me until she is quite
+recovered.  She has had a shock."
+
+Charles waited in the dark parlour for what seemed to him an
+exceedingly long time.  But at last the eldest Miss Evans returned.
+
+"She's all right now," were the welcome words he heard.
+
+"I'll go and see her," he said.
+
+"But she's in bed," exclaimed the scandalised Miss Evans.
+
+And then as Charles only laughed, "Oh, ah--yes, I suppose--of
+course," she added.
+
+And the eldest Miss Evans, left alone, sat down and wrestled with
+the conviction that she was dreaming.
+
+
+
+PORTRAIT OF A LADY
+
+
+
+My work pressed upon me, but the louder it challenged me--such is
+the heart of the timid fighter--the less stomach I felt for the
+contest.  I wrestled with it in my study, only to be driven to my
+books.  I walked out to meet it in the streets, only to seek
+shelter from it in music-hall or theatre.  Thereupon it waxed
+importunate and over-bearing, till the shadow of it darkened all my
+doings.  The thought of it sat beside me at the table, and spoilt
+my appetite.  The memory of it followed me abroad, and stood
+between me and my friends, so that all talk died upon my lips, and
+I moved among men as one ghost-ridden.
+
+Then the throbbing town, with its thousand distracting voices, grew
+maddening to me.  I felt the need of converse with solitude, that
+master and teacher of all the arts, and I bethought me of the
+Yorkshire Wolds, where a man may walk all day, meeting no human
+creature, hearing no voice but the curlew's cry; where, lying prone
+upon the sweet grass, he may feel the pulsation of the earth,
+travelling at its eleven hundred miles a minute through the ether.
+So one morning I bundled many things, some needful, more needless,
+into a bag, hurrying lest somebody or something should happen to
+stay me, and that night I lay in a small northern town that stands
+upon the borders of smokedom at the gate of the great moors; and at
+seven the next morning I took my seat beside a one-eyed carrier
+behind an ancient piebald mare.  The one-eyed carrier cracked his
+whip, the piebald horse jogged forward.  The nineteenth century,
+with its turmoil, fell away behind us; the distant hills, creeping
+nearer, swallowed us up, and we became but a moving speck upon the
+face of the quiet earth.
+
+Late in the afternoon we arrived at a village, the memory of which
+had been growing in my mind.  It lies in the triangle formed by the
+sloping walls of three great fells, and not even the telegraph wire
+has reached it yet, to murmur to it whispers of the restless world-
+-or had not at the time of which I write.  Nought disturbs it save,
+once a day, the one-eyed carrier--if he and his piebald mare have
+not yet laid their ancient bones to rest--who, passing through,
+leaves a few letters and parcels to be called for by the people of
+the scattered hill-farms round about.  It is the meeting-place of
+two noisy brooks.  Through the sleepy days and the hushed nights,
+one hears them ever chattering to themselves as children playing
+alone some game of make-believe.  Coming from their far-off homes
+among the hills, they mingle their waters here, and journey on in
+company, and then their converse is more serious, as becomes those
+who have joined hands and are moving onward towards life together.
+Later they reach sad, weary towns, black beneath a never-lifted
+pall of smoke, where day and night the clang of iron drowns all
+human voices, where the children play with ashes, where the men and
+women have dull, patient faces; and so on, muddy and stained, to
+the deep sea that ceaselessly calls to them.  Here, however, their
+waters are fresh and clear, and their passing makes the only stir
+that the valley has ever known.  Surely, of all peaceful places,
+this was the one where a tired worker might find strength.
+
+My one-eyed friend had suggested I should seek lodgings at the
+house of one Mistress Cholmondley, a widow lady, who resided with
+her only daughter in the white-washed cottage that is the last
+house in the village, if you take the road that leads over Coll
+Fell.
+
+"Tha' can see th' house from here, by reason o' its standing so
+high above t'others," said the carrier, pointing with his whip.
+"It's theer or nowhere, aw'm thinking, for folks don't often coom
+seeking lodgings in these parts."
+
+The tiny dwelling, half smothered in June roses, looked idyllic,
+and after a lunch of bread and cheese at the little inn I made my
+way to it by the path that passes through the churchyard.  I had
+conjured up the vision of a stout, pleasant, comfort-radiating
+woman, assisted by some bright, fresh girl, whose rosy cheeks and
+sunburnt hands would help me banish from my mind all clogging
+recollections of the town; and hopeful, I pushed back the half-
+opened door and entered.
+
+The cottage was furnished with a taste that surprised me, but in
+themselves my hosts disappointed me.  My bustling, comely housewife
+turned out a wizened, blear-eyed dame.  All day long she dozed in
+her big chair, or crouched with shrivelled hands spread out before
+the fire.  My dream of winsome maidenhood vanished before the
+reality of a weary-looking, sharp-featured woman of between forty
+and fifty.  Perhaps there had been a time when the listless eyes
+had sparkled with roguish merriment, when the shrivelled, tight-
+drawn lips had pouted temptingly; but spinsterhood does not sweeten
+the juices of a woman, and strong country air, though, like old
+ale, it is good when taken occasionally, dulls the brain if lived
+upon.  A narrow, uninteresting woman I found her, troubled with a
+shyness that sat ludicrously upon her age, and that yet failed to
+save her from the landlady's customary failing of loquacity
+concerning "better days," together with an irritating, if harmless,
+affectation of youthfulness.
+
+All other details were, however, most satisfactory; and at the
+window commanding the road that leads through the valley towards
+the distant world I settled down to face my work.
+
+But the spirit of industry, once driven forth, returns with coy
+steps.  I wrote for perhaps an hour, and then throwing down my
+halting pen I looked about the room, seeking distraction.  A
+Chippendale book-case stood against the wall and I strolled over to
+it.  The key was in the lock, and opening its glass doors, I
+examined the well-filled shelves.  They held a curious collection:
+miscellanies with quaint, glazed bindings; novels and poems; whose
+authors I had never heard of; old magazines long dead, their very
+names forgotten; "keepsakes" and annuals, redolent of an age of
+vastly pretty sentiments and lavender-coloured silks.  On the top
+shelf, however, was a volume of Keats wedged between a number of
+the Evangelical Rambler and Young's Night Thoughts, and standing on
+tip-toe, I sought to draw it from its place.
+
+The book was jambed so tightly that my efforts brought two or three
+others tumbling about me, covering me with a cloud of fine dust,
+and to my feet there fell, with a rattle of glass and metal, a
+small miniature painting, framed in black wood.
+
+I picked it up, and, taking it to the window, examined it.  It was
+the picture of a young girl, dressed in the fashion of thirty years
+ago--I mean thirty years ago then.  I fear it must be nearer fifty,
+speaking as from now--when our grandmothers wore corkscrew curls,
+and low-cut bodices that one wonders how they kept from slipping
+down.  The face was beautiful, not merely with the conventional
+beauty of tiresome regularity and impossible colouring such as one
+finds in all miniatures, but with soul behind the soft deep eyes.
+As I gazed, the sweet lips seemed to laugh at me, and yet there
+lurked a sadness in the smile, as though the artist, in some rare
+moment, had seen the coming shadow of life across the sunshine of
+the face.  Even my small knowledge of Art told me that the work was
+clever, and I wondered why it should have lain so long neglected,
+when as a mere ornament it was valuable.  It must have been placed
+in the book-case years ago by someone, and forgotten.
+
+I replaced it among its dusty companions, and sat down once more to
+my work.  But between me and the fading light came the face of the
+miniature, and would not be banished.  Wherever I turned it looked
+out at me from the shadows.  I am not naturally fanciful, and the
+work I was engaged upon--the writing of a farcical comedy--was not
+of the kind to excite the dreamy side of a man's nature.  I grew
+angry with myself, and made a further effort to fix my mind upon
+the paper in front of me.  But my thoughts refused to return from
+their wanderings.  Once, glancing back over my shoulder, I could
+have sworn I saw the original of the picture sitting in the big
+chintz-covered chair in the far corner.  It was dressed in a faded
+lilac frock, trimmed with some old lace, and I could not help
+noticing the beauty of the folded hands, though in the portrait
+only the head and shoulders had been drawn.
+
+Next morning I had forgotten the incident, but with the lighting of
+the lamp the memory of it awoke within me, and my interest grew so
+strong that again I took the miniature from its hiding-place and
+looked at it.
+
+And then the knowledge suddenly came to me that I knew the face.
+Where had I seen her, and when?  I had met her and spoken to her.
+The picture smiled at me, as if rallying me on my forgetfulness.  I
+put it back upon its shelf, and sat racking my brains trying to
+recollect.  We had met somewhere--in the country--a long time ago,
+and had talked of common-place things.  To the vision of her clung
+the scent of roses and the murmuring voices of haymakers.  Why had
+I never seen her again?  Why had she passed so completely out of my
+mind?
+
+My landlady entered to lay my supper, and I questioned her assuming
+a careless tone.  Reason with or laugh at myself as I would, this
+shadowy memory was becoming a romance to me.  It was as though I
+were talking of some loved, dead friend, even to speak of whom to
+commonplace people was a sacrilege.  I did not want the woman to
+question me in return.
+
+"Oh, yes," answered my landlady.  Ladies had often lodged with her.
+Sometimes people stayed the whole summer, wandering about the woods
+and fells, but to her thinking the great hills were lonesome.  Some
+of her lodgers had been young ladies, but she could not remember
+any of them having impressed her with their beauty.  But then it
+was said women were never a judge of other women.  They had come
+and gone.  Few had ever returned, and fresh faces drove out the
+old.
+
+"You have been letting lodgings for a long time?" I asked.  "I
+suppose it could be fifteen--twenty years ago that strangers to you
+lived in this room?"
+
+"Longer than that," she said quietly, dropping for the moment all
+affectation.  "We came here from the farm when my father died.  He
+had had losses, and there was but little left.  That is twenty-
+seven years ago now."
+
+I hastened to close the conversation, fearing long-winded
+recollections of "better days."  I have heard such so often from
+one landlady and another.  I had not learnt much.  Who was the
+original of the miniature, how it came to be lying forgotten in the
+dusty book-case were still mysteries; and with a strange perversity
+I could not have explained to myself I shrank from putting a direct
+question.
+
+So two days more passed by.  My work took gradually a firmer grip
+upon my mind, and the face of the miniature visited me less often.
+But in the evening of the third day, which was a Sunday, a curious
+thing happened.
+
+I was returning from a stroll, and dusk was falling as I reached
+the cottage.  I had been thinking of my farce, and I was laughing
+to myself at a situation that seemed to me comical, when, passing
+the window of my room, I saw looking out the sweet fair face that
+had become so familiar to me.  It stood close to the latticed
+panes, a slim, girlish figure, clad in the old-fashioned lilac-
+coloured frock in which I had imagined it on the first night of my
+arrival, the beautiful hands clasped across the breast, as then
+they had been folded on the lap.  Her eyes were gazing down the
+road that passes through the village and goes south, but they
+seemed to be dreaming, not seeing, and the sadness in them struck
+upon one almost as a cry.  I was close to the window, but the hedge
+screened me, and I remained watching, until, after a minute I
+suppose, though it appeared longer, the figure drew back into the
+darkness of the room and disappeared.
+
+I entered, but the room was empty.  I called, but no one answered.
+The uncomfortable suggestion took hold of me that I must be growing
+a little crazy.  All that had gone before I could explain to myself
+as a mere train of thought, but this time it had come to me
+suddenly, uninvited, while my thoughts had been busy elsewhere.
+This thing had appeared not to my brain but to my senses.  I am not
+a believer in ghosts, but I am in the hallucinations of a weak
+mind, and my own explanation was in consequence not very
+satisfactory to myself.
+
+I tried to dismiss the incident, but it would not leave me, and
+later that same evening something else occurred that fixed it still
+clearer in my thoughts.  I had taken out two or three books at
+random with which to amuse myself, and turning over the leaves of
+one of them, a volume of verses by some obscure poet, I found its
+sentimental passages much scored and commented upon in pencil as
+was common fifty years ago--as may be common now, for your Fleet
+Street cynic has not altered the world and its ways to quite the
+extent that he imagines.
+
+One poem in particular had evidently appealed greatly to the
+reader's sympathies.  It was the old, old story of the gallant who
+woos and rides away, leaving the maiden to weep.  The poetry was
+poor, and at another time its conventionality would have excited
+only my ridicule.  But, reading it in conjunction with the quaint,
+naive notes scattered about its margins, I felt no inclination to
+jeer.  These hackneyed stories that we laugh at are deep
+profundities to the many who find in them some shadow of their own
+sorrows, and she--for it was a woman's handwriting--to whom this
+book belonged had loved its trite verses, because in them she had
+read her own heart.  This, I told myself, was her story also.  A
+common enough story in life as in literature, but novel to those
+who live it.
+
+There was no reason for my connecting her with the original of the
+miniature, except perhaps a subtle relationship between the thin
+nervous handwriting and the mobile features; yet I felt
+instinctively they were one and the same, and that I was tracing,
+link by link, the history of my forgotten friend.
+
+I felt urged to probe further, and next morning while my landlady
+was clearing away my breakfast things, I fenced round the subject
+once again.
+
+"By the way," I said, "while I think of it, if I leave any books or
+papers here behind me, send them on at once.  I have a knack of
+doing that sort of thing.  I suppose," I added, "your lodgers often
+do leave some of their belongings behind them."
+
+It sounded to myself a clumsy ruse.  I wondered if she would
+suspect what was behind it.
+
+"Not often," she answered.  "Never that I can remember, except in
+the case of one poor lady who died here."
+
+I glanced up quickly.
+
+"In this room?" I asked.
+
+My landlady seemed troubled at my tone.
+
+"Well, not exactly in this very room.  We carried her upstairs, but
+she died immediately.  She was dying when she came here.  I should
+not have taken her in had I known.  So many people are prejudiced
+against a house where death has occurred, as if there were anywhere
+it had not.  It was not quite fair to us."
+
+I did not speak for a while, and the rattle of the plates and
+knives continued undisturbed.
+
+"What did she leave here?" I asked at length.
+
+"Oh, just a few books and photographs, and such-like small things
+that people bring with them to lodgings," was the reply.  "Her
+people promised to send for them, but they never did, and I suppose
+I forgot them.  They were not of any value."
+
+The woman turned as she was leaving the room.
+
+"It won't drive you away, sir, I hope, what I have told you," she
+said.  "It all happened a long while ago.
+
+"Of course not," I answered.  "It interested me, that was all."
+And the woman went out, closing the door behind her.
+
+So here was the explanation, if I chose to accept it.  I sat long
+that morning, wondering to myself whether things I had learnt to
+laugh at could be after all realities.  And a day or two afterwards
+I made a discovery that confirmed all my vague surmises.
+
+Rummaging through this same dusty book-case, I found in one of the
+ill-fitting drawers, beneath a heap of torn and tumbled books, a
+diary belonging to the fifties, stuffed with many letters and
+shapeless flowers, pressed between stained pages; and there--for
+the writer of stories, tempted by human documents, is weak--in
+faded ink, brown and withered like the flowers, I read the story I
+already knew.
+
+Such a very old story it was, and so conventional.  He was an
+artist--was ever story of this type written where the hero was not
+an artist?  They had been children together, loving each other
+without knowing it till one day it was revealed to them.  Here is
+the entry:-
+
+
+"May 18th.--I do not know what to say, or how to begin.  Chris
+loves me.  I have been praying to God to make me worthy of him, and
+dancing round the room in my bare feet for fear of waking them
+below.  He kissed my hands and clasped them round his neck, saying
+they were beautiful as the hands of a goddess, and he knelt and
+kissed them again.  I am holding them before me and kissing them
+myself.  I am glad they are so beautiful.  O God, why are you so
+good to me?  Help me to be a true wife to him.  Help me that I may
+never give him an instant's pain!  Oh, that I had more power of
+loving, that I might love him better,"--and thus foolish thoughts
+for many pages, but foolish thoughts of the kind that has kept this
+worn old world, hanging for so many ages in space, from turning
+sour.
+
+
+Later, in February, there is another entry that carries on the
+story:-
+
+
+"Chris left this morning.  He put a little packet into my hands at
+the last moment, saying it was the most precious thing he
+possessed, and that when I looked at it I was to think of him who
+loved it.  Of course I guessed what it was, but I did not open it
+till I was alone in my room.  It is the picture of myself that he
+has been so secret about, but oh, so beautiful.  I wonder if I am
+really as beautiful as this.  But I wish he had not made me look so
+sad.  I am kissing the little lips.  I love them, because he loved
+to kiss them.  Oh, sweetheart! it will be long before you kiss them
+again.  Of course it was right for him to go, and I am glad he has
+been able to manage it.  He could not study properly in this quiet
+country place, and now he will be able to go to Paris and Rome and
+he will be great.  Even the stupid people here see how clever he
+is.  But, oh, it will be so long before I see him again, my love!
+my king!"
+
+
+With each letter that comes from him, similar foolish rhapsodies
+are written down, but these letters of his, I gather, as I turn the
+pages, grow after a while colder and fewer, and a chill fear that
+dare not be penned creeps in among the words.
+
+
+"March 12th.  Six weeks and no letter from Chris, and, oh dear! I
+am so hungry for one, for the last I have almost kissed to pieces.
+I suppose he will write more often when he gets to London.  He is
+working hard, I know, and it is selfish of me to expect him to
+write more often, but I would sit up all night for a week rather
+than miss writing to him.  I suppose men are not like that.  O God,
+help me, help me, whatever happens!  How foolish I am to-night!  He
+was always careless.  I will punish him for it when he comes back,
+but not very much."
+
+
+Truly enough a conventional story.
+
+Letters do come from him after that, but apparently they are less
+and less satisfactory, for the diary grows angry and bitter, and
+the faded writing is blotted at times with tears.  Then towards the
+end of another year there comes this entry, written in a hand of
+strange neatness and precision:-
+
+
+"It is all over now.  I am glad it is finished.  I have written to
+him, giving him up.  I have told him I have ceased to care for him,
+and that it is better we should both be free.  It is best that way.
+He would have had to ask me to release him, and that would have
+given him pain.  He was always gentle.  Now he will be able to
+marry her with an easy conscience, and he need never know what I
+have suffered.  She is more fitted for him than I am.  I hope he
+will be happy.  I think I have done the right thing."
+
+
+A few lines follow, left blank, and then the writing is resumed,
+but in a stronger, more vehement hand.
+
+
+"Why do I lie to myself?  I hate her!  I would kill her if I could.
+I hope she will make him wretched, and that he will come to hate
+her as I do, and that she will die!  Why did I let them persuade me
+to send that lying letter?  He will show it to her, and she will
+see through it and laugh at me.  I could have held him to his
+promise; he could not have got out of it.
+
+"What do I care about dignity, and womanliness, and right, and all
+the rest of the canting words!  I want him.  I want his kisses and
+his arms about me.  He is mine!  He loved me once!  I have only
+given him up because I thought it a fine thing to play the saint.
+It is only an acted lie.  I would rather be evil, and he loved me.
+Why do I deceive myself?  I want him.  I care for nothing else at
+the bottom of my heart--his love, his kisses!"
+
+And towards the end.  "My God, what am I saying?  Have I no shame,
+no strength?  O God, help me!"
+
+
+And there the diary closes.
+
+I looked among the letters lying between the pages of the book.
+Most of them were signed simply "Chris." or "Christopher."  But one
+gave his name in full, and it was a name I know well as that of a
+famous man, whose hand I have often shaken.  I thought of his hard-
+featured, handsome wife, and of his great chill place, half house,
+half exhibition, in Kensington, filled constantly with its smart,
+chattering set, among whom he seemed always to be the uninvited
+guest; of his weary face and bitter tongue.  And thinking thus
+there rose up before me the sweet, sad face of the woman of the
+miniature, and, meeting her eyes as she smiled at me from out of
+the shadows, I looked at her my wonder.
+
+I took the miniature from its shelf.  There would be no harm now in
+learning her name.  So I stood with it in my hand till a little
+later my landlady entered to lay the cloth.
+
+"I tumbled this out of your book-case," I said, "in reaching down
+some books.  It is someone I know, someone I have met, but I cannot
+think where.  Do you know who it is?"
+
+The woman took it from my hand, and a faint flush crossed her
+withered face.  "I had lost it," she answered.  "I never thought of
+looking there.  It's a portrait of myself, painted years ago, by a
+friend."
+
+I looked from her to the miniature, as she stood among the shadows,
+with the lamplight falling on her face, and saw her perhaps for the
+first time.
+
+"How stupid of me," I answered.  "Yes, I see the likeness now."
+
+
+
+THE MAN WHO WOULD MANAGE
+
+
+
+It has been told me by those in a position to know--and I can
+believe it--that at nineteen months of age he wept because his
+grandmother would not allow him to feed her with a spoon, and that
+at three and a half he was fished, in an exhausted condition, out
+of the water-butt, whither he had climbed for the purpose of
+teaching a frog to swim.
+
+Two years later he permanently injured his left eye, showing the
+cat how to carry kittens without hurting them, and about the same
+period was dangerously stung by a bee while conveying it from a
+flower where, as it seemed to him, it was only wasting its time, to
+one more rich in honey-making properties.
+
+His desire was always to help others.  He would spend whole
+mornings explaining to elderly hens how to hatch eggs, and would
+give up an afternoon's black-berrying to sit at home and crack nuts
+for his pet squirrel.  Before he was seven he would argue with his
+mother upon the management of children, and reprove his father for
+the way he was bringing him up.
+
+As a child nothing could afford him greater delight than "minding"
+other children, or them less.  He would take upon himself this
+harassing duty entirely of his own accord, without hope of reward
+or gratitude.  It was immaterial to him whether the other children
+were older than himself or younger, stronger or weaker, whenever
+and wherever he found them he set to work to "mind" them.  Once,
+during a school treat, piteous cries were heard coming from a
+distant part of the wood, and upon search being made, he was
+discovered prone upon the ground, with a cousin of his, a boy twice
+his own weight, sitting upon him and steadily whacking him.  Having
+rescued him, the teacher said:
+
+"Why don't you keep with the little boys?  What are you doing along
+with him?"
+
+"Please, sir," was the answer, "I was minding him."
+
+He would have "minded" Noah if he had got hold of him.
+
+He was a good-natured lad, and at school he was always willing for
+the whole class to copy from his slate--indeed he would urge them
+to do so.  He meant it kindly, but inasmuch as his answers were
+invariably quite wrong--with a distinctive and inimitable wrongness
+peculiar to himself--the result to his followers was eminently
+unsatisfactory; and with the shallowness of youth that, ignoring
+motives, judges solely from results, they would wait for him
+outside and punch him.
+
+All his energies went to the instruction of others, leaving none
+for his own purposes.  He would take callow youths to his chambers
+and teach them to box.
+
+"Now, try and hit me on the nose," he would say, standing before
+them in an attitude of defence.  "Don't be afraid.  Hit as hard as
+ever you can."
+
+And they would do it.  And so soon as he had recovered from his
+surprise, and a little lessened the bleeding, he would explain to
+them how they had done it all wrong, and how easily he could have
+stopped the blow if they had only hit him properly.
+
+Twice at golf he lamed himself for over a week, showing a novice
+how to "drive"; and at cricket on one occasion I remember seeing
+his middle stump go down like a ninepin just as he was explaining
+to the bowler how to get the balls in straight.  After which he had
+a long argument with the umpire as to whether he was in or out.
+
+He has been known, during a stormy Channel passage, to rush
+excitedly upon the bridge in order to inform the captain that he
+had "just seen a light about two miles away to the left"; and if he
+is on the top of an omnibus he generally sits beside the driver,
+and points out to him the various obstacles likely to impede their
+progress.
+
+It was upon an omnibus that my own personal acquaintanceship with
+him began.  I was sitting behind two ladies when the conductor came
+up to collect fares.  One of them handed him a sixpence telling him
+to take to Piccadilly Circus, which was twopence.
+
+"No," said the other lady to her friend, handing the man a
+shilling, "I owe you sixpence, you give me fourpence and I'll pay
+for the two."
+
+The conductor took the shilling, punched two twopenny tickets, and
+then stood trying to think it out.
+
+"That's right," said the lady who had spoken last, "give my friend
+fourpence."
+
+The conductor did so.
+
+"Now you give that fourpence to me."
+
+The friend handed it to her.
+
+"And you," she concluded to the conductor, "give me eightpence,
+then we shall be all right."
+
+The conductor doled out to her the eightpence--the sixpence he had
+taken from the first lady, with a penny and two halfpennies out of
+his own bag--distrustfully, and retired, muttering something about
+his duties not including those of a lightning calculator.
+
+"Now," said the elder lady to the younger, "I owe you a shilling."
+
+I deemed the incident closed, when suddenly a florid gentleman on
+the opposite seat called out in stentorian tones:-
+
+"Hi, conductor! you've cheated these ladies out of fourpence."
+
+"'Oo's cheated 'oo out 'o fourpence?" replied the indignant
+conductor from the top of the steps, "it was a twopenny fare."
+
+"Two twopences don't make eightpence," retorted the florid
+gentleman hotly.  "How much did you give the fellow, my dear?" he
+asked, addressing the first of the young ladies.
+
+"I gave him sixpence," replied the lady, examining her purse.  "And
+then I gave you fourpence, you know," she added, addressing her
+companion.
+
+"That's a dear two pen'oth," chimed in a common-looking man on the
+seat behind.
+
+"Oh, that's impossible, dear," returned the other, "because I owed
+you sixpence to begin with."
+
+"But I did," persisted the first lady.
+
+"You gave me a shilling," said the conductor, who had returned,
+pointing an accusing forefinger at the elder of the ladies.
+
+The elder lady nodded.
+
+"And I gave you sixpence and two pennies, didn't I?"
+
+The lady admitted it.
+
+"An' I give 'er"--he pointed towards the younger lady--"fourpence,
+didn't I?"
+
+"Which I gave you, you know, dear," remarked the younger lady.
+
+"Blow me if it ain't ME as 'as been cheated out of the fourpence,"
+cried the conductor.
+
+"But," said the florid gentleman, "the other lady gave you
+sixpence."
+
+"Which I give to 'er," replied the conductor, again pointing the
+finger of accusation at the elder lady.  "You can search my bag if
+yer like.  I ain't got a bloomin' sixpence on me."
+
+By this time everybody had forgotten what they had done, and
+contradicted themselves and one another.  The florid man took it
+upon himself to put everybody right, with the result that before
+Piccadilly Circus was reached three passengers had threatened to
+report the conductor for unbecoming language.  The conductor had
+called a policeman and had taken the names and addresses of the two
+ladies, intending to sue them for the fourpence (which they wanted
+to pay, but which the florid man would not allow them to do); the
+younger lady had become convinced that the elder lady had meant to
+cheat her, and the elder lady was in tears.
+
+The florid gentleman and myself continued to Charing Cross Station.
+At the booking office window it transpired that we were bound for
+the same suburb, and we journeyed down together.  He talked about
+the fourpence all the way.
+
+At my gate we shook hands, and he was good enough to express
+delight at the discovery that we were near neighbours.  What
+attracted him to myself I failed to understand, for he had bored me
+considerably, and I had, to the best of my ability, snubbed him.
+Subsequently I learned that it was a peculiarity of his to be
+charmed with anyone who did not openly insult him.
+
+Three days afterwards he burst into my study unannounced--he
+appeared to regard himself as my bosom friend--and asked me to
+forgive him for not having called sooner, which I did.
+
+"I met the postman as I was coming along," he said, handing me a
+blue envelope, "and he gave me this, for you."
+
+I saw it was an application for the water-rate.
+
+"We must make a stand against this," he continued.  "That's for
+water to the 29th September.  You've no right to pay it in June."
+
+I replied to the effect that water-rates had to be paid, and that
+it seemed to me immaterial whether they were paid in June or
+September.
+
+"That's not it," he answered, "it's the principle of the thing.
+Why should you pay for water you have never had?  What right have
+they to bully you into paying what you don't owe?"
+
+He was a fluent talker, and I was ass enough to listen to him.  By
+the end of half an hour he had persuaded me that the question was
+bound up with the inalienable rights of man, and that if I paid
+that fourteen and tenpence in June instead of in September, I
+should be unworthy of the privileges my forefathers had fought and
+died to bestow upon me.
+
+He told me the company had not a leg to stand upon, and at his
+instigation I sat down and wrote an insulting letter to the
+chairman.
+
+The secretary replied that, having regard to the attitude I had
+taken up, it would be incumbent upon themselves to treat it as a
+test case, and presumed that my solicitors would accept service on
+my behalf.
+
+When I showed him this letter he was delighted.
+
+"You leave it to me," he said, pocketing the correspondence, "and
+we'll teach them a lesson."
+
+I left it to him.  My only excuse is that at the time I was
+immersed in the writing of what in those days was termed a comedy-
+drama.  The little sense I possessed must, I suppose, have been
+absorbed by the play.
+
+The magistrate's decision somewhat damped my ardour, but only
+inflamed his zeal.  Magistrates, he said, were muddle-headed old
+fogies.  This was a matter for a judge.
+
+The judge was a kindly old gentleman, and said that bearing in mind
+the unsatisfactory wording of the sub-clause, he did not think he
+could allow the company their costs, so that, all told, I got off
+for something under fifty pounds, inclusive of the original
+fourteen and tenpence.
+
+Afterwards our friendship waned, but living as we did in the same
+outlying suburb, I was bound to see a good deal of him; and to hear
+more.
+
+At parties of all kinds he was particularly prominent, and on such
+occasions, being in his most good-natured mood, was most to be
+dreaded.  No human being worked harder for the enjoyment of others,
+or produced more universal wretchedness.
+
+One Christmas afternoon, calling upon a friend, I found some
+fourteen or fifteen elderly ladies and gentlemen trotting solemnly
+round a row of chairs in the centre of the drawing-room while
+Poppleton played the piano.  Every now and then Poppleton would
+suddenly cease, and everyone would drop wearily into the nearest
+chair, evidently glad of a rest; all but one, who would thereupon
+creep quietly away, followed by the envying looks of those left
+behind.  I stood by the door watching the weird scene.  Presently
+an escaped player came towards me, and I enquired of him what the
+ceremony was supposed to signify.
+
+"Don't ask me," he answered grumpily.  "Some of Poppleton's damned
+tomfoolery."  Then he added savagely, "We've got to play forfeits
+after this."
+
+The servant was still waiting a favourable opportunity to announce
+me.  I gave her a shilling not to, and got away unperceived.
+
+After a satisfactory dinner, he would suggest an impromptu dance,
+and want you to roll up mats, or help him move the piano to the
+other end of the room.
+
+He knew enough round games to have started a small purgatory of his
+own.  Just as you were in the middle of an interesting discussion,
+or a delightful tete-a-tete with a pretty woman, he would swoop
+down upon you with:  "Come along, we're going to play literary
+consequences," and dragging you to the table, and putting a piece
+of paper and a pencil before you, would tell you to write a
+description of your favourite heroine in fiction, and would see
+that you did it.
+
+He never spared himself.  It was always he who would volunteer to
+escort the old ladies to the station, and who would never leave
+them until he had seen them safely into the wrong train.  He it was
+who would play "wild beasts" with the children, and frighten them
+into fits that would last all night.
+
+So far as intention went, he was the kindest man alive.  He never
+visited poor sick persons without taking with him in his pocket
+some little delicacy calculated to disagree with them and make them
+worse.  He arranged yachting excursions for bad sailors, entirely
+at his own expense, and seemed to regard their subsequent agonies
+as ingratitude.
+
+He loved to manage a wedding.  Once he planned matters so that the
+bride arrived at the altar three-quarters of an hour before the
+groom, which led to unpleasantness upon a day that should have been
+filled only with joy, and once he forgot the clergyman.  But he was
+always ready to admit when he made a mistake.
+
+At funerals, also, he was to the fore, pointing out to the grief-
+stricken relatives how much better it was for all concerned that
+the corpse was dead, and expressing a pious hope that they would
+soon join it.
+
+The chiefest delight of his life, however, was to be mixed up in
+other people's domestic quarrels.  No domestic quarrel for miles
+round was complete without him.  He generally came in as mediator,
+and finished as leading witness for the appellant.
+
+As a journalist or politician his wonderful grasp of other people's
+business would have won for him esteem.  The error he made was
+working it out in practice.
+
+
+
+THE MAN WHO LIVED FOR OTHERS
+
+
+
+The first time we met, to speak, he was sitting with his back
+against a pollard willow, smoking a clay pipe.  He smoked it very
+slowly, but very conscientiously.  After each whiff he removed the
+pipe from his mouth and fanned away the smoke with his cap.
+
+"Feeling bad?" I asked from behind a tree, at the same time making
+ready for a run, big boys' answers to small boys' impertinences
+being usually of the nature of things best avoided.
+
+To my surprise and relief--for at second glance I perceived I had
+under-estimated the length of his legs--he appeared to regard the
+question as a natural and proper one, replying with unaffected
+candour, "Not yet."
+
+My desire became to comfort him--a sentiment I think he understood
+and was grateful for.  Advancing into the open, I sat down over
+against him, and watched him for a while in silence.  Presently he
+said:-
+
+"Have you ever tried drinking beer?"
+
+I admitted I had not.
+
+"Oh, it is beastly stuff," he rejoined with an involuntary shudder.
+
+Rendered forgetful of present trouble by bitter recollection of the
+past, he puffed away at his pipe carelessly and without judgment.
+
+"Do you often drink it?" I inquired.
+
+"Yes," he replied gloomily; "all we fellows in the fifth form drink
+beer and smoke pipes."
+
+A deeper tinge of green spread itself over his face.
+
+He rose suddenly and made towards the hedge.  Before he reached it,
+however, he stopped and addressed me, but without turning round.
+
+"If you follow me, young 'un, or look, I'll punch your head," he
+said swiftly, and disappeared with a gurgle.
+
+He left at the end of the terms and I did not see him again until
+we were both young men.  Then one day I ran against him in Oxford
+Street, and he asked me to come and spend a few days with his
+people in Surrey.
+
+I found him wan-looking and depressed, and every now and then he
+sighed.  During a walk across the common he cheered up
+considerably, but the moment we got back to the house door he
+seemed to recollect himself, and began to sigh again.  He ate no
+dinner whatever, merely sipping a glass of wine and crumbling a
+piece of bread.  I was troubled at noticing this, but his
+relatives--a maiden aunt, who kept house, two elder sisters, and a
+weak-eyed female cousin who had left her husband behind her in
+India--were evidently charmed.  They glanced at each other, and
+nodded and smiled.  Once in a fit of abstraction he swallowed a bit
+of crust, and immediately they all looked pained and surprised.
+
+In the drawing-room, under cover of a sentimental song, sung by the
+female cousin, I questioned his aunt on the subject.
+
+"What's the matter with him?" I said.  "Is he ill?"
+
+The old lady chuckled.
+
+"You'll be like that one day," she whispered gleefully.
+
+"When," I asked, not unnaturally alarmed.
+
+"When you're in love," she answered.
+
+"Is HE in love?" I inquired after a pause.
+
+"Can't you see he is?" she replied somewhat scornfully.
+
+I was a young man, and interested in the question.
+
+"Won't he ever eat any dinner till he's got over it?" I asked.
+
+She looked round sharply at me, but apparently decided that I was
+only foolish.
+
+"You wait till your time comes," she answered, shaking her curls at
+me.  "You won't care much about your dinner--not if you are REALLY
+in love."
+
+In the night, about half-past eleven, I heard, as I thought,
+footsteps in the passage, and creeping to the door and opening it I
+saw the figure of my friend in dressing-gown and slippers,
+vanishing down the stairs.  My idea was that, his brain weakened by
+trouble, he had developed sleep-walking tendencies.  Partly out of
+curiosity, partly to watch over him, I slipped on a pair of
+trousers and followed him.
+
+He placed his candle on the kitchen table and made a bee-line for
+the pantry door, from where he subsequently emerged with two pounds
+of cold beef on a plate and about a quart of beer in a jug; and I
+came away, leaving him fumbling for pickles.
+
+I assisted at his wedding, where it seemed to me he endeavoured to
+display more ecstasy than it was possible for any human being to
+feel; and fifteen months later, happening to catch sight of an
+advertisement in the births column of The Times, I called on my way
+home from the City to congratulate him.  He was pacing up and down
+the passage with his hat on, pausing at intervals to partake of an
+uninviting-looking meal, consisting of a cold mutton chop and a
+glass of lemonade, spread out upon a chair.  Seeing that the cook
+and the housemaid were wandering about the house evidently bored
+for want of something to do, and that the dining-room, where he
+would have been much more out of the way, was empty and quite in
+order, I failed at first to understand the reason for his
+deliberate choice of discomfort.  I, however, kept my reflections
+to myself, and inquired after the mother and child.
+
+"Couldn't be better," he replied with a groan.  "The doctor said
+he'd never had a more satisfactory case in all his experience."
+
+"Oh, I'm glad to hear that," I answered; "I was afraid you'd been
+worrying yourself."
+
+"Worried!" he exclaimed.  "My dear boy, I don't know whether I'm
+standing on my head or my heels" (he gave one that idea).  "This is
+the first morsel of food that's passed my lips for twenty-four
+hours."
+
+At this moment the nurse appeared at the top of the stairs.  He
+flew towards her, upsetting the lemonade in his excitement.
+
+"What is it?" he asked hoarsely.  "Is it all right?"
+
+The old lady glanced from him to his cold chop, and smiled
+approvingly.
+
+"They're doing splendidly," she answered, patting him on the
+shoulder in a motherly fashion.  "Don't you worry."
+
+"I can't help it, Mrs. Jobson," he replied, sitting down upon the
+bottom stair, and leaning his head against the banisters.
+
+"Of course you can't," said Mrs. Jobson admiringly; "and you
+wouldn't be much of a man if you could."  Then it was borne in upon
+me why he wore his hat, and dined off cold chops in the passage.
+
+The following summer they rented a picturesque old house in
+Berkshire, and invited me down from a Saturday to Monday.  Their
+place was near the river, so I slipped a suit of flannels in my
+bag, and on the Sunday morning I came down in them.  He met me in
+the garden.  He was dressed in a frock coat and a white waistcoat;
+and I noticed that he kept looking at me out of the corner of his
+eye, and that he seemed to have a trouble on his mind.  The first
+breakfast bell rang, and then he said, "You haven't got any proper
+clothes with you, have you?"
+
+"Proper clothes!" I exclaimed, stopping in some alarm.  "Why, has
+anything given way?"
+
+"No, not that," he explained.  "I mean clothes to go to church in."
+
+"Church," I said.  "You're surely not going to church a fine day
+like this?  I made sure you'd be playing tennis, or going on the
+river.  You always used to."
+
+"Yes," he replied, nervously flicking a rose-bush with a twig he
+had picked up.  "You see, it isn't ourselves exactly.  Maud and I
+would rather like to, but our cook, she's Scotch, and a little
+strict in her notions."
+
+"And does she insist on your going to church every Sunday morning?"
+I inquired.
+
+"Well," he answered, "she thinks it strange if we don't, and so we
+generally do, just in the morning--and evening.  And then in the
+afternoon a few of the village girls drop in, and we have a little
+singing and that sort of thing.  I never like hurting anyone's
+feelings if I can help it."
+
+I did not say what I thought.  Instead I said, "I've got that tweed
+suit I wore yesterday.  I can put that on if you like."
+
+He ceased flicking the rose-bush, and knitted his brows.  He seemed
+to be recalling it to his imagination.
+
+"No," he said, shaking his head, "I'm afraid it would shock her.
+It's my fault, I know," he added, remorsefully.  "I ought to have
+told you."
+
+Then an idea came to him.
+
+"I suppose," he said, "you wouldn't care to pretend you were ill,
+and stop in bed just for the day?"
+
+I explained that my conscience would not permit my being a party to
+such deception
+
+"No, I thought you wouldn't," he replied.  "I must explain it to
+her.  I think I'll say you've lost your bag.  I shouldn't like her
+to think bad of us."
+
+Later on a fourteenth cousin died, leaving him a large fortune.  He
+purchased an estate in Yorkshire, and became a "county family," and
+then his real troubles began.
+
+From May to the middle of August, save for a little fly fishing,
+which generally resulted in his getting his feet wet and catching a
+cold, life was fairly peaceful; but from early autumn to late
+spring he found the work decidedly trying.  He was a stout man,
+constitutionally nervous of fire-arms, and a six-hours' tramp with
+a heavy gun across ploughed fields, in company with a crowd of
+careless persons who kept blazing away within an inch of other
+people's noses, harassed and exhausted him.  He had to get out of
+bed at four on chilly October mornings to go cub-hunting, and twice
+a week throughout the winter--except when a blessed frost brought
+him a brief respite--he had to ride to hounds.  That he usually got
+off with nothing more serious than mere bruises and slight
+concussions of the spine, he probably owed to the fortunate
+circumstances of his being little and fat.  At stiff timber he shut
+his eyes and rode hard; and ten yards from a river he would begin
+to think about bridges.
+
+Yet he never complained.
+
+"If you are a country gentleman," he would say, "you must behave as
+a country gentleman, and take the rough with the smooth."
+
+As ill fate would have it a chance speculation doubled his fortune,
+and it became necessary that he should go into Parliament and start
+a yacht.  Parliament made his head ache, and the yacht made him
+sick.  Notwithstanding, every summer he would fill it with a lot of
+expensive people who bored him, and sail away for a month's misery
+in the Mediterranean.
+
+During one cruise his guests built up a highly-interesting gambling
+scandal.  He himself was confined to his cabin at the time, and
+knew nothing about it; but the Opposition papers, getting hold of
+the story, referred casually to the yacht as a "floating hell," and
+The Police News awarded his portrait the place of honour as the
+chief criminal of the week.
+
+Later on he got into a cultured set, ruled by a thick-lipped
+undergraduate.  His favourite literature had hitherto been of the
+Corelli and Tit-Bits order, but now he read Meredith and the yellow
+book, and tried to understand them; and instead of the Gaiety, he
+subscribed to the Independent Theatre, and fed "his soul," on Dutch
+Shakespeares.  What he liked in art was a pretty girl by a cottage-
+door with an eligible young man in the background, or a child and a
+dog doing something funny.  They told him these things were wrong
+and made him buy "Impressions" that stirred his liver to its
+deepest depths every time he looked at them--green cows on red
+hills by pink moonlight, or scarlet-haired corpses with three feet
+of neck.
+
+He said meekly that such seemed to him unnatural, but they answered
+that nature had nothing to do with the question; that the artist
+saw things like that, and that whatever an artist saw--no matter in
+what condition he may have been when he saw it--that was art.
+
+They took him to Wagner festivals and Burne-Jones's private views.
+They read him all the minor poets.  They booked seats for him at
+all Ibsen's plays.  They introduced him into all the most soulful
+circles of artistic society.  His days were one long feast of other
+people's enjoyments.
+
+One morning I met him coming down the steps of the Arts Club.  He
+looked weary.  He was just off to a private view at the New
+Gallery.  In the afternoon he had to attend an amateur performance
+of "The Cenci," given by the Shelley Society.  Then followed three
+literary and artistic At Homes, a dinner with an Indian nabob who
+couldn't speak a word of English, "Tristam and Isolde" at Covent
+Garden Theatre, and a ball at Lord Salisbury's to wind up the day.
+
+I laid my hand upon his shoulder.
+
+"Come with me to Epping Forest," I said.  "There's a four-horse
+brake starts from Charing Cross at eleven.  It's Saturday, and
+there's bound to be a crowd down there.  I'll play you a game of
+skittles, and we will have a shy at the cocoa-nuts.  You used to be
+rather smart at cocoa-nuts.  We can have lunch there and be back at
+seven, dine at the Troc., spend the evening at the Empire, and sup
+at the Savoy.  What do you say?"
+
+He stood hesitating on the steps, a wistful look in his eyes.
+
+His brougham drew up against the curb, and he started as if from a
+dream.
+
+"My dear fellow," he replied, "what would people say?"  And shaking
+me by the hand, he took his seat, and the footman slammed the door
+upon him.
+
+
+
+A MAN OF HABIT
+
+
+
+There were three of us in the smoke-room of the Alexandra--a very
+good friend of mine, myself, and, in the opposite corner, a shy-
+looking, unobtrusive man, the editor, as we subsequently learned,
+of a New York Sunday paper.
+
+My friend and I were discussing habits, good and bad.
+
+"After the first few months," said my friend, "it is no more effort
+for a man to be a saint than to be a sinner; it becomes a mere
+matter of habit."
+
+"I know," I interrupted, "it is every whit as easy to spring out of
+bed the instant you are called as to say 'All Right,' and turn over
+for just another five minutes' snooze, when you have got into the
+way of it.  It is no more trouble not to swear than to swear, if
+you make a custom of it.  Toast and water is as delicious as
+champagne, when you have acquired the taste for it.  Things are
+also just as easy the other way about.  It is a mere question of
+making your choice and sticking to it."
+
+He agreed with me.
+
+"Now take these cigars of mine," he said, pushing his open case
+towards me.
+
+"Thank you," I replied hurriedly, "I'm not smoking this passage."
+
+"Don't be alarmed," he answered, "I meant merely as an argument.
+Now one of these would make you wretched for a week."
+
+I admitted his premise.
+
+"Very well," he continued.  "Now I, as you know, smoke them all day
+long, and enjoy them.  Why?  Because I have got into the habit.
+Years ago, when I was a young man, I smoked expensive Havanas.  I
+found that I was ruining myself.  It was absolutely necessary that
+I should take a cheaper weed.  I was living in Belgium at the time,
+and a friend showed me these.  I don't know what they are--probably
+cabbage leaves soaked in guano; they tasted to me like that at
+first--but they were cheap.  Buying them by the five hundred, they
+cost me three a penny.  I determined to like them, and started with
+one a day.  It was terrible work, I admit, but as I said to myself,
+nothing could be worse than the Havanas themselves had been in the
+beginning.  Smoking is an acquired taste, and it must be as easy to
+learn to like one flavour as another.  I persevered and I
+conquered.  Before the year was over I could think of them without
+loathing, at the end of two I could smoke them without positive
+discomfort.  Now I prefer them to any other brand on the market.
+Indeed, a good cigar disagrees with me."
+
+I suggested it might have been less painful to have given up
+smoking altogether.
+
+"I did think of it," he replied, "but a man who doesn't smoke
+always seems to me bad company.  There is something very sociable
+about smoke."
+
+He leant back and puffed great clouds into the air, filling the
+small den with an odour suggestive of bilge water and cemeteries.
+
+"Then again," he resumed after a pause, "take my claret.  No, you
+don't like it."  (I had not spoken, but my face had evidently
+betrayed me.)  "Nobody does, at least no one I have ever met.
+Three years ago, when I was living in Hammersmith, we caught two
+burglars with it.  They broke open the sideboard, and swallowed
+five bottlefuls between them.  A policeman found them afterwards,
+sitting on a doorstep a hundred yards off, the 'swag' beside them
+in a carpet bag.  They were too ill to offer any resistance, and
+went to the station like lambs, he promising to send the doctor to
+them the moment they were safe in the cells.  Ever since then I
+have left out a decanterful upon the table every night.
+
+"Well, I like that claret, and it does me good.  I come in
+sometimes dead beat.  I drink a couple of glasses, and I'm a new
+man.  I took to it in the first instance for the same reason that I
+took to the cigars--it was cheap.  I have it sent over direct from
+Geneva, and it costs me six shillings a dozen.  How they do it I
+don't know.  I don't want to know.  As you may remember, it's
+fairly heady and there's body in it.
+
+"I knew one man," he continued, "who had a regular Mrs. Caudle of a
+wife.  All day long she talked to him, or at him, or of him, and at
+night he fell asleep to the rising and falling rhythm of what she
+thought about him.  At last she died, and his friends congratulated
+him, telling him that now he would enjoy peace.  But it was the
+peace of the desert, and the man did not enjoy it.  For two-and-
+twenty years her voice had filled the house, penetrated through the
+conservatory, and floated in faint shrilly waves of sound round the
+garden, and out into the road beyond.  The silence now pervading
+everywhere frightened and disturbed him.  The place was no longer
+home to him.  He missed the breezy morning insult, the long winter
+evening's reproaches beside the flickering fire.  At night he could
+not sleep.  For hours he would lie tossing restlessly, his ears
+aching for the accustomed soothing flow of invective.
+
+"'Ah!' he would cry bitterly to himself, 'it is the old story, we
+never know the value of a thing until we have lost it.'
+
+"He grew ill.  The doctors dosed him with sleeping draughts in
+vain.  At last they told him bluntly that his life depended upon
+his finding another wife, able and willing to nag him to sleep.
+
+"There were plenty of wives of the type he wanted in the
+neighbourhood, but the unmarried women were, of necessity,
+inexperienced, and his health was such that he could not afford the
+time to train them.
+
+"Fortunately, just as despair was about to take possession of him,
+a man died in the next parish, literally talked to death, the
+gossip said, by his wife.  He obtained an introduction, and called
+upon her the day after the funeral.  She was a cantankerous old
+woman, and the wooing was a harassing affair, but his heart was in
+his work, and before six months were gone he had won her for his
+own.
+
+"She proved, however, but a poor substitute.  The spirit was
+willing but the flesh was weak.  She had neither that command of
+language nor of wind that had distinguished her rival.  From his
+favourite seat at the bottom of the garden he could not hear her at
+all, so he had his chair brought up into the conservatory.  It was
+all right for him there so long as she continued to abuse him; but
+every now and again, just as he was getting comfortably settled
+down with his pipe and his newspaper, she would suddenly stop.
+
+"He would drop his paper and sit listening, with a troubled,
+anxious expression.
+
+"'Are you there, dear?' he would call out after a while.
+
+"'Yes, I'm here.  Where do you think I am you old fool?' she would
+gasp back in an exhausted voice.
+
+"His face would brighten at the sound of her words.  'Go on, dear,'
+he would answer.  'I'm listening.  I like to hear you talk.'
+
+"But the poor woman was utterly pumped out, and had not so much as
+a snort left.
+
+"Then he would shake his head sadly.  'No, she hasn't poor dear
+Susan's flow,' he would say.  'Ah! what a woman that was!'
+
+"At night she would do her best, but it was a lame and halting
+performance by comparison.  After rating him for little over three-
+quarters of an hour, she would sink back on the pillow, and want to
+go to sleep.  But he would shake her gently by the shoulder.
+
+"'Yes, dear,' he would say, 'you were speaking about Jane, and the
+way I kept looking at her during lunch.'
+
+"It's extraordinary," concluded my friend, lighting a fresh cigar,
+"what creatures of habit we are."
+
+"Very," I replied.  "I knew a man who told tall stories till when
+he told a true one nobody believed it."
+
+"Ah, that was a very sad case," said my friend.
+
+"Speaking of habit," said the unobtrusive man in the corner, "I can
+tell you a true story that I'll bet my bottom dollar you won't
+believe."
+
+"Haven't got a bottom dollar, but I'll bet you half a sovereign I
+do," replied my friend, who was of a sporting turn.  "Who shall be
+judge?"
+
+"I'll take your word for it," said the unobtrusive man, and started
+straight away.
+
+
+"He was a Jefferson man, this man I'm going to tell you of," he
+begun.  "He was born in the town, and for forty-seven years he
+never slept a night outside it.  He was a most respectable man--a
+drysalter from nine to four, and a Presbyterian in his leisure
+moments.  He said that a good life merely meant good habits.  He
+rose at seven, had family prayer at seven-thirty, breakfasted at
+eight, got to his business at nine, had his horse brought round to
+the office at four, and rode for an hour, reached home at five, had
+a bath and a cup of tea, played with and read to the children (he
+was a domesticated man) till half-past six, dressed and dined at
+seven, went round to the club and played whist till quarter after
+ten, home again to evening prayer at ten-thirty, and bed at eleven.
+For five-and-twenty years he lived that life with never a
+variation.  It worked into his system and became mechanical.  The
+church clocks were set by him.  He was used by the local
+astronomers to check the sun.
+
+"One day a distant connection of his in London, an East Indian
+Merchant and an ex-Lord Mayor died, leaving him sole legatee and
+executor.  The business was a complicated one and needed
+management.  He determined to leave his son by his first wife, now
+a young man of twenty-four, in charge at Jefferson, and to
+establish himself with his second family in England, and look after
+the East Indian business.
+
+"He set out from Jefferson City on October the fourth, and arrived
+in London on the seventeenth.  He had been ill during the whole of
+the voyage, and he reached the furnished house he had hired in
+Bayswater somewhat of a wreck.  A couple of days in bed, however,
+pulled him round, and on the Wednesday evening he announced his
+intention of going into the City the next day to see to his
+affairs.
+
+"On the Thursday morning he awoke at one o'clock.  His wife told
+him she had not disturbed him, thinking the sleep would do him
+good.  He admitted that perhaps it had.  Anyhow, he felt very well,
+and he got up and dressed himself.  He said he did not like the
+idea of beginning his first day by neglecting a religious duty, and
+his wife agreeing with him, they assembled the servants and the
+children in the dining-room, and had family prayer at half-past
+one.  After which he breakfasted and set off, reaching the City
+about three.
+
+"His reputation for punctuality had preceded him, and surprise was
+everywhere expressed at his late arrival.  He explained the
+circumstances, however, and made his appointments for the following
+day to commence from nine-thirty.
+
+"He remained at the office until late, and then went home.  For
+dinner, usually the chief meal of the day, he could manage to eat
+only a biscuit and some fruit.  He attributed his loss of appetite
+to want of his customary ride.  He was strangely unsettled all the
+evening.  He said he supposed he missed his game of whist, and
+determined to look about him without loss of time for some quiet,
+respectable club.  At eleven he retired with his wife to bed, but
+could not sleep.  He tossed and turned, and turned and tossed, but
+grew only more and more wakeful and energetic.  A little after
+midnight an overpowering desire seized him to go and wish the
+children good-night.  He slipped on a dressing-gown and stole into
+the nursery.  He did not intend it, but the opening of the door
+awoke them, and he was glad.  He wrapped them up in the quilt, and,
+sitting on the edge of the bed, told them moral stories till one
+o'clock.
+
+"Then he kissed them, bidding them be good and go to sleep; and
+finding himself painfully hungry, crept downstairs, where in the
+back kitchen he made a hearty meal off cold game pie and cucumber.
+
+"He retired to bed feeling more peaceful, yet still could not
+sleep, so lay thinking about his business affairs till five, when
+he dropped off.
+
+"At one o'clock to the minute he awoke.  His wife told him she had
+made every endeavour to rouse him, but in vain.  The man was vexed
+and irritated.  If he had not been a very good man indeed, I
+believe he would have sworn.  The same programme was repeated as on
+the Thursday, and again he reached the City at three.
+
+"This state of things went on for a month.  The man fought against
+himself, but was unable to alter himself.  Every morning, or rather
+every afternoon at one he awoke.  Every night at one he crept down
+into the kitchen and foraged for food.  Every morning at five he
+fell asleep.
+
+"He could not understand it, nobody could understand it.  The
+doctor treated him for water on the brain, hypnotic
+irresponsibility and hereditary lunacy.  Meanwhile his business
+suffered, and his health grew worse.  He seemed to be living upside
+down.  His days seemed to have neither beginning nor end, but to be
+all middle.  There was no time for exercise or recreation.  When he
+began to feel cheerful and sociable everybody else was asleep.
+
+"One day by chance the explanation came.  His eldest daughter was
+preparing her home studies after dinner.
+
+"'What time is it now in New York?' she asked, looking up from her
+geography book.
+
+"'New York,' said her father, glancing at his watch, 'let me see.
+It's just ten now, and there's a little over four and a half hours'
+difference.  Oh, about half-past five in the afternoon.'
+
+"'Then in Jefferson,' said the mother, 'it would be still earlier,
+wouldn't it?'
+
+"'Yes,' replied the girl, examining the map, 'Jefferson is nearly
+two degrees further west.'
+
+"'Two degrees,' mused the father, 'and there's forty minutes to a
+degree.  That would make it now, at the present moment in
+Jefferson--'
+
+He leaped to his feet with a cry:
+
+"'I've got it!' he shouted, 'I see it.'
+
+"'See what?' asked his wife, alarmed.
+
+"'Why, it's four o'clock in Jefferson, and just time for my ride.
+That's what I'm wanting.'
+
+"There could be no doubt about it.  For five-and-twenty years he
+had lived by clockwork.  But it was by Jefferson clockwork, not
+London clockwork.  He had changed his longitude, but not himself.
+The habits of a quarter of a century were not to be shifted at the
+bidding of the sun.
+
+"He examined the problem in all its bearings, and decided that the
+only solution was for him to return to the order of his old life.
+He saw the difficulties in his way, but they were less than those
+he was at present encountering.  He was too formed by habit to
+adapt himself to circumstances.  Circumstances must adapt
+themselves to him.
+
+"He fixed his office hours from three till ten, leaving himself at
+half-past nine.  At ten he mounted his horse and went for a canter
+in the Row, and on very dark nights he carried a lantern.  News of
+it got abroad, and crowds would assemble to see him ride past.
+
+"He dined at one o'clock in the morning, and afterwards strolled
+down to his club.  He had tried to discover a quiet, respectable
+club where the members were willing to play whist till four in the
+morning, but failing, had been compelled to join a small Soho
+gambling-hell, where they taught him poker.  The place was
+occasionally raided by the police, but thanks to his respectable
+appearance, he generally managed to escape.
+
+"At half-past four he returned home, and woke up the family for
+evening prayers.  At five he went to bed and slept like a top.
+
+"The City chaffed him, and Bayswater shook its head over him, but
+that he did not mind.  The only thing that really troubled him was
+loss of spiritual communion.  At five o'clock on Sunday afternoons
+he felt he wanted chapel, but had to do without it.  At seven he
+ate his simple mid-day meal.  At eleven he had tea and muffins, and
+at midnight he began to crave again for hymns and sermons.  At
+three he had a bread-and-cheese supper, and retired early at four
+a.m., feeling sad and unsatisfied.
+
+"He was essentially a man of habit."
+
+
+The unobtrusive stranger ceased, and we sat gazing in silence at
+the ceiling.
+
+At length my friend rose, and taking half-a-sovereign from his
+pocket, laid it upon the table, and linking his arm in mine went
+out with me upon the deck.
+
+
+
+THE ABSENT-MINDED MAN
+
+
+
+You ask him to dine with you on Thursday to meet a few people who
+are anxious to know him.
+
+"Now don't make a muddle of it," you say, recollectful of former
+mishaps, "and come on the Wednesday."
+
+He laughs good-naturedly as he hunts through the room for his
+diary.
+
+"Shan't be able to come Wednesday," he says, "shall be at the
+Mansion House, sketching dresses, and on Friday I start for
+Scotland, so as to be at the opening of the Exhibition on Saturday.
+It's bound to be all right this time.  Where the deuce is that
+diary!  Never mind, I'll make a note of it on this--you can see me
+do it."
+
+You stand over him while he writes the appointment down on a sheet
+of foolscap, and watch him pin it up over his desk.  Then you come
+away contented.
+
+"I do hope he'll turn up," you say to your wife on the Thursday
+evening, while dressing.
+
+"Are you sure you made it clear to him?" she replies, suspiciously,
+and you instinctively feel that whatever happens she is going to
+blame you for it.
+
+Eight o'clock arrives, and with it the other guests.  At half-past
+eight your wife is beckoned mysteriously out of the room, where the
+parlour-maid informs her that the cook has expressed a
+determination, in case of further delay, to wash her hands,
+figuratively speaking, of the whole affair.
+
+Your wife, returning, suggests that if the dinner is to be eaten at
+all it had better be begun.  She evidently considers that in
+pretending to expect him you have been merely playing a part, and
+that it would have been manlier and more straightforward for you to
+have admitted at the beginning that you had forgotten to invite
+him.
+
+During the soup and the fish you recount anecdotes of his
+unpunctuality.  By the time the entree arrives the empty chair has
+begun to cast a gloom over the dinner, and with the joint the
+conversation drifts into talk about dead relatives.
+
+On Friday, at a quarter past eight, he dashes to the door and rings
+violently.  Hearing his voice in the hall, you go to meet him.
+
+"Sorry I'm late," he sings out cheerily.  "Fool of a cabman took me
+to Alfred Place instead of--"
+
+"Well, what do you want now you are come?" you interrupt, feeling
+anything but genially inclined towards him.  He is an old friend,
+so you can be rude to him.
+
+He laughs, and slaps you on the shoulder.
+
+"Why, my dinner, my dear boy, I'm starving."
+
+"Oh," you grunt in reply.  "Well, you go and get it somewhere else,
+then.  You're not going to have it here."
+
+"What the devil do you mean?" he says.  "You asked me to dinner."
+
+"I did nothing of the kind," you tell him.  "I asked you to dinner
+on Thursday, not on Friday."
+
+He stares at you incredulously.
+
+"How did I get Friday fixed in my mind?" inquiringly.
+
+"Because yours is the sort of mind that would get Friday firmly
+fixed into it, when Thursday was the day," you explain.  "I thought
+you had to be off to Edinburgh to-night," you add.
+
+"Great Scott!" he cries, "so I have."
+
+And without another word he dashes out, and you hear him rushing
+down the road, shouting for the cab he has just dismissed.
+
+As you return to your study you reflect that he will have to travel
+all the way to Scotland in evening dress, and will have to send out
+the hotel porter in the morning to buy him a suit of ready-made
+clothes, and are glad.
+
+Matters work out still more awkwardly when it is he who is the
+host.  I remember being with him on his house-boat one day.  It was
+a little after twelve, and we were sitting on the edge of the boat,
+dangling our feet in the river--the spot was a lonely one, half-way
+between Wallingford and Day's Lock.  Suddenly round the bend
+appeared two skiffs, each one containing six elaborately-dressed
+persons.  As soon as they caught sight of us they began waving
+handkerchiefs and parasols.
+
+"Hullo!" I said, "here's some people hailing you."
+
+"Oh, they all do that about here," he answered, without looking up.
+"Some beanfeast from Abingdon, I expect."
+
+The boats draw nearer.  When about two hundred yards off an elderly
+gentleman raised himself up in the prow of the leading one and
+shouted to us.
+
+McQuae heard his voice, and gave a start that all but pitched him
+into the water.
+
+"Good God!" he cried, "I'd forgotten all about it."
+
+"About what?" I asked.
+
+"Why, it's the Palmers and the Grahams and the Hendersons.  I've
+asked them all over to lunch, and there's not a blessed thing on
+board but two mutton chops and a pound of potatoes, and I've given
+the boy a holiday."
+
+Another day I was lunching with him at the Junior Hogarth, when a
+man named Hallyard, a mutual friend, strolled across to us.
+
+"What are you fellows going to do this afternoon?" he asked,
+seating himself the opposite side of the table.
+
+"I'm going to stop here and write letters," I answered.
+
+"Come with me if you want something to do," said McQuae.  "I'm
+going to drive Leena down to Richmond."  ("Leena" was the young
+lady he recollected being engaged to.  It transpired afterwards
+that he was engaged to three girls at the time.  The other two he
+had forgotten all about.)  "It's a roomy seat at the back."
+
+"Oh, all right," said Hallyard, and they went away together in a
+hansom.
+
+An hour and a half later Hallyard walked into the smoking-room
+looking depressed and worn, and flung himself into a chair.
+
+"I thought you were going to Richmond with McQuae," I said.
+
+"So did I," he answered.
+
+"Had an accident?" I asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+He was decidedly curt in his replies.
+
+"Cart upset?" I continued.
+
+"No, only me."
+
+His grammar and his nerves seemed thoroughly shaken.
+
+I waited for an explanation, and after a while he gave it.
+
+"We got to Putney," he said, "with just an occasional run into a
+tram-car, and were going up the hill, when suddenly he turned a
+corner.  You know his style at a corner--over the curb, across the
+road, and into the opposite lamp-post.  Of course, as a rule one is
+prepared for it, but I never reckoned on his turning up there, and
+the first thing I recollect is finding myself sitting in the middle
+of the street with a dozen fools grinning at me.
+
+"It takes a man a few minutes in such a case to think where he is
+and what has happened, and when I got up they were some distance
+away.  I ran after them for a quarter of a mile, shouting at the
+top of my voice, and accompanied by a mob of boys, all yelling like
+hell on a Bank Holiday.  But one might as well have tried to hail
+the dead, so I took the 'bus back.
+
+"They might have guessed what had happened," he added, "by the
+shifting of the cart, if they'd had any sense.  I'm not a light-
+weight."
+
+He complained of soreness, and said he would go home.  I suggested
+a cab, but he replied that he would rather walk.
+
+I met McQuae in the evening at the St. James's Theatre.  It was a
+first night, and he was taking sketches for The Graphic.  The
+moment he saw me he made his way across to me.
+
+"The very man I wanted to see," he said.  "Did I take Hallyard with
+me in the cart to Richmond this afternoon?"
+
+"You did," I replied.
+
+"So Leena says," he answered, greatly bewildered, "but I'll swear
+he wasn't there when we got to the Queen's Hotel."
+
+"It's all right," I said, "you dropped him at Putney."
+
+"Dropped him at Putney!" he repeated.  "I've no recollection of
+doing so."
+
+"He has," I answered.  "You ask him about it.  He's full of it."
+
+Everybody said he never would get married; that it was absurd to
+suppose he ever would remember the day, the church, and the girl,
+all in one morning; that if he did get as far as the altar he would
+forget what he had come for, and would give the bride away to his
+own best man.  Hallyard had an idea that he was already married,
+but that the fact had slipped his memory.  I myself felt sure that
+if he did marry he would forget all about it the next day.
+
+But everybody was wrong.  By some miraculous means the ceremony got
+itself accomplished, so that if Hallyard's idea be correct (as to
+which there is every possibility), there will be trouble.  As for
+my own fears, I dismissed them the moment I saw the lady.  She was
+a charming, cheerful little woman, but did not look the type that
+would let him forget all about it.
+
+I had not seen him since his marriage, which had happened in the
+spring.  Working my way back from Scotland by easy stages, I
+stopped for a few days at Scarboro'.  After table d'hote I put on
+my mackintosh, and went out for a walk.  It was raining hard, but
+after a month in Scotland one does not notice English weather, and
+I wanted some air.  Struggling along the dark beach with my head
+against the wind, I stumbled over a crouching figure, seeking to
+shelter itself a little from the storm under the lee of the Spa
+wall.
+
+I expected it to swear at me, but it seemed too broken-spirited to
+mind anything.
+
+"I beg your pardon," I said.  "I did not see you."
+
+At the sound of my voice it started to its feet.
+
+"Is that you, old man?" it cried.
+
+"McQuae!" I exclaimed.
+
+"By Jove!" he said, "I was never so glad to see a man in all my
+life before."
+
+And he nearly shook my hand off.
+
+"But what in thunder!" I said, "are you doing here?  Why, you're
+drenched to the skin."
+
+He was dressed in flannels and a tennis-coat.
+
+"Yes," he answered.  "I never thought it would rain.  It was a
+lovely morning."
+
+I began to fear he had overworked himself into a brain fever.
+
+"Why don't you go home?" I asked.
+
+"I can't," he replied.  "I don't know where I live.  I've forgotten
+the address."
+
+"For heaven's sake," he said, "take me somewhere, and give me
+something to eat.  I'm literally starving."
+
+"Haven't you any money?" I asked him, as we turned towards the
+hotel.
+
+"Not a sou," he answered.  "We got in here from York, the wife and
+I, about eleven.  We left our things at the station, and started to
+hunt for apartments.  As soon as we were fixed, I changed my
+clothes and came out for a walk, telling Maud I should be back at
+one to lunch.  Like a fool, I never took the address, and never
+noticed the way I was going.
+
+"It's an awful business," he continued.  "I don't see how I'm ever
+going to find her.  I hoped she might stroll down to the Spa in the
+evening, and I've been hanging about the gates ever since six.  I
+hadn't the threepence to go in."
+
+"But have you no notion of the sort of street or the kind of house
+it was?" I enquired.
+
+"Not a ghost," he replied.  "I left it all to Maud, and didn't
+trouble."
+
+"Have you tried any of the lodging-houses?" I asked.
+
+"Tried!" he exclaimed bitterly.  "I've been knocking at doors, and
+asking if Mrs. McQuae lives there steadily all the afternoon, and
+they slam the door in my face, mostly without answering.  I told a
+policeman--I thought perhaps he might suggest something--but the
+idiot only burst out laughing, and that made me so mad that I gave
+him a black eye, and had to cut.  I expect they're on the lookout
+for me now."
+
+"I went into a restaurant," he continued gloomily, "and tried to
+get them to trust me for a steak.  But the proprietress said she'd
+heard that tale before, and ordered me out before all the other
+customers.  I think I'd have drowned myself if you hadn't turned
+up."
+
+After a change of clothes and some supper, he discussed the case
+more calmly, but it was really a serious affair.  They had shut up
+their flat, and his wife's relatives were travelling abroad.  There
+was no one to whom he could send a letter to be forwarded; there
+was no one with whom she would be likely to communicate.  Their
+chance of meeting again in this world appeared remote.
+
+Nor did it seem to me--fond as he was of his wife, and anxious as
+he undoubtedly was to recover her--that he looked forward to the
+actual meeting, should it ever arrive, with any too pleasurable
+anticipation.
+
+"She will think it strange," he murmured reflectively, sitting on
+the edge of the bed, and thoughtfully pulling off his socks.  "She
+is sure to think it strange."
+
+The following day, which was Wednesday, we went to a solicitor, and
+laid the case before him, and he instituted inquiries among all the
+lodging-house keepers in Scarborough, with the result that on
+Thursday afternoon McQuae was restored (after the manner of an
+Adelphi hero in the last act) to his home and wife.
+
+I asked him next time I met him what she had said.
+
+"Oh, much what I expected," he replied.
+
+But he never told me what he had expected.
+
+
+
+A CHARMING WOMAN
+
+
+
+"Not THE MR. --, REALLY?"
+
+In her deep brown eyes there lurked pleased surprise, struggling
+with wonder.  She looked from myself to the friend who introduced
+us with a bewitching smile of incredulity, tempered by hope.
+
+He assured her, adding laughingly, "The only genuine and original,"
+and left us.
+
+"I've always thought of you as a staid, middle-aged man," she said,
+with a delicious little laugh, then added in low soft tones, "I'm
+so very pleased to meet you, really."
+
+The words were conventional, but her voice crept round one like a
+warm caress.
+
+"Come and talk to me," she said, seating herself upon a small
+settee, and making room for me.
+
+I sat down awkwardly beside her, my head buzzing just a little, as
+with one glass too many of champagne.  I was in my literary
+childhood.  One small book and a few essays and criticisms,
+scattered through various obscure periodicals had been as yet my
+only contributions to current literature.  The sudden discovery
+that I was the Mr. Anybody, and that charming women thought of me,
+and were delighted to meet me, was a brain-disturbing thought.
+
+"And it was really you who wrote that clever book?" she continued,
+"and all those brilliant things, in the magazines and journals.
+Oh, it must be delightful to be clever."
+
+She gave breath to a little sigh of vain regret that went to my
+heart.  To console her I commenced a laboured compliment, but she
+stopped me with her fan.  On after reflection I was glad she had--
+it would have been one of those things better expressed otherwise.
+
+"I know what you are going to say," she laughed, "but don't.
+Besides, from you I should not know quite how to take it.  You can
+be so satirical."
+
+I tried to look as though I could be, but in her case would not.
+
+She let her ungloved hand rest for an instant upon mine.  Had she
+left it there for two, I should have gone down on my knees before
+her, or have stood on my head at her feet--have made a fool of
+myself in some way or another before the whole room full.  She
+timed it to a nicety.
+
+"I don't want YOU to pay me compliments," she said, "I want us to
+be friends.  Of course, in years, I'm old enough to be your
+mother."  (By the register I should say she might have been thirty-
+two, but looked twenty-six.  I was twenty-three, and I fear foolish
+for my age.)  "But you know the world, and you're so different to
+the other people one meets.  Society is so hollow and artificial;
+don't you find it so?  You don't know how I long sometimes to get
+away from it, to know someone to whom I could show my real self,
+who would understand me.  You'll come and see me sometimes--I'm
+always at home on Wednesdays--and let me talk to you, won't you,
+and you must tell me all your clever thoughts."
+
+It occurred to me that, maybe, she would like to hear a few of them
+there and then, but before I had got well started a hollow Society
+man came up and suggested supper, and she was compelled to leave
+me.  As she disappeared, however, in the throng, she looked back
+over her shoulder with a glance half pathetic, half comic, that I
+understood.  It said, "Pity me, I've got to be bored by this vapid,
+shallow creature," and I did.
+
+I sought her through all the rooms before I went.  I wished to
+assure her of my sympathy and support.  I learned, however, from
+the butler that she had left early, in company with the hollow
+Society man.
+
+A fortnight later I ran against a young literary friend in Regent
+Street, and we lunched together at the Monico.
+
+"I met such a charming woman last night," he said, "a Mrs. Clifton
+Courtenay, a delightful woman."
+
+"Oh, do YOU know her?" I exclaimed.  "Oh, we're very old friends.
+She's always wanting me to go and see her.  I really must."
+
+"Oh, I didn't know YOU knew her," he answered.  Somehow, the fact
+of my knowing her seemed to lessen her importance in his eyes.  But
+soon he recovered his enthusiasm for her.
+
+"A wonderfully clever woman," he continued.  "I'm afraid I
+disappointed her a little though."  He said this, however, with a
+laugh that contradicted his words.  "She would not believe I was
+THE Mr. Smith.  She imagined from my book that I was quite an old
+man."
+
+I could see nothing in my friend's book myself to suggest that the
+author was, of necessity, anything over eighteen.  The mistake
+appeared to me to display want of acumen, but it had evidently
+pleased him greatly.
+
+"I felt quite sorry for her," he went on, "chained to that
+bloodless, artificial society in which she lives.  'You can't
+tell,' she said to me, 'how I long to meet someone to whom I could
+show my real self--who would understand me.'  I'm going to see her
+on Wednesday."
+
+I went with him.  My conversation with her was not as confidential
+as I had anticipated, owing to there being some eighty other people
+present in a room intended for the accommodation of eight; but
+after surging round for an hour in hot and aimless misery--as very
+young men at such gatherings do, knowing as a rule only the man who
+has brought them, and being unable to find him--I contrived to get
+a few words with her.
+
+She greeted me with a smile, in the light of which I at once forgot
+my past discomfort, and let her fingers rest, with delicious
+pressure, for a moment upon mine.
+
+"How good of you to keep your promise," she said.  "These people
+have been tiring me so.  Sit here, and tell me all you have been
+doing."
+
+She listened for about ten seconds, and then interrupted me with -
+
+"And that clever friend of yours that you came with.  I met him at
+dear Lady Lennon's last week.  Has HE written anything?"
+
+I explained to her that he had.
+
+"Tell me about it?" she said.  "I get so little time for reading,
+and then I only care to read the books that help me," and she gave
+me a grateful look more eloquent than words.
+
+I described the work to her, and wishing to do my friend justice I
+even recited a few of the passages upon which, as I knew, he
+especially prided himself.
+
+One sentence in particular seemed to lay hold of her.  "A good
+woman's arms round a man's neck is a lifebelt thrown out to him
+from heaven."
+
+"How beautiful!" she murmured.  "Say it again."
+
+I said it again, and she repeated it after me.
+
+Then a noisy old lady swooped down upon her, and I drifted away
+into a corner, where I tried to look as if I were enjoying myself,
+and failed.
+
+Later on, feeling it time to go, I sought my friend, and found him
+talking to her in a corner.  I approached and waited.  They were
+discussing the latest east-end murder.  A drunken woman had been
+killed by her husband, a hard-working artizan, who had been
+maddened by the ruin of his home.
+
+"Ah," she was saying, "what power a woman has to drag a man down or
+lift him up.  I never read a case in which a woman is concerned
+without thinking of those beautiful lines of yours:  'A good
+woman's arms round a man's neck is a lifebelt thrown out to him
+from heaven.'"
+
+
+Opinions differed concerning her religion and politics.  Said the
+Low Church parson:  "An earnest Christian woman, sir, of that
+unostentatious type that has always been the bulwark of our Church.
+I am proud to know that woman, and I am proud to think that poor
+words of mine have been the humble instrument to wean that true
+woman's heart from the frivolities of fashion, and to fix her
+thoughts upon higher things.  A good Churchwoman, sir, a good
+Churchwoman, in the best sense of the word."
+
+Said the pale aristocratic-looking young Abbe to the Comtesse, the
+light of old-world enthusiasm shining from his deep-set eyes:  "I
+have great hopes for our dear friend.  She finds it hard to sever
+the ties of time and love.  We are all weak, but her heart turns
+towards our mother Church as a child, though suckled among
+strangers, yearns after many years for the bosom that has borne it.
+We have spoken, and I, even I, may be the voice in the wilderness
+leading the lost sheep back to the fold."
+
+Said Sir Harry Bennett, the great Theosophist lecturer, writing to
+a friend:  "A singularly gifted woman, and a woman evidently
+thirsting for the truth.  A woman capable of willing her own life.
+A woman not afraid of thought and reason, a lover of wisdom.  I
+have talked much with her at one time or another, and I have found
+her grasp my meaning with a quickness of perception quite unusual
+in my experience; and the arguments I have let fall, I am
+convinced, have borne excellent fruit.  I look forward to her
+becoming, at no very distant date, a valued member of our little
+band.  Indeed, without betraying confidence, I may almost say I
+regard her conversion as an accomplished fact."
+
+Colonel Maxim always spoke of her as "a fair pillar of the State."
+
+"With the enemy in our midst," said the florid old soldier, "it
+behoves every true man--aye, and every true woman--to rally to the
+defence of the country; and all honour, say I, to noble ladies such
+as Mrs. Clifton Courtenay, who, laying aside their natural
+shrinking from publicity, come forward in such a crisis as the
+present to combat the forces of disorder and disloyalty now rampant
+in the land."
+
+"But," some listener would suggest, "I gathered from young Jocelyn
+that Mrs. Clifton Courtenay held somewhat advanced views on social
+and political questions."
+
+"Jocelyn," the Colonel would reply with scorn; "pah!  There may
+have been a short space of time during which the fellow's long hair
+and windy rhetoric impressed her.  But I flatter myself I've put MY
+spoke in Mr. Jocelyn's wheel.  Why, damme, sir, she's consented to
+stand for Grand Dame of the Bermondsey Branch of the Primrose
+League next year.  What's Jocelyn to say to that, the scoundrel!"
+
+What Jocelyn said was:-
+
+"I know the woman is weak.  But I do not blame her; I pity her.
+When the time comes, as soon it will, when woman is no longer a
+puppet, dancing to the threads held by some brainless man--when a
+woman is not threatened with social ostracism for daring to follow
+her own conscience instead of that of her nearest male relative--
+then will be the time to judge her.  It is not for me to betray the
+confidence reposed in me by a suffering woman, but you can tell
+that interesting old fossil, Colonel Maxim, that he and the other
+old women of the Bermondsey Branch of the Primrose League may elect
+Mrs. Clifton Courtenay for their President, and make the most of
+it; they have only got the outside of the woman.  Her heart is
+beating time to the tramp of an onward-marching people; her soul's
+eyes are straining for the glory of a coming dawn."
+
+But they all agreed she was a charming woman.
+
+
+
+WHIBLEY'S SPIRIT
+
+
+
+I never met it myself, but I knew Whibley very well indeed, so that
+I came to hear a goodish deal about it.
+
+It appeared to be devoted to Whibley, and Whibley was extremely
+fond of it.  Personally I am not interested in spirits, and no
+spirit has ever interested itself in me.  But I have friends whom
+they patronise, and my mind is quite open on the subject.  Of
+Whibley's Spirit I wish to speak with every possible respect.  It
+was, I am willing to admit, as hard-working and conscientious a
+spirit as any one could wish to live with.  The only thing I have
+to say against it is that it had no sense.
+
+It came with a carved cabinet that Whibley had purchased in Wardour
+Street for old oak, but which, as a matter of fact, was chestnut
+wood, manufactured in Germany, and at first was harmless enough,
+saying nothing but "Yes!" or "No!" and that only when spoken to.
+
+Whibley would amuse himself of an evening asking it questions,
+being careful to choose tolerably simple themes, such as, "Are you
+there?" (to which the Spirit would sometimes answer "Yes!" and
+sometimes "No!")  "Can you hear me?"  "Are you happy?"--and so on.
+The Spirit made the cabinet crack--three times for "Yes" and twice
+for "No."  Now and then it would reply both "Yes!" and "No!" to the
+same question, which Whibley attributed to over-scrupulousness.
+When nobody asked it anything it would talk to itself, repeating
+"Yes!"  "No!"  "No!"  "Yes!" over and over again in an aimless,
+lonesome sort of a way that made you feel sorry for it.
+
+After a while Whibley bought a table, and encouraged it to launch
+out into more active conversation.  To please Whibley, I assisted
+at some of the earlier seances, but during my presence it
+invariably maintained a reticence bordering on positive dulness.  I
+gathered from Whibley that it disliked me, thinking that I was
+unsympathetic.  The complaint was unjust; I was not unsympathetic,
+at least not at the commencement.  I came to hear it talk, and I
+wanted to hear it talk; I would have listened to it by the hour.
+What tired me was its slowness in starting, and its foolishness
+when it had started, in using long words that it did not know how
+to spell.  I remember on one occasion, Whibley, Jobstock (Whibley's
+partner), and myself, sitting for two hours, trying to understand
+what the thing meant by "H-e-s-t-u-r-n-e-m-y-s-f-e-a-r."  It used
+no stops whatever.  It never so much as hinted where one sentence
+ended and another began.  It never even told us when it came to a
+proper name.  Its idea of an evening's conversation was to plump
+down a hundred or so vowels and consonants in front of you and
+leave you to make whatever sense out of them you could.
+
+We fancied at first it was talking about somebody named Hester (it
+had spelt Hester with a "u" before we allowed a margin for
+spelling), and we tried to work the sentence out on that basis,
+"Hester enemies fear," we thought it might be.  Whibley had a niece
+named Hester, and we decided the warning had reference to her.  But
+whether she was our enemy, and we were to fear her, or whether we
+had to fear her enemies (and, if so, who were they?), or whether it
+was our enemies who were to be frightened by Hester, or her
+enemies, or enemies generally, still remained doubtful.  We asked
+the table if it meant the first suggestion, and it said "No."  We
+asked what it did mean, and it said "Yes."
+
+This answer annoyed me, but Whibley explained that the Spirit was
+angry with us for our stupidity (which seemed quaint).  He informed
+us that it always said first "No," and then "Yes," when it was
+angry, and as it was his Spirit, and we were in his house, we kept
+our feelings to ourselves and started afresh.
+
+This time we abandoned the "Hestur" theory altogether.  Jobstock
+suggested "Haste" for the first word, and, thought the Spirit might
+have gone on phonetically.
+
+"Haste! you are here, Miss Sfear!" was what he made of it.
+
+Whibley asked him sarcastically if he'd kindly explain what that
+meant.
+
+I think Jobstock was getting irritable.  We had been sitting
+cramped up round a wretched little one-legged table all the
+evening, and this was almost the first bit of gossip we had got out
+of it.  To further excuse him, it should also be explained that the
+gas had been put out by Whibley, and that the fire had gone out of
+its own accord.  He replied that it was hard labour enough to find
+out what the thing said without having to make sense of it.
+
+"It can't spell," he added, "and it's got a nasty, sulky temper.
+If it was my spirit I'd hire another spirit to kick it."
+
+Whibley was one of the mildest little men I ever knew, but chaff or
+abuse of his Spirit roused the devil in him, and I feared we were
+going to have a scene.  Fortunately, I was able to get his mind
+back to the consideration of "Hesturnemysfear" before anything
+worse happened than a few muttered remarks about the laughter of
+fools, and want of reverence for sacred subjects being the sign of
+a shallow mind.
+
+We tried "He's stern," and "His turn," and the "fear of
+Hesturnemy," and tried to think who "Hesturnemy" might be.  Three
+times we went over the whole thing again from the beginning, which
+meant six hundred and six tiltings of the table, and then suddenly
+the explanation struck me--"Eastern Hemisphere."
+
+Whibley had asked it for any information it might possess
+concerning his wife's uncle, from whom he had not heard for months,
+and that apparently was its idea of an address.
+
+The fame of Whibley's Spirit became noised abroad, with the result
+that Whibley was able to command the willing service of more
+congenial assistants, and Jobstock and myself were dismissed.  But
+we bore no malice.
+
+Under these more favourable conditions the Spirit plucked up
+wonderfully, and talked everybody's head off.  It could never have
+been a cheerful companion, however, for its conversation was
+chiefly confined to warnings and prognostications of evil.  About
+once a fortnight Whibley would drop round on me, in a friendly way,
+to tell me that I was to beware of a man who lived in a street
+beginning with a "C," or to inform me that if I would go to a town
+on the coast where there were three churches I should meet someone
+who would do me an irreparable injury, and, that I did not rush off
+then and there in search of that town he regarded as flying in the
+face of Providence.
+
+In its passion for poking its ghostly nose into other people's
+affairs it reminded me of my earthly friend Poppleton.  Nothing
+pleased it better than being appealed to for aid and advice, and
+Whibley, who was a perfect slave to it, would hunt half over the
+parish for people in trouble and bring them to it.
+
+It would direct ladies, eager for divorce court evidence, to go to
+the third house from the corner of the fifth street, past such and
+such a church or public-house (it never would give a plain,
+straightforward address), and ring the bottom bell but one twice.
+They would thank it effusively, and next morning would start to
+find the fifth street past the church, and would ring the bottom
+bell but one of the third house from the corner twice, and a man in
+his shirt sleeves would come to the door and ask them what they
+wanted.
+
+They could not tell what they wanted, they did not know themselves,
+and the man would use bad language, and slam the door in their
+faces.
+
+Then they would think that perhaps the Spirit meant the fifth
+street the other way, or the third house from the opposite corner,
+and would try again, with still more unpleasant results.
+
+One July I met Whibley, mooning disconsolately along Princes
+Street, Edinburgh.
+
+"Hullo!" I exclaimed, "what are you doing here?  I thought you were
+busy over that School Board case."
+
+"Yes," he answered, "I ought really to be in London, but the truth
+is I'm rather expecting something to happen down here."
+
+"Oh!" I said, "and what's that?"
+
+"Well," he replied hesitatingly, as though he would rather not talk
+about it, "I don't exactly know yet."
+
+"You've come from London to Edinburgh, and don't know what you've
+come for!" I cried.
+
+"Well, you see," he said, still more reluctantly, as it seemed to
+me, "it was Maria's idea; she wished--"
+
+"Maria!" I interrupted, looking perhaps a little sternly at him,
+"who's Maria?"  (His wife's name I knew was Emily Georgina Anne.)
+
+"Oh!  I forgot," he explained; "she never would tell her name
+before you, would she?  It's the Spirit, you know."
+
+"Oh! that," I said, "it's she that has sent you here.  Didn't she
+tell you what for?"
+
+"No," he answered, "that's what worries me.  All she would say was,
+'Go to Edinburgh--something will happen.'"
+
+"And how long are you going to remain here?" I inquired.
+
+"I don't know," he replied.  "I've been here a week already, and
+Jobstock writes quite angrily.  I wouldn't have come if Maria
+hadn't been so urgent.  She repeated it three evenings running."
+
+I hardly knew what to do.  The little man was so dreadfully in
+earnest about the business that one could not argue much with him.
+
+"You are sure," I said, after thinking a while, "that this Maria is
+a good Spirit?  There are all sorts going about, I'm told.  You're
+sure this isn't the spirit of some deceased lunatic, playing the
+fool with you?"
+
+"I've thought of that," he admitted.  "Of course that might be so.
+If nothing happens soon I shall almost begin to suspect it."
+
+"Well, I should certainly make some inquiries into its character
+before I trusted it any further," I answered, and left him.
+
+About a month later I ran against him outside the Law Courts.
+
+"It was all right about Maria; something did happen in Edinburgh
+while I was there.  That very morning I met you one of my oldest
+clients died quite suddenly at his house at Queensferry, only a few
+miles outside the city."
+
+"I'm glad of that," I answered, "I mean, of course, for Maria's
+sake.  It was lucky you went then."
+
+"Well, not altogether," he replied, "at least, not in a worldly
+sense.  He left his affairs in a very complicated state, and his
+eldest son went straight up to London to consult me about them,
+and, not finding me there, and time being important, went to
+Kebble.  I was rather disappointed when I got back and heard about
+it."
+
+"Umph!" I said; "she's not a smart spirit, anyway."
+
+"No," he answered, "perhaps not.  But, you see, something did
+really happen."
+
+After that his affection for "Maria" increased tenfold, while her
+attachment to himself became a burden to his friends.  She grew too
+big for her table, and, dispensing with all mechanical
+intermediaries, talked to him direct.  She followed him everywhere.
+Mary's lamb couldn't have been a bigger nuisance.  She would even
+go with him into the bedroom, and carry on long conversations with
+him in the middle of the night.  His wife objected; she said it
+seemed hardly decent, but there was no keeping her out.
+
+She turned up with him at picnics and Christmas parties.  Nobody
+heard her speak to him, but it seemed necessary for him to reply to
+her aloud, and to see him suddenly get up from his chair and slip
+away to talk earnestly to nothing in a corner disturbed the
+festivities.
+
+"I should really be glad," he once confessed to me, "to get a
+little time to myself.  She means kindly, but it IS a strain.  And
+then the others don't like it.  It makes them nervous.  I can see
+it does."
+
+One evening she caused quite a scene at the club.  Whibley had been
+playing whist, with the Major for a partner.  At the end of the
+game the Major, leaning across the table toward him, asked, in a
+tone of deadly calm, "May I inquire, sir, whether there was any
+earthly reason" (he emphasised "earthly") "for your following my
+lead of spades with your only trump?"
+
+"I--I--am very sorry, Major," replied Whibley apologetically.  "I--
+I--somehow felt I--I ought to play that queen."
+
+"Entirely your own inspiration, or suggested?" persisted the Major,
+who had, of course, heard of "Maria."
+
+Whibley admitted the play had been suggested to him.  The Major
+rose from the table.
+
+"Then, sir," said he, with concentrated indignation, "I decline to
+continue this game.  A human fool I can tolerate for a partner, but
+if I am to be hampered by a damned spirit--"
+
+"You've no right to say that," cried Whibley hotly.
+
+"I apologise," returned the Major coldly; "we will say a blessed
+spirit.  I decline to play whist with spirits of any kind; and I
+advise you, sir, if you intend giving many exhibitions with the
+lady, first to teach her the rudiments of the game."
+
+Saying which the Major put on his hat and left the club, and I made
+Whibley drink a stiff glass of brandy and water, and sent him and
+"Maria" home in a cab.
+
+Whibley got rid of "Maria" at last.  It cost him in round figures
+about eight thousand pounds, but his family said it was worth it.
+
+A Spanish Count hired a furnished house a few doors from Whibley's,
+and one evening he was introduced to Whibley, and came home and had
+a chat with him.  Whibley told him about "Maria," and the Count
+quite fell in love with her.  He said that if only he had had such
+a spirit to help and advise him, it might have altered his whole
+life.
+
+He was the first man who had ever said a kind word about the
+spirit, and Whibley loved him for it.  The Count seemed as though
+he could never see enough of Whibley after that evening, and the
+three of them--Whibley, the Count, and "Maria"--would sit up half
+the night talking together.
+
+The precise particulars I never heard.  Whibley was always very
+reticent on the matter.  Whether "Maria" really did exist, and the
+Count deliberately set to work to bamboozle her (she was fool
+enough for anything), or whether she was a mere hallucination of
+Whibley's, and the man tricked Whibley by "hypnotic suggestions"
+(as I believe it is called), I am not prepared to say.  The only
+thing certain is that "Maria" convinced Whibley that the Count had
+discovered a secret gold mine in Peru.  She said she knew all about
+it, and counselled Whibley to beg the Count to let him put a few
+thousands into the working of it.  "Maria," it appeared, had known
+the Count from his boyhood, and could answer for it that he was the
+most honourable man in all South America.  Possibly enough he was.
+
+The Count was astonished to find that Whibley knew all about his
+mine.  Eight thousand pounds was needed to start the workings, but
+he had not mentioned it to any one, as he wanted to keep the whole
+thing to himself, and thought he could save the money on his
+estates in Portugal.  However, to oblige "Maria," he would let
+Whibley supply the money.  Whibley supplied it--in cash, and no one
+has ever seen the Count since.
+
+That broke up Whibley's faith in "Maria," and a sensible doctor,
+getting hold of him threatened to prescribe a lunatic asylum for
+him if ever he found him carrying on with any spirits again.  That
+completed the cure.
+
+
+
+THE MAN WHO WENT WRONG
+
+
+
+I first met Jack Burridge nearly ten years ago on a certain North-
+country race-course.
+
+The saddling bell had just rung for the chief event of the day.  I
+was sauntering along with my hands in my pockets, more interested
+in the crowd than in the race, when a sporting friend, crossing on
+his way to the paddock, seized me by the arm and whispered hoarsely
+in my ear:-
+
+"Put your shirt on Mrs. Waller."
+
+"Put my -?" I began.
+
+"Put your shirt on Mrs. Waller," he repeated still more
+impressively, and disappeared in the throng.
+
+I stared after him in blank amazement.  Why should I put my shirt
+on Mrs. Waller?  Even if it would fit a lady.  And how about
+myself?
+
+I was passing the grand stand, and, glancing up, I saw "Mrs.
+Waller, twelve to one," chalked on a bookmaker's board.  Then it
+dawned upon me that "Mrs. Waller" was a horse, and, thinking
+further upon the matter, I evolved the idea that my friend's
+advice, expressed in more becoming language, was "Back 'Mrs.
+Waller' for as much as you can possibly afford."
+
+"Thank you," I said to myself, "I have backed cast-iron certainties
+before.  Next time I bet upon a horse I shall make the selection by
+shutting my eyes and putting a pin through the card."
+
+But the seed had taken root.  My friend's words surged in my brain.
+The birds passing overhead twittered, "Put your shirt on 'Mrs.
+Waller.'"
+
+I reasoned with myself.  I reminded myself of my few former
+ventures.  But the craving to put, if not my shirt, at all events
+half a sovereign on "Mrs. Waller" only grew the stronger the more
+strongly I battled against it.  I felt that if "Mrs. Waller" won
+and I had nothing on her, I should reproach myself to my dying day.
+
+I was on the other side of the course.  There was no time to get
+back to the enclosure.  The horses were already forming for the
+start.  A few yards off, under a white umbrella, an outside
+bookmaker was shouting his final prices in stentorian tones.  He
+was a big, genial-looking man, with an honest red face.
+
+"What price 'Mrs. Waller'?" I asked him.
+
+"Fourteen to one," he answered, "and good luck to you."
+
+I handed him half a sovereign, and he wrote me out a ticket.  I
+crammed it into my waistcoat pocket, and hurried off to see the
+race.  To my intense astonishment "Mrs. Waller" won.  The novel
+sensation of having backed the winner so excited me that I forgot
+all about my money, and it was not until a good hour afterwards
+that I recollected my bet.
+
+Then I started off to search for the man under the white umbrella.
+I went to where I thought I had left him, but no white umbrella
+could I find.
+
+Consoling myself with the reflection that my loss served me right
+for having been fool enough to trust an outside "bookie," I turned
+on my heel and began to make my way back to my seat.  Suddenly a
+voice hailed me:-
+
+"Here you are, sir.  It's Jack Burridge you want.  Over here, sir."
+
+I looked round, and there was Jack Burridge at my elbow.
+
+"I saw you looking about, sir," he said, "but I could not make you
+hear.  You was looking the wrong side of the tent."
+
+It was pleasant to find that his honest face had not belied him.
+
+"It is very good of you," I said; "I had given up all hopes of
+seeing you.  Or," I added with a smile, "my seven pounds."
+
+"Seven pun' ten," he corrected me; "you're forgetting your own thin
+'un."
+
+He handed me the money and went back to his stand.
+
+On my way into the town I came across him again.  A small crowd was
+collected, thoughtfully watching a tramp knocking about a
+miserable-looking woman.
+
+Jack, pushing to the front, took in the scene and took off his coat
+in the same instant.
+
+"Now then, my fine old English gentleman," he sang out, "come and
+have a try at me for a change."
+
+The tramp was a burly ruffian, and I have seen better boxers than
+Jack.  He got himself a black eye, and a nasty cut over the lip,
+before he hardly knew where he was.  But in spite of that--and a
+good deal more--he stuck to his man and finished him.
+
+At the end, as he helped his adversary up, I heard him say to the
+fellow in a kindly whisper:-
+
+"You're too good a sort, you know, to whollop a woman.  Why, you
+very near give me a licking.  You must have forgot yourself,
+matey."
+
+The fellow interested me.  I waited and walked on with him.  He
+told me about his home in London, at Mile End--about his old father
+and mother, his little brothers and sisters--and what he was saving
+up to do for them.  Kindliness oozed from every pore in his skin.
+
+Many that we met knew him, and all, when they saw his round, red
+face, smiled unconsciously.  At the corner of the High Street a
+pale-faced little drudge of a girl passed us, saying as she slipped
+by "Good-evening, Mr. Burridge."
+
+He made a dart and caught her by the shoulder.
+
+"And how is father?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, if you please, Mr. Burridge, he is out again.  All the mills
+is closed," answered the child.
+
+"And mother?"
+
+"She don't get no better, sir."
+
+"And who's keeping you all?"
+
+"Oh, if you please, sir, Jimmy's earning something now," replied
+the mite.
+
+He took a couple of sovereigns from his waistcoat pocket, and
+closed the child's hand upon them.
+
+"That's all right, my lass, that's all right," he said, stopping
+her stammering thanks.  "You write to me if things don't get
+better.  You know where to find Jack Burridge."
+
+Strolling about the streets in the evening, I happened to pass the
+inn where he was staying.  The parlour window was open, and out
+into the misty night his deep, cheery voice, trolling forth an old-
+fashioned drinking song, came rolling like a wind, cleansing the
+corners of one's heart with its breezy humanness.  He was sitting
+at the head of the table surrounded by a crowd of jovial cronies.
+I lingered for a while watching the scene.  It made the world
+appear a less sombre dwelling-place than I had sometimes pictured
+it.
+
+I determined, on my return to London, to look him up, and
+accordingly one evening started to find the little by-street off
+the Mile End Road in which he lived.  As I turned the corner he
+drove up in his dog-cart; it was a smart turn-out.  On the seat
+beside him sat a neat, withered little old woman, whom he
+introduced to me as his mother.
+
+"I tell 'im it's a fine gell as 'e oughter 'ave up 'ere aside 'im,"
+said the old lady, preparing to dismount, "an old woman like me
+takes all the paint off the show."
+
+"Get along with yer," he replied laughingly, jumping down and
+handing the reins to the lad who had been waiting, "you could give
+some of the young uns points yet, mother.  I allus promised the old
+lady as she should ride behind her own 'oss one day," he continued,
+turning to me, "didn't I, mother?"
+
+"Ay, ay," replied the old soul, as she hobbled nimbly up the steps,
+"ye're a good son, Jack, ye're a good son."
+
+He led the way into the parlour.  As he entered every face
+lightened up with pleasure, a harmony of joyous welcome greeted
+him.  The old hard world had been shut out with the slam of the
+front door.  I seemed to have wandered into Dickensland.  The red-
+faced man with the small twinkling eyes and the lungs of leather
+loomed before me, a large, fat household fairy.  From his capacious
+pockets came forth tobacco for the old father; a huge bunch of hot-
+house grapes for a neighbour's sickly child, who was stopping with
+them; a book of Henty's--beloved of boys--for a noisy youngster who
+called him "uncle"; a bottle of port wine for a wan, elderly woman
+with a swollen face--his widowed sister-in-law, as I subsequently
+learned; sweets enough for the baby (whose baby I don't know) to
+make it sick for a week; and a roll of music for his youngest
+sister.
+
+"We're a-going to make a lady of her," he said, drawing the child's
+shy face against his gaudy waistcoat, and running his coarse hand
+through her pretty curls; "and she shall marry a jockey when she
+grows up."
+
+After supper he brewed some excellent whisky punch, and insisted
+upon the old lady joining us, which she eventually did with much
+coughing and protestation; but I noticed that she finished the
+tumblerful.  For the children he concocted a marvellous mixture,
+which he called an "eye-composer," the chief ingredients being hot
+lemonade, ginger wine, sugar, oranges, and raspberry vinegar.  It
+had the desired effect.
+
+I stayed till late, listening to his inexhaustible fund of stories.
+Over most of them he laughed with us himself--a great gusty laugh
+that made the cheap glass ornaments upon the mantelpiece to
+tremble; but now and then a recollection came to him that spread a
+sudden gravity across his jovial face, bringing a curious quaver
+into his deep voice.
+
+Their tongues a little loosened by the punch, the old folks would
+have sung his praises to the verge of tediousness had he not almost
+sternly interrupted them.
+
+"Shut up, mother," he cried at last, quite gruffly, "what I does I
+does to please myself.  I likes to see people comfortable about me.
+If they wasn't, it's me as would be more upset than them."
+
+I did not see him again for nearly two years.  Then one October
+evening, strolling about the East End, I met him coming out of a
+little Chapel in the Burdett Road.  He was so changed that I should
+not have known him had not I overheard a woman as she passed him
+say, "Good-evening, Mr. Burridge."
+
+A pair of bushy side-whiskers had given to his red face an
+aggressively respectable appearance.  He was dressed in an ill-
+fitting suit of black, and carried an umbrella in one hand and a
+book in the other.
+
+In some mysterious way he managed to look both thinner and shorter
+than my recollection of him.  Altogether, he suggested to me the
+idea that he himself--the real man--had by some means or other been
+extracted, leaving only his shrunken husk behind.  The genial
+juices of humanity had been squeezed out of him.
+
+"Not Jack Burridge!" I exclaimed, confronting him in astonishment.
+
+His little eyes wandered shiftily up and down the street.  "No,
+sir," he replied (his tones had lost their windy boisterousness--a
+hard, metallic voice spoke to me), "not the one as you used to
+know, praise be the Lord."
+
+"And have you given up the old business?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, sir," he replied, "that's all over; I've been a vile sinner
+in my time, God forgive me for it.  But, thank Heaven, I have
+repented in time."
+
+"Come and have a drink," I said, slipping my arm through his, "and
+tell me all about it."
+
+He disengaged himself from me, firmly but gently.  "You mean well,
+sir," he said, "but I have given up the drink."
+
+Evidently he would have been rid of me, but a literary man,
+scenting material for his stockpot, is not easily shaken off.  I
+asked after the old folks, and if they were still stopping with
+him.
+
+"Yes," he said, "for the present.  Of course, a man can't be
+expected to keep people for ever; so many mouths to fill is hard
+work these times, and everybody sponges on a man just because he's
+good-natured."
+
+"And how are you getting on?" I asked.
+
+"Tolerably well, thank you, sir.  The Lord provides for His
+servants," he replied with a smug smile.  "I have got a little shop
+now in the Commercial Road."
+
+"Whereabouts?" I persisted.  "I would like to call and see you."
+
+He gave me the address reluctantly, and said he would esteem it a
+great pleasure if I would honour him by a visit, which was a
+palpable lie.
+
+The following afternoon I went.  I found the place to be a
+pawnbroker's shop, and from all appearances he must have been doing
+a very brisk business.  He was out himself attending a temperance
+committee, but his old father was behind the counter, and asked me
+inside.  Though it was a chilly day there was no fire in the
+parlour, and the two old folks sat one each side of the empty
+hearth, silent and sad.  They seemed little more pleased to see me
+than their son, but after a while Mrs. Burridge's natural garrulity
+asserted itself, and we fell into chat.
+
+I asked what had become of his sister-in-law, the lady with the
+swollen face.
+
+"I couldn't rightly tell you, sir," answered the old lady, "she
+ain't livin' with us now.  You see, sir," she continued, "John's
+got different notions to what 'e used to 'ave.  'E don't cotten
+much to them as ain't found grace, and poor Jane never did 'ave
+much religion!"
+
+"And the little one?" I inquired.  "The one with the curls?"
+
+"What, Bessie, sir?" said the old lady.  "Oh, she's out at service,
+sir; John don't think it good for young folks to be idle."
+
+"Your son seems to have changed a good deal, Mrs. Burridge," I
+remarked.
+
+"Ay, sir," she assented, "you may well say that.  It nearly broke
+my 'art at fust; everythin' so different to what it 'ad been.  Not
+as I'd stand in the boy's light.  If our being a bit uncomfortable
+like in this world is a-going to do 'im any good in the next me and
+father ain't the ones to begrudge it, are we, old man?"
+
+The "old man" concurred grumpily.
+
+"Was it a sudden conversion?" I asked.  "How did it come about?"
+
+"It was a young woman as started 'im off," explained the old lady.
+"She come round to our place one day a-collectin' for somethin' or
+other, and Jack, in 'is free-'anded way, 'e give 'er a five-pun'
+note.  Next week she come agen for somethin' else, and stopped and
+talked to 'im about 'is soul in the passage.  She told 'im as 'e
+was a-goin' straight to 'ell, and that 'e oughter give up the
+bookmakin' and settle down to a respec'ble, God-fearin' business.
+At fust 'e only laughed, but she lammed in tracts at 'im full of
+the most awful language; and one day she fetched 'im round to one
+of them revivalist chaps, as fair settled 'im.
+
+"'E ain't never been his old self since then.  'E give up the
+bettin' and bought this 'ere, though what's the difference blessed
+if I can see.  It makes my 'eart ache, it do, to 'ear my Jack a-
+beatin' down the poor people--and it ain't like 'im.  It went agen
+'is grain at fust, I could see; but they told him as 'ow it was
+folks's own fault that they was poor, and as 'ow it was the will of
+God, because they was a drinkin', improvident lot.
+
+"Then they made 'im sign the pledge.  'E'd allus been used to 'is
+glass, Jack 'ad, and I think as knockin' it off 'ave soured 'im a
+bit--seems as if all the sperit 'ad gone out of 'im--and of course
+me and father 'ave 'ad to give up our little drop too.  Then they
+told 'im as 'e must give up smokin'- that was another way of goin'
+straight to 'ell--and that ain't made 'im any the more cheerful
+like, and father misses 'is little bit--don't ye, father?"
+
+"Ay," answered the old fellow savagely; "can't say I thinks much of
+these 'ere folks as is going to heaven; blowed if I don't think
+they'll be a chirpier lot in t'other place."
+
+An angry discussion in the shop interrupted us.  Jack had returned,
+and was threatening an excited woman with the police.  It seemed
+she had miscalculated the date, and had come a day too late with
+her interest.
+
+Having got rid of her, he came into the parlour with the watch in
+his hand.
+
+"It's providential she was late," he said, looking at it; "it's
+worth ten times what I lent on it."
+
+He packed his father back into the shop, and his mother down into
+the kitchen to get his tea, and for a while we sat together
+talking.
+
+I found his conversation a strange mixture of self-laudation,
+showing through a flimsy veil of self-disparagement, and of
+satisfaction at the conviction that he was "saved," combined with
+equally evident satisfaction that most other people weren't--
+somewhat trying, however; and, remembering an appointment, rose to
+go.
+
+He made no effort to stay me, but I could see that he was bursting
+to tell me something.  At last, taking a religious paper from his
+pocket, and pointing to a column, he blurted out:
+
+"You don't take any interest in the Lord's vineyard, I suppose,
+sir?"
+
+I glanced at the part of the paper indicated.  It announced a new
+mission to the Chinese, and heading the subscription list stood the
+name, "Mr. John Burridge, one hundred guineas."
+
+"You subscribe largely, Mr. Burridge," I said, handing him back the
+paper.
+
+He rubbed his big hands together.  "The Lord will repay a
+hundredfold," he answered.
+
+"In which case it's just as well to have a note of the advance down
+in black and white, eh?" I added.
+
+His little eyes looked sharply at me; but he made no reply, and,
+shaking hands, I left him.
+
+
+
+THE HOBBY RIDER
+
+
+
+Bump.  Bump.  Bump-bump.  Bump.
+
+I sat up in bed and listened intently.  It seemed to me as if
+someone with a muffled hammer were trying to knock bricks out of
+the wall.
+
+"Burglars," I said to myself (one assumes, as a matter of course,
+that everything happening in this world after 1 a.m. is due to
+burglars), and I reflected what a curiously literal, but at the
+same time slow and cumbersome, method of housebreaking they had
+adopted.
+
+The bumping continued irregularly, yet uninterruptedly.
+
+My bed was by the window.  I reached out my hand and drew aside a
+corner of the curtain.  The sunlight streamed into the room.  I
+looked at my watch:  it was ten minutes past five.
+
+A most unbusinesslike hour for burglars, I thought.  Why, it will
+be breakfast-time before they get in.
+
+Suddenly there came a crash, and some substance striking against
+the blind fell upon the floor.  I sprang out of bed and threw open
+the window.
+
+A red-haired young gentleman, scantily clad in a sweater and a pair
+of flannel trousers, stood on the lawn below me.
+
+"Good morning," he said cheerily.  "Do you mind throwing me back my
+ball?"
+
+"What ball?" I said.
+
+"My tennis ball," he answered.  "It must be somewhere in the room;
+it went clean through the window."
+
+I found the ball and threw it back to him,
+
+*** Quick tidied and spell-checked to here--page 155 ***
+"What are you doing?" I asked.  "Playing tennis?"
+
+"No," he said.  "I am just practising against the side of the
+house.  It improves your game wonderfully."
+
+"It don't improve my night's rest," I answered somewhat surlily I
+fear.  "I came down here for peace and quiet.  Can't you do it in
+the daytime?"
+
+"Daytime!" he laughed.  "Why it has been daytime for the last two
+hours.  Never mind, I'll go round the other side."
+
+He disappeared round the corner, and set to work at the back, where
+he woke up the dog.  I heard another window smash, followed by a
+sound as of somebody getting up violently in a distant part of the
+house, and shortly afterwards I must have fallen asleep again.
+
+I had come to spend a few weeks at a boarding establishment in
+Deal.  He was the only other young man in the house, and I was
+naturally thrown a good deal upon his society.  He was a pleasant,
+genial young fellow, but he would have been better company had he
+been a little less enthusiastic as regards tennis.
+
+He played tennis ten hours a day on the average.  He got up
+romantic parties to play it by moonlight (when half his time was
+generally taken up in separating his opponents), and godless
+parties to play it on Sundays.  On wet days I have seen him
+practising services by himself in a mackintosh and goloshes.
+
+He had been spending the winter with his people at Tangiers, and I
+asked him how he liked the place.
+
+"Oh, a beast of a hole!" he replied.  "There is not a court
+anywhere in the town.  We tried playing on the roof, but the mater
+thought it dangerous."
+
+Switzerland he had been delighted with.  He counselled me next time
+I went to stay at Zermatt.
+
+"There is a capital court at Zermatt," he said.  "You might almost
+fancy yourself at Wimbledon."
+
+A mutual acquaintance whom I subsequently met told me that at the
+top of the Jungfrau he had said to him, his eyes fixed the while
+upon a small snow plateau enclosed by precipices a few hundred feet
+below them -
+
+"By Jove!  That wouldn't make half a bad little tennis court--that
+flat bit down there.  Have to be careful you didn't run back too
+far."
+
+When he was not playing tennis, or practising tennis, or reading
+about tennis, he was talking about tennis.  Renshaw was the
+prominent figure in the tennis world at that time, and he mentioned
+Renshaw until there grew up within my soul a dark desire to kill
+Renshaw in a quiet, unostentatious way, and bury him.
+
+One drenching afternoon he talked tennis to me for three hours on
+end, referring to Renshaw, so far as I kept count, four thousand
+nine hundred and thirteen times.  After tea he drew his chair to
+the window beside me, and commenced -
+
+"Have you ever noticed how Renshaw--"
+
+I said -
+
+"Suppose someone took a gun--someone who could aim very straight--
+and went out and shot Renshaw till he was quite dead, would you
+tennis players drop him and talk about somebody else?"
+
+"Oh, but who would shoot Renshaw?" he said indignantly.
+
+"Never mind," I said, "supposing someone did?"
+
+"Well, then, there would be his brother," he replied.
+
+I had forgotten that.
+
+"Well, we won't argue about how many of them there are," I said.
+"Suppose someone killed the lot, should we hear less of Renshaw?"
+
+"Never," he replied emphatically.  "Renshaw will always be a name
+wherever tennis is spoken of."
+
+I dread to think what the result might have been had his answer
+been other than it was.
+
+The next year he dropped tennis completely and became an ardent
+amateur photographer, whereupon all his friends implored him to
+return to tennis, and sought to interest him in talk about services
+and returns and volleys, and in anecdotes concerning Renshaw.  But
+he would not heed them.
+
+Whatever he saw, wherever he went, he took.  He took his friends,
+and made them his enemies.  He took babies, and brought despair to
+fond mothers' hearts.  He took young wives, and cast a shadow on
+the home.  Once there was a young man who loved not wisely, so his
+friends thought, but the more they talked against her the more he
+clung to her.  Then a happy idea occurred to the father.  He got
+Begglely to photograph her in seven different positions.
+
+When her lover saw the first, he said -
+
+"What an awful looking thing!  Who did it?"
+
+When Begglely showed him the second, he said -
+
+"But, my dear fellow, it's not a bit like her.  You've made her
+look an ugly old woman."
+
+At the third he said -
+
+"Whatever have you done to her feet?  They can't be that size, you
+know.  It isn't in nature!"
+
+At the fourth he exclaimed -
+
+"But, heavens, man!  Look at the shape you've made her.  Where on
+earth did you get the idea from?"
+
+At the first glimpse of the fifth he staggered.
+
+"Great Scott!" he cried with a shudder, "what a ghastly expression
+you've got into it!  It isn't human!"
+
+Begglely was growing offended, but the father, who was standing by,
+came to his defence.
+
+"It's nothing to do with Begglely," exclaimed the old gentleman
+suavely.  "It can't be HIS fault.  What is a photographer?  Simply
+an instrument in the hands of science.  He arranges his apparatus,
+and whatever is in front of it comes into it."
+
+"No," continued the old gentleman, laying a constrained hand upon
+Begglely, who was about to resume the exhibition, "don't--don't
+show him the other two."
+
+I was sorry for the poor girl, for I believe she really cared for
+the youngster; and as for her looks, they were quite up to the
+average.  But some evil sprite seemed to have got into Begglely's
+camera.  It seized upon defects with the unerring instinct of a
+born critic, and dilated upon them to the obscuration of all
+virtues.  A man with a pimple became a pimple with a man as
+background.  People with strongly marked features became merely
+adjuncts to their own noses.  One man in the neighbourhood had,
+undetected, worn a wig for fourteen years.  Begglely's camera
+discovered the fraud in an instant, and so completely exposed it
+that the man's friends wondered afterwards how the fact ever could
+have escaped them.  The thing seemed to take a pleasure in showing
+humanity at its very worst.  Babies usually came out with an
+expression of low cunning.  Most young girls had to take their
+choice of appearing either as simpering idiots or embryo vixens.
+To mild old ladies it generally gave a look of aggressive cynicism.
+Our vicar, as excellent an old gentleman as ever breathed, Begglely
+presented to us as a beetle-browed savage of a peculiarly low type
+of intellect; while upon the leading solicitor of the town he
+bestowed an expression of such thinly-veiled hypocrisy that few who
+saw the photograph cared ever again to trust him with their
+affairs.
+
+As regards myself I should, perhaps, make no comment, I am possibly
+a prejudiced party.  All I will say, therefore, is that if I in any
+way resemble Begglely's photograph of me, then the critics are
+fully justified in everything they have at any time, anywhere, said
+of me--and more.  Nor, I maintain--though I make no pretence of
+possessing the figure of Apollo--is one of my legs twice the length
+of the other, and neither does it curve upwards.  This I can prove.
+Begglely allowed that an accident had occurred to the negative
+during the process of development, but this explanation does not
+appear on the picture, and I cannot help feeling that an injustice
+has been done me.
+
+His perspective seemed to be governed by no law either human or
+divine.  I have seen a photograph of his uncle and a windmill,
+judging from which I defy any unprejudiced person to say which is
+the bigger, the uncle or the mill.
+
+On one occasion he created quite a scandal in the parish by
+exhibiting a well-known and eminently respectable maiden lady
+nursing a young man on her knee.  The gentleman's face was
+indistinct, and he was dressed in a costume which, upon a man of
+his size--one would have estimated him as rising 6 ft. 4 in.--
+appeared absurdly juvenile.  He had one arm round her neck, and she
+was holding his other hand and smirking.
+
+I, knowing something of Begglely's machine, willingly accepted the
+lady's explanation, which was to the effect that the male in
+question was her nephew, aged eleven; but the uncharitable
+ridiculed this statement, and appearances were certainly against
+her.
+
+It was in the early days of the photographic craze, and an
+inexperienced world was rather pleased with the idea of being taken
+on the cheap.  The consequence was that nearly everyone for three
+miles round sat or stood or leant or laid to Begglely at one time
+or another, with the result that a less conceited parish than ours
+it would have been difficult to discover.  No one who had once
+looked upon a photograph of himself taken by Begglely ever again
+felt any pride in his personal appearance.  The picture was
+invariably a revelation to him.
+
+Later, some evil-disposed person invented Kodaks, and Begglely went
+everywhere slung on to a thing that looked like an overgrown
+missionary box, and that bore a legend to the effect that if
+Begglely would pull the button, a shameless Company would do the
+rest.  Life became a misery to Begglely's friends.  Nobody dared to
+do anything for fear of being taken in the act.  He took an
+instantaneous photograph of his own father swearing at the
+gardener, and snapped his youngest sister and her lover at the
+exact moment of farewell at the garden gate.  Nothing was sacred to
+him.  He Kodaked his aunt's funeral from behind, and showed the
+chief mourner but one whispering a funny story into the ear of the
+third cousin as they stood behind their hats beside the grave.
+
+Public indignation was at its highest when a new comer to the
+neighbourhood, a young fellow named Haynoth, suggested the getting
+together of a party for a summer's tour in Turkey.  Everybody took
+up the idea with enthusiasm, and recommended Begglely as the
+"party."  We had great hopes from that tour.  Our idea was that
+Begglely would pull his button outside a harem or behind a sultana,
+and that a Bashi Bazouk or a Janissary would do the rest for us.
+
+We were, however, partly doomed to disappointment--I say, "partly,"
+because, although Begglely returned alive, he came back entirely
+cured of his photographic craze.  He said that every English-
+speaking man, woman, or child whom he met abroad had its camera
+with it, and that after a time the sight of a black cloth or the
+click of a button began to madden him.
+
+He told us that on the summit of Mount Tutra, in the Carpathians,
+the English and American amateur photographers waiting to take "the
+grand panorama" were formed by the Hungarian police in queue, two
+abreast, each with his or her camera under his or her arm, and that
+a man had to stand sometimes as long as three and a half hours
+before his turn came round.  He also told us that the beggars in
+Constantinople went about with placards hung round their necks,
+stating their charges for being photographed.  One of these price
+lists he brought back with him as a sample.
+
+It ran:-
+
+
+One snap shot, back or front ..    ...    ...  2 frcs.
+       "       with expression     ...    ...  3 "
+       "       surprised in quaint attitude .  4 "
+       "       while saying prayers ...   ...  5 "
+       "       while fighting       ...   ... 10 "
+
+
+He said that in some instances where a man had an exceptionally
+villainous cast of countenance, or was exceptionally deformed, as
+much as twenty francs were demanded and readily obtained.
+
+He abandoned photography and took to golf.  He showed people how,
+by digging a hole here and putting a brickbat or two there, they
+could convert a tennis-lawn into a miniature golf link,--and did it
+for them.  He persuaded elderly ladies and gentlemen that it was
+the mildest exercise going, and would drag them for miles over wet
+gorse and heather, and bring them home dead beat, coughing, and
+full of evil thoughts.
+
+The last time I saw him was in Switzerland, a few months ago.  He
+appeared indifferent to the subject of golf, but talked much about
+whist.  We met by chance at Grindelwald, and agreed to climb the
+Faulhorn together next morning.  Half-way up we rested, and I
+strolled on a little way by myself to gain a view.  Returning, I
+found him with a "Cavendish" in his hand and a pack of cards spread
+out before him on the grass, solving a problem.
+
+
+
+THE MAN WHO DID NOT BELIEVE IN LUCK
+
+
+
+He got in at Ipswich with seven different weekly papers under his
+arm.  I noticed that each one insured its reader against death or
+injury by railway accident.  He arranged his luggage upon the rack
+above him, took off his hat and laid it on the seat beside him,
+mopped his bald head with a red silk handkerchief, and then set to
+work steadily to write his name and address upon each of the seven
+papers.  I sat opposite to him and read Punch.  I always take the
+old humour when travelling; I find it soothing to the nerves.
+
+Passing over the points at Manningtree the train gave a lurch, and
+a horse-shoe he had carefully placed in the rack above him slipped
+through the netting, falling with a musical ring upon his head.
+
+He appeared neither surprised nor angry.  Having staunched the
+wound with his handkerchief, he stooped and picked the horse-shoe
+up, glanced at it with, as I thought, an expression of reproach,
+and dropped it gently out of the window.
+
+"Did it hurt you?" I asked.
+
+It was a foolish question.  I told myself so the moment I had
+uttered it.  The thing must have weighed three pounds at the least;
+it was an exceptionally large and heavy shoe.  The bump on his head
+was swelling visibly before my eyes.  Anyone but an idiot must have
+seen that he was hurt.  I expected an irritable reply.  I should
+have given one myself had I been in his place.  Instead, however,
+he seemed to regard the inquiry as a natural and kindly expression
+of sympathy.
+
+"It did, a little," he replied.
+
+"What were you doing with it?" I asked.  It was an odd sort of
+thing for a man to be travelling with.
+
+"It was lying in the roadway just outside the station," he
+explained; "I picked it up for luck."
+
+He refolded his handkerchief so as to bring a cooler surface in
+contact with the swelling, while I murmured something genial about
+the inscrutability of Providence.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I've had a deal of luck in my time, but it's never
+turned out well."
+
+"I was born on a Wednesday," he continued, "which, as I daresay you
+know, is the luckiest day a man can be born on.  My mother was a
+widow, and none of my relatives would do anything for me.  They
+said it would be like taking coals to Newcastle, helping a boy born
+on a Wednesday; and my uncle, when he died, left every penny of his
+money to my brother Sam, as a slight compensation to him for having
+been born on a Friday.  All I ever got was advice upon the duties
+and responsibilities of wealth, when it arrived, and entreaties
+that I would not neglect those with claims upon me when I came to
+be a rich man."
+
+He paused while folding up his various insurance papers and placing
+them in the inside breast-pocket of his coat.
+
+"Then there are black cats," he went on; "they're said to be lucky.
+Why, there never was a blacker cat than the one that followed me
+into my rooms in Bolsover Street the very first night I took them."
+
+"Didn't it bring you luck?" I enquired, finding that he had
+stopped.
+
+A far-away look came into his eyes.
+
+"Well, of course it all depends," he answered dreamily.  "Maybe
+we'd never have suited one another; you can always look at it that
+way.  Still, I'd like to have tried."
+
+He sat staring out of the window, and for a while I did not care to
+intrude upon his evidently painful memories.
+
+"What happened then?" I asked, however, at last.
+
+He roused himself from his reverie.
+
+"Oh," he said.  "Nothing extraordinary.  She had to leave London
+for a time, and gave me her pet canary to take charge of while she
+was away."
+
+"But it wasn't your fault," I urged.
+
+"No, perhaps not," he agreed; "but it created a coldness which
+others were not slow to take advantage of."
+
+"I offered her the cat, too," he added, but more to himself than to
+me.
+
+We sat and smoked in silence.  I felt that the consolations of a
+stranger would sound weak.
+
+"Piebald horses are lucky, too," he observed, knocking the ashes
+from his pipe against the window sash.  "I had one of them once."
+
+"What did it do to you?" I enquired.
+
+"Lost me the best crib I ever had in my life," was the simple
+rejoinder.  "The governor stood it a good deal longer than I had
+any right to expect; but you can't keep a man who is ALWAYS drunk.
+It gives a firm a bad name."
+
+"It would," I agreed.
+
+"You see," he went on, "I never had the head for it.  To some men
+it would not have so much mattered, but the very first glass was
+enough to upset me.  I'd never been used to it."
+
+"But why did you take it?" I persisted.  "The horse didn't make you
+drink, did he?"
+
+"Well, it was this way," he explained, continuing to rub gently the
+lump which was now about the size of an egg.  "The animal had
+belonged to a gentleman who travelled in the wine and spirit line,
+and who had been accustomed to visit in the way of business almost
+every public-house he came to.  The result was you couldn't get
+that little horse past a public-house --at least I couldn't.  He
+sighted them a quarter of a mile off, and made straight for the
+door.  I struggled with him at first, but it was five to ten
+minutes' work getting him away, and folks used to gather round and
+bet on us.  I think, maybe, I'd have stuck to it, however, if it
+hadn't been for a temperance chap who stopped one day and lectured
+the crowd about it from the opposite side of the street.  He called
+me Pilgrim, and said the little horse was 'Pollion,' or some such
+name, and kept on shouting out that I was to fight him for a
+heavenly crown.  After that they called us "Polly and the Pilgrim,
+fighting for the crown."  It riled me, that did, and at the very
+next house at which he pulled up I got down and said I'd come for
+two of Scotch.  That was the beginning.  It took me years to break
+myself of the habit.
+
+"But there," he continued, "it has always been the same.  I hadn't
+been a fortnight in my first situation before my employer gave me a
+goose weighing eighteen pounds as a Christmas present."
+
+"Well, that couldn't have done you any harm," I remarked.  "That
+was lucky enough."
+
+"So the other clerks said at the time," he replied.  "The old
+gentleman had never been known to give anything away before in his
+life.  'He's taken a fancy to you,' they said; 'you are a lucky
+beggar!'"
+
+He sighed heavily.  I felt there was a story attached.
+
+"What did you do with it?" I asked.
+
+"That was the trouble," he returned.  "I didn't know what to do
+with it.  It was ten o'clock on Christmas Eve, just as I was
+leaving, that he gave it to me.  'Tiddling Brothers have sent me a
+goose, Biggles,' he said to me as I helped him on with his great-
+coat.  'Very kind of 'em, but I don't want it myself; you can have
+it!'
+
+"Of course I thanked him, and was very grateful.  He wished me a
+merry Christmas and went out.  I tied the thing up in brown paper,
+and took it under my arm.  It was a fine bird, but heavy.
+
+"Under all the circumstances, and it being Christmas time, I
+thought I would treat myself to a glass of beer.  I went into a
+quiet little house at the corner of the Lane and laid the goose on
+the counter.
+
+"'That's a big 'un,' said the landlord; 'you'll get a good cut off
+him to-morrow.'
+
+"His words set me thinking, and for the first time it struck me
+that I didn't want the bird--that it was of no use to me at all.  I
+was going down to spend the holidays with my young lady's people in
+Kent."
+
+"Was this the canary young lady?" I interrupted.
+
+"No," he replied.  "This was before that one.  It was this goose
+I'm telling you of that upset this one.  Well, her folks were big
+farmers; it would have been absurd taking a goose down to them, and
+I knew no one in London to give it to, so when the landlord came
+round again I asked him if he would care to buy it.  I told him he
+could have it cheap,
+
+"'I don't want it myself,' he answered.  'I've got three in the
+house already.  Perhaps one of these gentlemen would like to make
+an offer.'
+
+"He turned to a couple of chaps who were sitting drinking gin.
+They didn't look to me worth the price of a chicken between them.
+The seediest said he'd like to look at it, however, and I undid the
+parcel.  He mauled the thing pretty considerably, and cross-
+examined me as to how I come by it, ending by upsetting half a
+tumbler of gin and water over it.  Then he offered me half a crown
+for it.  It made me so angry that I took the brown paper and the
+string in one hand and the goose in the other, and walked straight
+out without saying a word.
+
+"I carried it in this way for some distance, because I was excited
+and didn't care how I carried it; but as I cooled, I began to
+reflect how ridiculous I must look.  One or two small boys
+evidently noticed the same thing.  I stopped under a lamp-post and
+tried to tie it up again.  I had a bag and an umbrella with me at
+the same time, and the first thing I did was to drop the goose into
+the gutter, which is just what I might have expected to do,
+attempting to handle four separate articles and three yards of
+string with one pair of hands.  I picked up about a quart of mud
+with that goose, and got the greater part of it over my hands and
+clothes and a fair quantity over the brown paper; and then it began
+to rain.
+
+"I bundled everything up into my arm and made for the nearest pub,
+where I thought I would ask for a piece more string and make a neat
+job of it.
+
+"The bar was crowded.  I pushed my way to the counter and flung the
+goose down in front of me.  The men nearest stopped talking to look
+at it; and a young fellow standing next to me said -
+
+"'Well, you've killed it.'  I daresay I did seem a bit excited.
+
+"I had intended making another effort to sell it here, but they
+were clearly not the right sort.  I had a pint of ale--for I was
+feeling somewhat tired and hot--scraped as much of the mud off the
+bird as I could, made a fresh parcel of it, and came out.
+
+"Crossing the road a happy idea occurred to me.  I thought I would
+raffle it.  At once I set to work to find a house where there might
+seem to be a likely lot.  It cost me three or four whiskies--for I
+felt I didn't want any more beer, which is a thing that easily
+upsets me--but at length I found just the crowd I wanted--a quiet
+domestic-looking set in a homely little place off the Goswell Road.
+
+"I explained my views to the landlord.  He said he had no
+objection; he supposed I would stand drinks round afterwards.  I
+said I should be delighted to do so, and showed him the bird.
+
+"'It looks a bit poorly,' he said.  He was a Devonshire man.
+
+"'Oh, that's nothing,' I explained.  'I happened to drop it.  That
+will all wash off.'
+
+"'It smells a bit queer, too,' he said.
+
+"'That's mud,' I answered; 'you know what London mud is.  And a
+gentleman spilled some gin over it.  Nobody will notice that when
+it's cooked.'
+
+"'Well,' he replied.  'I don't think I'll take a hand myself, but
+if any other gent likes to, that's his affair.'
+
+"Nobody seemed enthusiastic.  I started it at sixpence, and took a
+ticket myself.  The potman had a free chance for superintending the
+arrangements, and he succeeded in inducing five other men, much
+against their will, to join us.  I won it myself, and paid out
+three and twopence for drinks.  A solemn-looking individual who had
+been snoring in a corner suddenly woke up as I was going out, and
+offered me sevenpence ha'penny for it--why sevenpence ha'penny I
+have never been able to understand.  He would have taken it away, I
+should never have seen it again, and my whole life might have been
+different.  But Fate has always been against me.  I replied, with
+perhaps unnecessary hauteur, that I wasn't a Christmas dinner fund
+for the destitute, and walked out.
+
+"It was getting late, and I had a long walk home to my lodgings.  I
+was beginning to wish I had never seen the bird.  I estimated its
+weight by this time to be thirty-six pounds.
+
+"The idea occurred to me to sell it to a poulterer.  I looked for a
+shop, I found one in Myddleton Street.  There wasn't a customer
+near it, but by the way the man was shouting you might have thought
+that he was doing all the trade of Clerkenwell.  I took the goose
+out of the parcel and laid it on the shelf before him.
+
+"'What's this?' he asked.
+
+"'It's a goose,' I said.  'You can have it cheap.'
+
+"He just seized the thing by the neck and flung it at me.  I
+dodged, and it caught the side of my head.  You can have no idea,
+if you've never been hit on the head with a goose, how if hurts.  I
+picked it up and hit him back with it, and a policeman came up with
+the usual, 'Now then, what's all this about?'
+
+"I explained the facts.  The poulterer stepped to the edge of the
+curb and apostrophised the universe generally.
+
+"'Look at that shop,' he said.  "It's twenty minutes to twelve, and
+there's seven dozen geese hanging there that I'm willing to give
+away, and this fool asks me if I want to buy another.'
+
+"I perceived then that my notion had been a foolish one, and I
+followed the policeman's advice, and went away quietly, taking the
+bird with me.
+
+"Then said I to myself, 'I will give it away.  I will select some
+poor deserving person, and make him a present of the damned thing.'
+I passed a good many people, but no one looked deserving enough.
+It may have been the time or it may have been the neighbourhood,
+but those I met seemed to me to be unworthy of the bird.  I offered
+it to a man in Judd Street, who I thought appeared hungry.  He
+turned out to be a drunken ruffian.  I could not make him
+understand what I meant, and he followed me down the road abusing
+me at the top of his voice, until, turning a corner without knowing
+it, he plunged down Tavistock Place, shouting after the wrong man.
+In the Euston Road I stopped a half-starved child and pressed it
+upon her.  She answered 'Not me!' and ran away.  I heard her
+calling shrilly after me, 'Who stole the goose?'
+
+"I dropped it in a dark part of Seymour Street.  A man picked it up
+and brought it after me.  I was unequal to any more explanations or
+arguments.  I gave him twopence and plodded on with it once more.
+The pubs were just closing, and I went into one for a final drink.
+As a matter of fact I had had enough already, being, as I am,
+unaccustomed to anything more than an occasional class of beer.
+But I felt depressed, and I thought it might cheer me.  I think I
+had gin, which is a thing I loathe.
+
+"I meant to fling it over into Oakley Square, but a policeman had
+his eye on me, and followed me twice round the railings.  In
+Golding Road I sought to throw it down an area, but was frustrated
+in like manner.  The whole night police of London seemed to have
+nothing else to do but prevent my getting rid of that goose.
+
+"They appeared so anxious about it that I fancied they might like
+to have it.  I went up to one in Camden Street.  I called him
+'Bobby,' and asked him if he wanted a goose.
+
+"'I'll tell you what I don't want,' he replied severely, 'and that
+is none of your sauce.'
+
+"He was very insulting, and I naturally answered him back.  What
+actually passed I forget, but it ended in his announcing his
+intention of taking me in charge.
+
+"I slipped out of his hands and bolted down King Street.  He blew
+his whistle and started after me.  A man sprang out from a doorway
+in College Street and tried to stop me.  I tied him up with a butt
+in the stomach, and cut through the Crescent, doubling back into
+the Camden Road by Batt Street.
+
+"At the Canal Bridge I looked behind me, and could see no one.  I
+dropped the goose over the parapet, and it fell with a splash into
+the water.
+
+"Heaving a sigh of relief, I turned and crossed into Randolph
+Street, and there a constable collared me.  I was arguing with him
+when the first fool came up breathless.  They told me I had better
+explain the matter to the Inspector, and I thought so too.
+
+"The Inspector asked me why I had run away when the other constable
+wanted to take me in charge.  I replied that it was because I did
+not desire to spend my Christmas holidays in the lock-up, which he
+evidently regarded as a singularly weak argument.  He asked me what
+I had thrown into the canal.  I told him a goose.  He asked me why
+I had thrown a goose into the canal.  I told him because I was sick
+and tired of the animal.
+
+"At this stage a sergeant came in to say that they had succeeded in
+recovering the parcel.  They opened it on the Inspector's table.
+It contained a dead baby.
+
+"I pointed out to them that it wasn't my parcel, and that it wasn't
+my baby, but they hardly took the trouble to disguise the fact that
+they did not believe me.
+
+"The Inspector said it was too grave a case for bail, which, seeing
+that I did not know a soul in London, was somewhat immaterial.  I
+got them to send a telegram to my young lady to say that I was
+unavoidably detained in town, and passed as quiet and uneventful a
+Christmas Day and Boxing Day as I ever wish to spend.
+
+"In the end the evidence against me was held to be insufficient to
+justify a conviction, and I got off on the minor charge of drunk
+and disorderly.  But I lost my situation and I lost my young lady,
+and I don't care if I never see a goose again."
+
+We were nearing Liverpool Street.  He collected his luggage, and
+taking up his hat made an attempt to put it on his head.  But in
+consequence of the swelling caused by the horseshoe it would not go
+anywhere near him, and he laid it sadly back upon the seat.
+
+"No," he said quietly, "I can't say that I believe very much in
+luck."
+
+
+
+DICK DUNKERMAN'S CAT
+
+
+
+Richard Dunkerman and I had been old school-fellows, if a gentleman
+belonging to the Upper Sixth, and arriving each morning in a
+"topper" and a pair of gloves, and "a discredit to the Lower
+Fourth," in a Scotch cap, can by any manner of means be classed
+together.  And though in those early days a certain amount of
+coldness existed between us, originating in a poem, composed and
+sung on occasions by myself in commemoration of an alleged painful
+incident connected with a certain breaking-up day, and which, if I
+remember rightly ran:-
+
+
+Dicky, Dicky, Dunk,
+Always in a funk,
+Drank a glass of sherry wine,
+And went home roaring drunk,
+
+
+and kept alive by his brutal criticism of the same, expressed with
+the bony part of the knee, yet in after life we came to know and
+like each other better.  I drifted into journalism, while he for
+years had been an unsuccessful barrister and dramatist; but one
+spring, to the astonishment of us all, he brought out the play of
+the season, a somewhat impossible little comedy, but full of homely
+sentiment and belief in human nature.  It was about a couple of
+months after its production that he first introduced me to
+"Pyramids, Esquire."
+
+I was in love at the time.  Her name was, I think, Naomi, and I
+wanted to talk to somebody about her.  Dick had a reputation for
+taking an intelligent interest in other men's love affairs.  He
+would let a lover rave by the hour to him, taking brief notes the
+while in a bulky red-covered volume labelled "Commonplace Book."
+Of course everybody knew that he was using them merely as raw
+material for his dramas, but we did not mind that so long as he
+would only listen.  I put on my hat and went round to his chambers.
+
+We talked about indifferent matters for a quarter of an hour or so,
+and then I launched forth upon my theme.  I had exhausted her
+beauty and goodness, and was well into my own feelings--the madness
+of my ever imagining I had loved before, the utter impossibility of
+my ever caring for any other woman, and my desire to die breathing
+her name--before he made a move.  I thought he had risen to reach
+down, as usual, the "Commonplace Book," and so waited, but instead
+he went to the door and opened it, and in glided one of the largest
+and most beautiful black tom-cats I have ever seen.  It sprang on
+Dick's knee with a soft "cur-roo," and sat there upright, watching
+me, and I went on with my tale.
+
+After a few minutes Dick interrupted me with:-
+
+"I thought you said her name was Naomi?"
+
+"So it is," I replied.  "Why?"
+
+"Oh, nothing," he answered, "only just now you referred to her as
+Enid."
+
+This was remarkable, as I had not seen Enid for years, and had
+quite forgotten her.  Somehow it took the glitter out of the
+conversation.  A dozen sentences later Dick stopped me again with:-
+
+"Who's Julia?"
+
+I began to get irritated.  Julia, I remembered, had been cashier in
+a city restaurant, and had, when I was little more than a boy,
+almost inveigled me into an engagement.  I found myself getting hot
+at the recollection of the spooney rhapsodies I had hoarsely poured
+into her powder-streaked ear while holding her flabby hand across
+the counter.
+
+"Did I really say 'Julia'?" I answered somewhat sharply, "or are
+you joking?"
+
+"You certainly alluded to her as Julia," he replied mildly.  "But
+never mind, you go on as you like, I shall know whom you mean."
+
+But the flame was dead within me.  I tried to rekindle it, but
+every time I glanced up and met the green eyes of the black Tom it
+flickered out again.  I recalled the thrill that had penetrated my
+whole being when Naomi's hand had accidently touched mine in the
+conservatory, and wondered whether she had done it on purpose.  I
+thought how good and sweet she was to that irritatingly silly old
+frump her mother, and wondered if it really were her mother, or
+only hired.  I pictured her crown of gold-brown hair as I had last
+seen it with the sunlight kissing its wanton waves, and felt I
+would like to be quite sure that it were all her own.
+
+Once I clutched the flying skirts of my enthusiasm with sufficient
+firmness to remark that in my own private opinion a good woman was
+more precious than rubies; adding immediately afterwards--the words
+escaping me unconsciously before I was aware even of the thought--
+"pity it's so difficult to tell 'em."
+
+Then I gave it up, and sat trying to remember what I had said to
+her the evening before, and hoping I had not committed myself.
+
+Dick's voice roused me from my unpleasant reverie.
+
+"No," he said, "I thought you would not be able to.  None of them
+can."
+
+"None of them can what?" I asked.  Somehow I was feeling angry with
+Dick and with Dick's cat, and with myself and most other things.
+
+"Why talk love or any other kind of sentiment before old Pyramids
+here?" he replied, stroking the cat's soft head as it rose and
+arched its back.
+
+"What's the confounded cat got to do with it?" I snapped.
+
+"That's just what I can't tell you," he answered, "but it's very
+remarkable.  Old Leman dropped in here the other evening and began
+in his usual style about Ibsen and the destiny of the human race,
+and the Socialistic idea and all the rest of it--you know his way.
+Pyramids sat on the edge of the table there and looked at him, just
+as he sat looking at you a few minutes ago, and in less than a
+quarter of an hour Leman had come to the conclusion that society
+would do better without ideals and that the destiny of the human
+race was in all probability the dust heap.  He pushed his long hair
+back from his eyes and looked, for the first time in his life,
+quite sane.  'We talk about ourselves,' he said, 'as though we were
+the end of creation.  I get tired listening to myself sometimes.
+Pah!' he continued, 'for all we know the human race may die out
+utterly and another insect take our place, as possibly we pushed
+out and took the place of a former race of beings.  I wonder if the
+ant tribe may not be the future inheritors of the earth.  They
+understand combination, and already have an extra sense that we
+lack.  If in the courses of evolution they grow bigger in brain and
+body, they may become powerful rivals, who knows?'  Curious to hear
+old Leman talking like that, wasn't it?"
+
+"What made you call him 'Pyramids'?" I asked of Dick.
+
+"I don't know," he answered, "I suppose because he looked so old.
+The name came to me."
+
+I leaned across and looked into the great green eyes, and the
+creature, never winking, never blinking, looked back into mine,
+until the feeling came to me that I was being drawn down into the
+very wells of time.  It seemed as though the panorama of the ages
+must have passed in review before those expressionless orbs--all
+the loves and hopes and desires of mankind; all the everlasting
+truths that have been found false; all the eternal faiths
+discovered to save, until it was discovered they damned.  The
+strange black creature grew and grew till it seemed to fill the
+room, and Dick and I to be but shadows floating in the air.
+
+I forced from myself a laugh, that only in part, however, broke the
+spell, and inquired of Dick how he had acquired possession of it.
+
+"It came to me," he answered, "one night six months ago.  I was
+down on my luck at the time.  Two of my plays, on which I had built
+great hopes, had failed, one on top of the other--you remember
+them--and it appeared absurd to think that any manager would ever
+look at anything of mine again.  Old Walcott had just told me that
+he did not consider it right of me under all the circumstances to
+hold Lizzie any longer to her engagement, and that I ought to go
+away and give her a chance of forgetting me, and I had agreed with
+him.  I was alone in the world, and heavily in debt.  Altogether
+things seemed about as hopeless as they could be, and I don't mind
+confessing to you now that I had made up my mind to blow out my
+brains that very evening.  I had loaded my revolver, and it lay
+before me on the desk.  My hand was toying with it when I heard a
+faint scratching at the door.  I paid no attention at first, but it
+grew more persistent, and at length, to stop the faint noise which
+excited me more than I could account for, I rose and opened the
+door and IT walked in.
+
+"It perched itself upon the corner of my desk beside the loaded
+pistol, and sat there bolt upright looking at me; and I, pushing
+back my chair, sat looking at it.  And there came a letter telling
+me that a man of whose name I had never heard had been killed by a
+cow in Melbourne, and that under his will a legacy of three
+thousand pounds fell into the estate of a distant relative of my
+own who had died peacefully and utterly insolvent eighteen months
+previously, leaving me his sole heir and representative, and I put
+the revolver back into the drawer."
+
+"Do you think Pyramids would come and stop with me for a week?" I
+asked, reaching over to stroke the cat as it lay softly purring on
+Dick's knee.
+
+"Maybe he will some day," replied Dick in a low voice, but before
+the answer came--I know not why--I had regretted the jesting words.
+
+"I came to talk to him as though he were a human creature,"
+continued Dick, "and to discuss things with him.  My last play I
+regard as a collaboration; indeed, it is far more his than mine."
+
+I should have thought Dick mad had not the cat been sitting there
+before me with its eyes looking into mine.  As it was, I only grew
+more interested in his tale.
+
+"It was rather a cynical play as I first wrote it," he went on, "a
+truthful picture of a certain corner of society as I saw and knew
+it.  From an artistic point of view I felt it was good; from the
+box-office standard it was doubtful.  I drew it from my desk on the
+third evening after Pyramids' advent, and read it through.  He sat
+on the arm of the chair and looked over the pages as I turned them.
+
+"It was the best thing I had ever written.  Insight into life ran
+through every line, I found myself reading it again with delight.
+Suddenly a voice beside me said:-
+
+"'Very clever, my boy, very clever indeed.  If you would just turn
+it topsy-turvy, change all those bitter, truthful speeches into
+noble sentiments; make your Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs
+(who never has been a popular character) die in the last act
+instead of the Yorkshireman, and let your bad woman be reformed by
+her love for the hero and go off somewhere by herself and be good
+to the poor in a black frock, the piece might be worth putting on
+the stage.'
+
+"I turned indignantly to see who was speaking.  The opinions
+sounded like those of a theatrical manager.  No one was in the room
+but I and the cat.  No doubt I had been talking to myself, but the
+voice was strange to me.
+
+"'Be reformed by her love for the hero!' I retorted,
+contemptuously, for I was unable to grasp the idea that I was
+arguing only with myself, 'why it's his mad passion for her that
+ruins his life.'
+
+"'And will ruin the play with the great B.P.,' returned the other
+voice.  'The British dramatic hero has no passion, but a pure and
+respectful admiration for an honest, hearty English girl--
+pronounced "gey-url."  You don't know the canons of your art.'
+
+"'And besides,' I persisted, unheeding the interruption, 'women
+born and bred and soaked for thirty years in an atmosphere of sin
+don't reform.'
+
+"'Well, this one's got to, that's all,' was the sneering reply,
+'let her hear an organ.'
+
+"'But as an artist -,' I protested.
+
+"'You will be always unsuccessful,' was the rejoinder.  'My dear
+fellow, you and your plays, artistic or in artistic, will be
+forgotten in a very few years hence.  You give the world what it
+wants, and the world will give you what you want.  Please, if you
+wish to live.'
+
+"So, with Pyramids beside me day by day, I re-wrote the play, and
+whenever I felt a thing to be utterly impossible and false I put it
+down with a grin.  And every character I made to talk clap-trap
+sentiment while Pyramids purred, and I took care that everyone of
+my puppets did that which was right in the eyes of the lady with
+the lorgnettes in the second row of the dress circle; and old
+Hewson says the play will run five hundred nights.
+
+"But what is worst," concluded Dick, "is that I am not ashamed of
+myself, and that I seem content."
+
+"What do you think the animal is?" I asked with a laugh, "an evil
+spirit"?  For it had passed into the next room and so out through
+the open window, and its strangely still green eyes no longer
+drawing mine towards them, I felt my common sense returning to me.
+
+"You have not lived with it for six months," answered Dick quietly,
+"and felt its eyes for ever on you as I have.  And I am not the
+only one.  You know Canon Whycherly, the great preacher?"
+
+"My knowledge of modern church history is not extensive," I
+replied.  "I know him by name, of course.  What about him?"
+
+"He was a curate in the East End," continued Dick, and for ten
+years he laboured, poor and unknown, leading one of those noble,
+heroic lives that here and there men do yet live, even in this age.
+Now he is the prophet of the fashionable up-to-date Christianity of
+South Kensington, drives to his pulpit behind a pair of thorough-
+bred Arabs, and his waistcoat is taking to itself the curved line
+of prosperity.  He was in here the other morning on behalf of
+Princess --.  They are giving a performance of one of my plays in
+aid of the Destitute Vicars' Fund."
+
+"And did Pyramids discourage him?" I asked, with perhaps the
+suggestion of a sneer.
+
+"No," answered Dick, "so far as I could judge, it approved the
+scheme.  The point of the matter is that the moment Whycherly came
+into the room the cat walked over to him and rubbed itself
+affectionately against his legs.  He stood and stroked it."
+
+"'Oh, so it's come to you, has it?' he said, with a curious smile.
+
+"There was no need for any further explanation between us.  I
+understood what lay behind those few words."
+
+I lost sight of Dick for some time, though I heard a good deal of
+him, for he was rapidly climbing into the position of the most
+successful dramatist of the day, and Pyramids I had forgotten all
+about, until one afternoon calling on an artist friend who had
+lately emerged from the shadows of starving struggle into the
+sunshine of popularity, I saw a pair of green eyes that seemed
+familiar to me gleaming at me from a dark corner of the studio.
+
+"Why, surely," I exclaimed, crossing over to examine the animal
+more closely, "why, yes, you've got Dick Dunkerman's cat."
+
+He raised his face from the easel and glanced across at me.
+
+"Yes," he said, "we can't live on ideals," and I, remembering,
+hastened to change the conversation.
+
+Since then I have met Pyramids in the rooms of many friends of
+mine.  They give him different names, but I am sure it is the same
+cat, I know those green eyes.  He always brings them luck, but they
+are never quite the same men again afterwards.
+
+Sometimes I sit wondering if I hear his scratching at the door.
+
+
+
+THE MINOR POET'S STORY
+
+
+
+"It doesn't suit you at all," I answered.
+
+"You're very disagreeable," said she, "I shan't ever ask your
+advice again."
+
+"Nobody," I hastened to add, "would look well in it.  You, of
+course, look less awful in it than any other woman would, but it's
+not your style."
+
+"He means," exclaimed the Minor Poet, "that the thing itself not
+being pre-eminently beautiful, it does not suit, is not in
+agreement with you.  The contrast between you and anything
+approaching the ugly or the commonplace, is too glaring to be aught
+else than displeasing."
+
+"He didn't say it," replied the Woman of the World; "and besides it
+isn't ugly.  It's the very latest fashion."
+
+"Why is it," asked the Philosopher, "that women are such slaves to
+fashion?  They think clothes, they talk clothes, they read clothes,
+yet they have never understood clothes.  The purpose of dress,
+after the primary object of warmth has been secured, is to adorn,
+to beautify the particular wearer.  Yet not one woman in a thousand
+stops to consider what colours will go best with her complexion,
+what cut will best hide the defects or display the advantages of
+her figure.  If it be the fashion, she must wear it.  And so we
+have pale-faced girls looking ghastly in shades suitable to dairy-
+maids, and dots waddling about in costumes fit and proper to six-
+footers.  It is as if crows insisted on wearing cockatoo's feathers
+on their heads, and rabbits ran about with peacocks' tails fastened
+behind them."
+
+"And are not you men every bit as foolish?" retorted the Girton
+Girl.  "Sack coats come into fashion, and dumpy little men trot up
+and down in them, looking like butter-tubs on legs.  You go about
+in July melting under frock-coats and chimney-pot hats, and because
+it is the stylish thing to do, you all play tennis in still shirts
+and stand-up collars, which is idiotic.  If fashion decreed that
+you should play cricket in a pair of top-boots and a diver's
+helmet, you would play cricket in a pair of top-boots and a diver's
+helmet, and dub every sensible fellow who didn't a cad.  It's worse
+in you than in us; men are supposed to think for themselves, and to
+be capable of it, the womanly woman isn't."
+
+"Big women and little men look well in nothing," said the Woman of
+the World.  "Poor Emily was five foot ten and a half, and never
+looked an inch under seven foot, whatever she wore.  Empires came
+into fashion, and the poor child looked like the giant's baby in a
+pantomime.  We thought the Greek might help her, but it only
+suggested a Crystal Palace statue tied up in a sheet, and tied up
+badly; and when puff-sleeves and shoulder-capes were in and Teddy
+stood up behind her at a water-party and sang 'Under the spreading
+chestnut-tree,' she took it as a personal insult and boxed his
+ears.  Few men liked to be seen with her, and I'm sure George
+proposed to her partly with the idea of saving himself the expense
+of a step-ladder, she reaches down his boots for him from the top
+shelf."
+
+"I," said the Minor Poet, "take up the position of not wanting to
+waste my brain upon the subject.  Tell me what to wear, and I will
+wear it, and there is an end of the matter.  If Society says, 'Wear
+blue shirts and white collars,' I wear blue shirts and white
+collars.  If she says, 'The time has now come when hats should be
+broad-brimmed,' I take unto myself a broad-brimmed hat.  The
+question does not interest me sufficiently for me to argue it.  It
+is your fop who refuses to follow fashion.  He wishes to attract
+attention to himself by being peculiar.  A novelist whose books
+pass unnoticed, gains distinction by designing his own necktie; and
+many an artist, following the line of least resistance, learns to
+let his hair grow instead of learning to paint."
+
+"The fact is," remarked the Philosopher, "we are the mere creatures
+of fashion.  Fashion dictates to us our religion, our morality, our
+affections, our thoughts.  In one age successful cattle-lifting is
+a virtue, a few hundred years later company-promoting takes its
+place as a respectable and legitimate business.  In England and
+America Christianity is fashionable, in Turkey, Mohammedanism, and
+'the crimes of Clapham are chaste in Martaban.'  In Japan a woman
+dresses down to the knees, but would be considered immodest if she
+displayed bare arms.  In Europe it is legs that no pure-minded
+woman is supposed to possess.  In China we worship our mother-in-
+law and despise our wife; in England we treat our wife with
+respect, and regard our mother-in-law as the bulwark of comic
+journalism.  The stone age, the iron age, the age of faith, the age
+of infidelism, the philosophic age, what are they but the passing
+fashions of the world?  It is fashion, fashion, fashion wherever we
+turn.  Fashion waits beside our cradle to lead us by the hand
+through life.  Now literature is sentimental, now hopefully
+humorous, now psychological, now new-womanly.  Yesterday's pictures
+are the laughing-stock of the up-to-date artist of to-day, and to-
+day's art will be sneered at to-morrow.  Now it is fashionable to
+be democratic, to pretend that no virtue or wisdom can exist
+outside corduroy, and to abuse the middle classes.  One season we
+go slumming, and the next we are all socialists.  We think we are
+thinking; we are simply dressing ourselves up in words we do not
+understand for the gods to laugh at us."
+
+"Don't be pessimistic," retorted the Minor Poet, "pessimism is
+going out.  You call such changes fashions, I call them the
+footprints of progress.  Each phase of thought is an advance upon
+the former, bringing the footsteps of the many nearer to the
+landmarks left by the mighty climbers of the past upon the mountain
+paths of truth.  The crowd that was satisfied with The Derby Day
+now appreciates Millet.  The public that were content to wag their
+heads to The Bohemian Girl have made Wagner popular."
+
+"And the play lovers, who stood for hours to listen to
+Shakespeare," interrupted the Philosopher, "now crowd to music-
+halls."
+
+"The track sometimes descends for a little way, but it will wind
+upwards again," returned the Poet.  "The music-hall itself is
+improving; I consider it the duty of every intellectual man to
+visit such places.  The mere influence of his presence helps to
+elevate the tone of the performance.  I often go myself!"
+
+"I was looking," said the Woman of the World, "at some old
+illustrated papers of thirty years ago, showing the men dressed in
+those very absurd trousers, so extremely roomy about the waist, and
+so extremely tight about the ankles.  I recollect poor papa in
+them; I always used to long to fill them out by pouring in sawdust
+at the top."
+
+"You mean the peg-top period," I said.  "I remember them distinctly
+myself, but it cannot be more than three-and-twenty years ago at
+the outside."
+
+"That is very nice of you," replied the Woman of the World, "and
+shows more tact than I should have given you credit for.  It could,
+as you say, have been only twenty-three years ago.  I know I was a
+very little girl at the time.  I think there must be some subtle
+connection between clothes and thought.  I cannot imagine men in
+those trousers and Dundreary whiskers talking as you fellows are
+talking now, any more than I could conceive of a woman in a
+crinoline and a poke bonnet smoking a cigarette.  I think it must
+be so, because dear mother used to be the most easy-going woman in
+the world in her ordinary clothes, and would let papa smoke all
+over the house.  But about once every three weeks she would put on
+a hideous old-fashioned black silk dress, that looked as if Queen
+Elizabeth must have slept in it during one of those seasons when
+she used to go about sleeping anywhere, and then we all had to sit
+up.  'Look out, ma's got her black silk dress on,' came to be a
+regular formula.  We could always make papa take us out for a walk
+or a drive by whispering it to him."
+
+"I can never bear to look at those pictures of by-gone fashions,"
+said the Old Maid, "I see the by-gone people in them, and it makes
+me feel as though the faces that we love are only passing fashions
+with the rest.  We wear them for a little while upon our hearts,
+and think so much of them, and then there comes a time when we lay
+them by, and forget them, and newer faces take their place, and we
+are satisfied.  It seems so sad."
+
+"I wrote a story some years ago," remarked the Minor Poet, "about a
+young Swiss guide, who was betrothed to a laughing little French
+peasant girl."
+
+"Named Suzette," interrupted the Girton Girl.  "I know her.  Go
+on."
+
+"Named Jeanne," corrected the Poet, "the majority of laughing
+French girls, in fiction, are named Suzette, I am well aware.  But
+this girl's mother's family was English.  She was christened Jeanne
+after an aunt Jane, who lived in Birmingham, and from whom she had
+expectations."
+
+"I beg your pardon," apologised the Girton Girl, "I was not aware
+of that fact.  What happened to her?"
+
+"One morning, a few days before the date fixed for the wedding,"
+said the Minor Poet, "she started off to pay a visit to a relative
+living in the village, the other side of the mountain.  It was a
+dangerous track, climbing half-way up the mountain before it
+descended again, and skirting more than one treacherous slope, but
+the girl was mountain born and bred, sure-footed as a goat, and no
+one dreamed of harm."
+
+"She went over, of course," said the Philosopher, "those sure-
+footed girls always do."
+
+"What happened," replied the Minor Poet, "was never known.  The
+girl was never seen again."
+
+"And what became of her lover?" asked the Girton Girl.  "Was he,
+when next year's snow melted, and the young men of the village went
+forth to gather Edelweiss, wherewith to deck their sweethearts,
+found by them dead, beside her, at the bottom of the crevasse?"
+
+"No," said the Poet; "you do not know this story, you had better
+let me tell it.  Her lover returned the morning before the wedding
+day, to be met with the news.  He gave way to no sign of grief, he
+repelled all consolation.  Taking his rope and axe he went up into
+the mountain by himself.  All through the winter he haunted the
+track by which she must have travelled, indifferent to the danger
+that he ran, impervious apparently to cold, or hunger, or fatigue,
+undeterred by storm, or mist, or avalanche.  At the beginning of
+the spring he returned to the village, purchased building utensils,
+and day after day carried them back with him up into the mountain.
+He hired no labour, he rejected the proffered assistance of his
+brother guides.  Choosing an almost inaccessible spot, at the edge
+of the great glacier, far from all paths, he built himself a hut,
+with his own hands; and there for eighteen years he lived alone.
+
+"In the 'season' he earned good fees, being known far and wide as
+one of the bravest and hardiest of all the guides, but few of his
+clients liked him, for he was a silent, gloomy man, speaking
+little, and with never a laugh or jest on the journey.  Each fall,
+having provisioned himself, he would retire to his solitary hut,
+and bar the door, and no human soul would set eyes on him again
+until the snows melted.
+
+"One year, however, as the spring days wore on, and he did not
+appear among the guides, as was his wont, the elder men, who
+remembered his story and pitied him, grew uneasy; and, after much
+deliberation, it was determined that a party of them should force
+their way up to his eyrie.  They cut their path across the ice
+where no foot among them had trodden before, and finding at length
+the lonely snow-encompassed hut, knocked loudly with their axe-
+staves on the door; but only the whirling echoes from the glacier's
+thousand walls replied, so the foremost put his strong shoulder to
+the worn timber and the door flew open with a crash.
+
+"They found him dead, as they had more than half expected, lying
+stiff and frozen on the rough couch at the farther end of the hut;
+and, beside him, looking down upon him with a placid face, as a
+mother might watch beside her sleeping child, stood Jeanne.  She
+wore the flowers pinned to her dress that she had gathered when
+their eyes had last seen her.  The girl's face that had laughed
+back to their good-bye in the village, nineteen years ago.
+
+"A strange steely light clung round her, half illuminating, half
+obscuring her, and the men drew back in fear, thinking they saw a
+vision, till one, bolder than the rest, stretched out his hand and
+touched the ice that formed her coffin.
+
+"For eighteen years the man had lived there with this face that he
+had loved.  A faint flush still lingered on the fair cheeks, the
+laughing lips were still red.  Only at one spot, above her temple,
+the wavy hair lay matted underneath a clot of blood."
+
+The Minor Poet ceased.
+
+"What a very unpleasant way of preserving one's love!" said the
+Girton Girl.
+
+"When did the story appear?" I asked.  "I don't remember reading
+it."
+
+"I never published it," explained the Minor Poet.  "Within the same
+week two friends of mine, one of whom had just returned from Norway
+and the other from Switzerland, confided to me their intention of
+writing stories about girls who had fallen into glaciers, and who
+had been found by their friends long afterwards, looking as good as
+new; and a few days later I chanced upon a book, the heroine of
+which had been dug out of a glacier alive three hundred years after
+she had fallen in.  There seemed to be a run on ice maidens, and I
+decided not to add to their number."
+
+"It is curious," said the Philosopher, "how there seems to be a
+fashion even in thought.  An idea has often occurred to me that has
+seemed to me quite new, and taking up a newspaper I have found that
+some man in Russia or San Francisco has just been saying the very
+same thing in almost the very same words.  We say a thing is 'in
+the air'; it is more true than we are aware of.  Thought does not
+grow in us.  It is a thing apart, we simply gather it.  All truths,
+all discoveries, all inventions, they have not come to us from any
+one man.  The time grows ripe for them, and from this corner of the
+earth and from that, hands, guided by some instinct, grope for and
+grasp them.  Buddha and Christ seize hold of the morality needful
+to civilisation, and promulgate it, unknown to one another, the one
+on the shores of the Ganges, the other by the Jordan.  A dozen
+forgotten explorers, FEELING America, prepared the way for Columbus
+to discover it.  A deluge of blood is required to sweep away old
+follies, and Rousseau and Voltaire, and a myriad others are set to
+work to fashion the storm clouds.  The steam-engine, the spinning
+loom is 'in the air.'  A thousand brains are busy with them, a few
+go further than the rest.  It is idle to talk of human thought;
+there is no such thing.  Our minds are fed as our bodies with the
+food God has provided for us.  Thought hangs by the wayside, and we
+pick it and cook it, and eat it, and cry out what clever 'thinkers'
+we are!"
+
+"I cannot agree with you," replied the Minor Poet, "if we were
+simply automata, as your argument would suggest, what was the
+purpose of creating us?"
+
+"The intelligent portion of mankind has been asking itself that
+question for many ages," returned the Philosopher.
+
+"I hate people who always think as I do," said the Girton Girl;
+"there was a girl in our corridor who never would disagree with me.
+Every opinion I expressed turned out to be her opinion also.  It
+always irritated me."
+
+"That might have been weak-mindedness," said the Old Maid, which
+sounded ambiguous.
+
+"It is not so unpleasant as having a person always disagreeing with
+you," said the Woman of the World.  "My cousin Susan never would
+agree with any one.  If I came down in red she would say, 'Why
+don't you try green, dear? every one says you look so well in
+green'; and when I wore green she would say, 'Why have you given up
+red dear?  I thought you rather fancied yourself in red.'  When I
+told her of my engagement to Tom, she burst into tears and said she
+couldn't help it.  She had always felt that George and I were
+intended for one another; and when Tom never wrote for two whole
+months, and behaved disgracefully in--in other ways, and I told her
+I was engaged to George, she reminded me of every word I had ever
+said about my affection for Tom, and of how I had ridiculed poor
+George.  Papa used to say, 'If any man ever tells Susan that he
+loves her, she will argue him out of it, and will never accept him
+until he has jilted her, and will refuse to marry him every time he
+asks her to fix the day."'
+
+"Is she married?" asked the Philosopher.
+
+"Oh, yes," answered the Woman of the World, "and is devoted to her
+children.  She lets them do everything they don't want to."
+
+
+
+THE DEGENERATION OF THOMAS HENRY
+
+
+
+The most respectable cat I have ever known was Thomas Henry.  His
+original name was Thomas, but it seemed absurd to call him that.
+The family at Hawarden would as soon think of addressing Mr.
+Gladstone as "Bill."  He came to us from the Reform Club, via the
+butcher, and the moment I saw him I felt that of all the clubs in
+London that was the club he must have come from.  Its atmosphere of
+solid dignity and petrified conservatism seemed to cling to him.
+Why he left the club I am unable, at this distance of time, to
+remember positively, but I am inclined to think that it came about
+owing to a difference with the new chef, an overbearing personage
+who wanted all the fire to himself.  The butcher, hearing of the
+quarrel, and knowing us as a catless family, suggested a way out of
+the impasse that was welcomed both by cat and cook.  The parting
+between them, I believe, was purely formal, and Thomas arrived
+prejudiced in our favour.
+
+My wife, the moment she saw him, suggested Henry as a more suitable
+name.  It struck me that the combination of the two would be still
+more appropriate, and accordingly, in the privacy of the domestic
+circle, Thomas Henry he was called.  When speaking of him to
+friends, we generally alluded to him as Thomas Henry, Esquire.
+
+He approved of us in his quiet, undemonstrative way.  He chose my
+own particular easy chair for himself, and stuck to it.  An
+ordinary cat I should have shot out, but Thomas Henry was not the
+cat one chivvies.  Had I made it clear to him that I objected to
+his presence in my chair, I feel convinced he would have regarded
+me much as I should expect to be regarded by Queen Victoria, were
+that gracious Lady to call upon me in a friendly way, and were I to
+inform her that I was busy, and request her to look in again some
+other afternoon.  He would have risen, and have walked away, but he
+never would have spoken to me again so long as we lived under the
+same roof.
+
+We had a lady staying with us at the time--she still resides with
+us, but she is now older, and possessed of more judgment--who was
+no respecter of cats.  Her argument was that seeing the tail stuck
+up, and came conveniently to one's hand, that was the natural
+appendage by which to raise a cat.  She also laboured under the
+error that the way to feed a cat was to ram things into its head,
+and that its pleasure was to be taken out for a ride in a doll's
+perambulator.  I dreaded the first meeting of Thomas Henry with
+this lady.  I feared lest she should give him a false impression of
+us as a family, and that we should suffer in his eyes.
+
+But I might have saved myself all anxiety.  There was a something
+about Thomas Henry that checked forwardness and damped familiarity.
+His attitude towards her was friendly but firm.  Hesitatingly, and
+with a new-born respect for cats, she put out her hand timidly
+towards its tail.  He gently put it on the other side, and looked
+at her.  It was not an angry look nor an offended look.  It was the
+expression with which Solomon might have received the advances of
+the Queen of Sheba.  It expressed condescension, combined with
+distance.
+
+He was really a most gentlemanly cat.  A friend of mine, who
+believes in the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, was
+convinced that he was Lord Chesterfield.  He never clamoured for
+food, as other cats do.  He would sit beside me at meals, and wait
+till he was served.  He would eat only the knuckle-end of a leg of
+mutton, and would never look at over-done beef.  A visitor of ours
+once offered him a piece of gristle; he said nothing, but quietly
+left the room, and we did not see him again until our friend had
+departed.
+
+But every one has his price, and Thomas Henry's price was roast
+duck.  Thomas Henry's attitude in the presence of roast duck came
+to me as a psychological revelation.  It showed me at once the
+lower and more animal side of his nature.  In the presence of roast
+duck Thomas Henry became simply and merely a cat, swayed by all the
+savage instincts of his race.  His dignity fell from him as a
+cloak.  He clawed for roast duck, he grovelled for it.  I believe
+he would have sold himself to the devil for roast duck.
+
+We accordingly avoided that particular dish:  it was painful to see
+a cat's character so completely demoralised.  Besides, his manners,
+when roast duck was on the table, afforded a bad example to the
+children.
+
+He was a shining light among all the eats of our neighbourhood.
+One might have set one's watch by his movements.  After dinner he
+invariably took half an hour's constitutional in the square; at ten
+o'clock each night, precisely, he returned to the area door, and at
+eleven o'clock he was asleep in my easy chair.  He made no friends
+among the other cats.  He took no pleasure in fighting, and I doubt
+his ever having loved, even in youth; his was too cold and self-
+contained a nature, female society he regarded with utter
+indifference.
+
+So he lived with us a blameless existence during the whole winter.
+In the summer we took him down with us into the country.  We
+thought the change of air would do him good; he was getting
+decidedly stout.  Alas, poor Thomas Henry! the country was his
+ruin.  What brought about the change I cannot say:  maybe the air
+was too bracing.  He slid down the moral incline with frightful
+rapidity.  The first night he stopped out till eleven, the second
+night he never came home at all, the third night he came home at
+six o'clock in the morning, minus half the fur on the top of his
+head.  Of course, there was a lady in the case, indeed, judging by
+the riot that went on all night, I am inclined to think there must
+have been a dozen.  He was certainly a fine cat, and they took to
+calling for him in the day time.  Then gentleman cats who had been
+wronged took to calling also, and demanding explanations, which
+Thomas Henry, to do him justice, was always ready to accord.
+
+The village boys used to loiter round all day to watch the fights,
+and angry housewives would be constantly charging into our kitchen
+to fling dead cats upon the table, and appeal to Heaven and myself
+for justice.  Our kitchen became a veritable cat's morgue, and I
+had to purchase a new kitchen table.  The cook said it would make
+her work simpler if she could keep a table entirely to herself.
+She said it quite confused her, having so many dead cats lying
+round among her joints and vegetables:  she was afraid of making a
+mistake.  Accordingly, the old table was placed under the window,
+and devoted to the cats; and, after that, she would never allow
+anyone to bring a cat, however dead, to her table.
+
+"What do you want me to do with it," I heard her asking an excited
+lady on one occasion; "cook it?"
+
+"It's my cat," said the lady; "that's what that is."
+
+"Well, I'm not making cat pie to-day," answered our cook.  "You
+take it to its proper table.  This is my table."
+
+At first, "Justice" was generally satisfied with half a crown, but
+as time went on cats rose.  I had hitherto regarded cats as a cheap
+commodity, and I became surprised at the value attached to them.  I
+began to think seriously of breeding cats as an industry.  At the
+prices current in that village, I could have made an income of
+thousands.
+
+"Look what your beast has done," said one irate female, to whom I
+had been called out in the middle of dinner.
+
+I looked.  Thomas Henry appeared to have "done" a mangy, emaciated
+animal, that must have been far happier dead than alive.  Had the
+poor creature been mine I should have thanked him; but some people
+never know when they are well off.
+
+"I wouldn't ha' taken a five-pun' note for that cat," said the
+lady.
+
+"It's a matter of opinion," I replied, "but personally I think you
+would have been unwise to refuse it.  Taking the animal as it
+stands, I don't feel inclined to give you more than a shilling for
+it.  If you think you can do better by taking it elsewhere, you do
+so."
+
+"He was more like a Christian than a cat," said the lady.
+
+"I'm not taking dead Christians," I answered firmly, "and even if I
+were I wouldn't give more than a shilling for a specimen like that.
+You can consider him as a Christian, or you can consider him as a
+cat; but he's not worth more than a shilling in either case."
+
+We settled eventually for eighteenpence.
+
+The number of cats that Thomas Henry contrived to dispose of also
+surprised me.  Quite a massacre of cats seemed to be in progress.
+
+One evening, going into the kitchen, for I made it a practice now
+to visit the kitchen each evening, to inspect the daily consignment
+of dead cats, I found, among others, a curiously marked
+tortoiseshell cat, lying on the table.
+
+"That cat's worth half a sovereign," said the owner, who was
+standing by, drinking beer.
+
+I took up the animal, and examined it.
+
+"Your cat killed him yesterday," continued the man.  "It's a
+burning shame."
+
+"My cat has killed him three times," I replied.  "He was killed on
+Saturday as Mrs. Hedger's cat; on Monday he was killed for Mrs.
+Myers.  I was not quite positive on Monday; but I had my
+suspicions, and I made notes.  Now I recognise him.  You take my
+advice, and bury him before he breeds a fever.  I don't care how
+many lives a cat has got; I only pay for one."
+
+We gave Thomas Henry every chance to reform; but he only went from
+bad to worse, and added poaching and chicken-stalking to his other
+crimes, and I grew tired of paying for his vices.
+
+I consulted the gardener, and the gardener said he had known cats
+taken that way before.
+
+"Do you know of any cure for it?" I asked.
+
+"Well, sir," replied the gardener, "I have heard as how a dose of
+brickbat and pond is a good thing in a general way."
+
+"We'll try him with a dose just before bed time," I answered.  The
+gardener administered it, and we had no further trouble with him.
+
+Poor Thomas Henry!  It shows to one how a reputation for
+respectability may lie in the mere absence of temptation.  Born and
+bred in the atmosphere of the Reform Club, what gentleman could go
+wrong?  I was sorry for Thomas Henry, and I have never believed in
+the moral influence of the country since.
+
+
+
+THE CITY OF THE SEA
+
+
+
+They say, the chroniclers who have written the history of that low-
+lying, wind-swept coast, that years ago the foam fringe of the
+ocean lay further to the east; so that where now the North Sea
+creeps among the treacherous sand-reefs, it was once dry land.  In
+those days, between the Abbey and the sea, there stood a town of
+seven towers and four rich churches, surrounded by a wall of twelve
+stones' thickness, making it, as men reckoned then, a place of
+strength and much import; and the monks, glancing their eyes
+downward from the Abbey garden on the hill, saw beneath their feet
+its narrow streets, gay with the ever passing of rich merchandise,
+saw its many wharves and water-ways, ever noisy with the babel of
+strange tongues, saw its many painted masts, wagging their grave
+heads above the dormer roofs and quaintly-carved oak gables.
+
+Thus the town prospered till there came a night when it did evil in
+the sight of God and man.  Those were troublous times to Saxon
+dwellers by the sea, for the Danish water-rats swarmed round each
+river mouth, scenting treasure from afar; and by none was the white
+flash of their sharp, strong teeth more often seen than by the men
+of Eastern Anglia, and by none in Eastern Anglia more often than by
+the watchers on the walls of the town of seven towers that once
+stood upon the dry land, but which now lies twenty fathom deep
+below the waters.  Many a bloody fight raged now without and now
+within its wall of twelve stones' thickness.  Many a groan of dying
+man, many a shriek of murdered woman, many a wail of mangled child,
+knocked at the Abbey door upon its way to Heaven, calling the
+trembling-monks from their beds, to pray for the souls that were
+passing by.
+
+But at length peace came to the long-troubled land:  Dane and Saxon
+agreeing to dwell in friendship side by side, East Anglia being
+wide, and there being room for both.  And all men rejoiced greatly,
+for all were weary of a strife in which little had been gained on
+either side beyond hard blows, and their thoughts were of the
+ingle-nook.  So the long-bearded Danes, their thirsty axes harmless
+on their backs, passed to and fro in straggling bands, seeking
+where undisturbed and undisturbing they might build their homes;
+and thus it came about that Haafager and his company, as the sun
+was going down, drew near to the town of seven towers, that in
+those days stood on dry land between the Abbey and the sea.
+
+And the men of the town, seeing the Danes, opened wide their gates
+saying:-
+
+"We have fought, but now there is peace.  Enter, and make merry
+with us, and to-morrow go your way."
+
+But Haafager made answer:-
+
+"I am an old man, I pray you do not take my words amiss.  There is
+peace between us, as you say, and we thank you for your courtesy,
+but the stains are still fresh upon our swords.  Let us camp here
+without your walls, and a little later, when the grass has grown
+upon the fields where we have striven, and our young men have had
+time to forget, we will make merry together, as men should who
+dwell side by side in the same land."
+
+But the men of the town still urged Haafager, calling his people
+neighbours; and the Abbot, who had hastened down, fearing there
+might be strife, added his words to theirs, saying:-
+
+"Pass in, my children.  Let there indeed be peace between you, that
+the blessing of God may be upon the land, and upon both Dane and
+Saxon"; for the Abbot saw that the townsmen were well disposed
+towards the Danes, and knew that men, when they have feasted and
+drunk together, think kinder of one another.
+
+Then answered Haafager, who knew the Abbot for a holy man:-
+
+"Hold up your staff, my father, that the shadow of the cross your
+people worship may fall upon our path, so we will pass into the
+town and there shall be peace between us, for though your gods are
+not our gods, faith between man and man is of all altars."
+
+And the Abbot held his staff aloft between Haafager's people and
+the sun, it being fashioned in the form of a cross, and under its
+shadow the Danes passed by into the town of seven towers, there
+being of them, with the women and the children, nearly two thousand
+souls, and the gates were made fast behind them.
+
+So they who had fought face to face, feasted side by side, pledging
+one another in the wine cup, as was the custom; and Haafager's men,
+knowing themselves amongst friends, cast aside their arms, and when
+the feast was done, being weary, they lay down to sleep.
+
+Then an evil voice arose in the town, and said:  "Who are these
+that have come among us to share our land?  Are not the stones of
+our streets red with the blood of wife and child that they have
+slain?  Do men let the wolf go free when they have trapped him with
+meat?  Let us fall upon them now that they are heavy with food and
+wine, so that not one of them shall escape.  Thus no further harm
+shall come to us from them nor from their children."
+
+And the voice of evil prevailed, and the men of the town of seven
+towers fell upon the Danes with whom they had broken meat, even to
+the women and the little children; and the blood of the people of
+Haafager cried with a loud voice at the Abbey door, through the
+long night it cried, saying:-
+
+"I trusted in your spoken word.  I broke meat with you.  I put my
+faith in you and in your God.  I passed beneath the shadow of your
+cross to enter your doors.  Let your God make answer!"
+
+Nor was there silence till the dawn.
+
+Then the Abbot rose from where he knelt and called to God, saying:-
+
+"Thou hast heard, O God.  Make answer."
+
+And there came a great sound from the sea as though a tongue had
+been given to the deep, so that the monks fell upon their knees in
+fear; but the Abbot answered:-
+
+"It is the voice of God speaking through the waters.  He hath made
+answer."
+
+And that winter a mighty storm arose, the like of which no man had
+known before; for the sea was piled upon the dry land until the
+highest tower of the town of seven towers was not more high; and
+the waters moved forward over the dry land.  And the men of the
+town of seven towers fled from the oncoming of the waters, but the
+waters overtook them so that not one of them escaped.  And the town
+of the seven towers and of the four churches, and of the many
+streets and quays, was buried underneath the waters, and the feet
+of the waters still moved till they came to the hill whereon the
+Abbey stood.  Then the Abbot prayed to God that the waters might be
+stayed, and God heard, and the sea came no farther.
+
+And that this tale is true, and not a fable made by the weavers of
+words, he who doubts may know from the fisher-folk, who to-day ply
+their calling amongst the reefs and sandbanks of that lonely coast.
+For there are those among them who, peering from the bows of their
+small craft, have seen far down beneath their keels a city of
+strange streets and many quays.  But as to this, I, who repeat
+these things to you, cannot speak of my own knowledge, for this
+city of the sea is only visible when a rare wind, blowing from the
+north, sweeps the shadows from the waves; and though on many a
+sunny day I have drifted where its seven towers should once have
+stood, yet for me that wind has never blown, pushing back the
+curtains of the sea, and, therefore, I have strained my eyes in
+vain.
+
+But this I do know, that the rumbling stones of that ancient Abbey,
+between which and the foam fringe of the ocean the town of seven
+towers once lay, now stand upon a wave-washed cliff, and that he
+who looks forth from its shattered mullions to-day sees only the
+marshland and the wrinkled waters, hears only the plaint of the
+circling gulls and the weary crying of the sea.
+
+And that God's anger is not everlasting, and that the evil that
+there is in men shall be blotted out, he who doubts may also learn
+from the wisdom of the simple fisher-folk, who dwell about the
+borders of the marsh-land; for they will tell him that on stormy
+nights there speaks a deep voice from the sea, calling the dead
+monks to rise from their forgotten graves, and chant a mass for the
+souls of the men of the town of seven towers.  Clothed in long
+glittering white, they move with slowly pacing feet around the
+Abbey's grass-grown aisles, and the music of their prayers is heard
+above the screaming of the storm.  And to this I also can bear
+witness, for I have seen the passing of their shrouded forms behind
+the blackness of the shattered shafts; I have heard their sweet,
+sad singing above the wailing of the wind.
+
+Thus for many ages have the dead monks prayed that the men of the
+town of seven towers may be forgiven.  Thus, for many ages yet
+shall they so pray, till the day come when of their once fair Abbey
+not a single stone shall stand upon its fellow; and in that day it
+shall be known that the anger of God against the men of the town of
+seven towers has passed away; and in that day the feet of the
+waters shall move back, and the town of seven towers shall stand
+again upon the dry land.
+
+There be some, I know, who say that this is but a legend; who will
+tell you that the shadowy shapes that you may see with your own
+eyes on stormy nights, waving their gleaming arms behind the ruined
+buttresses are but of phosphorescent foam, tossed by the raging
+waves above the cliffs; and that the sweet, sad harmony cleaving
+the trouble of the night is but the aeolian music of the wind.
+
+But such are of the blind, who see only with their eyes.  For
+myself I see the white-robed monks, and hear the chanting of their
+mass for the souls of the sinful men of the town of seven towers.
+For it has been said that when an evil deed is done, a prayer is
+born to follow it through time into eternity, and plead for it.
+Thus is the whole world clasped around with folded hands both of
+the dead and of the living, as with a shield, lest the shafts of
+God's anger should consume it.
+
+Therefore, I know that the good monks of this nameless Abbey are
+still praying that the sin of those they love may be forgiven.
+
+God grant good men may say a mass for us.
+
+
+
+DRIFTWOOD
+
+
+
+CHARACTERS
+
+MR. TRAVERS.
+MRS. TRAVERS.
+MARION [their daughter].
+DAN [a gentleman of no position].
+
+SCENE:  A room opening upon a garden.  The shadows creep from their
+corners, driving before them the fading twilight.
+
+MRS. TRAVERS sits in a wickerwork easy chair.  MR. TRAVERS, smoking
+a cigar, sits the other side of the room.  MARION stands by the
+open French window, looking out.
+
+MR. TRAVERS.  Nice little place Harry's got down here.
+
+MRS. TRAVERS.  Yes; I should keep this on if I were you, Marion.
+You'll find it very handy.  One can entertain so cheaply up the
+river; one is not expected to make much of a show.  [She turns to
+her husband.]  Your poor cousin Emily used to work off quite half
+her list that way--relations and Americans, and those sort of
+people, you know--at that little place of theirs at Goring.  You
+remember it--a poky hole I always thought it, but it had a lot of
+green stuff over the door--looked very pretty from the other side
+of the river.  She always used to have cold meat and pickles for
+lunch--called it a picnic.  People said it was so homely and
+simple.
+
+MR. TRAVERS.  They didn't stop long, I remember.
+
+MRS. TRAVERS.  And there was a special champagne she always kept
+for the river--only twenty-five shillings a dozen, I think she told
+me she paid for it, and very good it was too, for the price.  That
+old Indian major--what was his name?--said it suited him better
+than anything else he had ever tried.  He always used to drink a
+tumblerful before breakfast; such a funny thing to do.  I've often
+wondered where she got it.
+
+MR. TRAVERS.  So did most people who tasted it.  Marion wants to
+forget those lessons, not learn them.  She is going to marry a rich
+man who will be able to entertain his guests decently.
+
+MRS. TRAVERS.  Oh, well, James, I don't know.  None of us can
+afford to live up to the income we want people to think we've got.
+One must economise somewhere.  A pretty figure we should cut in the
+county if I didn't know how to make fivepence look like a shilling.
+And, besides, there are certain people that one has to be civil to,
+that, at the same time, one doesn't want to introduce into one's
+regular circle.  If you take my advice, Marion, you won't encourage
+those sisters of Harry's more than you can help.  They're dear
+sweet girls, and you can be very nice to them; but don't have them
+too much about.  Their manners are terribly old-fashioned, and
+they've no notion how to dress, and those sort of people let down
+the tone of a house.
+
+MARION.  I'm not likely to have many "dear sweet girls" on my
+visiting list.  [With a laugh.]  There will hardly be enough in
+common to make the company desired, on either side.
+
+MRS. TRAVERS.  Well, I only want you to be careful, my dear.  So
+much depends on how you begin, and with prudence there's really no
+reason why you shouldn't do very well.  I suppose there's no doubt
+about Harry's income.  He won't object to a few inquiries?
+
+MARION.  I think you may trust me to see to that, mamma.  It would
+be a bad bargain for me, if even the cash were not certain.
+
+MR. TRAVERS [jumping up].  Oh, I do wish you women wouldn't discuss
+the matter in that horribly business-like way.  One would think the
+girl was selling herself.
+
+MRS. TRAVERS.  Oh, don't be foolish, James.  One must look at the
+practical side of these things.  Marriage is a matter of sentiment
+to a man--very proper that it should be.  A woman has to remember
+that she's fixing her position for life.
+
+MARION.  You see, papa dear, it's her one venture.  If she doesn't
+sell herself to advantage then, she doesn't get another
+opportunity--very easily.
+
+MR. TRAVERS.  Umph!  When I was a young man, girls talked more
+about love and less about income.
+
+MARION.  Perhaps they had not our educational advantages.
+
+[DAN enters from the garden.  He is a man of a little over forty,
+his linen somewhat frayed about the edges.]
+
+MRS. TRAVERS.  Ah!  We were just wondering where all you people had
+got to.
+
+DAN.  We've been out sailing.  I've been sent up to fetch you.
+It's delightful on the river.  The moon is just rising.
+
+MRS. TRAVERS.  But it's so cold.
+
+MR. TRAVERS.  Oh, never mind the cold.  It's many a long year since
+you and I looked at the moon together.  It will do us good.
+
+MRS. TRAVERS.  Ah, dear.  Boys will be boys.  Give me my wrap then.
+
+[DAN places it about her.  They move towards the window, where they
+stand talking.  MARION has slipped out and returns with her
+father's cap.  He takes her face between his hands and looks at
+her.]
+
+MR. TRAVERS.  Do you really care for Harry, Marion?
+
+MARION.  As much as one can care for a man with five thousand a
+year.  Perhaps he will make it ten one day--then I shall care for
+him twice as much.  [Laughs.]
+
+MR. TRAVERS.  And are you content with this marriage?
+
+MARION.  Quite.
+
+[He shakes his head gravely at her.]
+
+MRS. TRAVERS.  Aren't you coming, Marion?
+
+MARION.  No.  I'm feeling tired.
+
+[MR. and MRS. TRAVERS go out.]
+
+DAN.  Are you going to leave Harry alone with two pairs of lovers?
+
+MARION [with a laugh].  Yes--let him see how ridiculous they look.
+I hate the night--it follows you and asks questions.  Shut it out.
+Come and talk to me.  Amuse me.
+
+DAN.  What shall I talk to you about?
+
+MARION.  Oh, tell me all the news.  What is the world doing?  Who
+has run away with whose wife?  Who has been swindling whom?  Which
+philanthropist has been robbing the poor?  What saint has been
+discovered sinning?  What is the latest scandal?  Who has been
+found out? and what is it they have been doing? and what is
+everybody saying about it?
+
+DAN.  Would it amuse you?
+
+MARION [she sits by the piano, softly touching the keys, idly
+recalling many memories].  What should it do?  Make me weep?
+Should not one be glad to know one's friends better?
+
+DAN.  I wish you wouldn't be clever.  Everyone one meets is clever
+nowadays.  It came in when the sun-flower went out.  I preferred
+the sun-flower; it was more amusing.
+
+MARION.  And stupid people, I suppose, will come in when the clever
+people go out.  I prefer the clever.  They have better manners.
+You're exceedingly disagreeable.  [She leaves the piano, and,
+throwing herself upon the couch, takes up a book.]
+
+DAN.  I know I am.  The night has been with me also.  It follows
+one and asks questions.
+
+MARION.  What questions has it been asking you?
+
+DAN.  Many--and so many of them have no answer.  Why am I a
+useless, drifting log upon the world's tide?  Why have all the
+young men passed me?  Why am I, at thirty-nine, let us say, with
+brain, with power, with strength--nobody thinks I am worth
+anything, but I am--I know it.  I might have been an able editor,
+devoting every morning from ten till three to arranging the affairs
+of the Universe, or a popular politician, trying to understand what
+I was talking about, and to believe it.  And what am I?  A
+newspaper reporter, at three-ha'pence a line--I beg their pardon,
+its occasionally twopence.
+
+MARION.  Does it matter?
+
+DAN.  Does it matter!  Does it matter whether a Union Jack or a
+Tricolor floats over the turrets of Badajoz? yet we pour our blood
+into its ditches to decide the argument.  Does it matter whether
+one star more or less is marked upon our charts? yet we grow blind
+peering into their depths.  Does it matter that one keel should
+slip through the grip of the Polar ice? yet nearer, nearer to it,
+we pile our whitening bones.  And it's worth playing, the game of
+life.  And there's a meaning in it.  It's worth playing, if only
+that it strengthens the muscles of our souls.  I'd like to have
+taken a hand in it.
+
+MARION.  Why didn't you?
+
+DAN.  No partner.  Dull playing by oneself.  No object.
+
+MARION [after a silence].  What was she like?
+
+DAN.  So like you that there are times when I almost wish I had
+never met you.  You set me thinking about myself, and that is a
+subject I find it pleasanter to forget.
+
+MARION.  And this woman that was like me--she could have made a
+man's life?
+
+DAN.  Ay!
+
+MARION.  Won't you tell me about her?  Had she many faults?
+
+DAN.  Enough to love her by.
+
+MARION.  But she must have been good.
+
+DAN.  Good enough to be a woman.
+
+MARION.  That might mean so much or so little.
+
+DAN.  It should mean much to my thinking.  There are few women.
+
+MARION.  Few!  I thought the economists held that there were too
+many of us.
+
+DAN.  Not enough--not enough to go round.  That is why a true woman
+has many lovers.
+
+[There is a silence between them.  Then MARION rises, but their
+eyes do not meet.]
+
+MARION.  How serious we have grown!
+
+DAN.  They say a dialogue between a man and woman always does.
+
+MARION [she moves away, then, hesitating, half returns].  May I ask
+you a question?
+
+DAN.  That is an easy favour to grant.
+
+MARION.  If--if at any time you felt regard again for a woman,
+would you, for her sake, if she wished it, seek to gain, even now,
+that position in the world which is your right--which would make
+her proud of your friendship--would make her feel that even her
+life had not been altogether without purpose?
+
+DAN.  Too late!  The old hack can only look over the hedge, and
+watch the field race by.  The old ambition stirs within me at
+times--especially after a glass of good wine--and Harry's wine--God
+bless him--is excellent--but to-morrow morning--[with a shrug of
+his shoulders he finishes his meaning].
+
+MARION.  Then she could do nothing?
+
+DAN.  Nothing for his fortunes--much for himself.  My dear young
+lady, never waste pity on a man in love--nor upon a child crying
+for the moon.  The moon is a good thing to cry for.
+
+MARION.  I am glad I am like her.  I am glad that I have met you.
+
+[She gives him her hand, and for a moment he holds it.  Then she
+goes out.]
+
+[A flower has fallen from her breast, whether by chance or meaning,
+he knows not.  He picks it up and kisses it; stands twirling it,
+undecided for a second, then lets it fall again upon the floor.]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg eText Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green
+
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