The discussion was brief. “Then I’ll send your agent the contract to-morrow,” Joan overheard him say a minute later. “You told me my coming would take you back thirty-three years,” Joan reminded him. “It makes us about the same age. I shall treat you as just a young man.”!

He met her in the corridor, and they walked up and down and talked, too absorbed to be aware of the curious eyes that were turned upon them. Joan gave him Carleton’s message. “Yes,” he answered musingly. “It’s your baby face that does the trick. In the ordinary way I should have known you were pulling my leg, and have shown you the door. As it was, I felt half inclined for the moment to reply with some damned silly platitude that would have set all Fleet Street laughing at me. Why do my ‘principles’ interest you?”

“It comes to the same thing, doesn’t it, dear?” she answered. “They are there, anyhow. And that is how He knows those who are willing to serve Him: by their being pitiful.” Her admiration of the independent woman had undergone some modification since she had come in contact with her. Woman was intended to be dependent upon man. It was the part appointed to him in the social scheme. Woman had hers, no less important. Earning her own living did not improve her. It was one of the drawbacks of civilization that so many had to do it of necessity. It developed her on the wrong lines—against her nature. This cry of the unsexed: that woman must always be the paid servant instead of the helper of man—paid for being mother, paid for being wife! Why not carry it to its logical conclusion, and insist that she should be paid for her embraces? That she should share in man’s labour, in his hopes, that was the true comradeship. What mattered it, who held the purse-strings! “There’s a chemist’s shop in the next street. We’d better take him there,” suggested the one who had first spoken to her. And she thanked them and followed them.