“I was just wondering,” she went on. “It was a pity, wasn’t it? I was silly and began to cry.” “Don’t you see it for yourself?” he demanded.!

“Or even Liverpool,” she laughed. She moved to a chair beside the desk, and, opening her bag, took out a writing-block.

“I’ll give him your message,” said Joan. “But I don’t see him exchanging his principles even for your support. I admit it’s important.” Those drawing-rooms? Might not something of the sort be possible? Not, perhaps, the sumptuous salon of her imagination, thronged with the fair and famous, suitably attired. Something, perhaps, more homely, more immediately attainable. Some of the women dressed, perhaps, a little dowdily; not all of them young and beautiful. The men wise, perhaps, rather than persistently witty; a few of them prosy, maybe a trifle ponderous; but solid and influential. Mrs. Denton’s great empty house in Gower Street? A central situation and near to the tube. Lords and ladies had once ruffled there; trod a measure on its spacious floors; filled its echoing stone hall with their greetings and their partings. The gaping sconces, where their link-boys had extinguished their torches, still capped its grim iron railings. “They talk about the editor’s opinions,” struck in a fiery little woman who was busy flinging crumbs out of the window to a crowd of noisy sparrows. “It’s the Advertiser edits half the papers. Write anything that three of them object to, and your proprietor tells you to change your convictions or go. Most of us change.” She jerked down the window with a slam.