“Interviewing?” he suggested. Joan remained silent. It made her mad, that a man could be suddenly robbed of fifteen years’ labour: the weapon that his heart and brain had made keen wrested from his hand by a legal process, and turned against the very principles for which all his life he had been fighting.!

“Nature appears to have only one idea in her head,” she continued after a pause, “so far as we men and women are concerned. She’s been kinder to the lower animals.” Joan did not answer.

“I’ve never been able myself,” he continued, “to understand the Lord’s enthusiasm for David. I suppose it was the Psalms that did it.” Joan laughed. “I’m a drummer boy,” she answered. “I beat my drum each week in a Sunday newspaper, hoping the lads will follow.” Flossie’s young man was standing near the fire talking, or rather listening, to a bird-like little woman in a short white frock and blue ribbons. A sombre lady just behind her, whom Joan from the distance took to be her nurse, turned out to be her secretary, whose duty it was to be always at hand, prepared to take down any happy idea that might occur to the bird-like little woman in the course of conversation. The bird-like little woman was Miss Rose Tolley, a popular novelist. She was explaining to Flossie’s young man, whose name was Sam Halliday, the reason for her having written “Running Waters,” her latest novel.