“I want to talk to them,” he said, “about their stomachs. I want them to see the need of concentrating upon the food problem: insisting that it shall be solved. The other things can follow.” It was daylight when she awoke. She was cold and her limbs ached. Slowly her senses came back to her. The seat opposite was vacant. The gas lamp showed but a faint blue point of flame. Her dress was torn, her boots soiled and muddy. Strands of her hair had escaped from underneath her hat.!

She showed the telegram to her father. “Do you mind, Dad, if we go straight back?” she asked. “Well, you can’t expect ’em to like it, can you?” submitted Miss Ensor.

杰罗米•K•杰罗米 Jerome Klapka Jerome 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. Joan considered. “Yes,” she answered. “I should say he’s just the man to manage her.”