Joan murmured her sense of favour, but hoped she would not be allowed to interfere with more pressing calls upon Mr. Phillips’s time. And suddenly—as years before in a Paris music hall—there leapt to life within Joan’s brain a little impish creature that took possession of her. She hoped the miracle would not happen. The little impish creature within her brain was marching up and down beating a drum. She wished he would stop a minute. Someone was trying to talk to her, telling her she ought to be tremendously shocked and grieved. He—or she, or whatever it was that was trying to talk to her, appeared concerned about Reason and Pity and Universal Brotherhood and Civilization’s clock—things like that. But the little impish drummer was making such a din, she couldn’t properly hear. Later on, perhaps, he would get tired; and then she would be able to listen to this humane and sensible person, whoever it might be.!

“So long as he doesn’t think that I came down specially to see him, I don’t mind,” said Joan. “And you don’t forget our compact, do you?” he continued, “that I am to be your backer. I want to be in it too.”

“I started out to preach the gospel: all that sort of thing,” drawled a Miss Simmonds from beneath a hat that, if she had paid for it, would have cost her five guineas. “Now my chief purpose in life is to tickle silly women into spending twice as much upon their clothes as their husbands can afford, bamboozling them into buying any old thing that our Advertising Manager instructs me to boom.” “They would never overtake the farmer,” he answered, with a laugh. “And the last word would always be with him. I am out to get rid of the landlords,” he continued, “not to establish them as the permanent rulers of the country, as they are in Germany. The people are more powerful—just a little, because they are no longer dependent on the land. They can say to the farmer, ‘All right, my son, if that’s your figure, I’m going to the shop next door—to South America, to Canada, to Russia.’ It isn’t a satisfactory solution. I want to see England happy and healthy before I bother about the Argentine. It drives our men into the slums when they might be living fine lives in God’s fresh air. In the case of war it might be disastrous. There, I agree with him. We must be able to shut our door without fear of having to open it ourselves to ask for bread. How would Protection accomplish that? Did he tell you?” “Oh, there were times,” answered Joan, “when she was more like her old self again. But I don’t think she ever quite got over it. Unless it was towards the end,” she added. “They told me she seemed much better for a little while before she died. I was away at Cambridge at the time.”