“Thank you,” she answered. “He would think it kind of you, I know.” “I’ve heard of him,” said Mrs. Phillips. “He’s worth reading, isn’t he?”!

It made her mad, the look of delight that came into his eyes. She could have boxed his ears. Hadn’t he anything else to do but hang about the streets. “I’m not so sure you’re not right after all,” she said, fixing a critical eye upon the rival suites. “It is a bit mousey, that other.”

His work had taken him into the Desert, far from the beaten tracks. He described the life of the people, very little different from what it must have been in Noah’s time. For months he had been the only white man there, and had lived among them. What had struck him was how little he had missed all the paraphernalia of civilization, once he had got over the first shock. He had learnt their sports and games; wrestled and swum and hunted with them. Provided one was a little hungry and tired with toil, a stew of goat’s flesh with sweet cakes and fruits, washed down with wine out of a sheep’s skin, made a feast; and after, there was music and singing and dancing, or the travelling story-teller would gather round him his rapt audience. Paris had only robbed women of their grace and dignity. He preferred the young girls in their costume of the fourteenth dynasty. Progress, he thought, had tended only to complicate life and render it less enjoyable. All the essentials of happiness—love, courtship, marriage, the home, children, friendship, social intercourse, and play, were independent of it; had always been there for the asking. “She ought not to talk to more than one person at a time,” the nurse explained, with a shake of the head. She was a quiet, business-like woman. She would not express a definite opinion. It seemed, in spite of its open door, a very silent little house behind its strip of garden. Joan had the feeling that it was listening.