“Tell me,” he said, “did you see your mother before she died. Did she speak to you?” Joan flushed. What did he mean by cross-examining her in this way? She was not at all used to impertinence from the opposite sex.!

“What does he think,” she asked, “about your illness?” “As a matter of fact they don’t,” she explained. “But it’s what people talk about whenever they discuss you.”

“It ought to be included in every woman’s education,” Madge continued. “It is reserved for spinsters of over forty-five. Susan Fleming wrote an article upon it for the Teacher’s Friend; and spent an afternoon and evening there. A month later she married a grocer with five children. The only sound suggestion for avoiding trouble that I ever came across was in a burlesque of the Blue Bird. You remember the scene where the spirits of the children are waiting to go down to earth and be made into babies? Someone had stuck up a notice at the entrance to the gangway: ‘Don’t get born. It only means worry.’” “Take care they don’t get the best of you,” Miss Ensor advised him. She ought to have insisted on their going to a decent shop. The mere advertisement ought to have forewarned her. It was the posters that had captured Mrs. Phillips: those dazzling apartments where bejewelled society reposed upon the “high-class but inexpensive designs” of Mr. Krebs. Artists ought to have more self-respect than to sell their talents for such purposes.