“Not many,” admitted Mr. Simson. “A Christmassy lot. You know. Sort of crowd that interrupts you and tries to be funny. Dead to their own interests. It’s slow work.” “I wasn’t really,” explained Mr. Folk. “I just walked and talked naturally. It made rather a sensation at the time. Your mother was a genius. You have never thought of going on the stage yourself?”!

“I didn’t ask you if you liked him,” he explained to her. “I asked you if he was brainy. I’m not too sure that you like brainy men.” “But I’m so useless,” pleaded the woman.

CHAPTER VIII Oh, the things she was going to get fond of! The things that her poor, round foolish eyes gloated upon the moment that she saw them! Joan tried to enlist the shopman on her side, descending even to flirtation. Unfortunately he was a young man with a high sense of duty, convinced that his employer’s interests lay in his support of Mrs. Phillips. The sight of the furniture that, between them, they selected for the dining-room gave Joan a quite distinct internal pain. They ascended to the floor above, devoted to the exhibition of “Recherché drawing-room suites.” Mrs. Phillips’s eye instinctively fastened with passionate desire upon the most atrocious. Joan grew vehement. It was impossible. “The great International Peace Congress at Paris,” explained Mrs. Denton; “just after the Crimean war. It made quite a stir at the time. The Emperor opened our proceedings in person, and the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury both sent us their blessing. We had a copy of the speeches presented to us on leaving, in every known language in Europe, bound in vellum. I’m hoping to find it. And the Press was enthusiastic. There were to be Acts of Parliament, Courts of Arbitration, International Laws, Diplomatic Treaties. A Sub-Committee was appointed to prepare a special set of prayers and a Palace of Peace was to be erected. There was only one thing we forgot, and that was the foundation.”