“Yes, but it needn’t be you,” suggested Miss Ensor. Miss Tolley appeared to be getting muddled. “Whose boy?” she demanded.!

It would be rather pleasant. There was a little place at Meudon, she remembered. The plane trees would just be in full leaf. “What do you mean by got to do it?” exclaimed Miss Ensor. “Who’s making him do it, except himself?”

In quiet streets of stately houses, she caught glimpses through uncurtained windows of richly-laid dinner-tables about which servants moved noiselessly, arranging flowers and silver. She wondered idly if she would every marry. A gracious hostess, gathering around her brilliant men and women, statesmen, writers, artists, captains of industry: counselling them, even learning from them: encouraging shy genius. Perhaps, in a perfectly harmless way, allowing it the inspiration derivable from a well-regulated devotion to herself. A salon that should be the nucleus of all those forces that influence influences, over which she would rule with sweet and wise authority. The idea appealed to her. She would write books. She would choose for her heroine a woman of the people. How full of drama, of tragedy must be their stories: their problems the grim realities of life, not only its mere sentimental embroideries. The daily struggle for bare existence, the ever-shadowing menace of unemployment, of illness, leaving them helpless amid the grinding forces crushing them down on every side. The ceaseless need for courage, for cunning. For in the kingdom of the poor the tyrant and the oppressor still sit in the high places, the robber still rides fearless. “You left a glove behind you, the first day you ever came to our house,” Mary explained. “And I kept it.”