WHEN after lunch on Wednesday afternoon John relinquished Miss Hamilton to the company of her friend Miss Merritt at Charing Cross Station, he was relinquishing a secretary from whom he had received an assurance that the very next morning she would be at his elbow, if he might so express himself. In his rosiest moments he had never expected so swift a fulfilment of his plan, and he felt duly grateful to Miss Merritt, to whose powers of persuasion he ascribed the acceptance in spite of Mrs. Hamilton's usually only too effective method of counteracting any kind of independent action on her daughter's part. On the promenade deck of the Murmania Miss Merritt had impressed John with her resolute character; now she seemed to him positively Napoleonic, and he was more in awe of her than ever, so much so indeed that he completely failed to convey his sense of obligation to her good offices and could only beam at her like a benevolent character in a Dickens novel. Finally he did manage to stammer out his desire that she would charge herself with the financial side of the agreement and was lost in silent wonder when she had no hesitation in suggesting terms based on the fact that Miss Hamilton had no previous experience as a secretary.

"Later on, if you're satisfied with her," she said, "you must increase her salary; but I will be no party to over-payment simply because she is personally sympathetic to you."

How well that was put, John thought. Personally sympathetic! How accurately it described his attitude toward Miss Hamilton. He took leave of the young women and walked up Villiers Street, cheered by the pleasant conviction that the flood of domestic worries which had threatened to destroy his peace of mind and overwhelm his productiveness was at last definitely stayed.

"She's exactly what I require," he kept saying to himself, exultantly. "And I think I may claim without unduly flattering myself that the post I have offered her is exactly what she requires. From what that very nice girl Miss Merritt said, it is evidently a question of asserting herself now or never. With what a charming lack of self-consciousness she agreed to the salary and even suggested the hours of work herself. Oh, she's undoubtedly practical—very practical; but at the same time she has not got that almost painfully practical exterior of Miss Merritt, who must have broken in a large number of difficult employers to acquire that tight set of her mouth. Probably I shall be easy to manage, so working for me won't spoil her unbusinesslike appearance. To-morrow we are to discuss the choice of a typewriter; and by the way, I must arrange which room she is to use for typing. The noise of a machine at high speed would be as prejudicial to composition as Viola's step-dancing. Yes, I must arrange with Mrs. Worfolk about a room."

John's faith in his good luck was confirmed by the amazing discovery that Mrs. Worfolk had known his intended secretary as a child.

"Her old nurse in fact!" he exclaimed joyfully, for such a melodramatic coincidence did not offend John's romantic palate.

"No, sir, not her nurse. I never was not what you might call a nurse proper. Well, I mean to say, though I was always fond of children I seemed to take more somehow to the house itself, and so I never got beyond being a nursemaid. After that I gave myself up to rising as high as a housemaid can rise until I married Mr. Worfolk. Perhaps you may remember me once passing the remark that I'd been in service with a racing family? Well, after I left them I took a situation as upper housemaid with a very nice family in the county of Unts, and who came up to London for the season to Grosvenor Gardens. Then I met Mr. Worfolk who was a carpenter and he made packing-cases for Mr. Hamilton who was your young lady's pa. Oh, I remember him well. There was a slight argument between Mr. Worfolk and I—well, not argument, because ours was a very happy marriage, but a slight conversation as to whether he was to make cases for Chi-ner or Chi-nese knick-knacks, and Mr. Worfolk was wrong."

"But were you in service with Mr. Hamilton? Did he live in Huntingdonshire?"

"No, no, sir. You're getting very confused, if you'll pardon the obsivation. Very confused, you're getting. This Mr. Hamilton was a customer of Mr. Worfolk and through him coming to superintend his Chi-nese valuables being packed I got to know his little girl—your secretary as is to be. Oh, I remember her perfickly. Why, I mended a hole in her stocking once. Right above the garter it was, and she was so fond of our Tom. Oh, but he was a beautiful mouser. I've heard many people say they never saw a finer cat nowhere."

"You have a splendid memory, Mrs. Worfolk."

"Yes, sir. I have got a good memory. Why, when I was a tiny tot I can remember my poor grandpa being took sudden with the colic and rolling about on the kitchen hearth-rug, groaning, as you might say, in a agony of pain. Well, he died the same year as the Juke of Wellington, but though I was taken to the Juke's funeral by my poor mother, I've forgotten that. Well, one can't remember everything, and that's a fact; one little thing will stick and another little thing won't. Well, I mean to say, it's a good job anybody can't remember everything. I'm shaw there's enough trouble in the world as it is."

Mrs. Worfolk startled the new secretary when she presented herself at 36 Church Row next day by embracing her affectionately in the hall before she had explained the reason for such a demonstration. It soon transpired, however, that Miss Hamilton's memory was as good as Mrs. Worfolk's and that she had not forgotten those jolly visits to the carpenter long ago, nor even the big yellow Tomcat. As for the master of the house, he raised his housekeeper's salary to show what importance he attached to a good memory.

For a day or two John felt shy of assigning much work to his secretary; but she soon protested that, if she was only going to type thirty to fifty lines of blank verse every other morning, she should resign her post on the ground that it was an undignified sinecure.

"What about dictating your letters? You made such a point of my knowing shorthand."

"Yes, I did, didn't I?" John agreed.

Dictation made him very nervous at first; but with a little practice he began to enjoy it, and ultimately it became something in the nature of a vice. He dictated immensely long letters to friends whose very existence he had forgotten for years, the result of which abrupt revivals of intercourse was a shower of appeals to lend money to these companions of his youth. Yet this result did not discourage him from the habit of dictating for dictation's sake, and every night before he turned over to go to sleep he used to poke about in the rubbish-heap of the past for more forgotten friends. As a set off to incommoding himself with a host of unnecessary correspondents he became meticulously businesslike, and after having neglected Miss Janet Bond for several weeks he began to write to her daily about the progress of the play, which notwithstanding his passion for dictation really was progressing at last. Indeed he worked up the manageress of the Parthenon to such a pitch of excitement that one morning she appeared suddenly at Church Row and made a dramatic entrance into the library when John, who had for the moment exhausted his list of friends, was dictating a letter to The Times about the condition of some trees on Hampstead Heath.

"I've broken in upon your inspiration," boomed Miss Bond in tones that she usually reserved for her most intensely tragic moments.

In vain did the author asseverate that he was delighted to see her; she rushed away without another word; but that evening she wrote him an ecstatic letter from her dressing-room about what it had meant to her and what it always would mean to her to think of his working like that for her.

"But we mustn't deride Janet Bond," said the author to his secretary, who was looking contemptuously at the actress's heavy caligraphy. "We must remember that she will create Joan of Arc."

"Yes, it's a pity, isn't it?" Miss Hamilton commented, dryly.

"Oh, but won't you allow that she's a great actress?"

"I will indeed," she murmured with an emphatic nod.

Carried along upon his flood of correspondence John nevertheless managed to steer clear of his relations, and in his present frame of mind he was inclined to attribute his successful course like everything else that was prospering just now to the advent of Miss Hamilton. However, it was too much to expect that with his newly discovered talent he should resist dictating at any rate one epistolary sermon to his youngest brother, of whose arrival at Ambles he had been sharply notified by Hilda. This weighty address took up nearly a whole morning, and when it was finished John was disconcerted by Miss Hamilton's saying:

"You don't really want me to type all this out?"

"Why not?"

"Oh, I don't know. But it seems to me that whatever he's done this won't make him repent. You don't mind my criticizing you?"

"I asked you to," he reminded her.

"Well, it seems to me a little false—a little, if I may say so, complacently wrathful. It's the sort of thing I seem to remember reading and laughing at in old-fashioned books. Of course, I'll type it out at once if you insist, but it's already after twelve o'clock, and we have to go over the material for the third act. I can't somehow fit in what you've just been dictating with what you were telling me yesterday about the scene between Gilles de Rais and Joan. I'm so afraid that you'll make Joan preach, and of course she mustn't preach, must she?"

"All right," conceded John, trying not to appear mortified. "If you think it isn't worth sending, I won't send it."

He fancied that she would be moved by his sensitiveness to her judgment; but, without a tremor, she tore the pages out of her shorthand book and threw them into the waste-paper basket. John stared at the ruthless young woman in dismay.

"Didn't you mean me to take you at your word?" she asked, severely.

He was not altogether sure that he had, but he lacked the courage to tell her so and checked an impulse to rescue his stillborn sermon from the grave.

"Though I don't quite like the idea of leaving my brother at Ambles with nothing to occupy his energies," John went on, meditatively, "I'm doubtful of the prudence of exposing him to the temptations of idleness."

"If you want to give him something to do, why don't you intrust him with getting ready the house for your Christmas party? You are always worrying about its emptiness."

"But isn't that putting in his way temptations of a more positive kind?" he suggested.

"Not if you set a limit to your expenditure. Can you trust his taste? He ought to be an adept at furnishings."

"Oh, I think he'd do the actual furnishing very well. But won't it seem as if I am overlooking his abominable behavior too easily?"

With a great effort John kept his eyes averted from the waste-paper basket.

"You must either do that or refuse to have anything more to do with him," Miss Hamilton declared. "You can't expect him to be the mirror of your moral superiority for the rest of his life."

"You seem to take quite an interest in him," said John, a little resentfully.

Miss Hamilton shrugged her shoulders.

"All right," he added, hurriedly. "I'll authorize him to prepare the house for Christmas. He must fight his own battles with my sister, Hilda. At any rate, it will annoy her."

Miss Hamilton shook her head in mock reproof.

"Act Three. Scene One," the dramatist announced in the voice of a mystic who has at last shaken himself free from earthly clogs and is about to achieve levitation. It was consoling to perceive that his secretary's expression changed in accord with his own, and John decided that she really was a most attractive young woman and not so unsympathetic as he had been upon the verge of thinking. Moreover, she was right. The important thing at present, the only thing, in fact, was the progress of the play, and it was for this very purpose that he had secured her collaboration—well, perhaps collaboration was too strong a word—but, indeed, so completely had she identified herself with his work that really he could almost call it collaboration. He ought not to tax his invention at this critical point with such a minor problem as the preparation of Ambles for a family reunion. Relations must go to the deuce in their own way, at any rate until the rough draft of the third act was finished, which, under present favorable conditions, might easily happen before Christmas. His secretary was always careful not to worry him with her own domestic bothers, though he knew by the way she had once or twice referred to her mother that she was having her own hard fight at home. He had once proposed calling upon the old lady; but Doris had quickly squashed the suggestion. John liked to think about Mrs. Hamilton, because through some obscure process of logic it gave him an excuse to think about her daughter as Doris. In other connections he thought of her formally as Miss Hamilton, and often told himself how lucky it was that so charming and accomplished a young woman should be so obviously indifferent to—well, not exactly to himself, but surely he might allege to anything except himself as a romantic playwright.

Meanwhile, the play itself marched on with apparent smoothness, until one morning John dictated the following letter to his star:

My Dear Miss Bond,—Much against my will, I have come to the conclusion that without a human love interest a play about Joan of Arc is impossible. You will be surprised by my abrupt change of front, and you will smile to yourself when you remember how earnestly I argued against your suggestion that I might ultimately be compelled to introduce a human love interest. The fact of the matter is that now I have arrived at the third act I find patriotism too abstract an emotion for the stage. As you know, my idea was to make Joan so much positively enamoured of her country that the ordinary love interest would be superseded. I shall continue to keep Joan herself heart free; but I do think that it would be effective to have at any rate two people in love with her. My notion is to introduce a devoted young peasant who will follow her from her native village, first to the court at Chinon, and so on right through the play until the last fatal scene in the market place at Rouen. I'm sure such a simple lover could be made very moving, and the contrast would be valuable; moreover, it strikes me as a perfectly natural situation. Further, I propose that Gilles de Rais should not only be in love with her, but that he should actually declare his love, and that she should for a brief moment be tempted to return it, finally spurning him as a temptation of the Devil, and thereby reducing him to such a state of despair that he is led into the horrible practices for which he was finally condemned to death. Let me know your opinion soon, because I am at this moment working on the third act.

Yours very sincerely,
JOHN TOUCHWOOD.

To which Miss Bond replied by telegram:

Complete confidence in you, and think suggestion magnificent, there should be exit speech of renunciation for Joan to bring down curtain of third act.

Janet Bond.

"You agree with these suggestions?" John asked his secretary.

"Like Miss Bond, I have complete confidence in you," she replied.

He looked at her earnestly to see if she was laughing at him, and put down his pen.

"Do you know that in some ways you yourself remind me of Joan?"

It was a habit of John's, who had a brain like a fly's eye, to perceive historical resemblances that were denied to an ordinary vision. Generally he discovered these reincarnations of the past in his own personality. While he was writing The Fall of Babylon he actually fretted himself for a time over a fancied similarity between his character and Nebuchadnezzar's, and sometimes used to wonder if he was putting too much of himself into his portrayal of that dim potentate; and during his composition of Lucretia he was so profoundly convinced that CÆsar Borgia was simply John Touchwood over again in a more passionate period and a more picturesque costume that, as the critics pointed out, he presented the world with an aspect of him that would never have been recognized by Machiavelli. Yet, even when Harold was being most unpleasant, or when Viola and Bertram were deafening his household, John could not bring himself to believe that he and Gilles de Rais, who was proved to have tortured over three hundred children to death, had many similar traits; nor was he willing to admit more than a most superficial likeness to the feeble Dauphin Charles. In fact, at one time he was so much discouraged by his inability to adumbrate himself in any of his personages that he began to regret his choice of Joan of Arc and to wish that he had persevered in his intention to write a play about Sir Walter Raleigh, with whom, allowing for the sundering years, he felt he had more in common than with any other historical figure. Therefore he was relieved to discover this resemblance between his heroine and his secretary, in whom he was beginning to take nearly as much interest as in himself.

"Do you mean outwardly?" asked Miss Hamilton, looking at an engraving of the bust from the church of St. Maurice, Orleans. "If so, I hope her complexion wasn't really as scaly as that."

"No, I mean in character."

"I suppose a private secretary ought not to say 'what nonsense' to her employer, but really what else can I say? You might as well compare Ida Merritt to Joan of Arc; in fact, she really is rather like my conception of her."

"I'm sorry you find the comparison so far-fetched," John said, huffily. "It wasn't intended to be uncomplimentary."

"Have you decided to introduce those wolves in the first act, because I think I ought to begin making inquiries about suitable dogs?"

When Miss Hamilton rushed away from the personal like this, John used to regret that he had changed their relationship from one of friendship to one of business. Although he admired practicalness, he realized that it was possible to be too practical, and he sighed sometimes for the tone that his unknown admirers took when they wrote to him about his work. Only that morning he had received a letter from one of these, which he had tossed across the table for his secretary's perusal before he dictated a graceful reply.

HILLCREST,
Highfield Road,
Hornsey, N.,
Dec. 14, 1910.

DEAR SIR:—I have never written to an author before, but I cannot help writing to ask you when you are going to give us another play. I cannot tell you how much I enjoy your plays—they take me into another world. Please do not imagine that I am an enthusiastic schoolgirl. I am the mother of four dear little children, and my husband and I both act in a dramatic club at Hornsey. We are very anxious to perform one of your plays, but the committee is afraid of the expense. I suppose it would be asking too much of you to lend us some of the costumes of The Fall of Babylon. I think it is your greatest work up till now, and I simply live in all those wonderful old cities now and read everything I can find about them. I was brought up very strictly when I was young and grew to hate the Bible—please do not be shocked at this—but since I saw The Fall of Babylon I have taken to reading it again. I went nine times—twice in the gallery, three times in the pit, twice in the upper circle and twice in the dress circle, once in the fifth row at the side and once right in the middle of the front row! I cut out the enclosed photo of you from The Tatler, and, would it be asking too much to sign your name? Hoping for the pleasure of a reply, I remain,

Your sincere admirer,
(Mrs.) ENID FOSTER.

"What extraordinary lunatics there are in this world," Miss Hamilton had commented. "Have you noticed the one constant factor in these letters? All the women begin by saying that it is the first time they have ever written to an author; of course, they would say the same thing to a man who kissed them. The men, however, try to convey that they're in the habit of writing to authors. I think there's a moral to be extracted from that observation."

Now, John had not yet attained—and perhaps it was improbable that he ever would attain—those cold summits of art out of reach alike of the still, sad music and the hurdy-gurdies of humanity, so that these letters from unknown men and women, were they never so foolish, titillated his vanity, which he called "appealing to his imagination."

"One must try to put oneself in the writer's place," he had urged, reproachfully.

"Um—yes, but I can't help thinking of Mrs. Enid Foster living in those wonderful old cities. Her household will crash like Babylon if she isn't careful, and her family will be reduced to eating grass like Nebuchadnezzar, if the green-grocer's book is neglected any longer."

"You won't allow the suburbs to be touched by poetry?"

John had tried to convey in his tone that Miss Hamilton in criticizing the enthusiasm of Mrs. Foster was depreciating his own work. But she had seemed quite unconscious of having rather offended him and had taken down his answer without excusing herself. Now when in a spirit that was truly forgiving he had actually compared her to his beloved heroine, she had scoffed at him as if he was a kind of Mrs. Foster himself.

"You're very matter-of-fact," he muttered.

"Isn't that a rather desirable quality in a secretary?"

"Yes, but I think you might have waited to hear why you reminded me of Joan of Arc before you began talking about those confounded wolves, which, by the way, I have decided to cut out."

"Don't cut out a good effect just because you're annoyed with me," she advised.

"Oh no, there are other reasons," said John, loftily. "It is possible that in an opening tableau the audience may not appreciate that they are wolves, and if they think they're only a lot of stray dogs, the effect will go for nothing. It was merely a passing idea, and I have discarded it."

Miss Hamilton left him to go and type out the morning's correspondence, and John settled down to a speech by the Maid on the subject of perpetual celibacy: he wrote a very good one.

"She may laugh at me," said the author to himself, "but she is like Joan—extraordinarily like. Why, I can hear her making this very speech."

Miss Hamilton might sometimes profane John's poetic sanctuaries and sometimes pull his leg when he was on tiptoe for a flight like Mr. Keats' sweetpeas, but she made existence much more pleasant for him, and he had already reached the stage of wondering how he had ever managed to get along without her. He even went so far in his passion for historical parallels as to compare his situation before she came to the realm of France before Joan of Arc took it in hand. He knew in his heart that these weeks before Christmas were unnaturally calm; he had no hope of prolonging this halcyon time much further; but while it lasted he would enjoy it to the full. Any one who had overheard John announcing to his reflection in the glass an unbridled hedonism for the immediate future might have been pardoned for supposing that he was about to amuse himself in a very desperate fashion. As a matter of fact, the averred intention was due to nothing more exciting than the prospect of a long walk over the Heath with Miss Hamilton to discuss an outline of the fourth act, which John knew would gradually be filled in with his plans for writing other plays and finally be colored by a conversation, or, anyhow, a monologue about himself as a human being without reference to himself as an author.

"What is so delightful about Miss Hamilton," he assured that credulous and complaisant reflection, "is the way one can talk to her without there being the least danger of her supposing that one has any ulterior object in view. Notwithstanding all the rich externals of the past, I'm bound to confess that the relations between men and women are far more natural nowadays. I suppose it was the bicycle that began female emancipation; had bicycles been invented in the time of Joan of Arc she would scarcely have had to face so much ecclesiastical criticism of her behavior."

The walk was a success; amongst other things, John discovered that if he had had a sister like Miss Hamilton, most of his family troubles would never have arisen. He shook his head sadly at the thought that once upon a time he had tried to imagine a Miss Hamilton in Edith, and in a burst of self-revelation, like the brief appearance of two or three acres of definitely blue sky overhead, he assured his secretary that her coming had made a difference to his whole life.

"Well, of course you get through much more in the day now," she agreed.

John would have liked a less practical response, but he made the best of it.

"I've got so much wrapped up in the play," he said, "that I'm wondering now if I shall be able to tear myself away from London for Christmas. I dread the idea of a complete break—especially with the most interesting portion just coming along. I think I must ask you to take your holiday later in the year, if you don't mind."

He had got it out, and if he could have patted himself on the back without appearing ridiculous in a public thoroughfare he would have done so. His manner might have sounded brusque, but John was sure that the least suggestion of any other attitude except that of an employer compelled against his will to seem inconsiderate would have been fatal.

"That would mean leaving my mother alone," said Miss Hamilton, doubtfully.

John looked sympathetic, but firm, when he agreed with her.

"She would understand that literary work takes no account of the church calendar," he pointed out. "After all, what is Christmas?"

"Unfortunately, my mother is already very much offended with me for working with you at all. Oh, well, bother relations!" she exclaimed, vehemently. "I'm going to be selfish in future. All right, if you insist, I must obey—or lose my job, eh?"

"I might have to engage a locum tenens. You see, now that I've got into the habit of dictating my letters and relying upon somebody else to keep my references in order and—"

"Yes, yes," she interrupted. "I quite see that it would put you to great inconvenience if I cried off. All the same, I can't help being worried by the notion of leaving mother alone on Christmas Day itself. Why shouldn't I join you on the day after?"

"The very thing," John decided. "I will leave London on Christmas Eve, and you shall come down on Boxing Day. But I should travel in the morning, if I were you. It's apt to be unpleasant, traveling in the evening on a Bank Holiday. Hullo, here we are! This walk has given me a tremendous appetite, and I do feel that we've made a splendid start with the fourth act, don't you?"

"The fourth act?" repeated his secretary. "It seems to me that most of the time you were talking about the position of women in modern life."

John laughed gayly.

"Ah, I see you haven't even yet absolutely grasped my method of work. I was thinking all the while of Joan's speech to her accusers. I can assure you that all my remarks were entirely relevant to what I had in my head. That's the way I get my atmosphere. I told you that you reminded me of her, but you wouldn't believe me. In doublet and hose you would be Joan."

"Should I? I think I should look more like Dick Whittington in a touring pantomime. My legs are too thin for tights."

"By the way, I wonder if Janet Bond has good legs?" said John, pensively.

It was charming to be able to talk about women's legs like this without there being the slightest suggestion that they had any; yet, somehow the least promising topics were rehabilitated by the company of Miss Hamilton, and most of them, even the oldest, acquired a new and absorbing interest. John had registered a vow on the first day his secretary came that he would watch carefully for the least signs of rosifying her and he had renewed this vow every morning before his glass; but it was sometimes difficult not to attribute to her all sorts of mysterious fascinations, as on those occasions when he would have kept her working later than usual in the afternoon and when she would have been persuaded to stay for tea, for which she made a point of getting home to please her mother, who gave it a grand importance. John was convinced that even James would forgive him for thinking that in all England there was not a more competent, a more charming, a more—he used to pull himself up guiltily at about the third comparative and stifle his fancies in the particularly delicious cake that Mrs. Worfolk always seemed to provide on the days when his secretary stayed to tea.

It was on one of these rosified afternoons, full of candlelight and firelight and the warmed scent of hyacinths that Miss Hamilton rallied John about his exaggerated dread of his relations.

"For I've been working with you now for nearly three weeks, and you've not been bothered by them once," she declared.

"My name! My name!" he cried. "Touchwood?"

"I begin to think it's nothing but an affectation," she persisted. "You're not pestered by charitable uncles who want to boast of what they've done for their poor brother's only daughter. You're not made to feel that you've wrecked your mother's old age by earning your own living."

"Yes, they have been quiet recently," he admitted. "But there was such a terrible outbreak of Family Influenza just before you came that some sort of prostration for a time was inevitable. I hope you don't expect my brother, Hugh, to commit a forgery every week. Besides, that excellent suggestion of yours about preparing Ambles for Christmas has kept him busy, and probably all the rest of them down there too. But it's odd you should raise the subject, because I was going to propose your having supper here some Sunday soon and inviting my eldest brother and his wife to meet you."

"To-morrow is the last Sunday before Christmas. The Sunday after is Christmas Day."

"Is it really? Then I must dictate an invitation for to-morrow, and I must begin to see about presents on Monday. By Jove, how time has flown!"

"After all, what is Christmas?" she laughed.

"Oh, you must expect children to be excited about it," John murmured. "I don't like to disappoint them. But I'd no idea Christmas was on top of us like this. You'll help me with my shopping next week? I hope to goodness Eleanor won't come and bother me. She'll be getting back to town to-morrow. It's really extraordinary, the way the time has passed."

John dictated an urgent invitation to James and Beatrice to sup with them the following evening, and since it was too late to let them know by post, he decided to see Miss Hamilton as far as the tube and leave the note in person at Hill Road.

James arrived for supper in a most truculent mood, and this being aggravated by his brother's burgundy, of which he drank a good deal, referring to it all the while as poison, much to John's annoyance, embroiled him half way through supper in an argument with Miss Hamilton on the subject of feminine intelligence.

"Women are not intelligent," he shouted. "The glimmering intelligence they sometimes appear to exhibit is only one of their numerous sexual allurements. A woman thinks with her nerves, reasons with her emotions, and speculates with her sensations."

"Rubbish," said Miss Hamilton, emphatically.

"Now, Jimmie dear," his wife put in, "you'll only have indigestion if you get excited while you're eatin'."

"I shall have indigestion anyway," growled her husband. "My liver will be like dough to-morrow after this burgundy. I ought to drink a light moselle."

"Well, you can have moselle," John began.

"I loathe moselle. I'd as soon drink syrup of squills," James bellowed.

"All right, you shall have syrup of squills next time."

"Oh, Johnnie," Beatrice interposed with a wide reproachful smile. "Jimmie's only joking. He doesn't really like syrup of squills."

"For heaven's sake, don't try to analyze my tastes," said James to his wife.

John threw a glance at Miss Hamilton, which was meant to express "What did I tell you?" But she was blind to his signal and only intent upon attacking James on behalf of her sex.

"Women have not the same kind of intelligence as men," she began, "because it is denied to them by their physical constitution. But they have, I insist, a supplementary intelligence without which the great masculine minds would be as ineffective as convulsions of nature. Women work like the coral polyps...."

"Bravo!" John cried. "A capital comparison!"

"An absurd comparison!" James contradicted. "A ludicrous comparison! Woman is purely individualistic. The moment she begins to take up with communal effort, she tends to become sterile."

"Do get on with your supper, dear," urged Beatrice, who had only understood the last word and was anxious not "to be made to feel small," as she would have put it, in front of an unmarried woman.

John perceived her mortification and jumped through the argument as a clown through a paper hoop.

"Remember I'm expecting you both at Ambles on Christmas Eve," he said, boisterously. "We're going to have a real old-fashioned Christmas party."

James forgot all about women in his indignation; but before he could express his opinion Beatrice held up another paper hoop for the distraction of the audience.

"I'm simply longin' for the country," she declared. "Christmas with a lot of children is the nicest thing I know."

John went through the hoop with aplomb and refused to be unseated by his brother.

"James will enjoy it more than any of us," he chuckled.

"What!" shouted the critic. "I'd sooner be wrecked on a desert island with nothing to read but a sixpenny edition of the Christmas Carol. Ugh!"

John looked at Miss Hamilton again, and this time his appeal was not unheeded; she said no more about women and let James rail on at sentimental festivities, which, by the time he had finished with them, looked as irreparable as the remains of the tipsy-cake. There seemed no reason amid the universal collapse of tradition to conserve the habit of letting the ladies retire after dinner. As there was no drawing-room in his bachelor household, it would have been more comfortable to smoke upstairs in the library; but James returned to Fielding after demolishing Dickens and protested against being made to hurry over his port; so his host had to watch Beatrice escort Miss Hamilton from the dining-room with considerable resentment at what he thought was her unjustifiably protective manner.

"As my secretary," he felt, "Miss Hamilton is more at home in my house than Beatrice is. I suppose, though, that like everything else I have my relations are going to take possession of her now."

"Where did you pick up your lady-help?" James asked, when he and his brother were left alone with the wine.

"If you're alluding to Miss Hamilton," John said, sharply, "I met her on board the Murmania, crossing the Atlantic."

"I never heard any good come of traveling acquaintances. She has a good complexion; I suppose she took your eye by not being seasick. Beware of women with good complexions who aren't seasick, Johnnie. They always flirt."

"Are you supposed to be warning me against my secretary?"

"Any woman who finds herself at a man's elbow is dangerous. Nurses, of course, are the most notoriously dangerous—but a secretary who isn't seasick is nearly as bad."

"Thanks very much for your brotherly concern," said John, sarcastically. "You will be relieved to hear that the relationship between Miss Hamilton and myself is a purely practical one, and likely to remain so."

"Platonism was never practical," James answered with a snort. "It was the most impractical system ever imagined."

"Fortunately Miss Hamilton is sufficiently interested in her work and in mine not to bother her head about the philosophy of the affections."

James was irritating when he was criticizing contemporary literature; but his views of modern life were infuriating.

"I'm not accusing your young woman—how old is she, by the way? About twenty-nine, I should guess. A damned dangerous age, Johnnie. However, as I say, I'm not accusing her of designs upon you. But a man who writes the kind of plays that you do is capable of any extravagance, and you're much too old by now to be thinking about marriage."

"I don't happen to be thinking about marriage," John retorted. "But I refuse to accept your dictum about my age. I consider that the effects of age have been very much exaggerated by the young. You cannot call a man of forty-two old."

"You look much more than forty-two. However, one can't write plays like yours without exposing oneself to a good deal of emotional wear and tear. No, no, you're making a great mistake in introducing a woman into the house. Believe me, Johnnie, I'm speaking for your good. If I hadn't married, I might have preserved my illusions about women and compounded just as profitable a dose of dramatic nux vomica as yourself."

"What do you mean by a dose of dramatic nux vomica?"

"That's my name for the sort of plays you write, which unduly accelerate the action of the heart and make a sane person retch. However, don't take my remarks in ill part. I was simply commenting on the danger of letting a good-looking young woman make herself indispensable."

"I'm glad you allow her good looks," John said, witheringly. "Any one who was listening to our conversation would get the impression that she was as ugly and voracious as a harpy."

"Yes, yes. She's quite good-looking. Very nice ankles."

"I haven't noticed her ankles," John said, austerely.

"You will, though," his brother replied with an encouraging laugh. "By the way, what's that rascal, Hugh, been doing? I hear you've replanted him in the bosom of the family. Isn't Hugh rather too real for one of your Christmas parties?"

John, after some hesitation, had decided not to tell any of the others the details of Hugh's misdemeanor; he had even denied himself the pleasure of holding him up to George as a warning; hence the renewal of his interest in Hugh had struck the family as a mere piece of sentimentality.

"Crutchley didn't seem to believe he'd ever make much of architecture," he explained to James. "And I'm thinking of helping him to establish himself in British Honduras."

"Bah! For less than he'll cost you in British Honduras you could establish me as the editor of a new critical weekly," James grunted.

"There is still time for Hugh to make something of his life," John replied. He had not had the slightest intention of trying to score off his eldest brother by this remark, and he was shocked to see what a spasm of ill will twisted up his face.

"I suppose your young woman is responsible for this sudden solicitude for Hugh's career? I suppose it's she who has persuaded you that he has possibilities? You take care, Johnnie. You can't manipulate the villain in life as you can on the stage."

Now, Miss Hamilton, though she had not met him, had shown just enough interest in Hugh to give these remarks a sting; and John must have been obviously taken aback, for the critic at once recovered his good humor and proposed joining the ladies upstairs. Beatrice was sitting by the fire; her husband's absence had allowed her to begin the digestion of an unusually good dinner in peace, and the smoothness of her countenance made her look more than ever like a cabinet photograph of the early 'nineties. Miss Hamilton, on the other hand, seemed bored, and very soon she declared that she must go home lest her mother should be anxious.

"Oh, you have a mother?" James observed in such a tone that John thought it was the most offensive remark of the many he had heard him make that evening. He hoped that Miss Hamilton would not abandon him after this first encounter with his relations, and he tried to ascertain her impressions while she was putting on her things in the hall.

"I'm afraid you've had a very dull evening," he murmured, apologetically. "I hope my sister-in-law wasn't more tiresome than usual. What did she talk about?"

"She was warning me—no, I won't be malicious—she was explaining to me the difficulties of an author's wife."

"Yes, poor thing; I'm afraid my brother must be very trying to live with. I hope you were sympathetic?"

"So sympathetic," Miss Hamilton replied, with a mocking glance, "that I told her I was never likely to make the experiment. Good night, Mr. Touchwood. To-morrow as usual."

She hurried down the steps and was gone before he could utter a word.

"I don't think she need have said that," he murmured to himself on his way back to the library. "I've no doubt Beatrice was very trying; but I really don't think she need have said that to me. It wasn't worth repeating such a stupid remark. That's the way things acquire an undue importance."

With John's entrance the conversation returned to Miss Hamilton; but, though it was nearly all implied criticism of his new secretary, he had no desire to change the topic. She was much more interesting than the weekly bills at Hill Road, and he listened without contradiction to his brother's qualms about her experience and his sister-in-law's regrets for her lack of it.

"However," said John to his reflection when he was undressing, "they've got to make the best of her, even if they all think the worse. And the beauty of it is that they can't occupy her as they can occupy a house. I must see about getting Hugh off to the Colonies soon. If I don't find out about British Honduras, he can always go to Canada or Australia. It isn't good for him to hang about in England."