"Well," she drawled, "you don't seem to know them, anyway. Come on, Aunty; it 's bedtime."

After that I avoided her for a few days. I persuaded the head-waiter to put my table at the other end of the room; and across the wide space Miss Mist and I self-consciously ignored each other. Then one afternoon I met her face to face in the hotel entrance as she was coming out and I was going in.

"Well," she said, "have you been at the saloon again?"

Although she neither liked nor approved of me, it was evident from this that she had given me some thought. I answered gruffly that I had.

"In America," she said, "there are millions of young men who never put their foot in a saloon and are leading perfectly pure lives-"

"And reading E. P. Roe," I put in morosely.

She colored, and looked at me with a little surprise, a little uncertainty, too, I thought.

we entered the dining-room, my friend stopped to talk to an acquaintance at a table where there was a large luncheon party. I have an excellent memory for faces, and I found myself looking with some attention at another of the guests. Where had I seen that face before? Then the little gray town of Mont Dore, basined in the harsh Auvergne Mountains, with the large empty hotel at the end of the season, suddenly came back to me. It was surely it must be Olivia Mist! But how changed! So changed that there was every excuse for my failure at first to recognize her. Instead of a very dowdy girl whose good looks were killed by ugly. clothes made in some small American town, and by particularly repellent provincial manners, she might now really and truly be called the pink of fashion in all the force of that phrase. very well indeed, and pretty, even handsome. very much at her ease, she was enjoying life. I believe she knew me from the first; she glanced at me

She was dressed looked extremely She was evidently and appeared as if

Her tone was mocking and condescending, intended to convey that no wisdom could possibly come from such a silly young ass as I; but underneath it I perceived a real curiosity.

"Well," I said slowly, "there are George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Henry James-"

"Wait a minute." She took a silver pencil from her belt and wrote these names down inside the cover of her Tauchnitz volume. "I may look at their books some time," she said, "just to see what your opinion is worth."

A few days later I missed them at lunch, and was told they had gone to Paris.

IT must have been quite two years afterward that I was taken, on one of those June days when London is the most beautiful city in the world, to lunch at a ladies' club somewhere in the neighborhood of Berkeley Square, I think. When

to recognize me.

"How do you do?" she said. "Did n't I see you at Mont Dore when my aunt was taking the waters there?"

I replied that she did, and added that we had had some conversations upon literary topics.

"Here is a man," said Olivia, blandly, turning to her neighbor, a very wellknown actress, "who had never heard of George Meredith till I told him."

At this point my friend moved on to our own table, and I bowed to Olivia without another word. I could hardly have spoken: I was too flabbergasted. My friend mentioned to me the names of some of those in Olivia's party. They were rather a celebrated lot, the kind of people. whose names are wont to be seen in the newspapers.

Afterward in the smoking-room, as I was standing alone while my friend was writing a note, Olivia, from the far side of the room, where she was sitting with another lady and a man, beckoned to me,

and I went over to her. There was considerably more graciousness in her manner to me now than there had been a little while ago; perhaps she was reassured by the name of the member I had come in with.

"We have just been this morning to an exhibition of Max Beerbohm's caricatures. They are awfully interesting. Do you know about him?"

"No," I said. "Not in the least." Olivia exclaimed.

"Oh, but you ought to. You are quite behind the times not to. So awfully interesting."

She proceeded to give me her views on the arts. She had covered a good deal of ground since the Mont Dore days, but I was no more abreast of her now than I had been then. She had reached John Lane, so to speak, while I was at Leonard Smithers. For the "Yellow Book" in the post-Beardsley period she had praise, but the "Savoy," she thought, should be suppressed by the police, for all the world like those cows at Mont Dore. The gentleman who was sitting there agreed with her. She no longer spoke of William Black and Mrs. Henry Wood. For them she substituted George Meredith and Mrs. Craigie. She asked me if I had read "Tess of the D'Urbervilles."

"I have not," I replied. "The only novelist I can stick is E. P. Roe."

Olivia uttered a cry of horror. "That quaint American person! You must know that we never mention him even at home. He is not a bit of an artist."

I wondered how far she had really got, and just how much she was able and willing to stand.

"Do you know Hubert Crackanthorpe's stories?" I asked casually.

"Crackanthorpe?" she repeated. She

paused, and then said, "I seem to know him."

"Do let me lend you his book," I urged. And I sent it to her hotel that same afternoon.

THAT settled it. A few days later the Crackanthorpe volume came back with an acidulous little note. I forget now the contents of the note, and I am sorry I do. I can only recall the final sentence, which was to the effect that Crackanthorpe's book was a book no gentleman would write and no gentleman approve of, and that it could have no circulation in the society of real ladies and gentlemen. It was a very scathing note indeed.

Since I read the notice in the Cincinnati paper a few days ago, I have been tempted to send her the Crackanthorpe volume again. She has got to him by But, alas! I, too, have moved.

now.

I am nearer to William Black and Mrs. Henry Wood than I was then; I can even toy with E. P. Roe. Olivia is far more advanced and modern than I am at present. She would force on me new painters and poets and prose writers who do not interest me at all, who, in fact, give me the creeps far worse than E. P. Roe used to do. She would hurl at me people who may perhaps some day be great geniuses, but who are in the meantime pretentious and tiresome. But even if they be authentic geniuses, I have no desire to add to my stock of geniuses. What is the use? Beardsley is a good enough artist for me, Symons a good enough critic, Dowson a good enough poet, Crackanthorpe a good enough tale-teller. To the persuasions and incantations of Olivia I could reply only as the pagans in St. Augustine's time. used to reply to the Christians: "Why trouble? Why follow us about? We don't want to be saved.”

were

ONSTANCE LADY WHITTLEMERE lives in a huge, gloomy house in the very center of Mayfair, has a majestic appearance, and is perfectly ready for the day of judgment to come whenever it likes. From the time when she learned French in the school-room-she talks it with a certain sonorous air, as if she we preaching a sermon in a cathedral-and played Diabelli's celebrated duet in D with the same gifted instructress, she has always done her duty in every state of life. If she sat down to think, she could not hit upon any point in which she has not invariably behaved like a Christian and a lady, particularly a lady. Yet she is not exactly pharisaical; she never enumerates even in her own mind her manifold excellencies, simply because they are so much a matter of course with her. And that is precisely why she is so perfectly hopeless. She expects it of herself to do her duty and behave as a lady should behave, and she never has the smallest misgiving as to her complete success in living up to this ideal. That being so, she does not give it another thought, knowing quite

well that whoever else may do doubtful or disagreeable things, Constance Whittlemere will move undeviatingly on in her flawless courses, just as the moon, without any diminution of her light and serenity, looks down on slums or battle-fields, strewn with the corpses of the morally or physically slain. And Lady Whittlemere, like the moon, does not even think of saying, "Poor things!" She is much too lunar.

At the age of twenty-two (to trace her distressing history) her mother informed her, at the close of her fourth irreproachable London season, that she was going to marry Lord Whittlemere. She was very glad to hear it, for he was completely congenial to her, though even if she had been very sorry to hear it, her sense of duty would probably have led her to do as she was told. But having committed that final act of filial obedience, she realized that she had a duty to perform to herself in the person of the new Lady Whittlemere, and climbed up on a lofty foursquare pedestal of her own. Her duty toward herself was as imperative as

her duty toward Miss Green had been, when she learned the Diabelli duet in D, and was no doubt derived from the sense of position that she, as her husband's wife, enjoyed. Yet perhaps she hardly "enjoyed" it, for it was not in her nature to enjoy anything. She had a perfectly clear idea, as always, of what her own sense of fitness entailed on her, and she did it rigidly. "The thing," in fact, was her rule in life. Just as it was the thing to obey her governess and obey her mother, so, when she blossomed out into wifehood, the thing was to be a perfect and complete Lady Whittlemere. Success, as always, attended her conscientious realization of this. Luckily, or unluckily, since her hope of salvation was thereby utterly forfeited, -she had married a husband whose general attitude toward life, whose sense of duty and hidebound instincts, equaled her own, and they lived together after that literal solemnization of holy matrimony in St. Peter's Eaton Square for thirty-four years in unbroken harmony. Both had an unswelled sense of their own dignity, never disagreed on any topic under the sun, and saw grow up round them a copious family of plain solid sons and comely daughters, none of whom caused the parents a single moment's salutary anxiety. The three daughters, amply dowered, married into stiff mahogany families at an early age, and the sons continued to prop up the conservative interests of the nation by becoming severally a soldier, a clergyman, a member of Parliament, a diplomatist, and they took into all these liberal walks of life the traditions and proprieties of genuine Whittlemeres. They were all honorables and all honorable and all dull and all completely aware

of who they were. Nothing could have been nicer.

For these thirty-four years, then, Lady Whittlemere and her husband lived together in harmony and exquisite, expensive pomposity. Had Genesis been one of the prophetical books, their existence

might be considered as adumbrated by that of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. Only there was no serpent of any kind, and their great house in shelter of the Wiltshire downs had probably a far pleasanter climate than that of Mesopotamia. Their sons grew up plain, but strong, they all got into the cricket eleven at Eton, and had no queer, cranky leanings toward vegetarianism, like Abel, or to homicide, like Cain; while the daughters, until the time of their mahogany marriages, grew daily more expert in the knowledge of how to be Whittlemeres. Three months of the year they spent in London, three more in their large property in the Highlands of Scotland, and the remaining six were devoted to home life at Whittlemere, where the hunting season and the shooting season, with their large, solid parties, ushered in the old English Christmas, and were succeeded by the quietness of Lent. Then after Easter the whole household, from majordomo to steward's room-boy, went second-class to London, while for two days Lord and Lady Whittlemere "picnicked," as they