Another thing that gave Mr. Strong this apparently off-hand hold over her was the confidential manner in which he had warned her not to take Mr. Brimby, the novelist, too seriously. For without the warning Amory, like a good many other people, might have committed precisely that error.... But when Mr. Brimby, taking Amory apart one day, had expressed in her ear a gentle doubt whether Mr. Strong was quite "sound" on certain important questions, Amory had suddenly seen. Mr. Strong had "cut" one of Mr. Brimby's poignantly sorrowful sketches of the East End--seen through Balliol eyes--and Mr. Brimby was resentful. She did not conceal from herself that he might even be a little envious of Mr. Strong's position. He might have been wiser to keep his envy to himself, for, while mere details of routine could hardly expect to get Amory's personal attention, there was one point on which Mr. Strong was quite "sound" enough for Amory--his sense of her own worth and of how that worth had hitherto been wasted. And Mr. Strong had not been ill-natured about Mr. Brimby either. He had merely twinkled and put Amory on her guard. And because he appeared to have been right in this instance, Amory was all the more disposed to believe in his rightness when he gave her a second warning. This was about Wilkinson, the Labour Member. He was awfully fond of dear old Wilkie, he said; he didn't know a man more capable in some things than Wilkie was; but it would be foolish to deny that he had his limitations. He wasn't fluid enough; wanted things too much cut-and-dried; was a little inclined to mistake violence for strength; and of course the whole point about the "Novum" was that it was fluid.... "In fact," Mr. Strong concluded, his wary blue eyes ceasing suddenly to hold Amory's brook-brown ones and taking a reflective flight past her head instead, "for a paper like ours--I'm hazarding this, you understand, and keep my right to reconsider it--I'm not sure that a certain amount of fluidity isn't a Law...." Amory nodded. She thought it excellently put. IV THE STONE WALL Amory sometimes thought, when she took her bird's-eye-view of the numerous activities that found each its voice in its proper place in the columns of the "Novum," that she would have allowed almost any of them to perish for lack of support rather than the Wyron's "Lectures on Love." She admitted this to be a weakness in herself, a sneaking fondness, no more; but there it was--just that one blind spot that mars even the clearest and most piercing vision. And she always smiled when Mr. Strong tried to show this weakness of hers in the light of a merit. "No, no," she always said, "I don't defend it. Twenty things are more important really, but I can't help it. I suppose it's because we know all about Laura and Walter themselves." "Perhaps so," Mr. Strong would musingly concede.