"Being the work of a lady, no. Doesn't matter how good it is. The thing to know about the _Consul_ man is this. He's very nice to ladies--can't resist ladies; consequence is, the paper's half full of ladies' copy every week. I know, because a cousin of mine writes for him, and most unsympathetic stuff it is. Yet it always goes in, and she gets her three guineas a week as regularly as the day comes. But her pull is that she knows him personally, and she's a damned pretty woman." Elfrida followed him with interest. "Is she as pretty as I am?" she asked, purely for information. "Lord, no!" Mr. Ticke responded warmly. "Besides, you've got style, and distinction, and ideas. Any editor would appreciate your points, once you saw him. But you've got to see him first. My candid advice is _take_ this to the _Consul_ office." Elfrida looked at him in a way which baffled him to understand. "I don't think I can do that," she said slowly; and then added, "I don't know." "Well," he said, "I'll enter my protest against the foolishness of doing it this way by refusing to post the letter." Mr. Ticke was tremendously in earnest, and threw it dramatically upon the table. "You may be a George Eliot or a--an Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but in these days you want every advantage, Miss Bell, and women who succeed understand that." Elfrida's face was still enigmatic, so enigmatic that Mr. Ticke felt reluctantly constrained to stop. "I must pursue the even tenor of my way," he said airily, looking at his watch. "I've an engagement to lunch at one. _Don't_ ask me to post that article, Miss Bell. And by the way," as he turned to go, "I haven't a smoke about me. Could you give me a cigarette?" "Oh yes," said Elfrida, without looking at him, "as many as you like," and she pushed an open box toward him; but she had an absent, considering air that did not imply any idea of what she was doing. "Thanks, only one. Or perhaps two--there now, two! How good these little Hafiz fellows are! Thanks awfully. Good-bye!" "Good-bye," said Elfrida, with her eyes on the packet addressed to the editor of the _Consul_; and Mr. Golightly Ticke tripped downstairs. She had not looked at him again. She sat thinking, thinking. She applied herself first to stimulate the revolt that rose within her against Golightly Ticke's advice--his intolerably, no, his forgetfully presumptuous advice. She would be just to him: he talked so often to women with whom such words would carry weight, for an instant he might fail to recognize that she was not one of those. It was absurd to be angry, and not at all in accordance with any theory of life that operated in Paris. Instinctively, at the thought of a moral indignation upon such slender grounds in Paris she gave herself the benefit of a thoroughly expressive Parisian shrug. And how they understood, success in Paris! Beasts!