Mr. Mercaptan sat at his writing-table—an exquisitely amusing affair in papier mâché, inlaid with floral decorations in mother-of-pearl and painted with views of Windsor Castle and Tintern in the romantic manner of Prince Albert’s later days—polishing to its final and gem-like perfection one of his middle articles. It was on a splendid subject—the ‘Jus Primæ Noctis, or Droit du Seigneur’—“that delicious _droit_,” wrote Mr. Mercaptan, “on which, one likes to think, the Sovereigns of England insist so firmly in their motto, _Dieu et mon Droit—de Seigneur_.” That was charming, Mr. Mercaptan thought, as he read it through. And he liked that bit which began elegiacally: “But, alas! the Right of the First Night belongs to a Middle Age as mythical, albeit happily different, as those dismal epochs invented by Morris or by Chesterton. The Lord’s right, as we prettily imagine it, is a figment of the baroque imagination of the seventeenth century. It never existed. Or at least it did exist, but as something deplorably different from what we love to picture it.” And he went on, eruditely, to refer to that Council of Carthage which, in 398, demanded of the faithful that they should be continent on their wedding-night. It was the Lord’s right—the _droit_ of a heavenly Seigneur. On this text of fact, Mr. Mercaptan went on to preach a brilliant sermon on that melancholy sexual perversion known as continence. How much happier we all should be if the real historical _droit du Seigneur_ had in fact been the mythical right of our ‘pretty prurient imaginations’! He looked forward to a golden age when all should be seigneurs possessing rights that should have broadened down into universal liberty. And so on. Mr. Mercaptan read through his creation with a smile of satisfaction on his face. Every here and there he made a careful correction in red ink. Over ‘pretty prurient imaginations’ his pen hung for a full minute in conscientious hesitation. Wasn’t it perhaps a little too strongly alliterative, a shade, perhaps, cheap? Perhaps ‘pretty lascivious’ or ‘delicate prurient’ would be better. He repeated the alternatives several times, rolling the sound of them round his tongue, judicially, like a tea-taster. In the end, he decided that ‘pretty prurient’ was right. ‘Pretty prurient’—they were the _mots justes_, decidedly, without a question. Mr. Mercaptan had just come to this decision and his poised pen was moving farther down the page, when he was disturbed by the sound of arguing voices in the corridor, outside his room. “What is it, Mrs. Goldie?” he called irritably, for it was not difficult to distinguish his housekeeper’s loud and querulous tones. He had given orders that he was not to be disturbed. In these critical moments of correction one needed such absolute tranquillity.