IT was later in the day, and the zest for Shakespeare had waned. Virginia had moved from beside the fire and was sitting nearer the window, in order to get what light there was from the sun just disappearing behind the opposite hills. She was very busy with some crochet edging she had lately started. It was the first time within the memory of living woman that Virginia had been seen with a crochet-hook in her hand—fancy-work had never been her strong point—hence the inordinate pride with which she patted out the short fragment on any available surface at frequent intervals, surveying it from different points of view with her head cricked at various angles, and calling upon all and sundry to admire. After moving nearer the window she again patted out the seven small scallops on her knee, as usual, and then became meditative. No one paid much attention to her, however. I was sitting on the settle, with a heaped-up table before me, absorbed in MSS., which I was reading, and then sorting into various piles—for printer, for reserve, for return—and arranging these on the seat beside me; important work, which accounted for my preoccupation. Ursula was busily engaged in the laudable endeavour to construct a pair of child’s knickers out of two pairs of stocking legs. Someone had told her this could be done. It had appealed to her as a serviceable way to use up done-with stockings (and she assured me the problem of what to do with these “done-withs” had been a long-standing mental burden), while at the same time one might be conferring a benefit upon the poor. The fact that the modern “poor” would have scorned anything so economical did not worry her. At last Virginia broke the silence. “It’s really quite remarkable! I don’t know that I’ve met with a more extraordinary crochet pattern than this,” she said thoughtfully. “Where did you get it from?” I asked rather absently, as I went on with my work. “From one of the magazines you are supposed to edit,” she said blandly. “What is there extraordinary about it?” I inquired, now thoroughly roused up to give the matter all my attention, while Ursula laid down the dislocated stocking leg she had been wrestling with. “Well, it’s like this. There is the pattern, you see,” pointing to a picture I had seen before, “and there are the directions. When you’ve worked them through once, that makes one scallop. Do you see?” We said we saw it quite plainly. “Then, you notice it says at the very end, ‘go back and repeat from the first row’? Now this is the extraordinary part of the affair; every time I go back and repeat from the first row it makes an entirely different scallop. The last time but one, you see, the scallop came on the opposite side of the sewing-on edge; I thought _that_ was interesting enough! But now I find this last scallop has _turned a corner_. Funny, isn’t it?”