Dorothy was tingling with excitement; but she took up a piece of sewing--the same piece on which she had bent her modest gaze when she had machinated against her aunt on the afternoon on which Lady Tasker had come on, weary and thirsty, from the Witan. It was a piece she kept for such occasions as these. She stitched demurely, and Mr. Miller went on again:-- "We want you. We want those bright feminine brains of yours, Mrs. Tasker. And your ladies' intooition. We're stuck. We want another Idee like the last. And so we come to the department where we got satisfaction before." Dorothy spoke slowly. She was glad the pond-room was beautifully furnished--glad, too, that the hours Ruth spent over her "brights" were not spent in vain. The porcelain gleamed in her cabinets and the silver twinkled on her tables. At any rate she did not look poor. "This is rather a surprise," she said. "I hardly know what to say. I hadn't thought of taking on another contract." But here Mr. Miller was prompt enough. "Well, I don't know that we were thinking of a noo contract exactly. You're a lady with a good many responsibilities now, and ain't got too much time for contracts, I guess. No, it ain't a contract. It's an Idee we want." Far more quickly than Dorothy's hopes had risen they dropped again at this. "An Idee:" naturally!... Everybody wanted that. She had not had to hawk an idea like the last--so simple, so shapely, so beauty-bright. And she had learned that it is not the ideas, but what follows them, that pays--the flat and uninspired routine that forms the everyday work of a lucrative contract. It is the irony of this gipsy life of living by your wits. You do a stately thing and starve; you follow it up--or somebody else does--with faint and empty echoes of that thing, and you are overfed. An Idea--but not a contract; a picking of her brains, but no permanent help against that tide of tradesmen's books that flowed in at the front door.... And Dorothy knew already that for another reason Mr. Miller had sought her out in vain. Ideas are _not_ repeated. They visit us, but we cannot fetch them. And as for echoes of that former inspiration of hers, no doubt Mr. Miller had thought of all those for himself and had rejected them. "I see," she said slowly.... "Well," said Mr. Miller, his worry-map really piteous, "I wish you could tell me where we've gone wrong. It must be something in the British character we ain't appreciated, but what, well, that gets me. We been Imperialistic. There ain't been one of our Monthly House Dinners but what we've had all the Loyal Toasts, one after the other. There ain't been a Royal Wedding but what we've had a special window-display, and christenings the same, and what else you like. We ain't got gay with the Union Jack nor Rotten Row nor the House of Lords. We've reminded folk it was your own King George who said 'Wake up, England----!'"