"I don't mind telling you." A slight hitch before the last word showed that the speaker had just avoided italics. He paused a moment, to be quite sure he didn't mind, then continued: "The original of 'Ziz' was my first wife. So far as there _was_ an original. But exaggerated out of all--out of all individuality." "I never knew that you had been married before." The wording of this--"never" during the last forty-eight hours!--was ahead of their intimacy, but her hearer accepted it. It chimed in with that luxury of the soul-brush, always at work. He would not on any account have had it exchanged for, "They did not tell me you had been married twice." Nevertheless, he was unaware that he was being influenced, and went on towards expansive confidence, unsuspicious of himself. "I married about fourteen years ago, and lost my wife within a twelvemonth. My son is a big boy now, at Rugby; he was born just before his mother died. He always thinks and speaks of Marianne as his mother. She has always been a mother to him, in fact. Her own children--we have two little girls--do not realize his half-brothership. We have never tried to make them do so." "How right!" from Judith. Confidence was improving. She was giving sanction to family arrangements. "Yes, I think it has been best. Their difference of age suggests nothing to them." "I suppose they know?" "Yes--academically, one might say. But knowledge of that is as nothing against the force of a child's acceptance of its _status quo_. When I married Marianne, the boy--he's Bob--was still too young to pay much attention to the fact that she brought him away from his granny's to live at my house. The only difference that impresses him between himself and his sisters is that _he_ can remember so much more clearly than they do the house where my first wife and I used to live. It is the house described in 'The Spendthrift's Legacy.' I shall always believe it was that title that made it so fetching. You see, you can't guess whether the Spendthrift inherited the legacy or bequeathed it. It gets on your brain, and then you ask for it at Mudie's...." Judith interrupted. "Of course, the Spendthrift _left_ the Legacy. But why was he a Spendthrift, one wants to know.... Yes, I see. It was a lucky title. But did you always write?" "Not until the firm of accountants I was with wound up the affairs of Eatwell and Lushington, the big publishers. I was sent to check and overhaul the stock. An almost unsold novel attracted my attention--an edition of two thousand--fifteen hundred in sheets. Its issue had been arrested by the discovery that the author--who had just died of appendicitis, by-the-bye--had taken another man's title." "I suppose you can be prosecuted for taking another man's title?"