“In a year! Let us give her a year!” Mr. Flood looked up at the lady beside him with a thin smile. I couldn’t bear him. He sat on the floor, and he called you ‘dear lady,’ and sometimes he would take hold of your watch-chain and finger it as he talked to you. But he was awfully clever, I believe. He wrote reviews and very difficult poetry that didn’t rhyme. Anita was generally mellifluous to him and she quoted him a good deal. She turned to him with just the same smile— “Ah, of course! You’ve met John Carey too.” “For my sins, dear lady—for my sins.” “Not the same sins, surely,” breathed the blonde lady. “As the virtuous Carey’s? Don’t be rude to me! It’s a fact—the man’s a churchwarden. He carries a little tin plate on Sundays! Didn’t you tell me so, Anita? No—we give her a year. Don’t we, Anita?” “But what did she marry him for?” wailed the Baxter girl. They all laughed. “Copy, dear lady, copy!” Mr. Flood was enjoying himself. “Why will you have ideals? Carey was a new type.” “But she needn’t have married him!” insisted the Baxter girl. The argument was evidently an old one. “She, if I read her aright, could have dispensed with the ceremony, but the churchwarden had his views. Obviously! Can’t you imagine him—all whiskers and wedding-ring?” “But I thought he was clean-shaven! I thought he was good-looking!” I sympathized with the Baxter girl’s dismay. “Ah—I speak in parables——” “You do hate him, don’t you?” said Miss Howe with her wide, benevolent smile. “Now, I wonder——” Mr. Flood flushed into disclaimers, while the woman beside him looked at Miss Howe with half-closed eyes. “I? How could I? Our orbits don’t touch. _I_ approved, I assure you. An invaluable experience for our Madala! A year of wedded love, another of wedded boredom, and then—a master-piece, dear people! Madala Grey back to us, a giantess refreshed. Gods! what a book it will be!” “I wonder,” said Miss Howe vaguely. Anita answered her with that queer movement of the head that always reminded me of a pouncing lizard. “No need! I’ve watched Madala Grey’s career from the beginning.” “For this I maintain—” Mr. Flood ignored her—“_Eden Walls_ and _Ploughed Fields_ may be amazing (_The Resting-place_ I cut out. It’s an indiscretion. Madala caught napping) but they’re preliminaries, dear people! mere preliminaries, believe me.” “I sometimes wonder——” Miss Howe made me think of Saladin’s cushion in _The Talisman_. She always went on so softly and imperviously with her own thoughts—“Suppose now, that she’s written herself out, and knows it?” The Baxter girl gave a little gasp of horrified appreciation. “So the marriage——” “An emergency exit.” But Anita pitied them aloud— “It shows how little you know Madala, either of you.” “Does anyone? Do you?” Anita smiled securely. “The type’s clear, at least.” Mr. Flood looked round the circle. His eyes shone. “_Une grande amoureuse_—that I’ve always maintained. Carey may be the first—but he won’t be the last.”