"Perhaps not," I said, "but you mustn't be a reviewer before I've begun. Anyway, mightn't I play a little at being a novelist, just for fun? I asked advice from quite a good man the other day and he said: 'When in doubt, to describe your neighbours is perhaps the second-best piece of counsel that one can give.' And that's not so very difficult. Mightn't I try that?" "I'd love you to," she said, "only I want you to do something." Then I made use of a cowardly argument: "When one has worked and then can afford to retire, one ought not to keep others out of a job." Naomi, bless her, has no patience with this kind of talk. "If work is good for the soul," she said, "as I believe, one must work and let the work of others be their own affair. A pretty pass we should come to if the good men abstained from work because by so doing they were giving the loafers a better chance of taking it if they felt so inclined! But I don't want you to make any money," she added. "Something honorary and useful." "Such as?" I asked. "We'll find it," she said. Chance, as so often happens, took the matter into its hands and settled it; for an evening or so later we met at a party a gentleman who had given his life to the search for, and reproduction of, old English songs and dances, several of which were rendered by a troop of London girls that he brought with him, and these melodies were so simple and fresh and charming that, although no musician, I was completely captured. In conversation with him afterwards, we learned that he was in need of assistance in forming and managing a society for the systematic encouragement and performance of these things, and at Naomi's suggestion I offered my services. So I am now an honorary secretary, one of those bustling diplomatic persons whom reporters always describe as courteous and indefatigable. The duties connected with the launching of this Society, together with such desultory private desk-work as it amuses me to do, ought to satisfy anyone. They convince me at any rate that no one is in such danger of overwork as that man of more or less amiable disposition who gives it out that he has retired. I don't pretend to understand the full value of folk-music or to be able to distinguish between the mixolydian and the dorian mode, and so forth; but I do know this, that there are no sweeter songs for young voices, or merrier and more innocent measures for young feet, and that the more we can catch of the spirit of the early days when English music had these pure and happy characteristics the better for all of us.