"Tricks!" said Mrs. Wiles. "You know what that means: shaking hands, eating with a spoon, pretending to read the paper. Nothing worth doing. Nothing like a nice little orphan girl who would be a companion and a pleasure to us and go to a cinema now and then. I'm so disappointed." "Well," I said, "there's time. It's only Wiles having his adopted child first. Your turn next. That's fair, isn't it, Wiles?" "We'll leave it at that for the present," said Wiles, pointing to an illuminated card on the wall. "That's our motto," he added. I am always attracted by stories of what might be called beneficent error, and this gesture of Wiles's gave me a perfect example. To my eyes and to ninety-nine observers out of a hundred the device, which ran thus, [Illustration: NOT NOW] represented nothing in the world but the text, "No Cross, no Crown." Judge, then, of my astonishment when Mrs. Wiles supplemented her husband's remark by saying: "Yes, we've had a lot of comfort out of those words in our day. 'Not now.' Later, it'll be all right. There's a better time coming. But it isn't quite ripe yet, so pull yourselves together and wait cheerfully. Wiles had it given him by an aunt of his, who was a very pious body, and it always puzzled us why she shouldn't have sent something more religious. But, as it happens, nothing religious could have helped us more, could it, Wiles? 'Not now.'" Naturally I said nothing to them about it, but I have been wondering since what difference it would have made had they known all along that "No Cross, no Crown" was the true reading. Once they accepted the full meaning of the phrase, none, I suppose; for "No Cross, no Crown" and "Not now" come to mean the same thing in the end. But it is an amusing confusion, and not the least amusing part of it is the circumstance that two poets at any rate have toiled to combine words that would convey the same ideas, while all the time such a commonplace and terse locution as "Not now" could have done it all. For what more does Pope's famous couplet say: Hope springs eternal in the human breast, Man never is, but always to be, blest? or "Rabbi Ben Ezra's" beautiful line: Grow old along with me: the best is yet to be? CHAPTER XII IN WHICH THE FIRST-FLOOR-FRONT UNFOLDS AND SOME OF THE SECRETS OF A REMARKABLE INDUSTRY ARE LAID BARE