Miss Rakestraw, I should explain, was an enterprising young lady journalist, who contributed society news and "on dits" to the leading Islington and Holloway journals, and was understood to have had "leaderettes" and "turnovers" accepted by periodicals of even greater importance. "If only," Lurana burst out on one of these occasions, "if only I could do something once which would get my name into all the papers, set everybody thinking of me, talking of me, staring after me wherever I went, make editors write for my photograph, and interviewers beg for my biography, I think I should be content." I made the remark, which was true but not perhaps startling in its originality, that fame of this kind was apt to be of brief duration. "What should I care?" she cried; "I should have _had_ it. I could keep the cuttings; they would always be there to remind me that once at least--but what's the use of talking? I shall never see my name in all the papers. I know I shan't!" "There _is_ a way!" I ventured to observe; "you might have your name in all the papers, if you married." "As if I meant _that_!" she said, with a deliciously contemptuous pout. "And whom should I marry, if you please, Mr Blenkinsop?" "You might marry me!" I suggested humbly. "You!" she retorted. "How would _that_ make me a celebrity. You are not even one yourself." [Illustration: "And whom should I marry, Mr Blenkinsop?"] "I do not care to boast," I said, "but it is the simple fact that nobody in the entire tea-trade has a palate approaching mine for keenness and delicacy. Ask any one and they will tell you the same." "You may be the best tea-taster in the world," she said, "but the purity of your palate will never gain you a paragraph in a single society paper. And even if it did, what should _I_ gain? At the best a reflected glory. I want to be a somebody myself!" "What's the use of trying to make ourselves what we are not?" I broke out. "If Fate has made us wooden ninepins in the world's nursery, we may batter our head against the walls as much as we like--but we can never batter it into a profile!" I thought this rather neatly put myself, but it did not appeal to Miss de Castro, who retorted with some asperity that I was the best judge of the material of my own head, but hers, at least, was not wooden, while she had hitherto been under the impression that it already possessed a profile--such as it was. She could not be brought to understand that I was merely employing a metaphor, and for the remainder of the evening her demeanour was so crushingly chilling, that I left in the lowest spirits, persuaded that my unlucky tongue had estranged me from Lurana for ever.