The young man began to regard her with a new expression in his face. As a literary woman she should have recognized the look, the expression which tells of the author on the scent of material. Whether Fairfield ever tried his hand at painting Mrs. Croydon or not, that look would have made it plain to any well-trained fellow worker that her peculiarities tempted his literary sense. Any professional writer who listens with that gleam in his eyes is inevitably examining what is said, the manner of its saying, the person who is speaking, in the hope that here he has a subject for his pen; he is asking himself if the reality is too absurd to be credible; how much short of the extravagance of the original he must come to keep within the bounds of seeming probability. Fairfield was confronted with a subject which could not be handled frankly and truthfully. Nobody would believe the tone of the woman or her remarks to be anything but a foolish exaggeration; if she had had the genuine creative instinct, the power of analysis, the recognition of human peculiarities, Mrs. Croydon must have seen in his evident preoccupation the indication that he was deliberating how far toward the truth it would in fiction be possible to go. "It is very kind of you," he murmured vaguely. "Oh, don't mention it," responded she, more graciously than ever. "You are really one of us now, as I said; and I always feel strongly the ties of the literary guild." "The guild owes you a great deal," Fairfield observed blandly. Mrs. Croydon waved her hand engagingly in return for this compliment, incidentally with a waving of various adornments of her raiment which gave her the appearance in little of an army with banners. "I didn't come just for compliments," she observed with much sweetness. "I am a business woman, and I know how to come to the point. My father left me to manage my own property, and so I've had a good deal of experience. When I see how women wander round a thing without being able to get at it, it makes me ashamed of them all. I don't wonder that men make fun of them." "You are hard on your sex." "Oh, no harder than they deserve. Why, in Chicago there are a lot of women that do business in one way or another, and I never could abide 'em. I never could get on with them, it was so hard to pin them down." "I readily understand how annoying it must have been," Fairfield observed with entire gravity. "Did you say that you had business with me?" "Yes," she answered. "I suppose that I might have written, but there are some things that are so much better arranged by word of mouth. Don't you think so?" "Oh, there's no doubt of it." "Besides," she went on, "I wanted to tell you how much I like your work, and it isn't easy to express those things on paper." It would be interesting to know whether to Fairfield at that moment occurred the almost inevitable reflection that for Mrs. Croydon it was hard, if her manuscripts were the test, to express anything on paper.