Lucinda was nice enough. Her struggles for a conventional manner of life were amusing. She never gave Gully any peace. She dragged him about to social functions. She made him use his influence to get her portrait in the ladies’ papers, as assistant at a charity concert or exhibitor at a cat show--she kept a couple of wild-looking Persians. She always had her photograph taken in evening dress. She was one of those coarse women--commonly called fine--who are disfigured by a big neck and big arms. She had her “At-Home” day, of course. She displayed a card bowl on a prominent table in the pleasant room overlooking the gardens which she called her drawing room. She peppered the conversation with references to dinners and receptions that she had been invited to. We were never allowed to smoke in the drawing room, nor to bring in our whisky. It was a modern drawing room, all white paint, cheap china, and cushion frills. She had a standard lamp with an amazing amber shade. She spent sixpence twice a week on cut flowers, and sold Gully’s old clothes for palms. It was a very fair attempt at Maida Vale--Lucinda and her drawing room. Therefore it was a surprise to me when Gully came round one night and said despondently: “I wish you could help me with Lucinda. She’s going all to pieces.” “Going to pieces!” I thought of dressmakers’ bills, of the minor journalists who sometimes dropped in to tea. Yet Lucinda was a safe woman. She was far too respectable to run into debt or to compromise herself. Gully proceeded to explain. “You know she makes me walk in the Park every Sunday afternoon. She wants to go in the morning when the fashionable frocks are about. But I draw the line at that. We compromise with the afternoon--when there is only the band and pretty shop girls I don’t so much mind. We were there six weeks ago, and we stopped to listen to a Socialist spouter--one of those rabid enthusiasts in a red tie. We had listened to them all--the religious ones, the atheists, the philosophers. Sometimes you get good copy out of fellows like that.