It made her happy to look at it. It made her happy to think of Ralph Bevan coming to-morrow. If it had been to-night it would have been all over in three hours. And something--she was not sure what, but felt that it might be Mr. Waddington--something would have cut in to spoil the happiness of it. But now she had it to think about, and her thoughts were safe. "What are you thinking about, Barbara?" "The view," said Barbara. "I want to sketch it." V 1 Mr. Waddington was in his library, drawing up his prospectus while Fanny and Barbara Madden looked on. At Fanny's suggestion (he owned magnanimously that it was a good one) he had decided to "sail in," as she called it, with the prospectus first, not only before he formed his Committee, but before he held his big meeting. (They had fixed the date of it for that day month, Saturday, June the twenty-first.) "You come before them from the beginning," she said, "with something fixed and definite that they can't go back on." And by signing the prospectus, Horatio Bysshe Waddington, he identified it beyond all contention with himself. It was at this point that Barbara had blundered. "Why," she had said, "should we go to all that bother and expense? Why can't we send out the original prospectus?" "My dear Barbara, the original prospectus isn't any good." "Why isn't it?" "Because it isn't Horatio's prospectus." Barbara looked down and away from the dangerous light in Fanny's eyes. "But it expresses his views, doesn't it?" "That's no good when he wants to express them himself." And so far from being any good, the original prospectus was a positive hindrance to Mr. Waddington. It took all the wind out of his sails; it took, as he justly complained, the very words out of his mouth and the ideas out of his head; it got in his way and upset him at every turn. Somehow or other he had got to stamp his personality upon this thing. "It's no good," he said; "if they can't recognize it as a personal appeal from ME." And here it was, stamped all over, and indelibly, with the personalities of Sir Maurice Gedge and his London Committee. And he couldn't depart radically from the lines they had laid down; there were just so many things to be said, and Sir Maurice and his Committee had contrived to say them all. But, though the matter was given him, Mr. Waddington, before he actually tackled his prospectus, had conceived himself as supplying his own fresh and inimitable manner; the happy touch, the sudden, arresting turn. But somehow it wasn't working out that way. Try as he would, he couldn't get away from the turns and touches supplied by Sir Maurice Gedge. "It would have been easy enough," he said, "to draw up the original prospectus. I'd a thousand times rather do that than write one on the top of it." Fanny agreed. "It's got to _look_ different," she said, "without _being_ different." "Couldn't we," said Barbara, "turn it upside down?"