"Well, then, let him get in first. You can bring your book out after." "And dish his?" "No, let it have a run first. Perhaps it won't have any run." "Perhaps mine won't." "_Yours_. That heavenly book? And his tosh--Don't you see that you _can't_ get in his way? If anybody reads him they won't be the same people who read you." "I hope not. All the same it would be rather beastly to cut him out; I mean to come in and do it better, show how bad he is, how frightful. It would rub it in, you know." "Not with him. You couldn't." "You don't know. Some brute might get up and hurt him with it." "Oh, you _are_ tender to him." "Well, you see, I did let him down when I left him. Besides, it isn't altogether him. There's Fanny." "Fanny? She'd love you to write your book." "I know she'd think she would. But she wouldn't like it if it made Horatio look a fool." "But he's bound to look a fool in any case." "True. I might give him a year, or two years." "Well, then, _my_ work's cut out for me. I shall have to make Horatio go on and finish quick, so as not to keep you waiting." "He'll get sick of it. He'll make you go on with it." "_Me?_" "Practically, and quarrel with every word you write. Unless you can write so like Horatio that he'll think he's done it himself. And then, you know, he won't have a word of mine left in. You'll have to take me out. And we're so mixed up together that I don't believe even he could sort us. You see, in order to appease him, I got into the way of giving my sentences a Waddingtonian twist. If only I could have kept it up--" "I'll have to lick the thing into shape somehow." "There's only one thing you'll have to do. You must make him steer a proper course. This is to be _the_ Guide to the Cotswolds. You can't have him sending people back to Lower Wyck Manor all the time. You'll have to know all the places and all the ways." "And I don't." "No. But I do. Supposing I took you on my motor-bike? Would you awfully mind sitting on the carrier?" "Do you think," she said, "he'd let me go?" "Fanny will." "I _could_, I think. I work so hard in the mornings and evenings that they've given me all the afternoons." "We might go every afternoon while the weather holds out," he said. And then: "I say, he _does_ bring us together." That was how Barbara's happy life began. 3 He did bring them together.