Consider the position of the city man. His daily routine is a matter of general knowledge. In order to carry on his business a great number of people must know where he is at any given moment to be found. His secretary should even know where he is lunching. If the telephone may be, and it doubtless is, of considerable assistance in the happy ordering of an intrigue, it is of no less service in the detection of it. If a wife rings up her husband in the afternoon and finds him away she begins to wonder. She knows, too, at what hour he leaves his office in the evening. If he is not home half an hour later her wonderment increases. He has either to resort to a lunch in a _cabinet particulier_ or he has to manœuvre with endless deception a week-end, or a business trip to Leeds. Every assignation has to be skilfully arranged. There is small scope for the sudden, the unpremeditated moment. It is as machine-made as the hosiery he handles. But if it is hard to conduct an intrigue, it must be infinitely harder to start one. Even nowadays the majority of women are under some sort of masculine protection; there is either a husband or a father, or a fiancé or “an uncle.” And at the only hours when he himself is free that masculine protection is in operation, a fact that the realistic novelist is in the habit of overlooking. One wonders sometimes how they get started, these affairs of which we read every other day in the evening papers. At haphazard, possibly. Adjacent bedrooms at the end of the passage in a country house. A husband detained in town: a sudden opportunity seized at eagerly--the sort of thing, though, that happens more frequently in literature than in life. Certainly not an accident in the hope of which a conscientious Casanova would be prepared to delay action. Either that, though, or else a purely business proposition. A lunch at the Carlton grill, and over the liqueur the offer of a flat and five hundred pounds a year. Paul Bourget is reported to have remarked that the only folk worth writing about were those with large incomes; because it was only people without employment who were able to develop themselves naturally, which sounds foolish enough; but as adultery is the invariable background for Latin fiction, it was possibly some such predicament that Bourget had in mind.