I don't know that I blame her, for the air is so full of cupidity nowadays that it is taken in through the pores unless you watch yourself very carefully. She is otherwise a rational little woman, of no great force of character but plenty of cheerfulness and loyalty, who has in reality one of the serenest of lives, for the twins are no more trouble than they ought to be to supply their mother with congenial topics of conversation and that leaven of anxiety that keeps mothers happy, and Mrs. Frank's mother and Frank's mother vie with each other in showering little presents on the household, and Naomi is continually looking in with her dear sunny face. Let Mrs. Frank be happy while she can. Some day her husband will be offered £1000 a year to edit a paper, and a literary peeress will take them up, and that will be the end. I find that Frank has been selling his review copies to Mr. Bemerton for a long time, and they are old friends. I met him there recently on the search for second-hand copies of the collected poems of one of the older living poets, having had a commission from an editor to prepare his obituary notice against the dread summons. I had not given much thought to this branch of journalistic industry, but of course now that I think of it I see that the pigeon-holes of Fleet Street must be full of these anticipatory articles which only need occasional revision to date to be all ready when the scythe is finally sharpened. To meet an editor must be for a thoughtful celebrity as chilling as the spectacle of the mummy at the Egyptian banquet. Frank tells me that the practice on one of the papers for which he is engaged is to withhold payment until the article is used. "This," he says, "is all very well so long as one is flush. But if one were broke just think of what one might be tempted to do, for I see Blank [his poetical victim] at the Museum continually, and could easily poison his soup at the Vienna Café." "Poets," Frank said to me one day, "ought to have some common fund from which they might borrow for sustenance without shame--some Pactolian spring into which to dip their cups. You know those ingenious contribution boxes invented by Mr. Sidney Holland, which invite you to drop in a penny and by so doing maintain the London Hospital for one second--a dial indicating the passage of your own pennyworth of time as you do so. Well, I thought once of adopting this plan, and calling upon the public to drop in a penny and thus maintain me. 'A penny keeps a poet for half an hour,' it might have said." "Apropos of poets," said I, "come upstairs and I will show you a book." I need hardly say what the book was. I delighted Frank immensely by reading him the passage describing the ruse to which Ch'ēn Tzu-ang the poet resorted in order to win recognition.