"That has been the dream of my childhood," said PSEUDONYMIA, her white Cordelia-like soul thrilled through and through with sacred convictions. A ripe gorse-pod burst in the basking sunlight. ("I never remember seeing sunlight bask before," she thought.) A bumble-bee said something inaudible. "But why," she added, "did you never give this pure sentiment to the world before? You who have written so many many books?" "My child," replied the artist, "I was compelled to write down to the public taste. One must consider one's prospects. This, you will say, seems to clash with what I said before about calculating egoists. But profession and practice are ever divorced under our depraved system of civilisation. At last, having established myself, I rose superior to sordid avarice, and wrote for once solely to satisfy my own taste and conscience." "A noble sacrifice!" said PSEUDONYMIA, suppressing her dimples for the moment. "As the physically weaker vessel, I could only have done it under an assumed name. But tell me of one difficulty which you have so cleverly avoided in your book. This question of the family. Will not a confusion arise in another generation when nobody quite knows who and how many his or her half-brothers and half-sisters are?" "PSEUDONYMIA!" said PERUGINO, and his voice broke in two places, "I am pained. I had thought that you, so pure, so emancipate, would have had a soul above blithering detail. Besides, do you not see that in this way the whole world will eventually become one family? _We_ may not live to see this Millennium, but future Fabians may. What we want is a protomartyr in the cause. SHELLEY promised well, but he ultimately reverted to legal wedlock. As for me, I have been deemed unworthy of the crown. I am, alas! happily married. But you, you are single; why should you not set to all your sister-slaves a high example of that martyrdom of which the glory, as well as the inconvenience, has been denied to me?" "Ah, dear PERUGINO!" she cried, visibly affected for the third time to her finger-tips, "must it ever be so? Profession, as you say, divorced from practice? Must one more noble name be added to the list of those that shock the world so fearlessly with their books and live such despicably blameless lives? I myself, too, am misleading in print. You judged me by my pseudonymous publications to be single and unscrupulous. But you were wrong. I also am unequal to the weight of that crown. How can I be your martyr in the cause--I who these many years have worshipped the very dust on which my husband deigns to tread? Can you and I ever be forgiven for thus sinning against the light?" PERUGINO rose to go, indignant, disillusioned. "_Et tu_, PSEUDONYMIA?" he bitterly cried. (She had been at Girton and could follow the original.) "Then I give you up. You are, I grieve to think, _a woman who won't do_." And he made a she-note of it. * * * * * "WITH WHAT PORPOISE?"