"Oh! Letty can take care of herself," said Watton, laughing. He might have said, if he had thought it worth while, that somebody had already given Letty a hint. Tressady, it appeared, disliked him. Well, people that disliked you were fair game. However, in spite of Tressady's dislike, he had been able to amuse himself a good deal with Letty and Letty's furnishing during the last few months. Harding, who prided himself on the finest of tastes, liked to be consulted; he liked anything, also, that gave him importance, if it were only with the master of a curiosity shop, and, under cover of Letty's large dealings, he had carried off various spoils of his own for his rooms in the Temple--spoils which were not to be despised--at a very moderate price indeed. "Who could have thought George Tressady would turn out such a weak creature," said his mother, rising, "when one remembers how Lord Fontenoy believed in him?" "And does still believe in him, more or less," said Harding; "but Fontenoy will have to be warned." He looked at the clock, to see if there was time for a cigarette before church, lit it, and, leaning against the window, gazed towards the hazy park with a meditative air. "Do you mean there is any question of his ratting?" said his mother. Harding raised his eyebrows. "Well, no--hardly anything so gross as that. But you can see all the spirit has gone out of him. He does no work for us. The party gets nothing out of him." Harding spoke as if he had the party in his pocket. His mother looked at him with a severely concealed admiration. There were few limits to her belief in Harding. But it was not her habit to flatter her sons. "What makes one so mad," she said, as she sailed towards the door in a stiff rustle of Sunday brocade, "is the way in which the people who admire her talk of her. When one thinks that all this 'slumming,' and all this stuff about the poor, only means keeping her husband in office and surrounding herself with a court of young men, it turns one sick!" "My dear mother, we keep all our little hypocrisies," said Harding, indulgently. "Don't forget that Lady Maxwell provides me with a deal of good copy." And after his mother had left him he smoked on, thinking with pleasure of an article of his on "The Woman of the Slums," packed with allusions to Marcella Maxwell, which was to appear in the next number of the "Haymarket Reporter," the paper that he and Fontenoy were now running. Harding was not the editor. He disliked drudgery and office-hours; and his father was good for enough to live upon. But he was a powerful adviser in the conduct of the new journal, and wrote, perhaps, the smartest articles.