An odd look passed between Mrs. Conway and her host. Both started to speak together. Then she yielded to him, nodding acquiescence as Ben said: “They are Fenwick’s property. It’s up to him whether or not he gratifies our curiosity.” But, Fenwick, jaunty now, uncramped, waved his cigarette. “It belongs to the company. I’m delighted to have been successful. But isn’t it extraordinary that I shouldn’t once have realized that I was writing or that I was tearing those sheets off?” “You did it very quietly. There was no noise,” Mrs. Conway volunteered. “Can’t we read the stuff, right off?” Carter inquired anxiously. Allis leaned over and took the papers from him. There must have been four or five sheets. Neither he nor Carter had examined them. “Fenwick’s property. It’s up to Fenwick.” “I don’t want the stuff. Let’s read it aloud if it makes any sense.” Mrs. Conway rose with determination. “Why not hand it over to me? I won’t read it.” But Mrs. Medford cried out. “Mr. Gregory wrote, ‘Ask Fenwick.’ So did Maud Allis. We _must_ ask Fenwick.” “Yes. What’s the use of spending all this time in an experiment if we can’t see what we’ve accomplished?” Miss Ford voiced her own and Carter’s grievance. “Well, Fenwick”--Allis’s bantering voice threw in--“if you are ready to vouch for the absolute purity of your subconscious, shall we oblige the ladies?” Fenwick looked sheepish. “Oh, I say! You don’t mean to load that stuff, whatever it is, off on me. Why, it may be a résumé of the last French novel I read--or anything.” Mrs. Conway spoke, for the first time, with some sharpness. “You don’t, any of you, know what may be there. It may be utter nonsense, or it may be a sermon. But whatever is there comes from no good place.” Some of us laughed. “You’re very hard on Fenwick’s subconscious,” Allis said. “It’s the first time you’ve ever done it?” Mrs. Conway asked. “Absolutely the first.” Fenwick nodded. “Well, then”--she sighed--“it’s probably all right. They’re usually careful how they begin.” She shrugged her shoulders. We moved in a body to the big lamp on Allis’s writing-table. “Thank goodness, Nora’s upstairs,” Maud Allis giggled in my ear. Fenwick now had let himself go in the spirit of Carter and Genevieve Ford, as they chaffed him. “All right,” he said; “I may be done for, but who wrote ‘Ask Fenwick’? Seems to me we’re all tarred with the same brush anyhow.” He held up the first page, getting the light over his shoulder, and began to read: “‘Jack Hilles speaking.’” The manuscript opened like a telephone call. Fenwick broke off. “Oh, I say, you don’t want me to read this. There can’t be anything in it, and we’d all be sorry to go any further----” But Mrs. Medford came close to him, her eyes almost glaring with the intensity of her feeling--a queer, soft, mad glare. I saw, like a shot, that she wasn’t going to be easy to manage. “Mr. Fenwick, you’ve no right to stop,” she panted.