"The suburbs do not appreciate me as they do you, old man!" he says sometimes. "If I was proper, they wouldn't even look at me!" "Ay! the suburbs?" George says dreamily; "the kind, the mild, the tenderly trustful suburbs. I manipulate them freely. I have taught Peckham Rye and Clapham that there are stranger things in Pall Mall and Piccadilly than are dreamt of in their simple philosophy----" "You have tickled the Philistines, not smitten them!" says Mr. Aix. "I have shocked them--they love being shocked! I have startled them--that does them good. I have puzzled them--not altogether unpleasantly. I have inured them to Dukes and familiarized them with Duchesses, as the butcher hardens his pony to a motor-car. I reduce to a common, romantic denominator----" "You are like those useful earthworms of _le père_ Darwin, bringing up soil and interweaving strata," said Mr. Aix wearily. George accepted the worm reluctantly, and went on. "Yes, I dominate the lower strata, they dote on any topsy-turvy upper-class gospel I chose at the moment to formulate for their crass benefit. Miss Mander, did you ever envisage Peckham?" "I lived there and sold matches once," said she, "and, moreover, I've kept a Home for distressed female-authors in the Isle of Dogs." "Is there anything you haven't done?" said Mr. Aix, quite jealous of a woman interfering in his own line. He always makes a point of living among his raw material. When he was writing _The Serio-Comic_, in order to get the serious atmosphere--which I should have thought gin would have done for well enough--he went every night of his life to some music hall or other, and went behind and talked to them, and fastened their frocks at the back for them, and put in hair-pins when they stuck out just as they were going on. Then he stood them drinks, and didn't preach for his life, for if he had, the serio-comics wouldn't have told him anything or shown him the secret of their inner life. He had to pretend that he thought them and their life all that was perfect. Christina calls this novel "The Sweetmeat in the Gutter," and loves it, though George says it is as broad as it's long, and that ladies shouldn't read it. But Christina has been to Klondike and seen the seamy side, so it doesn't matter. _I_ have read _The Serio-Comic_, and I can't see anything wrong. There's more seriousness than fun in it. Miss Deucie Dulcimer's real name is Frances Raggles, and she's the mother of five in the course of three hundred and fifty pages, and there's a brandy-and-soda in every chapter.