“Dear Alice,” (read Mrs. Elles), “I am so sorry that I cannot have the pleasure of dining with you on the 31st, but I hope to be in the North on the 26th, at latest, to begin my summer campaign. I see the spring buds in the parks, and the Inspector of Nuisances has invited me to clip my sprouting lilac bushes, and it all reminds me too painfully of the paradise of greenness that is growing up in the country, and calling me. I shall soon be ‘a green thought in a green shade’--as Marvel says, and very much in my element. Yours ever, Edmund Rivers.” “The twenty-sixth,” said Mrs. Elles, meditating. “This is the thirtieth. Then he is gone.” “Oh, yes, no one will set eyes on him again till November, when he comes back from what he calls his summer campaign. He takes good care that none of us shall even know where his happy hunting ground is--somewhere in Yorkshire, I believe! Oh, yes, you may keep the letter.” Mrs. Elles took the letter with her pretty, be-ringed fingers, and scanned it again with the air of a connoisseur. “Do you know,” she said, “I take a double interest in these things; first of all, because they are autographs of distinguished people, but, in the second place, because I can read their characters so well from their handwritings.” “I wonder if you can tell me anything of this man’s character, then?” said the novelist, with a look in her eyes which set Mrs. Elles thinking. Miss Giles, in her way, was attractive. It was not Mrs. Elles’ way, but Mrs. Elles had sufficient discernment to see merit in a style that was not her style at all. Miss Giles had no pose, unless it was that of bonhomie. The charm of her face lay in its nobility, touched with shrewdness; a certain modest mannishness as of a woman who had to look after herself, and who had cut out a way for herself, marked her appearance. Her dress was not in any way unfeminine, but Mrs. Elles decided that she would have looked well, dressed as a boy. She had beautiful eyes, and dark hair that curled. She must always have looked thirty-six, and would probably never look any older than she looked now. “It is a very odd, characteristic handwriting indeed,” she began gravely, “he is complicated, tremendously complicated, I should say.” “He is an artist, a genius indeed, in my opinion,” said the novelist, soberly. “Ah! then, of course, he has a right to be eccentric. They all are, aren’t they? Well, isn’t he a little--how shall I say it?--fanciful, faddish, difficult to get on with?” “You have, in the words of the song, ‘got to know him first,’” quoted Egidia, laughing. “And you do know him, well, of course! But still, I should say he is what is called a misogynist.” She was watching the effect of her words on the other. Even the strong-minded authoress of novels with a purpose has her weak spot, she was glad to see.