She flung aside the letter and turned over the morning paper. There she found, under the heading of ‘Scene at a London Club,’ an account of Aubrey Grovelyn’s horse-whipping at the hands of Paul Valdis. The _exposé_ of the so-called ‘poet,’ who, as Mr Brown, had been steadily booming himself, was cautiously hinted at in darkly ambiguous terms—no journal likes to admit that it has been cleverly fooled by one of its own staff. And great editors, who are anywhere and everywhere except where they should be, namely, in the editorial room, are naturally loth to make public the results of their own inattention to business. They do not like to confess that, in their love of pleasure and their devotion to race-meetings and shooting-parties, it often happens that the very porters guarding the doors of their offices know more about the staff than they do. The porter can tell exactly the hour that Mr B—— comes in to the office at night, the shortness of the time he stays there, and the precipitate hurry with which he goes home to bed. The porter knows that Mr B—— is paid five hundred a year for doing hard work at that office during a certain number of hours, and that Mr B—— seldom looks in for more than one hour, having other work on other papers, about which he says nothing. And that, therefore, Mr B—— is distinctly ‘doing’ his editor and proprietor. But as long as editors and proprietors prefer to caper about at the heels of ‘swagger’ society instead of attending strictly to their duties and to the grave responsibilities of journalism, so long will the British Press be corrupted by underlings, and ‘used’ for purposes which are neither honourable nor national, nor in any way exact, as reflecting the real current of public opinion. Delicia knew all this of old, hence her indifference to the press generally. She had always been entertained and surprised at the naïve delight with which certain society ‘belles’ had shown her descriptions of themselves in certain fashionable journals, where their personal attractions were enumerated and discussed as if they were nothing more than cattle in a market. She could never understand what pleasure there was in the vulgar compliments of the cheap paragraphist. And in the same way she never thought it worth while to attach importance to the scurrilities that appeared in similar quarters concerning all those women who stood aloof from self-advertisement and declined to ‘give themselves away’ by consenting to the maudlin puffery of the ‘ladies’ paper.’ So that the lofty tone of injury her husband assumed in his letter not only struck her as mean, but infinitely grotesque as well. She did not answer him, nor did he write again; and she passed a quiet fortnight at Broadstairs, finishing some literary work she had promised to her publishers at a certain date, and trying to think as little as possible of herself or her private griefs. When she was not engaged in