When he got well into the swing of it and was turning out a chapter every three or four days, he fell easily into the habit of slipping the last instalment into his pocket when he went to Mereside. Margery Grierson was adding generously to his immense obligation to her; hoping only to find a friendly listener, he found a helpful collaborator. More than once, when his own imagination was at fault, she was able to open new vistas in the humanities for him, apparently drawing upon a reserve of intuitive conclusions compared with which his own hard-bought store of experimental knowledge was almost puerile. "I wish you would tell me the secret of your marvellous cleverness!" he exclaimed, on one of the June afternoons when he had been reading to her in the cool half-shadows of the Mereside library. "You are only a child in years: how can you know with such miraculous certainty what other people would think and do under conditions about which you can't possibly know anything experimentally? It's beyond me!" "There are many things beyond you yet, dear boy; many, many things," was her laughing rejoinder; from which it will be inferred that the episode in the Farmers' and Merchants' burglar-proof had become an episode forgotten--or at least forgiven. "You know men--a little; but when it comes to the women ... well, if I didn't keep continually nagging at you, your two heroines--with neither of whom you are really in love--would degenerate into rag dolls. They would, actually." "That's true; I can see it clearly enough when you point it out," he admitted, putting his craftsman pride underfoot, as he was always obliged to do in these talks with her. "I should be discouraged if you didn't keep on telling me that the story, as a story, is good." "It _is_ good; it is a big story," she asserted, with kindling enthusiasm. "The plot, so far as you have gone with it, is fine; and that is where you leave me away behind. I don't see how you could ever think it out. And the character-drawing is fine, too, some of it. Your _Fleming_ is as far beyond me as your _Fidelia_ seems to be beyond you." "_Fleming_ is human in every drop of his blood," he boasted. "I don't doubt it for a moment; all the little ear-marks of humanity are there, and I know in reason that he must be a type. But I have never met the man himself; and I am sure I shall be scared silly if I ever do meet him. Think of being shut up in any little corner of the world with a man who has convinced himself that he can commit any crime in the calendar so long as he believes the particular one he chooses isn't a crime!" "Crime, so-called, is like everything else in this world; a thing to be defined strictly by the motive and the point of view," said Griswold, mounting his hobby with joyous alacrity.