‘Oh, I don’t know that I should like to meet such a man,’ the little woman said, with an anxious glance at her husband; and then she took Laurie a step aside, and became confidential. ‘If you would but make Reginald and him friends, Mr. Renton! I don’t mind speaking to you. Nobody knows what talent Reginald has; and I am so afraid he will get soured with never finding an opening; and he can’t afford to keep up a club like you young men, and we have been so much out of the world. What does it matter studying nature and studying the great masters, and staying out of London till everybody forgets you?’ the poor young woman continued, with tears in her eyes. She was young, and it was hard upon her to keep from crying when she met Laurie’s sympathetic look. ‘It is not so much the money I am thinking of,’ she said; ‘but if Reginald were to get soured----’ ‘I’ll get Slasher to meet him directly,’ said Laurie, with eager promptitude; ‘and you may be sure everything I can do----’ ‘Oh, thanks!’ said the painter’s wife. ‘It is not that he wants any favour, Mr. Renton, but only an opening; and we have been so much out of the world.’ ‘I wonder you don’t get up a Trades-Union, and make a stand,’ said Mrs. Thurston, who was literary. ‘How anything can keep alive that is so badly written as the “Sword,” I don’t know. It is because you are all so eager to see what it says about you, even though you hate it. Just like the articles in all the papers about women! If women were not so curious to see “what’s next,” do you think any one would take the trouble to write all that? Don’t mind it, and you take away its power.’ ‘Ah, it is so easy for you,’ cried Mrs. Suffolk;--‘you have nothing to do but to go to your publisher; but what with the Hanging Committee putting all their friends on the line, and those wicked papers that never think of merit, but only of some one the writers know----’ ‘That’s enough, Helen,’ said her husband, with an attempt at a smile; ‘you talk as if we minded. But what is the criticism of an ignorant fellow, who does not know a picture when he sees it, to me,--or any one?’ he added, with the slightest half-perceptible quiver of his lip. ‘Constable has just come back from Italy, Renton;--one of our old set;’ and so the talk ran on.