Derwent Rose had written a book called _An Ape in Hell_. I don't know, Derry never knew, I don't think anybody knows to this day, the real origin of the expression that formed its title; and if I were a syndic of one of these New Dictionaries I think I should frankly confess as much, instead of merely quoting other books as saying that "_A woman who dies without bearing a child is said to lead an Ape in Hell_." Had I written that book, and in my own way, I think the four corners of the earth would have heard of it; as Derwent Rose had written it, in his way, he had merely achieved a masterpiece for the reading of generations to come. Our contemporary agglomeration (if Mr Goddard is right) of ten and twelve years old intelligences had practically passed it over. Briefly, the book had to do with the merciless economic pressure that already, in 1910, made it difficult for people to marry in the freshness of their youth, and practically suicidal to have children. I cannot delay to say more of the book. I saw in it nothing but pity and beauty and tenderness and a savage and generous anger, and how anybody could have taken it in any other sense I could not imagine. Yet one person had done so--a friend of his childhood, the author of _The Parthian Arrow_. "One moment," I said when Madge arrived at this point. "There's one thing that isn't quite clear. His book came out in 1910. Hers only appeared quite lately." "That's so," she admitted. "But nobody brings out a rejoinder ten years after the event." "Well--she did. Read the book. Another thing: she started her book immediately his appeared, in 1910." "How do you know that?" "Those sleeves her heroine wears went out in 1910," was her characteristic reply. "She never even took the trouble to bring them up to date." So that the rancour, if there was any, was not only persistent, but seemed to have a curiously desultory quality as well. "Well--go on," I said. But here she broke out suddenly: "But surely, George, even you can see where the _Ape_ must have hurt her!" "As I've neither seen the lady nor read her book----" "But you know what his book's all about.... It was in her childlessness that she felt it." "_What!_" I cried. "Is anybody so stupid as to suppose that a man like Derwent Rose would----" "Wait a bit. Look at it as she sees it. She married at twenty-nine. She's forty-one now. And nothing's happened, and nothing's likely to. They were boy and girl together. Now suppose _I'd_ had an affair with somebody in _my_ young days, and had married somebody else, and then he'd gone and--rubbed it in. I don't think I should have written a _Parthian Arrow_ even then, but I'm not going to drop dead when I hear that another woman did." "But--ten years!"