been bored at their first Garden Party--do the really nice ones just go fluttering on and on until a nasty big net comes plump down on them, calling itself Marriage and Womanhood and so on? It is all very puzzling, I do think, and I see no reason at all for my going on calling myself a novelist if I don’t know a damn thing about what goes on behind the brown eyes of a girl of eighteen! What do other writers do when they are writing about girls of eighteen? I suppose they just go on making up lies like anything, and bitterly hope for the best. If it comes to that I am a thundering good liar when I am put to it, but I simply couldn’t make up enough to put inside a girl like Consuelo with any hope of getting away with it. No, but it’s very depressing, and me calling myself a writer. It’s all right of course, when one is dealing with older women--on paper, I am talking about--for no matter how many lies one makes up about them, just to make them seem real and lifelike, some of them are sure to be true, or as near the truth as makes no matter....” And then, a good while later, when I had moved from Algiers to Lagouat, which is right away in the desert, hundreds of miles away in the desert, Ralph Trevor wrote to me, and among other things he asked: “Why haven’t you mentioned Consuelo Brown in your last two letters? I am quite interested in her, and have been wondering whether you have fallen in love with her and had your advances rejected with contumely, which would be a quite sufficient reason for you to have lost all interest in her.” I wrote back rebuking him for his harsh opinion of me and pointing out various of the less lustrous episode in his own career of celibacy, and then I came to Consuelo. “Yes, there is certainly a reason why I ceased to mention her in my letters, but it is not the reason to which you have quite bestially subscribed. There are some things one simply does not, of one’s own accord, write about, not for any consideration, and so not even to cure you forever of your fatuous pessimism concerning my character will I ever again mention the name of Consuelo Brown. I am, as you see, in Lagouat now, an aeroplane from Biskra dropped me here, and here I will stay until the spring, between the sand and the sun and the beggars....” But when in the spring I returned to London, loveliest of all towns in the spring, and I dined one night with Ralph Trevor, he said to me, at that period after dinner when such things are commonly said: “Now then, out with it, old man. The later history of Miss Consuelo Brown, if you please.” Very unwillingly, I told him how one day a young man I knew, not very well, was added to the guests of the hotel on the hill over the bay of Algiers. “A pleasant young man he was, and I was shocked at the sight of him, he was so white and fragile. He said he had been ill of a rheumatic fever for a long time and was now convalescing.