"That's all!" mused Lady Tal. "Doesn't it seem rather lame? You don't seem to have got sufficient _denouement_, do you? Why shouldn't we write that novel together? I'm sure I could help you to something more conclusive than that. Let me see. Well, suppose the lady were to answer: 'I am as poor as a rat, and I fear I'm rather expensive. But I _can_ make my dresses myself if only I get one of those wicker dolls, I call them Theresa, you know; and I _might_ learn to do my hair myself; and then I'm going to be a great painter--no, sculptor, I mean--and make pots of money; so suppose we get married.' Don't you think Mr. Marion, that would be more _modern_ than your _denouement_? You would have to find out what that painter--no, sculptor, I beg your pardon--would answer. Consider that both he and the lady are rather lonely, bored, and getting into the sere and yellow---- We ought to write that novel together, because I've given you the ending--and also because I really can't manage another all by myself, now that I've got accustomed to having my semicolons put in for me----" As Lady Atalanta spoke these words, a sudden downpour of rain drove her and Marion back into the drawing-room. A WORLDLY WOMAN. I. "But why should you mind who buys your pots, so long as your pots are beautiful?" asked the girl. "Because as things exist at present, art can minister only to the luxury of the rich, idle classes. The people, the people that works and requires to play, and requires something to tell it of happier things, gets no share in art. The people is too poor to possess beautiful things, and too brutish to care for them: the only amusement it can afford is getting drunk. And one wearies and sickens of merely adding one's grain of sand to the inequality and injustice of existing social conditions--don't you see, Miss Flodden?" Leonard Greenleaf stopped short, his breathlessness mingling with the annoyance at having let himself be carried away by his ideas, and producing a vague sense of warm helplessness. "Of course," he went on, taking up a big jar of yellow Hispano-Moorish lustre ware, and mechanically dusting it with the feather brush, "it's absurd to talk like that about such things as pots, and it's absurd to talk like that to you." And raising his head he gave a furtive little glare at the girl, where she stood in a golden beam of dust and sunlight, which slanted through his workshop.