“Before I knew him, I was nothing in the world but a door with a letter on it, as I’ve just told you. That’s all I stood for, a mere letter of the alphabet who paid a monthly rent. I told him so, when I first came across, and he said, ‘Well, I’m very glad they didn’t leave G out of the alphabet.’ That’s all.” “But I’m his slave now. Nobody cared whether there was a G or not before. It isn’t pleasant to feel you’re a mere cypher, with no particular meaning to any one; just shot in haphazard to fill up a blank—a mere creature, useful to teach exercises and scales to odious children one only longs to slap. “Fancy being expected to keep yourself alive in a dingy little flat, for ever alone, just to do that!” The cups rattled more restively still. “I say, the universe is the grimmest jester there ever was. Me to teach music to keep life in a body that doesn’t want it! If I’d been employed laying out corpses in their grave-clothes there’d have been some sense in it. I’m not much more that a figurehead of an old hulk myself. But music!… music!… Oh Lord, and I haven’t one real note of it in my whole composition.” Hal seated herself on the table. With her quick intuition she perceived at once entertainment of an original kind was before her, and she promptly laid herself out to obtain all she could. “Why do you teach music? I don’t think you do quite suggest a musician?” “Of course I don’t.” The gaunt spinster was cutting some bread-and-butter now with a savage air. “Do I suggest anything, except perhaps a butcher or an undertaker? Yet I can only keep myself alive with music. That’s the jest of the Arch Humorist. My father was a clergyman. He droned out services for fifty years in a hamlet, with a little square church like a wooden money-box. I was taught music so that I could—well—make the tin-pot organ groan, I used to call it. I had twenty-five years of that, with never a break. I got so that, to keep myself from turning into a stone gargoyle on the organ seat, I must have my little jest too. “One way I had it was by making the organ groan dismallest at weddings and christenings, and squeak hilariously at funerals. Father never noticed, he’d already turned gargoyle, you see, and as for the village people! well, it suited them, because they always wept at weddings, and overate themselves at funerals.” “And then?…” Hal was so thoroughly enjoying herself now, she had almost forgotten the invalid. “Well, then the gargoyle died, or ran down, or something. I should think he got tired of sing-song the tender mercies of God to the devout people, and His judgments on the wicked. It always seemed to me the good folks got the nastiest knocks; and the wicked, well, they fairly left the green bay tree behind.