LUCILLA kept her word. She was not a woman of half measures. Just as she had set out, impelled by altruistic fancy, to carry provincial little Félise through part of a Riviera season, and had thoroughly accomplished her object, so now she devoted herself whole-heartedly to the guidance of Martin through the Land of Egypt. In doing so she was conscious of helping the world along. Hitherto it was impeded in its progress by a mild, scholarly gentleman wasting his potentialities in handing soup to commercial travellers. These potentialities she had decided to develop, so that in due season a new force might be evolved which could give the old world a shove. To express her motives in less universal terms, she set herself the holiday task of making a man of him. To herself she avowed her entire disinterestedness. She had often thought of adopting and training a child; but that would take a prodigiously long time, and the child might complicate her future life. On the other hand, with grown men and women, things went more quickly. You could see the grass grow. The swifter process appealed to her temperament. First she incorporated him, without chance of escape, in her own little coterie, the Dangerfields, and the Watney-Holcombes, father, mother and daughter, Americans who lived in Paris. They received him guaranteed by Lucilla as an Englishman without guile, with democratic American frankness. Of Mr. Dangerfield, a grim-featured banker, possessing a dry, subrident humour, Martin was somewhat afraid. But with the Watney-Holcombes, cheery, pleasure-loving folk, he was soon at his ease. “The only thing you mustn’t do,” said Lucilla, “is to fall in love with Maisie”—Maisie was a slip of a girl of nineteen, whom he regarded as an amusing and precocious child—“There is already a young man floating about in the smoke of St. Louis.”