as certainly not my intention to let
her run into my arms and press her face to my shoulder. She clung to me
with passion, but without joy, and her voice came through the tumult of
my senses as if from a long way off.

"Ambo, Ambo! You've asked nothing--and you want me most of all. I _must_
make somebody happy!"

It was the voice of a child.

V

I could not face Maltby again that evening, as I had promised, for our
good sensible man-to-man talk; a lapse in courage which reduced him to
rabid speculation and restless fury. So furious was he, indeed, after a
long hour alone, that he telephoned for a taxi, grabbed his suitcase,
and caught a slow midnight local for New York--from which electric
center he hissed back over the wires three ominous words to ruin my
solitary breakfast:

* * * * *

"He laughs best---- M. PHAR."

* * * * *

While my egg solidified and the toast grew rigid I meditated a humble
apologetic reply, but in the end I could not with honesty compose one;
though I granted him just cause for anger. With that, for the time
being, I dismissed him. There were more immediate problems, threatening,
inescapable, that must presently be solved.

Susan, always an early riser, usually had a bite of breakfast at seven
o'clock--brought to her by the faithful Miss Goucher--and then remained
in her room to work until lunch time. For about a year past I had so far
caught the contagion of her example as to write in my study three hours
every morning; a regularity I should formerly have despised.
Dilettantism always demands a fine frenzy, but now it astounded me to
discover how much respectable writing one could do without waiting for
the spark from heaven; one could pass beyond the range of an occasional
article and even aspire to a book. Only the final pages of my first real
book--_Aristocracy and Art_, an essay in aesthetic and social
criticism--remained to be written; and Susan had made me swear by the
Quanglewangle's Hat, her favorite symbol, to push on with it each
morning till the job was done.

Well, _Aristocracy and Art_ has since been published and, I am glad to
say, forgotten. Conceived in superciliousness and swaddled in
preciosity, it is one of the sins I now strive hardest to expiate. But
in those days it expressed clearly enough the crusted aridity of my
soul. However----

I had hoped, of course, that Susan would bre