t the customers' accounts. This was all in accord with
the far-seeing and generous policy of the laundry. The reading took a
little time, but it filled us with the soaring spirit. It made pedantic
precision and things-that-are repulsive to us. After I heard Hector read
the "Ode to a Nightingale" I could not bring myself to say that two and
two were four; nothing less than fourteen seemed to give me any
satisfaction. Hector knew how quickly responsive and keenly sentient I
was. A friend once told me that he had said of me that I made arithmetic
a rhapsody. "This," I replied quietly, "means business."

It did. One Saturday afternoon I had tea with him--not on the Terrace,
as the A.B.C. shop in the High Street was so much nearer. He was very
wonderful. He talked continuously for two hours, and would have gone on
longer. But the waitress pointed out that the charge for a cup of tea
and a scone did not include a twenty-one years' lease of the chair you
sat on.

He was, of course, a man of great scientific attainments. His work on
the use of acids in fabric-disintegration has a reputation throughout
the laundries of Europe. But he had not the habit of screaming
blasphemies which my Great Example failed to convince anybody that she
had discovered in Huxley. In brief, he did not conform to the
unscientific idea of what a scientific man must be like. He was a
cultured idealist. I will try to recall a few of the marvellous things
he said that afternoon.

In reply to some remark of mine, he said with authority and conviction:
"Marge, you really _are_."

And, indeed, I had to admit that very often I am.

He was saying that in this world gentle methods have effected more than
harsh, and added this beautiful thought: "In the ordeal by laundry the
soft-fronted often outlasts the starched."

Later, I led him on to speak of ambition.

"I am ambitious. That is to say, I live not in the present, but in the
future. At one time I had a bicycle, but in imagination I drove a
second-hand Ford; and now I possess the Ford, and in imagination I have
a Rolls-Royce. I once held a subordinate position in the laundry, but in
imagination I was the manager; and now I am the manager, and in
imagination am asked to join the Board of Directors. As the poet
Longfellow so wisely said--Excelsior. Engraved in letters of gold on the
heart of the ambitious are these words: 'And the next article?' At this
present moment I am having a cup of tea with by f