once, won't you? Ring
him up to-morrow and get him to dine with you or something. If there's
any way of stopping that poisonous woman's tongue, we'll find it....
Meanwhile, I shall tell our parish workers that Leila Yorke's works are
obscene, and that they're not to read them to mother's meetings as is
their habit.'

I sat up till midnight, wondering how on earth I was going to put it
to Arthur.

7

I didn't dine with Arthur. I thought it would last too long, and that he
might want me to go, and that I should certainly want to go, after I had
said what I had to say. So I rang him up at the office and asked if he
could lunch. Not at the club; it's too full of people we know, who keep
interrupting, and who would be tremendously edified at catching murmurs
about libel and murder and Lady Pinkerton being poisoned. So I said the
Temple Bar restaurant in Fleet Street, a disagreeable place, but so noisy
and crowded that you can say what you like unheard--unheard very often by
the person you are addressing, and certainly by every one else.

We sat downstairs, at a table at the back, and there I told him, in what
hardly needed to be an undertone, of the rumours that were being
circulated about him. I felt like a horrid woman in a village who repeats
spiteful gossip and says, 'I'm telling you because I think you ought to
know what's being said.' As a matter of fact, this was the one and only
case I have ever come across in which I have thought the person concerned
ought to know what was being said. As a rule, it seems the last thing
they ought to know.

He listened, staring at the tablecloth and crumbling his bread.

'Thank you,' he said, 'for telling me. As a matter of fact, I knew.
Or, anyhow, guessed.... But I'm not sure that anything can be done
to stop it.'

'Unless,' I said, looking away from him, 'you could find grounds for a
libel action. You might ask a lawyer.'

'No,' he returned quickly. 'That's quite impossible. Out of the
question.... There are no grounds. And I wouldn't if there were. I'm not
going to have the thing made a show of in the courts. It's exactly what
the Pinkertons would enjoy--a first-class Pinkerton scoop. No, I shall
let it alone.'

'Is there no way of stopping it, then?' I asked.

'Only one,' he murmured, absently, beneath his breath, then caught
himself up. 'I don't know. I think not.'

I didn't make any further suggestions. What was the good of
advising him to remonstrate with the