k from one of the places to which younger sons exile themselves,
and for all I knew it might be the correct thing for girls to elect
brothers nowadays in one set or another.

"Oh, tell me some more," I said, "one likes to know about one's sister.
You and the Right Honourable Charles Gurnard are Dimensionists, and who
are the others of your set?"

"There is only one," she answered. And would you believe it!--it seems
he was Fox, the editor of my new paper.

"You select your characters with charming indiscriminateness," I said.
"Fox is only a sort of toad, you know--he won't get far."

"Oh, he'll go far," she answered, "but he won't get there. Fox is
fighting against us."

"Oh, so you don't dwell in amity?" I said. "You fight for your own
hands."

"We fight for our own hands," she answered, "I shall throw Gurnard over
when he's pulled the chestnuts out of the fire."

I was beginning to get a little tired of this. You see, for me, the
scene was a veiled flirtation and I wanted to get on. But I had to
listen to her fantastic scheme of things. It was really a duel between
Fox, the Journal-founder, and Gurnard, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Fox, with Churchill, the Foreign Minister, and his supporters, for
pieces, played what he called "the Old Morality business" against
Gurnard, who passed for a cynically immoral politician.

I grew more impatient. I wanted to get out of this stage into something
more personal. I thought she invented this sort of stuff to keep me from
getting at her errand at Callan's. But I didn't want to know her errand;
I wanted to make love to her. As for Fox and Gurnard and Churchill, the
Foreign Minister, who really was a sympathetic character and did stand
for political probity, she might be uttering allegorical truths, but I
was not interested in them. I wanted to start some topic that would lead
away from this Dimensionist farce.

"My dear sister," I began.... Callan always moved about like a
confounded eavesdropper, wore carpet slippers, and stepped round the
corners of screens. I expect he got copy like that.

"So, she's your sister?" he said suddenly, from behind me. "Strange that
you shouldn't recognise the handwriting...."

"Oh, we don't correspond," I said light-heartedly, "we are _so_
different." I wanted to take a rise out of the creeping animal that he
was. He confronted her blandly.

"You must be the little girl that I remember," he said. He had known my
parents ages ago.