chair in the outer room. 'She must have known I was coming,' he
reflected swiftly. 'No, perhaps she didn't. The letter was not
dictated.... But then it was press-copied; I am sure of that by the
smudges on it. She must certainly have known I was coming.' And, despite
the verdict that she was a pushing young thing, Henry felt it to be in
the nature of a personal grievance that she was not always waiting for
him there, in that chair, with her golden locks and her smile and her
tight bodice, whenever he cared to look in. His right to expect her
presence seemed part of his heritage as a man, and it could not be
challenged without disturbing the very foundations of human society. He
did not think these thoughts clearly as he crossed the outer room into
the inner under the direction of Miss Foster's unexciting colleague, but
they existed vaguely and furtively in his mind. Had anyone suggested
that he cared twopence whether Miss Foster was there or not, he would
have replied with warm sincerity that he did not care three halfpence,
nor two straws, nor a bilberry, nor even a jot.

'Well,' cried Mark Snyder, with his bluff and jolly habit of beginning
interviews in the middle, and before the caller had found opportunity
to sit down. 'All you want now is a little bit of judicious
engineering!' And Mark's rosy face said: 'I'll engineer you.'

Upon demand Henry produced the agreement with Onions Winter, and he
produced it with a shamed countenance. He knew that Mark Snyder would
criticise it.

'Worse than I expected,' Mr. Snyder observed. 'Worse than I expected. A
royalty of twopence in the shilling is all right. But why did you let
him off the royalty on the first five thousand copies? You call yourself
a lawyer! Listen, young man. I have seen the world, but I have never
seen a lawyer who didn't make a d----d fool of himself when it came to
his own affairs. Supposing _Love in Babylon_ sells fifty thousand--which
it won't; it won't go past forty--you would have saved my ten per cent.
commission by coming to me in the first place, because I should have got
you a royalty on the first five thousand. See?'

'But you weren't here,' Henry put in.

'I wasn't here! God bless my soul! Little Geraldine Foster would have
had the sense to get that!'

(So her name was Geraldine.)

'It isn't the money,' Mark Snyder proceeded. 'It's the idea of Onions
Winter playing his old game with new men. And then I see you've let
yourself in for a s