, please!"

"What am I?" he insisted.

"You are the--the man who invents those delightful thingumbobs," she
cried with an inspiration.

"I never invented anything, except two books," said Tommy, looking at
her reproachfully.

"I know them by heart," she cried.

"One of them is not published yet," he informed her.

"I am looking forward to it so excitedly," she said at once.

"And my name is Sandys," said he.

"Thomas Sandys," she said, correcting him triumphantly. "How is that
dear, darling little Agnes--Elspeth?"

"You have me at last," he admitted.

"'Sandys on Woman!'" exclaimed Mrs. Jerry, all rippling smiles once
more. "Can I ever forget it!"

"I shall never pretend to know anything about women again," Tommy
answered dolefully, but with a creditable absence of vindictiveness.

"Please, please!" said the little hands again.

"It is a nasty jar, Mrs. Jerry."

"Please!"

"Oh that I could forget so quickly!"

"Please!"

"I forgive you, if that is what you want."

She waved her whip. "And you will come and see me?"

"When I have got over this. It needs--a little time." He really said
this to please her.

"You shall talk to me of the new book," she said, confident that this
would fetch him, for he was not her first author. "By the way, what is
it about?"

"Can you ask, Mrs. Jerry?" replied Tommy, passionately. "Oh, woman,
woman, can you ask?"

This puzzled her at the time, but she understood what he had meant
when the book came out, dedicated to Pym. "Goodness gracious!" she
said to herself as she went from chapter to chapter, and she was very
self-conscious when she heard the book discussed in society, which was
not quite as soon as it came out, for at first the ladies seemed to
have forgotten their Tommy.

But the journals made ample amends. He had invented, they said,
something new in literature, a story that was yet not a story, told in
the form of essays which were no mere essays. There was no character
mentioned by name, there was not a line of dialogue, essays only, they
might say, were the net result, yet a human heart was laid bare, and
surely that was fiction in its highest form. Fiction founded on fact,
no doubt (for it would be ostrich-like to deny that such a work must
be the outcome of a painful personal experience), but in those wise
and penetrating pages Mr. Sandys called no one's attention to himself;
his subject was an experience common to humanity, to be borne this way