d I, "are you aware that he was another's all the time?"

"What, sir?"

"Oh, yes! engaged to be married."

"Well, I never! Him! What, all the while he----"

"Precisely."

"Well, that beats everything. Oh, if I'd known that!"

"I'll give him your message."

"No, sir, not now, I thank you. The villain!"

"You are right," said I. "I think your mother ought to have--scolded
him, too."

"Now you promised, sir----" but Joe came up, and I escaped.

IV.

A REPENTANT SINNER.

It was, I believe, mainly as a compliment to me that Miss Audrey Liston
was asked to Poltons. Miss Liston and I were very good friends, and my
cousin Dora Polton thought, as she informed me, that it would be nice
for me to have someone I could talk to about "books and so on." I did
not complain. Miss Liston was a pleasant young woman of
six-and-twenty; I liked her very much except on paper, and I was aware
that she made it a point of duty to read something at least of what I
wrote. She was in the habit of describing herself as an "authoress in
a small way." If it were pointed out that six three-volume novels in
three years (the term of her literary activity, at the time of which I
write) could hardly be called "a small way," she would smile modestly
and say that it was not really much; and if she were told that the
English language embraced no such word as "authoress," she would smile
again and say that it ought to; a position toward the bugbear of
correctness with which, I confess, I sympathize in some degree. She
was very diligent; she worked from ten to one every day while she was
at Poltons; how much she wrote is between her and her conscience.

There was another impeachment which Miss Liston was hardly at the
trouble to deny. "Take my characters from life?" she would exclaim.
"Surely every artist" (Miss Liston often referred to herself as an
artist) "must?" And she would proceed to maintain--what is perhaps
true sometimes--that people rather liked being put into books, just as
they like being photographed, for all that they grumble and pretend to
be afflicted when either process is levied against them. In discussing
this matter with Miss Liston I felt myself on delicate ground, for it
was notorious that I figured in her first book in the guise of a
misogynistic genius; the fact that she lengthened (and thickened) my
hair, converted it from an indeterminate brown to a dusky black, gave
me a drooping mustache, and inves