"Mr. Machin," said Rose Euclid, "I do believe your eyes were shut!"

"So do I!" Edward Henry curtly agreed.

"But you'll spoil the group!"

"Not a bit of it!" said Edward Henry. "I always shut my eyes when I'm
being photographed by flash-light. I open my mouth instead. So long as
something's open, what does it matter?"

The truth was that only in the nick of time had he, by a happy miracle
of ingenuity, invented a way of ruining the photograph. The absolute
necessity for its ruin had presented itself to him rather late in the
proceedings, when the photographer had already finished arranging
the hands and shoulders of everybody in an artistic pattern. The
photograph had to be spoilt for the imperative reason that his
mother, though she never read a newspaper, did as a fact look at a
picture-newspaper, _The Daily Film_, which from pride she insisted on
paying for out of her own purse, at the rate of one halfpenny a day.
Now _The Daily Film_ specialized in theatrical photographs, on which
it said it spent large sums of money: and Edward Henry in a vision had
seen the historic group in a future issue of the _Film_. He had also,
in the same vision, seen his mother conning the said issue, and the
sardonic curve of her lips as she recognized her son therein, and he
had even heard her dry, cynical, contemptuous exclamation: "Bless us!"
He could never have looked squarely in his mother's face again if
that group had appeared in her chosen organ! Her silent and grim scorn
would have crushed his self-conceit to a miserable, hopeless pulp.
Hence his resolve to render the photograph impossible.

"Perhaps I'd better take another one?" the photographer suggested,
"though I think Mr.--er--Machin was all right." At the supreme crisis
the man had been too busy with his fireworks to keep a watch on every
separate eye and mouth of the assemblage.

"Of course I was all right!" said Edward Henry, almost with brutality.
"Please take that thing away, as quickly as you can. We have business
to attend to."

"Yes, sir," agreed the photographer, no longer victorious.

Edward Henry rang his bell, and two gentlemen-in-waiting arrived.

"Clear this table immediately!"

The tone of the command startled everybody except the
gentlemen-in-waiting and Mr. Seven Sachs. Rose Euclid gave vent to her
nervous giggle. The poet and Mr. Marrier tried to appear detached and
dignified, and succeeded in appearing guiltily confused--for which
they con