on't see why I should be expected to ask her to resign--" Mrs.
Ballinger at length began; but Laura Glyde turned back to remind her:
"You know she made you say that you'd got on swimmingly in Xingu."

An ill-timed giggle escaped from Mrs. Leveret, and Mrs. Ballinger
energetically continued "--but you needn't think for a moment that I'm
afraid to!"

The door of the drawing-room closed on the retreating backs of the
Lunch Club, and the President of that distinguished association, seating
herself at her writing-table, and pushing away a copy of "The Wings
of Death" to make room for her elbow, drew forth a sheet of the club's
note-paper, on which she began to write: "My dear Mrs. Roby--"

The End of Xingu

THE VERDICT

June 1908

I had always thought Jack Gisburn rather a cheap genius--though a good
fellow enough--so it was no great surprise to me to hear that, in the
height of his glory, he had dropped his painting, married a rich widow,
and established himself in a villa on the Riviera. (Though I rather
thought it would have been Rome or Florence.)

"The height of his glory"--that was what the women called it. I can hear
Mrs. Gideon Thwing--his last Chicago sitter--deploring his unaccountable
abdication. "Of course it's going to send the value of my picture 'way
up; but I don't think of that, Mr. Rickham--the loss to Arrt is all I
think of." The word, on Mrs. Thwing's lips, multiplied its RS as though
they were reflected in an endless vista of mirrors. And it was not only
the Mrs. Thwings who mourned. Had not the exquisite Hermia Croft, at the
last Grafton Gallery show, stopped me before Gisburn's "Moon-dancers" to
say, with tears in her eyes: "We shall not look upon its like again"?

Well!--even through the prism of Hermia's tears I felt able to face the
fact with equanimity. Poor Jack Gisburn! The women had made him--it was
fitting that they should mourn him. Among his own sex fewer regrets
were heard, and in his own trade hardly a murmur. Professional jealousy?
Perhaps. If it were, the honour of the craft was vindicated by little
Claude Nutley, who, in all good faith, brought out in the Burlington a
very handsome "obituary" on Jack--one of those showy articles stocked
with random technicalities that I have heard (I won't say by whom)
compared to Gisburn's painting. And so--his resolve being apparently
irrevocable--the discussion gradually died out, and, as Mrs. Thwing had
predicted, the price of "G