lieve I was _the_ Mr. Smith.
She imagined from my book that I was quite an old man."

I could see nothing in my friend's book myself to suggest that the author
was, of necessity, anything over eighteen. The mistake appeared to me to
display want of acumen, but it had evidently pleased him greatly.

"I felt quite sorry for her," he went on, "chained to that bloodless,
artificial society in which she lives. 'You can't tell,' she said to me,
'how I long to meet someone to whom I could show my real self--who would
understand me.' I'm going to see her on Wednesday."

I went with him. My conversation with her was not as confidential as I
had anticipated, owing to there being some eighty other people present in
a room intended for the accommodation of eight; but after surging round
for an hour in hot and aimless misery--as very young men at such
gatherings do, knowing as a rule only the man who has brought them, and
being unable to find him--I contrived to get a few words with her.

She greeted me with a smile, in the light of which I at once forgot my
past discomfort, and let her fingers rest, with delicious pressure, for a
moment upon mine.

"How good of you to keep your promise," she said. "These people have
been tiring me so. Sit here, and tell me all you have been doing."

She listened for about ten seconds, and then interrupted me with--

"And that clever friend of yours that you came with. I met him at dear
Lady Lennon's last week. Has _he_ written anything?"

I explained to her that he had.

"Tell me about it?" she said. "I get so little time for reading, and
then I only care to read the books that help me," and she gave me a
grateful look more eloquent than words.

I described the work to her, and wishing to do my friend justice I even
recited a few of the passages upon which, as I knew, he especially prided
himself.

One sentence in particular seemed to lay hold of her. "A good woman's
arms round a man's neck is a lifebelt thrown out to him from heaven."

"How beautiful!" she murmured. "Say it again."

I said it again, and she repeated it after me.

Then a noisy old lady swooped down upon her, and I drifted away into a
corner, where I tried to look as if I were enjoying myself, and failed.

Later on, feeling it time to go, I sought my friend, and found him
talking to her in a corner. I approached and waited. They were
discussing the latest east-end murder. A drunken woman had been killed