Her own brand of talk was not in
conflict with what she would have called her then creed. She never said a
thing was very black. She never said it was as black as the ace of spades.
She always said it was as black as the proverbial ace of spades. Once I
ventured to insinuate that perhaps it would be more nobly new to say "as
black as the proverbial ace of proverbial spades," but the suggestion left
her at peace with her custom. Well, when I got to her house last week, and
had a chance to scrutinize the others, they did not look as if she had
chosen them after any particular pattern.

Dinner, however, soon enabled us all to guess the model from which Mrs.
Watkin had striven to copy her occasion. I was greatly relishing the
conversation of my left-hand neighbor, a large-eyed, wondering-eyed woman,
who said little and seemed never to have heard any of the things I usually
say when dining out, and who I dare swear would have looked gratefully
surprised had I confided to her my discovery that in the beginning God
created the heaven and the earth. Before we were far gone with food the
attention of this tactful person was torn from me by our hostess, whose
voice was heard above the other voices: "Oh, Mr. Slicer, do tell us your
experience. I want _all_ our friends to hear it." Mr. Slicer, identifiable
by the throat-clearing look which suffused his bleached, conservative face,
was not deaf to her appeal. He had just returned from London, where he had
been at the time of the Zeppelin raid, and although he had not himself been
so fortunate as to see a Zeppelin, but had merely been a modest witness of
the sporting fortitude with which London endured that visitation, the
Zeppelin-in-chief had actually been visible to the brother of his
daughter's governess. "At the noise of guns," said Mr. Slicer, "we all left
the restaurant where we were dining, Mrs. Humphry Ward, George Moore,
Asquith, Miss Pankhurst and I, and walked, not ran, into the street, where
it was the work of a moment for me to climb a lamp-post, whence I obtained
a nearer view of what was going on overhead. Nothing there but blackness."
Instinctively I glanced at Mrs. Watkin, upon whose lips the passage of
words like "as the proverbial ace of spades" was clearly to be seen. "Of
course," Mr. Slicer went on, "I couldn't indefinitely hold my coign of
vantage, which I relinquished in favor of Mrs. Humphry Ward, to whom at her
laughing request George Moore and I gave a leg u