ondering," he said, "why I am taking this unusual course. It
is not often, I know, that one speaks well of one's friend behind his
back. It is six for Cartoner and half a dozen for myself. To begin with,
Cartoner is my friend. I should not like him to be misunderstood. Also,
I may do the same at any moment myself. We are here to-day and gone
to-morrow. Sometimes we remember our friends and sometimes we forget
them."

"At all events," said Wanda, shaking hands, "you are cautious. You make
no promises."

"And therefore we break none," he answered, as he crossed the threshold.

He had hardly gone before Netty entered the room, followed closely by
Mr. Mangles. She was prettily dressed. She appeared to be nervous
and rather shy. The two girls shook hands in silence. Joseph Mangles,
standing well in the middle of the room, waited till the first greeting
was over, and then, with that solemn air of addressing an individual as
if he or she were an assembly, he spoke.

"Princess," he said, "my sister begs to be excused. She is unable to
take tea this afternoon. Last night she considered herself called upon
to make a demonstration in the cause that she has at heart. She smoked
two cigarettes towards the emancipation of your sex, princess. Just to
show her independence--to show, I surmise, that she didn't care a--that
she did not care. She cares this afternoon. She had a headache."

And he bowed with a courtesy with which some old-fashioned men still
attempt to oppose the progress of women.

XXIV

IN THE WEST INDIA DOCK ROAD

It is not only in name that this great thoroughfare has the sound of the
sea, the suggestion of a tarry atmosphere, and that mystery which hangs
about the lives of simple sailor men. To thousands and thousands of
foreigners the word London means the West India Dock Road, and nothing
more. There are sailors sailing on every sea who cherish the delusion
that they have seen life and London when they have passed the portals of
one of the large public-houses of the West India Dock Road.

There are others who are not sailors, speaking one of the half-dozen
tongues of eastern Europe, of which the average educated Briton does not
even know the name, whose lives are bounded on the west by Aldgate Pump,
on the east by the Dock Gates, on the north by Houndsditch, and on the
south by St. Katherine's Dock and Tower Hill. A man who would wish to
knock at any door in this district, and speak to him who opened