him good advice
into the bargain; she was a repository of knowing hints, of esoteric
learning. These things were doubtless not the less valuable to him
for bearing wholly on the question of how a reputation might be with
a little gumption, as Mrs. Highmore said, "worked." Save when she
occasionally bore testimony to her desire to do, as Limbert did,
something some day for her own very self, I never heard her speak of the
literary motive as if it were distinguishable from the pecuniary. She
cocked up his hat, she pricked up his prudence for him, reminding him
that as one seemed to take one's self so the silly world was ready to
take one. It was a fatal mistake to be too candid even with those who
were all right--not to look and to talk prosperous, not at least to
pretend that one had beautiful sales. To listen to her you would have
thought the profession of letters a wonderful game of bluff. Wherever
one's idea began it ended somehow in inspired paragraphs in the
newspapers. "_I_ pretend, I assure you, that you are going off like
wildfire--I can at least do that for you!" she often declared, prevented
as she was from doing much else by Mr. Highmore's insurmountable
objection to _their_ taking Mrs. Stannace.

I couldn't help regarding the presence of this latter lady in Limbert's
life as the major complication: whatever he attempted it appeared given
to him to achieve as best he could in the mere margin of the space
in which she swung her petticoats. I may err in the belief that she
practically lived on him, for though it was not in him to follow
adequately Mrs. Highmore's counsel there were exasperated confessions
he never made, scanty domestic curtains he rattled on their rings. I may
exaggerate in the retrospect his apparent anxieties, for these after all
were the years when his talent was freshest and when as a writer he most
laid down his line. It wasn't of Mrs. Stannace nor even as time went on
of Mrs. Limbert that we mainly talked when I got at longer intervals a
smokier hour in the little grey den from which we could step out, as we
used to say, to the lawn. The lawn was the back-garden, and Limbert's
study was behind the dining-room, with folding doors not impervious to
the clatter of the children's tea. We sometimes took refuge from it in
the depths--a bush and a half deep--of the shrubbery, where was a bench
that gave us a view while we gossiped of Mrs. Stannace's tiara-like
headdress nodding at an upper window