had herself read the work our friend had just put forth. "No," she replied, "I gave him my word at the beginning, on his urgent request, that I wouldn't."
"Not even as a book?"
"He begged me never to look at it at all. He said he was trying a low experiment. Of course I knew what he meant and I entreated him to let me just for curiosity take a peep. But he was firm, he declared he couldn't bear the thought that a woman like me should see him in the depths."
"He's only, thank God, in the depths of distress," I replied. "His experiment's nothing worse than a failure."
"Then Bousefield is right—his circulation won't budge?"
"It won't move one, as they say in Fleet Street. The book has extraordinary beauty."
"Poor duck—after trying so hard!" Jane Highmore sighed with real tenderness. "What will then become of them?"
I was silent an instant. "You must take your mother."
She was silent too. "I must speak of it to Cecil!" she presently said. Cecil is Mr. High-
