"Guy Walsingham, your distinguished confrère—or shall I say your formidable rival?"
"Oh!" growled Dora Forbes. Then he added: "Shall I spoil it, if I go in?"
"I should think nothing could spoil it!" I ambiguously laughed.
Dora Forbes evidently felt the dilemma; he gave an irritated crook to his mustache. "Shall I go in?" he presently asked.
We looked at each other hard a moment; then I expressed something bitter that was in me, expressed it in an infernal "Do!" After this I got out into the air, but not so fast as not to hear, when the door of the drawing-room opened, the disconcerted drop of Miss Collop's public manner: she must have been in the midst of the larger latitude. Producing with extreme rapidity, Guy Walsingham has just published a work in which amiable people who are not initiated have been pained to see the genius of a sister-novelist held up to unmistakable ridicule; so fresh an exhibition does it seem to them of the dreadful way men have always treated women. Dora Forbes, it is true, at the present hour, is immensely pushed by Mrs. Wimbush, and has sat for his portrait to the young artist she protects, sat for it not only in oils, but in monumental alabaster.
What happened at Prestidge later in the day is of course contemporary history, If the interruption I had whimsically sanctioned was almost a scandal, what is to be said of that general dis-
