I have a particular dislike for Lady Pinkerton, and she for me. I hate those cold, shallow eyes, and clothes drenched in scent, and basilisk pink faces whitened with powder which such women have or develop. When I look at her I think of all her frightful books, and the frightful serial she has even now running in the Pink Pictorial, and I shudder (unobtrusively, I hope), and look, away. When she looks at me, she thinks 'dirty Jew,' and she shudders (unobtrusively, too), and looks over my head. She did so now, no doubt, as she bowed.

'Dreadfully tahsome, this muzzling order,' she said, originally. 'We have two Pekingese, a King Charles, and a pug, and their poor little faces don't fit any muzzle that's made.'

I answered with some inanity about my mother's Poltalloch, and we talked for a moment. She said she hoped I was quite all right again, and I suppose I said I was, with my leg shooting like a gathered tooth (it was pretty bad all that spring).

Suddenly I felt her wanting badly to tell me the news about Jane. She wanted to tell me because she thought she would be scoring off me, knowing that what she would call my 'influence' over Jane had always been used against all that Hobart stands for. I felt her longing to throw me the triumphant morsel of news—'Jane has deserted you and all your tiresome, conceited, disturbing clique, and is going to marry the promising young editor of her father's chief paper.' But something restrained her. I caught the advance and retreat of her intention, and connected it with her daughter, who stood by her, silent, with an absurd Pekingese in her arms.

Anyhow, Lady Pinkerton held in her news, and I left them. I dislike Lady Pinkerton, as I have said; but on this occasion I disliked her a little less than usual, for that maternal instinct which had robbed her of her triumph.

5

I went to see Katherine Varick that evening. I often do when I have been meeting women like Lady Pinkerton, because there is a danger that that kind of woman, so common and in a sense so typical, may get to bulk too large in one's view of women, and lead one into the sin of generalisation. So many women are such very dreadful fools—men too, for that matter, but more women—that one needs to keep in pretty frequent touch with those who aren't, with the women whose brains, by nature and training, grip and hold. Of these, Katherine Varick has as fine and keen a mind and as good a head as any I know. She isn't touched anywhere with Potterism; she has the scientific temperament. Katherine and I are great friends. From the first she did a good deal of work for the Fact—reviews of scientific books, mostly. I went to see her, to get the taste of Lady Pinkerton out of my mouth.

I found her doing something with test-tubes and bottles—some experiment with carbohydrates, I think it was. I watched her till she was through with it, then we talked. That is the way one puts it, but as a matter of fact Katherine seldom does much of the talking; one talks to her. She listens, and puts in from time to time some critical comment that often extraordinarily clears up any subject one is talking round. She contributes as much as any one I know to the conversation, but in such condensed tabloids that it doesn't take her long. Most things don't seem to her to be worth saying. She'll let, for instance, a chatterbox like Juke say a hundred words to her one, and still she'll get most said, though Jukie's not a vapid talker either.

'Jane,' she told me, 'is coming back next week. The marriage is to be at the end of April.'

'A rapidity worthy of the Hustling Press. Jukie will be sorry. He hopes yet to wrest her as a brand from the burning.'