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By Root 23141 0

he feels that he is earning his six-and-eightpence. Don't laugh! It is perfectly true. Now Continentals haven't got that feeling. They are always bothering about ideas, and the result is that every shopkeeper or peasant has a vocabulary in daily use that is simply Greek to the vast majority of Britons. I remember some time ago I was dining with a friend of mine who is a Paris cabman. We had dinner at a dirty little restaurant opposite the central post office, a place where all the clients were cabmen or porters. Conversation was general, and it struck me that a London cabman would have felt a little out of his depth. Words like "functionary" and "unforgettable" and "exterminate" and "independence" hurtled across the table every instant. And these were just ordinary, vulgar, jolly, red-faced cabmen. Mind you,' he went on hurriedly, as the lady crossed the room and took up his pen, 'I merely mention this to illustrate my point. I'm not saying that cab-men ought to be intellectuals. I don't think so; I agree with Keats--happy is England, sweet her artless cabmen, enough their simple loveliness for me. But when you come to the people who make up the collective industrial brain-power of the country .... Why, do you know--'

'Oh no, no, no!' cried Mrs Manderson. 'I don't know anything at the moment, except that your talking must be stopped somehow, if we are to get any further with that letter to Mr Marlowe. You shall not get out of it. Come!' She put the pen into his hand.

Trent looked at it with distaste. 'I warn you not to discourage my talking,' he said dejectedly. 'Believe me, men who don't talk are even worse to live with than men who do. O have a care of natures that are mute. I confess I'm shirking writing this thing. It is almost an indecency. It's mixing two moods to write the sort of letter I mean to write, and at the same time to be sitting in the same room with you.'

She led him to his abandoned chair before the escritoire and pushed him gently into it. 'Well, but please try. I want to see what you write, and I want it to go to him at once. You see, I would be contented enough to leave things as they are; but you say you must get at the truth, and if you must, I want it to be as soon as possible. Do it now--you know you can if you will--and I'll send it off the moment it's ready. Don't you ever feel that--the longing to get the worrying letter into the post and off your hands, so that you can't recall it if you would, and it's no use fussing any more about it?'

'I will do as you wish,' he said, and turned to the paper, which he dated as from his hotel. Mrs Manderson looked down at his bent head with a gentle light in her eyes, and made as if to place a smoothing hand upon his rather untidy crop of hair. But she did not touch it. Going in silence to the piano, she began to play very softly. It was ten minutes before Trent spoke.

'If he chooses to reply that he will say nothing?'

Mrs Manderson looked over her shoulder. 'Of course he dare not take that line. He will speak to prevent you from denouncing him.'

'But I'm not going to do that anyhow. You wouldn't allow it--you said so; besides, I won't if you would. The thing's too doubtful now.'

'But,' she laughed, 'poor Mr Marlowe doesn't know you won't, does he?'

Trent sighed. 'What extraordinary things codes of honour are!' he remarked abstractedly. 'I know that there are things I should do, and never think twice about, which would make you feel disgraced if you did them--such as giving any one who grossly insulted me a black eye, or swearing violently when I barked my shin in a dark room. And now you are calmly recommending me to bluff Marlowe by means of a tacit threat which I don't mean; a thing which hews most abandoned fiend did never, in the drunkenness of guilt--well, anyhow, I won't do it.' He resumed his writing, and the lady, with an indulgent smile, returned to playing very softly.

In a few minutes more, Trent said: 'At last I am his faithfully. Do you want to see it?' She ran across the twilight room, and turned on a reading lamp beside the escritoire.