' and I'm a
silly ass or else a beastly cad!"

"It isn't that," she answered with a gloomy petulance; "but something
might easily happen and I simply don't know how I should face Hubert."

"Hubert? Why, I expect he would be jolly proud of you."

"Proud?" she repeated bitterly; "when he has been so splendid to me
always, and here I am making him out a selfish brute who sacrifices his
wife's happiness to his career and me a poor little bullied creature
who goes upstairs and cries. He'd never believe that it was all
exaggerated--and nor, of course, would anybody else. Proud, indeed? I
do like that!"

Indeed, when she thought of what an awful thing she had done, Helena
very often could have gone upstairs like flabby Zoe (_nee_ Virginia)
and wept.

Geoffrey Alison at length got thoroughly impatient with her.

_He_ was enjoying it all hugely and he failed to see why she should not
enjoy it too. Every day he opened his paper eagerly to see what new
scheme the resourceful Blatchley had devised to spur a public interest
which as yet showed no signs of flagging.

Helena, in sympathy with her whole scheme, had much exaggerated the
eminence of the Husband's position. It was not a case of any
back-street Kit Kats here: he was away, night after night, delivering
most brilliant lectures to exclusive West End literary clubs or even
travelling four hundred miles to unveil well-earned lapidary tributes
of great authors who had actually managed to be dead now for a hundred
years. This husband, who deserted his wife and was jealous if she went
to anything with any other man, was not an author of the Hubert Brett
class, so that big names were thrown about at parties where in very
truth the problem soon became a topic. Each had it on the best
authority that So-and-So, the celebrated author, or Mrs. So-and-So, had
said this or the opposite; and nobody believed the other's story.

Nothing sells a book like talk. The printed word, paid or unpaid, is
only useful to set tongues a-wagging. And as the authorship was
bandied here and there, editions trickled slowly from the Press.

Mr. Blatchley was delighted. His firm was not among the
old-established, and this could rank as his first great success; but it
was very great. The book was only three-and-six; people actually
bought it; the libraries roared out for more.

Journalists, hot upon dinner-table topics as vultures after flesh,
interviewed him, each hoping to be in the o