ime: "Well, I can always be turned out. There's no real reason why we
should live together."

"The first sensible remark you've made," he had replied, made
elementary by anger, and gone out to telephone to Boyd.

Why, after all, _did_ they live together? Would he be happier without
her? Or would a cook-housekeeper be worse? How did other men get on?
Most of them, somehow, seemed to marry.... Boyd would know, though--he
went to so many homes. But Boyd might say that it was not quite fair
on Ruth.... That was nonsense, though. Brothers weren't ever meant or
bound to keep their sisters, and thirty-eight was not too old for women
to get married. It was the fashionable age. Nobody now cared for
girls. Only Ruth never wanted to go out, or, if she did, it was to
some quite silly show where he could not be seen.... Well, he would
see what Boyd said. That was the best way.

And Boyd, having listened to the passionate recital in an owlish
silence, had answered: "It's quite obvious. You ought to marry!" Just
what those idiots of doctors always said. Marriage and golf were their
only two ideas, even for any one with liver.

"_Why_ ought I to marry?" he blazed out suddenly, to the surprise of
his friend, who could not follow his thought during the long pause.

"Why, my dear fellow? Because you're stagnating--because it is life's
second stage--because you've got beyond the first--because each of your
books is exactly like the last----"

This ceased to be theory. Hubert was in arms at once.

"I don't see that," he said in a hard voice, almost sulkily. "As a
matter of fact, several of the critics went out of their way to call
_The Bread of Idleness_ new, original, etcetera."

"Yes," replied Kenneth Boyd, who secretly enjoyed wounding just deeply
enough his friend's self-esteem; "the plot was different, but its
heroine the same. You had her in _Wandering Stars_; you had her in
_Life_; you've had her in them all. There is a Hubert Brett type no
less than a Gibson Girl."

"I still don't see, even so," Hubert icily replied, "exactly why I have
to marry."

Kenneth Boyd smiled unseen. "Because to widen your art, you must widen
your idea of woman. If you really know one woman, they say, then you
can know them all."

A good deal of the author's self-esteem returned. He looked relieved.
So that was all, was it?

"If you know them all, as I do, by study," he answered, "you don't
_want_ to know one."

And n