the O'Kelly--he laid a fatherly hand upon my
shoulder--"there are fair-faced, laughing women--sweet creatures,
that ye want to put yer arm around and dance with." He shook his head
disapprovingly. "There are the sainted women, who lead us up, Paul--up,
always up."

A look, such as the young man with the banner might have borne with him
to the fields of snow and ice, suffused the O'Kelly's handsome face.
Without another word he crossed the road and entered an American store,
where for six-and-elevenpence he purchased an alarm-clock the man
assured us would awake an Egyptian mummy. With this in his hand he waved
me a good-bye, and jumped upon a Hampstead 'bus, and alone I strolled on
to the theatre.

Hal returned a little after Christmas and started himself in chambers
in the City. It was the nearest he dared venture, so he said, to
civilisation.

"I'd be no good in the West End," he explained. "For a season I might
attract as an eccentricity, but your swells would never stand me for
longer--no more would any respectable folk, anywhere: we don't get on
together. I commenced at Richmond. It was a fashionable suburb then,
and I thought I was going to do wonders. I had everything in my favour,
except myself. I do know my work, nobody can deny that of me. My
father spent every penny he had, poor gentleman, in buying me an
old-established practice: fine house, carriage and pair, white-haired
butler--everything correct, except myself. It was of no use. I can hold
myself in for a month or two; then I break out, the old original savage
that I am under my frock coat. I feel I must run amuck, stabbing,
hacking at the prim, smiling Lies mincing round about me. I can fool a
silly woman for half-a-dozen visits; bow and rub my hands, purr round
her sympathetically. All the while I am longing to tell her the truth:

"'Go home. Wash your face; don't block up the pores of your skin with
paint. Let out your corsets. You are thirty-three round the abdomen if
you are an inch: how can you expect your digestion to do its work when
you're squeezing it into twenty-one? Give up gadding about half your day
and most of your night; you are old enough to have done with that sort
of thing. Let the children come, and suckle them yourself. You'll be all
the better for them. Don't loll in bed all the morning. Get up like a
decent animal and do something for your living. Use your brain, what
there is of it, and your body. At that price you can have h