, promising, and highly virtuous young editor of a popular daily
paper. Being another member of the 1917, I dare say he understood.

But no one had tried to answer Juke's question, 'Why is she doing it?'
Johnny had supposed 'for the usual reasons.' That opens a probably
unanswerable question. What the devil _are_ the usual reasons?

4

I met Lady Pinkerton and her elder daughter in the muzzle department of
the Army and Navy Stores the next week. That was one of the annoying
aspects of the muzzling order; one met in muzzle shops people with whom
neither temperament nor circumstances would otherwise have thrown one.

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