ge, making no motion to take the
offered hand, but sat there in the corner of the hansom looking rather
old and shrunken.

'You and one other,' she said.

That roused him. 'Ah, he has come, then.'

'Who?'

'The other. The man who is going to count.'

Her eyelids drooped. 'The man who was to count most for me came a long
while ago. And a long while ago--he went.'

Borrodaile looked at her. 'But this---- Who is the gentleman who shares
with me the doubtful, I may without undue modesty say the undeserved,
honour of urging you to disappear into the slums? Who is it?'

'The man who wrote this.'

It was the book he had seen in her hands before the meeting. He read on
the green cover, 'In the Days of the Comet.'

'Oh, that fellow! Well, he's not my novelist, but it's the keenest
intelligence we have applied to fiction.'

'He _is_ my novelist. So I've a right to be sorry he knows nothing
about women. See here! Even in his most rationalized vision of the New
Time, he can't help betraying his old-fashioned prejudice in favour of
the "dolly" view of women. His hero says, "I prayed that night, let me
confess it, to an image I had set up in my heart, an image that still
serves with me as a symbol for things inconceivable, to a Master
Artificer, the unseen captain of all who go about the building of the
world, the making of mankind----"' Vida's finger skipped, lifting to
fall on the heroine's name. '"Nettie... She never came into the temple
of that worshipping with me."' Swiftly she turned the pages back.
'Where's that other place? Here! The man says to the heroine--to his
ideal woman he says, "Behind you and above you rises the coming City of
the World, and I am in that building. Dear heart! you are only
happiness!" That's the whole view of man in a nutshell. Even the highest
type of woman such an imagination as this can conjure up----' She shook
her head. '"You are only happiness, dear"--a minister of pleasure,
negligible in all the nobler moods, all the times of wider vision or
exalted effort! Tell me'--she bent her head and looked into her
companion's face with a new passion dawning in her eyes--'in the
building of that City of the Future, in the making of it beautiful,
shall women really have no share?'

'My dear, I only know that I shall have no share myself.'

'Ah, we don't speak of ourselves.' She opened the hansom doors and her
companion got out. 'But this Comet man,' she said as she followed, '_he_
might hav