od, though I don't see how you weave such things into
your books."

"Job--Job?" he repeated vaguely. Then a rush of blood went over his
whole face, up to his forehead. His dreamy dark eyes looked suddenly
anything but dreamy. "Good Heavens!" he gasped. "What have you got
there?" and began to ransack all the pockets of his waistcoat and coat
until he found the twin of the book he'd given me. "This is what I meant
you to see," he said in a queer, ashamed voice.

I handed the first book back to him. He seized it and glanced from page
to page, looking almost ill. By and by he came to something which seemed
to scare him. As far as I could tell, it was farther toward the end than
I had read.

"Would you mind showing me where you left off," he asked.

"It was where you were wondering whether your new heroine had swallowed
radium or something," said I.

"Oh!" He looked relieved. "Well--I wouldn't have had you see that
idiotic stuff for a good deal. But I told you, didn't I, that if the
book went on I'd have to put you into it? There's a lot of silly rot
there. Poetical license!"

"The thing that made the most impression on me was the part about the
red hair," I said. "The description sounded so nice. Who was Circe,
please? Was she Scottish? It's a name a Pictish princess might have
had."

"The first Circe lived even before the Pictish princesses," Basil
answered, quieting down, though he was still very flushed. "But she's
had a good many descendants--one or two at least in each generation of
women born in every country. Not that you--I mean the new heroine--will
be one of them really."

"What did Circe do?" I hurried on.

"Do? She was an exceptionally attractive woman. She had a special kind
of magnetism that nobody could resist. She amused herself by turning all
the men she knew--there were quite a lot of them--into animals of
different sorts."

"I think it would have been cleverer and more attractive of her if she
had turned animals into men," said I.

"That's what _my_ heroine can do," Basil explained. "She's a kind of
miniature baby Circe, for her red hair and general get up, and her
curious power of upsetting people and their plans from the first minute
they see her. But--my heroine wouldn't and couldn't turn her victims
into beasts. She makes them want to transform themselves into something
very extra special in the way of manliness."

"Why do you call her _your_ heroine with an emphasis?" I wanted to know