ncomfortable.

Mr. Bernard Tovey was a blunt-nosed beaming person. He leaned forward
abruptly whenever he spoke, thereby swinging a lock of hair into his
right eye. He agreed so heartily with everything that was said that
people who addressed him were left with the happy impression that they
had said something Rather Good. This habit, combined with the fact that
he never launched an independent remark, had given him the reputation of
being one of the best talkers in Kensington.

Mr. Darnby Frere was the editor of an advanced religious paper called _I
Wonder_, but he never wondered really. He knew almost everything, and
therefore, while despising the public for knowing so little, he
encouraged it to continue wondering, so that he might continue despising
and instructing it.

Now it was an almost unprecedented thing for two members of the small
trades-man class to come into Miss Ford's drawing-room, especially on a
Wednesday. The utmost social mingling of the classes that those walls
had ever seen was the moment when Miss Ford asked the electric light man
what he thought of the war. The electric light man's reply had been
quoted in the dialect on two or three of the following Wednesdays, as a
proof of Miss Ford's daring intimacy with men in Another Station of
Life. Really it would have been simpler, though of course not so
picturesque, to have quoted it direct from its original source, _John
Bull_, the electric light man's Bible.

The entrance of the witch and the Mayor was to a certain extent a
crisis, but Miss Ford kept her head, and her three friends, though
grasping at once the extraordinary situation, did not give way to panic.

"Well, well, well," said the Mayor, looking round and breathing very
loudly. "This is a cosy little nook you've got 'ere."

He was not at all at his ease, but being a business man, and being also
blessed with a peculiarly inexpressive face, he was successfully
dissembling his discomfort.

For it had happened that the lift had been one of those lifts that can
do no wrong, the kind that the public is indulgently allowed to work by
itself. And the Mayor, looking upon this fact as specially planned by a
propitious god of love, had tried to kiss the witch as they shot up the
darkened shaft. If I remind you that the witch was still accompanied by
her broomstick, Harold, a creature of unreasoning fidelity, I need
hardly describe the scene further. The Mayor stepped out of the lift
with a tin